Macdonald Center

This seminar is dedicated to reflection on the practice of imams and other Muslim leaders. The course will include readings on reflective practice and religious leadership, but the focus will be on peer-learning from the actual practice of Muslim leaders in their own religious communities and social situations. This process builds on the growing trust, reflective wisdom, and experience of the participants. The goal is for each participant to shape a form of reflective practice that integrates an approach to Islamic theology and thought with the daily demands of providing leadership, instruction, and spiritual care to local Muslim communities. Enrollment is limited to students in the Graduate Certificate in Imam and Muslim Community Leadership program.

This course will be conducted as a graduate seminar.  We will study in depth images of Jesus in Christian and Muslim sacred writings.  On the Christian side, the texts to be examined will include the four canonical Gospels, as well as the “synoptic-type” apocryphal gospels”, but not the Gnostic gospels.  On the Muslim side, we shall study the Qur’an, hadith, Tales of the Prophets, and the relevant materials in the works of classical historians.  We shall finally look at images of Jesus in some modern and contemporary Christian and Muslim writings.  Lectures will be given as the need arises, but greater emphasis will be placed on student participation and class presentations.

The course will be structured around the following major themes in the life and mission of Jesus: his birth, subsequent life and teaching, death and resurrection and eschatology.  We shall finally look at some 19^th and 20^th century images and critical investigations of Jesus by both Muslim and Christian thinkers.

This course explores the content and structure of Islamic belief, as elaborated by Muslim classical thinkers (7th-15th centuries), in relation to a selection of representative texts. The Introduction questions the nature and modalities of theology in Islam. History studies the origins and growth of the science of Kalâm in its interaction with the other major religious disciplines of Sunnism -- exegesis, Prophetic tradition, jurisprudence, sects, Sufism and philosophy (falsafa). The Creed is then analyzed more theoretically in its major components: the lordship and divinity of God, the mediation of the Messenger, the servitude and ethics of the believers. Society offers a last avenue for enquiry, in so far as it was shaped by particular theological doctrines. The Way/Law (sharî’a), power, love, innovation, and alterity -- religious or other -- are among the topics envisaged. No knowledge of Arabic is required for this course.