Among the more lofty and noble of this course’s goals is that it will train students to become more cognizant of the landscapes which they inhabit and produce through the lens of those places less familiar and therefore more open to critical analysis. To ask for cognizance is probably to vague, however, what it encapsulates is the understanding of how we make the world in which we live and share it with others. This can happen through even the most banal actions, such as the paths that we follow on our walk to class or the way in which we might respond emotionally and physically (perhaps constructively but also even destructively) to the objects in our landscape. What I hope that you will gain from this course is an awareness that a landscape is less a product but a process, one that requires us to maintain a vibrant and changing relationship to our material surroundings.

A more specific goal of this course is to provide students with significant knowledge of varied Muslim societies, their archaeology, history, beliefs and cultural patterns. Undeniably the Muslim world has become a major topic of discussion in contemporary discourse and it one of the aims of this course that you will have more than a passing understanding of a few much abused tropes (jihad, fundamentalism, civilizational stagnation, etc.) propagated in the speeches of pundits and politicians, east and west.

Finally this course aspires to a number of more practical, skill-oriented goals which should serve students throughout their future in the academy and beyond. In particular I will put great emphasis on your abilities to read carefully the materials for this course and use them to articulate coherent arguments in your written work. The ability to marshal evidence and follow a clear logic of argumentation is an invaluable skill which we will aspire to master in this course. However, this skill is in many senses secondary to your ability to draw out the important themes of the readings rather than simply come away with information that lacks categorization or an ordered hierarchy that articulates why it is useful or interesting beyond the idiosyncrasies that you bring to the table. Throughout this course I will ask you to pay attention to these recurring themes and how they are discussed and debated in the various studies which we will encounter. These themes will become the basis from which you will analyze material of your own choosing later in the course.