This event took place October, 24, 2023. In this conversation, hosted by Religion and Public Life, Dr. Rashid discussed his work and its uses in the classroom, with a particular focus on the Children’s Museum of Manhattan exhibit "America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far?"
Dr. Hussein Rashid is the new Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life and brought to RPL with a wealth of experience as an educator in public and classroom settings. He has particular expertise in integrating the arts into the study of religion. From work with museums to film, documentary, and comics, Rashid has long engaged the power of images and art to highlight complexity and captivate learners when teaching religious literacy. Among other projects Dr. Rashid executive produced the Times Op-Doc "The Secret History of Muslims in the US" and co-edited a volume on Ms. Marvel, the first Muslim to have her own comic series with Marvel Comics.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: From Ms. Marvel to the Smithsonian, Teaching Religious Literacy Through Arts and Popular Culture. October 24, 2023.
ANNA MUDD: Welcome, everyone. It's lovely to have you here with us today. My name is Anna Mudd. I'm a program specialist here at Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School where our mission is to promote the public understanding of religion and service of just world at peace. I have the privilege of working with educators in that capacity, working on resources and programming, enhance religious literacy in the classroom.
And today, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome for our conversation Dr. Hussein Rashid who is our new, as of this fall, Assistant Dean and lecturer in Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. So Dr. Rashid is also a graduate of this institution. He holds a Master's of Theological Studies from HDS as well as an MA and PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures also from Harvard. As you will hear throughout this presentation in our conversation, his research focuses on Muslims and American popular culture. And he writes and speaks extensively on music, comics, movies, this wonderful array of arts and popular culture that we'll talk about today.
And first, I'm actually going to drop a link to Dr. Rashid's full bio in the chat box because I can't possibly do it justice but just a few notes here. So Dr. Rashid has taught in a variety of university settings. And in addition to the edited volume on Ms. Marvel that we'll hear about today, he's co-edited The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture, the volume Islam in North America, An Introduction, and most recently Teaching Critical Religious Studies.
He also—I don't know that we'll get to hear about it today—was executive producer as well as other roles in the award winning animated short, The Secret History of Muslims in America. And he's currently working on a serial documentary also on Muslims in America. And as you'll hear today, he's worked in various leadership capacities with the Children's Museum of Manhattan, Project director of the Arts of Devotion at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, and on the advisory board of the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition, City of Faith, Religion, Activism, and Urban Space.
So you get this sense of this really deep and extensive set of just incredibly complex and engaging ways to engage with education and public conversations on the complexity of religious literacy. So today is an opportunity for our network, particularly our educator network, to meet and be in conversation with Dr. Rashid about a topic that is near and dear to both of our hearts to all of our programming here at Religion and Public Life, and that's this intersection with the arts and popular culture and how it can lend complexity, depth, engagement to these important conversations.
So today we're going to have comments from Dr. Rashid, and then we're going to have time for Q&A at the end. So feel free to use the Q&A function here on Zoom. We'll be monitoring that. You can add questions either during the presentation or at the end. And we'll have a chance to engage there. So with that, it's my delight to turn things over to Dr. Rashid. Thank you so much.
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you so much for that very generous introduction. And as always, it's a pleasure to work with you, and now we're doing it on more than a casual basis, which I love. So as Anna mentioned, I'm new here to HDS, but I'm also old here at HDS. This is a chance for me to come back. And a lot of what I learned in terms of religious literacy was while I was a student here. And so it feels like a full circle moment to come back, not only to HDS but to come into a program on Religion and Public Life and see how thinking around religious literacy has been structured in the school in the intervening years.
And a lot of my work thinking about religious literacy in culture work has also driven me to really think through what the humanities are and the place of religious studies in the humanities. And so what I'm going to offer you as a through tread today is thinking about religious literacy, but in a sense of how it fits into larger frameworks of what humanistic studies means and how do we understand religion playing a role in these spaces.
And so to that end, the sequence I want us to walk through today is going to be four parts. I'm going to first talk about my first large museum experience, which is with the Children's Museum of Manhattan on an exhibition called America to Zanzibar, Muslim Cultures Near and Far where I served as lead content consultant and worked with the education team and community engagement teams. Then cut to a volume I co-edited about Ms. Marvel with—and I quoted the volume with Jessica Baldanzi.
And I'll talk a little bit about that, and the framing behind that, and how religious literacy sort of came in but really through the lens of the humanities. I'll come back to museum work and thinking about my work at the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian and a particular project I was the project director for called the Arts of Devotion. That project is still ongoing. I'll mention it briefly. But I've seen through about half of that project. And then I'll come back to two volumes I've edited recently one on Muslims and popular culture, and one on Muslims in North America.
I will say one thing about the volume that Anna mentioned, this Teaching Critical Religious Studies Book that I co-edited with my colleagues and friends Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand and Beverley McGuire where we talked about religious studies versus lived religion. And our comparison was sort of looking at Freddie Mercury from Queen as our vehicle. And we sort of talked about that song "Under Pressure" between Queen and David Bowie as lived religion and religious studies gives us the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby" as that very weak sample that comes through. So that gives you a sense of where I think pop culture and religion sit together and how they can illuminate and elucidate each other.
But having set that up, let me turn to my first case study, American to Zanzibar, Muslim Cultures Near and Far. And here I'm going to be explicitly looking at religious literacy in the space of the Children's Museum of Manhattan. So there's a particular background here. The Children's Museum of Manhattan, as you can tell by its name, works with children. This is not an art museum. Museums have different categories. Most people when they hear the word museum, they tend to think of art museums places, like the Met, the MFA in Boston, the Getty, the Louvre, the British Museum, and so on.
But the children's museums are important museums as well. And they're geared for younger audiences. And they tend to be much more hands on. So there's a different type of learning, a different type of environment that goes in. And what the Children's Museum of Manhattan had been doing was doing these global exhibitions about different world cultures. So they had one on Japan. They had one on Ancient Greece. So they had Kawaii culture in Japan. They had Ancient Greece. And the question was, well, how do we do religion, and Islam was the case study that was chosen.
And so the question was, that emerged out of that conversation, was how do you talk about religion or religious literacy without talking about religion, right, because we weren't going to do a Islam 101 type exhibition. A, no kid is going to want to come to that. But B, it risks turning us into theological police that is who is a Muslim, who isn't a Muslim, who are we leaving out because of inherent biases. As much as we try to be inclusive, there are so many different ways you can think through that question of who's included in an exhibition on Muslims.
So this wasn't an exhibition on Islam. This was an exhibition specifically about Muslims. And that allowed us to say, OK, if you self-identify as Muslim, then we are going to try to figure out a way to bring these conversations in. And obviously, we couldn't represent all Muslims everywhere at all times, but we felt we got a representative sample. And I'll walk you through what we did. But what that broadness of—the broadening of the definition allowed us to do was for us to say, OK, this is how religion functions in society. So questions of religious literacy then started to organically emerge about that.
So keeping the principles of religious literacy in mind, that, is how do religions differ across time and space, how do we talk about diversity within religious traditions, how do we engage with questions of power. If we lead with those questions explicitly, again, who's going to come to that for a children's exhibition. But if that's implicit in the back of our mind, then how do we get kids to play in difference? How do we get kids to play, which is really the thing we wanted them to do, how do we get them to play in notions of not everything—just because they share the same label doesn't mean they're the same. So fruit means are you talking about grapes, are you talking about apples, that sort of level.
But a children's museum also works in two registers. It's not just the children, it's their caretakers, the people who are bringing them to the museum. So how are we also communicating to them? And this is what religious literacy did. It allowed us to have a framework that moved us away from questions of theological policing into people's lived experiences, and then coming back into these what are we trying to demonstrate to caretakers, what are we trying to demonstrate to children.
At about the same time that I was coming into this project as the Children's Museum of Manhattan, I had been asked by several journalistic organizations to help put together a guide for how do journalists think or write about Islam. And so I created this little cheat sheet which could probably have done with a better editor than the one I ended up with but that's a separate conversation, which is the Ten Commandments of Talking about Islam.
So the first thing I said was find real experts. And there are many ways to define expertise, but yelling the loudest is not often a sign of expertise. So find real experts on the thing you want. Saying that I have a PhD in Islamic studies doesn't tell you anything about what it is I actually do. If you want a Quran scholar, I'm not it just because I have that PhD. So who are the experts you want, and that involves digging into some questions.
Talk with Muslims. Muslims are not all natural experts on Islam. This is also part of religious literacy. That people can be religiously illiterate from within their own traditions as well. But having Muslims talk about their own religion can not hurt. Just like you wouldn't have an all-male panel talk about women's equality, or an all-White panel talk about racism against Black people, you wouldn't have a series of non-Muslims talking about Muslims.
Think about varying your sources. Don't go to the same communities, and the same people, or the same types of people over and over again. We also talked about seeing the diversity in Muslim communities and this is about varying your sources. The imam in Sunni traditions and Sunni Muslim traditions is often the most learned person in the community. But professionally, they could be a doctor or a lawyer. So are there other sources of authority you can turn to that can give you depth and meaning to what's happening in particular religious communities?
This is, I think, pulled straight out of questions of religious literacy. Muslims do not exist in a special silo, neither does any other religion. They're bound in the world. So they're connected to and are living in social contexts, after historical circumstances, and economic systems that have—that act as causes and create effects on religion and vice versa, that these religions then feedback into these systems. So really thinking about religion, in this case, Islam in context.
Your editorial choices matter. And at the time this was relevant was people were doing a lot of paring of the call to prayer, either in terms of visual or aural audio representations with images of violence. And so people were looking at correlation that if you're Muslim and you hear the call to prayer, it's going to make you want to be violent. And therefore, it's not just correlation, it's causation. But talking about the people's call to prayer and whatever other story you're writing about that isn't about the call to prayer, why is that even relevant? Because there's a particular stereotypical image and a particular framing that we lean into. So thinking about your editorial choices.
And I think it's related to also representing your audience. Thinking about how do people want to have their stories told and listening to their stories in their language, and trying to relay and tell it in their way. Thinking about checking yourself, right? If you feel like you've failed at any point here up until this—up until this section, why have you? Is it because of something that you failed at, or something that is genuinely hard? And how do you recover from that difficulty? Oh, sorry, I don't know how that re—let's just skip ahead very quickly.
Just as I'm queuing it up. The next thing is foreign language is scary. We tend to pride ourselves on saying you're not really an American unless you only speak one language, which I think is hilarious when you consider the diversity of people who live in this country. But foreign language is scary. And so really thinking about are your sources hoodwinking you. And I mean this quite seriously because I've seen this happen to a few people. But just because they're putting out a little bit of Arabic, or a little bit of Persian, or a little bit of Turkish, or Urdu, or whatever language it is, that they're trying to say something that you think sounds smart and intelligent but is really off putting to the audience and might often practice—might often obfuscate what they're trying to say.
So, you know, again, relevant to the time period in which I wrote this, people were talking about taqiyya, that Muslims could hide what they believe which we can talk about in Q&A. But it was a fancy way of saying Muslims are categorically liars. Now you wouldn't publish that in English that Muslims are categorically liars, but you would say Muslims practice taqiyya because you're glossing over what it is the person is trying to say. So just thinking about how are you conveying this language. And then finally, thinking about what I call the common sense rule. If you wouldn't say this to Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's face, why are you saying it through the impersonal medium of print, or television, or radio?
And so as I said, this was working—I was writing this at the same time I was working on the Children's Museum of Manhattan exhibit, and a lot of these with some reframing actually became really important guides for us to think through how we were constructing our exhibition on the Children's Museum of Manhattan. So we went and found academic experts. We found community experts. So this is how we started talking with Muslims. We started finding community leaders.
We tried to get a wide variety of sources. We didn't—we not only engaged Muslims talking about their own community, but we engaged with non-Muslim communities who engage with Muslim communities and have them tell us some of their stories as well as a way to try to bridge some of these stories with our non-Muslim audiences. We tried to put things in historical and social context that made sense for a six-year-old but more importantly, for their caretaker who had come in.
We tried to put everything in English except for a couple of key terms. Salam alaykum being one of them. And that if you weren't going to hear it casually and normally, we didn't want to include it. And we made sure that we did lots of focus groups with Muslim kids who we wanted to come in and say, do you recognize yourself in these places. And we did lots of iteration around that. And as for the common sense rule, when the exhibit opened we invited Muhammad Ali who then actually donated some stuff to us, which was the greatest validation we could get for the work we've done.
So let me come back to the exhibit. How did this look like in our final product? So here's a map of what this space looked like. So you'll see here an adult coming in with a child. This is the main entrance. When you come in, you see this courtyard here. And then to the right, you see trade routes. So the question was, do we want a camel, and you'll see an image of the camel here in the right corner. Do we want a camel, or is that too stereotypical? And the way we set it, the way we talked about this was that a camel by itself is very stereotypical.
But if we want to talk about trade routes, well, we have to talk about camels because they were and continue to be instrumental in trade. But then how do we put it in juxtaposition with something that is the opposite of a desert? So we thought ocean, and we did a dhow which is this Indian Ocean trading vehicle that particularly is known between Oman and Zanzibar in the Swahili Coast. So how did we bring in that juxtaposition? We had other texts that talked about other types of trade routes including trade vehicles, including planes.
But for our camel, we made sure it wasn't a camel set in an Arabian Desert. It was actually an Afghan camel. So again, trying to take the familiar and make it unfamiliar to audience members. And then in the back row here, we had a global bazaar. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. One of the things that we had in the bazaar was we had stalls from all over the Muslim world. So we had a Turkish ceramics counter. We had a Zanzibari fish market. We had a tea house between Dushanbe and Boulder, Colorado because they're sister cities. And the only central Asian teahouse in the United States is in fact in Boulder, Colorado because Dushanbe, Tajikistan sent a tea house over as their sister city relationship.
What you're seeing here is a young child playing on a rug from Morocco. And so this was a stall on Moroccan rugs. And I want to take this as an example of really how not to write about religion. Somebody from a press came to review the exhibition. And overall, the review was very good. It was thoughtful. They listened to what they said. But they took this photo, and the caption under the photo was CMOM mom teaches children how to play at—how to pray, sorry, we teach them how to play. But the caption said, we teach you how—we teach children how to pray in this exhibit.
We explicitly did not and do not teach children how to pray. And if you had taken a moment to look at the photo, you'd see that the child has shoes on which does not happen in Muslim prayer. The body position is wrong. And what the child is doing is in the activity is that the symbols on the rug—there's a flash card that the children could play with that said these symbols mean this, what story is being told by the rug. So the child is actually trying to read the rug, and the story that is on the rug.
And we had to speak to the reporter who did this. He said, yeah, but we had this expert who said, yeah, if you've got rugs and you've got a Muslim on knees on it, they're praying. And we're like this is why you need to find real experts because not all Muslims on their knees on rugs are praying. Sometimes, they're trying to clean it. But they got published that way. So I just want to highlight that.
This is the other end of—this is another end of the bazaar. This is a Petit Senegal. So this is an area in Harlem which has a large Senegalese Muslim community, and we wanted to illustrate transnational connections that as the children are playing with these fabrics that are being made in Petit Senegal, the idea is that this is not something that's foreign. But this is something that's here near where you live, in this instance, in Harlem.
We got people from within these communities to give us interviews. So any stall, we had somebody from one of those communities, whether it was Boulder, here Petit Senegal, Zanzibari fish market, a Turkish ceramics bazaar to give us a quote of what was happening and why this was important culturally for them. Both these tailors are from Brooklyn because they were partners, but we had other voices from Harlem.
And you'll see, I'll read the first one. "I always like to look different to make my style unique. Then I met Daouda who comes from a family of tailors in Senegal. He taught me how to sew and design, and now I love it even more." This is from Seynabou Nabou Seck. And then Daouda who's mentioned in the previous quote. Daouda David Dioume says, "I learned to sew, embroider, and tie-dye in Senegal. My father sews and embroiders. In Senegal, it is often the men who are the tailors, and the women who take white cotton called malikan, and dye it beautiful colors and patterns, and sell it in the market." So again, we're trying to give some context. And this is speaking to the community, getting Muslims to speak, and tell their own stories.
And then we also started trying to think across cultures and time. So something that's very important in Pakistan popular culture is truck art, where trucks become really beautifully decorated items. Because these truckers spend so much of their time in these trucks, they basically become their home away from home. So they really go all out decorating these trucks. So we showed a 20th century decorated truck which is what you see in the top left. And then in the bottom right, we have a 21st century modern artist based in New York who does this miniature style artwork in the form and utilizing the images of the Pakistani truck because, for her, it was really emblematic of home for her.
And then we built—we designed and built a truck for children to play in. So they could go in and pretend to drive the truck, but they had this magnetic wall here where we had the stick ons where they could decorate the truck in a way that they liked and enjoyed. And then we had a Pakistani truck artist who lives or is frequently in New York, I should say, help us design the images for the truck itself. So again, engaging the community rather than trying to represent the community, and engaging them in doing this work with us rather than us doing it for them.
Here's an example of some of the text we had describing the rooms. And this line I really like. Objects have stories to tell. The objects we own reflect our lives and personalities. And this for us was very important. That objects in and of themselves are not interesting unless you're connecting them to the stories of people. Objects are a way to get to know people, and try to challenge the idea that if I have an object devoid of any connection to people, I understand what a culture is about. And so this is very specifically about the American living room where we try to show diversity of ways of being Muslim.
And I'm not going to go through the whole thing here, but one of the ways we did that was we looked at music and we looked at American Muslim musical artists, whether it was Mos Def, Alsarah and The Nubatones, A Tribe Called Quest, or Yuna. We tried to get the history of Muslims in New York. So we had somebody by the name of Popmaster Fabel—for those of you who are familiar with the history of hip hop know his long history in hip hop, this is a relatively recent photo of him here. This is him back in the day. But he was one of the founding members of Alianza Islamica, the Latin Muslim organization in New York. So this is material that he gave us from his long history being Muslim in the Latin community in New York City. So we tried to get that sort of representation.
And then this is from the Warith Deen Mohammed community donated, or organized, I should say, by Precious Rasheeda Muhammad, another Div school graduate. We overlapped and became a friend of mine. But she was able to give us photos of Muhammad Ali of pictures from the schools, the flag, a bean pie recipe. So all these things became incredibly important because they were from the community.
And people from the community then came out because they said, you not only chose to represent us, but you let somebody from within the community tell you what was important and how it should represent us. So this is how we tried to bring some of these elements of listening to people and their stories and bringing that diversity in, not through artifice, but through conversation that allowed us to really engage with religious—questions of religious literacy in practice, not just in terms of framing but in terms of actually engaging what this exhibition looked like.
Then from here, I want to talk a little bit about Ms. Marvel. So for those of you who are unfamiliar, Ms. Marvel is the first Muslim character to headline her own series in one of the two big comic houses, that is DC Comics and Marvel Comics. So this is her first issue here on our left. This is the first issue of her relaunch. And this is the cover of a book I co-edited with Jessica Baldanzi, whose name you can see on there. And Jessica has approached me. She came from a different discipline. I sit in religion. She sits in English. And she said, how do we do this? We were referred by a mutual friend, Shabana Amir, and said, how do we do this.
And one of the things that we said was, look, talking about her being Muslim is actually not interesting because her being Muslim is so normal in the comic book series, it's actually unremarkable how normal it is, like the premises it takes. So what's interesting about this for us? And this is from our introduction. I apologize for the long text. Let me read it to you. "Our approach emphasizes Ms. Marvel's super power as a polymorph"—that is she can change shapes, and, you know, she can make a big fist, or change her appearance.
"Just as she can become what she needs to as the situation demands, we work to see her in multiple forms at once. The multiple ways scholars from different disciplines read the same source material and even the same secondary material. The humanities is about both/and, much more than either/or. Ms Marvel is both a figure of independent Muslima empowerment, and a reaction to stereotypes of Muslims. For us, as humanities scholars, observation creates multiple states of being, rather than resolving and oversimplifying them."
And so what we did with our anthology was we tried to get people from—we didn't try, we succeeded, I think, fairly well, getting people from across various disciplines writing about Ms. Marvel and what she means from their particular discipline, whether it's fandom studies, education studies, fashion studies, and sartorial choices, sociology, history, comics studies, religion and literature, obviously, and really getting into that. And for me, this is where I see the bridging of religious literacy and our work in the humanities coming together because religious literacy and the approach that we try to cultivate, I think, is about recognizing multiple stories being simultaneously true.
And it's not in the sense that we have to throw up our hands and abdicate responsibility. But saying what is the story we're looking at a particular moment. How did it come to be? Why did it come to be? That it is an invitation not to say all these things are true, but to say why is it true. Is it absolutely true? And getting into some of these questions. And that to me is what our volume on Ms. Marvel did—Ms. Marvel's America did, which is really trying to get into Ms. Marvel exists in all these states of being simultaneously, what is most inviting to you and why, and then how do you start discussing that.
From there, I'm going to come back to—I'm going to turn to another museum project which is the Arts of Devotion which is a Lilly Endowment funded project at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. I served as the project director for that. It consisted of four exhibitions, a curriculum component, and community engagement. And the mission of the Arts of Devotion was to further civil discourse around religion through the museum's collections of Hindu, Buddhist art and the arts of the Islamic world.
So how did the curators decide to do that? And they really started through the exhibitions really were very thoughtful in thinking about religion through various lenses of religious literacy. So our first exhibition which has run and is now closed is called Mind Over Matter Zen in Medieval Japan brings together works of Zen Buddhism in medieval Japan, digital tools, and contemporary community voices. But what the curator did before getting into zen and medieval Japan traced a history of the origin of zen.
So—and this was new to me. As somebody who lives in this space, I learned that zen comes from the Chan School of Buddhism, but which comes from the Sanskrit dhyana or thoughtfulness and thinking. And so it was interesting to see how the Sanskrit term of dhyana then became zen, and you can see the continuity then and the progression—[COUGHS] excuse me, the progression of practice and philosophy as it moves that is zen moves through time and space and begins to develop.
The next exhibition—excuse me. The next exhibition that opened and is now since closed was Revealing Krishna, Journey to Cambodia's Sacred Mountain which transports visitors to the flood plains of Southern Cambodia where monumental sculpture—where a monumental sculpture of the Hindu God Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan once stood. And so here, we're looking at an object of Hindu devotion coming from a country that is predominantly Buddhist now, and so thinking about that history, and the emergence, and retreat of religious traditions.
But what we did there—and full credit to the curator, Emma Stein, on this one—is that she went to the Cambodian community, Cambodian American community, and commissioned a film on Cambodian life in diaspora called Satook, S-A-T-O-O-K. And you can find this, it's available on YouTube. And it looks at four individuals, or four case studies, I should say, more individuals in that, looking at what does Cambodian religious life look like in diaspora including in Lowell, Massachusetts, not too far from where we are now Long Beach, California. And so that was a way where the curator was thinking about the complexity and diversity of the religious tradition.
The next two upcoming exhibitions, one is Beyond Rumi, a fully digital exhibition, that highlights Sufism in its diversity and multiplicity around the world, so looking at diversity and tradition across time and space that digital technologies allow, and Krishna's Path of Grace which explores the meaning and presence of Krishna through pichhwai monumental temple hangings and stories of his feats through exquisite court paintings. So really coming back to Krishna in a different context and getting to experience how do different Hindu traditions engage with and experience Krishna by doing a deep dive in one community to open a conversation about other ways of engaging that.
We also are—or the museum is developing educational resources called Encountering Religions Through Asian Arts which is a learning resource for teachers, students, and visitors about religion and the objects in our collection specifically around these three religious traditions that is Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. And then we had a strong communication. With all these pieces, if I haven't made it clear implicitly, I want to be explicit have strong elements of community engagement. We're always having community reviewers, expert reviewers to make sure that people feel that they're being seen and represented. And it's really resulted in some very rich understandings on our end on what it is that we need to include.
I'll start coming towards the end here and point to two other volumes I've co-edited, but again, coming back to questions of religious literacy in the humanities. The first is from a volume on Islam in North America, which I co-edited with my colleagues, Huma Mohibullah and Vincent Biondo. And again this is from our introduction. We think, that as we the editors. "We think that working with communities is an expression of the project of the humanities, including all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.
Even in historical surveys, we can invest in people's understanding of themselves rather than narratives of who we think they are. The goal of the humanities is not to determine if a group of people deserve to be called human but to celebrate the variety of ways of being human. A multidisciplinary approach to the study of Muslims in North America gives us the opportunity not only to build a library of stories but also to showcase what the humanities can do in examining the human condition."
And here again, we had experts from a variety of fields. We had legal scholars. We had sociologists, anthropologists, people coming from fashion studies, pop culture studies contributing to this volume and telling us what is the history of Muslims in North America from their perspective. And really this was thinking about how do we get to the diversity of what it means to be Muslim.
And we think part of that is the diversity of disciplines and the diversity of approaches because that's how you disrupt the idea of single narratives or stories. And again, centering people in their own narratives and trying to give that life in meaning and context, rather than saying this is what we think is happening. We really wanted authors who were embedded in communities, which is the earlier part that comes before this paragraph, and who were not just writing about Muslims in the abstract but were based on real engagement with various Muslim communities.
And then this last volume I'll point to is The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture, which I co-edited with my friend and colleague Kristian Petersen. And this is much more for our purposes about cellularity. "In religious studies, we understand that secularism is simply the diffusion of Christianity into the state, extending the assumptions of Christianity into social structures. As a result, the religious meaning and significance of Christian art is assumed and understood allowing one to focus on the aesthetics of that art.
There are also assumptions that are made about when artwork stops being religious based on this diffusion of Christian assumptions. Christianity abides in US cultural forms and discussions, but goes unremarked. In religious studies, popular culture is a vehicle to demonstrate how Christianity abides, and for us is a vehicle to move beyond the premise that cellularity is neutral. Instead, this volume shows that the language of cellularity is not useful in many of our contributors contexts because the myth of cellularity does not apply there. We can often take popular culture on its own terms."
So our contributors were global in this volume looking at Iran, and Sydney, Australia, and soap operas in Malaysia. And so really thinking about how does religion show up in popular culture, and how does that then allow us to think about the promises of cellularity in popular culture in the United States. And I think one of the things that some of you are familiar with based on what I've heard and some of you that I've spoken to is the idea that museums are secularizing spaces.
But what that means in practice often, particularly, art museums, is that religious objects don't stop being religious simply because somebody else thinks they stop being religious, that they continue to be religious, but they're expected to not be because they're now in a museum. And thinking about, OK, they're now an art object which is how a museum would like to present it as opposed to, no, these are living objects and living parts of culture that still have significance meaning and devotional value even in this context.
So really what religious literacy allows us to do is then start challenging some of the assumptions about the function of education, about what we think the humanities are, and how we've structured society with some of these, quote unquote, "secular assumptions" to think about religion in deeper and more complex ways. And so it's from this perspective that I really want to argue and put forward that to really get to the heart of the humanities is to get to and understand and think through the questions that religious literacy poses for us of how human beings live in context, and what that means for how they see themselves living and functioning in the world. So that's my quick wrap up. I'm going to end now and turn it back over to Anna.
ANNA MUDD: Oh, my goodness, Hussein, Dr. Rashid, thank you so much. HDS is incredibly lucky to have you back. And we are incredibly lucky to have you here at Religion and Public Life. Incredibly powerful through lines and particular examples. Really exciting to dig in here. So I think what I'm going to do—we have a couple questions here in the chat. One that I answered already, but I'm going to bring back around. I'm actually though going to use my facilitators privilege to start out with one of my questions, follow up questions here.
So I love that—so more broadly in our work around the arts, imagination, visual culture, RPL, and reflected in your presentation here, right, we have this sort of umbrella, this continuum, these overlapping categories wherein at times we're engaging with materials that we might label publicly as art, specifically, right? They're in this category of art, fine arts, popular arts, and then that sort of bleeds into what is really everyday visual and material culture. So those elements and images that pervade our everyday life.
And I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts on, knowing that you've engaged a bit on this in your own teaching, how do you see the toolkit that educators can invite students into as they're developing critical analysis engagement to art objects? How can that bring deeper engagement, or more critical analysis to how visual culture is just operating in their everyday lives, right? We always have this continual goal of saying, how do we understand these forces that are forming our lives, and how we want to more consciously think about what we're reproducing, or what we're disrupting. So how do you see those sort of toolkits interactive in educational contexts?
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: I get another hour to answer that one, right?
ANNA MUDD: [LAUGHS]
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: But I think—and I thank you for the question. I think there's—I think I want to come at this from a couple of different perspectives. One is for those of us who are sighted visual culture is our primary mode of stimulus. And we have to think about how we think about that, how we think about that stimulus that we get. I want to come into this with the ideas that I think about popular culture, and for me what popular culture means is it's not about high art and low art, but it's the art that we all have access to. It's the popular thing. So it could be the architecture on the street. It could be, I'm a New Yorker, it's graffiti, right? It's street art. It is the performers. It's the buskers, right?
And so there's also an oral element to this. I think people listening to their music through their cars is part of the popular culture, right? There's a reason they're listening to that and thumping it, right, that too is popular culture. But going to a museum as well and expecting to see—if you're at the Louvre, for example, expecting to see the Mona Lisa, that's popular culture. You're going because it's been popularized. These were once upon a time prestige arts, and they still are. They function as, and I'm using this term loosely, high art because they're in this great museum.
But they've also become popular. I mean, we're at a university. We have grad students, but I'm sure those of you who are familiar with undergraduates or older high school students are familiar where everybody's buying the Dali painting with the melting clock, persistence—what is it, The Persistence of Memory, Or the Monet's Water Lilies, or the Mona Lisa because this is the thing that has become popularized now, particularly through reproduction. And so when I think about popular arts as an educational tool, or popular culture as an educational tool, it's not just visual but it is also oral, it is reproduction, it is tactile.
It is fully engaging of the senses, right? Those candles that we buy, or those types of perfumes that offer a type of nostalgia, or that bring us proximity to some star because that's why you get the famous people endorsing these products, right, is you want that sort of social paraproximity—parasocial proximity. Sorry, that's the way it should be, parasocial proximity. And so how do we create environments that we invite our learners to be critical in what they're experiencing [INAUDIBLE]. And I think that's at the heart of the question that you're asking.
And I think it depends what discipline you're in, what context you're in. But I'll tell you one of the things, and you reminded me of this, is that I had, when Twitter was a thing—you could probably do this on other social media platforms—but had students tweet at me how they saw religion in the world around them. So I would get things like the halal label on the food cart on the street, or the Hare Krishna's on the corner of a street in New York singing a bhajan, or the ringing of church bells, right? And they're like this is religion. And I'm like, but did you notice it before. Sometimes, yes, but sometimes, no. Because it's part of the soundscape that they just didn't think of as religion, it just was.
So I think there are ways you can bring in some of that intentionality that opens up conversations. I think, and I know I have a lot of educators on this call, so some of you may be better at crafting questions that I am. I function better through discussion. So I try to think of activities that give us something to talk about, and we learn together through that thing. Some of you may be better at crafting those very specific conversations to elicit those types of responses. But I think is really having students be intentional about what they're observing, and how they're interacting, why do things look the way they do.
ANNA MUDD: Thank you so much for that. I love that. I was thinking about the wonderful phrase you used when talking about the camel and the Children's Museum exhibit of take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. And it reminded me of a not exactly the same but a related articulation from I think Maxine Greene when she's talking about the power of imagination and the arts. And she says, among other things, that have this power to both imagine new possibilities, but also defamiliarise the ordinary, right, make the stones stony again. So exactly to your point, how can that train the eyes to bring critical attention to that which may have been so normalized it became invisible, right? Thank you so much for that.
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: Sorry, I just want to pick up off that. And I think you have a course on arts and imagination. I'll let you speak about it because I don't—I'm not as familiar. But one of the poster images you have there is a quote from Octavia Butler, "there's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns."
And I love that for futurist thinking and imagining what else is possible. But I think part of what we need to do to get to the imagining what else is possible is fully imagining or fully realizing what's in front of us. That every time you look at a tree, you've looked at a tree probably through your biology class, or your Earth science class, or your living environment class, I don't know what it's called around the country, but that sort of ninth grade science class.
You're like, I know xylem up, phloem down. Phloem up, xylem down, somebody can correct me in chat. I've forgotten this. It's been too long since high school. But in photosynthesis and all of this, and all of that is true. But have you thought about a tree from a literary perspective. When was the last time you hugged a tree, literally hugged a tree, and felt it, and wanted to know what that was like, and your inability to get your arms around it, or get your arms around it. And I think just seeing that potential in the thing that is already every day is what we're asking for.
ANNA MUDD: Absolutely. Yeah, I think I have been [INAUDIBLE] also bringing quotes, Virginia Woolf talking about that art can cut through the cotton wool of daily life. So get—and I really love and appreciate that point but to fully ground and attend to where one is and where one is situated before that reenactment—or in an iterative process with that reimagining. I have that Octavia Butler, I won't manhandle my laptop, but it's to my left here.
And thanks so much for the pitch fork. So I was going to use—so one of our questions, and I'll get to the one we haven't answered, but someone just asked about a recording being made available, which we will absolutely do. And I'm actually hoping to incorporate that into—I'm going to put into the chat as Dr. Rashid just alluded to—first of all, I'll just say again that this sense of how do the arts and how they intersect both with imagination and critical engagement with our surroundings, with visual culture is a thread that's really through a lot of our programming here at RPL.
And a couple of years ago, we tried to consolidate a bit of this into what is one of our standalone modules for educators. So again, I just put that link in the chat, which allows you to sign up for that as well as two additional courses. So that is a totally free, self-paced set of resources and invitations to discussion for educators but more broadly on the arts imagination and intersections with religious literacy. And that module itself also attends to questions of power, specifically, through some case studies around Orientalism. So we invite you to continue the conversation there. And I hope to add this recording, there. Then we have-- Oh, it looks like you answered it here.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: I'll do it verbally, thank you. So Christina asks when is the Beyond Rumi digital exhibition opening. I don't want to give a firm date, since I'm not actively involved with the project at the moment. But I have dropped in a link directly to the project web page, which should have updates on when it launches. I've dropped the link both in the Q&A Christina to you for people who can see that, and I believe I've done it properly to drop it in the chat to everyone. So you can click that link and add that into your roster of things to check out when it launches.
ANNA MUDD: All right, so we have some great additional questions coming to the chat. Another topic that is near and dear to my heart around the intersection with comedy here. So I'll just read it. As someone who's currently researching the power of American-Muslim comedy to address stereotypes about Islam, I'm curious about your take on how hearing a Muslim comedian could shift the status quo in people's perception of Islam. And are there potentially limits to the impacts of this popular culture? This is something that Zahra Noorbakhsh has spoken out against, for example, in her op ed, It's Not This Muslim Comedian's Job to Change Your Mind.
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Just as a point, if you haven't been reading the work of Samah Choudhury I think she's doing amazing work on the impact of American Muslim comedians. I think she's at Ithaca College, but don't quote me on that. But her name is Samah Choudhury. Yeah, I think there are limits to popular culture, right? And I think art is not required to do work. There is an aesthetic quality, but also art exists in a particular historical and social context.
And I think we have to acknowledge that I think even Zahra, who I consider a friend, the fact that she could write this op ed, It's Not this Muslims Comedian's Job to Change Your Mind is spot on. But she had to write it because she is living in a particular social context where people are expecting art to do particular types of work. And so there are limits, right? I mean, there's—so part of the work that I do, or part of the theory that I engage with is what's called parasocial contact hypothesis. Long way of saying that most marginalized groups in this country are minorities.
And therefore, most people do not meet people—do not meet other people from these communities, that they are dealing with stereotypes, larger framings, and so on. But that if you have a friend on television that you can identify with, you feel good about that group as a whole. So colloquially, it's known as the Will and Grace effect because there is a market, and there's been lots of research on this, there is a market upswing in support of same sex marriage in the United States that trails slightly behind the release of the original Will and Grace series on television.
So that as people became more familiar with Will and Grace and felt that they could have a gay friend through Will, for example, that they were like, OK, why can't Will get married. And that, you see a track. Conversely, the show 24, there was very strong correlation, I'm very cautious about talking causation, but very strong correlation that-- I think they used to air Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights, 24 would air, and Wednesday, there would be an increase in Islamophobic hate crimes. So that there is this sort of narrative work that can be done. It's not a cure all. It's not a panacea.
But we have to recognize that stories are powerful and popular media, popular culture are our shared reservoir of stories and the ways in which we reach out, which is why I don't want—when I do this work, I don't want 100% great representations of religion because that's as ultimately as unbelievable as 100% bad representations of religion. I want those nuanced, messy stories where you're like, that it's so real you turn and say that can't be real because that's my experience, right. And you're like, I never thought about other people having my experience, and it doesn't matter whether you identify with that religion or not because ultimately it's a question of a human experience that is expressed through the particularities of religion. And I think that that's the strength and power of popular culture for me.
ANNA MUDD: So beautifully put. One of the things I often talk about with educators is I feel like this method, we have it's so getting at that constant disrupting of binaries, adding of complexities, as you're speaking to. We're never looking for a wholly positive, just as we're not looking for a wholly negative. And when framed purely academically, that complexity can start to feel overwhelming, paralyzing, you can't make a statement that qualifying it.
And I often think it's through the arts, it's through storytelling that complexity is this invitation to excitement, to inspiration because then complexity is a fantastic character, right? Of course, no one wants a one dimensional character. You can't-- it's not an interesting story. It's not something that's going to elicit that authentic kind of engagement and interest. So yeah, complexity becomes this beautiful invitation in art in a way that it can be. Sometimes, the opposite in purely academic speak.
I do want to get at just another question I had that had surfaced through educators, which is we have a lot of educators who engage with museums in all kinds of different ways, right, whether it's digitally, looking at some of those objects, whether it's on a visit to look both at the objects and as at the museum as an object, as we've heard. And as someone who works both in traditional classroom settings and public education in museums, I'm wondering if you can speak to both how those contexts can inform one another? And what are some really rich examples that you've seen of bringing the resources of museums or the complexities, critical analysis of museums into the classroom education space?
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: Thanks, Anna. I think maybe if I may before talking about maybe pedagogical interventions is thinking about—I'll tell you a little bit about my own story and relationship to museums because I think it's a way to maybe think about who's in your classroom before you even think about your pedagogical engagement. So I'm the child of immigrants born and raised in New York. And my religious community arranged a trip to the Met in New York. And they have a whole bunch of stuff on Islamic art. And it is quite powerful when you are young and feel like you're not seen and you're not represented to have this sort of validating institution.
And we can talk about complexity of museums, and who do they represent, and is it worth getting validation there. I mean, I think these are adult questions. I'm thinking from a student's perspective. It's incredibly validating to have an institution like the Mets say, you have something of value, your culture has something of value. And to see yourself in a space like that is really powerful. So thinking about when you do assignments or when you do museum work, thinking about how are you intellectualizing it, and how might it be perceived, or how might it impact your students is step one.
The other thing that I learned in working with the children's museum, and one thing we were very intentional about when we were working with communities, and the thing we kept hearing over and over and over again in the nicest way is that these were communities who did not have the social experience of museum going, period, full stop. And so how do we think about the children's museum, in this case, CMOM, but how do we think about a children's museum not only as a welcoming space for children and their caretakers, but also as a gateway to socialization for museum going overall.
So again, have your student—do your students have museum going experience? Do they know what it means to go to museum? Do they know how to read labels? Do they know how to follow paths? As we know these museums don't often have paths, but curators are intentional, thoughtful people. There is something that is happening there that sometimes is—in higher ed, we call it the invisible curriculum, the things that if you're socialized to it, you know it, and if you're not, nobody's going to tell it to you because it's assumed everybody knows.
So thinking about that, as you think about museum visits, is if you didn't know how a museum functioned, or how it's set up, or how people might approach it, how would you structure assignment to make sure that it is welcoming to students and they're not—they're not lost. So setting that out, questions of representation, feelings of being seen, acknowledging that while still being critical, right? This work is critical work. And also thinking about the social aspect of a museum.
So now turning to the pedagogy switching back and forth is thinking about how things are presented in museums. What does it mean—and I'm speaking as an Islamist, so I'm going to lean much more into questions of Islam. But what does it mean that the Met, for example, doesn't use Islam in their new Islamic Art Wing? Even though, everybody knows what it is, they go by geography instead of talking about Islamic art. What were the decisions that were made there? How were those decisions made?
In many ways, it opens up some very interesting cross-cultural conversations. I don't know if it's still up. But they had some wonderful art from the Iberian Peninsula that was across religious traditions and highlighting the common visual vernacular that was used across religious traditions, right. So using that geography opens up those types of conversations. But not using the nomenclature of Islam, does that preclude other types of conversations? So they've recreated this Moroccan courtyard in the Met, and they brought in these Moroccan artisans who've done most beautiful amazing job.
But what they've done is in traditional style in the archways, they've carved the name Allah in Arabic throughout the archways. And tour guides, docents, they don't shy away from it. Here it is. It's there. But if it's a Moroccan courtyard, how do you think about how do you engage with religion? I think that sort of shifts it, when you think about it geographically rather than religiously. And I'm not saying there's a right answer, or there's a better answer. But I think what they do is—these types of decisions continue to pose other types of questions for us as we talk about labeling, naming, structuring, juxtapositions.
All of this is the work of curators, of donors, of museum administration, of what the audience, your visitors expect to see. This is all part of that dynamic process. And so really trying to figure out, and I know a few people have done museum visits for older students. I think these are the types of things you can really reasonably ask. And you can probably speak better to this, but you shared a video with me of students who were even looking at who the donor list was to think about how is money being cleansed through museums and donations, right, which is an important part of this conversation as well.
ANNA MUDD: Well, we are a couple of minutes past the hour at this point. So I'm going to say, Dr. Rashid, thank you for your time today, for all the depths of insights that you bring to all of your work at Religion and Public Life, and for our audience, educators, and others. We are so grateful for your time, for your own ongoing work. Again, we invite you to engage with the module on arts and imagination and religious literacy, where I hope to incorporate a recording of this, and to all of these ongoing conversations throughout our work. So thanks all.
DR. HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor Religion and Public Life.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.