SCOPE OF PROJECT & CURRICULUM

In partnership with the social justice organization Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) and co-created and taught with Darakshan Raja, co-Founder/Director of JMC, this community-engaged course and oral history project explored how diverse Muslim communities navigated and contested belonging and political and cultural agency amidst state-sponsored violence and national debates on race, gender, citizenship and national security after 9/11 and during the ongoing War on Terror.

Through history, ethnography, first-person narratives, film, and online resources, students learned about the impact of 9/11 on American Muslim communities. This includes cultural and political resistance to imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia as well as to intersectional inequities within Muslim communities that were intensified in the context of Islamophobia.

  • Learning Goal #1

    Students will understand the impact and significance of 9/11 on American Muslim communities in the following areas: Surveillance, detention, immigrant rights, militarism, terrorism prosecutions, and gendered Islamophobia.

  • Learning Goal #2

    Students will understand what Islamophobia means and how it manifests, including the difference between interpersonal and structural Islamophobia. Students will understand Islamophobia in the U.S. as an outgrowth of American militarism and empire-building, and will also be introduced to Islamophobia as gendered.

  • Learning Goal #3

    Students will understand through secondary sources and first-hand accounts how Muslim activism, advocacy and organizing has been impacted by and has impacted the legacy of 9/11.

  • Learning Goal #4

    Students will have developed skills and resources for advocacy and allyship for Muslim communities. Students will also learn about power-building and community organizing. Workshops will be adapted from Muslims For Just Futures ’s Muslim Women’s Organizing Institute Organizing Curriculum created by Darakshan Raja.

  • Learning Goal #5

    Students will learn how to do, and will complete, an oral history project for Justice For Muslims Collectives’ War on Terror Resistance Archives. The project will focus on individuals in the DC, MD, and VA region and on ways in which 9/11 policies impacted local Muslim communities and the work to tackle organizing and advocacy at the local, national, and federal level. The oral histories will be added to the Muslim Abolitionist Futures microsite.

  • Learning Goal #6

    Students will learn about community activism and organizing from MJF and complete a participatory action research project with the organization. This project will contribute to an oral history archive to address gaps in the documentation of movement histories when it comes to early organizing against War on Terror policies by Muslim communities and communities racialized or perceived as Muslim.