Project MUSE®: Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 33, no, 2 (2010) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies2766-01760149-1784Latest articles in Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor: Volume 49, Number 1
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986680
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this is an important moment for the Journal for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES) as we embark on many exciting transitions. The JSAMES was created in 1976 by the late Hafeez Malik at Villanova University while he served as a Professor in the Political Science Department. In 1981, Fr. Kail Ellis founded the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS). This was one of his many, countless contributions to area studies and interdisciplinarity at Villanova while serving as Dean of what is now known as the College of Liberal Arts and Science for more than twenty years. While the two were very close friends and collaborators, the JSAMES retained independence from the CAIS, and on- campus programming was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallFrom the Editor: Volume 49, Number 12026-03-30text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor: Volume 49, Number 12026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®72722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986681
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The concept of femicide entered global English at the 1976 International Tribunal of Crimes against Women in Belgium. The meeting featured presentations from forty national committees on a wide range of crimes. The US delegation presented testimony on “femicide”—then defined as “the killing of females by males”—as a way to discuss the high rates of murderous violence against women because they are women and fill a gap in feminist analysis.1 Latin American feminists reshaped this earlier formulation by introducing the concept of feminicidio to highlight state complicity in the murder of women in a context of legal impunity.2 This critical conceptual intervention has enabled global scholars to analyze states as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-03-30text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®185022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Archiving Femicide: The Company State and Ritual Burnings of Hindu Widows in Early Colonial India
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986682
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The ritual of widow immolations or satipratha—burnings of Hindu widows (the sati) on the funeral pyres of their husbands—has a well-documented history from early colonial times.1 It also possesses a rich colonial archive, and I will try to track its gradual formation. At least 400–950 widows died in this manner every year in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency alone in eastern India. In just thirteen years, between 1815 (when the early colonial police force began to record the burnings) and 1828 (the ritual was legally prohibited in 1829), 8,134 widows burned themselves—and that, too, is considered a very low estimate.2 Many more deaths happened elsewhere in the country. The ritual, however, was never
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallArchiving Femicide: The Company State and Ritual Burnings of Hindu Widows in Early Colonial India2026-03-30text/htmlen-USArchiving Femicide: The Company State and Ritual Burnings of Hindu Widows in Early Colonial India2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®599202026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30The Construction of the Grave and Sudden Provocation in Bangladesh: Law, Colonialism, and Male Control Over the Female Body
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986683
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“Azam Reza to Die for Killing Wife” was one of the headlines of the Daily Star, a leading English daily in Bangladesh, on January 18, 2005. The story was about the killing of Jayanti Munshi, an architect and a teacher at the Australian International School, by her husband, Azam Reza on January 8, 2004. Her mother filed a criminal complaint, accusing Azam of killing her daughter so that he could marry Afsana Mimi, an actress. Police arrested Azam for committing murder. In court, Azam denied the charge and implied that Jayanti had committed suicide. However, he was unable to provide evidence to this effect—a “special knowledge” requirement under the law. In the absence of any witnesses of the alleged suicide, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallThe Construction of the Grave and Sudden Provocation in Bangladesh: Law, Colonialism, and Male Control Over the Female Body2026-03-30text/htmlen-USThe Construction of the Grave and Sudden Provocation in Bangladesh: Law, Colonialism, and Male Control Over the Female Body2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®639582026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Collision and Collusion: Colonial Laws and Postcolonial Ecclesiastical Reasoning in Pakistan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986684
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This article situates feminicide in Pakistan within a longer legal genealogy that begins with colonial-era criminal provisions, particularly the mitigation clause of “grave and sudden provocation” in the Indian Penal Code (1860) and extends to its postcolonial re-inscription under Islamized legal reasoning. By tracing this continuum, I demonstrate that the juridical leniency afforded to men who kill women in the name of “honor” is neither an exclusively “cultural” relic nor an inevitable by-product of religious law. Rather, it is the outcome of an enduring collusion between two distinct patriarchal legal orders (colonial and Islamic), each of which has been selectively mobilized by Pakistan’s judiciary to constrain
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallCollision and Collusion: Colonial Laws and Postcolonial Ecclesiastical Reasoning in Pakistan2026-03-30text/htmlen-USCollision and Collusion: Colonial Laws and Postcolonial Ecclesiastical Reasoning in Pakistan2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®694112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Femicide and Domestic Violence in Contemporary India
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986685
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Due to US and British ethnocentrism, we are apt to think of other countries as having terrible problems—like honour crimes—rather than looking for them here at home. It is usually easier to recognize oppression in cultures other than one’s own. The burning of brides in India tends to be seen by Westerners as a lot worse than the murder of wives in the US, but it is just another form of wife killing.1femicide is not a commonly used word in India, though it is a global crime involving the misogynist murder of women and girls. Family, community, and state are complicit in the crime through its normalization, ignorance, neglect and indifference, lack of reporting, lack of visibility, and loopholes in the law. Men and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallFemicide and Domestic Violence in Contemporary India2026-03-30text/htmlen-USFemicide and Domestic Violence in Contemporary India2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®1053762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Femicide in the Context of Palestinian Medico-Legal Postmortem Practices: The Entanglement of Patriarchy and Colonialism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986686
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In 1918, following World War I and four hundred years of governance by the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate in Palestine began and continued until 1947. In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to divide Palestine into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish, with twenty-three votes in favor, thirteen rejections, and ten non-votes. In 1948, the year of the Nakba (Catastrophe), Israel announced itself as the governing power over significant parts of Palestine. Until 1967, Palestine was fragmented into three sections: one under Israel’s governance, the West Bank that was annexed to Jordan, and the Gaza Strip that was annexed to Egypt. In turn, this division created three
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallFemicide in the Context of Palestinian Medico-Legal Postmortem Practices: The Entanglement of Patriarchy and Colonialism2026-03-30text/htmlen-USFemicide in the Context of Palestinian Medico-Legal Postmortem Practices: The Entanglement of Patriarchy and Colonialism2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®868422026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Q&A with Hafsa Ashfaque: “A Reflection on Belonging, Displacement and Survival as a Woman”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986687
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World-making is one of the central themes in the re-envisioned Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES). An interest in the act of world-making led the twenty-six-year-old Pakistani interdisciplinary artist, Hafsa Ashfaque, to turn a self-portrait project into a multi-layered map. The result is “Somewhere Else,” our special issue’s cover art. Ashfaque’s counter cartography artwork reframes a traditionally marginalized voice into a vision of a world in the shape of a woman’s silhouettes. Aside from its dominant aesthetics, it centers and honors a “reflection on belonging, displacement and survival as a woman.” On the one-year anniversary of her move from Karachi, Pakistan, to Düsseldorf, Germany, I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallQ&A with Hafsa Ashfaque: “A Reflection on Belonging, Displacement and Survival as a Woman”2026-03-30text/htmlen-USQ&A with Hafsa Ashfaque: “A Reflection on Belonging, Displacement and Survival as a Woman”2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®177452026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī: A Philosopher for All Seasons by Sayeh Meisami (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986688
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Sayeh Meisami’s Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī: A Philosopher for All Seasons offers a concise yet rich portrait of one of the most versatile minds in the Islamic intellectual tradition. In just under 140 pages, Meisami succeeds in capturing both the complexity and the coherence of Ṭūsī’s wide-ranging thought, covering philosophy, ethics, logic, astronomy, politics, and even music and poetry. The book is structured around Ṭūsī’s biography and intellectual development, making it ideal for readers seeking a holistic representation of the philosopher and his enduring legacy.The book consists of an introduction and four uneven chapters, along with a helpful chronological timeline of Ṭūsī’s life provided at the end. The Introduction
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/776/image/coversmallNaṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī: A Philosopher for All Seasons by Sayeh Meisami (review)2026-03-30text/htmlen-USNaṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī: A Philosopher for All Seasons by Sayeh Meisami (review)2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®112332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30