God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World By Alan Mikhail

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Author: Alan Mikhail

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Best Books of the Year • Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, History TodayLonglisted • Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionEditors' Choice • New York Times Book Review“A stunning work of global history. . . . Alan Mikhail offers a bold and thoroughly convincing new way to think about the origins of the modern world. . . . A tour de force.” —Greg GrandinLong neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520).Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. With personal charisma and military prowess—as well as the guidance of his remarkably gifted mother, Gülbahar—Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim—known by his subjects as “God’s Shadow on Earth”—fostered religious diversity, welcoming Jews among other minority populations into the empire; encouraged learning and philosophy; and penned his own verse.Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail’s game-changing account “challenges readers to recalibrate their sense of history” (Leslie Peirce), adroitly using Selim’s life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories that have held sway for decades. Whether recasting Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the “Americas” as a bumbling attempt to slay Muslims or showing how the Ottomans allowed slaves to become the elite of society while Christian states at the very same time waged the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, God’s Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the history of the modern world.

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Shouldn’t we expect something more than pop history from the chair of the Yale History Department? A scholarly historical work must examine the reliability of sources on which the historian relies. This Professor Mikhail rarely does. Time and again, he reports “facts” like “On August 5, Selim delivered a rousingly inspired speech before leading his army out of Elbistan,” or, describing Selim’s final meeting with his brother before Selim had him strangled, “Ahmed silent, fixed his eyes on the ground on which he languished.” The reader is left wondering, is that true? How do we know that? The footnotes are not helpful. The “rousingly inspired speech” is cited to a secondary source without further citation to what that source relied on.This is not just a cavil about minor details; the problem infects the text throughout. For instance, virtually all of the chapters concerning Selim’s seizure of power are cited to just three sources: a 2017 secondary source by H. Erdam Cipa, a 1995 PhD thesis translating and examining linguistically the Selīmnāme, and the Selīmnāme itself. The Selīmnāme was written after Selim died and during the reign of his son Suleyman and, as Professor Mikhail concedes when citing passages that are particularly fantastical, is a piece of propaganda meant to glorify its subject.Professor Mikhail prefaces his notes with the statement that, “To allow as many readers as possible to follow the sources used in this book, I have, when available, cited primary sources in English translation and referenced English-language secondary sources.” That is fine, but it is no substitute in a serious work of history for a frank examination of what we know about Selim and how we know it. Unless the point here was simply to write for the popular audience. I was shocked that Professor Mikhail went so far as to cite Wikipedia as a source. Really? Would he tolerate a student of his citing Wikipedia?But I don’t even think this book works as pop history, for two reasons. First, Professor Mikhail is not a great writer. His language is frequently clumsy (“rousingly inspired”?) and unengaging. Truly good works of history for a general audience read like a novel. Try Roger Crowley’s 1453 about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople for a really great read about the Ottoman period.Second, the big-picture point of this book – that professional historians and lay readers have ignored the role of the Ottoman Empire in shaping the modern world – is surely overblown. How can it be that Professor Mikhail thinks he is virtually the only one who knows that the existence of the Ottoman Empire astride the trade routes between the West and India and China caused the European explorers to sail south around the coast of Africa and west across the Atlantic to access the Orient’s riches? Or that people like Columbus, Cortes and Da Gama, as men of their times, saw their missions as not just economic but as religious as well? Perhaps the general public is not as well informed about these and other matters of history as historians would like, but whole bookshelves of works on this subject are available for those who wish to become educated.In fact, it is odd that Professor Mikhail chooses to make his point about the role of the Ottoman Empire in the European discovery of America in a book about Selim. Of all of the sultans during the expansionist period of the Ottoman Empire, Selim was the one most focused on expanding the Empire eastward, not westward. The reason to write and read a book about Selim is because it was during his short reign that the Ottomans, through conquest, acquired Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Egypt, and the Hejaz with the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, all of which they retained until World War I. It therefore seems bizarre, to this reader anyway, that fully one quarter of the book is devoted to examining what Professor Mikhail calls the crusading influences on Columbus, Cortes and other Europeans in their conquest of the Americas. That’s an interesting subject, but in a book about Selim, it seems like a glom-on. It also seems like Professor Mikhail was looking for an excuse to take shots at Columbus. Yes, it’s important to examine Selim in a global context, and yes Columbus was hardly a saint, but one hundred pages about the Europeans in the Americas in a book about Selim is out of place. Indeed, if, as Professor Mikhail says at the end of the book, his purpose was to present an alternative interpretation of the European conquest of America – in contrast to what he calls the dominant interpretation that Islam played to role in motivating Columbus, et al. – a book about Selim is an odd place to do it.The book, in my mind, is also somewhat biased in favor of the Ottomans over the Europeans. He constantly refers to Columbus as Crusader Columbus, which comes across as pejorative, the thought being, I guess, that the Muslims conquered Jerusalem fair and square and Christian attempts to get it back were illegitimate. At one point, he characterizes the fight between Ottomans and Europeans as a struggle over whether “Islam would prevail over Christianity, Ottoman Ecumenicalism over European intolerance.” In a book about Selim, the scourge of Shiite Muslims and who as a young man (the author tells us) “regularly led the raids that brought Caucasian slaves—mostly Christian, mostly white—into the Empire,” this is a bit rich. And it wasn’t just Selim. During the expansionist period of the Empire, the Ottomans took hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves through incessant raiding. If the European Christians saw themselves in a life-or-death struggle with Islam, they had good reason. If the Ottomans tolerated Christians and Jews within the Empire (if you call seizing Christian sons for forced service as Janissaries tolerant), they did so because, as Professor Mikhail concedes, they could afford to. The point here is not to favor Christians over Ottomans; personally, if I were alive in 1500, I would readily choose to live in Istanbul rather than London. For a historian, however, the point is simply to avoid making value judgments and to try to understand people within the context of their times.On the positive side, the book does cover the relevant period, although it could have done so in far fewer words. And the book has great illustrations. Obviously, a great deal of resources were placed behind the book. The maps are very well conceived and drawn, something that is not always the case with history books. And both the color and black and white reproductions are wonderful. I have always been a fan of Ottoman miniatures, and the author includes a number of these. Yet even here it is strange that Professor Mikhail sources many of the images to stock photos and picture books. The wonderful color reproduction of “Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Painting of Aleppo,” for instance, is cited to Roland and Sabrina Michaud/akg-images. Why not cite to the artist who painted it, the noted sixteenth century polymath Matrakçi Nasuh, and the location of the original work, Istanbul University? The author could also cite to the picture book to aid the reader who might want to see similar images.In the end, I was very much looking forward to a book about Selim. I share Professor Mikhail’s view that Selim is a much under-appreciated historical figure whose reshaping of the Middle East reverberated at least to the early twentieth century But I was hoping for something more scholarly – a book that really dug into Selim and the eastward expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, we have a book that seems to be of two minds, that seems to be directed against a straw man, and that too often seems agenda-driven.

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