Henry Stubbe (1632–1676) was a revolutionary English scholar who understood Islam as a monotheistic revelation in continuity with Judaism and Christianity. His major work, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, was the first English text to positively document the Prophet Muhammad’s life, celebrate the Qur’an as a divine revelation, and praise the Muslim toleration of Christians, undermining a long legacy of European prejudice and hostility. Nabil Matar, a leading scholar of Islamic-Western relations, standardizes Stubbe’s text and situates it within England’s theological climate. He shows how, to draw a positive portrait of Muhammad, Stubbe embraced travelogues, early church histories, Arabic chronicles, Latin commentaries, and studies on Jewish customs and scriptures, produced in the language of Islam and in the midst of the Islamic polity.

A biography of Henry Stubbe, 1632-76, classicist, polemicist, physician and philosopher.

A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century. Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty. This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.

How has fundamentalism betrayed the true spirit of Islam? This fully revised and expanded edition of the critically acclaimed book provides answers to this question and contains: a new essay on the role of women in Islam; an updated chapter containing insights into the true nature of the jih three fully revised chapters that bring the discussion up-to-date with the current global situation; a revised introduction. Book jacket.

Long before European empires came to dominate the Middle East, Britain was brought face to face with Islam through the activities of the Barbary corsairs. For three centuries after 1500, Muslim ships based in North African ports terrorized European shipping, capturing thousands of vessels and enslaving hundreds of thousands of Christians. Encountering Islam is the fascinating story of one Englishman's experience of life within a Muslim society, as both Christian slave and Muslim soldier. Born in Exeter around 1662, Joseph Pitts was captured by Algerian pirates on his first voyage in 1678. Sold as a slave in Algiers, he underwent forced conversion to Islam. Sold again, he accompanied his kindly third master on pilgrimage to Mecca, so becoming the first Englishman known to have visited the Muslim Holy Places. Granted his freedom, Pitts became a soldier, going on campaign against the Moroccans and Spanish before venturing on a daring escape while serving with the Algiers fleet. Crossing much of Italy and Germany on foot, he finally reached Exeter seventeen years after he had left. Joseph Pitts's A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans, first published in 1704, is a unique combination of captivity narrative, travel account and description of Islam. It describes his time in Algiers, his life as a slave, his conversion, his pilgrimage to Mecca (the first such detailed description in English), Muslim ritual and practice, and his audacious escape. A Christian for most of his life, Pitts also had the advantage of living as a Muslim within a Muslim society. Nowhere in the literature of the period is there a more intimate and poignant account of identity conflict. Encountering Islam contains a faithful rendering of the definitive 1731 edition of Pitts's book, together with critical historical, religious and linguistic notes. The introduction tells what is known of Pitts's life, and places his work against its historical background, and in the context of current scholarship on captivity narratives and Anglo-Muslim relations of the period. Paul Auchterlonie, an Arabist, worked for forty years as a librarian specializing in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and from 1981 to 2011 was librarian in charge of the Middle East collections at the University of Exeter. He is the author and editor of numerous works on Middle Eastern bibliography and library science, and has recently published articles on historical and cultural relations between Britain and the Middle East. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.

A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1: White American Muslims before 1975 is the first in-depth study of the thousands of white Americans who embraced Islam between 1800 and 1975. Drawing from little-known archives, interviews, and rare books and periodicals, Patrick D. Bowen unravels the complex social and religious factors that led to the emergence of a wide variety of American Muslim and Sufi conversion movements. While some of the more prominent Muslim and Sufi converts—including Alexander Webb, Maryam Jameelah, and Samuel Lewis—have received attention in previous studies, White American Muslims before 1975 is the first book to highlight previously unknown but important figures, including Thomas M. Johnson, Louis Glick, Nadirah Osman, and T.B. Irving.