what is “Islamic” about the texts assigned for week 14 from Schroeder and Irwin, taken from Arabic literature of the tenth through
twelfth centuries?
Given that this is a course on medieval Islamic societies, what is “Islamic” (or perhaps not “Islamic”) about the texts assigned for week
14 from Schroeder and Irwin, taken from Arabic literature of the tenth through twelfth centuries? With regard to religion and literature,
are we talking about harmony, conflict, or what? Pick two or three selections from the assigned reading to discuss in support of your
argument.
The question asks you what is “Islamic” and “not Islamic” about the adab texts.
This essay is an opportunity for you to show me how the class has complicated/nuanced your notion of what it means for something to “be
Islamic.” To that end, I expect you to be clear about how *you* think about the term “Islamic.”
The complexity of your understanding of what makes something “Islamic” is part of what I will be looking for in your essay. It should go
beyond just the bare fact of whether or not the authors explicitly mention Islam or religion.
For example, you know that there was a debate over whether drinking coffee was permitted according to Islamic law. But is Islamic law
really the only way to determine whether something is Islamic or not? You also know that Greek philosophy was the right way to be a good
Muslim for some but was not for others (think Ibn Rushd/Averroes and al-Ghazali). So there is not necessarily a stable way of determining
whether something is “Islamic” or not. But I’d like you to try to come to grips with that in your analysis.
One way to go about doing this is to try to figure out how the authors of these texts conceive of what it means to be “Islamic.”
please write a thesis argument and provide quotation from the reading to support this thesis. Use parentheses with page numbers i.e
(Schroeder 34)