"A warre . . . commodious": Dramatizing Islamic Schism in and after Tamburlaine

In one of the best-known moments of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays, the eponymous hero orders that copies of the "Turkish Alcoran" (2: 5.1.172) be burned. The play's spectators watch as his orders are carried out, to Tamburlaine's jeering dare: "Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, / Come down thyself and work a miracle" (2: 5.3.186-87). The dare has no immediate effect, temporarily gratifying the Christian spectator's expectations. But a mere thirty-one lines later, Tamburlaine is suddenly stricken with "distemper," of which he will soon die—although not before his physician has also had a chance to give a convincing medical account of what ails him. This sensational scene has fueled many a critical argument about Tamburlaine's self-understanding as the "scourge of God," and the grammatical double-speaking of that formulation: is Tamburlaine a scourge sent by God to the Muslim world, for the benefit of Christians, as John Foxe sees it? Or might he be the instrument of a wrathful Old Testament God's anger with Christians for their divisions and divergences from the true path, a Muslim scourge sent to punish them, as Richard Knolles viewed the mighty Ottoman emperors? Further questions arise given the pronounced construction of Tamburlaine as a Muslim, or at least a certain stereotype of Muslim identity, in part 2. From occasionally invoking pagan gods in part 1, Tamburlaine goes on to swear "by sacred Mahomet" (2: 1.3.109), and—killing his own son, torturing and humiliating those he has conquered, becoming increasingly obsessed with imperial expansion and with being "a terror to the world" (2: 4.2.201)—he seems to fall ever more closely into line with prevailing English stereotypes of the cruel Islamic despot.¹ But what might a Muslim Tamburlaine understand himself to be doing in burning the Koran?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the complexities of Tamburlaine's own religious and political identity within Marlowe's plays (and their sources), as well as in the reciprocal understanding that Marlowe could have expected from his first audiences. And the answer thus pursued sheds light on important but hitherto neglected aspects of the play: its engagement with a more complex and varied idea of Islam than the "Turk" stereotype prevailing in most modern scholarship acknowledges, as well as the domestic subtexts of this exploration of intra-Islamic conflict and schism. This essay suggests that we must turn our attention to Tamburlaine's aspirational Persian identity, an identity upon which he insists in both words and actions throughout the two parts, to understand his acts—and their interest for Marlowe's first audiences. This identity allowed him to be read by those first audiences as, among other things, a dissenting true believer like themselves (albeit within the Islamic tradition), and a timely surrogate for English Protestant imperial ambitions. It is the religious and political associations of Tamburlaine's Persian identity, as well as the intertexts that it evokes, that make sense—and substance—of the Koran-burning scene, and of the larger geopolitical purview of Marlowe's plays. In transforming the Mongol Timur of his sources into a Scythian shepherd-turned-Persian emperor, Marlowe brings his play right up to date with the domestic and international interests of his audiences, and charges his play with two topical but risky themes: religious schism and empire.

As the Persian king after whom he repeatedly styles himself, I propose, Tamburlaine becomes readable to early English audiences familiar with classical and contemporary Persia (and perhaps even with recent news of the 1587 accession of Shah Abbas) as a Shi'a Muslim ruler, opposed by belief as well as expediency to the Sunni Ottomans with whom he craves battle in both parts. In burning the Koran, then, Tamburlaine expressly burns the "Turkish Alcoran," the Sunni Koran regarding which Persian Shi'ites traditionally had some doubts.² In Marlowe's chief source for the Tamburlaine plays, George Whetstone's The Englysh Myrror (1586), immediately following the narratives of Usun Hasan, whose name Marlowe borrows for one of Tamburlaine's chief...