Global Arc

In 2014, ISIS distributed a pamphlet of authoritative responses (fatwas), based in Classical Islamic law, to questions about the enslavement and sexual exploitation of non-Muslim women and girls. This revival of slavery shocked the Muslim world and led to questions about the history of slavery and "concubinage" in Islam. We will address some of those questions through close reading of texts in translation and modern scholarship. What is the history of slavery in Islamic law and practice? What role do sex and gender play in slavery, specifically in Islamic societies? How "Islamic" is slavery? We will also include a comparative perspective.

India and Pakistan, home to nearly a third of the world's Muslim population, offer an unusually rich spectrum of the ways in which Islam has been lived, thought about, and transformed in recent times, both within this vast region and in the wider world. Our topics include: Sufism; the evolving relations between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims; major trends in Islamic law, theology, and political thought; Islamic institutions of learning (madrasas); and Muslim and non-Muslim minorities. One three-hour seminar.

This course studies the development of Judaism in the diaspora from 333 BCE to 200 CE. Its primary focus is the rich body of literature produced by Egyptian Jewry, the best documented of the ancient diaspora communities. It will also give some attention to the archeological and epigraphic evidence for Judaism in Rome and Asia Minor and to the writings of ancient non-Jews on the Jews and Judaism.

This course studies the rich corpus of revelations about end of the world, the fate of souls after death, the secrets of the cosmos, and God's heavenly abode in ancient Judaism and Christianity by placing them in their historical contexts and considering them in relation the development of Judaism and Christianity from the Hebrew Bible through late antiquity. Among the works to be considered are 1 Enoch (an anthology of ancient Jewish apocalypses about the antediluvian patriarch), Daniel (Hebrew Bible), Revelation (New Testament), early Christian tours of hell and paradise, and the early Jewish mystical work 3 Enoch (Sefer Hekhalot).

We will read the selections from the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew, considering aspects of translation and Hebrew grammar and syntax, as well as the historical, literary and religious contexts of the books.

Contemporary discussions about sexuality are filled with Jewish and Christian texts from antiquity. Quotations from the Bible and its ancient interpretations are continuously used to make claims about sexual behavior and sexual desire. Yet these texts themselves come from a very different world, with values, facts and passions of its own. This course examines the classical Jewish and Christian texts on sexuality within their own ancient historical context. Throughout the course, we will emphasize the diversity of positions in antiquity and the broad cultural conversations in which these positions were staked.

A critical introduction to some of the classics of medieval and modern thought. Specific topics include prophecy, miracles, and the possibility of knowing the divine, with particular attention to the relation between modern and premodern conceptions of reason and Moslem, Christian, and secular philosophical influences on Jewish thought. Two 90-minute classes.

A critical examination of the relation between the concepts of "religion" and "law" as they figure in the development of Jewish and Christian law, as well as in contemporary legal theory. Particular attention to the ways in which, historically, theological debates play out in contemporary secular legal arguments about the value underlying law. Two 90-minute classes.

The seminar will investigate sources ranging from the Babylonian creation story and Homer's Illiad to passages from Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Hebrew prophets, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament to see how stories of invisible beings (gods, demons, angels) construct group identity (who "we" are, and who are the "others"--and what characterizes each) and express group values. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar investigates the earliest sources about Jesus--New Testament gospels, "gnostic" gospels, and Jewish and Roman historical accounts--to explore various views of Jesus in historical context, as well as contemporary interpretations in poetry, fiction, and film. One three-hour seminar.