From the 1980s, and increasingly in the 1990s, scholars of Islamic legal studies have started to look at how gender has been conceptualised within Islamic legal discussions. Since then, they have combined methods and theories from the field of Islamic law and women and gender studies to look at gender (and later sexuality) in Islamic law, and there has been a mushrooming of works devoted to the topic that have taken into account different geographical and historical contexts and different case studies.
In this research area our underlying interest evolves around the intersection between gender related questions, sexuality and religious as well as secular law in the Middle East. For example, we look at how femininity and masculinity were (and are) constructed within Islamic legal discourse, or we focus on the entire spectrum of LGBTQI issues in the Middle East, especially from the legal perspective, and, generally speaking, on minorities in Islamic law.
Another sub-area of research within this field deals with feminisms in the Arab world. In this field, we analyse the mutual impact of feminist movements and processes of law-making in the region.
We are committed to an intersectional understanding of scientific questions in general and of the relation between law and people specifically. For example, one of our future projects aims at examining how the variants of gender, class, race and religion interact when looking at slavery and coerced labour. Moreover, we also apply digital approaches from the field of Digital Humanities in our research whenever possible. This allows us, as a first step, to analyse a much larger corpus of sources. As a second step, it enables us, for example, to identify better historical change and geographical specificities in terminology addressing gender and sexuality in Islamicate societies.
Research in this area allows us to challenge widespread stereotypes on gender and Islam, which are especially prevalent in Western media. Hereby, we aim at presenting a thoroughly researched, more nuanced and variegated image of how gender and sexuality were understood in the past and what consequences this has on contemporary understandings of them.
