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badareen@arizona.edu
Badareen, Nayel A
Lecturer
badareen
Currently Teaching
RELI 334 – Islamic Thought
This course provides an overview of Islamic intellectual history from the origins of Islam to the present day. The course is divided into three units: 1) Classical Islam and religious sciences; 2) Classical Islamic thought more broadly; 3) Modern Islamic thought. Students will be introduced to Islamic scriptures as well as original writings in translation by preeminent figures of the Islamic tradition and will learn how Muslim thinkers engaged issues concerning scriptural authority, theology, mysticism, human happiness and flourishing, politics, colonialism and gender. The course approaches these writings with particular attention to analysis of the concepts central to Islamic thought and their interconnections, and to the forms of expression through which these concepts are presented to envisioned audiences. Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on the implications of the ideas we study for values pertaining to justice, social hierarchy and inequality, freedom and domination. Ideas regarding the nature of human existence and its place within the universe always have relation to social life and order. Examining this relation in Islamic thought will involve probing our own notions on these matters and their implications in our own social life.
RELI 277A – History of the Middle East: 600-1453
In this course, students take a humanistic disciplinary perspective to explore the cultural products of the pre-modern Middle East and answer questions about its historical development. Using primary sources in translation and secondary scholarship, students will explore the context of the rise of Islam; the process of conversion and expansion across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia; the crystallization of Shi'ism and changing notions of religious authority; and the impact of Turkish migrations and Mongol conquests. They will become familiar with major genres of pre-modern Middle Eastern literary, religious, and scientific writings, and use techniques of close reading to answer questions about those texts' ideological positions and contexts.