The threat and lure of the East

The content of this book is no less startling than its title. Matar traces a thoroughly unfamiliar aspect of British history: the impact of Ottoman civilisation and religion on the troubled British mind between the reigns of Elizabeth and Charles II. As he justly complains, historians of this period have focused on our relations with Christian Europe, neglecting the important and in many respects more interesting story of British engagement with Islam.

Over much of this era the Ottoman empire was Britain's most substantial trading partner, and the merchants in the Levant who grew rich on this commerce returned with disturbing accounts of a society whose success seemed to raise questions about contemporary England. Religious uniformity, for instance, was a more negotiable assumption for those who had witnessed the diversity and tolerance of a world where "the Turke puts none to death for Religion". English Nonconformists polemically, but quite sincerely, insisted that Muslim rule would be preferable to that of Anglicanism. Curiosity about the "Turkish religion" added to the popularity of translations of the Koran, which in turn discreetly reinforced the anti-Trinitarianism which was evolving amid the confusion of the interregnum. There are signs of apostasies to Islam in London, and reports of the execution of several renegades, despite John Locke's plea for the legalising of the Muslim religion.

The East promised; but it also threatened. The Ottoman cavalry probing the valleys near Innsbruck was terrifying enough, but for the maritime English, North African piracy was an even more dire punishment for the sins of Christendom. Corsairs from the dynamic Barbary regencies captured and enslaved thousands of Britons at sea and through raids on the Cornish coast. More disturbingly still, large numbers of these slaves converted to Islam. When Charles II sent a mission to ransom British renegades, not one expressed a desire to return. The British consul in Egypt himself converted, vanishing into Muslim society.

The conversion of thousands of Britons was received with a fascinated horror which provided a stock theme for stage and pulpit. Matar shows how the character of the renegade, who encapsulated Christian England's vulnerability beside the more powerful civilisation of Islam, became a Faust-like metaphor for cupidity and betrayal. Even coffee was denounced as an "abominable liquor of Infidels", which turned the skin brown, incited un-Christian lust, and thus prepared Englishmen for conversion to Islam.

The book has other richnesses which cannot be treated here. Lucid and erudite, it will illuminate students of English history, of Islam, and of the origins of racism.

Tim Winter is lecturer in Islamic studies, University of Cambridge.