History of Arab-Islamic World

The objective of this course is to examine the presuppositions (ideological, social, and political) that determined the rise of Islam as the dominant religion in the Arab world, the history of the Arabian caliphates during the medieval ages as well as the adoption of Islam on behalf of the Persian and Turkish civilizations. Moreover, the course focuses on questions of development of nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire insisting on the imperial ideology of Panislamism as common matrix of the emergence of the Turkish (the version of “secular Islam”), as well as the Arab nationalism (the version of “nation-Umma”). Studying the rise of the Pan-arabic movement in the versions of Nasserism and Baathism the analysis includes also the conflicts of the Arab states with Israel focusing on the Palestinian question as well as the progressive shifting of the hegemony in the Arab world from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. Consequently the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism will be examined also as a result of the Saudi Arabian hegemony in the Sunni Islam, as well as of the outbreak and victory of the Islamic revolution in the Shiite Iran.

Objectives

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Prerequisites

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Syllabus

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