What does it mean to live as modern Muslims in western countries? How do they cope with prejudice, Islamophobia, traditions, integration, war, migration, and new opportunities? We explore the experiences in the U.S. and western Europe of Muslims whose families originate from the Arab world, Iran, Turkey, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Russia, and China. This course is a multi-disciplinary introduction to Muslim communities in western societies. It considers personal experiences of western Muslims living between multiple cultures, identities, and values. It also considers the broader significance of their status in the countries they live in, regarding belonging, citizenship, and justice.
Main course themes
- Migration
- refugees as a global problem,
- understanding culture, ethnicity, religion, values, and cultural differences;
- knowing Islamic belief and practice
- tensions between community traditions and diversity in society
- considering whether America is (or should be) a melting pot or multicultural society
- the meanings of citizenship, national belonging, and a just pluralistic society
About the Instructor:
Morgan Y. Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying the globalization of financial and economic elites in Central Eurasia; Islamic ideas of social justice in former socialist states; the agency and emergent complexity of informal social networks, corporations, states, and non-state actors. His broadest interests concern how Central Eurasians make sense of and act on their society’s structural problems. This includes turning an ethnographic lens onto the dependencies between elites in Central Asia, Turkey, Russia, and China.