islamicate

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…

Crónica de un debate presidencial (II) | ctxt.es. “Aproximadamente el 70% de las personas en los Estados Unidos no conoce a ningún musulmán”, explica Hussein Rashid, fundador de una empresa de consultoría centrada en conocimiento cultural. Oriente Medio sigue siendo también una región desconocida. … Sin embargo, la profundidad de la hostilidad hacia los musulmanes ha dejado a algunos educadores en estado de desesperación. Para Hussein Rashid, la retórica de Trump es profundamente perturbadora: “En los debates presidenciales, tiene que salir a relucir su intención de prohibir la entrada de inmigrantes a un país fundado por inmigrantes. No se trata…