Download “Intro to Middle East Islam” or “Engaging Middle Eastern Muslims”

“Intro to Middle East Islam” or “Engaging Middle Eastern
Muslims”
(Communicating Cross Culturally GE & Religious Studies course credit)
BIG PICTURE
In this course students will engage with the history, texts, and doctrines that inform
the Islamic worldview and Islamic civilizations. Students will then move beyond this
common foundation and engage with greater historical, regional, cultural, and
individual specificities. Students need to move beyond thinking in terms of “Islam
says this or that” to realizing Islam does not say or do anything; rather Muslims say
and do many things, frequently mutually contradictory things – just like Christians.
While coming to a greater understanding of how Islam holds together as a coherent
world view, students will be encouraged to grant Muslims the same humanity that
they demand for themselves, that is accepting that religious belief and practice is also
highly personal and based on a wide range of factors from socio-economic and
educational background, to varied life experiences. Adapting Bill Musk’s phrase,
students will be asked to seek the “human face” of Islam.
The course will be broken down into five sub themes: classical Islam, textual Islam,
mystical Islam, folk Islam, and political Islam. Students will also study some Turkish
in order to facilitate both speaking with Turks and also to familiarize themselves with
central religious concepts and terms, which in Turkish are overwhelmingly loan
words from Arabic.
COURSE GOALS: COMMUNICATING CROSS-CULTURALLY
Student will improve their
1. Ability to communicate cross-culturally and to adapt effectively to new cultural
environments
 Students will not only learn about, but how to interpret and navigate some of
the customs, doctrines, history, and mores that inform Muslim societies.
 They will observe and experience what is acceptable public and private
behavior in different socio-economic and national contexts.
 Students will participate in short-term homestays. They will also have
language partners in Turkey and volunteer one day a week in different
development and aid projects around Istanbul.
2. Capacities for building relationships of mutual respect across cultures
 Students will learn to appreciate commonalities that transcend culture: (i.e. all
want to be loved, have people laugh at their jokes, and provide for their
families).
 Students will be encouraged to see the world from different perspectives as
they meet and befriend those who see the world, or at least some aspects of it,
very differently than they do.
 Students will explore what it means to be a good guest in another culture.
3. Appreciation for the variety and richness of human cultures
 Students will be encouraged to appreciate the richness and diversity of Islamic
cultures across time and space.
 Students will study and see some of the political, literary, intellectual, and
artistic achievements of Islamic cultures.
4. Awareness of their own culture
1





Students will be encouraged to move beyond seeing their own world view as
normative, and instead recognize it as a cultural and historical construct like
any other.
Students will confront how their world views are informed by personal
experience, education and socio-economic background, etc.
Students will consider the meeting points between American and Christian
culture and how each informs the other, culturally and personally.
Students will study the ways in which Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East
are presented in American and Christian media and discourse. They will
consider how these views are influenced by politics and economics.
Students will consider how Islam and Muslims have become the defining
‘other’ for America and Christianity. They will ask how and why this came
about and what are Biblically informed responses to ‘the other.’
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. Students will be able to identify key terms, figures, texts, genres and
movements in Islam.
2. Students will be able to analyze Qur’anic passages using the tools of exegesis
and interpretation used by Muslims
3. Students will be able to assess the impact and application of Islamic beliefs
and practices within particular commuties and cultural settings.
READINGS
Classical Islam
 Denny, An Introduction to Islam (3rd edition)
Textual Islam
 Quran & hadith (excerpts)
 Qur’anic commentaries
Folk Islam
 Ozedil & Frank, Visible Islam in Modern Turkey (excerpts)
 Bill Musk, The Hidden Face of Islam (excerpts)
Mystical Islam
 Article on Sufism to compliment Denny’s chapters
 Poetry of Rumi
Political Islam
 Stephen Humphreys, Between Memory & Desire (excerpt)
 “The Nexus of Theory and Practice,” Nasr Abu Zayd in The New Voices of
Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity: A Reader (Berkeley: UC Press,
2006)
 Robert Hefner, ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: pluralism, contestation,
democratization
 Sayid Qutb, Milestones (excerpt)
SCHEDULE
Week ONE & TWO
2
Intensive Turkish
Week THREE & FOUR
Travel through Southwest of Turkey including visit to Konya & the shrine to Rumi
Week FIVE
Introductions
 Adil Ozdemir & Kenneth Frank, Visible Islam in Modern Turkey, chpt 5
“Expressions of Faith and Identity.” London: Macmillan Press, 2000.
 Denny 17 & 18
The Birth of a Community
 Denny 1-3 & Amrkhaled.net “The Prophet” & Life of Muhammad (excerpts)
Week SIX
The Five Pillars
 Denny 5
From Community to Polity
 Denny 4
(Reflection Essay #1 – What role does orthopraxy and public piety play in the lives of
Turkish Muslims?)
Week SEVEN
Foundations of Islamic Thought & Practice
 Denny 6 & 7 & hadith excerpts
Islamic Theology
 Denny 8
Week EIGHT
Life & Law
 Denny 187-198 & Sherman Jackson article)
Sunnis & Shiis
 Denny 198-207 & Reza Aslan, No God but God, chpt 7 (“in the footsteps of
the martyrs”)
Week NINE
Sufism
 Denny 10 & 11
 Sufi Women, edited and translated by J. Nurbakhsh, pp 94-107, 158-163
 Rumi
 Brian Silverstein, Modernity in Turkey “Everyday Ethics and Disciplinary
Practice” in Islam and Modernity in Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010.
The Gulen Movement
 Bill Pawrk, “The Fetullah Gulen Movement,” Middle East Review of
International Affairs, 12.4 December 2008.
 Excerpts from Fetullah Gulen’s writings
 M. Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito, Turkish Islam and the Secular
State (2003)
3

Hakan Yavuz, “Towards an Islamic Liberalism? The Nurcu Movement
and Fethullah Gulen,” Middle East Journal 53:4 (1999): 594-605
Week TEN
Islamic Renewal & Reform
 Denny 14 & 15
 Jenny B. White “The End of Islamism? Turkey’s Muslimhood Model,” from
Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, and Democratization, ed.
Robert W. Hefner (Princeton University Press, 2004)
 Robert Piggott, “Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts,” BBC News
2/26/08
Political Islam
 Denny 16
 supplementary readings TBA
Quran Paper Due
Week ELEVEN
Review & Exams
Week TWELVE
Retreat at Bugday
Week THIRTEEN & FOURTEEN: EGYPT
 “First Verses,” Passion for Islam by Caryle Murphy (NY: Scribner, 2002)
 “The Nexus of Theory and Practice,” Nasr Abu Zayd in The New Voices of
Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity: A Reader (Berkeley: UC Press,
2006)
 “Egypt’s air-conditioned Islam,” Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2003
http://mondediplo.com/2003/09/03egyptislam
(Reflection Essay #2 – “How does religious observance in Egypt differ from that in
Turkey?”)
Most of the lectures will be conducted by Dr. Heather Keaney and supplemented with
field trips to mosques, sufi dhikrs, whirling dervish performances, sufi shrines, and
Friday prayers, and meeting with Muslim sheikhs in Turkey and Egypt, and political
and religious reformers in Turkey in Egypt as well as casual daily encounters with
Muslims in Turkey, Egypt and Israel/Palestine.
GRADE
Participation – 20%
Qur’an Research Paper – 20%
Exam (week 11) – 20%
2 Reflection Essays – 20%
Turkish exam – 15%
Quizzes – 5%
This is a rough breakdown of grades. It is possible that quizzes could be used or more
reflection essays and a corresponding reduction in the weight of an exam. As the
4
program, speakers, site visits and travel itinerary develop the types of assignments
and due dates of assignments may need to change.
Assignments
Students will become familiar and conversant with the core tenets of Islam. For the
five subcategories students will not only have to master the course material, but are
expected to be taking every opportunity to speak with Muslims on these topics. They
should pay attention to the spectrum of belief and practice they encounter and begin
to form some explanatory frameworks for it, paying particular attention to how
gender, age, education, socio-economic background and geographical location inform
people’s understanding and practice of their Islamic faith.
Students will write 2 “reflection essays” that require them to observe general religious
practices around them as well as particular religious practices such as Friday
congregational prayer and sufi dhikrs. Students will also need to speak with Muslims
in Turkey and Egypt and reflect upon those conversations.
A more substantial research paper for which each student will be assigned a passage
from the Qur’an and need to research that passage in Qur’anic commentaries and
hadith as well as speak with three Muslims about the passage and its meaning. The
goal of this assignment is to have students engage with the core Islamic texts and
consider how those texts are used and understood by Muslims. While this is not a
comparative assignment students are encouraged to consider how Qur’anic
commentaries are similar to and different from Biblical commentaries as well as the
ways in which the role of scripture in the lives of Muslims differs from or is similar to
that for Christians. Students will need to take into account the gender, education and
social background of those they speak with and consider how these factors inform
their understanding and use of the Qur’an and hadith.
“The thirst for grasping the real meaning of things was indeed my habit and wont
from my early years and in the prime of my life. It was an instinctive, natural
disposition placed in my makeup by God Most High, not something due to my own
choosing and contriving. As a result . . . inherited beliefs lost their hold on me when I
was still quite young. For I saw that the children of Christians always grew up
embracing Christianity, and the children of Jews always grew up adhering to
Judaism, and the children of Muslims always grew up following the religion of Islam.
. . I felt an inner urge to seek the true meaning. . . of the beliefs arising through the
slavish imitation of parents and teachers.”
-- Al-Ghazali (d. 1111)
5