A Sea of Sorcery: Roundtable with Shannon Chakraborty

produced by Shireen Hamza

and featuring
Fahad Bishara, KD Thompson, Liana Saif,
Mahmood Kooria, Rebecca Hankins, and Samantha Pellegrino

| What could historians have to say about a fantasy novel? The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in 2023, follows an aging mother and captain on magical adventures across the twelfth-century Indian Ocean world with her crew. It has been read widely, hitting bestseller lists in the US and being translated into eight languages. In this episode, a group of historians discusses the novel with its author, Shannon Chakraborty. Our conversation covers gender and geography, language and literature, piety and piracy, and of course, magic.   

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What could historians have to say about a fantasy novel? The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in 2023, follows an aging mother and captain on magical adventures across the twelfth-century Indian Ocean world with her crew. It has been read widely, hitting bestseller lists in the US and being translated into eight languages. In this episode, a group of historians discusses the novel with its author, Shannon Chakraborty. Our conversation covers gender and geography, language and literature, piety and piracy, and of course, magic.

Below, we have included a recording of each author reading essays they wrote, responding to the question: What do you wish readers of this novel knew about history? You can also read edited versions of these essays on the website of al-Usur al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists. Note: this conversation and all of the essays include spoilers.

Contributor Bios

	Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (University of California Press, 2025).
	KD Thompson is Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research focuses on language, gender, and sexuality in Muslim communities, both on the Swahili coast and in North America. Their books include Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (NYU Press, 2023) and Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana University Press, 2017), as well as the edited volume (with Erin Stiles), Gendered Lives on the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast (Ohio University Press, 2015).
	Liana Saif is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and member of the Centre for The History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents. She is specialised in Islamic esotericism, Hermetic philosophical, and occult traditions in the medieval Islamicate world and Europe.
	Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK. He has authored Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices (Routledge, 2022).
	Rebecca Hankins is a full professor at Texas A&M University where she teaches courses in Africana Studies, Religious Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies. She has published widely on topics including African Americans, Islam, science fiction and fantasy, academic equity, archives including a recent Special-Section for the journal American Archivist on Middle East and North African special collections and archives.
	Samantha Pellegrino received her PhD in medieval Islamic alchemy from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2025 (thesis: "A Womb of One's Own: Theorizing Artifice, Artificiality, and Technology in the Jabirian Corpus"). She has taught at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago, and currently holds a position at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.
	Shannon Chakraborty is the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of The Daevabad Trilogy and The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages and nominated for the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy, Crawford, and Astounding awards. You can find her online at www.sachakraborty.com or on Instagram at @SAChakrabooks.
	Shireen Hamza is an historian, artist and organizer living in Chicago. She teaches with the Prison & Neighborhood Arts & Education Project, organizes with a community bail fund, and participates in the disability dance community. She completed her PhD in Harvard's History of Science department and continued her research on medicine and environment in the medieval Islamic world through a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with a research group based in Melbourne, “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800.”

Credits

Episode No. 575
Release Date: 18 November 2025
Sound Production by Shireen Hamza
Music: O-Shin by Nyentek; Bahrain - Fidgeri: Songs of the Pearl Divers, recorded by Habib Hassan Touma, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings; Arabic Music - Music performed by men from area of Ibri (major town of Dhahirah Region) by BBC Sounds
Images courtesy of KD Thompson, Liana Saif and Shannon Chakraborty

Images

"The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi" map by Virginia Allyn. (Courtesy of Harper Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)


Angel in Persian Qajar manuscript. f. 115 v, MS Persian 373, Wellcome Collection. Courtesy of Liana Saif.


A small bit of the contemporary Swahili Coast. View of the port, Tanga, Tanzania, 2023. Photo by KD Thompson.

Further Listening

	Orhan Pamuk & Nükhet Varlık	396 1/3/19	Imagining and Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World
	Jyoti Balachandran	516 1/8/22	The Muslim Communities of Medieval Gujarat
	Fahad Ahmad Bishara	383 10/5/18	Islamic Law and Commerce in the Indian Ocean
	Nancy Um	453 3/6/20	Indian Ocean Exchange in Early Modern Yemen
	Emrah Safa Gürkan, Joshua White, Daniel Hershenzon	446 1/28/20	The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy
	Nidhi Mahajan & Jeffery Dyer	318 6/20/17	Indian Ocean Connections

Further Reading

Arnold Koenings, Nathalie. Mystical Power and Politics on the Swahili Coast. Boydell & Brewer, 2024.

Dua, Jatin. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean. University of California Press, 2019.

Kresse, Kai, and Clarissa Vierke. “Swahili Language and Literature as Resources for Indian Ocean Studies.” History Compass, 2022, e12725.

Leoni, Francesca, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Liana Saif and Farouk Yahya, eds. Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020.

Prange, Sebastian R. "A trade of no dishonor: piracy, commerce, and community in the western Indian Ocean, twelfth to sixteenth century." The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1269-1293.

Richardson, Kristina. Roma in the medieval Islamic world: Literacy, culture, and migration. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Saif, Liana. The Arabic influences on early modern occult philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

van Bladel, Kevin. The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science

Wynne-Jones, Stephanie, and Adria LaViolette, eds. The Swahili World. Routledge, 2018.

Historical Texts 

al-Jawbarī, Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm. The Book of Charlatans. ed. Manuela Dengler and trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: NYU Press, 2020.

al-Rām-Hurmuzī, Buzurg ibn Shahriyār. Kitab ‘Aja’ib al-hind barrihā wa baḥrihā wa jazā’irihā. Ed. Hikoichi Yajima. Tokyo: Ma‘had li ‘l-abḥāth al-lughāt wa ‘l-thaqāfāt fi āsiya wa ifrīqīyā, 2018.

al-Sīrāfī, Abū Zayd. Accounts of China and India. trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith. New York: NYU Press, 2017.

Fiction

Barnes, Steven. Zulu Heart. Warner Aspect, 2003.

Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. trans. Jonathan Wright. Penguin Random House, 2018. 

Wilson, G. Willow. The Bird King. Grove Press, 2019.