Zahra Ayubi, PhD

Zahra Ayubi is a professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. She specializes in ethics and gender in Islam. She is the author of Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). She has published on ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences in divorce. With support from the Greenwall Foundation’s faculty scholars program, Dr. Ayubi is currently working on her next book on Muslim women’s experiences with medical ethics decision making. The project titled, “Women as Humans: Authority and Gendered Ontology in Islamic Medical Ethics,” focuses on practical medical ethics concerns of patients, care providers, and families as well as Muslim ontological, metaphysical, and existential conceptions of women.

Deciding for Women: Gender and Authority in Islamic Biomedical Ethics

Professor Ayubi’s project aims to uncover insights into how Muslim women’s bodies are regulated in male-centered biomedical ethics literature and by male decision makers, in order to develop gender- and religion-sensitive guidelines for clinicians, patients, and their caregivers. In analyzing ontological/philosophical understandings of women’s bodies in difficult biomedical ethics cases, this study will address ethical dilemmas regarding clinical care for Muslim women in the United States.