2020-21 Academic Catalog

This course rethinks how we understand Africa through attention to the role of Islam and Arabic culture in its past and present. Through religious texts, novels, and critical commentary from the continent, students will get a strong introduction to key trends in Islamic thought and activism, while exploring how attention to them might reshape our perceptions of both its history and present. Equally addressing Africa as geographic space and analytic category, we will examine its features--from the Sahara to the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and beyond--not as barriers, but as sites of complex, creative and often fraught exchange with the broader Muslim world.