Islam in Britain, 1558-1685
Title | Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 PDF eBook |
Author | Nabil I. Matar |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 1998-10-13 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0521622336 |
Examines the impact of Islam on Britain from the accession of Elizabeth to the death of Charles II.
Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery
Title | Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery PDF eBook |
Author | Nabil Matar |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 281 |
Release | 2000-10-25 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 023150571X |
During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, Nabil Matar vividly presents new data about Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions. Rather than looking exclusively at literary works, which tended to present unidimensional stereotypes of Muslims—Shakespeare's "superstitious Moor" or Goffe's "raging Turke," to name only two—Matar delves into hitherto unexamined English prison depositions, captives' memoirs, government documents, and Arabic chronicles and histories. The result is a significant alternative to the prevailing discourse on Islam, which nearly always centers around ethnocentrism and attempts at dominance over the non-Western world, and an astonishing revelation about the realities of exchange and familiarity between England and Muslim society in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Concurrent with England's engagement and "discovery" of the Muslims was the "discovery" of the American Indians. In an original analysis, Matar shows how Hakluyt and Purchas taught their readers not only about America but about the Muslim dominions, too; how there were more reasons for Britons to venture eastward than westward; and how, in the period under study, more Englishmen lived in North Africa than in North America. Although Matar notes the sharp political and colonial differences between the English encounter with the Muslims and their encounter with the Indians, he shows how Elizabethan and Stuart writers articulated Muslim in terms of Indian, and Indian in terms of Muslim. By superimposing the sexual constructions of the Indians onto the Muslims, and by applying to them the ideology of holy war which had legitimated the destruction of the Indians, English writers prepared the groundwork for orientalism and for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest of Mediterranean Islam. Matar's detailed research provides a new direction in the study of England's geographic imagination. It also illuminates the subtleties and interchangeability of stereotype, racism, and demonization that must be taken into account in any responsible depiction of English history.
Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713
Title | Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 PDF eBook |
Author | Gerald MacLean |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 350 |
Release | 2011-05-26 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199203180 |
Explores the interactions between Britain and the Islamic world from 1558 to 1713, showing how much scholars, diplomats, traders, captives, travellers, clerics, and chroniclers were involved in developing and describing those interactions.
Title | PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Minority Rights Group |
Pages | 43 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Islam For Beginners
Title | Islam For Beginners PDF eBook |
Author | N.I. Matar |
Publisher | Red Wheel/Weiser |
Pages | 222 |
Release | 2007-08-21 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1939994101 |
Five times a day, close to a billion people turn to the Ka’aba in submission to Allah/God. In the seventeenth century the religion of Islam was revealed to the prophet Mohammad through the Holy Koran. Since then, Islam has spread to every center of the world. Starting with the life of the prophet Mohammed, Islam For Beginners details the historic beginnings of Islam and its spread throughout the Middle East and Africa on to the European and American continents. It describes the major achievements of the Muslim community worldwide and examines the influence Islam has had on other cultures. In keeping with Islamic tradition, the illustrations in the book are rendered in two-dimensional silhouettes and shadows and include the repetitive, extendible patterns representative of Islamic expression.
Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689
Title | Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 PDF eBook |
Author | Nabil Matar |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Africa, North |
ISBN | 9780813030760 |
Matar examines the influence of Mediterranean piracy and diplomacy on early modern British history and identity. Drawing on published and unpublished literary, commercial, and epistolary sources, he situates British maritime activity and national politics, especially in relation to the Civil War, within the international context of Anglo-Magharibi encounters. Before there was the British encounter with America, there was the much more complex and destabilizing encounter with Islam in North Africa.
Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World
Title | Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World PDF eBook |
Author | Katharine Scarfe Beckett |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2003-10-16 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 113944090X |
In this book, Scarfe Beckett is concerned with representations of the Islamic world prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England. Using a wide variety of literary, historical and archaeological evidence, she argues that the first perceptions of Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens which derived from Christian exegesis preconditioned wester expressions of hostility and superiority towards peoples of the Islamic world, and that these received ideas prevailed even as material contacts increased between England and Muslim territory. Medieval texts invariably represented Muslim Arabs as Saracens and Ismaelites (or Hagarenes), described by Jerome as biblical enemies of the Christian world three centuries before Muhammad's lifetime. Two early ideas in particular - that Saracens worshipped Venus and dissembled their own identity - continued into the early modern period. This finding has interesting implications for earlier theses by Edward Said and Norman Daniel concerning the history of English perceptions of Islam.