lecture series of the Sawas Middle East Institute, this term. This evening's lecture is co-hosted by my colleague, Dr. Yorgos Dedes, senior lecturer in Turkish, who is also the convener of my department, the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, largest and most popular postgraduate program, the MA Middle Eastern Studies. And Yorgos himself is a very active member of Center for Ottoman Studies at Sawas and also teaches the Ottoman language. I also bring you the greetings of Professor Dina Matar, who normally coaches this session, but overwhelmed with so many other commitments. So we have my colleague Yorgos here tonight. Our distinguished guest tonight is Professor Mark David Bauer, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science at the good old LSE. And for quite a while, or perhaps still, Professor Bauer will correct me, is the only professor in the United Kingdom that teaches Ottoman history in the entirety of that title. We can spend the whole session and then some more to just list Professor Bauer's publications, but suffice to say that in the past 15 years alone, he has written extensively on the history of the Ottoman Empire, as well as Turks in Germany. And most recently, his highly acclaimed work entitled the Ottomans, Hans, Caesar's and Caliphs, which is published by Basic Books. And if I'm not mistaken, it was published at the end of 2021 in November 2021, which we will be talking, discussing this evening. And, you know, the numerous articles that list his publications, and I refer you to his webpage on the LSE website. We're delighted that Professor Bauer has been able to accommodate our invitation in his incredibly busy schedule. And if I am allowed to rely on the Twitter source of information, I learned this afternoon that Professor Bauer is on his way after India, after attending a literary festival in India to Lahore Literature Festival next week to talk about his book. Our format tonight is just a little bit different to the usual series of just giving a lecture, but we have had sessions when we have a conversation with the author. And that is what we will do this evening. So as usual, do please type your questions in the Q&A function. And I will collate them and I will look at them, and we'll perhaps, you know, intercept the conversation between Dr. Dethers and Professor Bauer with some of your questions. And we will leave plenty of time in the one hour session that we have tonight to address more of that. So if I may, if I am allowed, Professor Bauer, Mark, if I may, I thought I should quickly look at the GCSE syllabus and to see whether, you know, where do the Ottomans feature in that, whether the, you know, British students at that level engage with the topic. And it's really very selective. I have to say, I haven't looked at the entire thing. But it's, you know, the obvious one, the much later, you know, the end of the collapse of the empire, or perhaps seizure of Vienna. But it made me wonder that for a dynasty that for almost six centuries has ruled such a huge expanse of Asia and North Africa, big chunks of Europe. Why is, why is so little attention? And I say that advisedly, I haven't gone through every part of this syllabus of looking at it. So I wanted to ask you, first and foremost, is your book a about the sort of place of Ottomans in the European political thought? Or is it, you know, is it an encounter between Europeans and Ottomans? Would I be able to describe it as that? Thank you for having me on the at your at SOAS tonight. It's too bad that we can't do this in person. But here we are, we reach more people perhaps. And I also, my own children were just selecting GCSE subjects. And I can tell you that for year 10, where they're going to go to school, the Ottomans don't figure it is, it is, it is, it is how it is in many places. I am working with a secondary school system elsewhere in England, outside of London, and I am helping them develop a unit on the Ottomans to put into their curriculum. It won't be here. I'm not quite sure it might be year seven, but the year doesn't matter. So and and as we are writing it together, of course, you realize how many stereotypes about Muslims, about Turks, about Ottomans, there are. And so hopefully reaching out to secondary students, it'll help to change that. So the book doesn't do what you say. It's not about Europeans and Ottomans. One aspect of the book is to make the show how the Ottomans were European. And the Ottomans, of course, were an Afro-Asianic European Empire. And other scholars, colleagues of my own, are more focused on South Asia. And there have been some recently, there have been some really good books about the Ottomans and the Moguls. And that's important. My interests living here, living in post-Brexit England. I'm a new arrival to England. I've been here about 10 years. But living here in the Brexit times, I think I was influenced. And one of the things that I do focus on in the book is how European the Ottomans are. And so the book is not about how Europeans view the Ottomans, but it's about stretching a canvas of Europe, stretching out from London to Baghdad. And including Muslims and Jews in the story that we tell about the past here in Britain. And also for readers in Turkey, I've gotten very good feedback. There have been a number actually of Turkish ambassadors, not prompted by me, who are tweeting aspects of the book, where I show just how European the Ottomans are. And I could give lots of examples of that. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Mark, if I may step in now. And I think it would be fair to say that we're all in a sense, basking in your reflected glory and the glory of a distinguished colleague for doing exactly what you've just said, making it clear that with a book that is public faced, open to a general public, you have made it a particular point to stress how the Ottomans fit as part of what should be a new re-definition of what Europe is. It is not about the contacts and how they have been part of the imagination of Europe in mostly in an inimical way as the enemy, not to mention the sort of abysmal depths of negative propaganda that we're reaching the 19th century with expressions, the more famous expressions of the likes of Zahar Nicholas as the sick man of Europe, or even the unspeakable Turk and things like that. But your book very much tries to show that just like Muslim Spain, before them, at the other end of Europe, the Ottomans, when they occupied the southeastern space of strictly speaking geographical Europe were very much not just on that score, but because they were part of developments that affected everyone, an object of study that should be undertaken in parallel. And it's been a good, a good almost 20 years since a last book of that kind, which was not even of that kind, or the last two books of a similar kind that were published in the early 2000 Colin Imbers, more specialist sort of a book about the early and classical Ottoman Empire, the structure of powers called it, which was aimed at redressing some key misunderstandings about the Ottomans and setting the early chronology right. And then of course, Caroline Finkel's very impressive and all encompassing comprehensive book about the history of the Ottoman Empire, which was of course, precisely that and a general history that covered all aspects and which is not what, of course, your book is trying to do. And your book has a particular, so to speak, acts to grind, but in the best possible way of showing the way the Ottomans can help the general public, public intellectuals and of course, scholars to rethink some of their conceptions and preconceptions about Europe and so on. And from that point of view, it is it has been a remarkable achievement. And if I'm not mistaken, this was when you mentioned your involvement with secondary schools, which I think came as a result of your book. But I you mentioned in another occasion that, you know, for what it's worth, the European Parliament sort of took notice as well. So it is having exactly the sort of impact. And I use the word and not in the sort of dirty sense that it might just have in the in the strictly speaking academic circles, but the right sort of impact of picking up people's ears about the Ottomans. So perhaps it would be fair to start by you telling us a little bit more about, of course, the title and the allusion of the title to the three different sort of background of the Ottomans, the Turkic, the Islamic. So the Turkic alluding a little bit to the title as Hans, the Islamic in as much as they were, of course, it's at some stage, especially when they were now they became a power in the Middle East. They assumed the title of Caliph in the 16th century with Suleyman the Magnificent as as as your book argues convincingly rather than Silim the Grim Silim the first. And of course, the third title of Caesars, which refers with its connotations to to the Byzantine the Roman background of the Ottomans, who as nomadic Turks, who adopted Islam from the Persians, came and settled and ruled in an area that was primarily what we now call the Eastern Roman Empire, but an empire that very much thought of itself as the Roman Empire Byzantium, and and the Ottomans saw very much themselves as successes to that. So tell us a little bit more, if you don't mind a little bit about your choice of the three titles of the Ottomans as an appropriate title for a book on the Ottoman dynasty. That's right, I was asked to write a history of the dynasty, not a history of every event, every battle and every corner of the empire. So that's how the book differs from Caroline Finkl's masterwork, but very much is modeled on her on her work, which came out about 1516 17 years ago. And of course, Caroline is a is an alum from from so us, of course, is very proud of her. From Colin Imber's book, I took the idea that one should translate Ottoman terms into English. We as Ottoman specialists, we forget that our reading public doesn't know Ottoman Turkish. So so that's what I took from from Colin's book, but his book ends in 1650. And so so I was asked to write a history of the dynasty from the whole time period. And of course, when you write a book of this length, I think on audiobooks, it takes 18 hours to listen to it. Don't don't do that. That's too long of your time. But of course, when you write a book of this length, you have to have an argument, you have to have a theme. And I began to think about how I would present the Ottomans. And the Ottomans, if we go back to Osma, the very progenitor of the dynasty, he didn't know what would come after him. But I think of him, and we have to think of him, and think of all the inheritances that he's inheriting everything that he's drawing upon. So he is a Turkic chieftain, it's not even a sultan. He is a semi-nomadic warrior at the end of the 1290s. And he's raiding. He's raiding in Northwestern Anatolia in the Byzantine Empire. He's also raiding going on armed confrontations against other Muslim Turkic chieftains in the area. And he's surrounding himself, not only with fellow Turkic Muslim people, but also with with Greeks. And his right-hand man for a decade and a half, is a Greek who remains a Christian for about 15 years before he converts to Islam. But most of Osman's retainers are Christians. So this made me think about how the Ottomans drew upon the Byzantine past and their presence, also their Turkic Mongol past, and also Islam. And when we think about the Islam of the Ottomans, this isn't they have different interpretations over the centuries. There are different emphases. The dynasty, the members are surrounding themselves with different types of Muslims. So so I wanted to reflect that diversity in the book. But already from the earliest times, certainly from Osman, his son Orhan's time, Ottomans begin to intermarry with Christian dynasties, European dynasties with the Byzantines. They begin to intermarry with Serbian dynasties. They begin to play a role in the Byzantine Civil War. They send their the mystics, their Sufis to Constantinople, to the palace where the Christians complain about their their wild chanting and so on. So we have to think about the Ottomans, not black and white, but as an Asian and as a European Islamic power that is incorporating Christian elements. And most of the time, allowing Christians to remain Christian. And there are many examples of as we move forward into the centuries, aspects of our own past that we forget about, there is going to be a election in France in April. And no one's talking about how in the 16th century, the Ottomans and the French King launch naval campaigns against the Italian city states. That's not the tenor of the French election campaign right now. And the way they talk about Muslims. So these aspects of the European past are forgotten, buried, silenced. And so that's why I emphasize them in this book from the earliest days, all the way until as as Yorgo mentioned, the Russian Tsar called the Ottomans the sick man, the Sultan, the sick man of Europe. But in the book, I focused on the second part of that phrase of Europe. And his reflection in the 19th century, that there are parts of Europe, which was incorporated diplomatically speaking, after the Crimean War in the middle of the 19th century. This was a reality already from the 1300s, where the earliest diplomatic relations, excuse me, between the Ottomans and the French again, for example, goes back to the 14th century, when the French had to ransom nights that were captured by the Ottomans during a crusade. So so this is the point. But the other point is also, excuse me, to rethink different conceptions we have about history, not to fit Muslims in, not to say, okay, Europeans have established all the different patterns of history and Europeans have defined the different stages of history. And as a historian of the majority Islamic world, I'm just going to fit them into that. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to by showing, for example, how much of a Renaissance prince met with the second, the one of Concord Constantinople and his successor, Bayezid II, the second war. I'm trying to expand our understanding of what Renaissance means. So not just talking about encounters. But when we talk about when the same portrait painter was hired in Venice, and it was hired in Istanbul, then we're talking about a shared Renaissance culture. Absolutely, yes. And that ties in with the title of Caesar and Caesar, which as in the popular form of Caesari room, the Caesar of Rome, the Caesar of Rome, perhaps in translation, would refer in the popular epics about to the, would refer to the Christian rulers, but then eventually gets to be adopted as a title by Mehmet the Conqueror, who is exactly a kind of Renaissance man with his interests in both Italy and the pre Islamic past of the area, with his doubling into Greek and so on and commanding and commissioning rather manuscripts in both Greek and Hebrew and other sources and sowing his sort of attitude to learning. That is, you could argue, in some ways, typically Islamic, in the way that one could argue that Islam, in a sense, never went through a medieval period of dark ages, because it kept, in many ways, the old legacy of late antiquity, philosophical and otherwise, through the translations into Arabic, and then the use of those works, not just by the Arabs, but in Persian as well. A lot of the translations were done by all kinds of different people. And that tradition continued. So in many ways, for me, what your book nicely highlights is the way in which this sort of Platonic almost understanding or Neoplatonic, as we might call it now, which you exemplify in the figure of Ibn Arabi, one of the hardest, possibly thinkers to understand, but incredibly influential one, which, interestingly, comes from Spain to the Middle East and Anatolia itself, whose thought via his disciples and so on permeated Ottoman centers of learning, the famous madrasas, the religious schools, but also a lot of the thinking of the Sufi orders, as we would call them. So much so that you could argue that in many ways, members of the Ottoman dynasty is very well educated in the classical way, princes, but also, of course, the elite of the Ottoman court took this Ibn Arabi tradition, took this tradition of a combination of beauty and love of being in a position to appreciate the beauty as it crystallized, of course, in adolescent boys, more than anything else. Sometimes we speak of young boys, which would be a little bit unfair to give the impression that they were really boys. We're talking here about teenage adolescents being idolized for their beauty, a staple picture, of course, in symbol in Persian literature, which is there in Turkish and Ottoman literature as well. And in some ways comes to be an emotional script for life for the for the Ottoman elite who are given the, who have the luxury, if you like, of applying it given that they live in an empire, which because of its military success has the possibility of exactly promoting the arts, the finer arts. So next to this light motif theme of the empire being an empire of conversion that I would like to come to next, may I ask you first to comment yourself on the importance of this Sufi string, which of course, as you rightly stress, is not only of the elite, so to speak, persuasion, but but but has a very strong manifestation throughout the Ottoman period with the wandering type of dervish, the calendar, the deviant dervishes which are antinomian, they focus on faith, and not rituals, and and therefore have a possibly destabilizing role, but also a galvanizing role. So for me, one of the very successful aspects of your book is is is to see to trace the continuity of the presence of both types of Sufism in in in the empire, and within the dynasty itself. So I wonder if you could say a few how you visualize that in the writing of the book. The example that you gave of staring at young boys and relationships with with youth and the idealization of youth for beauty is something again, this illustrates how the Ottomans were all these different things are Asian and their European, because they're taking this both from Islamic culture, and in this case, they're taken from the culture of Rumi, the great the great mystic. They're also taking it from Renaissance culture. And this Renaissance culture, maybe it comes later in Europe than the rest of Europe that doesn't the Ottoman Empire. This is also shows how what was happening here in London was similar to what was happening Florence, which was similar to what was happening in Istanbul. So that's that's one aspect. And but Sufism is extremely important for the empire. And as I mentioned, there's different competing versions of Islam that are going to bubble and surface and come in different ways. Now so going back to Oswald, the very first progenitor, now he surrounds himself with a variety of Muslims and some of these Muslims beliefs and practices would not be accepted by today's Muslims as being proper and as being Islamic in any way. And so that's why in the book, I call them deviant dervishes in the sense that as you mentioned, these were people who they consume narcotic narcotic substitute marijuana, basically, they also they drank alcohol, they consume alcohol, they also tattooed their body, their peace pierced their body. Sometimes they went around with no clothes or only with bare skins or whatever kind of animals they could find. There's a famous there's a mosque in Bursa. And this is the mosque of Gekli Baba Gekli. So this is the the Sufi who who pranced around with deer. And if you go to that, that his tomb, then you have a lot of antlers are there still today. So you have these kind of Sufis and the Ottomans are close to them for the first at least three and a half centuries, they're close to this type of Sufi, they're want their blessings, they want their barakah. And they're they're close to the dynasty. But of course, there are other kinds of Muslims, mostly coming from what is today Iran. And these are Sunni Muslims whose beliefs and practices would be very understandable for Muslims in London today. So already from the beginning, it seems that Osman had these two types of Muslims in his red no surrounded himself by them. Now these Sufis I mentioned these these deviant dervishes on the one hand, they wanted them around for their blessings. But the problem was that these dervishes could give their blessing to someone else. And that's why in the book, I try to depict the Ottoman dynasty as being quite fragile, because especially in the early centuries, some of these deviant dervishes could raise armies, could proclaim using, as you mentioned, Ibn Arabi's concept of the pole of the universe, the one person who is lich upon whom literally the whole of the world revolves, some of these individuals claim that they were the pole of the universe. And because of that, they were the ones who were owed obedience, not the Sultan, who was just an ordinary man. So that's why we see, especially in the 16th century, we see uprisings, tens of thousands, perhaps of armed Sufis taking over provinces of the empire, threatening the Sultan, moving throughout the centuries, they were constantly their assassination attempts, attempts on the Sultan. And so over time, we see very different kinds of religiosity and different kinds of Islam proclaimed by the Sultan, depending on who it is. So I mentioned Osman and some of the crazy characters in his revenue, that would be continued for a while. Or if we think about someone such as Suleiman, in the middle of the 16th century, would be the first Sultan who called himself Caliph. So Caliph, of course, is the symbolic leader of all world Sunni Muslims. So this is very different. Now, earlier in his reign, we know from reading the material that was produced at his court, Suleiman actually had very radical views. And there were people in his court who thought Suleiman was a messianic figure, not just the Mehdi, not just the Redeemer, but something even even more powerful than that, the one rule world ruler who'd unite East and West. So this this Islamic thought and influence plays into the European aspect, when Suleiman, who believes probably it seems from the written sources that he was indeed the ruler to come at the end of time, that then he had a Venetian goldsmith create for him a four tiered crown, three of three of which now Charles the fifth had three tiers. I'm sorry meant to say Suleiman's is a four tiered maybe I said four Charles the fifths, the Holy Roman Emperor's crown is three tiered. Suleiman had the goldsmith add a purple tiara to it. So the crown looks like the Holy Roman Emperor's crown plus the Pope's crown. And this is what Suleiman actually wore in Sarah, he put on his on his head in ceremonies as he paraded through Belgrade under Roman ceremonial arches. So here again, we see how the Islamic is moving together with the European and creating something unique, and something that both startled but also made other Europeans wonder about. I mean, wondering the sense of they were they were impressed our own Henry the eighth, like to wear Ottoman dress, he was so jealous that this other power was so wealthy, and had such sumptuous materials. Thank you. There are different ways in which to continue from here. But I would like to pick up the strand of the of the messianic movements and the Sufi turmoil that you mentioned. To move on to of course, the Jewish messianic about a century later, the sabotage the incident or chapter which is a fascinating chapter of Ottoman history, which again via the Jewish Muslim connection brings the European aspect as well into the foreground, given the communications that that existed at the time and the correspondence between Jews in different cities in Europe and in the Ottoman Empire, and and invite you to sort of comment a little bit about the importance of of as you were saying at the beginning, not only Muslim, Muslims in Europe, but Jews with their connections across different borders in Europe, in the case of sabotage fee. That's right. And this is also another way to look at how our history is told. So the the great biography and biographical history we have of Shabtai Tzvi was written by a great scholar by the name of Gershom Sholom, who if you read the book, you would never imagine that it took place in the Ottoman Empire. It's also it's almost barely been mentioned that Shabtai Tzvi was comes from Izmir, the city some people call Smyrna. So this was it in the 1660s, 1666. This was the second greatest Jewish messianic movement in history after that of Jesus. And what is significant in many ways is there have been many Jewish messianic movements in history. But usually, they end up in very grim ways. The the messianic figure is is executed. This happened. There was a current Jewish messianic figure who was executed in earlier centuries. But in this case, what's interesting is that the Sultan at the fourth calls Shabtai Tzvi to the palace for an interview, and asks him to renounce all the in the Ottoman texts called the nonsense that was told about him being the messiah. Now in the Ottoman texts, they actually say about being a prophet, but what we understand the claim of Shabtai Tzvi was that he was a messiah. So Shabtai Tzvi denies everything according to the Ottoman source, and then he converts to Islam. So usually such figures and thousands of Jews were causing all kinds of chaos in the empire, because they were saying that this figure was going to remove the world was going to dethrone the Sultan and rule in his place. So despite all the upheaval, now that this followers weren't armed. But despite all this, the Sultan took Shabtai Tzvi as an usher into his palace as a Muslim. Now, this is this is intriguing. He wasn't executed for his blasphemous thoughts. He was taken into the palace. And we know from his own letters that he penned that he didn't really become a Muslim. In other words, and he told his followers, hundreds of them also converted to Islam, ostensibly, but secretly, they maintained a secret faith. It was not Judaism. It was not Islam. It was a new religion only for that group at which Shabtai Tzvi was the messiah. They believed in things that went against Judaism and went against Islam. So Shabtai Tzvi is not executed. He's exiled. His followers coalesced in Salonika, which is a great city today. And it was a great Ottoman city before it fell to Greece in 1913. And from there, this group of his descendants would arise again, and his his descendants, the descendants of those people converted along with Shabtai Tzvi would reappear in the 19th century and play an important historical role. And his case, of course, with a conversion opens up this other very important aspect of your book, which is the way in which the empire was an empire of conversion, one of its strength, one of its cornerstones rather militarily, but also in many ways socially with the Janissaries, who were the elite military corps, the result of conversion, but also the result of this so-called collection, that is the child levy, which wasn't necessarily, again, a levy of little children, but of young boys who were clearly at an age that it could be determined they would make sturdy and good soldiers to begin with, and possibly able administrators once trained as well. And your book traces this important theme, which is tied of conversion, which ties in with another extremely important theme of the book of tolerance, of Muslim tolerance, Ottoman tolerance, as you call it, which it is necessary for people to realize was taking place in the lands of Europe and therefore needs one should no longer think of European toleration and European tolerance without taking into account, again, both the Spanish example earlier and the Ottoman example later, but tolerance comes, is it the behest rather of the ruler for all that it is guided by Islamic practices to significant degree, the way it is applied, and was applied exactly at the time of sabotage these movement in the forced, if you like, expulsion of Jewish communities from the center of town, the expropriation of their areas for Islam and conversion to Islam is the two interesting faces of this coin of conversion on which so much of the application of tolerance hinged. So I wonder if you could say a few words about that, please. That's right. So we have to think of a tolerance and conversion together. And a lot of people misunderstand this. So tolerance by tolerance, they don't mean coexistence and equality. Of course, Islam was supreme according to the legal system of the Ottoman Empire, just as men had more rights than women, Muslims had more rights and better rights than Christians and Jews. So Christians and Jews were tolerated, they were allowed to live, they're allowed to flourish. But there was a social hierarchy. So again, compared to, for example, the treatment of Jews and the rest of Europe at the time, this was this was something this was something superior. It's not something we would want today. No one wants to be a second class citizen. But it was what it was. And the Spanish Muslims, the Muslims in Spain, from the eighth century, and the Ottomans in Eastern Europe from the 14th century introduced tolerance to Europe. And so as you mentioned, we shouldn't just believe that people began to understand and figure out how to live along with each other only in the 18th century and age of enlightenment. No, Muslims introduced it to Europe earlier. But it's not part of the story we tell about European tolerance. So if we keep this in mind, that tolerance is an allowing to live and allowing to flourish, but it's at the best, as you said, of the ruler, then we can also understand conversion. So over the centuries, Christians and Jews were allowed to remain Christian and Jewish. Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism and by the Spanish and Portuguese settled in the empire by the tens of thousands and returned to Judaism. So this this is this is important to keep in mind. At the same time, there was a, as you mentioned, one out of every 40 Christian youth in Ottoman occupied territories were taken from their homes and were circumcised, converted, trained in the Islamic languages and were then they were slaves enslaved, they were able to rise in the military or the bureaucracy based on their, their skills, their merit. So, so these go together, these go together, and we can't just narrate Ottoman history, not talking about the collection, only talking about tolerance and some people want to do, but we can't just talk about the Ottomans and just talk about the, the levy of youth. It's the Ottomans on the whole allowed Christians used to thrive. But at the same time, in order to build their machine of state, they came up with this policy, which again, goes against Islamic law of taking your own subjects and compelling them to convert. So, so we have to think about these, both of these together and over the centuries then, millions, absolutely millions of Christians until lesser state Jews were and converted to Islam. I wanted to come in because what you mentioned, there's a question here, which I thought might fit into just this section of the conversation. One of our members of audience asks that did the Ottomans ever then actively legalize this sort of tolerance? Was there any laws or legal devices that actually prohibited discrimination or hatred or of non-Muslims? Where is there any mechanism in the, in the legal system to not allow atrocities against non-Muslims? Well, the atrocities perpetrated against people in the early centuries of the empire were perpetrated against Muslims, people that we today would call Shi'i Muslims. There were massacres of Muslims in the 16th century. But there weren't any massacres of Christians or Jews in the empire. There were massacres of Armenians began in the 19th century, which was, which we could talk about. So the question is about the legal apparatus. The Ottomans incorporate two separate bodies of law and harmonized it. One was Islamic law, Sharia. And Sharia is, of course, something that's always evolving, always being interpreted anew. And so Ottoman thinkers over the centuries used that body of Sharia law. At the same time, there was a body of secular law. So these were simply the, the decrees of the Sultan, the Sultan could just declare a law. And many of these were not in harmony with Islamic law. So the Ottomans then created two figures, two positions. One was a chancellor. And his task was to try to make Islamic law go together or secular law fit Islamic law. And they also created the position of the Sheikh of Islam, the leading Mufti. And his position, his job was to harmonize, again, secular law and Islamic law. So they both were given very difficult tasks. And, you know, you could, we could question how legitimate they were in the sense or whether they were just trying to create a body of law that was, that was practical. The Ottomans were also incorporating perhaps the, the, their other inheritance, the Mongol inheritance. Of course, the leader of the Mongols, Akkad was able to, to declare a decree and make law. So, so they had these bodies of law. And there are many important scholars today, younger scholars than me who are working on, on those bodies of law. And, and apropos of that, which fits in with, with, with the tolerance paradigm. And what exactly you described is perhaps a more extreme case compared to the other Islamic setups. But it's important to realize that for all that there were some movements that could be described as, as fundamentalist and Puritan, again, bringing an analogy with Puritanism here in this country in the 17th century. On the whole, there were always several areas of practice in, in the Ottoman Empire like there had been previous Islamic polities, which were secular, where the Islamic law did not really apply. Medicine being a key example of it, of course, that, that, and famously, nothing stopped Muslims and the dynasty itself to usually have non-Muslim doctors, partly precisely because of the fact that they didn't want to follow Sharia based medicine, so to speak. And they were by no means the exception. This was something that, that happened both in other Islamic periods and in other places. So, that is something that your book highlights, I think, very nicely. And it is a tragic irony, more of a tragedy than an irony, of course, by any stretch, that it was when the equality between the Muslims and the non-Muslims was sort of put in, in, in, on paper with, with the decrease of the 19th century, the famous Perestroika to give them a bit of a now a reorganization that is tanzimat in, in, in, in, in the sort of Islamic term, decrease of the 19th century, which eventually after the Crimean War stipulated equality before the law between Muslims and non-Muslims, the vagaries of the Oriental question and, and the great power game on the one hand, the great rise of education on the other and the schools as you, as your book explains, and the education activities of both the Muslims and the non-Muslims led to an extra, to a boom, not just in education, but a boom of activity amongst the non-Muslims, which was greatly resented. And though there is no linear connection between these developments and the pogroms against the Armenians and some of the massacres of Christians in different parts of the empire, it still remains a fact that the traumatic events of the Balkan Wars, at the turn, of course, of the 20th century, where territories were assigned to different countries under the guise of nationalism, which had been abandoned by terrorized civilian populations, chased out exactly for the purpose of declaring one area to one state, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, being the three in particular, Romania, partly as well, they're not involved in these massacres, led directly to a chapter that is also an incredibly important, a contribution of your book on the Armenian genocide, which you both, which is in many ways the closing, the complete destruction of the possible Ottoman dream, or the Ottoman grand illusion, if one can put it like that. And that, of course, was not the result of the Tanzimat equality, but it is a chapter that is also very much part of European history, especially through its link to the definition of the crime of genocide by Lemkin. So it is, I want to give you an opportunity to comment on the way that the telling of the story of the genocide, as you do through this dramatic account of a woman again, and I think there will be a little bit more about women in a second, precisely exemplifies what could go terribly wrong in this polity. Yeah, from 1789 to the end of empire, different groups of people, members of the dynasty, the administration, intellectuals, were trying to figure out how to save the empire in their words. So it was a long period, a long 19th century, and because they realized that the Ottomans had lost their technological edge and by the 18th century, and the empire was beginning to lose territory, of course, and they also were threatened by a new enemy, which is Russia. And so Russia began to press upon Ottoman territories through southeastern Europe, but also down the Caucasus and into Eastern Anatolia. So from both ends, Russia was pressing. And so Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals thought, well, how can we make this a how can we save our empire? And there was a group of Ottoman Muslim intellectuals called the young Ottomans, and they believed that through parliament and constitution and Islam together, they could make the empire strong, and they could save it from these external enemies. So their ideas were reflected by the end of the 19th century, and the Ottomans did establish their first constitution and their first parliament. By that point, as Yorgos mentioned, they had given up tolerance. By that, I mean the medieval concept of inequality, where the ruler has subjects who are ranked hierarchically and given different rights and privileges based on where they fit in that hierarchy. So by the middle of the 19th century, end of the 19th century, the idea was that every citizen now, no longer subjects, would be equal, whether they were Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. This was happening at the same time as you mentioned. There were nationalisms. The Greeks and the Serbs, for example, began to and successfully were able to separate from empire in very, very bloody struggles. Recently, people are celebrating the 100th anniversary last year of Greece, the Kingdom of Greece. That was an incredibly bloody violence revolution in which thousands, thousands of Muslims and Jews were massacred in Greece, and in which a kingdom was created for Christians. They meant very exclusively that this was to be a kingdom of Orthodox Christians and Greek speakers too. So this went directly against the earlier Ottoman centuries, and so the Ottomans were faced with this new context, and so as we moved towards the 19th century, the end of the 19th century, with different nationalisms, with different external threats, again, they tried to figure out how could they save the empire, and they tried different things. They tried constitutionalism and parliamentarianism. They tried Ottomanism, having everyone be patriotic and be loyal to the Sultan, no matter who they are. They tried to enroll Christians and Jews in the military, which they did after 1909. All these efforts though, all these efforts, they needed more time to work out. These efforts didn't work out, and what we see, again, at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of Armenian revolutionary parties, political groups, even terrorists, deceiving banks and so on in Istanbul, we see a very harsh crackdown by the empire under Abdulhamid II. If we move into the First World War, this is a different regime. This is a different regime. You have a party of revolutionaries who have overthrown, really, the government have taken control into their hands from 1913 to 1918, the ruling the empire through more or less martial law. They've restricted all rights of the citizens, and it's in this context that they lose the Balkan War, they lose their homeland of Salonika, and you have all these traumatized Muslims who are the victims of Christian massacres moving into the empire, victims of Russia massacring civilians, not just today, but also at that time, 1912, 1913. So, you also have an increase in Ottoman Muslim nationalism, an increase in Turkish nationalism, and you throw all this together in World War. You have the Ottomans join the wrong side, the losing side on the World War. You have Ottoman armies commanded by Germans, you have Ottoman soldiers fighting alongside Ottoman soldiers. One of those soldiers, one of those Germans, was Rudolf Hauss, who would go on to be the commandant at Auschwitz. He's fighting for the Ottomans in Iraq, against the British. So, in this this war time, disaster, where the Ottomans are losing in the south to the British, losing in the east to the Russians, losing territory, panicking, holding off at Gallipoli, but worried that Gallipoli will fall, the capital Istanbul will fall, the dynasty will be extinguished. So, in this moment of panic, the rulers of the junta, Talat Pasha and the others, pay more attention to conspiracy theories about Armenians than they do to actual military developments, rather than focusing on the real Arab revolts in the south, and the Arabs who are allying with the British, they focus on Armenians, and they believe all Armenians, not just the revolutionaries, not just the guerrillas, all Armenians, men, women and children, babies, grandparents, they're all potential or actual traitors, and a decision is made in 1915 to annihilate them. I like to say that the Armenian genocide is probably the most well documented event in Ottoman history, and we could write a history of the Armenian genocide just using our Ottoman sources. We could ignore the the eyewitness accounts of the victims and of allies of the Ottomans, we could just focus on German sources, but forget the German sources too, they were there with the Ottoman soldiers. We can just read the Ottoman material, and when we do so we understand that they sought to annihilate this one component part of the empire, and this really was the end of the Ottomans. This is the end of the Ottoman idea, this is the end of the dynasty and the empire, when they turn on their own citizens. This is the end of coexistence in the early 20th century. It's not later on when the when the Zionists are doing their thing in Palestine. This is, as one current book would argue, it's the Zionist who caused the end of the age of coexistence. That comes later. The end of the Ottoman age of coexistence is the Armenian genocide. I have lots of wonderful questions are streaming in. I know that I booked my slot to ask you on the occasion of the 8th of March, International Women's, I was going to ask about Mehmet, but as usual women can have to be back of the queue. I need to honor the questions coming from our audience. We have a very interesting comment and then a question. The comment is that Sultan Mehmet's Ahname, which brings independence and tolerance to the ones who are from another religion, belief and race, is written by Fatih Sultan Mehmet after the conquest of Bosnia Herzegovina in May 28, 1463. The origin of the Ahname is kept as the Franciscan Catholic Church in Fonseco and Bosnia Herzegovina. The Ahname has just very recently been published by the Ministry of Culture on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Ottoman. This is one of our audience thought we ought to note that, but slightly changing the narrative, another audience member says that so far the painted picture of the Ottomans is overwhelmingly positive. But does the book also show how the Ottomans were a colonial force, taking the riches from the Middle Eastern provinces, keeping the population poor, enforcing the horrendous taxes, taking the great artisans from all over the empire and how they enforce the Hanafi legal system in the Sharia cause, rather than the existing tolerance and choice of having the former mazahib like Egypt, for example, did. Yes, in response to the first comment, I believe they're speaking of Bosnia, is it Bosnia with the ministry which has, yes, of course, I also always tell my students you don't have to go to Turkey to do Ottoman research, you go to Bosnia or what I've done, spend time in Greece or even better be to go to Bulgaria. Bulgaria has the second most Ottoman language materials in the world, they're kept in Bulgaria. We could research Ottoman history just looking at these archives and libraries in southeastern Europe. The other question was about the negative aspects of Ottoman rule. In the book I do have a chapter which talks about Ottoman Orientalism. So I talk about both the Orientalism of the British and the French and the Germans and Russians and the way they treated the Ottomans, but then I also talk about how some of the Ottoman elite they took in this, they assimilated this Orientalism and they turned it against Arabs and Bedouin and Druze and other component peoples of the empire. So as I state in the very beginning of the book, the aim of the book is not to praise the Ottomans, it's also not to simply criticize them. It's an honest history of the Ottomans. It's based mainly on Ottoman chronicles and leading scholarship from around the world and the aim is to tell the picture, tell the story of the dynasty and tell it in all its complexity. I've had readers email me and they're not too happy that I include different episodes, but a historian doesn't, a true historian doesn't just glorify the past, doesn't also just criticize the past, but we're trying to understand how the Ottomans were unique but also similar to us and all the different aspects of their society and their government. The book has social history, cultural history, diplomatic history for the military history buffs, there's battle scenes in there. This is a history of the dynasty in all these different dimensions. Today is World, it's International Women's Day. I think Nargis, you had a question about that. I wanted to know about how, I love the opening of your book. I love the description of the, you know, you looking at the manuscripts but rather longing to join the others who seem to have access to manuscripts, you might not have been given immediately. I love that scene and I have to say the book is so beautifully written. I mean it is, you know, it is very, it's not what one expects at this, you know, dry academic narrative and that must be a credit to your style of writing. My question was that when you were looking at this manuscript, to what extent the roles and lives of women at court is, you know, chronic world? Are they the written evidence and how much was this? Is it just by the by, you know, appendix or are they very much discussed as having, you know, central role? Well, I do spend a lot of time in the book on gender and sexuality both for men and women and that's something that's been missing from a lot of earlier studies and a lot of academic texts, a lot of academic scholars don't want to, to talk about aspects of gender and sexuality that might be controversial today. But again, if we read Ottoman sources, if we read Mehmet II's poetry written under Penne but we know it's his poems and he's devoting his poem and expressing his desire for Christian youth, Christian males, young Christian males that, you know, as a historian, didn't we have to write about that? And I, I began a chapter with, with a quote from his, one of his works. But regarding women, of course when I was in the archive at Tokapa Palace, I was able to realize that I realized that some Ottoman women ruled in, in reality, they weren't ruling, they didn't have legitimacy to rule, they couldn't legally rule, it was always a man, only men could rule. But in practicality, in the, especially in the 17th century, when someone like Mehmet IV comes to, is enthroned at the age of seven or eight, actually his mother and even his grandmother are there in the palace and when I was in the archives, I was realizing that actually this is a young boy, he's not making any decisions but it's his mother who's actually standing behind a curtain and when the sultan is meeting with the girl of Azir, the prime minister, it's actually the mother speaking from behind a curtain saying, we need to build these two fortresses on the, on the straits and this is how much money we could give to and I look, you know, this is how much I'm give for my own, my own purse and, and, and this is what happened, the mother of the sultan ordering two fortresses to be built, one is still there today. And also who should, you know, hiring people, firing people, all these personnel decisions in the palace, we know the mother is behind the curtain, she's, she's giving orders and through the sultan but she's actually the one. So we know that women in the palace are playing a big role in politics, especially in the 16th and 17th century and it does come out, it does come out in the, even in the archival sources. Fantastic, there are questions that I think you just touched upon the Ottoman and the 11th with the Druze, some question about that and also relationship between the Kurds and the Ottoman Empire. And I think if I find, if I look up for the, I think it about the Druze was that the Ottomans aligned with the Druze because they considered them Muslims in their struggle against Christians and Maronites. Well, that was, you know, the nuance of that question. And so the Druze Ottomans, Kurds and Ottomans and also another question that brings it up to say that is it correct that parts of Ukraine were, you know, ruled by the Ottomans and is this, is there anything we can trace in the current dynamic of this war let's call it what it is and going back to Russians and the Ottomans over that territory? These are all good questions. So the Ottomans, again, to understand them, we can't just think of them as Muslims going against Christians. We also can't think of the Ottomans so simply as simply being Sunni Muslims. And for example, when they battled the Safavids in Iran, that it's simply a Sunni versus Shiite conflict. It's not, it's not as simple as that. So the Ottomans, there was a large pocket of Shiite Muslims in Lebanon and you would think that the Ottomans wouldn't tolerate that, that this large body of Shiites. But we know from scholars' work, looking at the archives, the Ottoman archives, that actually for a century, a century and a half, two centuries, 15th and 16th centuries, at least even into the 18th century, the Ottomans are employing Shiites as governors and as administrators and as military leaders in what is today Lebanon. So never mind what we think might have been a confessional divide between Shiite and Sunni. The Ottomans were practical. There were these several big families in southern Lebanon and also in Tripoli, and also in the Bikal Valley. So three different parts of what is today Lebanon. There were Shiite families that gained and had full support of the dynasty. Now the group that suffered more in the Ottoman centuries were the group that today calls themselves the Alevi. In Syria they're called otherwise in Turkey they're called the Alevi and they trace their roots back to well at least the 16th and 15th century to a group that the Ottomans considered to be supporters of the Safavid Shah and they call them Kizilbash. This was the name of the fanatic supporters of the Safavid Shah. So there as I mentioned when Selim in 1516 is marching east to to battle the Safavids not in 1516, before that sorry in 1501 when he's going east he has local officials write up lists, draw lists of local Alevi, otherwise and when his army arrived in those towns those Alevids were taken out and executed. So it's actually this is the group that has remembers this and this is five centuries ago. So that's why when the current regime in Istanbul built a new bridge over the Bosphorus it called it the Sultan Selim bridge. This is why Alevi and Turkey were so outraged because Sultan Selim had they remember him for massacring their ancestors. The other question was about the Kurds. Of course there were diverse Kurdish groups in the empire. In the early centuries there were Kurdish sheikhs and Kurdish princes and notables who sided with the Ottomans. There were so for example one of the greatest Ottoman history writers was a Kurdish man called Bitlisi and he wrote a great work in Persian and great history. He sided with the Ottomans and he convinced other Kurdish notables to do as well. But of course there were other Kurdish groups. The Kurds were pretty much left alone on the frontier between Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Pretty much left alone. It was more a question of loyalty. So if they proclaimed their loyalty the Sultan then they were left alone. This will all change in the 19th century when we have a centralizing aspect and some Kurdish groups some Kurdish leaders were were attacked wiped out by the Ottoman dynasty and empire. Others sided with the Ottomans and benefited greatly and there are some names or some families that are still important today and they can trace their rise back to the Ottoman times. Yorgo, you're muted. In I was saying as well I almost lost contact as well with the mute button that unfortunately Narga's lost contact via her internet. So maybe Mark I can repose the question from Diana Dark about Russia and Ukraine and the Ottomans whether you see any as a historian any relevant connection to make. Well again the regime in Turkey today finds itself trying to play a delicate balance between Russia and Ukraine. It has relations with both. The last thing Turkey needs right now because of its economic crisis and political crisis is a war but they're right there on the Black Sea. It's really quite dangerous. But this is similar in a way to the Ottomans because the Ottomans in Ottoman times there were Ukrainian looking for the right word let's say military leaders who were who sided with the Ottomans and would go into battle with them against the Russians or against other powers in the region. Just at the same time there were other Ukrainian they were called Hetmen these military leaders who who went against the Ottomans and would side with the Russians or the Bulgarians or what have you. So it's so it's quite a diverse picture and the Ottomans had to again play a very delicate balancing act of giving those people a little bit of what they wanted but also making sure that they were loyal as long as they were loyal and providing arms and so on fighting alongside them against Russia and other times. And this goes back to the 17th century the Ottomans reached the greatest territorial limit not in the reign of Sudevan in the 16th century as people like to believe but actually again under that Boy Sultan met at the fourth in the in the middle of the 17th century that's when they're moving into southern you know very briefly of course but into Ukraine into southern Poland that might be the point at which my ancestors came across Turks for the first time I don't know in southern Poland maybe but but I don't want to draw out any other any other connections but there are scholars there are some really really good scholars in Turkey who look very carefully at the 17th century the chronicles and could give a very detailed discussion about which Ukrainian strongman supported the Ottomans at which time the point the bigger point again is not just see this as Muslims versus Christians but to see the different alliances that link the Ottomans to European history. Thank you. I apologize that I suddenly very uncharacteristic my I think it's because the landline rang and it just drops that I'm conscious of the time galloping away and I wanted I'll give you an announcement about our lecture in two weeks time or event in two weeks time but before that can I ask your question Dr. Dedez to give them a word of thanks and to wrap this section of the lecture and then I'll quickly do the announcement for the next lecture. All I can say is repeat my admiration for the task you have managed to accomplish to accomplish with this bookmark because it really is extremely important to do precisely what you've done in terms of arguing for the cause of needing to examine Ottoman history for its in all its aspects not supposedly the good ones that perhaps we have ended up highlighting a bit more than we should have had today as part of European's history and as part of the history of the changing Europe in many ways these days with large Muslim populations of course as well and so on from one end to the other end of Europe this being the case so certainly as an institution that has in the past produced Ottoman historians namely the last one that that wrote a book similar to yours Caroline Finkel as you said we're all very thankful. Thank you for having me appear in your seminar. We had a a question with privately addressed to you Mark which was about a lady from if I bring this back whether you are related to the anthropologist Hans Bauer is that something that because this lady who did her masters in University of Arizona with this professor but she wants to say she found this talk amazingly fascinating she is from the Chicago area and you know has studied German studied Ottoman history and is now very interested in the Turkish diaspora in Germany so she obviously has quite a few books of yours to read on that aspect. Absolutely it goes without saying how grateful we are that you did squeeze precious time squeezed into our program and I have to say I'm loving the book I thought I can just quickly Gina turn the pages find something to highlight a few bits to discuss but I actually found that it's really wonderful and I'm just taking my time over reading it and thank you so much as ever to our loyal audience our next event the last event of so as Middle East Institute on Tuesday lectures we are delighted to say that it's going to be face to face I don't want to jinx it it will be at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre on 22nd of March starting at 6 p.m. and it is a book launch an amazing book launch and how lucky is it that Dr. Dettis is here because it's on an entitled Faces of the Infinite and Neoplatonism and Poetry at the Confluence of Africa Asia and Europe a book co-edited by Professor Stefan Spell and Dr. Joghurt Dettis so you'll find more information about that on our webpage and I hope as many of you who are in London or a good you know commutable distance from London will join us the details for registration are there but thank you so much Yorgos and thank you so much Mark Professor Bauer for this amazing evening really grateful for your times and enjoy your love your time in the lovely literary festivals in India and there are very Jaipur and then Lahore we try not to be very jealous Thank you Thank you very much


I request Jyoti Kamalji to welcome our panelists for the next session, Alia Sultana Bhabhi, Dinosaur Princess from Dujral, but as she is known as Doctor Dinosaur and Malika Singh Dunlur from Baisa's Adventures. Princess Alia Sultana Bhabhi, the Dinosaur Princess is the daughter of the late Nawab of Balasinore, who has been advocating for the protection and preservation of the rare dinosaur fossil site in Raioli near Balasinore. Converting her family home, the Royal Palace in a heritage homestay, she has been successful in bringing recognition for the site. And daughter of the Royal Rajput family, Malika Singh leads Marwadi horse safaris in the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan. The indigenous Marwadi horse was revived by her father in 1985 by starting the horse safaris and she took it a step ahead by founding Baisa's Adventures. Let us begin with the session. Over to you Jyoti Kamalji. Thank you Ashi. Thank you so much. Alia starting with you. An unknown fact or maybe some people know it. Parveen Bhabhi is from your dynasty, the famous actor. And your dynasty of course comes from Afghanistan and then kind of the Bhabhi's settled down in this area of northwestern India and kind of made their strongholds there. How did you kind of really go from being somebody associated closely with royalty to actually making sure that dinosaurs in India get preserved? Because in Balasinore that area that you come from, Raioli, that village, there is this anecdote that is often recounted that you were kind of passing by and there were these flavorsome aromas coming from a hut there and you kind of go in and there is this one lady who is known for her cooking, who is cooking something really yummy out there and then you look at a mortar and pestle that she is using to kind of grind the spices and then when you look at the pestle you see that it is an odd shape, it is like oval and it has dots on it and then you suddenly realize that it is probably a dinosaur egg and you wanted that but they would not want to part with it till the time that you had to exchange a royal utensil with them and then they gave you that egg in return and that's how you kind of got that dinosaur fossil with you. And this is the Rajasaurus Narmadensis that kind of is in that area. How did you kind of traverse this journey of being a princess to actually making sure that dinosaur fossils are preserved in the Balasinore area of Gujarat where you come from? First and foremost, good evening, Namaskar. Thank you, News 18 for having me here. Our pleasure. Yes, I come from Balasinore which is one of its kind dinosaur region and it is considered to be the world's third largest hatchery. So we are in the top three which for us Indians it's a very proud moment and how I came about in it is also I was pushed into it by one of my media friends that you must do something for the preservation of these fossils because India has a lot to offer but we Indians are not aware and this is what I wanted every Indian to know what all India has to offer and today after a long and arduous struggle of more than 27 years we have a fantastic museum solely for dinosaurs in a tiny little village of Rayoli which was not even on the world map and when we have tourists visiting our place you ask any child what's your favorite dinosaur they say T-Rex because they have been exposed to the world of T-Rex through the movies the Hollywood movies but do any one of us know that there are Indian dinosaurs with Indian names I'm sure none of you know that but there are more than 30 dinosaurs from India one is named after the Vindranath Tagore one is named after the Kota formation of rocks and the tiny little of tiny little village of Rayoli also has a dinosaur named after it called Rayoli Sores Gujaratensis so it has Rayoli as well as Gujarat in it and the king of all the dinosaurs in India is the Rajasaurus Narmadensis which had a horn on its head which looked like a crown so it's just a wee bit of an effort that I made to popularize the dinosaurs in India because I felt yes today's generation needs to know about it and I wanted to create something called Dino Tourism you know you have temple tourism you have beach tourism you have wildlife tourism and especially after these movies I created something called Dino Tourism and today the Dinosaur Museum is visited by thousands of people from all over the world and I'm very proud of what I have managed to achieve for the tiny little village and more I'm proud because I through the Gujarat Tourism we have managed to give employment to the local people so that I feel is my biggest achievement and when you come back to the egg the interesting story yes I found this egg with a village woman and she was using it to grind her masala little did she know that in reality it was a dinosaur egg because even today when you go to the rural areas you don't find mixes and grinders in most of the homes they use a mortar and a pestle Silvatta and this egg particular egg was covered with chilies so I very lovingly give it a name Masalanda which is in my possession and Smithsonian did a fantastic story on the fossils that I have the fossil site and about my family so also Rajasaurus a big dinosaur because I've seen images of it it looked like a Tyrannosaurus but a smaller version of it we call it the Indian cousin of the T-Rex it had a horn on its head which was the most distinguishing feature it was approximately 30 feet in length and weighed approximately 4,000 kilos but the recent research says that it had a more ferocious grip much more than the T-Rex so it was an ambush predator so yes when the tourists visit to the museum and they do a tour with me I definitely managed to change the mindset of the children and instead of loving the T-Rex they start loving the Rajasaurus great and in fact the name itself is the royalty of dinosaurs Rajasaurus probably because of the crown that it had for two reasons first and foremost because it came I had a horn on its head which looked like a crown and secondly possibly I'm not to sure about that but I would like to say because it came from the princely state of Balasinor and that is why mighty king of the Narmada but scientifically speaking every naming of a prehistoric creature has a significance the region it was found or who founded it right I'll come back to you for another bit of kind of dinosaur trivia that's there in that region which is a snake that was also found which used to kind of eat up dinosaur eggs and like that was a non-dinosaur snake predator predator of dinosaurs some Indicus I forget its name but I'll come back to you for that going to Malika Malika the most yes good evening and thank you so much for I mean a very different outfit in terms of what you do in terms of preserving the Marwari war horse the most famous of them all of course is Chetak when we kind of talk about a war horse in India it was Chetak Maharaja Pratap's Marana Pratap's war horse and eventually they kind of started losing their kind of value in folklore and journal presence till the time that your father really decided that the war horses had to be kind of preserved and that's when the tourism started that's when the safari started what kind of a war horse was the Marwari or is the Marwari war horse okay so Kamagani to everyone and thank you for having me here so the Marwari horse is I'm not too loud right because my voice is already husky okay so the Marwari horses are very well known as war horses but as you said after the Britishers invaded and you know a certain time they were sort of getting lesser known and they guess they are very much read by our children and by all of us when we were in school in the history but people started knowing more about Polo and the Tharobreds and at some point you know the Marwari horses were not known and I would say even now the journey carries on in 1985 my father decided to revive the breed it was actually just out of his passion he bought a batch of 25 horses which was in Jaipur it was in our ancestral home known as Dunlod house and those days you know there was some information about it in South Africa that safaris like this take place so he thought that why not take this forward so we started doing horse safaris which was a way for equestrians from all over the world to come in experience India mounted on the horse and of course it it was something which you know began as his own passion to revive the breed and then we realized that people from all over the world really appreciated it they want you to know about the unique war horse and so and so for the you know there were times when we used to be like we used to my father used to be six months on a horse like from all the way to October to March and then we have off season now coming back to me looking at this since I was 13 I guess I would say it also came genetically and when you are around you know a family where someone is so involved in horses it automatically becomes you know a part of your life so yes yeah but when you look at these four horses now they are in this safari that you run and it's an amazing experience that you offer in that whole shekha with the region of Rajasthan and people come they do not know riding and then they have to figure out how to ride this horse and then but after they figure it out it's a magical experience of actually going out for two-day safaris on horseback how did how did you kind of really make all of this work and are people afraid of kind of learning to ride a horse for the first time these are war horses I mean in one's imagination they come across as kind of war horses really so I mean how how did you kind of blend the two this whole safari thing people not knowing how to ride horses getting them to really mount the horses getting them to form a bond with the horses and then actually taking them out there how does this whole process work like if suppose one amongst us who doesn't know horse riding turned up for you safari how would it work will we get to ride the horses yes yes so there are two things to your question so I'll have to answer it separately firstly when we heard about the Marwari horse like we know it's a war horse but there are many more features about it it's extremely sensitive it's extremely loyal and it's very spirited a lot of times people imagine that you know this horse is something which they may not be able to ride so there are two kinds of things when we are talking about long equestrian rides it has to be equestrians which are experienced we will never let anyone mount a horse who does not know riding and that to somebody who we have different levels it has to be intermediate or in advance because you're going ahead you know on you're literally like seven days on a horseback you're finishing 25 to 30 kilometers so that is one part of the business now the second thing is Baisa's adventures happened in 2019 because I myself been on horse safaris with my father and I wanted to open the world of Marwari horses to everyone it was my wish that you know everyone should experience what we feel and I created this experience called bonding with horses it's something which has really come about well it's about it is all about getting to know the horse in India everybody is very spoiled people come here and they go to a stable and they just mount a horse and go so this is not only for non-equestrians it's for equestrians also how are you going to spend the next six days with the horse they need to get to know you and you need to get to know them so because of that this idea came to me that why don't we create this for people who don't know how to ride so we created an experience where they could come and brush the horse get to know how to put a saddle you know simple stuff a lot of touches involved and everybody who likes animals will love this experience because you're getting also it's very therapeutic it's extremely interesting to be around an animal people do feel that it's a bigger animal so they tend to you know sort of have different ways of dealing with it I just let it go on and carry it on as the comfort of the person who's right there there is no time limit to it there are people who end up wanting to be with the horse for a way longer time there are people who end up saying that look we would just like to watch you know the person next to us could go ahead so you get a basic lesson of how to put a saddle we get you to mount the horse and a basic lesson on the posture and the little start of how it is to go riding I've had people who've come back to me and said that we want to join a club we are going to get to ride now and eventually when we sort of get somewhere we may want to come back to you so this is just a small way to sort of get them to experience how it feels to be with you know Marwari horse and not anything to do with knowing how to ride so that's it thank you so much it's so amazing that people like you and Alia who have been associated with royalty and absolute high ends of luxury and everything really kind of make sure that those communities where you kind of have your ancestral places where you have your family homes people around are also a part of your initiatives now they become an absolute part of that ecosystem that people like you who have taken the initiative have created you're offering an experience to people and along with it you're offering a livelihood to people who are kind of in that area so Ali in fact you've started your own line also called Alia so which is got a lot of these people from that area feeding into it so how did you kind of decide that okay this is how I'm going to make it all work together so that it becomes a viable business model for everyone and thereafter you can really focus on what you want to do which is taking care of the dinosaur fossils because a lot of that area still gets vandalized despite the fact that it has such a rich presence of fossils there they're all over literally like like you were talking about Smithsonian in Smithsonian again there was this description that you actually stand up on a slightly raised hill and then you kind of describe and ask what do you see there so people say that we just see some rocks bushes and stuff and then you say no that's the head of the dinosaur that's the body of the dinosaur that's where the tail starts and goes whatever fragments are available there so similarly there are dinosaurs all over the place and fossils everywhere so do you find it a challenge in terms of how these fossil parks are not really that well cared for there are these fossils that are there you have kind of filled that gap there in that ecosystem that I was talking about that whole business ecosystem which can help sustain and support all of this as I said earlier I created something called dino tourism so actually my parents were the pioneers who started the heritage homestay which is called the garden palace heritage homestay in Balasenor so we started with just one renovated room and at that time I think Gujarat was not even on the tourist map seeing to our neighboring state of Rajasthan where it was like every tourist wants to go to Rajasthan but no one wanted to come to Gujarat so when we started our place as a heritage hotel what do you offer the tourists of course Gujarat is very rich in terms of arts and crafts and all but that is more or less in catch and the other areas so when it came to Balasenor what were we going to offer the tourists the dinosaur site was discovered in 1980s but as I said not much was done about it and the second famous thing of Balasenor is the cuisine which my mother tried to revive and this is not Mughalai cuisine we call it the signature Balasenori cuisine so my mother was teaching the cooks teaching the chefs the recipes which she had inherited from her families or from the other families whether they were our own families or the other royalties and she in her own way through hosting food festivals across India in five star hotels be it the Ditaaj or the you know the Grand Maratha and all she was showcasing the cuisine of Balasenor to the world and these were all age-old recipes and the same kind of food we are serving our guest at the Garden Palace Heritage Hotel of course now my mother has retired and this the she's passed the baton on to my brother and my sister-in-law and in this way when you try to revive the cuisine you are also giving employment to the locals be it the chefs be it the waiters the head you know the room boys or you get the local musicians so we also played host to Maraja's Express which is a super luxury train and it came to Balasenor for nearly eight years and I think Balasenor was the only destination in Gujarat and we were giving them a traditional welcome so how were the locals benefited they were the Shenai Valas they were the Dolis so they were getting employment we had the dancers we had the Siddhi Dhamal dancers who were performing for them and this is how even this is what is happening today also for any tourist who wants to have this kind of an experience you want to learn cooking as Siddharth Daspa said we also do that you want to learn a traditional cuisine we will do that for you so this way we are trying to revive our heritage and maintain it for the future generation. India is such an amazing country the idea of getting you all to kind of join us for events like this is to kind of actually showcase what all is happening in India you as a dynasty come from Afghanistan and you come to Gujarat and then you just mentioned the Siddhi dancers the Siddhi dancers were slaves who were brought in by the Portuguese from Africa and now they have also by the Nawabs of Junagara yes absolutely they have also become such an integral part of society these Africans and royalty from Afghanistan and then the Maharaja Express coming in and people so much is going on in India Malika another quick question for you before we wrap up Marwari war horses you are kind of using them or you are kind of really being able to take care of them because they have become a part of the safari tourism circuit there then you have other race horses which are also bred for racing so there are the breeders there are the racers and then there are the safaris so do you see horse numbers in India rising do you see the horse having a good future that will kind of gallop into or do you see horses numbers going down in India in Punjab you specifically have the Nihang who really take care of the horses and they kind of make sure that horses in Punjab are kept alive but are you seeing numbers increasing dwindling what's happening to horses in India so I very much see that the numbers are increasing I mean I wouldn't have been like to put it like that because there's a whole world out there for Marwari horses today and we are proud to say that it's because of the hard work of many of our elders who have been passionate about the Marwari horses and that is the reason we are here today it's completely different when we talk about races when we talk about sports when we talk about polo and we talk about safaris each one has its own importance and all I could throw light on is that Marwari horses are extremely well known for tent pegging it's one of the sports we take part in we are very well known also for the endurance in fact my first endurance was a 40 kilometer it was with my father we were in a group of four and I got my first gold medal in endurance nationals and I would say it's not because of my hard work I would say it was 20% mine and 80% my horse so there is a whole world out there where the horses are taking us I would like to personally say that in fact my uncle Colonel Sal Pratap he's here in the you know in the people here and he has a stable called the stables and he is really fiercely you know taking jumping also for the Marwari horses and that is something which I'm interested in also I'm also interested in dressage for the Marwari horses so there is nothing which is not possible for the horse is just that they are differently trained so you cannot have a safari horse which will also do a jumping but that's about it the journey from here I would say it's just only begun thank you so much in fact you spoke about endurance a little known fact that an animal that can outrun horses in endurance in long distance is the human being so humans can actually run outrun horses on a continuous stretch so that's like a little known fact but thank you so much Malika thank you so much Alia for being a part of this evening and joining us here thank you so much thank you so much Alia thank you Malika thank you Jyoti Kamaldi please stay on the stage I'll now request news that in India editor to felicitate our panellists Alia Sultana Babi doctor dinosaur and Malika Singh don't load from Baisa's adventures thank you Alia thank you Malika I'll now request Jyoti Kamaldi to please stay on the stage


your host attorney in a line. Welcome everybody and we have today joining us our guest speaker, Mr. John Tarim Zumi from Central Pacific Bank. He is the senior vice president and senior commercial banking manager and who just celebrated his 24 year work anniversary with CPP. Welcome John. And a little bit more background on him. He graduated from University of Hawaii, Shidler College of Business and also Pacific Coast Banking School. He was born in Japan, raised in Hulu and Oahu. He majored in finance at UH Manoa and joined the Central Pacific Bank as a part-time teller when he was only 20 years old and he's been with the bank ever since. He is the immediate past president of the Moe Liedi Community Center where programs serve about 400 kiki and 650 kupuna. Aloha John, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. No, thank you now. Thanks for that introduction. I'm happy to be here and to cover AOL financing and some tips and factors we'll make going to the approval process. I guess just to start, there's several ways AOL funds improvements. You know, one, if they have strong reserves they'll be through their reserves. You know, if they're not adequately reserved they may do special assessments to owners for the respected share of costs. But you know, a lot of times the owners are on fixed income, they're retired. And so it's really hard for them to come up with that money. So many times the most economical option is for the AOL to take out a loan for the improvements that can be paid over a longer period of time. So at CPV here, we do provide loan options for AOLs and funding improvements. When an AOL comes in for a loan request there is information that we need to collect to help with our approval process. So just wanted to go over that with you. And also some factors that we review gauge risk so that they navigate through the process a little smoother. So if I can please get the first slide. Well, first go over the financial statement and information that is typically requested. And then later go over the factors that we review for approval. So the financial information that we typically request are first the last two years of financial statements from the AOL. So those are the profit and loss statements and most recent interim statements. So if it were today, it would be the 2021 and the 2022 fiscal year in statements and maybe an interim 2023 statement. This is to give the current cash flow of the AOL and process that is generating that income that could be used to cover the potential loan payments. The second would be the delinquency report, a current one. The assessors owners are on time with payments or if there are any payment issues. The third would be the current owner occupancy percentage. So this is the gauge and make up of the property if the majority owners are owner occupants, investors or if there's any ownership concentration in the property. The fourth would be a reserve study budget and maintenance fee schedule. So the reserve study covers improvements that are scheduled for the next 20 years. So we're looking to see that there's adequate reserves for teacher improvements that are coming up for that property. The fifth would be if there are any special assessments in the past, a scheduling explanation of any assessments for the last two years. The sixth would be approval from owners and board adhering to AOL's governing documents or approval financing. This is typically good to get ahead of time so that there are no delays in getting the financing in place. I know there's a lot of times where we are waiting for this and for the bank, we typically can fix rates, typically up to 60 days. So if we get that earlier, we would be able to move a little bit quicker. A seven would be copies of proposals, contracts and bonding requirements for the proposed improvements. The eighth would be the written statement from the board that there's no ongoing litigation that adversely affect the property. Evidence of adequate property insurance, insurance coverage will be required based on a replacement costs or full insurable value. And the timeline of when improvements will commence. So this is so we can structure the loan, a drop period appropriately. So those are the items, if we could get those, we typically ask those when a loan request comes in. So if we can get those up front, that would really help in the process of getting a proposal out to the AOL. So once we get the financial information, just wanted to go over what factors we look at to gauge risk for approval. So first would be make sure the properties adequately reserved for future improvement. If the properties adequately reserved, we would consider that a lower risk which is the property that's behind on funding replacement reserves which may lead to multiple borrowings to catch up. Well, a lower risk property would be one that's proactively dedicating a good portion of their maintenance fees and contributing to research for future improvement. A second thing we'll look at is to make sure the proposed loan will not lead to large increases in maintenance fees. Typically, the loan payments would increase maintenance fees by more than 25% with being higher risk as it may create financial difficulties for some households. Another thing we'd look at is we get the delinquency report. We'll look at delinquencies. So if there's a high amount of owners with delinquents payment, typically our gauge is 5% of owners that are more than 68 delinquents. We would look at that as a typically higher risk. The next would be owner concentration. Typically, the more owner occupants in the project, we see there's a greater possibility of collection and proactive upkeep of the property and reserves. The higher risk is if there's concentration where one owner or developer owns more than 10% of the unit. We could also consider a property high risk if the property's a conditel or some kind of conditel arrangement where a large portion of the property is reliant on short-term vacation rentals. For the loan term and amortization, it's basically useful life of the improvements as we would want the loan to be paid off and the main image feeds could be used to help other future projects. Well, you know, having said that, you know, if there are challenges to some of the above, we definitely work with our customers to try to mitigate some of those risks. However, you know, if we could not overcome some of that, it could potentially lead to a denial. So I guess everybody reading the news, the Fed is gonna probably cut the rate in June or after. So there's still time to plan ahead and get these factors under control, be better prepared for that process, right? Right, yes.  They'll be more gradual. And, you know, you may not be having to take out a huge loan, you know, at the end or even do special assessment. I mean, it's annual election season for associations. There's always, we always say, you know, the quicker way to lose your votes is really you have a huge hike on your maintenance fee or all of a sudden there's special assessment for the condo projects. And obviously that also makes existing owners super hard to try to resale their unit or try to refinance. So it's really everybody's best interest to really, you know, getting the financials of your association under control, you know, work better on the reserves, right? And then also remember, you know, there are statute requirements and also requirements set for your declaration bylaws for condo projects. You wanna borrow money as a whole. You would have to meet certain ownership approval requirements. I would imagine the bank would want to see these required approvals already in place when association submits this kind of loan application, right? Correct. You know, so I think we've had certain situations where, you know, we have a really attractive rate, but, you know, we're waiting for the ownership approval. And so, you know, if we can get that earlier or if we can get the owners on board earlier, one, you know, we can, you know, pick to our commitment on the rate and two, you know, I think we can get the project and process move along a lot quicker. Yeah, that's really helpful. And as we have a lot of new directors who, you know, got voted, become win their election, become board directors, and they're doing trainings. And we also have a lot of new property managers who join the industry, serve condominium associations. So I feel today's, you know, information is really helpful to our audience. And if they want, they do wanna work with the Central Pacific Bank to get help, AOL Finacy, who would be the good people to contact in your team? You know, our team in general, we help with AOLs as well as, you know, other business owners. So I have the contact there, you know, if anyone is, you know, has a request, needs a proposal, anyone on that list would be happy to assist. Awesome. There comes this most important question always for me. You know, a lot of clients are very anxious. They always want to know how long this process is gonna take. So can you help us answer this million dollar question here? Sure. You know, we like to move as quickly as possible. Ideally, if you could give us two weeks, that would be, you know, an ideal scenario, our timeline, I guess of, because internally we would, you know, have to go in, look at the numbers to get approval and then, you know, we would have to work internally also to get the best rates possible. So, you know, if you could give us at least a two week timeline, I could tell you that would be enough time to get a track, the most attractive proposal in place from us. But of course, you know, if it's shorter, you know, we definitely try to do our best to meet our client's needs. So there's also something maybe as a director or property manager, they may not be familiar. It's typically lender is gonna require borrower's counsel's opinion before loan closing. What is that? So when we get the loan approved, when the loan documentation sent out to, I guess the AOL for review, we do need an opinion letter from the AOL legal counsel certify that, you know, all of the loan documents are binding, they're enforceable, you know, to say that the AOL is in good standing, has the ability to borrow and to pledge its assets and it's been approved by the board. So that's one of the documents that we need from a letter that we need from the AOL attorney to attest to that. Okay, I guess we are about to wrap up today's session. And if you, you know, you can summarize the takeaways for our audience, it would be super helpful as we know the attention span these days are getting shorter and shorter. Everybody loves this, you know, takeaways. Yeah, so, you know, one would be happy to help with any needs that we have, you know, if we could get, I guess, go with the financial statements that we talked about, you know, if we could be prepared, getting all that in place and planning ahead, that would really help with the process. Definitely, if you have any questions, you know, please call any of us and we'd be happy to assist in the process with the beginning, the middle, or the end. We'd be happy to answer any questions that anyone may have. And are there any special programs down the road? Do you think Central Pacific Bank may consider rolling out given the rate of, you know, upcoming rate adjustment? I wouldn't say we have any special loan programs, but, you know, we do see AOLs as a good source of, it's a good loan for us. You know, we typically see AOL loans as really low risk. So, you know, we're really happy to look at, you know, any options and to provide, it's the best package possible. Thank you so much, John. Thank you. Well, thank you now. Thank you for having me. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel? Thanks so much.