Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727

Nabil Matar has given us an astonishing new picture of what North Africans knew, thought, and felt about European Christians in the early modern period. A treasure trove of discovery. -- Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds Fastidiously researched, showing a rigorous and comprehensive engagement with the fateful relationship between Arabs and Europeans, this narrative is remarkably convincing in its representation of what is known as a complex history of East and West. Europe Through Arab Eyes reflects Nabil Matar's life-long concern with the subject. It will be well received by anyone who is concerned with the writing of history, especially specialists in Middle Eastern studies, who will see how Matar elucidates historical events of the past and, with the translated selections, makes haunting, distant events close and familiar. A book of the past written for the present and future. -- Mohammed Shaheen, professor of English and comparative literature, University of Jordan Nabil Matar's meticulous translations and analyses make available a rich panoply of Muslim experiences and images in the early modern period. More than yet another brick in the edifice of knowledge, this collection of texts by Muslim captives and diplomats, court scribes and travelers, scholars and Sufis, recuperates often overlooked sites of European-Muslim interchange and, in doing so, demonstrates that Muslim awareness of and interest in Europe were both more extensive and polyvalent than pervasive arguments about 'Muslim parochialism and intolerance' recognize. -- Roxanne Euben, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College

Traveling to archives in Tunisia, Morocco, France, and England, with visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Spain, Nabil Matar assembles a rare history of Europe's rise to power as seen through the eyes of those who were later subjugated by it. Many historians of the Middle East believe Arabs and Muslims had no interest in Europe during this period of Western discovery and empire, but in fact these groups were very much engaged with the naval and industrial development, politics, and trade of European Christendom. Beginning in 1578 with a major Moroccan victory over a Portuguese invading army, Matar surveys this early modern period, in which Europeans and Arabs often shared common political, commercial, and military goals. Matar concentrates on how Muslim captives, ransomers, traders, envoys, travelers, and rulers pursued those goals while transmitting to the nonprint cultures of North Africa their knowledge of the peoples and societies of Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, and Malta. From the first non-European description of Queen Elizabeth I to early accounts of Florence and Pisa in Arabic, from Tunisian descriptions of the Morisco expulsion in 1609 to the letters of a Moroccan Armenian ambassador in London, the translations of the book's second half draw on the popular and elite sources that were available to Arabs in the early modern period. Letters from male and female captives in Europe, chronicles of European naval attacks and the taqayid (newspaper) reports on Muslim resistance, and descriptions of opera and quinine appear here in English for the first time. Matar notes that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq were eager to engage Christendom, despite wars and rivalries, and hoped to establish routes of trade and alliances through treaties and royal marriages. However, the rise of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of European military technology brought these advances to an end. In conclusion, Matar details the decline of Arab-Islamic power and the rise of Britain and France.