A group of professional women in Malaysia organizes a workshop for journalists to promote the legal rights of women within Islam. Some 4,000 miles away in Iran, human rights workers invite other Muslim women to challenge their cleric's age-old edicts on family.

And more than 7,000 miles from either activity, Madhavi Sunder of the School of Law is watching. Increasingly recognized for her scholarly contributions where law and culture meet, the professor has been named a 2006 Carnegie Scholar and will write her first book about Muslim women working to reform their religion from within.

"I want to show everybody these are real women risking their lives," the professor said.

Her book will be titled The New Enlightenment: How Muslim Women are Bringing Religion Out of the Dark Ages.

"Islam is stereotyped as regressive, anti-modern, anti-Western and incompatible with democracy," she said. "Too often, the media ignore those people doing the much harder work of exposing Islam's modern side."

Her project, which received the maximum $100,000 award, is one of 20 that the Carnegie Corp. is funding this year to advance knowledge of Islam and of Muslim societies. That Carnegie promotes the communication of research beyond academia to policymakers and the public is in line with Sunder's thinking. "I want to take the ideas to the public," she said.

Reform from within

Sunder's scholarship traverses several legal fields, from intellectual property to human rights and the First Amendment. Her Carnegie project will build on earlier articles in which she calls for the law to accommodate reform from within religious and other organizations.

In her landmark articles "Cultural Dissent" and "Piercing the Veil," Sunder said that without a change in its approach to culture, the law may become complicit in the efforts of traditional leaders to silence dissent within organizations, whether over equality for women or gays.

"Law treats religion and culture as spheres outside of law's domain," she said. "But this view leads to the absence of equality and rights in domains that people hold most dear."

Sunder conceptualizes a "New Enlightenment," based on a woman's right to seek equality, democracy and liberty not only in the public arena but also in the private spheres of religion, culture and family.

Her articles have appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and the California Law Review, among other publications. She is the editor of Gender and Feminist Theory in Law and Society, a forthcoming collection of essays chronicling 25 years of feminist thinking on equality and liberty.

Her work has already won the praise of senior scholars in her field. Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago said Sunder is telling the story of women's reforms with "very fine scholarship, intellectual incisiveness, theoretical grasp and with detailed knowledge of cultures."

"That's an extremely valuable contribution," she added, "when people too easily see religion and women's equality at odds."

Sunder received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her law degree from Stanford. After clerking for a federal appeals court judge and practicing intellectual property law in New York City, she came to Davis in 1999 and was awarded tenure in 2003. She has taught classes in intellectual property and next academic year will teach Women, Islam and the Law.

The professor said she has long been fascinated with the concept of cultural diversity not just across cultures but within them. She was born and raised in the United States by Indian American parents, except for one year in the care of her grandmother in India.

Her grandmother's life influenced the direction of her scholarship. Seetha Mylavarapu was president of her college's student government, played championship college tennis, earned a doctorate in physics and chose her own husband in a time and culture women did not do those things.

"Her story has always inspired me," Sunder said. "It's a reminder to me that in every age there are dissenters and reformers."

Entering the private spheres

A practicing Hindu, Sunder said she was attracted to the work of the Muslim women who are challenging the Enlightenment's abandonment of religion, and at the same time, bringing Enlightenment to religion.

"The Enlightenment took us from a world of empire to an age of reason and equality in the public sphere. But it left the private spheres of culture and religion in the Dark Ages of imposition and unreason," Sunder said.

"Women's stories show that's a very limited view of freedom. Much of our lives are lived out in the cultural sphere and under its influences."

"The New Enlightenment goes the next mile," Sunder said. "The core values of Enlightenment — reason, democracy, freedom of expression, and the call, in Kant's words, to 'think for oneself' — are extended to the private sphere.

"Women reformers in Muslim countries are the Kant and Diderot of our age."

Sunder said the law needs to be willing to redress wrongs in the private spheres and support calls for reason and rights within religion.

Her research assistants are already gathering information on reform movements and leading thinkers and activists around the world. This summer, Sunder will identify the reformers she will profile. The research that follows may take her to Morocco, Indonesia, Malaysia, France, the United Kingdom and Egypt for personal interviews with women reformers.

"It's a new challenge, and it's exciting," she said of the project.