مَنْ سَلَكَ طَرِيقًا يَطْلُبُ فِيهِ عِلْمًا سَلَكَ اللَّهُ بِهِ طَرِيقًا مِنْ طُرُقِ الْجَنَّةِ
“If anyone travels on a road in search of knowledge, Allah will cause him to travel on one of the roads [to] Paradise.”
- Hadith of Abu Dardā' (580-652 AD)
Courses and Seminars
My teaching, like my research, is interdisciplinary. In my survey level lectures students gain a broad understanding of the ethical and moral frameworks that have shaped our society from pre-biblical times until the present while my seminars tend to focus on more specialized topics. All my classes centralize the centrality of the sacred which is present in everyday life, from object we use, to the products we buy and the social and cultural constructs we leverage and the historical networks in which they are embedded. I emphasize the importance of recognizing personal ignorance, and through this acknowledgment unencumber ourselves from our implicit biases and fears so that we can attack ourselves with the unknown. Ethics, morals and history exist in a constant flux, and recognizing the absence of rigidity affords students an opportunity to view the world in a new a dynamic way. My classes cover difficult topics, exploring the ways religious ethics and social morals present in our culture has shaped, and been shaped by ideologies of race and processes of empire. But students will also understand the powerful significance of religious ethics as a means of seeing differently, of experimenting with and expressing new forms of identity and radically imagining alternative futures. I hope students will leave my classes with a deeper understanding of how religious ethics and morals shape the worlds we inhabit, and armed with this literacy they will be better prepared to creatively question, critique and reimagine how ideas of difference and ways of seeing impact our lived reality.
Religious and Political Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
This course introduces students to the complex issues that are derived from interactions of religious and political ethics in the domestic and international political arena of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The course is divided into four sections. The first section introduces students to the historical foundations, emergence, and evolution of the MENA. The second section examines major themes and issues that derive from interactions of religion and politics in the MENA. We will examine political determinants of religion, the complex and diverse nature of religious politics, the crisis of secularism, the causes, and consequences of Islamism in the region and the dynamics of the Arab Spring. The third section will assess the global aspects of the interaction of religion and politics including a critical study of ‘Jihādism’, ‘Shi’a revivalism’, al-Qāida, the Islamic State, and the impact of Christian Zionism on the politics of the region (among other topics). The last section will contextualize different types of religious politics through a series of comparative case studies in the region. We will study the dynamics of the Arab Spring in North Africa/Maghreb and Egypt. We will problematize the transformation of Judaism in Israel, the nature of state Shi’ism and the movement towards post-Islamism in Iran, and Islamist groups such as: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The major goal of this course is to introduce a critical and alternative perspective on the complex nature of religious and political ethics in MENA. After completing this course, students will have developed their analytical skills and theoretical tools in critical understanding of the domestic and international features of religious politics in this region.
Religious Ethics and Moral Problems
The intended focus of this course is to provide an introduction to the academic study of religious ethics and the associated social and moral problems which are understood through these diverse ethical systems. As a venture in theoretical rather than applied religious ethics, this course will address moral/ethical teaching(s) on range of particular quandaries and the existing narratives surrounding them. Moreover, this course will also touch on the possibility, method, and purpose of religious ethics, both in application and form. Though this theoretical orientation abstracts from quotidian moral problems, which presents religious ethics as something that are not themselves abstractions but the practical dimension of concrete religious traditions, experienced within the social and contextual present, past and future. To approach this goal, the selection of a discrete religious tradition(s) is required to examine the method and purpose of a religious ethic. Therefore, both Islam and Christianity (with some Greek insights) have been selected to fulfill this role, both because of its historical significance to humanity and the competence of the instructor. Consequently, after considering the relationship of religion to ethics more generically, this class will analyze a variety of representative Christian/Islamic understandings of the methods and purposes of ethics. Yet even with respect to these latter two assertions, this class harbours no pretension of surveying the panoply of Christian/Islamic positions on them exhaustively. Rather than strive for such comprehensiveness, this introduction will instead concentrate on influence as expounded by figures that have profoundly shaped their tradition(s).. Our focus will be on the ways groups of people—especially Christians and Muslims—argue about the rights and wrongs of particular aspects of contemporary life. We will pay particular attention to the ways these communities attempt to relate historic teaching to changing social and political conditions.