Category: Courses

Islam & The Meaning of Life

The course explores how Islamic thought engages questions such as: What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? What is true happiness? How can human beings overcome alienation and find inner peace? How are faith and reason related in the search for meaning? What grounds moral obligations, justice, and human dignity? And how does belief in God shape the understanding of human destiny? The course approaches the meaning of life from three complementary perspectives within Islamic intellectual tradition: The Qur’anic perspective, the mystical perspective, and the philosophical and rational-theological perspective.

Sharia and the Qur’an

The course examines Sharia—the Qur’an’s ethical and legal frameworks—through primary sources. It thematically and chronologically analyzes verses on morality, ritual, and human interaction. Students explore the Aḥkām al-Qurʾān genre across legal schools in original languages using a holistic, historical-critical approach. Alongside jurisprudence, the course delves deeply into Qur’anic morality and the ethical implications of key terms such as mercy, justice, fairness, and dignity, emphasizing the Qur’an’s enduring ethical and legal principles. Students will learn to apply holistic and historical-critical methods that examine all related verses collectively and contextually.

The Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence

This course offers a comprehensive study of the principles of jurisprudence, a foundational discipline for all Islamic narrative sciences. Students examine four main areas: Language and Meaning, addressing textual interpretation; Rational Correlations, exploring the role of reason in deriving rulings; Authority, assessing valid sources of law and their evidentiary weight; and Procedural Principles, guiding legal reasoning lacking clear proof. The course combines close reading of a major original text—Arabic proficiency required—and analysis of modern English-language scholarship. Emphasis is placed on historical development, theoretical foundations, and comparative perspectives.

 Religion and Science

The course discusses the relationship between religion and science from four perspectives: religion and ‘the history’ of science, religion and ‘the method’ of science, religion and the ‘theories’ of science, and ‘philosophical and theological’ reflections. Although it explores the relationship between religion and natural sciences in general, the focus sciences are four in addition to their metaphysical/theological implications: biology (Darwinism and evolutionary theory, natural theology, and randomness), physics (quantum theory and relativity), astronomy (the Big Bang, creation, design, and chance), and cognitive psychology & neuroscience (perception, and brain mechanisms).

Islam and Modernism

Why is the experience of Muslims about modernization and modernity different from Western modernization and modernity? Why do we have modernities (plural), not modernity (singular)? How did modernity divide Muslims into conservative or traditionalists, fundamentalists or revolutionaries, quasi-conservatives, reformists, and revisionists? How does each of these five camps introduce Islam? This course tries to respond to such questions, as the key questions of Islam and modernism. We focus on the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries’ main debates, tensions, responses, and adaptations, and cover the major classics of this period.

Religion and Politics In Post-Revolutionary Iran

This course will narrate a fair and balanced critical and historical analysis, and is organized into five thematic sections: a brief overview of the relationship between religion and politics in Iran, an intellectual history of the Islamic Republic, examining the concept of the “sacred as secular” and exploring the dynamics of secularization within a theocratic system, the governance in the name of Islam, focusing on theology and theocratic rule in the Islamic Republic, and the revolt against theocracy: the Mahsa Movement and the feminist uprising against theocracy in Iran.

Comparative Religious Studies

The main goal of the seminar is a better understanding of the key concepts of Abrahamic traditions through comparative religious studies methodology. The seminar discusses theological subjects in the philosophical realm, descriptive not prescriptive, as a historian or an outsider of these traditions, not as an insider or believer. The discussions are purely neutral, critical analysis, historical, and based on modern scholarship of religious studies. Is the scripture infallible? Are Jews, Christians, and Muslims worshiping the same God? What is the initial capacity for violent interpretation in each tradition?

Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of religion is a critical examination of metaphysics and rational justification for religious claims, as well as philosophical exploration of faith, religious experience, and the distinctive features of religious discourse. The course explores the nature of God’s attributes; arguments for God’s existence; the problem of evil; religious epistemology; religious language; God, science, and naturalism; faith and revelation; morality and religion; death and afterlife; miracles; and religious diversity. We compare the advantages and disadvantages of four methods of practicing the philosophy of religion: analytic, Wittgensteinian, continental, and feminist.

Ibn Arabi’s Sufism: Islamic Theoretical Mysticism

Ibn Arabi, one of the world’s great spiritual teachers, was a prominent mystic and visionary who enriched the Sufi tradition of Islam with his numerous and profound spiritual writings. This course explores Ibn ‘Arabi’s methodology (divine speech, deiformity, and names & relations), ontology (wahdat al-wujud, non-delimitation, imagination, and the barzakh), things and realities (fixed entities, the reality of realities, and entification [ta‘ayyun]), the return (the circle of existence, stages of ascent, and the two commands), and human perfection (the station of no station, perfect man, and divine presences).

Islam (Introduction)

Islam is simultaneously one of the most frequently discussed and least understood of the world’s major religious traditions. This introductory course includes the foundational scripture (the Qur’an), the life of the Prophet (Muhammad), and major dimensions of Islamic thought and practice ranging from ethics/law and theology to mysticism and philosophy. This course will also include a unit on contemporary debates in Islam, by examining the legacy of American Muslims. It is designed for any student who wants to learn about Islam, its essential teachings, and its foundational sources.