This session explores how various forms of narrative intersect with the goal of teaching against Islamophobia. From literature, to Bollywood films, to family conversations, to interfaith education, the papers featured on this panel ask how the stories we tell about Islam and Muslims have the power to either contribute to or resist anti-Muslim racism.
This paper presents a pedagogical approach to teaching an introductory humanities course, Religion and Culture in Bollywood Film, at a mid-sized Canadian prairie University. Students enrolled in this course are mostly South Asian (by birth or heritage), and mostly Muslim. The course plan centres student reflective processes in an anti-racist exploration of diasporic values and identity. The films illustrate the negotiation of relationships: within and between individuals, families, and societies. These relationships are not only escapist entertainment. Through reflective exercises in the classroom, they become fodder for analysis of identity, family relationships, and generational change. Through careful selection of films and by assigning secondary sources written from emic perspectives, students develop reflective fluency and skill in expressing their religious and cultural perspectives. By providing a safe space for exploring these cultural differences, the course gently encourages students to reaffirm the value and plurality of their own experiences and identities.
This study focuses on the schooling experiences of K-5 Muslim immigrant children in Toronto, Canada, by exploring the stories they share with their mothers. Adopting an anti-colonial theoretical framework, the study examines children’s stories as they inform how teachers’ attitudes and practices either dismiss or appreciate Muslim children’s cultures and identities in educational settings. The study engages with storytelling to capture the voices of immigrant children and disrupt educators’ deficit mentalities impacting immigrant students and their families. Through interviews with ten Muslim mothers about the stories their children share at home, the study aims to deconstruct students’ "emotionally sensed knowledge" regarding their schooling experience, developed throughout the educational process. The study highlights the need for anti-Islamomisia and anti-Muslim racism education targeted at teachers, school staff, and non-Muslim families, and provides recommendations for combating deeply ingrained oppressive structures and ideologies.
In recent decades American-Catholic views of Islam have been formed largely by a profitable “Islamophobia industry” that promotes negative stereotypes of Muslims and emphasizes examples of conflict over those of cooperation. Resisting and confronting Catholic Islamophobia is thus primarily the responsibility of American Catholics. Drawing on my own experience as a Catholic theologian teaching at a Catholic university, I propose to discuss three primary ways I have sought to challenge Islamophobia. Research: understanding examples of encounter, dialogue, and friendship with Muslims rather than rivalry and conflict. Teaching: helping non-Muslim students appreciate the values and beauty of Islam and assuring Muslim students that Islam is being presented on campus respectfully and sympathetically. Service: advocating for Muslim students and colleagues in a Catholic milieu and working to shift esteem for Muslims from the periphery to the center of the university’s Catholic mission.
The global outbreak of xenophobic attitudes that promote hostility on the basis of both racial and religious differences has made clear the close relationship of Islamophobia and antisemitism. These two forms of bigotry racialize their targets, Jews having long been seen as a “race” and Muslims now being racialized as “non-White” and a security threat. It is, therefore, appropriate to regard both as forms of racism and to seek approaches to educate against them together, particularly as the issue of Israel/Palestine has been used to set the two groups apart. This paper will demonstrate a pedagogy for such a joint approach to countering Islamophobia and antisemitism: a presentation by Muslim and Jewish speakers who will discuss the issues confronting both communities, including the challenges of antisemitism and Islamophobia and of maintaining their respective identities as two of the largest religious minorities in the United States.
As Muslim writers articulate their “Muslimness”, how do they respond to and challenge contemporary anti-Muslim rhetoric? This essay affirms the significance of Muslim American literature and the potential it holds to help counter Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. More specifically, Samira Ahmed's Internment (2019) serves as a tool, in the classroom (high school and college) and in community settings, for teaching against Islamophobia and highlighting the complex reality of anti-Muslim racism and its various impacts.
Internment is a dystopian novel that imagines a near-future America where American Muslims are stripped of their civil rights and forced into internment camps. The text addresses various facets of Islamophobia as it establishes a connection between individual and systemic anti-Muslim racism; contextualizes the fictional internment of Muslims in America within historical American as well contemporary global realities; illustrates its wide-ranging impacts on Muslim American individuals and community; and highlights forms of resistance and communal solidarities.