Traveling to documents in Tunisia, Morocco, France, and England, with visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Spain, Nabil Matar assembles an extraordinary historical past of Europe's upward push to energy as obvious in the course of the eyes of these who have been later subjugated by way of it. Many historians of the center East think Arabs and Muslims had no real interest in Europe in this interval of Western discovery and empire, yet in reality those teams have been a great deal engaged with the naval and commercial improvement, politics, and exchange of ecu Christendom.

Beginning in 1578 with a big Moroccan victory over a Portuguese invading military, Matar surveys this early glossy interval, within which Europeans and Arabs frequently shared universal political, advertisement, and armed forces objectives. Matar concentrates on how Muslim captives, ransomers, investors, envoys, tourists, and rulers pursued these objectives whereas transmitting to the nonprint cultures of North Africa their wisdom of the peoples and societies of Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, and Malta. From the 1st non-European description of Queen Elizabeth I to early money owed of Florence and Pisa in Arabic, from Tunisian descriptions of the Morisco expulsion in 1609 to the letters of a Moroccan Armenian ambassador in London, the translations of the book's moment part draw at the well known and elite assets that have been on hand to Arabs within the early smooth interval. Letters from female and male captives in Europe, chronicles of ecu naval assaults and the taqayid (newspaper) studies on Muslim resistance, and outlines of opera and quinine seem right here in English for the 1st time.

Matar notes that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq have been wanting to interact Christendom, regardless of wars and rivalries, and was hoping to set up routes of alternate and alliances via treaties and royal marriages. in spite of the fact that, the increase of an illiberal and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of eu army know-how introduced those advances to an finish. In end, Matar information the decline of Arab-Islamic energy and the increase of england and France.