020056 VO VO Religion and Culture (2025W)

This course offers a critical and comparative exploration of Islamic ritual life as it unfolds in practice—embodied, negotiated, and performed—across diverse cultural, legal, and theological contexts. Rather than approaching Islam through a purely doctrinal or textual lens, the course situates ritual at the intersection of embodiment, authority, aesthetics, and social life. It draws on theories of ritual and performance, as well as the framework of lived religion, to examine how religious meaning is not only codified in legal discourse but also enacted, reinterpreted, and contested in everyday acts of worship and celebration.

Emphasizing both ritual practice (ʿamal, ʿibāda) and religious performance as modes of theological expression, the course investigates how Muslims engage sacred time, space, and the body—from canonical rituals such as ṣalāt, ṣawm, ḥajj, and ʿĪds to less-institutionalized performative practices like Sufi dhikr, mourning ceremonies, and devotional processions. Particular attention is given to sacred nights—Laylat al-Qadr, Laylat al-Bara’ah, and others—as temporal intensifications of piety and performance. These will be studied in comparative perspective alongside Christian and Jewish ritual calendars, including Easter Vigil and Yom Kippur.

The course incorporates both classical Islamic legal sources (fiqh al-ʿibādāt) and contemporary ethnographic material, allowing students to trace how normative prescriptions are embodied, challenged, and reimagined across traditions and geographies. The performative dimensions of ritual—chant, movement, silence, weeping, feasting—are analyzed not as marginal embellishments but as central vehicles of religious formation, affective transmission, and theological meaning-making.

A sustained focus lies on ritual in diasporic and post-secular settings, particularly in European Muslim communities where public religion unfolds amid pluralism, securitization, and structural inequality. Here, questions of authenticity, visibility, and innovation take on heightened urgency. At the same time, these contexts give rise to new ritual forms—from interfaith festivals and digital prayer gatherings to embodied acts of resistance—that challenge conventional boundaries between religion, culture, and politics.

While rooted in Islamic tradition, the course is rigorously comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging theories from anthropology, religious studies, performance studies, and Islamic legal thought. Students will develop the analytical tools to interpret ritual not simply as symbolic or cultural expression, but as a theologically potent and socially consequential act. The course is open to students in Islamic theology, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, and related fields. Prior knowledge of Islam is welcome but not required.