Class session: Tuesday, October 27
Guest Summarizer: Jeremy Silverstein
We began today’s meeting with a discussion of Rumi’s poetry, the Islamic
character of which we noted to have been excluded from popular translations. Having
experienced Rumi only through these interpretations, contemporary audiences have
come to neglect the distinct Islamic context by which one might better comprehend both
Rumi’s work and the poet himself. We considered the role of secularization in
encouraging this treatment of religious themes, and we launched from there into a
sprawling conversation wherein we touched upon numerous intersections of religion
and public life. Perhaps most critically, we talked about the separation of church and
state, weighing the extent to which a society may viably heed the ideal and examining
the roots of the concept in a Christian understanding of religion. This class discussion
may have lacked focus, but I believe we gained some insight into the breadth of
questions that academic religious study–in our case, the study of Islam–may address.
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