Islamophobia

When I was teaching public high school, a colleague in the history department approached me to express his concern about our world religions curriculum. “I am scared to touch it,” he said. What he meant, first of all, was that he felt unprepared to teach about religion. The material was ...

Don’t we all have moments when we want to, or perhaps feel like we should, set aside a class session plan in lieu of discussing a pressing event or development? Despite the vast array of subjects that we teach within the broader field of Islamic studies—not to mention ...

For the past fifteen years I have tried to teach about Islam as a religiously diverse tradition practiced by communities around the globe. I have done so in hopes that my students would be able to imagine Islam as a complicated phenomenon beyond either Islamophobia or Islamophilia. Sometimes, it is ...

More often than not, it seems, students register for courses on Islam wanting to learn “stuff.” In a moment when the ubiquity of Islam in public consciousness is matched by general illiteracy about its history and diverse forms, these expectations are tempting. Yet if we don’t spend time really ...

Last year, I began asking students in my Islam, gender, and sexuality course to write a paragraph about what they think it means to study these topics from a humanistic perspective. It’s the first thing they write for the course. This year (as with last year), a good number ...