Fall 2021 Grant Recipient
Graduate Student
Ilma Qureshi (Religious Studies) My research focuses of Sufism, which has conceptualized as ‘heterodox’ or ‘unorthodox’ by certain Muslim reformers and Orientalist scholars. My research casts a probing and critical lens on Islamic mysticism by studying two seminal Persian poets, Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi (d.1289) and Amir Khusro (d.1325), who crafted the literary and intellectual culture of the thirteenth-century Indian Subcontinent. My research seeks to bridge the gap between Western research and the work undertaken by eminent South Asian scholars. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, it is an intervention in the current discourse as it seeks to address this lacuna by contextualizing Iraqi and Khusrow’s textual poetic corpus and probing the metaphysical and affective dimensions of love and knowledge.