Wilbur Awards to celebrate 70 years in Chicago, winners announced for 2019 – Religion News Service.
Documentary (up to 30 min.)
“The Secret History of Muslims in the US,” Zeyba Rahman, Hussein Rashid, Joshua Seftel, Negin Farsad, Maria Stanisheva; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Smartypants Pictures & Animadocs, Brooklyn, New York
Theologian Hussein Rashid discusses the challenges and possibilities he sees in environmental justice work today.
When former Barnard adjunct professor Hussein Rashid, CC ’96, first came to Columbia, he navigated his way through his undergraduate years as a first-generation low-income student with some difficulty. Twenty years later, when he returned as an adjunct professor of religion, he also took on an informal advising role in order to pass on his knowledge to students at Barnard.
“I’d talk to students about being a student of color when I was in school versus what it’s like now, what it’s like being a Muslim on campus, what it’s like being first generation and being on a lot of financial aid and still being conscious of class, as they themselves try to navigate that space,” Rashid said.
Rashid is just one of Barnard’s many adjunct faculty members who have been making an active effort to facilitate conversations surrounding diversity, inclusivity, and equity in the classroom.
Muslim Girlhood, Past and Present: A Conversation with Shenila Khoja-Moolji – BLARB.
HUSSEIN RASHID: Why did you decide to write a book about Muslim girls and their education? And why Muslim South Asia? SHENILA
KHOJA-MOOLJI: I had been researching and writing about the convergence on the figure of the girl in international development policy and practice for some time. I noticed that many development campaigns portray girls in the Global South as not only threatened by poverty, disease, and terrorism, but also as holding the potential to resolve these problems.
Hussein reflected a bit on human rights as that which we owe one another but “from a faith perspective, human dignity is vouchsafed by the divine, it is something is inherent and promised to us, over which we have no agency except to forget that we have it. And that’s an important way to think through, ‘How do we assure dignity?'”
Appreciating the expertise that farmworkers brought to creating the Fair Food Program’s human rights solution and how important it is to resist challenges to such expertise Hussein continued, “People say ‘who are you to say what it is that you need? How do you know what you need when you haven’t studied it?’ These are questions of performance that take away from human dignity. As a child of immigrants, as a person of color, as a Muslim in this country, I know that these goal posts are always moving. I have got a bachelor’s degree and three graduate degrees from Harvard and it’s not good enough.”
Today tens of thousands of farmworkers in seven states are harvesting free from slavery, sexual violence, and fear through the Fair Food Program which Harvard Business Review called “among the most important social impact stories of the past century.” Now the program’s model is being translated to supply chains around the world.”
Watch This Animated Tale of ‘The Secret History of Muslims in the U.S.’ | Colorlines.
Islamophobic fearmongering about Muslims in the United States ignores the ways they have influenced the country from its inception. Dr. Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion at Barnard College, chronicles this history from 1492 to today in an animated short from The New York Times yesterday (December 17)
I’m in a video on the New York Times.
Imaginary worlds extend and expand our visions of what is possible. In these worlds, we can fly with dragons or shoot lightning from our fingertips. Yet, this expansiveness does not always apply to the religious lives of the characters populating our narratives. Religion can be made flat, so that the lived religious experiences and ideals of characters are signified by objects: head coverings, prayer beads, or feathers. As a result, both the religion and practitioner are not fully realized. Conversely, imaginary worlds can add depth and nuance to religions that have been flattened in real life. This panel explores the tensions of how religion is (re)presented in fiction and in real life, and how it is actually practiced by adherents.
The Crisis Of Connection Book Launch Party Tickets, Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 5:30 PM | Eventbrite.
Join us for a celebration our new book, The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, edited and authored by 20+ PACH members.
Hussein