Turks, Moors and Englishmen
Keith Windschuttle
Washington Times
September 5, 1999

During the English Renaissance, a period that literary critics define as largely spanning the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I from 1558 to 1625, there was a great interest in the world of Islam. Almost all the playwrights of the time -- Shakespeare, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, Greville, Mason, Daborne, Heywood, Goffe, Rowley, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher -- created Muslim characters in their dramas. In some cases these were villains but in general they bore no fixed and narrow, or what we would now call stereotyped, characterisation. Even though this was a time when the expansion of the Ottoman Empire threatened the eastern reaches of Western Christendom, the evidence of their plays indicates the over-riding sentiment of the English towards Muslims was not hostility but curiosity.

Several critics who have analysed this dramatic phenomenon have assumed that Muslims were known in England only as literary representations or imaginary constructs and that real, live adherents of Islam were hard to find. The Duke of Venice might employ an Othello but beyond the Mediterranean few Englishmen, it was once assumed, had ever encountered a Moor. Nabil Matar, a professor of English at Florida Tech College, has already written one book, Islam in Britain 1558-1685, to dispel this myth and he has now produced another, which has more detail and a tighter focus. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery [1] is a study of the impact on Renaissance England made by the subjects of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic states of North Africa.

Rather than there being some great geographic and cultural chasm separating Near Eastern and African Muslims from the Christians of England, Matar shows that literally thousands of Turks and Moors visited and traded in English and Welsh ports during the reigns of Elizabeth and James. They represented both high and low society. Scores of ambassadors and emissaries dazzled the populace of London with their customs, cuisine and their much-envied Araby horses. Britons ate at the same tables with visiting Turks in London and admired Ottoman chiauses in their processions to the banqueting hall. At the other end of the social scale, hundreds of Muslim pirates captured off the Barbary coast of North Africa were brought to stand trial in English courts. The local criminal classes mixed with them in the jails of the southwestern sea towns, the coast of Ireland and the Channel Isles. British sailors were also involved in the annual transportation of Muslim pilgrims to the Hajj at Mecca. They traded with them in Mediterranean harbours. Until recalled by an edict of James I, British mercenaries fought in Muslim armies. A small number of English captives were sold into Muslim slavery but just as many were ransomed and set free.

"To numerous Britons," Matar writes, "the Turks and Moors were men and women they had known, not in fantasy and fiction, but with whom they had worked and lived, sometimes hating them yet sometimes accepting or admiring them. On a few occasions the two had become intimate through sexual and marital relationships."

Had he been content to fill out the detail of the evidence for these contacts, Matar might have produced a useful book that expanded our knowledge of Muslim-Christian cultural interaction in the Renaissance era. He might also, as a result, have made a small contribution to furthering understanding in our own time. However, he has a barrow to push from quite another direction. He derives his political agenda from the "Orientalism" thesis of the postcolonialist critic, Edward Said, who has long claimed that any knowledge gained by the West about Islam was turned into power in its quest for imperial domination. Matar not only endorses Said's argument but adds a novel twist of his own. By the end of the seventeenth century, he claims, the earlier curiosity about Islam has turned sour. This occurred, he says, because England had in the interim encountered another non-Christian people -- the American Indians. And even though the confrontations with Muslims and American Indians took place at very different political, social and military levels, "the two encounters were superimposed on each other so that the sexual and military constructions of the Indians were applied to the Muslims".

Matar is aware he is drawing a very long bow with a claim of this kind, which until now has escaped the notice of the generations of historians who have studied England's attitudes to other peoples. Moreover, he acknowledges that official English policy towards American Indians and Muslims had nothing in common -- the English established colonies in America but made no attempt to do so in the Levant or North Africa. In fact, British imperial expansion in the latter region did not eventuate for more than another two centuries. Nonetheless, he believes that the insights now offered by postcolonial literary theory allow him to see what nobody else has noticed before. Inhibited from actual conquest by the force of Muslim arms, the British substituted a form of symbolic imperialism, which, he informs us, "assured them of an epistemological control over the Muslims". While some of us might imagine this is not a terribly effective form of domination, Matar uses the now obligatory jargon of literary theory to tell us how wrong we are:

In their discourse about Muslims, Britons produced a representation that did not belong to the actual encounter with the Muslims. Rather, it was a representation of a representation: in order to represent the Muslims as Other, Britons borrowed constructions of alterity and demonization from their encounter with the American Indians.

According to Mr Matar, the English adopted this course primarily because they were frustrated by their inability to overcome Islam by force of arms. "Triumphant in America," he writes with reference to the fragile toehold on the continent held by the first tiny settlement, "the English found themselves humbled in North Africa and the Levant; conquerors in Virginia, they were slaves in Algiers." To maintain their sense of national superiority and "confirm the image of Englishmen as God's own", they took the moral constructions they had devised to legitimate the destruction of the Indians and imposed them on the Muslims. According to Mr Matar, there were two of these constructions that predominated, the notions of sodomy and of holy war:

As the American Indians were 'sodomites' and therefore were deserving of divine punishment, so too would the Muslims be deserving of the same English/Christian-wielded punishment for their 'sodomy'," he writes. "Just as the war against the Indians was a 'holy' and 'just' war that legitimated the usurpation of their land, so would the war against the Muslims be a 'Holy War'. But precisely because the Muslims of the Mediterranean basin were powerful and undominated, English writers turned to superimposition as an act of psychological compensation and vicarious assurance.

This thesis is a good demonstration of why literary critics should stick to their own turf and leave history to those who are actually qualified in the field. While he does provide evidence that there were some English writers who were critical of both Indians and Muslims for practising sodomy, he gives no explanation of how representative these views were. Were they part of the prevailing conventional wisdom or nothing more than isolated prejudices? He gives no evidence either way. Nor does he establish that such a view had any effect at all on official policy.

The purported suppressed desire for a holy war is on even shakier grounds. Mr Matar himself provides evidence that the only military campaign against the Muslims launched by James I was motivated by anything but sentiment of this kind. "The campaign against Algiers [in 1621] was not viewed in England as a 'holy war' but as a confrontation with an adversary who was destabilising commercial activity in the Mediterannean," he admits. "The accounts in the minutes of the Privy Council reveal no religious language and speak only of security needs." And although this attempt to end Algerian piracy was unsuccessful, its result hardly left the English in the position of being "humbled" or "slaves". In fact, in another part of the book, the author discusses the mutual regard shared by English and Muslim adventurers in the Elizabethan period. In 1603, for instance, the King of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, wrote to the Queen to enlist her support in a proposed expedition to attack the Spanish colonies in the West Indies and take them over as joint possessions.

When genuine scholars have approached the issues discussed by Mr Matar they have come to quite opposite conclusions. The orientalist Bernard Lewis has produced his own survey of European attitudes towards Islam since the Middle Ages, Islam and the West (1994). Rather than psychological aggravation against infidels and sodomites, Lewis finds a different mindset. Europe's initial theological and ethnic prejudices were gradually overcome within serious scholarship by the discipline of Oriental Studies. While Edward Said claims this field was racist and ethnocentric, Lewis shows it established the study of Islam as an academic subject worthy of attention and respect. The Muslims were no longer seen as they had been in the Medieval era purely in ethnic terms as hostile tribes, but as the carriers of a distinctive religion and civilisation; their Prophet was no longer a grotesque impostor or a Christian heretic but the founder of an independent and historically significant religious community.

Moreover, real historians who have studied the reasons behind European imperial expansion give short shrift to the "Orientalism" thesis of Said and Matar. Rather than literary constructs or "representations of representations", they have explained it in terms of trade, investment and military causes. The decisions of the British to move into North Africa and the Middle East in the 1880s were based on military rivalry with the French, the need to guarantee the sea trade routes to India and China, and to protect British financial investments from nationalist challenges after Egypt became bankrupt. Sodomy, holy war and the American Indians never came into it.

1. Nabil I. Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999