Islam & Early Modern Europe: Images, Encounters, Approaches

4345 Words18 Pages
European interest in the Islamic world was a multifaceted phenomenon, arising as it did during the age of discovery and exploration, the consolidation of vast empires and nation-states, and the beginning of European colonialism. The early modern era also saw the rise of global Christianity in the backdrop of the Reformations, as Europeans (particularly Catholic missionaries) struggled to define the relationship between Christianity and culture. All of these political, social, and cultural processes shaped the outlooks which European Catholics and Protestants brought to their interactions with Muslim men and women, as well as the attitudes that they brought to their studies of Islam, Arabic, and the Ottoman Empire. An important feature of the European encounter with Islam was how very closely intertwined the imagined and actual encounters were. Stage plays, learned treatises, and scholarly histories of the Ottoman Empire and its ruling dynasty shaped the attitudes of travelers, missionaries, diplomats, and merchants. Once in the Levant (the region bordering the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea, from modern-day Egypt to Turkey), Europeans frequently turned to the writings of other travelers to help them make sense of their own experiences. In turn, their accounts of their experiences in the Levant reflected the debts which they owed their predecessors, and inspired yet another generation of footloose and curious Europeans. These travelers, like their predecessors, would use previous writing about the Levant as a prism through which to view and understand their own experiences. Through this cyclical process, European writers and thinkers developed a discourse about Middle Eastern religions, cultures, and persons, both Muslim and Christian, which Edward Said would later come to characterize and condemn as orientalism, the intellectual counterpoint to
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