Teaching Inside-Out: On Teaching Islam

It is in colleges and universities that Muslim students in North America usually have their first serious opportunities to learn about their own traditions and to articulate their own ways of being Muslim. There is a marked difference here from the experience of Christian or Jewish
students. There are any numbers of Christian or Jewish schools in North America, in addition to a number of religious institutions of higher learning. By contrast, only a small percentage of Muslim students are the product of Islamic schools. They do not have the same opportunities to learn about their religion that are available to Jewish or Christian children. In this regard, there are a great many similarities with the other South Asian religions that are discussed in this volume. My own thoughts on the teaching of Islam have been shaped by a
decade of trying to integrate theoretical issues with pedagogical concerns. I began to teach courses on Islam at several different universities (McMaster University, the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University) in Southern Ontario in 1994. In 1997, I moved to Southern California to start teaching full-time at California State University, Northridge. Twelve relevant issues have arisen for me over the past decade of teaching Islam in North America.3 I have divided this list of issues into the following four categories: the assumptions of the instructor; the assumptions of the students; the role of the instructor in the modern university; and events post 9/11.