Teaching Islam

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 ...

In my last entry, I made curricular suggestions on teaching Islam and pluralism. The curricular suggestions continue as follows: Juristic Approaches to Diversity Ethics of Disagreement: This method is an internal modality for dissent for scholars of Islam who developed a systematized approach for juristic differences. They focused on methods ...

Today, Islam is paired with violence so often that these two concepts have become virtually synonymous. Conversations are often wedged between criticisms that Muslims are doing too much violence or not doing enough to stop it. Jihad, the Islamic keyword that has become equated with a distinctively Muslim kind of ...

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 ...

Many Islamicists, specialists in Islam, talk about the challenge of teaching Islam in a post-9/11 world, a world where the War on Terror (WOT), political chaos in the Middle East (exacerbated by the WOT), and global jihadi violence (which feeds off the WOT) dominates the news. Not surprisingly, this backdrop ...