A Muslim-American Educator on Teaching Sikhism: My Correspondence with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh

What are the consequences when we don’t know about one another? 

What is the risk of not having our stories known and heard?

These are two key questions that frame a recent conversation with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh, Executive Director for the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program and author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. The event, hosted by Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, was held as a lunchtime event for secondary educators committed to teaching and learning about religious literacy.

It was inspiring to listen to Dr. Simran Jeet Singh’s conversation for several reasons. One of them is because I personally know Simran. The first time we were introduced was in 2009 when I was in India on a language fellowship studying religion, specifically Sufism, and he had recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School. 

But it wasn’t until later that Simran and I really started connecting. In 2012, I reached out to him during a quiet bus ride to Wisconsin as news broke about the hate crime at the gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI. I didn’t know what to do, and felt a range of emotions. In that moment I thought that the least I could do immediately was what I would do with my own family and friends: reach out to check-in with those who I personally knew who would be directly impacted by the aftermath. We started an exchange that day which extended into my time as an educator in New York City and the founder of Illuminated Cities, a global education organization that offers self-development courses and community development programming that bring in research spanning religion, psychology, neuroscience, public health, and urban design.

In life everyone has turning points - moments that can shift our entire consciousness, our relationship with ourselves, and how we interact with the world around us. For Dr. Simran Jeet Singh, there were two such defining moments that he details in the RPL conversation that compelled him to reflect on in what ways he wanted to show up in the world. The first was the attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001 and the second was in 2012 during the Oak Creek gurdwara massacre when I had reached out to him. Simran says that until high school, he “never encountered any resource or any curricular approach to indicating that there was any awareness that my community existed.” These events and this reality made Simran realize that cultural ignorance and religious illiteracy has life-threatening consequences that he and his community would experience. He shared, “I can speak from a position of experience, my own lived experience as a Sikh growing up in this country, that the cultural ignorance of not just my community but many others has real serious violent consequences.” Simran began seeing religious literacy as a social justice issue because it became an issue of survival for his community. 

My students and I learned what survival means for Sikh-Americans in 2013 when Simran and I connected again while I was working as an educator in the South Bronx and he was a PhD student and working at the Sikh Coalition. I had designed a curriculum through Illuminated Cities for students to learn about the bystander effect and the diffusion of responsibility, two concepts of heroism, good, and evil in social psychology. We explored how to instead cultivate and embody compassion and courage, and how to intervene –  not look away – in moments of need. 

Simran’s best friend, Prabhjot Singh, a professor at Columbia University was in the news. He had been brutally attacked by 15 high school students because of how he looked. Both Simran and Prabhjot wear turbans as Sikh men in accordance with their faith tradition. I used this news story, as I was using other news stories at the time, and brought it to our classroom. I showed my students a photo of Prabhjot Singh and asked them to be as honest as possible about their thoughts and sentiments. My goal and hope as an educator was for them to be honest as teens, address their stereotypes, and disrupt their assumptions. They were polite and quiet at first, though many of them were openly laughing at his photo. Finally, one of them said, “Miss, honestly, he looks like Osama bin Laden.” Another said, “He looks like a terrorist.” Other students were more objective and said, “He is wearing glasses, he has a long beard, and a turban.” Then, one of them said, “He looks like a dad because he’s sitting with his son.” This is how we began the conversation. We began to speak about who Dr. Prabhjot Singh is as a person, and what had happened to him that week through the news story that served as a point of entry. In the RPL talk, Simran cautions educators that his “gentle request would be, sure, do that, share those stories. They're important. But maybe also build in, well, how did the community respond? And give them back some of their agency and show their resilience in those stories that you share. I think that's really important for us as educators to think about… these people aren't just what happens to them.” My students and I were able to reflect on the Sikh community’s response with Simran himself.

I arranged for my students to meet Simran in person to learn about the Sikh tradition and practices. Simran did this with so much compassion, kindness, and generosity of time, that it reminds me of what he said in one of his videos: “Be generous with what you give.” Simran spoke about the sentiment of not thinking about who he was giving to, in what capacity, or what it would do for him. 

Simran shares in the RPL educator’s conversation, as he did with my students, how his religious identity, the simple fact of how he appears to others as a turbaned Sikh man, is racialized in the United States. He also addresses tokenization, saying, “Part of my solution is: what can I do to ensure that other Sikh stories and voices are heard, so that we get a full spectrum of opinions and interpretations and experiences? …that's really the best way of getting to a place where we're tokenization is behind us and authentic representation orientation is in front of us.” RPL’s religious literacy method emphasizes the concept of internal diversity of traditions, and attention to the academic study of diverse, devotional representations of a religion.

Illuminated Cities worked to connect young people from the south side of Chicago, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx to Muslim and Sikh communities impacted by hate crimes in cities across the United States. Their task as students being trained as citizen journalists was to report back about their exchanges with individuals and communities during their visits to the gurdwara and mosques, and to learn about the lived experiences of Sikhs and Muslims, whether they included visiting a tea shop where Muslims had been surveilled by the F.B.I. in Bayridge or having Punjabi food with a Sikh family during their travel and homestays in Chicago. The goal was to create humanizing experiences, and my students’ initial visit with Simran served as a catalyst for developing deeply reflective work on the intersectionality of our identities. 

In his talk with the RPL, Simran says, “One of the things I've learned is that Sikhism is not just one thing. What I present in this book is my interpretation of Sikhism. It's my lived experience of Sikhism. And I'm very intentional throughout the book and whenever I speak about sharing that.” Simran’s book, The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life—the first of its kind—immediately pulled me in with a humorously worded account of his lived experiences, and is an excellent opportunity for others to meet him and learn about his life, his deep tenacity, and that of his community.

Watch the event recording or read the full transcript.

By zehra imam, MDiv '25