Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery by Nabil Matar. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.268 pages.)

Abstract

Nabil Matar's Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery is a
welcome addition to the important yet often-overlooked scholarship of
cross-cultural exchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era
between the Crusades and modem European colonial hegemony. Drawing
on literary and historical sources from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods,
Matar strikes at the heart of the Orientalism debate with a complicated yet
plausible link between English representations of Muslims and native
Americans and later imperialist racism. By stressing a triangular power
relationship between England, North Africa and the Ottoman world, and
the new American colonies, Matar convincingly argues that it was the very
failure of the English to conquer the Muslims in the face of English
successes in America against the indigenous populations that led Britons to
transfer their ideas about "savage natives" from the American Indians to
the Muslims. According to Matar, it was this transference that laid the
foundation for centuries of racism and stereotyping against Islam and its
adherents in western scholarship and popular culture. By using the
language of racism created during their destruction of the native Americans
against the Muslims they could not destroy, the English in the Age of
Discovery created the ideological foundation for their conquests in the Age
of Imperialism.
In his introduction, Matar is quick to remind his readers that Muslims
were the most familiar and significant Others in Elizabethan and Stuart
England unlike Americans, they were not in the colonial sights of the
English, but rather, to be admired and feared. Indeed, it was their very
resistance to being conquered that led to their demonization in literary and
theological works. However, in the realm of politics, English rulers were
keen to forge political and economic ties with Muslim governments,
because they knew they needed such ties to maintain their own national
and economic security. Matar is also careful to point out that English
representations of Muslims cannot be taken at face value as accurate
historical sources describing lived experiences of Muslims, but rather, as
representations of how the English viewed the Islamic world they knew
vis-a-vis the other major group of non-Christians with which they were
actively engaged, Native Americans.
The bulk of Matar's work can be divided into two parts. Chapter One ...