Category: Media Appearances

Letter 4 | Values and Voices. Muslims have been part of this country since its founding. Since nearly a third of all slaves were Muslim, this country literally was built on the backs of Muslims. We have remained important contributors to American history, serving to defend our nation and contributing culturally to what it means to be American. Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an sits in the Library of Congress as a testament to how important Muslim thought was to the founding of this country.

Why it’s absurd that a Muslim leader’s presence at the Washington National Cathedral is controversial – The Washington Post. The adhan, or call to prayer, is an important aspect of Muslim devotional life. It can be prayerful, but it is not part of a formal prayer. To suggest that Magid is praying, presumably for the success of Trump, is mistaken. When Magid calls out “I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God,” there is no benediction for anyone. There is only the praise of the divine. By framing it simply as…

Professors grapple with how to address Trump presidency in classroom – Columbia Daily Spectator. Religion professor Hussein Rashid, who teaches a class on Muslims in diaspora, explained how the effects of Trump’s presidency on Muslim communities could have ripple effects that would present challenges to the entire country.   “My job as a professor is to get students to think about the implications of all of these issues,” Rashid said. “If we talk about, say, a Muslim registry, it’s not just about Muslims in America, but what it means for American society, because these things don’t happen in a vacuum.”

Inspired by Ancient Practice, Rabbi Leads Interfaith Inauguration Day Fast – News – Forward.com. Visotzky and his friend and colleague Hussein Rashid, a professor and activist, see the fast and the marches they will participate in the next day as first steps on a long road of action.

The Power of Names – Sacred Matters Magazine. In many popular media reports, the default often seems to be Sunni Islam. It is unclear why this has become the baseline for what Islam is. Some academics have suggested, going back to the origins of the discipline of Religion, that Sunni Islam most closely resembled Protestant Christianity, which was constructed as the truest of religious groupings. As a result, structures that mirrored Protestant Christianity were elevated to true expressions of those traditions. Perhaps it has to do with the tyranny of the majority, so that by virtue of being the most…

Why I was scared to attend the AAR Conference this year | Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Like many scholars of religion, I normally make my plans to attend the annual national meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). This year, I decided I would not attend. Some of my friends and colleagues thought it was perhaps because I was an adjunct, and had no funding to attend the most important professional conference of our discipline. This concern is real for so many of our members, but was not my issue this year. Instead, it was that we…

Trump supporters think my life is worth less than theirs | Religion News Service. The high school I went to on Long Island taught me a lot about race. I learned about overt racism, and what we now call microaggressions. Over a quarter of a century later, I am under no delusions that we live in a post-racial society. The movement for, and resistance to, Black Lives Matter reminds me every day that racism is part of our national DNA. Even with all that experience, hearing the results of our presidential election shocked me.

Chronicle of a Debate (II) | ctxt.es. Yet the depth of hostility towards Muslims has left some educators in despair. For Hussein Rashid, Trump’s rhetoric is profoundly disturbing: “His desire to ban immigrants from a country of immigrants; his comparison of dying children to poison; and his use of anti-Semitic imagery should all be called out during the debates. It is not just Islamophobia, but racism writ large”. He admits that he is losing hope. “What we’ve seen in New York this year is men being shot, women being stabbed, and women being lit on fire. I am not sure…

Muslims love New York, too | Religion News Service. Muslims are New Yorkers and they live in Chelsea. A couple whose marriage I officiated at lived in that area. We are as likely to be victims of these attacks as other New Yorkers. We are more likely to be victims of racist assaults than white New Yorkers.   We can never tell our own stories. We always have to perform to someone else’s definition of a “good American” and are still told that our citizenship is conditional. We have to show we are not perpetrators, and we can never talk about how…