Cities of the Islamic World is an annual program that helps middle and high school teachers bring the premodern Islamic world into their classrooms through the stories of its great cities. Each year, three cities serve as case studies in how people of different faiths, languages, and cultures lived side by side, traded, and exchanged ideas. We offer an annual series of online lectures by scholars of the premodern Islamic world as well as by a month-long summer fellowship in which Southern California educators turn that scholarship into classroom-ready lessons aligned with California's History–Social Science Framework for seventh grade. This site gathers the lecture recordings, slides, and teaching materials from every year of the program, freely available for educators everywhere to use and adapt.

The Cities of the Islamic World program is a collaboration between the UCLA Islamic Studies Program, UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the UCLA History-Geography project.

Our 2027 lectures will be:

• January 23: Isfahan (Dr. Keelan Overton)

• February 20: Cordoba (Dr. Timothy Garrett)

• March 13: Mecca (Dr. Mohsin Ali)

To register for these lectures, please visit this link.