25 Oct. Alan Mikhail (Yale) and Neelam Khoja (Yale)

4:00-5:15 Alan Mikhail “Columbus the Muslim”

Alan Mikhail is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt whose research and teaching focus mostly on the history of empires and environments. Professor Mikhail is the author of three books and over thirty articles. He recently received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His book Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2017) received the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014) won the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize from the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. His first book, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), received three prizes, including the Roger Owen Award of the Middle East Studies Association. His articles have been recognized by the Alice Hamilton and Leopold-Hidy Prizes of the American Society for Environmental History, the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award of the Agricultural History Society, and the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. He has also reviewed for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Abstract: Christopher Columbus lived the vast majority of his life in a Mediterranean world in which the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires dominated the eastern part of the sea and were in constant economic, political, and confrontational interaction with the Christian states of Europe. This talk considers the importance of Islam in shaping Columbus’s life and voyages. In doing so, it thinks critically about the role of Islam in the Spanish decision to send him across the ocean and in the early history of the Spanish Caribbean. It furthermore uses this Muslim history of Columbus to suggest ways of analyzing early modern periodization and the place of Islam in the making of the modern world.

5:30-6:45 Neelam Khoja “Genealogical Affiliations and Territories: Mughal Placement of Afghans”

Neelam Khoja is a historian of trans-imperial and trans-regional early modern and modern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Her research interests include political and social history of Muslim empires and nation-states within the Persianate zone from the 16th-20th centuries. Khoja received her doctorate from Harvard University in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department and holds Master’s degrees in Islamic Studies from Claremont Graduate University and Harvard Divinity School. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. She is working on her first monograph, tentatively titled, Known Geographies: Afghan Sovereigns, Space, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Iran and Hindustan.

Abstract: As early as the fifteenth century, authors and historians used “Afghan” as a category of belonging and identity. Within the larger Afghan collective there existed different genealogies. A person would be associated to the larger community of Afghan who shared the same real, fabricated, or imagined genealogy. The members of the larger community, did not necessarily have to be related to each other by blood; rather, their inclusion could be based on shared occupations, such as serving in the army, or based on political allegiance and physical proximity to a ruler. In secondary scholarship, scholars have used the word “tribe, clan, or kinship” when describing the Afghans. Inadvertently, the association of Afghans as being “tribal” has de-legitimized Afghan contributions to historiography due to misreading and mistrusting primary sources written by Afghans, especially in the early modern period.

This presentation troubles the usage of “tribe, clan, and/or kinship” and introduces the term “genealogical affiliation.” It underlines that a genealogy—even if it was not real—was imagined and invoked by people within and without the group, and underscores people actively affiliated with said genealogy, whether they were born into it or not. In Mughal sources, these genealogical groups were further associated with certain territories. Through closely reading Mughal sources, beginning with the Bāburnāma, the presentation maps where the Afghans were located and how they moved from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The aim of the presentation is to trace genealogies associated with territories in and around Iran and Hindustan, and how the Mughal referred to and represented the Afghans.