In my last post, here, I explained how English-speaking expatriates living in the Maghreb were involved in news about the Maghreb travelling to London and further afield. Many expatriate letters, directly or indirectly, ended up in prominent London newspapers, and so passed on the detailed knowledge and pragmatic outlook they held regarding the Maghreb and its people. In this post, I want to look at some of the knowledge that they passed on, and how it offers a new angle and new insights into how people in London thought about the Maghreb.

One thing you will often hear in historical and literary accounts is that English people didn’t know much about the Maghreb, and tended to dislike what they did know. Theatrical representations of Maghrebi people were ‘types nearly always based on Spanish and Italian literary sources and never on actual familiarity with Muslims...[playwrights] invented stage Muslims without any historical or religious verisimilitude’.^[1] Sermons, aiming to encourage donations to redeem captives and discourage conversion to Islam, were filled with ‘Muslims imagined and determined by wild theological interpretations’, the ‘ahistorical...eternal enemies of Christendom’.^[2] For broadside ballads, ‘their purpose was not to represent the Turk at all. Rather, it was to represent a wide variety of enemies of the English by using a term that was largely accessible by the majority of English subjects ... He was the enemy, any enemy ... Catholics, anti-Catholics, the French, Presbyters, Jesuits, Jews, and the Devil himself.’^[3] (Some of these ideas have been interrogated by my colleagues in MEMOs, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Newes from Argeir, of the proceedings of our Royall Fleete since their departure from England, and what happened betweene them, and the Turkish Callies upon Christmas day last. A broadside ballad printed c.1624, giving a poetically triumphalist account of an ultimately futile English attack on Algiers. Available here.

A related trope is that the word ‘Turk’ meant not just a particular ethnic group but all Ottomans, all Muslims, and even a whole range of generic negative characteristics that could appear in just about anyone. As Gerald Maclean argues, ‘Christian culture in England had for so long defined itself in contrast to Islam that the words ‘Turk’ and ‘Turkish’ were not only synonymous with Muslim and Islamic but had also come to refer to a generalised range of personal qualities and meanings that could be applied to anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion, including the English themselves if they behaved in certain ways.’^[4] Or – in the characteristically offensive but in this case useful phrase from The Office’s Michael Scott – ‘You don't call retarded people retards. It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded.’^[5] In this context, ‘Turk’ appears so full of meaning that it comes to lose its specificity, and the regions and people groups of the Islamic world blur together into one undifferentiated whole.

However, while these arguments are usually true about plays, sermons, and broadside ballads, and sometimes true about other genres of literature, I disagree that they should characterise early English culture as a whole. Instead, particularly after 1660, there is good reason to think that many in London and further afield knew quite a lot of good information about the Islamic world’s diversity. One helpful way to understand this is looking into newspapers, where readers could find quite detailed and consistent descriptions of at least five distinct ethnicities of Muslims in the Maghreb, as well as clear demarcations of the four major polities (Ottoman Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, and the Moroccan Empire) with their territories and political institutions. Far from being undifferentiated and imagined, newspapers presented a very real and diverse Maghreb.

In the newspapers, we see repeated use of the terms ‘Turk’, ‘Moor’, ‘Arab’, ‘Negro’ and ‘Renegade’ applied to Muslims living in the Maghreb. While these are words we would rarely choose today, they took on very specific meanings in this particular genre of writing, and in the process needed to shed some of the prejudice that they carried elsewhere. Without going into the technical details of word counts and semantic analysis (you can read about it in my article here), it seems that ‘Turk’ referred to Levantine and Anatolian Ottomans, who ruled over the territories of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, with several thousand soldiers, sailors and officials living in each major city, and sometimes to the ships and armies they commanded; ‘Moor’ pointed to Maghrebi Arabs, who remained the majority population in the Ottoman Maghreb, but only ruled in Morocco, and to Moroccan armies and ships; ‘Arab’ meant nomadic Berbers and Bedouin, ‘Negro’ sub-Saharan Africans, and ‘Renegade’ European-born converts to Islam. We see newspaper articles where multiple ethnicities are mentioned (‘Moors, Arabs, and Negroes’ from Morocco go to battle against ‘Turks and Moors’ from Algiers), where ethnicities are used as qualifiers alongside terms related to nations (‘the Turkish corsairs of Algiers’), and, even more importantly, when words like ‘Turk’ and ‘Moor’ aren’t used at all, but replaced by ‘Moroccan’, ‘Tunisine’, and so on. These definitions, interestingly, are never deliberately explained, suggesting that either by existing knowledge or by following Maghrebi stories over time, people would understand the distinctions. More importantly, they also matched well with real ethnic diversity in the Maghreb – far better than just calling all Muslims ‘Turks’, anyway.

An example of detailed ethnic, political and religious reporting about the Maghreb. From the London Gazette, no. 1010, 22-26 July 1675.

In a similar way, there is good evidence to show that English readers could classify Maghrebi Muslims by their country of origin, rather than just their religion or their ethnicity, and that national descriptors like ‘Algerene’, ‘Tunisine’, ‘Moroccan’, ‘Tripoleen’ had definitions that were both fairly robust and distinctive, and broadly consistent with reality on the ground. We see the Maghrebi states each having recognised territories and borders, including not only their capital cities but various other cities and subregions: Béjaïa, Bizerte, Jijel, Porto Farina, and Annaba, and the European ports in Larache, Mazagan (El Jadida), Penon de Velez, Tangier, Ceuta, Melilla, and (sometimes) Oran, are accurately described in relation to the Maghrebi jurisdiction that controlled or surrounded them. We see how stories about internal political events and diplomatic negotiations in the Maghreb recognise each nation’s distinctive political history and political institutions, highlighting the various and changing roles of Deys, Beys, Pashas, Aghas and Divans throughout the seventeenth century. Each nation had unique diplomatic relations with Europe, one another, and the Ottoman Empire, and this too is reflected in the papers: England might trade peacefully with Tripoli and Tunis while in all-out war with Algiers; the Algerians could send three ships to assist the Ottomans against Venice, but Tripoli altogether refuse; and the Tripolitans and Tunisians might fight wars against one another (presumably impossible for an undifferentiated mass to achieve). Many of these stories give astounding detail about political institutions and internal events.

An example of detailed reporting on internal conflicts and political institutions. From the London Gazette, no. 2154, 8-12 July 1686.

The implications of these are broad. It shows that a wide reading public in London from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards had access to detailed information about Maghrebi diversity, sufficient to illustrate that the Maghreb was not an undifferentiated, chaotic mass of peoples and polities, unknowable and impossible to productively engage with. This means that, at the least, that genre is hugely important when attempting to understand how Maghrebis and Muslims were presented to English society, and that pragmatic, largely neutral, and well-informed representations were available; but more likely, it suggests that we should rethink how ignorant and prejudiced the society was as a whole. Newspapers deserve a place alongside plays, sermons, captivity narratives, ballads and other forms of literature in studies of Anglo-Islamic cultural relations, and tell a rather different story.

In my next two posts, we’ll have a more detailed look into how newspapers represented Maghrebi relations with Europe and Britain, and then how this information might have spread beyond London to audiences in rural England, Dublin, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Title image: Monsieur Sanson, Richard Blome, and Francis Lamb, A Generall Mapp of the Coast of Barbarie, 1667 engraving. Available here.

[1] Nabil Matar, ‘‘Introduction: England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577-1704’ in Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, edited by Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4.

[2] Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26-28.

[3] Katie Sisneros, ‘“The Abhorred Name of Turk“: Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2016), 262-63.

[4] Gerald MacLean, ‘Milton among the Muslims’, in The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1660, edited by Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 182.

[5] Michael Scott (Steve Carell), from ‘Gay Witch Hunt’, The Office Season 3 Episode 1.