© Columbia University Press
Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727
November, 2008
Cloth, 344 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14194-9
$50.00
/ £34.50
"This book fills a huge gap in our understanding of the history of that period." — Times Higher Education Supplement
"An excellent example of the creative use of source material . . . Highly recommended." — Choice
"Europe Through Arab Eyes offers a tantalizing glimpse into a rich and diverse corpus of early modern Arabic-language accounts of Europe and the Mediterranean world." — Ellen R. Welch, Journal of World History
"Europe Through Arab Eyes is a landmark in the study of the exchanges between Christendom and Islam in the early modern period." — Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Historian
"Nabil Matar's meticulous translations and analyses make available a rich panoply of Muslim experiences and images in the early modern period. More than yet another brick in the edifice of knowledge, this collection of texts by Muslim captives and diplomats, court scribes and travelers, scholars and Sufis, recuperates often overlooked sites of European-Muslim interchange and, in doing so, demonstrates that Muslim awareness of and interest in Europe were both more extensive and polyvalent than pervasive arguments about 'Muslim parochialism and intolerance' recognize." — Roxanne Euben, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College
"Nabil Matar has given us an astonishing new picture of what North Africans knew, thought, and felt about European Christians in the early modern period. A treasure trove of discovery." — Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
"Fastidiously researched, showing a rigorous and comprehensive engagement with the fateful relationship between Arabs and Europeans, this narrative is remarkably convincing in its representation of what is known as a complex history of East and West. Europe Through Arab Eyes reflects Nabil Matar's life-long concern with the subject. It will be well received by anyone who is concerned with the writing of history, especially specialists in Middle Eastern studies, who will see how Matar elucidates historical events of the past and, with the translated selections, makes haunting, distant events close and familiar. A book of the past written for the present and future." — Mohammed Shaheen, professor of English and comparative literature, University of Jordan