Class today began with the reading strategy of something important, something interesting, or something challenging. Professor Albert explained that this is a great way to begin a discussion about a text, then she proceeded to have us call out phrases throughout the text that fit one of those categories. After about 5 minutes of just calling out different phrases the class was prompted with what words did you hear a lot. Kelsey started off this discussion by bringing up the concept of fundamentalism and Western Society/Education. Some other words the class heard a lot of were, Muslims, The West, European, Media, etc. Professor Albert than brought up, what I find to be an incredibly interesting point, that Muslim and the west seem to act as a binary within this text. Ernst does typically use the west and Muslim as opposites or in a comparative context. Owen however, responded to this by saying he feels that they are used as a one-sided binary, in which Muslim is a binary to the West, but the West isn’t a binary to Muslim. The conversation then shifted a bit to talk about religion with Ernst writing. We talked about how most religions stem from similar core texts, but often times people criticize other religions without criticizing their own. That even though you can find a lot of common themes amongst may different religions its only okay in some of them. At the very end of class we ended up watching a video about a map that didn’t acknowledge Israel. I feel like this video was a pretty perfect way to wrap up class.
