This course examines the domestic, regional, and transnational politics of the Middle East and North Africa. The class is organized into three units. The first examines major armed conflicts— anti-colonial, intra-state, and inter-state—from 1948 through the 1990s. It uses these historical moments as windows onto key issues in Middle Eastern and North African political issues such as external intervention/occupation, human rights, sectarianism, social movements, and memory politics. Unit Two focuses on policy relevant issues such as democratization, minority populations, religion and politics, and gender. In Unit Three, students will explore the politics of the Arab Uprisings through critical reading and discussion of new (post-2011) scholarship on MENA states, organizations, and populations. Enrollment limited to Political Science and International Studies majors.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Parkinson, Sarah
• Room: Krieger 300
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/25
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST, INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL

For 1400 years, the Qur’an has played a central role in Muslim intellectual, spiritual, artistic and ritual life. This course will explore the sacred scripture of Islam through its foundational ideas, history of the text and thematic development, literary style, history and methods of interpretation, and role in Muslim spiritual and ritual life. We will also explore how the Qur’an weaves through literature, music and the visual arts.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Ziad, Homayra
• Room: 3003 N. Charles OMA Lounge
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST, INST-GLOBAL

This community-engaged course is co-created by a scholar and curator with expertise in religion, art, and material culture, and taught in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and centers how museums engage with the sacred. Recognizing that museums have traditionally been under-equipped to respond to the social concerns that animate their local communities, the BMA is rethinking how a twenty-first century civic museum engages the city in which it is located. Understanding the museum as a public space in which contemporary civic and social issues can be engaged, we will explore such questions as: how can a museum represent devotional objects while honoring a diversity of religious and spiritual perspectives and avoiding homogenous narratives about belief? How can a museum create relationships with religious communities to understand and interpret the objects in its collection, and navigate differences in faith-based communities with ethical care? How can a museum engage local communities in the process of writing labels for objects and in other acts of interpretation in a way that is not extractive and is genuinely value-aligned? In short, how can a museum truly become public? As a community-engaged course, students will build practically on their learning about museums, religion and public pedagogy to create and facilitate community listening circles at the BMA. The course will include visits to the BMA and other sites, guest visits on focused topics from museum professionals in other institutions, and training in listening and facilitation.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Ziad, Homayra
• Room: 3003 N. Charles OMA Lounge
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/20
• PosTag(s): CSC-CE, ISLM-ISLMST, INST-GLOBAL

You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST, INST-CP

Continuation of AS.375.115. Introductory course in speaking, listening, reading, and writing Modern Standard Arabic. Presents basic grammatical structures and a basic vocabulary. Through oral-aural drill in classroom, tapes in Language Laboratory, and reading/writing exercises, students attain a basic level of competence on which they can build in subsequent years of study. May not be taken Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory

• Days/Times: MWF 9:00AM - 9:50AM, TTh 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Jafire, Sana
• Room: Maryland 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/16
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST

Continuation of AS.375.215. Designed to bring students up to competency level required for third/fourth year Arabic. Students will consolidate and expand their mastery of the four basic skills acquired in AS.375.115-116. More authentic material--written, audio, and visual--will be used, and culture will be further expanded on as a fifth skill. Recommended Course Background: AS.375.215 or permission required.

• Days/Times: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, TTh 10:30AM - 11:20AM
• Instructor: Jafire, Sana
• Room: Maryland 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST

What does it mean to be “spiritual but not religious”? Why do U.S. Millennials and Gen Z continue to leave traditional religious institutions and seek to create alternative structures of meaning? And why do the majority of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated continue to say that they believe in a god? We will explore the history and current landscape of American spirituality and its connections and disconnections from religion and popular psychology. We will also enter the politics of race and cultural appropriation within the “spiritual marketplace,” the corporations and organizations that create products for the religiously unaffiliated (think yoga mats, Rumi calendars, and meditation apps). While asking critical questions about the history, politics and economics of American spirituality, the class takes seriously the existential questions behind spiritual seeking. Throughout the class, students will be invited to explore these questions for themselves through self-reflective and experiential exercises.

• Days/Times: TWTh 10:00AM - 12:10PM
• Instructor: Ziad, Homayra
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

What does it mean to be “spiritual but not religious”? Why do U.S. Millennials and Gen Z continue to leave traditional religious institutions and seek to create alternative structures of meaning? And why do the majority of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated continue to say that they believe in a god? We will approach religion and spirituality as cultural phenomenon through literature, music, film, apps/websites, and guest speakers, and explore the history and current landscape of American spirituality and its connections and disconnections from religion and popular psychology. We will also enter the politics of race and cultural appropriation within the “spiritual marketplace,” the corporations and organizations that create products for the religiously unaffiliated (think yoga mats, Rumi calendars, and meditation apps). While asking critical questions about the history, politics and economics of American spirituality, the class takes seriously the universal existential questions behind spiritual seeking. Throughout the class, students will be invited to explore these questions for themselves through self-reflective and experiential exercises.

• Days/Times: W 12:00PM - 2:30PM
• Instructor: Ziad, Homayra
• Room: 3003 N. Charles OMA Lounge
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This course highlights the special role that Washington, DC, has—as the nation’s capital—taken on within the broader story of Islamic representation in America, a topic we will explore through close firsthand engagement with artworks, buildings, and sites throughout the city. In addition to the world-famous Islamic galleries of the National Museum of Asian Art and the impressive Egyptian-style mosque that Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated in 1957 as the Islamic Center of Washington, we will address lesser-known manifestations of America’s long and politically charged relationship with the Islamic world, including the commemorative stone gifted by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I to the Washington Monument in 1854. The often-overlooked African American connection will feature prominently in the course, with visits to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, which houses the 1831 Arabic diary of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from present-day Senegal who spent most of his life as an enslaved man in North Carolina. Throughout the semester, we will remain mindful of the complicated and sometimes difficult nature of American—and, more broadly, Western—interactions with the Islamic world, which have played out against the backdrop of entrenched misconceptions that will be considered in relation to Orientalist paintings at the National Gallery. In responding to these various case studies and perspectives, students will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations, written assignments, and object-handling sessions—their own ideas about Islamic art and its place in the American capital.

• Days/Times: T 11:30AM - 2:15PM
• Instructor: Rustem, Unver
• Room: 555 Penn 
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, HART-RENEM

As a central practice of the Muslim faith, pilgrimage has long animated the arts of the Islamic world, not only by generating countless monuments and objects, but also by facilitating the movement of artists, artifacts, and ideas across vast distances. This course explores the rich visual and material products of the Islamic pilgrimage tradition during the early modern and modern periods, including the architecture of the sacred sites themselves, the processions and ceremonies enacted by those who journeyed to these destinations, and proxy monuments and artworks created for those unable to perform the pilgrimage in person. Although our focus will be on the Hajj—the main annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca—we will also consider the arts associated with other pilgrimage sites, in particular the Shi‘i shrines of Iraq and Iran, as well as the pilgrimage practices of non-Muslim communities in the Middle East. We will bridge the gap between these geographies and our own vantage point in Baltimore through locally housed artworks, among them a seventeenth-century Ottoman tile at the Walters Art Museum that shows the Great Mosque of Mecca and a printed Hajj certificate—probably designed by an Indian artist but published in Istanbul in 1895—recently acquired for Hopkins’ own Special Collections. Through close engagement with these objects and other materials, the course will address such themes as sacred spectacle and ritual, pilgrimage as a locus of female patronage, and the impact of modernity on the Hajj and its traditions.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rustem, Unver
• Room: BLC 2043
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM, HART-MODERN

In this course, we will survey the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of the three Islamic early modern gunpowder empires that ranged from “the Balkans to Bengal”: The Ottomans (1300-1922), the Safavids (1501-1736), and the Mughals (1526-1858).

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Noor, Rao Mohsin Ali
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-MIDEST, INST-GLOBAL, HIST-ASIA

For over a thousand years, the Sufi tradition has been a dynamic force in Islamic social, political and spiritual life. The tradition offers a treasure trove of devotional literature and music, philosophical treatises, contemplative practices, and institutions of social and political organization. After unpacking the politics of the term “Sufi,” we will trace the historical development of the tradition from the early ascetics in Iraq and Syria to the age of trans-national Sufi orders, with case studies from South Asia, Turkey, and the United States. We will then move into some of the key constructs of the tradition of spiritual growth and character formation: the divine-human relationship, the stages of the spiritual path, contemplative and practical disciplines, ideas of sainthood, discipleship and ethical perfection, and the psychology of love. Throughout the class, we will explore the nature of experiential language and interrogate the tradition through the lens of gender. We will also experience Sufism through ritual and music.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ziad, Homayra
• Room: 3003 N. Charles OMA Lounge
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Introductory course in speaking, listening, reading, and writing Modern Standard Arabic. Presents basic grammatical structures and a basic vocabulary. Through oral-aural drill in classroom, tapes in Language Laboratory, and reading/writing exercises, students attain a basic level of competence on which they can build in subsequent years of study. No Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory

• Days/Times: MWF 9:00AM - 9:50AM, TTh 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Jafire, Sana
• Room: Maryland 202
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 16/16
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST

Designed to bring students up to competency level required for third/fourth year Arabic. Students will consolidate and expand their mastery of the four basic skills acquired in AS.375.115-116. More authentic material--written, audio, and visual--will be used, and culture will be further expanded on as a fifth skill. Recommended Course Background: AS.375.115-116 or equivalent.

• Days/Times: MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, TTh 10:30AM - 11:20AM
• Instructor: Jafire, Sana
• Room: Maryland 202
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 16/16
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST

Designed to enhance students' ability to read, discuss, and write about various topics covered in traditional and contemporary Arabic texts. Recommended Course Background: AS.375.216 or equivalent.

• Days/Times: MWF 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Jafire, Sana
• Room: Krieger 517
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST