In this piece, History professor Adnan Husain talks about using education to combat stereotypes, and he explains how universities provide us with the opportunity of learning from the past to build a better future

As a historian, my reflex is to look to the past to analyze contemporary conditions and understand recent experiences.  When I first began to study medieval European and Middle Eastern/Islamic History as a university student, I did not imagine that my preoccupations with how religious identities were formed through the interrelationships between Muslims, Christians and Jews in the pre-modern world would seem so relevant to so many others.  My interests at the time developed from a more personal perspective as a Muslim from a religiously observant family raised in North America.  I was seeking historical grounding for what seemed an eccentric problem—being what one scholar would later term a “Western Muslim.”   My exploration of inter-religious interaction was meant to satisfy an internal dialogue about identity and its diverse sources and to discover ways to integrate and reconcile disparate influences of my heritage and formation. Continue Reading »