I will be giving a keynote lecture at the NISIS Autumn School 2025 on Gender Relations in Pre-Modern and Modern Muslim Contexts. My talk is titled “Intersex and the Making of a Non-Binary Discourse in Classical Māliki and Shiʿi Law and Its Contemporary Implication.“

Since the twentieth century, traditional Muslim scholars have largely promoted a rigid, binary understanding of sex and gender—explicitly rejecting non-binary categories. However, in this lecture, I demonstrate that several classical Māliki and Shiʿi jurists from the 11th to 16th centuries challenged this binary by recognising khunthā mushkils as a distinct ontological category beyond male and female. Through historical and legal-hermeneutical analysis, I examine how these jurists developed a non-binary discourse within Islamic law. The lecture concludes by contrasting these perspectives and their implications for contemporary intersex Muslims private and public spheres.