Hadia Mubarak

Hadia Mubarak is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte. She previously served as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College and as a Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her new book, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qurʾanic Commentaries (Oxford University Press, 2022), explores significant shifts in modern Qurʾanic commentaries on the subject of women against the backdrop of broader historical, intellectual and political developments in twentieth-century North Africa. She currently serves as a scholar-in-residence with the Muslim Community Center of Charlotte (MCC), a Board of Advisors member with the Carleton Center for the Study of Islam (CCSI) and a scholar with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).

Mubarak completed her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University, where she specialized in modern and classical Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic feminism, and gender reform in the modern Muslim world. Mubarak received her Master’s degree in Contemporary Arab Studies with a concentration in Women and Gender from Georgetown University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs and English Creative Writing from Florida State University.

Mubarak previously worked as a Senior Researcher at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and a researcher at the Gallup Organization’s Center for Muslim Studies, where she contributed research to Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (Gallup Press, 2008) and The Future of Islam by John Esposito. In 2006, Mubarak joined the “Islam in the Age of Globalization” initiative, sponsored by American University, Brookings Institute and the Pew Forum. As a field researcher, Mubarak conducted on-site interviews and surveys with a range of Muslim scholars, government officials, activists, students, and journalists in Qatar, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and India and published an analysis of these surveys in Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (The Brookings Institution Press, 2008). Mubarak taught as a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) in 2015-2017 and a visiting lecturer at Davidson College in 2015-2016.

Her most recent/forthcoming publications include “Gender and Qurʾanic Exegesis” in The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender, ed. Justine Howe (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2020); Mubarak, Hadia and Naved Bakali, “Violent, Oppressed and Un-American: Muslim Women in the American Imagination,” in The Body Politic: Bodily Experience in a Post-Trump World, ed. Christine Davis and Jon Crane (Brill, 2020); “Women’s Contemporary Readings of the Qurʾan,” in The Routledge Companion to the Qurʾan, ed. Maria Dakake, Daniel Madigan and George Archer (New York: Routledge, 2021); and “Classical Exegeses of Qurʾanic Verses concerning Women” in The Oxford Handbook on Islam and Women, ed. Asma Afsaruddin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Her previous publications include, among others, “Change Through Continuity: A Case Study of Q. 4:34 in Ibn ʿĀshūr’s Al-Taḥrīr wa-l-Tanwīr” (Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 20.1, February 2018); “Breaking the Interpretive Monopoly: A Re-Examination of Verse 4:34” (Hawwa 2.3); “Crossroads,” I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim (White Cloud Press, 2011), “Intersections: Modernity, Gender and Qurʾanic exegesis” (PhD Diss., Georgetown University, 2014), “Young and Muslim in Post 9/11 America” (The Brandywine Review of Faith & International Affairs Vol. 3, No. 2); The Politicization of Gender Reform: Islamists' discourse on repealing Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code (MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2005); and “Blurring the Lines Between Faith and Culture” (America Now: Short Readings from Recent Periodicals. 5th ed.).

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Islamic StudiesIslamic feminismQuranic ExegesisQuranic exegesis and genderModern islamic movementsIslamic LawWomen and Gender in the Middle East

AFFILIATIONS

Queens University of Charlotte, Philosophy and religion, Faculty Member Guilford College, Religious Studies, Faculty Member