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13

PLENARY

An Interview with Dr. Amir Hussain
Atla Annual 2024 Opening Plenary Speaker

Dr. Amir Hussain offered the opening plenary address at Atla 
Annual 2024. Dr. Hussain is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola 
Marymount University. He teaches religion and specializes in the 
study of Islam, focusing on contemporary Muslim societies in North 
America. He served as the president of the American Academy of 
Religion in 2023 and was the editor of the Journal of the American 
Academy of Religion from 2011–2015. Dr. Hussain co-edited the fourth 
edition of A Concise Introduction to World Religions (2019) and the 
fifth editions of World Religions: Western Traditions (2018), and 
World Religions: Eastern Traditions (2018). In 2016, he wrote Muslims 
and the Making of America, and contributed to Oil and Water: Two 
Faiths, One God (2006). He has published over 60 book chapters and 
scholarly articles about religion. For more information, visit https://
faculty.lmu.edu/amirhussain/ 

Prior to Atla Annual, Atla’s Alex Leiseca spoke with Dr. Hussain 
about his experiences in the world of religion and theology. The 
following interview has been edited for clarity and length.1

How did you decide to pursue the study of religion?

Oh, that’s a great question. I grew up working class, both my par-
ents worked in factories and I was born in Pakistan but grew up in 
Canada. So all my education was in Canada, and if you asked me in 
high school, “What do you want to do with your life?” I would have 
said, “I want to be a doctor.” As a child of immigrants, you had three 
career options. You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be 

https://faculty.lmu.edu/amirhussain/
https://faculty.lmu.edu/amirhussain/


14    AT L A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

an engineer, or maybe a business owner. Maybe there’s a fourth up, 
but that was it. And so you think, “Okay, I’m going to be a doctor, it’s 
the smartest thing I could think of.” You go to university. And within 
a week, there was this moment of “Wait, there’s this category where 
you can get paid to read and write to have an office full of books?” 
You know, if you’d asked me in high school, “Do you want to be a 
teacher when you grow up?” I would have said, “Are you crazy?” 
because I was thinking of high school teachers, but when you go 
to university, it’s a completely different world. And so it was like, 
“I want to do that. I want to be a professor. How do you become a 
professor? You need a PhD? What’s a PhD?” 

The course I liked the best was psychology. I went to the University 
of Toronto for all my degrees and at the time I think the University 
of Toronto had the largest English department in North America. 
And you had to take some English courses, so, my undergraduate 
degree is a psychology major with a minor in English. It was study-
ing English literature that got me into the study of religion. I was 
fortunate to have extraordinary people there. Northrop Frye, the 
great Blake scholar, he taught Shakespeare, and he was working on 
a book that would become his book The Great Code: The Bible and 
Literature. If you want to read one book to understand Western 
culture, not just Western literature, but Western art, and Western 
music: it’s the Bible. Shakespeare makes much more sense if you 
know the Bible, Blake makes much more sense if you know the 
Bible. I didn’t know the Bible because I’m a Muslim. And so I was 
like, “Well, maybe I should take a course on the Bible.” And then 
I’m thinking, “But I’m a Muslim, maybe I should take a course in my 
own religion and learn more about Islam.” That was where I made 
that switch from the study of psychology because, I knew within the 
first week of school that I wanted to be professor, and originally I 
was thinking that I would be a psychology professor, but this idea 
that you can be a religion professor intrigued me. I didn’t want to 
be an imam, I didn’t want to lead a congregation, but I can do this. 
I’m interested in how people behave. But in some ways, it’s much 
more about the religious motivation. 

You were the president of the American Academy of Religion last year 
and part of their mission is to “foster excellence in the academic study 
of religion, and enhance the public understanding of religion.” What 
do you wish was more understood about religion by the public?



Plenary    15

One of the things that I was really proud that we were able to do 
at AAR was that we got some funding from the Arthur Vining Davis 
Foundations to think about this notion of literacy around religion. 
And one of the things we thought about was what do we wish that 
every college student knew about religion because only about 20% 
of US colleges have a religion department.

No one goes to an engineering professor and says, “Hey, you know, 
I’m a smart guy, I know how that bridge structure works.” And no 
one goes to the president of my university, Tim Snyder, lovely guy 
and a mathematician, no one goes to his office and says, “Hey, that 
set theory you have is completely wrong. Here’s how the equation 
should be.” People talk to us all the time in religion as if they know 
as much as we do because they’re religious folks. But being able to 
count doesn’t make you a math professor, right? Having read the 
Bible doesn’t make you a scholar of Christianity.

I always tell my students that I think the most dangerous person 
is not the person who said nothing on the subject. It’s the person 
who read one thing on the subject, and they think that they know 
everything about the subject. 

One of the great sort of scholars of Islam is Dr. Khaled Abou El 
Fadl and he would always start his classes at UCLA with a sort of 
photograph of him in front of his own library. Now, he’s got 50,000 
books on Islamic law since he happens to be a scholar of Islamic 
law. And he didn’t do it to show off, or to say, “Hey, look at me, I’ve 
got 50,000 books on Islamic law,” it’s that “I own 50,000 books on 
Islamic law. How many books do you think there are in the world 
on Islamic law?”

How do you see religion playing a role in the increasingly secular 
future?

When I was growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, there was noth-
ing else to do on Sunday but go to church. All the stores were closed, 
and it wasn’t until the ’60s when public transit started to run on 
Sundays. Why aren’t Americans going to church today in the same 
way? Well, because they have things to do.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t that sense of connection with 
the ultimate concern kinds of ideas. But my students, I think, are 



16    AT L A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

deeply connected to something other than themselves, whether they 
define it as spiritual or mystical. And some of that comes not just in 
the church, but in music and art. We just had one of the biggest reli-
gious festivals in Southern California, you know it as Coachella—and 
of course, it’s not religious, it’s a music festival. But it provides this 
sense of being in community with like-minded people listening to and 
participating in something collectively. Why is it that evangelicals 
and particularly Pentecostals are sort of booming? Well, if church 
means you come in and sit down and listen while the man on stage 
says something, that’s not all that interesting. It’s the same thing 
with pedagogy. If I get up and start lecturing for forty-five minutes 
nonstop, my students after twenty minutes are going to tune out.

If church means you get up, and you move, and you dance, and 
you’re empowered, that’s a lot more compelling. I remember the 
first time I moved to LA, a friend took me to a service at the First 
AME Church here in Los Angeles. I never went back, because [the 
pastor] Chip Murray was at the height of his glory, he was walking in 
the Lord and the choir was seventy-five people, and the church was 
literally rocking and moving. And so when he made that altar call, 
I almost got up out of my chair to run down there and get down on 
my knees and confess my sins to Jesus. Which, as a good Muslim boy, 
that’s going to be a little hard. But it’s the non-religious compelling 
experience that takes the place of this religious experience because 
young kids are not going to go to church, they’re not going to go to 
church camp, they’re going to go to Coachella.

Your theme for your plenary address at Atla Annual is “Comparative 
Religion and Theology: Practical, not Theoretical Matters for Atla.” Can 
you elaborate on this? What gave you the idea for this presentation?

I met John [Kutsko] when I was on the board of the AAR, because 
AAR and SBL meet together for the annual meeting every year. And 
it was this lovely moment when I would touch base with him. And 
then he moved from SBL to Atla, and he approached me and said, 
“Hey, would you be interested in speaking at Atla Annual?” and I 
said that I’d be honored. And I think for John, there’s this sense of 
here we are with theological libraries that get put in a box of “Oh, 
well, theology is Christian, and these schools are Christian schools.” 
And John is thinking about how to serve the Muslims and Jews and 



Plenary    17

Buddhists at those schools, and making sure that Atla is serving all 
kinds of theology. 

I decided to talk about the “practical vs. theoretical” idea, because 
back in the day when ministers were training for the church, they 
had graduating classes of 100. But now there’s more churches clos-
ing, and so this idea that, well, if we’re going to survive, we’re going 
to have to do something different, because there isn’t the need to 
train 100 pastors every year for the church, and how do we con-
nect with the Muslim community that needs chaplaincy training 
for people who want to work in the hospital, or want to work in the 
prison system as chaplains. So there’s this question of how do we 
do chaplaincy programs. The imams are being asked to be social 
workers, therapists, chaplains, pastors and so there’re Muslims who 
just say, “Yeah, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Let’s go to these 
Christian places that know how to do this.” So, the Muslim studies 
program and the Buddhist studies program at Emmanuel College 
is really taking off and so you now have theological schools, many 
Christian theological schools, that have Muslims and Buddhists and 
Jews. Here we are at Loyola Marymount, a Catholic Jesuit school, 
with this Muslim who’s teaching theology across the hall from 
the Academy of Jewish Religion, California, which is a standalone 
Jewish seminary that’s now in the university. So here you have this 
Jewish seminary that’s in this Catholic Jesuit school and so I think 
that comparative component to this is so important for theological 
schools and for theological libraries. 

I stole the title about being “practical not theoretical” from my 
mentor, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who was one of the great scholars 
in the world for the study of religion, and he created the Institute 
for Islamic Studies at McGill, then went to Harvard and directed 
the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions for twenty 
years. And he would talk about envisioning a Muslim talking to a 
Christian theologian and saying that for us, it’s really a practical, 
not a theoretical matter. 

All this to say that, for me, as someone who’s both a scholar of 
Islam and a Muslim, it’s much more about the practical, the lived-
out reality, of how do you live? How do you pray?

And for religious scholars and theological librarians, you have 
theory, but you also have the mission of how do you help people? 



18    AT L A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

What do you do? What are the resources? So I was thinking about the 
practical kinds of things that come up around comparative theology. 

What role do you think Atla/theological librarians play in the study 
of religion and theology?

As I said earlier, I was a working-class kid, and I still have my 
paper library card, which then became the barcode library card, 
because as a poor kid, my parents couldn’t afford books. But I could 
go to the library, and I could take as many books as I could read. 
And then I go back and get more and more books. And that was an 
amazing thing for me. 

And part of the job of librarians is to be a sort of bulwark and to 
say, “Oh, you’re reading this? Have you read that? Have you thought 
about something that otherwise you might not have heard of?” And 
that’s what I love about librarians. 

What I love about the amazing work that librarians do, especially 
in this day and age: when did you ever think that the public enemy 
number one would be the librarian? Because you have books, and 
some of these books are “dangerous” and some people think we must 
ban them. And so that work that librarians do with digitization is 
fascinating and so important.

Just the other day, I got my copy of In Trust magazine. This is a 
magazine from the In Trust Center, which works with governing 
boards of theological schools. And so this article by Gregg Brekke 
is about Atla and what Atla is doing, and the changing face of the 
field, especially around the digitization of materials.

My presentation at Atla Annual will take place on Juneteenth, 
and talking about Juneteenth, talking about some of those kinds of 
things, like did you ever think burning books would come back? Did 
you ever think you’d have people saying, “Well, racism is done, and 
we don’t need to talk about it,” and it’s like, no, there’s still some 
pretty serious issues around race in this country. And what are some 
of those books that are being banned? Books that talk about Black 
people as human beings. That’s part of the crucial job of librarians: 
to keep these books accessible. 



Plenary    19

What hopes or concerns do you have for the study of religion and 
theology going forward?

One of the concerns is people not seeing the relevance of the 
study of religion and theology. They might say something like reli-
gion is outdated or argue about religion versus science. But to me, 
religion and science are not mutually exclusive. And so I think that’s 
something people think: that we need STEM, we need science, but 
we don’t need any of this religion or humanity stuff. 

One of my great mentors at the University of Toronto was Rob 
Prichard, who was the president there. And he would say that the 
humanities teach us who we are. And even if you’re not religious, 
you live in a multicultural world, so your boyfriend’s Hindu, your 
girlfriend’s Jewish, or there’s a Buddhist temple on your street. And 
for the humanities, think about why do we still read Shakespeare?

Why do we still talk about religion? Because these things tell us who 
we are.

There’re two kinds of books in the world. There’s the kind of 
book that you read once, and you don’t need to read it again. And 
then there’s the book you could keep coming back to, over and over 
again, whether that’s Beloved or Catcher in the Rye or The Handmaid’s 
Tale, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Every time you read it, you 
read it differently. And that’s the hope: that even as the medium 
changes from paper to digital manuscripts, we’re still going to tell 
those stories. 

REFERENCES

Brekke, Gregg. 2024. “Reconfiguration.” In Trust. (Spring): https://
www.intrust.org/in-trust-magazine/issues/spring-2024/libraries

https://www.intrust.org/in-trust-magazine/issues/spring-2024/libraries
https://www.intrust.org/in-trust-magazine/issues/spring-2024/libraries


20    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

ENDNOTES

1  This interview was previously published at https://www.atla.com/blog/
interview-with-atla-annual-opening-plenary-speaker-dr-amir-hussain/.

https://www.atla.com/blog/interview-with-atla-annual-opening-plenary-speaker-dr-amir-hussain/
https://www.atla.com/blog/interview-with-atla-annual-opening-plenary-speaker-dr-amir-hussain/

