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'Islam overpowered the English by its power of attraction, not by
the sword'
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Islam in Britain: 1558-1685 by
Nabil Matar
Book Review by
William Dalrymple
The Sunday Times, January 10, 1999
The British have always had a fairly ambiguous
attitude to Islam. On one hand, this country has produced a
stream of travellers and explorers who have written engagingly
and sympathetically about "heart-beguiling Araby",
Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger and so on. On the other
hand, Britain has never been short of xenophobes, and the howls
of derision and amazement that greeted the news of Jemima
Khan's conversion to Islam screamed The Sun on its
front page' represents a peculiarly British strain of
head-banging hostility to Muslims which has been more or less
consistent since the time of the Crusades.
The origins of both British attitudes to Islam are charted in
Nabil Matar's brilliant and gripping study, an astonishing
compendium of groundbreaking research whose very title is a
measure of quite how original and surprising this book is: I
certainly did not know that there were Muslims in Britain during
the time of the Tudors and Stuarts. Yet from the 16th century
onwards, Britain was closely engaged with the Islamic world as
the Ottoman Empire expanded eastwards through central Europe and
the Mediterranean, and Britain's trade network expanded
eastwards to meet it. Much of the initial contact took place
against a background of naval skirmishes, where Muslim
technological superiority at sea led to the capture and sinking
of large numbers of British vessels.
Between 1609 and 1616, it was reported that 466 English ships by
Ottoman or Barbary galleys, and their crews led away in chains.
By May 1626, there were more than 5000 British captives in the
city of Algiers and a further 1,500 in Sali, and frantic
arrangements were being made in London to redeem them "lest
they follow the example of others and turn Turk", i.e
convert to Islam.
By the 1620s, the Turkish naval presence was no longer confined
to the Mediterranean and had extended its reach into the waters
of the British Isles: in August 1625, "The Turks took
out from the Church of 'Munnigesca in Mounts' Bay Cornwall about
60 men, women and children, and carried them away captives";
while, in June 1670, a petition was presented to the king on
behalf of '140 men from Stepney' who had been captured from '22
merchant ships' by the Algerians.
What was more worrying still were reports that some of these
raids were being led by Englishmen who had converted to Islam
and "turned Turk": for example, in September
1645, seven ships "from Barbary" landed in Cornwall
and were led inland "by some renegade of this
country". It was reports that large numbers of British
captives were converting to Islam that really rattled the Stuart
authorities. Worse still, while some of these conversions were
forced, most were clearly not, and British travellers in the
East regularly brought back tales of their compatriots who had
"crossed over" and were now prospering in Ottoman
service. Indeed, Brits were constantly popping up in the most
unlikely places: one of the most powerful Ottoman eunuchs during
the late 16th century, Hasan Aga, was the former Samson Rowlie
from Great Yarmouth, while in Algeria the "Moorish
King's Executioner" turned out to be a former butcher
from Exeter called "Absalom" (Abd-es-Salaam).
When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen
who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast his mission was
unsuccessful as they all refused to return: the men had all
converted to Islam, risen in the ranks, and were now
"partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks",
living in a style to which they could not possibly have aspired
back home. The frustrated Captain Hamilton was forced to return
empty handed: "They are tempted to forsake their God for
the love of 'Turkish women,'" he wrote in his official
report. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally
very beautiful."
In a great many cases, the Englishmen who converted to Islam
were not slaves but free merchants or Servants of the Crown who
were attracted by what they saw. Soon after, trade with the
Ottoman Empire began to flourish - and by the end of the 17th
century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all
England's overseas commercial activity - Sir Thomas Shirely
warned that "conversation with infidelles doeth mutch
corrupte"; and that the more time Englishmen spent in
the lands of Islam, the closer they moved to adopting the
manners of the Muslims. "Many wylde youthes of all
nationes," he wrote, "as well Englishe as
others ... in euerye 3yeere that they staye in Turkye they loose
one article of theyre faythe."
Islam overpowered the English by its power of attraction, not by
the sword; in 1606, even the British consul in Egypt, Benjamin
Bishop, converted and promptly disappeared from public records.
All this, of course, went down badly at home, and the
treacherous 'renegade' soon became a stock character on the
English stage, where jibes about circumcision and men who
converted to Islam expecting harems, and instead ended up as
eunuchs, became the Jacobean equivalent of the mother-in-law
joke.
It also caused a problem to the church authorities when former
apostates began returning home in large numbers, some wishing
readmission to the church, others apparently wishing to keep to
their new faith. In 1637, the matter was the subject of a
full-scale parliamentary debate, when Archbishop Laud presented
to the house A Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a
Renegado or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turcism.
One of the most amusing sections of this remarkable and original
book deals with the anxious debate that rocked the country in
the mid-17th century as to whether the newly fashionable
Oriental drink of coffee - "The Mahometan berry" - put
the drinker under "the power of the Turkish spell",
thus preparing the way for Englishmen to commit apostasy;
indeed, a few took the view that coffee drinking was really part
of a secret Turkish plot to destroy Christendom. Much of the
debate, so it seems, revolved around whether coffee excited or
depressed the libido. A petition published in Restoration
London, purportedly prepared by "City-Wifes", referred
to the "Inconveniences that accrue to their sex, from
the Excessive Drinking of that Drying, and Enfeebling Liqour"
that turned their husbands into "EUNUCHS". Others
disagreed: "Coffee is the general drink throughout Turky,
and those Eastern Regions, and yet no part of the world can
boast more able or eager performers than those circumcised
gentlemen," wrote one pamphleteer. "Coffee
Collects and settles the Spirits, makes the erection more
Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritual escency to
the Sperme, and renders it more firm and suitable to the Gusto
of the womb, and proportionate to the ardours and expectation
too, of the female Paramour."
So wholly unexpected and unlikely is most of the material in
this book that one might take some of the text for a practical
joke were it not also minutely footnoted; as a feat of research
alone this book is a small miracle. But it is also warmly and
wittily written and, unusually for a heavyweight academic book,
enormously readable and accessible. It is certainly the most
surprising book I have read for many months.
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