Dr. Celene Ibrahim is a scholar of religious studies with a focus on Islamic social and intellectual history and applied ethics. She is the author of the monograph Women and Gender in the Qur'an published by Oxford University Press (2020) and Islam and Monotheism (2022), published in the Elements series by Cambridge University Press.
Ibrahim also specializes in chaplaincy, spiritual care, interreligious engagement, and religious leadership in the public sphere. She is the editor of the book One Nation, Indivisible: Seeking Liberty and Justice from the Pulpit to the Streets (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2019). She previously served as the Muslim Counselor affiliated with the Office of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School and as the Muslim Chaplain at Tufts University. She currently serves as a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Groton School and as the institution’s Muslim Chaplain.
Ibrahim has studied traditional Islamic sciences, was a Mellon Fellow and earned a doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Civilizations in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, received a degree in divinity from Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar, and was a Davis Scholar at Princeton University where she received a bachelor's degree with highest honors in Near Eastern Studies.
Dr. Ibrahim sat down over zoom with Rebekah Go, the Ansari Institute’s Program and Communication Manager, to talk about her research and scholarship. The following has been edited and abridged for clarity and length.
You may be best known for your book Women and Gender in the Qur’an. I think many individuals who grew up in the West may have questions and/or misconceptions about Muslim women. Could you pick one topic that you wish people would better understand?
In certain strains of Western political discourse, we find a tendency to typecast Muslim women as collectively oppressed or in need of Western-led interventions. Some politicians and interest groups even cultivate negative sentiments and then strategically capitalize on them. When negative stereotypes are deliberately propagated by maleficent actors, lay people consume these stereotypes unwittingly.
I can give an illustration from my own recent experience. I have a faculty colleague with little prior interaction with Muslims who recently traveled to a Muslim-majority country for the first time. She joked with me upon her return: “If the women I met in Dubai were oppressed, oppress me too please!” Now, we could talk about segments of that population – from migrant domestic workers to the princesses – but the stereotype of oppression writ large doesn’t hold. My colleague had been exposed to negative stereotypes but then had a completely different experience interacting with actual people. Especially in the US context, significant numbers of people have little personal experience with Muslims and modest educational exposure. We then make policy with inaccurate assumptions as a backdrop. This is a problem.
When we think about women’s well-being, we can systematically look at how any given issue manifests from one geography to another, from one population to another. For instance, we could look at factors such as access to divorce and child custody, or the transactions that marriage entails, or what a woman's opportunities look like for self-actualization. Based on the school of thought, cultural influences, the branch or sect of Islamic thought that influences a particular woman’s social circles, the women’s social standing, all of this impact life prospects. There's tremendous diversity of experience out there in terms of how religious thinking impacts any given woman’s day-to-day reality. It really does require a nuanced view.
We had a Sikh speaker in February, and he talked about the Sikh faith as “radically egalitarian.” Recently, the US Southern Baptist Convention expelled a Virginia congregation because it affirmed that women could serve in any pastoral role, including as a senior pastor. These are two radically different views on the roles of women. Is there a specific belief in the Muslim faith tradition about women in leadership - such as these?
Again, it can be hard to generalize about Islamic intellectual traditions, and I am not saying this as a copout – it is a good question! Because Islamic traditions can be geographically specific, and because there are different branches of Islamic thought and many different domains of leadership, we find vast differences in terms of approaches, attitudes, the way sources are treated, which sources are consulted on any given issue, and so forth. It's hard to give a brief but accurate picture.
Historically, women have made critical contributions by managing sizable endowments that serve the public good, and today, we can point to many women who run Islamic organizations and nonprofits that similarly serve the public good; so, we find continuity in this domain even though institutions and contexts have evolved. We find issues related to female leadership – such as women’s ability to teach traditional Islamic sciences – that have not so much been questioned throughout history, and other issues, such as women’s ability to lead public, mixed-gender ritual prayer, that have been contested, in particular in the U.S. and Europe in the twenty-first century.
There's a robust tradition of Islamic ethical thinking that includes themes related to female leadership and women’s well-being. We find many axiomatic gems in the Islamic intellectual tradition that can advance female interests. But in some places, Islamic intellectualism has been gutted, and when the intellectual tradition becomes impoverished, or when a host of social institutions become decimated because of civil strife, it is the parties on the margins who all-too-readily experience the brunt of the loss, whether that is women, children, orphans, the chronically poor, or the mentally or physically incapacitated. So, when social institutions are gutted or accountability is compromised, people whose well-being is most precarious suffer. And that's the bleak picture that we see playing out in some places. On the other hand, in societies where we find more social stability and public welfare, we also find female flourishing, whether across conventional leadership domains or in new spaces for female leadership, such as the sphere of chaplaincy.
In May of 2023, a leading group of Shaykhs and Scholars of Islam in the United States issued a statement called Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam. As both a scholar and a practicing Muslim, I wondered what your reaction was when you first heard about this statement and how - or if - you, yourself, are experiencing the so-called “culture wars” as a person of faith.
I've seen the statement, and in my opinion, it has strengths and weaknesses. The strength is that it calls for a discursive arena in which differences of opinion can coexist. As a public intellectual, I'm generally in favor of creating space for robust, reasoned, and respectful public conversations on ethical issues. In that sense, the statement was well-intentioned. At the same time, the authors and signatories attempt to speak for Muslims at large without including Muslim voices that have differing perspectives on the very ethical issues that they are addressing. And so, we have a case where a statement that is making a plea for a wider discursive space and simultaneously attempting to speak on behalf of a Muslim body politic without also extending that wide discursive space to co-religionists. So, there is a type of irony at work in the statement.
As a follow-up to that, I noticed that you are also the Muslim Chaplain at Groton School. Are you seeing the effects of the culture wars on the young people that you work with at school? And if so, how do you help those students to navigate their own faith in these sometimes fraught times?
Many of our young people in the US are raised in an ethos of acceptance of identity difference; that is the messaging that they're getting from the wider equity conversations from which Muslims benefit since we bring religious diversity, and often ethnic diversity too. On the whole, I work with youth in educational institutions who are very much committed to fostering spaces of broad-based inclusion and belonging. They don’t want to feel socially ostracized either. There is a real disconnect for many Muslim youth because they resonate with concepts of inclusion and belonging and at the same time are exposed to messaging from Muslim individuals and religious leaders who are skeptical of gender fluidity or who speak disparagingly about same-sex attraction. So, this creates real cognitive dissonance, not just for young people, but for many of us who receive these dissonant messages.
This situation is particularly tough for young people because their value systems are still in flux, and there are not many community spaces where they can reason holistically without being shamed, or blamed, or simply told what to think. I am in favor of creating robust spaces where people can reason without dictating a priori what they must conclude. I hope in these spaces we can differ about some fundamentals while also taking steps to preserve each other’s dignity and intellectual autonomy.
I am skeptical that regulating same-sex sexuality is a useful preoccupation of religious groups, particularly when there are much more obvious social challenges to devote time and intellectual resources toward – poverty, addiction, housing and food insecurities, and educational disparities come to mind. We cannot lose sight of the basic mandate toward the disenfranchised that has been at the core of Islamic social teachings.
Insofar as sexual preferences constitute an identity category, I see more potential losses than gains in mobilizing Muslim youth against their peers, friends, or even siblings. I have many colleagues who would disagree with me because they see the gender wars as a symptom of unhealthy individualism and licentiousness. From the bigger picture, the debates on gender issues are taking place alongside ethical debates on other arenas of human activity, such as bioethics, commerce, technology, and increasingly complicated networks for global finance. Muslim ethicists have a lot on their plates!
You moved from teaching in higher education to now working at Groton School, a private, college-prep, boarding and day school for students in grades 8-12. What prompted this move? And what particular joys and challenges have you experienced working with this age group/population?
I still contribute to intellectual discourses by publishing and attending academic conferences, but working with teens is a joy. It's such a dynamic and integral moment in the human life cycle. I remember my teenage years being deeply influential. I had a teacher who opened my mind to philosophy and comparative religion, and this impacted the whole trajectory of my life. Their growth and development are incredibly multifaceted – intellectual, social, emotional, physical, all at the same time.
In my current role, I teach global history from the origins of our species to the present. I am enjoying the challenges that teaching this wide scope entails. I also offer courses in applied ethics ranging the gamut from environmental ethics to my own specialty in women and gender studies. After having focused so intently on a narrower field for more than a decade, the wider scope is enriching my thinking. I have added courses on Qur’anic studies and Islamic ethics to the Groton School curriculum too, and the courses have been popular.
You write a beautiful piece called “Crossing Religious Boundaries at Groton” which discusses the curriculum that you have developed for both a trimester-long course Religion Studies and Philosophy course as well as a year-long global survey courses on ancient and current spiritual traditions. Are these new courses? What have you enjoyed the most in developing these for Groton? What has surprised you?
I enjoyed designing these courses together because the process was an intellectual journey for me to find the best sources and the best way to lead my students through the material. In putting together the courses, I consulted many scholar-practitioners in various indigenous studies specialties. I have to credit the Faith in the Story Workshops with the Ansari Institute at Notre Dame where I met wonderful conversation partners, including Natalie Avalos, Tyler Tully, and Shannon Rivers. As I write in the piece in the Christian Century, I am trying to expose my students to a dynamic field of knowledge that is rapidly expanding. I am also thinking through the pedagogies that are most appropriate for transmitting this knowledge to my students.
You are the editor of the anthology One Nation, Indivisible: Seeking Liberty and Justice from the Pulpit to the Streets which according to its description is “born of the conviction that open-hearted engagement across our differences is a prerequisite for healthy civic life today.” It can seem a bit counterintuitive to say that a more unified republic will occur as a result of a more diverse body politic, but that seems to be the argument. How do you think religious pluralism contributes to a more unified and ultimately stronger civic life?
Oh, I love this question! Human societies inherently have dissent, religious or otherwise, and one strategy is to quash dissent and another strategy is to engage it. That's basically the bare bones perspective: you either engage dissent or quash it. And I think that when we engage with dissenting voices, when we think long and hard about the reasons for the dissent, we arrive at a better understanding of issues. “What in a person's life experience has led them to this point of view?” In reflecting on perspectives that differ from our own, or in taking opposition seriously, we can come to more nuanced, potentially more accurate, more perceptive insights than we could achieve without having considered the difference of opinion.
If we consider totalitarian-leaning political systems that systematically quash descent, we realize that while they can accomplish certain feats and perhaps more readily propagate ideas, often these systems are short-lived because they're not sustainable. The human spirit will not stand to be repressed for very long before something internal to our nature pushes back against hegemony or tyranny. Rulers gain tremendous sway by just squashing dissent, and it can work for a time, but I think we serve ourselves, we serve humanity, better by engaging difference.
There is maybe a naive kind of faith that I have in the human mind or the human heart to be capacious and compassionate enough to engage different perspectives without resorting to epistemic violence, or worse. But I think that this capacity, where it is not inherent in a person’s disposition, can come about through training and acculturation. The capacity to engage differences productively is born out of experience and encounters across differences that are positive and life-giving. That's what I'm trying to teach when I do interreligious work or when I write in the field of interreligious studies. It's also the work that I'm doing with my students in ethics class when we stretch ourselves to think about issues from various perspectives.
I have a deep appreciation for having grown up in a liberal democracy where I could take advantage of political freedoms. Still, folks who are proponents of liberalism can themselves have narrow conceptions of what is normal, natural, moral, and so forth. Having studied a vast range of philosophical and religious systems, I find tremendous richness in the range of moral thinking. We do ourselves a favor, we do humanity a favor when we preserve this richness rather than try to level it out. In this regard, I appreciate the work of political philosopher and ethicist Danielle Allen who theorizes justice and democratic equality.
The question then is really, how do we set up spaces where we can engage in ways that are more enlightening than they are divisive? That's the real challenge, the real art. It takes certain skills and expertise, like other art forms. We cannot expect this capacity to be simultaneously intellectually capacious and discerning to be our natural state of being. But I think it is something to which we can collectively aspire.
Originally published by at ansari.nd.edu on June 28, 2024.