Resources

I was scheduled to write a blog post on teaching about controversial issues and how they are shaping contemporary Muslim identities in North America. Guessing, however, that many readers may be fatigued from the barrage of unfavorable events – from the U.S. travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries to a horrible attack on a mosque in Quebec – I have decided to dedicate this particular blog to one of my favorite pedagogical tools for inspiring hope as well as a lasting sense of personal connection to the subject matter: the telling of a story.  Storytelling is one of the oldest techniques that human beings have used to teach one another. From pre-Islamic times to the present day, all Muslim societies have been shaped by orality in the form of tales, fables, myths, legends, and narratives. As I have emphasized to my students, there are many purposes for storytelling: for spiritual and moral guidance; for creating a sense of the supernatural, the metaphysical, and the existential; for inspiring learning, wonder, and adventure; for critiquing self and society; and for reinforcing historical narratives, in ways that can create positive social identity as well as stereotypes, prejudices, and even a basis for ongoing conflict. Whether I am teaching an introductory course on Islam or a graduate course on Sufi expressions of Islam, some of my greatest moments in class are when I share with students a story of my living experience of traveling to particular places in the Muslim world. For this blog I would like to share a story from a visit to Egypt more than a decade ago, as a window into diverse aspects of Arab and Middle Eastern culture (I also sometimes share this story when lecturing on traditional Islamic cities). While my particular story will differ from the stories other instructors will use in their own teaching, I hope that the manner in which I communicate different realities and experiences will prompt others to harvest their own distinctive experiences, and consider which aspects of those experiences might be richest in content for students – particularly those whose ideas about Muslim-majority and Middle Eastern societies are abstract and largely gleaned from news and popular culture.   In 2003, I had the honor of planning and coordinating a conference at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. After the conference was over I lingered in Egypt for a number of days, and on my last day I wanted to go shopping for books on Sufism in Cairo. (I would share with my students that Cairo and Damascus have long been two of the greatest cities in the Middle East for finding and buying books on Sufism.) A list of books in hand, my husband and I went from one bookstore to another and then another until we finally encountered, at the very back of one store, a beautiful elderly man who wrote and then recited the following sentence on a piece paper: “You must find Abdul Rahman at 5:00 pm in Azbakeya.” Inspired by this new lead, we set out to find Azbakeya but no one knew where it was. Finally, after much searching, we found it – an area in Cairo where there were booksellers of every kind, clustered in row upon row of small metal shacks. Somewhat daunted about where to start, we began to ask where we might find Abdul Rahman. As so often happens in the Middle East, many people were willing to stop, listen, and try to help, leading us from one person to the next but still no Abdul Rahman. Eventually, though, we did find Abdul Rahman and promptly showed him the list. How long, he asked, would we be in Cairo? “We leave tonight,” we informed him. Hearing this, he physically closed his shack for the day and said, “Follow me.” Surprised by this turn of events and uncertain about exactly where we were going, my husband and I then started to follow Abdul Rahman through the busy streets of Cairo, swerving this way and that. The sunset prayer had just begun and people were bustling about – some going home, some praying on the street, and others on their way to whatever events they had planned for the evening. Abdul Rahman then did a strange thing. He climbed into the front passenger seat of a taxi cab and beckoned us to get into the back of it. Still unsure of our destination, we complied with his request and felt good about this new, unforeseen but promising development. As a professor once told us, “Surrender to the grace of the moment.” As we made our way down paved but dusty streets, we started to realize that our cab was approaching “the City of the Dead” (I would share with my students how this is an area known to be both one of the largest cemeteries in the Middle East and also a place where the poorest of Cairo’s poor find spaces to live.)  Abdul Rahman was taking us to his home. The cab dropped us off in front of a modest mausoleum building, and Abdul Rahman yelled up to the second floor where his beautiful daughter, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, was holding a baby. She peeked out, ran down to the front gate, opened it, and handed the baby to her father. We then entered the building and followed Abdul Rahman to his living quarters, where there were books on all four walls, and books in boxes as well as on top of boxes and tables. We could not imagine fitting more books into one space. Abdul Rahman then handed the baby to my husband before proceeding to search his stacks, and I thought to myself, “This is the first time I have seen my husband hold a baby and it was in the City of the Dead!” Knowing his collection well, Abdul Rahman moved efficiently from one stack to another and brought forth a stack of books on Sufism. Some, he pointed out, were hundreds of years old – for instance, an early edition of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Futuhat al-Makkiyyah. Even though we did not want to bargain – no easy task for us in any event, made somewhat more awkward by the circumstances – we then had to haggle for the books. (I would share with my students the social significance of haggling and the art to a good haggler!)  Soon, after a few purchases and some small talk about baby names (Abdul Rahman cited a hadith of the Prophet to explain his own preference for boys’ names starting with Abdul [meaning servant of a particular divine quality] and etymological variations on Muhammad [which translates literally as “praising and praiseworthy”]), it was time for us to leave. We had to get back to our hotel, check out, and then leave for the airport to catch our flight. Abdul Rahman went outside and hailed a taxi for us in the City of the Dead. While conversing with our young cab driver, we discovered that he was a Nubian, with roots in Egypt’s culturally distinctive south. Upon hearing that we had come from the United States, he smiled and, with a thumbs-up signal, articulated a single word with much drama: “Schwarzenegger!” We immediately grasped his meaning, though this was our first news of the matter: Arnold Schwarzenegger had won the election, becoming governor of California. Unable to resonate with his obvious excitement, we felt what might be described as the beginning stage of reverse culture shock. My husband and I looked at each other, and could read the same meaning in each others’ faces: “We are going back to that.” In an attempt to change the subject, we tried to steer the conversation to Egypt and Egyptians – so much hospitality, and so many amazing things to see. Our driver was happy to hear of our positive experience, and appeared to enjoy the exchange. Then about five minutes before arriving at the hotel our driver pulled over to the side of the road, and turned to us with a hand signal that every visitor to the country must learn within the first day or two: “Please wait just a minute.” He then hopped out of the car and left us in it! Once again we consulted intuition but things felt good and we “surrendered to the grace of the moment.” A few minutes later, our driver popped out of a small roadside shop, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned to present us with a single rose in each hand. He looked at us with light in his eyes and said, “Welcome to Egypt!”  Many of my students over the years have told me that this is one of the stories they remember. Like other stories, it beckons them to encounter the Muslim world with openness, wonder and awe rather than fear, perplexity, or prejudgment. With this story, I invite my students to enjoy the process of entering into the same sense of discovery experienced by a traveler abroad on some new journey, never quite knowing what to do or what to expect, but open to common humanity, curious about cultural nuance, and eager for the inevitable experience of surprise.        

If you are like me, the weeks since the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States have been filled with shock, horror, disbelief, sadness and fear. These feelings come not only from the executive orders and policies that have been emerging from the White House but even more from the contest of what counts as “real news" vs. “fake news" or “facts” vs. “alternative facts." To be fair, there has been plenty of “fake news" coming from the left side of the spectrum as well. As a professor of Religious Studies deeply steeped in the methods of critical theories and postmodern thought, I have found myself a bit angry that political figures are using the critiques of objectivity and truth coming out of the academy to promote their own political agenda.             The critiques of Enlightenment thought are well known within the humanities. Horkeheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, brought attention to the ways in which reifying the whole world within the confines of a specific understanding of human reason (writ large) is violent toward many earth bodies (including humans).[1] Liberation thought and critical theories have been challenging the maleness, whiteness, euro-centric, and heteronormative understandings of Reason, Ultimate Truth, and Reality. Furthermore, the horrors of two world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the rise of global environmental problems associated with advances in industrialized technologies have challenged faith and belief in the narrative of scientific progress. But the last 40 years of postmodern discourse and identity politics within the humanities has, it seems, come back to haunt progressive politics.  Whereas the critique of objectivity and enlightenment values has marked a certain progressive strand of academic discourse within the western academy, this same “uncertainty” over knowledge and truth is being misused to spread confusion and “alternative facts” for motives of political power.             The postmodern turn is multi-perspectival, takes many turns, and has many different movements (it is really too large to be considered “one,” but none-the-less here we are talking about it under common nomenclature).  The critique of objectivity comes, as mentioned above, from a place of valuing diversity and difference.  Yet, the other side of this is that those on the “right” (especially) have been able to use this epistemic uncertainty toward their own advantage. Donald Trump and others on the right have used postmodern tools to undermine any truth at all: this is not, however, what postmodern voices call for. This is merely chaos spreading and propaganda.              The logic seems to be that if there is no objectivity or universal truth, the only option left is relativity.  This is simply a false choice.[2]  Objectivity and relativity pay little to no attention to what postmodernism is all about: embodiment.  It is the fact that we can’t escape our embodiment (and the histories that lead up to that embodiment shaping our experiences of the world) that neither objectivity nor relativity is possible.  What is possible is a multi-perspectivalism.  A multi-perspectivalism doesn’t say “anything goes.”  In fact, we can have common ground [3]. My favorite ones to argue for are: we are all subject to gravity on this planet, we are all mammals, we are animals, we need oxygen, water, and food to live, and we can’t claim to know exactly what any other person (or animal) is “thinking” or “feeling.” There are things we can agree upon as common ground - but this does not mean they are universal, for all times and places the earth was once not and it will be burned to a cinder one day. Paradigms from 100 years ago are different today and will likely be different 100 years from now.  Who knows, maybe we are in some sort of bizarre multiverse?[4]             Contextuality and embodiment, then, mean that we need multiple perspectives to help articulate the common grounds on which we stand, but that none of them can fully exhaust that reality.  The parable of the elephant and the three blind men comes to mind.  One still must argue for his/her position; facts and events still matter, it is just that they are not in some way naively “out there” for all to see in the same way.  So while the uncertainty of postmodernism has fueled Trumpism and those of his ilk, it is a really, really bad interpretation and misuse of postmodernism.  In fact, if postmodernity suggests (which I think it does) that certainty is always more dangerous than uncertainty, he has proven that. He is so certain that he needs to listen to no one else and take no other perspectives into account before tweeting to the masses. This is solipsism gone wild.                As an educator, how might we best resist the erosion of facts and truths in public discourse, while maintaining the best fruits of postmodernity? I think, first, we need to really start talking about vision. The education system in the US and in other countries is still geared toward educating national citizens. This has led to a false choice between globalization and nationalism. I (and others) have tried to talk about "planetarity" (following and developing on Spivak's understanding of this word).[5] A planetary understanding of the world recognizes us first and foremost as planetary citizens among other citizens (both human and non). We are, after all, but one species on a planet full of non-human bodies that are each just as diverse (if not more) as every human body.             Second, planetarity recognizes that the globalization of neo-liberal economics is not good for all bodies equally but only a few (the now so-called 1%). We need safeguards for local peoples, places, other animals, and environments in general. We need safeguards that do not undermine the integrity of our earth's systems, nor the integrity and dignity of peoples. Nationalism, however, is not the proper response. Nationalism leads to an every-person-for-himself/herself mentality. The worst, rotten fruits of which we saw in WWII. Going "back" is not an option; so how do we go forward?             Third, while protecting local places, a planetary vision of the world also recognizes that we are multiple, hybrid, pluralistic and changing. Difference in all of its forms is good and what constitutes our very own self-identity - there is no me, without a lot of you's. Hence the multiple "isms" that seek to wall one group of people off from another will always fail. We are interdependent (with other humans, other animals, and the rest of the natural world both present and past) and there is no getting away from that. All attempts to flee interdependence will result in violence toward other earth-bodies.             It may sound simple, and I don't have answers in terms of where we ought to go. But before we can even begin to answer the question of "ought", we have to raze the structures of our educational systems and get out of the current rut of the political rhetoric that assumes we must choose between nationalism and localism or globalization and neo-liberalism. Call it "planetarity," call it a new form of "Eco-cosmopolitanism," or by some other name.[6] But let's start imagining again together a different world to co-inhabit and fighting to break down the old structures that prevent us from doing so.  If the university is not a place for critically reimagining what it means to be humans, on a common planet with a lot of  other-than-human life, then I don’t know what the university is for. [1] Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). [2] This is Haraway’s argument in: Donna Harraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Feminist Studies 14.3(Autumn 1988): 575-599. [3] Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller, EcoSpirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1-20. [4] Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014). [5] Whitney Bauman, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014). [6] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010-2011).

The shift in the pattern is subtle, and I might be hypersensitive given the national spectacle of alternative facts and fake news, but I think conversations riddled with non-sequitur speech are on the Lynn Westfieldrise. Here is an example: Recently, as a consultant for a weekend gig, I was checking into a hotel in Chicago. The desk clerk, a young woman, asked me for identification and my credit card. Reaching into my purse, I handed her my documents. When I noticed that she was swiping my credit card, I told her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party, and she need not swipe my credit card. She said she had to swipe everybody’s card. Again, I informed her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party and that their card was on file for all my expenses. The manager, overhearing our conversation, came to the desk. He told the clerk that I was correct and that my card need not be swiped. Two days later at checkout, mindful that my card had been swiped, I wanted to be sure no costs had been charged to my card. I handed the young woman at the hotel desk (different woman than at check-in) my room keys and asked to which card the expenses were charged. She told me, without looking at the paperwork, that the charges would go to the card I gave at check-in. I told her my expenses were being paid by a third party and asked which card was being charged. She looked irritated and called for the manager to help her (or me). When the manager appeared at the desk (same manager from check-in), I asked to which credit card the expenses were being charged. He replied that the charges were going to the card given by my client, but he did not tell me the number on the paperwork. I reminded him that my personal credit card had been swiped at check-in. Shaking his head no, he said that my card had not been swiped. I frowned at him. The manager responded begrudgingly, “Yes, but she made a mistake.” His response was confusing to me. His statement inferred that if a mistake had been made and subsequently rectified, then no mistake was ever made. Therefore, I should not be questioning the process. I asked again, “To which credit card will my expenses be charged?” Finally, looking at the paperwork, he read aloud the number on the bill, and indeed, it was the card of the client. I thanked them both. As I walked out of the hotel, I made a mental note to check my monthly credit card bill because it is likely my card will be charged. The feeling of suspicion and fuzziness I felt while walking out of the hotel is similar to how I feel while watching TV political interviews. Non-sequitur speech is seeping into public discourse at an alarming rate. Political pundits on news shows routinely, regardless of the posed question, give a scripted reply that ignores the question at-hand but instead polishes the political brand or repeats a generic political message. The confusing response to the question is often such a non-sequitur that the interviewer, even when poker-faced, looks confused and gropes for ways to bring some semblance of cohesion to the TV viewer. Regrettably, my hunch is that this strange and strained conversation pattern (which is not dialogue) is creeping into the classroom. It is as problematic in classrooms as it is in politics. The up-tick of non-sequitur speech by my students in the classroom is troubling. I do not want the deliberations in my classrooms to devolve into pseudo-conversations that have little to do with reality or where bold-faced lies are touted as truth. I do not want my students to mimic the patterns of communication from politics believing that specious comments make for genuine dialogue. If teachers are not vigilant in our classrooms to create space for healthy, open dialogue and the free exchange of ideas, then conversation patterns of alternative facts and non-sequitur speech will quickly seize our classroom discourse, rendering us a less able, more oppressed people. It seems, given the state of authoritarian governmental leadership and the shrinking respect for a voiced constituency, that it is imperative that practices of dialogue are reinforced and extensively utilized in our courses. We who teach must provide antidotes for the poisons of alternative facts and mean-spirited clamor that masquerades as dialogue. The truth, as well as the ability to speak it, in empirical facts or in the nuances of multi-faceted poetry, is to be guarded and nourished in our classrooms. Teaching students the power of dialogue, at this moment, is an act of resistance that will reach far beyond the classroom. Nurturing moral imagination, honing skills of courage and thoughtful activism, analyzing and reinforcing our bedrock values of equity, justice, and human dignity are pedagogical imperatives for all topics and all classrooms. Our classroom spaces must become cauldrons of resistance by the dialogues we share. As I plan my fall courses, I will increase the time for student dialogue in learning activities and assignments. I will intentionally discourage non-sequitur speech and encourage their critical wisdom. For the sake of our constitutional values we must equip our students with dialogue as a tool of resistance.

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.

Since Trump became a candidate in the 2016 US presidential race, educators have continued to reflect on how his political presence might influence pedagogy. Personally, I find myself in a familiar quagmire: to what extent do I focus on current events in my Islamic studies courses? If I wanted to, each class session could devote itself exclusively to political developments, domestic and international; this has been the case for years. Trump’s incendiary comments, policy moves, and cabinet picks who malign Muslims, exacerbate this quagmire. Trump, for example, said that “Islam hates us” in a March 2016 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. His cabinet picks and advisors have endorsed similarly disturbing, perhaps willfully ignorant, positions and rhetoric. In this blog post, I will discuss some strategies, as well challenges, for how Islamic studies teachers might react to a Trump administration in a classroom context, with special attention to building positive narratives in addition to challenging existing ones. A recent Executive Order bans travel to the US from nationals of several Muslim-majority countries. In the language of The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani, “If we bombed you, we ban you.” As students, professors, and researchers—even those with green cards—find themselves in limbo, the EO has already sent reverberations across the lives of Muslims in the US and abroad. Fortunately, many scholars of Islam remain positively engaged in public discourse and efforts toward bridge-building and political problem-solving on an ongoing basis. Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst wrote a blog post for the University of Vermont, “Trump 2016: The View from Islamic Studies,” in which she details the connections between Trump’s rhetoric, cabinet choices, and their consequences. Caleb Elfenbein, an author for this “Teaching Islam” blog, has contributed to an important project that maps anti-Muslim crimes in the US. Also chilling is Mohammad Fadel’s article for The Islamic Monthly that details worst-case scenarios for Muslims under a Trump administration, including comparisons with Japanese internment camps. This is all to say that there are simply too many, individual as well as cumulative, momentous and worrisome news headlines to introduce to an undergraduate Islamic studies course while still covering other material in the course. Are the Challenges (that) Different than Before? Effective pedagogy includes understanding one’s context, including institutional goals, student demographics, and the current political landscape. An effective way, I find, to invite students to draw personally meaningful connections to course material is to always keep in mind popular symbols and ideas that bear, even indirectly, on what we study. The absurdity of mainstream media coverage of Islam can also offer some cathartic moments of laughter, which also helps ease students into challenging discourses. In terms of noteworthy contributions that Muslims make to American public life, we saw Linda Sarsour—a Palestinian American activist—lead organizing efforts for the Women’s March on Washington. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress (now in his sixth term), received the endorsement of Bernie Sanders for chair of the DNC, and the funeral of Muhammad Ali in June 2016 attracted international media attention, including its full broadcast on Fox News. In a beautifully narrated but also depressing account, NPR’s Asma Khaled details what it was like, as a Muslim woman, to cover Trump’s campaign during the election. As Amir Hussain adroitly argues in his recent book, Muslims and the Making of America (Baylor, 2016), we have much to learn about American cultural fabric by studying the role of Islam and Muslims in our history, even as it continues to unfold. In my capacity as host for New Books in Islamic Studies podcasts, I have interviewed a number of scholars—including Amir Hussain, Sophia Arjana, and Todd Green—about how current political affairs impact the lives of Muslims in the US. I keep my students in mind as one audience for these interviews, and I have repeatedly assigned my students the interview I conducted with Todd Green, on Islamophobia (which prospered in the American mainstream long before Trump reached the national spotlight). The Good, the Bad, and the Mystical Despite the many humanizing accounts about Muslims that my students study, these same students also tell me that they aren’t surprised to learn about the pervasive Islamophobia in the news cycle. But don’t some details shock them, even a little bit? In a 2015 Public Policy Poll, for example, about 30% of Republicans and 19% of Americans supported bombing Agrabah—the fictional city from Disney’s Aladdin. Among Trump supporters: 41%. As I wrote in a previous “Teaching Islam” blog post, students can use current political tensions, and how they respond to them, as a way to make sense of Sufi conceptions of spiritual growth. “Do I,” students might ask themselves, “harbor anything related to these views that I find so toxic and ignorant?” I’m currently teaching Islamic Mysticism for the third time, and I’ve implicitly chosen in past iterations to focus less on current events than I do in my introductory courses on Islam, or even in my courses on the Qur’an in which we explicitly explore contentious political topics. This time, however, I find myself taking closer stock during class time of political context, and not only because of the most recent presidential election. I think students likewise crave a balance between attention to (depressing) current events and engaging with aesthetics and intellectual discourse that don’t immediately relate to the latest fake news (or “alternative facts”?) on their social media feeds. In conclusion, I would like to include a brief reflection on student activism and its connection to teaching. As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I witnessed some student groups host anti-Muslim ideologues including Dennis Praeger, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes. Frequently, I would watch many other student groups respond with formal protests, which I found both heartening and problematic. Indeed, protest is perhaps part of the human spirit; it encapsulates much of what it means to thrive in a democratic society. It’s also an effective catalyst for change as numerous examples from history attest. At the same time, however, I regularly remind myself that part of the difficult intellectual work of teaching and learning involves building narratives, not only challenging visible narratives. Both are necessary, and my course on Sufism helps me, and I hope my students as well, appreciate the significance of this balance, the complementarity between jamal (beauty) and jalal (majesty)—two sides of the same human condition. Where do you strike your balance in terms of navigating planned course material with course-related current events as they arise throughout the term? Please share in the comments section.