Welcome to the homepage of “Beyond Binaries: intersex in Islamic legal tradition“

The project is funded by NWO (The Dutch Research Council; Project number  VI.Veni.211F.093) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Utrecht. This research project runs from 2022 to 2025.

Beyond Binaries aims to question the currently dominant approaches of traditional Muslim scholars and the orientalists which predispose Islam to an unequivocal intolerance of trans-genderism or non-binary sex/gender divisions. Focusing on Muslim legal discourse, it will demonstrate that Islamic views toward sex or gender are oftentimes surprisingly dynamic. Notably, since the post-classical period (the 14th c. CE), several Shiʿi jurists have categorised intersex people as a third nature (third sex and/or gender). However, the tendency of scholars in the West to delve into classical Islamic sources has left the post-classical and early modern debates on intersex virtually untouched. This neglected idea of a third nature presents a challenge to the binary conceptions of sex or gender in Islamic Studies. This project thus examines the legal assessment of intersex as a third category in Shiʿi law from the post-classical period to the early twentieth century.

 

Beyond Binaries is grounded in the text-based, historical, and legal-hermeneutical approaches, which make it possible to deconstruct the rigidity of the current debates on sex/gender in Islam by referring to the repertoire of Shiʿi legal sources. The study combines these approaches with a genealogical approach to sex/gender in post-classical Islamic law. Such a combination enables the study to compare the modern phenomenon of intersex with premodern sex/gender categories related to intersex people in Muslim societies. By joining this line of research with the existing scholarship on Islamic law about intersex, the project aims: (1) to make a pioneering contribution to understanding the Islamic legal tradition of the post-classical period to the early twentieth century concerning intersex people; (2) to integrate the missing study of Shiʿi law on intersex identity into the broader field of Islamic legal studies, and provide a vital addition to the common Sunni-based approach to the topic; and (3) to provide a foundation for comparison between intersex identity in Shiʿi and current international laws regarding the third sex/gender category.