I am honoured to be teaching this summer course in Morocco with my mentor and friend, Professor Ali Zaidi.

It is a full-credit course for Laurier University undergraduates , offered jointly by the Global Studies Department and the Department of Religion and Culture.

Overview:

​Spring 2019, May  20-24 at Laurier
June 1-18 in Morocco

Stay in the capital, Rabat

Take excursions to Casablanca, Tangiers, Fez, Meknes, and UNESCO sites

Experience Ramadan and Eid during 5-day homestay

Witness the effects of coloniality, capitalism and the refugee-crisis

There are still some places left in the course I will be teaching next winter (in sha Allah), but I am glad to see it is filling up fast. I am really happy to be teaching this course. I think teaching intro level courses is a really important part of an academic's tasks. These courses can lay the foundations of so much in the lives of the learners. It was an intro to Islam course taught by my dear mentor Sheila McDonough nearly three decades ago that opened the way to my becoming a specialist in Muslim Studies.

Here is the description from the Laurier University website:
​MZ200
Introduction to Muslim Studies
0.5 Credit
This course provides an overview of the aims, methods, and central issues in the Muslim Studies field. In particular it will investigate the diversity of contemporary Muslims, ideational currents that are influencing them, and the major debates about Islamic identity.

Sorry I haven't been keeping this page updated lately. I have been so busy with fieldwork, research, teaching, and all the other aspects related to the academic life, that I have neglected my online duties. The slideshow below gives you an indication of some of the things I have been up to. Hopefully, more detailed entries related to the activities presented in these selfies will come soon.

My book review of The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam, by Jerry Brotton, has just been published in Nūr: The Newsletter of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies — Fall 2017 (Vol. 3, No. 1). The Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, at  St. Bonaventure University, is directed by Fr. Michael D. Calabria, OFM, PhD. I had the pleasure of meeting him last April, at  the Annual Meeting of the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion. That is when he suggested I write a review of this book. 
http://www.sbu.edu/docs/default-source/franciscan-institute2/Center-for-Arab-Islamic-Studies/nur-fall-2017.pdf?sfvrsn=0

I had lost hope that this book chapter would get published, but I have the book in my hands at last!
​J'ai enfin entre les mains une copie du livre dans lequel un article que j'ai écrit en 2012 a été publié! J'avais perdu espoir que cette publication verrait le jour, mais j'avais tort! Voici l'information bibliographique :

Sparkes, Jason. “Analyse comparative de la doctrine et des pratiques contemporaines de la voie soufie Burhaniya dans le monde arabe et en Occident.” Migrations et croyances : entre inculturation et acculturation, Samia Amor, Denitsa Tsvetkova et Patrice Brodeur (dir.), 123–43. Montréal: Association francophone pour le savoir-Acfas, 2016.

Problematizing Religious Diversity in A Secular Age was an interdisciplinary academic conference sponsored by McGill’s Center for Research on Religion. It was held last week from September 14 to 16, 2017, at McGill University in  Montreal.

​It was a pleasure to attend the keynote event, Charles Taylor and Rowan Williams in Conversation, as well as the various other events, including wonderful graduate student panels. I presented a paper in one of these panels entitled Decolonizing Secularization. 

I am presenting a paper today at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the CSSR, part of the broader Congress of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Science, held this year at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Title of presentation:
Decolonizing Canadian Diversity: A View from the Internal Muslim Periphery

Abstract:
This paper examines human diversity in Canada from a decolonial Muslim perspective. First, it
examines the thought of Ramón Grosfoguel (UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies). He contends that
while post-colonialism represents a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism, decolonialism adopts
peripheral epistemologies to critique the modern/colonial world-system. Grosfoguel challenges
Muslim academics like the author of this paper to think critically from an Islamic perspective
rather than simply to think about Islam. Second, this paper applies Grosfoguel’s framework to
Canadian Muslims, situating them as one of many peripheral minorities living in the core of the
world-system. Eurocentric depictions divide Muslims into anti-modern fundamentalists and
progressive modernists. Unfortunately, many Muslims adopt these categories. Instead, this paper
argues that Canadian Muslims must reject such binaries and draw upon the dynamic, adaptable,
and pluralistic dimensions of their tradition to help build a decolonial future, in solidarity with
other peripheral communities, from far and wide.

If we examine North American Islam from a social science and humanities angle, using the usual Eurocentric intellectual canon, we will end up asking very different questions than if we draw upon a canon of Muslim authors. In the first case we will enter a mandatory conversation with authors like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci, Hodgson, Schimmel, Lewis, and Esposito. In the second case, we might choose from a list of names like ʿAbd al-Qâdir al-Jazâʾirî, `Abd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyā (René Guénon), Seyyed Hossein Nasr, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), Abdal Hakim Murad (Timothy Winter), Aisha Al Adawiyya,  Hamza Yusuf, Zaid Shakir, Anse Tamara Grey, and Hatem Bazian. Authors from both lists offer penetrating insight and rich conceptual tools for scholars of North American Islam. But they address similar issues in very different ways because they have very different concerns.

I am scheduled to participate in a a multidisciplinary panel of undergraduate and graduate students during the Religion and Culture collaborative student colloquium, “Cultural Appropriation/Cultural Representation.” As a convert to Islam who spends most of his time with North Africans, this is an issue I think about a lot. I look forward to exploring it with my peers.
Date: Fri Jan 20, 2017
Time: 12:00 – 1:20 p.m.
Place: The Paul Martin Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.