CCMW Muslim Women Scholars Series: July Edition
The Breathwork of Ar-Rahman: An Islamic Conception of Birth Justice
Presenter: Dr. Sarah Munawar
Please join us in this virtual seminar titled “The Breathwork of Ar-Rahman: An Islamic Conception of Birth Justice”, featuring Dr. Sarah Munawar (Columbia College).
Abstract:
I offer an intersectional and Islamic ethic of reproductive care that makes visible the unmet care needs of and attends to the epistemic, moral and ontological injuries experienced by Muslim pregnant, birthing and postpartum people in a global pandemic. My feminist-theorizing is enveloped within Islamic stories of maternity, as well as an auto-ethnography of my birth-story. I offer a moral vocabulary of care which advocates for the Islamic right of Muslims to supported caregiving and labours against the violence of maternal separation. A central theme is kin-making, a type of caring labour, by which we house one another in our relations and accept responsibility for one another’s care and access needs. In an Islamic sense, kin-making is a kind of access-work, of sensing how our bodies fit and move together in the spaces we hold together. It is a way of making space in our gatherings, of homing, of housing within our relations those who have been dislocated by settler-colonial, heteropatriarchal and ableist violence . I argue that what paves safe passage for Muslims birthing in a pandemic are constellations of care that go beyond the scope of health-care settings and medicalized care. Such webs of care include Allah as doula, radical birthworkers, (grand)mothers, lands and waters, aunties and friends and the ancestors that watch over us in Creator’s name as we bear life. Such home-making is a way of mobilizing Islamic knowledge to protect the ontological security of Muslims and their right to possess their Muslimness, to think, critique and judge their experiences of reproductive care islamically.
Time: Jul 14, 2022 07:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
About Dr. Sarah Munawar
Sarah Munawar is an immigrant-settler living on and sustained by the occupied and unceded lands and waters of thexwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) People.
She received her PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia in 2019 and is currently teaching international relations, decolonial theory and development at Columbia College. She has also taught and designed courses on contemporary political theory and de-colonial liberation theologies at UBC and was a Muslim Community Fellow for the Centre of Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University.
As a scholar, she specializes in contemporary Islamic ethics, critical disability studies, de-colonial epistemology and care ethics. Her research and writing is rooted in her family’s situated experiences as primary care-givers for her father, a stroke-survivor. She is currently working on transforming her dissertation into a book manuscript in which she weaves her family’s stories of experiencing the depths of joy, grief and isolation as a community of care with the stories of Hajar, Maryam and Yunus in the Quran. The project will be a call to Muslims to interrogate the unequal distribution of care-work in our families and communities, to support and empower caregivers and disabled Muslims in our relations and to (re)imagine and (re)design our homes, our mosques, and the spaces in which we gather to be more inclusive and accessible.
As an advocate for disability justice, in her scholarship and her community work she always centres the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and carers and the authority of care-based modes of knowing and embodying Islam. Through her praxis as a political theorist and educator, she dreams of building a world in which inter-faith and intersectional communities of care bloom infinitely, the responsibility of care is equally shared, primary care-givers are cared for, labours of care are rooted in a de-colonial ethos, and everyone has equal access to quality and dignified care in times of need.
She is also the founder of The ZamZam Well—an online database and archive of feminist, de-colonial and intersectional contributions to Islamic thought and praxis authored and authorized by Muslims all over the world. The open-access database is a practice of public scholarship. It is a living and intentional gathering of anti-oppressive Islamic knowledge, practices and histories in the form of duas, rituals, stories, khutbahs, Quranic exegesis, practices of care, etc. Through the database, she hopes to support Muslims all over the world in the struggle against Islamophobia, (settler-) colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, secularism, and white supremacy by sharing community-based research, anti-oppressive vocabularies, educational resources, and practices that are rooted in the Islamic tradition and (con)texts.
You can read her dissertation here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0387144
Twitter: @sarahmun0
Website: sarahmunawar.com
Project: TheZamZamWell.com
About Muslim Women Scholars Series
The Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) is pleased to present the Muslim Women Scholars Series. One of CCMW's strategic goals is to promote critical thinking among Muslims and non-Muslims to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about Islam, Muslim women and their families. One way of doing this is to feature the work of contemporary Muslim women scholars focusing on diverse topics related to Muslim women.