Islam in Britain, 1558-1685.

Nabil Matar. Islam in Britain, 1558-1685.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 262 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-62233-6.

Not since Samuel Chew published The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance in 1937 has a literary history of this cultural encounter appeared with the breadth and detail of Matar's. Literary history, moreover, seems too narrow a label for Matar's study. Rather, as the bibliography of over three hundred primary sources indicates, it is a discursive history that engages travel narratives, diplomatic documents, political pamphlets, sermons, drama, and more. Matar contests persistent lacunae and fallacies in the extensive body of scholarship on the interaction between British and Islamic cultures in the early modern period, including the highly influential analyses of Bernard Lewis, Stephen Greenblatt, Fernand Braudel, Dorothy Vaughan, Paul Coles, Maxime Rodinson, Robert Schwoebel, Steven Clissold, and Samuel Chew. He further launches a number of theoretical challenges, most specifically to Martin Bernal's elision of the Arabic-Islamic legacy in Black Athena and Edward Said's assumption of transhistorical Western domination in Orientalism.

Matar concedes that the relationship between early modern Europeans, including the British, and the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States was one of colonizer and (potential) colonized; however, unlike the colonial relationship in the New World, the Europeans in this case were in the position of the colonized and enslaved. Even in the case of the British Isles, which did not directly border the regions of Muslim expansion, the conscioiusness of the power of Islam was decisive for cultural, religious, and racial formation. Matar stresses, moreover, that the British responded to the power of the Ottoman Empire not simply as a terrifying threat, but as an alluring opportunity. He documents with precision and persuasiveness the largely unilateral flow of British converts to Islam -- mostly enslaved Britons, but also sailors and travelers -- some of whom returned to Britain and perhaps remained crypto-Muslims. He further demonstrates that the demonization of Islam in dramatic and ecclesiastical sources largely fu nctioned as a fabrication to counter the reality of Islam's power and allure for the British. In particular, by putting Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in its overall discursive, economic, and political context Matar reveals that the drama was not solely or primarily determinative of English attitudes to Islam; rather, the drama's anti-Islamic representations offered an antidote, though not a completely efficacious one, for the allure of Islam. This recontextualization offers an important corrective to studies of Turks, Moors, and "Others" that rely for their evidence primarily on the drama. He finally proposes a dialectical model of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in the British engagement with Islam, which reaches a turning point in the late seventeenth century with the obvious decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the British Empire.

Matar's study is so rich that it is impossible to survey it in a short review. Particularly incisive sections of this study include his analysis of Alexander Ross's 1649 English translation of the Qur'an, which Ross framed as a rebuke of the Cromwellian regime, though which had an influence on royalists and radicals far beyond Ross's intentions; his assessment of the controversy over coffee-houses at the end of the seventeenth century, which were condemned as "the vanguard of Islam into the heart of English society" (112); and his discussion of "the 'Restorationist' heresy" (168) proposing the plantation of the Jews in Palestine elaborated by seventeenth-century British eschatologists-cum-colonists who believed that this Jewish colony, backed by the British, would finally convert into a Protestant Palestine that paid allegiance to the Archbishop of Canterbury!

Matar's impressive range of sources results in certain methodological limits: the tendency towards description rather than analysis, long catalogues of names by way of example, and chapters that occasionally seem cobbled together. The benefit of the breadth of scholarship Matar brings to this study may make such drawbacks unavoidable. However, a more serious critique of this study must be its evasion of a gendered analysis, though not necessarily of a positivistic variety. Matar occasionally cites Englishwomen who engage Islam in their writings -- Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, and Anne Conway -- as well as numerous, and mostly anonymous, female missionaries and captives. A discursive history of Britain and Islam must go much deeper into issues of gender and sexuality though, particularly when we receive tantalizing information such as the English captive Joseph Pitts's observation that he was viewed as a "pretty Maid" by "the Moors"(1) and titles from the coffee-house controversy that indicate it was waged under the personae of "maidens" and wives and through such genres as "women's petitions." Many more instances where a gendered analysis could be developed abound in Marar's text; his astute discussion of the emergence of a racialized English identity vis-[grave[a]]-vis Muslims indicates that such an analysis is not only possible but integral to a study of the interaction between British and Islamic cultures in the early modern period. Nonetheless, even these reservations, which suggest manifold avenues for future research, finally attest to the importance and endurance of Matar's study, which should become the backbone for the next generation of scholarship on early modern Britain and Islam.