Author: Nabil I. MatarPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521622336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Examines the impact of Islam on Britain from the accession of Elizabeth to the death of Charles II.
Islam in Britain, 1558-1685
Author: Nabil I. MatarPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521622336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
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
Author: Nabil MatarPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150571X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
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.
Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World
Author: Katharine Scarfe BeckettPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113944090X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
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.
Salafism and Traditionalism
Author: Emad HamdehPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Provides a detailed reconstruction of the heated debates between Salafis and Traditionalist over the contested role of Islamic scholarly authority.
Against the Trinity
Author: Muḥammad ibn Hārūn WarrāqPublisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521412445
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Abu 'Isa al-Warraq's Against the Trinity is the longest sustained attack on the Trinity to survive from the early centuries of Islam, and is a key work in the history of the early relations between Islam and Christianity. It contains refutations of the arguments and explanations represented by the Nestorians, Melkites and Jacobites, and comprises the first part of an attack on the major Christian doctrines. It was composed during the early ninth century, and is the only known extant work of the Shi'ite scholar Abu 'Isa al-Warraq. Although his ideas met with scepticism and rejection his works were widely influential in the centuries after his death. David Thomas presents the Arabic text of this treatise, with a facing English translation. In the introduction he shows how the work is both more profound and better researched than other contemporary attacks and traces its influence upon later polemical works. He also draws together details of Abu 'Isa's life and thought from the works of contemporary writers and attempts to give an impression of what the author was trying to achieve in his teachings.
Islam For Beginners
Author: N.I. MatarPublisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1939994101
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
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.
Europe and the Islamic World
Author: John Victor TolanPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691147051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Book Description
"In this ... book, three .. historians bring tio life the complex and tumultuous relations between Genoans and Tunisians, Alexandrians and the people of Constantinople, Catalans and Maghrebis - the myriad groups and individuals whose stories reflect the common cultural and religious heritage of Europe and Islam. Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and the Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. [Readers] are given an ... introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquista, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promises of this entwined legacy today. ..."--Jacket.
Islam and Britain
Author: Ron GeavesPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147427174X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Based on hitherto untapped source materials, this book charts the history of Muslim missionary activity in London from 1912, when the first Indian Muslim missionaries arrived in London, until 1944. During this period a unique community was forged out of British converts and native Muslims from various parts of the world, which focused itself around a purpose built mosque in Woking and later the first mosque to open in London in 1924. Arguing that an understanding of Muslim mission in this period needs to place such activity in the context of colonial encounter, Islam and Britain provides a background narrative into why Muslim missionary activity in London was part of a variety of strategies to engage with European expansion and overzealous Christian missionary activity in India. Ron Geaves draws on research undertaken in India and Pakistan, where the Ahmadiya missionaries have kept extensive archives of this period which until now have been unavailable to scholars. Unique in providing an account of Islamic missionary work in Britain from the Islamic perspective, Islam and Britain adds to our knowledge and understanding of British Muslim history and makes an important contribution to the literature concerned with Islamic missiology.
This Orient Isle
Author: Jerry BrottonPublisher: Penguin Press
ISBN: 9780141978673
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
In 1570, after plots and assassination attempts against her, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. It was the beginning of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakech in the hope of establishing an accord which would keep the common enemy of Catholic Spain at bay. This awareness of the Islamic world found its way into many of the great English cultural productions of the day - especially, of course, Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice. This Orient Isle shows that England's relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have ever appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England.
Encountering Islam
Author: Richard SudworthPublisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334055180
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
What do Christian Churches say Islam is? What does the Church of England say Islam is? And, in the end, what space is there for genuine engagement with Islam? Richard Sudworth's unique study takes as its cue the question of political theology and brings this burgeoning area of debate into dialogue with Christian-Muslim relations and Anglican ecclesiology. The vexed subject of Christian-Muslim Relations provides the presenting arena to explore what political theologies enable the Church of England to engage with the diverse public square of the twenty-first century. Each chapter concludes with an ‘Anecdotes from the Field’ section, setting themes from the chapter in the context of Richard Sudworth’s own ministry within a Muslim majority parish.