An exploration of the contacts and interactions among the major religious communities of Eurasia especially as facilitated by trade, travel and pilgrimage along the 'Silk Road'. After initial consideration of the idea of the 'Silk Road' and the history of its 'discovery', the course focuses on commerce and contacts in specific historical periods from antiquity to the present. Readings include sacred texts (including Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Daoist, Islamic and Zoroastrian texts), as well as merchants', travellers' and pilgrims' accounts. The course includes substantial attention to the material cultures and artistic works produced by the religious communities of the Silk Road.

An exploration of law in theory and practice in Muslim communities from the early Islamic period to the present day. How have Muslim societies developed legal principles, discourses and practices? How have different kinds of law – the religious law or shari'a, legal rulings issued by rulers and states, customary law – interacted at different times and in different localities? What have been the roles of scholars, jurists and judges? How have legal discourses and local practices interacted with issues of social and economic status, gender and sexuality? Areas of concentration include law in the diverse societies of the early modern empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), the legal interventions of colonial powers and their legacies, and contemporary legal discourses among Muslims in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim majority settings.

Love in its myriad manifestations constitutes a central and perennial theme in the literary and artistic repertoires of Arabic- and Persian-speaking societies. This course explores the varied, subtle vocabulary and the versatile, multivalent imagery linked with the themes of love and longing in Arabic- and Persian-language literature and film. In different times and places, how have men and women writers and directors used the themes of love and longing to depict and critique concepts of gender and gender relations, and social and political inequalities? How have men and women writers and filmmakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries both continued and disrupted earlier literary and poetic discourses of love? How have modern filmmakers engaged with and reworked classical stories of transgressive love? Divided roughly equally between literary and cinematic works, the course explores treatments of love and longing in, for example, early Arabic poetry and the Quranic text, philosophical and medical treatises, narrative cycles (for example the Thousand and One Nights), epic (notably the Persian Shahnameh or ‘Book of Kings’), lyric poetry (Rumi, Saadi, Hafez), modern verse, and film, including films by Dariush Mehrjui, Youssef Chahine, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, Rakhshan Bani-Etamad and Shirin Neshat.