Lady Fatima Endowed Chair

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.