Dr. Ayesha S. Chaudhry will discuss her recent book The Colour of God. The Colour of God is the heartfelt story of a South Asian child raised in Canada, born to parents who embraced a puritanical version of Islam to shield their family from racism. Fusing grand historical narratives of colonialism and migration to the small, intimate heartbreaks of modern life, Ayesha S. Chaudhry examines the joys and sorrows of growing up in a fundamentalist Muslim household. A crisis of faith, brought on by the sudden death of a loved one, leads her to re-examine the beliefs and ideals she was raised with.

Braiding together Western, South Asian and Qur’anic storytelling styles, Chaudhry illuminates what it means to exist in a world that demands something different from each of her identities. With lyrical prose and scholarly precision, she weaves her personal experiences with incisive social commentary, inviting us to reimagine our ideas of self and family, of state and citizenship, of love and loss.

Bio: Ayesha S. Chaudhry is the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice and Professor of Islamic studies and Gender studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellow. She has held residential fellowship at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at UBC and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of The Colour of God (Oneworld, HarperCollinsIndia, 2021) and Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2014). Dr. Chaudhry’s research focuses on Islamic law and theology.