Explores the interactions between Britain and the Islamic world from 1558 to 1713, showing how much scholars, diplomats, traders, captives, travellers, clerics, and chroniclers were involved in developing and describing those interactions.

Beginning with the medieval period, this book collates and reviews first-hand scholarship on Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, as noted down by eminent British travellers, sleuths and observers of lived Islam. The book foregrounds the pre-colonial and pre-Orientalist phase and locates the multi-disciplinarity of Britain’s relationship with Muslims over the last millennium to demonstrate a multi-layered interface. Fully sensitive to a gender balance, the book focuses on specially selected individuals and their transformative experiences while living and working among Muslims. Examining the writings of male and female authors including Adelard, Thomas Coryate, Mary Montagu and Fanny Parkes, the book analyses their understanding of Islam. Moreover, the author explores the works of a salient number of representative colonial British women to move away from the imperious wives stereotype and shed light on gender and Islam in Near East and South Asia by illustrating the status of women, tribal hierarchies, historic and architectural sites and regional politics. Going beyond familiar views about colonialism, travel writings and memsahibs without losing sight of the complex relations between Britain and Asian Muslims, this book will be of interest to academics working on British history, Imperial history, the study of religions, Shi’i Islam, Islamic studies, Gender and the Empire and South Asian Studies.

An eye-opening history of Britain and the Islamic world—a thousand-year relationship that is closer, deeper, and more mutually beneficial than is often recognized In this broad yet sympathetic survey—ranging from the Crusades to the modern day—Martin Pugh explores the social, political, and cultural encounters between Britain and Islam. He looks, for instance, at how reactions against the Crusades led to Anglo-Muslim collaboration under the Tudors, at how Britain posed as defender of Islam in the Victorian period, and at her role in rearranging the Muslim world after 1918. Pugh argues that, contrary to current assumptions, Islamic groups have often embraced Western ideas, including modernization and liberal democracy. He shows how the difficulties and Islamophobia that Muslims have experienced in Britain since the 1970s are largely caused by an acute crisis in British national identity. In truth, Muslims have become increasingly key participants in mainstream British society—in culture, sport, politics, and the economy.

This collection examines the role of Britain in the Islamic world. It offers insight into the social, political, diplomatic, and military issues that arose over the centuries of British involvement in the region, particularly focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. British involvement can be separated into three phases: Discovery, Colonization and Decolonization, and Post-Empire. Decisions made by individual traders and high governmental officials are examined to understand how Great Britain impacted the Islamic world through these periods and, conversely, how events in the Islamic world influenced British decisions within the empire, in protection of the empire, and in the wake of the empire. The essays consider early perceptions of Islam, the role of trade, British-Ottoman relations, and colonial rule and control through religion. They explore British influence in a number of countries, including Somalia, Egypt, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf States, India, and beyond. The final part of the book addresses the lasting impact of British imperial rule in the Islamic world.

The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth’s secret outreach to the Muslim world, which set England on the path to empire, by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps We think of England as a great power whose empire once stretched from India to the Americas, but when Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen, it was just a tiny and rebellious Protestant island on the fringes of Europe, confronting the combined power of the papacy and of Catholic Spain. Broke and under siege, the young queen sought to build new alliances with the great powers of the Muslim world. She sent an emissary to the Shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, with whom she shared a lively correspondence. The Sultan and the Queen tells the riveting and largely unknown story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes—and reveals how Elizabeth’s fruitful alignment with the Islamic world, financed by England’s first joint stock companies, paved the way for its transformation into a global commercial empire.

“Superb... A tour de force.” —Ebrahim Moosa “Provocative... Aydin ranges over the centuries to show the relative novelty of the idea of a Muslim world and the relentless efforts to exploit that idea for political ends.” —Washington Post When President Obama visited Cairo to address Muslims worldwide, he followed in the footsteps of countless politicians who have taken the existence of a unified global Muslim community for granted. But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World considers its origins and reveals the consequences of its enduring allure. “Much of today’s media commentary traces current trouble in the Middle East back to the emergence of ‘artificial’ nation states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire... According to this narrative...today’s unrest is simply a belated product of that mistake. The Idea of the Muslim World is a bracing rebuke to such simplistic conclusions.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is here that Aydin’s book proves so valuable: by revealing how the racial, civilizational, and political biases that emerged in the nineteenth century shape contemporary visions of the Muslim world.” —Foreign Affairs

Based on papers presented at an international three-day conference, sponsored by the British Academy and held at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in April 2009, this collection of essays provides a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of the most advanced specialist and scholarly knowledge to date concerning historical perspectives on relations between Britain and the Muslim World. Ranging from the early-modern period to the present day, the essays collected here represent work by leading writers and scholars from relevant fields—history, international relations, economics, religion, law, art history and design, film studies, and sociology, as well as literary and cultural studies. These essays explore the historical impacts of cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Britain by variously addressing the question of how relations between Britain and the Muslim world in the past have brought us to our current situation and, in some cases, by proposing directions for necessary further consideration and research.