Islam in Britain 1558-1685.

Burnett, Charles

Islam in Britain 1558-1685 By Nabil Matar Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998

The reader would be forgiven in thinking that these two books, published within a year of each other, are on the same subject, especially since `Turks' in the period concerned and `Muslims' were almost synonymous, since, in the Mediterranean basin, only Morocco lay outside the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, although both books cover the same time and space, Professor Matar manages to avoid duplicating material. He does this in two ways: first of all, he writes what is essentially a series of extended essays on specific aspects of the relationship of Islam and `Turks' to Great Britain, and distributes these essays between the two books. Secondly he sets up a different leitmotif for each book. In Islam in Britain the leitmotif is the consequences of the acknowledgment during this period that Muslims of the Mediterranean shore were both politically and culturally equals or even superiors to the Christian European States. The leitmotif of Turks, Moors and Englishmen is that European attitudes toward Muslims coloured their impressions of and dealings with the indigenous peoples of the New World, and that the imperialist policy that developed towards possessions in the New World, in turn, eventually determined European attitudes towards Muslims (this leitmotif is more clearly brought out in the title under which the second book is referred to in the first: The Renaissance Triangle: Britons, Muslims, and American Indians, which has survived as the title of a chapter within the book).

Of the individual chapters of the two books some exemplify the leitmotifs of the volumes more closely than others. In each, a thesis which could be applied to several countries of Europe, is demonstrated within the British context, and each chapter is virtually self-contained. In Islam in Britain, the topics covered are the historical examples of conversion to Islam, the depiction of conversation to Islam on the English stage, the knowledge and use of works of Arabic literature and theology (which includes a self-contained essay on coffee and coffee-houses), the conversation of Muslims to Christianity, and eschatological theories relating to the final defeat of Islam (especially those that involve the "Jewish restoration" to Palestine). The conversions (in both directions), the perception of the "renegade" in drama, the reception of Arabic literature, and the theological discussions, all illustrate how Englishmen engaged with the Turk as an equal, whether as an ally or (more often) as an opponent. This was inevitable, considering the importance of Islamic trade and piracy in the period. This background of the political and cultural might of the Turk is sketched in the wide-ranging Introduction.

The chapters of Turks, Moors, and Englishmen are devoted to Turks and Moors in England, and (contrariwise) Britons among the Muslims; then, after the central chapter on the significance of the contemporaneity of dealings with the Turks and Moors, and discovering the New World, come two essays, on the use of the terms "sodomy" and "Holy War" respectively, in relation to attacks on Muslims and on American Indians. This book, unlike the first, includes documentary appendices, providing a list of printed accounts of Englishmen's experiences as captives of Muslims, a summary of the first account of the New World written in Arabic, and a translation of an early seventeenth-century Muslim's discussion of the Islamic view on sodomy.

The first thesis, nowadays, is hardly controversial, though readers with an Anglo- or Eurocentric viewpoint still need to be reminded of it. Since at least the late tenth century, Europeans recognised the contribution that Arabic culture could make towards their own. The perceived cultural imbalance resulted in a surge of translations from Arabic into Latin and Spanish, which flowed unabated from the late eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century. But even when the cultural and scientific goods of Christendom and Islam appeared to have been brought to the same level, the riches of Islamic culture continued to attract Latin scholars. This was particularly true in the sixteenth century, when new manuscripts of Arabic texts were being sought in Istanbul, Damascus and Crete, new translations were made and published, and, eventually, with the Arabic printing press set up by Giovan Battista Raimondi under the aegis of the Medici in the 1580s, Arabic texts were published in Europe in their original language. Arabic studies continued to be pursued for the sake of the furtherance of knowledge in the seventeenth century, and may be said to have culminated in the publication of the Arabic astronomical tables of Ulugh Begh by Thomas Hyde in 1665 and the translation of the books of Appollonius's Conics that were lost in their Greek original by the English scholar, Edmund Halley in 1710. The European dimensions of this subject are being explored by a project in the University of Oklahoma on "Scientific exchanges between Islam and Europe: the making of the modern world 1300-1800." The English elements of the interest in Arabic learning have been investigated in two recent books to which Matar refers: the collection of essays edited by Gill Russell on The `Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1994), and Gerald Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996). Emblematic of the importance of Arabic culture is the statement of John Selden in 1642 that "the liberal and correctly taught sciences were formerly for a long time called by us [English] `the studies of the Arabs' ... as if called from the race and the places where they were then alone seriously cultivated." Matar's study nicely complements these works by concentrating not on the scientific inheritance, but rather on three more popular cultural exchanges: the translation of the Muslim's "untranslatable" Holy Book, the Koran, into English, the Arabic (or alleged Arabic) element in the writings of the Rosicrucians, alchemists and astrologers, and the fortune of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy al-Yaqzan as an exemplification of natural theology. With good reason Matar calls the chapter in which these cultural exchanges are discussed "Arabia Britannica," quoting an appellation given to Great Britain by Thomas Decker in a pageant put on for King James I in 1604.

The thesis of Turks, Moors, and Englishmen is likely to be more controversial. While Islam in Britain shows implicitly that the "Orientalism" described in the notorious book by Edward Said (for a later period) is inapplicable to the situation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen suggests a source for the "Orientalism" of more recent times. In the words of Matar (17-18): "If the orientalism of the late eighteenth century, as Edward Said defines it, is colonialism as a form of discourse, then what the Renaissance English writers produced was merely a discourse--without colonialism--that was generated by superimposing the discourse about the conquest of America on Islam. The Renaissance witnessed the birth of a British/European discourse of conquest that preceded the development of the other constituents of conquest, namely technological superiority and capitalism. Once the Ottoman and the North African Muslim dominions began their military and commercial decline in the eighteenth century, British and other European writers turned to their discourse about America and the Indians during the Age of Discovery and imposed it on Islam." The central chapter of the book, "The Renaissance Triangle," approaches this topic most directly, by pointing out the similarities between English descriptions of Muslims and those of American Indians, and the similarity of the accounts of Englishmen "going native" in both contexts. Matar rightly claims that such comparisons have been neglected, since most writers treat the English experience of North America as a completely different subject from that of North African affairs, in spite of the fact that most English voyages to the New World took in North Africa--forming a real geographical triangle. Matar's arguments are cogent and engaging, but must still remain speculative.

Even if the leitmotif of the second book is questioned, both books remain rich in information, and eminently readable. They are written in a style which is distinctive of modern English scholarship, and, as such, show great sensitivity to nuances of language, as one would expect of a professor of English. Matar, however, is able to draw upon his knowledge additionally of Arabic, not only in translating the passage from Ahmad bin Qasim on sodomy which forms Appendix C of Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, but also in putting forward the Islamic interpretations of the Koran and Traditions throughout the two books, where they differ from the meanings imposed on the Arabic material by Christian readers (e.g., in Islam in Britain, 151). Nevertheless, it would be helpful, especially for an Arabist or an Arab or Turkish reader of the book, to have more help in recognizing Arabic and Turkish equivalents. For example, in Islam in Britain, 142, one would like to know which Arabic word is translated as "Trust" and, on 149, the conventional Turkish transliteration of the office of "Chiou" could be given. Also (94) Matar wrongly identifies the astrologer "Haly" with "al-Majusti" (read: al-Majusi, the medical authority known in Latin as "Halyabbas"), rather than Ali ibn abi r-rijal or Ali ibn al-Ridhwan. Similarly, on the following page, he does not identify "Nassir Eddin," when it is of importance to know that he is Nasr ad-Din at-Tusi, the leading mathematician and astronomer at the Mongol observatory of Maragha. Moreover, for the eponymous hero of the novel celebrating natural theology, Hayy al-Yaqzan, it would be appropriate to give the translation of Yaqzan ("awake") as well as of Hayy ("alive"; 98).

CHARLES BURNETT is a lecturer at the Warburg Institute, University of London.