E525 | 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.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/04/moriscos.html

Mayte Green-Mercado is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University—Newark, and the director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies minor in the department of History. At Rutgers she teaches courses on Islamic civilization, medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Iberian history, as well as migration and displacement. She has published articles on early modern apocalypticism, the conversion of Iberian Muslims, as well as race and ethnicity in early modern Spain. Her first book, Visions of Deliverance. Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cornell, 2019) examined the political culture of Moriscos—Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism beginning in 1501—through their deployment of End Time prophecies. The book won the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies from The Mediterranean Seminar. Her current book project, tentatively titled Mediterranean Displacements. Morisco Migrations in the Sixteenth Century traces the history of migrations and displacement of Moriscos around the Mediterranean basin in the pre-expulsion priod, from their forced conversion to Catholicism until their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609. She is founder and co-director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project at Rutgers-Newark.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS

Episode No. 525
Release Date: 11 April 2022
Recording Location: Newark, NJ / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production by Chris Gratien and Brittany White
Music: Aitua; A.A. Aalto
Bibliography and images courtesy of Mayte Green-Mercado available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/04/moriscos.html

Season 11

Moriscos and the Early Modern Mediterranean | Mayte Green-Mercado

https://gharamophone.com/2022/09/15/mouzino-neklab-ssika-elked-eladi-ssabani-odeon-c-1906/

Mouzino - Elked Eladi ssabani (Odeon, c. 1905-1906)

E535 | When you think of the history of science, what people and places come to mind? Scientific knowledge production flourished in early modern Morocco, and not in the places you might expect. This episode transports us into the intellectual and social worlds of Sufi lodges (zawāya) in seventeenth-century Morocco. Our guest, Justin Stearns, guides us through scholarly and educational landscapes far removed from the imperial urban centers of Fez and Marrakech. We discuss his new book, Revealed Sciences, which examines the development of the natural sciences through close study of works produced by rural Sufi scholars. Challenging the idea that the early modern period was one of intellectual decline, Stearns reveals the vibrant multi-ethnic, intellectual networks of the early modern Maghreb and the implications of their story for the history of science and the writing of history. We speak about paper mâché astrolabes, Borgesian fantasies, resisting the lure of triumphant narratives, and the importance of failure for creativity and innovation.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/12/stearns.html

Justin Stearns is Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi where he teaches classes on the pre-modern Islamicate world and the relationship between science and religion. His research focuses on the premodern intellectual history of the Islamic West (Maghrib).

Shireen Hamza is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of medical exchange in the medieval Indian Ocean world.

Taylor M. Moore is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

CREDITS

Episode No. 535
Release Date: 14 December 2022
Sound production by Shireen Hamza
Music: "Touicha & Jabir," Moroccan Folk Music, Lyrichord
Bibliography and images courtesy of Justin Stearns at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/12/stearns.html

Season 12

The Natural Sciences in Early Modern Morocco | Justin Stearns

"La Tkhameme ya Bnadem" - Lamari (1960s)

E536 | What are the perils and possibilities of writing the histories of everyday people? In this episode, we return to this question with Randa Tawil, as she reflects on the process of research and writing. Tawil previously joined us on the Ottoman History Podcast to talk about the life of Zeinab Ameen, a woman from late Ottoman Lebanon who set out for the United States with her family, only to become separated from them and endure a difficult, circuitous, and ultimately heartbreaking journey that illuminates what it meant from Arab migrants to navigate the many spaces of the mahjar. In this conversation with University of Virginia students, we go behind the scenes to examine how the category of "migrant" can be both problematic and productive in writing about past people. We explore the importance of speculative analysis, and we discuss how history writing functions as an act of recovery with value for our present.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/01/tawil2.html

Randa Tawil is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. Her research interests include migration and mobility, histories of empire, and the production of racialized sexuality. Her current manuscript “Race in Transit: Mobilities Between Greater Syria and the United States” follows new mobilities of US empire and Syrian migration in the early 20th century, and examines mobility as the site of gendered and racial formations for Syrians on the move. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Open Democracy, and Ms. Muslim. You can follow her current projects at RandaTawil.com.

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS

Episode No. 536
Release Date: 21 January 2023
Recording Location: University of Virginia
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: A.A. Aalto
Bibliography courtesy of Randa Tawil
Special thanks to the students of HIME 3501 who appear in the podcast: Madeleine Frank, Melanie York, Graham Bucko, Amanda Kopf, Esha Saigal, Kelly Shirer, Tessa Bowman, Frankie Garner, and Carson Becker

Recovering Migrant Histories | Randa Tawil

E540 | What did it mean to be Arab during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire? What did it mean to be Arab and invested in continuation of the Ottoman Empire? In this episode Mostafa Minawi answers these questions by focusing on the lives of two Arab-Ottoman Imperialists from the same family in Damascus, the al-'Azm or Azamzade family. By recounting their lives, excavating their writings, and narrating how their descendants remember them, Minawi explores questions of belonging, race and ethnicity, and the emotional world of a family divided by the fracturing of an centuries-old empire.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/03/minawi.html

Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of History and the director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies initiative at Cornell University.

Zeinab Azarbadegan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the intersection of inter-imperial relations and history of science, technology, and medicine, in nineteenth century Ottoman Iraq

CREDITS

Episode No. 540
Release Date: 28 March 2023
Recording Location: MESA 2022, Denver, Colorado
Sound production by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: Katibim by Safiye Aliye and Banat Iskandaria by Mohammed El-Bakkar
Images and bibliography courtesy of Mostafa Minawi

Arab-Ottoman Imperialists at the End of Empire | Mostafa Minawi

E541 | In this episode, Linda Darling discusses the history of tax administration in the early modern Ottoman Empire, and how attention to it can open up a broad range of questions about technology, governance, and military power and, in the process, dispell simplistic stereotypes such as the "Sick Man of Europe." In addition, she speaks more broadly about her path to Ottoman history, her studies with Halil Inalcık, and how she came to write a book about tax administration. In closing, she touches on what projects--on the cusp of retirement--she is thinking about now.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/04/darling.html

Linda Darling is Professor of History at University of Arizona. Her books are Revenue Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire (1996) and A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (2013).

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power will be out in spring 2023 from Cambridge University Press.

CREDITS

Episode No. 541
Release Date: 4 April 2023
Recording Location: Denver, CO
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch, "Pacing"; Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Chiaroscuro"

Tax Administration in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire | Linda Darling

E548 | What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/05/dolbee.html

Samuel Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His is author of Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East.

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

Reem Bailony is an Associate Professor of Middle East history at Agnes Scott College and formerly an American Druze Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her book “Syria’s Transnational Rebellion: Diaspora Politics and the Revolt of 1925-1927" explores how the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora shaped the anti-French rebellion.

CREDITS

Episode No. 548
Release Date: 31 May 2023
Recording Location: Nashville, TN
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros
Images and bibliography courtesy of Samual Dolbee

Environment and Empire in the Ottoman Jazira | Sam Dolbee

E556 | During the interwar period, the recording industry reshaped Egyptian culture and politics through music. But as we discuss in part two of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," everyday sounds of the city are no less part of Egypt's political history. As our guest Ziad Fahmy explains, writing sonic history requires listening to the sources with ears attuned to the sentiments and sensibilities of past people. Together, we listen to a early recording of Egyptian street sounds and explore the world of sound that awaits within the textual record, focusing on how class dynamics played out on the soundscape of Cairo and Alexandria. We also consider how the rise of a new medium, radio, began to reshape the sonic life of ordinary Egyptians during the interwar period, paving the way for the media revolution of the 1950s and 60s.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/12/fahmy.html

Ziad Fahmy is a Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University’s department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy is the author of Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2020). Street Sounds was a co-winner of the Urban History Association's 2021 Award for Best Book in Non-North American Urban History. He also wrote Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), and is currently writing his third book, tentatively titled, Broadcasting Identity: Radio and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1925-1952.

CREDITS

Episode No. 556
Release Date: 3 December 2023
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Sound Elements: Travel Penguin - Islamic Cairo, Al-Muizz Street - Egypt; Chris Gratien - Nightime Cab in Cairo (2005); Munira al-Mahdiyya - Aldahre Kata Awsali; Fox Movietone - Egyptian Army review; Egyptian Dancers; Cairo Street Scenes, 1928 (University of South Carolina Libraries); Ya Shabab El Nil - Umm Kulthum; جزء من مباراة بين الزمالك وانترناسونالي الإيطالي تعليق محمد لطيف

Season 13

The Politics of Street Sounds in Interwar Egypt

©Annemarie Borg Antara (part of a live Mass for choir and electronic music)
Album AMB In Nomine Cetus 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-4jCG-Z-6U

Miserere

https://gharamophone.com/2020/05/04/sariza-plaine-chekoua-polydor-c-1936-1938/

Moriscos and the Early Modern Mediterranean | Mayte Green-Mercado

Ottoman History Podcast

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