Search Results
Your search for courses · during 25FA, 26WI, 26SP · taught by kghaneabassiri · returned 5 results
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MEST 110 Introduction to the Middle East 6 credits
In this introduction to Middle East Studies, we will embark on an interdisciplinary exploration of a region that spans from Central Asia to North Africa. We will study the Middle East as a multilingual, multireligious, multicultural space that, because of its unique cultural geography connecting peoples and governments from Africa, Asia, and Europe, has developed distinguishing characteristics over time. We will build familiarity with the diversity of this region and explain its multiple cultural and sociopolitical crossroads through analysis of storytelling, food, music, religious practices, governments, economies and more.
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MEST 110.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤 · Summer Forester 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- T, THHasenstab 105 1:15pm-3:00pm
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RELG 122 Introduction to Islam 6 credits
This course is a general introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the different ways Muslims have interpreted and put into practice the prophetic message of Muhammad through analyses of varying theological, legal, political, mystical, and literary writings as well as through Muslims’ lived histories. These analyses aim for students to develop a framework for explaining the sources and vocabularies through which historically specific human experiences and understandings of the world have been signified as Islamic. The course will focus primarily on the early and modern periods of Islamic history.
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RELG 122.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 301 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 301 1:10pm-2:10pm
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RELG 266 Modern Islamic Thought 6 credits
Through close reading of primary sources, this course examines how some of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East and South Asia conceptualized God and the ideal God-human relationship to address such pressing questions as: How should religion relate to modern technological and scientific advancements? Can Islam serve as an ideology to counter European colonialism? Can Islam become the basis for the formation of social and political life under a nation-state, or does it demand a transnational political collectivity of its own? What would a modern Islamic economy look like?
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RELG 266.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLibrary 344 10:10am-11:55am
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RELG 300 Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion 6 credits
What, exactly, is religion and what conditions of modernity have made it urgent to articulate such a question in the first place? Why does religion exert such force in human society and history? Is it an opiate of the masses or an illusion laden with human wish-fulfillment? Is it a social glue? A subjective experience of the sacred? Is it simply a universalized Protestant Christianity in disguise, useful in understanding, and colonizing, the non-Christian world? This seminar, for junior majors and advanced majors from related fields, explores generative theories from anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary studies, and the history of religions.
- Winter 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry
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RELG 300.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Kambiz GhaneaBassiri 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 303 10:10am-11:55am
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RELG 372 Sensory Cultures of Religion 6 credits
What makes a sound noise to someone and God's self-disclosure to another? What makes a statue a decorated stone to someone and a living deity to another? Are these distinctions rooted in faith or in people’s sensory experiences in different cultures? Together, we will explore such questions by inquiring into how sensory experiences and religious beliefs relate to one another. The course is designed as a practicum in which students will learn to develop sensory histories of objects and to practice exhibiting religious objects in museums or elsewhere for public understanding.