This project is based on completing a book manuscript focussed on “Gender, Sufi Ethics and Social justice in Islam”, which is under contract to Oneworld Academic Publications for their series Islam in the 21st Century. The book focuses on bringing premodern and contemporary Sufi perspectives to a number of current ethical debates on gender equality, sexuality and social justice. This construcive project of Islamic feminist ethics proceeds from a vision of imaginative and lively dialogue between core notions of human nature, purpose, values and ethics from the Muslim past with those of the present era.
This book draws conceptually and theoretically on two intellectual traditions: a feminist ethics of care and a Sufi ethics of relationality. I argue that the convergence of these two systems of knowledge generates a productive space for developing Muslim ethics focused on social justice and human flourishing. As a constructive Islamic feminist project, the book focuses on three contemporary ethical challenges: firstly rethinking the nature of the human being religiously in ways that inform justice-based gender ethics; secondly, replacing pervasive underlying paradigms of domination with those of reciprocity and mutuality between human beings; and thirdly, the careful mapping of an ethics that integrates justice and compassion in ways that are responsive to current Muslim realities.
