有趣的歷史。16世紀摩洛哥派遣使節到英國，請求女王聯合對抗西班牙…。
Sixteenth-century Elizabethan England has always had a special place in
the nation's understanding of itself. But few realise that it was also the first time that Muslims began openly living, working
and practising their faith in England, writes Jerry Brotton.
From as far away as North Africa,
the Middle East and Central Asia, Muslims
from various walks of life found themselves in London in the 16th Century
working as diplomats, merchants, translators, musicians, servants and even
prostitutes.
The reason for the Muslim presence in
England stemmed from Queen Elizabeth's isolation from Catholic Europe. Her official excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570
allowed her to act outside the papal edicts forbidding Christian trade with
Muslims and create commercial and political
alliances with various Islamic states, including the Moroccan Sa'adian dynasty,
the Ottoman Empire and the Shi'a Persian Empire.
She sent her diplomats and merchants
into the Muslim world to exploit this theological loophole, and in return
Muslims began arriving in London, variously described as "Moors",
"Indians", "Negroes" and "Turks".
Before Elizabeth's reign, England -
like the rest of Christendom - understood a garbled version of Islam mainly
through the bloody and polarised experiences of the Crusades.
No Christian even knew the words
"Islam" or "Muslim", which only entered the English
language in the 17th Century. Instead they spoke of "Saracens", a name taken from one of Abraham's illegitimate
offspring who was believed to have founded the original twelve Arab tribes.
Christians simply could not accept
that Islam was a coherent religious belief. Instead they dismissed it as a
pagan polytheism or a heretical deformation of Christianity, from which we get
the word "infidel", from the Latin perfidi (unfaithful). Much Muslim theology discouraged travel into Christian
lands, or the "House of War", which was regarded as a perpetual
adversary of the "House of Islam".
But with Elizabeth's accession this
situation began to change. In 1562
Elizabeth's merchants reached the Persian Shah Tahmasp's court where they
learned about the theological distinctions between Sunni and Shi'a beliefs, and
returned to London to present the queen with a young Muslim Tatar slave girl
they named Aura Soltana.
She became the queen's "dear
and well beloved" servant who wore dresses made of Granada silk and
introduced Elizabeth to the fashion of wearing Spanish leather shoes.
Hundreds of others arrived from
Islamic lands and although no known memoirs survive, glimpses of their
Elizabethan lives can still be gleaned from London's parish registers. In 1586
Francis Drake returned to England from Colombia with a hundred Turks who had
been captured by the Spanish in the Mediterranean and press-ganged into slavery
in the Americas.
One of them, known only as Chinano,
is the first known Muslim to convert to English Protestantism.
He was baptised at St Katharine's
Church near the Tower of London, where he took the name William Hawkins, and
insisted that "if there were not a God in England, there was none
nowhere".
Perhaps he meant it and relished
his new Anglican identity, or he knew what to say to his new English masters.
Whatever the truth, like many of his fellow Turks he quickly disappeared into
London's bustling life, taking with him his true religious beliefs.
How sincere Chinano's conversion
was may never be known, but he was not alone, and others like him were clearly
keen to make a living in diverse urban occupations.
They included weavers, tailors,
brewers and metalsmiths. Other registers record Muslim women being baptised
like Mary Fillis, a "blackamoor" daughter of a Moroccan basket-maker
who after working in London as a seamstress for 13 years and "now taking
some hold of faith in Jesus Christ was desirous to become a Christian".
She was baptised in Whitechapel in
1597 where she presumably lived out the rest of her life. The faith of others
was less certain, like the unnamed Moroccan who was buried the same year
"without any company of people and without ceremony", because church
authorities "did not know whether he was a Christian or not".
Nor were such conversions one-way. Hundreds of Elizabethan men and women travelled into
Muslim lands in search of their fortune, and many converted - some forcibly,
but others willingly - to Islam. They included
the Norfolk merchant Samson Rowlie, who had been captured by Turkish pirates off Algiers
in 1577, where he was imprisoned, castrated and converted to Islam.
He took the name Hassan Aga and rose
to become Chief Eunuch and Treasurer of Algiers as well as one of the most
trusted advisers to its Ottoman governor. He never returned to England or the
Christian fold.
Elizabeth's alliances with the
Ottoman, Persian and Moroccan empires also brought more elite Muslims to London. Records show that Turkish diplomats were sent over in
the 1580s, though no trace of them survives.
More details remain of Moroccan
embassies from later that decade. In 1589 the Moroccan ambassador Ahmed
Bilqasim entered London in state, surrounded by Barbary Company merchants,
proposing an Anglo-Moroccan military initiative against "the common enemy
the King of Spain".
Although the anti-Spanish proposal
came to nothing, the Moroccan ambassador sailed in an English fleet later that
year that attacked Lisbon with the support of the Moroccan ruler, Mulay Ahmed
al-Mansur.
Just over 10 years later another
Moroccan ambassador called Muhammad al-Annuri
arrived in London, with a large retinue of merchants, translators, holy men and
servants who stayed for six months living in a house on the Strand where
Londoners watched them practising their religious faith.
One reported that they "killed
all their own meat within their house, as sheep, lambs, poultry" and
"turned their faces eastward when they kill any thing; they use beads, and
pray to Saints".
Al-Annuri had his portrait painted,
met Elizabeth and her advisers twice and even proposed a joint
Protestant-Islamic invasion of Spain and naval attack on her American colonies.
The plan only seems to have foundered because Elizabeth feared upsetting the
Ottomans, who were at the time al-Mansur's adversaries.
The alliance came to an abrupt end
with Elizabeth's death and her successor James I's decision to make peace with
Catholic Spain, but the presence of Muslims like al-Annuri, Ahmed Bilqasim and
more modest individuals like Chinano and Mary Fillis remain a significant but
neglected aspect of Elizabethan history.
It shows that Muslims have been a
part of Britain and its history much longer than many people have ever
imagined.
The Koran's long journey
into British life
• 1095-1291 - The Crusades result in crusaders bringing
some Middle Eastern customs and Arabic words back to England.
• 1588 - Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great
contains a scene in which the Koran is burned.
• 1636 - Oxford University employs a chair of Arabic, who
advocates a rational, historical approach to the study of Islam.
• 1734 - The first full translation of the Koran into English
is made.
• 1869 - Lord Stanley becomes the first Muslim convert in
the House of Lords.
• 1935 - Words from the Koran are broadcast on British
radio for the first time, in BBC programme The Sphinx.
1997 - MP Muhammad Sarwar becomes
the first person to swear his Oath of Allegiance on the Koran in the House of
Commons.
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