Conscience and Community: A History of Islam and Muslim Societies from Origins to the Mongol Invasions

An 8-week course with Dr. Adnan Husain (Department of History, Queen’s University)

Many think that history, particularly after the life of the Prophet and generation of the companions, is basically irrelevant to understanding and practicing Islam or reflecting on what it means to be a Muslim today. In fact, the opposite is the case. Approaching Islam and Muslim identity historically is essential to thinking through present issues facing Islam and Muslims in the modern world. Previous Muslims wrestled over many difficult questions, came to diverse conclusions, and faced daunting choices posed by their social, political, and moral circumstances. In doing so, they forged a religious tradition and attempted to establish societies in response to their understanding and interpretation of Qur’anic revelation and the earliest community guided by the Prophet Muhammad. Their experiences are instructive, inspiring, and cautionary in numerous ways. This course examines the formation of Islam and Muslim societies to enable students not only to appreciate its complexities but to use it to pose questions for themselves about how this vital religious tradition has proven relevant to, and been influenced by, such vastly different political, cultural, and social conditions-nomadic tribalism in Arabia, Caliphal empire across the agrarian Near East, medieval cities from Seville in Al-Andalus to Samarqand, and so on. This history has its share of surprises that challenge conventional wisdom, myths of identity, and present presumptions: Is it really true that in Islam state and religion are inseparable? Was Baghdad as cosmopolitan and tolerant as Cordoba in al-Andalus? What was the status of Jews and Christians in medieval Islamic culture? Did the “gate of independent legal reasoning” (bab al-ijtihad) really close in the medieval era, preventing new interpretation of Islamic law? Did the early Arab Muslims conquer for the sake of conversion? When and how did the strict segregation of sexes predominate in Muslim societies of the Middle East?

However, the principal questions the course provides crucial background to are: What did it mean to live Islam and keep faith as a Muslim; and what can we learn from the variety of ideas about Islam and ways to live it that previous Muslims have attempted?

Time: 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Dates: Sunday April 19 – Sunday June 7, 2009
Location: Upper classroom, Noor Cultural Centre
Fee: $225 – includes course materials
Class cap: 20 students

*Teacher’s note: Students may wish to purchase either Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd edition or Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vols. 1 and 2 for background reading. The Hodgson text is better, but the readings are longer and more difficult than the Lapidus ones. Page references to readings for both texts will be given each class.

For more information or to register, please email [email protected] or phone 416.444.7148 ext. 222.

Course Outline

I. The Founding of Islam and the Muslim Community (c.550-692)

SESSION 1 April 19, 2009
Orientations: Geography, History, and the World before Islam

Part I: Introducing the course and its central themes, approaches to history and thinking historically, the history of Islamic studies and Orientalist approaches, and an introduction to the geography and environments of the core Islamic lands of North Africa and the Middle East.

Part II: Societies, empires, and religions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East in late antiquity—Judaism, Eastern Christianity, Zoroastrianism; Pre-Islamic pagan, tribal Arabia and the Mecca of Muhammad

SESSION 2 April 26, 2009
The Revolution of Revelation: Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the Advent of Islam

Biography and career of the Prophet and central themes of Qur’anic revelation, first in the context of Meccan tribal society and pagan idolatry and, second, in the context of a multi-religious and independent community at Medina. How was Arabian society transformed by the message of Islam? What was the relationship between Islam and previous revealed religions? What was the nature of the early Muslim community? How do we understand this period historically and assess the importance of these specific events for that time as well as ours?

II. The Formation of Islamic Tradition and Muslim Thought (692-c 950)

SESSION 3 May 3, 2009
Absolutism and Opposition: Religious Politics and Authority in the Caliphal Empires

Part I: The Muslim polity’s challenges and divisions after the Prophet’s death, political and religious authority contested in Shi’i, Sunni and Khariji orientations: who should lead and why?; Muslim conquests, settlement, and conversion in the Nile to Oxus regions—was Islam “spread by the sword” or only Muslim political power and rule? Why were the conquests so successful and lasting?

Part II: Islam and Empire under the Umayyads and the Abbasid revolution: what were the consequences of conversion, when/how was Islam universalist?, non-Arab and non-Muslim communities and their status, the culture war: mosque vs. Caliphal court.

SESSION 4 May 10, 2009
The Rise of the Scholars: Interpreting and Elaborating Islamic Law

Part I: The development of the religious sciences historically and its social, cultural, and political contexts. How did these contexts inform the concepts and conclusions derived from the study of the Qur’an, sirah, hadith, and fiqh? What was/is the Shari’ah, how was it understood, who should represent it and from which authoritative sources? What is ijtihad? What were the debates within the expanding Muslim community and how were they resolved? What did ulama’ believe constituted the proper Muslim life?

Part II: The mihna, sometimes called the “inquisition”, the attempt by Caliphs to assert religious authority and control over the ulama’. How did a class of ‘ulama emerge and how was their religious authority understood, established, and developed in opposition to Caliphal power? What consequences did this and other factors have for the shape of the developing Islamic scholarly tradition?

SESSION 5 May 17, 2009
Rationalizing Belief, Experiencing Faith: Currents of Islamic Theology and Muslim Spirituality

Part I: Is there such a thing as Islamic orthodoxy or Muslim heresy? How was doctrinal consensus achieved, if at all? An introductory exploration of the intellectual traditions of Islamic theology (kalam) and philosophy through their principal questions and debates in this formative era for Muslim thought. Three major areas of attention: political theology and sectarian division (i.e. what is the nature of political and religious authority—do we need an Imam? Who is a Muslim, what does it require to be a member of the ummah? Is rebellion a sin and obedience a duty?); reason and revelation in the Muslim creed (i.e. what is the nature of God, the status of his attributes, and the status of Qur’anic revelation? Does it have to make sense rationally?); interreligious apologetics and polemics (i.e. how do we know which religion, claims of prophethood, beliefs are true? How can one defend the doctrines of Islam against competing religious and philosophical systems?).

Part II: Muslim piety, devotional practice, and spirituality. What meanings did Islam have for Muslims and how did they express them? Sufism, its major practices and concepts in the earliest periods, and development into a coherent and orthodox mysticism. Traditions of Shi’i piety and reverence for the imams.

III. The Creation of Muslim Societies in the Middle East (c. 950-c. 1350)

SESSION 6 May 24, 2009
Politics, Society and Culture in the Medieval City

Part I: The Fragmentation of Empire, the challenge of Fatimid Shi’i North Africa and Egypt, and establishment of Turkish and Berber military hegemony in the Muslim East and West, respectively. How did the new political rulers, Sultans and their Amirs, legitimize their power and what role did the ulama’ play in the political and social system? How did political disunity paradoxically lead to the expansion of Muslim rule into Sub-saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent?

Part II: The world of the Thousand and One Nights: the flowering of “secular” and “religious” culture in the arts, literature, science, and philosophy under new dynastic patronage in Muslim cities and courts. Family structure, neighborhood institutions, mercantile exchange in the bazaar, and urban life in a majority Muslim society. What was daily life like in a medieval city? What was distinctive about Muslim cities of this age? Cosmopolitanism and multireligious society in Toledo and Cordoba in al-Andalus, Baghdad.

SESSION 7 May 31, 2009
Medieval Religious Culture: Sunni Orthopraxy and the Alternatives to “Normative” Islam

Part I: The development of a Sunni legal-Sufi spiritual-`Ashari theological synthesis as the dominant/orthodox consensus. The concept of shari’ah as social order in majority Muslim society. The defining role of al-Ghazali’s career and thought. The development of institutions like the madrasah for Islamic sciences and the khanaqah for emerging Sufi brotherhoods. The systematizing of Islamic law and crystallization of the four “schools of law” (madhhab). Was there a “Sunni Revival” or was this just the beginning of a true Sunni consensus? What were the consequences of all of these parallel developments during this period of consolidation and institutionalization? Did the bab al-ijtihad (the gate of independent legal reasoning and judgment) really close?

Part II: Dissident Shi’i and Khariji movements (Nizari Ismai’ili, Zaydi, Qarmati, Ibadi, Azraqi), “Ecstatic” and antinomian Sufism of the Qalandars, the mystical theosophy of Ibn Arabi and Rumi, and the radical Hanbalism of Ibn Taymiyya.

SESSION 8 June 7, 2009
Franks and Other “Barbarians”: Crusades, Mongol invasions, and the post-Caliphal aftermath

Part I: What were the consequences of the Crusades of the Franks and the Mongol invasions for Muslim identity and experience, and how did Muslim society respond? How did these events alter relations between Muslims and other religious groups within and without the dar al-Islam? How did Muslims respond to non-Muslim rule in the Muslim West (Spain, Sicily) and the East (Palestine, then Iran/Iraq/Central Asia under the Mongol Ilkhans)? Salah al-Din to Baybars, the Jihad as counter-crusade, Mongol invasions and conversions.

Part II: Creative chaos after Mongol collapse (1320’s), the new paradigms of religious and political authority and legitimacy—religious charisma as political force; the politics of wujudism and social mobilization of the Sufi brotherhoods. Radical messianic Shi’ism, apocalyptic movements and syncretic “heresies” (the ghulat).

Dr. Adnan Husain is both a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian. His early work focused on religious phenomena and social imagination in Medieval Catholicism and Islam, particularly on Franciscan spiritual and Sufi mystical traditions. He now principally studies and teaches on the cross-cultural and inter-religious encounters among the Muslims, Christians and Jews of Latin Christendom and the Islamic world in the Mediterranean zone from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. On these topics, he has published several articles; completed a forthcoming study, entitled Identity Polemics: Encounters with Islam in the Medieval Mediterranean World (1150-1300); and has co-edited a collection, A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700, in a new series he edits called “Islam and the West: Influences, Interactions, Intersections.” He is currently at work on a study of the intellectual and religious culture of Muslim diasporic minorities in “the West” from the late Medieval Mediterranean to the Early Modern Atlantic worlds, while co-editing a collection on the cultural history of the Qur’an in translation.

Dr. Husain attended Deep Springs College, a small alternative two-year school located in a high desert valley in California, before receiving his B.A. in History at the University of California at Berkeley. After spending two years at the School for Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as a British Marshall Scholar, he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley on a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities. He has taught at UC Berkeley, Deep Springs College, and New York University in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies before immigrating to Canada and joining the Department of History at Queen’s University as a Queen’s National Scholar. In addition to his academic training, he has studied in traditional Islamic circles among scholars in Damascus and at the Abu al-Noor College in the same city. For many years he has frequented spiritual sessions of Sufi masters from several brotherhoods in both the Islamic world and the West and he regularly speaks to interfaith groups. Adnan is well-known to the Noor community as a frequent participant in events and occasional giver of Friday sermons.