14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
The new Orientalism
- Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities, Barbara Fuchs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp211;
- Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England, Daniel J Vitkus, ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. pp376
America is much concerned with Islam these days, and not just since 11 September. Currently the most fashionable topic in 16th and 17th century literary scholarship is the Ottoman Empire and its relationship with early modern England. There has been a rash of books on the subject; conventions and job talks; the title of this year's conference at the Folger Institute -- a private academic institute devoted to the study of Shakespeare and located in an odd reproduction of a Tudor manor house next door to the Supreme Court in Washington DC -- is "The Impact of the Ottoman Empire on Early Modern Europe from 1453 to the death of Ahmed I." What does hip scholarship's new Turkish flavouring tell us about the American academy?
The Scribe, Ludwig Deutsch (1855 - 1935)
We describe ourselves by explaining how we are different from something else -- the Other. This relatively simple sociological insight underpins much of the recent work on the Ottoman Empire. Barbara Fuchs' Mimesis and Empire belongs squarely within the new academic trend. She is concerned with the role of Muslims in 16th and 17th century English and Spanish literary texts, specifically texts concerned with New World trade. In her reading, Muslims are a symbolic presence: they provide a metaphor for something else. Fuchs therefore, for example, concentrates on how the 1616 Comentarios reales de los Incas, an account of the Spanish colonisation of Peru, compares the conquest of the Incas with the late mediaeval expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the 16th century persecution of the Spanish Moriscos. Elsewhere, for Christian writers the mighty Ottoman Empire provided a convenient symbol of worldly testing, "a heavenly scourge," or of pride, or lust. Fuchs reads the Ottoman Empire as a symbolic presence in early modern western European intellectual life, and it never rises to the level of a tangible historical entity.
The subtitle is "The New World, Islam, and European Identities." Islam, I would suggest, makes its way into the title due to academic fashion rather than as a reflection of the book's subject-matter. Her readings focus on the Western literary tradition, and the Islamic world is only an incidental presence. Fuchs centralises a series of marginal figures who are heading towards Spanish or English identity: educated Incas pretending to be Spanish noblemen; Moriscos, half-Spanish converted Moors, who Fuchs calls "virtual Spaniards"; and pirates and renegades, on the edges of empire and legitimate trade. The centre of her account is at all times western Europe.
Mimesis and Empire is dominated by a theoretical language, of "individuation," of "the difference between self and other." Her text wallows in a jargony mire, of marginalised subjects, of facsimiles and simulacra, of ideological mimesis and textual counterfeits. Her argument is no clearer than her prose style. Fuchs gets lost on the trail of the nebulous concept of "identity." The index has 84 citations to "identity," but not one to Halil Inalcik, the leading American historian of the Ottoman Empire. Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida all get mentioned, but Cemal Kafadar, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and another expert in this field does not.
Just as what is lacking from the theoretical language is any sense of history, what is oddly absent from Fuchs' narrative is the Turks themselves. The second of her footnotes explains her use of the term "Islam": "I purposely use the term Islam here to recall the European confusion between the very different groups -- Moors, Turks, Saracens, and so forth -- which were perceived as a cultural and military boundary to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries."
In failing to distinguish between the different groups, she is therefore perpetuating the early modern confusion. Surely the role of scholarship is to clarify these earlier errors? Fuchs is committing the academic equivalent of white trash Americans murdering Sikhs in their confused post-11 September hatred and anger. Turks or Moors as real historical subjects dissolve, to be replaced by vague, ahistorical Muslim symbols.
Other recent American studies perform the same disappearing act. Nabil Matar is one of the leading figures in American literary scholarship's new Turkish delight. His two books, Islam in Britain 1558- 1685 and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, fall into the same intellectual model as Fuchs'. In the former, Matar fails to distinguish between different branches of Islam, instead treating Muslims as a single group. Similarly, in the latter, he groups experiences together collectively: "Britons" encountering "Muslims." Both books are concerned with how English writers described their encounters with American Indians in the New World in anti- Muslim terms: again, the weight of the Ottoman Empire in early modern Europe is held to be symbolic.
The best of this work has been done by Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, written by Brotton and Lisa Jardine, traces the movement and production of material objects like medals or portraits between eastern and western aesthetic traditions. The eastern traditions are various: the Byzantine iconography on an Italian medal, for example, or the cross-breeding of Arabian horses with European ones. The Venetian Doge lent artists including Gentile Bellini to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in the 1460s and 70s. Brotton and Jardine are sensitive to the cultural suggestiveness of an Ottoman rug they glimpse in the background of a Holbein painting.
But the other side of the story is still largely absent. Brotton is strong on the ways in which the Western intellectual tradition was formed by negotiation with the Ottoman court, but what about Ottoman writers? None of these accounts refer to Ottoman historians like Tursun Beg or Nesri, who described the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or the 17th century geographer Katib Celebi, who wrote on Christianity and European customs. Despite the recent American interest in the Islamic world, the Ottoman view -- descriptions by Ottoman writers, even events from Ottoman history -- is oddly lacking. Reduced to a symbolic presence, the Turks, Moors, and other Muslims are largely absent as historically specific entities.
This was not the case in early modern Europe. Ethnographies of Islamic customs, histories of the Ottoman Empire, and travel narratives about Moors and Turks were very popular in late 16th and early 17th century London. Texts like The History of the Warres between the Turkes and the Persians (1595) and The Policy of the Turkish Empire (1597) offered accurate descriptions of the contemporary state of the Ottoman Empire. Turks were on the stage: Daniel Vitkus has edited a collection of early modern English plays about or featuring Turks. The information available is fairly sophisticated: the plot of the 1607 play The Travels of the Three English Brothers hinges upon the distinction between Sunni and Shi'ite theology. Early modern Englishmen were presented with specific and accurate information about the different branches of Islam: in Shakespeare's Othello, for example, Othello as a Moor is clearly distinguished from the Ottoman Turks.
Daniel Vitkus' new collection, Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, brings together a series of narratives written between 1589 and 1704 by Englishmen who were captured by Barbary pirates and held prisoner in North Africa. These accounts had a wide readership, and the Barbary captives were a cause of public concern: there were collections in London churches for funds to buy them back. Captivity was a widespread phenomenon: in 1685 in Meknes alone there were 800 Christian captives, 260 of them English. An introduction by Nabil Matar sets these captivity accounts in their historical context, and clearly describes these provocative and fascinating interactions between European Christians and North Africans.
The accounts of Islamic religious practice are not flattering. The Puritan William Okeley describes Ramadan: "they fast when they can eat no longer. But indeed their fast by day is nothing but a dry drunkenness, for when they have drunk and whored themselves into sin, they fancy they merit a pardon by abstinence, a piece of hypocrisy so gross that whether it be to be sampled anywhere in the world, unless by popish carnivals, I cannot tell."
In another account, Joseph Pitts simply declares that "indeed their whole religion is a miscellany of popery, Judaism, and the gentilism of the Arabs." Being held captive by the Other is not going to win you over to their culture. I imagine that the stories being told by Taliban POWs currently in Cuba are not exactly pro-American. But this is not the only characteristic of the accounts: in amongst the condescension and prejudice, there is valuable first-hand description of a very foreign civilisation.
Joseph Pitts' 1704 True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans is the first English account of Mecca and Medina. Pitts' Account was very popular, going through five editions before 1750. Pitts was captured by Algerian pirates, and converted to Islam -- the text is largely his self-justification for an English audience -- and the account of his pilgrimage to the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina via Alexandria and Cairo is extraordinarily detailed. The information ranges from the anecdotal -- there are 72 different languages spoken in Cairo, and he saw no crocodiles in the Nile -- to the architectural, about the buildings and palaces. Mecca and Medina are pictured with loving precision.
He writes, "the temple of Mecca hath about forty-two doors to enter into it, not so much, I think, for necessity as figure, for in some places they are close by one another. The form of it is much resembling that of the Exchange in London, but I believe it's near ten times bigger. 'Tis all open and graveled in the midst, except some paths that come from certain doors which lead to the beat-olloh (which, as I said, stands in the midst of the temple) and are paved with broad stones. The walks or cloisters all round are arched overhead and paved beneath with fine, broad stone and all round are little rooms or cells where such dwell as give themselves up to reading, studying, and a devout life, which are much akin to their dervishes or hermites."
These thick descriptions of Mecca and Medina go on for many pages.
Pitts' narrative includes many intimate details: that the Algerians do not wear shoes indoors; that they sit at a low table to eat; that they use burnt wool, mixed with water, as ink. He transliterates Arabic phrases, particularly prayers: "Allah whyek barrik, allah whyek barrik, ashhaed wa la e la he il allah..." The centre of his narrative is a sometimes confused, sometimes accurate account of Islamic theology and religious practice, described in minute, slightly awkward terms: how many times a day the Algerians pray, or wash, or how thick prayer mats are, or that they do not remove their turbans in the mosque. What this level of detail shows is that 16th and 17th century England was fascinated by Islam in all its forms and varieties. They were fascinated with Islam, and specifically the Ottoman Empire -- Islam in its most visible guise -- not just because it was powerful and different, but because it was centrally important to the early modern English state.
"The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power" wrote Edward Said in Orientalism; Said sets out how from the 19th century onwards, English and French writers justified their eastern colonies by describing eastern peoples within stereotyped set forms. But in the 16th and 17th centuries the Orient was in the position of power. On the first page of his best-selling Generall Historie of the Turks, published in 1603, Richard Knolles described the Ottoman Empire as "the present terror of the world." The Book of Common Prayer--the handbook of the 16th century Anglican Church -- included a prayer against the "terror of the Turk." The cause of the terror, and the power of the Turks, was economic.
The cause of the fascination we have seen was the economic control the Ottoman Empire had over England. Halil Inalcik has argued that from the sultanate of Mehmet II (1451-81) onwards, the Ottoman Empire pursued a specific economic strategy towards western Europe. In the first half of the 16th century, the Ottomans took advantage of divisions in Europe to attack the Hapsburgs, occupying Hungary between 1526 and 1541, and besieging Vienna in 1529. They also supported forces opposed to the Hapsburgs and the Papacy in order to foster division: they granted commercial capitulations to friendly nations, such as France -- in 1569 -- and England -- in 1580. England's commercial development in the late 16th century was fuelled by Ottoman concessions.
This economic role has been largely ignored in the recent rush towards the Ottoman Empire. Of course, these new accounts of early modern Europe provide a valuable service, reversing previous Orientalist paradigms and beginning a more complex, complete historical picture. But as often as not, the Turks in these American accounts fall back into the old caricature: lustful, cruel slavers, who practise an odd and confusing religion and lack Western self-consciousness and historical identity. Paradoxically, new American academics are perpetuating the clichés and weaknesses of older scholarship. A new history is still needed, where Turks are more than mere traces, and Muslims are not simple metaphors. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it.
Reviewed by Daniel Swift
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page