God’s Shadow: An Interview with Alan Mikhail

Omar Abdel-Ghaffar, PhD candidate at the Center of Middle East Studies at Harvard University, and Karim Malak, Borderlines editor and PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, sat down with Professor Alan Mikhail to discuss his latest book: God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World.

July 20, 2020

Omar Abdel-Ghaffar (OA): I was a little surprised at the shift in your new book away from the themes of animals, nature, farming, and the environment to your main focus in this book: Yavuz Sultan Selim (r. 1512-1520) and his political career. So I was wondering—why this shift and what is it like to write a monograph on a single person, especially after years of writing environmental histories?

Alan Mikhail (AM): Implied in your question is, I think, the assumption that there should be a consistency to the subjects one tackles. I’m not sure. I think the intellectual arc of one’s writing and thinking career can have continuities to it, but can also have breaks. Both are fine. I don’t necessarily think that there has to be a single through-line to one’s career. I’m much more of a fox than a hedgehog.

In some ways, you could say that this book is a departure from my previous work. It's not environmental history. It’s not very Egypt-centric. It focuses on a much earlier period than my previous work and uses different kinds of sources. It’s much more “Ottoman” than my previous work, perhaps. So in those ways, it’s a departure.

I do also see, though, many continuities with my previous work. I’ve always been interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire in the Arab world. Up until this point, I’ve examined that topic through environmental history. The foundational moment of the Ottoman Empire in the Arab world is of course 1516-17, and that’s how I initially came to this project. I was interested in narrating a history of 1516-17, the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Empire, as a moment in global history. It’s striking that such an important imperial conquest, such an important historical event, is one we still don’t have a full grasp of—one for which we don’t even have a straight empirical narration. There is some work, of course. I don’t want to overstate the absence, but it’s striking how little there is. I think this is due in part to the fact that it’s the end of the Mamluk story. And for Ottoman historians, to the extent they care about the Arab world at all, it’s the beginning. As a result, 1516-17 falls between the cracks of those imperial ends and beginnings. I wanted to dwell in that moment of 1516 and 1517. So that’s the first thing that drew me to writing this book.

The next is noting just how crucial 1516-17 is to the history of the empire. I’d argue it’s more important than 1453 or any other single moment in Ottoman history. Selim’s conquest more than doubles the size of the empire, giving it a radically different geography, from an empire that’s mostly in western Anatolia and the Balkans to one that is mostly in the Arab world, plus Anatolia and the Balkans, and parts of North Africa. It puts the empire in the worlds of Africa and the Indian Ocean in a real way. It makes the empire, for the first time in its history, a majority Muslim empire. It gives it Mecca and Medina. It changes the empire on the world stage and domestically more than any other moment in its history. Given all of this, I wanted to understand 1516-17 as both an Ottoman moment and a global moment—how this conquest changed the world inside and outside of the empire.

In some ways, I should say, I wrote this book more for scholars outside of the fields of Ottoman and Middle East history than for those of us in these fields. I want to show them why they can’t think about their fields without the Ottoman Empire and also Islam. The empire’s expansion in this period has to be central to the study of the early modern world and, I would argue, after too.

So if you’re interested in continuity, then this is a kind of continuity—how the Ottomans came to the Arab world, what this rule meant, an understanding of its significance. Any historian interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire and/or the Arab world has to understand this moment. I’d also say this book is similar to my earlier work in that it aims to connect Ottoman history to concerns in global history. I did that before through an environmental lens and here through what one might call a more traditional methodology of geopolitics, trade, and war.

Still, God’s Shadow is very obviously different from my earlier books, both in the ways we’ve already said, but also in its style. It is written as narrative history, again, in part, to draw in historians outside of the fields of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. But I didn’t want, of course, just to tell a good story. I hope I’ve threaded the needle of narrative and analytic in this book. I don’t think of this book as a biography, more of a life and times account. Selim and I have an ambivalent relationship. I’m really using him because he helps me to tell the story I want to tell—how the Ottomans impacted the globe in the decades around 1500. Selim is my Trojan horse to get into that history.

That said, the book is structured around a chronology of Selim’s life, and I try as best I can to take the full measure of the man. I have no interest in recovering him or bashing him. He is obviously a controversial figure in Turkey, in the Arab world, and in Ottoman and Arab historiography. I walk both with and apart from Selim, from the Caribbean to India.

OA: Absolutely. You show how the Ottomans and Islam directly influenced the conquest and settlement of the Americas, for example. However, how is it that the Ottoman Empire “made the modern world,” as you say? I think many might be surprised by that claim.

AM: I'm not claiming that the Ottomans were the first moderns or invented modernity, whatever that might mean, or anything like that. I think of it this way. Historians regularly ascribe various importance to a set of events that occurred in and around the year 1500. These include 1492, in its various meanings, the Reformation, the rise of commercial trade, the establishment of polities that remain with us in various guises today, the transatlantic slave trade, and the entrance of Mediterranean powers into the Indian Ocean world. I agree that all of this is crucial to understanding the early modern period and today. My book argues, though, that our understanding of each of these events is incomplete because we haven’t fully understood the role of the Ottomans and Islam in them.

If you consider any or all of these events to be important—I think most scholars do—then you have to understand that the Ottomans and the Muslim world were involved in all of them and then how. We haven’t done this. And this is the primary project of the book—to bring the Ottomans and the Muslim world into the conversation about these events. Wherever we stand on them, let’s have the debate. But to do it well and fully we need the complete historical canvas. We’ve been missing a large piece of that so far.

This obviously then leads to the question of why have Muslims been cut out of this story. What has been lost by this removal? What are the implications and the politics of that? And what might it mean to “restore” the Ottomans and Muslims to this story? What does it mean for our understanding of the modern world? I try to answer these questions in the book.

It’s so striking how present Islam is for the historical actors we know so well and yet how absent it is in the histories we write about them. On the very first page of Columbus’s journal about the voyages, Islam is front and center and tied directly to his Atlantic voyages. He says, “When your Highnesses had concluded their war with the Moors who reigned in Europe….your Highnesses decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to see these parts of India and the princes and peoples of those lands and consider the best means for their conversion.” Against this though, historians have tended to rend 1492 in two: to be interested either in the voyages, or the Reconquista, the Catholic unification of Spain, the expulsion of the Jews, and the eventual expulsion of the Moors. As Columbus did in his journal, I want to hold those two things together. This is the more historically accurate telling and the more illuminating. Columbus and his first generation of conquistadors thought of Islam and the New World together.

So Islam is right there in the sources and yet usually absent from our narratives. During his conquest of Mexico, Cortés writes that he sees 400 mosques. He calls Montezuma a Sultan. He describes Aztec women as “Moorish women.” These bright flashes of Islam in a strange place have to be explained. And that’s part of what I try to do in the book. Many in this first generation of conquistadors, Cortés included, had fought Muslims in Spain and in North Africa before crossing the Atlantic. Some of them returned from the Caribbean to fight Muslims again. The last battle Cortés waged in his life was in Algiers in 1541. As their fundamental civilizational enemy—I use this terminology deliberately since it was theirs—Islam represented their greatest other on earth and on the battlefield. They understood war and difference through their wars with Islam in the Old World. They did not somehow forget this in the month it took them to cross the Atlantic. They arrived in the New World with these Old World mentalities. This is a key aspect of understanding the tragic history of 1492. Without it, we miss fully and correctly grasping the story.

Likewise, there is a deep and important strand of Islam and the Ottomans in the story of Martin Luther. He wrote a great deal about Islam and the Ottomans, always “the Turks” for him. He admired the anticlericalism and iconoclasm of Islam as a foil to the depravities he saw in the Catholic church. He even contemplated sponsoring a German translation of the Quran (he never did). I’m of course not the first person to notice these things, but I do want to take seriously what it might mean to make Islam part of the early history of Protestantism. It’s key for Luther, rhetorically and theologically, but also geopolitically in that it’s because of their mobilizations to defend against the Ottomans that Catholic powers held back from diverting their fighting forces to quell the early Protestant stirrings.

Again, as with Columbus, in the story of Luther, Islam is present in the sources. This shouldn’t be a surprise. In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Islam and the Ottomans were central and consequential forces in the world. The fact that Islam is absent from our stories of the “making of the modern world” is wholly our fault, one with enormous political implications.

OA: This ties into another question I have. There almost appears to be a schizophrenic relationship between conquistadors and Muslims. Europeans see Muslims in the New World as “Muslims of the Caribbean,” pirates and Moors—as you describe it—yet not as the same Muslims of the East. This got me thinking about Ottoman seafaring. Of course, Ottoman ships never sailed to the Caribbean. Your book pushes back on a lot of scholarship that depicts Ottoman seafaring as something more economic than political. How can we understand Ottoman seafaring in terms of the larger early modern seafaring empires? What set the Ottomans apart from their Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch counterparts? What did they have in common?

AM: Around 1500, territory equaled power. Those who held the most territory usually were the most powerful. More land meant more taxes, meant more resources for war, meant more power. Machiavelli, for instance, was always envious of the Ottomans for having a salaried standing army whereas European powers were forced to try to round up an army of mercenaries and irregulars every time they went to war. The Ottomans could do this because they had tax revenues from land. Over the course of the early modern centuries, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this would begin to shift so that maritime holdings and trading networks became increasingly important. Trade and commercialism over revenue extraction from land. Today when we think of the early modern world and global history, we immediately go to the maritime empires—the Portuguese and the Dutch, and later the British, as the models for thinking about global impact. As I argue in the book, one of the reasons European states became maritime powers in the first place—in some ways why they had to become maritime powers—was because the Ottomans, Mamluks, and other Muslim polities forced them to try to find ways of getting around their enormous landholdings and control of trade routes.

The Ottomans had some maritime ambitions, of course, and a kind of maritime moment during the period I tackle in the book. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman captain Selman Reis was sent to Suez to help the Mamluks rebuild their fleet to fight against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Of course, once the Ottomans captured Egypt and Hijaz in 1516-17, they gained territory for the first time on the Red Sea and thrust their power east in the Indian Ocean. This was all rather temporary though and by the end of the sixteenth century they had largely given up on their Indian Ocean push. There’s a lively and fruitful debate about the long-term implications of this maritime project for the empire.

Even if the Ottomans didn’t sail ships all across the world, they still travelled these maritime routes. That is to say, for example, that the Spanish imagination of Islam and the Ottomans took them to the Caribbean and shaped the European colonization of the Americas in very real ways, as we’ve discussed. So when I talk about the Muslims of the Caribbean, that's what I am referring to—at first the imagined Muslims of the Spanish psyche and then the very real West African Muslims brought as slaves.

So having a sprawling maritime network is one form of global empire in the early modern world. Selim’s Ottomans offer another one too—an enormously large land-based empire on the three continents of the Old World whose impacts stretched across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Karim Malak (KM): I’d like to come in here, because I think this ties us back to one of the very first things that you were talking to us about: the conquest of Egypt. You mentioned the joint Mamluk-Ottoman fleet being built to counter the Portuguese, even before 1517. The incorporation of Egypt was a world-defining moment and one that had a lot to do with seafaring. I mean the juxtaposition of that event, say, with the incorporation of the Algerian Deys has always been very striking for me. The Algerian Deys are ruled by the Kapudan Pasha through an order that is issued to appoint the Deys. All of this is to ask how does Ottoman seafaring, and the incorporation of Egypt after 1517, change our understanding of Ottoman history?

AM: Absolutely right. The Indian Ocean world was opened up for the Ottomans by the conquest of Egypt in 1517. Having a foothold on the Red Sea allowed them to extract resources and revenues from Yemen and then to build up trading relationships in India and even further afield in Southeast Asia. All clearly very important, if even not long lasting, as we mentioned before. Yemen remains, of course. Extraction of tax revenue from land, rather than long-distance maritime trade, persists as the key source of revenue for the Ottomans. New goods come into the empire, which is important: Chinese porcelains, Indian textiles, and, above all, coffee. And clearly Ottoman maritime control of the Red Sea is crucial to imperial power in Mecca and Medina.

OA: I have a few questions about sources. I’m very interested in the sources you used for the study because it’s an extremely global history. Your previous works relied on the Mühimme defterleri, local court records, and imperial sources that captured everything from peasants in Upper Egypt requesting material assistance to manage their canals to those in places as far as Thessaloniki asking for assistance with their harvest. In God’s Shadow, you rely more on textual sources. You rely on the Selimname, discussing how it creates an almost mythological Selim. You also read the waqf of Selim’s mother Gülbahar Hatun to understand more about who she was. How would you characterize that shift in your use of sources from archival materials to different textual sources that are narrative or even hagiographic?

AM: Any historian tries to find everything they can on their subject. That said, my goal was not to write the definitive biography of Selim. As I said before, I think of the book more as a story of the life and times of Selim. A source like the Selimname—every source, archival, narrative, or otherwise—of course has to be read as critically and honestly as one can. Every source is biased and has its blind spots. Sure, the Selimname is hagiographic, but one would obviously be remiss to ignore it in a story about Selim. It’s indispensable.

The project is a little early for the kind of archival materials I used in my previous work. We don’t yet have the heft of court records. Around 1500, the rigor of bureaucratic documentation is not what we will have even just a few decades later. There are still, of course, plenty of Ottoman archival sources for Selim’s reign. A number of Turkish scholars and others have used these to great effect, and I don’t repeat their work, relying mostly on them.

My main contribution in terms of the sources I use is my combination of materials. I don’t think people have brought the range of sources I have together in the way I have. So, of course, I use the Selimname, as you said. I also use the Arabic chronicler sources of some of the major areas Selim conquers. As best I can, I use some Safavid sources too. And then I pair all of this with Spanish accounts of the conquest of Granada, North Africa, and the New World. I use, with help, the Venetian sources of Marino Sanudo too, which are quite useful. I read the works of Luther, Machiavelli, Columbus, and other major figures as well, mostly in translation.

OA: Your text extends Ottoman studies to very different reaches and readers. It studies the Ottoman Empire not only as a pre-modern or Mediterranean force but also as a truly global phenomenon. I was wondering how you saw your work as interrogating and being in conversation with other Ottoman scholarship on the early modern period. I’m thinking of the works of Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar in particular. How do you see other scholars in the field who are writing about similar periods of time and similar questions? And how do you situate your work in the conversation?

AM: Well, I’m honored even to be mentioned in the same breath as Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar. The field would not exist without them, and others of course, and all our work in some ways is in conversation with theirs, even as we move in new directions.

I hope my book works to instigate and inspire new avenues for research. I throw out big and, I hope, productively provocative ideas that others can run with, challenge, or amend. Luther and Islam, for instance. I devote just one chapter to this. There is a universe of material one could explore. Ottoman North Africa, which is important for me too in the book, is another area where I would love to see more research in coming years, in the early modern period and beyond. Islam and the Atlantic—huge potential there. I don’t want to make it sound as though no one has worked on these topics. They have. But there’s so much more to do. One could say that about so many topics in Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. We’ve barely scratched the surface as a field.

I hope too that my book will help to spur others to think about new ways of understanding the Ottomans and global history, both empirically and methodologically. This is both for those of us in the field, to work more to connect our scholarship to concerns outside of the field, and for scholars outside of Ottoman history, to show them the importance of the Ottomans and Muslims to many of the things they’re interested in. One has to be careful here. In Middle East Studies, we’ve often asked questions derived from other fields, which can be a problem. But I think there are ways of gaining insights from outside of the field without shoehorning Ottoman history into something it’s not. Any attempt at connection will run this risk, and one has to always keep this in mind as a trap to avoid.

We should as well push those outside the fields of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. It’s always amazing to me how the referent for historians of Europe and America is almost always Europe or America. I understand of course the deep imperial connections, but still it’s such a narrow view of history, so small and incomplete. As if nothing else can offer insights to Europeanists or Americanists. We scholars of the Middle East have a lot to say about European history and therefore about American history. And we’re in an even more privileged position in this regard than other fields since it’s not just methodological or theoretical work we can offer, but hard empirical historical realities. The Ottoman Empire and Europe were always connected. In various periods, the Ottomans held more territory in Europe than many European states. Proximity matters. Said made this point in Orientalism. The divisions of the Middle East and Europe are political choices of our own creation. Cutting out the Middle East and Islam, as if they didn’t matter, is part of a political project that we should reject. In its place, we should offer alternatives. I hope my book does some of that work. The Ottomans and Islam were always there, in Antwerp and Genoa, of course, but also in Hispaniola and Virginia.

To put it slightly differently, I think we as a field have missed opportunities to make our work conversant with other historiographies, really of any period. This is a missed opportunity in several respects. One, as banal as it sounds, we have great histories and stories to tell. We should tell them and tell them well. Beyond that, these histories have wholly important consequences for our understanding of, in my case, the early modern world. If we don’t tell our stories, then we cede that territory to others who don’t necessarily have our expertise, know what we know, etc. This is a knowledge problem and a political one. We can’t cede that territory to Orientalists. We’re only a few decades beyond Orientalism and it lingers in all kinds of ways in scholarship on the medieval and early modern periods. For the modern period, ceding intellectual territory to the kind of right-wing political wonks of the world who have a derogatory understanding of Islam and of the Middle East is obviously a major—and very live—problem. It’s of course the case that there are active forces attempting to prevent us from entering that space. Scholars and engaged readers though do want stories and a deeper understanding of Islam, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, etc. It’s on us to do a better job of entering that space, of demanding to enter that space, in ways that are engaging, that bring people in, and that nevertheless challenge their normative understandings. It’s possible. It’s necessary.

OA: In your book, you have a remarkable focus on individual people, their words, their visions, their feelings. This has a lot to do with the narrative style of the text. You describe in great detail how individuals from bureaucrats on the Bosphorus to conquistadors in the Americas felt in various moments, what they saw, what they smelled. How do you uncover and determine this and why do you feel this is important?

AM: Yes, this is a useful craft-of-history question. Mine is not a psychohistory of Selim nor obviously historical fiction. Throughout, I try to be very careful not to impute emotion or feeling back in time. The maternal or paternal love that we take for granted, for example, was not as operative in the sixteenth century. I only write what I can from the sources. There are moments in the book when I describe what a person would have seen or maybe heard or something like that from circumstantial evidence. I’m careful to qualify in those places. In a book like this, I think it’s vital to humanize in various kinds of ways, and the sources allow us to do that to a degree. And because a fuller picture of the humanity and the historical experience of individuals has something to say about their larger society and the politics all around them, I hope that by bringing the reader into that world of the individual it will help him to understand the larger historical context. Overall, then, my goal was to evoke places, persons, and moments to help to humanize history.

I think this is especially important when one is writing about Muslims today, given the global vilification of Islam. Muslims soldiers fought for territory and booty like all soldiers did. Not everything any Muslim has ever done can be explained by Islam. We would never claim this for Hindus, Jews, or Christians. Muslims are fully formed, contradictory, and complicated humans, just like everyone else. This is obviously more than basic, and it makes me sad to have to say it, but I feel it necessary to stress, given our world. Those of us working in Middle East Studies are still faced with the daunting task of having to fight for the basic humanity of our historical subjects. We can reject this call of course as the ignorant prejudices of some. I’ve ignored this before.

In this book though, given my desires to reach a wide audience outside of the field, I felt a duty to take this on directly. The level of ignorance and bias towards Muslims or anyone from or in the Middle East is really deep and would not be tolerated for most groups. So part of the political project for me is, again, to humanize and evoke. To say that we can understand the Middle East, its history, politics, and society in the same ways we would any other place, history, group of people. Social and intellectual history works, so does economic and environmental history. The same historical tools work in the Middle East, and we have some of our own tools to offer you. Again, this is so utterly basic, but here we are. In my teaching and conversations with other scholars outside of the field, on television and in literature, from both the left and the right, it’s a constant barrage of prejudice, ignorance, and vilification. As people who know things, we should help to change the narrative. We can’t do it all the time—it can be exhausting and frustrating—but we shouldn’t cede this territory to others either.

KM: If I could move in a different direction—it seems to me that one of the interventions that you’re making, similar perhaps to other historians, other historians of global history in particular, is really to write off the medieval era in its semantic categorization as an era of decline. After a ‘classical’ period of Hellenistic production and before the modern era, stands the Dark Middle Ages in Europe. For Ottomanists this translates into a similar rubric where some, such as Virginia Aksan, see Süleyman’s death as ending the classical era that precedes the early modern, which acts as a bridge from roughly the seventeenth century up until the beginning of the tanzimat era in 1800. The early modern is marked, amongst other things, by “a centralized bureaucratic organization” according to Boğaç Ergene. It seems to me that you are pushing the “early” in “early modern,” well into, say, the fifteenth century through Selim, and not Süleyman—as you say. In so doing you’re showing us that there are different narratives of progress that are emerging at the same time; skipping the medieval paradigm of decline associated with Europe and showing us the classical period itself can be subsumed thematically under the label of “early modern” which does not act as a bridge or place-holder anymore. Would that be a fair characterization of your historiographical and conceptual intervention here? This is one that I think follows from one of your very early contributions when you were writing against the paradigm of the Lale Devri period as the apogee of the Ottoman Empire while pushing back against the depiction of Süleyman as the high point of Ottoman rule.

AM: If I understand your question correctly, we’re basically thinking together about periodization, a deep Ottomanist love, as you know. We rise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The sixteenth century is the pinnacle. We decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth and then try to modernize in the nineteenth century only to fail in the twentieth. One of the moves I make, I hope somewhat provocatively to Ottomanists, is to argue that Selim was much more important than Süleyman. He is the one who changed the empire more than any other sultan.

In this way, you might say I’m actually reinforcing the story of the sixteenth century as the high point of Ottoman history. I’m slightly diverting us away from the middle of the sixteenth century and Süleyman to a focus on Selim. Still, I think it’s important to provincialize the heart of the sixteenth century in favor of the later decades of the fifteenth and early ones of the sixteenth century. This helps us to decenter a narrative of the golden age.

Moreover, it helps also to challenge the notion that before 1516-17 the Ottoman Empire, majority Christian, mind you, was characterized by tolerance, a kind of ecumenical rule, the light touch of Islam, a sort of happy-go-lucky Islam in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims held hands and loved one another. An argument for a particularly democratic and tolerant Turkish version of Islam that’s different from an Arab version or any other.

1516-17, this story goes, then brings in all these Muslims and all these Arabs, and suddenly the empire is different. It’s more ‘Islamic’ and less Turkish, which means it’s less tolerant, less democratic, generally worse in this version of things. Before 1516-17, we were tolerant, ecumenical, basically a Christian empire with a majority Christian population, even if, okay, the ruling dynasty was not. After these years, the empire is now rapacious, violent, intolerant, backward, with a majority Muslim population. It’s as crude as Christianity is good and Islam is bad (remember what I said about ceding territory to Orientalism before). The story is one of loss in 1516-17. That the empire is no longer the empire.

I agree that the empire is no longer the empire, but reading these years as a loss of Turkish non-Muslim democratic innocence is not only ideological on its face but clearly empirically wrong. The empire is something different for sure that we should understand on its own terms as the beginnings of what the empire will be for the next four hundred years. This is part of the reason I see 1516-17 as more important than 1453. We like 1453 because it’s a sparkly victory: Istanbul! But part of the reason we hold this up is because it’s the defeat of a Christian empire and therefore the passing of the baton from Christians to Ottomans and because Christendom infused this loss with so much meaning. To my mind, Constantinople was going to come one way or another, frankly, so 1453 in many ways was inevitable and did not forever change the empire. The thing that really changes the empire and sets it on its dominant course for the rest of its history is 1516-17, not 1453. Understanding that moment of origin is again then wholly important.

OA: Let me ask you about violence and how it fits in your narrative. I was very intrigued by your description of the Shi‘a massacres in Anatolia that Selim conducts during his campaign against the Safavids. The idea of registers of residents and cities being drawn up and the systematic torture of people seems strikingly modern and really very much part of a drive towards projects of delineation and the enumeration of imperial residents. How do you see this as an early act of so-called sectarianism? And what is its relationship to modern questions of sect and identity? How can we avoid falling into the trap of retrospective determinism, of reading these events teleologically as always and already part of the unfolding of modernity?

AM: Thanks in particular to the work of Tijana Krstić, we have a good understanding of the process of confessionalization and how it operated in the standoff between the Ottomans and Safavids and the Ottomans and Hapsburgs. Religious identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries becomes foundational for the political programs of states in Europe and the Middle East, whether that is Catholicism in Spain, Sunni Islam for the Ottomans, or Shiism for the Safavids.

Selim’s massacre of around 40,000 Shiites in Anatolia stood until the end of the nineteenth century as perhaps the largest Ottoman domestic killing. It is rightly still remembered and mourned until today as part of the collective memory of suffering of the Alevi community in Turkey, a legacy of suffering that tragically continues.

How to interpret such an event? I think it’s ahistorical simply to say that this is a paradigmatic example of the fact that Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting since time immemorial. This is the not the case, of course, and we could cite many examples of Sunni-Shiite coexistence and cooperation, as we could Muslim-Christian, Christian-Jewish, etc. So a sectarian clash between Shiites and Sunnis since the sixteenth century is not right. And yet intergenerational trauma is real and such a massacre in the sixteenth century had material, affective, demographic, and cultural consequences that maintain until today, shaping our present, and therefore must be understood and addressed in honest ways. Both things can be true and are. We should be able to understand the consequences of violence in the past without essentializing it as primordial or forever.

This sort of thing is especially true in Turkey today, given the politics of the present. And Selim, and this massacre, play a central role here. I discuss this at the end of the book. For President Erdoğan, Selim is very useful. He was the first sultan who was also the Khalifa. He is expansionist and conquers a lot of territory. He makes the empire Muslim. He massacres his enemies. He is a global figure of a certain kind whose rule represents a turning point. Erdoğan rhetorically finds a lot that’s useful in Selim. I often think of him as Erdoğan’s Andrew Jackson. And he performs a similar sort of symbolic and material violence as Jackson does in the United States. When Selim is depicted as the paragon sultan by, for example, naming the third Bosphorus bridge after him, that is a very pointed and direct strike against the state’s enemies, in a moment in which the state attacks its opponents with brutish physical violence. For Alevis in Turkey today, the Sultan Selim the Grim Bridge incites feelings of intergenerational trauma, insult, and violence similar to those experienced by African Americans, and many other Americans, when faced with Confederate monuments in the United States. Erdoğan of course knows this and uses something like the bridge to send a clear message about who he sees as the “real Turks.” These are some of the ways that history obviously matters today, but none of this is preordained and we need to be careful to understand this in the context of the politics of the moment.

OA: You describe the transition from Cairo to Istanbul in the book, and from the Mamluks to the Ottomans, as being an important moment that denotes a transfer of power. I’m very interested in how this occurred materially. What were the cues given that the seat of serenity had changed? How significant was this transition and how would it have been perceived by those who lived through it? In the literature it is often depicted as being symbolic, not having any real significance, but you seem to argue that this transition actually was significant for establishing sovereignty for the Ottomans.

AM: I think it’s very important for the Ottomans in all kinds of rhetorical and materials ways. You see this, for example, in the kind of titulature that the sultans adopt for themselves, in the claims of universality that begin to be made in this spirit. Again, this is one of the reasons I think Selim sets up Süleyman. Selim is really the first Ottoman sultan who can honestly claim a kind of universal sovereignty. This will come to be advanced and developed by subsequent sultans, to be perfected later in the sixteenth century. Selim is only sultan for eight years, of course, yet in those years he lays the groundwork for the universal claims of sovereignty that later sultans would draw on. It’s his territorial expansion that makes this all possible.

Materially, the shift from Cairo to Istanbul matters in where tax revenue goes. To put it simply, it makes the Ottomans rich.

It also begins to shift the intellectual and cultural center of gravity in the Muslim world north and west towards Istanbul. It doesn’t fully get there in Selim’s lifetime; we might argue it never gets there. But Istanbul certainly becomes one of the world’s key centers of Islamic learning after this period. Scholars hailing from North Africa to South Asia gravitate more and more to Istanbul. The old Arab nationalist story that Selim forcibly moves all of the scholars and artists of Cairo and Damascus back to Istanbul with him is exaggerated but does, I think, point to the fact that Istanbul becomes the primary city of Islamic learning in the early modern period. Even if some people were forced to go after 1516/17, many more chose to go later because of its manifold artistic, cultural, and intellectual attractions.

We can also measure this shift from Cairo to Istanbul through the changing status of Turkish as a language of Islamic learning. It is in this period that Ottoman Turkish earns its stripes as a language of real Islamic scholarship.

Thanks to Selim, the caliphate stayed in Istanbul until the twentieth century.

KM: The word universal keeps coming up in your answers. And I do think the sultan saw himself as the embodiment of universal sovereignty. You see that in the titles he used: Kahraman, Şevketmaab, Hakan, Khalifa. Those are the things that I think about in my own research. But I’m very curious about this universal projection that you're talking about with Selim that would come with, for example, the acquisition of Mecca and Medina. How did that really transpire? How did you go about thinking about that whilst writing? But also, what was Selim’s aim behind projecting himself in that way? Is it a way to make a claim vis-à-vis other sovereigns, other kings? Is he positioning himself different to them or is this something, you know, that isn’t worldly? That is perhaps grander.

AM: The idea of universal sovereignty is a common one at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. For example, the Spanish Catholic sovereigns clearly saw themselves as universal sovereigns, as did the Safavids, and the Mamluks too given their possession of Mecca and Medina. If one imagines one’s rule as divinely ordained, universality quickly and easily follows.

Still, Selim’s vision of universal rule is quite different than, say, the Catholic version. The Catholics, well the Spanish at least, see their rule as involving the eradication of Islam and Judaism from Spain, and preferably from the face of the earth altogether. Ottoman universal sovereignty never envisioned such a thing as necessary for itself. Recognition not eradication was the Ottoman form of universal sovereignty.

OA: How do material objects fit into this? There was a recent debate about whether certain objects in Topkapı were taken from Medina or Cairo. How do the actual material things themselves and where they came from and where they go shape this idea of universal sovereignty?

AM: I think that’s a really significant point. The symbolic power of certain objects is obviously very important for making claims to the upholding of the patrimony of Islamic history, to being the literal possessors of the physical manifestations of this tradition. The Quran of ‘Uthman is one example of such a material claim to sovereignty. The keys to Mecca, which go to Istanbul after 1517, are another. All these objects move with the human beings who go to Istanbul. The humans and things that end up in the city, the institutions that are built, the money that begins to flow to the capital, the increasing number of imperial orders and fatwas that Istanbul issues—all of this obviously adds to the sense that Istanbul is now a center of the Islamic world, if not the center.

KM: It’s interesting that all these claims are so layered. In a way Ottoman sovereignty is almost interlocking together in the sense that these schools, the madrassas, that are rededicated after Egypt is famously conquered bear the marks of their prior but also their new sovereigns. The Ottomans see the al-Ghuri Madrassa and they say we want one like it. For me this leads to the question of how this form of universal worldmaking or sovereignty, whatever we want to call it, deals with the question of the past? The Selimname, for example, argues for a rupture with the past, but there is also a continuity with its claim to worldly sovereignty. We are distinct yet part of a long tradition. It’s not like the Catholic pope with his famous papal bull Inter Caetera in the sense that everything east of this line is to be destroyed; take everything and leave nothing.

AM: I think that’s right. I completely agree with you. There is a kind of layered commingling, as you say. This reminds me of the story that in the thirteenth century Ibn ‘Arabi predicted Selim’s entrance to Damascus centuries later in the sixteenth century. I see this very much as inscribing Selim into a longer Islamic history. According to the story, the teacher of Osman, founder of the empire, trained with Ibn ‘Arabi. So here again is the inscribing of the Ottomans into this longer lineage of Islamic learning and prestige, Selim’s isnad, if you like. In conquering other Muslims, the current caliph no less, the Ottomans are not acting against Islamic history, but very much weaving themselves into it, in fact fulfilling their prophesied destiny.

KM: On the point of apocryphal texts and narratives, one of the things you are saying reminds me of Halil İnalcık’s history of the conquest of Constantinople. İnalcık deftly shows that during the conquest of Constantinople, when the city’s residents did not surrender to the Ottomans, the Sultan nevertheless put an end to looting. This prompted Ottoman jurists to later issue a fetva interpreting these actions as comprising some sort of covenant; it had the effect of affording the non-Muslim population the optic of surrender in order to safeguard their land, allow them to repair and build houses of worship, as well as pay the cizye poll tax as opposed to the more expensive haraç. I wonder if you see the same historiographical politics with the Selimname, namely that history is not necessarily about facticity—it’s not about what has happened. But it’s also about a way of writing and weaving that narrative, which at times can be apocryphal. 

AM: Histories usually have more to say about the presents in which they are written than they do about the past. This is as true of the Selimname as it is of any other text. Later in the sixteenth century and then into the seventeenth, there are efforts to resuscitate earlier sultans, to portray them as projections of Ottoman strength to serve the immediacy of the contemporary moment. This is more about that present than it is about the past it portrays. This is par for the course. You have to be able to understand the context in which any historical narration was produced to interpret the text correctly.

KM: One of the more provocative academic breakthroughs of recent years is Cemil Aydin’s book The Idea of the Muslim World. Aydin demonstrates how Muslim polities—such as the Safavids and the Ottomans—fought one another in the sixteenth century and regularly allied with ‘Christian’ powers against other polities; showing the idea of a Muslim ‘World’ to be an orientalist and later invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea of a hermetically sealed ‘Muslim’ world—that did not trade or ally with Christian powers—can be seriously challenged on the grounds of its ahistoricism. Yet, conversely, I think that your book shows this doesn’t mean that early modern Ottomans didn’t see themselves as fashioning their own world through Selim’s idea of universal sovereignty. Perhaps an Ottoman world was slowly being carved out by the sixteenth century, one that—as you show—had new imperial challenges but also transcended what it meant to be only Muslim?

AM: Cemil Aydin’s books are inspiring for multiple fields and for my own work. While I don’t explicitly reference his research in my book, I see where your question is going. As you say, he is masterful at showing us how to think about the modernity of a notion of a Muslim world. For Selim, I don’t think there was intentionality, or even self-consciousness, about his world making, but it’s pretty clear looking at the historical record that Selim was involved in some form of such a project. This was territorial in that he made a polity that could claim major swathes of the world. (As I say this, I wonder about the question of maritime versus terrestrial empires we brought up before. Does one sort of polity over another lend itself to this kind of world making? Worth a thought.) It was symbolic and rhetorical along the lines of the caliphate and the universality we discussed before. And it was economic too, something we haven’t touched on too much. I don’t want to set up a story of “Muslim civilization” against a “European” one. That is too crude and ahistorical, but the point is to say that Selim creates an Ottoman world that deeply impacts the rest of the world.

Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, is widely recognized for his work in Middle Eastern and global history. He is the author of four books and over thirty scholarly articles that have received multiple awards in the fields of Middle Eastern and environmental history, including the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History and the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association for Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History.