Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 412-413

A Sea of Sorcery: 
Roundtable on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

Shireen hamza

Northwestern University

When Shannon Chakraborty published The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, I realized that 
it may become the most popular English-language book about the medieval Indian Ocean 
world to be published in my lifetime. Chakraborty’s novel brings the western half of this 
region—from East Africa to Southern Arabia to Western India—to life for its readers. It is 
at once a work of historical fiction and fantasy, following a band of pirates led by a roguish 
woman captain across the ocean we recognize and into uncharted magical territories. 
Chakraborty builds her version of this world by weaving together the work of historians, 
the perceptions and imaginations of the people who inhabited the medieval Islamic world, 
and her message to readers today. 

Novels have long played an important role in telling this region’s history, highlighting 
connections across a world before the militarized borders surrounding us now. Amitav 
Ghosh has inspired generations of readers with historical fiction about the colonial period 
of Indian Ocean history, showing how Calcutta, Canton, and Baltimore were part of a 
connected maritime world. As a work of fiction about people on the margins of society, 
everyday people whose voices are rarely preserved in the historical record, The Adventures 
of Amina al-Sirafi is engaging new audiences in an even earlier period of history. We hope 
this roundtable will help. 

Academic historians and authors of historical fiction do not often converse, but we 
share a goal: to intervene in the present by shaping people’s perceptions of the past. In this 
roundtable, I have asked a group of historians to read Chakraborty’s novel and answer the 
question: What would you want to share about history with readers of The Adventures of 
Amina al-Sirafi? As scholars who study the regions where this novel is set, and the themes 
that animate its plot, we have endeavored in our essays to provide accessible windows into 
scholarly conversations. To that end, we have also published audio versions of these essays 
with the Ottoman History Podcast. Edited versions appear here in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā. Please 
note, the essays all contain spoilers!
© 2025 Shireen Hamza. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/chakraborty.html


Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025)

A Sea of Sorcery Round Table     •  413

Many of our essays touch on how the novel’s narrative highlights which archives we 
do and do not have, and which kinds of stories historians can and cannot tell as a result. 
Only certain events are documented in ways that endure. In the novel’s many interludes, 
Chakraborty sometimes includes quotations from historical texts, like a delightful passage 
about women in the pirate communities of Socotra from the thirteenth-century travelogue 
of Ibn al-Mujāwir.1 But she also crafts passages that mimic the style of a historical text. In 
“A Missive to the Wali of Basrah,” the author describes Amina and her lively companions 
in the denigrating and anxious voice of a political official.2 Moments like this remind us of 
her characters’ distance from elite urban society, and of the power wielded by the authors 
of documents, chronicles, and legal treatises—the texts that survive until now—over people 
like Amina and her motley crew. And yet, in the novel, these characters hold their own, 
and we get to watch. We hope these essays will help deepen future conversations about the 
contexts inspiring this delightful journey across a sorcerous sea. 

1.  Ibn al-Mujāwir, Ṣifat bilād al-Yaman wa-Makka wa-baʿḍ al-Ḥijāz (Cairo: Dār al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1996), 
296–97.

2.  Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (New York: Harper Voyager, 2023), 57–58.