City & State – Nonprofits confront fear in their communities.
“I have always believed that the fastest way to get gun control legislation passed in this country is to mass mobilize the American Muslim community to start getting firearms,” said Hussein Rashid, a lecturer on Islamic and American culture, as part of the panel.
Mizan Project: We are All Children of the Atom
The recent launch of the new comic series X-Men Gold has generated international controversy over religious and political images included by its artist, Ardian Syaf.
These images stand in striking contrast to the diversity that Marvel Comics has recently come to energetically espouse. The company has released a statement that explains their being unaware of the symbolism in the book as it was originally published, and declared its plans to discipline Syaf and remove the offending imagery from future reprints of the comic. We do not believe that this incident should detract from Marvel’s commitment to diversity; rather, it should compel Marvel to aim for more than just diversity, and push more fully to realize an ethic of pluralism instead.
Religion and Public Life series – Hussein Rashid.
The methods of the Digital Humanities present an opportunity to think about the goals and methods in the Study of Religion. The emergence of these new tools challenges the ways in which we consider academic work, and the premises around which Study of Religion is built. By broadening the scope of what we can do with “religious” material, we can more broadly imagine what religion is.
To be Muslim in America is to either be invisibilized, or Otherized. To be Muslim in America is to be pushed into the margins, racialized, and Orientalized. How then can we, as Muslims, choose to write ourselves onto the pages of modern memory? Join us as Hussein Rashid, Bushra Rehman, Shannon Chakraborty, and Melody Moezzi delve into the challenges that come with centering the margin and the Muslim protagonist.
Trump’s Muslim Ban and the History of Stolen Citizenship in America | Religion Dispatches.
As historians of South Asian America, we know that having your citizenship stripped because of the color of your skin is not unusual in our history. The United States has a long history of racism being encoded into law, and manifesting in law, on a regular basis. The story of internment of Americans of Japanese descent is perhaps the one that is most recent in our collective memory, partly because of George Takei’s tireless work to keep those stories alive.
Building Bridges | A Christian-Muslim Interfaith Dialogue | The Church of Saint Luke in the Fields.
With recent political decisions to attempt to ban Muslims and refugees from entering this nation for a better life or even for safety, what is our role in responding as people of faith? As a nation founded upon principles of religious freedom and enshrined in our Constitution, what are the duties of a Christian majority in defending the freedom of religious minorities? Fear is a highly controlling force that plays a major role in the narrative around Muslims – and a lack of common understanding about Islam as a religion often fuels the fire of fear.
I’ll be hosting a #GlobalEdChat with Asia Society on Teaching Islam.
Thursday, Mar. 23, 2017
8PM EST
A Children’s Museum ‘Surprise Blockbuster’: A Show on Islam – The New York Times.
“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.
A top White House aide was asked if Trump thought Islam was a religion. He refused to answer. – Vox.
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.”
Hussein