Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 by Humberto Garcia (review)

How the notion of “Islamic republicanism” came to haunt the English Enlightenment imagination is a fascinating, and, in some ways, surprising, story. This book deserves to be read by all Restoration and eighteenth-century specialists, though only the introduction and first two chapters address the period of most concern to the Scriblerian’s readers, and these are by no means the strongest chapters. Tracing persistent ideas from the 1680s and Henry Stubbe to Coleridge’s “Mahomet” (1799) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Mr. Garcia brings to bear a judiciously chosen, broad range of scholarship on Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and East-West relations to illuminate eighteenth-century English literary culture. What he achieves by doing so is to uncover a radical undercurrent of Enlightenment ideas for which Islamic precedents could be invoked—constitutional government, and guaranteed liberties, especially religious toleration and the protection of minorities. English Protestant alliances with the Ottoman Empire against a Catholic absolutist Europe could easily be imagined and deployed by either side in the Toleration debates and debates about sovereignty throughout the vicissitudes of later Stuart rule. Whether mobilized approvingly by deists or antagonistically by Anglican clergymen, the figure of the Prophet Muhammed had, by the 1680s, come largely to stand for republicanism and freedom of religion, not conversion by the sword.

In the first chapter, Mr. Garcia ushers in Henry Stubbe, author of a manuscript, The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, that went further than anyone else dared to do in asserting that Islam was a rational and natural religion, much closer in fact to Jesus’s (in Stubbe’s Qur’anic usage, Isa’s) original Christianity than subsequent clerical and ecclesiastical deformations. Inspiring Stubbe in this defense of Islam was the so-called Count Teckely conspiracy, during which a Hungarian nobleman acted to guarantee, by means of an Ottoman alliance, his Protestant countrymen’s property rights and religious freedom. Protection against Habsburg domination could only be secured by becoming an Ottoman client state. The collapse of this alliance, resulting from the Habsburg victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, gave both Titus Oates and Anglican and Tory satirists plenty of material during the era of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. Mr. Garcia convincingly shows how the private circulation of Stubbe’s manuscript continued to influence thinkers, including Toland, into the early eighteenth century. The second chapter, on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from the Ottoman embassy, is the weakest in the book, though it serves to support the argument. Mr. Garcia’s take on Montagu contains few surprises but takes as its text a nineteenth-century edition of Montagu’s writings instead of the expected combination of Robert Halsband’s authoritative Clarendon edition of the Complete Letters with early editions of the Letters from 1763 onward, taking note of spurious interpolations. It is also a pity that the excellent Broadview edition of Turkish Embassy Letters, edited by Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn (2013), was not available to Mr. Garcia. The attribution of “Tory feminism” to Montagu is not persuasively presented here. The friendship between Mary Astell—who supplied a preface to the Letters—and Lady Mary notwithstanding, abundant evidence for Montagu’s otherwise Whig sympathies needed to be explored.

The limitations of these first two chapters should deter nobody. Mr. Garcia really does helpfully clarify the otherwise confusing positions taken by Burke during the trial of Warren Hastings regarding the “ancient Mughal constitution.” The final three chapters—on Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798), on Coleridge and Southey, and on the Shelleys—continue to illuminate familiar and less familiar literary works. Anyone who has not studied Coleridge’s poem “Mahomet” of 1799 (and one suspects that there are a number) will discover a young Coleridge portraying the Prophet of Islam as a reformist hero and deliverer of the oppressed, wreaking whirlwind justice of the sort of which he and his friend Southey only ever diffidently dreamed...