When West Looks East: Some Recent Studies in Early Modern Muslim Cultures

Few will need reminding how greatly the world has changed since 1937 when Samuel C. Chew's study, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance, first appeared, priced at $5. Yet in terms of Anglophone scholarship on Chew's general topic, any impartial jury would surely conclude that a great deal of work is still waiting to be done. Following Chew's comprehensive survey of how English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the peoples and cultures of the Ottoman and Persian empires, Clarence Dana Rouillard in 1940, Dorothy Vaughan in 1954, and Robert Schwoebel in 1969 produced general accounts of French, Italian, and German writings about the so-called "Turks." These scholarly surveys remain indispensable for their broad coverage of the contemporary vernacular materials. The limitation of this first wave of pioneering surveys—and it is one that continues to reappear in studies being produced in the field today— might be their one-way approach, for none of these scholars knew or cared very much about the peoples that their European sources purported to represent (other than what they could deduce from those very sources.) In all fairness to Chew, Rouillard, Vaughn, and Schwoebel, none ever claimed that they were doing more than investigate the ways that early European writers regarded those they called "Turks" and the world of Islam they inhabited, but their indifference to who and what was being represented marks a cautionary absence. For the result of this one-way analysis is that misinformation all too often reappears as fact, past prejudices resurface as reliable judgments, and before very long fantasy returns as history. All four scholars, for instance, recycled the early modern European usage of "Turk" as synonymous with both "Muslim" —regardless of origin—and with "Ottoman," while to the Ottomans themselves, the term referred disparagingly to the Anatolian peasantry over whom they had come to rule.¹ Many continue in this habit, one rendered even more confusing and potentially misleading since the Turkish Republic declared all inhabitants to be "Turks" in order to erase Kurds, Armenians, Laz, and other ethnicities from the national landscape.

Examining how and why Europeans represented the Muslim world during our period is arguably the most exciting and certainly the most important scholarly endeavor on the agenda of early modern cultural studies today. Understanding what those representations or "images" meant then, and might mean today, however, necessarily requires accurate knowledge of the peoples and cultures being described. We must also grasp how, and to what ends, those early "images" distorted and misrepresented the populous and complex world that they claimed to be portraying, and we must be able to recognize when and why they were accurate. How did the early modern Muslim world record and represent itself?

The immediate challenge facing scholars who would avoid the one-way method arises from two distinct directions. The first is the enormous difficulty of access to, and interpretation of, sources in languages such as Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, and the various Arabic dialects—a difficulty greatly compounded by the unfamiliar nature of such archives as do exist and are available. In the case of Ottoman sources, two complicating factors have further exacerbated the problem: the Ottomans themselves were generally uninterested in writing history of the kind known to the West since the Enlightenment, while the study of the Ottoman past was...