Muslim Contributions to Europe’s Intellectual and Cultural Renaissance

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:04]Assalamu allayikum everyone out there and welcome back to another live.

[00:00:11]I'm going to get us set up on Instagram so others can join us. All right, we are live across all platforms. Welcome to International Muslim History Month 2026.

[00:00:23]I'm your host Ashley Pearson Khan. And for too long, our history as Muslims has been written by others. And today, we are taking the pin back. Founded in 2021 by the World Hijab Day organization and recognized from New York to the global stage, this month is more um than just dates. It's about impact. We are live every Friday this May to celebrate Muslim thinkers, the creators, and icons who have shaped our world. So you are watching international international Muslim history month virtual conference uh live at world hijab day. So make sure you're following us on all platforms Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or X as it's called um uh LinkedIn as well and drop a comment and tell us where you are watching from. And as you can see I've got a guest here with me today. This is Carlo Traviso. He is a firstg generation Sicilian American. He's an author. He's a storyteller and content creator. And he's been captivated by Sicily's forgotten past. So through his debut novel, I'm gonna say try to say this. S Chislana.

[00:01:35]>> Sichilana.

[00:01:36]>> Thank you. Chili. Like Chilana. Okay, great.

[00:01:40]>> Yes, ciao. That's right. So through his debut novel and social media platforms, he ex uh explores the real history, challenges uh myths and stereotypes and shares cinematic stories about identity, legacy, and the m in the Mediterranean world. So welcome Carla. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:02:01]>> Thank you so much. Great to be here.

[00:02:04]>> Yes, we're so happy to have you. So, I actually do not know much about Sicily's history, and I feel like there's probably a lot of um Muslims out there who probably don't. So, I'm super excited to dive into this, and I know you've got a presentation for us. So, if you'd like to get started.

[00:02:21]>> Yeah, I think it's it's going to be fun.

[00:02:23]So, I thought it'd be nice to spend our time doing a little showand tell, what I like to call it. So um as we know May is Muslim history month and most people when they hear when they hear that they don't think of Sicily but they should because for two centuries Sicily was a Muslim island and the fingerprints of that era are everywhere in the food we eat the words we speak the buildings we walk into and the names of the towns we drive through hiding in plain sight. So today I thought it'd be fun to do a short this short show and tell. Eight slides, eight short stories, a thousand years of Sicilian history in um and the Muslim hands who helped shape it. So let's begin. Next slide.

[00:03:04]Okay, so look at this canolo. Ask anyone in America what this is, and they'll likely tell you it's Italian. But the actual ingredients tell a different story. Nearly every defining ingredient on this plate was introduced to Sicily during Muslim rule. The sugar that sweetens the raakota, the candied citrus at the tip, the pistachios, even the fried shell technique traces back to North African desserts. So when you eat canoli, you're eating a thousand years of Muslim agriculture, trade, and culinary craft. But what do we take away from this? Right? Like that Sicily contributed nothing, that it's all borrowed, that we should feel embarrassed. Not at all. because it took Sicily's genius to bring all of this together. And that's what Sicilian really means. Many things all at once made into something new.

[00:03:52]Next slide.

[00:03:55]So between the 9th and 11th centuries, Muslim farmers transformed Sicily from a tired Roman wheat colony into the most productive agricultural landscape in the Mediterranean. Historians even have a name for this. It's called the Islamic Green Revolution. These farmers brought lemons, eggplants, artichokes, sugarcane, and even rice. They built irrigation networks called gennat that turned hillsides into orchards. And they uh wrote farming manuals and created a body of agricultural science that had no equal in Christian Europe for centuries.

[00:04:26]I mean, look at this plate here. None of these foods were in Sicily before the Muslims arrived. And much of the entire vocabulary of what we know today as Sicilian cuisine grew out of this very period, literally. Next slide, please.

[00:04:43]We're in the year 1139 AD and Muslim geographer Alleadi is traveling through Sicily on commission from the Norman King Roger II. He stops in a small coastal town just east of Polarmo called Trabia and he writes something extraordinary. He describes workshops producing something called itria, long thin dried strings of dried pasta in such enormous quantities that ships are carrying the citria across the Mediterranean to both Muslim and Christian lands beyond. And this is actually the first written account of industrial dried pasta anywhere in the world. More than a hundred years before Marco Polo was even born. So the myth that Marco Polo brought spaghetti back from China is exactly that, a myth. The truth is older and more interesting.

[00:05:28]Dried pasta production as we know it was a Muslim Sicily Sicilian innovation.

[00:05:34]Next slide, please.

[00:05:37]Okay, so same man, bigger project. Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, has just unified the most cosmopolitan court in medieval Europe. He hires Aladresi, the Muslim geographer from North Africa, to map the entire known world. They work together in Polarmo for 15 years. They interview travelers, merchants, sailors.

[00:05:59]They cross reference Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian sources. And the result, completed in 1154, is called the Book of Roger. It's the most accurate map in the known world for the next 300 years. So, I want to direct your attention to that image on the left.

[00:06:15]That's the map. So, north is actually at the bottom. South is at the top. So, it's the map is actually inverted, which was the Arab Convention at that time. So you'll see Africa sits above the Mediterranean and Sicily is right in the heart of the project, sitting right at the center of the world. So here we have a Christian king, a Muslim geographer, and a Norman court that conducted business in three languages. And this is what medieval Sicily actually looked like at that time. Next slide.

[00:06:46]Here we step into Roger II's private chapel in Polarmo. It's known as the Palatine Chapel. It's built inside the Norman Palace which sits right in the heart of the city and was con consecrated in 1140.

[00:06:58]And as you walk in, be sure to look up because that ceiling is a mukarnas with the the Islamic um honeycomb shaped agricultural form. So here we have a Muslim ceiling in a Catholic chapel inside a Norman palace. This is not a fusion accident. This is what Roger II commissioned on purpose as a statement of who he was and what his kingdom meant. A multicultural Mediterranean made of many faiths working together all in the same room.

[00:07:28]Next slide.

[00:07:31]Polarmo Cathedral again right in the heart of the city is a living time capsule. Every turret, column, and inscription tells the story of an of era upon era layered on top of the next. But there's one detail that really tells the entire story.

[00:07:47]So at the entrance carved into a column is an inscription in Arabic from the Quran. But how did a verse from the Quran end up in a ca a Catholic cathedral?

[00:07:58]Well, as I mentioned, from the 9th to 11th centuries, Polarmo was one of the great capitals of the Muslim world. The Arabs called it Balarm. And at its heart stood the great mosque of Balarm on the same ground that the cathedral now stands. But that column is actually older still. So the column was originally a Roman column when the Romans used to occupy Sicily and it was eventually repurposed and absorbed into the great mosque where that was built.

[00:08:24]But after the Norman reconquest, it was carried into the cathedral and replaced and by the 15th century, way later after the Spanish took over, masons set it into the entrance portico. And that inscription might have been forgotten.

[00:08:38]It might have been ignored, but either way, it's it's still there. So here we have Roman stone, Islamic verse on a Catholic cathedral and that's really Sicily in one column. Next slide.

[00:08:54]The year is 1224. So we're fast forwarding in time now from the time of Roger II. So it's almost been a century since Aladdi mapped the world for Roger.

[00:09:07]The age of coexistence, unfortunately, is now dying. Emperor Frederick II, Roger's grandson, has decided to expel the remaining Muslims of Sicily. He deports them town by town to a colony on the Italian mainland called Luchera. And most go quietly, but one city doesn't.

[00:09:26]High in the mountains of western Sicily sits Antella, an ancient stronghold the Muslims have held for generations. And one woman there refuses to leave. Arab chroniclers actually don't have her birth name. Today we simply call her the Verago of Intella, which means the warrior woman. She rallies a Muslim resistance, takes up arms, and leads a campaign against the most powerful emperor in Europe.

[00:09:51]But unfortunately, the fortress finally falls after a long siege, and her fate is lost to history. And almost no one in Sicily knows today knows her story. So let's remember her today. The Verago of Intella.

[00:10:05]Next slide.

[00:10:09]So the Muslims were expelled from Sicily. The mosques were converted. But language is harder to erase than architecture. And Arabic is still in the mouth of every Sicilian alive today.

[00:10:20]Words like Marsala, the famous uh the city famous for its fortified wine comes from comes from Mars Allah, God's port, or Zaffirana, the prized spice we call saffron, straight from the Arabic zaffron. I hope I'm saying that correctly.

[00:10:36]There are thousand there are thousands of more words uh place names, food names, um ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar architectural vocabulary.

[00:10:43]Every time a Sicilian speaks, Arabic speaks with them. And it's a reminder that the Muslim history of Sicily was never truly lost. It's whispering through every conversation, and we just have to know how to listen for it.

[00:10:56]Next slide.

[00:10:59]And that's our showand tell for today.

[00:11:06]I forgot I was muted. I was just saying that's amazing. I did not know any of that. That's that's so cool. The history is just wow. It's incredible.

[00:11:17]>> The Muslim histories of Sicily is like I would say one of the most one of the lesser known aspects of that of that culture, right? And it's fascinating when you find out that most of the foods it's when I was originally doing all of this research for my uh novel Siciliana and just you know I came in um growing up I was I was surrounded by Sicilian history and culture because my my dad came from Sicily but you know we spoke English at home and we had a I had a very we could call it standard American upbringing right. Um, so I really had to start digging into the Sicilian uh histories myself when I started writing my novel. And it was fascinating to find out that um much of the cuisine, canoli, uh, arenchini, rice balls, um, eggplant, saffron, all of that came to Sicily during the Muslim period. Every when you go to Polarmo today and you're walking through their markets, it very much feels like a North African uh, you know, North African bazaar.

[00:12:17]Wow.

[00:12:17]>> So, yeah, it's very cool.

[00:12:20]>> It's really interesting because I feel like a lot of times credit is often given, you know, to the wrong maybe group of people. Um, a lot of names attached to history, you know, they didn't bring certain things. So, I I wonder when you started your research, was it difficult to find the truth? How did you know, I guess, that you were finding the actual facts and maybe not something that had just kind of been made up? Oh, of course. Well, fortunately, there are many amazing historians who have already done all of this work. We can go back as far as a gentleman named Michelle Amari, who was a historian back, I think in the um I'm going to make sure the years like late 1800s around the time Italy was unifying. He wrote he was I think he was probably the first historian to write a full history of Muslim Sicily. um was back around 1861 and he was actually um ostracized for it because you know it's he was uncovering a lot of the past that people either forgot or chose to forgot.

[00:13:23]We I mean we don't know but he he was kind of like the father of that history and then obviously there's a lot of modern there's a lot of modern historians today um that have books that you can read up on this on this on these histories. So um yeah, you just kind of start you kind of pick one. It's kind of like throw a dart, pick one, and just start you going down this rabbit hole of of what these authors are uncovering, and it's it's all fascinating.

[00:13:49]>> Yes. Yes. I I definitely agree. I think there's a lot of um places, not just in Europe, but all around the world, that I think people don't realize that Muslims have contributed to. I remember um my um mother-in-law and my father-in-law, they went to Spain um I don't know year or two ago and you know there's a lot of Muslim history there as well. Um and when they were exploring they wanted to go into some buildings and everything and at one point this one lady goes but don't pray in there. she didn't, you know, and I thought, you know, a long time ago there were a lot of Muslims there and now you're not even allowed to, you know, practice your faith. I think it's really interesting. And then, um, even when I was talking, um, previously last Friday, I I kind of brought up Spain and then I was like, you know, let me save it for the the European side. But also, I was looking at I've been looking into the history of Oxford and the the women that first uh went to Oxford University in England and um my husband uh has graduated from there recently. And so the other day we decided to look up and see the first Muslim maybe like who went there, you know, at least what time period it was.

[00:15:02]And there's nothing for sure that we could find at least on the internet, but it was uh it said possibly 800 years later some after after it opened that a Muslim was able to go. But um I think their their history with faith because Christians were at one time fighting Christians, it wouldn't have been safe.

[00:15:23]But it's really interesting to see how Muslims have touched uh different parts of the world.

[00:15:30]>> Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned Spain.

[00:15:32]And I was in Spain a couple years ago on a vacation and we stopped in Cordoba.

[00:15:36]Are you familiar with Cordoba?

[00:15:38]>> I've heard of it.

[00:15:38]>> It's a city in Anducia, southern uh southern Spain and they have preserved it's it's called the great mosque. It's called the great mosque or the mosquita >> and it's a huge preserved mosque right in the center of the city that when the Spanish took over actually built a cathedral, a cathedral inside of it. So, it's a mosque with a cathedral in the middle. And it's a it's just a fascinating piece of architecture to walk through. All the the columns seem like they go on for a mile, right? It's And you just feel the power of like the history when you walk in there.

[00:16:09]>> Wow. Yes. I I have to visit some of these places. It It just sounds really incredible. So So why do you think why does Sicily matter so much when we talk about Muslim history?

[00:16:20]>> I think um great question. I think uh Sicily matters because it challenges the way that people imagine European history. When people hear Muslim history, they often think the Middle East, North Africa, even we mentioned Andalucia and Spain. But um Sicily was also part of that story. And like I said, you know, from uh the 9th to 11th centuries, much of Sicily was under Muslim rule. And that period left anor an enormous imprint on the island's identity. We talked about the cuisine, the citrus groves, the sugarcane, the the pe the elements of the language that still exist about, you know, thousands of words that still exist in the language. Um, and like I said in my show and tell, what really fascinates me is like all of this is really hiding in plain sight.

[00:17:03]>> Sicy is often presented as purely European, purely Catholic, but its c culture was sharply deepened by the Muslim civilization. And to understand Sicy honestly, I really think you have to really include that chapter in these conversations.

[00:17:18]>> And it's interesting because there's so many places and I feel like especially in Europe, but honestly even in America, you know, it's always people say, "Oh, we don't want Muslims coming in and erasing our culture when a lot of that culture, the foundation is Islam."

[00:17:34]So interesting.

[00:17:36]>> And I talked about this in my Sorry. Go ahead.

[00:17:39]>> No, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, in my show and tell, if you remember, I talked about Roger II. He was he was he was probably considered the the greatest Norman king. So, when the Normans, the Normans are a people from Northern France, um Normandy, if you know the word, Normandy, right? The D-Day invasion is in World War II took place in Normandy.

[00:17:58]So, those those peoples came from France, took over Sicily from the Muslims, but when they did, >> they preserved the infrastructure, they preserved the culture. So that's why Roger II was very famous for like having a lot of Arabic um art, Arabic dress uh within his reign during that time. I mean I showed you the chapel ceiling he had that chapel built to look like that chapel looks like. So if you've ever been to Spain again the Alra and the Alra and Granada is another preserved um Arabic um palace the the Mukarna ceilings are all preserved in that chapel in Plmo. So, it's just fascinating that the Normans decided to keep all of that. Um, and again, yeah, that like they kept and that's where a lot of that the like they didn't eradicate the cazine, they kept the farming, they kept the science, and that's that's what makes Sicily Sicily.

[00:18:54]>> Yeah. I wonder what their decision-making process was like. Maybe it was like, let's not Well, we would say this, not reinvent the wheel, you know? Hey, they've already got a system that works, so let's just keep it, you know, make our life easier. Um, >> absolutely. Well, I I like to think Roger II was a smart guy, right? And um he was honest about, wow, these people know what they're doing. Um, you know, Sicily is beautiful. You know, this the the foods we eat here are are amazing.

[00:19:21]It's like, why would we want to get rid of this? And the reason the Muslims were eventually expelled, I didn't really dive into it in my show and tell, but I suppose I could say it here, >> is so Roger II's grandson, his name was Frederick II, and he was a very famous Holy Roman Emperor. He was considered the they called him the eighth uh the eighth wonder of the world. Uh the stup or I believe it was the eighth or the seventh. Uh they called him the super Monday, the wonder of the world.

[00:19:48]Frederick II was a very enlightened scientific intellectual thinker, but he was the emperor that expelled the Muslims. And unfortunately, the reason he did that is because um obviously the current administration on the island was encroaching on Muslim villages across the island and the Muslims were starting to fight back. And he was basically said, I can't have this anymore. I need to run a I need to run a nation that is um that doesn't have this kind of conflict. So he just decided to boot them all out and that's what happened.

[00:20:20]So it was basically a political decision. It had nothing to do with, you know, what you might assume is just racism or anti-immigration or anything like that. It's just it was just a political decision. These people are causing me problems. They need to go.

[00:20:33]>> Right. Right. Wow. I feel like after after learning all of this, I'll never look at Italy the same.

[00:20:40]>> You know, it's so interesting. He was another guy Frederick II which had Muslim um you know court uh what do you call them court like court scholars court scientists like he appreciated the culture too but when you know he was stuck between >> appreciation goes so far when political you know issues start causing >> anyway >> yeah at some at at some point you kind of have to appreciate you know what's in front of you regardless of who who came up with it right um So your work often talks about Sicily as as a crossroads. What does that mean to you?

[00:21:18]>> Yeah. So Sicy as a crossroads uh means that Sicily was never one simple thing.

[00:21:24]It's layered. It's mixed. It's remixed.

[00:21:27]It's culturally complex, right? It sits right in the middle of the Mediterranean between Europe, North Africa, and the East. And because of that, every major civilization has moved and through and touched Sicily in some way. The island itself absorbed Greek temples, which you can still see, Arab agriculture, like we talked about, cuisine, Norman cathedrals, and um even Spanish influence as well. So that's what makes Sicily a really powerful subject to write about because it resists purity myths, right? It resists a narrow nationalist identity. And I think that really matters today in this day and age because a lot of modern identity debates are built around this fantasy that cultures are clean, cultures are pure and untouched. But that is not the case.

[00:22:18]We've been mixing and remixing basically since the dawn of humanity and proves that right like its beauty comes from this cultural contact, the conflict, the exchange, the survival. And that's the story I really try to tell.

[00:22:34]>> Yes. And I also see, you know, I I've seen when visiting um England um how sometimes I'll use Jane Austin for an example, they have some of her clothes at um her home on display and um I think at one point somebody had brought her something from India to wear like a shawl. Uh it was Muslim and I was just and she loved that and other women of course wanted them as well. And so I I think it's really interesting that so many things even today that celebrities wear, they try to say, "Oh, you know, this is this is the newest thing from from Dior and Chanel and everything."

[00:23:13]But you can trace that all the way back to basically Muslims and and they're they're taking credit for it and people are like, you know, we've been wearing this for centuries, you know. Um, I just think it's it's so interesting. Um, just all the the little things that you see every day. Um, >> and another another point, like this isn't related to Europe, but I was in the Philippines about a year ago, and I had no idea that Muslims even touched that island. Did you know that?

[00:23:45]>> Um, a little bit, but not a lot about the the history.

[00:23:50]>> Yeah, it was news to me. Like, you don't think going to, you know, the South Pacific that the Muslims went that way.

[00:23:55]like you think, okay, so they came to Europe, they came through Sicily, up to Spain, but they also went east >> and they went as far as the the South Pacific, which was crazy. So the the southern half of that island is is Muslim based. That's where they landed and they built the first mosque there and then that so the first the top half of that island is Catholic, the bottom half is Muslim. So it's just fascinating.

[00:24:16]>> Yeah. And I think a lot of people probably don't know that um the first university ever built was by a Muslim woman. she she founded the first university in existence and it is still there today. Um so it is it is quite old. But then I also think you know about how people in Europe are often like you know we don't want the Islamic culture. Um but they adopted like the graduation gowns and like the head the doctoral hats I believe were taken from like Muslims who who did that at their first universities. So that was adopted from from uh is an Islamic tradition. I think it's so interesting and I a lot of people aren't going to know that because nobody wants to talk about it.

[00:25:02]>> Well, even Catholic nuns, right? Like a lot of a lot of similarities between how Catholic nuns dress with their bales and whatnot. So it's >> Yeah, it's it's all we're all connected.

[00:25:14]>> Yes. So, how does your novel connect to the historical work that you do every day?

[00:25:20]>> Yeah, sure. So, Sichilana is my first novel and that's it's a historical fiction. Uh, I call it I call it a thriller because it's written kind of like a suspense page turner style.

[00:25:32]>> And yeah, like I I love I um I grew up on, you know, um what do you call them?

[00:25:39]The the Goosebumps. Uh >> yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:43]>> Little They're They're like horror stories, right? But they were >> Yeah. horror stories for kids.

[00:25:48]>> Exactly. and uh a big fan of uh authors like Dan Brown who just kind of like hook you from page one, right? So take I took a lot of inspiration from that style and I wanted to write a book about Sicilian history, about Sicilian culture in that style and my I I I would say that the the fictional um the way that I wrote Sichilana is a fictional expression of my philosophy on how I approach how I talk about history.

[00:26:13]Um, it's basically at the heart of it, while it's an action adventure story, um, it gets to this question of what does it mean to remember where you came from? Uh, the the heroine on the journey, uh, she needs she's basically orphaned as a child and she her journey through the story is basically kind of discovering what it means to to become Sicilian because she doesn't have a sense of that uh, growing up without a without a family. So, and that was also kind of my journey as well. You know, being the son of a Sicilian immigrant growing up in America. I, you know, in writing the book, I kind of also had to discover what Sicily truly meant and what does it truly mean to be Sicilian and diving into the history and where do we come from and, you know, this clash of cultures and all that stuff that kind of exists in our DNA. And um so that that question that that that quest, if you want to call it, um really drives my writing, that drove the writing of my novel. It drives my uh writing on social media. I do a daily history blog. Uh I have a Substack called the Reno where I write about forgotten Sicilian civilizations. Um I did a I did a social media series on the Elmians, which were one of the first peoples in Sicily, one of the first um indigenous peoples in Sicily. I did a social media series on the Muslims of Sicily. That was a fun one. And I so I post every day about a piece of a nugget here that I find and I I do research on it. I write a story on it and then I post it and it it creates a lot of fun conversations and um yeah, my novel ties into that because the novel basically gives you an emotional experience, an emotional experience kind of through the lens of entertainment, >> but then my blog kind of provides the historical architecture behind that. So >> very cool. Very cool. And you know as as Muslims we're encouraged to always seek knowledge and I think it's it's important that you know everybody really seek knowledge about the world. You know there's always we're always um butting heads across the world. You know countries are are always fighting.

[00:28:18]Nobody can agree. and Christians, Jews, Muslims, um, Hindu people, it's all, you know, there's always this this tension within a lot of religions, right? But we're all on the same planet. You know, that's how I I view it. And we should learn about each other. We should learn about our history. And, you know, it's important to to learn from history so we don't repeat mistakes and things like that. And so, I just wish, you know, there was a little more cohesiveness in the world and and education like that.

[00:28:47]And to that point, that's a great point.

[00:28:49]I think I think honestly I'm just thinking of this. I think food and cuisine is the way to get there.

[00:28:55]>> Yes.

[00:28:55]>> Because once again, like I I think I said before, like once you start looking at the history of how food arrived in a place and you realize it came from somewhere else and you realize, for example, this chickpea dish that we make in Sicily is exactly the same one that they make in North Africa, is exactly the same one that they make in Baghdad.

[00:29:12]Um, you know, it's like we eat the same foods, we're sharing the same we're we're mixing and remixing the same recipes, >> we're sharing some of the same words, right? So, it's just like uh I I don't understand this need and I see this a lot on social media, unfortunately, this need to to have this like purity myth, right? Like um one of the biggest uh things I hear on social media when I talk about the Muslims of Sicily is I'm going to paraphrase but basically Rome was better, right? Or ital or Sicilians are really Roman because these people have a um false view that Roman equals white for some reason >> or Roman equals Italian when that is not the case at all. I mean if anything Rome treated Sicily like a slave colony. So I wouldn't I wouldn't be too proud of you know going behind Rome like you know it's at that point. So anyways um but yeah so like this idea of purity right does not exist at all. Uh again on another point with DNA right like my dad did a DNA test and he had 14% um Arabic DNA.

[00:30:26]>> He was born in like that's that's the whole point. He came from Polarmo. It's like he has 14% Arabic DNA. What does that tell you? It's like it's there.

[00:30:34]It's like we're it's it's part of us.

[00:30:36]>> Yeah. Like it's part of your roots, >> right? Exactly.

[00:30:40]>> I think if everybody did DNA tests, I think that they would probably be surprised.

[00:30:45]>> Oh, 100%. 100%. Yeah.

[00:30:47]>> Yeah. Um I I actually did mine and I'm 100% European.

[00:30:53]I think Yeah. Yeah. So, it was it was fun to to do that and so then my husband was like, I want to do it, too. So, we didn't really have any surprises, but I think that a lot of people do would be surprised.

[00:31:05]>> Yeah, exactly. It's And again, going back to the the cultural exchange, cultural remixing. I mean, I talked about food as kind of like going in, but DNA would obviously do a DNA test, take a food history class, and your mind's gonna be blown, I tell you.

[00:31:21]>> And who doesn't enjoy eating?

[00:31:25]>> You gotta You gotta explore. So before we go, what uh do you hope that our audience takes away from your work?

[00:31:33]>> Sure. Well, like I hope they take away that like Muslim history is not separate from European history. It's actually woven through it. And Sicily, as we've been talking about, is a perfect example of that. Um you know, the way that the Muslim period transformed the island's architecture, agriculture, markets, and then the Normans came in and preserved it. um that story complicates that usual narrative that European is somehow pure and separate. So it shows that um you know I hope that people see that Muslim civilization was not outside the west looking in. It was actually helping build it you know and it helped create what later generations call the west.

[00:32:14]>> So for me um that's the power of talking about history. uh it helps expand the frame and that's what I really try to do in my work and tell richer stories, challenge inherited myths and remind people that identity is much older, deeper, and more beautifully mixed than we've been taught. And that's what I hope people take away from my book, my work on social media, and just, you know, us talking here right now.

[00:32:44]>> Right. Very nicely put. I think um I have learned a lot and I know that anybody who watches this is probably also going to learn a lot and take away take away um something new. So I really appreciate you joining us and I'm really glad that you share on social media every day uh bits of history. So thank you so much and hopefully we'll, you know, have you back again sometime.

[00:33:07]>> Yeah, thank you. And I have to say your page has been very friendly to me on Instagram. You you all, you know, sometimes hit me up and say, "Hey, let's collaborate when I when I share a post."

[00:33:16]I did a post on the Verago of Intella a couple weeks ago and your page reached out and said, "Hey, tag us. We want to be part of this." So, that's always cool to see that kind of collaboration happen.

[00:33:26]>> Yeah, it's important. I think it helps uh reach a broader audience as well, right?

[00:33:30]>> Absolutely.

[00:33:30]>> To collaborate. So, amazing. Well, thank you so much and thank you to everyone who joined, who is watching live and all of those of you who watch later. So, don't forget, mark your calendars. Every Friday at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, we will be here to talk about Muslim history. Thank you so much. Asalam alaikum.