Instructor: Shady Nasser

This course will introduce students to the major writers, canonical works, and important literary movements of Arabic Literature from late antiquity up to the modern period. The course will be structured thematically with special focus on the historical...

Instructor: William Granara

Description:

Introduction to Arab-Islamic cultures of medieval Sicily, Spain (al-Andalus), and North Africa through primary historical and literature texts. Examines the emergence of a Maghribi identity amidst cross-cultural...

Instructors: Shady Nasser and Khaled El-Rouayheb

Description:

An introduction to the medieval Arabic tradition of rhetoric (balagha). We will read Arabic texts that illustrate the historical evolution of the genre, as well as more systematic introductions to the field...

Instructor: Luis Giron Negron

Examines trends, issues and debates in the comparative study of mystical literature. Close readings of primary works by Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Topics include poetry and mysticism; allegory,...

Instructor: Ida Yalzadeh

In this course, we will explore, expand, and question the disciplinary boundaries between Asian American and Arab American Studies. Grounded in converging critiques of US empire, we will ask: what are the possibilities and limitations of linking these two...

Instructor: Ali Asani

One need only walk into a church, a mosque, a temple, a synagogue or any place of worship to experience the beauty and aesthetic power of religion. For millions of people around the world, understanding of religion is forged through personal experiences, often...

Instructors: Patricio de Real and David Roxburgh

Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various ...

Instructor: Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar

Examines multimedia arts, monuments, gardens, and cities of the Ottoman Empire straddling Asia, Europe and Africa. The selective fusion of Ottoman-Islamic, Byzantine, and Italian Renaissance artistic traditions, and the earliest pictorial...

Instructor: David Roxburgh

Is Genghis Khan’s characterization “as terrifying as genocide and as dreadful as the plague” (Time, Dec. 31, 1999) sufficient? His legacy entailed the destruction of social and cultural order, but paradoxically, his empire also forged a dynamic...

Instructor: Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar

Three empires from the Balkans to Bengal developed distinctive architectural, urban, material, and ornamental cultures rooted in their Timurid-Turkman pasts and transformed by cosmopolitan regional traditions. An inter-imperial dialogical...

Instructor: David Roxburgh

The seminar examines the medium of drawing in the Islamic lands, focusing on the post-Mongol through early modern periods throughout the Middle East, Iran, India, and Central Asia. Topics include the medium, materiality and practice of drawing; subject...

Instructor: Giovanni Bazzana

The course will focus on the history of Israel/Palestine in the span of time of almost a millennium that witnessed the emergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specific attention will be devoted to the changing landscape of the region and, by way...

Instructor: Yasir Fahmy

This course will engage in a critical reading and analysis of Hadith Jibril. Also known as Umm Al-Hadith (or the mother of Prophetic narrations), this narration gathers the essential acts and practices that are to be performed, internally and externally, in...

Instructor: Rahina Muazu

The perception of the female voice in Muslim West Africa as part of her ʿawra (nudity, nakedness), which is determining socially and religiously acceptable gender roles for women, is not only a result of difference in legal opinions (fatwas...

Instructor: Khalil Abdur-Rashid

This course is designed to prepare students to effectively engage with Islam, members of the Muslim community, and the Muslim world broadly speaking. The first portion of the course provides students with a broad, historical survey of Islam, including...

Instructor: Yunus Kumek

This course introduces students to practices of spiritual care from a Muslim Perspective. As we will survey spiritual care practices of different Muslim cultures, our focus will be the relevant application of these practices in North America with a special...

Instructor: Nurhaizatul Jamil

This course aims to ethnographically examine the relation among pious subject-formation, race, and gender as they relate to Muslim women’s social media engagements. We will interrogate the ways that Muslim women function as objects of discourses on...

Instructor: Jocelyne Cesari

Nationalism is not simply an ideology: it is also a set of practices by which  territory,  political power and the cultural identity of the people that inhabit this territory are constituted in a unique and singular fact.  The religious...

Instructor: Ousmane Kane and Khalil Abdur-Rashid

This course, as part of the new HDS Initiative on Islamic Spiritual Life and Service, is intended for students preparing for vocation in a variety of settings in which they will provide Islamically-inspired service and support. The...

Instructor: Mohsen Goudarzi

The birth of Islam in the seventh century C.E. was a momentous historical turning point, but many aspects of this crucial process remain vigorously contested in modern scholarship. Was the Prophet Muhammad a local preacher of righteousness or the...

Instructor: Diana Eck

How "Asian" is America today? This seminar explores the Asian dimensions of American history, immigration, religion, and culture as immigrants have come from India, China, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. When and why did they come to the U.S.? What forms of...

Instructor: Jacob Olupona

This course focuses on the history and phenomenology of African peoples’ religious experiences in the Americas. The historical and social processes that led to the emergence of African diasporic religions in Latin America and the Caribbean will form the...

Instructor:  Jacob Olupona

Religion is pivotal to the understanding of the history, culture, and politics of Nigeria's nation-state. The seminar examines the historical development of religion in Nigeria and explores its intersection with ethnic identity, culture, and...

Instructor: Hajnalka Kovacs

Iqbal's Urdu Poetry is a comprehensive introduction to Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938) Urdu poetry. Along with reading and translating selected poems from Iqbal’s collections Bāng-e Darā, Bāl-e Jibrīl, Zarb-e Kalīm, and Armaghān-e Hijāz, we will discuss...

Instructor: Ali Asani

Instruction in Hindi-Urdu in topics not covered in the regular curriculum.

Instructor: Rosie Bsheer

Description:

How was the region of North Africa and West Asia between the Atlantic and Central Asia constructed, physically and discursively, as “the Middle East”? What were the major local, regional, and global events that have most profoundly...

Instructor: Rosie Bsheer

This course is a critical history of political economy that centers on the Middle East and South Asia. It begins with readings in classical political economy, liberalism, and Enlightenment thought, coupled with colonial, postcolonial, and feminist critiques...

Instructor: Kristen Stilt

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: One Day Take-Home

This course is a broad introduction to Islamic law in historical and contemporary forms.  We will first cover the origins and early...

Instructor: Tarek Masoud

Explores the major political, economic, social, and security challenges facing - and emanating from - the Middle East. Particular attention paid to the causes of the so-called Arab Spring and the prospects for genuine democratization. Explores the role of...

Instructor: Khaled El-Rouayheb

This course offers a reading of a number of major works of Islamic Civilization, for example from the universal chronicle of al-Tabari (d. 923), the forty hadith of al-Nawawi (d. 1277), a work on the lives of the Shi’i Imams by al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d....