Episode 57: The Succession to Muhammad
Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an
One rainy April morning in 2011, I requested Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an from the Rare Book Room in the Library of Congress. Outside, tulips blazed in bright patches of red around the Capitol building. The flowers reminded me of their origins in the Ottoman Empire. The sultan had first sent them as diplomatic gifts to European rulers in the sixteenth century...And so it was that, through contact with Muslims long ago, this stunning flower had eventually reached North America, where it now reigns as a sign of spring.
Episode 45: An Iranian Intellectual Visits Israel
The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters
Many historical accounts of events in the Crimea simply mention that Nikita Khrushchev “gifted” the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. This does little to explain the Crimea’s current demographic make-up or what happened to put the strategic peninsula in the position to be “given” by Moscow to Ukraine in 1954.
Episode 31: Who are the Turks?
Episode 30: Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an
Exploring the Silk Route
It’s the afternoon of a hot summer’s day and I am standing at the bottom of a staircase—with no handrails—that’s not so much set in to the side of a mountain as built on top of it. Way up there, at the top of four hundred fifty five stairs, there’s a shrine whose gleaming silver dome is barely visible in the afternoon sun. That’s our destination.
The Emergence of Atatürk: A Turning Point in Turkish History
Could a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – Be President? A 1788 Constitutional Debate
The Constitution’s ban on religious tests prompted the nation’s first debate in 1788 about whether a Muslim – or a Catholic or a Jew – might one day become president of the United States. William Lancaster, a delegate to the North Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution, worried: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence.