Self and Secrecy in Religion: An Islamic Contribution
Ruqqaya Khan
Associate Professor of Islamic Studies
Claremont Graduate University
This lecture is mainly interested in assessing the significance of secrecy and interiority for conceptions of the self and secrecy in Islamic sources, including the Qur’an and a range of literary sources. It first takes stock of how the study of secrecy is generally very important to the study of religions. For instance, Religion scholar Kees Bolle, who has analyzed the links that secrecy has with human self and identity, has gone so far as to argue that religion cannot exist without secrecy, and neither can human existence. But in History of Religions’ scholarship, secrecy mainly has been analyzed within the context of esoteric traditions. In scholarship on Islam, most published works largely evince an approach that again situates secrecy in the context of traditions and transmission of knowledge, as well as a part of preservation and protection of esoteric knowledge or gnosis. By drawing upon Khan’s published work (book Self and Secrecy in Early Islam 2008), this lecture will take a different route and comparatively examine the construction and representation of three iterations of the self in Islamic scripture, ethics and love literature respectively: (1) the transparency of the self in relation to God (as portrayed in the Qur’an); (2) the ethics of the self (as portrayed in a 9th-century treatise on the self by a Baghdadi jurist, al-Jahiz); and (3) the embodied self in love literature (with a focus upon the 10th-century romance of Majnun and Layla).
Ruqayya Yasmine Khan is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in Claremont Graduate University’s Department of Religion. Born in Pakistan (outside of Karachi), with her childhood in Kenya, Africa, she and her family moved to the US when she was a young girl. Dr. Khan received all her education on the East Coast. She undertook her graduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received both her M.A. and Ph.D. She also has spent time studying at the American University of Cairo in Egypt and she is well-traveled in parts of the Islamic world, especially the Middle East and South Asia.
Dr. Khan’s research interests include Arabic Literary Studies (both medieval and modern), Qur’anic Studies, Feminist Theologies in Islam, Islam & the Environment, as well as the Digital Age & Religion. She teaches courses on Islam, the Qur’an and Middle Eastern Literatures at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Ca. She is the author of a book Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (2008) and her most recent article is entitled “Did a Woman Edit the Qur’an? Hafsa and her Famed Codex” (2014, Journal of American Academy of Religion) which concerns Hafsa bint ‘Umar, a female figure in early Islam and one of the wives of prophet Muhammad. Currently, she is the editor for a volume Muhammad in the Digital Age (forthcoming University of Texas Press, c. September, 2015), to which she has also contributed a chapter, “Of CyberMuslimahs: Wives of the Prophet and Muslim Women in the Digital Age.”
At CGU, Dr. Khan teaches courses entitled “Classical Arabic Literatures & The Qur’an,” “Feminism & the Qur’an,” and other courses generally on the Islamic religion and on the three Abrahamic Religions.
Dr. Khan’s religious heritage is Islamic and her parents are devout Muslims. She is married to John Sepich and together they have three children. Her blended family and her other kin include Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus.
Limited seating for this event. Please RSVP to [email protected].