The last two blog posts were about specific sessions that I went to but instead of giving reviews of all the individual sessions I attended, I’d like to give my thoughts about ISNA 2007 in general.
Alhamdullilah, I thought it went pretty well.
A theme that I found while spending most of my time in Meet the Author sessions is that Muslims need to step up and be part of the intellectual spectrum present in the U.S. and in the world. It’s evident that Muslims have lost their place among the intellectual elite, not to say that there isn’t work being done. For instance, Zaytuna has done quite a bit in this realm.
In his Meet the Author session for his book, A Muslim in Victorian America: The Story of Alexander Russell Webb, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah said that he wrote the book for us and that his book is merely the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ indicating that further research can be conducted on Alexander Russell Webb, someone who seemed to be around many major historical events in the U.S. in his time period.
Ebrahim Moosa discussed his book Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination in which he argues that Ghazali “provides a sorely needed model for a cosmopolitan intellectural renewal among Muslims.”
Even in the session for Lost History, author Michael Morgan admitted that his sources were limited because he doesn’t know Arabic, Urdu, and other languages needed to gather material from primary sources firsthand.
I came away from ISNA really feeling the need to do improve myself and just try to learn because there is so much out there that Muslims need to educate themselves about in order to begin the process of contributing to the “intellectual renewal” as Moosa calls it.
In the end, I learned a lot, had a really good time, and met some interesting people. Perhaps I will attend next year as well.
Check out The New York Times about ISNA: Abandon Stereotypes, Muslims in America Say
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