Can the Muslim Speak?

Khurram Hussain, assistant professor of religion studies at Lehigh University, will present "Can the Muslim Speak?" as a part of the Center for the Humanities 2016–17 theme, Rethinking Global Cultures. The free, public event begins at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 11, 2017 in Joe Rosenfield '25 Center, Room 101.

In this talk, Hussain will highlight the ways in which contemporary conversations about Islam in the West restrain and limit the prospects of Muslim participation in mainstream debates about the common good in societies around the world. He will argue that Muslims can offer critical perspectives on pressing issues that could help non-Muslims rethink some established ideas in Western societies.

A native of Pakistan, Hussain has lived, worked and studied in the United States for the last 19 years. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in religion and physics from Bowdoin College in 1997 and spent the next few years working first in corporate America, and then with a small nonprofit publishing house specializing in Buddhist texts in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He went on to graduate school, earning a Master of Arts in religion from Yale Divinity School. He received his doctorate from the Department of Religious Studies. Hussain's doctoral dissertation was an examination of the work of the 19th-century Muslim reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan as a "mediatory discourse" between Islamic societies and their Western counterparts.

Hussain is interested in exploring the possibility of a robust critical conversation across diverse cultures and traditions and has extensive training in comparative ethics, historical sociology and modern Western philosophy. His course offerings at Lehigh include classes on modern and South Asian Islam, comparative ethics, nationalism, and critics of modernity.