Courses

Week One

Locating Muslim Cultures in Historical Contexts
Abdou Filali-Ansary, AKU and Derryl MacLean, SFU

This session will focus on recent approaches to world history which shed light on the evolution of religious and cultural patterns, highlighting the various interactions between cultures, religions and areas that have shaped them and influenced local processes. The emergence of world religions and early empires, their integrative impact and the resulting waves of migration and conquest will be discussed. In addition to this, the impact of modernity and the challenges it has brought to traditional conceptions and forms of collective life inherited from historical times will be analysed. The main focus will be an attempt to understand how the stage was set for Muslim cultures to develop, bringing further integration across various geographic and cultural barriers. The development of specific answers to the challenges faced by human societies, and the attempt to implement ideals of religious traditions within diverse contexts, and in the face of different challenges will be discussed.

Thinking about Islam and Muslims in the West
Derryl MacLean, SFU

Recent reflections in the media about Islam and Muslims have tended to emerge as a kind of caricature, reducing reducing understanding to religious factors and in the process emphasising violence, exoticism, and deceit. This kind of focus has a history within orientalism in the West and this module will attempt to confront that history in two movements. First, we will examine the related discourses of orientalism and exoticism from their origins in the medieval period to the emergence of a neo-orientalism focusing on the clash of civilisations. Second, we will pose the question of how should we as academics and public intellectuals respond to the problem of orientalism? We will examine the responses by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Marshall Hodgson and then confront orientations of our own in the context of definitions of civilisation. To what extent is it possible to approach the idea of civilisation with its corollary of continuity without a degree of essentialism? If so, does this require privileging a particular discourse or foundational moment within the larger array of Muslim experiences?

Contemporary Debates in Muslim Contexts
Abdou Filali-Ansary, AKU

This session will highlight discussions that have taken place within Muslim contexts during the 20th century, as a means to overcome stereotypes offering reductive perceptions pitting fundamentalism against modern ideals and values. It will introduce course participants to the ideas of several leading figures within contemporary Muslim contexts, whose debates and discourse raises new questions and offers original interpretations opening new perspectives on key aspects of the heritages of Muslims. Debates about the questioning of interpretations which prevailed in Muslim contexts and the role of modern scholarship in shaping a renewed understanding of the founding moments of Muslim histories will be examined.

Introduction to the Qur’an
Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, AKU

This session seeks to achieve four major objectives. First, the course will introduce participants to contemporary scholarship on the Qur’an, taking the opportunity to provide some reflections on approaches to the study of the Qur’an in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. Second, it will explore the formation of the Muslim Ummah through the Qu’ran. Third, it will reflect on the emergence of the five pillars of Islam (Iman) in the Qu’ran. Finally, it will critically analyse, through a number of examples, the relationship between “legal” and moral matters in the Quran.

Formation of Legal Schools in Muslim Contexts
Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, AKU

This session offers the opportunity for a reflection on the process of the formation of legal thinking in Muslim societies. It stresses the nature of legal thinking before the advent of al-Shafi’i, the significance of al-Shafi’i's Risala, and the formation of legal schools in Sunni, Shi’i and Ibadi contexts. The relationship between sectarian theological views and legal attitudes will be explored. Through examples related to marriage, divorce and inheritance, this session intends to analyse the diversity of legal perspectives which have impacted Muslim societies in the past. Finally, it raises some critical questions about the appropriations or reformations of such perspectives in contemporary Muslim societies.

Formation of Muslim Communities
Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, AKU

This session will attempt to answer key questions related to the formation of Muslim communities and the diversity of their respective worldviews in historical and present contexts. This session will raise key questions including: What might be the Qur’anic perception of Ummah? How did Muslim society become sectarian? What were the key markers of each community? To what extent were Muslim communities pluralist in nature? What impact has the formation of Muslim communities had on contemporary Muslim societies?

Gendering Islamic Diaspora
Parin Dossa, SFU

How is diaspora defined in this age of militarization and forced migration? What are the political, religious and cultural impulses that lead to the constitution of diasporic communities and identities? How do gendered interpretations of migration and relocation act as agents of social and cultural change? We will explore these questions in relation to the migratory experiences of Muslim women. Drawing upon theoretical and ethnographic studies, we will focus on two themes: (a) Exploring Muslim women’s activism and socio-political reactions to new realities in the face of western misperceptions and negative images of Muslims in the diaspora and elsewhere. (b) Providing a deeper understanding of the diversity that constitutes Islamic feminisms and gender relations. Topics that will explore the transformative potential of diasporas may include borderlands and boundaries, civil pluralisms and everyday life. Participants will have the opportunity to tell their stories on migration, belonging and citizenship.

Week Two

Ethics in Muslim Contexts
Modjtaba Sadria, AKU

There are a multitude of views regarding concepts of morals and ethics in contemporary Muslim societies. To create an understandable representation and interpretation of these views, without oversimplifying them, one could say that they form two separate perspectives. (a) Do ethical/moral values belong in a public domain, where they may be imposed by the state and/or society on individuals, and where the exercise of coercion becomes a key factor? (b) Or do they primarily concern the private, inner world of individuals, within the context of personal values, incorporating all the necessary implications for social life and political behaviour?

Civil Society and Development Challenges in Muslim Contexts
Modjtaba Sadria, AKU

Over the past 40 years, an abundance of literature has been produced, initiatives created and institutions founded in an endeavour to build civil societies within Muslim contexts. The implicit or explicit premise is a kind of tabula raza approach to key practices related to civil society derived from endogenous and historically related cultural contexts. This course looks from a critical perspective to this point of view.

Expressing Mysticisms in Muslim Contexts
Derryl MacLean, SFU

Much of the recent focus on Islam has tended to understand it as centred essentially around a dominant discourse of jurisprudence based on the shari’ah. The tacit assumption is that this foundational juristic focus produces a type of aridity and inflexibility that stands in sharp contrast to western expressions of religion. This module intends to shift the focus from law to mysticism, which arguably was the predominant mode of expressing Islam in the pre-modern period and constitutive of much of the popular culture of Muslims: music, poetry, art, and architecture. Our understanding in this module will move in three stages. First, we will examine the emergence, institutionalization, and expansion of Sufism, the primary vehicle for Islamic mysticism. Second, we will discuss the qualities of an ‘irfan (Gnostic) orientation within Shi’ite Islam, especially through the works of Mulla Sadra and the drama of Husayn. Finally, we will address Islamic mysticism in the context of the modern world. To what extent has it been able to offer new responses and insights into modernity?

Inspiring Islamic Art
Laura Marks, SFU

This session will examine some of the diverse practices in the history of Islamic art that are providing a new source of inspiration to contemporary artists. We will focus on moments in eighth-century Iraq, eleventh-century Egypt, sixteenth-century Iran, and eighteenth-century Turkey. As there is a general avoidance of the representation of images of people and animals in Muslim societies (a tendency that was in fact quite varied historically), Islamic art developed many techniques of abstraction that anticipated twentieth-century abstract art and contemporary media art. These include the use of geometry, calligraphy, the fascinating islimi or arabesque, techniques of algorithmic repetition and variation, and self-generating patterns. We will also look at figurative religious art, especially in Shi’ia contexts but also in Ottoman Turkey, where we are able to witness the many captivating devices artists developed to imply the divine without showing it explicitly.

Secularism and Islam in Turkey
Thomas Kühn, SFU

Secularism has often been considered one of the defining features of the state and society that founders of the Republic of Turkey sought to create during the decades after World War I. While secularism to this day is among the constitutionally recognised principles of the Turkish state and an important marker of identity for many of Turkey’s elites, political Islam has played an increasingly prominent role in Turkish politics and society from the 1950s. Since 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party has formed the government, and in 2007 one of its leaders, Abdullah Gül, was elected president of the republic. This session looks at the origins, characteristics, and development of secularism and political Islam in Turkey from the proclamation of the republic in 1923 to the present. We will explore what it means to be a “secularist” or an “Islamist” in today’s Turkey and how these meanings are defined and fought over in the courtroom, in fashion shows, and the columns of tabloid newspapers.

Imagining Islam on TV and in Textbooks
Özlem Sensoy, SFU

This session explores popular culture, film, and other media-based curriculum as pedagogical texts. Media texts operate not simply as reflections of, but as producers of culture – what education theorist Henry Giroux (2004) describes as the new “teaching machine”. Scholarship in critical media education and childhood cultural studies argues that such non-formal corporate-produced children’s media has replaced schooling as the primary source of cultural knowledge (Steinberg and Kincheloe, 1994). This condition of twentieth and twenty-first century corporate media culture demands that we move away from the common-sense tendencies among teachers, educators, and parents to dismiss popular culture, cartoons, films, and toys as “just entertainment,” and instead apply criticisms that we might of any educative text. Given the overwhelming power of mainstream corporate media to circulate their messages in a manner, format, and consistency that classroom texts rarely enjoy, media texts may in fact demand closer scrutiny than any other curricula with which students engage. In this session, we will view and examine some of the most widely-circulated texts and discourses of mainstream popular culture about Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East. We will look at selections from children’s cartoons (Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Aladdin), popular TV shows (I Dream of Jeannie, Star Trek, Dancing with the Stars), films (Borat), and toys (Genie Magic Bratz Dolls), analysing these texts as more than just entertainment.

Education and Intellectual Life in Muslim Contexts I and II
Farid Panjwani, AKU

Education and, more generally, intellectual life in Muslim societies today is seen by many as both the most lamentable reflection of the state of these societies and the most important factor requiring attention if the situation is to change. In this session, we will seek to explore the nature and scope of current educational and intellectual challenges – philosophical, organisational, political and pedagogical – in selected Muslim contexts. A glance at the intellectual traditions that were fostered under Muslim rule in the past will help gain some historical insights into the processes that have led to the current situation. Various responses to these challenges – ranging from the re-appraisal of heritage to its rejection; and from a retreat into the myth of the ‘Golden Age’ to honest self-criticism will be examined. This will involve consideration of selected debates around modernity, secularisation and the selected debates around modernity, secularisation and the relationship between reason and authority.