ACMCU Courses

For a summary of registration dates and deadlines, please visit the Georgetown University Registrar’s Important Dates page. For more information about classes and the registration process here at Georgetown University, please visit the Registrar’s Registration page.

Fall 2019

HIST-109: The Islamic World
Taught by Jonathan A.C. Brown
From humble beginnings nearly 1500 years ago, to enormous power and prestige in the Middle Ages, to political decline and foreign occupation in the modern era, Islam has developed into a highly diverse, global tradition representing nearly one quarter of the world’s population. Yet it is most widely known through caricatures of terrorists and despots. This course examines that phenomenon. It focuses on the historical development of Muslim communities and their interactions with European and other powers. It emphasizes the impact of those interactions on Islam’s ideological and political developments. The interaction between religion and politics is a major sub-theme of the course.

INAF-100: PROSEM: Islam & The West
Taught by Jonathan A.C. Brown
Every first year student in the SFS will take a proseminar during the fall semester. Pro-seminars are small interdisciplinary courses, limited to 15 students in each topic and are taught by some of Georgetown’s finest professors. The goals of the pro-seminars are:

To develop critical approaches to the study of global issues
To gain the academic reading and writing skills necessary for success in SFS
To promote intensive interaction and camaraderie among students and professors
To explore new ideas

HIST-363: Muslims in the West
Taught by Yvonne Haddad
The seminar will examine the formation and growth of the Muslim communities in North America and Europe with specific focus on France, Germany, UK and the US, It will provide a history of the formation of the various Muslim communities in the west; explore the dynamics of community and identity development of the immigrants in a western context and various government integration policies (multiculturalism, laicite and assimilation); the development of western depictions of Muslims as labor migrants, ethnic enclaves to Muslims and increasingly as terrorists. It will also explore the creation of an Islamic minority perspective particularly among the alienated youth as a response to Islamophobia, and the various Muslim effort to create an authentic Muslim western identity through literature, music, fashion, and art.

HIST/INAF-569: Sayyid Qutb & Islamic Extremism
Taught by Yvonne Haddad
The seminar will examine the development of Islamic radicalism during the 20th century with special focus on the life and works of Sayyid Qutb in the context of Egyptian political, literary and religious history. It will provide an overview of the classical texts on jihad as well as well as the modern western sources that Qutb utilized in his redefinition of political Islam. It will also focus on the appeal of his ideology in the context of the encounter with the modern west as a colonial power and as a source of challenging ideas. We will look at texts from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution, Takfir wa Hijra, Hamas, Hizbullah, Jihad Islami, and al-Qaeda.