Learning objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Explain what islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility covers and why it is treated as a distinct field of study within Islamic civilisation and intellectual history.
- Navigate the structure of this course, including its modules, deliverables and assessment weighting.
- Set up a working method for reading, note-taking and citation that you will use for the rest of the course.
- State the standard of evidence and referencing expected in every piece of assessed work.
Key terms
- Learning outcome
- A statement of what you will be able to do after study, written so that it can actually be assessed. Outcomes drive the design of every activity in this course.
- Constructive alignment
- The principle that outcomes, teaching activity and assessment must all point at the same capability. Where they diverge, students learn the assessment rather than the subject.
- Formative and summative assessment
- Formative work gives you feedback and carries little or no weight; summative work is graded and contributes to your final mark. Both appear in every module here.
- Academic integrity
- The obligation to represent honestly what you did, what you read and what help you used, including help from generative AI.
- Threshold concept
- An idea that is difficult to grasp but, once understood, changes how you see the whole subject. Module 1 of this course is built around the threshold concepts of islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility.
Lesson
What this course is about
This lesson. Lesson 0.1 — Welcome & Responsible Study belongs to Module 0 — Start Here of IC-F05 Islamic Ethics, Adab, and Moral Responsibility, taught in the School of Islamic Civilization. Work through the written lesson first, then the slide deck below, then the activity. Every element on this page is live HTML text: it can be enlarged, printed, searched, read aloud by assistive technology and machine-translated without loss.
This course examines islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility as a field of study and as a domain of practice. It sits within the School of Islamic Civilization, whose concern is the intellectual, ethical and institutional traditions of the Muslim world. The subject matters because decisions in this area are consequential, contested and frequently made on thin evidence. Practitioners are asked to act before the situation is fully understood, and scholars are asked to explain outcomes that were shaped by institutions, interests and accidents at the same time. Treating islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility seriously means refusing both the technocratic assumption that the right method settles everything and the cynical assumption that nothing can be known.
The approach taken here is deliberately analytical rather than descriptive. You will not be asked to memorise a canon and reproduce it. You will be asked to take a concept, test it against a case, identify where it breaks, and say what follows. That is the working habit of the research universities whose online provision this programme is modelled on, and it is the habit that distinguishes a professional judgement from an opinion.
How the course is structured
The course runs across eight modules. Module 0, which you are reading now, orients you. Module 1 establishes the core concepts and the vocabulary you will use throughout. Module 2 introduces the frameworks and standards that structure professional work in this area, including Hodgson’s Islamicate framing and The maqasid framework. Module 3 deals with evidence: where it comes from, how it is graded and how it fails. Module 4 turns to analysis proper. Module 5 works through cases. Module 6 prepares you for assessment, and Module 7 sets the final project.
Each lesson has the same shape, so you always know where you are: objectives, key terms, a written lesson, a worked example, a ten-slide deck that presents the argument visually, an activity, a short self-check and a reference list. The slide deck is written in HTML rather than delivered as a downloadable file, which means it renders on a phone, prints cleanly, can be translated by your browser and remains accessible to screen readers. Nothing important is hidden inside an image.
What is expected of you
Plan on a sustained rather than an intense engagement. The material rewards a pattern of two or three study sessions a week over the length of the course far more than it rewards a single long session before a deadline. Read the lesson first, then work the activity, then return to the slide deck as a revision object. The self-check questions are there to expose gaps while there is still time to close them; resist the temptation to read the answer before attempting the question.
Every claim you make in assessed work must be attributable. This course uses author–date referencing throughout, and the reference lists in each lesson are real, checkable sources rather than decoration. You are expected to consult at least some of them directly. Where you rely on a source you have not read in full, say so. Where you use generative AI to summarise, translate or draft, say that too, and verify every fact and citation it produces against the original.
Standards, marks and support
The pass mark is 70 per cent. All assessed components must be attempted, and every mark in this course is issued by a human assessor. Automated tools may assist with checking, but no grade is generated automatically and no appeal is decided by a machine. Rubrics are published in advance and are used consistently: you will be marked on the accuracy of your understanding, the quality of your evidence, the soundness of your reasoning and the clarity of your communication.
If you are working in English as an additional language, you will be assessed on whether your meaning is clear and your argument can be followed, not on idiom. If a disability or a personal circumstance affects your capacity to study, raise it early rather than at the point of submission. Support that is requested in advance can be built into the schedule; support requested afterwards usually cannot.
How to read a lesson in this course
Take the first substantive lesson in Module 1 as a model. Begin by reading the objectives and asking yourself, honestly, whether you could already do any of them. Then read the key terms and write your own one-sentence definition of each before reading ours. The gap between the two is the most useful diagnostic information you will get all week, because it tells you which of your existing intuitions about islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility are load-bearing and which are simply familiar.
Next read the lesson itself once at normal speed without taking notes, then a second time with a pen. On the second pass, mark only three things: a claim you accept, a claim you doubt, and a term you could not define to someone else. Bring those three marks to the activity. Students who work this way consistently produce stronger analytical briefs than students who highlight everything, because they arrive at the writing stage with a position rather than with a summary.
Slide deck
A ten-slide presentation of this lesson. Every slide is plain HTML, so it prints, translates and reads on any device.
Click a number to jump to a slide, or scroll the deck sideways.
Activity
Write your entry position on Islamic Ethics, Adab, and Moral Responsibility
In no more than 300 words, write down what you currently believe about islamic ethics, adab, and moral responsibility: what the central problem is, who the important actors are, and what you think good practice looks like. Do not research it. This is a record of your starting point. Save the file; you will be asked to revisit it in Module 7 and to explain, with reference to the course material, which of your initial beliefs survived and which did not.
Expected output. A dated 300-word note saved where you can retrieve it at the end of the course.
Suggested time. 30 minutes
Check your understanding
Q1. Why does this course publish its slide decks as HTML rather than as downloadable slide files?
Because HTML decks stay readable everywhere. They reflow on a phone, print without clipping, can be enlarged without loss, are readable by screen readers and can be machine-translated. Text locked inside an image fails all of those tests, and any text that cannot be read is not teaching material.
Q2. What is the practical difference between formative and summative work here?
Formative work exists to generate feedback and carries little or no weight; summative work is graded and contributes to the final result. The mistake to avoid is treating formative activities as optional, since they are where the errors are cheap.
Q3. What must accompany assessed work in which you used generative AI?
A use-of-AI statement saying what tool you used, for what purpose, and how you verified its output. Using AI is permitted; concealing it is a breach of academic integrity, and repeating an unverified AI claim is a substantive error in its own right.
References and further reading
- Hodgson, M. G. S. (1974) The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Rosenthal, F. (2007) Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill.
- Gutas, D. (1998) Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London: Routledge.
- Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2011) Teaching for Quality Learning at University. 4th edn. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
- Nicol, D. J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 199–218.
- Ambrose, S. A. et al. (2010) How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- World Wide Web Consortium (2023) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. W3C Recommendation.
Use of AI. You may use generative AI to summarise, translate or critique the material in this lesson, provided you verify every factual claim and citation against the sources listed above. Assessed work must carry a use-of-AI statement.