This course will have students read choice pieces of South Asian literature. While tackling a text in simple Sanskrit from a major literary tradition, Buddhist or Hindu, and discussing its content and context, students will learn strategies for translating and interpreting Sanskrit literature.

This seminar will address, as a theoretical matter, the relationship of religion to a liberal state, with particular attention to the writings of John Rawls as set forth in Political Liberalism and leading "religion" cases law from Canada, the United States and the European Court of Human Rights that address the relationship of religion and a liberal constitutional order. The course will also provide an introduction into classical and modern Islamic thought on the State.

It is well known that the Qur'ān refers to many biblical stories, events, and personalities but it almost never directly quotes the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. The Qur'anic version of biblical narratives often follows the synopsis that one finds not in the text of the Bible but in various sources of the para-biblical literature such as the Talmud, midrashim, apocryphal gospels, and early patristic writings. The Qur'anic version of a given biblical narrative is also usually bent towards the larger theological exigencies of the Qur'ān. In this course students will read and discuss the textual development of biblical and para-biblical narratives from their source-texts to their retellings in the Qur'ān. After reading some of the most recent scholarship on the complex relationship between the Qur'ān and the biblical literature, the course will follow the stories of major qur'anic figures within a rough chronological framework. Beginning with the creation story and the Adam narrative we will go through the stories of Noah, the Patriarchs, Joseph, Job, Jonah, Moses, David, and Solomon. We will end our survey with qur'anic portrayals of Christian figures such as Mary, Zechariah, John the Baptist, and Jesus. This means that each week we will be reading portions from the Qur'ān and corresponding sections from the biblical literature often with the help of some secondary literature.

This course places Islamic Law within the wider debates on law and society, a field that evolved out of the social scientific study of law, with a special focus on the anthropology of Islamic Law. It is organized thematically, and combines readings from different periods, emphasizing the profound changes to Islamic law and society since the nineteenth century. The course will be mostly focused on the early modern and modern Islamic history, and will not delve into the debates of the formation of Islamic Law, legal schools and genres. Each session will combine theoretical readings addressing the questions we will be tackling in the nexus of law/society, and we will address various substantive topics (like gender, property, punishment, war).

This course focuses on critical scholarship and traces the development of the field of Shi'i studies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Notably, in the past 25 years there has been a significant increase in publications focusing on Shi'ism in such fields as religious studies, visual studies, anthropology, and history, which have contributed to our understanding of this second largest branch of Islam. This course will establish an intellectual foundation in the field and prepare students for more advanced research using primary sources and ethnographic fieldwork in Shi'i studies.

This course is intended to be the first in a two course sequence in the study of Shi'ism in the study of religion. The second course in the sequence is RLG3517H. "Foundations" focuses on critical scholarship and traces the development of the field of Shi'i studies in the 20th century until the late 1970s. This course will introduce students to scholarship focusing on Shi'i mysticism, theology, doctrine, law, and historiography. This course will provide students with an understanding of the longue-durée of the field, its trends, and the major issues that have shaped the field in its earlier period.

This seminar will cover three main areas of the Islamic intellectual tradition: legal, theological, and mystical. Each section will be covered by reading an original work translated into English with the aid of secondary literature. The aim of the seminar is to develop the students' knowledge of the classical Islamic tradition. Students will choose a research topic and develop and present to the class a synopsis of their research. The seminar culminates in writing a research paper on one aspect of the Islamic religious tradition.

The orientalist Ernest Renan famously said in the 19th c. that Islam, compared to Judaism and Christianity, "was born in full light of history." After two centuries of scholarship, however, there are still many questions about the rise of Islam that remain unanswered not least because the authority and reliability of Muslim sources, as vast and detailed as they are, have been doubted in the last few decades. The revisionist wave that started in the 1970s questioned nearly everything that we thought we knew about the life of Muhammad, the Qur'an's textual history, Islam's relationship with other monotheistic religions of its time and the Muslim conquests. In the meantime, new discoveries such as ancient Qur'an manuscripts and inscriptions from the Arabian peninsula further reinvigorated the debate.

In this course we will explore the field of Islamic origins and the hot debates that made it a lively field in the last few years. A large portion of the class will be devoted to what we know about the rise of Islam and from what kind of sources we generate that knowledge. Students will be introduced to the fields of epigraphy, numismatics, and manuscript studies to get a sense of what is at stake when it comes to identifying and analyzing sources that inform the beginnings of Islam. We will also look at how the study of Islamic origins can benefit from the tools and methods of similar or adjacent fields such as biblical studies, early Christianity and New Testament studies.

This course highlights the anthropological contributions to the study of Islam, providing students both an historical overview of anthropological approaches to the study of Islam and readings of seminal contemporary ethnographies of Islam, highlighting the latest interventions in the field. The course will cover a variety of areas of the Muslim world, from Muslim-minority to Muslim-majority countries, East and West.

From working with fragile manuscripts to ensuring that Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards are met when preparing critical editions, from understanding how citations are used in research papers, to taking advantage of the latest software advances to automate research, the digital revolution has unleased a sea-change in how scholarship is conducted in the humanities. At the same time, it has also revealed that many age-old tools and skills are still indispensable. Through experiential learning in the field of Islamic Studies, this course will give students hands-on exposure to both primary and secondary scholarship — from working with manuscripts to learning how digital advances can facilitate and improve the papers and books we write.

This course examines the role of things, practices, circulation, space, and embodiment have played a critical role in shaping material forms of religious culture to reveal the historically contingent nature of trans-local practices in Muslim history. As Muslims settled beyond the Arab core In Iberia, South Asia, China, Iran, and Sub-Saharan Africa, we will focus on issues of repurposing and reuse of objects and space and questions of ownership, gifting and alienability, and the many lives of an object. We will examine such topics as relics, re-use/appropriation of sacred spaces/objects, amulets, and tombs. Primary sources for this course will include the Islamic collection at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Aga Khan Museum.

The conception of the ahl al-bayt, the family of the Prophet Muhammad, plays a vital role in Islamic history, thought and piety. In the tashahhud portion of the ritual prayers, Muslims of all persuasions supplicate daily, "O God! Bless Muhammad and his family (āl) as you blessed Abraham and his family." From the Arabic teachings of the Prophet's cousin 'Ali and the Shi'i Imams descended from him, to the legitimacy drawn from their sayyid lineage by Sunni religious and political leaders, from the Persian poetry of countless Muslim mystics to the Indic and Turkish stories about members of the hallowed lineage, this course draws on both primary and secondary sources to explore the significance of the Prophet's family in the Islamic tradition.

This course deals with the 1st century Alexandrian Jewish thinker, Philo Judaeos, the first major Jewish thinker to engage in philosophy.

In different years, this seminar treats either books (Job, Ben Sira/Sirach, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Solomon) or thematic aspects (creation, prayer, eschatology) of the wisdom tradition as it evolved in the period 333 BCE to 70 CE with an eye to the relationship of these books to the broader swath of sapiential traditions of the era, including the instruction literature from Qumran. In 2012, the focus will be on the book of Daniel and related prophetic and wisdom materials from the Dead Sea Scrolls and their significance for our understanding of the formation of the Bible. Seminar participation, seminar presentations, major paper. Requires working knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic

The course will consist of a close study of major themes, texts, and thinkers in modern Jewish thought. Attention will be focused on the historical development of modern Judaism, with special emphasis on the Jewish religious and philosophical responses to the challenges of modernity. Among the modern Jewish thinkers to be considered will be: Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Krochmal, Steinheim, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Scholem, Strauss, and Fackenheim.

An introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, and to some of the basic themes in Jewish philosophical theology and religion. Among topics to be considered through close textual study of the Guide: divine attributes; biblical interpretation; creation versus eternity; prophecy; providence, theodicy, and evil; wisdom and human perfection. Also to be examined are leading modern interpreters of Maimonides.

The course will offer an introduction to the philosophic thought of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), which will examine his major interests: philosophy, theology, and politics. We shall approach his thought through his writings on modern Judaism and on modern Jewish thought.

This graduate seminar will examine selected psalms, prayers, and hymns and other less overtly "liturgical" texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. We will consider the performative role of such texts in the Qumran movement and their relation to the evolving growth of the Hebrew Bible in the two centuries before and after the common era. The relationship of these texts to later Jewish and Christian liturgical texts (e.g., the book of Psalms) and the New Testament will also be considered. Seminar participation, seminar presentations, major paper. Requires working knowledge of Hebrew.

This graduate course is designed to deepen the student’s abilities to deal with Jewish legal texts, most particularly the Babylonian Talmud. The significance of philology and relocation criticism in outlining the history of halakha as well as historicist division between Tannaim and Amoraim, Amoraim and Stammaim will be explored. Regnant positions of Rosenthal, HaLivni, Friedman, and others serve as a background to a critique of contemporary scholarship. Judicious use will be made of codes such as Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and the Rabbi Joseph Caro's Shulhan Arukh and their super commentaries. The topics explored vary from year to year and student to student and are subject to negotiations dependent on mutual interest.

This course will deal with the emergence of Vaishnavism as a dominant strand of religion from around the 6th century of the Common Era in the Indian subcontinent and its eventual efflorescence over several centuries culminating in the devotionalism of Eastern India in the 16th century. The survey over several decades of epigraphic, art historical, poetic, theological, and ritual materials will enable one to get a historical perspective on why Vaishnavism has one of the dominant forms of Hinduism existent today.

This course focuses on Classical India, from around 0 to 1000 CE. Beginning with the rise of theism and extending through the Gupta Empire and later dynasties, we will explore topics as diverse as the development of tantrism and temple cults, feudalism in India, and courtly culture. We will focus on transitions in the political, social, economic, and religious world of the Subcontinent and introduce major trends of interpretation in the secondary literature and the sources upon which these scholarly interventions have been based.

In this course, we explore the major genres of Sanskrit literature, including epic, courtly poetry, inscriptional poetry, drama, and devotional praise poetry. Students will become familiar with philological methods for interpreting Sanskrit literature and learn about Sanskrit literary criticism and Sanskrit literary theory, in conversation with relevant theoretical debates in modern literary studies. The objective is to use the reading of Sanskrit to enhance our understanding of the religious and cultural history of South Asia. While class sessions will be devoted to primary source readings, this is a content course culminating in a final research paper.

This course will cover the range of Hindu rituals that define Hindu life and lead towards the constitution of a Hindu social and religious personhood. They range from the life cycle rituals, to initiatory rituals, to rituals of fasting, festivities, and penance. The course explores how these rituals are part of the Hindu social order, even while they are marked by differences of caste, gender, and religious communities. The course will look at a wide range of textual materials on Hindu rituals including prescriptive texts, ethnographies, and literary accounts. These materials will be explored also within the help of ritual theory in order to understand the relationship between religion, ritual, and personhood.

An academic legend recounts that if you ask a Newar whether he is Hindu or Buddhist the answer is yes. The course deals with the problem of how to study religions which coexist and compete with each other by replacing and replicating practices in a densely populated environment over a very long period of time such as the Kathmandu Valley, thus creating shifting coordinates of religious identification. The course will try to understand these historical processes from the perspective of one specific Nepalese community engaging in unique local forms of Buddhism and Hinduism while trans-regionally employing Indian, Burmese, and Tibetan agents. The course will be conducted as a seminar grounded on Newar primary sources in translation, literary and art historical studies as well as recent anthropological research. The required preparatory reading is David Gellner, The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism. Weberian Themes. Delhi: Oxford University Press 2001.

This graduate seminar surveys classic and recent scholarship on religion in modern South Asia, as well as select primary sources, to provide students with a strong grounding in this interdisciplinary field that cuts across history, anthropology, literature, visual studies, and other disciplines. While the seminar’s scope is defined chronologically (1800 to present), it organizes material thematically around such topics as empire, law, secularism, reform, caste, communalism, gender, sexuality, family, image, cinema, city, ecology, etc., and cut across multiple religious traditions (Hinduism, Islam, etc.) and scholarly methodologies (ethnography, history, etc.).

Of the aspects of courtly life treated in early Sanskrit poetry, none was more central than erotic love, with depictions of courtship in dramas, independent verses, and epic poems closely mirroring the categories and technical language of the early science of erotica. This course examines the paradoxical relationship of the erotic in Sanskrit poetry with its opposite — renunciation and the technologies of asceticism involving a rejection of sexuality. While the treatment of these themes reflects a deeper civilizational history emblematized by the figure of Siva, the erotic ascetic, Sanskrit courtly poetry allows us to examine problems peculiar to courtly life and kingship. Did the aestheticization of power in Sanskrit poetry conflict with transcendental ideals? How was the legitimacy of pleasure seen as both autonomous from and concurrent with other legitimate human ends?

This course focuses on Sikhs in the early modern period (1550-1850), their cultural production, and their encounters with members of other religious traditions (Hindus, Sufis, Muslims, Jains). In addition to learning about shared historical, religious, and cultural contexts in which Sikhs and other groups interacted, students will be using theories and methods in Religious Studies to think critically and to develop skills in close reading of texts. Notions such as encounter, language choice, and religious identity will constitute a central thread and shape class discussions.

This course will introduce the student to the study of South Asian Religions from a literary perpective; literary primary sources will be highlighted and literary theoretical models will be explored and discussed. While a variety of sources from a number of traditions will be investigated (from Vedic to vernacular devotion and modern novels), the stressin this course will be reading literature carefully in through different methodological lenses. Students will learn to be more comfortable using literature in their own work on South Asian Religions.

Advanced study in specialized topics on Hinduism such as Ramayana in Literature. This course explores how this conception is the result of a historical process by examining documentable transformations in the reception of the Ramayana. Our focus will be on the shift in the classification of the Ramayana from the inaugural work of Sanskrit literary culture (adi-kavya) in Sanskrit aesthetics to a work of tradition (smrti) in theological commentaries, the differences between the Ramayanas ideal of divine kingship and medieval theistic approaches to Ramas identification with Visnu, the rise of Rama worship, and the use of Ramas divinity in contemporary political discourse.