Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today by John V. Tolan (review)

In recent decades, offensively negative European representations of the Prophet Muhammad have sparked outcry and sometimes violent reprisals. Non-Muslims have portrayed the Prophet in derogatory and polemical ways since the early centuries of Islam. Some may be surprised to learn that Europeans have often portrayed Muhammad positively, too. In Faces of Muhammad, historian John V. Tolan traces the development of both positive and negative representations of Muhammad. Tolan, who earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and is now professor of history at the University of Nantes, includes views from European Christians, Jews, and freethinkers. He also acknowledges the existence of European Muslims and the artificiality of "the West" even as he uses it to delimit his project. Non-Muslim European writers, scholars, artists, and other elite figures have developed many depictions of "Mahomet," distinct from the Muhammad of history or of Islamic tradition. These "Mahomets" were rhetorical and symbolic tools in debates among Europeans, even when they were based on knowledge of Islam and Islamic sources. By tracing these images through a wide range of primary sources, Tolan makes a valuable contribution to intellectual and cultural history.

The book proceeds chronologically. In medieval and early modern Europe, "Mahomet" was sometimes a naked idol worshiped by the "Saracens." The images associated with the cult of the saints made Christians uneasy, and imagining their foes worshiping images relieved this anxiety. It enabled Christians to draw the line between good and evil based on who won battles, not who used "idolatrous" images. These fantastic depictions also justified the Crusades and entertained audiences. In time, corruptions of Muhammad's name (mahounde, mahun, and so on) came to mean "idol" in French and English. Others, particularly from the twelfth century on, described Muhammad as a fraudulent inventor of heresy. Accounts of his life usually involved some of the following legends invented by non-Muslims: a trained dove that ate grain from his ear so that it appeared the Holy Spirit was speaking to him; a trained cow that brought him the Qur'an tied to its horns; epileptic fits he claimed were caused by Gabriel's visits; and a floating coffin suspended by magnets. These stories "served to explain away the successes of Islam … and to denigrate heretics closer to home by associating them with the charlatan Mahomet" (48).

In the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, some Iberian Christians read Islamic sources but still depicted Muhammad as a "pseudoprophet." This enabled them to justify conquest as a restoration of lands illegitimately seized, to discourage fellow Christians from converting to Islam, and to argue for crusading. In the mid-fifteenth century, however, Nicholas of Cusa saw an essential unity of religions and believed that Muhammad proclaimed much truth. Later, some Muslims attempted to subvert Christianity or to convert Christians with forgeries such as the lead books discovered at Sacromonte near Granada in 1595 and the Italian-language Gospel of Barnabas written at Istanbul ca. 1600. Until this point, the themes will be familiar to readers of Tolan's earlier books, including Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press 2002).

From chapter 4 onward, Tolan successfully ventures later than his usual era of research. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Ottomans conquered much of eastern Europe and western Christians split in the reformations, Islam and its prophet played an important part in European polemics. Some, like Martin Luther, saw the Turks as God's punishment for the errors of the European Church. They denigrated their opponents by arguing that even the (obviously bad) Turks were closer to the true faith than the Catholics, Lutherans, and so on. Others, though, claimed Muhammad as a positive religious reformer, using passages from the Qur'an and the hadith to reinforce their criticisms of contemporary Christian doctrine and practice. Some Catholic theologians even cited Muhammad...