Abstract
The moment at which I write seems a fairly propitious one to be reflecting on early modern ideas of toleration in relation to Islam, but also to be questioning what the study of early modern attitudes to Islam might mean for the present. The scholarly field of ‘encounter’ in this period, and specifically of the Christian—Islamic kind, has grown considerably in the last ten or 15 years, from the publication of Nabil Matar’s Islam and Britain in 1998.’ A rich seam of scholarship on different aspects of this topic now runs through early modern studies.2 In one obvious sense, then, the field is well established, but in others — questions of methodology, in the extent and scale of a corpus of primary source material and the development of a coherent sense of the implications of this study for twenty-first-century culture and politics — remain indistinct and disputed.
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Notes
Nabil Matar, Islam and Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Daniel Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia, 2000), and Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005);
Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatising Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005);
Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Mark Hutchings, ‘The “Turk Phenomenon” and the Repertory of the Late Elizabethan Playhouse’, Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (September 2007), and his forthcoming edition of Three Jacobean ‘Turkish’ Plays (Manchester University Press, 2012).
This life, as understood by early modern Christians, is further explored in Matthew Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
For a detailed exploration of the genesis of this idea, the reader is recommended John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia, 2002),
and Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (2nd edition. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1993).
Meredith Hanmer, The Baptizing of a Turke. A Sermon Preached at the Hospitall of Saint Katherine, Adjoining unto her Majesty’s Tower the 2. of October 1586, at the Baptizing of one Chinano, a Turke, Born at Nigropontus (London: Robert Waldegrave, 1587);
Thomas Lanquet, An Epitome of Chronicles Conteyninge the Whole Discourse of the Histories as well of this Realme of England, as al Other cou[n]treys, with the Succession of their Kinges, the Time of their Reigne, and What Notable Actes they did … Gathered out of the Most Probable Auctours (London: William Seres for Thomas Marshe, 1559); ‘Was Mahomet inspired by a dove?/Thou with an eagle art inspired then’, William Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI (1.2.140–141), The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt [Gen. Ed.]. (New York and London: Norton, 1997).
Such as those evangelists detailed in the final chapter of Thomas S. Kidd’s American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), although Samuel Huntington’s thesis regarding a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is often referenced in this context: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Such rethinking, generated out of the Deist/Socinian controversies of the later seventeenth century, is detailed in Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
and Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
Stubbe, ‘The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism’; John Toland, Nazarenus or, Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London: J. Brown, J. Roberts and J. Brotherton, 1718).
Jack T. Chick, Allah Had No Son (Ontario, CA: Chick Publications, 1994), The Little Bride (Ontario, CA: Chick Publications, 2004), and Men of Peace? (Ontario, CA: Chick Publications, 2006).
Ergun M. Caner and Emir F. Caner, Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2002). See also Kidd, American Christians and Islam, pp. 147–48.
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration Humbly Submitted (London: for Awnsham Churchill, 1689) p. 54.
Kristan Tetens, ‘The Lyceum and the Lord Chamberlain: The Case of Hall Caine’s Mahomet’, pp. 49–64, in ed. Richard Foulkes Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent Victorian Actor-Manager (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); a useful overview of the Satanic Verses controversy can be found in Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009).
Discussed in M. M. Ahsan, ‘The Satanic Verses and the Orientalists’, Hamdard Islamicus, 5.1 (1982), 27–36.
Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 11–12.
Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton eds, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 28.
Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007) pp. 15–16, 64–68.
John Milton, Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Vnlicens’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (London: [s.n.], 1644), p. 13.
Mirza Ab’ul Fazl, Selections from the Koran (Allahabad: G. A. Asghar & Co., 1910);
Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Holy Qur’an (Woking: Islamic Review Office, 1917);
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. An Explanatory Translation (London: A. A. Knopf, 1930);
Allama Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Quran: An Interpretation in English (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1934);
N. J. Dawood, The Koran. A New Translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956).
Alexander Ross, Pansebeia, or, A View of all Religions in the World with the Severall Church-governments from the Creation, to These Times: also, a Discovery of all known Heresies in all Ages and Places, and Choice Observations and Reflections Throughout the Whole (London: T. C. for John Saywell, 1653).
Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present In foure partes… (London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1613).
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Dimmock, M. (2014). Tolerating ‘Mahomet’: Or, Thinking about Then, Now. In: Glaser, E. (eds) Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_10
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