Teaching "A New Vision" for Islamic Studies

My paper argues that Shahzad Bashir’s new, all-digital book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures offers an alternative to the typical timeline of Islam presented in undergraduate survey courses. Accessibly written, the book invites scholars and students to think of Islamic history as a web, through which different people along different paths which intersect through various thematic, narrative, and material “nodes.” In Fall 2023, I redesigned my introductory survey course, “Islamic Traditions” around Bashir’s A New Vision. The course follows a “choose-your-own-adventure” format in which students collectively select each section of the book that we read as a group. The paper draws on my experience as an instructor and student survey responses to demonstrate that it is possible to introduce students to the study of Islam without flattening the complexity of Islamic historical thinking and that doing so can increase student excitement about, and engagement in, our courses.