Islamic History to 1800
(Offered as HIST 138 and ASLC 138) At the dawn of the sixteenth century, the world’s largest land-based empires were in the Islamic world, stretching from the Atlantic shores of Morocco across the Indian Ocean to Pacific coasts of Indonesia, from the steppe of Central Asia to Zanzibar in East Africa. We depart from the origins of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula to explore the evolution of legal and scholarly traditions, art, architecture, science, technology, literature and a wide array of social institutions as they took shape across fast expanding Islamic empires.