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
Project: TheZamZamWell.com
