 We're meeting today in an era when the United States is grappling with the legacies of histories buried and unacknowledged and the flux we're all living through and the debates swirling around the emergence of new voices in public debates give resonance I think to James Baldwin's observation that history does not merely refer or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us and are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways. History is literally present in all that we do. That's true for all but I think there's an interesting particular resonance for Muslims looking back at their own history where the words and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad and to a lesser extent of his companions the followers who helped form the first Muslim society have been said as gold standards of how Muslims live today. The subsequent eras that were closer to the time of the Prophet are also looked back for inspiration for contemporary Muslims too. Though the shake who strenuously avoids politics will never say it, I will. I find the evidence of women riding horse and camel back through the Levant is a resonant commentary on Saudi Arabia's historical ban on women driving which of course changed last June. Though it should be noted that it was also accompanied by imprisonment and torture of the women who campaigned for it, some of the women who campaigned for it, as well as more widespread restrictions on women's free movement and agency through the guardianship system. I think the madrasas filled with women learning fiqh and hadith in the 9th, 10th century makes a mockery of the hostility to women's education by the Taliban and other groups. So in summation, even if 39 of the 40 volumes remain buried, it's terrible news for real academics but I comfort myself that just the news of this accidental feminist history of women scholars and jurists remains a powerful tool for women activists and scholars and their allies as they contest their rights to access to public space and positions of power. At the very least it provides a long view, a suggestion of other times of other mores that women and their allies can bring into the public squares as they fight for their God-given rights. Thank you.