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2007-2008 Undergraduate Fellows

 

Natasha Dar

Stanford University
Anthropology, International Relations, and Sociology

Natasha Dar has conducted extensive field work in Morocco on the imbrications in the gender, religious, and class politics of the 2004 Mudawanna Islamic Family Law reform, and is currently working with women’s rights groups to present recommendations for revisions to the legal code. Under Professor H. Samy Alim’s guidance, Natasha’s present project examines the production and transformation of Islamic legal knowledges in diaspora communities, with the hope that exploring both the radical aspects of gender equality that Islamic Family Law delivers, as well as the patriarchal limitations of the Shari’a, and how both discourses are reproduced and challenged by new forms of social interaction in Muslim-minority states, local host policies, and post-9/11 global politics, will allow for a more nuanced understanding of the North African immigrant experience, perhaps partly even explaining the tenuous nature of the social, political, and economic standing of the Muslim diaspora in Europe. Her research interests include legal reform and practice as sites for social change, normalization, and resistance; negotiations between Islamic and “secular” legal frameworks; and the post-colonial racializations of Islam and Muslims.