L75-3622 - Islam in the Modern World

Spring 2014
Monday and Wednesday, 2:30-4:00 pm
Cupples I 207
INSTRUCTOR: DR. NURFADZILAH YAHAYA
nyahaya@wustl.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 12:30-2:30 pm, Busch Hall 106
Course description: This seminar explores the modern Islamic world through
thematic approaches from the early nineteenth century up till the present day. How
have Muslims responded to industrialization and the advent of secular politics? We will
explore the evolution of political authority, development of Islamic law in the modern
era, impact of colonialism on the Muslim world which led to the reform movement,
postcolonial responses to European notions of modernity and the rise of Islamism.
Changing notions of gender and sexuality during the modern period will also be
examined. In addition, we will look at how Japan rose to become an alternative locus of
modernity in some parts of the Islamic world. This course investigates how both the
transmission of religious knowledge and the development of Sufi networks have been
transformed by new technology. We round off the semester by examining how the
modern world of finance has recently been infused with Islamic terminology and
processes.
Assessment
Quizzes: 20%
Weekly class participation (including one class presentation and 4 take-home
assignments): 30%
Mid-term Exam (take-home): 25%
Final-term Exam (take-home): 25%
Textbooks:
Clifford R. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Dale E. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996.

Class participation
Regular attendance is very important as well as careful reading of assigned
materials and active participation in class. You may miss up to 3 classes before
half a letter grade is knocked off your participation for each day that you miss.

Pick a day to present. Summarize the readings for the day, and prepare
questions for the class to discuss that day.

Your grades for the four take-home assignments will count towards class
participation.

You will have two quizzes during the semester to test your knowledge of the
materials you have been studying for this course. Together, these quizzes will
account for 20% of the overall grade.

Discussion Etiquette
Laptops and iPads are allowed in the classroom. If I ever catch one of you doing
something other than taking notes and perusing the readings. I will ban the use
of all laptops and iPads in class for the rest of the semester.

Some of the material we will discuss in this course is controversial and

ideologically loaded, and it may disturb or offend you. I encourage you to
express your opinion about the material you encounter, but we can only have
open discussions if everyone treats each other with dignity and respect.

Exams
There will be two take-home exams. Both are open-book exams.

Syllabus
Week 1 (1/13)
Monday: No class
Wednesday: What is modernity?
No readings
Week 2 (1/20): Introduction
Monday:
o Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, (Washington: Center
for Contemporary Arab Studies Georgetown University Occasional
Papers Series, 1986), 1-22.
o Clifford R. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and
Indonesia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1-55.
Wednesday: Beginnings
Jonathan Berkey, Chapter 6: The Origins of the Muslim Community,
The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 61-69.
Fazlur Rahman, Muhammad Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979), 11-42.
Week 3 (1/27): Political Authority
Monday
Dale E. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 1-21.
Dale E. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 46-79.
Patricia Crone, The Origins of Government, Gods Rule: Government and
Islam Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), 3-16.
Wednesday
Dale E. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 108-164.

Abbas Amanat, From Ijtihd to Wilyat-I Faqh: The Evolution of Shiite

Legal Authority to Political Power, in Abbas Amanat & Frank Griffel,
eds., Shari'a: Islamic law in the Contemporary Context (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 120-136.
1st Assignment

Week 4 (2/3): Sharia

Monday
Wael Hallaq, Rule of Law, or Rule of the State The Impossible State: Islam,
Politics and Modernitys Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013), 31-73.
Robert W. Hefner, Indonesia Sharia Politics and Democratic
Transition, Robert W. Hefner, ed. Sharia Politics: Islamic Law and Society in
the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 280-317.
Wednesday
William R. Roff, Whence Cometh the Law? Dog Saliva in Kelantan,
1937? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (1983): 323-338.
Jeffrey Sachs, Native Courts and the Limits of the Law in Colonial
Sudan: Ambiguity as Strategy Law and Social Inquiry 38,4 (August: 2013):
973-991.
Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006), 143-190.

Week 5 (2/10): Reform

Monday
Quiz One
Tariq Ramadan, "Introduction"; "The concept of reform"; "What reform
do we mean?"; Society, education, and power" Radical Reform, pp. 1-38,
259-292, 323-326.
Roxanne L. Euben, A View Across Time: Islam as the Religion of
Reason, An Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999), 93-122.
Wednesday
William R. Roff, Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1967) 56-90.

Ahmad Najib Burhani, Liberal and Conservative Discourses in the

Muhammadiyah: The Struggle for the Face of Reformist Islam in
Indonesia, Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the
Conservative Turn(Singapore: institute of Southeast Asian Studies Press,
2013), 104-144.

Week 6 (2/17): Islamism

Monday: Extremism?
Giles Kepel, Signposts The Vanguard of the Umma, Muslim Extremism
in Egypt The Prophet and the Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984). 36-67, 129-171.
Wednesday: No class
Take-home Midterm Exams released on Blackboard on Tuesday 2/18, due
by Friday 2/21 at 5pm
Week 7 (2/24):
Monday: Islamist Intellectuals
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in Rozanne Euben
and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds. Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 155-162, 224-229.
Wednesday: Homosexuality in the Islamic World

Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Lesbian, Gay,

and Transgender Muslim (Oxford: One World Press, 2010),
Tom Boellstorff, Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in
Indonesia. American Anthropologist 2005: 107(4):575-585.

Week 8 (3/3): Gender & Sexuality

Monday: Women in Public Discourse
Lila Abu-Lughod, Authorizing Moral Crusades. Do Muslim Women Really
Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 81-112.
Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 1-39. (e-book)
Wednesday: Film Persepolis (2008)

2nd Assignment

MIDTERM BREAK (3/10-3/16)

Week 9 (3/17)
Monday
Women in Public Discourse (2)
Zakia Salime, Gender and the Nation-State: Family Law, Scholars,
Activists and Dissidents, in Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and
Sharia Law in Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013),
1-29.
Rachel Rinaldo, Solidaritas Perempuan: Feminist Agency in an Age of
Islamic Revival, Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 155-191.
Wednesday: Dissemination of Knowledge (1)

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Tradition and Authority in Deobandi

Madrasas of South Asia in Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Robert W.
Hefner, eds. Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim
Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 61-86.
Gregory Starrett, Learning about God Putting Islam to Work: Education,
Politics, and Religious, Transformation in Egypt, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 89-125.

Week 10 (3/24)
Monday: Dissemination of Knowledge (2)
Nile Green, The Enchantment of Industrial Communications Bombay Islam: The
Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 90-117.
Andrew Shyrock, A City of Shadowy Outlines Remembering the Sword and
Lance, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and textual
Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
Wednesday: Other Modernities Pan-Asianism as Alternative to

European Modernity

Michael F. Laffan, "Tokyo as a Shared Mecca of Modernity: War echoes in the

colonial Malay World", in Rotem Kowner, ed. The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War,
(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), 219-238.
Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese
Occupation, 1942-1945 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958), 120-168.
3rd Assignment

Week 11 (3/31):
Monday
Quiz Two
Film: Wadjda (2012)
Wednesday: Responses to Secularism: France
John R. Bowen, Why the French Dont Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and
Public Space (Princeton University Press, 2007), 1-62, 155-241.
Week 12 (4/7): War and Peace
Monday:
Khalid Abou El Fadl, Between Functionalism and Morality: The Juristic
Debates on the Conduct of War, in Jonathan E. Brockopp, ed. Islamic
Ethics, 103-128.
The Religious and Moral Doctrine of Jihad: Ibn Taymiyya on Jihad, in
Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton: Markus
Wiener, 1996), 43-54.
Usama bin Laden in Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman,
eds. Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 425-435.
Wednesday
Film - Paradise Now (2005)
Week 13 (4/14): Modern Sufism
Monday

Mamadou Diouf, Islam, the Originaires, and the Making of Public Space
in a Colonial City, Saint-Louis of Senegal, Mamadou Diouf, ed. Tolerance,
Democracy and Sufis in Senegal, (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 180-214.

Wednesday
Carl W. Ernst, Ideological and Technological Transformations of
Contemporary Sufism, in Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds.
Muslim Networks: From Hajj to Hop Hop (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 205), 191-207.
Nile Green, The Enchantment of Industrial Communications Bombay
Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 49-89.
4th Assignment
Week 14 (4/21): Islamic Finance Today
Monday
Maurer, Bill. 2001. Engineering an Islamic Future: Speculations on
Islamic Financial Alternatives Anthropology Today 17(1): 8-11.
Daromir Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in
Contemporary Indonesia Cultural Anthropology 24(1):104-141.
Wednesday
Recap