Uncovering the Hidden Ottomans: Was the Islamic world a part of the “West” all along?

Course Description

Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the great city of Istanbul, or binged historical dramas and documentaries about the Ottoman Islamic Empire on Netflix, that gave you a sense of how grand, powerful, and enduring this Empire was – lasting almost a thousand years in the modern Middle East! You might have also seen the Ottoman legacy in your favourite movies and TV shows without realizing it – for example, if you’ve ever seen or read Game of Thrones, the Army of the Unsullied was actually partly inspired by the Janissaries, the famous warriors of the Ottoman Empire trained from childhood to fight for the Ottoman Sultan. But the legacy and impact of the Ottomans are closer to our home in the “West” than you might think at first. Usually, in history class, we only ever encounter the Ottoman Empire as the Empire that conquered that last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, but would you be surprised to learn that the Ottomans didn’t think of themselves as the “end”, but rather as a continuation? In other words, how surprised would you be to learn that the Ottomans thought of themselves as an updated Roman Empire? So why then don’t history classes teach us how one of the largest, most powerful, and most successful Islamic Empires in history might actually have been a part of the Roman Empire and Western civilization?

In our class, we look at the original evidence ourselves to reach our own conclusions and try to get a sense of who the Ottomans really were in history. We’ll read translations of rare and little-known documents, as well as look at the paintings, calligraphy, and architecture that the Ottomans left behind, in order to try to piece together what everyday life was really like for people in the Ottoman Empire. We’ll also consider how the Ottomans are represented in popular media, such as books, movies, TV shows, and games in the West as well as in the countries that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, and hear from guest speakers from different parts of the former Ottoman Empire, in order to get a sense of what the Ottoman legacy means to different people. Based on our own interpretations of the evidence, we’ll design our own personalized, role-playing characters as part of our class’s very own board game to represent what we think life would’ve been like for people like us in the Ottoman Empire in order to tell the stories that we’ll discover!