The Moor at a Distance

In his essay "Turning Turk in Othello" Daniel Vitkin talks extensively about English attitudes toward the Turks, black Africans, Muslims, and Moors. One thing that both confused and intrigued me in the essay was the living presence of Turks and Moors in actual relations with the English, and also a sense that the English were so distant from Middle East and North Africa that they frequently confused and conflated terms as different as "Turk" and "Moor," even linking Mohamed and the Pope as devilish enemies to good Protestant Christians.

Vitkin describes the expanding Turkish empire as a threat to Europe and to England, one that the English were very much concerned about. In fact, Vitkin quotes sources to argue that the Turks regularly captured British ships and even directly raided the English coast line, in part in order to capture Englishmen (and women, I suppose) to enslave them, make them work on their ships, and so on. Apparently, these captured Christians would sometimes convert, either to save their lives or to be able to enter into commerce with the Muslims. Sermons were regularly preached in English against this type of "conversion." Apparently there was a group of Moorish ambassadors who visited and were well received in England only a couple of years before Othello was written -- so not all contacts with Islamic people were negative.

In contrast, or in addition to, these "real" contacts there was a great deal of myth making about Islamic, African, Turkish, and/or Moorish people in 17th Century England. Lumped together they were stereotyped as "violent," "cruel," "lustful," "sensual," "arbitrary," and "deceitful." And I wonder how much Othello bears these out... And, hmmm.... These terms sound a bit familiar. Consider the comments on the website Islam and the Western Media

• This ignorance that the West accumulates from the media leads them into making stereotypes about Islam and associating all Muslims and Arabs together. The West often times views Islam as "fundamental" "extremist" or "discriminatory", but all of these terms have be manipulated, purposely because of biased feelings and accidentally because of ignorance, by the media to present a negative image about Islam.