REL 237
Islam, Pluralism, and the Religious Other Fall 2013
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

In recent years, Islam has become a major topic in the media, in political rhetoric, among intellectual communities, and among ordinary citizens in the Western world. A recurring refrain in these discussions is the question of the position of Islam and Muslims vis-à -vis other religious and secular traditions in a pluralistic world. In this course, we will situate this discourse as the product of a particular set of circumstances and an end result of particular historical and contemporary discourses that have portrayed Islam and Muslims as the West’s “Other”. It is only when this perception of Islam as the other has been established that we can understand the self-perception of Muslims and the Islamic tradition and it is only when we understand this “self” that we can fruitfully understand how that tradition has perceived its own “others”. This course will examine the historical and theological interface between Islamic and other religious traditions and between Muslims and religious others. We will look at: 1) the Qurâ’an, focusing on verses that deal with questions of religious diversity and otherness, and their multiple interpretations; 2) the concept of prophecy and the particular example of Muhammad in relation to religious others; 3) how the different schools of Islamic thought and practice- in scriptural exegesis, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, and mysticism- have used their specific methodologies to theorize religious difference; 4) how Muslims have theologically situated and culturally interacted with other religious traditions, specifically Christianity, Judaism, Hindu traditions, Buddhism, and the Chinese religions; 5) how new discourses on religious diversity that articulate new modes of hermeneutics in relation to the Qurâ’an and the Islamic tradition are being developed in the contemporary period by Muslim intellectuals and scholars and how they relate to global issues of identity, otherness, and pluralism.