Winter

This course examines the widely held view that changes in Ottoman commerce precipitated a decisive shift in the nature of the Ottoman state during the nineteenth century. Many narratives highlight the incorporation of Ottoman lands into the capitalist world-economy, government-led liberal economic reforms, the political ascent of merchants and bankers tied to foreign capital, and even an “imperialism of free trade.” Taking the Ottomans as its case study, the course invites broader reflection on the relationship between commerce and politics in the modern world. How and when does trade acquire political significance? Which forms of commercial activity and which regions are emphasized—or overlooked—in economic histories? When and what kinds of markets and merchants become identified with capitalism? Focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, we will explore these questions by bringing together four classic works on Ottoman trade and four recent studies that offer new perspectives on commerce and state in the Empire. With renewed attention to political economy and capitalism in Ottoman and Middle East studies, the course equips students to think across classic and recent literatures on these themes.

In the second quarter of Islamic Thought and Literature, students will explore the Islamic world in its various political, social, and intellectual aspects. Chronologically, the course begins with the consolidation of the “gunpowder empires” in the 16th Century and continues into the modern era. Students will leave the course with a historical and geographical framework for understanding the history of the Middle East and a familiarity with the major debates such as state reform efforts, Islamic modernism, and nationalism; new genres (e.g., the novel); and new modes of communication, such as journals and newspapers. No prior background in the subject is required. Participation in the first quarter of the sequence is assumed. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

This advanced graduate seminar explores various genres within hadith literature, a vast corpus encompassing traditions about the speeches, and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. Beyond examining different types of hadith collections, the course will trace the development of classical hadith scholarship and the critical methodologies employed by classical and medieval scholars in evaluating hadiths. In addition, the seminar will analyze key texts that discuss the role of hadith in law, theology, and Sufism, as well as its significance in the daily religious life of Muslims. The course will also introduce the intertextualities between Twelver Shi‘ite and Zaydi hadith traditions and the Sunni hadith corpus, offering a comparative perspective on hadith transmission and interpretation across different Islamic traditions.

This course, a continuation of Islamicate Civilization I, surveys intellectual, cultural, religious and political developments in the Islamic world from Andalusia to the South Asian sub-continent during the periods from ca. 950 to 1750. We trace the arrival and incorporation of the Steppe Peoples (Turks and Mongols) into the central Islamic lands; the splintering of the Abbasid Caliphate and the impact on political theory; the flowering of literature of Arabic, Turkic and Persian expression; the evolution of religious and legal scholarship and devotional life; transformations in the intellectual and philosophical traditions; the emergence of Shi`i states (Buyids and Fatimids); the Crusades and Mongol conquests; the Mamluks and Timurids, and the "gunpowder empires" of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls; the dynamics of gender and class relations; etc. This class partially fulfills the requirement for MA students in CMES, as well as for MES majors and PhD students.

This course uses the vantage point of Syria to survey the history of the Middle East, from the eighteenth century to today. The course will take us from the province of Damascus in the Ottoman Empire to the millions of Syrians in the West in the twenty-first century to understand the changing nature of where Syria is and what being a Syrian meant throughout these three centuries. As this course will reveal, the interlocutors of this question included rioting craftsmen and Janissaries, a local US vice-consul in Damascus, the nomads of the Syrian desert, émigré Syrian critics of the Ottoman Empire, agronomists invested in national economy, men of business as well as those of religion, and an authoritarian regime and a people who rose against it. As we unravel the social, political, economic, and intellectual processes that shaped the Syrian identity, we will cover milestone events such as the infamous interconfessional massacres of 1860, the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Baathist coup of 1963, and the Syrian Revolution in the context of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The course material will include scholarly texts as well as excerpts from Syrian texts, novels, and films in translation. 

Jewish Civilization II begins with the early modern period and continues to the present. It includes discussions of mysticism, the works of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, the nineteenth-century reform, the Holocaust and its reflection in writers such as Primo Levi and Paul Celan, and literary pieces from postwar American Jewish and Israeli authors. All sections of this course share a common core of readings; individual instructors will supplement with other materials.

The Umayyads ruled over the last “great empire” of late antiquity: the early Islamic empire, spanning from the Atlas to the Hindu Kush, from the Atlantic to the Amu Darya, and embracing regions with different cultural and political traditions. This course introduces to the history of the Umayyad caliphate, focusing on some of the visible legacies its inhabitants left behind: texts, objects, and monumental buildings that are still standing in cities of the Middle East and Europe. But we will also reflect upon less material legacies: for example, cities with a long-lasting urban culture, infrastructures for communicating across a vast empire, the consolidation of religious traditions, and exchanges and cohabitation of different religious groups.

This course introduces students to the Hittite Empire of ancient Anatolia. In existence from roughly 1750-1200 BCE, and spanning across modern Turkey and beyond, the Hittite Empire is one of the oldest and largest empires of the ancient world. We will be examining their history and their political and cultural accomplishments through analysis of their written records – composed in Hittite, the world’s first recorded Indo-European language – and their archaeological remains. In the process, we will also be examining the concept of “empire” itself: What is an empire, and how do anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians study this unique kind of political formation?

The goal of this class is to get an overview of Hittite literature, as “defined” by the Hittites themselves, in the wider historical-cultural context of the Ancient Near East. Some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves in reading ancient texts are: why were they written down, why were they kept, for whom were they intended, and what do the answers to these questions (apart from the primary content of the texts themselves) tell us about — in our case — Hittite society?

This course surveys the archaeology and history of the Levant from the time of its earliest human habitation in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age around 1100 BCE.