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( History 284 is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 384 is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) The Ottoman Empire ruled the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe from the 15th to the early 20th centuries. How did the Ottoman enterprise appear in the frontier region between Christendom and the Islamic world? How were diverse peoples, religions, and regions integrated under the Ottoman order? Was there an Ottoman Mediterranean and Indian Ocean? How did reform movements in Islamic, Christian and Jewish thinking transform Ottoman societies? Topics include the Ottoman Empire between Europe and Eastern Islamic World; merchants and their markets; elite, urban, rural and nomadic lives; women, family, childhood and sexuality; life, afterlife and dreams; epidemics and natural disasters. Special emphasis will be given to coffee and coffee houses which shaped public life in the Ottoman World since the 16th century. The survey ends with the rise of nationalism, inter-communal violence and the disintegration of the Ottoman world.

This course aims to provide an intellectual history of contemporary Muslim political thought. It presents post-nineteenth century Muslim contributions to political thought. It is designed as a survey of some major thinkers from the Arab world to Iran and Southeast Asia, from Turkey to North America, who sought to interpret Islam's basic sources and Islamic intellectual legacy. Our readings include primary texts by Tahtawi, Tunisi, Afghani, Rida, Huda Sharawi, Qutb, Shariati, and Mernissi among other prominent figures. We will analyze recurring ideas in this body of thought such as decline, civilization, rationality, ijtihad (Islamic independent reasoning), shura (deliberative decision-making), democracy, secularism, Muslim unity, khilafah (caliphate and vicegerency), freedom, equality, and justice. We will discuss their current significance for the ongoing theoretical debates in Muslim political thought, Muslim intellectual history, and comparative political theory.

Focuses on political regimes, transregional connections, economic interactions and sociocultural formations in the early modern Islamic Afro-Eurasia. Topics include complex political-economic systems of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires and expansion of Turco-Persianate political and literary cultures across the Post-Mongolian Eurasia; experiences of various Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu, as well as urban, rural and nomadic communities and networks under Islamicate political regimes; consolidation of transregional commerce and cultural exchange with the proliferation of networks of merchants, scholars and sufis; new tendencies in knowledge, individual, gender, family, social order, and religion; incorporation of the Islamic world in the global economy; Muslims in the age of revolutions; political and social reforms and consolidation of Muslim internationalism in the age of imperialism.

This course begins with the withdrawal of the European empires from the Middle East in the wake of World War II and the ascendance of the United States (and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union) in the region. We will follow these superpowers' attempts to build and control spheres of influence in the Middle East throughout the 20th Century and continue on to an examination of the Arab Spring as a response to decades of American-imposed neoliberal policies. The focus will be on two themes: first, what techniques did the US and USSR use to project power in the Middle East, and what (if anything) distinguished them from the practices of European imperialism? Second, how did local actors navigate this environment, either by contesting American/Soviet power or by using it to their advantage?