Mohammad Hassan Khalil

Mohammad Hassan Khalil, 44, is an East Lansing native who has served as the director of Michigan State University’s Muslim studies program since 2013. He teaches religious studies and is an adjunct professor of law at MSU. Khalil has written two books on Islamic thought and recently co-produced “American Jedi: The Salman Hamdani Story,” a 2023 documentary film about a Muslim-American who died while rescuing others on 9/11.

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in East Lansing. My father was a professor of electrical engineering, and my mother did a variety of things but also received a bachelor’s degree in business from MSU. I met my future wife in high school here. She said she was going to the University of Michigan, so that’s where I decided to go. Love will make you do strange things.

I ended up majoring in Arabic and Islamic studies, but I started in pre-dental. I wanted to be a dentist because, at the time, people were telling me you really can’t make a career out of Islamic or religious studies. I saw that my orthodontist was making a lot of money, so I went to dental school for my first year.

What changed your mind?

I was in my first year when 9/11 happened. At that point, it became hard for me to focus on dentistry. I would skip classes to attend other classes that I found more relevant to my personal concerns. That eventually led to me quitting dental school altogether as a sophomore and switching over to religious studies.

How has the American perception of Muslim people changed?

We go through these cycles where things get quiet, and then things get intense, and we get breaks in between. Obviously, 2001 was an intense period. Then you have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so there’s a lot of tension there. Things began to settle down until we got to Barack Hussein Obama, and then again until Donald Trump called for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the country” in December of 2015. Then, in 2016, the number of hate crimes against Muslims were significantly higher than they were in 2001. Through Oct. 6 this year, I would say it was actually maybe the quietest it had been in a long time. And then Oct. 7 hit, and now we have a lot of things going on again.

Why do you think that is?

I think a big part of it has to do with what people see. If you look at the 2010s, the reports on Muslims in that decade were overwhelmingly negative. So, people are seeing negative stories on the Boston Marathon bombing, the Orlando nightclub shooting and ISIS, and they’re not seeing anything positive to counterbalance that. What I always remind people of is, if you add all of these negative stories of all those individuals involved in terrorism, they don’t even make up a percent of a percent of the Muslim population.

Would you say representation has improved since?

It’s gotten better, to some extent, but it’s not perfect. One example is “Back to the Future,” a film I love. There’s a scene in the middle of it where you see these Libyan terrorists who just kind of appear out of nowhere as the bad guys and start speaking gibberish. It was like they were just these caricatures, like they weren’t even human beings.

That’s why, for me, it was so refreshing to see the recent Spider Man films, where you have characters wearing hijab, who appear to be Muslim, and they’re not necessarily the hero or the villain, they’re just normal. In my mind, that was one of the greatest things that I’ve seen in recent years.

You’ve written two books on Islamic thought.

In my first book, I looked at how Muslims think about non-Muslims. I read pre-modern Muslim scholars from hundreds of years ago, who had nothing to do with the American context, because I was curious to see how they thought about that issue. What I found was that they were much more open minded than I’d assumed.

For my second, I’d always been interested in how violent extremists use religion and twist the sources to justify their claims. I think there’s this assumption that people like Osama bin Laden and the leaders of ISIS are literalists — that they’re scary because they’re taking the sources seriously. What I wanted to show was, no, they aren’t. They may be literalist in some areas, they’ll have a beard and some of the superficial things. But when it comes to terrorism and violence, they really aren’t.

—  TYLER SCHNEIDER