Oriental languages and civilizations

Knowledge This course aims at providing students with basic knowledge on Islam both as a religion and as an intellectual tradition. Such an understanding will include the founding texts, the main trends of Islamic thought and the principal branches of Islamic religious knowledge, following their historical developments from the Middle Ages to the present. Skills This course aims at planting the following skills in the students’ minds: - Finding their bearings among legal norms, theological doctrines, ethical principles, spiritual and mystical experiences of classical Islam by learning to distinguish the relevant domains and their respective religious disciplines, without losing sight of interdisciplinary links. - Analyzing passages from a translated version of the Qur’an and recognizing some of their thematic and stylistic features, especially the ones that allow to situate a given passage within the traditional internal chronology of the text; identifying at least some of the interpretative issues that a given passage raises. - Considering religion, and particularly Islam, through the methodological approach of human sciences, regardless of one’s own personal beliefs, by combining empathy with critical thinking, and joining the use of neutral language with an understanding from within of Islamic key concepts. - Deconstructing with a critical mind some simplistic representation of Islam (whatever their leanings) which are currently spread through a variety of media, by putting them into historical perspective - Understanding the historical nature of religious phenomena under scrutiny, in both their genesis and their further development, by relating them to the different historical contexts in which they originated and to a variety of changes in Muslim societies. - Using in an appropriate way some technical terms from religious studies, and most notably from Islamic studies, without neglecting more general propriety of language, as far as both lexicon and syntax are concerned. - Being able to pursue their study of this discipline independently (and feeling motivated to do it), building both upon bibliographical suggestions provided throughout the course, and upon some examples of open debates in Islamic studies which will have been shown by the teacher.