RELG 440. Global Islam.

Western scholarship has oscillated between orientalizing Islam and co-opting it into the Western (Abrahamic) fold of religious traditions. The course will challenge both perspectives by exploring Islam’s dynamic unfolding across a variety of civilizational regions and during subsequent epochs. Its patterns of premodern globalization are nowadays retrieved, sometimes by fitting Islamic cultures into neoliberal patterns of globalization, more often by sidelining or overlaying the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. The course will show how Islamic traditions have, both in history and in the present, developed unique intellectual tools and practical resources to interface both with ‘radical’ (Abrahamic) and ‘dialogic’ (non-Abrahamic) religious traditions: from the West (also via labor-based migration), through Central and South Asia, to East and Southeast Asia.