Zahara Ali

Zahra Ali is a French-Iraqi sociologist and associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University–Newark, where she founded and directs the Critical Studies of Iraq initiative. Her research focuses on women, gender, and feminist movements in Iraq and the wider Middle East, with a particular focus on the period following the 2003 Iraq War. Alongside her academic work, Ali describes herself as a social activist with interests in Muslim feminism, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Early life and education Ali was born to Iraqi parents who had left Iraq as political exiles during the rule of Saddam Hussein and settled in France. She grew up in Rennes. Her parents returned to Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion; several members of her immediate family, including her father, were killed in Baghdad during the subsequent period of unrest.

As a teenager in Rennes, in the period leading up to the 2004 French law on conspicuous religious symbols in schools, Ali helped found a feminist organization that both included Muslim and non-Muslim members, and became involved in anti-war and anti-racist activism. In April 2024 the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded the initiative a three-year, $450,000 grant. A French translation by Nada Ghosn was published by Éditions Syllepse in 2022, and an Arabic translation by Wasan Qasim was published by the Academic Center for Research (Baghdad) in 2023. Yasmin Chilmeran reviewed the book in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. The book was also reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Study of Islam A review in Middle East Monitor described Ali's fieldwork as "groundbreaking".

Other books Ali edited Féminismes islamiques (La Découverte, 2012), a French-language volume on Muslim feminist thought with contributions from Margot Badran, Asma Barlas, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Asma Lamrabet, among others.

On France, Ali has been a long-standing critic of state laïcité as applied to Muslim women's dress; her edited volume Féminismes islamiques frames Muslim feminist thought as part of what Ali describes as an effort to "decolonize" hegemonic Western feminism. Current History, and Third World Quarterly. She has argued that successive US military interventions in Iraq dismantled the country's educational and research institutions and that scholarship on Iraq has been disproportionately produced by researchers based in or tied to the United States. She has also written, in English and Arabic, on debates over revisions to the Iraqi personal status code, including provisions on the legal age of marriage.

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza, Ali has publicly expressed support for Palestinian solidarity movements, including in a 2025 essay for The New Arab titled "As an Iraqi and a Feminist, I Stand with the People of Iran and Palestine. Not with their Oppressors". She is a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, which lists her public commentary among its affiliated faculty publications.

Selected publications

Books

Selected articles