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

Alan Mikhail offers a rich, if sometimes flawed, revisionist global history in his biography of the Ottoman sultan.

I had no idea when I sat down to read God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, the new book from Alan Mikhail, that I was wading into a book that had ignited a bit of a storm of criticism when it was published last year. A trio of scholars penned a truly scathing takedown of the book, essentially tearing it to shreds and sneeringly referring to it as “fake global history.” In response, a duo of scholars penned a defense of the book, arguing that it did the much-needed work of globalizing Ottoman studies. (The original trio then responded again).

Having now finished the book, I think I can safely say that most of the criticisms that have been lobbed at it are a bit unfair. Though it does have its issues here and there, by and large Mikhail has dome a creditable job of bringing some much-needed light to both an important historical figure and to the significant role that Islam has played in the creation of the modern West. 

As its title suggests, the book offers us a thorough biography of Selim, the Ottoman sultan who would do much to expand the boundaries of the empire that he inherited. Though he was the fourth-born son of his father, Bayezid (and thus not in a prime position to take the throne), through shrewd politicking and subtle manipulation of events, he managed to finally work his way up the ladder of power, killing several of his brothers in the process. Ultimately, he came face-to-face with his father and, realizing that the older man would never cede him the authority that he wanted, he forced him to abdicate, the first time such a thing had happened in the history of the Ottoman Empire. 

Arguably, Selim’s most noteworthy accomplishment was his conquest of the Mameluk Sultanate of Cairo, which not only granted him control over vast new territories--thus transforming his empire from a Christian-majority one to a Muslim-majority one--but also allowed him to officially attain the title of “calilph,” due to the fact that he now controlled Mecca and Medina, the two most important cities in Islam. 

Given his tremendous success, and the power of the Ottoman Empire more generally, it’s no wonder that so many in Europe found the prospect of a rising Islamic power to be so terrifying. As Mikhail documents, the figure of the Muslim became a motivating and perpetual fear in the mind of almost every contemporary European. So great was that fear, in fact, that they carried it with them across the ocean, naming places in the “New World” that evoked their terror. They even sought to fit the indigenous peoples they encountered into their preconceived notions of the world and its cultures, seeing in Native American customs reflections (and, in their minds, potential connections) to the Muslims they knew from back in Europe. To put it bluntly: the great Muslim other was the specter against which they measured themselves. 

It’s important to note that, while Selim is the putative focus of the book, Mikahil does take a few (very lengthy) detours into the politics and colonization of the New World, in an effort to show how the events that shook the Ottoman Empire (and, by extension, Europe) had global consequences. Unlike some, I’m ready to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. It is important to see early modern Europe as part of a network of powers that were often superior to it in terms of material might, and this was especially true of the Ottoman Empire, which truly was a military and political behemoth. However, it has to be said that Mikahil isn’t always as graceful with these transitions as one might wish, and he might have done a bit more of the important work to show the organic connections here. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is a hagiography of Selim, but it does certainly paint him as a great leader (though not, as some reviews have been at pains to point out, a particularly good one). Likewise, Mikhail does paint the Ottoman Empire in a fairly gentle (I might even go so far as to say utopian) light, while making some pretty sweeping generalizations about Europe, Catholicism, and about the Renaissance (most thinkers and writers of the Renaissance, he claims, were more interested in writing about Muslims than they were about the nobility of the human spirit). At times, Mikhail comes dangerously close to allowing the purpose of his project--a revisionist history of both Selim and the Ottoman Empire and their role in the early modern period--to swamp his objectivity as a historian. As some other reviewers have noted, he does tend to overgeneralize in his efforts to prove his point, which leads to some rather peculiar leaps in logic that can be hard to follow or sustain. 

That being said, there’s no question that the Ottoman Empire was a cosmopolitan sort of place, and that, for the most part, they practiced a form of religious toleration that was largely unseen in Europe (particularly once the Protestant Reformation began to sweep across the continent). However, I would have liked to see a bit more of a well-rounded analysis of the Empire, including its shortcomings, even in a revisionist history.

All in all, I very much enjoyed the book, and as someone who has only a passing familiarity with the Ottoman Empire, I learned a great deal about both Selim and the empire that he led to greatness. I likewise have a greater appreciation for just how much the Ottomans were able to attain in such a short time. What’s more, Mikhail shows us how integral this political entity was, standing as it did between Europe to the west and the other Muslim powers, particularly Iran, to the east. The very conflicts that were so central to that time--between a Christian Europe and a Muslim Middle East, between Sunni and Shiite, between colonizer and colonized--are, Mikhail eloquently argues, still with us today. It remains to be seen whether we will do better than our predecessors in keeping them from destroying us.