Hello and Welcome!

Fall 2007

Good evening! Welcome and welcome to my FIRST EVER blog effort.

I'm a Jewish and Unitarian Universalism student in the Master of Divinity program at Starr King School for Ministry in Berkeley, CA. This term, I'm taking a class called Andalusia: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, which is taught by Dr. Ibrahim Farajajé.

According to the class description:

This course invites us to a thorough, profound, and exciting interrogation of the ways in which we have traditionally approached the study of the interconnections and intersections between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The broad container for doing this will be through looking at the patterns and practices of co-existence in al-Andalus, from the early 8th century until the end of the 15th century, as well as what the consequences of this period were for the Spanish conquest and colonisation of the Americas and the post-Andalusian Jewish and Muslim dispersions.

To study religions and to study their intersectionalities is also to study people, borders, notions of ethnicities, languages, geographies and all that those things entail and embrace. And this usually entails subverting some of our own dearly-held ideas! For example, in this course, we will be challenged to look at the Africa-Europe axis in different ways; to understand all three religions, we will have to grapple with issues of vast geographical contexts. Often our contemporary notions of nationstates/countries/empires, are based on geographies that reinforce notions of primacy. To put it more simply, we tend to think of the world as being divided into discrete groups which are neatly separated by borders. Of course, the notions of porosity of borders and transnational identities and fluidities come more and more into our consciousness, but when we think of the past, we think of some areas of the world and their populations as being pretty static. For example, that there were transcontinental movements of peoples from the east of Africa to the west of Africa, or from the east of Muslim territories to the west is not something that is usually emphasised in contemporary studies of the histories of religions.

Given the current situation in the world, it is difficult to imagine relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians that were not relations of constant violence and annihilation. We have come to think of those ways of relating as being almost "just the way things are". This course invites us to enter a space where ways of being that were based on living-in-the-differences grew creatively. How do food, music, spiritual practice, sacred space/architecture, environmental sciences, gender, class, sexualities, embodiment/disabilities, language, notion of community express the intersectional cultures that grew out of la convivencia, the coexistence of these religions? Come, enter into the space that was al-Andalus!

Cool, huh? Stay tuned. . .I'll be posting my reflections soon. Whew, my FIRST EVER POST wasn't as arduous as anticipated. Just as Ibrahim promised. Amen.