Browse Hierarchy HST6117: The Making of Palestine: History of a Holy Land, 300-1800

The history of Palestine in the medieval and early modern eras has been hijacked by modern agendas. Zionist historians often attempted to erase or marginalise much of the Islamic past, as if Jewish settlers were coming to an empty land. The Palestinian counter-narrative tended to harness the study of history to its anti-colonial struggle. This module seeks to examine the history of Palestine and the people who lived in it, from the spread of Christianity, through the Islamic period, and until the beginning of Western domination in the nineteenth century. We will seek to tell the story of the land from the bottom up, focusing on peasants and the urban non-elites, and to encompass the diversity of the ethnic and religious groups who made Palestine their home.