[The old women of Nishapur] constitute a “muted category” who are not necessarily silent in and of themselves; the old women…
Knowledge and encompassment: The old women of Timbuktu
Year: 2022
Death, definitions, and ontological design
What roles do naming and self-definition play in the liberation or oppression of a people? One might argue that words…
Capabilities of old women
The old women cannot be relegated to the past or overcome. Their relationship to scholarship is asymmetrical: the old women’s…
Healing hands in Black religion
Rev. Fannie Elizabeth Burgin Harris. She was a healer. She was a pastor, and while not ordained by any denomination,…
Defining and organizing masculinities: Nishapur’s old women in the books of men
When Ghazālī and Juwaynī (via Ibn Taymiyyah and others) are pointing towards the faith of old women, we should not…
Prophetic blackness: The legendary tale of Alexander Bedward, “the flying preacher”
Anthony Bogues describes Bedward as a “prophetic redemptive figure” whose only insanity was his attempt to “break” and “reorder the…
From deathbed anecdote to polemical trope: The “old women of Nishapur” in Islamic historiography
Analyzing the reception history of al-Juwaynī’s deathbed anecdote reveals the substitutions, generalizations, and symbolic conflations of groups of people that…
Al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali, and Talal Asad on the religion of the old women of Nishapur
Several texts prompted the forum on the religion of the old women of Nishapur. To give readers the ability to…
Etymology of the Arabic root ʿa, j, z
The etymological and semantic features of the root ʿa, j, z provided below are intended to complement the forum on…
The religion of the old women of Nishapur
As a hadith or as a trope, the expression “the religion of the old women” (dīn al-ʿajāʾiz) appears in many…