by Alan Mikhail
SELIM LED THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE along a similar set of dual paths, as he amplified the importance of personal piety while at the same time reformulating his society’s religious institutions. His conquests of 1516 and 1517 not only made his empire a majority-Muslim state for the first time in its history, they also delivered to the Ottomans cities—including Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina—with long and proud traditions of Muslim culture and learning. These ancient cities housed the Muslim world’s most significant institutions—the mosques of Mecca and Medina, al-Azhar in Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, to name only a few—and thus challenged the Ottomans to demonstrate their own piety. Having seized mostly Christian territories to this point, and having included so many converted Christians in their imperial administration, the Ottomans, even as conquerors, had to prove their Islamic credentials if they wanted to win the loyalty of their new and mostly Arab Muslim populations.
By becoming caliph almost overnight in 1517, Selim faced the profound challenge of being the foremost defender of the faith. Embracing this new imperative, he responded swiftly by becoming more visibly Islamic in his person and actions—through his dress, his insistence on the use of the title caliph as coequal with sultan, and his patronage of religious sites, for example. At the same time, he remade one of the most widespread, centrally organized religious institutions in the Muslim world, the Islamic court system. These courts, already situated in nearly every major neighborhood of every city and small town of the empire, were extremely effective and highly visible imperial outposts, the most immediate interface between the empire and its subjects.
Muslim political authorities—in a structure somewhat akin to the American legal system—appointed judges and oversaw the function of these courts. Sharia—the unified body of Islamic legal prescripts that began to be formed during the Prophet’s lifetime and was largely codified in Islam’s first two centuries—served, in theory at least, as the basis of the rule of law. Because sharia was so vast and complex a corpus of legal knowledge and practice, it afforded judges enormous flexibility in exercising their personal judgment; rulings often had only the thinnest of connections to sharia. Thus, for centuries before 1517, local judges had exercised largely autonomous and individualized control, essentially independent of state power, based on their own interpretation of sharia as well as on traditional practices, legal precedent, and sometimes even coercion.
After 1517, Selim revolutionized this system, unifying under a more formal administration the network of courts spread out across both the old Ottoman Empire and the vast territories he had just conquered from the Mamluks. Decades earlier, as governor of Trabzon, he had accomplished something similar, on a much smaller scale. By expanding the administrative purview and governing capacities of the courts, he converted them into strong projections of state power, transforming institutions that were, in theory, upholders of sharia law into secular bodies of governance that dealt with a wide range of issues often having little to do with Islamic law. Like Luther in his attempt to reform the Catholic Church, Selim aimed to make the institution of the Islamic law court a social body that served people’s everyday needs.
With his promulgation of a new imperial legal code, Selim secularized the courts to make them more accessible and relevant. Serving multiple functions, they now combined the roles of a local public records office, a police station, a forum for public shaming, and an agency for dispute resolution. Recast almost as Ottoman embassies in nearly every urban district and rural locale throughout the empire, the courts helped to win over newly conquered populations—Jews and Christians as well as Muslims—by steadily demonstrating that the Ottomans’ imperial presence could improve the material and personal conditions of their daily lives. In court, one could protect major assets, adjudicate an estate, accuse a spouse of adultery, or register the costs of a new construction project. Above all, Selim’s reforms allowed Ottoman subjects, for the first time, to create permanent and protected public records of their local community’s affairs that they could summon during a later dispute or otherwise reference when needed. Thus, the courts came to serve as valuable repositories of communal history and memory.
Contrary to popular thinking and both recent and older assertions otherwise—by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (many of whom, conveniently, are either Muslims or ex-Muslims)—Islam did in fact undergo a reformation. Selim’s Islamic Reformation formulated new ways for Islam and Islamic institutions to function in a changing world. Because of the unique status he had earned for himself, Selim was the only ruler capable of leading such a program of reform, the only Muslim monarch able to adapt the civilization and institutions of Islam to stand as universal principles of governance. His retooling of the court system for worldly rule represented one of the most monumental administrative reforms ever undertaken in Islamic history, one that positioned the Ottomans at the center of a global movement of religious reformation in the early sixteenth century.
IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that Martin Luther and Sultan Selim embarked upon major reforms of their religious cultures almost simultaneously. Both agendas were responses to the same set of global exigencies. Moreover, what each man did shaped the thoughts and actions of the other, as if in musical counterpoint. The Ottoman Empire’s military successes revealed Christian weakness and exposed the corruption of its ideology; in turn, the apocalyptic fervor of the imperial rivalries of the early sixteenth century pushed the Ottomans to define themselves more vigorously and directly as the vanguard of global Islam after 1517. Luther saw affinities between his own ideas and Islam; Selim and his successors saw in the Protestant Reformation a further rift in Europe that they could exploit to their advantage. The splintering of Christendom that resulted from the increasingly violent Protestant–Catholic conflict allowed the Ottomans, under Suleyman, to win massive territorial gains, especially in southeastern Europe. Thus, even as professed ideological enemies, Luther’s Christians and Selim’s Muslims ultimately marched in synchronicity toward their religious reformations, each ever-mindful of the other.
As Selim and Luther sought to remake older religious institutions into practical bodies that served the needs and interests of the individuals in their charge, each fought an internecine battle that forced him to define and defend his own vision of society and the world, as well as to argue vociferously for why it should triumph over the rival worldview. All the aspirants in this struggle for world domination—Selim and Luther and their corresponding enemies, the Safavids and the Catholic Church—developed ideas of universality and proclaimed themselves the sole sovereign power that would rule the globe after the end-times. Sunnis and Shiites and Protestants and Catholics all fused religion to politics, making their wars not only about empire but also about eternity. The Ottomans, however, were singular among these states, because they initiated this political and religious struggle for world domination—winning territory that led their enemies to predict that the ultimate battle was nigh, proving the bankruptcy of the supposed divinity of various imperial rulers, and challenging the notion that God was on the side of anyone other than themselves.
Many Muslims today ignore the fact, or simply do not know, that Sultan Selim led a reformation in Islam almost half a millennium ago. Similarly, though the world’s Protestants may not recognize or accept it, their history and success owe a major debt to the Ottoman Empire.
CHAPTER
25
AMERICAN SELIM
John Smith’s map of Virginia, with his coat of arms depicting three severed Turkish heads
SEEING THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS IN THE LIGHT OF THE RISE of the Ottoman Empire offers an alternative narrative to the dominant interpretation, which pretends that Islam played no role in Europe’s expansion to the New World. As we have seen, Columbus was a man of his time, driven by the zeal of Crusade, as was his patron, Queen Isabella; and the Spanish, obsessed by the threat of Islam, imported those fears to the New World.
The notion of Islam as a specter looming over the New World has—most often, quite irrationally—coursed through the history of the Americas in an unbroken line from the period of Spanish colonization to the present day. No group has been vilified for longer in the Americas than Muslims.
AS EVERY SCHOOLCHILD LEARNS, Columbus set sail with India on his mind’s horizon. Rarely, though, do schoolchildren learn why Columbus sought to cross the Atlantic. Hoping for an alliance with the Grand Khan of the East, he aimed to retake Jerusalem and destroy Islam; more prosaically, his voyages promised an end run around the trade monopolies of the Ottomans and the Mamluks. And when Columbus arrived in the Americas, fresh from the battle which marked Spain’s final defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, he saw—or, more accurately, imagined—Muslims everywhere. Spanish conquistadors would claim to see mosques in Mexico, American Indians wearing “Moorish” clothing and performing “Moorish” dances, Turks invading New Spain from the Pacific, and West African slaves attempting to convert America’s indigenous peoples to Islam. Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a new version of their very old Crusades, a new kind of Catholic jihad. Long after the many Matamoros—Moor-slayers—who sailed to the Americas aboard Columbus’s ships were dead themselves, Islam would continue to forge the histories of both Europe and the New World and the relationship between the two.
On either side of the unambiguous watershed represented by the year 1492, Islam endured as Europe’s primary obsession, its perennial rival and major cultural “other”—a spur of innovative historical change as well as an enemy on the battlefield. Throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, Europe remained far more concerned about the Ottomans and Islam than about the lands across the Atlantic. Remarkable, in fact, is the apparent lack of interest in the Americas among most Europeans. Spain’s Charles V, for example—the leader most responsible for his empire’s enormous expansion in the New World—uttered not a word about the Americas in his memoirs. What obsessed him were the Ottoman advances in Europe and his fears about the growing weakness of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam. Sixteenth-century France produced twice as many books about Islam as it did about the Americas and Africa combined. Overall, between 1480 and 1609, Europe published four times more works about the Muslim world than about the Americas. This disparity only increased over the course of the seventeenth century.
Following the lead of their Spanish predecessors in the New World, the British a century later initially understood American Indians through their own history of encounters with Muslims in Europe and the Mediterranean. Before it ever set sail across the Atlantic, that quintessential symbol of British arrival in North America, the Mayflower, had begun its seafaring life trading with Muslims in the Mediterranean. And before he crossed the Atlantic, John Smith, the founder of Jamestown in 1607, spent several swashbuckling years helping to beat back the Ottomans in Hungary and Wallachia (now part of Romania). The Ottomans captured him in 1602 and held him enslaved for two years before he managed to escape. Later, when he became Admiral of New England, Smith named three islands across from Cape Cod “the three Turkes heads,” and he dubbed what is today Cape Ann “Cape Tragabigzanda,” after a young woman with whom he had fallen in love while serving her family as a slave. Smith’s personal coat of arms—like the one Melchor de Castro drew up after the 1521 Wolof Rebellion in Hispaniola—featured the severed heads of three Turks he had supposedly killed while fighting in eastern Europe. “The lamentable noise of the miserable slaughtered Turkes,” he wrote, “was most wonderfull to heare.” In addition to his account of his travels around the Mediterranean and works on Virginia and New England, Smith produced the first map of Virginia, with his coat of arms proudly displayed in the bottom right corner. Thus, more than a century after Piri Reis drew the first world map to join the Americas to the Old World, the Ottomans appeared yet again—in very different circumstances—on one of the first maps of North America. Beneath the three heads on his crest, Smith emblazoned his favorite Latin dictum: Vincere est vivere (To conquer is to live).
And conquer Smith most certainly did. He would soon add hundreds of Indian heads to his gruesome tally from the Old World. Like the Spanish conquistadors, Smith and countless other Englishmen who arrived to fight in America had already battled, traded with, or otherwise engaged the Ottomans and other Muslims in the Mediterranean. William Strachey, Virginia’s secretary, had spent time in Istanbul a few years before going to Jamestown, and George Sandys, eventually the colony’s treasurer, had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire—to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Egypt—and had written a bestselling account of his adventures. Although one might assume they would have known better, these Britons repeated Spanish assertions from a century earlier about Muslim connections across the Atlantic—for example, again, that Native American dancing somehow had roots in Old World Muslim dances. They also filtered their understanding of the New World through their earlier personal experiences. Strachey drew parallels between Indian deerskin leggings and “the fashion of the Turkes.” Smith wrote, “If any great commander arrive at the habitation of a Werowance [chief], they spread a mat as the Turkes do a carpet for him to sit upon.”
The Ottoman Empire affected the English colonization of America in other ways as well. In the seventeenth century, many of the thousands of English Protestants who crossed the ocean would cite two evils as the reasons for their flight: the injustices and discrimination of their Catholic coreligionists and the scourge of the Muslim Ottomans. In 1621, for instance, Robert Cushman, a passenger on the Mayflower, wrote of the promise of America as a refuge from an Old World then in the grip of the Protestant–Catholic Thirty Years’ War: “If it should please God to punish his people in the Christian countries of Europe, for their coldness, carnality, wanton abuse of the Gospel, contention, &c., either by Turkish slavery, or by popish tyranny, (which God forbid) . . . here is a way opened for such as have wings to fly into this wilderness.” As Luther had done at the very start of the Protestant Reformation, Cushman here speaks simultaneously of two enemies: pope and sultan. Persecuted by papal tiara and sultanic turban, he saw America as his salvation from both.
The road to that salvation was not straightforward. Only after a century or so of abysmal living conditions, rampant death, few profits, and apparently only a fleeting possibility of permanent settlement in the Americas, did the English succeed in making some small territorial gains. Some even began to turn a profit along the western Atlantic coast. Though Native Americans were frequently—understandably—hostile to the settlers, negotiation eventually proved possible, and what settlers could not accomplish through these means they attained by subjugating those whose land they felt entitled to take by virtue of their superiority as Christians. Slow though the progress of these fledgling colonies was, when juxtaposed with their ongoing skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire and Barbary pirates in North Africa, the English experience in North America was, by the end of the seventeenth century, beginning to look like a resounding success.
In the course of that century, North Africa remained the primary locale of England’s overseas operations. With its storied riches of gold, slaves, and spices, North Africa attracted more English adventurers in the seventeenth century than North America did. Some of these adventurers succeeded in earning handsome profits, but many more succumbed to the entrenched power of North Africa’s numerous independent sovereigns and pirate captains. Barbary pirates regularly captured English ships in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic (many of them sailing to and from the Americas) and enslaved those on board. Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century, there were more enslaved Englishmen in North Africa than free ones in North America. “Conquerors in Virginia, they were slaves in Algiers,” as the scholar Nabil Matar nicely summarizes.
In 1699, the infamous Puritan minister Cotton Mather bemoaned the fate of those prospective New England settlers taken into North A
frican slavery. “God hath given up several of our Sons, into the Hands of the Fierce Monsters of Africa. Mahometan Turks and Moors, and Devils are at this day oppressing many of our Sons, with a Slavery, wherein they Wish for Death, and cannot find it.” Mather—a slaveholder himself—thus drew a direct line between the English colonial project he represented in America and the Muslims of the Mediterranean. At the same time that he attacked North African slavery, he expressed no qualms about—and, in fact, encouraged—the American and English enslavement of African Muslims and non-Muslims. Moreover, Mather believed it was the duty of all Christians to contribute to the annihilation of the Ottoman Empire, in order to precipitate the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel in Palestine, a vital prerequisite for the second coming of Christ.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the conquest of North America would stand as the ultimate model of English colonial warfare. Given their divergent fortunes in their two main theaters of war, success in Virginia and New England made it easier for the English to abandon their largely failed efforts at commerce and settlement in North Africa. They would, however, return in the early nineteenth century to colonize parts of the Middle East. When the Ottomans pushed Europe out of the Mediterranean around 1500, they obviously had no inkling of the violent fury with which it would one day return.
THIS TRANSATLANTIC CRISSCROSSING OF war, cultural denigration, and colonization between Europe and Islam, Old World and New, had, as we have seen, already begun in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And even as the American colonies began to assert their independence from England, phantom Muslims continued to lurk in North America. Like the Spanish and English before them, the founders of the United States saw Islam where it did not exist. The largest group of Muslims in North America in the mid-eighteenth century were slaves. While estimates vary, Muslims might have constituted up to a tenth of the African slave population of North America between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet, given their racial bondage and scattered demography, they clearly posed no “Islamic threat” to the burgeoning American republic.
