God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

AS EVERY SCHOOLCHILD LEARNS, Columbus set sail with India on his mind’s horizon. Rarely, though, do schoolchildren learn why Columbus sought to cross the Atlantic.

John Smith, the founder of Jamestown in 1607, spent several swashbuckling years helping to beat back the Ottomans in Hungary and Wallachia (now part of Romania). The Ottomans captured him in 1602 and held him enslaved for two years before he managed to escape.

And conquer Smith most certainly did. He would soon add hundreds of Indian heads to his gruesome tally from the Old World. Like the Spanish conquistadors, Smith and countless other Englishmen who arrived to fight in America had already battled, traded with, or otherwise engaged the Ottomans and other Muslims in the Mediterranean. William Strachey, Virginia’s secretary, had spent time in Istanbul a few years before going to Jamestown, and George Sandys, eventually the colony’s treasurer, had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire—to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Egypt—and had written a bestselling account of his adventures.

Perhaps they would have learned that Islamic courts served Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and that Christians and Jews often preferred the Islamic court to their own. Taking a comparative perspective, they might have discerned that sharia courts in Selim’s day provided more rights to religious minorities, especially to women in the realm of family law, than did Christian courts in Europe. Needless to say, in such polemical conversations, historical reality is usually beside the point.

the American right assert that President Barack Obama is a Muslim (or, even worse, a crypto-Muslim), in a direct echo of the founders’ debate over whether a Muslim could ever be president. Far more than an echo, however, was the statement by Ben Carson—Republican candidate, one-time front-runner, and subsequently President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—during the 2016 presidential campaign: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”

Indeed, the idea that Islam is a deep existential threat to the Americas is one of the oldest cultural tropes in the New World. Its history is as long as the history of European colonialism and disease. It must, therefore, be a part of any understanding of the history of the Americas.

The origins of the American people must obviously include the history of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, West Africans, and the Jewish and Catholic subjects of mainland European polities.

On the 560th anniversary of Mehmet’s conquest, it was announced that the third bridge would be named for Mehmet’s grandson: the Sultan Selim the Grim Bridge (in Turkish, Yavuz Sultan Selim Köprüsü).

Naming this new connector of continents after Selim serves Erdoğan’s political project. He and his Islamist party colleagues regularly describe themselves as the “grandchildren” of the Ottomans, making Erdoğan unique among modern Turkish leaders.

Part of Erdoğan’s exceptionality, therefore, is his calculated embrace of aspects of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage. He casts himself as a new kind of Turkish politician, one who celebrates Turkey’s Ottoman lineage instead of rejecting it and one who positions himself, at least symbolically, in the tradition of the sultanate.

Erdoğan seeks to revive that global influence. As he would explain it, one of the reasons the republic lost its clout in the twentieth century was its staunch secularism.

Erdoğan also took rhetorical aim at Turkey’s external Shiite enemies.

SELIM FIGURES IN ERDOĞAN’S symbolic politics in another way, too. In 2005, thieves stole a kaftan and crown that Selim had worn during his life and that had adorned his tomb in the mausoleum Suleyman built for him in the 1520s.

Selim’s kaftan and crown symbolize the caliphate, so their possessor symbolically becomes Selim’s successor, as both sultan and caliph. If indeed Gülen sought the kaftan and crown for himself, it would have been to impress upon Erdoğan and the world that he—not Erdoğan—was Selim’s rightful descendant, Turkey’s true political and spiritual leader.

With his characteristic showmanship, Erdoğan made the most of this event; his far-from-subtle first act after winning a referendum that gave him near-limitless power in Turkey reverberated all the way to Gülen’s headquarters in Pennsylvania.

I presented some of the ideas here—especially about Columbus—at the University of Michigan, McGill University, and New York University.