What Is Islam? New Approaches to Religion and Culture


What should the student of Islamic studies make of the omnipresence of images of Muslim rulers as drinkers, in spite of the well-known Islamic prohibition of alcohol? What about the plethora of figural art, even though legal scholars prohibit such representation? Western scholars of Islam have often posited a division between Islam as a religion and Islamic culture, privileging the clarity of legalistic definitions above more amorphous cultural practices. According to this vision, drinking and making figural art are “un-Islamic,” and their existence among Muslims constitutes a kind of subversion. In his path-breaking new book What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Shahab Ahmed argues that images of drinking rulers were constitutive of Islamic culture, as much as the laws that forbade such activities. Islam constitutes a system of coherent contradiction, and definitions should encompass “the human and historical phenomenon of Islam,” in all its complexity. Using Ahmed’s book as a springboard, this course examines “Islam in its plenitude of meaning.” Arranged in roughly chronological order, each week will explore an apparent contradiction, such as Muslim/Infidel, Figurative/Abstract, Rational/Ecstatic, and will focus on how the idea of Islam functioned to make meaning across time and space. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which scholarly discourses about Islam have attempted to craft an orthodoxy that fits into western academic frameworks, and how this orthodoxy—visible in scholarship and museum displays—elides the breadth of historical and contemporary meanings associated with Islam. Visits to the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are planned. 3 credits. Satisfies the pre-1800 or non-Western requirement.