We know about Islam in America, but what about America in Islam? Yale historian Alan Mikhail unpacks Sultan Selim I, the thuggish sultan who wrote bad poetry yet conquered the Arab world in 1516–17 and, Mikhail argues, changed the course of world history. From the water buffalo that powered Ottoman Egypt’s rural economy to Muhammad Ali’s deadly Mahmudiyya Canal, they explore how environmental history reveals the lives of the farmers who made up most of the Middle East’s past. Then the conversation crosses the Atlantic to meet Anthony the Turk, often called New York’s first Muslim, whose mysterious origins and life in the Dutch colony are at the heart of Mikhail’s new book Newcomers.
We know about Islam in America, but what about America in Islam? Yale historian Alan Mikhail unpacks Sultan Selim I, the thuggish sultan who wrote bad poetry yet conquered the Arab world in 1516–17 and, Mikhail argues, changed the course of world history. From the water buffalo that powered Ottoman Egypt’s rural economy to Muhammad Ali’s deadly Mahmudiyya Canal, they explore how environmental history reveals the lives of the farmers who made up most of the Middle East’s past. Then the conversation crosses the Atlantic to meet Anthony the Turk, often called New York’s first Muslim, whose mysterious origins and life in the Dutch colony are at the heart of Mikhail’s new book Newcomers.
00:00 Introduction
01:08 Growing up between America and Egypt
04:16 Why the Ottoman Centuries Matter
07:00 What is environmental history?
10:41 Rethinking Muhammad Ali's Egypt
14:40 Animals, land, and the Life of an Empire
23:09 Selim, the Overlooked Sultan
27:21 What Does it Actually Mean to Conquer an Empire?
33:23 How Ottoman was Ottoman Egypt?
38:00 Anthony the Turk and Islam in Early America
47:53 Did the Ottomans Care About the New World?
Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of six books that have garnered numerous distinctions and been translated into ten languages. His most recent book is Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York. In addition to his current work on the intertwined histories of Islam and early America, he has written about the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. His book My Egypt Archive received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Before that, God’s Shadow won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour. Mikhail has written dozens of scholarly articles as well as for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.
Connect with Alan Mikhail 👉 https://www.alanmikhail.org
Hosted by Mikey Muhanna 👉 https://instagram.com/mikey_mu
Theme music: Peninsular, Tarek Yamani 🔊 https://spoti.fi/47I59ns
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