Islamic Encounters: America, Europe, and the Middle East before 1835 (JCB Digital Catalogue)

The year 1492 is known to every American schoolchild as the year of Columbus’s first arrival in the Americas and the beginning of a vast colonial undertaking by European powers. Earlier that same year, the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella had completed their conquest of the parts of Spain that had for centuries been under Muslim rule. With the recapture of Grenada, Jews and Muslims were required to convert to Christianity or leave the combined kingdoms of Spain. Between 1492 and 1610, some 3,000,000 Muslims voluntarily left or were expelled from Spain, resettling in North Africa. This displaced population provided an army of recruits prepared for commercial war against Christendom, launching piratical attacks from bases in Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli.

At the time, half the world’s Jews lived in Spain, often achieving eminent positions in society. They were placed under severe pressure to convert or leave Christian areas as early as 1391, while grandfather agreements in peace treaties allowed the continued practice of Islam for at least a generation or so. Many Jews left Spain for Portugal, while most accepted conversion. The Inquisition was introduced to inspect the veracity of the converts. The conversion or removal policy came to Grenada early in 1492.

Between 1492 and 1610, some 3,000,000 Muslims voluntarily left or were expelled from Spain, resettling in North Africa. This displaced population provided an army of recruits prepared for commercial war against Christendom, launching piratical attacks from bases in Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli.

In 1521 the Ottoman Turks conquered Belgrade and began an invasion of Hungary. By 1526, Hungary was defeated at the battle of Mohacs, and the city of Buda was taken. In 1529, the Turkish army advanced into Austria and laid siege to Vienna. These rapid advances struck terror in the hearts of Europeans as they exposed the vulnerability of European states and conveyed an image of invincibility on the Ottoman forces.

A sense of dread and foreboding pervaded European consciousness, even as Spanish forces a world away were conquering American civilizations. Many believed that the Turks would continue their advance until all of Europe fell under Islamic rule.

Images of the Islamic world, especially of Muslim Spain, came into European literature from early times. In the Chanson de Roland, the Basque Christians who destroyed Charlemagne' s Frankish army at Roncevaux were transformed into Muslim Saracens. Muslims in Spain of course figure in the literary works inspired by the complicated historical narrative of El Cid. Only a few literary examples have been selected, ranging from early seventeenth-century literature to early nineteenth. Islamic themes and questions crept in some form into each major national literature, from Shakespeare to Voltaire to G. E. Lessing. Many lesser literary figures joined in this industry of cultural tourism.

From the time of Marco Polo, Europeans were drawn by the thought of travel to the Islamic lands to the east. The westward discoveries in the Americas only increased the fascination invested in the much closer realms from Morocco to Tartary. Living in early sixteenth-century Italy, Lodovico de Varthema sensed that the great geographical discoveries were almost over, and longed to experience the mysteries of the near East. Religious quests drove people to the Holy Land, and European armies gathered many thousands for power struggles against the Turks and their imperial allies.

Following extensive migrations and conquests in the sixth and seventh centuries, a vast Arabic and Islamic empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean across North Africa and the Middle East to Central Asia. In this realm, a great civilization developed that fostered education and prized literature, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and science. Often its cultural leaders were not Arabs, but members of other ethnic groups and even Christians and Jews. Christian scholars in such places as Spain and Sicily gained much from Islamic knowledge, and scholasticism and Western science derived in part from the Arabs. The rise of the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century and the Ottomans in the 13th ended the specific dominance of Arabs in Islam, but Muslim culture continued to rest on its Arabic foundations. The reception of Classical learning in Western awareness continued to develop as Classical texts were translated from earlier Arabic translations into Latin.

The art of printing in the German lands of central Europe was quickly harnessed for religious purposes, making mass production of indulgences possible and providing for faster reproduction of Bibles and religious treatises than had been possible in the manuscript tradition. Engraving had a similar utility for the production of maps and illustrations.

As the trade of printing spread, governments, trade groups and religious bodies made efforts to control and regulate it. In Russia, printing was placed under the control of the Orthodox Church and used solely for religious purposes until the time of Peter the Great, when printing for secular purposes began. In Ottoman Turkey, the idea of Turkish or Arabic printing was viewed with concern and scribal resistance, and limited initially to secular purposes. Beginning in 1729, Ibrahim Müteferrika was authorized to issue almost a score of books in a range of secular subjects. Beginning about two centuries earlier, religious minorities were permitted to print works in other languages, notably Hebrew.

With the close of the American Revolution, Americans imagined an open, hospitable commercial system in which trade was free and ports were open, with unlimited opportunities for the benefit of all countries. Since American merchants were no longer under the protection of the British flag, they were subject to the same problems in the Mediterranean Sea that Europeans had been confronting for centuries. Without a strong navy, and without the temporary protection afforded by regular payments of tribute, their ships were subject to seizure and loss of cargo. Their crews were subject to capture as hostages and sale into slavery. Newspapers carried whatever stories were available of Barbary pirates. Each occurrence was viewed at home as an outrage against long-conventional concepts of international law. In this environment, American readers began perceiving the remote Ottoman empire and the Barbary states of North Africa as a part of their own world.

Curated by Dennis Landis

During the migration of our legacy catalogs and past exhibitions into Americana, there are occasionally items that cannot be immediately included in our new environment. This may happen for two reasons: the item in question is not yet cataloged, or it was lent by another institution.
Any items that are not integrated into Americana are included in this section and added to our processing queue.

Georg Braun. Civitates orbis terrarum. (Antwerp: 1575).
This plate presents the embattled city of Jerusalem, a place of transcendent importance for the adherents of three major religions. Sites holy to Christians were open to pilgrimages in the first century of Islamic rule, but became troubled under the reign of Calif Hakim early in the eleventh century. When the Seljuk Turks secured Jerusalem from the Egyptians in 1071, as well as defeating Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV, Christian access was denied and the Holy Sepulcher despoiled. Late in the eleventh century, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I appealed to the west for military assistance. Pope Urban II argued for recapture and restoration of the Holy Sepulcher, inspiring the First Crusade.
Explanatory text by Georg Braun is printed on recto of each plate; the engravings are by Franciscus Hogenberg and Simon Novellanus. This is the second of two views of Jerusalem prepared for this volume on great cities by Braun and Hogenberg. Partly the work of imagination, it also shows some awareness of the physical relationship of various holy sites, derived from the description by Bernhard von Breydenbach. At lower left is the crucifixion site of Golgotha, on the lower right inset, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. Columbus, a millennialist mystic himself, expected Jerusalem to be recaptured – and much more – as a result of his westward explorations and their accumulated wealth.

Gerardus Croese. [ Historia Quakeriana. English] The General History of the Quakers. (London: 1696).
One of the more unusual travel accounts is that of the Quaker woman Mary Fisher. In the spring of 1658 this woman in her mid-thirties set off to bring the Turkish Sultan the Good News of Christianity as understood by the Society of Friends. Any straightforward conversion attempts were officially forbidden. The Grand Vizier, having heard that an Englishwoman wished to present the Sultan with a message from God, caused her to be brought before the seventeen-year old Sultan Mohammed IV, who was camped near Adrianople. The Sultan, in the company of his advisers, urged her to speak the truth without fear. When she had finished, he declared that he had understood every word conveyed by the interpreter, and that he held it to be the truth. The advisers then questioned her on her understanding of the Prophet Mohammed, which she answered in a manner deemed acceptable to them. She turned down an offer of escort to Constantinople, and proceeded there on her own, and afterward safely back to England.
A much different response was received by the Quakers Perrot and Luffe, who tried something similar on arriving that same year of 1658 in Venice. They were tried by the Inquisition and imprisoned. Mary Fisher herself later traveled to New England, where her beliefs were judged heretical. Two Quaker men known to her were hanged for their beliefs at about the same time in Massachusetts. Quakers escaping persecution in Massachusetts found a safer environment in Rhode Island.

Avicenna, 980-1037. Principis Avic. Libri canonis, necnon De medicinis cordialibus [et] Cantica / ab Andrea Bellunensi ex antiquis Arabum originalibus ingenti labore summaq[ue] diligentia correcti atq[ue] in integrum restituti vna cum interpretatione nominu[m] Arabicoru[m], q[uae] partim mendosa p[ar]tim incognita lectorem antea moraba[n]tur. Opus plane aureu[m], ac omni ex parte absolutum. (Venice: [1527]).
Ibn Sina (980-1037), known to the West as Avicenna, was of Persian origin and became the most famous philosopher of medieval Islam and was everywhere the most influential medical writer from 1100 to 1500. His classification of the sciences was adopted by the medieval schools of Europe.
In the illustrated title page of this medical book, portraits appear of the great classical and medieval Islamic figures of medicine and philosophy: Aesculapius, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicena, Rasis, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and Averroes. Also shown is a view of the first page of the glossary of Arabic medical terms from the front of the book.
It is not by accident that the Venetian printer Lucantonio Giunta included three Muslim men of learning with the names and portraits of the great Greek and Roman scientists and philosophers: Avicenna, Rasis and Averroes. Rasis, also rendered as Rhazes (850-923), is known to Arabs as abu-Bakr Muhammed ibn-Zakariya al-Razi. He was born in Persia and rose to the position of chief physician in a great hospital in Baghdad. Having written 140 medical works, the most important being translated later into Latin, he had a great influence on medical science in medieval Europe.
Averroes (1126-1198), known by his full name in Arabic as Abu 'l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, is better known just as Ibn Rushd. Averroes was an Andalusian polymath born in Córdoba, Spain, in its Muslim era; he died in Marrakech, Morocco. In his career, Averroes was an authority in early Islamic philosophy and theology , Islamic law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, in the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics and physics, and even in Arabic musical theory. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism. His theological thinking took some unusual turns, and he has been described as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.
LOAN FROM THE LOWNES COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY

Adriaan Reelant. Four treatises concerning the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Mahometans. (London: 1712).
Reelant, a professor of Oriental Languages in the Netherlands, was probably the first European to publish a systematic study of the beliefs and practice of Islam, in particular making an effort to dispel common misperceptions.

The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mahomet. Translated from the original Arabick into French. By the Sieur de Ryer. ... The whole now faithfully translated into English. First American Edition. (Springfield: 1806).
The earliest documented Koran to be brought to North America was owned by Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1719) who arrived in Pennsylvania from Germany in 1683 and was named mayor and justice of the peace for Germantown. The learned statesmen John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both owned Korans that have survived, and Jefferson spent some time teaching himself Arabic. The Adams Koran is preserved at the Boston Public Library and Jefferson’s at the Library of Congress.
The edition shown at left is the first Koran printed in the United States; it draws on the well-circulated French-language version of Du Ryer.
LOAN FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed. Translated into English immediately from the original Arabic; with explanatory notes ... by George Sale, Gent. A new edition, with a memoir of the translator. Philadelphia: Thomas Wardle ... John Wiley ... New York., 1833.
The second Koran to be printed in North America was the edition shown here. It was the first American edition of the George Sale translation from Arabic. It includes scholarly apparatus.
LOAN FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

France. Treaties, etc. Treaty of Amity and Commerce between His Most Christian Majesty Louis the Sixteenth and the Thirteen United States of America. In Treaties of Amity and Commerce. (Boston: Draper & Folsom, 1778).
With their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and their state of rebellion, the new United States were without the protection of the British flag when sailing near and into the Mediterranean Sea. The States looked to their protector and ally France for assistance also in that region. Ben Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee all signed this treaty for the American government on February 6, 1778.
Article 8 provided that “the Most Christian King will employ his good offices and interposition with the King or Emperor of Morocco or Fez; the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoly, or with any of them; and also with every other prince ... of the coast of Barbary in Africa ... for the benefit, conveniency and safety of the said United States ...”.

Portrait of Joel Barlow. Engraved by Anker Smith, from a painting by Robert Fulton, the inventor and artist (Brooklyn, N.Y.: 1800).
In 1796, in Washington's second term, Barlow resolved the first American hostage crisis. As the American consul in Algiers, he worked to implement a peace treaty and managed to secure the release of more than 100 American seamen, some of whom had been held captive since 1785. The achievement was a measure of Barlow’s great patience and patent diplomatic skill. He returned to Paris in 1797.
GIFT OF THE MAURY BROMSEN ESTATE

United States. Treaties, etc. Treaty of peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: 1800).
Issued with the treaties between “His most Christian Majesty”, the King of France, and “His Britannic Majesty”, the King of Great Britain, with the 13 United States were two other treaties between the U.S. and the Dey of Algiers and the Bey of Tripoli, respectively.
Article 11 of the Tripolitan treaty, signed by the American plenipotentiary Joel Barlow, emphasizes the secular character of the American government:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen — and as the said States have never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Tribute was paid prior to signing and acknowledged by the Bey of Tripoli.

The Providence Gazette, Saturday, March 14, 1801.
John Brown's ship the George Washington first crossed the sea in 1794 and made trips to China in 1795 and 1796. By the time of her return to Rhode Island, the United States found itself in an unofficial war with France. The federal government desperately needed ships, and Brown saw an opportunity to sell the 624-ton vessel for at least $40,000 in cash and financial instruments. She was refitted as a warship in Rhode Island, with John Brown furnishing the cannon and ammunition.
The government sent the George Washington to Algiers in 1800 with a negotiated payment of tribute to the reigning Dey, in order to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean. Once in Algiers, an unexpected duty was forced on Captain Bainbridge. The Dey maneuvered him into a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, bearing the Algerian ambassador and retinue, 100 African women and children, 150 sheep, plus horses, cattle, lions, tigers, and a large store of precious metals. The captain flew the Algerian flag, as ordered, as he sailed from the port of Algiers. Once out of sight, he hoisted the American colors. As reported in the Providence Gazette, the ship became the first ever to enter the harbor of the Ottoman Turkish capital under the flag of the United States.
Tea was among the goods imported from Canton to Providence by John Brown aboard the George Washington prior to its advantageous sale to the United States.