This week considers the politics of Islam as an intellectual, social, and political movement in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. We situate the trajectory of modern Islamic thought and its pivotal figures within the context of social and political transformation through the modern era of colonization, anti-colonial struggle, and the most recent period of political and economic reform.

Questions:

How do historical, political, economic, and social forces shape the differentiation of interpretation (e.g. Islamic revivalism/reform and Islamic modernism)?

What are the dominant points of intersection between Islam and the West in modernity?

Is Islam an essentially political religion?

What is Islamic fundamentalism?

According to Mitchell, what is the relation between the political economy of oil and the politics of Islam?

Readings:

John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, chapters 4 and 5 (chp. 5 up to p.225 and 230-236).

Timothy Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the US Global Order,” Social Text 20, no.4 (2002): 1-18 or revised version in chapter 8 of Carbon Democracy [ebook].

Gudrun Kramer, ‘Islamist notions of democracy: Essays from the Middle East Report,’ in Joel Benin and Joe Stork eds., Political Islam (1997) pp.71-82.

Recommended Readings:

Bowering, Gerhard, Patricia Crone, Wadad Kadi, Devin J. Stewart, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and Mahan Mirza, eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Madawi al-Rashid, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (Hurst, 2015).

Fawaz Gerges, Isis: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

John Esposito and James Piscatori, “Democratization and Islam,” The Middle East Journal 45 (1991), pp. 427-440.