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Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions

10th Anniversary Edition

Excerpt from Life as a Muslim Scholar of Islam in Post-9/11 America by Amir Hussain

In recent years, there has been a great deal written about scholars as public intellectuals. I prefer a different concept, the scholar as citizen. Although I teach in a private university, I have an obligation to the state and its citizens. This is confirmed by the mission of the university, which comes from its Jesuit heritage and values "the service of faith and the promotion of justice". For me, it is important to reach different audiences. I reach some in my classes, others with the scholarly writing that I have done. But I reach a far greater number of people with my editorial pieces in newspapers, or my work with various local and national media. My students do not know me from my scholarly writing, but they recognize me from television on the History Channel, or on the local news, or on talk shows such as The Tavis Smiley Show or Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher .

I mention this because I think it signals a shift for some of us as academics. Most of us work in universities where peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly monographs are considered of ultimate importance. I have been fortunate to have those, and I recognize the value of scholarship, one of the hallmarks of the university. However the other hallmark is teaching, and so I understand the need to get our work "out there," to people who do not have the ability to take our classes or read our scholarly prose. And I am well aware of the numbers involved: I am sure that no more than 50 people have read any of my scholarly pieces, but a million or so have read my work in the Los Angeles Times , and several million have seen me on network television. I get far more email about television appearances than I have ever received about a scholarly article. In the case of Islam and Muslim communities, it is all the more important to get my work out to the widest possible audience. I also realize that it has become important to teach "media literacy" alongside of religion.

After the events of 9/11, many of us made curriculum changes. I used to start with a standard historical introduction to the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an. I now have students start by reading a book that describes how the news media construct reality (Postman and Powers 1992). Most of my students get their information about Islam and Muslim lives from television, so I think it is important to begin with how the television news works. I also use a videotape of Bill Moyers interviewing Jon Stewart and talking about The Daily Show with Jon Stewart . My students are admirers of Stewart's work, and agree with me that the satirical news that he presents is better informed than the "real" news. I have also had colleagues from local television stations come to my class to talk about ratings, and how important they are to the local news.

Having discussed media constructions of Muslim lives, I sometimes then move to something of a case study to demonstrate how, in the American media, Palestinians--whether they are Muslim, Christian, or secular--are constructed as Muslims. I next ask students to read a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) that describes something of the realities of Palestinian experience (Sacco 2002) and contrast that presentation with the ways in which Palestinians are perceived in America. There is a great advantage to using a comic book in class (aside from the reactions of students who are either delighted or appalled to have a comic book on the reading list). Some students still think that a photograph is objective, that it "tells the truth." They do not consider how it is composed. It is much easier to show this with drawings, where it is obvious that one person has made the drawing from their perspective, and someone else might do it very differently. Eventually, we do get to the Qur'an. And when we do, my students have a much clearer sense of the cultural barriers to studying it objectively.

Teaching and learning also occur among scholars. The study of Islam section of the American Academy of Religion used to be a small group of scholars who mostly talked only with one another. Post 9/11, it became a much larger group, and we are now asked to reach out and talk to all sorts of people outside our group. One of us, Carl Ernst, has written about his own recent experiences: "[I]t still amazes me that intelligent people can believe that all Muslims are violent or that all Muslim women are oppressed, when they would never dream of uttering slurs stereotyping much smaller groups such as Jews or blacks. The strength of these negative images of Muslims is remarkable, even though they are not based on personal experience or actual study, but they receive daily reinforcement from the news media and popular culture. (Ernst 2003, xvii).   Ernst goes on to point out that in workshops on key issues in Islamic studies in 1992 and then a decade later, it was determined that: "the real issue is to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims" (Ernst 2003, xvii).

Of course, this concern to "humanize" Muslims does not mean that we should take a defensive or apologetic attitude towards the very serious problems that exist within Muslim communities. We need to discuss issues such as gender discrimination, religious arrogance and intolerance, violence, and so on. However, we need to make clear that when these problems are viewed as the only reality of Islam, the richness and beauty that exists as well are hidden from awareness. Teaching Islam today means teaching the fullness of the tradition with cultural sensitivity and a critical mind.

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