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Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Nabil Matar is Professor of English and department
head of Humanities and Communication at the Florida Institute
of Technology. His other works include
The work of Ilyas b. Hanna al-Mawsuli has recently
been given another translation; c.f. Caesar E. Farah, In
the Lands of the Christians, by Nabil MatarTurks, Moors,
and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999)
and Islam in Britain: 1558-1685 (Cambridge,
1998).
Hugoye will find
particularly interesting the selection by Ilyas b. Hanna
al-Mawsuli, a Chaldean Catholic priest (later, bishop) of
Baghdad. In this review, I wish to focus first on Matar’s
introductory essay, which views the travel writings of Ilyas b.
Hanna and the other authors from the perspective of current
academic historical and Middle East studies. Secondly, I wish
to look at Ilyas b. Hanna’s narrative more closely, and
suggest another possible way of contextualizing his
travels.An
Arab’s journey to colonial Spanish America: the
travels of Elias al-Musili in the seventeenth century (New
York, 2003). Unfortunately this study came to my attention too
late to be incorporated into this review.
Matar,
Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” p.
351, in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Lands, p. xiv, citing Bernard
Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York,
1983), p. 299 [sic; probably p. 297 was intended]. A professor
emeritus of Princeton University, Lewis is a prolific
author of academic and popular works on Islam and the Middle
East, and has been a prominent advisor on Middle Eastern
affairs to successive American federal administrations.
Orientalism published just a few years
earlier, was to wonder how Lewis could feel that knowledge
about Europe was “the only acceptable criterion for true
knowledge.”Orientalism: A
Reader (New York, 2000), pp. 345-61. Originally
published in F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iverson and D. Loxley
(eds.), Literature, Politics and Theory (London,
1986), pp. 210-29.
The travelers did not frame their encounter with the Europeans within the “particular myths, visions and fantasies” that characterize many (if not necessarily all) European texts. The Arabic travel accounts cannot therefore be approached through the theoretical models with which European accounts have been studied by writers as different as Stephen Greenblatt, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. They belong to a tradition that is different not only in its history but in its epistemology: the travelers were not harbingers of an Islamic imperialism compelled to alterize and to present, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, the “redundancy, discontinuity, and unreality” of the Christians. Rather, they wrote empirical accounts about Europe with the same precision that many of their coreligionists used to describe their journeys within the world of Islam, and in the case of the Christian travelers, within the world at large. Furthermore, and unlike the European travelers who used classical or biblical sources as their guides, the Arabs did not have previous models with which to compare or contrast Europe and America. They went with an open mind and a clean slate. And even when a traveler such as al-Ghassani went with anger and antipathy—repeatedly denouncing thenasarafor having expelled his forefathers and coreligionists from Spain—he still admitted, on the first page of his account, that he had kept himself open to the wonders and innovations of thenasara.(p. xxxii, nn. 75-77.)
One might question the “open mind and clean
slate” of Matar’s authors, since it is axiomatic in
literary studies today that no author ever “starts from
scratch.” However, it is impossible not to notice
the difference in tone between the selection of travel
narratives that Matar presents, and many of those discussed by
Mary Louise Pratt, which were written in the mid-eighteenth to
nineteenth centuries.
Mary Louise Pratt,
Matar,
C.f. Daniel Goffman, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992).
Lands, p. xxxv.
Britons in the Ottoman
Empire, 1642-1660 (Seattle and London, 1998), pp. 3-12.
Saliba, “Seeking the origins of early modern
science?” [review article].
Ahmad Dallal, “On Muslim curiosity and the
historiography of the Jews of Yemen.”
The Rise of Early Modern
Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge
University Press, 1993), the historian of science George Saliba
notes how this decline (once argued to have been well under way
in the early twelfth century) keeps having to be pushed later
and later in time, as scholars start to read new manuscripts
and process their findings.Bulletin of the
Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn
1999):139-52. Also deflated is the often concurrently
held notion that the decline in Arabic science is due to the
oppressive force of Islam: the reknowned astronomer Ibn
al-Shatir (d. 1375) was a timekeeper at the Umayyad Mosque in
Damascus, and a number of his contemporaries and followers
“were religious scholars in their own right” (pp.
147-8).
Bulletin
of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2
(Autumn 1999):77-112.
Ibid., pp. 88-90, nn. 65-79.
Matar, Lands, p. 48.
Matar, Lands, p. 56. The West
Indies, India, and Yenki Dunia (the New World) seem to
be used almost interchangeably. The care taken by Spain to
restrict access to her American colonies is well known.
C.f. Sevket Pamuk,
A Monetary
History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UK, 2000),
Ch. 8-10, pp. 131-71.
groschen (Ottoman kuruş), forming an
increasingly popular currency alongside the Ottoman silver
akçe. Ultimately, the Ottoman state silver
mines in the Balkans could not compete with this cheaper
source, and the mines were virtually closed by the
1640s. But the influx of silver was more than matched by
outflows, and the seventeenth century (not unlike the later
sixteenth century) was marked by a series of debasements in the
akçe, accompanied by counterfeiting. This
led to currency substitution and hoarding; sources for Ottoman
coinage dried up to the point where, from the mid-1650s to the
mid-1680s, the minting of new gold and silver coinage in
Istanbul was primarily to provide for ceremonial
usage. During the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-87), only seven
mints at most produced the akçe and
para. But the European currency that was
substituted for Ottoman had a curious feature—in the
mid-seventeenth century, it was mainly copper, with a silver
wash. This currency was called luigini, and it
reached its peak usage between 1656 and 1669. Minted by
French, Italian and Dutch merchants, it was not legal in its
places of origin, but was made under contract, specifically for
the Ottoman market. Both observers of the era and many
modern scholars have been scandalized by this debased coinage,
but, as Pamuk notes, the Ottoman empire was at war with Venice
over Crete, and “debased coinage was better than no
coinage.”Ibid., p. 154.
kuruş starting in 1690. American silver
production had been in decline since 1670, to a degree that
made the Anatolian and Balkan mines viable again, and these
were the sources for the new kuruş.
Matar, Lands, p. 106, citing I. IU.
Krachkovskii, Tarikh al-adab al-jughrafi
al-‘Arabi (Cairo, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 701-6.