Michael Cook, "A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with a very distinguished scholar, Dr. Michael Cook, about a recent book that he has published with Princeton University Press. The book is called The History of the Muslim World, From Its Origin to the Dawn of Modernity.

Professor Michael Cook is a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, published by Princeton, and also Brief History of Human Race and the Quran, a very short introduction.

Michael, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. Thank you very much for having me here. My pleasure. Before we start, can you tell us about the idea behind this book, the inception of this book? This is such an expansive book with lots and lots of information. I can't even imagine how many hours of research and studying have

I've gone into this book. Can you briefly talk about why you decided to write a book about the history of Muslim world? And then we'll also go to talk about title as well. Okay, right. And I think the answer is, in a way, autobiographical. For the best part of 60 years, I've been teaching students about one aspect or another of the history of the Muslim world. And that's coming to an end. On Monday at midnight, I retire. Oh, wow.

So, now, I mean, in the course of nearly 60 years of teaching, I've accumulated an enormous mass of material, you know, sort of outlines for lectures, interesting stories, interesting quotations, recondite facts, you know, all sorts of things. And the question then is, what do I do with it? Now my time is up.

And one idea that came to me was to take the officials of ancient China as a role model. And some of them were buried with copies of the rules and regulations they had spent their lives enforcing. I thought about that, but somehow I wasn't very enthusiastic. And the other idea that occurred to me was to take all this material and melt it down and recast it as a book. And that's what I've done.

Fantastic. I'm sure that the university must be really sad to see you go and also the students. But yeah, I could sort of see that this is like a collection of like a lifetime of research and teaching. Let me ask you about the title of the book. This book is not... When I first saw the book, I think on Princeton website, without really reading the review or overview of the book, I thought it was a history of Islam, maybe a new history of Islam. But then

it was different. It's the history of the Muslim world, and it's not the history of the Islamic world, or the history of Islam. Can you talk about the title? Why did you name it the history of Muslim world, and how is it different from other books that are about the history of Islamic world? Right. I mean, by the Muslim world, I mean wherever Muslims are dominant, either politically, that they rule, or demographically, that they're the majority of the population. And

My distinction between Muslim and Islamic really has no significance geographically. If I said the Islamic world, I'd be talking about the same region. But I do make a distinction between Muslim and Islamic, and I could explain it like this, that...

Muslims down the centuries have produced a large amount of poetry about the pleasures of drinking wine. And I don't, it would be strange to call that Islamic poetry, but it's not entirely strange to call it Muslim poetry. It was produced by Muslims. Oh yes, I don't know if down in Australia you know the Northern Irish joke,

about the policeman. He goes to a man and he says, are you a Catholic or a Protestant? And the man says, I'm an atheist. And the policeman is very patient. He says, yes, sir. But are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist? And I think in the same way, I mean, I know Muslim atheists, they exist, but I would not call them Islamic atheists. That sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Yeah, I know a lot of them. I have a friend from Sri Lanka who's a Muslim. He goes on fast, but he does sorts of things. He smokes kind of drugs. He drinks. He didn't drink wine in a way. We were at parties or work events. He never drank wine. He did not eat pork. I said, well, I guess he's a pious one. But then I saw him smoking stuff and then said, no, I hate wine. I prefer whiskey. But he's a pious one. He's a pious one.

So I know, yeah, I know the concept. And I think you're absolutely right because, well, I guess you could call me a Muslim atheist anyhow because I'm from Iran. So by birth, I'm a Muslim. I'm a Shia Muslim, but I was never a practicing Muslim. Yeah, I had this Muslim upbringing, not in my family, but in the country. So everything is kind of mediated by when you go to school, your name, your

Even when you want to get a job, ask you a question if you're a Muslim and if you're a Muslim, are you Sunni or Shia? So it's always there that. But...

But, you know, Shia Muslims, Sunnis call Shia Muslims fake Muslims, mainly Iranians, because they're very kind of liberal. The majority of population, I mean, liberal with that. And when you spoke about wine or drinks, there was a recent book, which was the history of alcohol in the Muslim world. And in Iran, even after the Islam came to Iran, still making wine or making alcohol and selling it was practiced quite commonly.

So it kind of makes sense why they call it the Muslim world. And one of the focuses of your book is, so you look at the book from different aspects, but a couple of main focuses is, as you put it in the book, making and unmaking of states and major cultural shifts in the history of Muslim world. Can you tell us what they mean, making and unmaking of states? And what do you mean by cultural shifts?

Right. Okay, making and unmaking of states. It seems to be important that my readers should know when and how the Ottoman Empire came into existence, when and how it disappeared, and the same for many other states. I mean, that's a kind of vital backbone of history. Major cultural shifts. I mean, things like Iran in the 16th century,

switches from being Sunni to being Shiite. And that's a major change with major implications. And there are many much more sort of subtle, minor things going on that specialists are very interested in. But I mean, this is something that is really important historically, and therefore I want to talk about it. I mean, basically what this comes out of is the fact that you can't do everything.

even in 800 pages, so that I had to choose. And those two themes to me are, well, one, they're important, and two, they're reasonably well-researched so that I could write a coherent account, whereas some other kinds of history, I couldn't do that. Maybe in another two generations, people will be able to.

And the Muslim world, if you talk about Muslim world these days, it's roughly equated with the Middle East. And what I really enjoyed in your book is that you have this session, this chapter at the beginning, talking about that region in antiquity. It wasn't known by that name, but you talked about it.

You're talking about the history of the region, but why is it important to know the region in the late antiquity, roughly from 4th to 7th century as you put it in the book? And can you very briefly give us the lay of the land? Were the superpowers there? What was the region like? And why is it important to know the region before the origin of Islam? Okay, right. Why it matters? I'll put it this way. The rise of Islam is a story.

and every story has a background. If you don't know the background, you find it hard to understand the story. The background to the rise of Islam is the Middle East in late antiquity, in Arabia, but also elsewhere. That's why I think it's important. Then to give you the lay of the land, let me start with—this is going to be very crude. This is going to be a first approximation.

But let's say there are regions of the Middle East with good land and regions with bad land. By good land, I mean regions where you can have a dense agricultural economy with a large peasant population. And on top of those peasants, you'll have aristocracies, states, etc.

And the badlands are places where you can't do that, where you have desert instead, wilderness, where if you have agriculture, it mostly has to be an oasis, where much of the population is nomadic because resources are so scarce, you have to move around to exploit them. So that's the basic distinction I'd want to make. And then to put a political superstructure on that,

Where the good lands are, that is to say, what's now Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, that whole region, what we have in late antiquity is two empires. We have the Persian Empire, the Sassanian Empire in the northeast, and the Byzantine Empire in the northwest.

And each of those empires has a state religion. The state pushes Zoroastrianism in the Persian Empire. The state pushes Christianity in the Byzantine Empire. And then in complete contrast to that, you have Arabia, where basically you don't have states because there are not the resources for successful state formation.

What you have instead is tribes. They have their politics without rulers. Some of them are in the oases. Some of them are out in the desert nomads. But the whole of Arabia basically is tribal. And obviously there is no state religion in Arabia because there's no state religion.

So what you have is a kind of, you know, whereas you have a lot of intolerance in the empires, Arabia is a very tolerant part of the world. We have a kind of background of paganism inherited from antiquity, but we also have monotheist ideas of coming from outside that are in the air.

So that I think you could say that Arabia in later antiquity would be a good place if you want to start a new religion in a way in which the empires would not be good places. They would clamp down on you. And this idea of monotheism is an important one, the rise of monotheism.

I personally, a long time ago, I still don't know much about Arabia before the rise of Islam, but I've seen a couple of well-researched videos and read a short article that there was paganism, polytheism. There was, let's say, pre-Arabia civilization. And one thing that I never paid attention to, which is highlighted in your book, is the importance of that monotheism.

and the rise of monotheism that it wasn't in Arabia, but its impact on Arabia. Can you talk about the impact of rise of monotheism in Arabia? Why was it important, particularly to Islam and Muhammad? Right. Yeah. And certainly it is absolutely central to Muhammad's message. Okay. So let's backtrack a bit then.

I mean, ancient Arabia is entirely pagan. Some pagan cults that are widespread, some that are just local, but it's completely pagan. And then at some point, we don't know when we begin to get monotheism. And we begin to get it through the arrival of Jews, very likely refugees from Roman persecution.

who come and settle in Arabia. So that introduces the idea of monotheism. Then later in the fourth century, we have the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire becoming Christian. And naturally, I mean, you know, the Arabs, they trade outside Arabia. They hear what's going on and they must have some kind of sense that monotheism is now what they do out there.

so that we have very real monotheist influences in Arabia. Now, how far has the rise of monotheism gone by the time of the rise of Islam? That's a question that the experts are quarreling about right now.

There's the old view, which I have in my book, which says that basically at the time of the rise of Islam, Arabia is pagan. There are a few monotheists, but overwhelmingly it's pagan. And then there's a new view that says, no, it seems that paganism had largely disappeared by the time of the rise of Islam.

And this is a big and interesting issue. There's going to be a conference about it in Oxford next year. But what I would say, without trying to anticipate the results of that conference, what I would say is that the monotheism you have in Arabia, or particularly the monotheism influenced by Christianity, I mean, you don't have...

institutionalized Christianity in the form of the kind of churches that you have out in Egypt, etc. Yeah, I mean, if we take the Hejaz, the core region where Islam is going to make its appearance,

And now we hear a lot about it in late antiquity, you know, close to the time of the rise of Islam. But you never, ever hear of a bishop. There's no kind of organized institutional Christianity. That's right.

And you're absolutely right that it was an important feature of Muhammad's message. And in the history of Islam, small history books that are read in school was that famous episode. I don't know how historically accurate it is.

that when he conquers Mecca, he walks into Kaaba, which is the house of God. And then he, with his cane, he topples all the idols that the Arabs worship. And it was featured in that famous movie. I don't remember the name, but it was in Iran. It was called The Life of Muhammad, something like this. It was a famous movie. Yeah, I don't remember the name anyhow. Muhammad the Messenger. Yeah, I guess that was the name of the film. Yeah.

And I guess one of the remarkable features was that Mohammed managed to establish a

I don't know if estate is the right word to use or polity. Exactly. An army in Arabia, something that hadn't been done before with all those different tribes. But they managed to bring them all together and establish a powerful army, which then took over even the Sassanian Empire, which was one of the largest empires of ancient times. Can you talk about how he managed to establish that, let's say, polity? Right.

Okay, let me start by qualifying the words state and army, as you were doing. And first, regarding the state, I think you could say that basically, in institutional terms, this is a one-man state. If you go looking for a council of ministers, you won't find it. If the prophet wants advice, he'll ask somebody. But there's no formal institution there. In the same way,

If the prophet needs to draft a document, he'll get somebody literate to do it for him. But there's nothing like a formal bureaucracy. And it's very similar, I think, with the army. If you take the Persians or the Byzantines, they will have a standing army that is systematically paid. There's nothing like that in Muhammad's polity.

And if he wants to put together a military force and send them to go and do something, he will recruit men specifically for that expedition. When they come back, the force is dissolved. They go back to whatever they were doing before. But I mean, nevertheless, I think, yes, it is extremely important that he was able to do that.

in a part of the world where that was a very difficult thing to do. And I'm not sure I can give you a really good account of how he was able to do it. But I think that quite honestly, the best thinking about this that's been done to date was by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century. And what he said, to put it in a nutshell, is, look,

These Arab tribesmen, they're incredibly proud and refractory people. There is no way they're going to accept anyone with pretensions to royal authority. But on the other hand, if somebody comes to them as a man of God with a religious message, they can submit to that. Now, exactly why they can submit to that, he doesn't really tell us. But there seems to be something in what he's saying, I think very definitely.

And it appears in this way that Mohammed seems to have discovered a mode of state formation in tribal Arabia that nobody had thought of before. It's something fundamentally new.

But after Muhammad, he has many lesser imitators. You have people with a religious doctrine. It may be, say, some Islamic sectarian doctrine, Shiite or Kharijite. And they will go to a tribal society in Arabia or elsewhere. And they will manage to an extent to repeat what the Prophet had done, to form some kind of a state in a stateless society.

I think Ibn Khaldun somehow put his finger on it, but I couldn't say more than that. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

Yeah, you're right. It's a difficult, difficult phenomenon, quite surprising one to explain. Yeah. And let's talk about, and I must mention it to the readers that this is an expansive book. And I haven't read all the book. I've read parts that I was more curious to know about.

So I do strongly recommend that they have a look at the table of contents. There is a lot, and unfortunately, we can't cover most parts of the book in a short podcast. So I'll ask about the areas that I'm more interested in myself. One thing that I'm interested in is the rise of what we know as caliphate after the death of Muhammad. And there were a lot of caliphates, like Umayyad caliphates, Abbasid caliphates, the important ones, the major ones, let's say, and we can't get into history of them, but maybe you could tell us briefly about

What is a caliphate and what were the major caliphates of the time after Muhammad passed away? Right. So we have this Arabic word, khalifa, the English form being caliph. And a khalifa is either your deputy or your successor. If you're alive, he's your deputy. If you're dead, he's your successor. And the Prophet had then

many deputies on different occasions while he was alive. Every time that he led a military expedition and left Medina his base, he would appoint somebody to take care of things in Medina. So that's a deputy. And then when he dies, we have a khalifa, a caliph, in the sense of a successor. And first you have four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman, and Ali.

And those four caliphs are not a dynasty in the common use of the word. They're not one family that's passing on rulership from one to the other. But that succession ends with a civil war in the 650s.

And out of that civil war emerges the first caliphal dynasty. Dynasty is American. I'm trying to talk English. Namely, the Umayyad dynasty. And they rule quite successfully for a bit less than a century. They have many ups and downs. They manage to

whether a second civil war and come out victorious. They then fall to a third civil war in the middle of the 8th century, and we get another powerful dynasty, the Abbasids. So, I mean, they rule starting in 750, 749, 750 AD.

And whereas the Umayyads had ruled from Syria, the Abbasids rule from Iraq. And that's when you get the creation of Baghdad. And the Abbasids are imperial rulers for a bit over a century. They have their ups and downs, just like the Umayyads. But in the early decades of the 10th century, as imperial rulers, they have a definitive downturn.

They don't pull out of it. After that, the Abbasid caliphate survives as a symbol and for a while as a kind of local regional state, but it's never again an empire. And it survives, if you really want to draw it out, down to the early 16th century, 1517.

when the Ottomans come to Egypt where there's a sort of shadow Abbasid caliphate that nobody pays much attention to and the Ottomans put that in the trash can. And what happened after the, let's say, the breakup of this powerful caliphate

because that's, again, an area of focus making up our making. So it wasn't maybe a state, but they were powerful like Abbasids. They were really powerful caliphates. They had lots of, I don't think it was the golden age of Islam as well, but it broke down. What are the cultural impacts? What happened in the area when these large caliphates vanished? Right. And I think the key thing is that, especially in a pre-modern state, every time the center is weak,

people in the provinces have opportunities to act up. That's what happens. Let's take Iran in the later ninth century and into the 10th century. What we get is a great variety of people acting up against the background of the decay of Abbasid power. Just to give you a brief rundown, one pattern you get is provincial governors who dig into their provinces,

So ideally, from the point of view of the center, you let someone govern a province for a few years, then you move him somewhere else so he doesn't grow roots there. But a governor will always grow roots if you let him. And so we get governors who are able to establish dynasties. Their own descendants inherit power from them. You get that in Azerbaijan. You get it in Khorasan. So that's one pattern.

And then another pattern is sectarian state formation. It's either, you know, there are two sectarian wings of Islam, the Kharijites and the Shiites. And you get both in Iran in this period. In Sistan, in eastern Iran, you have Kharijites who establish their imamate, their caliphate. They don't recognize the Abbasids.

In the mountains south of the Caspian Sea, you get descendants of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin of the Prophet, who established little states among the Dalamite tribesmen up in the mountains. Then you get something that I don't think you get elsewhere, and that is, again, going back to Sistan, where the Karajites are, we also have a Sunni militia there, an anti-Karajite militia.

And there's this man who, he's a pretty simple guy. He's a coppersmith. But somehow he manages to become leader of this militia. And somehow he turns that into conquering a large part of Iran. And you have briefly this, in military terms, very successful state led by this coppersmith, ex-coppersmith by now in Iran,

Yeah, there's one more pattern. I'm probably forgetting others, but there's one more pattern worth mentioning. And that is, now we go back to those mountains south of the Caspian Sea where we have the Dalamites. And the Dalamites, they make very good infantry. So they come down from the mountains and they become mercenaries and they enlist in the armies of the states down in the plains. Mm-hmm.

It's just like the Swiss in Europe in the 16th century. They come down from their Swiss mountains and enlist as mercenaries. But these Dalamites do something the Swiss mercenaries don't do. As far as I know, the Swiss mercenaries never established a state in Europe. Whereas these Dalamites, they get the idea that they can take over from their employers.

and they do that. And they establish states that will then last for something like a century. And the major example of that is the Buyid family. So that gives you an idea of the variety of actors that are taking advantage of Abbasid weakness. And if I may, I should have asked this question before this one, so I'm not really following a chronological order here. It doesn't matter.

Like I told you before, so I'm originally from Iran and I'm curious to know more about what happened in the region with the rise of Islam. A Sasanian empire was one of the largest empires of the time, but it

collapsed. What were some of the causes that it was easier conquered by Arabs? And did they accept the Iranian society back then? Did they accept the new religion? Or how did the new religion, what was its cultural impact on the region when it entered Iran?

Right. Okay, that's first the fall of the Sasanian, the Persian Empire. And I think that's, well, I mean, you know, history is full of bad luck, which you can't say anything very systematic about. But I think, I mean, there are two key factors at work. One is a matter of timing. The Sasanian Empire was established as a strong state in the 3rd century.

And as usual, it has its ups and downs. But it's remained a strong state into the 7th century. And then it gets involved in a very long war, in a quarter of a century of warfare with the Byzantine Empire. And at first, it's extremely successful.

It looks very likely that the Persian Empire will completely destroy the Byzantine Empire and rule the whole Middle East, as the Achaemenids had done over a thousand years before. But then, suddenly in the 620s, the tide turns and it ends with catastrophic Persian defeat and Byzantine victory.

Now, the Byzantine emperor doesn't push his victory. What he wants is regime change in the Persian Empire, and he gets that. So a deal is done, and he goes home. But the fact is that the Persian Empire has just been defeated in a catastrophically long war. It's the weakest it's ever been. So

and we have a very weak persian empire and on the other hand the arabs are stronger than they've ever been because thanks to the prophet creating his state they've managed to get together on the same page

And the combination of them, I mean, if there was ever a time when the Arabs could conquer the Persian Empire, it was then in the 630s. That's one side. Then the other side, how they adapt to the new religion. Right? Yes. That's right. Okay. Yeah, I would say there are two very basic ways.

One, there are alternatives. You can continue as a Zoroastrian. The new rulers will probably not be very nice to you. They'll make you pay an extra tax, but you can continue. They will let you continue. The other thing you can do is convert to Islam. And that, in the end, is what the great majority of people in Iran do.

I mean, as I'm sure you know, at the present day, Zoroastrians are a tiny minority in Iran. And nobody knows exactly when Muslims became a majority. But I mean, it seems quite likely that by the 10th century, we have a Muslim majority in the heartland of the Persian Empire. Let's call it Iran. So, yeah.

The next question you could ask, and here we come to adaptation again, you've adapted by converting to Islam, but have you, so to speak, completely surrendered to Islam? And there are two ways in which converts may not surrender completely. One is that they may reshape their new religion under the influence of their old religion.

This is something that happened very prominently in Java. The Javanese convert to Islam, but they javanize Islam. And they create an Islam that to people in Arabia looks completely weird and exotic. Now,

The population of Iran doesn't do that. But what they do do is to retain a strong memory of their pre-Islamic past, and sometimes in very practical ways, like...

Yeah, I mean, they still live according to the Zoroastrian calendar in terms of the months of the year. They don't live according to the months of the lunar calendar. They live according to the old months of Sasanian Iran. That's one thing. Another thing, yeah, let me think. Yes, of course, yes.

To this day, people in Iran celebrate Nowruz. Nowruz, that's not an Islamic festival, and pious Muslims can get very upset about it. But the fact is that people in Iran persisted in celebrating Nowruz continuously down to the present day. And another really major thing

We take Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh. So this is a poet who writes a poem about the history of pre-Islamic Iran. He's writing it around about the year 1000. And that poem actually is not the first poem written in Persian about the history of pre-Islamic Iran. It's just the most successful one, 60,000 lines. And then very quickly, it becomes, you would say, canonical.

And there's a Shiite poet about 50 or 60 years later who is very shocked by this. He says, no, people should be reading poetry about Ali and his wars for Islam, not about these pre-Islamic pagans. But the fact is that he uses the poetic meter of the Shah's name,

There is diction of the Shahnameh in his poem. I mean, clearly he's reacting to a situation in which everybody is reciting the Shahnameh and he is trying to change the subject, but he has to do it in a way that acknowledges just how successful the Shahnameh has been.

I'm really glad you mentioned Ferdowsi and Ferdowsi's poem, The Book of the Kings, because I also wanted to ask about the role of Persian language, which was quite significant in that empire back then. But before that, I have a quick question. A lot of Iranians might say that if it hadn't been because of Ferdowsi, we would be speaking Arabic. I personally think it's a bit of an over-exaggeration because there were Arabs and also poetry in Arabic and Persian even before Ferdowsi.

but that's not to downgrade his importance. But the whole Ferdowsi and Shah Nomeh project was an aspect, part of it was also an aspect, nation-building aspect, which King of Iran Reza Shah started. He made Persian the national language of Iran. For the first time when Pahlavi was in, first Pahlavi, first King of Iran in Pahlavi dynasty, we had the history of Persian literature. They started building mausoleums for the poets and

And Fredoci was really front and center. And I'm interested to know the history of reception of Fredoci. People back then, lots of them were illiterate. Printing a book was not easy. Of course, they were familiar with Shahnameh. It was an oral tradition. But

Is it an exaggeration that if it hadn't been because of him, Iranians would be speaking Arabic and the whole, let's say, industry, if I put it this way, was a more modern phenomenon? Or do you think that it was still quite significant when the book came into being in the 10th century? Mm-hmm.

Right. Okay. So first the question of what language people in Iran would have been speaking. Yeah, I think, I mean, as you say, and this, the view you quote is exaggerated. It's completely exaggerated. I think completely wrong. And I mean, it was because Persian had survived as the spoken language of Iran that Ferdowsi was able to write a poem in Persian.

Okay, here, let's go. There's a major contrast, I think, here between Iran and Iraq, Syria, Egypt. Iraq, Syria, Egypt, they have their non-Arabic languages at the time they're conquered by the Arabs. And those languages gradually disappear or almost disappear. And so that by the 10th century,

People in those countries, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, they're speaking Arabic. If you want to write something that will be understood by you're a Christian and you want to write for your fellow Christians, not for the priests, but for the laity, you have to write in Arabic by the 10th century. And

The old languages are dead. That is not what happens in Iran. In Iran, there's no indication that at any stage there is any real question which way it's going to go. Persian survives as the spoken language. You could qualify this a bit. If you take Khorasan,

and further out in Central Asia beyond the current borders of Iran, you do have little islands of Arabic dialect here and there, which seem to survive from the time of the Arab conquests. But these are islands in a sea of Persian. I think there's a reason for this. And I think the basic... No, this is... Okay, this is my guess.

I think very likely the crucial agent in the spread of Arabic in the countryside is Arab nomads, Arab tribes. Now, Arab nomads go all over Iraq, Syria, and they're very big in Egypt, but they don't much like Iran because it's up on the plateau, has a different climate, it's horribly cold in winter from an Arab point of view.

you don't get a really successful, large-scale Arab nomadic presence in Iran. And I think that's why the villages, they remain Persian-speaking. They're not disrupted by nomads. I think that's why Persian remains the language of Iran. And then coming to Ferdowsi, okay, my first point would be that Ferdowsi

He was not the only poet or the only person in this business of writing up the pre-Islamic history of Iran in Persian. The poet before him, the poet Darighi, he started composing his Shahnameh. We have a guy who did the same thing, but he did it in prose.

Ferdowsi, I think, is simply the most successful competitor in this. There's already a market. He didn't create the market. He merely cornered it, so to speak. And then with regard to his subsequent place in the culture of Iran,

I mean, there's a lot I don't know here that I'm sure one should know. But what I was saying before about the Shiite poet, and that is testimony to how quickly the Shatnam became something very well known. And then a detail that comes into my mind, I hope I have this right, is

I think when the Qajar army in the late 18th century is besieging the city of Tiflis in Georgia, I think that they have the Shahname being recited to the troops, to encourage the troops. So in other words, the Shahname is not just for intellectuals, it's also for common people.

One of my recollections of being in Iran long, long ago, before the revolution, was of the city of Gurgaon. There were some young men who invited me and my traveling companion to come and see them perform in the local gym, where they did their exercises in traditional style, accompanied by the recitation of the Shahnameh.

And these were not sophisticated graduates of important universities. These were just the young men of Gurgaon. So my sense is that the Shah Nama established itself early and was a continuing part of the culture. And then, of course, yes, when we get to Reza Shah, he makes an even bigger deal of it because he's a nationalist.

But it's not, I think, as if he's taking something that has no nationalistic overtones to it and misusing it. Thank you. It's a very good response. I think I told you before, according to the interview, that I studied English literature myself, and the history of English literature, how some poets, even like Shakespeare, became canonical. It's quite well established. Shakespeare somehow disappeared for a century later.

He didn't really become the superstar that he is today. But unfortunately, we don't have that kind of research in Persian culture and history for various reasons. But one thing I might want to mention, when you said that Arab nomads were not able to travel because they didn't find that area, although geographically parts of Persia, they didn't find it friendly, let's say, to travel to. And Persian remained a language in Persia.

In Iran, I'm also a small village. I'm originally from southern parts of Iran. I grew up in Shiraz, but I'm originally from a very small village. I was born in a small village in southern parts of Fars.

And in that village, the major cities in Iran, the word for evening in Farsi or afternoon is asr or ba'dazur, which is Arabic words. But in that village, they use the word for evening is pasin, which is the Persian word that you find in Shah Namir. So it's small villages.

They're all languages. They speak Farsi, so they don't really speak Dalit, but they're words that are archaic Persian words. But in the major cities, because we had this step with the court and Arabic language and the Persian language, so the use of Arabic words are more common, let's say.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. I'm not going to ask about Iran anymore. I've asked enough. The emergence of Islamic civilization towards the end of 9th century, that's another part of the book that I really found interesting. What do you mean by Islamic civilization towards the 9th century? And what were some of its features and how did it develop?

Right. What I mean is that there emerges, if you like, a complete culture in which you can live your life reading nothing but Arabic. I mean, this is a framework of civilization comparable to, say, Chinese civilization or Western civilization.

It's something that was in the 7th century was not there, and in the 9th century it is there. This is a very dramatic cultural change. Now in terms of features, maybe I would pick out three. One is that this civilization in the first instance is built around Arabic. And there we have a language that had never before been a language of high culture, and

If you wanted to read about philosophy in the 7th century and the only language you knew was Arabic, forget it. You would have to learn another language. To the best of our knowledge, the Quran is the first book actually written in Arabic. And then we come down a few centuries to the 10th century and we know of thousands of books written in Arabic.

And we're lucky to have a bookseller in Baghdad who makes a catalogue of all the books that he knows of. And it's thousands and thousands. And we also know that he missed many other books. There are probably thousands more of them. So that's one thing. And it revolves around Arabic. The second thing would be that it revolves to a very large extent around Islam. So that...

If you take it in terms of academic disciplines, I mean, just take the Qur'an and you have one academic discipline about the exact text of the Qur'an and you can write long books about that. You have another academic discipline about exactly how to recite the Qur'an and you can write long books about that. You have another academic discipline about what does God mean in the Qur'an?

Quranic interpretation and books this big are written about that. So Islam is, I think, very central. But thirdly, I would say Islam and Arabic are not everything in this civilization.

We've already talked about the way in which we get a kind of version of Islamic civilization in Persian, mixed with some very specifically Persian-Iranian heritages. I lost my thread, but it'll come to me in a minute.

Yeah. Another obvious thing is the way in which in the 9th century, the Muslim Arabic speaking elite imports the philosophy and sciences of non-Arab peoples, non-Muslim peoples, in particular those of the Greeks. You have a whole translation movement. And also, I mean, Indian science is a bit involved in this too, and Middle Persian.

So there is this kind of importation of what you might call alien wisdom. That was the title of a book somebody wrote long ago about the Greeks in relation to the Babylonians and people. A value is set on alien wisdom. Those people, they may not have been Muslims, they may be going to hell, but they knew something that we want to know. And then just finally...

This civilization never loses a kind of obsession with pre-Islamic Arabia. They don't say pre-Islamic Arabia. That's not Islamic. Forget it. Instead, they're tremendously interested in the antiquities of pre-Islamic Arabia. Many books are written about the traditions, about events and goings on in pre-Islamic Arabia.

And above all, pre-Islamic Arabian poetry is a very big thing. If you don't know your pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, Arabic poetry, you're not an educated person. So there we have something, and this is very Arabic, but it's not in the least Islamic.

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You mentioned Arabic poetry, Arabs, but I guess the whole term also needs some clarification as well.

And that's what you do in chapter 14 of the book. You discuss a number of countries. You discuss the meaning of the word Arab, how you use it in the context of your research, but also several countries. And from all the countries that you discuss from 16th century onwards, you only consider Morocco.

to be an Arab state. Can you tell us how you kind of problematize this idea of Arab and then why you consider only Morocco to be an Arab state from 16th century onwards? Okay, right. So first, Arab. And I'm not concerned there with the way in which I use the word Arab. I'm concerned of the way in which they used it before modern times in the Middle East and elsewhere in North Africa.

And I make a distinction between two very different usages. One is to use Arab to mean Arab nomads. So that if you're somebody who lives in Damascus, who speaks Arabic all the time, but never goes outside the city, you're not an Arab in that sense, in that specific sense of Arab nomads.

But then there's another sense in which they also use the term where it really means anyone whose native language is Arabic. And sometimes they consider the question, are people whose native language is Arabic, say people in Damascus, are they really of Arab descent? Do they descend from the pre-Islamic Arabs? And they say, well, perhaps not. We don't really know who people are descended from.

they could perfectly well be non-Arab, coming from a non-Arab stock that has assimilated to the Arabs. So that then you have the narrow use of Arab and the wide use of Arab. And that wide use, you see it a lot, and I think I quote examples that come from Morocco, but you also find it in the Middle East. Quite often they use a different term. They talk about sons of the Arabs.

By that, they mean people who are not nomads. They don't probably descend from Arabs, but they're Arabized. They speak Arabic, and they call them sons of the Arabs. But often, they just call them Arabs. That's the word Arab. Then, Morocco. I don't actually want to say that Morocco was the only state ruled by Arabs in the 16th century.

But I do want to say that it was by far the biggest, the most powerful. If you like, it's the only first-class state. We also have Arab states further east, and we've got Arabia.

We have Arab states in Yemen. We have them in Oman. The one in Oman does become quite successful in acquiring a kind of overseas colonial empire, which the Yemeni states don't do. And there are other sort of minor examples that I could give you, but nothing on the scale of Morocco.

Morocco is by far the biggest, most powerful state that is ruled by Arabs in that period. Whereas if you go to other places where you might expect to find a powerful Arab state, like Tunisia, a rich part of North Africa, that is ruled by the Turks. You go to Egypt, it's also ruled by the Turks. Now by the Ottoman Turks, previously by the Mamluk Turks.

So that the Arabs are no longer ruling the best parts of the Arab lands, with the exception of Morocco. And another part of the book I'm interested in is the attitudes of Europeans and also Muslims, especially from Middle Ages onwards,

And again, that's another part, interesting part of the book, which is towards the end of the book. And I'm personally interested in the topic, mainly because, like I told you, I study English literature, so I really loved Edward Said's work, despite all the flaws and, you know, critiques of the work.

But again, when I was reading British novels, you know, I would come across some references, even in poetry, would come some references to Islam, which I found interesting. But I'm interested to know more about the attitudes, the Muslim attitude towards Europeans since the Middle Ages.

And I know it's a terribly broad question, but there's a lot in the book that people can read and unpack. But if you could briefly tell us about this and if there has been a major shift in these attitudes in modern times. I'm particularly interested in Muslim attitudes towards Europeans. Yes, right. And I think there certainly is a major shift. And if we go back to the Middle Ages, certainly to the...

The first few centuries of Islam. And something that we owe to Muslim writers of the time is a lot of ethnographic information about other peoples. And they give us some information about the Europeans. But I think you could basically say that they regard them as...

No, they're barbarians. They have some strange and interesting customs, in particular, the way they handle their women folk is bizarre. And yeah, there's a certain amount of curiosity there, but there's no sense that these are people we should take very seriously.

It's not, for example, like in, say, Biruni, who writes his book about India, and he learns Sanskrit in order to understand what the Brahmins are saying, what they're talking about in their books. Nobody thinks to learn Latin, that there's anything interesting you could learn by getting to read Latin.

In the same way, medieval Muslims have an idea that there are peoples who cultivate science and peoples who don't. And it's not a Muslim chauvinist idea at all. I mean, they think that the Hindus, they are people who cultivate science. We take them seriously.

from a scientific point of view. Nobody thinks of the Franks as people who cultivate science. Now, they're just not part of it. So there isn't that much interest in Europe. But that, yes, it does change. I mean, just to give you a kind of straw in the wind, let's come to Ibn Khaldun, a very perceptive author. And he has a remarkable passage somewhere towards the end of his Muqaddima,

in which he says, we hear that the philosophical sciences are now being very strongly cultivated in Europe with lots of professors and lots of students, and God knows best. He's not going to go out of his way to learn Latin to find out about this, but he's interested. He's heard something is going on there.

We come down to, say, the 17th century. I'm just picking and choosing. And we have an Ottoman intellectual called Hussein Hezarfen. And he is very friendly with a Frenchman in Istanbul. And this Frenchman gives us accounts, an account of their conversations, where Hezarfen says things that he would never say in writing in Turkish.

And at one point, His Arfane says to him, you know, in my next life, I would like to be reborn as a Frenchman. So there's some kind of sense that the French have something that is worthwhile, something that we should know about. And then that sense gets stronger in the 18th century. You know, I mean, towards the end of the century, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III, a

And I think maybe, yeah, I think this is already before he is sultan, when he's still the prince, he is corresponding with the king of France because basically saying we have awful problems here. Can you help me out? Can you give me any ideas? There's a sense that the French know things. And you get that again from Jabarty. Jabarty is an Egyptian chronicler.

He's of Ethiopian origin, and he talks about the French conquest of Egypt in 1798. And he tells you that the French, they're dirty, they're promiscuous, but their library is something special. And he says that he has visited the library many times. So again, this is clearly somebody who has a sense that the French have something to offer.

And then as we move on into the 19th century, more and more people are saying we have to take things from the West. We have to take their science, their statecraft. We have to get it from them. Until you get to, I suppose we could end the story with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, where under his rule, you get a sort of almost total adoption of European culture. Mm-hmm.

against which we've now had considerable backlash. Yeah. And I guess in a way you could also say the same thing happened even in Iran with Reza Shah, who visited Turkey and he was inspired by him as well. And one of the maybe the unintended consequences is what happened. I wasn't born at that time, I don't know, but I've heard stories of how in pre-revolutionary Iran,

And I've seen movies from that time, so I could understand how part of the society which was more traditional, which wasn't economically well-off as the middle-class bourgeois might have felt alienated. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't know if Saudi Arabia is walking down the same path or not. I don't know. I guess we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. You're right. As a final question, I'm always interested when I read history books, I'm always interested in how they can inform our attitudes in present, how they can

help us, you know, navigate the challenges we have these days. And, you know, we have the rise of right-wing populists in Europe, in America. It's unfortunately a global thing. We have this division, again, the division between the West and the East, at least the way the media is actually playing that thing.

And I've been reading a lot about history these days and the points you mentioned were new to me, but I've read stories about how some medieval scholars from Morocco, for example, traveled to Europe, were inspired by them. So there's a long, long history of interaction between East and the West. But given the

things that are happening around the world, especially in the Middle East with the conflict between Israel and Palestine, some commentators, and I would say some naive commentators, simply resort to this idea that this is centuries-long conflict between the Muslim and the Jews. Do you think that Islam and Judaism have been in conflict with one another in the same way, for example, that maybe Jews were persecuted in Europe?

Or do you think it's just a very facile and narrow view of things? And again, how can your book help us navigate all these complexities, not only between Jews and Muslims, but also Muslims and non-Muslims or people like me? But the moment I tell someone I'm from Iran, they will say, okay, you're a Muslim. Well, I don't know. Yeah, I'm a cultural Muslim, but nowadays, to be honest, because I know where that question comes from, because I'm at the party, I'm drinking wine,

where are you from? Iran. Oh, so you're Muslim, you're drinking wine. If I say, no, I'm not, I'm reinforcing a stereotype. If I say, yes, I am. Well, I'm not. I used to say I'm a cultural Muslim, but now I don't even bother. These days, I guess I'm deliberately being cheeky just to confuse them further. They say, yeah, yeah, I'm a very pious Muslim. And I don't even bother to get into a conversation. Anyhow, I'm rambling.

Can you briefly tell us about the lessons it can have for us, and if you think that Judaism and Islam have always been in conflict with one another? Right. And I mean to say that they've always been in conflict with one another would certainly be wrong. I mean, the accommodation that many Jewish communities had with their Muslim rulers in medieval times was by no means a bad one.

there is that basic, on the Muslim side, that basic possibility of tolerating certain unbelievers who have, well, I mean, in principle, it's supposed to be people of the book, people who have divine revelation, but that's then extended to

in the first instance, that's Jews and Christians, then it's extended to Zoroastrians, and then eventually to the Hindus. So there is a sort of basic and built-in option of toleration. And from time to time, of course, that breaks down and you get unpleasant events. But, I mean, that...

you can tolerate unbelievers in good conscience. And that's, I think, an important point. And of course, in those days, the Jews are not any kind of political threat to Muslim political power. On the contrary, they're useful people, they're good doctors, good merchants, that kind of thing. Now, clearly, the establishment of the State of Israel

was going to create considerable backlash in the region. And it would have done that supposing that the dominant religion in the region was Buddhism and not Islam. It doesn't matter. That venture was bound to create backlash.

And when you get backlash, it's going to be expressed in terms of the values people have, values that are being offended. And Islamic values come in very easily here because for Muslims to have political power is basically an Islamic value. But then if we take... I mean, what I fundamentally want to say is that these kind of things may in a sense...

be fantasies, but they are fantasies that are very real for people. But then there's the other half of all this, which is geopolitics. If we take Israel and Iran in the days of the Shah, that was more like an alliance, and that makes a lot of geopolitical sense.

in the sense that you quarrel with your neighbors and so you ally with the neighbors of your neighbors. I tend to think that the attitude of the Islamic Republic to Israel has, I mean, there are genuine Islamic values there, but also that it has a geopolitical dimension which consists in the fact that

Because Iran is a Shiite country, it has problems with the Sunni world. And to be able to say, we are the ones, we Shiites are the ones who are confronting Israel, whereas you Sunnis, you're a total failure. That is a way to get some kind of legitimacy.

in the eyes of Sunnis. And I suspect that that is an element in the situation. Yeah, and again, with the 12-day conflict between Iran and Israel, and I was terribly distressed by what happened because I've got family in Iran, but when I was going through social media, a lot of not politicians, not Arab politicians, but a lot of Arab-oriented populations would be praising Iran for doing that, which I don't necessarily agree with. I don't believe that

Because I think at the heart of it, as you were right to mention, there are geopolitical, from the point of view of government, there are a lot of geopolitical reasons for that. But then I thought to myself, and I've spoken with some friends, that this conflict between Iran and Israel at the ideological level has not really done Iran any favor in the past 40 years.

It's Iranian community. Iranian people have paid a heavy price in terms of sanctions and the threats. Yes. I'm not joking. I said to a friend, look, I think we are using the expression, we are more Catholic than Pope. Even Saudi Arabia has recognized Israel. All these Islamic countries, the birthplace of Islam, they have recognized the state of Israel. Understand that you have geopolitical issues. The same way that Saudi Arabia does have geopolitical issues with Israel,

Israel or Emirates or Qatar, but at least they have downgraded the level of conflict or hostility by at least recognizing and still advocating for the rights of Palestinians as well. So it's a very complicated issue there when it comes to the geopolitical issues between countries like Iran and Israel. And then some people were praising Iran. I said, well, you can praise it, yeah, but it's ordinary Iranians who are paying the price now. Like I said, I was really distressed myself in the past two weeks because

I'm really relieved that it has stopped and I hope it keeps going that way. But, you know, if history is a lesson, it's still a very volatile situation. You never know what might happen in the next three or four months. Yeah.

Professor Michael Cook, I immensely enjoyed talking to you and I took much more of your time than I asked for. So I apologize if I went over time. Really fascinating book. And it's not only a history book. I do strongly recommend to people who want to know what's happening in the region. They need to know the history of the region. And this book, if you come from Turkey, there are a couple of chapters you could go to if you're from parts of Asia. Again, there are chapters you could go to. I was from Iran. So I mainly focus on chapters related to Iran.

There's something in this book for everyone. The book we just discussed was The History of Muslim World from its Origin to the Dawn of Modernity, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. Thank you very much, Michael, for your time. Thank you very much, Murtaza. I really enjoyed that.