Humanities

The Humanities Department aims to give students the tools to understand and engage the Western academic tradition at an advanced level. Students are exposed to a variety of fields within the humanities, including history, philosophy, logic, and writing.

Students are introduced to the basic outline of European history and philosophy, studying works from the ancients such as Plato and Aristotle, to Medieval figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, to the dawn of the modern age, with philosophers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Foucault. At each step along the way, students are taught to think critically about the relationship between philosophical development and historical processes.

After this introduction to the generalities of Western history and philosophy, students focus more intensely on Aristotelian logic. This gives them the tools to critically engage academic literature across a wide variety of fields. In addition, emphasis is placed on developing their writing skills, allowing students to author papers on subjects within the Islamic sciences that are logically coherent.

In addition, the Humanities Department seeks to give students a broad understanding of post-Sahaba Muslim history. The goal of these courses is to supplement students’ study of the Islamic sciences by learning the historical context in which the sciences developed. This involves a survey of Muslim polities and societies from the Maghrib to the Mashriq over the course of the past 1400 years. Students learn not only the general course of Muslim history, but a variety of theories regarding how to understand historical processes. This allows students to go beyond rote memorization of facts and instead understand how history is understood from a variety of theoretical frameworks.