Competing Legalities? Violence, Gender, Shari'a, and the State

Workshop, Monday February 8, 4:10-6

This exploratory workshop, preparatory for an international conference in
2011, will examine the relationship between Islamic law and gender
violence in the Muslim world from two perspectives. The first queries the
culturalization of gendered violence, asking why certain repertoires of
violence -- honor killing, sexual humiliation, stoning -- have come to be
associated with community formation, notions of honor, and retributive
justice broadly identified as "Islamic." A second set of questions emerges
from more local concerns with how judicial lifeworlds --e.g., forms and
practices of adjudication, legal knowledge formation -- constitute female
subjects through sexual vulnerability. The workshop thus addresses the
centrality of women (and of gender violence) to the global dialectic of
human rights vs. Islamic law, using case studies drawn from diverse parts
of the Muslim world -- Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and
Israel/Palestine -- that reflect historically specific, if mutating,
relationships between religion, law, and the state.

Some specific concerns of the workshop will be to: 1) Explore the long
life of colonial law and constitution of legal categories as they impact
gender and sexuality in the postcolony;  2) Examine (and challenge) the
binarisms that tend to frame debates about law and culture, human rights
and Shari'a; 3) Address emergent discourses around a new category of
gender violence, 'honor killings,' and ask how their 'discovery'
interpellates women as subjects of various social groups and the state.

Four or five background papers, available on CCASD's password protected
site, will form the basis of the discussions in this closed workshop. Work
by the following participants should be read in advance: Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Anthropology, Columbia); Sonia Ahsan (Anthropology, Columbia); Professor Steven Pierce (Anthropology, Manchester); Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Law, Hebrew U. and Mada al-Carmel).

This workshop is part of CCASD's "Liberalism and its Others" project. It is organized in connection with the initiative, "Who's Afraid of Shari'a? Religious Law, Secular Reform and Global Debates on Muslim Women's Rights," co-sponsored by Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

If interested in participating, please contact Murat Guney:
mkg2116@columbia.edu