RaveThe Wall Street Journal... very original and wide-ranging ... Mr. Mikhail draws on sources in several languages to tell this gripping story; he wields a lucid and fast-moving prose, and his analysis is full of surprises. For like a skilled janissary—one of those elite troops that made Ottoman armies so formidable in the field—Mr. Mikhail has more than one string to his bow. He sets Selim’s accomplishments within an exceedingly wide context, for he views the persistent Ottoman threat to the West and the panicked response to it, following the capture of Constantinople in 1453, as the catalyst for numerous seemingly unrelated events not only in Europe but in the Americas ... We are used to a depiction of Columbus as a man fired by the quest for discovery or the riches of an undiscovered world, but Mr. Mikhail makes his case convincingly ... Mr. Mikhail’s alignment of Selim’s admittedly impressive reforms with the Reformation in Europe is provocative and interesting, if perhaps exaggerated. In fact, it exemplifies Mr. Mikhail’s brilliance, as a historian, in discerning previously unsuspected correspondences and parallels. But a reform of the law courts and legal practices, however sweeping, is hardly equivalent to the redefinition of doctrine and ritual practice that the Protestant Reformation produced. Whatever the consequences of Selim’s reforms, he did not revolutionize fundamental aspects of Islamic belief, nor did he have any intention of doing so; the binding creeds of the theologians and jurists remained as they had been defined and promulgated centuries before. Rather, Selim’s reforms seem intended to centralize and solidify the power of the Ottoman state, and in this they were certainly successful. Little wonder that Erdogan and his cronies offer obeisance at the tomb of Selim the Grim.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
RaveWSJ[a] superb account of the Arabs over three millennia ... As a privileged observer of his \'adoptive land,\' with a rare mastery of Arabic, both classical and modern, he is ideally positioned to make the tangled past vividly present. His use of the Arabic language as a recurrent point of reference is only one important aspect of Mr. Mackintosh-Smith’s originality of approach ... The sheer onrush of events in this history could have proved overwhelming in the telling ... But Mr. Mackintosh-Smith handles his complex account with great aplomb ... There are occasional lapses ... he writes with wit and verve ... His words...tacitly offer an exuberant homage to his fractious and eloquent masters.
Casey Cep
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... brilliant and gripping ... probably the nearest we will ever get to the book Harper Lee tried so hard to complete. It is a tacit tribute to Harper Lee but even more, an attempt, largely successful, to bring her abandoned project to final fruition ... a book of compelling portraits ... [Cep\'s] frequent asides on matters ranging from the construction of the huge Martin Dam to the predatory practices of “burial insurance” salesmen, from the vociferous rival claims of Baptists and Methodists to the arcana of voodoo, among many other recondite subjects, give us a sense of a region too often dismissed as an epitome of \'backwardness\'. As Cep reveals in this painstakingly researched and beautifully written book, even backwardness may have its nuances, as provocative as they are puzzling.
Jack Miles
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"[Miles takes] a novel and rather startling approach to scripture, but in Mr. Miles’s hands it allows a kind of openness to a text that, to non-Muslim readers, can seem puzzling and alien ... Mr. Miles’s account stands alone, both in its generous openness of mind and in its scrupulous yet lively scholarship ... In his treatment of the Allah of the Quran, suspension of disbelief is finely balanced by a generous suspension of his own personal beliefs, and his book is all the stronger for this equipoise.\
