Summer Teacher Institute 2025: “Teaching the Three Muslim Empires in the First Global Era”

There are many complexities and contradictions in teaching about the First Global Era from 1450 to 1750. The Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires arose alongside the overall expansion of Islam into new Asian and African regions. As “gunpowder empires,” they owed their conquests to the weapons of mass destruction of that age–cannons, artillery, and hand-held firearms. There is the problem of their military conquests and subsequent patronage of arts, science, engineering, and Islamic institutions. Indeed, these three empires’ patronage and style brought forth new heights in the Islamic arts and architecture.
A pedagogical problem in teaching about them is historical hindsight. Comparing the splendor of Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman royal portraits, magnificent courts, and artistic outpouring beside similar portraits and courtly magnificence of rising European nations, the former are seen as decadent, and the latter as dynamic, creative and in ascendance. The eruption of European nations into the oceans, and claims of universal sovereignty overshadow the global role of the 3 empires. Alongside new worlds of human society and civilization that Europeans encountered in their travels, their experience of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Empires contributed to three major movements in the First Global Era–the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment–through exchange and exposure to new social and commercial environments.

This summer institute explores these historical conundrums and the ways in which cross-cultural and inter-cultural exchanges enriched global civilization and investigates the evidence for commercial, religious, artistic and intellectual influences that flowed in all directions. We will explore how these interactions set the tone for the industrial and imperial eras, and their lasting influence.

In-person and virtual attendees will receive teaching resources to incorporate into the curriculum. Lunch will be served daily, reflecting regional culinary cultures. A museum trip to the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art is planned. Registration here https://forms.gle/fjthYNqmYnR3ensdA.

This program is made possible by a Title VI grant from the United States Department of Education, which is funding a National Resource Center on the Middle East and North Africa at Georgetown University, and by support from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.