English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on 'Turning Turk* in Early Modern Texts Jonathan Burton In October of 1583 an English ship called the Jesus embarked on a trade expedition from Portsmouth to the Ottoman suzerainty of Tripoli in Barbary. Foul weather and three early deaths by drowning kept the ship in English waters for several months, but once in Tripoli, as Thomas Sanders describes it, the crew found themselves "very well entertained by the king of that country, and also of the com mons" (293). Sanders reports ideal conditions for the trade: "The commodities of that place are sweet oils: the king there is a merchant, and the factors bought all their oils of the king custom free" (293). Six weeks later, the hundred-ton Jesus was laden with valuable oils, the king had "very courteously bid them fareweir (295), and the crew prepared to sail for England. More than a year would pass, however, before the Jesus finally departed from Tripoli. The fascinating story of her delay, with the captivity and fate of her crew, tells us a great deal about the relative weakness of the English in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Islamic world. Yet, England's feeble authority and influence in the East is a sub ject that has already been treated at some length.1 More interesting tome are the ways inwhich English authors chose to represent or explain away that weakness, both in trave logues and on the stage. I am interested not only in the vari ous compensatory modes English writers deployed to deal with the power of Islam, but also in the ways in which recent accounts of Anglo-Islamic relations in the early modern peri 36 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies od continue to disavow that power. This is not to say that recent criticism has ignored the political force of Islam in the early modern period. Indeed, the commercial, diplomatic, and military importance of the Islamic world, and particular ly of the Ottoman Empire, has moved rapidly to prominence in early modern studies. Nonetheless, even as contemporary scholarship concedes the political might of Islam, scholars regularly disregard the fact that Islam was a religion, a force whose capacity to offer narratives of salvation interacts pow erfully with, sometimes even superseding, other axes of social formation. In the essay that follows, Iwill examine the treatment of conversion to Islam, or "turning Turk," first in Sanders' account of the Jesus'voyage, and then in a group of English plays from the period between 1580 and 1625. I am con cerned, however, that by limiting our studies to English rep resentations of Anglo-Islamic trafficking we risk reproducing the discursive hermeticism and imbalance of Orientalism. If early modern Anglo-Islamic relations were based on recipro cal, or even deferential, relationships wherein English domi nation was unthinkable, what picture emerges when we restrict our vision to English narratives of those relations? Alternatively, how does that picture change when we admit Muslim sources into our discussions? As a preliminary response to these questions, I will end by turning from the English plays and travelogues to a Moorish text, Kitab Nasir Al-Din Ala 'L-Qawm Al-Kafirin, or The Supporter of Religion Against the Infidel (1638) by Ahmad Ibn Qasim Al-Hajari. Al Hajari's account of his travels and numerous polemical debates in Christian Europe offers an important foil to English treatments of Christian-Muslim encounters. I will limit myself here to al-Hajari's treatment of conversion; how ever, the text as a whole offers numerous points of contention to expose the strategies of disavowal and displacement both in early modern English texts as well as in recent critical approaches to Anglo-Islamic encounters. Imaintain no illusions that reading a Muslim author such as al-Hajari will produce a suddenly revelatory picture of Anglo-Islamic relations such as has been missing from previ ous accounts. Muslim writers are, of course, no less suscep tible to cultural bias than their Christian counterparts. Furthermore, no amount of primary source study can extri cate us from the cultural locations and institutional limits that...