Pres. Obama Shouts Out The 99

For those who care, my dissertation is finally online at UMI (if you are at a subscribing institution, I’m sure you know the link to use). Search under “Rashid” for name and “dust” for the title. You should hopefully get my dissertation. It is available via Open Access, so free PDF downloads for all. UMI butchered the illustrations and tables in the scans, so if those things are important to you, drop me a line and I’ll send you a clean copy. Rashid, Hussein. “A Handful of Dust: Reading South Asian (Im)migrant Identity in Islamicate Literatures.” PhD, Harvard University, 2010.  

Rearrange Your Head: An Interview with American Muslim Convert and Memoirist G. Willow Wilson | RDBook | ReligionDispatches. Sheikhas and alimas [female spiritual and religious authorities], if you can find any — and you have to look pretty hard — will totally change the way you think about Islam and gender. There is a long and revered tradition of female scholarship in this religion, but it’s dying out. Most of the female scholarship we have now is part of a new tradition—postmodern academia—not a continuation of the old. Old school sheikhas, educated the traditional way, will rearrange your head. In…