Ferial Khalifa

Research project

Muslim Women’s Piety and Agency: The Case of the Women’s Piety Movement in the West Bank, Palestine

This project explores an Islamic Women’s Piety Movement in which women undertake various Islamic pedagogic activities. It considers alternative framing of such activism as an outcome of Islamist politics and subordination to patriarchal norms by framing it, instead, as a social field, a new social movement, and an important means of gender empowerment.

Profile

Ferial Khalifa is an independent scholar and researcher. She earned a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester and an MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her PhD thesis was on women’s Islamic activism in the West Bank, Palestine. Dr. Khalifa’s research interests include Muslim women's piety and agency, Islamic movements and religion, and aesthetics. She is particularly interested in the investigation of Muslim women’s practice of Quran recitation, supplication and religious story-telling as aesthetic moral practices.