POL 346 - Modern Islamic Political Thought

This course is designed to introduce students to the history of modern Islamic political thought. The debates within modern Islamic political thought will be illustrated through specific examples of Muslim intellectuals and scholars and an accompanying theme such as democracy, sovereignty, gender equality and the secular state.

This course is divided according to different thinkers and intellectuals and an accompanying general intellectual theme. Each week will examine a Muslim thinker and a set of interrelated themes in their writings. We will focus on the impact of external and internal factors in the Muslim world on the continuous development of modern Islamic political thought. Since the rise of early Muslim reformism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Islamic political thought has wrestled with the problematics of colonialism, modernity, tradition, sovereignty, democracy, gender quality and secularism. We will examine the impact of external and internal factors on the debates among Muslim thinkers and the solutions they proposed in response to perceived and actual problems.

Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought: The Response of the Shi'i and Sunni Muslims to the Twentieth Century, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi', Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual. History, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Students will follow the weekly lecture schedule (subject to modifications during the semester) and read the accompanying course readings for every week. In their assessments, students are expected to demonstrate evidence that they have fulfilled the following three criteria: comprehension of course materials, writing coherent and structured essays, and an informed point of view about the course's themes and subjects. Any signs of blatant unoriginal writing (including, but not restricted to, copying sentences from a source without due acknowledgement or from another student's paper) will be punished with an automatic fail and may be referred to disciplinary action for investigation.