2017

“Would I love to get more people to this exhibit and get them to understand that Muslims are human beings with desires and passions and artistic creativity in ways that maybe they haven’t thought about before? Absolutely,” Mr. Rashid said.

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 not American.”

Baldanzi is not alone in her research. Dr. Hussein Rashid, professor of religion at Hofstra University, has been co-editing papers alongside Baldanzi and is now teaching at Barnard College. The two are working on a collection of scholarly essays called Ms. Marvel in America.

Those same voices who engage in this idle worship now hold the reins of power in the U.S. government. And they seek to exterminate Muslims. There are concerns of a Muslim registry and internment camps. More extreme fears consider other types of camps, imagining a return of the Holocaust. These fears are not unfounded, nor are they out of character with what President Trump’s advisers and appointees have said.

As time went on, I realized how disastrous the job market was for academics in the humanities. Ultimately, I decided to become academia adjacent and focus on my own consultancy. I would teach as an adjunct, but in the earliest incarnation of the term, someone who did the work in addition to a career.

“This protest is the first one in a long time that I can recall when so many Muslims gathered to protest something,” said Hussein Rashid, founder of islamicate, a consultancy focusing on religious literacy.