Educational objectives Knowledge and understanding: This course will introduce students to the study of the political, economic, social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire from its emergence in the late 13th century to its demise in the aftermath of World War I. The course will analyze the modernization process in the Ottoman empire during the long 19th century, how those transformations were reflected in the making of modern Turkey, one of its principal successor states, and the Ottoman legacy in Republican Turkey.
Applying knowledge and understanding: Students will be able to identify and analyze the major transformations of Ottoman Empire and, through reflections concerning mainly Ottoman intellectual, social and cultural history, they will acquire the fundamental tools for understanding modernization and the birth of modern Turkey as well as of other nation-states emerging from the Ottoman Empire. The students will acquire a solid foundation from which they can pursue further specialized study in the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Making judgements: the students will be able to analyze critically the knowledge they have acquired and formulate their own judgments. These skills will be built up also through promoting independent and collaborative learning activities such as self-direct learning, written essays, Problem Based Learning (PBS).
Communication skills: the students will learn how to express their ideas clearly and adequately and how to communicate effectively what has been learned. These skills will be enhanced by promoting collaborative learning activities such as Think-Pair-Share (TPS), small discussion groups, simulations, peer reading and peer editing.
Learning skills: the students will learn how to study in a self-directed and autonomous way, understand their shortcomings and conceive and develop a self-learning project within a set time limit. These skills will be enhanced by activities such as flipped classroom, self-evaluation exercises and written essays.
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Educational objectives Knowledge
The present course aims at providing students with basic knowledge of the history of Muslim societies from
the origins of Islam to the late Middle Ages and, within available time, to the Early Modern era. One of its
objectives is that students acquire an understanding of the current diffusion and distribution of Muslim
presence in the world and, more precisely, in its different geographical areas. It also aims at providing
students with a general framework of historical references within which they might integrate any further
knowledge they will acquire in courses of Arabic and Persian languages and literatures (as well as Bengali,
and potentially also other languages of the Muslim world which are not currently taught in our Oriental
Languages and Civilizations Bachelors Program), Islamic Studies, History of Islamic Art, etc. A further goal is
that students start to familiarize themselves with technical terms in Arabic and, to a lesser extent, in the
other main languages of Islamic civilization.
Skills
This course aims at planting the following skills in the students’ minds:
- Collocating in time and space the main events and processes in the history of the medieval (and,
within available time, early modern) Muslim world.
- Consulting thematic maps, statistic databases and interactive websites focused on current religious
demography of global Islam, which will have been explained in class and made available on the e-
learning platform; using these tools independently and combining different data to formulate fresh
comparative remarks.
- Tracing back, at least in broad terms, the remote origins and historical developments of social,
political and religious institutions, as well as other longue-durée features, which still characterize
Muslim societies.
- Deconstructing with a critical mind some simplistic representations of the Muslim world (whatever
their leanings) which are currently spread through a variety of media, by putting them into
historical perspective.
- Using in an appropriate way some technical terms from historical sciences, especially from
historical studies on Islamic civilization, without neglecting more general propriety of language, as
far as both lexicon and syntax are concerned.
- Reasoning on acquired notions and concepts and on their possible interactions instead of
reproducing them passively.
- Being able to pursue their study of this discipline autonomously (and feeling motivated to do it),
building both upon bibliographical suggestions provided throughout the course, and upon some
examples of open historiographical debates which will have been shown by the teacher.
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