Book Reviews 125
Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery
Nabil Matar. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1999.268 pages.
Nabil Matar's Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery is a
welcome addition to the important yet often-overlooked scholarship of
cross-cultural exchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era
between the Crusades and modem European colonial hegemony. Drawing
on literary and historical sources from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods,
Matar strikes at the heart of the Orientalism debate with a complicated yet
plausible link between English representations of Muslims and native
Americans and later imperialist racism. By stressing a triangular power
relationship between England, North Africa and the Ottoman world, and
the new American colonies, Matar convincingly argues that it was the very
failure of the English to conquer the Muslims in the face of English
successes in America against the indigenous populations that led Britons to
transfer their ideas about "savage natives" from the American Indians to
the Muslims. According to Matar, it was this transference that laid the
foundation for centuries of racism and stereotyping against Islam and its
adherents in western scholarship and popular culture. By using the
language of racism created during their destruction of the native Americans
against the Muslims they could not destroy, the English in the Age of
Discovery created the ideological foundation for their conquests in the Age
of Imperialism.
In his introduction, Matar is quick to remind his readers that Muslims
were the most familiar and significant Others in Elizabethan and Stuart
England unlike Americans, they were not in the colonial sights of the
English, but rather, to be admired and feared. Indeed, it was their very
resistance to being conquered that led to their demonization in literary and
theological works. However, in the realm of politics, English rulers were
keen to forge political and economic ties with Muslim governments,
because they knew they needed such ties to maintain their own national
and economic security. Matar is also careful to point out that English
representations of Muslims cannot be taken at face value as accurate
historical sources describing lived experiences of Muslims, but rather, as
representations of how the English viewed the Islamic world they knew
vis-a-vis the other major group of non-Christians with which they were
actively engaged, Native Americans.
The bulk of Matar's work can be divided into two parts. Chapter One
126 The American J o d of Islamic Social Sciences 18.3
('Turks and Moors in England), Chapter Two ("Soldiers, Pirates, Traders,
and Captives: Britons Among the Muslims"), and Chapter Three ("The
Renaissance Triangle: Britons, Muslims, and American Indians") focus on
specific venues in which Britons and Muslims encountered one another,
while Chapter Four ("Sodomy and Conquest") and Chapter Five ("Holy
Land, Holy War") present particular thematic cases explored in English
literature regarding Islamic society. The first half of the book gives a good
historical overview of the variety of situations in which cross-cultural
encounters could and did emerge. Muslims made themselves present
in England in a variety of venues and circumstances, including trade,
diplomacy, and as slaves and servants, and their ubiquitous presence in
English literary works of the day demonstrates the impact they had on the
English imagination. But, although they were (according to Matar) the
most prominent non-Christian group in the country, there were far more
encounters between Muslims and Englishmen outside of Britain than
within. Indeed, the vast majority of representations utilized by Matar were
generated by Britons keenly aware of their subservient position to the
Muslims, as they were written in the contexts of captivity, mercenary
military service, or trade outside the boundaries of Enghsh law. Such
relationships were coupled with legitimate economic and diplomatic
exchanges in the Muslim world, yet for Matar, it is captivity accounts in
particular that are the most useful, because "the captivity accounts are the
first realistic documents in English that are situated within the conflict
between Christendom and Islam." These and other documents from
encounten outside of Britain reveal a reflexive relationship whereby the
Muslims gained technical knowledge from the English and the English
garnered military footholds within Muslim administrations.
However, the knowledge gained by the English in the context of
captivity also paved the way for the collection of colonial knowledge to
be used in other venues. Realizing their inability to conquer the Ottomans
or the Moroccans, English traders and government officials turned their
attentions toward the New World and its potential for colonial exploitation.
Chapter Three serves as a transition for Matar, enabling him to introduce
his main argument, that experiences with American Indians in the New
World provided Britons with a ideological framework for coming to terms
with their inferiority against the Muslim world they knew much better.
Although there were far more English people in the Muslim Mediterranean
than the American colonies in the Age of Discovery, Matar asserts that it
was the very success against the Native Americaw-in large part due to
Book Reviews 127
disease as much as strategy--which allowed the English to superimpose
their superiority over the world they knew much better--that of the
Muslims.
This was most effectively done, according to Matar, through the literary
exploitation of two key theological themes: sodomy and the ideals of "holy
war." Both native Americans and Muslims were increasingly portrayed as
frequently and willingly engaging in homosexual activities reminiscent of
those that were assumed to bring on God's destruction of the Biblical city
of Sodom. For many Britons, this legitimated the conquest of the
Americans, who were viewed as lazy and unwilling "properly" to utilize the
lands they "inhabited" (rather than lands they "owned") due to their moral
failings. Thus, their land should be conquered by those who could serve as
better custodians. This was heightened by the second common theme, that
of the New World serving as a Holy Land in wait for a New Jerusalem
established by English colonists. This ideal arose just as the notions of Holy
War to conquer Palestine--the "original" Holy Land--were fading in
Europe. The Ottoman Porte was portrayed as a morally and sexually
corrupt body undeserving of custodianship for Palestine, but conquest was
far beyond the abilities of the English. Thus, they conflated Palestine and
the Americas, as well as their inhabitants: Palestinians and Americans alike
were viewed as sodomites who should be cast out of their "empty" lands,
but in only one venue was that a feasible reality for the British in the Age
of Discovery.
In his conclusion, "Britons, Muslims, and the Shadow of the American
Indians," Matar looks toward the eighteenth century and the beginnings of
significant British imperialist threat to the Middle East. The links made
between Muslims and American Indians in the Age of Discovery were
enhanced as the English gained more prominence in their imperialist
endeavors throughout the world, establishing the foundation of colonial
knowledge collection that ultimately resulted in the Orientalist pursuit. By
knowing--or at least representing themselves as knowing--the Muslim
world through centuries of encounters, coupled with their conflation of
non-Christians they subdued with those they wished to conquer, the
English were on the way to becoming the preeminent imperialist power
of the Age of Imperialism. In this way, Matar's book serves as a dramatic
and important contribution to the Orientalist debate, for it provides an
historicized literary review of many English accounts of the Ottoman and
North African worlds at a time in which English hegemony was far from
predictable, and the Muslim world served as a powerful symbol of what the
128 The Amuicvl Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 18.3
English wished they could achieve themselves.
Concise (194 pages of text) yet well documented (34 pages of notes, 24
pages of bibliography), Matar supplements his fascinating analysis with
three useful appendixes. Appendix A is a bibliography of English captivity
accounts dating from 1577 until 1704. Appendix B is Matar's summary of
"The Journey of the First Levantine to America," the travelogue of a Syriac
Catholic priest who wrote the f i t Arabic rihlu describing the New World
(1668-1683). The rihlu is a very promising work, and I hope that Matar will
do more with it in the future; however, perhaps because it was written by
a Christian, it demonstrates that this Arab priest had already assimilated the
negative notions of native Americans propagated by Europeans, and
his account reveals someone who sees what he expected to see before
his arrival, as the European accounts do. Matar views this result as one
of the most damaging effects of colonialism, racism propagated by the
imperialist at the expense of the victims of imperialism. The rihla could
also be more fully explored by illuminating the diversity of the world of the
Levant and questions about the impact of non-Muslim churches and
governments in the Ottoman context before the Eastern Question became a
prominent feature of global politics. Finally, Appendix C is a translation of
Ahmad Bin Qasim al-Hajari al-Andalusi on the question of sodomy and
Islam, set against a conversation between a Muslim and a Christian on the
subject. This is an interesting inclusion, but because Matar gives no
commentary, it needs more context to be fully integrated into his otherwise
interesting study.
Overall, Nabil Matar has given scholars of Orientalism and its effects a
very interesting and important book. This is not a book about the world of
Islam in the Age of Discovery, but rather, a book about the way Islam
was perceived by those outside its membership--but well within its influ-
ence. By examining the ways that cross-cultural exchanges between the
successful Muslim imperialists of the Age of Discovery and the soon-to-be
successful English imperialists of the Age of Imperialism shaped the
conquest of the Americas, as well as the foundation of modern racism
against Muslims in the Middle East, Matar has written an excellent
example for historians and literary critics alike who wish to understand how
representations made empire attractive and/or odious to future generations.
.
Nancy L. Stockdale
University of Central FIorida
Department of History