The Lady Fatima Zahra Endowed Chair in Women and Divinity at Habib University is the first of its kind in the world. The Chair is housed in Habib University’s Comparative Humanities Program, and seeks to institutionalize, in the Religious Studies component of the major, the scholarly study of the role of women, as well as the feminine aspects of divinity, in the Muslim tradition and beyond. There is a globally recognized need for a focus on women, and it is indeed a growing field that has produced some of the best scholars and scholarship over the past few decades.
In the tradition of the Ahl-e-Bayt (the Prophet’s household of which Lady Fatima Zahra is part), the Chair also has an interfaith dimension, addressing the relation between women and divinity in a spectrum of faiths. An endowed chair is one of the highest academic awards that the University can bestow on an academic scholar.
The benefit of establishing an endowed chair benefits not only the scholarly community at the University, it also increases the depth of conversations in the wider society – locally and globally – highlighting the critical aspects associated with the title awarded to the endowed chair.
Professor Marcia Hermansen is a distinguished scholar of Islamic Studies whose research spans Islamic thought, Muslims in South Asia, Muslims in America, and women in Islam. She formerly served as Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago, where she also directed the Islamic World Studies Program.
She earned her Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago and has pursued extended research and language training in Egypt, Jordan, India, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. Fluent in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as several major European languages, Dr. Hermansen’s scholarship bridges theological inquiry with contemporary global issues, including interfaith engagement and multicultural citizenship. She has published extensively, contributing to academic discourse and advancing public understanding of Islam’s intellectual and social traditions.
