Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Salaam and hello dear listeners, and welcome to History Speaks. It's truly a pleasure to bring both the work and the person of Deanna Wommack to you today. Deanna is an associate professor of History of Religions and Interfaith Studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.
Deanna and I began our academic journey Atlanta around the same time when she first moved here. She reached out, and I've been grateful ever since for her company and friendship.
Even with our busy lives, we've managed to stay connected, sharing ideas, inviting each other to our campuses, and building conversations across our institutions.
Those exchanges have been deeply meaningful to me.
One summer I had the Joy of teaching an Introduction to Islam course at Emory, still one of my favorite group of students to have taught. And around the time Deanna invited me to write the afterword of her book, Neighbors, Christians and Muslims Building Community.
That invitation also meant a great deal to me, and it reflects the kind of thoughtful, collaborative scholar she is.
I'll say something honestly. As someone who works within the study of Islam, I sometimes find myself wondering about those who study and teach Islam from outside the tradition.
But I say this with full confidence. Deanna approaches her work with care, rigor, and good faith. It shows in her scholarship, and it shows in how she engages others.
Today we are here to talk about her most recent book, Reinventing Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia. Published by Oxford University Press in May 2025.
The book examines the history of Protestant discourse about Islam and Muslims, the with a particular focus on gender.
Before we begin our conversation, I wanted to pause for just a moment on the title. I often tell my students that a strong title does important work. It should stay with the reader and clearly signal the book's contribution. Diana's title does exactly that. It tells us that Islam as understood in America has been shaped, reinvented, and thought through specific historical actors and perspectives, and that gender plays a central role in that process.
This is not just a work of academic history, though it is certainly that. It is also a book that helps us think about how these inherited narratives continue to shape perceptions today and how we might begin to move beyond them.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Without further ado, Deanna, the title of the book is Reinventing Islam and the Concept of Reinventing or Repeatedly Reshaping Earlier Ideas about Islam for new purposes appears throughout the book.
Could you explain the concept of reinventing Islam and why it is important for understanding the full history of Protestant engagement with Islam?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Thank you so much Roshan for having me on the podcast. I'm really delighted to be talking with you about my book.
So the concept of reinventing Islam, or my thinking about it, began with my desire to better understand the historical thought patterns that have contributed to present day Islamophobia in the US and my desire to learn from this history new ways to advance Christian Muslim relations. Here I wanted to trace the roots of Protestant ideas about Islam and gender, particularly because of the stereotypes that are so ingrained in American Protestant culture that all Muslim women are oppressed or all Muslim men are dangerous and oppressive. Those kinds of stereotypes and because of my previous research on American missionaries in 19th century Syria and Lebanon, I knew that missionaries during that period were a major source from which Americans received their ideas about Muslims. So I find in the book that assumptions about masculine and feminine behavior, behavioral norms, guided Protestant approaches to Islam. And I argue that missionary messaging especially seeded the soil for Islamophobia to emerge in the late 20th century.
So in terms of reinventing Islam, I describe this reinvention as a process of adapting, adopting and recycling ideas about Muslims that Protestants and inherited from previous generations and reused for new purposes. For example, in the book's second chapter, I look at ways that the first Protestants reshaped existing Catholic ideas about Islam in order to uphold the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. Some of the references to Muslims, for example, were meant as a critique of Catholicism and weren't really directed toward Islam at all.
In the central chapters of the book, I then consider how missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries reframed the images of Islam and that they inherited from the Reformers. And as the Enlightenment era brought new understandings of Western womanhood, this played a role in the ways ideas about Muslim women especially were reinvented. So then they were being portrayed as oppressed and needing salvation.
And now it's also important to note that many missionary discourses, although they were recycled often from earlier and sometimes completely inaccurate Christian sources, others were based on Islamic texts or on missionaries personal encounters with Muslims. So there can be positive reinventions that humanize rather than cast judgment. And along these lines, I should also mention that of course Western Christians were not the only ones shaping ideas about Islam, but Muslim reform movements, for example, have done the same. So recognizing this, I think it's important to understand the purposes and motivations behind the ways that we reshape existing portrayals, whether it be of our own religious traditions or of others.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's what I found so fascinating in your book. And to reiterate what you just said it is not invention out of nothing. It is recycling, reframing, sometimes even repackaging older ideas so that they make sense in a new political or social context.
And that's why this concept really matters for understanding Protestant engagement with Islam. Because what we see over and over again in your book is that Protestant thinkers, missionaries and writers weren't just describing Islam. They were working with a set of inherited ideas, then reshaping them to fit their own concerns, whether against, like Catholicism or, you know, saying something about Islam, whether that was gender, empire, morality or theology. So the story isn't static, it's layered. It evolves. And that is what is so fascinating about your work. But I also want to say, and I think it's important for intellectual honesty, something that you ended with, which is that, you know, Muslims also have repackaged Islam, that the process of reinventing isn't something that only happens from the outside. It happens within Muslim communities too. So let me give you a concrete example from Pakistan, where I am from. In the late 1970s and 80s, under Zial Haq, who came into power after a coup, there was a state led effort to Islamicize the country.
But what that meant in practice was a very particular version of Islam being elevated and institutionalized.
With significant support from Saudi Arabia and the petrodollars that come from Saudi Arabia. There was a massive funding for madrasas, which is like Islamic schools that promoted more rigid and scripturalist interpretations.
Now, for many families, these school provided a real service, free education, housing, food. But at the same time they were also reshaping or rethinking what counted as Islam. They were promoting interpretations that were quite different from the more Sufi inflected, locally rooted practices that had been long been part of Pakistan's religious life. So again we see the same pattern. Inherited traditions being selected, emphasized and refurbed for new political and ideological purposes. And in this case, it had very real geopolitical consequences, not just for religious life on the ground, but for social cohesion and even regional politics, especially when you connect it to the war and the rise of militant movements.
So thinking in terms of reinventing Islam helps us see these ideas, whether coming from Protestant writers or Muslim reformers, are never neutral. They are shaped by context, by power, and by the needs of the movement. And that I think, is what makes this concept so useful.
So moving on to the next question that I had for you, which was what kind of historical sources and archives were important for your research?
What theories and methodological approaches does this book employ? And how does your research engage with the critique of Orientalism. Sorry that it's a long question, but I thought, you know, I think the audience would love to hear what sources were used and what methodology was used, which is really important.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Thanks so much for the question. So my research draws significantly from mission and church archives. I'm primarily an archival historian, so these included unpublished materials and publications by missionaries that were widely disseminated in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This research also required some extensive travel to a variety of archives in the US and the uk So I do want to recognize the support that I received for research travel from the Gerda Hinkel foundation in Germany and also from the Louisville Institute, which made this possible.
A lot of mission histories have relied on missionary texts, so written words, and especially on the writing of missionary men. But I wanted in this book to help readers see the variety of formats through which Protestants cultivated ideas about Muslims, not just through religious and scholarly texts, but through other creative and tangible mediums like fictional stories or images.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I love your use of images and the children's stories you use. Amazing.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Thank you. This book has a lot more images in it than anything else I've ever written.
And so I also look at collections of material culture like museums and stage performances in costumes. And similarly, when I look at the earliest Protestant engagements with Islam during the Reformation, which is a time when scholars usually think about Protestants are focusing on the biblical text. It's all about text. I actually consider not only the theological writings, but the sorts of printed images of Muslims, usually of Ottoman Turks, that were circulating at the time, and the way that Islam appeared in songs and on the stage in, like, Elizabethan theater, for example. So in terms of the theories and methodologies, I engage with material theories of religion. Additionally, throughout the book, I seek to especially include women missionaries and activities in order to break the assumption that Protestant reinventions of Islam were mostly a male activity.
The book's central questions, however, revolve around Protestant discourses not about women specifically, but about gender, so not just Protestant or Muslim women. In examining reinventions of Islam, I trace how ideas about appropriate roles for women and for men influence Protestant views of Muslims in relationship to their own theological and cultural predispositions. And I emphasize that studying gender, then, implies more than studying women's histories in terms of Orientalism. I also extend Edward Said's critique to deal with issues of gender and explore how Protestant missionaries exhibited Orientalism in the literature they published, in their talks and their presentations in front of supporters, and in the way that they displayed Islamic material culture. And I note in the book, in terms of Orientalism, that although my focus on Protestant discourses doesn't dwell much on what the actual lives of Muslim men and women might have looked like during the periods under study, there are select places in the book where I do point to the really robust existing scholarship on these topics. And I try to offer a bibliography of work for students and readers if they want to investigate this more. So I'll just name some of the scholars. They're all female scholars whose work has been really important. And you could find in the bibliography, there's Lailah Abu Lughod, Maryam Khalid, Ameerah Al Ashari Sonbal, Nikki Keddie, Marilyn Booth, Leila Ahmed, Ziba Mir Hosseini, Kesha Ali Salim Ibrahim, Hadiya Mubarak, and also Roshan Iqbal.
Your work on marital and sexual ethics and Islamic law also shows up in the book. So there's a wide variety of resources to choose from. And it would be a different.
You can't cover everything in one book. And so this one happened to be more about Protestant Orientalization than about Muslim women and gender.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: I actually really appreciated that you lay it, like, if anyone did want to look into these works, you have, like, a bibliography there that they can go to and that they can understand that there is a rich body of scholarship that exists that is by Muslim women, about Muslim women, and that reminds us that there is no single typical Muslim woman, that Muslim women, like women everywhere, have been active agents in shaping their own lives and communities.
In your list, I think the only thing sort of, I will bring up because it is really close to my heart, and I think it's really helped. I try to include this book and this work in most of my classes about Islam. So I'll speak about. Just a second about Saba Mahmood's politics of piety.
Her work is a real paradigm shift. She asks us to rethink what it means by what we mean by agency. Instead of assuming that agency looks like resistance pushing back against norms, she shows that it can also mean choosing to live within a traditional in a thoughtful and intentional way. Through her ethnographic work in mosques in Cairo, she studies women movements who were actively cultivating virtue, like humility and submission to God. And that's what's so striking, in that these were not passive choices. These women saw their practices as meaningful, ethical, and deeply agentive.
So Mahmood really challenges the core secular liberal assumption that freedom always means distancing yourself from religious authority.
Instead, she shows us a different model where discipline, devotion and tradition are not constraints, but chosen ways of living.
On the more recent works, I think you pointed out Selene Ibrahim and Haadiya Mubarak, and I wanted to say that I have had the pleasure of hosting them on my podcast, so if audiences wanted, they could go back and look at the Gender and Quran podcast where I speak to them. And then there is, in the more contemporary moment, Shaban Amir's book, which is a Muslim American Women on Campuses. It's a beautiful ethnographic study, and I had hosted her too. So taken together, these works really help us fill in what Orientalist frameworks often leave out. They center Muslim women's voices, their complexity and their agency.
So let's move on to, like where you start your book. It begins in the 16th century, during the period of Protestant Reformation. Why did you choose this historical moment as a starting point for your book that focuses on Anglo Protestant missionaries and the roots of American Islamophobia?
[00:15:26] Speaker B: So I began the book in the 16th century because this was the first point of contact between Protestants and Muslims. From the earliest days of Protestantism, Islam was on people's minds because of the significant power of the Ottoman Empire as well as its civilizational advances, its expansion into southeastern Europe, and the potential actually, during this period, that all of Europe might soon be under Ottoman musl.
So we need to understand how that context in which European Christians both feared and admired Ottoman Muslims, how that context shaped what the first Protestants wrote about Islam. This long historical view also helps to show the way that Protestant views of Islam and gender have changed or adapted or been reinvented over time. Most notably, Protestant reformers like Martin Luther were not at all concerned with post Enlightenment ideas about the hijab or Muslim women's head and face coverings. On the contrary, Luther repeatedly complimented Turkish women's modesty, noting that they veiled their heads and their entire bodies. So although some of the things that he wrote about Islam were not that favorable, he was particularly impressed with Muslim women's reverent behavior at religious gatherings. And he regarded their reserve, their humility and devotion as surpassing that of European Christian women. Of course, this is partly a critique of Catholicism and Catholic women, but nevertheless, positive things to be said. So notably, the critique of veiling, which would become so prominent by the 19th century, especially among missionaries, didn't have a place in Protestant thought in the 16th century.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: It's kind of interesting. And I also think, I mean, what fascinates me is that in this era, men were also covering their head, right? Like all Arab men wear the like head garments. So it's interesting that they sort of focused or narrowly focused on how women wailed versus men and women like covered their head because you had to in that environment with sand flowing and the heat, you have to cover your head anyway.
Side story.
So then in that case, I mean, I want to move on to the next era.
When you turn to the 19th and early 20th century, you argue that during this period the modern missionary enterprise played a significant role in transmitting ideas about Islam and Muslim societies to American Protestant constituents at home who would otherwise never have come into contact with Muslims.
Why was it important for you to consider both British and American missionary materials?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Although I am ultimately most interested in this book with the ideas that missionaries transmitted to American Protestants that eventually fed Islamophobia in the US I take an Anglophone Protestant approach because British and American missionaries developed a really close symbiotic relationship, particularly as part of the movement for missions to Muslims in the early 20th century. Through collaborating in publications and conferences, and through reading and promoting both British and American literature, they streamlined the messaging that Protestants on both sides of the North Atlantic received about Islam. That is to say, if I left the British missionaries out, the story would be incomplete because their images and ideas of Islam truly influenced Americans, both directly through their own publications and their visits to the US but also indirectly through the narratives and performances of American missionaries whose ideas were cultivated in this American British relationship.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: So now that we've moved on from the timeline and the audience understands what the timeline is, I would like to move now to discuss chapter three and four, which covers British and American missionaries textual reinventions of Islam in the 19th and 20th century. This third chapter examines a wide variety of missionary writings for adult readers, and the fourth chapter addresses writings for children, including a number of fictional stories.
What were some of your most important findings in these two chapters?
[00:19:18] Speaker B: I'd like to mention three key findings across the two chapters on literature. So the first is that missionary women, as I mentioned before, took an active role in publishing books and stories focusing on Muslim women and children, and they used this literature to advance their own religious authority and to reinforce the need they felt for more women missionaries. A lot has been written about certain missionary men like Samuel Zwehmer, who were known to have galvanized the Protestant missionary movement in Islamic context and the vast amount of literature that they wrote on Islam. But women missionaries were just as much a part of the movement, and perhaps even more in some cases because they gained access to female audiences who were doing most of the fundraising and to women and to children who were, you know, would grow up with these ideas. And they gained significant attention and funds for their work by specifically stressing the needs of Muslim women.
So they need to be recognized both as knowledge producing agents in their own right and also in many cases, as disseminators of stereotypical views about Muslim men and women.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: I mean, it's interesting that Muslim, I mean, sorry, female missionaries were able to use like, Muslim women and the access to Muslim women for their own sort of cause and disseminating information.
But moving on to the next two chapters, you look beyond textual sources, and I love that. To explore the ways that missionaries used visual and material culture to convey ideas about Islam and their supporters back home.
Chapter five is titled Recasting the Protestant Gaze. I love the word of the gaze.
Missionary Images of Islam as Material Religion. And the chapter six is titled Performative Reinventions. Missionary Costumes Curios. Right. That's how it's pronounced. And comparative religion. What were some of the key insights you gained by focusing on the way Protestant missionaries used images of Muslims, religious artifacts and material culture, like clothing, to disseminate messages about Islam?
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah. In these two chapters, just like in the previous chapters, I saw a tension between the ways that missionary Orientalism is happening and also the humanizing effect. And let me just mention something on the missionary literature for children. In the previous chapter, I found that to be actually much more humanizing of Muslims than the literature for adults because it was educational, it was ethnographic, and women missionaries often would write, would write stories about Muslim children for Protestant children to read. And they really stressed the commonalities so that Protestant young people would see, would empathize or even empathize with Muslim characters. So there's a tension there as well in the literature, but it comes out a little bit differently when you look at material culture. So in chapters five and six, I look at photographs and postcards displayed in scrapbooks, costumes, curated displays in museums, and even stage performances of missionaries wearing Islamic dress or what purported to be Islamic dress. For them, these tangible items helped to shape a Protestant gaze that informed the way that American Protestants ultimately imagined Islam in everyday Muslim life. A way of sort of viewing through a lens and understanding what they were seeing.
So with developments in photography in the late 19th century, missionaries. Missionaries had access to colonial photography studios, and then later, many of them took their own photographs. But one popular genre of colonial photography that you'll see printed reprinted in missionary publications featured scenes and types which purported to portray typical ways of life, landscapes People with certain ways of dress or physical features. And if you find the stories of the people who are photographed, they are often not the people who, you know, their actual identities don't match with the subtitles of these postcards. But these practices are related to really problematic late 19th century ideas about racial hierarchies and biological types that could be used to categorize and understand global cultures and religions. And missionaries made use of these to portray various Muslim peoples.
And mission supporters collected postcards with Muslim images on them. Missionaries were also avid collectors of objects of material culture. So I look at that in chapter six, and they used these to represent Muslim cultures in photographs that they sent back, but also in museum like displays that they would travel around with and set up in churches. So clothing was one of the most common things that missionaries used to portray the societies in which they worked. They would either send photographs of themselves home wearing local garb, or they would perform in costume when speaking in person. To supporters, such practices were often a form of gendered pageantry that helped reinforce ideas about Islam as a rigid religion that required women, especially to dress in a particular way.
But I did also find that missionary costumes, although they reinforce stereotypes, they could also be used to humanize. So I'll end with just a couple examples. I found that for women like Lilias Trotter, who was a British missionary woman in Algeria, and Eleanor Calverly, who was an American missionary doctor in Kuwait, both of them wanted to convey the beauty that they saw in local Muslim life in the context where they work. And so. So Trotter did so by using colonial postcards that looked like women and children named women and children who she knew. And also by illustrating painted scenes of Algeria. She was an artist before she was a missionary, and Calverly did this by photographing herself wearing Kuwaiti women's robes and head coverings. And I think she was trying to sort of show the beauty that she saw when Kuwaiti women would come into her clinic and they would take off their outer garments. So that was something that her, you know, her supporters at home wouldn't be able to see in person. So again, as I found in my analysis of missionary literature, there's a tension in these legacies because these missionaries could simultaneously convey appreciation for Muslim cultures while also repeating common stereotypes that their supporters would expect to hear about Muslim women and men.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I really sort of appreciated your looking at unconventional material like postcards, photographs, costumes to sort of of describe and capture the history of this, like, movement.
And I think that the tension that you're describing connects really well with how we think about Orientalism. Maybe I should have defined it earlier, but better late than never.
When we talk about Orientalism, we are drawing on Edward Said's idea that there's a deep structure, a way of seeing that divides the world into west and non west, and that this division ends up supporting a system of political and intellectual dominance.
But what I hear you doing in these chapters, and what I think is so important, is showing that it isn't just about individuals with bad intentions. And I actually think that's very much in line with how I at least read Said isn't simply saying that these scholars or missionaries were sitting down and consciously trying to misrepresent Muslims. It's more that they were working within a whole system, a kind of grammar of seeing that made certain representations feel natural, even when they were deeply unequal or distorting. So, for example, they saw the woman covering their head as oppressive, whereas men also were covering their head, but they don't see it as anything. And even women themselves don't see, like describing women's clothing as policing women while, you know, sort of thinking that they are being emancipatory. So it's like, kind of complex.
So I really appreciated your effort to hold that tension to be critical, but also recognize that the human complexity, that some of these missionaries were educating their audiences, that some of them changed over the time, their opinions, and they weren't always acting with hostility.
For me, that actually strengthens the critique of Orientalism because it shows that the problem isn't just individual prejudice. It's something bigger, something structural that people can participate in when they think that they're being fair or curious or even emphatic. Sorry. No, no, not emphatic. Empathetic. Sorry.
And I think that's what makes your chapters so compelling that they help us see these visuals and material practices weren't neutral. They were doing real work in shaping how Islam was understood, even when the work wasn't always intentional.
So moving on to your seventh chapter, which is your final chapter, which maps a number of significant shifts that came about in the United states from the 1940s onwards, including the rise of interfaith movements, a decrease in missionary influences, and a proliferation of mediums through which Americans received messages about Islamic cultures and political events in the Middle east, such as blockbuster films, political cartoons. In light of these changes, what historical lessons would you like the readers to take away from the book? To repeat the question that you posed at the opening of the chapter. What bearing does this history have on the birth of Islamophobia in the late 20th century and on efforts for Christian Muslim dialogue in the United States today.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Thank you. The final chapter brings up multiple implications for Christian Muslim relations in the US So I'll just close by naming several.
First, we need to recognize the way that Protestants discourses tilled the soil for Islamophobia as the originally religious ideas about Muslims were adapted and merged with the broader cultural currents of the mid to late 20th century. Missionary messages at that time became just one source of many sources informing American views. But I see their lingering impact on the ways that the average American bought into the idea that violent activities of some Muslim men in very specific geographical and political contexts, like the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, that some Muslim men became representative not just of all Muslim men, but of Islam everywhere, Islam as a whole. And so such perceptions, which can be easily manipulated into the support of violent retribution, are all too apparent for us today, whether we're speaking of Iran or Gaza, or the anti Muslim hate crimes in the US that tend to always accompany any sort of US supported military action in the Middle East East.
So from that I'd like to close with a few positive possibilities or ways that we can recognize what's going on and what's happened in the past, but move forward so interfaith relations can be built through humanizing the other, being open to changing perceptions and learning from people of another faith. Those missionaries who began emphasizing human commonalities over cultural stereotypes and were open to changing their own predispositions were the ones who contributed to the development of interfaith and Christian Muslim dialogue in Western context. So it's important to see that that positive what we can take some positive lessons we can take from a legacy that is also quite negative. Additionally, we really have to deal with presuppositions around gender. There's been fantastic practical and theological work done over the past 75 years or so on Christian Muslim relations. But prejudices against Muslim men and misperceptions about Muslim women remain, I think probably the most significant barrier to American Christian Muslim relations today. And these gendered ideas are really similar to the ideas that mission disseminated 100 years ago. This is therefore, I think, a much more difficult subject to address in most circles in Christian Muslim relations than theological commonalities. But it's necessary if we want to improve relationships on the ground and break the power of Islamophobia. And finally, I just want to reiterate that images of Islam, Protestant images of Islam and gender have changed over time and the Reformation, as I said, Protestant theologians saw Muslim women's attire, including headscarves and face veils, as modest and pious. During the Enlightenment and on into the 19th century missionary movement, the face veil in particular became a symbol of oppression. These missionaries were not talking about the hijab like the head covering. It was the face that they were worried about at that time.
And then now or in the 20th century and up to present, so many Americans have become fixated in simplistic and problematic ways on the hijab, just the head covering, not even the face veil.
So images of Islam and gender have changed over time. And I think that we can play a role in changing them again for the better.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: I mean, I guess I agree with you, but at this particular moment in time it's hard for me to have a hopeful note. Though as your book shows, it is not always easy.
One of the things that stayed with me in how central gender has been to both Orientalism and colonialism and the history that you describe.
Again and again we see colonial powers taking up the language of saving women as a way to justify domination while at the same time extracting resources and undermining local societies. And one of the real tragedies of that history is that often this appropriating of feminist ideals weakens indigenous feminist movements because women advocating for change could then be dismissed as siding with colonial agenda.
And of course it doesn't stop there. What we are dealing with now is even more complicated.
And just like I gave the example of Pakistan and how Muslims can also reinvent an Islam, I want to say that Orientalism, there is a version of Orientalism that we call, that scholars call neo Orientalism which is more subtle, more layered. It is not always obviously hostile in its not only produced by outsiders anymore. So they are Muslim women who will also like say the same things that have been said about them and their culture. And how the whale can is oppressive. And Muslim men do oppress.
Sometimes those same narratives are taken up and reproduced by people from within communities being described. So then the lines blur, but the larger effect can still be similar, shaping how the non whale west is understood in ways that serve existing power structures.
You even see echoes of this in current global politics where the language liberating women continues to be used to justify intervention. And at the moment, like we know what's happening with Iran, often without a full or honest picture of women's lives, realities on the ground and as you so carefully show, reality is always more complex than these narratives aligned.
But maybe this is where the hopeful note comes in. And I'll like borrow from what you were saying. I think your book invites us and or really sort of pushes us to pause and ask why do we see things the way we see them? Why are we drawn to certain narratives about others, about their cultures, their religion, their women, their men?
And if we can sit with this question, honestly, I do think there's something liberating in it. To borrow from your title, it is an invention to rethink invitation sorry to rethink not just Islam but our own assumptions, our own frameworks, the very habits of thought we inherit.
And that to me is what makes this such an important and generous book. It's rigorous, it's critical, but it also opens up a space for reflection, for dialogue and for doing better. So thank you, Deanna for a truly thoughtful and deeply engaging book.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Sam.
