Contesting the State: Political Theology in Modern Egypt

Sarah Eltantawi

Associate Professor

Fordham University

Sarah Eltantawi is a specialist in contemporary Islam and Islamic law, with a focus in authoritarian and post-colonial contexts.  Professor Eltantawi’s book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017) examines why Northern Nigerians took to the streets starting in 1999 to demand the re-implementation of shari’ah law.  This book focuses on the career of the stoning punishment in Islam, centered on the famous case of Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to death by stoning at the turn of this century for committing adultery (and ultimately acquitted). Professor Eltantawi’s current book, tentatively titled, The Uneasy State: Islam and Egyptian Modernity, understands Egyptian modernity as a process of conforming Islam to the modern state - with mixed results. 

At Fordham, Prof. Eltantawi is a co-coordinator of the minor in Islamic Studies and the co-director of International Studies, both at the Rose Hill campus. 

She holds a PhD from Harvard University in the Study of Religion (Islamic studies), where she was the Jennifer W. Oppenheimer Fellow, an MA from Harvard University in International Studies (Middle East), and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Rhetoric and English literature.  She has held fellowships at the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, at Brandeis University as a Scholar in Residence in Religion, Gender, Culture and the Law, at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Sultan Fellow in Arab Studies, and at the Forum Transregionalle at the Wissenschaftskoleg in Berlin as well as the Freie Universität in Berlin. Prof. Eltantawi has also been a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo.