ISLAMCIV 181: Islam and Religious Diversity (Boylston)

Questions arising from the diversity of religions recur in all of the major branches of Islamic thought and appear in complex permutations in diverse cultural contexts. Focusing primarily on pre-modern Islam, this course invites students to investigate perspectives on the religious other in the Quran, Islamic law, theology, philosophy and Sufism. In the final portion of the course, we will look at Muslim Spain, Mughal India, and the Muslim-Confucians of late imperial China as examples of how these complex dynamics played out on the ground. The larger aim of this course is for students to develop interpretive skill in dealing with the internal complexity of a number of Islamic discourses and contexts by pursuing a single problematic across them. To this end the course will be taught in seminar format and participants will be encouraged to engage creatively with primary and secondary sources (in translation) to develop their own scholarly points of view.