Peter Wright

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Institutional Affiliation

Colorado College

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
J.D., Duquesne University School of Law
B.A., University of Pittsburgh

Regional and Thematic Interests

Islamic Sacred Literature and its Interpretation, Religion and Violence, History of Religions, Islam in the Americas, Theory and Method in Religious Studies

Profile

I am a historian and critic of religious literatures, specializing in Islamic studies. As a historian, I read religious literature for clues to its historical contexts and implied audiences. As a critic, I study the ways in which the use of literary devices such as allusion, citation, and echo suggest intertextual relations among religious literatures and the communities who hold them sacred. Where Muslim literatures are concerned, my work builds upon the pioneering studies of Egyptian modernists such as Taha Husayn, Amin al-Khuli, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.

Selected Publications

Varieties of Islamic Humanism: Prophetic, Cosmopolitan, Gnostic, and Ecstatic (forthcoming from Oneworld Books).

"Islam: The Khalifa Ideal" in Leslie Stevenson, David L. Haberman, Peter Matthews Wright, and Charlotte Witt, Thirteen Theories of Human Nature, 7th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018), pp. 138-155.

"Imperial Privilege: On War and Violence Near and Far," Rashna Batliwala Singh and Peter Matthews Wright, Common Dreams, October 14, 2016, available at: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/14/imperial-privilege-war-and-violence-near-and-far.

Review ofMuslim Identitiesby Aaron Hughes inReview of Middle East Studies48: 1 & 2 (2014), 83-85.

"The Qur'anic David" in Constructs of Prophecy in the Former and Latter Prophets and in Other Texts (Ancient Near Eastern Monographs/Monografias sobre el Antiguo Cercano Oriente), edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Martii Nissinen, Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press (2011), pp. 187-196.

Review of The Qur'an and its Biblical Subtext by Gabriel Said Reynolds, New York: Routledge (2010) in Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 219-223.

"Critical Approaches to the 'Farewell Khutba' in Ibn Ishaq's Life of the Prophet," Comparative Islamic Studies 6.1-2 (2010), pp. 215-248.

"After Smith: Romancing the Text When 'Maps Are All We Possess,'" Religion and Literature 42.3 (Notre Dame: Autumn 2010), pp. 93-122.

"From Politics to Metapolitics: Norman O. Brown's The Challenge of Islam," Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media & Culture 32.3 (Wayne State University Press: Fall 2010), pp. 338-347.

"Qur'an," The Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, New York: Facts on File, May 2010, pp. 475-479.

"Auf dem Spiel steht nichts geringeres als die Freiheit" ("At Risk Is Nothing Less Than Freedom"), published by the German on-line journal Sicherheit-Heute (Security Today), http://www.sicherheit-heute.de/forum (Reflections on remarks made by Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd in the same publication), April 2007.