with Laleh Khalili hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did massive, modern shipping ports emerge from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, and what they teach us about our present forms of global exchange? Combining historical research with site visits that included multiple voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, our guest Laleh Khalili sheds light on these questions in this two-part series on shipping and empire around the Arabian Peninsula. Through her investigation of the entangled realms of commerce, technology, and empire in the Indian Ocean world, Khalili shows how changes in any of one of them sparked associated changes in the others. In this second part, we focus on the period from the mid-20th century period when new centers of trade like Dubai vied to attract commerce and investment to their shores. As vessel size grew, so too did ports, whose construction and maintainence have remade coastal ecologies in the Gulf. We discuss the the impacts of armed conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic on shipping, as well as the recent shifts in global logistics that have arisen with the rise of large Middle East-based ports management firms. « 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 »

Episode 431 with Jörg Matthias Determann hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud When Sultan bin Salman left Earth on the shuttle Discovery in 1985, he became the first Arab, first Muslim, and first member of a royal family in space. Twenty-five years later, the discovery of a planet 500 light years away by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey – subsequently named ‘Qatar-1b’ – was evidence of the cutting-edge space science projects taking place across the Middle East. Discussing his recent book, Space Science and the Arab World, Jörg Matthias Determann shows that the conquest of space became associated with national prestige, security, economic growth, and the idea of an ‘Arab renaissance’ more generally. Equally important to this success were international collaborations: to benefit from American and Soviet expertise and technology, Arab scientists and officials had to commit to global governance of space and the common interests of humanity. « Click for More »

Episode 405 with Gökçe Günel hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud About half-hour's drive from Abu Dhabi sits Masdar City, a clean technology and renewable energy business cluster and research institute. Founded in 2006, Masdar imagines a sustainable and business-savvy future where technology, ecology, and humanity co-exist and thrive, even in the oil-rich deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. In this episode we speak with Gökçe Günel, who spent over a year at Masdar examining the anthropology of renewable energy and green technology development. We talk about the challenges of pioneering greener versions of transportation, currency, and energy, as well as how experts imagine and produce these projects. How can developing technologies help us mitigate or even avert ecological disaster? And how does faith in their powers define whether and how we can transform our current patterns of consumption and energy use? « Click for More »

Episode 365 with John Chen hosted by Shireen Hamza and Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In the early twentieth century, Muslim modernizers all over the world were making new claims about Islam, and the Muslims of China were no exception. In this episode, we discuss the relationship of Southeast Asia to the emergence of a modern Chinese Islam. In a period often characterized in terms of non-Arab Muslims' rediscovery of the Middle East, John Chen shows how connections between Chinese Muslims (Hui) and diverse groups across the Indian Ocean also shaped the new Chinese Islam. The processes often considered to be Arabization were in fact multiregional exchanges. Delving especially into the histories of Islamic medicine in China, John illustrates how Chinese Muslim leaders, imams, and historians took to print, radio, and even to sea routes, to articulate new visions of identity in an emerging nation-state and a changing Islamic world. « Click for More »

Episode 324 with Elise Burton hosted by Shireen Hamza, Chris Gratien, and Maryam Patton Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also integral to the transformation of the very national and racial categories through which ancestry has come to be described over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this podcast, we speak to Elise Burton about her research on the development of human genetics in the Middle East. Burton has studied the history of genetics within a comparative framework, examining the interrelated cases of human genetics research in Turkey, Israel, Iran, and elsewhere. In this episode, we focus in particular on the history of genetics in Turkey and its relationship to changing understandings of nation and race within the early Republic. In a bonus segment (see below), we also look under the hood of commercial genetic ancestry tests to understand present-day science within the context of these historical developments. « Click for More »

Episode 317 with Tamar Novick   hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The history of late Ottoman Palestine and the changes in settlement, agriculture, economy and politics that occurred there remain a subject of great interest for historians of the Middle East. In this episode, our guest Tamar Novick introduces a new approach to that history using the lens of ecology. We explore changes in late Ottoman Palestine through enivoronment and human-animal relations and in particular, the transformation of beekeeping practices that arrived with Europeans during the late 19th century. We learn about how the introduction of moveable hives transformed the relationship between beekeepers, bees, and the landscape, and we consider how European settlers saw in the bees of the Holy Land a unique animal stock that could be developed and possibly exported elsewhere while simultaneously casting the bee and apiculture in Ottoman Palestine as a site of technological intervention. « Click for More »

Episode 316 with Kenan Tekin hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Among the many important medieval texts written in Arabic, few have received more attention from scholars in Europe than The Muqaddimah, an introduction to history by the 14th-century North African writer Ibn Khaldun. In this episode, we explore another of arena for reception of Ibn Khaldun, the Ottoman Empire, with our guest Kenan Tekin. We examine Ottoman translations of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, especially that of the 19th-century statesman and scholar Ahmet Cevdet. In our discussion of Cevdet's translation of and commentary on Ibn Khaldun's work, we explore the intellectual engagement of Ottoman Tanzimat-era thinkers with ideas from the past centuries of Islamicate scholarship and consider Cevdet's late Ottoman work as an early example of writing about the history of science. « Click for More »

Episode 295 with Arthur Asseraf hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud We 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. « Click for More »

Episode 291 with Omnia El Shakry hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud A 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 El Shakry 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 Horney alongside Ibn 'Arabi and Abu Bakr 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 « Click for More »

with Anne Marie Moulin hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During 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. « Click for More »

with Elias Muhanna hosted by Chris Gratien and Zoe Griffith readings by Nora Lessersohn Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Classical 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. « Click for More »

with Nükhet Varlık hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | SoundCloud Geneticists and historians are generally considered strange bedfellows. However, new advances in bio-archaeology and genetics are facilitating this odd coupling. In this episode, we speak to Nükhet Varlık, author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World : the Ottoman experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge University Press), about how genetic evidence has transformed the study of the plague in the past ten years, allowing geneticists to more readily identify the presence of Yersinia pestis bacteria in human remains. Whereas before historians had been hesitant to diagnose diseases posthumously, they can now speak with greater certainty about the presence of plague. We then discuss the life of plague in the early modern Ottoman Empire in particular, focusing on the creation of ‘plague capitals’ in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire following the conquest of Constantinople and how integrating the Ottoman experience of plague changes the story of how historians of medicine approach the topic. To inspire future collaborations among our listeners, we end with a peek at the process of working with geneticists and what such approaches can contribute to the study of the history of the Middle East. « Click for More »

with Eric van Lit hosted by Nir Shafir and Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | SoundCloud Commentaries are a common, even a nearly ineluctable, part of the textual landscape of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Especially when it came to philosophy, commentaries were perhaps the main venue of discussions. An earlier generation of scholars believed these commentaries to be derivative but we now see them as a major piece in the development of the philosophical tradition in the Middle East. In this podcast, we speak with L.W.C (Eric) van Lit about how to approach these commentaries and their effect on the intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. « Click for More »

with Michael Tworek hosted by Nir Shafir, Polina Ivanova, and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud A man known as Wojciech Bobowski to some, Albertus Bobovius to others, and Ali Ufki to yet others, is one of the prime examples of an early modern intermediary operating in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, we discuss with Michael Tworek the fascinating figure of the Bobovius, from his childhood in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to his capture in a Tatar slave raid, to his numerous translations both from and to Ottoman Turkish. These included musical treatises, the translation of the New Testament, the Genevan Psalter and more. In particular, we focus on how Bobovius mediated and developed his image as an inter-imperial mediator to his correspondents in the Republic of Letters. « Click for More »

with Kathryn Schwartz hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake, whether political and religious. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought always leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In this episode, Kathryn Schwartz discusses why this question is often poorly posed and then delves into an in-depth look at how and why people used print in one particular historical context—nineteenth-century Cairo. Touching upon topics such Napoleon, Mehmed Ali, and the Bulaq press, we explore how print slowly and haphazardly embedded itself into various aspects of Egyptian learned life. This fresh history casts nineteenth-century Egypt in a new light by examining the technological adaptation of print not as an act of unstoppable and transformative modernity, but as a slow and incremental expansion of already existing practices of book production. « Click for More »

with Hoda Yousef hosted by Graham Pitts Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late nineteenth century, Egyptian society witnessed the rise of new debates and practices concerning reading and writing in the Arabic language. In this episode, Hoda Yousef explores the discources surrounding literacy in Egypt, which is the subject of her first book entitled Composing Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016). This work examines how different actors from Islamic modernists and feminists to journalists and officials sought to produce particular kinds of Egyptians through language politics. Dr. Yousef demonstrates that emergent practices of reading and writing had impacts well beyond the conventionally-defined literate circles.  Even for those who did not read and write, the written word became an important part of daily life. Through the medium of public exchange created by the writing, different segments of Egyptian society could engage in discussions regarding nation, home, and belonging. « Click for More »

with Edna Bonhomme hosted by Chris Gratien Edna Bonhomme updates us on the progress of her research concerning the history of plague in North Africa. This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud As research on the early modern period increasingly shows, bubonic plague played a formative role in the making of state policies and medical practice, and concern over plague created new connections between different regions of the Mediterranean. In this episode, Edna Bonhomme joins us again to talk about her research on plague in North Africa, its relationship with the issue of the global slave trade, and the ways in which experimenting with plague became a practice among Europeans residing in 18th-century Egypt. « Click for More »