Brendan Newlon | University of California, Santa Barbara (original) (raw)
Most Popular by Brendan Newlon
![Research paper thumbnail of Praising the Prophet Muhammad in Chinese: a new translation and analysis of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang’s Ode to the Prophet Muhammad (百字讃) - [draft]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/47361697/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](A new English translation and detailed analysis of a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written i... more A new English translation and detailed analysis of a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written in the 14th century by the founding emperor of China's Ming Dynasty.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Book] Reliable Creed for a Community in Need: a rhyming English translation of Imam Tahawi's (d. 933) famous formulation of orthodox Islamic theology. 38 pages. ISBN: 1979077894](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/58223188/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Taha... more Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Tahawi's famous formulation of orthodox Islamic theology. Abu Jafar Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Tahawi’s (d. 933) text on creed is the most widely accepted exposition of the beliefs of Ahl al-Sunnah wa’l-Jama`ah, or Sunni Islam. Students pursuing a traditional curriculum in Islamic sciences begin by studying short primer texts that introduce three foundational subjects: theology (`aqidah), essentials of individual religions practice (fiqh) within the guidelines of a recognized school of jurisprudence (madhhab), and spiritual refinement (tasawwuf). To facilitate the learning process, those texts have often been adapted to rhyme, which makes them easier to commit to memory. This book is designed to aid students in memorizing the concepts expressed in Imam Tahawi's classic manual of orthodox Sunni belief in English. 38 pages. ISBN: 1979077894
![Research paper thumbnail of [Book] The Islamic Studies Notebook: A Student Manual of Islamic Traditions](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/55620976/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam? On... more How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam?
One of the course assignments in a six-week undergraduate Summer course on Islamic Traditions at the University of California, Santa Barbara was for the students to maintain their notes on all aspects of the course as a collaboratively authored living document that would be continually updated and reorganized to present their total understanding of the course topics in the form of a textbook.
Their remarkable final product is presented here, without any significant changes to the content.
This volume offers educators the valuable opportunity to directly perceive what students took away from an introductory undergraduate course on Islam. How did the students understand the assigned readings? What topics did students engage with most enthusiastically, and why? What expermental teaching styles were employed in the course, and how effective were they as means to support the learning objectives of the course?
Collaboratively authored by Sean Knight, Trent Davidson, Paul Pineda, Thao Nguyen, Anthony Khoa A. Tran, Leslie J.Acero, Sara Moretti, Alexandra Kineret, Blake Keane, Mingfei Xu, Afreen Chaus, Ramzi Bekeri, Kaitlyn Woodward, and Aniela Grych.
Edited by Brendan Newlon.
Forewords by Ahmad Atif Ahmad, Ovamir Anjum, Jamaal Diwan, and Suheil Laher.
Translations by Brendan Newlon
In his prologue, Akhdari lists the duties one is obliged to understand and act upon once they att... more In his prologue, Akhdari lists the duties one is obliged to understand and act upon once they attain the age of maturity. It is a common practice in Muslim pedagogical tradition to versify basic texts so that students can memorize them more easily. Here, the text is presented as translated into rhyming couplets of English verse.
This is a short poem by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān (d. 1206/1791) translated from the original A... more This is a short poem by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān (d. 1206/1791) translated from the original Arabic into English verse. The poem is a concise, technical list of the ten essentials aspects of any science. It is intended to help students memorize the outline of the topic, while a teacher's additional commentary would be needed to really understand the content and meaning of the ten essentials.
An excerpt from the classic of Islamic systematic theology by Abū Ja'far Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭa... more An excerpt from the classic of Islamic systematic theology by Abū Ja'far Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭaḥāwī (4thc. Hijrī / 10thc. CE), Al-Aqidah al-Tahawiyyah, translated into English in the style of Islamic didactic poetry to facilitate memorization.
This is a translation of a 100-character poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written by the Foundi... more This is a translation of a 100-character poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written by the Founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368 – 1398).
Thesis Chapters by Brendan Newlon
American Muslims are diverse in many ways, but is it appropriate to imagine American Muslims as o... more American Muslims are diverse in many ways, but is it appropriate to imagine American Muslims as one community, or are there really several different communities of American Muslims? If there are several, are there senses in which the social and aesthetic expressions of such communities could be referred to as “American Islam”? What follows is a multifaceted approach to answering these questions. This dissertation demonstrates that several distinct communities of American Muslims can be identified, and introduces one of these communities, which I refer to as the “Neotraditional” Muslim community, in detail. This dissertation also proposes a new interdisciplinary methodology for social science research exploring the nature and boundaries of communities.
The majority of academic works relating to Islam in China discuss the Hui people as a Muslim-majo... more The majority of academic works relating to Islam in China discuss the Hui people as a Muslim-majority ethnic group predominant in certain areas of China, however, this is an oversimplification that fails to adequately represent historical reality. Furthermore, presenting the Hui in terms of ethnic designation without a critical consideration of how that designation evolved can lead to broad misunderstandings in this topic. This thesis describes how the meaning of 'Hui' has shifted over time from designating geographic origin, to religion, to nation, and finally ethnicity and highlights important social and political causes and effects of those changes. I encourage scholars to carefully note these changes in order to be more precise about how the term 'Hui' should be interpreted in various historical contexts. See also this timeline of Chinese Muslim identity: https://goo.gl/DFsRzJ
Leadership by Brendan Newlon
Jim Joseph Foundation & Center for Creative Leadership - Cross-Portfolio Research Study Literature Review, 2019
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | JEWISH LEADERSHIP | BEST PRACTICES The primary research questions guidi... more LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | JEWISH LEADERSHIP | BEST PRACTICES
The primary research questions guiding this study can be paraphrased as follows:
1. How have Jewish leaders developed through opportunities and learning experiences?
2. What are best practices for leadership development in the Jewish community?
3. How can understanding the learning journeys of Jewish leaders and state of the art practices in leadership development inform strategies to achieve greater impact through investment in leadership development in the Jewish community?
This literature review represents our first step to exploring these complex questions by researching the distinguishing features of Jewish leadership and highlighting the current day challenges faced by Jewish leaders.
* On behalf of the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Center for Creative Leadership is conducting a cross-portfolio research study of leadership development in the American Jewish community to support Jewish learning experiences. The Foundation defines Jewish learning experiences broadly as “experiences that draw upon Jewish wisdom, values, practices, culture, traditions and history to engage people in activities that guide them towards living more connected, meaningful and purpose-filled lives.”
Conference Presentations by Brendan Newlon
Symposium on Data Science and Statistics, 2020
Graph Analytics | Topic Modeling | Qualitative Research | Data Visualization ~ Topic complexity p... more Graph Analytics | Topic Modeling | Qualitative Research | Data Visualization ~ Topic complexity presents a challenge for interpreting qualitative data in interviews, especially when the scope of discussion is broad and topics are interrelated in complex ways. We developed a process that combined manual qualitative coding with automated coding and graph analysis to reveal what we termed "virtual conversations," or discursive patterns weaving through 83 hour-long interviews with American Jewish community & nonprofit leaders. After an initial process of manual qualitative coding followed by more extensive machine coding in R using lists of topic-associated terms, we used Neo4J to represent interview excerpts and the codes related to them as connected nodes in a graph database. After excluding extreme cases (excerpts related to too few or too many codes), we applied the Louvain algorithm to detect community clusters. In R, we gathered the community groups of excerpts and converted their combined texts into document-term matrices and used word clouds to visualize the most differentiating terms for each cluster. Later thematic analysis referred to those term groups as suggesting threads of deeper "virtual conversations," indicating the conversation topics that would have most likely prevailed if interviewees had been in direct dialogue with one another. I will present our process, what worked well, and how we think it can be refined with LDA topic modeling, convolutional neural networks, and statistical analysis of cluster exclusivity.
https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/sdss/2020/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?AbstractID=308411
The theme of “Islamic Environmentalism” has become common in the discourse of contemporary Americ... more The theme of “Islamic Environmentalism” has become common in the discourse of contemporary American Muslim community leaders and religious authorities, but changing dynamics in how this theme is presented are leading to new social connections and community identities among networks of American Muslims.
In this article, I consider lectures such as the Zaytuna College workshop's “Planting Seeds for a Greener Tomorrow”, publications such as Ibrahim Abdul-Matin's Green Deen, and events like the February 2014 “Prayer for Rain” led by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf but performed simultaneously in cities throughout California. In each, I outline the consistent relationship between themes of social justice, economic ethics, and environmentalism as essential aspects of a modern Islamic lifestyle.
I also highlight the deployment of multimedia and social networking to promote and coordinate religious messages, events and initiatives related to environmental stewardship and the role of networking in forming vibrant, non-localized subculture identities among American Muslims.
![Research paper thumbnail of Exploring the Political Construction of Identity through the Case of Islam in China [Conference Presentation]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37617202/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Minority groups are socially & politically defined ~ Chinese Muslim identities changed over time ... more Minority groups are socially & politically defined ~ Chinese Muslim identities changed over time ~ This presentation was delivered at UC Santa Barbara's fifth annual Islamic Studies Graduate Student Conference on May 10, 2015. It addresses the historical shifts in the construction of Chinese Hui Muslim identity from the 7th century to the present, and uses those identity shifts to elucidate current identity discourse in the United States and Europe, in which national identity is imagined in opposition to the Muslim Other. The video, presentation slides, and charts can be found online at http://goo.gl/kUywnu.
Book Reviews by Brendan Newlon
American Journal of Islam and Society / American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2017
Tristan James Mabry’s research investigates whether Muslim populations are exceptionally resistan... more Tristan James Mabry’s research investigates whether Muslim populations
are exceptionally resistant to ethnonationalism, which he assumes to be more
conducive to a liberal democratic form of government than any concept of
community defined in terms of a shared religion. He concludes that Muslims
are not immune to it, and that the determining factor in whether a Muslim
community will organize itself according to ethnonationalism instead of Islamism
– Mabry apparently considers these the only modes worth mentioning
– is whether they develop a print culture in their local vernacular.
Ultimately, the author concludes that nationalism founded upon ethnic solidarity
is inherently superior to alternative sociopolitical models, and therefore
advocates promoting local ethnonationalisms as a strategy to prevent
Muslims from organizing themselves in terms of shared religious identity
(p. 202) ...
American Journal of Islam and Society / American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2016
Through research spanning 1,300 years, Sophia Rose Arjana presents a historical genealogy of mons... more Through research spanning 1,300 years, Sophia Rose Arjana presents a historical
genealogy of monstrous representations of Muslims that haunt the
western imagination and continue to sustain the contemporary bigotry of Islamophobia.
The central question introduced in the first section, “Introduction:
Islam in the Western Imagination,” is “How did we get here, to this place of
hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants,
Abu Ghraib, and GTMO?” (p. 1).
To answer this question, Arjana highlights connections between historical
representations of Muslims and monstrosity in imagery, literature, film, and
popular culture to produce a volume she describes as “an archive of Muslim
monsters” and “a jihad – an effort – to reveal Muslims as human beings instead
of the phantasms they are often presented as” (p. 16). This work is a timely
contribution that will benefit scholars researching anti-Muslim sentiment, Islamophobia,
postcolonial and subaltern studies, the psychology of xenophobia
and genocide, or who are interested in historical manifestations of Islamophobia,
antisemitism, and racism in art, literature, film, and media.
In the first chapter, “The Muslim Monster,” the author argues that cultural
“ideas of normativity are often situated in notions of alterity” and that
monstrous representations of Muslims have functioned as an enduring signifier
of alterity against which the West has attempted to define itself since
the Middle Ages. Through the production of dehumanized and monstrous
representations, Muslims became part of a mythological landscape at the
peripheries of Christian civilization that included dragons, giants, and dogheaded
men. The grotesque and uncanny attributes of monsters reveal the
anxieties of the society that produces such images, and chief among those
is the fear of racial contamination and the dissolution of culture through intermingling
with the foreign and the strange. Each of the following chapters
focuses on depictions of Muslims as monsters in visual arts and literature
within a particular era or context.
The second chapter, “Medieval Muslim Monsters,” introduces Muslim
monsters of the Middle Ages, many of which survived as tropes used to vilify
Muslims, Arabs, Jews, and Africans for centuries thereafter. This chapter introduces
monsters such as “the giant, man-eating Saracens of medieval romances
and the Black Saracens, often shown in medieval art executing saints,
harassing and killing Jesus, and murdering other Christian innocents” (p. 19) ...
Encyclopedia Entries by Brendan Newlon
Encyclopedia of Global Religion, 2012
Encyclopedia of Global Religion, 2012
A new English translation and detailed analysis of a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written i... more A new English translation and detailed analysis of a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written in the 14th century by the founding emperor of China's Ming Dynasty.
Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Taha... more Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Tahawi's famous formulation of orthodox Islamic theology. Abu Jafar Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Tahawi’s (d. 933) text on creed is the most widely accepted exposition of the beliefs of Ahl al-Sunnah wa’l-Jama`ah, or Sunni Islam. Students pursuing a traditional curriculum in Islamic sciences begin by studying short primer texts that introduce three foundational subjects: theology (`aqidah), essentials of individual religions practice (fiqh) within the guidelines of a recognized school of jurisprudence (madhhab), and spiritual refinement (tasawwuf). To facilitate the learning process, those texts have often been adapted to rhyme, which makes them easier to commit to memory. This book is designed to aid students in memorizing the concepts expressed in Imam Tahawi's classic manual of orthodox Sunni belief in English. 38 pages. ISBN: 1979077894
How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam? On... more How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam?
One of the course assignments in a six-week undergraduate Summer course on Islamic Traditions at the University of California, Santa Barbara was for the students to maintain their notes on all aspects of the course as a collaboratively authored living document that would be continually updated and reorganized to present their total understanding of the course topics in the form of a textbook.
Their remarkable final product is presented here, without any significant changes to the content.
This volume offers educators the valuable opportunity to directly perceive what students took away from an introductory undergraduate course on Islam. How did the students understand the assigned readings? What topics did students engage with most enthusiastically, and why? What expermental teaching styles were employed in the course, and how effective were they as means to support the learning objectives of the course?
Collaboratively authored by Sean Knight, Trent Davidson, Paul Pineda, Thao Nguyen, Anthony Khoa A. Tran, Leslie J.Acero, Sara Moretti, Alexandra Kineret, Blake Keane, Mingfei Xu, Afreen Chaus, Ramzi Bekeri, Kaitlyn Woodward, and Aniela Grych.
Edited by Brendan Newlon.
Forewords by Ahmad Atif Ahmad, Ovamir Anjum, Jamaal Diwan, and Suheil Laher.
In his prologue, Akhdari lists the duties one is obliged to understand and act upon once they att... more In his prologue, Akhdari lists the duties one is obliged to understand and act upon once they attain the age of maturity. It is a common practice in Muslim pedagogical tradition to versify basic texts so that students can memorize them more easily. Here, the text is presented as translated into rhyming couplets of English verse.
This is a short poem by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān (d. 1206/1791) translated from the original A... more This is a short poem by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān (d. 1206/1791) translated from the original Arabic into English verse. The poem is a concise, technical list of the ten essentials aspects of any science. It is intended to help students memorize the outline of the topic, while a teacher's additional commentary would be needed to really understand the content and meaning of the ten essentials.
An excerpt from the classic of Islamic systematic theology by Abū Ja'far Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭa... more An excerpt from the classic of Islamic systematic theology by Abū Ja'far Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭaḥāwī (4thc. Hijrī / 10thc. CE), Al-Aqidah al-Tahawiyyah, translated into English in the style of Islamic didactic poetry to facilitate memorization.
This is a translation of a 100-character poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written by the Foundi... more This is a translation of a 100-character poem praising the Prophet Muhammad written by the Founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368 – 1398).
American Muslims are diverse in many ways, but is it appropriate to imagine American Muslims as o... more American Muslims are diverse in many ways, but is it appropriate to imagine American Muslims as one community, or are there really several different communities of American Muslims? If there are several, are there senses in which the social and aesthetic expressions of such communities could be referred to as “American Islam”? What follows is a multifaceted approach to answering these questions. This dissertation demonstrates that several distinct communities of American Muslims can be identified, and introduces one of these communities, which I refer to as the “Neotraditional” Muslim community, in detail. This dissertation also proposes a new interdisciplinary methodology for social science research exploring the nature and boundaries of communities.
The majority of academic works relating to Islam in China discuss the Hui people as a Muslim-majo... more The majority of academic works relating to Islam in China discuss the Hui people as a Muslim-majority ethnic group predominant in certain areas of China, however, this is an oversimplification that fails to adequately represent historical reality. Furthermore, presenting the Hui in terms of ethnic designation without a critical consideration of how that designation evolved can lead to broad misunderstandings in this topic. This thesis describes how the meaning of 'Hui' has shifted over time from designating geographic origin, to religion, to nation, and finally ethnicity and highlights important social and political causes and effects of those changes. I encourage scholars to carefully note these changes in order to be more precise about how the term 'Hui' should be interpreted in various historical contexts. See also this timeline of Chinese Muslim identity: https://goo.gl/DFsRzJ
Jim Joseph Foundation & Center for Creative Leadership - Cross-Portfolio Research Study Literature Review, 2019
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | JEWISH LEADERSHIP | BEST PRACTICES The primary research questions guidi... more LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | JEWISH LEADERSHIP | BEST PRACTICES
The primary research questions guiding this study can be paraphrased as follows:
1. How have Jewish leaders developed through opportunities and learning experiences?
2. What are best practices for leadership development in the Jewish community?
3. How can understanding the learning journeys of Jewish leaders and state of the art practices in leadership development inform strategies to achieve greater impact through investment in leadership development in the Jewish community?
This literature review represents our first step to exploring these complex questions by researching the distinguishing features of Jewish leadership and highlighting the current day challenges faced by Jewish leaders.
* On behalf of the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Center for Creative Leadership is conducting a cross-portfolio research study of leadership development in the American Jewish community to support Jewish learning experiences. The Foundation defines Jewish learning experiences broadly as “experiences that draw upon Jewish wisdom, values, practices, culture, traditions and history to engage people in activities that guide them towards living more connected, meaningful and purpose-filled lives.”
Symposium on Data Science and Statistics, 2020
Graph Analytics | Topic Modeling | Qualitative Research | Data Visualization ~ Topic complexity p... more Graph Analytics | Topic Modeling | Qualitative Research | Data Visualization ~ Topic complexity presents a challenge for interpreting qualitative data in interviews, especially when the scope of discussion is broad and topics are interrelated in complex ways. We developed a process that combined manual qualitative coding with automated coding and graph analysis to reveal what we termed "virtual conversations," or discursive patterns weaving through 83 hour-long interviews with American Jewish community & nonprofit leaders. After an initial process of manual qualitative coding followed by more extensive machine coding in R using lists of topic-associated terms, we used Neo4J to represent interview excerpts and the codes related to them as connected nodes in a graph database. After excluding extreme cases (excerpts related to too few or too many codes), we applied the Louvain algorithm to detect community clusters. In R, we gathered the community groups of excerpts and converted their combined texts into document-term matrices and used word clouds to visualize the most differentiating terms for each cluster. Later thematic analysis referred to those term groups as suggesting threads of deeper "virtual conversations," indicating the conversation topics that would have most likely prevailed if interviewees had been in direct dialogue with one another. I will present our process, what worked well, and how we think it can be refined with LDA topic modeling, convolutional neural networks, and statistical analysis of cluster exclusivity.
https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/sdss/2020/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?AbstractID=308411
The theme of “Islamic Environmentalism” has become common in the discourse of contemporary Americ... more The theme of “Islamic Environmentalism” has become common in the discourse of contemporary American Muslim community leaders and religious authorities, but changing dynamics in how this theme is presented are leading to new social connections and community identities among networks of American Muslims.
In this article, I consider lectures such as the Zaytuna College workshop's “Planting Seeds for a Greener Tomorrow”, publications such as Ibrahim Abdul-Matin's Green Deen, and events like the February 2014 “Prayer for Rain” led by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf but performed simultaneously in cities throughout California. In each, I outline the consistent relationship between themes of social justice, economic ethics, and environmentalism as essential aspects of a modern Islamic lifestyle.
I also highlight the deployment of multimedia and social networking to promote and coordinate religious messages, events and initiatives related to environmental stewardship and the role of networking in forming vibrant, non-localized subculture identities among American Muslims.
Minority groups are socially & politically defined ~ Chinese Muslim identities changed over time ... more Minority groups are socially & politically defined ~ Chinese Muslim identities changed over time ~ This presentation was delivered at UC Santa Barbara's fifth annual Islamic Studies Graduate Student Conference on May 10, 2015. It addresses the historical shifts in the construction of Chinese Hui Muslim identity from the 7th century to the present, and uses those identity shifts to elucidate current identity discourse in the United States and Europe, in which national identity is imagined in opposition to the Muslim Other. The video, presentation slides, and charts can be found online at http://goo.gl/kUywnu.
American Journal of Islam and Society / American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2017
Tristan James Mabry’s research investigates whether Muslim populations are exceptionally resistan... more Tristan James Mabry’s research investigates whether Muslim populations
are exceptionally resistant to ethnonationalism, which he assumes to be more
conducive to a liberal democratic form of government than any concept of
community defined in terms of a shared religion. He concludes that Muslims
are not immune to it, and that the determining factor in whether a Muslim
community will organize itself according to ethnonationalism instead of Islamism
– Mabry apparently considers these the only modes worth mentioning
– is whether they develop a print culture in their local vernacular.
Ultimately, the author concludes that nationalism founded upon ethnic solidarity
is inherently superior to alternative sociopolitical models, and therefore
advocates promoting local ethnonationalisms as a strategy to prevent
Muslims from organizing themselves in terms of shared religious identity
(p. 202) ...
American Journal of Islam and Society / American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2016
Through research spanning 1,300 years, Sophia Rose Arjana presents a historical genealogy of mons... more Through research spanning 1,300 years, Sophia Rose Arjana presents a historical
genealogy of monstrous representations of Muslims that haunt the
western imagination and continue to sustain the contemporary bigotry of Islamophobia.
The central question introduced in the first section, “Introduction:
Islam in the Western Imagination,” is “How did we get here, to this place of
hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants,
Abu Ghraib, and GTMO?” (p. 1).
To answer this question, Arjana highlights connections between historical
representations of Muslims and monstrosity in imagery, literature, film, and
popular culture to produce a volume she describes as “an archive of Muslim
monsters” and “a jihad – an effort – to reveal Muslims as human beings instead
of the phantasms they are often presented as” (p. 16). This work is a timely
contribution that will benefit scholars researching anti-Muslim sentiment, Islamophobia,
postcolonial and subaltern studies, the psychology of xenophobia
and genocide, or who are interested in historical manifestations of Islamophobia,
antisemitism, and racism in art, literature, film, and media.
In the first chapter, “The Muslim Monster,” the author argues that cultural
“ideas of normativity are often situated in notions of alterity” and that
monstrous representations of Muslims have functioned as an enduring signifier
of alterity against which the West has attempted to define itself since
the Middle Ages. Through the production of dehumanized and monstrous
representations, Muslims became part of a mythological landscape at the
peripheries of Christian civilization that included dragons, giants, and dogheaded
men. The grotesque and uncanny attributes of monsters reveal the
anxieties of the society that produces such images, and chief among those
is the fear of racial contamination and the dissolution of culture through intermingling
with the foreign and the strange. Each of the following chapters
focuses on depictions of Muslims as monsters in visual arts and literature
within a particular era or context.
The second chapter, “Medieval Muslim Monsters,” introduces Muslim
monsters of the Middle Ages, many of which survived as tropes used to vilify
Muslims, Arabs, Jews, and Africans for centuries thereafter. This chapter introduces
monsters such as “the giant, man-eating Saracens of medieval romances
and the Black Saracens, often shown in medieval art executing saints,
harassing and killing Jesus, and murdering other Christian innocents” (p. 19) ...
From the time of the Han dynasty until the Revolutionary era of modern China, the social identity... more From the time of the Han dynasty until the Revolutionary era of modern China, the social identity question of “what is Chinese” has been answered in terms of Confucian ethical and social ideals. Self-definition is always contingent upon contrasting with others, however, so increased interaction with foreign peoples over time led to discourse on the definition of what it means to be Chinese in dialogue with what it means to be Confucian and what it means to be Muslim.
Approximate areas governed by the Ming dynasty and by various Muslim administrations in the 14th ... more Approximate areas governed by the Ming dynasty and by various Muslim administrations in the 14th century and areas in Asia with historically significant Muslim populations (ranging from Muslim majority to estimated 1/400) © 2018 Brendan Newlon.
This timeline shows how Chinese Muslim identity has shifted over time, from the 7th century to th... more This timeline shows how Chinese Muslim identity has shifted over time, from the 7th century to the present. Hui identity has been conceived in terms of political identity, culture, religion, nation, and ethnicity. I discussed this timeline in a conference presentation which can be viewed online here: http://goo.gl/m0KDN4
This chart is designed for use in classrooms as a tool to encourage students to approach identity... more This chart is designed for use in classrooms as a tool to encourage students to approach identity categories as discursive claims rather than fixed realities. I briefly described its use in a conference presentation, which you can view online: http://goo.gl/m0KDN4
“The Impossible Quiz” is actually a disguised review activity that leverages the connection betw... more “The Impossible Quiz” is actually a disguised review activity that leverages the connection between emotion and memory to focus student attention, help them remember difficult material, and provide an early warning for those students who need to review more thoroughly before the “real” exam.
Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Taha... more Reliable Creed for a Community in Need —Pocketbook— is a rhyming English translation of Imam Tahawi's famous formulation of orthodox Islamic theology. Abu Jafar Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Tahawi’s (d. 933) text on creed is the most widely accepted exposition of the beliefs of Ahl al-Sunnah wa’l-Jama`ah, or Sunni Islam. Students pursuing a traditional curriculum in Islamic sciences begin by studying short primer texts that introduce three foundational subjects: theology (`aqidah), essentials of individual religions practice (fiqh) within the guidelines of a recognized school of jurisprudence (madhhab), and spiritual refinement (tasawwuf). To facilitate the learning process, those texts have often been adapted to rhyme, which makes them easier to commit to memory. This book is designed to aid students in memorizing the concepts expressed in Imam Tahawi's classic manual of orthodox Sunni belief in English. 38 pages. ISBN: 1979077894
How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam? On... more How much can fourteen undergraduate students learn from a six-week summer course about Islam?
One of the course assignments in a six-week undergraduate Summer course on Islamic Traditions at the University of California, Santa Barbara was for the students to maintain their notes on all aspects of the course as a collaboratively authored living document that would be continually updated and reorganized to present their total understanding of the course topics in the form of a textbook.
Their remarkable final product is presented here, without any significant changes to the content.
This volume offers educators the valuable opportunity to directly perceive what students took away from an introductory undergraduate course on Islam. How did the students understand the assigned readings? What topics did students engage with most enthusiastically, and why? What expermental teaching styles were employed in the course, and how effective were they as means to support the learning objectives of the course?
Collaboratively authored by Sean Knight, Trent Davidson, Paul Pineda, Thao Nguyen, Anthony Khoa A. Tran, Leslie J.Acero, Sara Moretti, Alexandra Kineret, Blake Keane, Mingfei Xu, Afreen Chaus, Ramzi Bekeri, Kaitlyn Woodward, and Aniela Grych.
Edited by Brendan Newlon.
Forewords by Ahmad Atif Ahmad, Ovamir Anjum, Jamaal Diwan, and Suheil Laher.