Knowledge, Identity and Power in Islamic Societies

Catalog description

This course will explore how careful attention to questions of knowledge and identity can illuminate the complexity of Muslim perspectives and societies. Philosophers and poets, esotericists and encyclopedists, artists and artisans, reformers and renunciants: Muslims from Detroit to Damascus have wielded a vast array of discourses and practices to fashion themselves and the world(s) around them. Throughout the course, students will investigate these ideas and strategies as dynamic and contingent human products, inextricable from urgent social and political concerns. Students will analyze how knowledge is shaped by relationships of power and molded by institutions, values and practices that privilege some individuals and exclude others. At the same time, students will examine how knowledge production can reorient relationships and identities, opening up new possibilities for action.