Book Reviews

Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge

Since the end of the Cold War, Islam has resurfaced as one of the West’s pri-
mary Others. Edward Said has shown that Islam has long provided a mirror
or foil for the West’s self-definition; what these two studies by Nabil Matar
powerfully demonstrate is that the role it has played in this process of self-
definition has not remained constant. The Islam of Orientalism dates largely,
argues Matar, from the eighteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire’s long,
slow decline was already underway. During the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, by contrast, Islam was the object of fear, admiration and fasci-
nation, “a powerful civilization which [Britons] could neither possess nor
ignore” (Islam 20). Although England was at this time laying the groundwork
for their colonial empire, “In the interactions between Britons and Muslims
there was no colonial discourse, practice or goal. Muslims were seen to be dif-
ferent and strange, infidels and ‘barbarians,’ admirable or fearsome, but they
did not constitute colonial targets” (Turks 12). In this particular cultural en-
counter, the English were by no means confident of their superiority.
In these two works, Matar convincingly makes the argument that the place
of Islam in the English world picture has not been adequately accounted for
in scholarship on the period. This, in spite of the fact that Muslims “repre-
sented the most widely visible non-Christian people on English soil in this
period—more so than the Jews and the American Indians, the chief Others
in British Renaissance history” (Turks 3). When scholarship does take notice
of Muslims, argues Matar, it often unhelpfully conflates North Africans with
sub-Saharans, which “is misleading because England’s relations with sub-
Saharan Africans were relations of power, domination and slavery, while re-
lations with the Muslims of North Africa and the Levant were of anxious
equality and grudging emulation” (Turks 7–8). In spite of the ongoing skir-
mishes between English and Muslim pirates and privateers, Elizabeth’s gov-
ernment, shows Matar, had very cordial relations with both the Ottoman
Empire and various North African states, particularly the kingdom of Algiers.
Both sides, at various points, either expected or asked for military assistance
from the other.
Matar’s work thus challenges recent, more monolithic accounts of differ-
ence within the early modern period, and it also offers ample demonstration
that the most familiar view of Muslims, that offered by the Renaissance stage,

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is not the only, or even the dominant, view of Muslims in England at the
time. The two studies cover overlapping terrain. The earlier study, Islam in
Britain, 1558–1685, is concerned largely with the representation of Islam or
the Muslim world in English writing, whether religious, political or literary.
Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery casts a wider net, look-
ing at actual encounters between England and the Muslim world, whether
this took the form of Muslim ambassadors visiting London or English pirates
being held in slave prisons in Algiers. Ultimately, the argument of the latter
book is that the representation of Islam changes significantly in the early
modern period, at least partly as a result of England’s encounter with the na-
tives of North America.
In Islam in Britain, Matar surveys a range of texts that offer representations
of Muslim culture, tradition or religion, including sermons, plays, English
translations of the Qur’an, alchemical treatises, religious polemic and escha-
tological writings. Not surprisingly, conversion, whether from Christianity
to Islam or the reverse, surfaces frequently. In actual fact, shows Matar, the
conversions were overwhelmingly in one direction: the Muslim world offered
soldiers and sailors, many of whom converted after being captured, advan-
tages that they could never have in England, including wealth, status, and
influence: “Although travelers, captives and chroniclers always made a point
of denigrating the convert for renouncing his religion and country, they con-
firmed that renegades lived in prosperity and wealth: indeed, the over-all
portrait of the renegade in their writings is of one who had met with suc-
cess” (50). On stage, however, they faired rather differently, where the figure
of the renegade is used to show “the futility and despair of apostasy” (51),
sometimes by changing quite dramatically the histories of actual renegades.
Matar argues that playwrights did this in order to “inject fear about the con-
sequences of apostasy” (58), but this raises the question as to why the com-
mercial theatre, which was not an agent of the state, would worry about such
a thing in the first place. It is at least equally likely that the stage is playing
on some deeper fear or anxiety about conversion, or some desire on the part
of the culture at large to believe that the converts were in fact wrong. Given
that the renegades were most often the common man, with little hope for
advancement in England, it may well be that these anxieties are ultimately
about class.
In scientific and philosophical writings, the picture was markedly differ-
ent. There was a great respect for Arabic learning at Oxford and Cambridge,
which both established chairs of Arabic Studies in the 1630s, and “Arabic
became an adjunct to a complete university education and, as P. M. Holt has
stated, the hallmark of the enlightened Englishman—particularly the man

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of science” (87). The Arabic influence is seen most clearly in scientific fields
that would rapidly become intellectually disreputable, alchemy and astron-
omy, but other Arabic texts in translation were also widely read and referred
to, including the twelfth-century Sufi work by Ibn Turayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan,
and the Qur’an, which first appeared in English in Alexander Ross’s 1649
translation.
A third major source of references to Muslim culture included religious
polemic (generally of the “even the Turks are better than the Catholics/
Protestants/Puritans” variety) and works concerned with conversion to
Christianity. Actual missionary activity was low to non-existent (121, 132–
7), but the conversion of the Turk nonetheless remained a cherished dream.
In the large body of writings both popular and academic that concerned
the coming apocalypse, conversion became a millennial imperative; it is in
these eschatological writings, argues Matar, that we see “the first anti-Muslim
and anti-Arab racism in English thought” (155). Here as elsewhere, Matar’s
scholarship usefully complicates the accepted picture of the origins of ra-
cialized thinking in England. According to the most popular eschatological
fantasy, the Jews would resettle Palestine after driving out the Muslims, and
then would convert to Protestantism. This represents a significant historical
change: “In the medieval period, the Muslim was the ‘ally’ of the Jew as the
object of Christian invective and polemic: by the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, English writers differentiated the two groups and pitted one
against the other” (181). This more sympathetic (or at least utilitarian) ap-
proach to the Jews is partly the result of different status of Jews and Muslims
within the period: Jews were a scattered and oppressed nation, whereas
the power of the Ottoman empire made them largely inassimilable to the
European imagination.
The historical shifts in England’s thinking about Islam, especially in re-
lation to its Others, is also the subject of Turks, Moors and Englishmen in
the Age of Discovery. Once again, Matar offers documentation of an amaz-
ing range of encounters between England and Islam, whether in London,
Istanbul, off the coast of Tangiers or Dover. Here Matar advances the thesis,
which he hinted at in the first book, that the changed thinking about the
Muslim world is at least partly the result of England’s encounter with the na-
tives of North America: “for the first time, Muslims of the Ottoman Empire
and North Africa began to be categorized as ‘Barbarians’ by English (and
other European) writers. The use of the term at this stage in the history of
Christian-Muslim interaction is striking because in the medieval period, the
term had not been used” (14–15). The label, of course, ultimately stems from
North American encounters.

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The parallel appellation is not the result of any symmetry between the
encounters. The book argues instead that calling the Muslims “barbarian”
was a psychological compensation, born out of an anxiety produced by en-
countering a powerful culture that viewed the English as inferior: “English
writers and strategists recognized, from the first establishment of the Turkey
Company until the Great Migration and well into the rest of the seventeenth
century, that their colonial ideology was winning against the Indians but
losing against the Muslims; they were enslaving Indians while Muslims were
enslaving them” (103). In spite of these striking differences, the English in-
creasingly viewed the two cultures through the same lens, until “By the end of
the seventeenth century the Muslim ‘savage’ and the Indian ‘savage’ became
completely superimposable in English thought and ideology” (170).
The accusations of barbarism were bolstered in both cases by discoveries
of sodomy, but here the argument goes a little astray. Matar shows how ubiq-
uitous the references to sodomy in Muslim lands were in travel literature,
but doesn’t really address the accuracy of these observations or what might
be revealed by this English fascination with perversion abroad. Behind the
argument is the implicit suggestion that things are pretty much the same all
over, and the English are simply being hypocritical. The admirable historical
and cultural nuance that Matar elsewhere displays is here lost and the argu-
ment is further muddied by the assertion that “sodomy” is simply the period’s
term for homosexuality (109). This is, interestingly enough, contradicted by
Appendix C, which contains an excerpt from Ahmad bin Qasim’s dialogue
between a Frenchman and a Muslim; in the dialogue, it is clear that “sodomy”
refers to heterosexual anal intercourse (193–4).
In both of these studies, Matar points in a highly illuminating way to the
wide gulf that frequently existed between how Muslims figured in the English
imagination to what the English actually knew about Muslims through their
many encounters. Not least among the valuable lessons we are given is that
race and cultural difference in the period are complex and often contradic-
tory matters. And not only are they contradictory, they are not stable across
time. The highly schizophrenic relation of England to the Muslim world that
is mapped out in these two books, alternately admiring and vilifying, would
change as the power of England and its technology grew, and the Ottoman
empire began to decline. It was only then that Europe felt to free to mytholo-
gize the Orient as it pleased. Opening up what was largely forgotten terri-
tory, these works both exemplify and call for a more sensitive approach to
the differences and the parallels between the various nations and peoples that
England encountered on its way to empire.
Ji m El l i s

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