ALEXANDER ROSS'S THE ALCORAN OF MAHOMET: OLIVER CROMWELL IN THE PROPHET MUHAMMED'S MANTEL

• Published in: International journal of arts & sciences Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 257 - 265
• Main Authors: Riche, Bouteldja, Mohamed, Gariti
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cumberland International Journal of Arts and Sciences LLC 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Boleyn, Anne (1507?-36); British history; Churches; Containment; Historians; History; Islam; Language; Mosques; Poetics; Politics; Propaganda; Quran; Religion; Ships; Terrorism; Translation studies; United Kingdom > UK; England; Spain
• ISSN: 1557-718X; 2326-7372

Looked at closely, the notion of the sacred with which Ross approaches the Koran does not belong to that positive sacredness associated with his own system of Christian beliefs but the negative one associated with the Other religion (Islam) which even then was linked with subversion, impurity and danger to what in the Occident in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers is called "our way of life." History books tell us that England turned protestant when the Pope refused the Tudor King Henry VIII his demand for divorce from the Spanish-born Queen Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she was not able to give birth to a male heir. Historians like Sir Godfrey Fisher suggests that the commercial advantages accorded by the Porte to English merchants in the 1580s, the opening of Algerian ports to English ships for refuelling and commerce, the Algerian containment of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean by the activities of the famous Reis or sea captains, and other factors like the huge expenditure of the New World wealth by Spain on its wars of attrition against the world of Islam on the Southern border of the Mediterranean account to a large extent for the success of England's resistance to the formidable re-conquering power of the Spanish Empire. To the accusation of intimate political alliance with the "Turk," whose effects can be seen in English Churches turned into what the Spaniards described as Mosques because of their shared lack of religious paraphernalia, English propaganda replied with a similar accusation pointing to the long history of Muslim occupation of Spain that turned Spaniards into "white Moriscoes"(See Dimmock Matthew, 2007).No matter the truth of these accusations, the fact remains that the cultural and political influence exerted by the Sublime Porte at the global scale at the time was so