SHARIAsource Lab – S. Zahra Moballegh

On March 8, 2021, Zahra Moballegh (University of Tehran) presented “Beyond God the Commander: Data Analysis Uncovering the Narrator God and Reconstructing an Islamic Narrative Theology.” She explained the results of a narratological study in the Qur’anic stories. Alireza Javanmard and Zahra Moballegh examined 26 Qur’anic fragments in which a woman has a role (as a heroine or a secondary character) in their textual contexts and via linguistic and narratological analysis methods to see how women are represented and characterized in the stories. In the first step, through coding all the characteristics for the characters and analyzing the codes in terms of their frequencies and dependences on each other, the two scholars have reached an imaginary integrated female character that is in sharp contrast to what is traditionally represented in the Islamic theological and legal sources.