Author: islamoyankee

This week we feature selections from the December 8, 2019 Sounds of Faith concert at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. According to Dr. Hussein Rashid a religious literacy expert and cultural competency consultant who teaches at the New School in New York,  if you don’t appreciate the religious and spiritual dimension of music you miss the depth of the genre.

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.

NYCC ‘19: Wilson, Shammas, Alfageeh & Henderson on Orientalism in comics & the White, Western gaze – The Beat. Rashid began proceedings by citing theorist Edward Said and describing Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The othering that Orientalism does to Asian and Arab cultures, he continued, is “a tool of colonization, a means of convincing people that some people are less worthy of their humanity.” The panellists nodded along, taking this definition as their starting point for discussion.  In turn, each panelist presented some examples of where we see Orientalism in…