Islam in Britain: 1558-1685

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 ("How Khan Jemima cope with Allah this?" 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", ie 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 un successful 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 3 yeere 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 LlQUOR" 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.


Copyright 1999 The Times Newspapers Limited.