Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840

6 A Last Woman’s Eschatology: The Avenging Turks in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

c h a p t e r s i x A Last Woman’s Eschatology The Avenging Turks in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man When the earth shall be shaken by an earthquake; and the earth shall cast forth her burthens; and man shall say, What aileth her? On that day the earth shall declare her tidings, for that thy Lord will inspire her. On that day men shall go forward in distinct classes, that they may behold their works. The Koran,“The Earthquake,” chapter 101 Mary Shelley’s interest in a syncretistic account of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is best exemplified in Percy Shelley’s The Assassins: A Fragment of a Romance (1814–15),an unpublished work that she edited and transcribed.1 This incomplete “fragment” romance aligns the historical narrative of the Jewish diaspora following General Titus’ sacking of Jerusalem in ad 70 with an Oriental tale about an early antitrinitarian Christian community. The Assassins, a primitive JewishChristian people named after a radical Gnostic sect in Islam, the Nizari Ismailis, fled Jerusalem before it was sacked by the Roman armies. In the wilderness of Lebanon, these nomadic people established an egalitarian commune. Lacking magistrates and priests, their Islamic republic practices equal labor and mutual love,and,“acknowledging no laws but those of God,they modeled their conducts towards their fellow men by the conclusions of their individual judgment on the practical application of those laws” (124). The Assassins are proto-Protestant Muslims. They remained secluded from state priestcraft and gross superstition, choosing instead to study the rational truth found in scripture and the esoteric sciences without clerical mediation. By borrowing the name of an eleventhcentury radical Islamic sect, Percy and Mary Shelley provide an extremely unorthodox account on the origins of apostolic Christianity. Their synchronized prophetic (Abrahamic) history not only indulges in the Gnostic heresy but also implies that Trinitarian Christianity deviated from the natural religion of love. Only “Gnostic” Islam remains faithful to primitive Christianity. 190   Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 The Assassins’ Islamic republicanism helps elucidate Mary Shelley’s unusual eschatological portrayal of the Turks in The Last Man. Indeed, it is highly ironic, if not outright bizarre, that this novel posits an apocalyptic history in which the modern (Christian) millennium does not commence with Islam’s fall. On the contrary, the defeat of the Turks dashes all utopian schemes, secular and religious. This event inaugurates a “feminine” Oriental infection—the avenging Turks in a metaphorical form—that spreads into Europe and England. For a novel that stages an apocalyptic clash between a “civilized” Christianity and a “barbaric” Mahometanism in Constantinople (Istanbul), I find it remarkable that The Last Man has not received as much attention as the Safie-Felix subplot in Frankenstein. Much has been written about the liberal feminist Orientalism informing the story of Felix’s “sweet Arabian,” Safie, who escapes the oppression of her father’s Muslim faith for the feminist freedom found in European Christendom . However, literary critics have not investigated the feminist-Orientalist tropes employed in Shelley’s other novels.2 In examining representations of Islam in The Last Man, it is possible to move beyond Frankenstein and build on scholarship that treats Mary Shelley as an author in her own right—and not simply as Percy Shelley’s alter ego or Mary Wollstonecraft’s shadow-image.3 Many critics have discussed “the Last Man” theme in the nineteenth century and offered countless attempts to read the novel’s characters as allegorical portrayals of the author, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron.4 Unfortunately, these discussions limit the novel to biographical issues (Mary’s tragic and lonely life) or to the preoccupations of a small literary coterie. Building on previous chapters, I explore how Mary Shelley’s resistance toward Godwinian politics leads to an alternative feminist story about the Islamic republic within the eschatological framework of The Last Man. I contend that she, unlike her husband, never abandoned her commitment to the radical syncretism featured in The Assassins. In a journal entry dated October 21, 1838, Mary Shelley describes her uneasy relationship to Godwinism, the feminist cause, and, implicitly, Mary Wollstonecraft : In the first place, with regard to “the good cause”—the cause of the advancement of freedom and knowledge, of the rights of women, &c.—I am not a person of opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this. Some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my...