Kathryn Kueny, assistant professor of religious studies, credits a four-month bout of wanderlust with sparking her initial interest in Islam. During a pre-graduate school backpacking adventure that took her across much of Africa, Kueny experienced her first extended encounter with the world's second-most popular religion and discovered "a certain austere aesthetic" to Islam that she says appealed to her.
Fluent in Arabic, Kueny spent an additional 15 months in the Middle East -- Egypt and Syria -- as a Fulbright Fellow after receiving master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and before joining the Lawrence faculty in 1995.
As a specialist in comparative religions with an emphasis on Islam, she has concentrated her research interests on early Islam and the religious practices that distinguish Muslims from Jews and Christians. She has had nine scholarly articles and reviews published, among them "Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam," in History of Religions, and "A Guide to the Contents of the Qur'an" in Religious Studies Review. Three additional articles she recently completed include "The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman" and "Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth," both in the Journal of Religion, and "Concepts and Ideas at the Dawn of Islam," for the Middle East Studies Association. In early 2000, Kueny presented the paper "Jewish and Islamic Prohibitions" at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Nashville.
The role of alcohol and the evolution of its eventual prohibition in the Islamic faith is the subject of Kueny's first book, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam. Her interest in religious movements also has led her to an examination of cults, their formation and the factors that separate the followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh, among others, from more established religions.
