teaching with the arts

In his “Homage to Joe Sacco,” Edward Said celebrates the author of Palestine and gives us one of the best love letters to comics ever written. He shares his first comic book experience, “Everything about the enticing book of colored pictures, but specially its untidy, sprawling format, the colorful, riotous ...

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

Some time back, I wrote a blog post called “Teaching Islam and gender: why we need to set an ethical agenda for the classroom.” It described how, working collaboratively, my class on Islam, gender, and sexuality drew on the work of Lila Abu-Lughod to articulate an ethical approach to our ...

In the teaching of Islam, there are many ways through which we can engage our students in the classroom. My intention here is to share one assignment that I have developed over the years that has proven to be incredibly dynamic in both how it can be incorporated into an ...

My primary objective as a professor is to nurture my students’ ability to think critically. Given the rising tide of Islamophobia and the increasingly acerbic rhetoric targeting Muslims in national political discourses, however, I consider developing their empathy and compassion an additional imperative. In my courses, I have increasingly turned ...