Gods Shadow Sultan Selim His Ottoman Empire And The Making Of The Modern World

Download or read book God's Shadow written by Alan Mikhail and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.

Download or read book God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World written by Alan Mikhail and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world. The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.

Download or read book Dangerous Gifts written by Ozan Ozavci and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility to bring security in the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to 'liberate', 'secure' and 'educate' local populations. They staged first 'humanitarian' interventions in history and established hitherto unseen international and local security institutions. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth and nineteenth century origins of these imperial security practices. It explicates how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox-an ever-increasing demand despite the increasing supply of security-ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, emancipating the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and foregrounding the experience of the Levantine actors. It explores the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter's economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law in their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

Download or read book Suleiman the Magnificent written by Andre Clot and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suleiman the Magnificent, most glorious of the Ottoman sultans, kept Europe atremble for nearly half a century. In a few years he led his army as far as the gates of Vienna, made himself master of the Mediterranean and established his court in Baghdad. Faced with this redoubtable champion, who regarded it as his duty to extend the boundaries of Islam farther and farther, the Christian world struggled to unite against him. 'The Shadow of God on Earth', but also an expert politician and all-powerful despot, Suleiman ruled the state firmly with the help of his viziers. He extended the borders of the empire beyond what any of the Ottoman sultans had achieved, yet it is primarily as a lawgiver that he is remembered in Turkish history. His empire held dominion over three continents populated by more than thirty million inhabitants, among whom nearly all of the races and religions of mankind were represented. Prospering under a well-directed, authoritarian economy, Suleiman's reign marked the apogee of Ottoman power. City and country alike experienced unprecedented economic and demographic growth. Istanbul was the largest city in the world, enjoying a remarkable renaissance of arts and letters; a mighty capital, it was the seat of the Seraglio and dark intrigue.

Download or read book Empress of the East written by Leslie Peirce and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

Download or read book Imperial Mecca written by Michael Christopher Low and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Download or read book Fall of the Sultanate written by Ryan Gingeras and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was by no means a singular event. After six hundred years of ruling over the peoples of North Africa, the Balkans and Middle East, the death throes of sultanate encompassed a series of wars, insurrections, and revolutions spanning the early twentieth century.This volume encompasses a full accounting of the political, economic, social, and international forces that brought about the passing of the Ottoman state. In surveying the many tragedies that transpired in the years between 1908 and 1922, Fall of the Sultanate explores the causes that eventuallyled so many to view the legacy of the Ottomans with loathing and resentment.The volume provides a retelling of this critical history as seen through the eyes of those who lived through the Ottoman collapse. Drawing upon a large gamut of sources in multiple languages, Ryan Gingeras strikes a critical balance in presenting and interpreting the most impactful experiences thatshaped the lives of the empire's last generation. The story presented here takes into account the perspectives of the empire's diverse population as well as the leaders who piloted the state to its end. In surveying the personal, communal and national struggles that defined Italy's invasion ofLibya, the Balkan War, the Great War, and the Turkish War of Independence, Fall of the Sultanate presents readers with a fresh and comprehensive exposition of how and why Ottoman imperial rule ended in bloodshed and disillusionment.