Category: Islam - JASON IDRISS SPARKES

Lots of news to share

1/6/2025

It has taken me two years to get fully into the flow as Assistant Professort of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University. While it has been a pleasure getting used to my life with my family in Saudi Arabia, it has also kept me extremely busy. That is why I have not been posting here as often as I should. Hopefully, this will change now (in sha Allah)! Anyway, here is an update:

New academic publications:

A review of the following book by Walaa Quisay: Neotraditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality and Politicshttps://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/939072/pdf
An encyclopedia article entitled "Sufi Groups in North America: A History," published in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.1153

I will make another post about my updated Youtube page...

Sacred Montreal

9/13/2022

Here is another of my Islamic poems chanted and recorded live and lo-fi last weekend:

Islamic Chant in English

9/6/2022

This (We Praise and Glorify the One) is the unedited recording of the first time I performed this poem from a series of Islamic chants I have been working on. It was recorded on August 28th, 2022, at the wonderful zawiya of Sidi Nezar, in Mississauga. The performance still needs to be fine-tuned but it was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed singing it together for Allah's sake.

Expressions of Sufism in Canada

2/4/2022

Honoured to have co-written a chapter with my mentor Meena Sharify-Funk, on Sufism in Canada, in a book edited and written by so many esteemed friends and colleagues.

This is the book:
Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality, and Politics

Graduation and Dissertation Results

10/7/2020

It has been a busy few months as you can see from the following summary of my activities:

successfully completed the Joint Laurier-Waterloo PhD in Religious Studies, with a concentration in Religious Diversity of North America
successfully defended dissertation, "Tradition as Flow: Decolonial Currents in the Muslim Atlantic," in May 2020
dissertation published online: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/2300/
will be recognized at the upcoming Fall 2020 convocation ceremony
recipient of the Award for Outstanding Work at the Graduate Level by the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Laurier University
for the public presentation of dissertation findings, published a series of five videos online: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC-Hd5dnAtd0U5wwbuwm2UKVMF8wyL-yt (the last video is now posted)

Dissertation Findings Video 4

9/2/2020

My Dissertation is Available Online

8/28/2020

My dissertation has been published online. To access it, please click here: Tradition as Flow: Decolonial Currents in the Muslim Atlantic.

Dissertation Findings Videos 2 and 3

7/11/2020

Here are videos 2 and 3 from the series summarizing my dissertation findings:

Dissertation Findings Video 1

6/12/2020

Here is video 1 of 5 presenting my dissertation findings. Yes, I successfully defended my dissertation on May 26th, 2020 (al-hamdulilah). The full text of the dissertation will be published and made available online this summer (in sha Allah). In the meantime, I am publishing videos presenting my research findings. Stay posted in the coming weeks for the other 4 videos of this series. Comments and questions are welcome. Enjoy!

Scenes from Morocco and Spain

10/19/2019

Here is a slideshow with photos from my travels in Morocco and Southern Spain in 2018 and 2019. Enjoy!