Zahra Moballegh

Lecturer on Women’s Studies and Islam, 2026-27
WSRP Research Associate 2025-26, 2024-25, 2023-24, and 2018–19
Zahra Moballegh
smoballegh@hds.harvard.edu

Profile

Zahra Moballegh specializes in Philosophy and Islamic thought and has published several articles on feminist philosophy and Islamic feminism in Zanan e Emrooz (Women of Today), the leading magazine for women’s voices in Iran. Her first book, Faith as Reason: An Epistemological Approach to Feminist Theology, was the first Persian book about feminist philosophy and theology. Her other work, Logical Structure of Illuminationist Philosophies, introduces a new reading of Islamic philosophical thought inspired by feminist criticism regarding the separation of the theoretical reason from the practical.

Dr. Moballegh spent eight years at Encyclopedia Islamica Foundation where she wrote many entries about Qur’anic concepts, including the insightful entry of “Woman in the Qur’an.” Her 2023-24 and 2024-25 research project at HDS, Narrating for Love and Change, was initiated from the writing process of that entry and her studies in narratology. Dr. Moballegh earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tehran in 2012. She holds an MA and a BA in philosophy from the University of Tehran.

2025-26 research project

Islamic Narrative Theology: Voice, Gender, and Authority in the Qur’an

Offering a narrative approach to Islamic theology and law, this project examines the role of storytelling through a collective narrator in the Qur’an. Analyzing systematic silences and the narrative voice in Qur’anic stories of women, it explores these narratives as dynamic, aesthetic-political events challenging conceptions of the Qur’an’s authorial voice as a unitary male authority. 

2023–24 and 2024–25 Research Project

Narrating for Love and Change: Reading Women’s Stories in Search of a Feminist Qur’anic Narrator

There are about 25 stories in the Qur’an in which one or more women have a role. A linguistic-narratological study of these stories supports new feminist approaches to the Qur’an by shedding light on the meaning of femininity from the Qur’anic God’s point of view. This study also considers some repeated phenomena in the narrating style of the Qur’anic stories which reveal new features about the Qur’anic narrator.

2018–19 research project

From Being to Becoming Woman: Decoding the Meaning of Femininity in the Qur’anic Stories

Courses

  • HDS 3649: Chosen Silence in Medieval Islamic Mystical Literature (Spring 2026)
  • HDS 3157: God, Gender, and Power: Toward a Narrative-Based Feminist Theology in Islam (Fall 2025)
  • HDS 3635: What is "Islamic" Philosophy? (Fall 2025)
  • HDS 3893: Logic in the Islamic Intellectual History: A Feminist Critical Reading (Spring 2025)
  • HDS 3157: Reading Women's Narratives, Recovering a Hidden Narrator: Toward an Islamic Feminist Theology (Spring 2024)
  • HDS 3041: Discovering Femininity in the Gendered Language of the Qur’an (Spring 2019)