Teaching "A New Vision" for Islamic Studies

The publication of Shahzad Bashir’s new, all-digital book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (2023) offers both a challenge and an opportunity for Islamic Studies instructors. Bashir’s theoretical framework examines how the construction of a “modern global time” by eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans led to an understanding of history as both a timeline and a teleological force, moving people from stable points of origin towards our own inevitable present. Orientalist scholars fit Islam into the narrative of modern global time in a way that simultaneously reflected certain Muslim theological assertions and flattened the complexity of Islamic historical thinking. While previous scholarship has addressed how Orientalist scholarship distorted certain aspects of Islamic history, Bashir’s is the first work examine the effect of disparate forms of temporality on how we understand and talk about the Islamic past.

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures challenges us to reimage the teaching of “Intro-to-Islam” style classes and to break with a timeline model that begins with seventh-century Arabia and then proceeds inevitably and teleologically to our present circumstances. And the book simultaneously offers us an opportunity to make such a break by providing a structured alternative that serves as a teaching resource. Accessibly written, the book invites scholars and students to think of Islamic history as a web, through which different people along different paths which intersect through various thematic, narrative, and material “nodes.” The various sections of the book then address those nodes by examining disparate artefacts of Islam – events, objects, and narratives – from various points in time and space. The digital form mirrors that framing by offering a visual, web-like, table of contents.

In Fall 2023, I redesigned my introductory survey course, “Islamic Traditions” around Bashir’s A New Vision. The course followed a "choose-your-own adventure" format in which I chose an initial chapter section for the class to read as a group and also tasked each student with choosing a second chapter section to read individually. We met in class to discuss their individual choices and then students voted on which of those sections would serve as the next group reading. The entire course followed this format: for every chapter section that we read collectively, the students read an additional section on their own and then voted for the next collective section. Students kept a journal of all the chapter sections they read to keep track of their path through the course. For each chapter section that the students chose, I add additional readings and materials to craft a 1-2 week “unit” around the theme of that section. In this fashion, the course reflected students’ interests and concerns as well as my expertise as an instructor. There was no pre-ordained path or list of topics to cover and the course structure highlighted student agency over their own learning.

I received IRB approval and students consented to participate in a survey on their experience in the course and to share anonymized excerpts from their work. The survey specifically asked them how the pedagogical model of the course effected their learning, engagement, and enjoyment in the course. This paper will present my course design as a pedagogical model for undergraduate survey courses in both Islamic Studies specifically, and Religious Studies more broadly and discuss how to adapt this format to institutional requirements. The paper will draw on my experiences as an instructor as well as student survey responses to demonstrate the effect of the format on student learning, engagement, and enjoyment. As I will demonstrate, it is possible to introduce students to the study of Islam without flattening the complexity of Islamic historical thinking and doing so can increase student excitement about, and engagement in, our courses.