An Early Modern Dialogue With Islam. Antonio de Sosa's Topography of Algiers (1612) by Antonio de Sosa (review)

In 1581, the Portuguese-born cleric Antonio de Sosa returned to Spain from Algiers, where he had been held captive for some four years. During the time of his captivity he had observed the city that was his prison and its many and varied inhabitants with an anthropologist's eye, recording in extraordinary detail the customs, beliefs, physical appearance, and ways of speaking of its inhabitants. Those notes would be published posthumously, albeit under another man's name, in Spain in 1612 as the five-volume compendium titled Topographia, e Historia general de Argel, repartida en cinco tratados, do se verán casos estraños, muertes espantosas, y tormentos exquisitos que conviene se entiendan en la Christiandad: con mucha doctrina y elegancia curiosa. The Topografía serves to this day as one of the most valuable sources of insight both into everyday life in what was then one of the Mediterranean's most prominent sites of intercultural commerce, and into a European's view of a Muslim society at the time.

This translation of the first volume, specifically titled the Topografía, by Diana de Armas Wilson, edited and with an introduction by María Antonia Garcés, represents not only the first available edition of his invaluable resource in English, but also an enormous improvement on the hitherto available editions in Spanish, which in addition to the rare princeps edition of 1612, include only an early twentieth-century edition that Garcés calls "inaccessible and deficient, lacking any sort of critical apparatus."

This volume clearly addresses that deficiency by providing a truly thorough critical apparatus. The text of the Topography of Algiers is presented in its entirety, and is translated by de Armas Wilson into clear and direct English. Her "Note From the Translator," along with a helpful preface addressing the problem of "Transliteration and Translation" in the volume's front matter, take into account some of the thorny problems generated by de Sosa's transliteration of Arabic terms and names. De Armas Wilson has used the Encyclopedia of Islam as the basis for the transliterations she provides in the text, and Garcés provides a detailed, 13-page glossary at the end of the text, which is enormously helpful. The Topography itself is organized into 41 chapters dealing with such diverse topics as "Turks," "Renegades," "The Jews of Algiers," "Algerian Women's Fashions," and "Islamic Feast Days and Festivals in Algiers." There are also 18 illustrations, including a number of full-color plates.

In addition to making the Topography available to a wider audience, this volume's chief contribution is the exhaustive and compelling introduction authored by María Antonia Garcés. "Introduction" may be selling short the almost 80-page monograph that delves with great insight into the circumstances of the writing and publication of the Topography and the life and times of its author. Garcés sets herself the ambitious task of presenting the Topography in the context of the history of interactions between Christendom and Islam, as well as of early modern Spanish and European perceptions of Islam as recorded in the literature of the day. She even has some interesting remarks on the importance of the text in light of the reemergence of critical interest in dialogues between Islam and the West in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which she makes in the context of an informative review of recent scholarship on such intercultural dialogues. As she points out, furthering our knowledge of early modern European views of Islam is of great relevance for today's political reality: "Prejudices and outlooks, then, were not only amazingly similar in both societies and their views of each other, but also subsisted over time, conditioned by centuries of frontier life, war, and mutual mistrust. The current battles between Islam and the...