Gender Matters: Normativity, Positionality, and the Politics of Islamic Studies

Once, a few years back, I was asked by a graduate student at a conference how I could substantiate my claim that all our scholarship in Islamic studies has political implications. His own research focused on the medieval textual tradition and he could see no political relevance and thus no responsibility for any political implications of his work. Indeed, he seemed rather disturbed by my forceful assertion that we cannot escape the politics of knowledge production, no matter how hard we try to insist that the responsibility is not there if we do not acknowledge it. It was certainly not the first time that my insistence on recognizing the political significance of scholarly work in Islamic studies was challenged. But this time, certainly owing in part to more institutional security gained through tenure, I took him up on his challenge and started writing more openly and intentionally about questions and debates regarding normativity and positionality in Islamic studies. These are the questions that animate my research, inform my work with graduate students, and influence my teaching. They are, I would argue, still not at the forefront of methodological and theoretical reflections in much of Islamic and religious studies scholarship. One way to explore the politics of knowledge production in our field is through something that we have debated at some length, namely scholarly normativity, religious normativity, and the positionality of scholars of Islam/religion.