History 390B - Borderlands of Islam

This course seeks to advance our understanding of the ways that Islamic polities, practices and institutions were shaped by interaction with the non-Muslim peoples and states that neighbored them. This course, divided into three parts, will take up these questions through the study of Islamic borderlands in Asia, Africa and Europe from the 7th to the early 20th century. The first part will examine Islamic doctrines relating to the spread of Islam, and the question of the status of political borders within the Muslim world. The second part will investigate societies that existed on the borders of Muslim and non-Muslim lands where contact and exchange was marked by accommodation as much as antagonism. The third part charts the emergence of modern state formations in the Middle East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how the attempts to create stable borders illuminates the process of modernization in the Middle East.