ISLA 390. Islamic Reform and Radicalism: Middle East

The process of modernization and reform in the late Ottoman period in Greater Syria, including Lebanon, Iran and Iraq leading up to the rise of modern nation states and the call for secularization in several Middle Eastern countries through the lens of Shi`ite Muslim citizens. The tensions that characterize the interface between the secular state and Islamic law in modern times. The voices of religious modernists, liberal secularists, leftists, and Islamists. Diverse Arab and Iranian thinkers and the historical forces, the political and socio-economic conditions that shaped their approaches to religious modernism, secularism, public religion and the Shari`a.