“You need to know the history to understand the situation,” insists Jerry Brotton as he considers the conflicts wreaking havoc in the modern-day Middle East and what he believes can be learnt from Elizabethan England and their attitude to the Muslim world.
Brotton’s new book, “This Orient Isle”, reveals the surprising stories of the 16th-century Christians who traded and sought alliances with powerful empires such as the Ottomans and the Persians. He describes the adventures of unlikely English trailblazers travelling to places such as Aleppo and Raqqa — now synonymous with the civil war currently tearing apart Syria, where Westerners fear to tread — and building relationships with Muslims of all sects as they sought to help their struggling homeland survive.
While Sunnis and Shiites clashed in the east, Catholics and Protestants were at war in western Europe thanks to the reformation — and it is the similarities between these conflicts that contemporary Western powers should consider when trying to bring peace to the troubled Middle East region, according to Brotton.
“You hear people such as [US Secretary of State] John Kerry talking about the Syrian problem and how to address it and I think maybe his advisors are not explaining to him the longer history of these conflicts and how significant they are,” Brotton told Weekend Review.
“Here in the UK we’re completely aware that. If we talk about the Northern Irish problem, it’s a sectarian conflict that goes back centuries and we absolutely accept that. But we’re not doing that in Syria and Iraq, so in a way I hope we can learn something from the Elizabethans because I think there is an assumption that the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric, which has really developed since 9/11, has always been in place. But it hasn’t and this period tells you that.
“There have been encounters that weren’t just defined by conflict. When I have English characters in the late 16th century travelling across places such as Raqqa and Aleppo, I’m trying to implicitly say ‘look, they are moving through these places that we know very well today albeit in a very different way’.”
While the 16th-century travellers were a long way from fully understanding Islam — English universities didn’t start embracing orientalism until the 1630s — they gained enough knowledge to see similarities with their own religion and they might actually have been less ignorant than many people today.
“If you pushed people to it now — even though we know this is crucial to the conflict in Syria and Iraq — how many people understand the distinction between Sunni and Shiites?” Brotton asked. “So when people such as Kerry stand up and say ‘we need to understand this problem’, I think they have no understanding of the history, of how the caliphate works, of the sectarian divisions and the long-standing histories. So how can you make policy on that basis?”
“This Orient Isle” brings together the fascinating reports, letters and memoirs of individual travellers and their patrons back home to tell the story of Elizabethan England’s dealings with the Muslim world in the backdrop of war with the Catholic Philip II’s Spain and the vulnerable Queen’s desire to expand her power base and attract much-needed commerce.
Brotton, who is professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of London’s Queen Mary College, had been gathering the information used in the book for more than 20 years — but what surprised him is that much of it had been published but largely ignored in the past. So the 46-year-old has brought together the wide range of sources to recount the mutually beneficial convergence of two diverse worlds.
“My inspiration for this book goes right back to where I came from. I’m from northern England and I went to a state school just outside Leeds, which had a significant Muslim community, as well as Sikh and Hindu communities,” the former Samuel Johnson Prize nominee said. “I’ve always been aware there are those different communities that help make up what it means to be English or British.
“As I’ve gone through my career I’ve always been interested in questioning those ethnically pure ideas about nations and their histories, so to look at the Tudor period and see there is an Islamic influence to me was not surprising. Many people who work in this area — the Renaissance or the Tudors — have completely ignored or didn’t want to engage with that question. To me it’s very significant as that is my history.”
Of his research for the book, Brotton added: “Most people would assume it would be very difficult because it involves manuscripts in far-away archives, but in a funny way it’s not — all the material is reasonably accessible, but people have just ignored it.
“People have written about this subject but they’ve all been done in these very small, isolated pockets of academic work and nobody has ever really joined it all up and taken it seriously.”
The sources used in “This Orient Isle” are all from the English archives, so while the accounts give an intriguing insight into the workings of Elizabeth’s reign and her subjects’ take on the Islamic world, they also hint at the as-yet untold story of how the Ottomans, Persians and Sa’adians reacted to these unusual visitors to their lands.
Brotton admits he would love to be involved in a project that brought together sources from all sides, but fears such an undertaking is not a realistic prospect.
“I’m very clear that the book is written from the perspective of where I stand, but we don’t know what is in the archives on the other side,” he said. “Nabil Matar, who is a wonderful Arabic scholar now based in the US, wrote a book on Islam and its relationship to Britain in the 17th century. He went into the Rabat archives about 10 to 15 years ago and found this extraordinary material about Anglo-Moroccan relations that nobody knew about.
“So I think this is only the beginning of finding out the archival sources within the Islamic world that may tell us even more exciting and interesting things. But a lone scholar can’t do this work anymore, you have to have teams of scholars. So you have to have an Ottomanist, you have to have somebody from Morocco, even somebody from the Persian tradition. They all have to engage on the project and bring all their different language skills, archival training and interest in history to bear in the one project.
“I’m sure the Arabic and Turkish-speaking world’s sources would tell us something very new. But they don’t necessarily want to work on that research, so it’s a very difficult one. You can’t just go to these places and say ‘we want to do this’ because they have their own intellectual agendas.”
Brotton may be an established historian and writer — his last book “A History of the World in 12 Maps” was translated into 11 languages — but he also has a passion for literature and originally trained as a scholar in that field. His knowledge of Elizabethan playwrights and their work is a key aspect of “This Orient Isle”, as he describes how the likes of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare reflected the uncertainty and fear in English society in light of the country’s early dealings with the Muslim world.
He originally set out to write a book solely on how the playwrights of the late 16th and early 17th centuries represented Islam and its followers, but he says that didn’t work out so he widened his brief to also tell the history behind the growth of Muslim characters — including the barbarous Tamburlaine and the tragic Moor Othello — in English plays.
“All the Elizabethan dramatists are fascinated by encounters with the Muslim world because they are interested in exploiting their audience’s ambivalence,” said Brotton, who is associate director of the Global Shakespeare project.
“In some of the records you can find English preachers saying ‘the Turks are terrible, they are killing our women, murdering our children, they’re going to take over the world and they’re evil’. That’s the story we’ve tended to focus on for generations, but there are other stories such as Samson Rowlie [an English merchant who became treasurer of Algiers] converting, merchants working in places such as Morocco and Constantinople and accommodating themselves in the Muslim world and it’s all fine.
“The dramatists look at those opposing ideas and see it as really fantastic raw material for conflict. Do we think that the Muslims are going to murder us all in our beds? Or maybe they are the salvation.”
The conflicts between East and West, Christianity and Islam, and the issue of tolerance are as relevant today as they were when Elizabeth I started making deals with the Muslim world. And Brotton believes using history to scrutinise long-held beliefs and challenge misconceptions ensures it will always remain relevant.
“I grew up thinking it [Tudor England] was all wonderful — you know, Henry VIII and Shakespeare prancing around — but I’ve since radically revised my view,” he said. “I think it’s a period that is very confrontational and antagonistic, it’s quite a violent period. It’s not a lovely merry England. It’s a place that is struggling economically, it’s defined by dirt, by the plague — this is a place that is consistently under threat, it’s a place which, people feel, could come to an end at any point. They are hanging on, so no wonder they reach out to the Islamic world.
“I suppose I work on that era because I am always fascinated by that longer history. That longer history informs our current history because it remains so important to how we talk about Englishness. I always like to question and critique that.”
Martin Downer is a freelance journalist based in the UK.
