HIST 433 - Muhammad and the Origins of Islam

This course examines the historical context of the emergence of Islam, its origins in seventh-century Arabia, and the rapid Islamic imperial conquests of the Byzantine and Sassanian Near East and much of the Mediterranean world by the mid-eighth century. We will examine important themes in the formation of the classical Islamic religious, legal, and historiographical traditions down to the early tenth century. Since the majority of the population resisted conversion to Islam during this period, we will also examine how Jewish and Christian subjects of the new Islamic empire were able to retain their distinctive religious identities while at the same time accommodating themselves to interacting with the new Islamic imperial order in areas of politics, society, law, religion, etc.