Gender and fundamentalism in a season of AIDS

Prof. Dr. Farid Esack

Farid Esack, born in 1959, is Professor in the Study of Islam at the University of Johannesburg. He studied in Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Germany and received his Ph.D. 1996 on Qur’anic Hermeneutics from the University of Birmingham.He served as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in South Africa and has taught at the Universities of Western Cape, and Hamburg, the College of William & Mary and Union Theological Seminary (NY) and at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He has recently returned to South Africa after serving as the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islam at Harvard University. He has published on Islam, Gender, Liberation Theology, Interfaith Relations, and Qur’anic Hermeneutics.

Selected Publications

Whose Qur’an? A Concises Guide to Progressive Islam (forthcoming).

Islam and AIDS – Between Scorn, Pity, and Justice (co-edited with Sarah Chiddy)(2009), Oxford: Oneworld.

HIV, AIDS, and Islam: Reflections on Compassion, Justice and Responsibility (2005), Cape Town: Positive Muslims, translated into Urdu, (Islamabad: Unicef) and Swahili (Daressalaam, IFH, 2008)
An Introduction to the Qur’an (2002, 2003, 2004), Oxford: Oneworld, translated into French (Paris: Albin Michel) and Bahasa Indonesia (Jakarta: Mizan). Republished in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 as The Qur’an – a User’s Guide, by Oneworld.

Qur’an Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression (1997, 1999, 2002), Oxford: Oneworld,  translated into Bahasa Indonesia, Jakarta: Mizan.

Gender and fundamentalism in a season of AIDS

The discourse on Islam and women is often presented as one located in the contestation between modernity and traditionalism or one largely shaped by the urgencies arising from the encounter of Muslims with ‘the West’. This paper seeks to consider the question of gender justice and Islam within the context of the AIDS pandemic that continues to spread around the world at an alarming pace. This is a pandemic and utilizes pre-existing pathways of economic inequality and poor women have been particularly affected as AIDS has become a gendered pandemic. This paper begins with an exploration of some of the fundamentalisms operative in the world today - Islamic, market, and gender and then examines these fundamentalisms and the pandemic itself from the opposing perspectives of the ongoing theological debate between liberal and traditional expressions of Islam. After reflections on the limitations of these approaches the paper espouses an alternative vision which begins to seriously address the demands of the marginalized Muslim woman today in the context of not only patriarchy but also of globalization and poverty that underlie the spread of the pandemic.