 Hey everyone, thanks for coming. I know today was a very busy social calendar kind of day for Stanford, so thanks for making the time. So welcome, I'm Salma Musa. I'm a fifth year PhD student in the political science department and a former fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics and Society and at the Center in Philanthropy and Civil Society. Thank you for joining us for what I'm sure is going to be a really engaging and exciting evening speaking with Carla Power. It's my honor to introduce Carla. Carla has come to the Center for Ethics and Society here at Stanford as part of a new initiative, which is now in its fourth year. The initiative selects a non-fiction writer who is not an academic to give a public talk and to participate in a small workshop about his or her current book project, which takes up a question of ethics in public life. We're very lucky to have Carla here through this initiative. So Carla, as you might know, is a journalist specializing in relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim societies. And it's a topic which she covers with great compassion and great nuance. Part of this coverage included a close reading of the Quran over one year with her longtime friend, a traditional Islamic scholar. That journey culminated in Carla's Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist book If the Oceans Were Ink and Unlikely Friendship and Journey to the Heart of the Quran, which is the topic of tonight's discussion. Her upcoming book, which I've had a little sneak peek at, Prodigal Children, is a powerful account of de-radicalization strategies around the world. In a characteristically empathetic style, Carla went from Indonesia to Pakistan to Belgium to weave together the narratives of former fighters, the mothers of ISIS fighters, and frontline community organizers to help us understand the complex individualistic, but at the same time, deeply structural forces that can radicalize and potentially de-radicalize young minds. Carla currently writes for Time magazine and other publications and is a former correspondent for Newsweek, where she produced award-winning stories reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of publications from Vogue and The Oprah Magazine to The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy. I can't think of a better person to talk about tonight's subject, the often surprising intersections and divergences between traditional Islamic scholarship and secular feminism. After Carla's talk, we'll have some time for Q&A, and so without further ado, it's my great pleasure to welcome Carla Power. Thank you so much, Sarah. I had such a great time meeting you yesterday with your incredibly incisive comments on my manuscript, and so thank you for that gorgeous introduction as well. It's a real honor to be here at Stanford today. I wanna thank the McCoy Family Center for Ethics for giving me a chance to talk, and in particular, Joni Berry to making it all happen. I also wanna thank this talk's co-sponsors, the Office for Religious Life, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Klayman Institute for Gender Research. And just thinking about and trying to get my head around what the Ethics Center does, it reminded me not too long ago my family and I escaped the gray rain of Brexit, Britain, where I live, to go to Granada, the great city, and one of the last outposts of Muslim Spain right near where Europe and Africa kiss, and where the Nazareth dynasty ruled from the 13th to the 15th century and built the Alhambra on a hill high above a town. And my family and I were feeling kind of bleak and bruised from watching the upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. And one evening we found ourselves on a hill, on an open square, and it was a square facing another hill where you can see the Alhambra pitched upon it. And it was at that time of the evening when movie lighting guys call it the magic hour where everything, no matter how ugly, looks like it's turned to gold. And in this open square, there were playgrounds, there were kids kicking soccer balls and negotiating the swing sets in other places in Spanish and Arabic and Italian and English. And there were groups of guitarists and there were groups of people talking and laughing and looking across at the Alhambra, which of course is a symbol of a peaceful and engaged era, at least in many histories, in Muslim and European histories when Christians and Jews and Muslims live together, trading, studying one another's languages and cultures, and producing a flowering in the intellect and the arts. And standing in the piazza, I was thinking about this extraordinary vibe and wondering why I was so struck. And it occurred to me that afternoon that we were seeing two incredibly important building blocks in creating healthy pluralistic societies. You need a public square or an agora or a plaza or a bazaar or even an internet chat room where different people can come together and talk and hang out. And the second thing you need is a view and preferably a long view. It doesn't have to be a view as spectacular as the Alhambra. It can be an internal view. It can be a vision brought to you courtesy of a conversation, a seminar, a work of art. But what I mean is a sense of vantage, either historical or cultural or psychological, some sense of having left the gated communities of our own convictions and prejudices and being forced to look at something bigger than our own selves, our own views. And when I was watching the videos of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics and its attempt to sort of provide cross-disciplinary thinking about ethical issues on campus, it reminded me of this sort of square and view civilizational ideal. And at the risk of keeping on waxing metaphorical, it seems to me that in every university you have hundreds of public squares. But what the Ethics Center seems to do is provide a view to contextualize these conversations, providing a view of the Alhambra for the people in the public square. So having got you settled in with the warm image of a sundredged Spanish piazza or plaza, I'd like to switch to actually a bleaker space, a graveyard for this talk is fundamentally a talk about intellectual burial and disinterment, specifically about the uncovering of an all but hidden history of Muslim women scholars stretching back to the seventh century to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Like so many others, I was raised to have an image of an Islamic religious scholar as male, bearded, and aged. When I first started being interested in Muslim societies in the 1980s, as someone outside the tradition studying in English and in the secular spaces of Western universities, there were precious few discussions I found of Muslim women's leadership at all and certainly not Muslim women's leadership in the religious sphere. I later found out there were a couple of scholarly books on historical learned women and there were a handful of women who had made it into the mainstream for their prodigious learning in the Islamic tradition. Among them, of course, Aisha, wife of the Prophet and a towering scholar in her own right. So towering indeed that the Prophet Muhammad himself said, take half your religion from Humaira, from the little rosy one, as he called his wife. In my classes on Islam, we learned about Khadija, the Prophet's wife, first wife, and Aisha, but less is spiritual and intellectual leaders than his wives. There were a couple of books on Muslim queens through history by the pioneering Muslim feminist author Fatima Marnasi and there would be in some classes name checks for Fatima al-Fihri who used her inheritance to found the oldest degree awarding institution in the world, al-Qaeda'un infez in 800, I think, and who herself was learned in both Islamic jurisprudence and hadith, the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. And later when I came to study women's movements of modernity in the Arab world, we would learn about Huda Sharawi credited with starting the Egyptian feminist movement in 1923 and much was made of the famous and sort of primal moment almost when she returns from a feminist conference in Rome in 1923 and steps off the train in Cairo station and unveils herself. So the women that I had learned about initially were outsized and extraordinary. Wives of the Prophet or daughters of kings or later looking at the modern era and this is a crucial point I think which we'll unpack a bit more later, women who had been inspired by their Western feminist sisters. There was no real discussion of a tradition of women learning and teaching within Islamic religious institutions, merely a few exceptions that proved the rule. So the man who for me at least, and I'm pretty sure for most people, first uncovered the extent of this hidden history of women scholars and religious authorities, was my friend and teacher Sheikh Muhammad Akram Nadswi, an Indian born Madrasa trained and Oxford based Islamic scholar. A few years ago, he was kind enough to let me embark on the year long conversation with him. As I read the Quran and came to his lectures and trailed him around from every place from the gym to his hometown in India and tried to see where our worldviews converged and where they diverged. And I wrote a memoir of our friendship called If the Oceans Were Ink. I call the Sheikh an accidental feminist because he sort of backed into this discovery of 10,000 women scholars stretching back to the seventh century. He was classically trained in a fairly traditional Madrasa course of Islamic sciences at Nadwatul Ulama, a prestigious Madrasa in Lucknow, India. And though he'd written on topics from Arabic grammar to philosophy to history, his expertise was hadith, which of course, after the Quran is the second source for Muslims on their faith. Just for, I'm sure most of you know, but the hadith are the sayings and anecdotes which not only provide sources for Islamic jurisprudence, they provide the blueprint for how many pious Muslims live their lives day to day. As Sheikh Akram says, hadith is the source of law and the source of life. And it's through this interest in hadith and also his interest in the Muslim scholastic genre of biographical dictionaries. There are tons and tons of books on comprising short listings of scholars. You can have a biographical dictionary of the scholars of Lucknow, for example, or scholars who were in Medina between 800 and 802. And there are tons and tons of these books. And these biographical dictionaries are sort of comprised of lists of scholars where they studied, and it's usually the same stuff, who they studied with, where they studied, what books they mastered, where they might have traveled and how they, and from that a knowledgeable person knows how they fit into the Islamic tradition. So I just wanna tell a little bit about the Sheikh who by rights actually should be here rather than me. But as he's a very studious man and he's not particularly interested in looking up from his books or classes for speaking engagements, he's left it to a non-Muslim American journalist to try to help spread the word. He has many other students who are trying to do the same, but he is not a man for publicity, I've gotta say. He was raised in a tiny village in Uttar Pradesh, born 55 years ago, spending his days at the tiny local mosque school. And evenings taking his family's water buffalo to the river and nights reading the stories and poems from the Persian poet Saadi by Kerosene Lamp. His brilliance eventually propelled him from his village to the prestigious Madrasa of Lucknow and where after a stellar career, his own Sheikh sent him on to Oxford to work at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, the Think Tank, where we met when we were both in our early 20s. And we've remained friends for nearly three decades since growing grayer, raising our families. We each only had daughters, each pursuing our writing. And he stayed on in Oxford writing and publishing on theology and philosophy, exegesis, history and his first academic love, Hadith. And so one day in the late 1990s, and I had actually just come back from doing a story for Newsweek on the Taliban in Afghanistan, we were sitting and having tea in a cafe in Oxford. And he's like, Carla, you're interested in women's issues. I'm thinking about doing a short pamphlet on women scholars. And he's like, they'll be the usual people. I think it'll be like 30 or 40 names. Well, a little over a decade later, he now had 40 volumes and 9,000, now it's up to 10,000 names of women scholars stretching back to the seventh century. And of course, historically and even in many places now, women's Islamic knowledge was generally thought of as a kind of cottage industry. If women studied, or so we thought, it was in the privacy of their own homes largely. And if they were taught, it was generally thought that women only taught women. But the shake discovered or rediscovered women who were out in the public square, women whose freedom to travel, engage with, debate and even teach male religious thinkers stands in stark contrast to the freedoms that many women in contemporary Muslim societies are denied. He found, for example, women from the eighth and ninth centuries roaming around on horseback and camelback on lecture tours. He found medieval women like Fatima al-Samarkandiyah, a judge trained by her father in Hadith and Fik, Islamic jurisprudence, who would judge court cases. She'd issue Fatima al-Samarkandiyah's non-binding religious opinions and advise her far more famous, but rather less intellectually gifted husband on how to issue his. She found in 12th century Egypt a woman scholar who impressed her male students by having written a quote camel load of books, books which the shake tracked down and found to number around 400. I should add, we're probably again talking pamphlets rather than books, but you get the idea. It's still impressive. He wrote about Umaldarda, who was better known actually, and who was a seventh century jurist and scholar from Damascus who taught jurisprudence in the mosques of both Damascus and Jerusalem. And she was so brilliant, evidently, and her renowned as an expert in Fik grew so widely that her classes included not just women, but men and even for a time the Caliph himself. She was, it seems, very much her own woman. She was an orphan and would go to mosque without covering her head. And for a time she could even be found praying in the men's rose rather than in the women's rose. And she's the author of one of my favorite quotes of all time about the holiness of good conversation in pursuit of knowledge, which is, I've tried to worship Allah in every way, but I've never found a better one than sitting around and debating other scholars. And as a young woman, she used to sit with male scholars in the mosque talking about theology. So another sort of stellar woman was the 14th century Syrian scholar, Fatima al-Bataia. I'm sorry if I'm mangling the names. I love, I'm sure there are many folks out here who can correct me on my pronunciation, don't be shy. Who taught men and women in the prophet's mosque in Medina. And she was so famous that she drew students from as far away as Fez to come. And one of her clearly dazzled male students reported that she leaned on the prophet's tomb while she taught. And he couldn't resist adding that, not only did she lean on the tomb during her classes, but she leaned right near the most revered spot, which was right beside the prophet's head. So there's also, in terms of someone who lived a life in terms of someone who lived a life beyond the bounds of what we imagine, Fatima bin Sad al-Kher born nearly a thousand years ago. And I think her life suggests sort of the richly cosmopolitan nature of a Muslim intellectual in the 12th century or the 5th century in the Islamic calendar. She'd been born to wealthy parents in China, but her father had gone to China plus a chance because he was a very successful businessman from the West, from Valencia in Spain, who wanted to go seek his fortune in Kashgar. Fatima and her sisters as well as her brother were given educations, their records of her sitting, learning in a madrasa as young as four. As she grew older, she traveled with her dad, studying with important Islamic scholars, and these are male ones in Bukhara and Samarkand, and rounding back to Isfahan not once or twice, but three times to perfect her study of biographical dictionaries with another famous woman, scholar. She married a rich man from Baghdad and settled there for a time, but kept traveling and teaching in both Baghdad and Damascus and finally settled in Egypt, where she's actually credited with reviving the study of Hadith in Egypt then, where it had been in decline as other sciences, particularly jurisprudence, had become more popular. She was, she revived the discipline. She died in her late 70s and she was eulogized by many male colleagues as one of the great intellects of her day. Now these individuals that I've mentioned are obviously extraordinary, but there does seem to be reading between the lines, evidence that there were occasionally institutional attempts to teach more women Islamic studies. Of course, during the Prophet's day in the first mosque in Medina, women attended his sermons and the mosque alongside the men. And, but also later on, the Sheikh found evidence of an eighth century mosque with 40% women pupils. He found evidence of hundreds of schoolgirls in medieval Mauritania who could recite al-Mudawama, a famous book on Islamic fiqh by heart. Or in 12th century Damascus, women would study Hadith alongside men at the famous Umayyad Mosque and other Damascus mosques. And there was even one instance of the institutionalization of female authority. And for this I'm grateful to Dr. Rania Awad, who I don't know if she's here tonight, but of the Zaituna Institute and Stanford who last night told me that there was a time in medieval Central Asia where fatwas or religious opinions from religious scholars required not just a male signature on them, but a female one. Now to be sure, as the centuries went on, there wasn't a steady flow of female Muslim scholars. The time of the Prophet and his companions as the Prophet's contemporary followers are known showed a particularly strong showing of fathers teaching their daughters in Hadith and other subjects, as did the 11th and 12th century. There's lots to be discovered on why the numbers seemed to wax and wane as you, between century at particular times. It's clear that after the 15th century, according to Akram's research, there was a decline in Hadith scholarship among both men and women. And then again, after the 17th century, with the rise of European colonial rule in many countries, women's scholarship declined along with the, more broadly, the decline of the Madrasa system. And the shake, when I pressed him on this, said that his theory was that the decline of women scholars was linked to a more general decline in Muslim intellectual confidence. He argues that the sense of intellectual malaise and the humiliation of Western political triumph allowed patriarchal customs to sort of fill the vacuum where once was a much sturdier tradition that allowed both men and women to study. He also notes that the Ulama, the religious scholars, often turned to politics rather than to classical Islamic scholarship in the modern era and that patriarchal customs were allowed to creep in as people were less engaged with the classical texts. As he said to me, our traditions have grown weak. When people are weak, they grow cautious and when they're cautious, they don't give women their freedoms. Even for the sources in the centuries that allowed women greater freedoms, the shake had to hunt for them in the margins of Islamic history. He found mention of these women in biographical dictionaries of men and so he'd read to see who had taught a particular shake and when he found a woman's name, he'd trace it back. He looked in travel books, in private letters, in the lists of students from mosques and madrasas. The lost history he was looking for was scattered across continents, genres, and languages. He'd often call on other religious scholars back from his days of studying in Lucknow and later in Mecca to send him copies of manuscripts from Pakistan or Turkey or Saudi Arabia. And often just putting together one entry would take him to a half a dozen different texts in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, or Turkish. I mean, when I'm talking to a crowd of non-academics, that gets gasps but of course here, everybody who's used to the painstaking work of academic research, that probably doesn't phase this audience. But I should caution that we're not talking three-dimensional biographies here. Most of the entries by the standards of modern biography, the facts are fairly bare-boned. Dry lists of books, teachers, hijazas, or certificates of learning or books mastered. The mosques or madrasas they traveled to and occasionally a nod to the scholar's virtues. But to a scholar like Akram, versed in the chains of scholarship and the reputations of particular teachers, mosques, and madrasas, these brief details are in fact rich descriptions. In some ways, as trench into the clues we would find on any CV for a prospective would-be Stanford professor. I remember that he noted that one woman had taught hadith in 11th century Mecca and she had historians and imams among her students. And the fact that she taught Bukhari, the most important of the six canonical collections of hadith, meant that she was held in real esteem there. He's like, if she's teaching Bukhari, she was definitely the equivalent of tenure tracker or whatever. But in short, all these portraits help point up the lie peddled by bearded men from Kabul to Riyadh to those who say that Islamic religious authorities are male and always have been. As Sheikh Akram himself has said, I do not know of any other religious tradition in which women were so central, so present, so active in its formative history. 10,000 sounds like a lot of names. It makes a good headline. When you divide it over 14 centuries, it's less impressive, I realize. But when women was hoping to find 40 or 50, it is impressive. Doubtless because of the sorts of information that we got, like lists of people who attended a particular seminar at a particular mosque. Some of them were probably just young women who got included in class lists and were snoozing in the back of the class rather than fully engaging with the texts. But Sheikh Akram has a point that actually, he didn't just find quantity, he found quality by the standards of the Islamic intellectual tradition. As people here familiar with the Islamic sciences will know, one of the challenges facing hadith scholars as people who are trying to maintain and curate the words and thoughts that weren't set down until centuries after the Prophet lived, is how to evaluate the soundness of a hadith. There are a lot of fake ones floating out there. And the original, you know, an early version of fake news in many cases. And what counts in evaluating the soundness of a particular hadith, particularly before the six foundational collections of hadith in the Sunni tradition were compiled 200 years after the Prophet's death, was the strength of chains of narration or the isnad between the person who narrates it, who tells it, and the Prophet Muhammad. It's kind of like a long game of telephone and you need reliable narrators all along the way. And the Sheikh said that the women he found were excellent authorities and reliable narrators to the point where he asserts that in the history of Islamic scholarship, no woman has ever been accused of fabrication or inaccurate reporting of hadith. And his explanation for that is not, alas, the inherent superiority of women, but rather a socio-economic one. His argument is that these women weren't professional hadith scholars. They hadn't had to go into the workplace. These were women who did it as a spiritual vocation rather than as a career. Male scholars, he suggests on the other hand, had to earn their living and the cut and thrust of getting ahead in public sometimes meant that they had to pitch their scholarship to appeal to the powers that be. And by way of example, he cites a Central Asian scholar, for example, who managed to find a hadith stating that the Prophet Muhammad said that the rivers of Central Asia were just like the rivers of paradise. And there's another savvy operator who noted that his boss, the Caliph, tended pigeons as a hobby, found a hadith stating that whoever looks after pigeons has a place in paradise. The pious Caliph, who clearly knew flattery and sensed invented tradition when he saw it, promptly killed all his birds. So if Parda and the observation of codes of modesty is an argument for what kept these women's accounts pure, it also obscured many of their identities. Often the women Sheikh Akram found in these things weren't named. Initially, I assumed that these women's names had been covered and forgotten for much the same reason that Western women's lives have been ignored or indeed, the lives of formerly enslaved or indigenous people had been ignored, that the old saw that history is written by the powerful. But within the context of many traditional Islamic cultures, the erasure of women seemed to be coming out of a more complex space. It was a kind of linguistic purda, a shielding of women's names out of cultural respect for modesty. The Sheikh explained that many Muslim families, particularly in the earlier centuries, didn't want the names of wives, daughters, or sisters on registers of classrooms or madrasas or mosques. This was essentially just a kind of broad definition of the concept of hijab, commonly used to denote Muslim women's head coverings, but more broadly, the modesty required by both men and women. For the Sheikh, it was painstaking work collecting these scraps of information. It was also lonely. When he started, he was at the think tank we both met at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, where despite his brilliance in Islamic societies, he seemed to be tasked with low level translation work, combing through biographical dictionary for an atlas of the Islamic world, or translating letters asking for funding for a fancy new building that the center was building. Like the women's scholars, he was chronicling, his work was pushed into the margins by the mainstream, I think. So the Sheikh had to pursue this on weekends and holidays, but he kept at it not just as a dutiful scholar uncovering the past, but also as somebody who became increasingly concerned about what this hidden history might be able to do to help women of the present. It attained a certain more pressing moral urgency for him. I watched over the years. One link to what he began to see as fair access to intellectual resources, the right of every Muslim woman to be able to fulfill what the Prophet Muhammad told his followers to seek knowledge unto China. I knew his interest in it had shifted from a sort of academic project compiling another biographical dictionary to something more. Not just because I heard him talk about his high aspirations for his six daughters, but because one day he framed it in light of Jahlia, the Arabic term, and again, if I mangle that, please correct me, for the ignorance that reigned in Arabia before the advent of Islam. He told me one day, as we discussed how horrible it was that the Taliban were blowing up girls schools in northern Pakistan, he said, preventing women from pursuing knowledge is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. Cultural barriers to women's education was exactly the same as this pre-Islamic custom. God has given girls qualities and potentials, he said, and if they aren't allowed to develop them and not given opportunities to study and learn, it's basically a live burial. He elaborated on this burial metaphor by drawing on a very different text a bit later. He cited the 18th century poem by the English poet Thomas Gray, elegy written in a country churchyard, which he'd read in his English class back at Nadwadah al-Lolama in Lucknow. And the poem is basically a lament for English peasants who without access to education are effectively buried by illiteracy and rural life. One of the famous lines is perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire. And a later line references the poet John Milton that the graveyard might have been a place where, quote, some mute and glorious Milton here may rest. And the shake remembered this poem and said to me, Muslim women are in the same situation. There could have been so many Milton's. As news of his research sort of trickled out, he's gone from being a scholar respected in his own world by other classically trained Muslim scholars to gaining more fame, including as a champion of women's rights. And sort of the balance between these two roles is interesting. Sometimes an Islamic feminist I knew would come to Oxford. And I remember one in particular, I was like, oh, you've got to meet, you've got to meet. And afterwards she's like, oh, he's very conservative, isn't he? And at the same time that Islamic feminists were surprised by how in many ways conservative the shake was, at the same time he was being decried online by people who thought he was advocating mixing between the genders and was stepping out of line in terms of what was permissible and what isn't for Muslim women. He's been asked to speak in India and up and down Britain and Malaysia and Egypt. And when he goes on these tours, he trips across the ironies, the gaps between what he has found women doing in his research in the past and how many of these freedoms are softly and not so softly curtailed in the present. He went to talk on this and was invited by Al Azhar in Cairo. And Al Azhar has many women scholars there, but he turned up and he was expecting to see men and women and there were only men in the audience. And this is at the greatest university, the oldest university and the greatest university for many in the Arab world. Or sometimes when he goes on tours of rather traditional mosques in the north of England and the host and mom will tell him sort of soto voce, they're delighted to have him here, but could he please leave out the stuff about his research on women? And for me, I mean, I saw these ironies most starkly when I followed him back home to his hometown in Uttar Pradesh. And he was very sweet. He said, I was like, can I trail you back to India? And he's like, yes, as long as you lecture at the Madrasa I've set up in Jamdahan, which is near Johnpur in Uttar Pradesh. And he's like, you'll be the first American that they've ever seen, let alone the first American woman probably. And I was delighted to be asked. But when I went and he has a household of lots of sisters and nieces and so on. And I walked out there and it was in a public space. So it wasn't inside a mosque or anything. No woman showed up. The only woman in the audience for my speech was a 10 year old, his 10 year old niece. And afterwards I kind of said, look, you are the guy who's literally written the book on a women's access to religious institutions. And you're also this town's brightest son. Elders have been letting you lead prayers since you were a teenager. You are the most respected religious person here. Why don't you just tell them? Just say, look, my research shows women can go to the mosque, women can attend public events. And he said, look, he put it in terms of it's like building roads or bridges. You need the intellectual and cultural infrastructure before you muscle in and declare that there's gonna be this revolution in cultural mores. And he said, and what's more? Yeah, I may be respected in religious terms, but they wouldn't believe me either. They'd say, oh, you went off to Lucknow and then you went off to England and I'm, in a sense, he was saying I'm a big city guy and I might have been corrupted by big city ways. So they would be suspicious. Now, from the Vantage of the Villagers in Jamdahan, population maybe in the hundreds, the shake might be thought of as cosmopolitan. But in other Muslim circles, I think it's very important that he's not, in fact, a Western trained scholar, but a classically trained one, that his findings of this hidden history are coming not from a women's studies department or even just a history department at a Stanford or a Yale or something, but from within the Islamic tradition and that they've been found moreover by a working alum, someone who's not just linked to Islamic scholastic traditions but who is immersed in the community. He's, I think this status is incredibly important because we're watching an internal debates within Muslim societies about the rights of women and Muslim activists and scholars who are advocating for greater freedoms and for what they see as their God-given rights to justice and equality, often in some contexts around the world get smeared by conservatives as just importing Western feminism and that the efforts to give women freedom and rights is somehow imperialism in disguise with no roots in the classical tradition of Islam. And this dangerous conflation of women's freedoms with something modern or Western has real life consequences and the shake sees this all the time. I got a sort of year shadowing him and it was sort of a lesson in the multi-pronged expectations of a working alum, at least in Britain where he lives, watching his range of activities was a little bit like watching a chaired Stanford professor also serve as a Sunday preacher, a social worker and an agony aunt. In addition to the shake scholarship, he often fields phone calls from, for example, young couples worried about whether or not they can buy a mortgage, you know, elderly widows who are lonely and who are looking for a mate and phone calls from girls whose parents don't wanna let them go to the mosque or to graduate school, fearing that they'd be seen as too modern or Western to get a husband. And I think his interfacing with real life issues has made him rather bolder and more outspoken in his defense of women's rights. I was, I sort of sat up straight when I saw him open a lecture just a couple of years ago on al-Muha'di thought by opening the lecture by stating flatly that there won't be a really robust tradition of women's scholarship until Muslim men start treating Muslim women better. And these are his quotes, not mine, so I am not, I am just the messenger of what he is saying here. He says, people hate women so much, he said. If these things keep happening, I really don't feel any hope for reviving female scholarship. Now, I think that's too bleak an appraisal. Despite these buried, many of these buried militants remaining buried, there is a growing sense that as James Baldwin noted in 1963 as another civil liberty struggle got underway, that all your buried corpses have begun to speak. In addition to all the women who are being trained in all women madrasas in Iran and the classically trained women in al-Azhar in Egypt, there are many other traditions of women working both in modern universities and madrasas, furthering classical thought. There are very high-profile Islamic feminist thinkers, this has been emerging for decades, including Aminah Wadud, Sayyida Sheikh, and Asma Barlas. And at a sort of grassroots level across the globe, Muslim women and men are challenging the misogyny that has crept into Islamic cultures. Pakistani schoolgirls are defying Taliban edicts for their quest for education. African activists are demanding that local Mullahs point to where exactly the Quran advocates FGM. Indonesian feminist scholars are giving male Mullahs gender-sensitivity courses, and there are Malaysian campaigners traveling to village mosques and schools and handing out pamphlets with provocative titles such as are men and women equal before Allah. Women are returning to the basic texts and chiseling off man-made prejudices that have hardened into truth over centuries. It's slow work digging down to find scriptural, the scripture's universal messages, ones that guarantee women and men justice and humanity. It takes courage to peel back what's grown up over 14 centuries. The Quran, for example, may say that men and women are mates, but laws in many Muslim-majority countries rarely reflect this. In many of them, the modern laws governing marriage and divorce, inheritance and custody are often based on the thinking of Islam's classical jurists, guys in medieval Baghdad or Damascus making laws between one and four centuries after the Prophet's death. And like any human interpretation of a religious text, they bear the stamp of the culture of their times and of the mostly masculine outlook of those who wrote them. There have been lots of revivals of female Islamic scholarship in Madrasas and beyond and indeed, as Rania Awad who is in the audience and herself a professor of Islamic law at the Zaituna Institute was telling me last night, pre-war Syria had a robust tradition of female religious scholars, many of whom were accorded great respect by their male peers. 10 years ago, the organization Masawa, founded in Kuala Lumpur, is an international organization of Muslim women scholars and activists and their allies, determined to harness Islamic traditions and classical texts to struggle for the justice and equality they see in the Quran. Two years ago, the first international forum of women ulama's met in Indonesia issuing fatwas against child marriage and sexual harassment and indeed, the Sheikh Akram himself has worked to promote female scholarship and indeed has allowed the female scholars he's trained to challenge him and to even change his thinking. He's founded a girls madrasa in his own village back in Uttar Pradesh working hard to convince village parents to let their daughters attend and now has his own college for Islamic studies back in Cambridge and when he started it, he insisted that three of the five full-time professors be female. Now, I wish I could end on a really cheerful note here and say that in place of the buried graveyard, we move back to the view of the Alhambra, the square in the view and that in the nearly quarter century since the Sheikh started his work, that it's been propelled out into the public space and that as a result, the lives of these 10,000 women are out there and helping to revolutionize and change people's lives and change what the mainstream view of what an Islamic scholar looks like. Sadly, that hasn't happened yet. 12 years after he published his first volume introduction to his 40-volume biographical dictionary, there are still 39 volumes not published and they're in the hard drive of Sheikh Akram's computer. This is for a mix of reasons, I think. Some of them just plain old expense. His usual publishers in Damascus and Beirut and Lucknow have all told him it's way too expensive to publish. For a time, there was an interest from a Saudi prince who was going to fund it and then from a time, Sheikh Yusuf Karadawi seemed to take an interest in the project, he's a very prominent Sheikh whose television sermons on Al Jazeera have made him a household word. There were flurries of interest from the Moroccans, trips to Qatar. His students loyally even started a muhadithat fund attempting to raise money themselves working tirelessly and they also really tried to get him just to slap it on the internet but he really has a kind of old school faith in the book and the published book and the published book in Arabic first and then in other languages and it's also the Sheikh's own scholasticism, I think, and just his own character as someone who is very modest, very humble and very focused on studying rather than self-promotion. I remember the day that we were meeting and I was like, so what's the news on the book? And he's like, oh yeah, a few weeks ago some guy from the UN called and he wanted to talk to me about it but I misplaced his phone number and I don't know where it is now and he'll call back sort of thing. So there's a kind of braid of things that are conspiring to keep this unpublished as of yet. We're very much hoping there is talk that there is a gentleman from Saudi Arabia who may be willing to help the Sheikh get it published but it's frustrating and actually when I think about it, I still haven't puzzled out the scope of how it matters that these women remain buried in a hard drive. I obviously it does matter, it's very important but I don't know the ramification. It's a huge question. 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 of us 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 set as gold standards of how Muslims live today. And the subsequent eras that were closer to the time of the Prophet are also looked back for inspiration for contemporary Muslims too. So though the shake who strenuously avoids politics will never say it, I will. I find the evidence of women riding horse and camelback 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. And I think the madrasas filled with women learning fiqh and hadith in the 8th, 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. Thank you.