Postgraduate Module Descriptor

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

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

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:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching ActivitiesGuided independent studyPlacement / study abroad
501000

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

CategoryHours of study timeDescription
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities22Classroom seminars
Guided Independent Study66Readings and online formative tasks, preparation for classes
Guided Independent Study62Preparation for presentations and assessments (web based on ELE etc)

Online Resources

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

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

  • 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