Aysha Hidayatullah

Home institution

University of San Francisco

Research project

This Body Called Muslim

This book examines how the study of gendered embodiment in Islam’s core ritual practices deepens understandings of the meanings of these practices and definitions of Islam.

Profile

Aysha Hidayatullah is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches undergraduate courses on gender, sexuality, race, ethics, and religious studies in Islamic traditions. She began teaching at USF in 2008, after receiving her MA and PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in Women's Studies and English from Emory University. 

She is the author of Feminist Edges of the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 2014), a study of feminist exegesis of the Qur'an. Her forthcoming book, This Body Called Muslim, is a study of Islamic ritual practices in relation to the body. Her other publications and research interests span constructions of gender and sexuality in Islamic traditions; literary representations and self-representations of Muslims in relation to gender; constructive Muslim theology; and methodologies and epistemologies in the study of Islam.

She is the co-founder and former co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Islam, Gender, Women program unit, a setting for supporting reflection on the development of the study of gender and women in Islam. She has worked in a leadership capacity on a number of projects addressing anti-racism, religious diversity, and combatting anti-Muslim prejudice, including co-developing/co-facilitating the "Moment to Movement" anti-racist pedagogy faculty program at the University of San Francisco, and a "Teaching Against Islamophobia" faculty pedagogy workshop co-sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion.

Course

HDS 3145: Embodied Religion in Muslim Memoir and Autobiography (Fall 2024)