Islamic feminism, far from being an oxymoron, has emerged as an intellectual and political movement reclaiming interpretive authority within the Islamic tradition while advancing gender justice. It builds upon the work of pioneering scholars such as amina wadud, Asma Barlas, Fatema Mernissi, Sa'diyya Shaikh, miriam cooke, and Aysha Hidayatullah, who have demonstrated that patriarchal interpretations of Qur n and Hadich are historically contingent rather than divinely mandated. amina wadud's hermeneutics of equality, Asma Barlas's theological critique of patriarchy through the principle of tawhid, Sa'diyya Shaikh's "radical critical fidelity," and miriam cooke's framing of "multiple critiques" together affirm that feminist readings of sacred texts can emerge from within faith-based epistemologies while engaging critically with global power structures. The intellectual lineage of Islamic feminism stretches back to early Muslim women's reformist voices like Aisha al-Taimuriyya and Hind Naufal (late 19th-carly 20th centuries), whose pedagogical, journalistic, and literary activism challenged male hegemony but often remained erased in mainstream historical accounts. In colonial South Asia, women such as Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Begum Sultan Jaharn, Iqbalunnisa Hussain author of Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Housebold and contributors to periodicals like Tabzib un-Niswan, Kb tün and Zill- us-Sultân shaped a reformist discourse grounded in Qur nic ethics, community welfare, and gender justice. Similarly cooke's retrieval of Nazeera Zain al-Din's carly ision in reconciling religious authority with women's intellectual and civic participation, positioned veiling not as a static religious mandate but as a socially constructed practice open to reinterpretation. This early negotiation between textual authority, women's agency, and modernity prefigures the epistemological commitments of contemporary Islamic feminism, making it an essential precursor in the genealogy of Muslim women's reformist scholarship. By the 1970s and 1980s, Fatema Mernissi's sociological and theological critiques decisively questioned patriarchal readings of Prophetic tradition. Her work The Veil and the Male Elite emphasised that misogynistic norms originated in human interpretation, not Qur nic text, and argued that Muslim women's equality is consistent with Islam's founding ethos. In the 1990s, Saba Mahmood's The Politics of Piety reframed agency within religious piety as ethical self-making, showing that Muslim women's resistance often arises within devotional systems rather than against them, thus challenging secular feminist categories of autonomy. This intellectual tradition remains deeply relevant for Muslim women's lived realities. As Margot Badran notes, Islamic feminism "derives its understanding and mandate from the Qur n" and situates gender justice as intrinsic to Islam rather than external to it. Through separation of divine sharia from human fiqb, Islamic feminists open an interpretive space for egalitarian readings that inform legal reform, justice, intra-community dialogue, and epistemic decolonisation. Movements such as Musawah exemplify the translation of these ideas into activism. Its advocacy has notably influenced Morocco's 2004 family law reform (Moudawana), which expanded women's rights in marriage, divorce, and guardianship demonstrating how Islamic legal principles can be mobilized for equality. Ziba Mir-Hosseini describes this as reinserting women's voices into processes of religious knowledge-making, challenging giwmab (husband's authority) and wiläyab (male guardianship) via feminist ijtib d grounded in Qur nic values. Feminist scholars and activists like Nawal El Saadawi in Egypt bridged religious and secular frameworks in her critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, and authoritarianism mirrored, in another geography, the critical interventions of South Asian Muslim women who contested both colonial modernity and religious orthodoxy. As we reckon with increasingly authoritarian and gender-regressive political climates across the globe, especially for Muslim minorities, the urgency of these debates becomes even sharper. In the digital sphere, this convergence takes on new urgency. Platforms such as Muslim Girl, and South Asian feminist collectives on Instagram and YouTube operate as transnational counterpublics (Fraser, 1990), where Muslim women perform a digital ijribad and hashtags, vlogs, podcasts, and visual culture become theological tools of interpretation, solidarity-building, and resistance. These platforms allow for rapid circulation of feminist hermeneutics, the democratisation of religious knowledge, and the amplification of voices traditionally excluded from both religious and academic institutions. The conference thus seeks to explore how these digital mediations transform the epistemic authority of Islamic feminist discourse traditionally centred in textual scholarship? What methodological and ethical frameworks can decolonial approaches offer to Islamic feminist scholarship in the Global South? How can these frameworks be mobilised to address the urgent questions of representation, authority, and lived realities of Muslim women in both majority and minority contexts? This conference invites contributions that critically engage with feminist hermeneutics, ethical reinterpretations of Islamic texts, the politics of knowledge production, legal reform, literary and lived practices of Muslim women across diverse contexts. Submissions are encouraged from scholars, researchers and practitioners who seek to explore the intersections of theory, faith, activism and justice within the framework of Islamic feminism. Potential areas of scholarly inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following.

Sub-Themes

- Feminist epistemologies and the politics of knowledge production in Islam

- Postcolonial critiques of mainstream feminism and secular-liberal frameworks

- Historical trajectories of Muslim women's scholarship and activism

- Muslim women and fiction: Islamic feminist perspectives

- Intersections of Islamic feminism with queer and decolonial thought

- Lived experiences of Muslim women and grassroots activism in different geographies

- Islamic feminist responses to Islamophobia, Orientalism and securitisation discourses Revisiting Islamic jurisprudence: gender justice and family law reform

- Sufi imaginaries and feminist spiritualities

- Digital activism and New Media in Muslim feminist movements Women in popular media and cultural production Cinematic re-framings of Muslim womanhood

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be submitted by 20 October, 2025. Abstracts should include a title, author's name, institutional affiliation, email address. A brief bio (100-150 words) must accompany each submission. Papers should be original and not published or presented elsewhere. Submissions should be formatted in .doc or .docx, following the APA citation style. All submissions (or queries ) should be sent to: islamicfeminism.sncws@gmail.com.

The conference will be conducted in Hybrid mode(online+offline) on 1st and 2nd November 2025