Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM (Chicago Time)
Venue: Online via Zoom

How do Muslims in China live, worship, and sustain their traditions under a Communist one-party state?

In this talk, Dr. Michael Brose explores how Islam has taken shape within the People’s Republic of China—a state that formally guarantees “freedom of religion” while still regarding faith as “the opiate of the people.”
Dr. Brose will introduce China’s ten officially recognized Muslim ethnic groups—including the Hui, Uyghur, Kazakh, Dongxiang, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan, Tatar, and Kyrgyz—and discuss where they live, how they differ in culture and language, and how they practice their faith in modern China.

The lecture will also consider how China’s broader project of Sinicization—building a unified national identity centered on Han culture—shapes religious and ethnic life. Islam, with its global connections and strong communal identity, presents a unique challenge to this effort.
Two key regions illustrate these contrasting experiences:

Xinjiang: Home to the Turkic Uyghurs, whose history, language, and Islamic identity have come under intense state control and repression. (Read more)
Yunnan: A region where Chinese-speaking Hui Muslims maintain deep trade and cultural links with Southeast Asia, offering a different example of how Islam coexists with Chinese society. (Read more)
By comparing these two cases, Dr. Brose sheds light on how Islamic identity and practice have evolved under Communist rule and how Muslim communities continue to navigate faith, ethnicity, and belonging in modern China.

Dr. Michael Brose is a Professor of Practice in Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

His research bridges Chinese history, Central Eurasian Studies, and Islamic studies, with a focus on the Hui Muslim communities of Yunnan Province. His work examines mosque architecture, the halal food industry, and the political economy of Muslim life in contemporary China.
Dr. Brose is also active in digital history, using GIS and network analysis to study data from Chinese historical sources such as gazetteers and tomb inscriptions.

His publications include:
– “China and Transregional Halal Circuits” (Review of Religion and Chinese Society)
– “Permitted and Pure: Packaged Halal Snack Food from Southwest China” (International Journal of Food Design)
– “Globalization and the Chinese Muslim Community in Southwest China” (Asia Pacific: Perspectives)

He has also written on Mongol and Ming history and on the Uyghur elites of medieval China, combining quantitative and historical methods to study social networks across Eurasia.

Date: Monday, September 22, 2025
Time: 6:30 PM on Zoom
Venue: Online via Zoom

Registration (Required):
Free livestream. Please register to receive link.

Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

He obtained his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and previously was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Global Institute.

Dr. Hashemi was previously the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. While there, he was also Co-Director of the Religion and International Affairs certificate program, as well as the Political Theory Initiative.

His intellectual and research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, in particular debates on the global rise of authoritarianism, religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, Middle East and Islamic politics, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies and Islam-West relations.

He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Routledge, 2023).

He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook on Islam and Secularism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and his next book project focuses on explaining the global divide over Israel/Palestine.

He is frequently interviewed by PBS, NPR, CNN, CBC, Al Jazeera, Alternative Radio, Pacifica Radio and the BBC and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Al Jazeera Online, CNN.com among other media outlets.

He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

Learn more about him here.

Date: Thursday, May 8, 2025
Time: 6:30 PM Light Reception | 7:00 PM Talk
Library, American Islamic College

Omer Awass is an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American Islamic College in Chicago, IL. His current research interests center on religion, modernity, and globalization. He has been carrying out field research on contemporary fatwas across the Muslim world to assess how they are negotiating their postcolonial realities. His book Fatwa and the Making and Renewal of Islamic Law is published by Cambridge University Press (2023). Read More >

Kholoud al-Ajarma is Alwaleed Lecturer in the Globalised Muslim World and Deputy Director of the Alwaleed Centre, University of Edinburgh.

Kholoud holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Comparative Study of Religion from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Her PhD thesis focused on the socio-cultural embeddedness of Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj) in Moroccan everyday life. During her Ph.D. studies, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Groningen and delivered several courses including ‘Anthropology of Muslim Societies’, ‘Islam: History, Sources, and Practices’, and ‘Minorities in Contemporary Europe’. Her current research focuses on water resource management and contemporary environmental concerns in the Muslim World.

Kholoud received her MA in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from Coventry University (UK) and her Mphil in Anthropology and Development from the University of Bergen (Norway). In addition to her academic experience in anthropology and religion, Kholoud has worked in the fields of refugee studies, gender, youth development, migration, human rights, and environmental justice in several countries of the Mediterranean region including Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. She was a Chevening visiting fellow at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) and peace fellow of the MENA cohort fellowship programme of the United Nations Allience of Civilizations (UNAOC).

Kholoud is also an award-winning photographer and film-maker who has extensive experience developing and leading programs and projects among refugee communities, including innovative platforms for human rights research and media production among young refugee youth. Full bio.