Religion 183 - Islam through Media: Past, Present, Representation

(Offered as ASLC-183, RELI-183) The discourses of Islam that play out in contemporary mass media often implicate the media themselves: Do these media misrepresent Islam, and how might Islam be truthfully represented? Does Islam require an iconoclastic hostility to representational media in general, or is this idea just one more misrepresentation? This course takes a historical perspective on such topical questions and on the media through which they circulate and proliferate, exploring how various tools and technologies of representation have shaped Islamic thought and practice, Muslim social worlds, and non-Muslims’ understandings of Islam across multiple modern and pre-modern contexts. We will examine the continuities and differences among representations and performances of Islam through media such as television, visual art, cinema, relics and artifacts, photography, theatre, audio recording, toys and games, manuscript and print, and internet-based media. Our analysis of the aesthetic, ideological, and political idioms, investments, and strategies of diverse pieces of media will situate them in their social contexts with support from secondary literature. We will compare and experiment with various theories of media produced in the Euro-American academy and in Islamic intellectual cultures. 

Spring Semester. Professor Molloy

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Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Class discussion, close reading of various media, formal written analysis, in-class presentation, paper or other creative project based on independent research.