Martin Nguyen

Martin Nguyen, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Director of Islamic Studies. Fairfield University. Martin lives with his wife Kiran and young daughter in Connecticut, which they now realize to their delight is really just a string of beaches. His work revolves around the Qur’an, theology, and the intersection of race and religion. His latest book Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) presents a contemporary theology rooted in the practice of the religious imagination. He is also the author of Sufi Master and Qur’an Scholar: Abū’l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and the Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt (Oxford, 2012), which explores the confluence of Sufism, theology, and Qur’anic hermeneutics in the life and works of an eleventh-century mystic and scholar. Martin presently serves on the editorial board of the Wabash Center journal Teaching Theology and Religion and is involved with a Connecticut-based community activist group called Stratford Citizens Addressing Racial Equity (CARE), where he is establishing the StoryShare oral history project and facilitating community conversations.

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For those of us who teach on Islam and Muslims, the teaching of the narrative of Joseph, or Yusūf in Arabic, is old hat. It has proven to be a useful pedagogical device for placing the Qur’an in conversation with the Hebrew Bible. The narrative is easy to ...

The questions and challenges concerning the teaching of Islam and race that I raised last year in “Teaching Islamic Theology through Black Lives” are no less urgent and relevant now as they were then. In that contribution, I attempted to delineate ways in which I could make important interventions on ...

As anyone who takes on the task will appreciate, teaching the Qur’an is an incredibly challenging undertaking. The scripture bears out multiple layers of meaning and finds expression across a range of literary devices: parables, similitudes, hyperbole, sacred narratives, direct exhortations, and so on. Moreover, my students – like most ...

Not too long ago I was invited to join a panel with the ambitious aim of putting into context for the campus community the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment and the Islamophobia industry behind it. I was specifically requested to open the gathering with a 10-minute Islam 101 in order to ...

In a time when it is of paramount importance to assert and witness that black lives matter, how do we go about preparing our Islam courses that all too often afford little to no time at all for the societal crises that prevail all around us? This, at least, is ...

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