Imag(ing) Islamic History

As an international premier institute for higher learning, MIT should offer courses that cover all major cultures of the world. To a certain extent, it does through its HASS programs. But not all cultures are well represented in the current curriculum. This is especially the case for the cultures of the Islamic world. Only two faculty members at MIT today teach courses that deal with the Islamic world at HASS and the department of architecture. And despite the presence of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the department of architecture, which functions as a magnet for people interested in the architecture of the Islamic world the world over, there are no courses offered at MIT that focus primarily on the history of Islam or Islamic polity, cultures, or understanding of the world. There is only a course that offers a concise overview of pre-modern Islamic history to concentrate on the encounter between the West and the Middle East with the dawn of colonialism (21H.601: Islam, the Middle East, and the West) and a number of undergraduate lecture courses on the architecture of the Islamic world that I teach at the department of architecture (4.614, 4.611, 4.615, 4.612). To fill that gap, I am thus proposing to develop a new and innovative Islamic history survey course entitled, Imag(ing) Islamic History, and designed especially for the age of learning through images.