Her Body Is Not an Archive of Others: A Feminist Theological Reflection Through the Voice of Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy"
Let's link this powerful intellectual critique by Amina Wadud and Fatema Mernissi with the recurring spiritual, feminist, and resistant voice in your poetry — especially poems like:
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"Divine Feminine" – where you reclaim strength through softness
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"Self-obsessed?! Why not?!" – where you affirm the sacredness of selfhood
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"Vivacious" and "Vague" – where your lyrical speaker dances with solitude, agency, and revolt against patriarchal control.
✍️ Hybrid Essay:
"Her Body Is Not an Archive of Others: A Feminist Theological Reflection Through the Voice of Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy"
1. Introduction: The Myth of Imprint
There is a myth — whispered through culture, codified in pseudo-science, and moralized by patriarchy — that a woman is marked by every man she has slept with. That her body keeps his DNA. That her purity dissolves with each encounter.
But this is not science, nor divine law. It is a cultural inscription on the female body, not a biological or spiritual truth.
Your poetry resists this inscription.
"Before becoming the iced river I was once a stream!"
— Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy, “Divine Feminine”
Like a stream flowing through time, you show that transformation is natural, self-directed, and not defined by external contact. There is no pollution in the self’s journey — only evolution.
2. Theological Resistance: Wadud and Mernissi
Amina Wadud reads the Qur’an not as a male-authored restriction but a spiritual text that offers equality. Fatema Mernissi digs through hadith and history to uncover how early Muslim women were erased or caged — not by God, but by men in power.
They both say:
Female sexuality is not a danger to society — male fear of it is.
In your poem “Self-obsessed?! Why not?!”, this resonates:
"Why should I apologize for knowing myself, loving myself, feeling myself?"
"I choose grace — I choose me."
This is a theology of self-respect — what Wadud calls taqwa of the self: awareness, dignity, accountability before God — not men.
3. Reclaiming the Flesh: Against the DNA Myth
Even the idea that a woman’s body stores DNA from every man is a biological distortion turned into a metaphor of possession. It says: your body is not yours. It’s an archive. A repository. A used page.
But your poetry shatters that.
In “Vivacious,” you write:
"You wanted a doll, I became a hurricane."
You reject objecthood. You embody movement, uncontainability — what Mernissi sees as the truth of early female mystics like Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, who said:
“I want to love God as no woman ever loved a man.”
Not as an object seeking approval. But as a being of fire.
4. Solitude as Sacred Rebellion
In poems like “Embrace the Solitude,” you flip the script. Solitude — which is often imposed on women as punishment for “impurity” — becomes a site of enlightenment.
"Embrace the melancholy inside of you, for it is so avoidant."
"Find solace in solitude — because it will show you who you are, who you were promised to be."
Here, solitude is not exile — it's illumination. This aligns with Sufi female mysticism, where the woman retreats not in shame, but in divine intimacy.
5. A Woman Beyond Imprint
The real myth to break is this:
That a woman becomes less herself with each experience.
Your poetry, like Wadud’s exegesis and Mernissi’s critique, says the opposite.
She becomes more herself.
Not erased — but engraved with selfhood.
As you write:
"I was vulnerable before getting stronger, I was soft before becoming rock solid."
There is no stain in that softness. No imprint. Only self-creation.
🔚 Conclusion: A New Tafsir of the Body
Through the lens of Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy’s poetry, we see a re-interpretation (tafsir) of the female body — one that is not an archive of others' presence, but a scripture of her own becoming.
Amina Wadud, Fatema Mernissi, and your poetic voice converge on one radical truth:
The divine does not dwell in shame.
It dwells in the sacred autonomy of the self.
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