This article sets out to define the role of Islam in the early modern emergence of a Christianized transatlantic sphere that was to stand at the origins of our contemporary notion of "the West". This not only allows al-Mawsuli access to Christendom (which his countrymen lacked), but also complicates his view, producing a narrative that projects the history of the New World as the triumph of Christendom in the exotic “fourth clime,” packaged for a readership in the Ottoman lands, written in colloquial Mosuli Arabic and in the style of riḥalāt (Arabic travel writing). Al-Mawsuli’s outlook owes to his unique status of straddling two different ethno-cultural identities: that of what I call an “Ottoman-Arab” (an Arabophone temporal subject of the Ottoman imperial cultural-political milieu) and a “Catholic-European” (one with knowledge of Latin, and a spiritual subject of the Roman Catholic Church and its cultural-political milieu). In this paper, I will demonstrate that, as a seventeenth-century Arab from Ottoman Mosul traveling throughout Iberian America, al-Mawsuli wrote for a home audience, peppering his narrative with familiar terms throughout, producing (or perhaps projecting) the Christian New World (yeni dünya) for an Ottoman readership. After eight years abroad, al-Mawsuli finally returned to his homeland, leaving behind his travel narrative-the first piece of explicit evidence of a Middle Easterner in the New World prior to the modern era. By virtue of his status as both an Ottoman subject and an Eastern Christian with ties to the Roman Catholic Church, Ilyas al-Mawsuli had access to the upper echelons of both societies and utilized it to move beyond his homeland, transforming a simple pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1675 into a short stint as official translator for Mehmet IV’s emissary to Venice, to obtain an audience with the Habsburg Spanish Queen Regent, and into a travel to colonial Spanish America with permission from the Spanish crown and the Vatican. 1685, published first in 1906) offers historians far more than just a unique and interesting early-modern travel narrative. Though the ending of Of an Age is dismayingly abrupt, much of what’s come before is sweet and erotic and wise about the fits-and-starts process of coming out-chiefly to oneself.The Riḥlāt Awwal Sharqī ʾila Amarika of Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli (c. But Stolevski has threaded his film with textures all his own, looking at the Balkan diaspora in Australia and allowing for some gentle humor. Stolevski seems to have been influenced by Andrew Haigh’s landmark gay romance Weekend there’s a similar wistfulness, a discursive chattiness, a woozy sense of closeness at work in Of an Age. A time jump reveals them as more fully realized adults, perhaps still carrying torches for one another. An attraction blooms and is consummated, but the two young men’s lives are on divergent paths. Told in two parts, Of an Age centers on Kol ( Elias Anton), who begins the film as a closeted teenager who has a chance encounter with a friend’s older brother, Adam ( Thom Green). Australian Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s sophomore feature (his first was last year’s exquisite You Won’t Be Alone) is a coming-out story, of sorts.
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