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Newsday on America to Zanzibar

Here is a Newsday article on the exhibit America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far, at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, for which I was the lead academic advisor. It’s a good chance to shout out my friends from high school. “Our goal is to have children deal with differences in a healthy, positive way and encourage them to be inquisitive while exploring the world instead of running away from its differences,” Rashid said, an experience not so different from his years growing up in Elmont.  

A top White House aide was asked if Trump thought Islam was a religion. He refused to answer. – Vox

A top White House aide was asked if Trump thought Islam was a religion. He refused to answer. – Vox. Questioning whether Islam is a religion is not, in and of itself, a new idea. Dr. Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion at Barnard College, told me that it was a dynamic that began in Europe and has a “centuries-long pedigree.” “We are seeing a particularly American manifestation of it now,” he added. He continued, “This administration is playing into all of these themes very clearly: They are trying to say that Muslims are not human and that they are…

Scholars of religion and biblical literature object to having conference badges coded and scanned

Scholars of religion and biblical literature object to having conference badges coded and scanned. Hussein Rashid, independent scholar of religion, also tweeted that he’d seen nothing in his conference registration documents to suggest QR codes were a possibility. The society was therefore retroactively changing its terms of attendance, he said, raising the possibility that someone could refuse to be scanned, be denied entry and later challenge the academy legally.