Research

Affect, Animality, and Islamophobia

My current research arises out of observations from my dissertation which investigated depictions of saintly bodies in one medieval Persian poem, Nizami Ganjavi’s Makhzan al-Asrar. One significant chapter focused on how human bodies were discussed in relation to animal bodies in Nizami’s work, and Islamic mysticism more broadly. The introduction reviewed Orientalist struggles to classify Nizami’s work, seeing him as too focused on asceticism to be a Sufi (as they understood Sufism) and too good a poet to be writing “mere” religious allegory. The topics and tropes of Nizami’s work were clearly both situated in and highly influential on Sufism and Persian poetry, but he didn’t neatly fit into Orientalist presuppositions about Sufism at the time. It struck me that this complex of bodies, animals, and re-imaginings of the other in an echo-chamber had resonances with contemporary Islamophobic discourse.

Rather than focus on Islamophobia as “fear” of Islam, Affect Theory allows scholars to explore the range of affects that Islamophobic rhetoric can evoke in and in relation to bodies. Donovan Schaefer, for example, has argued that we should not overlook “the lush, self-absorbed pleasure in erasing another body’s face” as an affective motivation for hate speech (Schaefer 123). I began to explore this connection in a response to Schaffer’s Religious Affects, published in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Here, I discuss the use of pig imagery in anti-Muslim discourse online. While this anti-Muslim rhetoric has strong analogues to prior-anti-Semitic uses of pigs and pig imagery, the War on Terror and social media give it new and unique contours, such as the online (and incomplete) filing of patents for pig blood filled anti-bomb barricades or the creation of fabricated businesses using virtual business addresses and Google Voice phone numbers to advertise pig fat coated bullets that were never produced (but widely covered by national news outlets).

This article forms the core of one chapter of my in-progress book manuscript tentatively titled Pig Fat, Goat Blood, and Dog Hair: Animals, Islam, and American Anxiety about Religious Difference. In the book, I investigate the relationship between Islamophobia, affect, and human-animal relations through various animals: pigs, dogs, cows, and goats. Each highlights something different about what American and European Islamophobes find important about their own culture and how they assume Muslims are and must always be inherently other.

This book fills an important gap in scholarship on anti-Muslim animus by focusing on how certain human-animal relationships are seen as central to what it means to be American/European/civilized, (pigs are for eating, cows too, but their death should be hidden from view, dogs are family, etc) and how Muslims are framed as other because of perceived differences in how Islam configures these human-animal relations.

Although there has been a proliferation of works on Islamophobia in the past decade, a small, but growing number of scholars have focused on the role of human-animal relations in Islamophobic discourse. This includes a forthcoming documentary project by Dr. Andrea Jain that investigates the relationship between animal ethics and white supremacy. I have been privileged to contribute to this project and hope that it leads to increased discussion of the important intersection between contemporary American racist formations and animal ethics.

Sufism & Poetry

The importance and time-sensitive nature of research on Islamophobia has led me to backburner my dissertation-to-book project but it nevertheless represents a significant and ongoing aspect of my research. My dissertation highlights the complexity and diversity of the Islamic tradition through the study of a widely-circulated and emulated but under-researched medieval Persian text, Nizami Ganjavi’s Treasury of Mysteries. Research for the dissertation, future book, and related articles has included grant-funded archival work in England, Turkey, and India.

In “Sensing the Ascent,” published in Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies, I investigate the importance of the Prophet Muhammad’s physical body to his journey through the heavens in the introduction to Nizami’s Treasury of Mysteries.

In “I Too Desired a Child,” forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, I investigate the theological challenge celibacy creates for medieval Sufis who wish to valorize asceticism yet emulate the Prophet Muhammad.

Forthcoming and in-progress work on this topic includes Nizami’s use of animals as spiritual exemplars and the compilation and circulation of abridgments or “summaries” of Nizami’s Khamsa (quintet).

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In my teaching, I am interested in developing strategies to overcome student resistance to confronting their own biases. I have the most success when asking students to engage in roleplaying, embodied practices, or other naive learner activities that circumvent their defense mechanisms and prior ideological investments. I have written about the success of one student-designed ritual practice assignment in introductory classes. This assignment teaches students about the importance of embodied elements of religion while also revealing the limits of American religious freedom. This article comes with appendices that should allow other faculty to run this assignment in their class with little additional development. I invite anyone interested to read the article and adopt the assignment in their own classroom. I am also currently working on a piece about teaching definitions of religion to non-Religious Studies students.