‘Mahometan’, and to a lesser extent ‘Musselman’, were early modern terms for followers of Islam at a time before ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ were in use.[1] The post-classical Mahometanus was a rendering of the Arabic name for Muhammad (d. 632), the founder of Islam. Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity, was an Abrahamic religion.[2] Prolonged English encounters with Islam stretched back to pilgrimage and crusading in the early Middle Ages. The collapse of the Christian Byzantine empire following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 shifted international political power, and ongoing Ottoman expansion ‘propelled Mahomet into a wider Christian consciousness’.[3] While the term ‘Moors’ referred to North African Muslims, sometimes also categorized as ‘blackamoor’, ‘Mahometans’ often referenced Ottoman imperial might: thus in 1529, Thomas More described the ‘Machometanys’ as ‘a sensual sect [that] dyd in a fewe yeres draw the great part of the world unto it’.[4]
In their desire to establish conformity to the Church of England, Protestant authorities in post-Reformation England sought to dispel parallels drawn between Christians and Mahometans deriving from their shared Abrahamic roots.[5] Elizabethan and Jacobean travellers and writers projected the idea of ‘Mahomet’ as a false prophet who relied on tricks and deception to gain followers. Tales circulated that he had invented the Quran with the assistance of a renegade monk named Sergius, in a narrative which enmeshed Islamic prophecy with Catholic superstition. Giles Fletcher in The policy of the Turkish empire (1597) relayed that ‘Mahomet’ and the ‘fugitive Monke’ decided to ‘coyne’ a new religion that was ‘neyther perfect Jew nor perfect Christian’, but a patchwork of several pre-existing religions.[6] Protestants must reject ‘Mahomet, that cozening Arabian’, Joseph Hall urged in 1607, whose ‘rude ignorance...palpable imposture...[and] barbarous fictions...a wise Christian will scorne’.[7]
Portrayals of Mahometans by English eyewitnesses tended to describe Islamic societies as corrupt or ‘counterfeit’. Visiting the Ottoman Empire in the early 1610s, George Sandys lamented the circumcision of children, who were taken into mosques in white turbans where ‘they dream that they shall all be assumed by Mahomet into Paradise’.[8] Sandys critiqued the imperatives of survival that drove Christians to publicly convert to Islam, but reserved his greatest criticism for what he characterized as Islamic ‘fables’ and superstitions. The afterlife, based on ‘the impious saying of Mahomet’ was to be a world of ‘sensuall felicities’, of ‘fragrant shades’ with ‘amorous virgins’.[9] This, Sandys insisted, was ‘rude and vulgar’, a trick to ensure conversion through ‘sensuall doctrine’.[10] At the same time, as the translator and traveller John Pory acknowledged in ‘Of Mahumet, and of his accursed religion in generall’ in A geographical historie of Africa (1600), ‘Mahumet his law’, though ‘it embraceth circumcision’, also ‘looseth the bridle of the flesh, which is a thinge acceptable to the greatest part of men’.[11] It was perhaps this awareness of its attraction that compelled Protestant writers to seek to discredit Islam by emphasizing that the Prophet Muhammad had been a man, marked by bodily dissolution and death.[12]
English descriptions of Islam in England also encompassed ideas about social order and political organization, which invited the English to think about and articulate their own hierarchical norms. Muhammad’s role as prophet was related to territorial gain, as Fletcher described in The policy of the Turkish empire. ‘In this manner did MAHOMET erect a new Religion and kingdome amongest the Sarracens in the yeare of grace 623’, Fletcher wrote, ‘making Siria the seate of his Empire’.[13] Mahomet ‘was then grown to be a great power and estimation by reason of his wealth and the opinion of his Religion’, which rendered him ‘highly adored, both of the Arabians and the Egyptians’.[14] Having spent several years in captivity in Constantinople, Thomas Shirley returned to England in 1606 and wrote his ‘Discours of the Turkes’, describing the arrival of the Ottomans in Asia Minor as responsible for ‘the erronious & devilishe sect of Mehemett’.[15] Shirley discussed sodomy in order to relate deviant religion to destabilizng social order: ‘Theyre manner of living in private & in generalle is moste uncivil and vicious...for theyre Sodommerye they use it soe publiquelye & imprudentelye as an honest Christian would shame to companye with his wyffe as they doe with theyre buggeringe boyes’.[16] Since private acts in domestic settings subverted the patriarchal order so integral to early modern English stability, the perceived threat of Islam did not just imperil the individual soul but the entire fabric of the commonwealth.
The English were also wary of how Islam absorbed, even welcomed, converts. A deep, implicit unease that Islam might prove stronger than Christianity ran alongside these vehement attacks against Mahometans.[17] This helps explain the invectives against Englishmen who ‘turned Turk’, such as the pirate John Ward in the 1610s. It also framed the public conversions of Muslims to Christianity celebrated by the Church. When Meredith Hanmer celebrated the ‘Turk’ who had rejected ‘the superstitious lawe of Mahomet’ and now embraced ‘his true faith in Jesus Christ, received into the congregation of the faithful’, it was important to publish the news.[18]
The English encountered Muslims beyond the Ottoman Empire. The ascension of the Safavids in Persia around 1501 established a Shi’a polity which directly confronted and competed with the geopolitical and economic influence of the Ottoman Sunni caliphate. At times, the English sought alliances with the Safavids against Ottomans for their mutual interests. The Persian empire fascinated English humanists who sought imperial templates and were drawn to Persia’s classical heroes. English attitudes to Persia were ‘markedly different to [their] fearful attitudes to the Ottomans’, where ‘Safavid ideology held a place for exemplary figures from Persian antiquity, including both Cyrus and Alexander’.[19] Philip Sidney hailed the conqueror Cyrus and the Persian empire as the ‘portraiture of just empire’ in the early 1580s, and the English continued to frame their own political aspirations in relation to Persia at various points in the seventeenth century.[20] Tellingly, discussions of ‘Mahomet’ tended to be absent in these more positive appraisals of Islamic power by highlighting Cyrus’s religious toleration prior to the Ottoman conquest.
The brothers Anthony and Robert Shirley travelled to Persia in 1599, where the Shah welcomed them at court. Ever an opportunist, Anthony received the title of mirza, an honour usually reserved for Muslim princes, and became especially close to Shah Abbas, with whom he could be seen walking arm in arm down the city streets.[21] Anthony acknowledged that Persian attitudes towards religion were politically strategic. The Shah was ‘exceeding curious and vigilant to suppress through all his dominions, that religion of Mahomet which followeth the interpretation of Ussen’, referring to the shah’s Shi’a beliefs and his desire to suppress Sunni followers.[22] While Anthony spent less than a year in Persia, his younger brother Robert lived there eight years. Through pressured to convert to Islam, Robert converted to Catholicism instead and married a baptized Circassian woman, Theresia.[23] The poet Thomas Middleton celebrated Robert as ‘this famous English Persian’, but also praised him for seeking ‘Christian confederacie against Mahomet & his Adherents’.[24]
The dramatization of the adventures of the three Shirley brothers in the play by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), is illustrative of long-standing traditional ways of representing Islam and ‘Mahometans’ in the popular and literary culture of the period.[25] Within the wider narrative tradition, Muslim characters appeared frequently in medieval crusading romances. The Sowdone of Babylone (c. 1400), for instance, involves the invasion of Rome by a sultan and his son Ferumbras, who eventually converts to Christianity, along with his sister, Floripas. Apart from the ever-present issues of conversion and temptation (often represented by the figure of a Muslim woman), the ‘Mahometan’ in such texts could function as a figure against and in response to whom Christian chivalric ideals could be explored. Within European literary tradition, the representation of adherents to Islam – ‘Saracens’ – was shaped through hugely influential Italian chivalric narrative poems like Matteo Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando (1483) and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516). In England, Edmund Spenser’s Redcrosse knight battled Saracens and an evil dragon from ‘Tartary’ in Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590). In such sources, it is difficult to ascribe a single conceptualization of religious or cultural difference or a single idea of ‘otherness’ to such a range of texts. Instead, as Jonathan Burton argues, ‘Islam functions as a discursive site upon which contesting versions of Englishness, Christianity, masculinity, femininity, and nobility are elaborated and proffered’, leading to ‘a representative practice, particularly apparent in English drama, which accommodates the solicitous, peaceful Turk and the bloody miscreant Turk, the convert and the temptress, the saint and the tyrant’.[26]
Prior to the English translation of the Quran in the mid-seventeenth-century, many scholars had relied on an error-ridden medieval Latin translation that exhibited little effort to convey the stylistic features of the original text.[27] Insufficient or faulty knowledge informed English views towards Muslims along with superstition or prejudice, coupled with preconceptions about the inherent state of damnation shared by any who did not practice Protestantism. William Bedwell’s Mehammedis Imposturae (1615) engaged with an anonymous Arabic text and contained three dialogues between two pilgrims returned from Mecca, though the title suggests mere polemic. One became Christian, while the other was a Muslim who sought to learn the true nature of salvation, asking for essential points of the faith as they were understood by both the Quran and the Gospels. The book concluded with the converted Sheich Sinan converting Doctor Ahmed to Christianity, but the text nonetheless displayed an interest in cross-religious exchange and understanding, even if it ultimately ended with an expression of Christian superiority.[28] Bedwell was a well-respected Arabic scholar who worked on an Arabic-Latin dictionary and served as an interpreter to the Moroccan ambassador at court in 1600. Several of his publications included an index of the chapters of the Quran and ‘Arabicke termes used by Historians’, though, as he noted, this was intended for ‘the confutation of that Booke’.[29] The first English translation of the Quran, The Alcoran of Mahomet, appeared in 1649, though based on a French translation. Henry Stubbe writing in the later seventeenth century sought to combat the misinformation that had circulated as a result of faulty copies and translations. ‘We have so many fabulous and ridiculous Accounts, both of Mahomet and his Imposture’, Stubbe maintained, ‘a great deal of fabulous, ridiculous trash, with which most of the Christian Narratives of him are stuff’d’.[30]
Iberian categories such as moriscos also contributed to English ideas about Muslims. Accounts in Purchas his pilgrims (1625) labelled Arabic as the ‘Morisco tongue’.[31] The original meaning of morisco, however, related to Christian converts from Islam, particularly those descended from the Muslim communities of Al-Andalus. Morisco was thus a designation which stigmatized and racialized a group that, although mostly Christianized, remained religiously and politically suspicious due to its Moorish and Arabic roots.[32] Successive translations of Portuguese and Spanish works such as António Galvão’s Tratado dos Descobrimentos (1601), Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote (1612), or Miguel de Faria e Sousa’s Asia Portuguesa (1695), contributed to a wide dissemination of the term in England, but also to an association of morisco with its original racialized and discriminatory meaning.[33] In 1599 Richard Perceval’s Dictionarie in Spanish and English already described morisco as a ‘blacke Moore made or become a Christian’.[34]
Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula also generated a perception in England of the Iberian world as ‘Moorish’. James Howell in his Instructions for forreine travel (1642) noted that the ‘hyperbolizing vaine’ of some travellers produced xenophobic sayings such as ‘Seville is like a chessboard table, having as many Moriscos as Spaniards’.[35] Lying behind these prejudiced views was the perception of the rampant miscegenation of Iberian metropolitan and colonial societies which, in spite of the efforts made by Portuguese and Spanish authorities to enforce religious and ethnic uniformity, separated them from other European nations. The association between Iberians and Moors is evident in the Dutch merchant Jan Linschoten’s description of the populations of Macao and Canton: ‘people of brownish colour, like the white Moores in Africa and Barbaria, and part of the Spaniards, but those that dwell within the land, are for color like Netherlanders'.[36] Although a Catholic, the anti-Jesuit polemicist Anthony Copley accused the English Jesuits of betraying England in favour of Spain in 1602 by denouncing ‘a mere foreign and Morisco nation’ who promoted a ‘Morisco doctrine’.[37] Both Linschoten and Copley imply a persistent and corruptible presence of Moorish elements in Iberian ethnicity and culture, suggesting that Islam had a remarkable capacity to endure in different forms.
Converts to Islam became a growing concern for English secular and religious leaders as commercial activities placed English men and women in increasing contact with Muslims. The Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud published A Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turkism (1637), providing a liturgical way to formally reintroduce English converts to Islam back into Church and thus Christian society.[38] Outlining the process of recovery and reconciliation, Laud ordered that the individual should come to the Church ‘in a penitent fashion in a white sheet and white wand in his hand, head uncovered’ to beg the congregation to ‘remember in your prayers a poor, wretched apostate or renegade’.[39] The penitent had to repeat these actions for four weeks until they could ‘penitently confess that I have grievously offended the majesty of God and deeply wounded my own soul’.[40] Upon doing so the individual would not only be accepted back into the church, but would in the eyes of the English be considered a subject of the Crown once again. One such case took place in the spring of 1649, when East India Company agent Thomas Breton wrote of his grief to ‘imparte unto you a sad story’ of Joshua Blackwell, a company employee at Agra, who was ‘irrecoverably lost’ after becoming a Muslim.[41] Breton believed that Blackwell was beyond reformation, citing Mughal legal acts that prevented any interaction that would lead to the reconversion of an individual. Yet, despite Breton’s assertion that he was beyond ‘redemption’, Blackwell initiated a series of correspondences which would lead to him being readmitted into the Protestant community.[42] As a result, Blackwell found himself forced by circumstance to return to England to avoid being ‘subject to the abuse of every Mahometan that knowes your condition’.[43]
Increased trade routes and diplomatic exchanges in the later seventeenth century broadened existing English knowledge about Muslims, but the belief persisted that ‘the Mahometists...doo erre and wander in the Labyrinth of straunge superstitions’.[44] As the eighteenth century dawned, London feared ‘turning Turk’ once again, though less through conversion than through altered bodies with the arrival of coffee from the Levant. ‘Coffee-politicians’, complained one anonymous writer in 1679, were ‘Turky News mongers, who with their Pipes and Dishes look as learnedly, as the Mahometan in the Sign’.[45] Detractors celebrated the sociability of imbibing alcohol as an act that socially differentiated English and Ottoman consumers: ‘To drink is a Christian Diversion, / Unknown to the Turk and the Persian: / Let Mahometan Fools / Live by Heathenish Rules, / And be damn’d over Tea-Cups and Coffee’.[46] Yet coffeehouse discourse, so enmeshed with current affairs, travel and politics, signalled the continual presence of Ottomans in English sociability and exchange. Like ‘popish’ chocolate from Spanish America, or Virginian tobacco, the ethnicities and faiths of the people who produced new commodities of consumption changed how the English lived forever.
