Research Associate Z. Fareen Parvez Explores ‘Women, Trauma, and the Islamic Sciences of Healing’

Z. Fareen Parvez’s work uses ethnographic and other qualitative methods to explore the political, economic, and religious lives of working-class communities. She is the author of Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (2017, Oxford University Press). Her writing has appeared in such publications as Newsweek, Salon, The Guardian, and LA Times, among others.

In addition to her research on gender and possession in Morocco, her current research looks at predatory lending and household debt in urban India. 

Below, Parvez talks about her experience as a 2023-24 WSRP Research Associate and Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Islam, her work as a public sociologist and activist, and how her teaching at HDS enhanced her own research project at the WSRP. 

Intellectual and Professional Background

My PhD is in sociology from UC Berkeley, and I am currently an associate professor of sociology at UMass Amherst. I teach social theory, ethnographic methods, sociology of religion, and contemporary Marxist theory at the graduate level. The sociology of religion course I teach is from an international perspective, looking at case studies around the world.

I consider my work to be intersectional. I'm a sociologist by training, and intersectionality is a theoretical frame and methodological approach that's integral to my discipline. I have also been involved with feminist movements since I was an adolescent and as an activist in college. I entered graduate school with certain ideas of wanting to work with South Asian feminist movements and issues around gender violence. But then 9/11 happened, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and the War on Terror began. 

As someone with a Muslim background, I was really troubled by this and felt like I needed to better understand what was happening and that I could contribute a unique perspective. I ended up studying Islamic movements and mobilization among minority Muslim communities. I wanted to pursue global ethnography, so I chose to work in both France and India, comparing Europe and Asia. I observed different Muslim communities across class, examining their political and religious practices. 

I ended up looking at how different formations of state secularism impacted the way that Muslims were organizing and responding to the War on Terror. Back then, there was a lot more surveillance and pressure on Muslims in France than in India, which had a much more pluralistic secularism. Since then, both countries have ended up moving towards the far right on questions of social justice and religious freedom. 

It was at the end of my fieldwork in France that I saw so much surveillance in these working-class mosque communities and how people were under significant pressure. There were national debates raging about banning different forms of women's veiling. The hijab had already been banned in public schools. Then they went after the niqab, the facial covering. It was around this time that I saw an outbreak of jinn possessions in the mosque community I was participating in. I found it really disturbing and also hard to separate from the wider political context at that moment. 

I also saw women actively rejecting the health care system and looking to traditional methods of Islamic healing. This also was in the context of great discrimination in public space, including hospitals. Doctors would often lecture my interlocutors and interrogate them about why they covered their hair. This kind of planted the seeds for my work in Morocco.

Islamic Healing and Exploring a Lingering Question 

I finished my first book, Politicizing Islam, on the India-France comparison. I decided then to look more deeply at the subject of Islamic healing—the meaning of illness and healing from within the religious tradition and in everyday life. There was some literature about the growing global revival of traditional and Islamic healing. I wanted to branch out to a different field site, and so I decided to go to Morocco, which offered a very different, postcolonial context. 

I did a few months of ethnographic research in Fes, along with in-depth interviews. I spent time observing healing sessions in Islamic healing (ruqya al-sharia) clinics. Ruqya is based on Quranic recitation. If someone is sick or suspecting they might be possessed, the healer recites verses from the Qur'an at the person or into their ear to convince the jinn to leave. I observed many of these sessions and spent time with healers. I also saw multiple modes of healing in Morocco. There is such a rich and fascinating history of how people manage spirit possession. Ihad the privilege of observing lila ceremonies, or trance rituals. This is a very different approach for dealing with possession. Trance is often denigrated as being un-Islamic, even though it is a fairly widespread ritual and has a long history. I met seers and other traditional healers, but I was focused mostly on Islamic healing. 

I tried to understand their experience and what it meant for them to heal. For many of them, they might heal for a little while, but then the jinn comes back. So then it becomes a matter of how you manage the condition. 

I interviewed a few men, but most cases of possession were of women. It’s nearly universal in the literature that possession affects women at much higher rates. There are certainly men who fall into possession, and I will venture to say that this is more so now than 50 years ago. But in general possession seems to happen more to women. There are scholarly explanations for that as well as popular explanations for why women seem to be more vulnerable. It’s a question I’m always struggling with. For my interlocutors, possession is just about the whims of the spirits and what the spirits choose. For the researcher, it’s hard not to see connections to issues of power and trauma, which are both gendered. 

WSRP as an Educator and Researcher

The history of women that have come through this program is so impressive. I was really surprised and happy to have been accepted. 

The WSRP cohort exceeded my expectations, and I found it to be a really encouraging space where we all found each other's work fascinating and saw the best in each other. I think the program strikes a good balance of giving us time and space to do what we need to do while also holding us together. Every semester, we each circulate a paper, and then meet and comment on one another’s work. I received great feedback.

As I had already completed the research in Fes, I did not have to leave Cambridge to go back to Morocco and could focus on reading and trying to write. Of course, it has been a very distracting year, and I chose to dedicate much of my time to activism. However, teaching the course “Gender, Possession, and the Islamic Sciences of Healing” has been wonderful. 

I think for most of us who are trying to focus on writing, teaching can often take us away from that. But I felt like it really advanced my project. The students were fantastic, and I was forced to read a bunch of classics that I had been putting off because it seemed overwhelming. Reading them collectively with the students was great. It was a wild class and not something I could teach in most settings, but I was lucky to have strong enrollment and enthusiastic students. It was a nice mix of MDiv and MTS students, as well as undergraduates. 

As someone doing work that is on the absolute fringes of sociology, at least American sociology, being in an interdisciplinary space where others really see the value of what you are working on was a nice change. While at the end of the day, I tend to think like a sociologist, my work crosses different disciplines and boundaries. The Div School, and especially the WSRP community, welcomed and embraced this complexity.

—Interview conducted and edited by Rachel Mallett, HDS news correspondent