Term: Fall 2021
Participating Campuses: Host – University of Maryland | Receiving – Penn State University
Semester Dates:
- University of Maryland: August 30 to December 21, 2021
- Penn State University: August 23 to December 17, 2021
Day & Time: Thursdays, 3:30pm-6:00pm Eastern
Course Number & Title:
Students at participating campuses must enroll in the following sections for local course credit:
- University of Maryland: HIST 428G “Islamic Reformism”
- Penn State University: HIST 497 “Special Topics”
Instructor: Dr. Peter Wien | pwien@umd.edu
“Islamic Reformism” follows various trends of Islamic Reformism in the modern period. We will start with an introduction of central issues for our discussion of topics, and then move to an inquiry of reform trends in the eighteenth century CE in scholarly and Sufi circles, both in terms of intellectual engagement and activism. On the basis of primary and secondary sources, we will then trace the impact of the encounter with European rationalism and missionary activity in the nineteenth century on Islamic thought and pious practice. We will juxtapose the well-known examples of “high reform” and “high rationalism” with others that emerged out of earlier trends in Sufism and purification movements.
Moving to the twentieth century, we will look at the increasing entanglement of political ideology with religious morality and forms of Islamic representations, laying the groundwork for Islamism as a political ideology, and its liberal, conservative, radical, and fundamentalist variations. This was also the time when questions of gender relations took center-stage in socio-ethical discourses. We will then move to the interwar period as a crucial era for the formulation of political ideologies and emergence of new forms of social and political mobilization, which, in the context of the transformation of religious practice, found its clearest representation in the emergence of the movement of the Muslim Brothers. Finally, we will look at the evolution of socio-ethical positions in Islamic thought and practice in the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting, once more, its diverse appearances as theories of militancy, economic practice, practical morality and media, as well as the legitimacy of government.
The primary focus will be on the Arab lands, but we will include Iranian and Turkish examples, and venture into South Asian Islam for one entire session.
About the Instructor: Peter Wien is Professor for the History of the Modern Middle East at the University of Maryland in College Park. He received his PhD in 2003 from the University of Bonn, Germany, and Master degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Heidelberg. He taught at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and was a fellow of the ZMO (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) in Berlin. He is the author of the books Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2017) and Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932-1941 (London: Routledge, 2006). Peter Wien serves as President of The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII). He previously held positions as Interim Chair and Associate Chair of University of Maryland’s Department of History.