Muslim Internationalism and Islamic Socialism

HDS 3435 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This seminar explores the transnational networks through which Muslim reformers, missionaries, writers, and activists imagined Islam as a source of global solidarity and social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across South Asia, Britain, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, students examine how Muslims used journals, translations, associations, and missionary work to connect communities across oceans and empires.

Drawing on historical and anthropological scholarship, as well as Islamic writings, the course considers how these thinkers responded to colonialism, Christian missionary activity, racial hierarchy, and economic exploitation. They presented Islam variously as a rational and modern faith, a universal brotherhood, and a democratic or socialist alternative to capitalism, caste, and imperial domination. Students explore ideas of progress, education, social justice, and Islamic solidarity, while considering the tensions between these ideals and political loyalties, gender norms, and reformers’ own social hierarchies.

Muslim internationalists were never a unified movement. The seminar examines disputes over religious authority and sectarian boundaries, as well as the exclusions and hierarchies that could shape reform projects. Through these debates, students consider how competing visions of Islam, socialism, and international community took shape across the modern Muslim world.

Course Notes

The instructor will review all petitions in my.Harvard continuously during the enrollment period on a first-come, first-served basis. Students should also send a short note to the instructor over email, introducing themselves and briefly describing their background and motivations for taking the course.