Ottoman History Podcast - A Sea of Sorcery: Roundtable with Shannon Chakraborty

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

produced by Shireen Hamza and featuring Fahad Bishara, KD Thompson, Liana Saif, Mahmood Kooria, Rebecca Hankins, and Samantha Pellegrino | What could historians have to say about a fantasy novel? The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in 2023, follows an aging mother and captain on magical adventures across the twelfth-century Indian Ocean world with her crew. It has been read widely, hitting bestseller lists in the US and being translated into eight languages. In this episode, a group of historians discusses the novel with its author, Shannon Chakraborty. Our conversation covers gender and geography, language and literature, piety and piracy, and of course, magic.    « Click for More »

In February 23, American novelist Shannon Chakrabarty published a fantasy novel set in the 12th century Indian Ocean world. It follows a middle-aged pirate, Amina Asirafi, on a magical maritime adventure with her motley crew from Sokotra to Solala, from Qadishu to the Maldives. Now, I think this is an exciting time and place, but I usually have to convince people of that. Shannon's novel, The Adventures of Amina Asirafi, has done it. Having made it onto bestseller lists here in the U.S., it is also being translated into eight languages, including Arabic and Turkish.

I asked a group of historians with relevant expertise to read the novel. Together, we wrote a series of essays on this question. What do you wish readers of this novel knew about history? You can listen to these historians read their essays in full in this series. Or you can read them on the website of Al-Aursur al-Wustat, the Journal of Middle East Medievalists. In this episode, we sit down with novelist Shannon Chekker-Barty to discuss our essays and the novel. I think there's a loss of compassion sometimes. When we look at the lived practices of things people did 200 to 300 years ago, they were ignorant. That's haram. That's obviously forbidden

to make that little amulet. I think we should give a bit more credit and compassion to people in the past. Our conversation covers gender and geography, language and literature, piety, and piracy, and of course, magic. Just a warning, both this conversation and the essays are full of spoilers. This is the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Shireen Hamza. I wanted to put together this table because I thought to myself when I first found out about this novel being published, this is going to be the most popular book about the medieval Indian Ocean that will be published possibly in my lifetime. And as much as I delight in the work of historians, our work just reaches a much smaller audience than the work of fantasy writers, of fiction writers. And so I

feel really grateful that Shannon wrote this book and gave us the opportunity to read it, bringing our interests, our historical interests to bear on the novel. And I thought that maybe this is a conversation that other readers of the book would like to hear. So I'm going to pass the microphone over to our contributors to this roundtable on the Adventures of Amina Asiravi. Rebecca, would you like to go? Thank you for having me be a part of this wonderful panel. I am a professor at Texas A&M University.

I've been here going on 22 years. I teach in the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Global Languages and Cultures. I particularly do research and teach about popular culture in Africana, studies and religious studies, but I also look at Muslims broadly to international and national, but mostly dealing with African American, the depiction of African American Muslims and their identity construction in popular culture.

So I'm Samantha Pellegrino and I've just finished my doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School in Islamic Studies. My research focuses specifically on the history of magic and occult sciences in an Arab-o-Islamic context in early medieval one, and especially the alchemical and magical corpus of Jabra bin Hayan, and its relationships to discourse on craft and artifice and wonder. I also routinely teach a course titled Magic Marbles and Wonder in Arabic literature at Loyola University, Chicago, and so I'm especially excited to be here to talk about themes from that course as well as my research and how they rhymed and resonated with this novel.

And so thank you so much again, Shereen, for inviting me. It's really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'll pass it to Leanna. Yes, I am very grateful to be part of this wonderful team of authors and scholars. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam in religious studies, but also as part of the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy, and related currents. And I guess from this, you can surmise that I work on things that are hermetic, esoteric, and

the occult in the Islamic and Islamic context, with a focus on the medieval context. However, I also work on the entanglements, global entangements of the occult sciences and Islamic esotericism in Europe. but also beyond that. Lovely. Yeah, thank you. And Katie, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, yeah, thank you for the invitation to participate today. My name is K.D. Thompson, my pronouns are they, them.

I'm a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Religious Studies. And I'm a linguistic anthropologist. My research focuses on language use in Muslim communities, mainly among Swahili-speaking Muslims in East Africa. in East Africa, as well as among queer-inclusive Muslim groups in North America. Happy to be here, looking forward to the conversation. Wonderful.

And I would love to give Shannon a chance to introduce herself as well. My name is Shannon Chakraborty. I'm a historical fantasy writer from New York City. First, I just want to thank everyone for reading my book and writing such wonderful and incisive comments. And for Shereen, putting this together. A little bit about my background, I joke that I am. a waylaid academic because my plans to go study the medieval Indian ocean world were sort of

displaced by successfully publishing a novel and now that's my job so this something like this is very much a dream for me to have to finally discuss these things i love with actual experts well the pleasure is is all ours um i think that your book has brought up a lot of really relevant themes and as sam said resonances for all of us with our work We're going to have some time for each of us to discuss the essays that were inspired by the Adventures of Amina Sarafi, followed by some Q&A with each other, and also any questions that come up for Shannon as we speak. So to get us started, before we jump right into the medieval and the pre-modern, I would love

to ask Rebecca to speak a little bit about her research on the history of Muslim science fiction and fantasy novels and contemporary fiction written by Muslim authors. So I come out of, first of all, let me say this, I come out of a library archival background, so I'm a trained archivist. Also trained to be a historian, one of the first things I noticed that Texas A&M's their science fiction and fantasy collection is that there was very little that related to African American, science fiction and fantasy, and even unless that dealt with Muslims and Islam. And I kept saying, how could that possibly be

when we know so much of Islam has been at the forefront in terms of science fiction, fantasy, and even what Dr. Susan Ritchie calls, of the mutual influence that Islamists had on literature throughout the world, throughout generations and centuries. So this is why this novel in so many ways appealed to me because it was a challenge to those ideas that Islam and Muslims were not a part of that canon. And you see that in Dunia's library, which I love the fact that it was a library, and other aspects of the novel that puts Islam right in the center of a lot of these things. And so what I loved about the other essays is that they show that there is this through line that Islam has been a part of these discussions.

of magic and piracy and all of these things, and they're not outside of Islam. And I love the character of Amina El Serafi as someone who sees herself in many ways having to fight the stereotypes of who is Muslim and who is not constantly because I used to do this presentation on campus that said that I'm black, I'm Muslim, I'm a woman, am I a part of who you see as Islam?

I always ask my, when you talk about Islam, do you see an African-American Muslim? And so those identities that I capture resonated so much with me with Amina L. Surafi in terms of who gets to wear that moniker. I would love to know, Rebecca, in your piece, you talked a little bit about futurism. And even though this novel is about the medieval past, I think it was super fascinating to put it in conversation with a broader set of novels by Muslim authors who are imagining a different path forward or a different version of the future than what seems likely right now. Right. And I do think that there's been a number of essays that talked about, are there Muslims in the future?

And this whole notion of, especially Afrofuturism, which is on this area that I've written about too, is, are there black people in the future? In terms of, you know, black history that is trying to be erased as we see daily. I mean, science fiction and fantasy offers that opportunity to imagine a world. For me, speculative fiction and what I call fictional Islam really pushes against this whole notion that our future is determined by someone else's understanding of who we are. And so when I think of speculative fiction, it is a... time of can we start to question the past and question the future and how we are determining

what that future will look like. In terms of being in conversation with other writers, I see so much of this novel fitting in with Saladin Ahmed's work. Throne of the Crescent Moon, similar ideas within it, and also G. Willa Wilson's work on the Bird King, you see very, very similar. Not the same and definitely adventure tales all three of these that are really fascinating because they also center Muslim characters, but they also look at gender fluidity. They look at gay characters also. So I definitely would encourage you to look at that. But the other thing is Cassandra Jones' Black Speculative Feminisms is a new book that she wrote. And there's so much in that book where she is in, she's talking about this restorative, critical fabulation, which I think is really fascinating.

And you see this whole notion of re-remembering that I think your work could be very much in conversation with the whole idea of conjure women that we see in Tatarib Dool's work and Naila Hopkins' work. And so I do think that there are black women writers, black feminist writers out there. Of course, Octavia Butler, also Nydia Corifor, especially women. And we're talking about the continent and making those connections to females who are also a real challenge to the patriarchal idea. So definitely we just wanted to put you on to some of those resources out there and be in conversation with some of these writers. Oh, my God, Oh my God! Oh my God!

Bradley! You're going to be. I'm going to be. Oh, yeah. And even some of the language that is used, part of the language that is used, part of what is not spoken about about in terms of what is not spoken about in terms of of Amina is this notion of darkness, of blackness, and I think that that is something that I was wondering is not included oftentimes in these novels when you are absolutely referencing an African continent.

You know, so many of the writers that I look at are looking at a specific idea of what blackness is and trying to understand how do we determine what is black and how do we define blackness is something that I really think, especially in the Muslim world, where oftentimes blackness is considered less than, not just in the Muslim world, was all over us. But it is something that I think the Muslim world has not really answered for. It's something that the novel absolutely doesn't shy away from. There are moments where anti-blackness, definitely, which had its own certain kind of manifestation in the pre-modern world, does surface in the novel as well. So thank you for taking us right there. And as you said,

it's a beautiful transition over to KD's piece on Swahili. Thank you. So my piece looks at your references to various places on the Swahili coast and tries to pull on some of the historical references we have to those places and what they were like, which you obviously drew on as well. People, you know, travelers like Ibn Batuta, as well as your references to language. although you don't mention Swahili specifically which I'm kind of curious about why you didn't but we know that many of the characters are meant to be speaking Arabic or different dialects of

Arabic and so they can understand each other throughout this region and I was interested in how even some of the supernatural characters like the Paris interaction so on are also meant to be speaking Arabic. So it's interesting to think about language as not just belonging to people, but also to other kinds of beings in the world and how we can communicate across not only ethnic and linguistic barriers, but also maybe these kind of worldly and other worldly borders between different types of beings. But I was also struck, I didn't talk about this in my essay, but this question that Rebecca brought up about not identifying Amina as black, even though she's from Pemba, which is part of the Swahili Coast, and kind of what

you imagined her ethnic identity to be, or her racialized identity, or however you want to think about that. That's so fascinating that you brought. that up because when we look at Arabic speakers there are more African Arabic speakers than our Arab Arabic speakers and so this whole notion that you can't be an Arabic speaker and be black is something too that adds some complexity to Amina's character and this connection like you said to the Swahili well she clearly does speak Arabic as well but

I just, I assume she must also speak so. You know, it's interesting. And this is one of those situations where I looked at the essays and I'm like, I'm going to have an expert. Maybe I shall learn something because a lot of what I wanted to do when I put together this novel was place it in the context of the 12th century. And what did it look like? What did language and identity mean back then versus how do we think about it in the modern

period and put sort of our ideas on that? And it was interesting because I very much wanted to use. use Swahili. I knew immediately it would be a marker for readers who maybe don't know so much about the region that they'd know Swahili where they wouldn't necessarily know Zanzibar or Kila. But I was, from my reading, and now maybe I'm going to learn something, I didn't get the impression that there was a sort of an understood Swahili identity or language yet in the 1140s, that this was sort of kind of all melding together and becoming something that would be. be that in even the next century or so. So I'm very curious, like, I would love to learn more

about that. And in terms of identity, I really wanted to make Amina a daughter of this sea. I think there's, we don't have a lot of references to, you know, what we would think of as blue collar or working class members, let alone sailors living these lives where they travel from place to place but usually in history and even in modern examples these are diaspora communities they're mixed communities i think amina would have spoken arabic but i think on her ship they would have been speaking a creole um it would have have had persian it would have had arabic it would have had words from sort of maritime languages all around the coast um so it's it's interesting to kind of look at different elements of that of what does she see herself as well what would have sort of

more power in that time and day. And I think looking at some of the travelogues, yes, the fact that she came from this patriarchal Arabic-speaking line that had roots in the Arabian Peninsula in the time, and I would argue in good ways and bad ways, still today, of course, in, you know, Islamic communities, it can be seen as a sign of lineage and nobility to be from some of these places to have, you know, your grandfather, he was a pirate, but hey, he was an Arabic speaker from the Arabian Peninsula. So I thought that would that's an interesting idea to come from all of these peoples and sort of what aspects of your identity of her identity would she choose to sort of bring up to the to the primal point. Yeah, I mean you bring up an interesting question about when people

started to think of themselves as Swahili. I think the language definitely existed at the, in the time period that you're talking about, we know that it was spoken in Mogadishu, for example, even from Ibn Batuta's tribal acts that's mentioned, although it's referred to by a different word. I mean, identity is a little more ambiguous because even in contemporary times, Swahili identity means a lot of different things to different people. But, but it comes from the Arabic word for coast. So, you know, people who were traveling around that region were using it as an edict term to refer to people on the coast in the language that they spoke. So it's not clear, you know, how many people would have self-identified with that term. They might

have identified with more localized terms about ethnicity or location and so on, rather than calling themselves Swahili but definitely the language that they spoke um would have well again i guess we don't know the label but would have been what um you know very close to what swahili is today even if it wasn't referred to by that label it's hard that was a challenge throughout all different elements of the novel was i think we just think in such a different way of borders and places now myself constantly thinking, well, how much would they have thought of this united Islamic world, the UMA? Like how, you know, like that, that goes through different periods of transitions. What does it mean to think you're part of this or part of that? And it was sort of wondering,

you know, I feel like from when we look at the past, they're like you said, localized. Like what does that mean to be from that place that 100 years later might have a greater term? Absolutely. I think this conversation really points out the, um, the many uncertainties of the archives and of the desires that we bring to it to know people who were not elite in the medieval period. And I think we'll keep coming back to that. But I would love to pass this over to Sam if you would like to say a little bit about your essay about magic. This essay I thought did such a great job of grounding us in, the kind of politics of writing about magic in the medieval Islamic world.

Sure. Thanks, Shereen. So my essay talks about, yeah, the politics of what it is to talk about magic and magic specifically as a discrete category that is different from categories like science and religion. The point that I'm picking up from is actually the aforementioned library scene and sort of the different lineages of magical influence that are present in that library that range from the vernacular to the very elite. And sort of, I use that as a jumping off point to talk a bit about just how magical would the, or was the medieval Islamic and Islamicit world as compared to Amina Saraffi's world. And in talking about that, it becomes necessary to talk about how magic was understood as

something different in medieval context than we understand it now, or rather, the term that we use for magic doesn't have exactly a linguistic equivalent and a lot of this gets down to sort of the the historiography of how we talk about again what today is very much kind of delineated into into separate categories of magic and science and religion where there are much there the overlaps between those categories don't don't track exactly and there's a specific history to how and why this becomes the case and the history of science is certainly involved in those disciplinary breakdowns, the history of religious studies as well. But the long and short of

it really is that what we understand to be magic for the medieval Islamic world is, again, a broad category that encapsulates occult sciences, that encapsulates vernacular practices that taps into things that we might today term religious, but really, again, there's such a a blending and a melding of these terms. And a lot of my work and my interest is in, again, sort of picking apart the historiography of this and challenging the ways in which contemporary assumptions are that these are discrete and separate.

When, in fact, they are really imbricated with each other as categories, and they shape each other. They make each other as categories. You really don't get one without the other. That's essentially the gist of the essay. I had written down a few observations, building out of my essay, but also out of my experience, as I said before, I teach a magic marbles and wonder class, which taps directly into that line. The first thing is the idea of wonder and horror being distinctly related, kind of flip sides of the same coin.

And you find this in medieval literature when you have, you know, an a frit who demands your life and recompense for killing his son with a date pit a la El Lela. You find this in, we could even talk about sort of the Ajab Wahraib, like the marble. and the strangeness, the wonders and oddities, that genre of literature that discusses these different ideas. There's this pairing of what is both wonderful in sort of the positive valence and also potentially strange, potentially negative, potentially scary. And this comes up in modern literature as well.

I'm thinking here specifically of one of my favorite books, Frankenstein in Baghdad, which really plays with this idea. Of course, this theme is also present in the adventures of Amina al-Sarafi. I'm thinking about how we're introduced to Amina fighting off a demon in a lake. I'm thinking about the merit. I'm thinking even about the court of birds, their ethics, the sort of ambiguity of this wonder, horror nature, about Raqsh. And even Amina herself, and I think this is a place where I'd love to hear a bit from Liana talking about gender.

And I think this taps in actually to some of what Rebecca's been saying, too, about racialization, right? Amina is a wonder, but also sometimes a terror. her legend pulls from both of these ideas. And so an observation that I had is about the way that wonder has, how we understand it, has changed over time and culturally. And I think this novel plays with an understanding of wonder that draws from again a medieval context by virtue of when it's set, but I have the suspicion, Shannon, that you are also doing some of that work intentionally.

Yes, I think that was very intentional on my part, because I think, In so many stories, in stories we tell now, in stories we told 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, there is that balance of, we say something, oh, that old woman, she has this sorceress magic and she said all these terrible things, or that island of strangers that don't look like us, they tie knots in the trees, and it makes our ship go array. And I find those stories fascinating, but with this book, I very much wanted to see the flip side to let that supposedly monstrous old woman have her say. And all of that was very intentional. And in the book, I actually tried to pair some of those, the historical account,

who gets to write what your story was, somebody from a different country, a different language, a different time, a different class, whereas you and your people and your ways of life will now be memorized as some sort of scandalous, lewd, sorceress pack of people who live on the beach and don't dress appropriately and don't know how to slaughter their meat. And I wanted to let those people give their take on that. So that was very much my intention. But at the same time, and I think we'll get into this further with ideas of magic, there is that element of both horror and wonder.

And I feel like that's a very human aspect to both look out at the world and see its wonders and see magic in that, but also fear that. And I think that play comes into how we look at. lot at these elements. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also the ability, there's great potential for using that, again, that sort of flip side, that pairing of horror and wonder for commentary as well. You mentioned it being such a human thing. And I think that a lot of the contemporary examples that I really admire that take this up in literature, yours included, play with again how that becomes a commentary, how the human nature of that, that wonder and horror simultaneously can

speak to other, to other broader issues, broader aspects of society, that sort of thing. So, of course, one of the things that indeed struck me about the construction of Amina's identity is her uncanny nature, right? Her liminality. She occupies a realm between land and sea, between society and outside it. And also, she has this alluring. yet repulsive monstrosity and that's why in my contribution I picked up on the character

of or rather the legend of Aisha Kandisha the Jinn because she lures and attracts men into her liquid fields and at the same time

she's also half woman half a non-human animal So this liminality is, I think, very well expressed in the novel. And it, you know, Amina lives between the tension in all of this. And the way that I personally, on a very personal level, connected to Amina, is in the reception of what I do as a Muslim scholar.

A recent example of that is the reception of some of the interviews that I give online, for example, and seeing the comments that usually grace those channels. And a lot of it is appreciative, but also a lot of it is just people not knowing what to make of me. So at last, in a recent interview online, there was a comment that said, interesting subject, I thought we'll have a Muslim scholar instead we had a witch. And I found that fantastic. I was not offended. And it just made me realize that there is some people who cannot reconcile my scholarship, probably also my appearance, probably at how they identify my own gender, as someone who is capable of talking about magic also from a less monstrous place, from a rational place,

from a male place. And so that made me feel that I also occupy this place. And to be honest, I'm playful enough to play with it. And so it always intrigues me that I do not compute as a Muslim scholar, and what is expected is either for my knowledge to be read as a knowledge of a witch rather than a scholar, which as I said, I like to play with it. I don't like to be offended by it. And also this ties in, I think, indirectly with what Rebecca was saying about, you know, who counts as Muslim?

And in many cases, I don't, because of my scholarship on magic, but also I fully am aware, it's like also my ethnic ambiguity as well as a white passing Arab. I feel like that puts me in a similar liminal space, but also in a more like in the professional context, the study of magic and the study of the occult, you know, have only recently been integrated into a more mainstream academic outlook, I would say. So there was always this tension of, is what I do to niche, is what I do too liminal, too marginal, to occult, to esoteric. And so I tried to see that reflection in the novel. And it just ties in to what we were

talking earlier about, you know, the gnarliness of identity and with that gnarliness comes a darkness as well. So, you know, I guess as a Muslim scholar who works on the occult and on magic, I feel that also there is a threatening aspect of that where power of having knowledge of magic remains threatening. The most extreme reflection of that is obviously the tahrim of what I do, you know, is that, you know, a lot of the times, again, you can see that on public comments, the thing of like, you're talking about it historically, you're approaching it from religious studies perspective and history of science, and most of the comments would go like, but it's haram, but we should not talk about this because it is haram and what is this witch talking about? It is just haram, and it's like there's this. assumption that I also have no knowledge about like the theological complexity of of the practices themselves. And it's and it's so much about power in so many ways. And this whole idea that speculative fiction, magic, all of these things that we're talking about are the profane

versus the sacred and we're constantly being told that what we're, we're doing is profane. It's not important. And I think it's all a matter of power. And it's just this whole notion that if you are dealing with imagination and creativity, I mean, it mirrors so much of what we're facing here at Dase and A&M where critical thinking is under attack. It's all wrapped up into these ideas of what Muslims can or cannot do and I and I and I object strongly to those notions this came up in Rebecca when you were first discussing you know what it means to write like Muslim pop fiction so and I and who gets to be Muslim and you know I often say I very much write with

a purpose we like to say oh politics shouldn't be in books or motive shouldn't be a book I do write with with a motive of course and my primary motive especially for this book and my earlier books was quite frankly, to bring more Muslim nuance into characters. I am a Western writer writing in English. We have a slight dearth of Muslim characters. What we often do get is, you know, somebody who chucks off their veil or somebody who hates their religion. I have my oppressive father. And I wanted to write, or somebody who's perfect, I should say that, or someone who's just we're perfect in our fate. I wanted to see a Muslim who struggled, who found great meaning

in coming back to their religion at a different point because that's not something we see in a lot of portrayals of religious people at all. You either have to be perfect from the beginning or you have to cast it all aside. Well, what does it mean to come back to that, to find the compassion and orderliness in God in following the laws and find that? I wanted to sort of give a mirror. We talk about representation. We talk about what that means.

But I wanted to give a mirror to other Muslim readers who might not feel. perfect or might say hey this feels more reflective of my lived experience we can have that we should have those characters also get to go on grand adventures and on the aspect of magic I was laughing when we were discussing because I've seen all those allegations as well don't talk about this this is this is this is you know magic seer all these things and I think we should we should take a step back one because as Leon just said perfectly we There is a rich history behind this.

It is not this terrible, forbidden thing. What did it mean to centuries of Muslim scholars who had theological knowledge? 95% of us will never attain and thought there is worth in this. I think that's something, there's a reclamation to be made of that knowledge. And I also think, I think there's a loss of compassion sometimes. When we look at the lived practices of things people did 200 to 300 years ago, they were ignorant that is that's haram that's obviously forbidden to tie that string to make that little amulet i think we should give a bit more credit and compassion to people in the past i remember

and it's something that stuck with the novel a few years ago going to an exhibit on magical talismans and they had a small little amulet and it was from i believe the 14th century in cairo and it was to help babies fall asleep and i had a toddler and i have never in my life had such a pure moment of connection with this tiny little carving and or even aspects, you know, that's something like, what did it mean to suffer from mental illness 200, 300 years ago, the loss of your children? People found faith in their religion and they also found faith in rituals and practice that I think we should try to understand from a human perspective rather than immediately discount. Two things. The first one is what Samantha mentioned is that what is

the category magic. What are we talking about? Even the translation of magic as seher and seher as magic is not straightforward. And this has complications on the level of sharia. This immediate reaction, negative reaction to this also stems from a lack of noance about terminology and concept, but also the kind of like variated debates, even within the sharia and even regarding the sharia itself and how it develops these opinions. and it develops all, and how in our modern time, the attitudes about the supernatural and the magical have been kind of rigidified into a haram practice.

I'm not making a claim that I am putting it into the halal caricatory either. I'm not a theologian. That's not my expertise, but as a historian of Islam in general, I have had the privilege of understanding, for example, how Tahrim works and how how Shariah works and how post-19th century Shariah works and the effect of colonization in informing the way Sharia looks today. And so that pivoting the conversation into Haram and Halal sometimes takes us away from the past, takes us away from literally

the dynamics of how Islamic doctrine works. And the second thing is that what happens on a formal level, you know, the level, you know, the official formal level does not necessarily always reflect on the level of practices, because as you said, Shannon, there are different ways and different incentives and different reasons that people lean on these things. There is the, you know, social, sexual anxieties that come with it. And so this, this reduction I find into a, halal and haram, what it tells me is less about the theological aspect, but it tells me more about the anxieties of people towards it. And that anxiety is not just about demons are scary,

but about people scare me. The person who has magical knowledge scares me. That person places me in a place that is so liminal that I am no longer capable of categorizing this person as a Muslim, whether it was based on their knowledge, and knowledge is currency of power or whether it's based on skin color, language, all of these things. And so I like to see those conversations about haram and halal.

I like to throw it back at the people who are doing this and see what are these anxieties. And Shannon, you talk about these anxieties, the missives and the way that Amina is constantly presented as a sorcerer or Banu Sasan. It's always putting, it's reflective of, of these anxieties, and that concerns me a lot more than the formal legal legitimacy of these practices.

And I think you do show those two levels and how that works very well, I think, in the novel. I see a great moment to connect with the piece by Mahmoud Curia, who unfortunately couldn't join us today. He wrote a wonderful essay on piracy, and I just want to bring this back to Leanna's original point about liminality, where he talks about how unclear it is, really, about who among sea raiders, let's say, are pirates and who are heroes, who are protectors and who are thieves, that these lines are actually quite blurry. Even today, international law has a very blurry definition of piracy that has very limited enforceability because it is so unfixed. The example he gives about the Malabar, the Malabar coast and the naval battles

fought in the 16th century by these groups of seafaring warriors would be fascinating for readers. So I do want to plug that and ask people to check that out. And that's another moment where the language of Arabic literary sources, there's an interlude in the plot, which is a quotation from a 13th century travelogue by Ibn Mujah. And he's describing Sukhotra. It was fabulous, Shannon. I was like so happy to see you bring that translation of that passage in because, you know, it connects right back to what Sam and Leanna are pointing out, that. these old women of Sukkotra are described both as kind of like fearsome in their trickery but also kind of marvelous and strong but in that passage he uses the word surak you know from the root

sarak in arabic to talk about these pirates uh you know there's no word in arabic for pirates he's just calling them thieves but yet there's something really compelling to us about the idea of brigands and pirates. And so I appreciated the way that that was played with, because Amina would be lumped in with all of that, even though her mission was quite different in the novel, that there is this reality created by the text authored by a male traveler. And then there is the kind of richness and depth and complexity of the story itself, you know, the story about these, here's some old women. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I want to add one last note, oh, oh, oh, I want to add one last note on, on this. as well, which is just to say that the idea that magic is irreligious or religion is unscientific, this is again part of the problem of these categorizations and the way we tend to make

these discrete ideas or these discrete categories of knowledge. It's not so much actually the case, especially in the historical record that these things are so separate from each other, or that they neatly fit into the ideas of what we think, again, should be or is religious, or should be or has been scientific, or that sort of thing. That being said, one of the other things that I would love to talk about is that there's a real tension in the history of Islamic magic and the study of Islamic magic between questions of truth and even science and entertainment, truth and trickery. Occult scientists in history are so often classified alongside charlatans or street performers, whether it is true or untrue that alchemy could

turn lead into gold. Again, very often that's phrased as a truth question. Literary. Rarely we are presented with magical tales like El Fla Wa Leila that nonetheless reflect certain practices that also may have held veracity or truth value for contemporary readers. And one of my favorite things is that at the, one of my favorite things about the Adventures of Amina Sarafi is that at the very beginning we're given this frame tale where it's explicitly called out that these stories are meant to entertain. And of course, it's a publishing market, these stories are definitely meant to. entertain. But that's implicit also. One thing I would love to hear you talk about Shannon is what work is being done by voicing the purpose of these stories as entertainment? Why choose to make that claim at the start in sort of an explicit call-out? I would love to hear about that. Of course. You know, when you were speaking about the idea of charlatans, my first thought was

it's interesting because so many times we think, oh, it's the past. These stories were believed as magic and and but i recall reading um aljabari's i know basically the book of charlatans it has a couple different translations and it's a 13th century text and it is a guide to being a charlatan and it is a very very expansive guide he has ways to fake food he has ways to fake knockout gas he has ways to fake sexual perversions i'm not going to speak about on a podcast and i love this text because it plays with the idea of how much of this does he believe? Is he making this up to entertain to his audience? Is he giving it as a true guide? We know he's partially doing it for entertainment. He wants to entertain his ruler. And to me, that was the tone I wanted to have with this. I feel like

so many of these texts are saying outright, I'm only writing this for scholarship. And then they go into some of the pettiest, most scandalous, entertaining anecdotes you've ever heard in your life. It's better than things we write in the modern period. Alma Jager is a great example we were discussing. He talks about the Pirates of Socotra. Some of the worst and best things I have ever come across my life are in this book. And I don't believe that he was talking about, say, the grooming methods of women in certain areas to help increase geographical knowledge. He was telling it, essentially, to entertain, to amuse his buddies and get this sort of acclaim. So that was a tone that I very much wanted to play with.

The idea of, you know, life is short, we are telling these tales to entertain. We're also telling them to remark upon the wonders that God has given us and the world that we live in. but there is an element of entertainment in that. Yeah, wonderful. And another one of the examples that comes to mind for me in the medieval period is Cosweenis, the Ajabha el Mahlucat, right, the wonders of the world, and sort of the pairing that you have there of both things that, again, we might very traditionally call scientific sort of representations of bees and

fern trees as well as descriptions that stretch veracity a little bit more or that sort of enter into entertaining as well, talking about fruit-shaped like women's bodies for my personal favorite example. And again, the tension wherein all of this is done in part to proclaim the wonders of creation, but it really straddles this sort of entertainment, scientific, magical, all these divides again. The ambiguity really feels like the salient theme here. I have one other, if I can just keep going well, I've got it, I've got one other sort of question observation that I think actually builds really well on what we were talking about

at the start of this conversation in terms of speculative fiction and futurity, but also tying the future to the past. We've referenced, or at least I've referenced a few times now, the 1001 Nights Elf Leila Wa Leila. And another thing that really strikes me about the adventures of Amina Saraffi is that while references made to Elf Leila, I would say that the historical paradigm of magic and magical tales that the work is drawing from isn't primarily Elf Leila. You know, the characters conduct research and draw from a canon that I would call occult scientific, right? And this comes up in my essay a lot. We're talking about Abu Masha, Jabber, Ibn Washiyah, those sorts of figures.

The Queen of Shiba legends remind me more of the Kisselenbiyah than Elf Leila. Amina herself has this legendary status that reminds me of popular Arabian epics like Antra or the at Saif, much more than El Fela, even as your work is very obviously aware of and playing with aspects of Elflela. And I found that really refreshing. I am a big fan of the 1001 nights, but there's more than one way to tell a medieval Islamicite magical story. There's a diversity of engagements with magic and marvels across Islamic and Islamicate history. As a reader, I wouldn't perhaps expect stories like yours, Shannon, to riff on 1001 nights. And Amina Sarafi is again clearly aware of it, but riffing on so many other things. And so I would love to hear you speak

to tropes of Islamic magic in your work, your intentional use and breaking of them. And this is where I think it comes back to what Rebecca and Leanna have spoken at length about, right? A diversity of entanglement, a diversity of histories, a diversity of tropes and different kinds of imaginings that we can do about both the past and the future. I would, yeah, just love to open conversation to that, too. Of course. And that was very intentional as well. I think to write about Islamic magic or write anything that touches upon something, someone will connect to a thousand old nights. It looms large. It looms so large it can be difficult to write as to write Muslim fantasy and not touch on that or just write these stories and know it's going to be

dismissed. Oh, it's another Aladdin retelling. It's another Sinbad retelling. When of course, as you said, there's an entire corpus of work. I was joking when I was kind of first talking about the publishing of this novel, of course, everyone's going to want to say, it's Sinbad. And I was like, no, you don't understand. It's, you know, mostly inspired by the medieval travelogs and nobody wanted to hear about medieval travelogs. Or like there's all these, you know, stories of female warriors, not just Antara, but, um, and I'm going to pronounce the tabulate, but dot al-himna, um, again, these stories of female warriors, this was something that was very popular. I remember reading that medieval tattoos in Cairo would have

female warriors over them. They were, you know, this was, this was a trope. So there are all of these other stories we can bring in to kind of express this was a wide world. Amina herself would have been familiar of some of the earlier stories that come into 1001 nights. But at the same time, that's one story compilation from all sorts of tales that we have. I often think, you know, the Book of the Wonders of India, which is reported to be a book of captains and sailors' tales from about the 10th century. and it reads like you sat down and you got the stories of all the people who were traveling the Indian Ocean, particularly the Persian Gulf in the 9th, 10th century. And so many of those same stories, the character beats, the beasts, the monsters,

they are then repeated a century or so later in the 1,0001 nights. They're repeated again in later versions when you have the Sinbad stories. And you can see parallels to that. You can see the accounts of thieves and charlatan guilds, which are not told in A Thousand One Nights. They are told in their own stories, you know, essentially medieval true crime. And then later they get added to what is A Thousand One Nights. So I think I want to see a breakdown of that that A Thousand One Nights is not the only story collection.

It's fascinating because it is building off even older tales, off more expansive tales that came from different geographical regions. regions, and I think there's a lot of value to chase down those roots and talk about those stories as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really appreciative. I'm thinking about what Leanna had said at the start of our conversation about, again, tropes and orientalism and sort of the expectations. And I think that, yeah, one of the things that I really appreciated about this is that I see you pushing against that sort of understanding of, oh, we have to reduce Islamic speculative fiction or fantasy to the Arabian nights. And so I think that this does a really great job at, yeah, expanding that canon for our futurity as well.

I wonder at this point if we'd like to get into these stories of pre-modern witches, which kind of comes beautifully into this intersection of the sources we have, these fabulous travelogs, these fabulous tales, and also the complex feelings we might have about them as women, as feminists. and I think Leanna's essay about this topic. So Leanna, would you like to share a little bit about what you wrote? I was really happy to be given the opportunity to write about this, Shidian, because in the study of magic, I think there has become this kind of holy grail for historians

of who will find the first book on magic written by a woman. woman. We know Jabber, we know all this canon, and it's very male canon. And I was very glad to see that Jean-Shah Coulon has written on the text known as a Kitab Sharasim al-Hindiya, the purported author of which is this Bond's woman who worked for a caliph, and supposed she wrote this text that was described as a text on simia and the word simia is one of those words that are very ambiguous but in the text it was it was referred to as intellectual magic so this is a very positive uh uh representation of it now the fact is it actually is it really written by a charlesim from india unlikely um i think jean char colin makes a good point

about it's really not clear who the author is. But this reference to it being intellectual magic gave me an example of a text that associated femaleness, womanhood with magic in a positive way. So I was very happy with that discovery. And I contrast it in my contribution with the biblical Quranic character. of Anaq, right? And she's the first witch. It's like the Lilithian character who steals the sanctified magical power from Eve particularly. And this is sanctified because it's paradisical, right? And she turns it into, she gives it gnarliness. She gives it nastiness. And this

is reflected in the way that Anaq is described as a monster. And I remember searching for terms sahera and hakeema. So, witch and a wise lady. And that's where some interesting things started coming up, including the trope of the nisatawatik, the old women who are also liminal. Because in that context, their sexual, function, their reproductive function, made them more akin to mailness, right? But at the same time,

their bodies are still the bodies of aging women. And so this anxieties of attributing the nisha Awatik magic, I found really interesting, but also like the universalism of it, right? And on top of that, you know, we often associate the broom with like the European witch, but also there were reference to, I think, Dubbo, who had a magical power that she channeled through a broom. And so it just made me think of like the obvious link between gender, womanhood and sorcery. In the novel, the sorceress is recast in such a way that clutches her away from both orientalist fantasies but also modern Muslim anxieties. Again, allowing Amina to like inhabit this liminal space where like piety, sorcery and and female defiance coexist. So rather than presenting

the East as a timeless, even non-African land of sensuality, mystery, irrational sorcery, I think, Shannon, you offer a textured and an historically anchored narrative that pushes forth local knowledge systems and cosmologies and gender politics as well. So the characters are not exoticized backdrops, but Amina and others were like agents embedded in networks of science, piety, trade and even and even resistance. I also like that the novel de-exoticizes the magical east without stripping it of wonder and it centers this gender expansive figure of Amina in that conversation. Like Amina elicits wonder but she produces wonder as well, like actively produces wonder. But she's navigating it. Her relationship with the material manifest of piety and magic is conflicted, and I think this is something also I personally resonate

with. And then you have on the other side all these Muslim anxieties, I alluded to some of them from my personal experience, but to look at it more generally, Amina unapologetically reclaims the entanglement of Islamic cultures and their historical imagination with occult and esoteric knowledge. And these are elements, as we see, as we talked about, often presented as heretical, suspect. But in the modern context, I think they are also embarrassing in contemporary discourses, particularly in modern Muslim identity. And that's, of course, partly shaped by, you know, secular nationalist anxieties. And the fact that this is all been navigated by the characters of Amina and Dunya, who don't just like cast spells, they cite the Quran, they invoke

divine names, at the same time practicing astrology, crafting talismans, and studying scientific books. And this integration unsettles these modern efforts to sanitize Islamic history into a neat rationalist narrative that excludes the esoteric in order to respond or even conform to Western white models of science and religion as Samantha articulates really well. Going back to KD, sorry, KD, you highlight beautifully the linguistic diversity of Amina's world. We also repeatedly encounter magical scripts, coded talismans, invocation in multiple languages, multiple languages. And these are not ornamental details in the novel.

They're part of like the novels world building, like foregrounding even magical literacy as part of this perhaps feminist plurilingual epistemology of the occult and Dunia's library. And here archives come in as well. It houses tomes in Greek, Arabic, Persian, perhaps even Indic tongues in all of these magical instruments.

instruments and sigils and and and scripts as well but it's all part of of me thinking about can we refer to amina as an example of someone who exercises a kind of plurilingual multilingual feminist epistemology of the occult it's interesting I like looking at the academic perspectives of this and then sort of what it means to write a commercial novel because some of these things you don't think about until it's together and I was reading um her piece and thinking about yes I was like this was you know all the ideas of historical ways that we marginalize older women and then I stopped reading it and I thought to myself well what was it like to publish a book about a woman in her 40s because fantasy my genre is largely dominated by male characters it's overwhelmingly dominated by

younger characters and there was fear when this book book first came out that it would fail because because nobody wants to read about middle-aged women. So I just thought it was interesting that here we have the book. It's supposed to be deconstructing historical ideas of middle-aged women. And now even today, I don't know if I want to read. You know, she's probably menoposal. That's not interesting anymore. They have knowledge that we're not supposed to have.

So it's just, it's remarkable to see sort of the connections between even today and the past. I also wanted to write this book and have these conversations with other Muslim fantasy writers because I do feel like there is a lot of fear of, well, we can't write about this. It's Haram. When I had my first trilogy come out, I encountered this a lot. People were saying, like, I would love to write about Jin, but my parents won't approve or my community won't approve. This is all forbidden.

And I think it's time to sort of look to the past and say, well, Muslims have always written these stories. they've not only written these stories, they've studied this as science. The highest minds and, you know, greatest names of the culture have looked at this and have marveled at it and have held it up in esteem. I think there needs to be a reclamation of that, that, you know, not just for awareness and everything, but for creative freedom and taking up more space in these conversations, in these books, in this general media. We had discussed this in the beginning.

I love history. I also, I think we would be naive to say that popular history notions don't inform the lay understanding of public media things, whether that's a video game, whether that's a novel. And I think there's a responsibility there that I don't know genre creators always want to take up. But it's a lot to paint the picture of what the past looks like in the mind of possibly millions of people. And I think as creatives, we really need to sort of wrestle with our own ideas of what the past looked at, engaged with scholarship, and I would just love to see more creative freedom for Muslim writers when discussing some of these aspects. Fahadishara, a and alexia, and a man,

a writer, a historian, a historian, he wrote a fabulous essay, a historian, he wrote a fabulous for this roundtable on The Voyage, which I highly recommend our listeners check out. He couldn't make it today. Very sadly, we are missing you, Fahad. I will just bring in a brief summary of one of the arguments he makes,

the kind of narrative structure of the voyage, the going and returning back changed that connects this novel to so much of world history and world literature. and yet it's something that historians struggle with the idea that in this historical source there's something really fantastic or marvelous or unbelievable happening that is central to the text right but as a secular modern historian writing in a secular academy i can't say that this happened right the text and those who read it and who wrote it believe it happened or believed it could have happened, but I cannot. And so there's this sort of break between the way that the people creating these texts approach them and the way that we as

modern readers can read and write about them in the academy. So I think he was celebrating the freedom of the fantasy writer, of the speculative fiction writer, in actually saying, well, I'm going to take this seriously. I'm going to take these elements of the text, even if I don't know exactly how they might have been real. I'm going to lean into that, because without that, how could we possibly understand the medieval people we claim to study and whose world we claim to be making? Highly recommend folks check out this fabulous essay on world making, as well as Mahmoud Kuria's piece on piracy. As for my essay on transformation, I was really struck by the way that Jamal, the narrator of the novel, the one who is ascribed writing down Amina's words,

this frame story, I was really struck by many of the moments in his journey of transformation from Dunya to Jamal. There's this very tender moment where Amina witnesses Dunya, right, as something perhaps other than woman. When they first met, they're first getting to know each other on the ship. And Amina asks Dunya, who is wearing, you know, has wrapped her hair in a turban and is wearing men's clothing and asks, is this how you see yourself? And Dunya responds, lets out this weary, world weary laugh and says, I do not know. Nothing has ever felt quite right. I had hoped to find out, but for now, I suppose I'm still Dunya. So it's this moment in the path of the transformation that we don't know yet in the novel where it's going.

We see this tender moment of being witnessed and being asked a question that until that point in Dunya's life probably had never been asked of her. That really prompted me to think about which questions do I not get to ask because I'm a historian, where the archives I can work with, especially for the history of sexuality, are so shaped by violence, by people's interaction with the court, with the state, with some authority who then shapes and intervenes in their lives and creates a record of that occurrence, a record that I can read 700 or 400 or 200 years later. This is generally what we as historians of sexuality have to work with. We have these very dark archives that give us a piece.

into someone's life in the moment of its change or of its ending also or of its intervention at the hands of an authority often that they cannot escape and so in my essay I explore two conflicting accounts of a couple and how they are treated by the political authorities after making the claim that this person whose gender whose sex is called into question is actually what we might now call an intersex person, Ahuntha, which was a whole legal category

within Islamic law. So I just give a little bit of backstory about that category, but in this moment of these two chronicles with conflicting kind of information about this, you know, we can only ask certain questions of this, which is who was called in as a legal expert, how was the decision made, what were the consequences for these,

people. We can't know anything about their lives until that point. How did they come? What was the internal process that led them to be living in this risky way that they could draw the attention of the court? They could draw the attention of their neighbors who eventually report them to the political authorities, right? And those are the questions that this novel delves into. And many historians have also gotten into this, Sadia Hartman, in her most recent work, Wayward Lives. It talks about this method of critical fabulation. There are a lot of historians pushing against this issue of how the archive has limited our imagination and the questions that we can ask of it and how creatively we can think beyond that. But I think what's also interesting is that as a novel, we do end up kind of

resolving certain unresolved vobal ambiguities that the archive leaves. It was exciting to feel the freedom of your imagination, Shannon, to kind of imagine something that I have not allowed myself to ask, which is, what are the quiet moments when someone who is gender variant or gender expansive in this pre-modern context might have been witnessed by the people around them and asked questions and also held in that in the points leading up to being brought before an authority or not? There are so many people like hopefully Jamal, right? We don't know if there's a sequel or something coming, we don't know what Jamal's future holds. But hopefully he wouldn't have to answer to that violent gaze in the same way as the real people whose stories

I start my essay with. I would love to respond to that because issues of gender and sexuality are the number one thing. People have pushed back with this novel and had conversations with the novel and, oh, I'm surprised you're traveling to that place to discuss this novel. surely you're not allowed to do that. So I want to talk about that and take a couple different ways. First, as I was mentioning before about, I think writing historical fiction has a responsibility. And that very much comes into the play when talking about gender and sexuality. I don't think we should put modern terms on it, but it is there.

In every society, in our historical past, there is evidence of different ideas of what we might call queer identity, what we might call gender exploration, it is overwhelmingly documented in the medieval Islamicite world. I mean, you can't open up some of these books without coming across references to homoerotic poetry, to same-sex sexual relations. It's everywhere. There are ideas of third gender

in many of these societies that rimmed the Indian Ocean. So when I talk about putting together historical fiction, I say that to not touch upon elements of queer life of gender exploration is to put that's putting politics in your book you are the one censoring yourself it doesn't matter what you think about these elements of society it doesn't matter what you think your religion your community says or is allowing to not put it in the book is to be is to censor yourself I don't think you should be doing that I think you have a responsibility to try to capture this this life let alone in a space so submersive and liminal as a pirate ship

I mean, that's going to attract people who are, you know, looking for a different method of life. And I have to thank you in some ways, Shireen, because it was actually your work several years ago that made me start thinking about this character and how I wanted to document this story. We have so many tales of the girl who was forced to take on male attire to run off and live out her dreams. Well, what if there's more to that? even in discussing you know the fact that so many of the records are they come from a place of violence i'm really happy that i can offer this moment of joy i wrote this novel during the pandemic during really the worst part of the pandemic and i wanted to find that joy i wanted to

find a joy for muslim readers to read about swashbuckling devout women who were fighting with religious verses i wanted it for queer muslims or queer people in general and were like i wonder what if i could read a fantasy story that then doesn't doesn't involve violence. I really would encourage people who are, again, writing about the historical past to think about that past and not always put together these grim, dark worlds of everybody wearing brown

and only straight people exist. And all women are living as slaves. That's terrible and it's incorrect. And I think we should find other stories and really think about what we're putting out there to be read and understood by readers. I was really interested in your comments in the essay and then just right now about the identity of the narrator as male and how that might affect our reading. Because we meet Jamal ostensibly as a man right at the beginning of the novel in this frame story.

And it's only at the end that we realize his identity is more complicated than that. And I think that kind of transforms not only Jamal as a person, but transforms us as readers and makes the whole novel into kind of a queer story. I think what it demonstrates this is that gender expansion and queerness is not just abstraction. It's not just an abstract construction of identity, but it is a practice. and of course that made me think of alchemical transformation and which is a strong theme in alchemy it's more than just a moment of of sitting down and figuring out one's gender and one's queerness but rather that it manifests in practice and it is guided through the practice in this in

in a very alchemical way and i'm sure samantha even like in in your own research talking about even the womb, but the womb outside the traditional, you know, female body, and that is cast within the question of transformation, generation. And so I found that very actually illuminating and seeing, made me ask questions like, how can I read alchemy and magic in the occult as a site of queer identity formation and gender expansion? Whoa. I'm like, I'm putting some things in the sequel.

Well, if I can just jump in to offer some context there. A lot of my work is dealing with questions of if artificial is really the right qualifier for that, how it's tied into discourse of craft, and again, wonder and paradigms of artifice as opposed to artificiality. And the alchemist has made a womb, and to think with Jabber about this, I think is actually really interesting because there's a question of alchemical experts taking women's bodies out of procreation. But then there's also the way in which the Jaberian alchemist presupposes in how these wombs are built in this, this life is created that to modify something isn't to make it unnatural, that a lack of, that there doesn't have to be the sense of, oh, you've modified it, so you're unnatural,

so you're impure, so you're out of the natural order of things. And I think this is a place where the past really speaks importantly to our present moment, especially with discourse about trans bodies and the fact that to modify a body does not rend you from the order of creation or from, again, a sense of, there's not, there's not, to the Jaberian perspective, there's not impurity in that. To be unmodified is not to be more. The modification is as much a natural thing as to not. the medieval Islamic past and Islamic past really speaks valuably to our present moment. And that resonates with me certainly in this novel where I feel as though the same kind of ideas about how the past can comment on the present become really important.

Thank you so much for bringing that up, Leanna, and giving us a chance to hear this very cool kernel from Sam's dissertation. And I also, you know, on that note, it's also something I returned to in the essay is that there's so much discussion of sin in the novel and none of it is about gender expansiveness. You know, it's all about Amina's reckoning with her own relationship with the divine and how she can make peace with her life and stand in front of her creator. And I so appreciated that. That was a phenomenal way to make this novel a beautiful read for Muslims for people of any faith

on a spiritual journey. But I also think of all the horrors that Amina has witnessed in her life, a young person finding his way is certainly not the one that she identifies as sinful. Thank you. And you know what? I should even say on that. I think what I took away from this, honestly, was that far more people embraced it than were upset about it. Ironically enough, even more than my previous trilogy, that got people a little more upset. But I think with Amina, there is just, and this was intentional, I wanted to just, it was meant to be such a love letter to Muslim fantasy readers, to the medieval Islamic.

world and this larger world and kind of have this this devout woman who did find such faith and strength and purpose in her religion that to have that alongside queer joy it's sort of meant to kind of be these things can exist at the same time and overwhelmingly um that's the perception i've gotten i haven't gotten you know these hate-filled emails that i expected and i think That should be its own lesson that we're all, we're actually a lot more willing to listen to differing point of views than we would imagine. Listeners, thank you for joining us.

On our website, you can find a bibliography, as well as the full recordings of essays by each of the contributors you've heard today. That's all for now. Until next time. Thank you.