In what ways did pre-modern Muslims express their love and longing for the Prophet? This talk highlighted the variety of expressions of prophetic love among scholars of al-Andalus and the Maghrib, ranging from highly mystical commentaries upon his names and his supreme station to praise poems and eulogies dedicated to his blessed sandals.
Date: Thursday, November 30, 2017
Time: 6:00pm Reception; 6:30pm Talk
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College
Yousef Casewit is an Assistant Professor of Qur’anic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He specializes in the Qur’anic Studies, Andalusi and Maghribi intellectual history, and Sufism. He has several publications, including a critical edition of A Qurʾān Commentary by Ibn Barrajān of Seville (Brill TSQ Series, 2015). His study on Ibn Barrajan, The Mystics of al-Andalus, was published in April 2017. He is currently working on a critical edition, translation, and analytical examination of the “Commentary on the Beautiful Names of God” (Sharḥ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā) by the celebrated North African poet and gnostic ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (d. 690/1291). Born in Egypt and raised in Morocco, he is fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish. Yousef has traveled throughout the Islamic world, and has studied with Muslim scholars in Morocco, Syria, and Mauritania.
American Islamic College, along with other sponsors, hosted speakers with unique perspectives into the life of M. Cherif Bassiouni. The presentations offered an insight into his life as a scholar and activist, alongside with legacy of his work. David Scheffer from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Mansa Bilal Mark King, Professor of Sociology from Morehouse College, and Louise Cainkar, Professor of Sociology and Social Justice from Marquette University gave presentations. The forum provided opportunities to directly interact with the speakers and with the audience to build a better understanding of what the work of Professor Bassiouni meant to the Muslim community and to the rights of the oppressed.
Date: Sunday, November 12, 2017
Time: 2pm – 5pm
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College
Address: 640 W. Irving Park Rd, Chicago, IL 60613
Additional Parking: 613 W. Bittersweet Place
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
David Scheffer, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
“Cherif Bassiouni: The Oracle of International Criminal Law”
Mansa Bilal Mark King, Sociology, Morehouse College
“Observations on the international decade for people of African descent”
Louise Cainkar, Sociology & Social Justice, Marquette University
“Seeking Justice for the Silenced: From the Middle East to the USA”
How have Syrians lived the uprising and war transforming their country? We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria tells this story exclusively through the voices of Syrians themselves. Based on interviews that the author conducted with more than 300 Syrian refugees across the Middle East and Europe since 2012, the book is a mosaic of personal reflections that together form a testament to the courage and resilience of the Syrian people.
Date: Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Time: 6:00pm Reception; 6:30pm Talk
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College
“An essential addition to the emerging body of literary reportage from Syria in English.”
New York Times Book Review
“A powerful must read book for anyone wanting to understand what’s happening in Syria and why it matters.”
Chicago Review of Books
“Everyone talks about Syrians, but very few actually talk to them … We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled bucks the trend … These heart-stopping tales of torment and triumph are perfectly enchained, chronologically and thematically, to reflect the course of the crisis.”
The Guardian
A book signing will follow the lecture. The author is selling them with a generous discount of $15. Please plan to bring cash or check!
Wendy Pearlman is the Martin and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she specializes in the comparative politics of the Middle East. She is the author of three books, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins 2017), Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada(Nation Books, 2003), as well as dozens of essays, academic articles, or book chapters. Pearlman holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Georgetown, and a PhD from Harvard. She speaks Arabic and has studied or conducted research in Spain, Germany, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Timothy Gutmann’s talk has three parts: discussing modern social and political work that he is calling progressive power, exploring visions of universal education of 19th and 20th-century Egyptian ʿulamāʾ, and understanding the changes these made to older norms of knowledge and learning. The presentation asks to think beyond the opposition of old and new and about modernizing processes understand and use tradition.
Date: Thursday, October 26, 2016
Time: 6:00pm Reception; 6:30pm Talk
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College
Timothy Gutmann is an advanced PhD candidate in religion at the University of Chicago. His dissertation is titled “Conscripting Tradition: Islam, Confucianism, Modernity” about how modernizing processes interpret and change older understandings. His research and teaching focus on East Asian and Islamic traditions. He teaches at St Francis College in Brooklyn, New York.
On Saturday, October 7, 2018 American Islamic College hosted a day of community building and art in partenership with One Chicago. Attendees enjoyed a day of artist workshops for the whole family and a special basketball clinic hosted by Muslim activist and basketball player Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir!
On the evening they enjoyed a jam packed performance of dance, music, storytelling, poetry, and much more. Thank you for helping us celebrate the richness and diversity within the Muslim artist community.
Basketball
2pm – 3pm: Join Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, first hijabi to play at the collegiate basketball level, and recognized by former President, Barack Obama, as an inspiration to girls and young women around the globe as she leads a Basketball Clinic for ages 10 and up. She will be teaching fundamental skills and drills. All levels of experience welcome!
Detroit Jit
3pm-4pm: Join international dancer and educator, Haleem “Stringz” Rasul, as he teaches a movement workshop focused on the “Detroit Jit”. The Jit is a dance originating from Detroit, characterized by a combustion of intricate, high energy footwork, kicks, wiggles, shuffles, and arm syncopations that can be taken to the floor in order to create an even more dynamic aesthetic. Not only will you learn fundamentals such as foundation exercises, short footwork combinations and shuffle patterns, you will learn about the history of this energetic dance! Ages 10 and up. All levels of experience welcome.
Breakin’
4pm-5pm: Join Mary Mar, “B-Girl Mama”, a nationally recognized female, hijabi , break dancer, choreographer, and teacher hailing from Detroit, for an energetic workshop in the hip-hop dance form known as Breakin’. You will learn the elements of this exciting dance form including basic structure of a breakin’ set, including top rock, go downs, ground moves, and freezes. Ages 10 and up. All levels of experience welcome.
Poppin’/Tutting
5pm-6pm: Join Amirah Sackett international dancer, choreographer, and teacher and creator of “We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic” as she teaches the funk of dance originating from the West Coast called Popping. Learn basic popping techniques including dime stopping, robot, and tutting, a dance based on creating geometric shapes and illusions with the arms and body. Ages 10 and up. All levels of experience welcome.
Writing
3:30 to 4 & 5:30 to 6 pm: Join Gulnaz is a Desi-American-Muslim nonfiction writer whose work has been published by the Georgia Review, Brain Mill Press Voices, and the Huffington Post. She co-found and writes for Mixed Company. She has a MS in Journalism, with a concentration in magazine writing, from Northwestern University.
Rap
4 pm – 5 pm – Join Alia Sharrief, female emcee from California, as she leads a workshop to create your own rap! She will share her techniques for creating rhythm and poetry to express yourself in one hour, culminating in you performing your rap to the class if you feel so inclined! All ages and experience welcome!
Visual Art
2-6 pm LIVE ART with Bazigha Tufail Khan in the main lobby! Bazigha Khan is an mixed media painter who utilizes vibrant colors and textures to give her work a modern take on the traditional art forms of calligraphy, Islamic geometric design and illumination. Inspired by her travels to different parts of the world, Khan has grown a special affinity for Islamic and Persian art styles and incorporates them into her work.Instagram: @dramabazi
Hisham Mahmoud has studied theology, hadith, legal theory, jurisprudence, ethics, Qur’anic recitation, and Arabic with scholars in Morocco, Mauritania, and Egypt.
His first forthcoming work will be entitled, “A Portrait of the Prophet,” which is a translation of one of the most important compilations of the personal qualities of the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم. He has lectured internationally on the Islamic sciences and on world religions, and continues to read with scholars and students in the United States.
Hisham Mahmoud taught for more than a decade at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard Universities. More recently, he founded Lanturna, a national, non-profit educational institution that intends to establish learning collectives across the country to enhance personal lifestyle and enrich community living. Currently, he resides in Pennsylvania with his wife and two children.
American Islamic College
640 W. Irving Park Rd.
Chicago, IL 60613
4:30PM – 7:00PM
Main Building
Additional Parking located in the rear: 613 W. Bittersweet Place
Please RSVP at development@aicusa.edu
Traditional or Business Attire
Adults only program
On Tuesday, September 12th, AIC welcomed Dr. Maliha Chishti, who spoke on “Islam, Pluralism, & Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan.” She opened with a thought-provoking question on “Why liberal peacebuilding by way of international interventions seem to fail?” She went on to discuss the myriad of statistics that reveal that western aid outside of development work, do little to build conflict-torn countries. Dr. Chishti believes that the giving of aid is more ideological than humanitarian or developmental in its process and implementation. She advocates for a more pluralistic standpoint when discussing ways to provide aid that will be beneficial and helpful to those needing it. She urges for a democratization of the peacebuilding process where local Afghans are invited to take part in the aid discussion with international partners, as their voices are currently not included. More than that, she suggests not getting involved at all and allowing for local and/or non-profit organizations both within and outside their borders to address the concerns of its citizens in a healthy and insightful way.
Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Time: 6:00pm Light Refreshments; 6:30pm Talk
Where: Conference Hall, Main Bldg, American Islamic College
Maliha Chishti is a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Martin Marty Center where she is furthering her research on the opportunities and challenges to peacebuilding in Muslim-majority contexts. Her focus is on the role of religion, traditional authority and the politics of mulitivocality and pluralism in post-conflict contexts. Her research draws upon anticolonial and postcolonial thought to investigate broader, inclusive and more locally relevant approaches to building peace in non-western contexts, with a specific emphasis on Afghanistan. Dr. Chishti’s research responds to the current crisis of liberal peacebuilding and questions why the process of rebuilding war-affected Muslim societies remains a peculiarly distant and inaccessible project for the majority of the poorest, traditional, rural, and often non-English speaking population, arguing that the current emphasis on supporting greater local control is not enough, until and unless the politics of difference, multivocality and pluralism are meaningfully addressed.
Northwestern University’s Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa held a conference on Islamic art and manuscripts. Special guests, Nuria Garcia Masip & Mohamed Ahmed Salem shared their expertise in the art of Arabic Calligraphy with a lecture and workshop at AIC.
The aim of this workshop is to familiarize participants with the main elements present in Islamic calligraphy. The workshop will be hands-on practice and participants will be introduced to the traditional materials, system of proportions, and main aesthetic elements of calligraphy. This is a unique opportunity to participate in a workshop done by two masters of two different schools of Islamic calligraphy, and appreciate the different approaches and styles that characterize this rich tradition
One-time registration fee of $15/person covers cost of supplies, which will be offered in class. [Sold out!]
For questions, please contact Romana at programs@aicusa.edu or 773.281.4700 x.202
JULY 22, 2017. A unique international gathering of specialists will convene for a workshop: “Working with Islamic manuscripts in Africa” on the Northwestern campus for seven days, beginning August 13th. They will be studying a literary tradition that was not even known to exist 50 years ago, when the eminent British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, declared that Africa had no history, only the history of Europe in Africa, since there was no written record in Africa’s past. Since then, tens of thousands of manuscripts – some say they number in the hundreds of thousands – have been discovered. Today, much of the world has heard of the endangered manuscripts of Timbuktu that were threatened in 2012 by Islamic extremists; what is not so well known is that the Timbuktu manuscripts are but a fragment of a literary heritage that stretches across West Africa to East Africa and down that coast to Mozambique. Robert Launay, speaking for the sponsoring Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, explains: “This conference will be a valuable opportunity to expose scholars and laypersons alike to the rich heritage of Islamic writing in Africa. It also will serve to remind all of us, in these troubled times, that Islamic culture in Africa and elsewhere has a long history of peaceful, philosophical and introspective thought, to say nothing of the significance of Arabic in Africa where it was used to record African languages.”
Northwestern, in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana, the American Islamic College, and the University of Hamburg Center for Manuscript Studies, and with the help of the Field Museum, Newberry Library, and the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, will host fifteen US researchers and librarians for the workshop. Their teachers will be eight curators from African manuscript libraries and an international group of specialists from Paris, Cape Town, Hamburg and a half-dozen US universities. The African curators, coming from Senegal, Ghana, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zanzibar and Mozambique, will then hold a three-day workshop of their own to craft an open-access electronic international database of African manuscripts. For the general public, the American Islamic College will hold a three-day course on calligraphy August 17-19, beginning with a public lecture on “The Art of Islamic calligraphy: Scripts and Transmission” taught by two internationally acclaimed calligraphers, from Paris and Mauritania.
Several international workshops on the materiality of Islamic manuscripts, known as ‘codicology’ (the study of papers, inks, format, and structure), have taken place during the past five years. This is the first to bring together the African curators and the end-users of their manuscripts in the U.S. to educate each other about this newly discovered African literature. One focus will be on the African languages that were transcribed in the Arabic script and that make up nearly 15% of all manuscripts uncovered to date. Another focus will be the ongoing discovery of yet more of this literary heritage once said to not exist, and how to make it accessible to students of Africa.
For more information contact:
Rebecca Shereikis,
Associate Director r-shereikis@northwestern.edu
Institute for the Study of Islam in Africa
Program of African Studies
Northwestern University
Romana Manzoor,
Director of College Programs programs@aicusa.edu
American Islamic College
I was pleased and overwhelmed to have completed the defense of my Master’s thesis – “The Muslim American Fight for Social Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.” It came at the end of months of research and interviews, but was also the culmination of so many important courses I had taken at AIC. From Islam and the West, History of Islamic Civilization, Islam and the African American Experience, Islam and Gender Studies, Quranic Studies, Islamic Ethics and Spirituality, Islamic Political Thought, Prophetic Biography and more – all were courses I drew upon to tell a history and provide an analysis of the Muslim American community that has an untold history of fighting for social justice.
The professors I had were all leaders in their fields and conveyed deep knowledge of their subjects while challenging me to grapple with the material in new ways.
My experience in completing the thesis reflected my experience at AIC. I was accepted and challenged to embrace both a wide body of knowledge in the Islamic world and the diverse cultures in which that knowledge can be found, even here in our own country.
I would not have been successful at completing my degree without the warm, welcoming, diverse, academically challenging, and Muslim American centered atmosphere and staff at AIC. The only regret I have is that I can’t do it again.
By Bill Chambers, MA Islamic Studies
American Islamic College, Class of 2017
Khizr Khan, Constitutional Rights Advocate, Gold Star parent, and Muslim American patriot was born in Pakistan where he attended Punjab University and its University Law School. He was licensed to practice law in 1974. He subsequently moved to UAE and later to the United States where he graduated with an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School in 1986.
Khizr Khan is licensed to practice law in Washington, DC, New York, and the Federal District Courts, Southern and Western Districts of New York. He is a member of the American Bar Association, DC Bar Association, and New York State Bar Association and specializes in Commercial Civil Litigation Electronic Discovery and Health Privacy Law Compliance.
Together with Ghazala Khan he is the proud parent of three sons including the late US Army Captain Humayun Khan, and the Khans have four grandchildren.
Imam Tariq I. El-Amin has served as the Resident Imam of Masjid Al-Taqwa, in Chicago IL since 2014, and is dedicated to addressing the concerns of underserved communities within the Chicagoland area through service, activism, and education, paying special attention to youth development.
In the past, Tariq has served as an appointee to former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s Muslim Advisory Council, and is the past Convener of the Chicagoland Shura Council (the gathering of masaajid and organizations in the community of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed). He also is a board member of The Abolition Institute, and Determined To Be Upright. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of Bridging The Gap, Inc, a nonprofit organization which provides educational, service, and developmental programming.
When he’s not engaged in community work, Tariq enjoys spending time with his wife of 17 years, and their three teenage daughters.
