Cornell Fleischer Cemal Kafadar Sanjay Subrahmanyam Awareness of Islamic history may need significantly more attention in the US but not by falsely glorifying the achievements of an Ottoman sultan. Reinforcing the hero myth makes a mockery of historical accuracy and greater complexity. On 20 August 2020 the Washington Post carried an essay in its ‘Made by History’ section entitled ‘The Ottoman sultan who changed America’ with the sensationalist claim in its subtitle ‘America, Protestantism and coffee all have a Muslim history’. The essay was written by Alan Mikhail, a historian from Yale, who has recently published a popular biography of the Ottoman Sultan Selim (r. 1512-20), entitled God’s Shadow. It was full of elementary errors of fact and logic, and