Project title

Non-Binary Intersex and Its Legal Implications in Nineteenth-Century Shiʿi Discourse

Research question

How did nineteenth-century Shiʿi jurists engage with the non-binary conceptualisations of intersex bodies developed in earlier Shiʿi legal discourse, and how did these understandings inform the formulation of legal rulings within nineteenth-century Shiʿi Muslim societies?

Project description

How did Islamic legal thought conceptualise bodies that did not fit neatly into binary categories of male and female? This question lies at the heart of Mehrdad Alipour’s project, which offers a detailed examination of the intersex body within nineteenth-century Shiʿi legal thought.

The project builds on Alipour’s earlier NWO-funded research, Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition, which identified a strand within Shiʿi jurisprudence that has recognised intersex individuals as a distinct ontological category since the fourteenth century. The present study extends this work through a sustained analysis of the juristic writings of Mīr ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Marāghi (d. 1834), a pivotal figure whose work bridges earlier juristic formulations and later developments in twentieth-century Shiʿi legal thought. Alipour examines how intersex individuals were conceptualised within two competing frameworks — one adhering to a binary model of sex and gender, and another recognising intersex individuals as a third category — and how these conceptions shaped rulings on inheritance, marriage, ritual, dress, and eligibility for religious and legal office.

Drawing on close reading of published and manuscript juristic sources, and incorporating selected insights from modern gender theory, the project reconstructs the legal frameworks through which intersex individuals were understood in the Islamic tradition — and assesses their broader implications for Islamic legal thought, both historical and contemporary.

Selected publications

  • Alipour, Mehrdad and Gesink, Indira F. (eds.). Intersex and the (Non)Binary Body in Classical Muslim Legal, Medical, and Literary Discourses. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2026.
  • Alipour, Mehrdad. “Navigating Body Politics in Shiʿi Legal Tradition: Examining Sayyid Kāẓim al-Yazdī’s Account of Non-Binary Intersex.” Islamic Law and Society 32:3 (2025): 262–315. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685195-bja10063
  • Alipour, Mehrdad. Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-Hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shiʿi Discourse. Leiden: Brill, 2024.