Today at Brown

Initially, Nancy Khalek’s research interest was eastern Christianity. When she changed her focus to the classical period of Islam, Khalek became fascinated by how much the two religions overlap.

“They have a shared tradition, even though they argue about it,” Khalek said, mentioning monotheism, scripture, prophecy and revelation as key elements of both faiths.

“Not only do they have a lot in common, but they were invented in the same place,” she said. “It’s a shared world, one big culture where both exist as religious competitors and imperial rivals. Each informs the other.”

Issues that interest Khalek include saint veneration, relics, sacred space and the relationship between material culture and religious practice. She also explores the relationship between Islam and Byzantium, the formation of Islamic identity, and the role historical writings and hagiography play in the process of identity formations.

“In the early classical period, there was a growing awareness of Islam as a distinct faith with its own place in history, its own perspective on the future,” Khalek said. She wrote her dissertation on everyday life in the first capital of the Islamic empire — Damascus — during the first centuries of Islam.

One of the first courses Khalek will teach at Brown is an introduction to Islam, which will open the eyes of anyone who stereotypes the faith according to post-9/11 headlines.

“It would be a mistake to oversimplify the Islamic world as a monolithic thing,” she said. “It was already so complex in the early Middle Ages; how much more so it must be in our contemporary context.”