Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees...

Han Hsien Liew’s fascinating and insightful new book, Preaching Pious Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought (Edinburgh UP, 2026) offers a new way of understanding the political thought of one of medieval Islam’s most influential preachers, Ibn al-Jawzi. Al ...  Show more

Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was suppose ...  Show more

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky on “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press). The book explores the forced migration from the Russian Empire of around one million Muslims, who settled in the Ottoman Empire between the 1850s a ...

From the steppes of Central Asia, thousands of Turkish people migrate to Anatolia and the Middle East. These new arrivals become first the Seljuk Turks, then the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, and finally, the Osmanlis. 

When we think about modern Europe, we tend to think about Muslims as newcomers to the continent. Professor Emily Greble, chair of the history department at Vanderbilt University, turns the tables on this assumption. This episode looks at the Muslim communities that were living in ...  Show more

From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the Fir ...  Show more