Overview of Course

For centuries prior to the Mongol invasion of the Muslim world that began in 1217 and continued until 1305, Islam as a religion and a civilization was a source of threat and new ideas to the Greek East and Latin West. The chronology of the early modern Muslim world is most prominently marked by the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, by the Ottomans in 1453. This course is designed to give students a broad-based exposure across a variety of conceptual debates, historical events, and sociopolitical issues at the intersection of Islam and the early modern and modern world and the paths forward. These themes include the rise and fall of multiple Islamic Empires (Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire, and Mughal Empire), encounters between Islam and the West, revivalist, reformist, and secularist movements in the Muslim world, and the resurgence of religion in international and domestic politics and the struggle for Islam. These issues will be contextualized in normative, empirical, and historical frameworks to equip students with a sophisticated and multi-dimensional conceptual toolbox to make sense of them.