Featuring these speakers:

Omaima Abou-Bakr is a professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University, Egypt; a founding member of “The Women and Memory Forum”; and a member of the Musawah Knowledge Building team. She specialises in medieval Sufi poetry and comparative topics in medieval English and Arabic literature. Her scholarly interests also include women’s mysticism and female spirituality in Christianity and Islam, feminist theology, Muslim women’s history, and gender issues in Islamic discourse.

Asma Lamrabet is a hematologist at the Avicena Public Hospital in Rabat. She was the Director of the Center for Women’s Studies in Islam in the Rabita Mohammadia des Oulémas du Maroc from 2011 to March 2018. She has studied women’s issues in Islam for many years and has delivered lectures on this topic at various conferences around the world. From 2004 to 2007, she was the coordinator of a research and reflection group on Muslim women and intercultural dialogue in Rabat. She is also the founding member of the Fatéma Mernissi Chair at Mohammed V University in Rabat since 2017 and a member of the Moroccan National Committee on Education and Culture since 2015. She is currently the Gender Studies Chair in the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies in Granada, Spain, and a member of the scientific committee of the Moroccan Driss Benzekri National Institute for Human Rights. She is the author of several books; Women and Men in the Qur’an, published by Palgrave Macmillan, received the Social Sciences Awards 2013 by the Arab Woman Organization.

Mulki Al-Sharmani is Associate Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Helsinki. She is also a member of the Knowledge Building Working Group at Musawah. She is the author of Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Navigating Muslim Family Law (2017); the co-editor of Men in Charge? Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (2015) with Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Jana Rumminger; and the co-editior of Wellbeing of Transnational Muslim Families: Marriage, Law, and Gender (2019), with Marja Tiilikainen and Sanna Mustasaari.

(Moderator) Sarah Marsso is a graduate of Sciences-Po in European Studies and International Relations and holds an MA in Development and Cooperation in the Middle East & North Africa from l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Lyon.  Since 2015, she has been coordinating the activities of Musawah’s Knowledge Building Working Group. As part of these activities, she co-authored Musawah’s reports “Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives: Male Authority in Muslim Contexts” (2016) and “Who Provides? Who Cares? Changing Dynamics in Muslim Families” (2018).