Meet The Students

Maryam

Maddie

Aya

Ananda

Sylvain

Nafisa

Marcos

Sela

Naba

Nicholas

Sophie

Maiss

Ashraf

Lubna

Bonnie

Alexis

Dr. Homayra Ziad, Course Instructor

Never Forget? Muslims, Islamophobia, and Dissent after 9/11

This is a community-engaged course and oral history project created and taught in partnership with the social justice organization Justice For Muslims Collective (JMC). We explore how diverse Muslim communities navigated and contested belonging and political and cultural agency in the context of 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, fiction, and online resources, students will learn about the impact of 9/11 on American Muslim communities, and Muslim cultural and political resistance to imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia.  The course will incorporate pedagogy from activism and organizing, in partnership with JMC. 

A key component of the course is the creation of an oral history archive to meet a community-defined need. There is a gap in the documentation of movement histories when it comes to early organizing by Muslim communities and communities perceived as Muslim in response to War on Terror policies like the Muslim registry. To meet this need, students will be trained to record resistance stories in Muslim communities in DC, MD, and VA. Through this partnership, students will participate in learning as an explicitly activist practice that will shape the future power-building, community organizing, and advocacy efforts of JMC and other justice organizations.