Women's Ijtihad and Lady Amin's Islamic ethics on womanhood and motherhood

Women's position, identity, and value in Islam have been affected by androcentric interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith throughout Islamic history. Women's roles in society, as well as their position vis-a-vis Islamic sources and authority, have been shaped by these interpretations. In Shi'a Islam, due to the majority male clergy's resistance, women have rarely reached the highest loci of Shi'i authority and jurisprudence. However, there have been women scholars who have transgressed these normative frameworks. Lady Amin, who was one of the most prominent Iranian theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a notable example. Lady Amin had great knowledge of jurisprudence and gained the status of mujtahida at the age of forty. Her scholarly work addressed not only interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith, but also women's issues and gender politics of her time. This study addresses women's ijtihad in Shi'a Islam and investigates Lady Amin's teachings on the topics of womanhood and motherhood. This study focuses on Lady Amin's book of Islamic ethics, titled Ways of Happiness: Suggestions for Faithful Sisters, written as a Shi'i source of guidance with a specific focus on women and gender in Shi'a Islam

Milk kinship and the maternal body in Shi’a Islam

In Islamic law, kinship is defined by consanguineal and affinal relationships. Birth and Islamic marriage are important events that define religious responsibilities of family members towards each other. Some responsibilities are connected to Mahramiyat, a framework of interpersonal relations that regulates marriages and interactions with the opposite sex. Besides consanguineal and affinal bonds, mahramiyat and kinship can also be established through breastfeeding. The relationship formed through breastfeeding is called milk mahramiyat/kinship. It is spoken of in the Quran and hadith and has been extensively discussed in Islamic Feqh. This study investigates Shi'i guidelines on milk kinship. My interest is in the exploration of existing gendered rulings on the conditions of milk mahramiyat/kinship in Shi'i jurisprudence. The analysis aims to bring forth discussions on the significance of breast milk and the maternal body, and to investigate how milk kinship is framed within the patrilineal system of kinship in Shi'a Islam. The findings discuss rulings on the role of milk-mother and -father in the way kinship takes effect. While patrilineal kinship is often defined based on a paternal 'milk line', the study suggests that alternative readings and interpretations of the Quran and hadith are available that centralize the mother and the maternal body

Smaller = denser, and the brain knows it: natural statistics of object density shape weight expectations.

If one nondescript object's volume is twice that of another, is it necessarily twice as heavy? As larger objects are typically heavier than smaller ones, one might assume humans use such heuristics in preparing to lift novel objects if other informative cues (e.g., material, previous lifts) are unavailable. However, it is also known that humans are sensitive to statistical properties of our environments, and that such sensitivity can bias perception. Here we asked whether statistical regularities in properties of liftable, everyday objects would bias human observers' predictions about objects' weight relationships. We developed state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to precisely measure the volume of everyday objects, and also measured their weight. We discovered that for liftable man-made objects, "twice as large" doesn't mean "twice as heavy": Smaller objects are typically denser, following a power function of volume. Interestingly, this "smaller is denser" relationship does not hold for natural or unliftable objects, suggesting some ideal density range for objects designed to be lifted. We then asked human observers to predict weight relationships between novel objects without lifting them; crucially, these weight predictions quantitatively match typical weight relationships shown by similarly-sized objects in everyday environments. These results indicate that the human brain represents the statistics of everyday objects and that this representation can be quantitatively abstracted and applied to novel objects. Finally, that the brain possesses and can use precise knowledge of the nonlinear association between size and weight carries important implications for implementation of forward models of motor control in artificial systems

Computational Characterization of Visually Induced Auditory Spatial Adaptation

Recent research investigating the principles governing human perception has provided increasing evidence for probabilistic inference in human perception. For example, human auditory and visual localization judgments closely resemble that of a Bayesian causal inference observer, where the underlying causal structure of the stimuli are inferred based on both the available sensory evidence and prior knowledge. However, most previous studies have focused on characterization of perceptual inference within a static environment, and therefore, little is known about how this inference process changes when observers are exposed to a new environment. In this study we aimed to computationally characterize the change in auditory spatial perception induced by repeated auditory–visual spatial conflict, known as the ventriloquist aftereffect. In theory, this change could reflect a shift in the auditory sensory representations (i.e., shift in auditory likelihood distribution), a decrease in the precision of the auditory estimates (i.e., increase in spread of likelihood distribution), a shift in the auditory bias (i.e., shift in prior distribution), or an increase/decrease in strength of the auditory bias (i.e., the spread of prior distribution), or a combination of these. By quantitatively estimating the parameters of the perceptual process for each individual observer using a Bayesian causal inference model, we found that the shift in the perceived locations after exposure was associated with a shift in the mean of the auditory likelihood functions in the direction of the experienced visual offset. The results suggest that repeated exposure to a fixed auditory–visual discrepancy is attributed by the nervous system to sensory representation error and as a result, the sensory map of space is recalibrated to correct the error

‘Do you plan to stay?’ : Iranian migrant women’s experiences of hospitality and intolerence in Belgium

Program for the 2018 Student Funded Fellowship Auction

“Their Beastly Manner” : discourses of non-binary gender and sexuality in Shi’ite Safavid Persia

The Safavid dynasty ruled Persia between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as a turning period in the political, social and religious trajectories of Persian history. The ethnographic literature about the Safavid Persian culture written by Western travelers is an indication of the forming relations between the West and the Orient. The travelogues indicate that Safavid discourses of sexuality were different from their counterparts in the West. These non-binary discourses were not based only on gender and sexual orientation, but also on social factors such as age, class and status. Relations of these factors to different forms of “masculinities/femininities” were focal for gendered and sexual categorization. Nonbinary sexual/gendered identities and expressions were explicit, and a sexual continuum was prevalent. The fundamental differentiation of masculinity and femininity were not valid, and sexual relationships were not confined to heterosexuality. This study uses historical sources to explore the discourses of gender and sexuality during the Safavid era. Drawing on criticisms of Orientalism, implications of Western narratives on our understandings of sexuality and gender in the Safavid era are discussed