Through Arab Eyes

“This book is the outcome of the most impressive research. Confessionalised Europe seen in Arab eyes has never been studied properly before, and the author has worked through an immense amount of material, both printed and in manuscript, in numerous Eastern and Western libraries and archives. The book is highly original and fills a major gap in our knowledge of Christian-Muslim relations.”

—Alastair Hamilton, FBA, Honorary Fellow, Warburg Institute, UK; Former Professor of the History of Ideas, University of Leiden, The Netherlands

“Through an impressive mastery of sources and a deep sensitivity to language, culture, and theology, this groundbreaking study transforms our understanding of Christian-Muslim relations in the early modern Mediterranean. A scholarly tour de force that illuminates the Arabic Christian experience with extraordinary depth and originality.”

—Bilal Orfali, Sheikh Zayed Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

The first book based exclusively on Arabic sources in the study of the early modern religious encounters between Western Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean, this volumeelucidates the impact of the Protestant and Catholic reformations on the Islamic Mediterranean from Morocco to Bilad al-Sham. Drawing on the vast collection of Arabic Christian manuscripts and Arabic books printed in Europe from the Ottoman conquest to the Napoleonic invasion, it provides an account of the Christian culture of Arabicity as reflected in Christian Arab pilgrimages, multiple calendars, and the role of the Arabic language in the construction of Christian identity. Through contemporaneous debates, disputations, autobiographies, correspondence, and histories, it analyzes the missionary efforts to convert Eastern Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Druzes to the new Christianities of Western Europe and the resulting consequences on the Arab East, thereby calling attention to the differences in the ideologies of conversion between Christianity and Islam.

Nabil Matar is Professor of English, Presidential Professor in the President’s Interdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities, and Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities, University of Minnesota, USA.