By Sophia Rose Arjana
If you were to ask me to describe what my first syllabi fresh out of graduate school looked like, I would say aspirational. I aspired to design courses that reflected my areas of main areas of expertise—Islam, theory and methodology, Orientalism, comparative religion, and pilgrimage. In other words, I saw myself as someone deeply committed to diversity, postcolonial critique, and critical engagement. However, I eagerly showed an early syllabus to a mentor and he remarked, “This looks great. But, it is all men.” My liberal, even somewhat leftist, doctoral program had not helped me erase my self-doubt about who counted as an expert.
Fast forward a decade. Today, as a tenured faculty member with four published books, engaged more broadly in the disciplines of religious studies, history, and critical theory, and more carefully reflecting on the problems of representation and equity in the classroom, the issues of expertise, representation, and inclusivity are core to my pedagogical design. These guide the ways I craft my courses, present a history of the field, choose texts for my students, introduce the topic of citational politics, and craft assignments for different types of learners.
Framing the Study of Religion
The problem of representation often comes up in discussions of the Academy and the way we design courses. I am white, a Muslim convert, and privileged. For these reasons, I must be honest about the history of the study of religion. It has a racist, colonial, and sexist past (and present), but how do we help students understand this? If we are not helping students understand the field of religious studies, as well as how the religious worlds people inhabit have been imagined, constructed, and then used as agents of power, then I am afraid that we are failing as educators. I find this an especially critical issue in world religions courses, where instructors often launch into the big five traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—with no foregrounding of how religion is “defined,” who has delineated what counts as a religion, or how these assumptions impact the way we understand our subject.
Starting the course with a unit on how religion is defined and the history of the field is one way to address these issues. Two articles I use, Richard King’s “Orientalism and the Modern Myth of Hinduism” and Gregory Schopen’s “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism,” elucidate many of the problems in the study of religion. They also serve to introduce the first two religious traditions in the course—Hinduism and Buddhism. King and Schopen ask hard questions and require students to think critically. Students can be coached into this critical enterprise in a variety of ways such as through reverse outlining and journaling their reflections on the course readings. King and Schopen are white, male scholars is a fact that provides an opening for us to discuss other voices represented in the class, such as Diana Eck, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Su’ad Abdul-Khabeer.
Providing a history of the field, even a brief one that covers the past century of religious studies in the U.S., also helps to show the assumptions we may have about other people’s religious worlds. The transition of the field from one focused on theological prescriptions of other people’s religious worlds that compared Christianity to other traditions (often poorly) to the study of these traditions in schools of divinity, and now the study of religion in the secular university, illustrate how the field has changed. Students can also learn about this history by looking at a specific scholar. My effort at this is called the “Theory and Methods Report,” where students choose a scholar on whom to write a brief report and construct a bibliography of the scholar’s work. The list they choose from includes queer, Black, Native/indigenous, and postcolonial scholars including Amina Wadud (a favorite of my students), Judith Butler (who we also study as part of the unit on Jewish thought), and George “Tink” Tinker, the Native scholar who I worked alongside at my first job out of grad school. Students like this assignment because it gives them the freedom to choose a scholar to explore, in some cases they choose someone that they identify with their own community.
The Text Is the Expert
Who among us has taken over an existing course, only to look at the course readings and see a list of all male-authored texts? I have, and too many times to count. In one case, I was asked to teach a class on global religious literary traditions and all of the texts were written by white men. Not one female expert. Not one scholar of color. I threw out the old syllabus and wrote my own. The students responded beautifully, as new voices spoke to them in unexpected ways. Texts by Indigenous authors introduced Native American beliefs and experiences, something that most of my students have no experience in. When we teach courses that have all male authors, or all white authors, this is who students see as intellectual authorities. I call this “The Text Is the Expert” problem. When we offer other ways of seeing the world, entire new ways of thinking can emerge.
In the study of Islam, we often see the framing of the subjects we teach revolving around Orientalist prescriptions regarding who counts as a legitimate Muslim—Sunni, Arab or South Asian—and situated in a tradition deemed as “orthodox.” The problems with these issues are too lengthy to discuss here, but they challenge us to do better. In my class on Islam, I use the historical novel by Laury Silvers titled The Lover, which centers upon a diverse set of characters who are Sufi, Shi’i, African, from the upper class, and the poor. The second formative text I use is Liz Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, a study of Muslim fashion that focuses on the aesthetics and sartorial choices of women in Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul, exposing students to places they may not be familiar with. These two books are white-authored, but this is countered by the book review students must do as part of the course from a curated list of South Asian, Persian, and Arab scholars, as well as units in the course on topics such as Muslim fashion, which centers on African-American Muslim communities. This fall, I am adding a third book to the existing two, Su’ad Abdul-Khabeer’s Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip-Hop in the United States. I also teach a course titled Islam in America, which is centered on Black Islam, communities, and contributions; most college students are woefully ignorant about the history of Muslims in the U.S., in part because of the way we teach but also through the media’s framing of Islam as a “foreign” or “exotic” religion from faraway places, the assumption is that most American Muslims are new to U.S. soil.
Connected to the selection of texts for students is how we use texts in the classroom. Citational politics is another place where questions of fairness, equity, and justice present themselves. One great resource for thinking about this is Kecia Ali’s 2017 lecture “Muslim Scholars, Islamic Studies, and the Gendered Academy.” Every time I watch this with my students the people we cite matters. Beyond resources like Ali’s masterful lecture, conversations need to take place centered upon the problems created by ignoring female scholars, scholars of color, and queer scholars, which not only marginalizes their work but can impact their careers. The numbers of times a scholarly work is cited can be used, and is used, to influence decisions about hiring, promotion, and tenure.
Teaching First-Generation, Working Kentuckians
Course design also reflects my student community and geographical location. I teach in southern Kentucky at a state school with a large number of first-generation college students who work—sometimes more than one job—to put themselves through college. The town my university is located in is diverse, with large Muslim and immigrant populations, a vibrant African-American community, and a noticeable progressive movement. In many cases, the first time a student has been in the same room with an international peer, or American Muslim, is in my classes. The fact that so many of my students are overwhelmingly driven, focused, and committed to their educational journey impacts course design, as do my own concerns about student success. I don’t give quizzes, tests, or exams because they create high levels of anxiety in my students, whose majors range from Nursing to Arabic. Instead, all the assessments in my courses are based on writing and creative projects ranging from reading journals (Pilgrimage and Islam), using software to construct story maps (Saints, Monsters, and Superheroes), and mapping religious figures (World Religions).
Why do these types of assessments work? One reason is that they allow students to pursue themes and topics they are interested in. For the mapping project, a student may choose the religious tradition they are most familiar with and create a map of the life of Jesus. A surreptitious reason these assignments are included is that they allow me to sneak in skills students need. The reading journals require Chicago Style footnotes, the story maps require research skills, and the mapping project requires an annotated Chicago Style bibliography. On the first day of class, I gauge student anxiety about these assignments by doing an Emoji Exercise, where every class member places emoji stickers on huge, blow-up pages of the syllabus, so that we can process their concerns >:-( and relief 🙂 together.
This year, while we all struggle with a pandemic and our own growing lists of anxieties about teaching, research goals, and stalled progress on writing projects, is also a good time to think about how we are serving our own students. As I often tell them, my pedagogy is inspired by Buddhism, designed to create the least amount of anxiety and to model compassion. A critical part of this pedagogy is focused on justice for my discipline, my less privileged colleagues, and my students.