Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An interdisciplinary study of a selected theme that has made a lasting contribution to the humanistic tradition in more than one field of endeavour(e.g. philosophy, politics, literature,economics, religion). This course may be repeated once for credit. Students who have credit for a course with this content under another Humanities course may not take this course for further credit. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Section of the Umayyad Mosque courtyard's western wall with significant remains of original Umayyad-era mosaics, depicting landscapes and buildings

Travel, Cosmography, and Geography in the Islamic Eurasia

The course investigates the development of geography and cosmography in the premodern Islamic world as an intellectual tradition and as a form of human experience. We will explore how it evolved in relation to technology, pre-Islamic and Islamic literature, philosophy, science, empirical knowledge, religion, politics, etc. Students will also develop approaches to Islamic intellectual, cultural, and political history, as well as the history of science, through a selection of primary readings, supplemented by scholarly literature on one hand, and—when appropriate—by art history and cartography, on the other hand.

The course will proceed through three units. Unit I will look at how Islamic geographical literature emerged as heir to the intellectual traditions of Mediterranean, Iranian and Indian Antiquity, as a response to the needs of a territorially expanding Muslim Caliphate, and as an expression of the consciousness and intellectual, economic, and political aspirations of an increasingly complex imperial elite of multiple cultural, confessional, and ethnic backgrounds. Unit II will discuss different genres, including cosmographical encyclopaedias, cartography, pilgrimage narratives, as well as poetical works and popular tales, that convey a new sense of spatiality at the time of Islamic cosmopolitanism in the medieval era, which saw the increased migration of commodities and people on the one hand, and intellectuals and ideas on the other hand. Unit III will discuss geography and cartography in the Ottoman Empire supporting and underscoring its expansionist ambitions, and encyclopedic projects in the mid-seventeenth century incorporating some of the latest paradigmatic shifts in science at the time. We will also discuss early modern Muslim intellectuals who wrote about their homeland for a western Christian audience, analyzing their writings at the cross-section of the Islamic geographical tradition and western Christian sensibilities, expectations and literary traditions.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of the course, students will

• acquire broad familiarity with the key works and genres of premodern Islamic geography and cosmography
• learn how to use the most important research tools, including certain digital tools, and databases of the field
• demonstrate the use of principles in historical analysis
• recognize and reflect on the contingency of analytical frameworks  
• demonstrate the ability to develop research methods and use coherent analytical frameworks to broach historical and geographical phenomena through primary and secondary sources.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: