''Spinoza Lectures Asma Barlas is Professor of Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, at Ithaca College in New York State. She is the author of Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics (2004), Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Quran (2002), and Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia (1995). She has received awards from the International Center for Islam and Pluralism in Indonesia, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the American Association of University Women and the United Nations Department for Public Information. For her c.v. see http://faculty.ithaca.edu/abarlas/. In these two lectures, Barlas offers a double critique: of Muslims for reading sexual inequality and oppression into Islams scripture, the Quran, and a critique of the West for failing to develop morally relevant ways of speaking about Islam and Muslims. In Believing Women in
