Britain and the Muslim World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The historical connections between Britain and Muslim society are central to understanding the birth of the modern world. During the 20th century, over half of the world’s Muslim population lived under British colonial rule. Today, Islam is the second-largest religion in the United Kingdom, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe. This course will show how modern Britain was created through its encounters with the Muslim world and how Muslims themselves navigated the transition to modernity through the British Empire and its afterlives. The course provides students with substantive knowledge of the creation of modern Britain and modern Muslim societies through their historical entanglements to 1) demonstrate how the power dynamics between Britain and the Muslim world shifted over time through colonialism, industrialization, and globalization 2) problematize colonizer-colonized binaries that obscure the complex interdependencies between Britain and Muslims in the age of empire 3) show that a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative between the West and Islam is ahistorical and weaponized for political expediency. Students will learn and apply historical methods and concepts for examining the role of the Muslim world in the creation of the modern British state and national consciousness in Britain. These same methods in historicization are applied in the study of how political, cultural, economic, and intellectual traditions of modern Islam have been produced through dialogue and transculturation. While attending to hierarchies of power, students will therefore explore Britain’s interactions with Muslims and Muslim society through the lens of exchange and hybridity rather than through monolithic or essentialized narratives. The course will proceed chronologically through three modules, beginning with early encounters between Britain and Islam through exploration, geopolitics, and cultural production, and then investigates histories and legacies of British imperialism in Muslim lands and patterns of human migration and intellectual exchange. It ends with an exploration of post-World War II British domestic and foreign policy vis-a-vis Muslims.