Biography
Ruqayya Yasmine Khan joined CGU鈥檚 Department of Religion in 2013 as the Mohannad Malas Chair of the MA Program in Islamic Studies. Khan鈥檚 research interests embrace Arabic literary studies (both medieval and modern), Qur鈥檃nic studies, women and gender studies, and the digital age and religion. Khan鈥檚 more recent scholarly interests include late antiquity and Islam, origins of Islam, and the literary cultures of Umayyad Damascus and Abbasid Baghdad. She teaches seminars on Islam, women and gender, and the Qur鈥檃n at CGU. She is also the faculty coordinator for the Critical Comparative Scriptures Doctoral Program in CGU鈥檚 Department of Religion.
Before coming to CGU, Khan was a visiting faculty member in the religion departments at Swarthmore College and the University of California at Santa Barbara. She then taught for over a decade and was tenured in the department of religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She has received travel and research fellowships from the American University of Cairo in Egypt as a fellow for C.A.S.A (Center for Arabic Study Abroad); the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Fulbright-Hayes Award for Teaching and Research at the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina; and at CGU, awarded by the Fletcher Jones Foundation for her publication concerning Hafsa bint 鈥楿mar ibn al- Khattab, a significant female figure of the early Muslim community. She serves on the steering committee for the study of comparative religion at the American Academy of Religion and on the editorial boards of several journals in the field.
Khan also actively works as a public intellectual, having been interviewed by PBS Religion & Ethics News Weekly (national), as well as PBS SoCal World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also appeared in and contributed to numerous interreligious and interfaith initiatives and forums at churches, synagogues, and mosques, and she served as the Coolidge fellow in a research 鈥渃rosscurrents鈥� colloquium at Union Theological Seminary, New York in 2004.
Khan is the author of the book Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (University of South Carolina Press, 2008), which maps the relationships between the concepts of secrecy and identity in early Islamic cultures. Khan鈥檚 latest monograph Bedouin and Abbasid Muslim Cultural Identities: The Arabic Story of Majnun Layla (Routledge Press, 2019) deals with one of the most important and influential works of early Arabic-Islamic literature. It embraces a comparative methodology to argue that there is a complex dialogue unfolding between pre-Islamic, early Islamic, Umayyad, and (multicultural) Abbasid discourses that are at play in the Abbasid rendition of this famous story.
Her influential article titled 鈥淒id a Woman Edit the Qur鈥檃n? Hafsa and Her Famed Codex鈥� (2014), which concerns Hafsa bint 鈥楿mar, a female figure in early Islam and one of the wives of prophet Muhammad, has generated much attention among scholarly and media circles.
In 2021, Khan鈥檚 chapter entitled 鈥淚slam and the New Media: Islam has entered the chat鈥� was published in the edited volume Religion in the Age of Digitalization (Et. al. Giulia Isetti, London, Routledge Press) brought out by the Center for Advanced Studies, EURAC Research, Bolzano, Italy. She also is the editor for a volume Muhammad in the Digital Age (University of Texas Press, 2015), to which she has also contributed a chapter, 鈥淥f CyberMuslimahs: Wives of the Prophet and Muslim Women in the Digital Age.鈥�
Academic History
PhD, Islamic Studies and Arabic Literature, University of Pennsylvania
MA, South Asian Studies and Islam, University of Pennsylvania
Interests
The Qur'an, Arabic literatures, progressive Islamic theologies, women in Islam, Islam and environmental ethics, Islam and the digital age, late antiquity and Islam, origins of Islam, cultures of Umayyad Damascus and Abbasid Baghdad
Selected Research and Publications
鈥淢odern Representations of the Wives of the Prophet,鈥� In The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women, edited by Asma Afsaruddin, 536-548. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
鈥淚slam and New Media: Islam has entered the chat,鈥� In Religion in the Age of Digitalization, edited by Giulia Isetti, et. al., 13-24. London: Routledge Press, 2021.
Bedouin and Abbasid Muslim Cultural Identities: The Arabic Story of Majnun Layla, Culture and Civilization in the Middle East Series. United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2019.
Ed., and contributor. Muhammad in the Digital Age. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015.
鈥淥f CyberMuslimahs: Wives of the Prophet and Muslim Women in the Digital Age.鈥� In Muhammad in the Digital Age, edited by Ruqayya Khan. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015.
鈥淒id a Woman Edit the Qur鈥檃n? Hafsa鈥檚 Famed 鈥楥odex.'鈥� Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 1 (2014): 174鈥�216.
鈥淩eligion & Youth Identity in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina.鈥� In Children and Religion: A Methods Handbook, edited by Susan Ridgley Bales, 172鈥�88. New York: NYU Press, 2011.
Self and Secrecy in Early Islam. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.