Office hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays 15:30-16:20 at the Liberal Arts Research Building Room 309.

**This course will be conducted entirely in English including lectures, class discussions, student presentations, and written assignments.**

In July 2014, the military group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) surprised the world by overrunning western Iraq. Combining these conquests with its territories in eastern Syria, ISIS declared the establishment of the “Islamic Caliphate.” An institution and state that first emerged 1400 years ago in the 600s C.E. thus gained new life. What was the caliphate in its early form? This course studies the history of the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates and the Ottoman Empire. These states gathered together large parts of the Islamic world. The majestic figures of caliphs (such as the Rashidun Umar ibn al-Khatib, the Umayyad Abd al-Malik, the Abbasid Harun al-Rashid, and the Ottoman Suleyman the Lawgiver), their power, and their imperial courts have captured popular imagination. Indeed, the author of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the fables about Sheherazade, Aladdin, and genies, sets his stories in the court of Harun al-Rashid. Under the caliphates, Islamic society, culture, religion, and institutions developed. While ISIS has instituted a particularly totalitarian, violent, and intolerant type of polity, a study of premodern caliphates reveals a surprising side of Islamic history that is often distorted in popular media today. To undertake our studies, we will approach the subject from a historical perspective. We will examine the historical circumstances that fostered a new religion, community, and ultimately polity.