REL 74.19 Islam in Diaspora: Colonial pasts and Decolonial Futures
This course takes advantage of being in Edinburgh: we will reflect on Scotland’s own history and location in the British Empire to inspire us to study colonial pasts of Muslim imperial subjects of the Empire, how colonialism has shaped diasporic Muslim modernity, and what decolonial futures might look like. The British and other European crowns colonized most of the world’s Muslim population and that experience irrevocably changed Muslim beliefs and practices, and even Islamic theology on a global scale. We will critique colonialist/orientalist frameworks of studying religion and culture of Islam/Muslims while using interdisciplinary tools of Religious Studies as a field to propose new frameworks. The central questions we will ask are how have religious beliefs and practices morphed throughout the experience of colonialism and how do they continue to change with the added awareness of intersectional forces of identity formation.