Ottoman History Podcast - Shibli Nomani's Urdu Travelogue of the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Episode 468 with Gregory Maxwell Bruce hosted by Zoe Griffith In 1892, the renowned Islamic scholar and educator Shibli Nomani traveled to the Ottoman Empire, where he visited cities in modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. His travelogue, entitled Safarnāmah-i Rūm o Miṣr o Shām, was published in the Urdu language within his own lifetime. In this episode, we talk to Gregory Maxwell Bruce, the author of an annotated translation of Shibli's travelogue, which has been recently published by Syracuse University Press. In our conversation, we delve into the process of translating the travelogue and explore the South-South connections between South Asia and the Middle East revealed by Shibli Nomani's relationships and contacts during his travels in the Ottoman Empire. « Click for More »

Welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zoe Griffith. Our guest today is Dr. Gregory Maxwell Bruce, but he goes by Max. He's a lecturer in Urdu at the University of California at Berkeley and the translator of a brand new book just out at the end of 2019 with Syracuse University Press. The book is called Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, a Travelogue, and it presents an English translation of a well-known Urdu travelogue by Shibli Nomani, a 19th century Urdu language historian of Islam, who is also a professor of Persian and Arabic. Max, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So Shibli Nomani, we'll call him Shibli.

He's a major figure in South Asian studies, very familiar to scholars in that field, but may not be immediately familiar to Ottoman and Middle East historians. And he's also not a totally straightforward person to introduce. So I will let you explain for our listeners all the many hats he wore and kind of, you know, who is the author of this travelogue? So Shibley was born in 1857 and died in 1914, which are very interesting years. 1857, of course, marks the transition from colonialism to imperialism in British India. And 1914, of course, is the beginning of the First World War and the kind of changes brought by the First World War. And so Shibley was educated at home, but he studied with

some well-known scholars who taught Arabic literature, the rational sciences, poetry, and eventually got a job as a professor of Arabic and Persian at a colonial college where he was required to prepare students who would go on to become major figures in Urdu literature, in South Asian political history, to help them to pass the colonial exams. And that was his job. It was during that early period of his life that he was exposed to certain forms of historiographical writing and became a fairly well-known historian in his lifetime, and then later became a very well-known historian in his lifetime. By the time that he wrote the travelogue, he had written a biography of Mamun, the Abbasid caliph, and also a biography of Abu Hanifa, the founder of the sort of Hanafi school of jurisprudence.

that he was interested in producing, biographical studies of what he called heroes of Islam, as well as histories of translation into Arabic. He wrote on theological topics. He ended up writing biographies of Umar, the second caliph of the Sunni tradition, and also Ghazali and other figures. He's a fascinating figure in his own right. It's also an extremely interesting time sort of within Ottoman history during the reign of Abdulhamid II. This is,

we were talking a little earlier about, you know, the height of pan-Islamic thinking or sentiment. So why is it that Shibli kind of heads to the Ottoman Empire to acquire the materials for the kind of work he wants to do back in British India? That's a great question. And we have some evidence to tell us why he left and his letters. And there's some discussion of that in the travel log and why he traveled to the Ottoman Empire. It seems to me that he went there with a number of agendas. There wasn't one agenda motivating his travels. One of them was, as I mentioned, to collect materials for the scholarship that he was hoping to produce.

And he felt that he didn't have enough materials in India to work with. Another was because he was a part of this colonial college, which was still sort of shaping its institutional identity. He appears to have been charged by the founder of the college, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who was a very famous reformer and writer. He was charged by Sayyid Ahmad Khan to go to the Ottoman Empire and to look at educational institutions and libraries and to study them and to bring back information and to bring back books, to purchase books, not only for his own scholarship, but for the college library. And so he was also in the Ottoman Empire as an institution builder, not just as a research scholar. And I think he was there

to travel. I mean, he was also a part of, I mean, he studied this rich tradition of travel literature in Persian, in Arabic. And I think there was a part of his sort of own personal life that motivated him to travel because he wanted to travel, you know, to seek knowledge, right? I mean, the sort of famous travel as far as China to seek knowledge. And I think he inherited that sense from the people around him and the books that he read. So all of those things, I think, converged to motivate him. It's interesting, in the travelogue, of course, he tells us that the timing was quite coincidental, that he had sort of thought, oh, wouldn't it be nice to travel to the Ottoman Empire? But one afternoon, he tells us, Thomas Arnold, the Orientalist and one of the first editors of the Encyclopedia of Islam, comes into Shibley's office and says, oh, I'm headed

back to Europe. And Shibley thought, oh, what a great opportunity. I can travel with him as far as I think he was planning to travel all the way to Italy with him at the time and then to take the boat from Italy over to Istanbul to the Ottoman Empire. And of course, Thomas Arnold would go overland to England. So that's his motivation, I think. And so Shibley, if I recall, I mean, he doesn't speak English or read English. No. And he doesn't speak or read Turkish, but he lands in Constantinople in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. And so you can maybe tell us a little bit about his linguistic experience and how he made his way around in the Ottoman Empire.

Thanks for asking that. how he made his way around in the Ottoman Empire. Thanks for asking that. I think that's actually one of the most interesting parts of the travelogue that I think I was mentioning earlier initially escaped my attention. And this is going to be kind of a long, long story. Oh, please. Yes. Go ahead. So first, we know from his letters home and from remarks that he makes in the travelogue

that he was a little bit frustrated that he couldn't speak Turkish. He tried to learn some Turkish, and we're told that he learned to read Turkish a little bit, and he could read Turkish newspapers and things and brought some of that literature back to India with him. But he was frustrated that he couldn't communicate with Turkish-speaking people in Istanbul. But quite early in his journey,

and in the initial section of the travelogue, in fact, he comes to meet a group of really of Damascene Sufi scholars living in diaspora, living in Istanbul. And the first time I read the travelogue, of course, you note this encounter. There's a wonderful episode at the beginning of the book in which Shibley tells us that he had brought some copies of a book that he had written on an issue in Hanafi jurisprudence. And that one of these Damascene Sufis recognized the book. that one of these Damascene Sufis recognized the book. And Shibley, his mind is blown. The idea, right, that someone would have read my work in Damascus. And we could step back for a moment from that episode to reflect a little bit on the ways in which I think that there's an idea

that knowledge flows from West to East, whether that's a kind of Eurocentric West or the Arabic speaking and writing world producing texts that are then so that then travel to South Asia. There is this idea of knowledge of Arabic in particular traveling that direction, and that the Arabic that's produced in India really is only relevant to an Indian context. It stays there. And this is a wonderful moment in the travelogue in which you see knowledge and text not circulating from west to east, but actually from east to west. And it's a moment, I think, for Shibley, kind of a revelatory moment of a certain kind to see this. And those two become best friends, the one who sees his text, Ali Zabyan or Zipyan, depending on whom you ask. And they sort of spend a lot of time together in Istanbul and in Beirut.

But what's fascinating is that although when I initially read the book and began working on it, I had, of course, noticed that many of Shibley's friends and interlocutors in Istanbul were Arabic-speaking people, mostly from Damascus, but really from across the Levant. that in fact much of his experiences, that's most of his experiences and much of what he sees and thinks in the travelogue is actually through the lens of this community and through their social networks and people, Ottoman statesmen, institutions, language abilities that they have that Shibley doesn't have or isn't connected to.

So the obvious example of that in the book is that Ali Zabian introduces Shibli to Darvesh Pasha, this Ottoman statesman. Through him, he meets Javdat Pasha. And the book, I think, is remarkable for the ways in which it offers glimpses of the ways in which these sort of what some have called pan-Islamic networks operated in Istanbul at the sort of the height of Abdulhamid's pan-Islamism. And, you know, some of the words that Shibley reports back in Urdu, here they use this word to refer to this thing. Those words are actually, again, this is the benefit of doing deep, close analyses of texts. Those words,

when I was sort of looking them up because they were unfamiliar to me, turned out to be, in one case, injas, the word for a pear that he reports in the travelogue, turned out to be

from a very particular dialect of Arabic, Damascus Arabic. They call this in joss and shibli uses the the wrong uh sound for this he reports that they spell this with scene but it's spelled with swad and in urdu of course they don't uh pronounce those two letters differently and so it makes sense that if he heard it he might think oh this is with so you know anyway a little bit of speculation. But it is remarkable, again, that he's, there are clues in the travelogue that his interaction with fruit vendors and his

interaction with the world around him in the city is filtered and sort of not determined by, but certainly informed to a great extent by this community of people living in diaspora, if that's the right word for the time, right? I mean, they've settled into to some extent in Istanbul and are living there. So for that reason, I think it's quite remarkable. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a fascinating period, not just for the pan-Islamic element, but I mean, this is also, we know Abdulhamid is famously paranoid, shall we say? I mean, this is also, we know Abdul Hamid is famously paranoid, shall we say? I mean, it was a period of very intense censorship within the Ottoman Empire. It was also the period of the Arab Nahda, like in Beirut and Damascus and in Cairo. So it's a really interesting

kind of moment in time. And since most of his interlocutors are Arab, you know, he meets some of these very important figures that we associate with the Arab Nahda. And he's also kind of remarking on freedom of information, freedom of speech, educational standards. And I wonder if you can just talk a bit about, you know, going along with this question of who are his kind of guides or intermediaries for this journey, you know, he meets some very recognizable figures and maybe you can talk a bit about what he takes from them and then we can talk about what he doesn't take. Yeah, so I initially read and began working on this book with the assumption that it was a key text in Shibley's intellectual life. My main book project is kind of looking at his life and some of his ideas.

And I thought that this was going to be a key text for that project. And in some ways it is. It gives us new sources for thinking about the transmission of knowledge across the Ottoman Empire and South Asia. On the other hand, he meets some very famous figures, Muhammad Abduh being one of them. And yet the extent of influence one way or the other is unclear. So I went through Muhammad Abduh's letters and I didn't find any mention of Shibli in it. There may be some mention of this in there. And similarly, in Shibli's letters, there's very little mention of Muhammad Abduh.

And so there are limitations, I think, to the significance of those encounters. On the other hand, some of the lesser known figures that Shibley encounters become quite important to short and then longer term intellectual projects. I'm always drawn to lesser known figures who were actually probably much more important than the available historical record would allow. And so the intermediate, the interlocutors that Shibley encounters in Istanbul or these kind of, you know, characters who come to the fore beneath the level of Muhammad Abduh and Butrus al-Bustani and kind of these people who just dominate our understanding of whatever period, I think that's, for me, those are the doors that get opened.

I agree. And I'm glad that you remarked on the unstudied figures, right? Because it reminds me that when I began working on this book, I had assumed, I think I mentioned earlier, I had assumed that it was a key text in Schindler's intellectual life. And then I assumed, because of the way that he talks about these figures, that when I went into the English language scholarship on the history of the Middle East, late Ottoman Empire, that these would be really well studied figures. It would be easy to sort of access their intellectual lives

and to understand what it was that they were writing and why and who they were. And I was sort of shocked to find that a large number of the figures in the book who were clearly prominent intellectuals, prominent community members, business people, right, in their lifetime really haven't been studied in English. And so one of the reasons I sort of joked earlier that it was painful to annotate this text, it was a lot of fun, but it was clearly a lot of work. It was a lot of work and it took years of really just three things. One, emailing scholars around the world asking questions about who these figures might be.

And there's a long list of people in the acknowledgements of the book. And I hope I haven't forgotten anyone. But really, finding out who these people were became a major goal of the project of translating this text. It's one thing just to translate sentence meaning. It's another thing to create a book that allows scholars to kind of think a little bit more about what hasn't been studied and what figures haven't been looked at, et cetera. But basically, so I emailed scholars. I did some Google book searches. Those did not prove very helpful, unfortunately. And in Arabic and in English, it just wasn't very helpful. And I just went to the library

at the University of Texas where I was finishing my PhD. I had a room in the back of the library and spent 12 hours a day in there. And, you know, for an hour a day, I would just go through the Arabic biographical dictionaries and thumb through them. And then here at Berkeley as well, just thumbing through. I had to teach myself Turkish so that I could go read some of the Ottoman records that have been published. And I still don't read Turkish very well, but I needed to do these things because I wanted to bring the stories of these people that he encounters into the scholarship. And again, you know, one of the things that I discovered was that there are these, like, figures who were really quite really quite

remarkably influential in their lifetime but who have just not been studied either because they live in the shadow of other figures or because the scholarship has focused on a certain set of figures whose influence is more acutely felt in the interwar period in particular, and have kind of focused on the emergence of their ideas. And these other scholars have not really been studied. At least that was my experience as a non-Ottomanist, sort of going and sort of encountering the world of Ottoman studies, which is wonderful and rich. But for this particular text... But no, I mean, it's absolutely... I mean, I think that what you're describing is pretty acutely felt.

Are there any of them that come to mind, just for a quick... I don't know why, but Abdul Basit al-Unsi is this bookseller in Beirut whom Shibli seems perhaps to have met when he was on his way to Istanbul. But then when he comes back, you know, he's headed to Cairo and he stays at Beirut for a while. And he's there to meet Tahir-e-Magribi is what he calls him. He's been called by various names. But in that process, he meets this book seller, Abdulbasit al-Unsi. And it's pretty clear from the travel log that it's through Abdul Basit al-Unsi that Shibley is introduced to this network of scholars, journalists, that is academic journalists, sort of educational reformers, local scholars and poets. And that world seems to revolve for Shibley around Abdul Basit al-Unsi's bookshop. And so I wanted to know who is Abdul Basit al-Unsi and, you know, what was up with his bookshop in the 1890s?

Why are there so many people hanging out at this bookshop? And I couldn't find anything about him in English, nothing. And so I just began digging around. And sure enough, there's actually produced a sizable corpus of writings of various kinds, one of which is a guidebook to Beirut, which has been studied a little bit in English. There's an article that I had found. I think it's in the annotations. A very good article. But just about that particular text and the sort of construction of Beirut's urban identity and things.

So I found myself digging through biographical dictionaries. And, of course, then you enter contradictions uh i think i have two different death dates for him that are 20 years apart so you have to deal with that yeah uh and then uh i emailed some friends who are have connections to beirut and they couldn't help me unfortunately there may be more uh uh to learn about him uh in archives i'm sure there is more to learn about him in archives in I'm sure there is more to learn about him in archives in Beirut that I'm just not aware of because I haven't traveled there for the book. I wish I had and tried to, to be honest with you, but it didn't work out. And it's kind of a long dream. I really want to go to Beirut. Anyway, yeah, so there was that. But then I also, I managed to track down

the catalogs of his bookshop. And that had a little bit of information, just little details. You know, when was it founded? He seems to have been a book distributor first, and then he opened up a bookstore. Where was it? I have kind of a general sense of where it was in the city. And what kind of books was he selling. And based on those things, a little bit of biographical information, and some, he eventually founded a fairly well-known literary journal, but this was 20 years later. And there's been a little bit written on that, which is very good. And that is what's been written about is very good. And so I had some details and I was able to piece together a kind of picture of who this scholar was, what the significance of his bookshop was, what kinds of books he was selling,

and what the general trajectory of his intellectual life was and where the intellectual world of Beirut at the turn of the 19th century ended up taking him. And I don't know why, but he's someone that I just, I sort of, and, you know, I should say we were talking earlier and I mentioned that there was a lot, it was painful, as I keep saying as a joke, of course, to annotate this book. But I have to say it was also a lot of fun. And I think translating it was, of course, a challenge and took years. And the frustration of flipping through Tazgira literature to try to find someone's name. It took me, I think, two years to find Aliza Byan, Shibu's companion. But I got a little tiny, just a tiny bit of information about him.

That kind of detective work was challenging and very frustrating, but it was also a great deal of fun. You know, wonderful textures of lives and moments in history that are both very remote from us and yet very familiar to us. And that was, I think, the great fun of this project. I think earlier you and I were talking and I mentioned that a great deal is made of his encounter with Muhammad Abduh. And Muhammad Abduh is, of course, someone who's been studied extensively in the English language literature. And I would argue that a not more interesting, but certainly not less interesting encounter takes place between Shibley and another scholar in Cairo, Hamza Fathullah. And Hamza Fathullah had written this book on women in Islam. And Hamza Fathullah had written this book on women in Islam. And he gives Shibli copies of this. And we learn through the letters that I translate into English in the appendices that he brings copies of this book and gives copies of it to an Indian scholar named Mumtaz Ali.

Mumtaz Ali writes this work, Hukuk and Isvan, which is a very famous, the rights of women, which is a very important and famous work of Islamic feminism in Urdu. And that connection hasn't been studied. Sort of what is, to what extent do Hamza Fathullah's ideas influence Mumtaz Ali's? And to set those two books into conversation with each other and to think about that connection between what some scholars these days are calling south-south or east-east intellectual worlds is something that I think I'm hoping that the book facilitates and I think there's a growing number of scholars who, myself included, who are really interested in thinking about the 19th century, not exclusively in East-West

binaries, and thinking about the intellectual, I guess we could call it modernity or something, of figures like Shibley. I don't think he would think of it in those terms or in terms of, you know, modernity necessarily, but thinking about their projects not as determined exclusively by some kind of an, you know, indigenous Islamic or Arabic or Persian tradition set in or encountering European modernity. There are other ways of thinking about the circulation of ideas that are actually, I think, in many cases, much more fruitful for thinking about the history of ideas in the period. Here's the text of a letter that Shibley writes to Sayyid Mumtaz Ali. Good sir, salutations. I arrived here yesterday. I received your exalted letter in Egypt on the evening before the morning I departed from Egypt for Hindustan. I could not do anything about the Arabic dictionary, though I did bring a copy of Mukhtar As-Sahah. As for your questions regarding women, I hope to earn 100 out of 100 on the examination. Whenever you wish, send the examination papers.

An esteemed member of the delegation that went from Egypt to the Oriental Conference, which previously was organized in Stockholm, located in Europe, presented a tract related to women at the conference. Although with respect to its contents and subjects, it is not too valuable. The text and writing is completely like that of the classical writers. In any case, I've brought a copy of it, too, for your exaltedness. I will dispatch both books into your service in a few days. Connection in Turkey Perhaps you have no need of it now, and doubtless

there is no need. Still, if you want to converse about it, I can certainly do so. But the result is that this idea is without benefit. Well, I wrote all this regarding you. Now hear my motives too. You have become an employee. By God, I felt unlimited happiness. I prayed for this from my heart. But tell me this. Will you remain of use to us or not? That is, does one have a break from government work or not? If not, and you, like others, have become merely a scrap of paper in government offices, then I am not so happy. I am playing with the idea of a shared series of writings in which you were to play a purposive

part, but I do not know if this can be expected or not given your situation. Please write your response and write soon. Regards, Traveler of Egypt and Turkey. The period in which Shibley was visiting the Ottoman Empire in Egypt, I mean, it's one of the most studied periods of Ottoman history and of Egyptian history. And yet this is like a really, for historians of the British occupation of Egypt, it's certainly a different perspective. And for scholars of the late Ottoman Empire, it's a really unique perspective.

And we were talking a bit about how Shibley is certainly aware of all these civilizational categories that we're familiar with, sort of Turk and Arab and Christian and Muslim. But he doesn't have the kind of progressivist or positivist mentality that we're kind of accustomed to from either the young Turks or from, you know, European colonialists. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, what do you think that Shibley maybe was hoping to find when he was visiting these kind of great centers of Islamic learning? And then what did he kind of come away from? I mean, it's a difficult question because we can't know, but there are some clues, I think. Yeah, I agree that there's certainly a lot of material on the basis of which we can speculate. I think that Shibley was, I mean, first he was looking for, as I mentioned before, he was looking for materials. He was looking for books and he was looking for sources.

But I think you're asking a broader question. And I think he was looking to find models of a certain kind of hybridity, a certain kind of mixture of what he considered to be the best of the Islamic tradition, of the Arabic rationalist tradition, of the Persianate literary tradition, and what he thought of as the best of, let's call it European modernity in his time. And I think that he was frustrated by institutions in the Ottoman Empire because he felt that the sort of traditional institutions weren't doing enough to bring the best of the European, of European modernity into their curricula. But he also was disappointed by the modern institutions, which seemed not to value some of the literature and the history and the rational sciences that he valued. And I think that's one thing that makes him a figure that's both difficult to work on in some ways, but also so fascinating because he doesn't fit neatly into

the kinds of modernist versus traditionalist or modernist versus fundamentalist binaries that we've become used to in much of the scholarship. There's that wonderful collection of works in translation edited by Mu'adhal and Talat Tawf, modernist and fundamentalist debates in Islam. And Shibley makes an appearance in the collection, I think, as a modernist, I think, in this case. But there are other sort of studies that see him as a traditionalist. And I think that's really a problem of the categories and not a problem of Shibley. You know, the British occupation was, of course, something that Jamal al-Din of Ghani and Muhammad Abd al-Duh vehemently opposed.

And so Shibley was aware of the political stakes of these things. We don't see a lot of that directly mentioned in the travelogue, but he certainly was aware of the linguistic difference. but he certainly was aware of the linguistic difference. He was certainly aware of the political stakes of British presence in Egypt. And he's critical in the text of colonialism in various forms. I think in the opening section of the text,

he makes some comments about the depiction of Muslims and Turks in European literature. And the criticism that he's making, I think, is remarkable because he's doing it in 1894, around 1894 when he's writing. And of course, this is something that just seems very in line with the Said's criticisms and critiques in the 1970s. I mean, the depiction of this kind of other, the projection of a certain kind of fantasy onto the Orient. The fact that people who are being talked about in this way don't recognize themselves in the language of this literature, the political implications of that projection. And by the way, I think it's also remarkable that he identifies Fatima Aliye as the kind of intellectual inspiration for that argument in the travel book.

And this tells us something about the way in which ideas are being transmitted and received, I think. That Fatima Aliyeh writes this book on women in Islam. Shibley finds an Arabic translation. He is inspired by the project of this book to make it the kind of framework of his travel log and is very direct in the way in which he's sort of citing her and engaging her ideas. And then, of course, that text is translated, her text is translated into Urdu

just a few letters and published from Aligarh. And I can't but imagine that Shibley had some role in having that translated. And so, again, more evidence of this sort of circulation of ideas of a certain kind of modernity, if we want to call it that, which is emerging in the Ottoman Empire and the ways in which that's being received in British India. Right. Whether it be in the form of these Arabic language journals being read at the college where Shibley teaches, and Shibley, of course, is teaching them, or sort of among scholars in the circulation of these new ideas

about Muslim identity, the relationship between what Shibley thought of as Islamic civilization and Europe, etc., etc. It's very interesting. And, you know, thinking of distance and proximity, you know, we were talking earlier about Shibley's critique and this balance of, well, not balance, but sort of this position that he has, which he's comfortable with European modernity.

He's comfortable with Islamic tradition. And he sees no reason why a rational, critical mind can't sort of bring these two traditions into confluence. I mean, this is sort of one of his agendas in his intellectual life. But as a researcher and a scholar, when he goes to the Ottoman Empire, he's frustrated by things that he sees there, some of which are tied to that broader agenda, tradition, modernity, Europe, Islamic tradition, Arabic, etc. But some of which are just frustrations that he faces as a research scholar. He doesn't have

access to manuscripts. Or he's frustrated with the fact that the scholars in the area just keep reading the same set of books, you know, this sort of narrow canon of Arabic rational training that people are getting. And he wants people to read history. And he thinks poetry is important. And that's a critique that feels quite familiar to me. And to many of our listeners, I imagine, yeah. I mean, you know, the sort of to advocate for capaciousness. Right. And to be frustrated by the presence of this vast archive of material she encounters and the total lack of attention toward it and that's

something i think that doesn't feel so remote in time or uh last no i mean right and and and so there are those moments also in the travel log and there are other figures that i i would have liked to learn more about uh who appear here and there in the travelogue as well. Perhaps inspiration for future projects. I mean, for other listeners or for other scholars or for yourself. I hope so. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's such a valuable addition to, I mean, the primary source canon for this period, which begins to be a little bit repetitive or a little bit

overdone perhaps so this is a really amazing uh you're very kind to say oh hard no i mean this has been a incredibly valuable conversation it's a really valuable book and and the work that you did to put together these uh biographiesographies and the letters at the back, I think are as precious as the text itself because it's a very human glimpse into this period that I think just kind of gets sucked into the void of colonial questions of power that maybe weren't the obsessive focus

of everyone who lived through it at the time. As always, you can go to our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. Max is going to provide us with a short bibliography of related works to learn a bit more about Shibley and his world. The text of the letter that was read earlier in our conversation will also be available. And thank you so much for listening. Tune in next time

for the Ottoman History Podcast. And Max, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much. It's been just wonderful. Thank you. Thanks. © transcript Emily Beynon