Ottoman History Podcast

E351 | In 1609 the Moriscos were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, marking the end of a hundred year effort to assimilate as New Christians these former Muslims. In this podcast, Seth Kimmel speaks to us about the impact of these conversions and expulsions on Iberian intellectual history. We discuss how Spanish officials and scholars attempted to force Moriscos to abandon practices like speakin...

E 350 | In this episode, we discuss the emergence of new masculinities, femininities, and visions of "good sex" in Egypt's al-Mahalla al-Kubra, a city in the Nile Delta that became one of the main centers of industrial production and manufacturing in the early twentieth century. How did men and women who came to al-Mahalla to work in the factory, run boardinghouses, and perform other forms of labo...

E349 | Idare-i örfiyye, loosely translated as a “state of emergency or siege,” was a neologism introduced in the first Ottoman constitution in 1876 to allow the suspension of ordinary legal order in Ottoman localities in case of actual or potential uprisings. While the term clearly referred to the Ottoman legal tradition, the idare-i örfiyye was also inspired by contemporary definitions of regimes...

E348 | When and how did European scholars first begin to seriously study Islam and the Arabic language? It has often been assumed that Medieval misconceptions and polemic towards Muslims were not cast off until the secularism of the European Enlightenment. In this episode, we learn that the foundations of the modern Western understanding were actually laid as early as the 17th century. Alexander B...

E347 | What are the origins of the Arabic language, and what are its foundational texts? Most writers of lexicons of the Arabic language center the Arabian peninsula and the Quran. In this episode, we discuss an alternative narrative put forth in the nineteenth century by an Arab Christian writer, Buṭrus al-Bustānī. Rana Issa explores the passages in al-Bustānī's lexicon of the Arabic language, Mu...

E346 | Over the course of the seventeenth century, Kashmir became a valley adorned with gardens as Mughal emperors and nobles built garden after garden across the valley floor and mountainous landscape. In this episode, we speak with landscape architect and preservation specialist Jan Haenaerts on his research into the history of these gardens. We discuss not only their historical formation and us...

E345 | In this episode, Will Hanley transports us to the gritty, stranger-filled streets of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, as we discuss his book, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. We explore how nationality—an abstract tool in the pages of international legal codes—became a new social and legal category that tangibly impacted the lives of nativ...

E344 | 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War and the start of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights. Gershon Shafir discusses why this occupation has lasted for so long in the West Bank and how “the Occupation” has differed from earlier forms of settler colonialism in Israel-Palestine. In particular, we focus on the state of “perm...

E343 | How do we assess fizzling protest movements? How do social scientists account for difficult-to-quantify facets of political engagement like emotion and momentum? In this episode, we discuss ihbat, or disillusionment, in the failures of Morocco’s February 20th movement. Part of the Arab Spring movements across the region, the coalition of groups that comprised February 20th rather quickly gr...

E 342 | In this episode, we discuss the history of Beyoğlu's Emek Cinema from its construction in 1884 to its 2013 destruction, which sparked major opposition among Turkish intellectuals, writers, researchers, members of the film industry, and lovers of cinema and of Beyoğlu, many of whom fought to keep this piece of Istanbul's cultural and architectural heritage. Through a wide-ranging discussion...

E341 | In this episode, we explore debates about aesthetics, headwear, and dress in interwar Algeria and Turkey. Why did hats and hijabs generate so much debate among Algerian thinkers, both men and women? How did expectations about what men would wear on their heads carry different political connotations than similar debates about women's head coverings? This episode takes up the role of dress an...

E340 | In this episode, we explore the life and times of Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, a slave girl who became chief consort and then legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566). We trace Roxelana's probable beginnings and the possible paths that took her to Istanbul, asking how she rose above her peers in the Old Palace to become a favored concubine and then the wife of the Su...

E339 | In this episode, we consider the story of the Tanzimat reforms from the perspective of rural Cappadocia, a region in central Anatolia now famous as a tourist destination. In the nineteenth century, Cappadocia was home not only to the Muslim subjects who made up the majority of Anatolia's population but to a large population of Orthodox Christians as well. How did these communities experienc...

E338 | The history of al-Andalus has a special place in Arabic poetry -- as well as in American hiphop. al-Andalus, a name for the Iberian peninsula when under the political rule of Muslim dynasties, has remained a symbol of loss, exile and memory, centuries after the last Muslim king lost power. In this episode, Anna Cruz explores this phenomenon through Arabic poetry by Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati a...

E337 | During the late Ottoman period, the diverse and vibrant Aegean ports of Izmir (Smyrna) and Thessaloniki (Salonica) experienced rapid growth and transformation through the increased interconnection of the Mediterranean world and the rise of maritime trade. But in the tumultuous final decade of the Ottoman period, both cities witnessed political and demographic upheaval as well as outright de...

E336 | How did people in Tibet view the Islamic World, and vice versa? How did a figure like Galen travel from Ancient Greece, through the Islamic World, and end up as a founding father in Tibetan medical history? In this episode, we speak to Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim about the exchange of knowledge, and especially medicine, between these regions. We discuss objects like musk, which originated in Tibet b...

E335 | In this episode, we uncover histories of feminist writing and activism in the Modern Middle East, asking how women's textual production and activism changed over the twentieth century and looking at new directions in research on the history of women and feminism in the region. In the first half of the episode, Marilyn Booth introduces us to feminist writer and biographer Zeinab Fawwaz, who...

E334 | Along with new maritime networks, information stiched together the empires of the early modern period. One component of the growing networks of information in the increasingly connected space of the Mediterranean world was espionage. As we learn in our latest conversation with Emrah Safa Gürkan about his new book Sultanın Casusları (Spies of the Sultan), the Ottoman Empire was both party an...

E333 | Pirates are usually imagined as outlaws. But as the history of the early modern Mediterranean demonstrates, the line between illegal raiding and legitimate maritime violence was blurry, easily crossed, and often a moving target. In this episode, we talk to Joshua White about his book Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean. We consider how piracy shaped legal institutions and thought in...

E332 | Migration has long been a driving force in the history of global and transnational connections. In this episode, we explore the politics of diaspora surrounding different migrant communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond with three student guests. First, we discuss the little-known history of Vietnamese migrants in the state of Israel. Then, through film, we revisit the histo...

Bibliography and full episode at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/09/diaspora.html

E331 | Though it is often ignored among the many histories of the great migrations of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire experienced the arrival of millions of migrants over the course of its last decades. The migrant or muhacir was therefore not just a critical demographic component of both Ottoman cities and the countryside but also part of and subject to different political projects associate...

E330 | When did Muslims first come to the South Asian subcontinent? The answer to this question has formed a crucial part of nationalism in both India and Pakistan, where the story begins with the conquest of Sind by Muhammad ibn Qasim in 712 AD. In this episode, we speak with Manan Ahmed Asif about his book, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia, which reexamines a ke...

E329 | In this interview, we explore the early history of Islam in West Africa with Professor Ousmane Kane, who has mapped out the networks of Islamic learning in the region. We discuss intellectual history, the curricula of madrasas and a day in the life of a 16th-century student in Sankore. We then turn to the role of language in West African Muslim intellectual production, and the effects of co...

E328 | The seventeenth century, contrary to popular belief, was a time of great originality and change for scholars in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. In this interview, Khaled El-Rouayheb debunks the many myths of intellectual decline by showing how the intellectual production changed in tandem with major migrations across the Islamic world. We start with the influx of Kurdish and Azeri logic...