Themes in the Anthropology of Islam: Debates, Tradition, Critiques

Undergraduate / Graduate

The course begins by examining principal themes and debates the anthropology of Islam has engaged with in its attempt to undo Western universalist concepts such as secularism and the anthropological categories of culture and religion. We will learn to historicize these concepts and explore alternative frameworks anthropologists have offered for studying Muslim societies. We will turn an ethnographic lens towards studies on the Islamic Revival in Egypt, Turkey, Europe, and East Asia in order to study how Muslims cultivate piety, relate to the unseen, and retain cultural ties alongside their religious identities. In the process, we will learn the ways they trouble conventional notions around women's agency, ideas around modernity's "disenchantment," and secular conceptions of belief. We will then explore texts that indirectly problematize the anthropology of Islam's coordinates around orthopraxy, authority, and ritual. As we do so, we will interrogate the relationship between U.S. Blackness and Islam, religious piety and consumer capitalism, as well as transnationalism and incarceration. We will situate our readings and discussions within the broader political context of the Global War on Terror and secular governmentality, with a particular attention to questions of race, gender, and political struggle.