Spring 2008

MES 321K • ISLAMIC THEOLOGY -W

Course Description

What is the nature of God? Do we have free will? Where does evil come from? How do we know the true from the false, the good from the bad? Do we rely on revelation alone, or also on reason? How are we to live in a pluralistic world? What is the relationship between philosophy and religion? Between science and religion? These are the types of questions that exercised -- and continue to exercise -- the greatest theologians of Islam. In this writing-intensive, upper-division course we will study Islamic cosmological and theological doctrines in both the medieval and the modern periods. We will learn how historical context influenced religious doctrines, and how those doctrines in turn influenced socio-political events. Some of the outstanding figures we will study are the following: the medieval Sufi theologian al-Ghazali, the Aristotelian philosopher and jurist Averroes (Ibn Rushd), the forefather of contemporary political Islam Ibn Taymiyya, the challenger to colonialism al-Afghani, and the contemporary public intellectual Abdolkarim Soroush.

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