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Postgraduate Module Descriptor

ARAM250: The Sovereign, the Good, and Society in Islamic Thought

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

The aim of the module is to introduce students to a range of historical and normative arguments and discourses about the nature of political thought, of the good, of the ethical and of the just, starting from the early reception of Platonic ethics and politics all the way through to contemporary Islamic debates in the aftermath of the ‘Arab spring’ and the uprisings since 2011. Alongside the study of texts, we will also consider different modalities of discourse in material culture, the sonosphere, and the arts of the articulation of ideas on sovereignty, justice, and the good in Muslim societies. We will also draw upon the perspectives of practitioners. By the end of the module, the students will have a good grasp of normative and theoretical elements of the tradition as well as their historical manifestations and some empirical grasp of attitudes and debates in the contemporary world.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

The intention is to cover the following topics week by week:

• Some Definitions: Political Thought, Political Theology, Political Philosophy in Global Context
• Platonopolis: the Pursuit of the Virtuous Society
• Aristotelian Public Ethics and the Making of the Islamic Ethical Tradition
• Religious Philosophies and Philosophical Religions
• The circle of justice and the akhl?q tradition
• Mirrors for princes and statecraft
• Sufi Public Ethics
• Whose Sovereignty? Whose Justice?
• Individuals and Communities
• Squaring Divine Sovereignty between Liberals and Traditionalists
• Intersectionality, Decolonial Islamic Studies and the Pursuit of the Good

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

• Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu
• The Immanent Frame https://tif.ssrc.org

How this Module is Assessed

In the tables below, you will see reference to 'ILO's. An ILO is an Intended Learning Outcome - see Aims and Learning Outcomes for details of the ILOs for this module.

Formative Assessment

A formative assessment is designed to give you feedback on your understanding of the module content but it will not count towards your mark for the module.

Summative Assessment

A summative assessment counts towards your mark for the module. The table below tells you what percentage of your mark will come from which type of assessment.

...and this table provides further details on the summative assessments for this module.

Re-assessment

Re-assessment takes place when the summative assessment has not been completed by the original deadline, and the student has been allowed to refer or defer it to a later date (this only happens following certain criteria and is always subject to exam board approval). For obvious reasons, re-assessments cannot be the same as the original assessment and so these alternatives are set. In cases where the form of assessment is the same, the content will nevertheless be different.

Indicative Reading List

• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
• Husain Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012
• Mehrdad Boroujerdi (ed), Mirror for the Muslim Prince, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013
• Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005
• Patricia Crone and Gerhard Böwering (eds), Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013
• Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre & Decolonization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018
• Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012
• Wael Hallaq, Reforming Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019
• Murad Idris, ‘Islam, Rawls, and the Limits of Late Twentieth Century Liberal Philosophy’, Modern Intellectual History 18 (2020): 1–14
• Humeira Iqtidar, ‘Redefining “tradition” in political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 15.4 (2016): 424–44
• Nelly Lahoud, Political Thought in Islam, London: Routledge, 2013
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, London: Duckworth, 1981
• Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005
• Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016
• Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011
• Andrew March, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019
• Dominic O’Meara, Platonopolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
• Noah Salomon, For the Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016

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