The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (47 page)

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,

Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silenced by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled. And by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man;

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes,

Would feed on one another.
⁸

It is a powerful and emotive rejection of xenophobia, arguing that if mob rule triumphs over the dispossessed and the rule of law, it will unleash a vicious and anarchic individualism where everyone will “feed on one another.” To clinch his point, Thomas More asks the rioters what might happen if their roles were reversed with those of the aliens and they found themselves seeking asylum:

Say now the king,

As he is clement if th’ offender mourn,

Should so much come too short of your great trespass

As but to banish you: whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:

Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts

But chartered unto them? What would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.
⁹

More’s speech works and the rioters disperse. His compassionate plea for toleration of aliens and strangers might seem inconsistent coming from a playwright who seemed to relish expelling aliens and outsiders from his plays, from Aaron and the Prince of Morocco to Shylock and Othello. But perhaps, buried within these tortuous dramas is an abiding sympathy, an instinct for toleration and reconciliation that finds its clearest expression in this fragment from another play.
¹⁰
It is surely one of the reasons Shakespeare’s plays continue to hold our attention four hundred years later.

This desire for reconciliation can be found in another play Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. Around 1611 he returned to the Mediterranean a final time for the setting of one of his plays:
The Tempest
. Act I opens on board a storm-tossed ship carrying Alonso, King of Naples, and Antonio, Duke of Milan, with other members of a wedding party. They are returning to Italy after marrying Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis and are shipwrecked on an island somewhere between Tunis and Naples—the same island where Antonio’s deposed brother, Prospero, had been exiled with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero was washed up on the island with his young daughter and all the books he could salvage from his library. Tutored in the arts of magic, Prospero established a way of life on the island with his “spirit” Ariel
¹¹
and his onetime companion, now slave, Caliban. But the island has a longer history: Ariel had been imprisoned in a cloven pine by the island’s previous resident, the “damn’d witch Sycorax,”
¹²
Caliban’s mother. With the witch gone and Ariel released, the “bare isle” is governed by Prospero and inhabited by his daughter, his slave and his ethereal assistant.

For centuries, critics have debated the location of Prospero’s island, some placing it in what Ariel calls “the Mediterranean float [sea],” others noting that in the same speech he speaks of “the still vexed Bermudas.”
¹³
This, alongside Caliban’s apparent similarity to Native Americans, has led many scholars (mostly Americans) to assume that the play is set in the “brave new world”
¹⁴
of the Americas. Such interpretations point to reports from the recently established colony of Jamestown, in Virginia, to which a fleet of English ships had been sent in 1609 to reinforce the beleaguered English settlement. The fleet was struck by storms and was shipwrecked in the Bermudas, but miraculously everyone survived and managed to reach Jamestown.

Yet Shakespeare’s play was rooted in the myths and histories of the Mediterranean world. He reminds his audience that Caliban’s mother was born “in Algiers,”
¹⁵
an Ottoman stronghold throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of Shakespeare’s sources for the story was the Roman poet Virgil’s classical epic of the foundation of Rome, the
Aeneid,
in which its hero, Aeneas, travels from Troy to Rome via Carthage, where he meets its queen, Dido. The play’s courtiers even quibble over Dido’s and classical Carthage’s location in relation to sixteenth-century Tunis. One of them insists, “This Tunis, sir, was Carthage,”
¹⁶
a dispute that serves to remind the audience of the transitory nature of empire.

As in Virgil’s poem, Shakespeare imagines the gulf between North Africa and Europe as vast. The seaborne crossing between Tunis and Naples is less than 370 miles, but Claribel, the “Queen of Tunis,” is described as “she that dwells / Ten leagues beyond man’s life,”
¹⁷
in Muslim North Africa. One of Alonso’s courtiers accuses him of failing to marry his daughter off to a European prince, “But rather lose her to an African.”
¹⁸
Once again, Shakespeare returns to a story of a Christian woman—first Portia, then Desdemona, finally Claribel—being offered in marriage to a North African man—the Prince of Morocco, Othello, now the King of Tunis. In
The Tempest,
the far away becomes near at hand as the various dreams of colonization, interracial marriage, republicanism and revolution are rehearsed through the characters as they arrive or reflect on this “desolate isle.”

In this play Claribel, the King of Tunis and the Algerian witch Sycorax remain far away, and never appear onstage. The rich potential of the island’s location and history remains buried in its many layers of meaning. The stories of trade, and the threats of privateering, piracy, enslavement and conversion that affected thousands of English men, women and children throughout the Mediterranean as it was being performed in London, are almost completely silenced. Only a whisper can be heard in the implied histories of Ariel, Caliban, Tunis, Algiers, Naples and Bermuda. The geography of
The Tempest
is relevant only insofar as it is labeled self-consciously as irrelevant: the island is nowhere and anywhere, a utopia in the Greek sense of the term
ou-topos,
meaning both “good place” and “nowhere.” Shakespeare understood that by 1611 King James’s foreign and economic policies left Jacobean England looking east
and
west, gazing backward to the Mediterranean “Old World” of Greece, Rome, Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and forward to the Atlantic “New World” of the Americas. His play uses this new global awareness to tell a story of uncertain habitation and conflicted identity, filtered through the layered history of the Mediterranean.

The Tempest
provides a fitting conclusion to the history of Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world. Shakespeare grew up under a regime whose isolation from much of Catholic Europe propelled it into alliances with Muslim rulers from Marrakesh, Algiers, Tunis, Constantinople, Qazvin and Isfahan. With the accession of King James, this policy came to an abrupt end, and with it a tradition of representing formidable, eloquent and savage Turks, Moors and Persians on the Elizabethan stage. They would be reinvented in a different key by a new generation of Jacobean playwrights.

As we have seen, the Sherleys had already been given their own play,
The Travailes of the Three English Brothers,
first performed at the Curtain Theater in 1607. Robert Daborne was at work on
A Christian Turned Turk
(1612), the story of the English pirate and Muslim convert John Ward, who took the name Yusuf Reis and lived out his life in Tunis in opulent luxury. In 1624 Philip Massinger premiered his tragicomedy
The Renegado,
also set in the privateering capital of Tunis, where Christian and renegade Italians flee the temptations of the Muslim court to return to Italy. In contrast to
The Tempest,
plays like Massinger’s responded to reports of English men and women living and working in the Mediterranean, some captives, others converts (willing or forced) to Islam. But the preoccupations of their authors were not those of Marlowe, Peele and Shakespeare; their interests were primarily historical, their tone comical, their aim pure entertainment, lacking the urgent topicality of the 1590s, when many feared that Protestant England could at any moment be invaded. The Islamic world was just one of many within the emerging global economy with which the Jacobeans found themselves entangled. The threat—or hope—of a rapprochement between Protestants and Muslims was now a thing of the past.

As if to emphasize this shift, in 1632 the London draper Thomas Adams endowed the first English professorship in Arabic at Cambridge University for “the good service of the King and State in our commerce with those Eastern nations, and in God’s good time to the enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sit in darkness.”
¹⁹
In 1636 Oxford followed suit when Archbishop William Laud, then chancellor of the university, appointed Edward Pococke, an English chaplain working in Aleppo, as the first Laudian Professor of Arabic (the post still exists, and it was recently filled by a woman for the first time in its history).
²⁰
In 1649 the first English translation of the Qur’an was published; entitled
The Alcoran of Mahomet,
it was based on André Du Ryer’s French edition,
L’Alcoran de Mahomet translaté d’arabe en françois
.
²¹
The Arabic-speaking Islamic world became the subject of scholarly study that promised (though did not always manage) to dispel the fantasies, misconceptions and prejudices that had driven English perceptions of the subject for centuries and that were so rich a resource for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. England would now try to contain the Islamic world through orientalist scholarship and the painstaking study of philology, archaeology and comparative religion.

Scholarly endeavor was aided by political disengagement. The long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire and its withdrawal from western Europe’s borders from the end of the seventeenth century enabled European scholars to re-create the “Orient” anew. It became an exotic, sensuous world that was regarded as despotic and backward, where Europeans needed to impose order, rationality and enlightenment (though only on their own terms). The orient isle of Elizabethan England, for so long almost a confederate of the Islamic world, became an island of orientalism, as one set of myths and misconceptions of Islam gave way to another. Over time, England’s early relations with Islam were quietly forgotten as the grander, more memorable fables of imperialism and orientalism prevailed. But that is part of another era’s history.

The story told in this book is one of a largely unknown connection between England and the Islamic world, one that emerged out of a very specific set of circumstances during the European Reformation. English history still tends to view the Elizabethan period as defined by the timeless rhythms of agrarian Anglo-Saxon traditions, ethnically pure and exclusively white. But, as I hope this book has shown, there are other aspects to this island’s national story that involve other cultures, and in the Elizabethan period one of them was Islam. To occlude the role Islam played in this past only diminishes its history. Now, when much is made of the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and Christianity, seems to me a good time to remember that the connections between the two faiths are much deeper and more entangled than many contemporary commentators seem to appreciate, and that in the sixteenth century Islamic empires like those of the Ottomans far surpassed the power and influence of a small and relatively insignificant state like Elizabethan England in their military power, political organization and commercial reach. It turns out that Islam in all its manifestations—imperial, military and commercial—is part of the British national story.

One way of encouraging tolerance and inclusiveness at a time when both are in short supply is to show both Muslim and Christian communities how, more than four centuries ago, absolute theological belief often yielded to strategic considerations, political pressures and mercantile interests. In a period of volatile and shifting political and religious allegiances, Muslims and Christians were forced to find a common language of messy and uneasy coexistence. Despite the sometimes intemperate religious rhetoric, the conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic world was then, as now, defined as much by the struggle for power and precedence as by theology.