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When asked, “What was Muhammad’s moral character like?” Aisha replied: “His moral character was the Quran.” Students encounter this hadith at two moments in the introductory course to the study of Islam. The first is when students meet the Prophet Muhammad through hadith literature, the written record of sayings and actions of the Prophet. We return to the hadith the following week when students begin to explore the Quran. In our second pass of this famous narration, we begin to contemplate what it means to say that the Prophet’s character was the Quran. The idea that the Prophet was a walking Quran is at once simple and simultaneously beyond the immediate reach of the class. Students explain that to say the Prophet’s character was the Quran means he exhibited ideal virtues. This exegesis grasps at an accessible meaning of the hadith, but does not yet appreciate the concept of embodied knowledge that is so important in classical Islamic education, especially Quran education. In some respects, the notion of embodied knowledge runs counter to the kind of education students embark upon in their college years (and the whole of their education leading up to college). Most students describe the purpose of their liberal arts education as a training in a particular way of thinking—honing the skills of critical reading and analysis. But perhaps the idea of embodied knowledge is not so foreign to them. The university where I teach emphasizes “hands-on” and “experiential” learning, the power of doing to facilitate learning. Students are encouraged to study abroad, take on internships, and generally roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves—physically—in their education. So, there are some comparisons to make with students as we discuss the idea of what it might mean to embody the Quran. In this way, the institution’s learning philosophy translates to our classroom in my effort to create for students an embodied experience of the Quran. One of my goals when I teach the Quran is to develop in students an appreciation for the Quran beyond its written text (the Quran as mushaf). I emphasize the significance of the recited Quran and the place of recitation in Muslim life. As I introduce them to the art of Quran recitation, I try to create an auditory experience for the class. In doing this, I aim to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation of the recited Quran. This is an ambitious goal, one that deserves some probing. What kinds of possibilities and limitations might there be in cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for the recited Quran in the (secular) liberal arts classroom? To introduce the Quran to the uninitiated through its recitation is, first, to invite the audience to listen. Listening is itself an act to be honed. To prepare students for the auditory experience, they learn about the significant place of memorization (ḥifẓ) and the art of enunciation and elocution (tajwīd) with patterns of melody (maqāmat). Even with this preparation, the listening we try to practice in our class is complex. Just as much as opening the Quran and reading a page of text cannot convey its meanings, neither can listening to the most beautiful of recitations. In my effort to cultivate for the uninitiated an appreciation of the aural experience of the Quran, I try to create an opportunity for them to recognize its beauty. But this beauty may not be accessible to everyone. My hearing-impaired students have urged me to consider more deeply what an aural attunement to the Quran means for the deaf. For hearing students, the question of what it means to listen to the Quran can be overwhelming. In their preparation to listen, I share various sources with them (readings by Michael Sells and Kristina Nelson, as well as videos of Quran recitations where audiences physically and vocally respond to the performance). So, when students are not moved by a Quran recitation, they describe a sense of feeling left out. For them it is like standing in front of the Mona Lisa and grasping to understand its power. The Quran itself situates ways of listening in relation to the recognition of its truth. While the Quran describes hearing as a physical perception of sound, hearing is typically associated with spiritual understanding. Indeed, the Quran insists that listening requires the heart. Hearing is sutured to learning and understanding, whereas those who reject its message are described as those who “do not hear,” and those who are “deaf,” among other sensory descriptions. In one passage, those who reject God’s message are described as putting their “fingers in their ears” (2:19). At other moments, God interferes with hearing, such as when God placed “heaviness in their ears” (18:57), and “a seal upon their hearts so that they do not hear” (7:100). To listen, then, is not limited to creating an auditory experience for hearing students, but one that involves the heart. Or to put it in less anatomical terms, hearing in the Quran requires a recognition of it as revelation. In this way, the goal of cultivating in students an aesthetic appreciation of the Quran may be at best naïve and at worst problematic. Listening to the Quran for delight, pleasure, or entertainment may be an invitation to over-aestheticize the Quran—to dissolve its message into mere beauty. Listening to the Quran does not allow for a distanced observation. It immerses the listener, all listeners, in an embodied experience. While Quran recitation offers an opening into the Quran in ways that might awaken students’ interest (since it offers a break from the written word and involves their senses that are so often neglected in liberal arts classes), it is through recitation that those who hear and those who do not are distinguished by their bodies and beliefs. To expose students to the significance of the embodied Quran may be to invite them to the edge of its beauty.

In my classrooms, I have noticed that more and more students are coming to the study of religion with preconceived conceptions about different religious communities, most frequently, and consequentially, Islam. My sense is that many students in my World Religions courses have a sympathetic imagination about the religions of the “East,” and a positive familiarity with Christianity, even if they aren’t part of a Christian community. However, when it comes to learning about Islam, some students have slight anxiety about Muslims or, more rarely, an established intolerance of the tradition. As an expert in the study of Islam, I feel a responsibility to address why students have placed Islam in an exceptional position, seeing it as a tradition very different from others. Therefore, in addition to outlining key themes and activities about Islam in my World Religions courses, I set two goals: to dismantle the idea that Muslims pose a new and unique threat that legitimizes an unprecedented reaction in American religious history, and unpack why many of my students have come to this conclusion in the first place. As others have noted (Youshaa Patel, Debra Majeed, Sufia Uddin, Elliott Bazzano), we live in a time of rising levels of hateful public rhetoric towards Muslims, support for discriminatory policies, and general demonization of Islam. It’s easy to conclude that students’ deep-seated assumptions about Muslims are shaped by dominant media representations of Islam, which are usually sensational, one-sided, or incomplete at best. What’s key for my students is to understand how their media-informed prior knowledge has shaped their views about Islam. If students do not engage Muslims in their own experience–as their neighbors, doctors, peers, etc.–how can they unlearn their biases? How can we disrupt students’ implicit biases and reframe their understandings of Muslims? Media literacy is an important component of my World Religions class. I begin by thinking about news media because for many of my students the news is seemingly unbiased and simply an unmediated account of the world out there. Jolyon Mitchell’s essay, “Religion and the News: Stories, Contexts, Journalists and Audiences (from Religion and the News, eds. Jolyon Mitchell and Owen Gower (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), has been successful in revealing the various constraints of print and visual news media given the limits they create for its ability to convey stories with rigor and detail. Using this essay alongside several sources about a single current event effectively demonstrates how the structures of this medium require the use of labels, formula, and clichés (i.e. stereotypes). This primer on news media leads us to critically deconstruct representational forms that are clearly more produced (i.e. television and film, political campaigns, literature, etc.).         Moustafa Bayoumi’s book This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (2015) is a useful source for this type of genealogical approach (cf. SherAli Tareen). Bayoumi outlines key aspects to the construction of the homogeneous portrait of Islam and Muslims that dominates mainstream media. He shows that the production of Islam in the American imagination includes several components: the effects of anti-Muslim political discourses, the production of knowledge about Muslims by so-called “experts,” policies of governance and policing, and an archive of images in popular culture. He effectively demonstrates the intersections of various forms of representation and their social consequences in lived realities. Through this focus on how Islam is envisioned in America, I find that frequently stereotypes remain invisible to students and they aren’t convinced that social policies or practices facing Muslims are unwarranted. Therefore, an important question is what histories do I need to provide in order to make students sensitive to biased representations? I place Muslims in the American historical landscape in order to highlight that anti-religious discrimination is recurring and typical. I want students to see that there is an extended history of prejudice and intolerance of religious minorities in the United States. Bayoumi aids this process by covering the long history of Islam in America, going back to the colonial period. I pair this with Peter Gottschalk’s book American Heretics: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the History of Religious Intolerance. By linking contemporary anti-Muslim racism with the legacy of American exclusion and religious persecution, I show students that oppression of minority groups is nothing new. Gottschalk clearly describes the parallel systems of oppression and operations of exclusion that dominant American religious groups have wielded over minority communities across our history. My hope is that by seeing the effects of discrimination historically, students will be inclined to denounce and act against similar forms of oppression that exist today. The final pedagogical piece is assignments that draw students into media production, thus highlighting the restricted nature of specific mediums, the structural boundaries within which media producers work, and how difficult it is to create content that is nuanced and complex. I find that responding to real life scenarios rather than abstract essay questions generates student knowledge about Muslims in robust and valuable ways. Writing prompts meet students within their own social context (i.e. the university, the regional community, other institutions, etc.) and require them to reflect on the current reproduction of issues we covered in class. For each assignment, they need to respond to local or national circumstances and justify their argument. Some of the tasks are very immediate and personal, such as outlining a conversation with friends about classes and discussing the assumptions their peers might have about Islam. Other assignments include activities such as responding to a vitriolic opinion-piece in the local newspaper, giving a presentation about Muslims to non-Muslim interfaith community members, reacting to a campaign to stop the construction of a new mosque, or attending a meeting with the University Board of Trustees to argue for internationalizing the curriculum. Overall, requiring students to address real life scenarios forces them to respond with clarity and nuance. It also empowers them to confront stereotypes and their social consequences in their local settings. Placing these new tasks within their acquired knowledge of the extensive history of American religious discrimination and the ways in which Islam is produced in an American context (as a reified entity) dismantles many of their previous suppositions about Muslims. Ultimately, it also reveals some of the rhythms of United States religious history that still play today.

One of my previous blog posts mentioned the significance of storytelling and how I love sharing stories of my own travel to help students imagine the world of the classroom subject and, hopefully, to inspire students to travel and experience this world for themselves. As most teachers can testify, some of the greatest moments of being a teacher involve learning how knowledge that was conveyed within the classroom leads students to new learning experiences beyond the classroom. For example, it is quite wonderful when one receives word from a former student who decided to travel to places that were shared in the classroom setting – places like Fez, Cairo, or Lahore. Just this summer a former student, originally from Serbia, sent a message that he had visited Shiraz, Iran, and mentioned how he remembered my lecture on this beloved city.    As teachers, we all have favorite lectures and one of mine is on Shiraz. In it, I help the student to explore how a city can become not only an intellectual center and intercultural capital for convening scholars from many disciplines and identities, but also a home to “immortal” poets and saints who became known as “friends of God.” In this blog post and my next, I want to describe why it is so important to teach about such cities, which were renowned for their “Houses of Knowledge,” eternal gardens, and magnificent shrines.     I begin my lectures on these cities by mentioning how when a student leaves home he or she starts to reflect more about his or her parents and home. It is often only when we leave our home that we become more curious about who we are, where we came from, and how our own family fits into the larger world. I then share my own story of how at their age (entering into university) I started to learn more about my father’s heritage and eventually I took a trip to Iran with my father that would change my life.  Why? Shortly after the trip, my uncle, himself a professor of entomology, mailed me a package containing a most intriguing book, written entirely in Persian by a great-great-great grandfather during the 1800s. Folded into the center of the book was a remarkable Islamic cosmological map drafted by yet another grandfather from six generations back. As I share this map with my students, I then tell my students that for the last 20 years I have been trying to decipher the metaphysical and symbolic content of this spiritual map, and to gain a firmer grasp of how this content synthesized centuries of Sufi Muslim thought about two arcs of the soul’s journey through a multi-layered cosmos – an arc of emanation, and an arc of return.  In sharing the physical map I am able to explain a variety of aspects of living in a traditional Islamic city like Shiraz. For instance, the map represents a pre-modern understanding of the world and the cosmos where everything is a symbol and there are multi-layered meanings to reality itself. This helps me explain how many Muslim theologians and philosophers understood metaphysics in terms of different levels of reality which might be deciphered through such diverse means as letter mysticism, numerology, astrology, and contemplation of passages from sacred texts as well as inspired poetry. I mention how the map itself was intended to provide a symbolic representation of the soul’s journey through unseen as well as visible dimensions of the cosmos. Having been produced by a respected religious leader in Shiraz generations ago, the map speaks not just to the ideas of the author but also to the larger spiritual and cultural milieu in which he lived. It conveys how Shiraz was a center for learning not only metaphysics but also physics and astronomical observation. I share with my students how the map’s shape is in the form of an astrolabe, a scientific as well as navigational instrument for measuring the altitudes of celestial bodies. I then show them an astrolabe that I found in Shiraz which is very similar in design to the map. With the astrolabe, I am able to explain a variety of amazing scientific contributions, inventions, and innovations that were made by Muslim astronomers, such as Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (d. 986) and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311). I also point out that the map has poetic verses inscribed on it in writing that reflects the artistic forms of calligraphy. Once again, I have the opportunity to offer my students a window into a traditional world of Islamic culture, within which the great poets of a city or region would play a major role in defining unique aspects of that place’s heritage and identity. I note that for Shiraz the preeminent poets were Hafez and Sadi, whereas other cities had their own patron saints and poets. I mention how the shrines of these two poets remain among the most celebrated spaces in the city to this very day, establishing a link between past and present.  

My most recent post for “Teaching Islam” deals with some of the stakes in teaching and studying religion at a Catholic college. My colleagues Shabana Mir and Sherali Tareen have also provocatively and sharply addressed related topics of “confessional” and “secular” curricular methodologies, so I’d like to continue the thread by focusing on student experience in the great debate on distinctions between religious studies and theology. I touch on the fluid boundaries of allegedly dispassionate approaches to the study of religion in my article “Normative Readings of the Qur’an,” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as part of a roundtable, “Normativity in Islamic Studies.” This roundtable focuses on scholarship; I would like to focus on teaching in this essay. Distinctions Aren’t Always Clear Notably, my own Department of Religious Studies at my Jesuit Catholic institution, Le Moyne College, offers courses in religious studies as well as theology. According to institutional parameters, theology courses differ from religious studies courses insofar as the former must give significant attention to Catholicism, either on its own or in relation to other traditions. Among the professors who teach theology courses at Le Moyne, some are Catholic and some aren’t. So what does it mean to engage (in) Catholic theology when it’s not limited to Catholics? I think this is at once a relevant field-wide query and also departmentally specific. However one answers the question, though, if a Catholic school is paying non-Catholics to teach Catholic theology—and my Catholic institution isn’t the only one doing this—in a religious studies department, then at the very least the distinctions between religious studies and theology aren’t black and white. As for student engagement with such matters, I find that students aren’t so interested in abstract theoretical distinctions between religious studies and theology, but are quite interested in making sense of such contours on the ground. In my first couple of years of full-time teaching, I attempted to formally introduce students to distinctions between religious studies and theology in the first days of class, but as the years go by, I find a better approach is to largely leave the debate in the background and to teach through examples instead, e.g., encouraging reflection on field trips to mosques or on challenges of teaching religion at a public high school full of disgruntled parents who think Islam is a devil religion. Teaching Students New Vocabulary As an undergraduate religious studies major myself, I was excited to learn about epoché (suspension, bracketing), both as a concept and as a disciplinary key term. Thanks to my colleague Darryl Caterine’s suggestion, I have begun making sure that students know the word epoché in the first week of classes, and without doubt, students find this helpful. What’s more, introducing students to the term gives them implicit permission to decide which approaches to studying religion ignite their interests most. To this extent, in a student-centered classroom—which in my case involves a lot of in-class discussion, often led by students themselves—it’s counterproductive to police the boundaries of conversation too much. If students want to talk about what a “true Christian” is, for example—based on their subjective, even myopic view of Christianity—that’s fine. Although the students shouldn’t expect me to chime in with my own partisan position, or corroborate theirs for that matter. Experimenting with Theological Inquiry One of my favorite writing assignments in recent years was in my course “Islamic Mysticism.” I posed in a prompt: Are Islam and mysticism inherently connected or could one reasonably separate the two? This prompt takes place in a context where we read, for example, William James’ categories of mysticism, while also giving attention to Muhammad’s role as a medium for divine Revelation, in addition to a variety of films, texts, and art that point toward the significance of first-hand numinous experiences. The prompt invites synthesis and reflection on course material, but is it an academic question or a theological question? I think it’s both. It’s academic because it requires students to synthesize evidence based on a careful examination of course material. But it’s theological, too, I think, because there is no single correct answer to the question and the stakes are significant in terms of how one’s answer might provide commentary on course material. How might student responses to the question incite them to go beyond epoché and perform their own creative process, or poeisis, with course material? In many ways students answer the question depending on personal sensibilities toward categories they understand as “Islam” and “mysticism.” The essay prompt, moreover, produced some really thoughtful essays, many of which included disclosures on how the students struggled with the question and changed their minds as they wrote; some students even referenced the question weeks later in the course. My sense is that giving students formal opportunities to personalize course material, while engaging in relatively free reflection, helps them perform better on a variety of levels. Conclusions: How Much Should Students Care? When speaking with colleagues across the country—with a particular Facebook thread in mind, I will admit—I sometimes get the impression that some of us don’t always want students to indulge their deepest interests in religion, at least not in our religious studies courses. This is understandable to the extent that many of us, including me, don’t want to put ourselves in positions of evaluating the veracity of a theological claim or spiritual experience. But I think one can largely assuage this concern by relying on low stakes assignments (e.g., short writing assignments, journal entries, in-class activities) that allow students to mine their own theological, spiritual, or metaphysical curiosities. Without this freedom, I think we risk signaling to students that they can’t learn as holistic beings. Ironically, many institutions require religious studies courses precisely so that students learn about the world beyond their classes in engineering, biology, business, or what have you. Perhaps as instructors we would do well to more carefully bracket our own disciplinary dogmas when they might impede the creativity, imagination, and even effort from our students. How do you navigate the boundaries between religious studies and theology in your pedagogical practices?

In a previous blog post, I sounded an optimistic note about the believing educational community that engages profoundly with various streams of the religious tradition – in my case, the Muslim tradition. As I contemplate a valuable piece by SherAli Tareen on the potential issues with which we regard as critical secular pedagogy, I anticipate some of the pedagogical decisions I will make this semester. I teach at the American Islamic College, one of only two Islamic liberal arts colleges in the United States. This generates a unique and continuing set of pedagogical and disciplinary questions for me - questions that I do not usually find reflected in my colleagues’ pedagogical concerns regarding the teaching of Islam in the academy.   My feelings of - shall we say, comfort – in teaching Islam to mostly Muslim students are tempered by practical pedagogical concerns as I am a Muslim, female professor who teaches gender at a Muslim college in the United States. Apart from the study of religion, classroom spaces in general can be battlegrounds for identities. A dash of critical distance can be a useful addition to the red-hot dynamics in classroom discussions. I nervously anticipate certain pedagogical situations in Muslim-majority learning settings as my own, as well as in mainstream academia, where critical distance is my go-to approach. Most of my Muslim students are eager to understand diverse perspectives on religious issues, and have been astoundingly eager to broaden their horizons, even to the point of intellectual discomfort. Still, I have learned to expect the Guerilla Student. He (usually) does not form a majority in my classes. But when he makes an appearance, he steps into the academic fray, brandishing a Qur'anic verse, intent upon shutting down any "wayward" discourse. As the class community contemplates various religious perspectives on Muslim politics, this student brings in And be not disunited (Qur’an 3:103). The discussion quickly falls flat, everyone hangs their heads piously, as if to contemplate the frivolity of human words before the Word, and that is that. Or the Guerilla Student lobs a Prophet tradition into the controversy, and the hadith instantly establishes a literalistic, atomistic framework over the intellectual community - a framework that allows for a singular one-dimensional view of religion, and therefore, shuts down discussion as unnecessary or even reprehensible. A young fervent woman might react negatively to the complexification of a religious problem, demanding a simple response to her “Well, should I do it or not?” The impact of such guerrilla warfare is to silence, at least temporarily, the majority of students who are interested in investigating the sociological implications of religious norms, who wish to explore the contextual deployment of religious sources, and who are interested in a religious world where people disagree. In other words, says the Guerilla Student, let's just shut our books and our mouths, and retire to our corners and recite Qur'an. Not that I haven't frequently been tempted to do the same, because ambiguity isn't exactly soothing. In anticipation of the Guerrilla Student, I set up a classroom community where, most importantly, students must engage with the required readings in all discussions. No one can simply show up without doing any of the work and, swaggering, simply toss the grenades of Scriptural texts amidst the group. Anyone who hasn’t done the reading will be reminded that entrance to discussion is guarded by the test of academic work. I explicitly state in my syllabus: "You must develop the analytic habit of considering various perspectives, including opposing ones." This is troubling to the student who regards feminist interrogations of the Qur’an as disrespectful and impious. To some, these readings are not worshipful. For students who study Islam to seek piety rather than profound understanding, this is a distraction. For some Muslim students, a Gender course would be better served by Maudoodi’s Purdah and the Status of Women in Islam rather than Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics in Islam. I add, in my syllabus, "In this academic setting, all claims and opinions must be supported by scholarly evidence and reasoning." In these words, I establish that the setting was an academic one, and not a religious one. To some students, this is disappointing. To me, as a religious Muslim academic, it’s not entirely truthful. I do regard academic Islam as worship. Moreover, the evidence expected is human scholarship. This establishes the importance of interpretation. To the believer who sees his or her interpretations as self-evidently true, this is blasphemous.   When I classify my classroom as an academic one, I clarify that no one may come in with their credentials as local imam and become the lecturer here. In terms of my role as facilitator and my authority as course instructor, a religious educational setting is dangerously democratic. A religious classroom demands clerical or seminary/madrasa credentials; with my Ph.D., I am not appropriately appareled. Any public preachers, study-circle leaders or madrasa-trained males could always turn up their noses at my Western academic credentials.  And then there is patriarchy. As a woman - of color (and of short stature) - my pedagogic authority is always at risk in all classrooms. Most of my Muslim students bring a deeply Islamic affectionate respect to my teaching. In fact, my Muslim students at AIC humanize and respect me in a way that, in my previous teaching experience, many of my White students never did. I cannot express how deeply refreshing this teacher-student relationship is, in contrast to the experiences I had before. But there has been the occasional male student - especially when I taught Islam & Gender - who finds the dynamic in my class intolerable. At times, such a student drops the class, but not before lobbing the Scriptural grenades and disrupting the analytic discussion. If he simply evades the readings, he succeeds in getting by in a disturbingly water-off-a-duck’s-back manner. A student committed to patriarchy could not stomach the idea of a female professor who taught Amina Wadud and Leila Ahmed - or a female professor who gave out C's.  When Islam is used as a patriarchal stick to establish the authority of literalism, or Islamism, or Traditionalism, or sexism, critical distance in pedagogy can be a handy shield. When the literalistic, patriarchal, hegemonic interpretations are brandished in my classroom, I do sometimes brandish certain critical secular tools. "We cannot throw out ayaat or ahadith as responses to a question. You can bring your readings of those sources to the discussion, but they are readings. You cannot use the Qur'an to shut everyone up.” "But," sputters a certain kind of student, “It should shut everyone up.” This critical distance and interpretive freedom is widely regarded as critical secular pedagogy. But it is not just that. To me, as a Muslim professor, it is also an internal Muslim tool to safeguard the right to ikhtilaf (difference of opinion). But when I embrace this tool of critical distance as an Islamic one, there is always the danger that we commence the battle of my-source-trumps-yours. Appeals to religious authority in religious settings can close debate. I respect and value the sources, but there is a danger in how they are deployed by my interlocutors. The problem isn’t the Qur’anic verse being lobbed by the student. In such pedagogical encounters, I’m at the mercy of the Guerilla Students. I’m hostage to the personality of the discussant at risk, to his conception of adab (etiquette) in Islamic education. Any pedagogical approach must necessarily be multi-faceted and respectful of its context. As a Muslim professor of Islamic Studies, I combine a believer's loving commitment with an explorer's dedication to the journey. I ask my students to bring the same intrepid commitment to this path. No woman or man will be allowed to blow up the trail. I'll deploy any tools necessary to protect the trail. Critical distance is one of those tools. Critical distance is frequently used in secular settings to shut down Muslim critiques of dogmatic secularity. But my critical distance is different. It is a protective distance of love.

This is the fourth and last installment of a series of posts on the theme of “teaching theory without theory talk” in an introductory course on Islam. To review, I have explored ways in which one might present to students in an introductory course important theoretical arguments (e.g., complicating binaries like tradition/modernity or religion/secular; appreciating the intimacy of discourse, power, and material conditions; interrogating the legacy of colonial modernity in the formation of contemporary categories of life) that are by now commonplace in the study of religion. How might one advance such conceptual tasks without burying students in the often intimidating and prohibitive protocols and operations of theoretical discourse? In the last three posts, I shared my experience wrestling with this challenge at different moments in an introductory Islam course. In this post, I want to take a step back. Rather than reflecting on teaching theory through teaching Islam, I wish to think through some of the theoretical assumptions that often sustain the teaching of Islam within the study of religion. More specifically, I wish to ponder aloud a certain discomfort I have often experienced on the first day of a course, especially the introductory Islam course. On day one, as is common practice among religion scholars, I try explaining to students what the study of religion is and how it differs from theological studies. This usually involves making a list of contrastive attributes. The study of religion (and Islam) is historical, non-confessional, non-normative, and analytical as opposed to the normative confessional study of religion as an object of faith. This sentiment is usefully captured in the formula of drawing the contrast between studying religion and studying about religion. There is obviously much merit in these explanatory gestures. One would not want the academic classroom to become a space for resolving competing truth claims or of passing certificates of normativity and heresy. However, there is nonetheless an underlying secularity at work in this exercise that I find not only conceptually troubling but also a potential roadblock to teaching Islam. To begin with, the act of contrasting the historical, academic, and non-confessional study of religion with the allegedly confessional character of theological studies risks reducing the latter to a caricatured representation. Surely, despite their normative preoccupations, seminaries and madrasas also often engage in analytically sharp and historically informed scholarship, even if their logics of history and critical thinking might differ. Making a conscious and concerted effort to distinguish religion studies from theological studies might have the unintended effect of smugly suggesting the superiority of the former over the latter. “We are cooler than those people who are unable to separate personal faith from scholarly inquiry.” Even if not intended as such, it is hard to imagine this not being among the implicit messages communicated by the assertion of the religion/theological studies dichotomy. Making such a contrast also embraces and replicates the secular/religious binary, which as many scholars have argued, is a very problematic binary. “We the critical historians of religion will undertake for the next fourteen weeks the secular study and inquiry of this religion and these religious subjects.” That is the upshot of the eager disclaimer that the study of religion is not theological/seminary studies. There is an underlying nod to the virtues of secularity at the heart of the promise of historicizing religion. This secular gesture does bring the benefits of absolving a course on Islam from the sins of establishing orthodoxy, encouraging piety, or of promoting confessional bias. But, it also carries certain limitations that are important to acknowledge and engage if not resolve. Let me highlight just one such limitation. The positioning of an introductory course as a non-confessional (read secular) inquiry into Islam can hamper the effectiveness of discussions on the affective and phenomenological aspects of a religion. An important moment in the introductory Islam course that speaks to this point is that of the revelation of Islam to Muhammad. This is a powerful moment. It combines awe, terror, anticipation, physical pain, and marks a permanent cleavage in time and history. But the history of religion approach deflates the power of this moment. Having taken their position as detached (even if sympathetic) observers of a tradition, students are unburdened from the weight of entangling their beings with the experiential registers of the religion. They are absolved of feeling, perhaps even suffering, the mixture of perplexity and wonder that suffuses and accompanies moments like Muhammad's revelation. They might sympathize with such moments or be fascinated by them, but the thick crust of secular historicism makes even the attempt at inhabiting the experience of such moments almost impossible. My point, or perhaps more accurately, my attempt at articulating a less than fully formulated doubt and discomfort, is not a rehearsal of predictable musings on the insider/outsider problem. Rather, I am after the implications and effects of a pedagogical orientation towards Islam that renders it a foreign object of secular historicist inquiry and consumption. Such an orientation, animated by the assumptions and logics of secularity, captured most prominently by the secular imperative of historicizing and desacralizing life, can produce rather deleterious effects. Most notably, it relies on and perpetuates a binary between the enlightened critical investigator and the tradition bound uncritical religious subject who is the former’s object of investigation. In other words, the history of religion approach to teaching Islam is a decisively secular approach that replicates and advances the religion-secular binary. Obviously, recourse to a confessional approach is hardly the solution; that is both untenable and undesirable. Perhaps what is needed is a pedagogical orientation that is thoroughly unaccepting of the religion-secular binary in all its manifestations. Being more critical of the critical historical study of religion, especially when set in contrast to traditionalist theological studies, might be a useful step towards the cultivation of such an orientation.

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.

Due to the diversity of Muslims in the southern Ontario region, my classes on Islam always bring together students from a variety of different sectarian, legalistic as well as interpretive, understandings of Islam. For instance, in my “Introduction to Islam” course, one can find Sunnis from various regions of the world, Shias from Ithna al-Ashariyya and Ismaili backgrounds, and Ahmadiyya Muslim students as well – all in one classroom. With such diversity, intra-Muslim dialogue becomes one of the best pedagogical tools I can use to help all of my students (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) understand the complexities of Muslim identity and the great debates that have shaped Islamic thought. While teaching about these many facets of internal Muslim diversity can be a delicate matter and care must be taken to create an atmosphere of curiosity and mutual respect, engaging the real-life distinctions present among Muslims in the classroom can bring the subject matter to life in remarkable ways. Muslim differences are on display quite regularly in the daily news, yet much Muslim discourse tends to downplay their significance. In classes, I try to cultivate greater openness to exploring these differences in an effort to understand them better and build relationships, rather than to dwell on them from a particular partisan standpoint. I point out that for centuries sectarian differences have remained far more resistant to accommodation than differences in jurisprudence.  Despite contemporary voices calling for an Islamic ecumenism that embraces Shia as well as Sunni practitioners, early differences over religious leadership have led to enduring intramural rivalries, exacerbated in the last decade by patterns of sectarian mobilization amidst protracted power struggles in present-day Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon as well as simmering tensions in Pakistan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.  In order to unpack this history, students learn that the past politicization of sectarian differences has left an imprint on communal attitudes, beliefs, and narratives. In the absence of a robust, well-developed framework for Islamic ecumenism, conflicts rooted in problems of theological, as well as socio-political and economic exclusion, have the potential to cascade in destructive ways, with events in one country or context impacting tensions in other regions. Since the regular class sessions are devoted to helping the students navigate these historical tensions intellectually, I also facilitate supplementary “dialogical” sessions for interested students who would like to explore classroom topics in more detail. These sessions enable some of the best conversations about differences to emerge. For instance, I always open the dialogical session with a student asking a question or sharing an experience. In one session, a student who was a leader of my university’s Muslim Student Association (MSA) started the conversation by stating, “I cannot pray behind a Shi‘ite Muslim.” This statement, of course, was met with a strong reaction from one of my Ismaili students who was himself a member of the Ismaili Student Association (ISA). For the rest of the session, we had a very important sharing of different understandings of Muslim prayer and the meaning infused in different forms of prayer. From this one session, a dialogue between the MSA and the ISA started. We then formed a weekly dialogical session in which the leaders of these two groups and some of their members came together to discuss differences and similarities in rituals, beliefs, and understandings of history.  After a year of dialogical sessions, the same student who had stated that he could not pray behind a Shi‘ite Muslim shared with me that “every chance I get I try to pray with a Shi‘ite Muslim.”  Another pedagogical tool that I like to use when teaching about sectarian differences in Islam is taking my students on a field trip to the Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Arts in Toronto, the first museum in North America dedicated exclusively to Islamic Arts. Instead of learning through a lecture or textbook about Islam, students learn through rare art, artifacts, material culture, and stories about the different historical circumstances within which these objects were created. They also learn about the Ismaili Muslim community and Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, who is the current spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims. Known internationally for his various charitable works and developmental projects (the Aga Khan Development Network is a well-respected NGO in the development field) and in Canada for opening the Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa as well as the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre in Toronto, the man whom Ismailis regard as their 49th Imam provides a counterpoint to many non-Muslim preconceptions about Muslims. Although the Aga Khan Museum highlights particular Ismaili and Shia experiences, it also sheds light on the character and internal diversity of traditional Islamic civilization in a much broader sense. During the field trip, students experience a general tour of the permanent collection. This enables them to learn about many artistic, intellectual, and scientific heritages of Islam and its many cultures, from North Africa to Southeast Asia. In addition, the Aga Khan Museum offers regular exhibits of contemporary Muslim art as well as programs featuring international artists and scholars, thus affording opportunities to learn about more recent manifestations of Muslim music, poetry, and thought through mediums as diverse as workshops, lectures, live performances, and film screenings. Since the museum is located adjacent to the Ismaili Centre, students also get a tour of a distinctive space for community assembly and worship, with its unusual architecture, a library, and a jamat khana (prayer hall) for daily prayers. Muslim and non-Muslim students alike testify that this field trip offers a rich, immersive experience and encourages them to reflect on Islamic religious and cultural heritages in new and exciting ways. 

In two classes that I teach—“Islam” and “The Qur’an”—I often assign the film Wadjda (dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012) as the first homework assignment. Wadjda tells the tale of a young girl (same name as the film’s title) in Saudi Arabia who longs to own a bicycle, despite cultural norms that allow them only for boys. Her story takes place before a backdrop of a Muslim society, institutional corruption at her all-girls school, her parent’s crumbling marriage, and a male-dominated world. Most importantly, even for the uninitiated, I find that the film is plenty relatable to American college students. Wadjda, the protagonist, is an adorable, clever, and perseverant young girl and it’s easy to become engrossed in her story. I give students a pair of questions to consider as they watch the film, which we spend time exploring in the following class meeting: 1) In what ways does Wadjda challenge stereotypes (yours or American society’s more broadly) about Islam; 2) In what ways does Wadjda confirm stereotypes about Islam? These questions are straightforward, but I find that they work well because they set a tone that invites students to share their experiences, without risking right or wrong answers at the very beginning of the semester. The questions additionally push students to reflect on the complex choices and characters in the film as well as on their own complexity as agents in the world. Naturally, American students enter a course on Islam with any number of sensational ideas about Muslims. Western cinema, moreover, often presents Muslim characters as nothing more than bloodthirsty villains or quaint Orientalized simpletons (or both), which Jack Shaheen adroitly explores in Reel Bad Arabs (both the title of a monograph and documentary film). Indeed Wadjda could well be the first film college students ever see that portrays Muslims as something other than caricatures. By and large students like the film, but I do struggle with how to make the plot sound more intriguing when I tell students about it on the first day of class (i.e., it’s about a girl who wants a bike?); trailers are helpful. Because Wadjda features primarily female characters, it pushes Western viewers all the more, given the naïve ideas many of us have not only about Muslims in general but about Muslim women in particular. The context of the film also offers much for reflection. It’s the first feature film directed by a Saudi woman. It has received acclaim across many venues, including “Rotten Tomatoes” and the New York Times, which refers to the film as “sweetly subversive.” It was also nominated as best foreign language film for the Academy Awards and adapted in 2015 as an English-language novel. Despite all the benefits from assigning the film, I find that subtitles tend to invite a minority of students to complain, as the labor of viewing while reading taints their experience with the film. While I appreciate this as a consumer—plainly, subtitles can create more work for the film viewer, who often prefers a more passive than active experience—I think it also symbolizes a valuable struggle when encountering new cultures and new ideas. Additionally, unless the viewer knows to interpret a small clue (a shirt with KSA on it), or previously learned the context for the film, it’s actually not even completely clear where the film takes place. Throughout the film, Wadjda’s aloof father explores the possibility of a second marriage, while her mother struggles to provide for her family and create a good life for her only child. Like many good films, the characters in Wadjda are complex and believable. Wadjda argues with authority figures and listens to Western music but also lives innocently in her own challenging world of early adolescence. Toward the goal of acquiring her prized bicycle, Wadjda learns to negotiate a few under the table deals with members from her community (e.g., delivering secret messages between sweethearts), but her primary strategy to earn money involves entering herself in a Qur’an recitation competition. She practices with dedication and her hard work shows. Students won’t usually catch a certain subtlety at this part of the film, but the verses recited in the competition (including their translations in subtitles) speak to many of the themes in the film—thus this scene on its own could work well pedagogically in a number of contexts. While the film resolves the question of acquiring the bike (with an endearing twist), the overall ending leaves Wadjda’s future open to interpretation. I think it leaves a key question for my students: How can Wadjda and other females in the film demonstrate such agency and complexity if Muslim women are supposed to be oppressed? Even though this question presupposes a monolith of “Muslim women,” I think that the first part of the question, which acknowledges complexity and nuance, works well to emphasize one of the main themes of my courses: you can’t study religion without also studying people. Indeed, a required visit to a local mosque is among the most memorable aspects of my course for many students, so starting the semester with a drama helps set the stage for thinking about humanly complicated interactions with our course topic. What makes the film so effective, though, is that it’s not just a central question that the film raises. It touches effectively on so many themes, subtly and explicitly, central to what I want my students to engage throughout the course: gender, Islamophobic stereotypes, “religion” vs. “spirituality,” public vs. private religion, multivalent characters, polygamy, and non-English languages. Islam functions subtly in the film, moreover, which works well pedagogically for communicating how religion often works in people’s lives—as an integrated but still striking aspect of culture and society, in relationship to the lives of individuals, with unique stories and experiences. I’ve introduced other courses I’ve taught, as well, with feature films, and in this way, I think my approach with Wadjda is largely transferable as a model to begin a course. I would like to argue, as well, that it’s a strategy that could do well to receive more attention. After all, how important is the “hook” in any rhetorical expression? I’m of course not arguing that films are necessarily the best hook to capture students’ attention—I think this is largely a matter of taste—but I wonder to what extent that opening a course with a feature film is often overlooked because it doesn’t fit into the typical paradigm of how a college course is supposed to begin. Indeed, how is a college course supposed to begin? Do you use films to frame your courses? What kinds of questions best help your students to make sense of their themes? Have you screened Wadjda for your students? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below!    

This is the third and penultimate blog in a series of posts in which I have sought to meditate on the question of how one might present theoretical/conceptual arguments to students in an introductory course on Islam in a manner that does not burden them with theory talk. To recap, in the last two posts, I shared some thoughts on this front in relation to teaching about the category of religion and in regards to teaching Sufism. In this post, I want to continue this theme by reflecting on the topic of what could broadly be categorized as “Islam and colonial modernity.” Through this topic, I want to reflect on the experience of teaching two central and interconnected theoretical arguments: 1) that tradition/modernity is not an oppositional binary, and 2) that conditions and discourse are always intimately connected such that new conditions generate new kinds of argument and ways of arguing. These two points are by now staple to the humanities and to the study of religion. But what are some specific ways in which they might be impressed in an introductory Islam course? Here are some examples that speak to this question. In this context, I have found most helpful working with collections of primary texts, such as the anthology of Muslim Modernist writings (edited by Charles Kurzman) and the anthology of Islamist texts (edited by Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Roxanne Euben). Let me walk you through some moments from my teaching when I draw on these anthologies. I employ the relatively straightforward tactic of locating and then discussing places in a primary text where the author’s argument is indebted to modern conditions. So for instance, in the Modernist Islam sourcebook, we find the example of the 19th century Indian Muslim scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) arguing that Muslims should alter their explanation for why the Qur’an was miraculous. Rather than attach the Qur’an’s miracle to the inimitability of its language (a long running argument in the tradition), he argued that Muslims should instead locate the miracle of the Qur’an in the inimitability of its meaning and guidance. More crucial than the argument here (which was not altogether novel) was the logic behind the argument: namely that a linguistic explanation for the Qur’an’s miracle “cannot,” in his words, “be put forward in confrontation with nonbelievers” (Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 300). He continued tellingly, “it will not satisfy their mind” (Ibid). Clearly, the new condition of missionary activity and competition in colonial India had a lot to do with the content and framing of Khan’s argument. Similarly, elsewhere in the same anthology, we find the Lebanese/Egyptian scholar Rashid Rida (d. 1935) expressing his admiration for European “nationalism” (Ibid, 82). And even more illustrative is the case of the 20th century Central Asian intellectual Abdurrauf Fitrat (d. 1938) who championed a new system of education as a way to cultivate “perfectly civil, patriotic Muslims” (Ibid, 247).  I have students reflect on the question of how desires such as nationalism and patriotism might be contingent to the emergence of the nation state as the center of modern politics. Would these desires have existed even a couple centuries ago? What would they have looked like? Again, what I am after in posing these questions is to have them ponder, even if indirectly, the interaction of conditions and discourse. Perhaps the most effective case study for this task is the extract from the 20th century Egyptian thinker/activist Sayyid Qutb’s (d.1966) landmark text Signposts Along the Road in Zaman’s and Euben’s anthology of Islamist thought. There are many moments in this text that can be mobilized. Let me offer one particularly cutting example. In pushing for an exclusively Qur’an centered understanding of tradition, Qutb exclaimed that Muslims should read the Qur’an “like a soldier studies ‘the daily command’ to act immediately upon what he learns in the battlefield” (Zaman and Euben, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, 141).  “Knowledge is for action” (Ibid), he had memorably continued. Again, these quotes provide an opportunity to have students think about possible connections between approaching the Qur’an as a soldier’s manual and new technological conditions such as the efflorescence of print and the concomitant materiality of the Qur’an as a bound printed book. Having worked through some of these examples, I put on the board a list of different categories of conditions including political (rise of the nation state, colonialism etc.), technological (print, commerce, railways), institutional (new educational institutions etc.), and epistemic/intellectual (valorization of science, championing of secular reason and progress etc.). In another column, I list the discursive moves of the authors we have examined that depended on and were made possible by any of these conditions. The point of this exercise is to show students that in analyzing discursive arguments, it is important to carefully consider the conditions, the terrain so to say, that make those arguments thinkable in the first place, and that shape the modality of their articulation. This of course is the now familiar conceptual point advanced and executed most forcefully in the work of Talal Asad. A careful navigation of and commentary on illustrative primary texts holds the potential of at least attuning students to such a conceptual orientation that takes seriously the interaction of discourse, conditions, and ultimately, power. There are two limitations of this method that I should like to briefly mention by way of conclusion. First, while this exercise is effective in demonstrating the dynamicity of tradition by showing ways in which it adapts, responds, and negotiates modern conditions, it is less successful in interrupting a celebratory teleology of modernity. “Ok, Muslim scholars can also desire modern stuff” is an all too convenient conclusion that some students might draw. Constantly reminding them about the power differentials involved in how modern conditions shape indigenous discourses and about the violence of colonial modernity (physical and otherwise) is thus very crucial. It might also be useful to frame modernity as a “narrative category;” a narrative that dramatizes its own claims to have eclipsed the past and tradition. I have found that students respond favorably when asked to think carefully about the kind of story modernity tells about itself and to reflect on the problems attached to that story. And second, the teaching tactic described in this post makes acutely palpable the absence of a substantive anthology that engages the work of Muslim traditionalist scholars (the ‘ulama’). Certainly, many among the modernists and Islamists were also trained in traditionalist methods. But still, there will be much to benefit from a reader (like Kurzman’s and Zaman’s and Euben’s) that takes as its focus the writings of modern Muslim traditionalist scholars. Such a resource will be especially useful for discussing continuities and ruptures in Islamic legal and ethical reasoning in the modern period, a topic that adds a particularly rich layer to this discussion.