Teaching Cross-Cultural Humanities with Language: Islam and Arabic.

My academic speciality is hermeneutic theory, which involves he role of language n the process of understanding, especially cross-cultural understand ing where the interaction of two relatively distinct world-views takes place. A request by my department that I design and teach a course on Islam presented an exceptional opportunity for applying hermeneutic theory to instructional method, since no religious tradi tion is as bound to a particular language, both in theory and in practice, as Islam is to Arabic. If Islam is intrin sically tied to Arabic and if understanding is inescapably linguistic in mode, the notion of including Arabic in struction as a component in a course on Islam is an in herently natural proposition. Following up these basic assumptions, I proceeded to design my course on Islam as an experimental model. If the incorporation of language study into the teaching of Islam should prove to be of value, perhaps the method would be generalizable to other cross-cultural humani ties courses. These courses differ from typical humani ties courses, which concern one's own tradition, by at tempting the difficult task of transcending the parochialism of one's own cultural prescriptions in order to encounter an alien culture in an authentic man ner. Innovation in cross-cultural humanities instruction is especially needed, given the increasingly pluralistic character of the contemporary world. Whether or not my model proved successful, I hoped to draw some useful conclusions about the dynamics involved.