In this episode of the afikra podcast, Professor Michael Christoper Low – director of the Middle East Center at The University of Utah – explains how Mecca and its burgeoning influx of pilgrims from around the world — transported by the recently invented steamships — became ground zero for cholera. He maps out how this situated the Hejaz within broader colonial interests. We reflect on perceptions and understandings of Mecca — placing it in a "trans-imperial" space — and Michael underscores that to understand the Arabian Peninsula we need to go beyond studying the Middle East and include the Indian Ocean and British Empire.

0:00 Introduction
2:11 Michael's Background
5:33 Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and Indian Ocean Hajj
6:45 Colonial Fear of Cholera and Hajj
20:02 Quarantine Stations in the 1860s: Kamaran Island
26:09 How Did Cholera Spread & What Happened to the Corpses?
33:19 Place of Cholera in the Hashemite’s History
36:26 Mecca as a Trans-Imperial Space
41:40 Mecca’s Identity & Connections to Caucuses & African Continent
51:43 Jeddah’s Population Between 1950s and the Present
56:29 Perceptions of Mecca & Sovereignty

Michael Christopher Low received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015. He is the director of the University of Utah's Middle East Center and his primary research and teaching interests include the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean world, and environmental history. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020) which in 2021 won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award.

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Theme music: Peninsular, Tarek Yamani 🔊 https://spoti.fi/47I59ns

Hosted by:
Mikey Muhanna 👉   / mikey_mu  

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