RELG 325 - Understanding Muslim Ethics

Credits: (3)
College Curriculum: COLL 200
Domain (Anchored): CSI
Domain (Reaching Out): ALV

This course is designed to help students understand the ethical lives of Muslims qua religious beings: their views about the good life, their understanding of God and the varied ethical implications they have drawn by taking seriously God’s existence and the existence of revelations and prophets. In short, this class is a window onto the range of ways in which Muslims in different cultural and social settings have reasoned about a good life. We will read a wide range of primary and scholarly sources to examine how Muslims justify particular moral positions, the values they hold dear and the variety of ways in which, and methods by which, they conceptualize a flourishing human life at the personal, social, cultural and political levels. We will try to understand how Muslims argue about things that matter to them as religious and moral beings. We shall learn about the legal, philosophical, moral, political and exegetical dimensions of their individual and communal lives. We will do this by focusing on a limited range of important ethical topics such as war and conflict, political governance, the environment, gender, sex and marriage, biomedical issues, inter-faith relations and others. Throughout, we will think comparatively about how Muslim understandings and behaviors about such issues challenge, contradict or deepen other ways of reasoning about the good life.