LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE by VOLTAIRE: ISLAM AS A VEHICLE FOR THE CRITIQUE OF CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE IN PARIS, 1742
In Mahomet, Voltaire recounted the founding of Islam as a polemical tale of a licentious villain, whose relentless lust and pursuit of power victimize all who stand in his way. Since the eighth century, Christians had charged that the Prophet’s multiple marriages could only be the evidence of unbridled desire, emphasizing a notable contrast with the celibacy of Jesus.91 Criticism of the Prophet’s marriages had become a cornerstone of his polemical biography in medieval Catholic sources, and would be reiterated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant texts.92
The majority of the characters in Mahomet were Voltaire’s creations, with no relation to historical reality.93 His plot reimagined how the intransigent Meccan pagans of the seventh century were forced through violence to yield their faith and sovereignty to the duplicitous false prophet Mahomet. In fact, the final capitulation of pagan Mecca to the Prophet’s monotheist forces in 630 had been negotiated by a treaty two years before. When the city surrendered, only four inhabitants were actually killed.94 But Voltaire’s point about religious fanaticism would not be served by retelling this basically peaceful resolution. By imagining the murder of pagans, Voltaire condemns rather than celebrates the triumph of Islam as a new monotheistic religion. To further stimulate outrage against the Muslim “oppressors,” he depicts the Meccan pagans as true, honest, heroic martyrs.
In contrast, Voltaire portrays his Mahomet as a lascivious predator, who lusts after a beautiful young woman called Palmira, a name drawn not from Arabic but a pre-Islamic site in Palmyra, Syria. Captured by Mahomet as a child, Palmira grows up not knowing that her father, Zopire, is the leader of the Meccan pagan opposition. Although Palmira reveres Mahomet as a father figure, a ruler, and a prophet, she does not return his affections. Instead she loves Seide, who had also been taken captive as a child, but whom she does not know is her brother.
Mahomet commands Seide to assassinate Zopire, his own father. Out of loyalty to Mahomet, Seide carries out the order, but duplicitous Mahomet then poisons his rival. In the last scene, Palmira realizes too late that both her father and brother have died at the fanatic’s direction. Maddened with grief, she commits suicide, exposing Mahomet’s true nature with her final breath:
You blood-smeared impostor … Executioner of all my loved ones … The holy prophet, the king I served, the god I worshipped! Monster! whose madness and treacherous plots have made two murderers out of two innocent hearts!95
While the audience identifies with this suffering, Voltaire makes clear his vision of Mahomet, who alone on stage admits that he is a violent impostor: “The sword and the Alcoran in my bloody hands, / Will impose silence on the rest of humanity.”96 When his first choice to play Mahomet bowed out, Voltaire found another actor he said was even better than his original choice because of “his simian appearance.”97 On stage, the character of Mahomet was conceived by the playwright as both subhuman and inhumane.
But Voltaire’s caricature belies his knowledge of actual Islamic history and religious doctrine. By 1738, he too owned George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’an, which included a long expository section on history and religion.98 By ignoring this relatively accurate information available to him, Voltaire betrays a deliberate decision to distort Islamic history as a means of warning against religious persecution and despotism.
Although Voltaire’s condemnation of the Catholic persecution of Protestants was indirect, church authorities recognized the analogy and quickly banned the play after its Paris premiere in 1742. They correctly charged that Voltaire’s intent was to attack Christianity rather than Islam; some even contended that he was promoting Deism.99 Voltaire resented the Catholic censorship of his play, but he agreed that Ottoman ambassadors in Paris would have had legitimate reason to object.100 In this case, he admitted, “It would not be decent to blacken the Prophet while entertaining the envoy.”101 But the calumny against Islam had proved too useful to abjure. In 1745, attempting to have the ban lifted, Voltaire wrote directly to Pope Benedict XIV, paying homage to him in Italian as “the head of the true religion” and casting the Prophet, unsurprisingly, as “the founder of that false and barbarous sect.”102 But his papal strategy failed, and the play would not be performed again in Paris until 1751.
MAHOMET THE IMPOSTOR in BRITAIN AS PROPAGANDA AGAINST FRANCE AND CATHOLICISM, 1744
When Voltaire’s play opened in London in 1744, under the new English title Mahomet the Impostor, it had undergone a few changes. Palmira’s father, named Alcanor instead of Zopire, was now styled not as an Arab leader, but as the head of an unhistorical “senate,” and Zaphna, rather than Seide, was Palmira’s love interest and brother. The changes had been made by two Protestant British authors, who translated and reworked Voltaire’s Fanatisme for the London production.103 The first, James Miller (d. 1744), an Anglican minister, took charge of the first four acts. In his hands, the play became an attack on the oppressive Catholic regime in France, which stood in contrast to the “unique” tolerance of Protestant British freedoms. The idea that Islam and Catholicism were both violent faiths, spread by the sword, had already been a common Protestant claim, and was even used in a newspaper advertisement, which proclaimed, “The original was by Authority forbid to be played in France on account of the free and noble Sentiments with regard to Bigotry and Enthusiasm, which shine through it; and that Nation found as applicable to itself, as to the bloody propagators of Mahomet’s Religion.”104 The play thus served to characterize the freedom of religion and thought as innately British. This Whig view of individual rights would go on to inspire American revolutionaries twenty years later.
It was not a coincidence that the advertisement for Mahomet the Impostor echoed key concepts of Cato’s Letters. Both were the products of Whig thought. John Hoadly (d. 1776), who stepped in to rework the play’s fifth and final act when James Miller died in 1744, probably also wrote the advertisements and the new prologue for the piece. Hoadly has been described as a “libertarian pamphleteer,” but he was also the son of the famed Whig and Anglican bishop Benjamin Hoadly (d. 1761),105 who’d been defended in 1717 by one of the authors of Cato’s Letters when he had preached about the king that “the Gospels provided no textual support for any visible church authority.”106 When controversy ensued, support for Bishop Hoadly’s views became a public affirmation of one’s Whig affiliation.107
Truly his father’s son, the younger Hoadly probably wrote a rhymed prologue for Mahomet the Impostor that praised British freedoms absent in repressive Catholic France. He also stressed his father’s Whig ideals of anticlericalism and toleration:
No clergy here usurp the free-born mind,
Ordained to teach, and not enslave mankind;
Religion here bids persecution cease,
Without, all order, and within, all Peace
Religion to be Sacred must be free;
Men will suspect—where bigots keep the key.108
After some of the play’s extensive verses in the last act were excised in 1765, Mahomet the Impostor finally became a hit both as a stage production and a book. In the print editions from 1776 and 1777, the engravings of an actor named Bensley dressed in an approximation of Ottoman garb, with “the Alcoran” in one hand and a scimitar in the other, embodied in a single image the themes of religious fraud and violence.109 Frequently republished, the play would be widely disseminated in writing on both sides of the Atlantic.110 And it was immensely popular as a London stage staple from 1776 and beyond.
MAHOMET THE IMPOSTOR as a BRITISH VEHICLE FOR THE CRITIQUE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IN NEW YORK CITY, 1780
In 1780, British officers besieged by American rebels performed Mahomet the Impostor in New York City.111 They penned a new rhymed prologue, which was recited by a member of the Royal Navy, dressed as a Native American chief, who condemned the American traitors as heretics:
Make
false apostate Subjects blush to own,
That Indians are more Loyal to the Crown,
Than those the Parent Country bred and bore,
Clasp’d to her Breast, and nourish’d on this Shore.112
The Indian chief goes on to predict Britain’s victory in America, her commercial domination of the world, and the defeat of her Catholic enemies Spain and France:
The sword shall sheath when stern rebellion’s dead
And Cities rise, where gallant Soldiers bled.
Then shall the produce of this Land be bore,
To foreign Marts, and every distant shore
Receive our Commerce, and acknowledge too
That while we are to Parent England true,
To France and Spain defiance shall be hurl’d,
And leagued with her, we’ll conquer all the World.113
The British officers identified the American revolutionaries with the forces of Mahomet, an anti-Islamic condemnation of the enemy.114
MAHOMET THE IMPOSTOR as a POSSIBLE AMERICAN CRITIQUE OF BRITISH TYRANNY, 1782
Two years later in Baltimore, the American revolutionaries presented their own production of Mahomet the Impostor. The Americans certainly did not identify with Mahomet, viewing the play as a parable of the dangers of tyranny.115 Instead, they likened King George III to “the Impostor.” Advertisements in the local paper praised the French troops, still stationed in town since helping the Americans defeat the British at Yorktown the previous year, for their “great politeness,” and saw the play as an “Opportunity to declare, that the prejudices against the French Nation which the English so pertinaciously attributed to the Americans” were false.116 Voltaire, a supporter of the American Revolution, might at last have been pleased with the reception of his play.
No special prologue exists from this first Baltimore performance of Mahomet, but one dedicated to George Washington for another contemporary production by the same theater company reflects the sentiments of the American audience in the wake of their recent victory over the British. The actress who declaimed the prologue celebrated the virile Revolutionary virtues of courage, liberty, freedom, and independence possessed by her imagined future husband:
To be a patient wife, I grant’s a curse;
But then, old Maid! O Lud! that’s surely worse,
But hold, what kind of men will suit us best?
A Fool—no, no—there we can’t agree—
The Man of Courage is the man for me.
Who fights for glorious Liberty, will find
His empire rooted in the female mind.
’Tis base Slave that stains the name of Man,
Who bleeds for Freedom will extend his plan;
Will keep the generous principle in view,
And with the Ladies Independent too.117
Extant broadsides announce the Baltimore performances of Mahomet on October 1 and October 15, 1782.118 The last American performance would be in 1796, when it may have served to criticize the violence of the French Revolution.119
Broadside announcing the performance of Voltaire’s Mahomet in Baltimore. (illustration credit 1.1)
THE ALGERINE CAPTIVE AND THE MULLAH: AN AMERICAN LESSON IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION AND TOLERATION, 1797
In 1797, the American lawyer and playwright Royall Tyler (1757–1826) published The Algerine Captive; or The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner among the Algerines. By this time, the United States had suffered the captivity of its sailors for more than a decade, because independence from Britain had left the new country without naval protection or sufficient funds to establish treaties with North African pirate states. By 1793, more than one hundred Americans had been captured and imprisoned in Algiers, but negotiations to free them stalled for lack of ransom.120 The earliest group of twenty-one Americans seized in 1785 was thus held for eleven years in Algiers. Two of them were rescued by private donations; almost half would die of disease waiting for their freedom.121 In 1797, six months before the publication of Tyler’s novel, survivors of the earliest group along with more recently imprisoned Americans were released as the result of a treaty.122 By 1800, the United States had established peace treaties with all four North African powers: Morocco (1787), Algiers (1796), Tripoli (1797), and Tunis (1799).123 But the problem of piracy remained so serious that Thomas Jefferson chose military action as a response during his first term as president, from 1801 to 1805. With the exception of Jefferson’s attack against Tripoli and a final assault against Algiers in 1815, the so-called Barbary Wars consisted, in effect, of North African fleets’ raids of American ships.
Unlike Voltaire’s imagined account of the distant past, The Algerine Captive dealt with an urgent contemporary issue through the experience of a fictive New Hampshire native taken captive by Algerian pirates.124 The main character, Dr. Updike Underhill, though appalled by his exposure to slavery in the southern United States, nevertheless participates in the African slave trade, as did many seafaring New Englanders: “I execrated myself for even the involuntary part I bore in this execrable traffic: I thought of my native land, and blushed.”125
One day, the unfortunate Yankee is captured at sea by Algerian pirates. The pirate commander is impractically decked out for a corsair: “the captain, glittering in silks, pearl, and gold, sat cross-legged upon a velvet cushion to receive me.”126 As Underhill suffers from vermin, thirst, and hunger, he is befriended by a West African slave who, in a display of profound humanity, feeds the man who had helped enslave him.127 The former American slaver, ashamed, and now himself a slave, vows that if he were “once more to taste the freedom of my native country,” then “every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce” of the American slave trade.128 Neither Tyler nor his readers were aware of the double irony of American slavery: Muslims were among those West Africans seized and sold to Americans as slaves.
In 1788, the year of Underhill’s capture, the Constitution of the United States had just been ratified after heated debate. Underhill declares yearningly, “Let those of our fellow citizens, who set at nought the rich blessings of our federal union, go like me to a land of slavery, and they will then learn how to appreciate the value of our free government.”129 By contrast, he depicts the dey of Algiers as an Islamic despot, with “a diamond crescent” upon his turban, surrounded by prisoners literally “licking the dust as a token of reverence and submission.”130 In this regard, Tyler’s novel echoes earlier political theory distinguishing British and American liberty from Islamic tyranny.131
Stripped of everything, Underhill remains captive in Algiers for six years, unable to pay his own ransom or obtain help from his government, like so many real-life American captives. Eventually, he becomes the private property of a former Turkish military officer, who has only one wife, as was common, despite the allowance for four, akin to “the patriarchal manners described in Holy Writ.”132 In other words, the author here refuses the stereotype of supposedly unbridled sexuality among Muslim males while also reminding readers of the similar behavior of the Old Testament prophets. This was to challenge the general consensus in Europe and the United States that polygamy was a decadent, uniquely Islamic practice.
After defending himself against an overseer, Underhill is sent to work in a stone quarry, often the lot of real Christian captives. Debilitated by harsh treatment, he is urged by a British Muslim convert to forsake Christianity and join Islam to gain his freedom.133 In fact, many Europeans and a few American captives in North Africa were thus converted to Islam.134 To aid in Underhill’s conversion, his friend arranges a meeting for him with “the mollah,” a term for a Muslim cleric more common in Turkey, Iran, and India than in North Africa. With the promise of rest from hard labor during this proselytizing attempt, Underhill agrees to listen to arguments in support of Islam. The author assures the reader that his American hero will resist any attempt at conversion to a faith long held in contempt on both sides of the Atlantic. He
wonders “what could be said in favour of so detestably ridiculous a system as the Mahometan imposture.”135 But as Underhill listens to a series of persuasive arguments about the positive aspects of Islam and Christianity’s history of religious intolerance toward fellow Christians and Muslims, his reaction surprises.
The Muslim cleric is a former Greek Christian from Antioch, also captured by Algerian pirates, who assures Underhill that conversion to Islam will involve only persuasion through discussion. This the cleric presents in contrast to “the church of Rome and its merciless inquisitors,” who in contrast employ “all the honour and profit of conversion by faggots, dungeons, and racks.” Tyler’s predictable anti-Catholicism is thus expressed by his Muslim character who favors “rational argument” over torture.136
In his compelling speeches, the Muslim asserts that religious affiliation is a geographical and cultural accident rather than a choice: “Born in New England, my friend, you are a Christian purified by Calvin. Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist.”137 Having mapped out the possibilities that Underhill might have wound up as a Hindu, a follower of the Dalai Lama, Confucius, or Zoroaster, the cleric continues, “A wise man adheres not to his religion because it was that of his ancestors. He will examine the creeds of other nations, compare them to his own, and hold fast that which is right.” When Underhill remains quietly skeptical, the cleric urges him to “Speak out boldly” and without fear, acknowledging that Christians have understood Islam as “the Mahometan imposture.” The cleric then goes on to compare the relative merits of Christianity and Islam by posing four questions:
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Page 5