The Quran in the American Imagination
The Quran is one of the most iconic objects in American debates about racial and religious tolerance. Is the Quran a “good book”? Is it like the Bible and other scriptures? Or is its message more violent, more misogynistic, more intolerant? Or is the danger in the power readers ascribe to the book? Tracking the Quran’s social life as an American culture-object, anthropologist Zareena Grewal provides a window into today’s culture wars.
Zareena Grewal, associate professor of American studies, Religious studies, and Middle East studies at Yale University, is a renowned scholar of Islam in the US, the author of an award-winning book, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority, and a documentary filmmaker, By the Dawn’s Early Light: Chris Jackson’s Journey to Islam.
This program is co- sponsored by the Scripps Humanities Institute and the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities .