Diploma in Comparative Social Sciences

This course gives students a broad overview of the development of the modern world from the Western Middle Ages when the West was still traditional through the radical transformations of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment until the early 21st century. The students will gradually become acquainted with the cognitive shifts and philosophical, social, cultural, political, and economic transformations that gave birth to the modern world.

We will look at key figures and currents that brought an end to the traditional worldview and gave birth to the modern worldview. Chronologically, the course will overlap with the last few centuries covered in a previous course on Islamic Civilization but within the Western timeline. Towards the end of the Western timeline, the course will shift back to cover the post-traditional or early modernization period in the Islamic world in the early to mid-19th century.

The purpose of these courses is to uncover the conceptual roots and ontological and epistemological assumptions of major methodological schools in social sciences. While surveying the basic assumptions of major schools, the courses will uphold a genealogical approach, that is, it will comparatively discuss the origins and theoretical foundations of each school.

Rather than favoring one approach over another, the courses aim to illustrate the existence of a wide array of methodological approaches in social sciences. Various approaches emanating from different worldviews and ideologies may sometimes appear in tension with one another. The courses aim to bring them into dialogue within a comparative perspective by highlighting their potential strengths and limitations. The courses will provide alternative perspectives highlighting the potential power of Islamic schools of thought to respond to contemporary questions in the social sciences. In this regard, the methods of falsafah, kalām, taṣawwuf and fiqh will be presented alongside social science and humanities perspectives.

The purpose of these courses is to uncover the conceptual roots and ontological and epistemological assumptions of major methodological schools in social sciences. While surveying the basic assumptions of major schools, the courses will uphold a genealogical approach, that is, it will comparatively discuss the origins and theoretical foundations of each school.

Rather than favoring one approach over another, the courses aim to illustrate the existence of the wide array of methodological approaches in social sciences. Various approaches emanating from different worldviews and ideologies may sometimes appear in tension with one another. The courses aim to bring them into dialogue within a comparative perspective by highlighting their potential strengths and limitations. The courses will provide alternative perspectives highlighting the potential power of Islamic schools of thought to respond to contemporary questions in the social sciences. In this regard, the methods of falsafah, kalām, taṣawwuf and fiqh will be presented alongside social science and humanities perspectives.

The course will then introduce students to a pre-modern notion of ʿaql that is a lot more expansive. Several lessons will also introduce students to contemporary debates in the philosophy of science.

This course examines broad Islamic perspectives on the ethical, political, and economic domains of society — corresponding to the intellectual, protective and appetitive faculties of the self — and thereby sets forth a comprehensive framework that can shed light on modern ideology in comparative and historical terms.

Part I of the course identifies, from a comparative Islamic perspective, the three most fundamental ideological orientations of self and society: principle, arbitrarism and immanentism. In the ethical domain, this perspective situates the various modern ethical philosophies – alongside their ancient Epicurean, Stoic and Platonic precursors – in relation to an account of the multiplex degrees of the Good in Islamic ethics. In the political domain, it offers a resolution, in Islam’s “principial liberality,” to the modern bipolarity between arbitrarist liberalism and immanentist authoritarianism. In the economic domain, in contradistinction to the injustices intrinsic to the modern economics of arbitrarist wants, economic life in Islam is an eminently moral domain of earning and spending – where earning actualizes dīn in relation to the Creator and spending actualizes akhlāq in relation to creation.

Part II of the course examines the determining phases of the socio-intellectual history of the emergence of modernity, from medieval Christendom, to the age of Absolutism, to Modernity. The transitions in this dynamic are understood as steps in the total inversion of the ethical, political and economic order of society. The immanentist ideology that came to dominate Christendom in the late Middle Ages created fault lines of conflict between priests and princes from which emerged the age of Absolutism, supported by the idea of a “divine right of kings” and the more radical idea of “reason of state.” With Church authority subsumed by political power, forces were released through which the economic domain came to dominate political power and rise to the apex of the social order, thus completing the modern hierarchical inversion. Central to the expansion of this new order around the world was a triad which was first actualized in Britain following the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688: the economic dominance of politics, a debt-based monetary and financial system, and military and economic supremacy.

The purpose of this course is to explore and compare the social thought of various classical thinkers from different cultural and historical backgrounds. Students will examine key texts from influential philosophers and intellectuals, gaining insights into their ideas, beliefs, and theories about society, ethics, politics, and human behavior. The course aims to provide a deeper understanding of how these classical texts have shaped the development of social thought and their relevance in contemporary society.

This course provides a survey of the Islamic intellectual heritage as it pertains to the subject matter of psychology. The focus of the course will be to provide a familiarity with the classical Islamic scholarly literature drawing directly from its primary sources. This will allow students to have an unfiltered exposure to the style of writings found across different Islamic scholarly disciplines and to become well acquainted with the Islamic scholarly tradition through the words of its authorities directly. The primary sources discussed in this course will largely be drawn from the following classical fields: Ṭibb, Falsafah, Taṣawwuf, Kalām and Fiqh. The style of the course will be one that combines both lecture and reading directly from the original text with the instructor’s commentary.

Additionally, classroom discussions and critical thinking exercises will be included. During the course of the classroom readings, there will be a continuous comparative analysis between these classical Islamic texts and modern psychology. A focus on how rich Islamic scholarly tradition can enhance and enrich modern discourses of psychology is explored. The instructor’s commentary and classroom discussions will pivot around the convergence and divergence between them as well as encouraging critical thinking for how to potentially synthesize or sift through the various parts of these disparate bodies of knowledge.

The conceptual key of this course involves a contrast between two different notions of reason. The course lessons will show, in a comparative context, the broader scope of intellect (ʿaql) and the reductionist nature of rationalism and positivism. It will start by showing the complex nature of reality as a hierarchy of levels (traditional metaphysics), then move on to a detailed discussion of how materialism’s reduction of the levels of reality to just the physical-material plane is illogical and irrational (modern naturalism). It will also show how positivism or empirical reasoning is an inadequate tool for appreciating levels of reality beyond the physical and modes of knowledge beyond the purely rational.

The course will then introduce students to a pre-modern notion of ʿaql that is a lot more expansive. Several lessons will also introduce students to the contemporary debates in the philosophy of science.

This course’s conceptual key focuses on the distinction between objective beauty and subjective beauty. It develops the argument that most cultures in human history distinguished between two types of beauty: objective and subjective. The former represented by the objective beauty of nature, which held to be universally true while the latter refers to a type of beauty determined by cultural preferences, social distinctions, and personal idiosyncrasies. Through detailed arguments and visual examples (from Christian, Islamic, and World Art), it shows how most cultures saw the emulation of nature as the ideal for art given that nature was fashioned or created by the Supreme Being Who perfected it and so nature alone was worthy of emulation for human art. This explains why so much of traditional art is universally recognized as beautiful.

However, from the European Renaissance onwards, a shift occurred away from objective beauty towards an increasing reliance on subjective criteria for beauty until Romanticism and the 19th century when subjective experiences of what is true and beautiful dominated shifting European aesthetics away from what is objectively true and beautiful to what is subjectively true and beautiful. This gave birth to the artist as ‘genius,’ i.e. as someone possessed of a unique in-born talent who did not conform to the socially acceptable standards of truth and beauty but rather explored the darker realms of one’s interiority or subconscious. This birth of subjectivity has had grave consequences for epistemology, philosophy, ethics, truth, and art.

With colonialism and globalization this has become a universal phenomenon. Its impact on traditional Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism has been catastrophic. This will be explored giving examples from the Islamic world. We will also explore contemporary postmodern art in light of traditional principles of sacred art showing how postmodern art can only produce ugliness because it is no longer anchored in the transcendent dimension of the spirit but rather in the very personal dimension of subjective experience and expression.