Spring 2023 Religion GU4326 section 001

SUFISM IN SOUTH ASIA

Call Number 13069
Day & Time
Location
W 12:10pm-2:00pm
477 ALFRED LERNE
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Quinn A Clark
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

Sufism or tassawuf has misleadingly been described as the mystical side of Islam, implying that it is somehow detached from the material world.  Throughout the history of Islam, Sufi ideas, practices, and institutions have borne a complex, intimate, and sometimes fraught relationship with other aspects of Islamic tradition and practice, a relationship that has also been profoundly impacted by Orientalist scholarship in the colonial period and by global reformist currents in the postcolonial period.  This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is an interdisciplinary investigation of how Sufism has been affected by the historical, sociocultural, political, and everyday environments in which is it experienced and practiced, with a particular focus on South Asia.  Eclectic in approach, we will begin by considering how Sufism has been construed and even constructed by scholars, considering how modern notions of the self, religion, and the political have shaped scholarly understandings of what Sufism is. Focusing on bodily practices and well known individual Sufis who lived in South Asia during different historical periods, we will use them as a vehicle for understanding Sufi experience within the context of the evolving Sufi orders within specific local spaces. We will consider why Sufism has become such a target of controversy and ambivalence among Muslims in the modern world and trace some of the changing controversies and tensions that Sufis have struggled with over time, focusing on their understandings of self, society and reality. 

Web Site Vergil
Department Religion
Enrollment 6 students (15 max) as of 11:06AM Friday, March 29, 2024
Subject Religion
Number GU4326
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Campus Morningside
Section key 20231RELI4326W001