You can now listen to my lecture, Unveiling Discursive Spaces: Modern Shiʿi Legal Debates on Homosexuality in Islam, delivered on Wednesday, 6 November 2024, at the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University. The recording is available on YouTube: here

A brief report of my lecture delivered at the University of Texas at Austin on 25 October 2024, written by Marina Schneider, a PhD student at Austin, can be read here. The event was sponsored by the South Asia Institute, Religious Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin.

From 18 to 25 November 2024, I had the privilege of joining Professor Dr. Loren Schechter and his team at Rush University Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. Renowned for their professionalism and excellence, the clinic provided a remarkable opportunity to observe the intricate procedures and clinical processes involved in gender affirmation surgeries. This included being present…

The conference “Beyond Binaries: Intersex Body Politics in Premodern Islamic Legal, Medical, and Literary Discourses” took place on June 26, from 09.30 to 18.30, at Utrecht University. There were rich and inspiring lectures by several outstanding scholars of the field. Click hereto see the topics that were discussed.     Many thanks to our speakers:…

Wednesday 26 June (09.30 – 18.30) Location: Utrecht University, Drift 21, room 0.05 To see the programme please click here Image. Boy (?) Holding a Falcon, Hermitage Museum While, on the one hand, numerous studies have currently focused on the history of Islamic doctrines and cultural traditions concerning gender and sexuality, such as effeminacy, transgenderism,…

17 May 2024 My monograph entitled Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shiʿi Discourse (Series: Studies in Islamic Law and Society, Volume: 55) has just been published by Brill Academic Publishers. A short description of the book as featured on the back cover: “To enrich the existing debates on Islam and sexual…

(Mis)application of Modern Gender and Sexuality language to Premodern Culture: the case of Persian literary discourse The very modern culture has produced various gender, sex, and sexuality categories, terminologies, and discourses, such as transgenderism, intersexuality, masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality. While sometimes vernacular culture and a group of scholars tend to generalise these categories…

  My talk at ECIS 10 (Leiden 21-25 August 2023) was entitled “Gender Transgression in Premodern Persianate and Shiʿi Legal and Medical Discourses: the case of intersex.” It was part of our panel on “Gender and (Un)Belief Transgressions in Persianate Culture and Shiʿi legal Discourses.”   Abstract: The present traditional Muslim and orientalist approaches assert that Islam…

We discussed transgression in Persianate culture and Shiʿi legal discourses at ECIS 10/Leiden 21-25 August 2023. Panel Convenors: Asghar Seyed-Gohrab & Mehrdad Alipour Panellists: Noorian, Alipour, Ghajarjazi, Seyed-Gohrab. Here are the abstracts of our panel (pp. 402-406): https://t.co/jLTY1vqTX

My presentation at BRISMES 2023 (3-5 July-University of Exeter) was on “How to do the history of intersex in Islam: examining ‘intersex’ in premodern Shiʿi legal discourse.”  Abstract The current traditional Muslim and orientalist approaches assert that Islam is intolerant of trans-genderism or non-binary sex/gender divisions. By contrast, Islamic legal discourses on sex and/or gender…