Prof selected as Carnegie Scholar

Prof selected as Carnegie Scholar

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

Assistant Professor of Humanities and Political Science Elora Shehabuddin is among 20 leading scholars from across the nation selected as 2006 Carnegie Scholars, a prestigious fellowship awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support innovative and path-breaking scholarship.

Shehabuddin

Her Carnegie fellowship marks the first for Rice University.

Each of this year’s scholars will study themes focusing on Islam and the modern world. Shehabuddin’s research, titled “Women at the Muslim Center: Islamist Ideals and Democratic Exigencies,” will examine the role politically engaged Muslim women play in the transformation of Islamist politics in the 21st century.

Specifically, she will study how Jamaat-i Islami, the main Islamist party in Bangladesh, and Hizbullah, the main Islamist party in Lebanon, have regarded issues of gender and how the presence of gender issues in national public discourse is compelling the parties to change their ideologies.

“What I want to explore is how paying attention to issues of women and gender might be able to force these parties to make changes in what they regard as the most sacrosanct areas of law and policy, those pertaining to family and gender issues,” Shehabuddin said. “For me, that’s a litmus test of how willing they are to change and to respond to current social and political realities — and how they’re doing it without necessarily diluting their ideals or sacrificing their ‘Islamic-ness.’”

She hopes her study will inspire a rethinking of “our positions on one of the most contentious debates in the early years of the 21st century: Can Islam be supportive of democratic rights generally and women’s rights in particular?”

“The fact that large numbers of women throughout the Muslim world are working to bring about changes in Islamist parties rather than simply turning their backs on them completely suggests that not all Muslim women associate Islamism with oppression,” Shehabuddin wrote in her proposal. “It is likely that they are trying to produce their own notion of what it means to be a modern Muslim woman, one that differs in important ways from the visions of modern-day Islamists as well as U.S. policymakers.”

Since 1999, the Carnegie Scholars Program has been supporting individual scholars to conduct research that extends the boundaries of its grant-making priorities. Current priorities focus on supporting scholars whose research relates to intellectual and policy developments in Islam and Muslim communities. The overall aim is to build a critical mass of thoughtful and original scholarship to add to the fund of knowledge regarding Islam as a religion as well as the cultures and civilizations of Muslim societies and communities, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Each of the Carnegie Scholars will receive up to $100,000 over the next two years to help fund their research. The foundation receives 100 to 150 nominations annually from designated nominators and narrows that list to 40 finalists. They ultimately award fellowships to 20 scholars.

“This award from the Carnegie Foundation is a remarkable achievement for a young scholar like Elora,” said Gary Wihl, dean of the School of Humanities. “Her work is representative of a new generation of Islamic scholars who contribute to understanding the pressures now upon some of the globe’s most traditionalist societies.

“I am thrilled about the recognition conferred upon Elora and upon Rice by this fellowship,” he continued. “But I am also pleased for the attention this brings to other Rice scholars of the multifaceted Muslim world whose studies span Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria and Bangladesh: David Cook, Shirine Hamadeh, Ussama Makdisi and Paula Sanders. Elora’s achievements complement the work of Rice’s Rhodes Scholar this year, Noorain Khan, also from our program in the Study of Women and Gender.”

Shehabbudin, who joined the Rice faculty in 2001 after two years at the University of California–Irvine, teaches regularly in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and in the Asian Studies Program. She received her doctorate in politics from Princeton University and an Artium Baccalaureatus Degree in social studies from Harvard University. She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.