Dr. Margherita Picchi

CV

MARGHERITA PICCHI, Ph.D.  earned her Master’s degree in Science of Languages, History and Cultures of the Mediterranean and Islamic Countries at the University of Naples “l’Orientale” in 2011. She obtained her doctoral degree in Women’s and Gender History at the same university in 2016, with a dissertation focusing on women’s agency in reclaiming religious discourse in contemporary Egypt. Her research interests include: modern Islamic intellectual history, Qur’anic studies, as well as gender and queer studies in Muslim contexts. Since 2021 she is a research fellow at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Cape Town, where she is conducting her research on the historical development of progressive Islam in South Africa.

Publikationen (Auswahl)

• Sayyid Qutb, Margherita Picchi (ed.) La battaglia fra Islam e capitalismo, Venezia, Marcianum Press, 2016
• “Egypt in Transition: What Future for Islamic Feminism?” in Studi Magrebini vol. XIV, no. 1 (2016), p. 285-321
• “Muslim Marriage and Contemporary Challenges” in Lukens-Bull R., Woodward M. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives. Springer, Cham, 2020
• “Muhammad Abduh and the Doctrine of Tawhid: from Theology to Politics”. In Massimo Campanini, Marco Di Donato (eds.).  Islamic Political Theology. Lexington Books, London 2021, pp. 67-82.
• “Schiavi, mistici, banditi: breve storia dei musulmani del Capo nel Sudafrica coloniale (1652-1834)”. Protestantesimo 76:2-3 (2021), pp. 139-164

FRIAS Projekt

Khutba activism in South Africa: A history of the Claremont Main Road Mosque’s community tafsir in late Apartheid and post-Apartheid period

The outbreak of the 1979 Iranian revolution dramatically brought to Western attention the discursive power of the Islamic sermon (khutba), and particularly its rhetorical potential for promoting transformation in Muslim societies. However, the existing literature on the role of sermon in shaping religious discourse mostly lean towards an anthropological approach, while there is a serious lack of scholarly work taking into account the sermons as a form of Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) in a historical perspective. This research attempts to fill this gap in academia by taking into analysis sermons delivered in Cape Town’s Claremont Main Road Mosque (CMRM) in the late Apartheid and post-Apartheid period. Main goal of this research is to explore how the Qur’an has been relied on by CMRM’s interpretive community to legitimize the mosque’s mission (risala) in its five key dimensions: namely the empowerment of youth, jihad against poverty, gender jihad, interfaith solidarity and environmental justice. A special attention will be devoted to explore the relation between the explicit tafsir - performed through explanatory analysis of the meaning of certain verses - and implicit tafsir as found in Qur’anic translations. In fact, all preachers take a great deal of liberty in their English rendering of the Qur’an, including in their translation extratextual terms, interpretations, and grammatical shifts that sensibly influence the meaning of the text but are rarely explicated in the sermons itself.