Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (review)

Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. By Nabil Matar (New York, Columbia University Press, 1999) 268 pp. $32.50.

Turks, Moors, and Englishmen proposes a new paradigm for envisioning Britons' encounter with the "Other" during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The first section (chapters 1-2) details the various ways in which Englishmen, Turks, and Moors encountered, and became familiar, with each other (for example, as immigrants, traders, soldiers, and captives). Section two (chapter 3) delineates Matar's model, called "The Renaissance Triangle," which postulates a triangular relationship between England, North Africa, and the Americas, the examination of which reveals similarities in the ways in which "Britons" imagined and represented American Indians and Muslims (106-107). Section three (chapters 4-5) proposes to illustrate those similarities through an examination of rhetorics of sodomy and holy war.

Matar's work adds to a growing body of literature that restores some balance to the portrayal of "Islam" and the "West." His cases, showing English watchmakers in the Moroccan court and perplexed British jailers wondering what to do with Muslim captives, help to humanize the story of cross-cultural encounter. Some readers, however, will find his arguments about the interchangeability of English rhetorical models for the Muslim and for the American Indian forced. "Such interchangeability of models was possible for Britons because they 'discovered' the American Indians at the same time they 'discovered' the Muslims" (99). Matar concludes that, "By the end of the seventeenth century, the Muslim 'savage' and the Indian 'savage' became completely superimposable in English thought and ideology" (170).

There are two methodological problems in this work that derive from a failure thoroughly to contextualize and critique language and sources. Despite his interest in issues of identity, the author makes little attempt to sort out the boundaries of "Turks," "Moors," or even Englishmen." Turks are Ottomans, more or less, unless they are in North Africa; Moors are usually "Moroccans"; and Englishmen are often "Britons." Matar also uses the terms "nationalism" and "national identity" without discussing what those terms might, or might not, mean in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England or Morocco (for example, 145, 177). He suggests that homosexuality was referred to as sodomy in "European writings about the American Indians," but his examples demonstrate that use of the term "sodomy" was much broader (109). He finds it striking that the Arab writer al-Mawsuli uses the term futuh, "the word that in Arabic describes the early Muslim conquests in the Levant, North Africa, and central Asia (188)," to describe the Spanish conquest of America. But since futuh means simply "conquest," this usage is hardly surprising. Such overstating of the comparative case is common throughout the text. The author also fails to take into account earlier European narrative traditions. As a case in point, his effort to equate English characterizations of Muslims and Native Americans as unbelievers ignores the important distinction that Muhammad and his followers were characterized as heretics.

The book's narrative moves from literature to theater and then to captivity narratives with little or no accompanying frame discussion of representational modes (44-46, 117, 125-126). An author concerned to discuss rhetorical constructions, identity, and cross-cultural encounter could have done a more thorough analysis of the sources' authors, motives, and audiences. The fact that "Turks" were depicted in many English plays and the fact that thousands of people were reported in the newspaper to have watched the procession of the Turkish ambassador have different implications for measuring the degree of familiarity that the "Englishman" had with the Turk, or for determining the English "national" vision of Turks. Nor does the fact that some Englishmen routinely called Turks, Moors, and some Native Americans "sodomites" mean that English visions of the "Indians" and the "Muslims" were either uniform or equivalent. Matar does sometimes address these levels of rhetoric, but he does so too little and too infrequently.

Despite these...