Political Studies Speaker Series: A Care-Based Epistemology of Islam

Presented by the Department of Political Studies, College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan

Speaker: Dr. Sarah Munawar (PhD)
Date: Friday, March 11, 2022
Time: 1:30 pm - 3 pm
Location: Online via Zoom

Meeting ID: 926 6345 4574
Passcode: 83987505

Abstract:
Can you be a Muslim and do political theory in a way that does not come at the expense of your faith, witnessing capacities, and relationships? What kinds of responsibilities arise from an Islamic ethic of knowledge production for Muslim political theorists studying Islam? Instead of “Journeying to Other shores,” I argue that before assuming the “work” of comparative inquiry, we must open up the boundaries of political theory as a tradition and the moral inscrutability of political theorists as subjects. This requires unlearning and disinheriting white-orientated textual sensibilities and orientations of knowing the Other. Through embodied tafsir (quranic exegesis), I introduce care as a decolonizing intervention into how we come to know Islam and study Muslim subjectivities in political theory. Instead of bifurcating my scholarship into the Islam/political theory binary, or sanitizing my sense of Islam to make it intelligible, I illustrate how the notion of tradition, within both knowledge systems, is mutually imbricated and relies on matricide as an epistemic orientation. Conceiving of tradition as a linear trajectory of inherited knowledge relies on a matricidal conception of citizenship and interpretive authority as birthrights. The subjectivity of able-bodied man as a knower is b/ordered by and sustained through the appropriation and exploitation of caring labours and care-based modes of knowing. Knowledge production and subject formation require one to expunge all marks of dependency—including our dependency on our mother to be born.

I redefine tradition not as birthright, but as birth-work. I visualize the ecology of Islamic knowledges not as a chain but as a multi-directional care web that is nested within our relational interdependencies and sustained by the defining features of ethical Islamic knowledge production (care-knowing, collective accessibility, moral witnessing, interrelationality, social location, and giving).I offer a care-based epistemology of Islam that is intersectional, decolonial and transnational. It is only through such comparative inquiry, that de-centers whiteness, that Muslim scholars can imagine a “hermeneutic of alternative contact," of just relations, between Muslim-settlers and Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial states.

Speaker's Bio:
Dr. Sarah Munawar (PhD) is a Punjabi-Muslim and settler living on and sustained by the occupied and unceded lands and waters of the the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. She received her PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia and is also a political science instructor at Columbia College.

As a primary caregiver and mother, her research focuses on designing an intersectional and decolonial ethic of care through Islamic thought that centres the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and Muslim women as knowers of the “Islamic” and care-based modes of knowing Islam. Writing from the borderlands, she interrogates the limits of comparative political theory and the colonial politics of recognition as paradigms for cross-cultural inquiry. Instead she offers political theorists, and Muslims, an Islamic-feminist and decolonial epistemology that prioritizes body-sense, consent-based care, moral witnessing and collective accessibility in knowledge consumption and knowledge production.

Upcoming Events