Margot Badran sees revolution as a complex process calling the public quest for gender equality and social justice from early last century as the ‘Long Revolution’ encompassing the 1919 Revolution, the 1952 Revolution, and the 2011 Revolution ongoing. She approaches revolution not simply as marked by significant—and named—political revolutions but as the perennial struggle for transformation expressing social and cultural overhaul. Professor Badran’s talk centres on the continuing 2011 Revolution (al-thawra al-musatmira) as a new generation of women and men engage in forms of creative activism displaying at once tenacious militant activisms and stunning aesthetic politics. Facile constructions of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ dissolve in this latest phase of the long revolution releasing society, culture, and people from the counter-weight of destructive dichotomies and oppressive allegiances. Professor Badran shows how actors catapult themselves into new creative spaces full of the excitement and dangers that accompany the blasting out of space for living lives of equality and justice within supportive structures of state and society.
Margot Badran is a historian and gender studies specialist focusing on the Middle East and Islamic world. She is Senior Fellow, The Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University and Senior Scholar, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her research interests include secular and Islamic feminisms, women, gender and revolution including diverse activisms and verbal and visual narratives. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Harvard University, and a diploma from Al Azhar University. She has taught and lectured at many universities in the US and abroad. She has held the Reza Khatib and Georgianna Clifford Khatib Visiting Chair in Comparative Religion, St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn, was the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Religion, Northwestern University. Among her books are: Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton University Press, 1995); Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Discourses (Oneworld, Oxford, 2009; and Women and Gender in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law (Stanford University Press 2011). She is currently working on a book on revolutionaries in Egypt.