Symposium on Jewish-Muslim Entanglements

With emerging societal divisions and reshaped university policies on academic freedom, inclusivity, and dialogue, Jewish and Muslim students, faculty, and staff are facing increasing polarization, hostility, and institutional challenges. This symposium seeks to reframe these tensions by exploring the deep, intertwined histories of Jewish and Muslim communities—histories marked by both collaboration and conflict. By drawing on these shared pasts, we aim to develop strategies that foster inclusivity, combat racism, and reduce ethnic and religious intolerance in academic spaces. 


The symposium will consist of four sessions that focus on Judeo-Muslim Entanglements in the Middle Ages; Jewish-Muslim Life in the Present; Interrogating Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Blackness; and Zionism and the Christian Right. The papers presented in the symposium will be developed into short book chapters that will be published as an edited volume (anticipated as a contribution to the "Darom: Global Self-Perspectives in Jewish Studies" series at Wayne State University Press). The editors will be Mostafa Hussein, Bryan K. Roby, Adi Saleem, and Rebecca Wollenberg.



Judeo-Muslim Entanglements and Coconstruction

Available Seats 15
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Michigan League, Koessler Room
Aaron Rock-Singer, Walid Saleh, Elisha Russ-Fishbane

The study of Jewish-Muslim engagement is often framed as an affective history. That is, contemporary scholarship frequently characterizes historical relations between Jewish and Muslim communities in emotional terms. Thus evaluating interactions based on the affection or antipathy expressed by religious authorities towards other communities. How a society treats its religious minorities often has dramatic and lasting historical implications. Yet, at least when it comes to the intertwined histories of Judaism and Islam, the attitudes of religious authorities, or even those of local practitioners, do not determine to what extent two religious communities become intellectually entangled and come to coproduce religious and cultural imaginaries. In many cases, even practitioners and thinkers who were ostensibly at odds with one another developed shared religious and cultural vernaculars that influenced the communal imaginaries of all players. 

This session explores examples of shared Jewish-Muslim religious, scriptural, cultural vernaculars and how these historical cases can (and cannot) function to open up new affordances for the way university communities imagine the function of religion in general and Jewish and Muslim practitioners as contributors to campus life in particular. This session will also consider the ways in which these historical models might open up new ways of thinking about modern questions of intellectual pluralism within the university.


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