Resources by Martin Nguyen

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 set for side-by-side comparative readings (Qur’an 12:1-111 and Genesis 37:1-50:26), and this particular Qur’anic narrative of a prophet is self-contained making it especially accessible to students. In contrast, the Qur’anic treatment of other figures like Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and Mary is spread across many different places. Having students read the biblical and Qur’anic narratives of Joseph alongside one another, when framed carefully, can be an incredibly productive and engaging learning experience for students. It raises questions concerning intertextuality and compels students to ask questions concerning language, authorial intent, and reception. Nevertheless, as many of you may well know, the assignment does not always go well. It is not a “set it and forget it” kind of assignment. Over the years, how I have taught the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative has changed as I continually adapt the unit to the reactions and responses of my students. Unsurprisingly, they are not all approaching the texts with the same set of presuppositions and sensitivities. I see in some of the papers that my students submit a dismissal of the Qur’anic narrative as purely derivative of the biblical one. Others walk away perplexed by what they believe to be the overly elliptical or densely opaque language of the Qur’an. With both narratives emerging from historical contexts greatly removed from those of today, I also find students conflating the Sitz im Leben or social contexts of the biblical and Qur’anic accounts. All ancient societies in arid climates start blurring together for them. What I would like to share are some of the changes that I have made to improve how I frame the assignment and guide my students. 1) I encourage my students to consider reading the passage from the Qur’an first. Students want to begin with the biblical account either out of familiarity or a desire to read the material in historical order, but this can prime them to privilege the biblical account as the “authentic” or “original” one. By flipping the reading order, how they go about processing the two texts is substantially shifted. This is evident in our class discussions. Typically the students end up split in which they read first, but this difference itself has generated fascinating discussions about how each student perceives certain narrative elements as either missing, added, extraneous, abbreviated, or prolonged depending on which scripture is granted “priority.” 2) If time permits in a semester, I try to provide a broader introduction to the work being done by the authors of these scriptural texts. While this naturally takes place with the Qur’an, since it is the subject of my course, it takes more effort to carve time out to properly situate the Hebrew Bible. What seems to be the Hebrew Bible’s larger objective? Who is its audience(s)? What overarching story is it trying to tell with its many books? How does it tell that story? Who is emphasized and why? Of course, we entertain the same questions when it comes to the Qur’an. In sum, I am trying to get students to think, what sort of work is each of these narratives doing in their respective historical and cultural settings? Attention is also paid to language. I have my students reflect and discuss on why the Qur’an and Bible seem to speak in different ways. How does naming, or the lack thereof, figure into the telling of the story and what effect does it have for the reader? This is also an opportunity for students to do some translation comparisons, a tactic I discussed in an early post. The point of the narrative assignment, of course, is not only the content of the accounts themselves, but drawing attention to the ways that the stories are told. 3) I have also found it helpful to extend the Yūsuf/Joseph unit on occasion by moving beyond scripture and looking at how the narrative is received and reinterpreted by later historical communities. What life has the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative had? Obvious choices are the musical and film Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the array of religious art, both Christian and Islamic, that has been produced around the story. What I have found more compelling and useful, however, is the novel Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah which uses the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative to tell the history of East Africa during the period of European colonization. Both the setting and the characters of this book serve to further decenter our discussions from biblical normativities and the western cultural prism. We are dealing, after all, with Africans and Muslims under colonialism. Although the novel adheres relatively loosely to the scriptural accounts of Yūsuf/Joseph, it nonetheless allows us to revisit the narrative with a more contemporary lens as we explore questions of power, identity, and belonging. It is also a powerful reminder for my students of the ways that art and literature can intersect with religion and scripture. These narratives are not just old stories, but important ways of making meaning and shaping the present.

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 race and racism in a relatively conventional course offering on Islam. The deepening consciousness and raised campus awareness over the Black Lives Matter movement has continued to spur learning interventions across campuses. One concrete way in which this has emerged here at Fairfield University is the formation and development of a Black Lives Matter course in the spring semester of 2016. Students, faculty, and staff came together to establish what is hoped to be a regularly taught course. I was able to join the second iteration of this course for the present spring semester of 2017. I took this as an opportunity to see if I could develop the converse of what I had implemented earlier, namely to teach Black Lives Matter through the lens of Islam and the experience of Muslims. This new opportunity for engagement, of course, presented a significantly different set of challenges, especially with respect to structure. Typically when I undertake a course, like my Islamic theology one, I have an incredible amount of autonomy because I serve as the sole instructor. I can plot out the content of a course, scale its pacing, and ultimately direct it as appropriate. In contrast, the Black Lives Matter course was designed from the outset to have a collaborative teaching structure. While the students enrolled in the course have a single instructor of record joining them for the duration of the course, a rotating group of University faculty and staff cycle through the classroom. On a weekly basis visiting instructors enter the classroom to offer their perspectives and share insights from their respective areas of expertise. While the diverse array of voices joining the students serve to both broaden and deepen the experience, it also entails negotiating some pedagogical hurdles. As one of the visiting instructors, rather than the instructor of record, I had to work around certain limits. As I sat down to plan out my contribution to the course, two pressing issues rose to the fore: 1) How could I navigate the challenges inherent to teaching in a rotation where my engagement with the students is limited to a single 75-minute session? and 2) How can I introduce most effectively Islam and Muslims as an important frame of analysis for the broader subject of Black Lives Matter? To spell out the difficulties of the first issue, I will enter the course in the fourth week as a newcomer and outsider whereas the students and the instructor of record will have developed by then into an ongoing and self-reflective learning community. My fellow colleagues will be facing a similar dynamic for their scheduled visitations. We will be entering as unknown entities offering ideas and starting conversations that may not be consistent with or may not bridge well with the concepts and terms previously introduced. We will have our own presuppositions and expectations. We will not be privy to the idiosyncrasies of the class. With this set of difficulties in mind, the faculty and staff contributing to the course took several steps in anticipation. First, several weeks prior to the beginning of the semester we came together for a half-day workshop. As a large group and then in smaller breakout ones, we shared our topics and approaches with one another in hopes of better understanding how the course as a whole would unfold and hold together. The syllabus was also circulated in advance so we could get in touch with those who would precede our visit and those who would follow us. We spent time as well discussing general pedagogical strategies for discussing sensitive matters related to issues of race and identity. In sum, efforts were made to prime each of us to connect with one another as we prepared to join the students for our one-time visit and to familiarize ourselves with the learning culture for this particular classroom community. With regards to introducing the relevance of Islam and Muslims to the course, I sought to build explicitly upon previously assigned materials while also providing new pieces for consideration. With respect to prior readings, I identified two pieces in particular that I thought worth recalling and reframing for the set of issues that I hoped to cover: (1) The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills, which served as the course’s main textbook and presents an incisive critique of the ways in which white supremacy are operative politically and socially, and (2) the 2016 documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay, which explores how mass incarceration came to and continues to target disproportionately black communities. While Islam and Muslims do not figure explicitly in either exposition, I believe both works offered important windows for contemplating connections and points of intersection with the larger subject of Black Lives Matter. As for new material, I settled on the following reading: Edward E. Curtis, IV, “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post-9/11 Variations,” in Carl Ernst, ed. Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 75-106. The benefit of Curtis’s contribution is that it both provides a historical overview of black Muslim American experiences while also shining a light on the ways in which black Muslim groups have been subjected to state surveillance, animus and at times suppression. A week before my visit I pre-circulated several questions for the students to consider. These questions made the task of revisiting and rethinking these earlier works more concrete and fostered a sense of continuity. Specifically, I wanted them to think back to 13th to see how they might imagine how the discourse on Islam and Muslims in America relates to the history of black criminalization and imprisonment in the United States. Furthermore, I asked them to think how the “racial contract” is at work with how Muslims are racialized presently in American society. When the day of my visit arrived, I drew explicit parallels between the country’s political discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s over the war on crime and the war on drugs with the more recent discourse over the war on terror. I sought to illustrate the ways in which blackness and Muslimness have intersected in a number of significant ways: from the racialization of Muslims in America to the enduring place of Islam in the African American imagination, to the long historical experience of African American Muslims that includes groups like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, and persons like Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. Finally, we concluded by looking at the ways in which citizenship is used, even weaponized, as a means of exclusion and containment. Ultimately, working with structure of the course, I felt my time was best served by building my discussion of Islam and Muslims as explicitly and carefully as possible upon the ideas already seeded by previous readings and ongoing conversations in the Black Lives Matter course. While the visit produced a rich discussion, the need to adapt and connect is ongoing as this course and the call around which it is built moves forward.

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 that we encounter – rarely have the ability to access the Qur’an in its original Arabic, through which much of the scripture’s polysemy is most evident. Adding to the difficulty of teaching the Qur’an is that there is a pedagogically valuable array of exegetical traditions that have emerged from the innumerable engagements Muslims have had with the scripture across history. While it is certainly possible to teach the Qur’an on its own in English, I have always felt compelled to draw my students’ attention to these many interpretative communities and to expose them, at the very least, to some of the hermeneutic concerns held therein. In short, I want to teach my students something about Qur’anic exegesis alongside the Qur’an itself. How, then, have I done this for my largely English-speaking undergraduates? I have expanded upon and adapted a set of “exegetical exercises” that Farid Esack used when I served as his teaching fellow over a decade ago. The point of these assignments was to expose students to different interpretative resources and techniques in graduated stages so that by the end of a semester they were prepared to undertake a focused interpretative analysis of their own. What I’d like to do here is share some of those pedagogical techniques that I’ve used in different iterations of my Qur’an course. Translation Comparison One of the first tasks I assign is the reading of a short Qur’anic passage, usually Q. 96 or Q. 97, across multiple English translations. While I allow students to go out and find credible translations of their own, I also state that they must all reference specific translations in order to ensure a common starting point for everyone. At present I require the translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem published by Oxford, Michael Sell’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, and the Study Quran from HarperCollins. Narrowing their attention to a small set of verses has proven ideal because it compels them to comb through a translation word-by-word. The assignment is essentially about attention to detail. In the short essay, I ask them to write on these verses, they identify noteworthy differences, comment upon how these small changes affect their understanding and then opine on why some choices are made over others. Why translate it this way over that? For example, students often spend much of their time thinking through the interpretative implications of a keyword in Q. 96:2 that is variously translated as “clinging form,” “blood clot,” “embryo,” and “congealed blood.” When we discuss our findings in class, I make it a point to turn also to the translators themselves and situate each translation project by referencing the introductions of their respective translations to better understand their objectives and methods. While most of my students may lack familiarity with Arabic, this exercise impresses on them the nuances of language and word choice and introduces them to an important method of interpretative investigation. Qur’an Commentaries in Translation Another step that students take is to look at Muslim Qur’an commentaries or tafsīr in English translation. While the overwhelming majority of the extant corpus of Qur’an commentaries remains unavailable for my students, there are several works that offer students a window into this scholarly world. Two helpful compilations are The Quran and Its Exegesis: Selected Texts with Classical and Modern Muslim Interpretations (Oneworld, 1996) by Helmut Gätje and An Anthology of Qur’an Commentaries: Volume I – On the Nature of the Divine (Oxford University Press, 2010) edited by Feras Hamza, Sajjad Rizvi, and Farhana Mayer. Both works allow students to see different commentators weigh in on the same topic or passage. A harder to find book, but one worth excerpting is J. Cooper’s abridged translation of the beginning of the tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) (The Commentary on the Qurʾān, Oxford University Press, 1987). This translation provides students with a sense of how a classical work of exegesis was structured and approached. There are, of course, many more translations of Qur’an commentaries emerging and the site http://www.altafsir.com furnishes online access to some of these. Exegetical Reference Works The end goal is to provide students with the resources and tools to undertake some preliminary exegesis for themselves. With that in mind, I find it worthwhile to introduce my students to the research and literature being produced by scholars of Islam in the Euro-American academy. Typically I arrange a library research session when – working with a librarian – we expose students to important reference works like English-language Qur’an concordances and Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an and Encyclopaedia of Islam. These reference works are often a good starting point for further research into topics and persons appearing in the Qur’an. Given the idiosyncrasies of all these works, students find the guided hands-on experience in the library invaluable. We also spend time familiarizing students with Arabic transliteration conventions (and variations) as well as how to successful navigate the journal databases. While the secondary scholarship on the Qur’an is substantial and growing, it is often difficult for undergraduates to successful find and identify the best that is out there. These library sessions are aimed at providing them with some grounding and guidance for their work. While this is not an exhaustive look at the exegetical exercises I use, the above points represent what I believe to be some of the most helpful activities for preparing new students to do some preliminary exegesis of their own. I offer them models and tools so that they can explore their own lines of inquiry and raise their own questions in response to this incredibly dynamic and multi-layered text.

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 dispel common misconceptions of Islam and Muslims. The event was well-intentioned, but the initial framing of the event and my role in specific, I realized, would only serve to reinforce that religion and Muslim religiosity somehow lie at the heart of the problem. The part that was asked of me implied that there exists a mainstream, normative, conventional understanding of Islam that did not warrant prejudice. As this line of thinking goes, anti-Muslim sentiments would surely subside if only more people knew about this safe, good, and moderate Islam. According to this narrative, there is a right kind of Islam out there and the burden of responsibility lies with those right-thinking Muslims to push back and make themselves heard. What this narrative leaves unaddressed is the complicity and accountability of the larger majoritarian society in uncritically perpetuating anti-Muslim sentiments. Instead, religion is foregrounded as what matters most. This line of thinking eerily echoes the deeply problematic expectation that race issues in America are a “black problem” in which the burden of change lies with black communities. In both cases, the larger systemic social, political, legal, and economic issues are overlooked or worse, exonerated. My argument is not that Islam or religion is altogether irrelevant or unimportant in conversations like these. What is problematic is the continual recourse to find answers (and false comfort) in explanations centered on religious motive and identity when conflicts, crises, and tragedies transpire. When a discussion is framed narrowly around Islam or religion, we end up missing the bigger picture. The above event I described, which was eventually productively reframed, brings to the fore a particular pedagogical challenge that many scholars of Islam face. In the few minutes I was granted, how could I speak beyond the lens of religion to highlight other structural problems of greater significance? Part of the dilemma is one of time. When I think of my role as a teacher, I often take for granted the generous amount of time I have with my students each semester. Instead of a mere fifteen minutes, my students and I engage in conversation and critical inquiry on a wide array of topics related to Islam and Muslims over the course of fifteen weeks. With each class meeting we progressively build our knowledge base, nuance our language, and continually circle back to thorny issues with keener questions and alternative perspectives. When we are invited to speak we remain committed teachers, but we must carry out our work without the benefits that a semester of engagement affords. Moreover, we do not have the ability to slowly build a thoughtful base of knowledge. Speaking opportunities are typically topical and the range of topics we are asked to speak on can be dizzying, if not outright perplexing. We are invited to speak on the deeply problematic categories of terrorism and radicalization. We are asked to provide background and context to wars and conflicts in Muslim majority countries. We are asked to weigh in or explain headline issues like the refugee crisis, the position of presidential candidates, anti-Muslim hate crimes, and most recently the burkini ban across Southern France. Because of our place and position, our “expertise” on Islam is sought – never mind what our areas of specialization actually are. Time and again, we are deployed, both intentionally and unintentionally, to reinforce religion – especially Islam – as the primary frame of reference. While respecting the request and good intentions of event organizers, there are several ways we can work to change or better the discourse. Structural Reframing: Whether speaking individually or on a panel, the typical expectation is that we will say our part and then field a handful of questions. I have found it useful to collaborate with organizers well in advance in imagining alternative models of engagement. Might colleagues in other disciplines be invited in addition to or in place of ourselves? Would a roundtable or town hall style conversation be better suited for a larger audience? When faced with a smaller and more intimate group, could participants be engaged through a service experience or could the discussion be facilitated around a more reflective and participatory fishbowl dialogue? Interventions like these at the organizational level can be used to introduce a different horizon of understanding, one that extends beyond religious reductionism, by simply changing the angle of approach or the terms of the conversation. Engaging the Audience: At one-off events it is often difficult to gauge where an audience is coming from. It can be worthwhile to quickly poll or even pose direct questions to those in attendance to better understand their expectations and concerns. At times it can even be helpful to even call into question problematic premises or assumptions about the role and significance of religion. For example, questions of scriptural interpretation arise frequently at many events, especially those concerning violence. The assumption is that somehow the Qur’an directs the actions of its readers. Of course, human behavior is hardly driven by such a crude correlation of text to action. Moreover, texts, even scriptural ones, are incredibly malleable and open to interpretation. By simply spotlighting erroneous assumptions, the audience can be prompted to explore the many other factors and influences at play. Speak Beyond Religion: For a variety of reasons, strategic planning is not always possible. In fact, more often than not, I only have at my disposal the speaking time I am given and the content I choose to convey. In these situations, I believe it is still important to push past an exclusively religious frame of reference. Religion is only one identity marker that inflects the realities we face today, and yet the singular attention to religion in our attempts to understand these realities serves to obfuscate more pressing systemic problems that underlie them. We may be scholars of religion, but as our research and work in the field continually demonstrates there are many other intersecting power structures shaping the persons, societies, and ideas that we study. What structural inequalities are peoples responding to? What role do state actors and colonial histories have in creating, perpetuating, and worsening the situation in question? How is religion or Islam being coopted or instrumentalized? What are the identity politics at stake that continue to draw religion or Islam into suspicion? Speaking about religion and Islam is not just a matter of content, but also one of context. By drawing connections to wider cultural, social, political, and economic questions we can raise the level of discussion and deepen the narratives at work in the public discourse.

Martin Nguyen Associate Professor, Faculty Chair for Diversity Fairfield University 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.

Martin Nguyen Associate Professor, Faculty Chair for Diversity Fairfield University In the teaching of Islam, there are many ways through which we can engage our students in the classroom. My intention here is to share one assignment that I have developed over the years that has proven to be incredibly.

Martin Nguyen Associate Professor Fairfield University Teaching the Qur’an can be a formidable undertaking. Even though the Qur’an is an abiding research interest of mine, it makes teaching the scripture no less challenging. What do I choose to cover and how should I go about it in the course of