Why Muslim Women Are Re-interpreting the Qur'an (event)

How I wish I could attend this talk/book-signing! Anyone in or around San Francisco is encouraged to attend, if convenient or possible for them.

Join us at the ACCC [Arab Cultural and Community Center]  for a thought provoking presentation and discussion with Cornell University's research fellow, Nimat Hafez Barazangi on why Muslim/Arab Women are reinterpreting the Quran.
Summary: Muslim/Arab women have remained a passive force in changing the reality of the approximately 800 million Muslim/Arab women and the prevailing unjust practices in Islamic/Arabic thought. By reflecting on some historical reform movements, Nimat will use examples from contemporary events to argue that passive views and unjust practices concerning Muslim/Arab women remain because the premises and foundations of reform have not changed.
Nimat Hafez Barangi is a research fellow at Cornell University. Her forthcoming book: Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading (The University Press of Florida, December 2004) was labeled by one of the reviewers as "the most radical book in the last 14th centuries of Islam". She edited Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice (University Press of Florida 1996, 2000) translated into Arabic, Dar Al Fikr, 1999) in which she also contributed "Vicegerncey and Gender Justice, and has published about thirty articles, essays, and book reviews.

Event Properties

Event date:	March 29, 2012 06:00 pm
Event End Date:	March 29, 2012 08:00 pm
Capacity	Unlimited
Price	Free
Location	Arab Cultural and Community Center

SOURCE: arabculturalcenter.org

Maulvi Begum Sahib: The eunuch who found her calling as a Qur'an teacher

SUKKUR: Seventy-year-old Jameela has come a long way from playing as a child with eunuchs to teaching 450 children the Holy Quran every day.

Born a transgender in March 1941, Jameela never fit in at home or at school, so when an elderly eunuch, Pasham Fakir, offered to take her away she ultimately yielded and followed him.
She continued to live in what she later called ‘sin’ until May 1972, when her brother died in a robbery. “This proved to be a turning point in my life because I started learning the Holy Quran,” Jameela told The Express Tribune.

She was born in Syed Mohammad Yakoob Shah’s household in Pishin, Balochistan. “My father had two wives: my mother was from a Syed family, while my stepmother was from a non-Syed family,” she said. “My mother died when I was four and my aunt looked after me for two years after which my father sent me to live with my stepmother in Ranchore Lines, Karachi.”

Jameela’s stepmother sent her to an all-girl middle school near their house, but the young eunuch left school when she was in class three because she used to get teased for her “attitude and strange style of walking.”
After dropping out of school, she helped her stepmother with domestic chores. “When I was 10 years old, a eunuch named Pasham Fakir came to our house and asked my mother to hand me over to him but my mother refused.”

She said that Pasham kept coming back for her and they used to talk outside the house. “Then one day I just went him without telling my mother,” she said dolefully.