Islam in Early Modern Quaker Experience and Writing

From their beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, offered a unique and often challenging perspective in the Western world as pioneers of both inter-faith dialogue and social justice issues. This paper will demonstrate that early modern Quakers were uniquely open to befriending and learning from Muslims and that this contact aided Quakers of the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries in challenging Western social norms, particularly with regard to Western slavery. Lessons learned from Muslims and the process of inter-faith dialogue outside of Western boundaries enabled Quakers enough distance and breadth of perspective to take unique ideological positions that ran counter to the powerful discourses of the West.

Contact with Islam aided the early modern Quakers in thinking beyond the discourses of their English, Christian, Western culture and helped them to challenge oppression by presenting alternative models. The Quakers were much better suited than their fellow early modern English and Western European Christian religionists to learn lessons from other cultures because their religion did not prejudice them against Muslims and other cultures but rather encouraged dialogue. Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the direct links between early modern Quaker values of equality and tolerance and the largely Quaker-led reform movements of the nineteenth century including abolition of slavery, rethinking capital punishment and the enfranchisement of minorities and women. Nevertheless it is a premise of this paper that there is a strong continuity of ideology and that these later social movements were a logical outworking of early modern Quaker beliefs and values. While Islam was by no means the only force influencing early modern Quaker ideas, it was a vital ingredient because it presented the Quakers with a different set of cultural discourses with which they could begin their centuries-long challenging and overthrow of Western injustices.

This paper will first explore the importance of Islam in forming the uniquely inclusive Quaker worldview in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; secondly this paper will examine the influence of Islamic culture in early modern Quaker thinking on the issue of slavery, demonstrating how this intercultural and inter-faith exchange stimulated early Quaker social activism.

Part I: Relationship with Islam Aids Early Modern Quakerism in Transcending Western Discourses

This paper does not claim that Islam was the primary religious influence on the Quakers as they formed their worldview. It is beyond the scope of this project to consider the vast array of religious traditions and Enlightenment thinkers whose ideas filtered into Quakerism. In terms of religious traditions, the early Quakers certainly identified much more closely with the Christian Millenarian and Anabaptist traditions; and, more broadly, with Christianity in general and even Judaism. Derogatory references to Islam, Muslims and the Qur'an outnumber favourable ones in early modern Quaker writings. George Fox, the man who founded Quakerism in the middle of the seventeenth century, believed that Muslims were misguided¹ and should be evangelized into Christian truth.² Even so, Quaker openness to Islam was remarkable for its time. Extensive research of Quaker writings for this paper has failed to uncover any demonic imagery employed against Muslims or characterizations of the Qur'an as a wicked or evil book. As will be demonstrated below, there was an emergence among Quakers of a collective concept of Islam, or the "Turk," that was fundamentally different from the predominating English and Western perceptions. Overwhelmingly, Quaker writers found Muslim society to be morally equal to the Christian societies of Europe, and they often cited examples in which Muslims were acting in a more enlightened way than Christians. This section will demonstrate that early modern...