In this episode, Lindsey is joined by Dr. Michael Christopher Low, Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University, to talk about his new book, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). Dr. Low discusses the challenges the Ottomans faced in administering the province of Hijaz and the hajj in the rapidly transforming 19th century. He explains how steamships boosted the number of visitors to the Hijaz, carrying pilgrims, passports, contagious diseases, and even the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. As those who traveled to the Hijaz by steamship were primarily from British India, administering the hajj opened up a new space of Ottoman and British Imperial competition in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Low casts Arabia as a semiautonomous frontier that the Ottomans struggled to modernize and defend against the encroachment of non-Muslim colonial powers. Conversely, from the 1850s through World War I, British India feared the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion. Together, these gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam's most holy places. ...
Thanks to our amazing supporters of our recent crowdfund, Ajam will now be producing and releasing podcasts. We expect a wide variety of formats, but we wanted to use our first episode as a chance to update our listeners and introduce our new series. Remember to visit us at ajammc.com to learn more or contact us! Check out the article from Nir Shafir that we discussed: https://aeon.co/essays/why-fake-miniatures-depicting-islamic-science-are-everywhere ...
In this episode, Rustin and Ali are joined by Professor Najam Haider, Professor of Religion at Barnard College, to talk about his recent book, The Rebel and the Imām in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography. The lack of contemporary sources for the first century of the Islamic period poses many challenges for historians past and present. Engaging with many of the impasses that still animate the study of early Islam, Professor Haider proposes that one way forward is to explore the rules that governed historical writing among early Muslims as well as their intended audiences. Instead of remaining preoccupied with 19th century European standards of historical writing, such as the search for veracity, he argues that the historians of the early Islamic period worked in continuity with the traditions of Late Antiquity. They were not interested in what “really happened,” but rather, they played with known narratives to make competing claims for contemporary audiences. After a personal anecdote about his own interest in the subject, Haider walks us through the example of the seventh Twelver-Shi’i Imam, Musa al Kadhim, explaining how sources over the centuries have told and retold his biography in keeping with their own theological and political concerns. ...
