Ottoman History Podcast

Episode 528 hosted by the Ottoman & Turkish Studies Association and featuring over a dozen of our contributors past and present Click for RSS Feed Even though Ottoman History Podcast has been producing weekly episodes for over a decade, the times when our recording team and contributors have been able to gather to reflect on and celebrate our work have been rare. In April 2022, the Ottoman & Turkish Studies Association hosted a Zoom event for the OHP contributors and listeners to talk about what we have been doing since the podcast launched in 2011 and discuss the role it has played in the broader development of our fields of study. Join us to learn more about the history of our program and put faces to the voices you have been listening to over these years. As always, thank you to our hundreds of contributors and thousands of listeners for making this decade of experience worthwhile. And check out our special list of suggestions for further listening below compiled based on the recommendations of those who were in attendance!« Click for More »

Episode 527 with Richard Antaramian hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did the Ottomans secure widespread buy-in for modernization projects across the empire's many geographies and communities? This episode explores that question through the experiences of Armenians in the Ottoman East. Our guest, Richard Antaramian, shares some of his research, which argues that Ottoman shared governance worked through networks of power that linked center to periphery and sustained relationships among notables of different confessions, classes, and locations. The Ottoman tax-farming system of the 18th century forged ties among central authorities, provincial notables, and Armenian financiers. As the Ottoman government embarked upon the modernizing reform projects of the late 1700s and 1800s, those forms of shared governence frayed. In the Ottoman East, the Armenian Patriarchate's attempts to enact new notions of reform saw major successes, with the establishment limited representative governance, a constitution, and new educational institutions. Yet, those successes came at the cost of weakening the ties between provincial Armenians and important power brokers like provincial notables and Kurdish tribal leaders. Ultimately, the Armenian Patriarchate's successes at reform translated into trouble for its newly-isolated flock in the empire's eastern borderlands. « Click for More »

Episode 526 with Ozan Ozavci hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | How was European military intervention in the Ottoman Empire justified throughout the nineteenth century? What did Ottoman statesmen and subjects think of these would-be attemepts to provide them with more security? From the late eighteenth century, as a new international system was emerging, European powers considered the Ottoman Empire a weaker foil to their own expanding empires. In this episode, Ozan Ozavci explores how this perception of Ottoman weakness, known as the Eastern Question, affected the Ottoman Empire's place in and engagement with the new international system and law. Exploring the different phases of the Eastern Question, from the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the Civil War in Greater Syria durings the 1860s, Ozavci highlights agency of individual actors in the Ottoman capital and the provinces. « Click for More »

Mayte Green-Mercadohosted by Brittany White | In 1609, King Phillip III of Spain signed an edict to expel a community known as the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. The Moriscos were Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity during the 16th century, after Christian kingdoms displaced the last remaining Muslim rulers in Iberia. The persecution and erasure of the Moriscos following the Reconquista are well documented in the historiography, where alongside Iberian Jews, they appear as victims of the fall of Islamic al-Andalus. But in this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we'll explore what these events looked like through the eyes of the Moriscos themselves and study their roles as political actors in the momentous political shifts of the 16th century. In this conversation with Mayte Green-Mercado about her book Visions of Deliverance, we discuss the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts, known as jofores; and how these texts were catalysts for morisco political mobilization against the Spanish crown. We chart the formal and informal networks of communication between Moriscos, the Ottoman Empire, and the broader Mediterranean world. And we reflect on the challenges and benefits of using biased sources like the records of the Inquisition alongside other material. « Click for More »

with Helen Pfeifer hosted by Maryam Patton | In 1517, the Ottomans captured Cairo and with it, the Arabophone lands of the Mamluk Sultanate. Suddenly, scores of learned scholars who had been preparing and vying for positions of esteem in either the academy or the bureaucracy found themselves under new authority. How did these scholars navigate the new political and linguistic environments? As Helen Pfeifer argues in a new book, Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands, the answer lies in gentlemanly salons, where elite men displayed their knowledge and status. These social laboratories played a key role in negotiating Syria and Egypt's integration into the empire. Through Pfeifer's study of the life and network of the star scholar Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi, we learn how urban elite of former Mamluk Syria and Egypt continued to exert social and political influence, rivaling powerful officials from Istanbul. The gentlemanly salons also illustrate how Ottoman culture was forged collaboratively by Arabophone and Turcophone actors. « Click for More »

with Chris Gratien hosted by Susanna Ferguson | How did ordinary Ottoman subjects experience the momentous changes that made our modern world? This episode explores that question through the history of the Çukurova region of southern Turkey. As our guest Chris Gratien has argued in a new book entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Çukurova can be studied as a microcosm of social and environmental change in the late Ottoman Empire. In our conversation, we explore how the approaches of environmental history can offer a fresh perspective on the political history of the Tanzimat period, and we discuss how the history of malaria -- an ancient disease -- sheds light on a modern experience of displacement and dispossession for rural communities in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. « Click for More »

with Marina Rustow hosted by Chris Gratien | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. « Click for More »

with Jörg Matthias Determann hosted by Shireen Hamza | Islam and science fiction have more history together than you might expect. In this episode, we speak with Jörg Matthias Determann about the many ways science has fueled the imagination of people in Muslim-majority contexts over the last few hundred years. In his latest book, he shows how artists and missionaries participated in "cultures of astrobiology," or the study of life on other planets. Exploring the ways that a variety of authors, artists, and governments have imagined a future with and for Muslims, Matthias shows that there are many overlapping and competing visions of Muslim Futurism. « Click for More »

with Carlos Grenier hosted by Maryam Patton | How did one learn to be a good Muslim in the early 15th century? In newly conquered Ottoman lands where Christians and converts lived side by side, how would one go about learning the proper rites and beliefs to hold? This conversation with Carlos Grenier explores the lives and ideas of two brothers, Mehmed Yazıcıoğlu and Ahmed Bican, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu who grappled with this very question. Their response was to craft a synthesis, an Ottoman Islam so to speak, in the form of Turkish texts that guided their communities on the proper way to be a Muslim. They reached an enormous readership and rank as some of the most popular books to ever be produced in Ottoman Turkish. And as Grenier explains, the Yazıcıoğlus articulated a new Ottoman spiritual vernacular forged in the balance between two worlds of the Balkan and Mediterranean frontiers and the Islamic intellectual sphere. « Click for More »

with Marc Baerhosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | The expulsion of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their arrival in the Ottoman Empire thereafter changed the relationship of Jewish communities to the Ottoman dynasty. The history of Ottoman Jews would become part and parcel of a narrative that contrasted the Ottoman Empire's beneficence and tolerance with the anti-Semitism of other European societies. Yet as Marc Baer explains in this second part of a two-part conversation, the image of "Sultanic saviors" became entangled with the denial not only of anti-Semitism in Turkey but also of violence against Christians in the late Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide. Adopting a history of emotions approach, Baer explores the reasons for the erasure of violence and persecution in the memory of the Ottoman Empire's relationship with Christians and Jews and uses the sentiments that animate this historiography and memory as a starting point for a way forward. « Click for More »

Episode 518 with Milena Methodieva hosted by Andreas Guidi and Jovo Miladinović In 1878, following the Congress of Berlin, Bulgaria became a de facto independent principality. Not anymore under Ottoman rule, the Muslims of Bulgaria navigated this political shift by redefining their place as a minority of a nation-state. The community underwent a political polarization between traditional notables and a group pushing for reforms within Muslim institutions. In this episode, we discuss how these reformists engaged with state and nation-building in Bulgaria by highlighting their connections with the broader Muslim world. Not only did Bulgarian Muslims contribute to the rise of the Young Turk movement, they were also part of a transnational space in which intellectuals and activists debated issues such as the place of Islam in modern society, the value of education, and the question of political relationship with non-Muslim rulers. This episode is cross-listed with The Southeast Passage.« Click for More »

Emrah Şahin Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Amerikalı misyonerlerin Osmanlı Devleti sınırlarındaki faaliyetlerini incelemek, İslam ve Hristiyan dünyası ilişkilerine dair yaygın kabuller hakkında bize ne anlatır? Osmanlı Devleti sınırları dahilindeki misyoner varlığını tespit, teftiş ve tahdid etmek amacıyla hangi yöntemlere başvurmuş, bu süreç aktörler arasında ne gibi gerilimlere yol açmıştır? Bu bölümde Emrah Şahin ile ”İtikadın Peşinde: Osmanlı Bürokratları ve Amerikan Misyonerleri” kitabı odağında Amerikan misyonerlerinin Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda bıraktığı mirası ve devlet erkanı ile misyonerler arasındaki çok katmanlı ilişkiyi değerlendiriyoruz. « Click for More »

with Jyoti Balachandran hosted by Shireen Hamza | How did Sufis shape the identity of Gujarat, a region in northwest India? Gujarat is best known for its ancient port cities and its connectivity to the broader Indian Ocean world. It is also the site of some of the oldest Muslim settlements in the Indian subcontinent. In this interview, Jyoti Balachandran traces the way Sufi saints and communities settled the region in the fifteenth century, with lasting impacts for Gujarat's regional identity. Taking us on a tour of the vast Sarkhej tomb complex outside Ahmedabad where Sufis and Sultans are buried side by side, and through a variety of historical texts from the Sultanate to the Mughal periods, Balachandran explores the many layers of this story of Muslim belonging. « Click for More »

  with Shay Hazkani hosted by Sam Dolbee | The 1948 War resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba of 750,000 Palestinian refugees. In Dear Palestine, Shay Hazkani sheds new light on these events through a unique source base: hundreds of personal letters secretly copied by an Israeli censorship apparatus. We talk in this episode both about his struggle to access these materials and the subversive truths that they reveal, including everything from Moroccan Jewish volunteers who felt solidarity with Arabs to Palestinian refugees who attempted to care for and return to their homes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. « Click for More »

with Giancarlo Casalehosted by Brittany White | Osman of Timișoara was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire born during the late 17th century in modern-day Romania. As a young man serving in the Ottoman military, he was captured by the Habsburg army. He would spend more than a decade as a captive in Austria. Many people of his time had similar stories. What made Osman special was that he left behind a rare autobiographical account of his experiences and exploits. In our conversation with Giancarlo Casale about his translation of Osman's memoir entitled Prisoner of the Infidels, we'll explore the similarities among experiences of enslavement in the Ottoman and Habsburg lands and learn how Osman positioned himself as a linguistic and later diplomatic go-between. And through the life of Osman, his account of his own efforts to return to the Ottoman Empire, and the momentous events he witnessed, we will reflect on his autobiography as a work of literature and the messages contained within it. « Click for More »

with Şölen Şanlı Vasquez hosted by Brittany White | Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the themes of family, gender, ethnicity, race, and erasure --- not only in Turkey --- but across contexts of migration and displacement in the US and elsewhere. And we also reflect on the importance of public history that makes these issues relevant and relatable to a wider audience. « Click for More »

with Monica Green hosted by Chris Gratien | For years, the historiography of the 14th-century Black Death produced more questions than answers. Then, roughly a decade ago, genomic research confirmed that the medieval Black Death was caused by the same bacteria, Yersinia pestis, which causes the modern bubonic plague. This settled the burning question of precisely which disease had caused the pandemic that produced colossal mortality in many parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. In this episode, we speak to Monica H. Green, whose recent work has raised new questions about the Black Death by showing that the chronology of the Black Death was incomplete. As she explains, prior outbreaks of plague in 13th-century Asia occurred at the edges of the ascendant Mongol Empire, roughly a century before the plague arrived in Western Europe. In our conversation, we learn how Green uncovered the new story of the "four Black Deaths" and in doing so, explore the historiography of the Black Death and how genetics, archaeology, and a fresh approach to textual sources have brought us to a deeper understand of one of history's deadliest pandemics. « Click for More »

with Rudi Lindner hosted by Joshua White & Maryam Patton | Among the most murky periods of the Ottoman dynasty's six-century history is the period of its very emergence in medieval Anatolia. In this episode, we talk to Rudi Lindner about his attempts to understand this early period of Ottoman history and the development of hypotheses and methods concerning the investigation of Ottoman origins over the past century of scholarship. We also reflect on what decades of research and teaching have taught Lindner about sources for history and the questions they require us to ask. « Click for More »

with Laura Robson hosted by Sam Dolbee and Deren Ertaş | Depictions of the Middle East as a space of timeless violence pervade media, popular culture, and scholarship. In The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East, Laura Robson offers a rejoinder to such misconceptions while providing a historical explanation of these distinctly modern forms of violence in greater Syria and Iraq, also known as the Mashriq. In this episode, we discuss how a new kind of territoriality in the late nineteenth century combined with imperialist interventions to transform violence into a way of making political claims through the twentieth century and up to the present across the region. We additionally talk about historical research and writing more generally, and how Robson's past as a trained pianist has shaped her work. « Click for More »

with Nada Moumtaz hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The waqf, often translated as "endowment," is a critical player in the story of urban landscapes, charitable giving, property management, and religion in the Islamic world. But what is a waqf? In this episode, Nada Moumtaz uncovers the many lives of waqf in the city of Beirut, from Ottoman times until the present. We talk about waqfs as buildings, processes, acts, and investments. We see how the story of waqf illuminates central features of the modern state while blurring boundaries between family life and public life, religion and business, charity and investment, past and future, and human and divine. « Click for More »

with Rayya Haddad | The modern history of Beirut has been defined by periods of intense construction, destruction, and reconstruction. In this episode, we explore the layers of history in Beirut's cityscape through a walking tour with Rayya Haddad. We chart Beirut's transformation from its rise as a late Ottoman capital through the expansion of the port during the French Mandate period, its golden age as a commercial center in independent Lebanon during the 1950s and 60s, the long civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, and the postwar reconstruction carried out by the company Solidere. We also explore the history of Beit Beirut, a unqiue building designed by Youssef Aftimus--Beirut's foremost architect of the late Ottoman and French Mandate period--from its Mediterranean revivalist origins to its redesign as a sniper's haven during the war, ending with its rescue and renovation by activists in recent decades. We conclude with some thoughts on what this layered history of the city means for the new layer of destruction and reconstruction created by the port explosion during August 2020. « Click for More »

with Fariba Zarinebaf hosted by Sam Dolbee and Nir Shafir | In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf discusses the history of Galata and the early modern Mediterranean more broadly. Beginning with the incorporation of Galata's Genoese community of Istanbul under Ottoman rule in 1453, Zarinebaf explains how the treaties known as the capitulations (ahdname in Turkish) provided a durable framework for commercial exchange and pluralistic everyday life in Ottoman port cities. She also considers how these arrangements compared with commerce and life in non-Ottoman Mediterranean ports. Through a focus on French-Ottoman relations, Zarinebaf offers a glimpse of how treaties become involved in changing economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the world. She also attends to how these economic patterns shaped the more intimate aspects of social life in Galata, closing with the impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt on the French community of Galata. « Click for More »

with Christine Philliou hosted by Sam Dolbee and Brittany White | Refik Halit Karay (1889-1965) was a writer, bureaucrat, and political exile whose life spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Christine Philliou traces his life as well as a genealogy of political opposition more broadly in her new book Turkey: A Past Against History. Following Refik Halit between his exiles in Sinop, Syria, and elsewhere as well as his momentous encounter with Mustafa Kemal in the Telegraph Episode, Philliou sheds light on the complicated transition between empire and nation. She also grapples with the challenge of telling history based on the voluminous and often satirical musings of a figure himself deeply invested in interpreting the past. « Click for More »

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan Sunucu: Can Gümüş | 19. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında, dinamit gibi patlayıcıların icadı ile küresel düzeyde oluşan küçük silah fazlası Osmanlı Balkanlarındaki devrimcileri hangi bakımlardan güçlendirdi? Osmanlı Devleti, imparatorluk karşıtı eylemleri kolaylaştıran bu "devrim karaborsası"nı hangi yöntemleri kullanarak kontrol etmeye çalıştı? Bu bölümde, Dr. Ramazan Hakkı Öztan ile geç Osmanlı Balkanlarında devrimcilik, şiddet ve teknoloji ilişkisini, meselenin küresel politik ekonomi boyutunu da dikkate alarak değerlendiriyoruz. Devrimci şiddetin kavramsallaştırılması ve ideolojilerin devrimci siyasetteki önemini eleştirel olarak ele alırken, bu alandaki arşiv kaynaklarının nasıl incelenebileceğini de örneklerle tartışıyoruz. « Click for More »

with Faisal Husain hosted by Chris Gratien | The Ottoman conquests of the 16th century represented a watershed moment in many senses. Our guest Faisal Husain explains the most literal of these senses: the unification of the Tigris and Euphrates basins under a single political authority and its ramifications for the history of Iraq. In our conversation, we explore how Ottoman rule in Iraq created new ecological possibilities and realities, setting the stage for momentous interventions in the rivers detailed in Husain's recent book Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. We also reflect on what Iraq reveals about Ottoman history writ large and the empire's dualist historical identity as an agrarian empire on one hand and flexible one on the other, in which accommodating local ecological difference was critical to governance. « Click for More »

with Marc Baerhosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk to Marc Baer about how he first became interested in Ottoman history and explore the main themes and the questions underpinning the research in his five books. In this conversation, we place special focus on the books Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe and The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Our discussion centers on approaches to the subject of conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the dönme community born out of the transformations of the 17th century. « Click for More »

with Zeynep Gürsel | The Ottoman archives contain just over a hundred photographs that look like old family portraits, but they were created for an entirely different purpose. They document the renunciation of Ottoman nationality, "terk-i tabiiyet," by Armenian emigrants bound for the US and elsewhere. As our guest Zeynep Devrim Gürsel explains, these photographs were "anticipatory arrest warrants for a crime yet to be committed"--the crime of returning to the Ottoman Empire. Gürsel's research goes far beyond the story of the small number of photographs that remain as she has documented over four thousand individuals who went through the process of "terk-i tabiiyet." In this Ottoman History Podcast-AnthroPod collaboration, we talk to Gürsel about her research project on the production, circulation and afterlives of these photographs titled "Portraits of Unbelonging." It is a double-sided history that explores not only the context of Armenian migration and policing during the late Ottoman period but also the experiences of those pictured and their descendants following their departure from the Ottoman Empire. (Recorded August 2019) This episode is dedicated to the memory of Mary Lou Savage (née Khantamour). « Click for More »

with Michael Christopher Lowhosted by Sam Dolbee | In the Hijaz, the Ottoman Empire managed not only Mecca and Medina--the two holiest cities in Islam--but also port cities of the Red Sea with connections to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this episode, Michael Christopher Low explains how the empire ruled this region as the hajj transformed thanks to steam travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While European colonial anxieties about the hajj focused on epidemic disease and subversive politics, Ottoman concerns centered on the legal status of the region and its infrastructural networks. Although projects such as the Hijaz Railway are often understood as manifestations of Abdulhamid II's commitment to pan-Islam, Low suggests that these measures were more accurately a product of emerging technocratic forms of Ottoman governance. He also discusses continuities with the Saudi state. Low's book is Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj.  « Click for More »

Episode 500 with Malte Fuhrmann hosted by Andreas Guidi and Zeynep Ertuğrul At the turn of the twentieth century, Ottoman port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were sites of vibrant cultural encounters. While infrastructural innovations at docks and quays reshaped the urban waterfront, the inhabitants of Izmir, Istanbul, and Salonica engaged with new forms of entertainment arriving from Europe. Operas, balls, and beerhouses changed the way people mingled and interpreted coexistence and diversity in their urban environment. Migrants from Europe and from the hinterlands of major port cities created an original form of Ottoman Mediterranean modernity. This cosmopolitan urban culture was alluring and festive but also had its discontents, who denounced it as decadent and servile to European imperialism. Exploring the everyday life of late Ottoman port cities reveals an effervescent lapse of time in which notions such as modernity, Europe, empire, and nation could be experienced in manifold ways, before the major conflicts of the twentieth century gave a fatal blow to Mediterranean urban diversity. This episode is cross-listed with The Southeast Passage.« Click for More »

Episode 499 with Dana Sajdi & Chris Gratien hosted by Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian In this collaboration between the Harvard Islamica Podcast and the Ottoman History Podcast, we discuss the new series called "The Making of the Islamic World," using podcasts in the classroom, and engaging in public-facing history in the changing landscape of scholarship in the humanities. Chris Gratien shares his experiences as a long-time producer of public-facing scholarship through OHP and how he created and used the 10-part, multi-vocal series on "The Making of the Islamic World" to expose his students to diverse methods and perspectives on a millennium of Islamic history in his remote teaching amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, talks about her course on Ottoman history, "Podcasting the Ottomans," and the importance of of scholars adapting to the new realities of how the internet is changing the academic profession.« Click for More »

with Christopher Silver | The history of North Africa is usually framed by the period of French colonialism and the era of independent nations that followed. But what happens if we let an object like the 78 rpm record do the work of periodization? In this episode, we talk to Christopher Silver about the unique vantage point that gramophone records offer on the emergence of national culture in the Maghreb during the first half of the 20th century. We will explore the work of artists whose lives straddled Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco as well as the colonial metropoles, and we will highlight the role of North African Jewish singers, musicians, producers, and promoters in the development of the region's music industry. « Click for More »

with Dylan Baun hosted by Susanna Ferguson | Starting with the nationalist and anticolonial movements of the early 20th century, youth have played an important role in political life in the modern Middle East. But despite their importance, youth often go unrecognized as a category of analysis. In this episode, we speak with historian Dylan Baun about his work on youth politics in interwar Lebanon, exploring the rituals and political practices of groups like Kata'ib (Phalange) and the Progressive Socialist Party which would become key actors in the fighting of 1958 and later on, in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990. We learn how young people forged political community both through and beyond sectarian violence, a phenomenon that Dr. Baun argues became strongly associated with rebellious youth. « Click for More »

with Ambereen Dadabhoy hosted by Maryam Patton and Chris Gratien | William Shakespeare's lifetime overlapped with the height of Ottoman prowess on the world stage, which is partly why so many Turkish characters graced the Elizabethan stage during the 16th and 17th centuries. As our guest Ambereen Dadabhoy explains, the representations of "Turks" and "Moors" in early modern English drama offer a window onto conceptions of race in Europe before the modern period. In this conversation, Dadabhoy shares her experience writing and teaching about race in early modern English literature, and we reflect on the value of Shakespeare for charting connections and transformations in conceptions of Muslim societies from Shakespeare's time to the present. « Click for More »

Çiğdem Oğuz Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde Dr. Çiğdem Oğuz ile I. Dünya Savaşı'nda Osmanlı'da "ahlak buhranı"nı tartışıyoruz. "Ahlaki çöküş" ya da "ahlak buhranı" söylemlerinin farklı entelektüellerce nasıl kullanıldığını inceleyen Oğuz'un çalışması, bu tartışmalara odaklanmanın Osmanlı toplumunun söz konusu dönemde geçirdiği politik, siyasi ve kültürel dönüşümleri anlamada bir anahtar görevi üstleneceğini iddia ediyor. Oğuz aynı zamanda, bu tartışmaların ve ahlakı korumaya yönelik atılan adımların politik alanın yanı sıra, aileye ve toplumsal cinsiyet ilişkilerine yansımalarını da araştırıyor. « Click for More »

with Richard Breaux | Richard Breaux needed a hobby. He began collecting 78 rpm records as a break from his work as a professor of Ethnic and Racial Studies at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. But when he stumbled upon a trove of Arabic language records at an estate sale, his hobby became a scholarly project of its own to document and reconstruct the history of the Arab diaspora in La Crosse, Wisconsin and the Greater Midwestern United States. In this episode, we talk about the history of early 78 rpm Arabic records in the United States, the people who owned them, and the story of a forgotten center of the Midwest Mahjar. « Click for More »

with Emily Drumsta hosted by Sam Dolbee | Nazik al-Mala'ika (1923-2007) is one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. Born in Baghdad, she wrote about varied topics, ranging from the 1947 cholera epidemic in Egypt to the rise of communism in Iraq to a nighttime train ride. She pioneered what became known as "free verse," a form at once innovative but also based upon older metrical structures. Emily Drumsta has recently translated a collection of al-Mala'ika's poetry into English under the title of Revolt against the Sun, with Saqi Books. In this episode, we discuss how al-Mala'ika's Arab nationalist politics informed her metrical innovation, and how she played with gendered expectations in her poetry. We also talk about some of the challenges of preserving rhythm and sound in translation.  « Click for More »

Buket Kitapçı Bayrı Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde Dr. Buket Kitapçı Bayrı ile 2019'da Brill yayınevinden çıkan Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes. Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th-15th Centuries) başlıklı kitabı üzerine söyleşiyoruz. Bayrı bu çalışmasında, orta çağ Anadolu'sunda Türkçe yazılmış Battalname ve Danişmendname gibi kahramanları savaşçı ve Saltukname gibi kahramanı Abdalan-ı Rum'u dervişi olan epiklerin yanı sıra 13. ve 15. yüzyıllar arasında Bizanslılar tarafından yazılmış Yunanca şehitlik hikayelerini de incelenmektedir. Kitabın başlığı kahramanlara hikayelerde biçilen savaşçı, şehit ve derviş gibi temel rol kimliklerine gönderme yapar. Ancak kitap savaş, ölüm ve tasavvuftan ziyade bu hikayeleri birleştiren ana mekân Diyar-ı Rum'un tasvirini, sınırlarını ve algılanışını; karakterlerin bu mekândaki hareketlerini, bu mekânın Rum/Romalı, Müslüman ve Hıristiyan gibi kimlikleri belirlenmesindeki rolünü, yazar, bani ve dinleyici/okuyucu ilişkisi çerçevesinde tartışmaktadır. Bayrı'nın çalışması, yemek, aşk ve seyahat gibi başlığın okuyucuda hemen çağrışım yapmadığı ancak hikayelerde kimlikleri tanımlamada etkin olan konuları da inceler. « Click for More »

with Monica Ringer hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | What is Islamic modernism, and how did authors of this movement position themselves vis-á-vis other 19th century intellectual movements? In this episode, we examine how Islamic modernism was more than a product of 19th century social and political reforms or even an attempt at using Islamic language to justify such reforms. Rather, Islamic modernism was a substantive theological reform movement, fueled by the belief that God's intent could be recovered through correct and contextual readings of the past. As a result, Islamic modernists helped give rise not only to new understandings of Islam but also to new understandings of history. In our discussion, we draw on Dr. Ringer's book Islamic Modernism and the Re-enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History out from Edinburgh University Press in 2020. In it, she takes up the work of four authors from across Eurasia: Namık Kemal from the Ottoman Empire, Ataullah Bayezidof from the Russian Empire, Syed Amir Ali from British India, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who spent his formative years in Iran. Although they shared a religion, it was much more Islam that tied their ideas together. « Click for More »

with Nevila Pahumi hosted by Susanna Ferguson | In 1919, Paraskevi Kyrias went to Paris to advocate for Albanian independence. As a woman in the overwhelmingly masculine space of international diplomacy, she faced sexism and unwanted romantic overtures. Nevertheless, she called on her connections within a global Protestant community, her life in diaspora in the United States, and her experiences at the elite Constantinople Girls' School to play a unique role in the Albanian campaign for independence after World War I. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Nevila Pahumi about Kyrias' story, her leadership of the early Albanian women's movement, and the diary of her experiences in Paris she left behind. We also trace the history of this remarkable woman after 1919, as she and her family were repudiated by a secularizing Albanian state determined to exise Protestant activism from their national history -- until she was once again remade as a feminist icon in the last years of her life. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Mohamad Ballan, Joshua White, Zoe Griffith, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Neelam Khoja, Fahad Bishara, Jeannie Miller, and Maryam Patton | Across the 14th to 17th centuries, significant political transformation occurred in the Islamic world. Muslim al-Andalus was conquered and largely erased by the Christian kingdoms of Iberia, and the Byzantine Empire was absorbed and conquered by the Ottoman Empire. By the beginning of the 17th century, much of the Islamic world was controlled by three major empires, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals, who combined a long tradition of Turco-Persian culture and Islamic statecraft with the military organization of post-Mongol societies and new possibilities created by the adoption of firearms. The empires they built laid the foundation for the societies of the modern period. In this episode, we detail the momentous rises and fall that accompanied the early modern period in the Islamic world. Beginning with itinerant scholar-statesmen like Ibn Khaldun, we explore how the Islamic world was changing during the period following the Black Death of the mid-14th century. We cover the gradual erasure of al-Andalus as well as the rise of the Ottomans and their rivalry with the Safavids of Iran. We also detial the life of Babur and the Mughal Empire his descendants built, and we consider the enduring status of the Indian Ocean as a "Muslim lake." We conclude with a reflection on how the intellectual developments of the early modern period built on medieval legacies. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Wendell Marsh, Rabiat Akande, and Ann McDougall | From the 10th century onward, Islamic polities emerged in West Africa. Centered on the southern edge of the desert, these states built empires that benefited from the brisk Saharan trade. With time, they also built centers of Islamic learning as the wider population of West Africa began to embrace Islam. In this episode, we study what Islam meant for West Africa and what West Africa means for the history of Islam. We trace the evolution of Islamic polities in the region, which were built on the mineral wealth of salt and gold. Like other states of the period, they were also built on slavery and the slave trade. In our discussion, we focus on how the local tradition of Maliki jurisprudence engaged with the question of slavery, especially as the trade became increasingly racialized and global around the turn of the 17th century. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Joshua White, Zoe Griffith, Amina Elbendary, and Kristina Richardson | Military slavery was critical to the function of most imperial states in the medieval Islamic world. But in a moment of crisis during the 13th century, the cadre of enslaved military personnel or mamluks employed by the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt overthrew that dynasty, establishing their own sultanate that governed Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz for more than two centuries. In this episode, we're examining the making of the Mamluk Sultanate and life in its capital of Cairo. We discuss the institutions and structures established in the city of Cairo as displays of power and charity by Mamluk elite, and we consider the role of urban protest and contention between the streets and the citadel as an integral facet of politics in Mamluk cities. We also shed light on the little-studied community of Ghurabā' who lived on the city's margins and engaged in one of the earliest examples of printing in the Islamic world. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Joshua White, Zoe Griffith, Sara Nur Yıldız, and Neelam Khoja | The Mongol conquests of the 13th century were an unprecedented event. Not since the Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries had such a rapid political rise occurred. For a time, Mongol successor states controlled most of Asia. And though many of these dynasties would not last, the lasting consequences of the Mongol Empire would be many. In this episode, we study the consequences of the Mongol period for the Islamic world, focusing both on the immediate destructive impacts that appear in the Islamic sources from the period as well as the lasting transformations introduced by Mongol rule. Whether in terms of political ideology, law, trade, or culture, the Mongol period represented a significant departure for Muslim societies east of Egypt. In addition to highlighting the impacts of the Mongols in former Seljuk domains of Iran and Anatolia, we discuss the rise of the Timurid dynasty in Khorasan and foreshadow its legacy for South Asia. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Joshua White, Maryam Patton, Zoe Griffith, and Gary Leiser | The Crusades loom large in the Western imagination of medieval history and Christendom's relationship with the Islamic world. But what did these wars of the 11th-13th centuries mean for Muslims at the time? In this episode, we explore the history of the Crusades and their impact on the Islamic world. While the wars of the Crusades were bloody, they were not necessarily the main event of Islamic history beyond the regions bordering the Crusader states. In the Eastern Mediterranean, these states emerged as sites of both conflict and contact between European Christians and Muslims. In our episode, we go beyond the battlefield to discuss the gendered portrayals of the Crusaders within Islamic sources, and we consider the intellectual implications of access to the Islamicate scholarly tradition offered in the Crusader states. We also discuss the history and memory of Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi or Saladin, whose chivalry and military prowess inspired awe both among Europeans of his day and among Arab nationalists many centuries later during their struggle with Western imperialism. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Fahad Bishara, Jeannie Miller, and Mohamad Ballan | During the early 8th century, less than a century after the creation of the first Muslim communities, Islamic armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and quickly conquered most of modern-day Spain and Portugal. Muslim life in what became known as "al-Andalus" would last about eight centuries, reshaping the politics, culture, and landscapes of the Iberian Peninsula in numerous ways. In this episode, we're exploring the first centuries of Muslim life in al-Andalus and the legacies not just for Iberia but also for the rest of Europe and the Islamic world. We'll examine the distinctive Andalusi identity that emerged out of centuries of Muslims, Jews, and Christians living under Islamic polities. And we'll also consider the literary impact of Arabic on European culture and consider the historical significant of ecological exchange between the broader Islamic world and Iberia before the momentous date of 1492. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara | For brief period of history, the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt presided over arguably the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean. Yet because the legacy of this Ismaili dynasty was erased or downplayed by its Sunni rivals and successors, the Fatimids are often misunderstood. As we show in this installment of "The Making of the Islamic World," the Fatimid period and the sources that survive from it can in fact be critical to learning more about how pre-modern Islamic polities functioned, demonstrating that the Fatimids had a much more sophisticated state apparatus than some have assumed. The statecraft of a pre-modern Islamic empire is just one of the topics we can study in the Fatimid world thanks to a rich trove of documents from the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a storeroom of a synagogue in Fustat that ended up containing a wealth of documents, many of them simply discarded or reused, that reveal the complexity and interconnection of the medieval Mediterranean. In this episode, we explore how scholars make use of the Genizah documents and the interconnected world stretching from Southeast Asia to Mediterranean Europe reveals in the Genizah papers. In the process, we learn about the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate as a dynasty and state structure and the developments that took place under Fatimid rule in Cairo. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Joshua White, Neelam Khoja, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, and Maryam Patton | The political expansion of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods brought a wide range of territories into the Islamic fold. By the end of the 9th century, the Abbasid Empire could no longer exert central authority over its vast caliphate. Semi-autonomous governors throughout the Islamic world would gradually form their own dynasties. In the eastern portion of the Islamic world, this resulted in the rise of a number of Persian and Turkic dynasties that rather than displacing the Arabo-Islamic culture of early Islam, fused it with a Persianate tradition of statecraft, literature, and scholarship. In this episode, we're exploring the Turco-Persian dynasties of the 9th-13th centuries. We'll discuss the works of scholars like Ibn Sina, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and their far-reaching impacts in the Islamic world and beyond. In addition to examining the evolution of Islamic polities, we'll shed light on the rise of Sufism and how it tied the new regions of the Islamic world together. We'll call that world "Rumi's world" after the 13th century mystic, scholar, and poet who was born in Khorasan but rose to fame in the newly conquered lands of the Seljuk Empire in Anatolia. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Hugh Kennedy, Joshua White, Fahad Bishara, Maryam Patton, and Jeannie Miller | The first decades of Islam were characterized by a rapid territorial expansion accompanied by conflicts over leadership following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Despite opposition from the supporters of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muawiya Ibn Abi Sufyan would become Caliph and establish a dynasty for his clan: the Banu Umayyah. The next centuries of Islamic history would be defined by the imperial Caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids, who controlled empires stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India. This episode of The Making of the Islamic World focuses on the creation of these Islamic empires, their institutional legacy, and the intellectual life of the Abbasid Caliphate during its height. We conclude with the Abbasid luminary al-Jahiz and what his writings tell us about the changing social fabric of the Abbasid world during the 9th century. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Saadia Yacoob, Intisar Rabb, Joshua White, Fahad Bishara, and Joel Blecher | Islamic legal traditions rest on the revelations of the Qur'an and precedents attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community. But they also rest on over a millennium of interpretation and debate. In our first episode of this series on "The Making of the Islamic World," we're exploring the history of Islamic legal traditions and the ways in which scholarship on the past relates to how people imagine what Islamic law is and what it can be. In addition to discussing what Islamic jurisprudence is and how it developed, we examine the extent to which Islamic law provided a framework for addressing matters that had little to do with religion as we might conventionally understand it. We also feature the voices of scholars engaged in new research that makes us rethink common misconceptions about the early history of Islam that have implications for how Muslims understand Islamic law today. « Click for More »

Episode 478 with Randa Tawil hosted by Chris Gratien How do social categories like gender and race impact migrant trajectories as they move through different imperial, national, and liminal spaces? In this episode, we explore this question through the incredible journey of Zeinab Ameen, one of many Syrian migrants featured in the work of our guest Randa Tawil. Zeinab Ameen was born in late Ottoman Lebanon. Like hundreds of thousands of other people of her generation in the Ottoman Empire, she and her family decided to emigrate to America during the early 20th century. The result was a tale of tribulation that spans more than three decades. In telling Zeinab's story, we'll visit a number of other global ports, including Marseille, Liverpool, New York City, and Veracruz. We'll also visit both land borders of the United States--the Canadian border and the Mexican border, as well as the Midwest, one of the great centers of the Syrian-American mahjar.« Click for More »

Episode 476 with Valerie McGuire hosted by Chris Gratien The Dodecanese Islands in the Southeastern Aegean Sea are part of Greece today, and for centuries, they were controlled by the Ottoman Empire. But for a brief period, Italy governed the Dodecanese as part of its empire under the Fascist government of Mussolini. In this podcast, we talk to historian Valerie McGuire about the history of Italian Empire and the ignored importance of the Dodecanese Islands within the study of colonialism writ large. We explore how the islands changed under Italian rule and the creation of a special nationality known as Italian Aegean Citizenship. We also discuss the legacy of the islands beyond the amnesia and nostalgia concerning Italy's imperial impact on the Mediterranean region.« Click for More »