Pedagogy, Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Belonging: Twenty Years on (original) (raw)

Two decades after the 9/11 attacks, I continue my journey on the two fundamental quests I had embarked upon in the aftermath of the attacks. My first quest was pedagogical: how might I adequately capture within my literature courses the complex dynamics between the Muslim world and the West and between various Muslim identities and cultures, dynamics shaped by legacies of colonialism, decolonial struggles, and neocolonialism. My second quest was personal-intellectual: how might I locate and situate myself as a progressive secular Muslim woman within America's long history with Muslims. In September 2001, I was a couple of weeks into my first year as an assistant professor in English at a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho. Many of my students came from rural Republican backgrounds with military ties. The predominant Mideast engagement in the curriculum or faculty body on campus came from an aggressively pro-Israel stance. I had been in the U.S. for more than a decade by that point, and thus was familiar with the Orientalist Islamophobia that permeated the West's 1 framing of and long history with the Muslim World (Nasr 1999; Smith 1999). Observant Muslims were absent from media, entertainment, education, and politics. None of my undergraduate or graduate courses in either literature or creative writing was taught by a Muslim-identifying professor. I was never assigned a story, poem, novel, or nonfiction essay by a Muslim(/-American) writer or works that examined a Muslim or Muslim-American (postcolonial) experience. Muslims appeared on American popular and intellectual cultures as caricatures: backward, irrational, and misogynistic. They were anti-Semitic suicide bombers and honor killers. They were not artists, poets, or mathematicians. There were no Muslim ghazal singers, mountain climbers, eco-farmers, or Sufi poets, except Rumi, who in the West had been stripped of his devout Muslim faith and slotted into New Age gurudom (Gamard 2012). Shock and Awe: Reverberations through Muslim Lives A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Arundhati Roy (2001) presciently framed G.W. Bush's cobbling together of a coalition to invade Afghanistan as a search for war, and if the U.S. did not find a war, it would manufacture one that would "develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own" (paragraph 3). And it did manufacture one,