with Perin Gürel hosted by Chris Gratien | Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today.    « Click for More »

with Richard Calis hosted by Maryam Patton | In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal Turcograecia. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books and manuscripts, and even interviewed Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who passed through Germany. In this episode, Richard Calis explores how Crusius’s fascination with the so-called Ottoman Greeks sheds light on broader early modern debates about cultural and religious difference and how Greek identity became entangled with orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Turks, both omnipresent and strangely absent in Crusius’s research, emerge in unexpected places, including in his dreams.    « Click for More »

Emre Can Dağlıoğlu Sunucu: Can Gümüş & Önder Eren Akgül | Emre Can Dağlıoğlu’nun Arapların 1915’i: Soykırım, Kimlik, Coğrafya başlıklı derlemesine (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022) odaklanan bu bölüm, 1915’i Osmanlı ve Osmanlı sonrası Arap dünyası bağlamında ele almanın önemine işaret ediyor. Hem soykırımı hem de 1915 sonrasını bölgenin siyasal, toplumsal ve çevresel krizleri içinde konumlandıran çalışma, Arap vilayetlerine sürülen Ermenilerin karşılaştıkları politikaları, hayatta kalma stratejilerini, Arap toplumları ve coğrafyasıyla kurdukları karmaşık ilişkileri inceleyen makalelerden oluşuyor. Bu podcastte, bu çalışmaların soykırımın tarihyazımında açtığı yeni pencereleri detaylandırırken 1915’i sabit bir kırılma anı olarak görmek yerine, farklı yerel dinamikler ve ilişkiler çerçevesinde zamansal ve mekânsal olarak genişleyen bir perspektifle ele almanın imkânları üzerine de sohbet ediyoruz. « Click for More »

with Uğur Z. Peçe hosted by Sam Dolbee | In the 1890s, Ottoman Crete descended into communal violence between its Christian and Muslim inhabitants, abetted by foreign powers and Ottoman officials alike. In this episode, Uğur Z. Peçe explains how this conflict--which he calls a civil war--came about, what it meant in people's intimately connected everyday lives, and how it shaped the end of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, Cretan refugees resettled elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire became a key part of various protest movements including boycotts. Uğur speaks with us about these topics while traveling through present-day Crete, considering, among other things, the unexpected connections between the Eastern Black Sea and Crete, the island's distinctive landscape, and snails.         « Click for More »

with Susanna Ferguson hosted by Chris Gratien | What does the history of modern Arab political thought look like from the perspective of women authors? In this podcast, we sit down with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Susanna Ferguson to explore this question, which animates her new book Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought. Previous scholarship has focused on the role of women in discussing the roles of women, but as Prof. Ferguson argues, women writers of the 19th and 20th century can also be studied as producers of social theory and commentators on the important matters of their era. In our conversation, we use the lens of public discourse about child-rearing or tarbiyah as a window onto ideas about a wide range of topics, including morality, labor, and democratic governance. In doing so, we consider the importance of seeing the Arab world as a source of portable ideas about modern society, as opposed to a merely passive recipient of Western modernity.    « Click for More »

with Peter Hill hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | Across the 19th century Arab East, or Mashriq, there were two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory trends afoot. On the one hand, new ways of understanding religion, science, and community, often associated with the intellectual 'revival' of the Arab Nahda, ushered in new forms of thought and more fluid subjectivities. On the other hand, movements emerged to reinscribe, intensify, and uphold stricter communal boundaries between religious groups. How did these two trends coexist? The life and thought of Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1888) offer some answers. Mishaqa was a doctor, merchant, moneylender, and writer who was raised in Greek Catholicism, lost his faith, regained it, and then converted to Protestantism. Through his many-sided life, his voluminous writings, and his obstinate commitment to 'reason', Mishaqa offers an example of how a single life could integrate these seemingly contradictory trends of 19th century Arab East.    « Click for More »

with İlkay Yılmaz hosted by Sam Dolbee | Passports are objects at once momentous and mundane. How did they come about in the late Ottoman Empire? In this episode, İlkay Yılmaz discusses the history of this technology, and how the state effort to manage information about identity and control people's movement emerged alongside international police efforts to control anarchist and revolutionary subjects between different empires in the late nineteenth century. With this new technology, the ability to control people's movement also became contingent on the photograph and connected to late Ottoman politics of migration and ethnicity. She also discusses how these state efforts to limit people's movement through the technology of the passport have echoes in the present, even in her own life.         « Click for More »

with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky hosted by Chris Gratien & Can Gümüş | During the late 19th and early 20th century, tens of millions of migrants crossed the seas, settling in the Americas and beyond in a mass migration event that reshaped politics and economies throughout the world. In this episode, we focus on one of the most ignored groups within the history of those momentous events: North Caucasian Muslims. As our guest, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, explains, North Caucasian refugees fleeing Russian expansion became a large segment of the Ottoman migrant (muhacir) population and in turn, became a major new demographic component, constituting about 5% of the empire's citizens by WWI. Under the Muhacirin Commission created to facilitate their movements, they settled in remote provinces, from the edges of the Syrian desert to the plateaus of Central Anatolia, founding what would become major cities like Amman (modern-day Jordan) and constructing new diasporic identities in the process. As we discuss, these migrations not only changed the millions of people who became Ottoman refugees during the empire's last decade and their communities back home. They changed the nature of the Ottoman state itself.    « Click for More »

with Ali Kulez hosted by Sam Dolbee | In 1866, a series of unexpected events led to an Ottoman imam by the name of Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi ending up in Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, Ali Kulez explains how he got there, and what happened when al-Baghdadi became close with enslaved and free Afro-Brazilian Muslims, and attempted to teach them his vision of Islamic orthodoxy. In addition to exploring themes of Islam and race in Brazil, Kulez also traces how the translation of al-Baghdadi's travel narrative can offer a window onto the history of South-South relations into the present. In closing, he discusses the challenge of evaluating past solidarities and differentiating them from those we might want to see.    « Click for More »

with Andrew Simon, Alia Mossallam, and Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | The Egyptian revolution of 2011 is one of the most spectacular examples of how social media has played a pivotal role in political movements of the 21st century. However, in this final installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we argue that the true beginning of Egypt's media revolution arrived with the cassette tape, which for the first time, made it possible for every Egyptian to be a producer rather than a passive consumer of popular culture. As our guest Andrew Simon explains, this veritable "media of the masses" was not only a means of disseminating commercial music. Western pop music and classics of the Nasserist era mingled with new underground music, religious content, home recordings, and personal voice messages on Egyptian cassettes, which circumvented and subverted state censorship. Artists like Sheikh Imam and the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm produced celebrated political satire that defined the sound of the Infitah era, much to the chagrin of state authorities and the commercial recording industry. In 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime, Imam's songs along with a century of sound stretching back to the First World War filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, as a new generation produced new sounds of revolution. We conclude our series with reflections from Alia Mossallam and Ziad Fahmy on the sounds of the square in 2011 and what they reveal about change and continuity in Egyptian politics.    « Click for More »

with Leena Dallasheh hosted by Chris Gratien | As an Arab city inside the 1948 borders of Israel, Nazareth defies many of the general narratives of both Israeli and Palestinian histories. But as our guest Leena Dallasheh explains, that does not mean that Nazareth is necessarily an exception. In fact, its paradoxical survival is key to understanding the history of modern Palestinian politics. In this conversation, we chart the history of Nazareth's rise from provincial town to Palestinian cultural capital. We consider the reasons why Nazareth survived the Nakba, and we explore the important role of Palestinian communities in the years before and decades after the foundation of Israel.    « Click for More »

Şeyma Afacan Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde, Dr. Şeyma Afacan ile geç Osmanlı’da biyolojik materyalizm, psikolojinin gelişimi ve Afacan’ın bir “ezber bozma alanı” olarak nitelediği duygular tarihi üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Osmanlı’da materyalizm tartışmalarının eksikliklerine işaret eden Afacan, beden, duygu ve üretkenlik arasındaki ilişkiye odaklanmanın bu çalışmalara sunabileceği olası katkılara dikkati çekiyor ve biyolojik materyalizm tartışmasının her şeyden evvel “psikolojik bir tartışma” olduğunu öne sürüyor. Afacan tarih yazımında duyguları analitik bir kategori olarak kullanmanın imkânlarını ve kısıtlarını da detaylandırıyor. Afacan’ın bu söyleşide çizdiği genel çerçevenin bir izleğini Toplumsal Tarih’in Ocak 2024 sayısı için derlediği dosyadaki çalışmalarda görmek de mümkün. « Click for More »

with Ümit Kurt hosted by Sam Dolbee | What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received.    « Click for More »

with Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In 1952, a coup d'état led by Gamal Abdel Nasser ushered in a revolutionary period of Egyptian history in which sound played an integral role in shaping collective political consciousness. The culture of the 50s and 60s was dominated by songs by artists like Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez that still resonate within national consciousness, but as we explore in this third installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," the period produced spectacular sound as well as conspicous silence. As our guest Alia Mossallam explains, triumphant musical celebrations of the Egyptian state's signature achievement --- the construction of the Aswan High Dam --- shaped the terms through which Egyptians have come to remember this period. At the same time, songs of workers and Nubian villagers displaced by the dam captured subaltern sentiments beneath the surface of Nasserist cultural hegemony. We conclude our conversation with a reflection on the singular importance of sources like folk songs for writing histories erased by official sources.    « Click for More »

with Brett Wilson hosted by Brittany White | Set between elite households and a Sufi lodge, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's 1922 novel Nur Baba was a provocative take on competing notions of religion, morality, gender, and romance in the dynamic world of late Ottoman Istanbul. In this episode, we speak to Brett Wilson, author of the first-ever English translation of Karaosmanoğlu's controversial classic. We discuss Yakup Kadri's ethnographic approach to his subject, its mixed reception, and the insights it offers about modern Turkish culture. We also discuss the joys of translation, and its importance for students of Ottoman history today. « Click for More »

with Maha Nassar hosted by Susanna Ferguson | 1948 marks the year that Israel gained independence, and for Palestinians, an experience of mass exile known as the Nakba. The displacement of Palestinians and subsequent conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors had immense consequences. But how did the Palestinian Arabs who remained and make up roughly 20% of Israel's population today fit into a Middle East region defined by the "Arab-Israeli conflict?" In this podcast, we speak to Maha Nassar, whose first book Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World casts new light on a community historically marginalized both within Israel and within broader discussions of contemporary Arab history. We discuss how Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends, relatives, and compatriots after 1948, and how they used literature as means of forging new transnational connections during the era of Arab nationalism and decolonization. Through the insights born out of their paradoxical experiences, Arab-Israeli authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction would come to occupy a prominent place not only within both Arab and Israeli literature but also global political thought.    « Click for More »

with Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | 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.    « Click for More »

with Avner Wishnitzer hosted by Sam Dolbee | What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist.    « Click for More »

with Kyle Anderson & Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In the aftermath of the First World War, the Egyptian streets rose up against British rule during a period of global anti-imperialism, and the voices of the 1919 revolution have echoed throughout Egyptian history ever since. In this first installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we consider how the First World War reshaped political consciousness in Egypt, as our guests Kyle Anderson and Alia Mossallam explore the experiences of the Egyptian Labor Corps and the sonic history of WWI. We examine the adventure, hardship, exile, and abuse Egyptian workers faced serving the British war effort, as well as how the war changed the society they returned to, in the words of one famous song from the period, "safe and sound." In discussing the popular songs of the war period that entered Egyptian national canon, our guests illuminate the ways in which shared songs can be modified and repurposed for new political contexts, drawing attention to the need for reconstructing the layers of context contained within some of history's earliest sound recordings. « Click for More »

with Jessica Marglin hosted by Brittany White | In 1873, Nissim Shamama died suddenly at his palazzo in Livorno. He was quietly one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. A Tunisian Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, Shamama had taken his place among the mercantile elite of a newly-unified Italy. He was a man who belonged to many places. But to whom would his vast inheritance belong? Our guest Jessica Marglin has published an award-winning book, The Shamama Case, that marshals an impressive array of archival sources to investigate how this question was resolved. As she demonstrates, the decade-long legal dispute over Shamama's estate was an international affair involving Tunisian officials, rabbis from throughout the Mediterranean, and some of Italy's foremost legal minds. In this conversation, we talk to Marglin about some of the highlights of the Shamama case, what it taught her about the history of citizenship and nationality in the 19th century Mediterranean, and the power of microhistory for disrupting conventional framings of the period. « Click for More »