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Dr Mulki Al Sharmani

Dr. Al-Sharmani trained as an anthropologist and received her doctorate degree from Johns Hopkins University, USA in 2005. From 2005 to 2010, Dr. Mulki was a research and teaching faculty at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. From 2010 to 2011, she was a research fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. She is currently working on two Academy of Finland research projects titled: ‘Islamic Feminism: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics,’ and ‘Transnational Muslim Marriages in Finland: Wellbeing, Law, and Gender.’ Dr. Mulki’s field of research covers two overlapping areas. One is the relationship between Islamic interpretive tradition, modern Muslim family laws, and Muslim gender norms. Her work in this area examines how Islamic interpretive tradition is understood, contested, and drawn on in modern processes of law making, legal practice, and in the shaping of dominant religious discourses. Since 2011, her work developed to investigating epistemological projects undertaken (collectively and/or individually) by selected Muslim women scholars/activists from different countries in the Global North and South; these projects engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, tackling the two questions of gender and methodological reform. Dr. Mulki’s other area of research is modern diasporas and transnational family life. She investigates how the ‘transnational’ is constituted and experienced in migrant family life; and how marriage and family life become social fields where religious and cultural norms are negotiated and refashioned. She is currently an Academy of Finland research fellow and a lecturer at Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Finland.