Professor Marilyn Booth

Inaugural lecture of Professor Marilyn Booth, 19 January 2012.

Event details

Lecture title: "The Islamic Politics of John Stuart Mill: Street literature, translation and gender activism in Egypt, circa 2002"

Date: 19 January 2012, 5pm

Venue: Auditorium lecture theatre, Business School

Lecture abstract

The discourse on Islamic practices as a basis for politics in Egypt has been accompanied for at least a century by the production of manuals to guide believers in their daily lives, as gendered members of a community—as Muslim women and Muslim men.

This literature of conduct echoes and draws upon believers’ use of the Prophet’s sunna—his example in conduct and in words—to enact the proper and pious life. Such popularly aimed manuals focus particularly on assigning specific gender roles and social spaces to women as the signifiers of family and national honour.

This lecture considers the messages such conduct manuals propound, in light of 20th-century rhetoric on Islam and governance, and juxtaposes these works with a recent translation of John Stuart Mill’s 'The Subjection of Women' into Arabic, exploring how a classic work of European thought becomes part of a contemporary production of the gendered Muslim subject.

Lecture video