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Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
This course examines in detail the debates over political obedience, engagement and dissent in the Muslim societies of the Middle East. It begins by an examination of modern Islamic thought and considers diverse views of the state, authority, pluralism, and citizenship. It assesses the importance of political culture and structural factors to both the maintenance and the radical reform of non-participatory political orders. In doing so, it critically examines essentialist and exceptionalist assumptions about Middle Eastern and Muslim societies, the degree to which authoritarianism is engrained, the position of Islamist movements, the reasons for and constraints on popular protest, and the possibilities of externally-influenced political transformations. While the course is organised thematically, examples are drawn from a number of specific cases and theoretical insights on authoritarianism, democracy and protest are invoked in order to relate the specificity of Middle Eastern Muslim societies to broader debates.
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 25 hours of contact over 12 weeks: 2 hours of seminars per week for 11 weeks and 3 hours of exam for 1 week b) 105 hours of independent student research, reading and writing
Preliminary Reading John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg, Islam and Democracy in the Middle East. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.