Religion-Islam

Jewish and Muslim communities share a complex history of interaction, spanning from seventh-century Arabia to the present day, and including instances of collaboration as well as moments of violence. Our course examines this dynamic relationship through documentary and literary sources. We focus on points of contact between Muslims and Jews in contexts ranging from battlefields to universities, from religious discourse to international politics.

Studies the Irano-Semitic background, Arabia, Muhammad and the Qur'an, the Hadith, law and theology, duties and devotional practices, sectarian developments, and Sufism.

Global Islam traces the development of political Islamic thought from Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the Arab Spring in 2010 and its aftermath in the Middle East.

Surveys Islamic history from the "age of the great empires" (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) to the colonial period and up to the present day, including Islam in America. Islamic life and thought will be examined from multiple angles -- including popular piety and spirituality, philosophy and theology, law, gender, art, architecture, and literature -- with particular attention paid to the rise of modern Islamic "fundamentalist" movements.

Systematic reading of the Qur'an in English, with an examination of the prophet's life and work.

This course will be a historical and topical survey of the development of Sufism from the classical Islamic period through the modern age, paying special attention to the interaction of ideas and the social and political contexts surrounding them.

Islam began strange and will return to strange as it began. So blessings to the strange ones! So goes a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, celebrating the virtue of truth over conformity. This course examines Islamic movements that have sought to push back against religious and political norms of their times. Along the way, we read debates about orthodoxy: what are the limits of the Muslim community and how are such limits contested?

Prophecy provides the theme for our comparative inquiry into two sacred scriptures (the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible) alongside the rich traditions of Muslim and Jewish interpretive literature. We will consider narratives about specific prophets, medieval debates between and within Muslim and Jewish communities about the status and function of prophecy within their traditions, and modern theoretical approaches to prophecy

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Islam.

From Islamic states to Muslim secularism, from progressivism to salafism, from Islamic feminism to social conversativism, this course examines a broad range of political thought and practice that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Exploring thinkers and real-world cases, historical and contemporary, students will get beneath the headlines, coming to a robust understanding of the place of Islam in modern politics across the globe.

This course will survey the history of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa through their arts. Covering three periods (Precolonial, Colonial, and Post-colonial), and four geographic regions (North, East, West, and Southern Africa), the course will explore the various forms and functions of Islamic arts on the continent. Through these artistic works and traditions we will explore the politics, cultures, and worldviews of African Muslim societies.

This seminar will examine some of the most profound and influential writings about love from the Islamic intellectual and poetic traditions. Perhaps more than any other civilization, the literary and philosophical traditions of Islamic civilization have been "love-centric." In this course we will closely read and discuss various philosophies and theories of love from the mundane to the mystical.

This course examines Hindu-Muslim interactions in South Asia, bridging the long-standing gap between Hindu and Islamic studies while introducing critical issues currently facing the historiography of Hindu-Muslim relations. Special topics within the ambit of Hindu-Muslim encounters will be explored in depth, with a particular emphasis on intellectual interactions between traditions of Hindu and Islamic philosophy.

This graduate seminar provides a comprehensive survey of the subjects and areas addressed in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies.

This course surveys the major developments within Islamic philosophy and theology from the classical to the early modern periods. Topics covered include the early theological schools (Ash'aris, Maturidis, Mu'tazilis), the transmission of Greek philosophy into Arabic, Peripatetic philosophy, Illuminationism, Shi'ite philosophy, and philosophical Sufism, concluding with the challenges faced by Islamic philosophy through the colonial and modern eras. This course has no prerequisites, but some previous experience in either Islamic studies or philosophy will be helpful.

Topics in Islamic Studies

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Islam.

The discipline of anthropology has made significant contributions to the study of Islam. Yet far too rarely has it been asked, how might we take Islamic traditions' own ways of knowing not merely as objects of inquiry, but as intellectual partners? This course will engage readings in ethnography & critical theory that examine diverse expressions of Islam as it intervenes into debates over what it means to be human in the world.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Islam.

Advanced readings in Arabic philosophical, theological, mystical, and literary texts. Course readings will be in Arabic.

Advanced readings in Persian philosophical, theological, mystical, and literary texts. Course readings will be in Persian.

This individualized graduate tutorial provides an introduction to the important tradition of Arabic poetry in praise of the prophet Muhammad, surveying both secondary literature & Arabic poetry in the original. Students will learn about the history, uses, formal features, & contemporary legacy of this literary tradition. At the end of the tutorial, an annotated bibliography or translation or review essay (>20 pages) will be submitted for grading.

This course will examine the ways the ideal life has been imagined in Islamic thought, from antiquity to modernity. Putting these narratives in conversation with writings on the nature of self-hood and subjectivity in Euro-American academic traditions, we will examine what unique resources Muslim traditions have to explore the capabilities and limits of the self, and in what ways they participate in dilemmas shared across traditional boundaries.

The course explores multiple theoretical and methodological scales, ranging from classical legal interpretation to affect theory, and from ethnographic approaches to intellectual history. The rationale for this tutorial is to assemble a focused reading list of contemporary political texts in Islamic Studies that will support students in the subfield as they develop doctoral research projects and design future syllabi. This specific collection of readings is not currently offered elsewhere.