Episoder
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Episode 452
with William Granara hosted by Chris Gratien
During the 9th century, Arab armies from North Africa conquered Sicily, leading to four centuries of Muslim history on the island, which is now part of Italy. Sicily during that period has often been portrayed as an interfaith utopia where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side, giving rise to a cultural synthesis, but as our guest William Granara explains, the reality was more complex. In this conversation with Granara, author of Narrating Muslim Sicily, we explore the history of Muslim societies in Sicily, grappling with questions of representation and reality as well as conflict and coexistence. We also discuss what this history means today centuries after the departure of Sicily's last Muslims, as a new wave of Muslim migration arrives on the island.
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Episode 446
featuring Emrah Safa GĂŒrkan, Joshua White, and Daniel Hershenzon
narrated by Chris Gratien
with contributions by Nir Shafir, Taylor Moore, Susanna Ferguson, and Zoe Griffith
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Piracy is often depicted as a facet of the wild, lawless expanses of the high seas. But in this episode, we explore the order that governed piracy, captivity, and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean and in turn, how these practices shaped early modern politics, Mediterranean connections, and the emergent notions of international law. Emrah Safa GĂŒrkan talks about Ottoman corsairs and the practicalities of piracy in the early modern Mediterranean. Joshua White discusses facets of Islamic law and gender in the realm of piracy. And Daniel Hershenzon explores the paradoxical connections forged by slavery, captivity, and ransom on both sides of the Mediterranean.
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Manglende episoder?
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Episode 409
with Jennifer Sessionshosted by Chris Gratien
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In 1827, Hussein Dey, the Ottoman governor of Algiers, hit a French consul on the nose with a fly whisk during a dispute over unpaid French debts. And as the story goes, the rest is history. France soon invaded Algeria and stayed for over 130 years. But as our guest in this episode Jennifer Sessions explains, France's decision to invade and colonize Algeria beginning in 1830 was far less arbitrary and far more intertwined with domestic French politics than lore would have it. And while the invasion was partially about political divisions in France, even as French politics transformed French colonization in Algeria became a national consensus over the course of the 19th century. In this episode, we examine the importance of the early decades of French colonialism in Algeria for understanding what followed, and we consider the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria for France and Algeria today.
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Episode 388
with Karim Bejjithosted by Graham Cornwell
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Tangier is in the midst of a massive renovation and expansion -- a new ferry and cruise port, a duty-free zone, and the massive Tangier Med shipping facility all meant to make the city and Morocco into a critical juncture of the global flows of goods, people, services, and capital. Of course, Tangierâs proximity to Europe and position astride the Strait of Gibraltar has long provided it with a cosmopolitan, international character, typified by the International Zone days during European colonial rule of Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century. But Tangierâs polyglot, imperial past goes back much further. In this episode, we turn to one of those more distant episodes: the English occupation of Tangier from 1661 to 1684. It was a brief interlude: control of the city itself was part of Catherine of Braganzaâs dowry to King Charles II, but English forces quickly found the situation (under intermittent but heavy resistance from local Moroccan tribes) unsustainable. The period produced some interesting characters on both sides--Samuel Pepys, for one, was a resident--but has generally been overlooked by scholars in favor of the Portuguese imperial enclaves on the Atlantic coast. What made English Tangier unique? Why did it fail, and how did the experience shape Moroccan-English relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
This episode is cross-listed with tajine, our series on the history and society of North Africa.
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Episode 362
with Mâhamed Oualdi & Hayri GökĆin Ăzkorayhosted by Andreas Guidi
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Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how slavery flourished in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the wake of growing connectivity with other world regions and territorial expansion. The discussion draws out the ambiguity between slavery and servitude in the case of the Mamluks of the Tunisian Beylik during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Which economic processes, legal interpretations, and geographic routes impacted the evolution of the slave trade from the sixteenth century until its abolition? What are the possibilities for and problems in retracing the self-narratives of those directly involved in the slave trade?
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Episode 351
with Seth Kimmelhosted by Nir Shafir
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In 1609 the Moriscos were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, marking the end of a hundred year effort to assimilate as New Christians these former Muslims. In this podcast, Seth Kimmel speaks to us about the impact of these conversions and expulsions on Iberian intellectual history. We discuss how Spanish officials and scholars attempted to force Moriscos to abandon practices like speaking Arabic and going to the bathhouse. In the process, each of these groups had to define the line between religion and culture, not only for Islam but also for Christianity. At the same time, the need to explain the failure of Morisco integration required new techniques of narration, source usage, and philological expertise. Taken together, these are unexpected intellectual and religious developments from a tragic chapter of history.
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Episode 343
with Taieb Belghazi & Abdelhay Mouddenhosted by Graham Cornwell
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How do we assess fizzling protest movements? How do social scientists account for difficult-to-quantify facets of political engagement like emotion and momentum? In this episode, we discuss ihbat, or disillusionment, in the failures of Moroccoâs February 20th movement. Part of the Arab Spring movements across the region, the coalition of groups that comprised February 20th rather quickly ground to a halt a few months later. In a major speech in March 2011, King Mohammed VI pledged major reforms, a new constitution, and a new election. In July of that year, Moroccans voted overwhelmingly in favor of stability and âconsultationâ and approved the new constitution. The euphoria of the early days of the movement subsided and gave way to feelings of ihbat. But disillusionment, as we discuss here, is not as one-dimensional nor permanent as one might think. Taieb Belghazi and Abdelhay Moudden point towards a possible new direction in political science research that uses literary and artistic sources to get at the emotional aspect of political engagement and organization.
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Episode 302
avec Pierre Daumanimée par Dorothée Myriam Kellou et Aurélie Perrier
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Depuis la fin de la guerre dâindĂ©pendance, la question des harkis agite les consciences en France comme en AlgĂ©rie. Pierre Daum, journaliste au Monde Diplomatique et auteur du livre Le dernier tabou : les « harkis » restĂ©s en AlgĂ©rie aprĂšs lâindĂ©pendance, est parti Ă la rencontre de ces supplĂ©tifs de lâarmĂ©e française et de leurs descendants. Dans cet Ă©pisode, il explore avec nous les non-dits et tabous qui entourent cette question : qui sont ces plus de 400,000 AlgĂ©riens, qui Ă un moment ou un autre entre 1954 et 1962, se sont engagĂ©s aux cĂŽtĂ©s de la France? Quelles Ă©taient leurs motivations, et quel fut leur sort suite Ă lâindĂ©pendance de 1962? Au fil de la discussion, Pierre Daum bat en brĂšche un certain nombre dâidĂ©es reçues sur les harkis et explore leur signification dans lâimaginaire français et algĂ©rien.
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Episode 296
with Sarah Ghabrialhosted by Edna Bonhomme and Sam Dolbee
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In French Algeria, the colonial imperatives of assimilation and difference gave birth to legal pluralism. In this episode, Dr. Sarah Ghabrial explains what it meant for Algerian women to have different legal structures operating at the same time. The ability to argue one's case in an Islamic court and also appeal it in French common law provided openings for women in matters of personal status. But it also had limits. They may have ultimately been able to divorce their husbands, but divorcing themselves from patriarchal structures of power proved more difficult, if not impossible. At the same time as legal codes changed, so, too, did medicine. As in much of the world, a state-sponsored scientific medicine, mostly practiced by men, began to crowd out local healing practices and knowledge of bodies, in many cases performed and possessed by women such as midwives. But it would have a particularly racialized impact in French Algeria. We also examine the impact of this change in court, where the latter form of medicine came to be an arbiter of truth, particularly in divorce cases. We close by shifting from matters of impotence to questions of agency, and how useful of a concept it is for this history.
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with Karen Rignall
hosted by Graham Cornwell
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Pre-Saharan Morocco is a transitional space between the Atlas Mountains in the north and the Sahara in the south, and the oases of pre-Saharan Morocco have long been marked by local autonomy, diversity, and particularities of agriculture, property ownership, class, and race. In this episode, we talk to Karen Rignall about her research on land, labor, and social life in a Moroccan oasis and discuss socioeconomic change in rural morocco through the lens of agricultural production in the transitional environments and political economies of the pre-Sahara.
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with Elizabeth Perego
hosted by Graham Cornwell and Soha El Achi
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Between December 1991 and February 2002, Algeria experienced a protracted civil war, which earned the period the designation of the "dark decade." In this episode, we explore how Algerians experienced and coped with the violence and trepidation of the civil war through the lens of humor. Our guest Elizabeth Perego has studied to role of humor, jokes, and caricatures in the politics of Algeria since the struggle against French colonialism in the 1950s. In our conversation, we focus on the dark humor of the dark decade, retelling some of the most widespread jokes of the period in a discussion of how humor provided a source of relief and platform for commentary on the unsettling realities of the war.
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with Muriam Haleh Davis
hosted by Chris Gratien and Aurelie Perrier
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The French military struggle to maintain control over Algeria throughout the war period (1954-1962) is remembered for its violent and destructive impacts. But during the war, the French administration also sought to maintain control over Algeria by attempting to build the rural economy and deepening the structures of colonial rule in the countryside. In this episode, we talk to Muriam Haleh Davis about the Constantine Plan, a project of social and economic development carried out within the context of the Algerian War and the rise of Cold War developmentalism. In our conversion, we explore the understandings of race embedded in French development in Algeria and situate the context of the Algerian War within the broader history of decolonization, the rise of the social sciences, and the making of the European Community.
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with Jennifer Johnson
hosted by Chris Gratien, Zoe Griffith, and Nora Lessersohn
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The Algerian War is perhaps the most recognizable national and anti-colonial movement of the 20th century. From the iconic film âThe Battle of Algiersâ to Frantz Fanon's influential book The Wretched of the Earth, the violence of the Algerian fight for independence and the French reaction has marked depictions of not only the war but representations of Algerian history on the whole. In this podcast, however, we explore another battlefield of contention during the Algerian War: medicine and humanitarian relief. As our guest Jennifer Johnson demonstrates in her new monograph The Battle for Algeria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), both the French government and the Algerian National Liberation Front used medicine and public health as a tactic, and the presence of humanitarian organizations in Algeria as well rendered the war not just a national struggle but in fact an international affair.
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avec Aurélie Perrier
animée par Dorothée Myriam Kellou
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Lâhistoire de lâAlgĂ©rie coloniale est souvent abordĂ©e du point de vue des bouleversements Ă©conomiques et politiques engendrĂ©s par lâoccupation française. Mais cette derniĂšre entraĂźna un remaniement dans la sphĂšre de lâintime qui fut tout aussi significatif, bien que peu Ă©tudiĂ©. Dans cet Ă©pisode, AurĂ©lie Perrier se penche sur la question de lâĂ©volution des formes de sexualitĂ©s illicites en AlgĂ©rie, particuliĂšrement de la prostitution. OrganisĂ©e et mise en place par les autoritĂ©s françaises dĂšs lâarrivĂ©e des premiĂšres troupes en 1830, la rĂ©gulation de la prostitution apparait rapidement comme un enjeu mĂ©dical et social majeur pour les français : il sâagit Ă la fois dâenrayer le pĂ©ril vĂ©nĂ©rien qui sĂ©vit au XIXe siĂšcle et dâassurer la puretĂ© de la race « blanche » en limitant les contacts sexuels entre les deux communautĂ©s (europĂ©enne et autochtone) au cadre prostitutionnel.
Si les courtisanes existaient bien Ă lâĂ©poque ottomane, leur statut Ă©tait trĂšs diffĂ©rent. Nombre dâentre elles Ă©taient musiciennes ou poĂštes, ce qui leur permettait de contribuer Ă la vie sociale et culturelle de leur sociĂ©tĂ©. AprĂšs 1830, la courtisane devient simple prostituĂ©e. Par ailleurs, les autoritĂ©s françaises mettent en place de nouveaux espaces et modalitĂ©s de contrĂŽle des « filles soumises ». Le bordel et le quartier rĂ©servĂ©, jusque lĂ inconnus en AlgĂ©rie, apparaissent dans une majoritĂ© de villes algĂ©riennes tandis que mĂ©decins et police des mĆurs Ă©laborent des rĂšgles rigoureuses visant Ă discipliner ces filles dont la sexualitĂ© et le mode de vie sont considĂ©rĂ©s comme dangereux.
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with Jonathan Wyrtzen
hosted by Chris Gratien
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In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa, European colonial rule lasted only for a matter of decades, and yet its influence in the realms of politics and economy have been profound. In this episode, we talk to Jonathan Wyrtzen about the legacy of colonialism in Morocco for the politics of identity, which is the subject of his new book entitled Making Morocco. As Dr. Wyrzten explains, colonial rule shaped understandings of issues such as territoriality, religion, ethnicity, and gender that remain relevant to this day.
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with Isabella Alexander
hosted by Graham Cornwell
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âHrig,â the Moroccan Arabic term for âillegalâ immigration, translates to âburning.â In the latest episode of Tajine, Isabella Alexander discusses the dramatic rise in sub-Saharan migrants attempting to enter the E.U. from Morocco - now the primary entry point for all African migrations north. As Spanish officials start exploring their border controls further south in response, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharans now find themselves trapped in Morocco. Their act of âburningâ signifies the literal burning of their identification papers to avoid repatriation when arrested by European authorities, but also the symbolic burning of their pasts in hopes of a better future abroad. They wait in sprawling slums outside of Moroccan cities, scraping together enough money to attempt the journey into Spain by boat or by land once again. But, what happens when their position in this liminal spaceâMoroccoâbecomes a permanent one?
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with Yelins Mahtat
hosted by Graham Cornwell
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Moroccan folk literature has drawn the attention of researchers for over a century, beginning with the earliest French colonial ethnographers' exhaustive studies of Moroccan dialects through recordings of poems, folktales, and proverbs. The influence of these stories can also be found in the work of some of Morocco's most internationally acclaimed authors such as Mohammed Mrabet. On this podcast, Yelins Mahtat recounts a folktale from the region of OulmĂšs in the present-day province of Khemisset. Afterwards, Yelins takes us into the process of collecting and translating Amazigh folktales from the foothills of the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. His research records folktales from storytellers in his family and from the villages near where he grew up. We discuss the politics of authorship and performance as well as the utility of folktales for understanding social and cultural dynamics of the Middle Atlas (cross-listed from tajine).
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with Aurelie Perrier
hosted by Sam Dolbee
This episode is part of a series on Women, Gender, and Sex in Ottoman history
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The association of Algeria with sex figured prominently in the artwork and literature that was critiqued so famously by Edward Said in Orientalism. In this episode, Dr. Aurelie Perrier discusses the practical backdrop of this argument beyond the level of discourse by exploring illicit sex in 19th century Algeria under both Ottoman and French rule. Beginning with the fluid boundaries of Ottoman-administered sex work, she describes the transformations that accompanied French colonialism beginning in 1830. Contextualizing the sex trade in both eras with flows of labor migration, Perrier also illuminates the spatial dynamics of the French approach to prostitution, namely the birth of red-light districts and brothels. At once centralizing and segregating sex work, this new politics of space was intimately connected to the boundaries of race and class that were the premise of colonialism in the first place. Yet it appears in many cases these boundaries were transgressed, undermining the credibility of the colonial state. Moreover, even as the state claimed unprecedented control over the intimate lives of its citizens/subjects, people still managed to use the system for their own purposes, or evade it altogether. Still, the undeniable encroachment of the state left an indelible mark on Algeria's history with distinctly gendered implications.
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with Sumaiya Hamdani
hosted by Graham Cornwell
The story of the twelfth-century scholar Umaya b. `Abd al-`Aziz Abu al-Salt al-Dani al-Ishbili starts in al-Andalus but moves eastward, to Fatimid Cairo and Zirid Tunisia. His movement across the Mediterranean illustrates a west-east transmission of knowledge and intellectual culture. A prolific scholar trained in diverse fields, Abu al-Salt's story traces scholarly links between multiple medieval Islamic states. Professor Sumaiya Hamdani joins Graham Cornwell to discuss her work on Abu al-Salt and the historiography of intellectual culture in the medieval Mediterranean.
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with Sarah Stein
hosted by Alma Heckman
Crosslisted from tajine
The 1870 Crémieux Decree extended French citizenship to most, but not all, of Algeria's Jewish population. The Jews of the M'zab Valley were excluded from this legislation. As Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein explains in this episode, this was due to a complex web of historical confluences including the chronology of conquest, shifting military and administrative structures for French Algerian rule, and perceptions of Jewish, Arab and Berber indigeneity. This story, while anchored in the local, participates in wider discussions of international Jewish philanthropies, decolonization, citizenship, belonging and marginality amid rapidly shifting global conditions.
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