E459 | In this episode, anthropologist and lawyer Darryl Li discusses his new book The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Based on ethnographic and archival research, the work explores the Bosnian jihad, in which several thousand Muslim volunteers ventured to the area to fight in response to the mass atrocities against Muslims in the midst of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995. Through this lens, Li critically engages with many of the omnipresent yet unexamined concepts associated with Muslim mobility and jihad. Or, as he pithily put it, he aimed "to write a book about jihad that didn't suck." With this goal in mind, he offers a perspective on the Bosnian jihad on its own terms. Highlighting the jihad as a universalist project, he moreover reveals unexpected intersections, including everything from South-South legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement to Habsburg Neo-Moorish design confused for Ottoman architecture to Sufi-Salafi alliances. He also grapples with the long shadows cast on Muslim mobility by the US-created global network of prisons in the context of the Global War on Terror.
More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/04/darryl-li.html
Darryl Li is an assistant professor of anthropology and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago and an attorney licensed in New York and Illinois.
Sam Dolbee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He completed his PhD at New York University in 2017. His research is on the environmental history of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies. His research focuses on the intersections of sectarianism, humanitarianism, and famine in central and eastern Anatolia between 1839 and 1893.
CREDITS
Episode No. 459
Release Date: 15 April 2020
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Audio editing by Sam Dolbee and Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Sombra"; Kai Engel, "Illumination"; Blue Dot Sessions, "Our Only Lark"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Darryl Li at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/04/darryl-li.html
