Prof. Nathan J. Brown (George Washington University/HIAS Hamburg): Does Studying Islam Change It? How Universities Structure Religion

About the speaker
Nathan Brown is currently a fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. He is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent books are Lumbering State, Restless Society: Egypt in the Modern Era (with Shaimaa Hatab and Amr Adly) and Arguing Islam after the Revival of Arab Politics. His current work focuses on the place of religion in the modern statet.

About the topic
Education in a religious tradition and education about a religious tradition are often seen as distinct enterprises, with the second generally emerging only over the past century or so. Not only is the divorce between personal religious affiliation and the study of particular religions fairly recent, the study of "religion" as a distinct field is even more recent and its geographical reach is very uneven. In this talk, Nathan Brown will explore how various systems of higher education approach the study of religion in general as a subject matter and Islam in particular as an academic subject. He will connect variations in the academic treatment of religion to the nature of the state-religion relations in the modern period.