Islam and Muslims in Western Contexts
HONORS 394 B
This class provides a survey of Muslims living in non-Muslim context, but primarily in the US and Europe. This course explores the historical journey(s) of this religion/culture and its eventual settlement in the western world and eventually to North America. We will examine the diversity of Islam in the US and in Europe, and will explore and compare the experiences of Muslims in the US and other parts of the western world. Discussions over gender roles, transnational ties, radical versus moderate Islam will be examined and explored. The larger question posed by the class deals with the compatibility between Islam as a religion and a culture, and modernity and western democracies, and the extent to which the anti-Muslim feelings are significant in determining the relationship between Islam and the Western world.
As a Muslim American, I didn't expect this class to be as enlightening as it turned out to be. Even I was surprised that some of the facts which I had taken for granted about Arabs and Muslims were actually myths, and I think Professor Dana did a really excellent job of providing us with a substantial amount of significant material with which to gain a rather significant depth of understanding in a short period of time. I think the most valuable aspect of this class was being able to ground what I knew personally about the Muslim-American life in theory. The extensive work we did with Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" and how that connected to Islamophobia allowed me for the first time to express what I had personally gone through in the context of academic discourse, giving my words and feelings more weight. In the following three response papers, I did my best to mediate my academic objectivity with my personal background.
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It was only natural, then, that my final research project for the class was as much a reflection on my own identity as it was an investigation of the Muslim identities formed by these Western Contexts.
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Since I had interviewed two Muslim students for my research, I felt it only right that their voices should be heard. To this end, I decided to present my research in the form of a film (which seemed doubly right because we had seen so many films in the class). It also seemed like a great way for me to stretch my film-making legs since I hadn't done on in ages. I definitely spent several weeks plagued by equivocation, not quite sure if I could feasibly craft a film with only that little interview to work with. I also was concerned with simply making a slideshow presentation with narration, music, and sound effects. Professor Dana was reluctant to let me create a film because he thought I was doing it to avoid public speaking. This wasn't an issue at all, but I wanted to make sure that my film was distinctive enough from a slideshow presentation because otherwise there wouldn't be much point to creating the film. However, I think the blend of descriptive narration - more in line with a power point presentation - and the clips, effects, and of course the interview which had inspired me to create the film in the first place definitely justified presenting my research in this format. It's something I'm proud of committing to, and I had a lot of fun creating and sharing it with the class, for a subject that I was definitely passionate about. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect way to wrap up an excellent class.