Chai Chat is an interactive gathering where we explore current social concerns and other issues that affect our spiritual and communal cultivation.
We invite you to read ahead of time, join us with your favourite tea or coffee, and engage in critical and constructive conversation.
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On Monday February 22nd at 7:30 pm CST we will gather to discuss the article “Muslims Are Not a Race” by Caner K. Dagli.
A snippet from the article:
But the reduction of Islamophobia to racism muddles our understanding of other real motives behind anti-Muslim bigotry and depends on misused or simply confused ideas such as “racialization” that are difficult for many people to grasp. Worse than that, the conceptual apparatus underpinning “Islamophobia is racism” turns Islam into a mere cultural marker of non-white people, a cipher that is spiritually, intellectually, and morally inert.
Join us to talk about:
the benefits and harms of considering a religious community a racial community
tolerance and the clash of civilizations
authority and liberation
We look forward to seeing you then.
Further listening: There is a related discussion on racialization and religion between Dr. Caner and Dr. Khalil Abdul-Rashid called Why Are Muslims Seen as a Race?. A snippet:
“I think given the unique contextual constraints that we’re working under, critical race theory emerges as a powerful analytical tool to help us think through some of the complex issues that we’re dealing with today and perhaps ask the right questions and to critique answers to those questions. I do not say that it provides answers, but I do say it helps us provide the right questions—and I think that’s a different thing.” —Khalil Abdur-Rashid
“What I was seeing was a reduction of everything you could call Islamophobia to being a form of racism. So not that [Islamophobia] includes or overlaps with racism but that it simply is racism. And when you look into this what you see is that this is not a neutral observation. It’s a way of trying to cram religion into an existing theoretical construct.” —Caner Dagli
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Caner K. Dagli is an associate professor of religious studies at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, specializing in Qur’anic studies, interfaith dialogue, and philosophy. An editor of The Study Quran, he was among the 138 Muslim signatories of the 2007 letter “A Common Word Between Us and You,” an appeal to Christian world leaders for peace and cooperation between Christians and Muslims.
Khalil Abdur-Rashid is the Muslim chaplain at Harvard University, an instructor of Muslim studies at Harvard Divinity School, and a public policy lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Having pursued a rigorous traditional training in Islamic studies in Istanbul, Turkey, that he later accompanied with academic studies of the discipline, Abdur-Rashid has served both as a community educator and university lecturer.