Oriental languages and civilizations

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 It also aims at providing students with a general framework of historical references within which they might integrate any further knowledge they will acquire in courses of Arabic and Persian languages and literatures (as well as Bengali, and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.