Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the best.

The next few episodes of our season on global patriarchy will focus on the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa.

And one critical underpinning of gender relations in this part of the world is Islam.

I looked for a long time to find a book that would give us a foundational knowledge of

the religion of Islam. And so when I found a book called Gendered Morality, Classical Islamic

Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, I was thrilled, and I read the book, and it was fantastic. I learned so much and I'm so excited to

welcome the author of this book, Dartmouth professor, Dr. Zara Ayubi to our podcast today. Welcome,

Zara. Hi. Thanks for having me. I'll just start by reading your professional bio and then I'll ask

you to introduce yourself a little bit

more personally in a minute. Dr. Zara Ayubi is a scholar of gender in pre-modern and contemporary

Islamic ethics. She specializes in feminist philosophy approaches to the Muslim intellectual

tradition. Her work includes a serious look at masculinity and gendered childhood, in addition to

studying more traditional gender topics such as constructs of femininity, women's experiences, marriage,

divorce, sexuality, and feminism. She has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice,

and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women's

experiences. Her book, Gendered Morality, Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society

was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. In it, Ayubi calls for a philosophical turn in the

study of gender and Islam based on resources for gender equality

that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition. She's currently

taking that philosophical turn in her second book project, Women as Humans, Life, Death, and

Gendered Being in Islamic Medical Ethics, which was supported by a three-year

grant from the Greenwall Foundation's Faculty Scholars Program. The project is a textual and

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