The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (48 page)

Today Britain is a multicultural society, with a significant community of Muslim believers, as is the United States, a country whose mores and institutions would come to be formed in its image. Developments over the past half century, intensified by recent events, have forced us to confront once more the question of Britain’s relation with Islam, although they are very different from those experienced by the Elizabethans, when mass migration was almost nonexistent.

The impetus toward cultural integration that (mostly) followed the mass immigration of various communities into Britain as its empire collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, including Muslim communities from South Asia, is now being questioned as politicians and the media of various persuasions accuse British Muslims of failure to assimilate into the national culture. Born in Bradford in the north of England in the late 1960s, I went to school in nearby Leeds with Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs and we hardly ever spoke about religious belief and sectarian divisions as we played and learned together. It was not a multicultural idyll, but neither was our world defined by theological absolutes. This was my experience of Englishness, and I realize now that it partly explains why I wrote this book. If what I have written makes a small contribution to understanding the long and often difficult history of connections between Islam and the West, then it will have been worth the while.

Muhammad al-Annuri, the Moroccan ambassador who arrived in London in August 1600 with a large delegation to propose an Anglo-Moroccan alliance and twice met the queen. Shakespeare started to write
Othello
around six months later.

Willem de Pannemaker’s tapestry showing Catholic Habsburg forces triumphantly sacking Tunis in 1535. These scenes of slaughter and enslavement were first displayed in London following Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554.

A double portrait of Philip of Spain and Mary Tudor painted in 1558. It shows Philip ruling England alongside Mary, who died in November that same year.

The “Rainbow Portrait” of Elizabeth I, c. 1600. The jewels and fabrics are all recognizably oriental, a reminder of the extensive Anglo-Islamic trade.

Diogo Homem’s map of the Mediterranean from the Queen Mary Atlas (1558), showing Ottoman flags flying over North Africa.

The idealistic but naive king Sebastian I of Portugal, whose defeat and death (alongside two rival Moroccan rulers) at the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in 1578 sent shock waves throughout Europe.

A view of Marrakesh, the capital city of the Sa’adian dynasty, from a seventeenth-century engraving by the Dutch artist Adriaen Matham.

Hans Eworth’s 1549 portrait of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent on horseback, one of many pictures of Islamic rulers owned by the Elizabethan elite.

Sultan Selim II, surrounded by his army, receiving homages after the death of his father, Sultan Süleyman, in 1566.

Samson Rowlie, a Norfolk merchant captured by the Turks in 1577. As the Latin inscription states, he was castrated, converted to Islam, and was renamed Hassan Aga; he then became chief eunuch and treasurer of Algiers.