More than at any time before in American history Islam is in the news. Especially since 9/11, words like Qur'an, hadith, shari`a, fatwa, imam, jihad, and Islamists (also called Muslim fundamentalists) have entered the American vocabulary, as has wide-scale misunderstanding of the religion and history underlying these terms.

Divided into three weekly units, the seminar will address three questions: What is Islam? How has it manifested itself in history? How has Islam treated non-Muslims?

The first unit will be taught by Shahab Ahmed, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Committee for the Study of Religion and in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is one of the few scholars of Islamic intellectual history to read all five of the major languages of the Islamic world, and works in several intellectual discourses, time periods and regions. His unit will include exposure to some of the most important sources of the Islamic intellectual tradition, including Quran and Hadith (the normative words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad).

The second week, taught by seminar director Mark R. Cohen, a noted historian of the Jews in Islamic lands in the Middle Ages, will be devoted to the question of Islamic attitudes towards and treatment of non-Muslims. Non-Muslims have lived, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in relative harmony, in Muslim society. Today the question of Muslim- non-Muslim relations has particular resonance because of what is called by some a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the non-Muslim West. The Arab-Israeli conflict is perhaps the most visible of these confrontations, but the issue of Islam in Europe and in America is also central. An understanding of the historical relationship between Islam, on the one hand, and non-Muslim Jews and Christians, on the other, is essential to an understanding of today's realities, especially in the light of claims that Islam is inherently hostile toward the "other," or antisemitic in the case of the Jews.

The third and final, unit, led by Professor Richard Bulliet of Columbia University, one of the most eminent historians of the Islamic world, will address the evolution of Islamic society from the end of the Arab conquests ca. 720 down to the Mongol invasion five hundred years later. Special emphasis will be placed on the impact of religious conversion in the conquered territories and the ways in which the changing proportion of Muslims in society affected economic, political, social, and religious institutions. Sources that will be consulted in this survey will range from biographical dictionaries of Muslim scholars, to works devoted to prescribing Muslim social behavior, to literary descriptions of different societies.