I believe I am a good fit for this fellowship due to my extensive and genuine passion for the inquiry of religion and politics in modern life, which occupies a prominent weight in my career, published work, and continues to shape my prosepctive intellectual endeavors as well. Among those endeavors is the pursuit for breaching the gap between the religious theology and social sciences for better understanding for social life and human needs.
As a social sciences researcher, I hold a master’s degree of political science, and I work across interdisciplinary bounderies through my employment for various think tanks and research projects in fields of public polic, political science, sociology of law, human rights, and anthropology. With regard to religion, this diverse research experience gave me a broad persepctive of approaching the inquiry of faith and manifest in modern life. Also, my education is not limited to social sciences, for I have pursued Islamic studies to obtain a precise and in depth perception about its percepts and premises. In doing so, I had pursued those studies in prominent centers of teaching and producing religious knowledge in Egypt, namely Al-Azhar mosque, the higher institute for Islamic studies, besides informal religious education in order to grasp the classic way of teaching Islamic knowledge and modern way.
As has been said, this training gives me knowledge about sacred Islamic texts, theology and jurisprudence, where themes of faith, relationship with other religions, women’s rights, family structure, and representative democracy were addressed and discussed during the decade that followed 2011. Thus, I believe this kind of training would be relevant to the purpose of the fellowship of bringing sacred and modern texts about religion and faith into conversation, and to deliver the outcomes anticipated by the fellowship program, in particular scholarly ones.
Coming from global-south context, particularly a Muslim majority country, would enable me to bring the experience of this context to the table where the relationship of religion with public life differs from the liberal tradition, and sheds its lights on all religions and shapes their perceptions about freedoms, rights, authority over community in the same fashion, despite theological differences. This experience was hardended by the context I have been living in where themes of extremism, metaphyiscs, role of religious establishment in legislation process, sponsoring women rights were raised and contested. Herby, my awarness of these themes combined praxis and theory, and I owe it to the political turmoil that unfolded after 2011.
Moreover, I am aware that a few number of female researchers is there in my region and context who are trained in field of religious studies, or who master both social sciences and religious studies equally. Therefore, I feel a sense of responsbility to carry on with my pursuits in this intersection in order to cultivate a female presence and voice.