This course explores questions relating to the multiple epistemological roles of the humanities in the history and present of Islam and the Near East. How might we imagine and interrogate humanistic intellectual traditions populating the Near East including philosophy, literature, arts, poetry, among others? In what ways are such intellectual disciplines related to each other? What are the central questions, concerns, and aspirations that animated the intellectual lives of scholars from the Near East invested in traditions of knowledge we today call the
“humanities”? These are among the questions that will occupy our inquiry in this class.
