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." "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." --Book Jacket.
This interdisciplinary work engages with the issue of how Europe and Europeans were perceived by observers from various parts of the world during the early modern period.
Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Hermes shows that there was no shortage of medieval Muslims who cast curious eyes towards the European Other and that more than a handful of them were interested in Europe.
As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences. An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing examines: Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world. Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study. Contributors: Simon Bainbridge, Anthony Bale, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Dúnlaith Bird, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Wendy Bracewell, Kylie Cardell, Daniel Carey, Janice Cavell, Simon Cooke, Matthew Day, Kate Douglas, Justin D. Edwards, David Farley, Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, Laura E. Franey, Rune Graulund, Justine Greenwood, James M. Hargett, Jennifer Hayward, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Graham Huggan, William Hutton, Robin Jarvis, Tabish Khair, Zoë Kinsley, Barbara Korte, Julia Kuehn, Scott Laderman, Claire Lindsay, Churnjeet Mahn, Nabil Matar, Steve Mentz, Laura Nenzi, Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Manfred Pfister, Susan L. Roberson, Paul Smethurst, Carl Thompson, C.W. Thompson, Margaret Topping, Richard White, Gregory Woods.
Simple paradigms of Muslim-Christian confrontation and the rise of Europe in the seventeenth century do not suffice to explain the ways in which European mapping envisioned the 'Turks' in image and narrative. Rather, maps, travel accounts, compendia of knowledge, and other texts created a picture of the Ottoman Empire through a complex layering of history, ethnography, and eyewitness testimony, which juxtaposed current events to classical and biblical history; counted space in terms of peoples, routes, and fortresses; and used the land and seascapes of the map to assert ownership, declare victory, and embody imperial power's reach. Enriched throughout by examples of Ottoman self-mapping, this book examines how Ottomans and their empire were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe's Christian kingdoms. The maps serve as centerpieces for discussions of early modern space, time, borders, stages of travel, information flows, invocations of authority, and cross-cultural relations.
In 1766, the Moroccan ambassador Aḥmad ibn al-Mahdī al-Ghazzāl embarked on an unprecedented visit to Spain during a time of eased tensions between the two countries. The sultan Sidi Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdallah wanted the return of Muslim prisoners and sacred Islamic texts, while the Spanish king hoped to improve trade and security across the Strait of Gibraltar. With royal welcome and escort, al-Ghazzāl traveled for several months in order to meet with Carlos III at his summer palace north of Madrid. There they negotiated a historic treaty, and then the Moroccan ambassador made his way back to Marrakesh, where the treaty was ratified in the presence of the Spanish ambassador Jorge Juan and hundreds of freed Muslim captives. In total, the trip lasted a year and covered more than fifty Spanish cities and towns. Most remarkable, however, is the fact that al-Ghazzāl’s travelogue, in which he recorded the experience in great detail and moving prose, has been lost to history. This first full translation with critical introduction recovers his voice. It offers insight into the dawn of modern diplomacy and its overlap with literature; it looks at eighteenth-century Europe through Arab eyes; and, it explores the deep nostalgia that the Islamic past of Andalusia provoked for a Moroccan traveler who traced his family ties to exiles of the region. Finally, al-Ghazzāl’s visit has further significance as the neglected backdrop to one of Spain’s most canonical eighteenth-century works, the Moroccan Letters of José Cadalso. Thus, the world literature approach of the present introduction also reimagines the pluralism of Cadalso’s “foreign gaze” through the encounters of the actual ambassador in his own words.
Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.
Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain’s colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule. Writers of many political stripes have celebrated convivencia, the fabled “coexistence” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco’s colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain’s colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco’s Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco. Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources—including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts—Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.
Studies of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean have long been dominated by specialists of its northern shores, that is, by European historians. The seven leading authors in this groundbreaking volume challenge views of Mediterranean space as shaped by European trajectories, and in doing so, they challenge our comfortable notions. Drawing perspectives from the Mediterranean’s eastern and southern shores, they ask anew: What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders, its defining characteristics? What forces of nature, politics, culture, or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they or will they endure? Covering the sixteenth century to the twentieth, this timely volume brings the early modern world into conversation with the modern world in new ways, demonstrating that only recently can we differentiate the north and south into separate cultural and political zones. The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South offers a blueprint for a new generation of readers to rethink the world we thought we knew.
