| Course Description |
Teaching and learning in the premodern Islamic world centered around the person, rather than the
space. Entries in medieval biographical dictionaries tend to emphasize a scholar’s teachers, not the
institutions they studied at. Nonetheless knowledge had a geography: it was embodied and situated.
Where people studied, discussed, and taught determined how and what knowledge was gained and
transmitted, and to whom. At the same time, different practices and values of knowledge transmission
shaped spaces of scholarship.
This class will question the interplay between knowledge and space. We will focus on social and material
dimensions of spaces, revealing connections and separations between scholars and disciplines as we
attempt to materialize intellectual history. We will interrogate the boundaries between the informal and
formal, personal and institutional, public and private, and use these categories to analyze the teaching
and transmission of various kinds of knowledge, such as Islamic and Ancient sciences. Drawing from
biographical dictionaries, literary works, documentary and archeological evidence, we will explore the
importance of religious endowments and patronage, and examine access to scholarly spaces for the elite,
the ‘sub-elite’ and the ‘common’ people. Finally, this class will confront enduring myths, such as those
surrounding Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma, and the Jundishāpūr hospital, and narratives surrounding the
place of the natural sciences within the Islamic world.
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