A cartoon history of Beyezit's empire

Up on the Lockdown List, God's Shadow. I don't think Alan Mikhail is being ironic in his title. And I don't know how long I can keep reading its content.

Snide asides about that atrocious Catholic Church dot these pages, which pages start with the Osmanlis and rush through to Mehmet II's death without much discussing what horrors attended the sacks of Constantinople then Trebizond "Trabzun". I will concede Pope Innocent VIII isn't high on anyone's list of decent or effective Popes but I think one could word his tenure better than that he was the exemplar of the [implicitly intrinsic] brutality of his Church. Mikhail later lets slip that when prince Cem died as a Muslim not aiding a crusade against Beyezit, that Cem perhaps saved his soul.

That is: that Catholicism is damnation. Mikhail hates the Latin Church; deeply, viscerally hates it. Mikhail despises Europeans, too: so called glories of the nineteenth century is not just in the Yale interview I quoted but the book as well. Wait 'til you see what he has to say about Trump re: The Virus That Began In Xi's Empire.

Mikhail does have a point that Catholic Europe was less tolerant of Muslims and, of course, Jews than was the Osmanli régime. But he glides over what happens to Christians (and to Jews) under Islamic rule. As noted they don't stay Christian or Jewish. Mamluk Cairo is an Islamic city in the late AD 1400s. Was it Islamic in the 400s? And the process wasn't always peaceful: the sultan or the pasha always had the whip-hand. When Mikhail says Muslims "never" forced conversion or death on their subjects Mikhail is lying.

Mikhail has a motive - a more inclusive present. He notes in the book all the terrible violence done to Muslims in the West after 9/11. Which events pale beside the reverse: Boston, Madrid, Orlando, London, Paris - but hey, I'm not keeping score, here. To the likes of Mikhail, "inclusion" means Christian and Western subjugation. It doesn't much matter to whom. As a point of ethics it means Mikhail's motive in writing the Ottoman gospel was never in providing us a biography.

Mikhail is exactly the sort of man Cohen describes in his own (so much better) book; the Jew who would die and maybe even slay his own daughters, rather than convert to Christianity; but who would eagerly defect to the Muslims if it gave his family advantage. Yes, to the point of apostacy.