Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. .

Nabil Matar. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi + 268 pp. $32.50. ISBN: 0-231-11014-6.

Adventurous early modern Englishmen set their sights on horizons both west and east. While pilgrims and planters struggled in the North American wilderness, their countrymen pursued fortunes, often far more successfully, on the coasts of Barbary and in the ports of the Ottoman Levant. Many more Englishmen traveled to the Mediterranean than crossed the Atlantic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Thousands of them dwelled among Muslims for extended periods, as renegades, soldiers, pirates, traders, or slaves. At the same time, hundreds of Turks and Moors, from high-level ambassadors to shipwrecked pirates, brought Islam to English soil.

In Turks, Moors and Englishmen, Nabil Matar documents the variety and extent of interactions between England and Islam from the late 1 1500s to the early 1700s. Questioning recent postcolonial and orientalist models of a perpetual imbalance between arrogant Europe and impotent Islam, he shows that in many arenas the Muslim world found early modern England a distinctly junior partner. English gunners sought employment in Muslim armies; English traders fretted over the superiority of Turkish cloth; English pirates made themselves the partners, sometimes the co-religionists, of Barbary corsairs; English captives enjoyed profitable service under benevolent masters, often preferring Islamic dominion to the poor prospects awaiting them in freedom back "home."

Such clear-eyed pragmatism was shared by Elizabeth I, who liked the look of Turkish dresses and was nor ashamed to call for Moorish help against Catholic Spain. But among the literate upper classes of English society; hers was an attitude that did not spread far. Investigating the place Turks and Moors occupied in the literary and political imagination of Renaissance England, Matar exposes an intriguing paradox: why, despite unprecedented degrees of cross-cultural contact, did most educated Englishmen continue to entertain false and hostile stereotypes about the Islamic world? "Trade, bilinguality, socialization, cohabitation, and even sexual familiarity" (107) failed to overturn prejudicial notions about the Muslims, for in every case, "evidence did not change constructions" (107).

Matar argues convincingly that the same qualities--economic health, military success, and social mobility--that attracted certain enterprising Englishmen into the orbit of Islam could inspire dismay and even dread in their stay-at-home countrymen. His suggestion of a class differential in this regard is especially intriguing: while the destitute and the desperate embraced the possibilities of "turning Turk," men with a stronger stake in English society reacted to Islamic success with a mixture of "fear, anxiety and awe" (8). "The commoner was willing to transform himself into the Other" (95), but the educated, powerful, "aristocratic identity" set itself apart from and against the Muslim world, seeking "psychological compensation and vicarious assurance" (16) from negative images of Islam.

This analysis raises some intriguing possibilities: that religious allegiance, national identity, and racial hatred were all changeable qualities in the early modern period whose intensity could diminish over gradients of space, time, class, and even gender. Such issues are explored only briefly, however, as a prelude to the author's central thesis: that in the development of Renaissance England's hostile discourse on Islam, the most important determining factor was the contemporaneous "discovery" of the natives of North America.

Through a close reading of captivity accounts, political pamphlets, learned treatises, poems, and plays, Matar identifies some striking parallels between English misperceptions of native Americans and the peoples of Islam. Both nations were accused of sexual depravity (in particular, sodomy), cultural poverty, violence, idleness (evidenced, most shockingly for the English, in the inefficient use of arable land), and irredeemable godlessness. And for both, the remedy proposed was purification through English "holy war." Juxtaposing these parallel "discourses of alterity" provides some fascinating insights into the practices of racial polemic in the English Renaissance. Less convincing is Matar's assertion of the primacy of the American encounter: he argues that because the English "'discovered' the American Indians at the same time they 'discovered' the Muslims" (99), the American experience provided England with its model for comprehending Islam, an entire rhetoric that had not existed before. "English write rs. . . constructed the sexual and military identity of the non-Christian/Indian Other, and through this construction they initiated a discourse of separation from, and alterity with, the Muslims" (16, my italics); they "borrowed constructions of alterity and demonizarion" (15) from the Indians and applied them, second-hand, to the Moors and the Turks.

This model neglects England's (indeed, Europe's) long history of contact with and hostility for Islam. Matar claims that the very idea of "holy war" was new in the late sixteenth century, carried by Englishmen from the American colonies to the empires of the east (16, 153), and that prior to the discovery of the North American aboriginals, no European writer, English or otherwise, had ever described Muslims as barbarians (14), cannibals (169), or primitive pastoralists (135). But Cotton Mather's hostile account of his Indian neighbours as monstrous "Scythians" (141) indicates which direction the rhetoric really flowed, for "Scythian" was the term used by European writers since the early fifteenth century to describe the Turks, who had since the eighth century AD been accused of primitive habits and a taste for human flesh. A complete assessment of Renaissance England's attitudes toward Islam would have to consider its debts to the medieval past, for Turks and Moors were on the minds of Englishmen--indeed of most Europeans--well before the "Age of Discovery," and a European discourse of barbarity had enveloped the Muslims long before the first encounter with the natives of North America.