Meet the Scholar: Snapshots of Intellectual Journeys

amina wadud – National Islamic University in Jogjakarta, Indonesia

Dr. amina wadud is a world renown scholar and activist with a focus on Islam, justice, gender and sexuality. After achieving Full Professor she retired from US academia—except as Visiting Researcher to the Starr King School for the Ministry, California, USA. After 15 years in retirement she has recently returned as Visiting Professor at the National Islamic University in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. She migrated to Indonesia in 2018 to avoid the chaos of US politics and ethics first hand. Author of Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, a classic that helped towards the development of epistemology and methodology in Islamic feminism, which is the most dynamic outcome of Islamic reform today. It is 3 decades old and translated over 10 times, most recently into French. Her second manuscript, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, then moved the discussion further and aligned with the mandate for ethics and activism to be in collaboration. After completing a 3 year research grant investigating 500 years of Islamic classical discourse on sexual diversity and human dignity, funded by the Arcus Foundation, she is organizing an International Center for Queer Islamic Theology: the first in the world.

Mother of five and Nana to six, she is best known as The Lady Imam