2020-21 Academic Catalog

This course will examine the multiple ways the ideal life has been imagined in the Muslim world, from antiquity to modernity, in both Shi‘i and Sunni renderings. Through putting biographical/auto-biographical narratives from the Muslim world into conversation with readings about the nature of selfhood and subjectivity that emerge in philosophy, psychology and anthropology, we will examine together what unique resources the Muslim tradition has to explore the self, its capabilities and its limits, and in what ways it participates in dilemmas shared across traditional boundaries. Rather than merely studying concepts of the self as they pass through history, this course will ask students to inhabit authors’ worldviews long enough to see how they might grapple with some of the most vexing and intractable issues of our time: from the nature of freedom and submission, to the politics of identity, to the boundaries between humans and their environment.