Sara Omar

Fields of Interest:
Islamic intellectual history, Islamic Law, textual hermeneutics, gender and sexuality, religious authority, violence, and the Abrahamic traditions.

Bio:
Sara Omar received her PhD from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Prior to that, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, where she conducted field work on female religious authority in Damascus and subsequently published an article on this topic in The Muslim World. She has published an article on same-sex sexual acts and Islamic Law in Islamic Law and Society as well as on contemporary discourses over homosexuality and Islam in the Routledge Handbook on Early Islam. She is currently completing an article on the constructions of violent acts as acts of martyrdom or suicide in legal edicts (fatwas). She is also in the process of publishing her first monograph entitled, Same-sex Intercourse and the Formation of Early Muslim Discourses. In it, she examines the historical discourses (6th-12th century CE) over same-sex intercourse across an array of historical genres as a means of gaining insight into the development of Islamic law and Islamic thought. This monograph follows texts, their writers, ideas, and discourses across time, space, disciplines, and occasionally across religious traditions. It relies on the abundant, yet understudied, primary sources on this topic, some of which she has uncovered in manuscript form during her travels to Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Iran.