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Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727. By nabil matar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 344 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
In Europe through Arab Eyes, Nabil Matar continues the project he began with his previous book, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), making early modern Arab perspectives on Europe available to scholars whose work pertains chiefly to countries north of the Mediterranean. Spanning the Moroccan defeat of Portuguese invaders in 1578 through the death of Moroccan Muley Isma'il in 1727, Matar's latest study carves out a 150-year period of history characterized by frequent contact and significant cultural exchange between the Arab-Islamic West (defined as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and, to a lesser extent, the Levant) and Christian Europe. This "familiarity" between the two cultures, Matar argues, resulted in "less of a monolithic construction of otherness and more of a diversity of perspectives," at least among Arab writers describing Europe (p. 5). It is possible to dispute the argument that this period represents an exception in the variety and nuance of views of the "other" it records. (Medieval Andalusia immediately leaps to mind.) Matar's book, however, brilliantly illustrates the diversity of Arab perspectives on Europe and Europeans in the early modern period.
In the first half of the book, Matar offers a presentation and analysis of the primary sources that appear in translated excerpts in the second part. Matar adopts a microhistorical approach to his sources,...