I had the pleasure of delivering a lecture this past Monday, June 5th, on “Combating Islamophobia” at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE. The lecture was sponsored by the Department of Political Science and International Relations, the Center for Global and Area Studies, and the Islamic Studies Program. Over 60 students, both graduate and undergrads, and clearly of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, came out for the evening lecture. My topics included: Anti-Muslim prejudice in Western Civilization; the similarity of contemporary Islamophobia to 19th Century American anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism; the rise of the Islamophobic network, and its funding sources, in post-9/11 America; and effective strategies of countering Islamophobia on campus and in the mainstream media.

I was very excited that Imam Zaid Shakir, Co-Director of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA, and the keynote speaker at our Annual Banquet on March 15, devoted the first few minutes of his inspirational talk to the subject of climate change. For those new to the discussion of faith-based responses to this issue, the subject of climate might seem like an odd choice for a banquet presentation, and perhaps a not especially Islamic question. It was the opinion of Imam Zaid, as well as other contemporary Muslim scholars I have read in the last few years, that far from being irrelevant, climate change is the single greatest challenge facing humankind, and a profoundly Islamic issue for the following reasons.