History of Islamic Philosophy and Theology
During the 8th-10th centuries, Muslim intellectuals began engaging with Aristotelian philosophy via a massive Greek-to-Arabic translation movement. Modern opinion has tended to mourn this era as a brief golden age, stifled by religious fanaticism. However, recent scholarship questions the so-called “decline” narrative, arguing that Islamic philosophy and theology flourished into the 20th century. In this course we will survey the key movements and debates of Islamic intellectual history by reading texts by major thinkers like Avicenna and al-Ghazali. We will also read a range of scholarship to understand how and why the historical narrative is undergoing such radical revision.