Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery

Abstract

Nabil Matar's Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery is awelcome addition to the important yet often-overlooked scholarship ofcross-cultural exchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims in the erabetween the Crusades and modem European colonial hegemony. Drawingon literary and historical sources from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods,Matar strikes at the heart of the Orientalism debate with a complicated yetplausible link between English representations of Muslims and nativeAmericans and later imperialist racism. By stressing a triangular powerrelationship between England, North Africa and the Ottoman world, andthe new American colonies, Matar convincingly argues that it was the veryfailure of the English to conquer the Muslims in the face of Englishsuccesses in America against the indigenous populations that led Britons totransfer their ideas about "savage natives" from the American Indians tothe Muslims. According to Matar, it was this transference that laid thefoundation for centuries of racism and stereotyping against Islam and itsadherents in western scholarship and popular culture. By using thelanguage of racism created during their destruction of the native Americansagainst the Muslims they could not destroy, the English in the Age ofDiscovery created the ideological foundation for their conquests in the Ageof Imperialism.In his introduction, Matar is quick to remind his readers that Muslimswere the most familiar and significant Others in Elizabethan and StuartEngland unlike Americans, they were not in the colonial sights of theEnglish, but rather, to be admired and feared. Indeed, it was their veryresistance to being conquered that led to their demonization in literary andtheological works. However, in the realm of politics, English rulers werekeen to forge political and economic ties with Muslim governments,because they knew they needed such ties to maintain their own nationaland economic security. Matar is also careful to point out that Englishrepresentations of Muslims cannot be taken at face value as accuratehistorical sources describing lived experiences of Muslims, but rather, asrepresentations of how the English viewed the Islamic world they knewvis-a-vis the other major group of non-Christians with which they wereactively engaged, Native Americans.The bulk of Matar's work can be divided into two parts. Chapter One ...