Archives for 2016

Laughter is an important ingredient in my classroom. I bank on my ability to make students laugh with my often-droll sense of humor, but I also frequently rely on professional comedians through the magic of the Internet. The status of Islam and Muslims in political satire, specifically in the genre ...

Countless hate crimes since Election Day already show the widespread effect of the President-Elect’s unpredictable nature and his death-inducing ideologies: racism, islamophobia, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, anti-Semitism. What do we as higher educators do when our global context is unstable, the future is uncertain, and the local context is even dangerous ...

In my last two blogs, I have been sharing some thoughts on teaching Sufism and contemporary Sufism, giving special consideration to the importance of helping students actively explore different elements of Sufi tradition and culture in the different Islamic periods. For this blog, I would like to point out opportunities ...

In this blog, I want to continue with the theme that animated my last post “Genealogically Attuned teaching in an Introductory Course on Islam.” To remind, the question I had engaged had to do with the problem of presenting in an undergraduate amenable fashion theoretical insights from the study of ...

Why and how has Sufism become such a contested topic in the 20th and 21st centuries, and what does “authentic” Sufism look like today? Why are historical Sufi shrines in Pakistan, Mali, and Iraq being destroyed by Muslims?  Why do some Muslim governments ban Sufi literature and persecute Sufis, at ...