Encountering Islam. Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-Century Algiers and Mecca. A Critical Edition, with Biographical Introduction and Notes, of Joseph Pitts of Exeter’s A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans, 1731 by Paul Auchterlonie (review)

Sailor, slave, traveler, and pilgrim: these are the categories Mr. Auchterlonie uses to introduce Joseph Pitts (c.1663–1739), whose account of his captivity and conversion in Algiers and subsequent return and reconversion to English Protestantism has fascinated and unsettled readers since its initial publication in 1704. This critical edition reproduces Pitts’s revised and enlarged third edition of 1731, which followed the publication of an unauthorized second edition. With an extensive scholarly Introduction, historical illustrations, copious glosses, and detailed notes, this critical edition not only makes accessible the first published account in English of the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca required at least once of all Muslims with means. It also offers a unique ethnographic account of seventeenth-century Algiers and its environs, a firsthand and generally informed description of Islamic practices, and a compelling personal account from one of the many captive English boys and men who survived, and occasionally thrived, in Islamic North Africa.

Mr. Auchterlonie’s substantial Introduction details the historical, biographical, and literary contexts necessary to understand Pitts’s achievement. It begins with the political, social, and economic history of Algiers from its incorporation into the periphery of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century to its expansion into one of the main hubs for Mediterranean piracy by the seventeenth century. He maintains that “Pitts was critical of the Algerians’ naval qualities, but his claim goes against the evidence” of their challenge to British, as well as Spanish and French, hegemony in the Mediterranean up to the nineteenth century. This misconception signals Pitts’s ambivalence towards Muslim power and piety throughout his account, written for an English audience that demanded renunciation of his fifteen formative years in the Islamic world, with eleven to twelve of those years as a practicing (if perhaps not believing) Muslim. As he reiterates, his “heart” remained Christian and his “home” England; however, he also adduces an Englishman who decamped for Islamic North Africa after a hostile reception in “his own Country.” Pitts himself, after walking hundreds of miles across Europe following his harrowing escape from the Turkish mainland, immediately upon his return was impressed into the British Navy—a form of virtual slavery—and wrongly imprisoned. Yet, he persisted in asserting his Protestant faith and his English identity, partly through publishing his account.

Mr. Auchterlonie specifies that “Islam defines slavery with two different terms, asr (captivity) and ubudiyyah (slavery)”: the first category of slave could be ransomed, the second “had to spend the rest of their life in captivity.” Pitts’s account blurs the two categories, as his second master refused several attempts by English merchants and diplomats to free his slave at any price. His third master freed him as a pious act after his hajj. Pitts records the cruel conditioning of new captives, the dehumanizing experience of being displayed in the slave market, and the spectacular punishments for escaped slaves, especially if they had converted to Islam. Yet he also records how he, and other English slaves, adapted to life in Algiers by working for wages, fighting with the Turkish forces, and following Islamic law. He describes his tasks as similar to “a Servant-Maid’s Work in England.” Yet, he also indicates that he learned to read and write Turkish, which suggests he was being trained for a bureaucratic position in the Ottoman administration.

Although he does not view Islam as a reformed version of Protestantism, as did late seventeenth-century Unitarians such as Henry Stubbes, Pitts recognizes its validity as a related monotheism even as he voices the clichés of medieval anti...