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Course begins January 11, 2027
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Live sessions with the instructor each week from 1:00 to 3:00pm Eastern U.S. time
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All sessions are recorded and available to view for up to 2 weeks after the last live session
Session 1
Before Islam: Arabia and its Urban Worlds
We'll start where you might least expect: pre-Islamic Arabia was connected by trade, pilgrimage, kingdoms, and settled towns, not only by desert routes. By looking beyond Arabia to the Byzantine and Sasanian worlds, we'll reconstruct the varied urban landscape into which Islam emerged.
Session 2
Mecca, Medina, and an Early Muslim Urban Vision
Mecca and Medina show how ritual, migration, community, and governance could reshape a settlement. We'll look at the Prophet's mosque and early ideas of shared urban life, then meet the later Orientalist image of the "Islamic city" as a single, timeless, and disorderly type, an image the rest of the course will test.
Session 3
From Camps to Cities: Kufa, Basra, and Fustat
This session follows the rapid transformation of military settlements into thriving cities. Tribal districts, a central mosque, a governor's residence, and new markets reveal how conquest, administration, and community shaped the first Muslim foundations.
Session 4
From Polis to Madina: Damascus and Jerusalem
Early Muslim rulers did not begin with empty ground. In Damascus and Jerusalem, they inherited Roman streets, Christian sacred landscapes, and established communities, then adapted them through new monuments and rituals. These cities allow us to see continuity and change side by side.
Session 5
Palace-cities: Cordoba and the Desert Palaces
A caliph builds an entire gleaming city outside Cordoba to outshine his rivals; meanwhile, in the desert, Umayyad princes raise palaces that were far more than playgrounds. We'll ask why rulers performed power through whole cities and what the stones tell us.
Session 6
Baghdad and Samarra: Capitals of Empire
Baghdad was imagined as a carefully ordered imperial center, while Samarra stretched along the Tigris on an extraordinary scale. Through their plans, palaces, mosques, and ceremonial routes, we'll explore how the Abbasid caliphs turned city building into an expression of authority.
Session 7
Citadels and the Divided City
One day the rulers moved into hilltop citadels leaving the city below. Ordinary neighborhoods answered by gating their own streets. We'll explore what physical separation does to a city's sense of safety and belonging, in Cairo, Aleppo, and Granada.
Session 8
Living Together: Communities, Water, and Crisis
Cities were lived environments, not only collections of monuments. Through neighborhoods, property records, markets, water systems, plague, and the reuse of building materials, we'll consider how Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated proximity, access, risk, and survival.
Session 9
Is there an "Islamic city"?
In our final session, we'll return to the label that has guided and sometimes limited the study of these places. Comparing the cities we have encountered, we'll identify shared practices without erasing local histories and consider what survives in cities today.
Meet Your Instructor
Hend Elsayed
Hend Elsayed is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in Islamic urban history and architecture with a particular focus on the Mamluk period. Her research examines the intersections of space, law, and economy, exploring how religious architecture and endowment systems shaped urban development and economic change in late medieval Cairo. She has published on topics related to medieval urban and architectural history, and the ecological effects of the Black Death on Cairo’s urban fabric. Her forthcoming book, Religious Architecture, Business, and Urban Growth in Medieval Cairo, will be published by Edinburgh University Press.