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Westward Ho! with Matthew Melvin-Koushki
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‘Our physicists are so Islamicate these days! And by “Islamicate”, I mean cool and weird.’
Interview Bio:
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina. He specialises in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the wider Persianate world to the nineteenth century. His many publications can be browsed here.
Works Cited in this Episode:
Our interview with Jason Josephson-Storm on the myth of disenchantment can be found here.
Richard W. Bulliet. The Sufi Fiddle: A Novel. St Martin’s Press, 1991.
Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. Putnam, 1962.
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2017.
Matthew Melvin-Koushki. Dr Dee’s Ottoman Adventure. Hellebore, pages 71-9, Samhain 2021.
Thomas Kiefer
January 28, 2025
Absolutely gripping discussion–thank you. Your and Dr. Melvin-Koushki’s way of describing certian political “things” in “magical” terminology was really novel to me, and is very potent.
I completely get your counterfactual Ottoman history, although I wonder if the logic of capitalism would have ultimately undone it. Would it have adapted to capitalism like Japan, or would it have become a medieval/hyper-capitalist petro-state like Saudi or the UAE, or maybe some other way like how you describe? Certainly one would hope the 20th century history of the region would have been less violent and corrupt.
I might counter with another counterfactual: if the German SPD had voted against going to war with Russia then France (like they should have according to their internationalist principles) in 1914, then WWI would not have happened, or WWI would’ve centered around a German civil war. 20th Century history (incl. Ottoman) would have been almost incomprehensibly different.
Earl Fontainelle
January 29, 2025
Ah, the joys of irresponsible speculation!
I think the main difference in the Ottoman 21st century would just be one of balance. If we forget about all the specifics for a minute and just speculate on how the world would look different if the largest oil reserves on the planet had been in the hands of a powerful, self-confident empire with a strong geopolitical position instead of a number of artificially-crafted mini-states, which can be toppled with ease whenever necessary, the world-picture is much less unipolar (or dipolar, or whatever). There are more poles to take into account, that’s what I’m saying.
This would be considered a bad thing by some folks, but a good thing by others.
Thomas Kiefer
January 29, 2025
Thank you for the clarification, and I understand your point clearly now. Yes, you are definitely onto something here with this counterfactual. Not only would the world-picture been more multipolar in a geo-political (and thanks to the oil, economic) sense, it would have been more multipolar in a cultural sense. So much suffering, and cultural homogenization, could have been avoided.
By the way, Melvin-Koushki’s comment about our “New Mongol Age” is very apt.
All-in-all a very spellbinding discussion (that term is being used advisedly).