Anti-Muslim Prejudice

Past and Present

Maleiha Malik

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415815987
• eBook ISBN: 9781317988977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection makes a unique contribution to the study of anti-Muslim prejudice by placing the issue in both its past and present context. The essays cover historical and contemporary subjects from the eleventh century to the present day. They examine the forms that anti-Muslim prejudice takes, the historical influences on these forms, and how they relate to other forms of prejudice such as racism, antisemitism or sexism, and indeed how anti-Muslim prejudice becomes institutionalized.

This volume looks at anti-Muslim prejudice from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including politics, sociology, philosophy, history, international relations, law, cultural studies and comparative literature. The essays contribute to our understanding of the different levels at which anti-Muslim prejudice emerges and operates - the local, the national and the transnational – by also including case studies from a range of contexts including Britain, Europe and the US.

This book contributes to a deeper understanding of contemporary political problems and controversial topics, such as issues that focus on Muslim women: the 'headscarf' debates, honour killings and forced marriages. There is also analysis of media bias in the representation of Muslims and Islam, and other urgent social and political issues such as the social exclusion of European Muslims and the political mobilisation against Islam by far-right parties.

This book was published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Britons and Muslims in the early modern period: from prejudice to (a theory of) toleration

NABIL MATAR

ABSTRACT Matar examines the representation of Muslims in English writings in the early modern period, roughly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. There were two views of Muslims: the first was generated by literary and theological writers whose depictions were predominantly negative and stereotypical. The second was generated by diplomats and traders who had interacted with Muslims, both in the Mediterranean and during ambassadorial visits in London. These latter writers furnished a less hostile image than the playwrights and preachers, and influenced John Locke who became the first European philosopher to argue for the toleration and the endenization of Muslims, qua Muslims, in Britain.

The civilization of Islam was the first non-Christian civilization that early modern Britons encountered as they ventured into their age of navigation and discovery. It was also the first civilization that inspired in them mixed emotions: fear, powerlessness and ‘imperial envy’.¹ From 1511 on, British ships sailed the Mediterranean, from Beirut to Istanbul to Tangier, while travellers and traders crossed into Persia towards Hormuz and the Mughal empire, learning about the natural resources and manufactured products in the Islamic world. As they bought carpets and silks, raisins and spices, ‘Barbary’ horses and saltpeter, scimitars and coffee, Britons marvelled at the rich lands and the powerful military and religious cultures of the ‘Mahometans’.

In this context of exploration and trade, prejudice against Turks, Moors, pagans and Saracens, Hagarians, Ishmaelites—the last two terms denigrated Muslims as descendants of Abraham’s slav–concubine in the Judaic tradition² —and Arabians began. Prejudice (praejudicium) is pre-judging, forming an opinion before and/or without possessing reliable data about the subject. Early modern Englishmen possessed little historical or documentary information about the Muslims they met in the various Mediterranean seaports and cities. As a result, they relied on literary tropes from the popular miracle and mystery plays, since their literature had not produced an equivalent to the Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian national epics—El Cid, La Chanson de Roland,Os Lusiadas and La Gerusalemme liberata, respectively—that recalled Christian engagements and conflicts with Muslims. In mediaeval poetry, church plays and romances, English readers and audiences met with allusions that both misrepresented and demeaned Muslims: ‘Mahound’ was the god who sent Pharaoh after Moses across the Red Sea (York Plays); he was instrumental in the Massacre of the Innocents, since Herod was a ‘Mahumetan’ and dressed in Saracen clothes (Coventry Mystery Plays); and Muhammad took part in the crucifixion of Jesus, and both Caiaphas and Pilate were his followers (Coventry Mystery Plays).³ On altar pieces and in paintings and tapestries, from Spain to Italy and Malta, travellers and visitors saw Muslims depicted as the crucifiers of Christ and the enemies of Christians.⁴ Such images furnished the English public with its first pictorial representations of Islam.

The early modern period witnessed two parallel approaches to Muslims and Islam in Britain. First was the prejudice that was nurtured by a rich literary and theological imagination. Preachers, dramatists and poets, eager to gain attention for their works, invented images of the Muslims that nearly always had little or no relation to Islamic civilization and religion. What fuelled this imagination was the military danger of Muslims. With his accession to the Ottoman throne in 1520, Sultan Suleiman launched campaigns that reached Vienna in 1529 and led to the capture of vast regions of Europe. Numerous Englishmen travelled to the continent to fight against the Ottomans, whether in Crete (1522) or Algiers (1541), as Richard Hakluyt recorded in his Navigations (1589).⁵ The military momentum declined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century as the Ottomans turned away from the Habsburgs to fight the Safavids but, in the mid-seventeenth century, the Ottoman fleet laid siege to Crete, the longest naval siege of a city in modern history (1645–69). In 1683 the Ottoman armies again attacked Vienna, where they met with a defeat that marked the beginning of their retreat from Western Europe. It was against the backdrop of this continuing destabilization of ‘the common corps of Christendom’ that Britons first came to learn about Islam and Muslims.⁶ And it was a destabilization that the popular media transformed from a war of competing Ottoman—Habsburg empires into a cosmic conflict of Christianity against Islam, of the Christian cross versus the Muslim crescent. From the first decades of the sixteenth century until 1699, it was difficult for British writers—and their readers—to dissociate Islam and Muslims from the expansionist wars of the Ottoman empire.

But, as theologians declaimed against the ‘Turk’ and playwrights maligned the ‘Moor’,⁷ Portsmouth seamen and Whitehall courtiers, along with employees of the East Levant and East India companies, were becoming familiar with the varieties of languages, ethnicities and histories among the Muslims.⁸ This second approach towards Muslims was governed by national interests and a Realpolitik that could not afford ignorance or invention. Monarchs, from Elizabeth I on, wrote polite letters of co-operation to Muslim potentates, sometimes even emphasizing the propinquity between Islam and Protestantism and appealing to common ground. In the corridors of power and commerce, prejudice was counter-productive; precision, accuracy and proper data helped to reduce military danger and increase commercial profit. The diplomatic records kept by Britons who were active in the Islamic world and that have survived in the British national archives and libraries reveal the vast amount of information that Britons amassed about Muslim societies, regions and histories.⁹ Only through such detailed information could British merchants and diplomats, factors and residents oust their continental (French, Dutch, Venetian) rivals from the lucrative Mediterranean and Indian trades, and manufacture goods that would appeal to their religiously different clients. Openness towards Muslims was necessary, even if it went as far as permitting them to ‘exercise theire religion … in the kingdome of the King of Great Britaine’.¹⁰

By the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke called for the inclusion of Muslims (and other non-Anglicans and non-Christians) in the British body politic. Although voices had been raised earlier in the century for toleration of Muslims, it was Locke who, uniquely in early modern Europe, formulated a theory that moved the status of Muslims from the exclusion of prejudice to the inclusion of toleration. For centuries after Locke, his theory remained a theory and prejudice continued, but at least the English philosopher set in motion the long process of transforming the Muslim from an Other to a fellow subject of the crown.

The early modern period, therefore, witnessed the parallel development of two attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. A raging Turk or a lascivious Moor strutted on stage at the same time that a British ambassador in Istanbul or a consul in Algiers or Aghra conveyed information about diplomatic strategy and Arabian horses.¹¹ At the pulpit the preacher might demonize Muhammad and ridicule Islam, but letters would subsequently reach the Privy Council about the prospects for increased trade with the followers of Muhammad, about rich resources and distinct industrial needs in the lands of Islam. Still, prejudice remained dominant in the fertile world of the imagination: more so than in the corridors of power, where it was not absent but had to give way to financial, commercial and diplomatic priorities.

Prejudice

One of the first publications on Islam in English, Here Begynneth a Lytell Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe Called Alcaron (1519?), included the woodcut of a Muslim preacher standing in front of the figure of a horned beast-like devil.¹² English parishioners also read translations of continental polemics against Islam, such as Here after Foloweth a Lytell Treatyse agaynst Mahumet and His Cursed Secte (c. 1530) and Paolo Giovio’s A Shorte Treatise vpon the Turkes Chronicles (1546) with its rousing words on the title page: ‘Wake up now, Christiens out of your Slumber. Of the Turkes to recouer your long lost glory.’¹³ In the absence of a translation of the Qur’an or of documents from Arabic, Turkish or other Islamic civilizations, Britons saw Islam exclusively through the prism of Muslims attacking, enslaving, converting (as with the Janissaries especially) and killing Christians. The vast scientific, philosophical and artistic legacy of Islam was buried under the mantle of the Ottomans to the extent that surveys about the ‘Mahometans’ opened with a few pages devoted to the biography of the Prophet Muhammad (with his Jewish parents and Nestorian/heretical teacher) before shifting to the House of Osman and its dangerous legacy. Islam was the prelude to the Ottoman onslaught.¹⁴

English men and women became acutely aware of this Islam-war association in the mid-1560s. In 1565 they invoked God in ‘common prayer every Wednesday and Friday’ to assist the Christians of Malta ‘to defend and deliver Christians professing his holy name, and in his Justice to repress the rage and violence of Infidels’.¹⁵ In 1566 another ‘common prayer’ was used ‘every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, through the whole Realm: To excite and stir all godly people to pray unto God for the preservation of those Christians and their Countries, that are now invaded by the Turk in Hungary, or elsewhere.’¹⁶ The communal fear felt by English parishioners at the Ottoman naval attack on the island where St Paul had been shipwrecked, as well as at the military campaigns in Central Europ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Anti-Muslim prejudice in the West, past and present: an introduction
• 1 Britons and Muslims in the early modern period: from prejudice to (a theory of) toleration
• 2 Anti-Turkish obsession and the exodus of Balkan Muslims
• 3 Can the walls hear?
• 4 The crusade over the bodies of women
• 5 Muslim headscarves in France and army uniforms in Israel: a comparative study of citizenship as mask
• 6 Revisiting Lepanto: the political mobilization against Islam in contemporary Western Europe
• 7 Refutations of racism in the 'Muslim question'
• 8 'Get shot of the lot of them': election reporting of Muslims in British newspapers
• 9 Where do Muslims stand on ethno-racial hierarchies in Britain and France? Evidence from public opinion surveys, 1988–2008
• 10 Confronting Islamophobia in the United States: framing civil rights activism among Middle Eastern Americans
• Index