November 16, 2016, 7:27 am
with Elias Muhanna
hosted by Chris Gratien and Zoe Griffith
readings by Nora Lessersohn
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudClassical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, which covers everything from astrological and natural phenomena to religion, politics, food, animals, sex, and of course history. Al-Nuwayri’s compendium, entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Nihayat al-arab fi funun al-adab), is rare glimpse into not only the worldview of a 14th century scholar but also the centuries of texts and learning available to the literati of the Mamluk Empire and the medieval Islamicate world.
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November 25, 2016, 11:18 am
with Eve Troutt Powell
hosted by Susanna Ferguson
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudThe epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around today's Cairo. The word and its negative connotations, however, have a long history. In this episode, Professor Eve Troutt Powell explores this history by tracing the many lives of slaves and slavery in late Ottoman Egypt. She draws on the narratives of Ottoman Egyptian elites, Sudanese slave traders, and slaves themselves to show how the practice of owning people with dark skin shaped a regional Ottoman-Egyptian-Sudanese economy, gendered patterns of elite household life, and prominent forms of textual and visual culture. She reads representations of slavery and slaves' lives in the late nineteenth century to show how practices of Egyptian and Sudanese slave trading and owning, developed far from the decks of Atlantic slavers, nevertheless produced their own forms of racist thinking that have persisted into the present in Egypt as elsewhere.
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November 29, 2016, 11:55 am
with Antonis Hadjikyriacou
hosted by Michael Talbot
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudThe history of Mediterranean islands offers a dynamic paradox of insularity engendered by geographical isolation and connectivity fostered by access to ports and maritime networks. In this podcast, we discuss those themes through a conversation about the transformation of Cyprus over the centuries of Ottoman imperial rule. Our guest
Antonis Hadjikyriacou has studied the history of Cyprus from the earliest years of Ottoman rule during the late 16th century into the 19th century. In the interview, we explore agricultural production and political economy in Cyprus through geo-spatial analysis of early Ottoman documentation and consider how the local politics and economy of Cyprus were situated in a changing Mediterranean.
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December 3, 2016, 9:36 am
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December 4, 2016, 1:26 pm
with Anne Marie Moulin
hosted by Chris Gratien
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudDuring the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur and his disciples promoted a laboratory-based study of disease and contagion that led to what many call "the bacteriological turn" and reshaped public health in France and beyond. In this episode, we sit down with doctor, philosopher, and historian Anne Marie Moulin to talk about the history of the Pastorians and the early establishment of Pasteur Institutes in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. We explore the role of the Ottoman Empire in the creation of the Pasteur Institutes and their global network, and we consider the relationship between medicine and religion, politics, and colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East.
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December 6, 2016, 9:13 pm
with Karen Rignall
hosted by Graham Cornwell
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudPre-Saharan Morocco is a transitional space between the Atlas Mountains in the north and the Sahara in the south, and the oases of pre-Saharan Morocco have long been marked by local autonomy, diversity, and particularities of agriculture, property ownership, class, and race. In this episode, we talk to Karen Rignall about her research on land, labor, and social life in a Moroccan oasis and discuss socioeconomic change in rural morocco through the lens of agricultural production in the transitional environments and political economies of the pre-Sahara.
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December 11, 2016, 1:43 pm
with Betty Anderson
hosted by Chris Gratien
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudThe political, social, and cultural roots of the modern Middle East stretch into the early modern period of Ottoman and Safavid rule and even beyond. So how should we narrate the long making of the Middle East within the context of an ever-changing present? In this episode, we talk to Betty Anderson about the perspectives and practices that inform her new textbook
A History of the Modern Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues. We consider ways of organizing and thematically arranging the history of a diverse region over hundreds of years, we discuss the importance of bringing previously silenced actors and groups into the historiography, and we reflect on how the past decades of historiography as well as recent events have changed how we conceptualize prevailing narrative of Middle East history.
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December 18, 2016, 7:20 am
Episode 289
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudWhat terms and ideas were considered erotic in early modern Ottoman literature, and what can studying them tell us about later historical periods and our own conceptions of the beauty, love, and desire? In this episode, we welcome İrvin Cemil Schick back to the podcast to discuss a project he is compiling with İpek Hüner-Cora and Helga Anetshofer: a dictionary called the "Erotic Vocabulary of Ottoman Literature."
Release Date: 18 December 2016
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Episode 290
Download the podcastNational language politics and the transformation of literacy have effected major changes in both spoken and written language over the course of the last century, but few languages have changed as dramatically as modern Turkish. The reform of the language from the 1920s onward, which not only replaced the Ottoman alphabet with a new Latin-based alphabet but also led to a radical transformation of the lexicon and grammar, has been described by Geoffrey Lewis as "catastrophic success" due to the extreme but unquestionably successful nature of this attempt to revolutionize language in Turkey. In this episode, we talk to Emmanuel Szurek about his research on the politics of the alphabet change, the language reforms, and the surname laws of the early Republican period. Our extended interview is followed by a brief conversation in French about the history of French Turcology.
Release Date: 4 January 2017
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Episode 291
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudA tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co-constitutive encounters between these two traditions of thought, both so prominent in the 20th century. This presumed incommensurability has hardened the lines between the "modern subject," assumed to be secular and Western, and its Others, often associated with Islam or with the East. In this episode on her forthcoming book, The Arabic Freud, Dr. Omnia Elshakry asks what it might mean to think psychoanalysis and Islam together as a "creative encounter of ethical engagement." She shows how psychoanalysts and thinkers in Egypt after World War II drew on Freud and Hornay alongside Ibn 'Arabi and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi to explore the nature of the modern subject, the role of the unconscious, and the gendered process of ethical attunement. In so doing, she suggests that Arabic psychoanalytic texts were neither epiphenomenal to politics nor simply political allegory for nationalism or decolonization; rather, we have ethical and historiographical responsibilities to read these texts and others like them as something more than a product of their time.
Release Date: 8 January 2017
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January 10, 2017, 10:46 pm
292. Bölüm
Bölümü indirOttoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde, Özge Samancı ile Osmanlı’da saray, elit mutfağı ve sokak yemek kültürü üzerine bir sohbet gerçekleştirdik. Osmanlı saray mutfaklarında çalışanlar arasında nasıl bir işbölümü olduğuna ve mutfağın mekansal düzenine değindik. Alaturka ve alafranga mutfak kültüründe, yemek ve içecek olarak tüketilen ürünleri ve nasıl tüketildiklerinin yanı sıra tüketim alışkanlıklarının kültürel ve toplumsal boyutunu da ele almaya çalıştık.
Yayın Tarihi: 11 Ocak 2017
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January 14, 2017, 6:22 pm
Episode 293
hosted by
Nir Shafirfeaturing additional material by Samuel Dolbee
The Opium Wars and the massive trade in opium between South Asia and China over the nineteenth century attest to the prominent role of opium within the history of colonialism and globalization. But it is less well known that in the early twentieth century, the Republic of Turkey became the largest exporter of opium in the world. In this episode we speak with Daniel-Joseph Macarthur-Seal about how and why opium became an export commodity in Turkey and how Turkish citizens smuggled the substance out once it became formally illegal. Along the way we gain a glimpse into the economic history of the young republic, the legal life of its citizens abroad, and how these smuggling operations built new forms of cosmopolitanism from the ground up as the Turkish republic became less and less accommodating for non-Muslims.
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January 18, 2017, 6:05 pm
Episode 294
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudIn this episode, Christine Philliou traces the story of Istanbul's Phanariots, a group of wealthy, "Greek-identified" families who rose to play a central role in Ottoman foreign policy and diplomacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. What happened to these families in the tumultuous years preceding and following Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832? In this episode, we explore the biography of Phanariot Stephanos Vogorides and ask what his story has to offer Ottoman history. His story and that of the Phanariots shed light on Ottoman governance and diplomacy, as well as relations between Muslims, Christians, Ottomans, and Greeks in the important but often-overlooked moment just prior to the 19th century reforms known as the Tanzimat.
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January 22, 2017, 9:23 pm
Episode 295
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudWe often assume that as we become increasingly connected to ever larger networks of information and news we become part of larger and more cohesive polities. In this episode, Arthur Asseraf discusses how the introduction of new networks of communication in colonial Algeria generated friction and unevenness instead of expansive flows. Looking at telegraphs, newspapers, cinemas and more we discuss not only the types of intermediaries that flourished in this new environment, but also how news led to new and imagined forms of Muslim belonging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From a discussion of telegrams and coffee shops we jump into discussions of pan-Islamism, colonial conspiracy theories, and the nature of polities.
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February 7, 2017, 5:03 pm
Episode 296
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudIn French Algeria, the colonial imperatives of assimilation and difference gave birth to legal pluralism. In this episode, Dr. Sarah Ghabrial explains what it meant for Algerian women to have different legal structures operating at the same time. The ability to argue one's case in an Islamic court and also appeal it in French common law provided openings for women in matters of personal status. But it also had limits. They may have ultimately been able to divorce their husbands, but divorcing themselves from patriarchal structures of power proved more difficult, if not impossible. At the same time as legal codes changed, so, too, did medicine. As in much of the world, a state-sponsored scientific medicine, mostly practiced by men, began to crowd out local healing practices and knowledge of bodies, in many cases performed and possessed by women such as midwives. But it would have a particularly racialized impact in French Algeria. We also examine the impact of this change in court, where the latter form of medicine came to be an arbiter of truth, particularly in divorce cases. We close by shifting from matters of impotence to questions of agency, and how useful of a concept it is for this history.
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February 9, 2017, 8:21 pm
Episode 297
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudThe preeminent position of manuscript painting and poetry at the Ottoman court has been well established by historians, yet the equally important practice of commissioning and collecting sumptuously decorated copies of the Qur’an--the sacred text of Islam--has been less explored. The role of the Qur’an in the artistic culture of the Ottoman world is just one facet of the landmark exhibition The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The show traces the formal evolution of the Qur’an, especially in terms of calligraphy and manuscript illumination, with over 60 manuscripts and folios spanning a thousand years and created in an area stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan. Besides having an opportunity to appreciate the level of labor and skill invested in producing such high-quality manuscripts, visitors will also be surprised to learn about the mobility of these books, as they were avidly collected, repaired, and donated by members of the Ottoman court to various religious institutions around the empire. In this episode, curators Massumeh Farhad and Simon Rettig sit down with us to reflect both on the reception of the exhibition in the United States, as well as the process of organizing this collaborative venture between the Smithsonian and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul.
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February 11, 2017, 6:03 pm
Episode 298
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudA handful of obscure archival fragments from Sultan Abdülhamid II’s imperial library in Yıldız have revealed a curious architectural practice that took place in the urban gardens of members and officials of the Ottoman court: they had a penchant for imported chalets. In this episode, Deniz Türker discusses her research on how this relatively niche fad for importation quickly shifted to widespread local prefabrication in the last decades of the nineteenth century. With the entrepreneurial oversight of production facilities in Istanbul, a larger swath of the capital’s population began to find ways to express their domestic tastes in an extremely competitive spirit on Istanbul’s expanding suburbs. In tracing these practices through state archives, newspapers, novel, and photographs, Türker also proposes some preliminary answers to the scarcity of original architectural drawings in the Ottoman archives.
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February 13, 2017, 7:45 pm
Episode 299
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudIn this episode, we approach the religious architecture of the Alevis, to examine how practice shapes architectural space and how socioeconomic change transforms such spaces. Many of our episodes on Ottoman History Podcast have focused on how monumental architecture, such as mosques and other buildings of religious significance, are tied to political transformation and expressions of political power and ideology. Taking a different perspective, our guest, Angela Andersen, researches the history and development of Alevi architectural forms in Turkey and abroad. Historically, Alevi religious practice and cem ceremonies took place in homes and other multi-purpose buildings, which could be configured as ad hoc meeting places for local communities during the communal cem ceremony. But with Alevi urban migration to cities in Turkey, Germany, and elsewhere, the creation of a "permanent address" for Alevis has emerged in the form of community centers providing a number of services, including designated rooms or halls for the cem. In this episode, we trace the genealogy of the modern cemevi to older contexts of Alevi religious practice and consider the role played by the cemevi in Turkey's new political landscape.
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February 17, 2017, 9:36 am
Episode 300
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudDid the Ottoman Empire "decline" after an initial golden age of rapid expansion and military conquest? This question has long haunted the telling of Ottoman history. Critics note that describing centuries of Ottoman history simply as "decline" makes it seem inevitable that the Empire would be defeated in World War I, emptying the story of the contingency and nuance it deserves. How else might we describe the nature of political, economic, and cultural change in the later centuries of the Ottoman Empire? What other questions could we ask? In this episode, Baki Tezcan describes the period he calls the "Second Ottoman Empire," between roughly 1580 and 1826, not as a period of decline but as one of political transformation. His story radically remakes existing narratives about the nature and history of Ottoman political authority and governance and offers an important alternative to the "decline thesis" that has haunted Ottoman history for so long.
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February 20, 2017, 5:51 pm
Episode 301
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudIn the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman/Qajar borderlands (today’s Turco-Iranian border), East Syrian Christians had their first encounters with American Protestant missionaries. These encounters brought to the region new institutions like printing presses and American-style schools. They also helped remap Neo-Aramaic concepts for communal belonging like melat and tayepa– which loosely correspond with the Ottoman and Arabic terms millet and taife, what today we might translate as “nation” and “sect.” An older generation of scholars characterizes the missionary project as one of enlightenment or modernity, while others describe it as a form of colonialism. In this interview with Professor Adam Becker, we discuss approaches to studying changing notions of piety as well as different ways of thinking about the missionary encounter.
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