Engaging with current debates about the “clash of civilizations,” this book offers a novel challenge to the notion of a monolithic Islam in opposition to a monolithic West. The essays in this book analyze a range of genres—travel narrative, canonical and non-canonical drama, and prose romance—to consider geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire, including Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and the Muslim regions of Southeast and Central Asia. This collection deepens our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined “traffic” between England and the “Islamic worlds” it encountered and constructed.
