Nabil Matar. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi + 268 pp. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-11014-3; $36.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-11015-0.
Reviewed by Barry Reay (Department of History, University of Auckland)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2001)
In a recent issue of the famous historical journal, Past and Present, Linda Colley examined captivity narratives, around 100 in all, that have survived from the thousands and thousands of Irish and British men and women who were held captive and sometimes enslaved in North Africa, North America, and India in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such narratives, she argues, are potentially unsettling; "by definition they are about Britons or other Europeans being defeated, captured and rendered vulnerable by those not white, or Christian, or European." Nabil Matar's brilliant little book, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, explores the early history of this strange relationship between the English (or the British--there is a certain slipperiness in his account) and one of their "others": Islam.
The interaction between Britons and Muslims is not some footnote to early modern history. Nor was it a relationship purely of the imagination, confined to the archetypal Moor of English drama--though we shall see that the imagination was certainly important. Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, and those of the areas of North Africa not under the Empire's rule (and distinct from sub-Saharan Africans--Matar insists on not conflating the two) were engaged in long-term trafficking with the English through trade, piracy, fighting, capture, travel, and diplomacy. And we should not be mislead by later power dynamics between the West and Islam; in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the power lay with Islam, and Britons certainly did not view them as even the potentially colonized. "In the interactions between Britons and Muslims there was no colonial discourse, practice, or goal. Muslims were seen to be different and strange, infidels and 'barbarians,' admirable or fearsome, but they did not constitute colonial targets" (p. 12). Those Britons--mainly men--who went to North Africa and the Levant comprised four main groups: soldiers, pirates, traders, and captives. Their importance lies in their unimportance, so to speak: they were little men, of sub-ambassadorial status, whose writings, when they left them, "reflect the British experience from a position of defensiveness and sometimes subservience" (p. 43).
Predictably, as others, the Muslims were sodomites (mistakenly synonymous with homosexuality in Matar's account). The Muslim was a sexual other. Almost every account of an Islamic country mentioned sodomy: "To describe sodomy among the Muslims," writes Matar of one early modern traveler, was "as commonplace as talking about hens and market prices" (p. 127). Equally predictably, they were "infidels" and "heathens"; it was the duty of Christians to wage a holy war against God's enemies. It is somewhat salutary to be reminded that the English were also "others." They had a reputation for ruthless piracy: "In the same way that many Britons knew Muslims only as Barbary Corsairs, so did many Muslims know Britons only as infidel pirates" (p. 57). Early stories of cannibalism related to Christians eating Saracens during the Crusades (p. 169).
The otherness of Islam, represented in the figures of the Turk and the Moor, was a product of early modern power relationships. But Matar is at pains to point out that there was not just one image of alterity, drawing a sharp distinction between the predictable racial and sexual stereotyping of literature and Christian polemic (on the one hand), and the more experientially-based sources generated by commerce, capture, and diplomacy (on the other). For him the captivity accounts, particularly those in deposition form, are "authentic," "realistic" accounts of the Islamic world (pp. 44, 76). Many readers may not be so convinced by his sometimes easy separation between the worlds of stereotyped imagination and actual interaction, this stress on the authenticity of lived experience over crafted inexperience; cultural interaction is rarely so unproblematic. Indeed such throw-away comments sit in uneasy tension with the book's main contribution to scholarship: sophisticated analysis of the way in which attitudes to Islam were based not on experience of the cultures in question but on familiarity with a totally different entity: the native peoples of North America. For the tropes of the otherness of the American Indians influenced representations of the Muslims--"representation of a representation," in Matar's extremely apt phrase (p. 15).
One of the most useful concepts in the book is the notion of "The Renaissance Triangle": Britain, North Africa, and North America. In the Elizabethan period the links between Britain and Muslim Africa were arguably stronger than those with the much written about North America. "In that age of English discovery, more Britons went to North Africa than to North America, and more Britons crossed over to Islam than to American Indianness" (p. 96). But the most interesting triangle explored by Matar is the triangle of the mind. Again and again attitudes to Islam were based on attitudes to the North American Indians, forged out of entirely different power relationships. The imaginative holy war against Islam reflected the actual holy war against the indigenous peoples; the sodomy of the Muslims deserved the same divine punishment as that of the sodomitical Indians. Matar sees such adaptation of discourse as a form of psychological compensation for English powerless in the face of Islamic might, "an epistemological control ...over those whom they had failed to dominate" (p. 16). "If the orientalism of the late eighteenth century ...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." (p. 17).
It is a fascinating and important book.
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Citation:
Barry Reay. Review of Matar, Nabil, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5475
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