'Teaching Against Culture' in Geography of Islam

摘要

This article explores various ways of how to challenge the "otherness" of Islam and Muslims when teaching geography of Islam. It suggests a critical project of "teaching against culture," which challenges essentializing notions of Islam as a monolith, and rather demonstrates the complexity of Muslim geographies and "lived" Islam. Furthermore, it implies examining the various identity categories and binaries such as secular-religious and West-East that come about in the classroom itself in the secular academic context of an urban state university. As such, the article engages in questions of significance to a wider set of courses on social and cultural geographies, geography of religion, and postcolonial geographies.