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Claritas Books.
First Published in May 2022
Typeset in Minion Pro 14/11
Islam and the English Enlightenment: The Untold Story
By Zulfiqar Ali Shah
Series Editor: Sharif H. Banna
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-905837-11-3
Zulfiqar Ali Shah received his B.A. and M.A. (Hons) in Comparative
Religions from the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan
and his Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of
Wales, UK. He has taught at the International Islamic University in
Islamabad, the University of Wales in the UK, the University of North
Florida and Cardinal Stritch University in the US. He is former President of
the Islamic Circle of North America and the Shariah Scholars Association
of North America. Dr. Zulfiqar Shah is currently the Executive Director and
Secretary General of the Fiqh Council of North America and Religious
Director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, USA. He has authored many
articles and books including Anthropomorphic Depictions of God: The
Concept of God in the Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions, Islam’s
Reformation of Christianity and St. Thomas Aquinas and Muslim Thought.
His forthcoming ground-breaking books include Islam and the French
Enlightenment and Islam and the Founding Fathers of America.
Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s Islam and the English Enlightenment: The Untold Story
offers an important and hitherto underappreciated account of the impact of
Islamic theology on the development of European and particularly English
Enlightenment, tracing the path from the early Reformation through the
development of Antitrinitarianism and the Enlightenment. This is a book
that anyone interested in stepping outside a Eurocentric view of the rise of
the West and of the modern age must read.
Michael A. Gillespie
Professor of Political Science and Philosophy
Duke University

I
Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s Islam and the English Enlightenment is one of the
most profoundly enlightening books I have read in years. Dr. Shah
compellingly demonstrates that English Enlightenment thinkers were
undeniably indebted to Islamic sciences and thought, and that the
foundational principles of rationalist thought, scientific inquiry, and
religious toleration were deeply anchored in the Islamic tradition. In my
view, Dr. Shah’s research soundly challenges the exclusionary and
ahistorical idea of the West being a product of a Judeo-Christian tradition or
civilization that exists in tension with the Islamic civilization. If the Western
civilization is indebted to the Enlightenment then historians must come to
terms with the fact that the Enlightenment is deeply indebted to the Islamic
tradition. Islam and the English Enlightenment is a must read for every
serious student of history, religion, or culture.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law

I
Students of European intellectual history are made to believe that the
European renaissance has its roots in its liberation from church authority
and rediscovering the Greek spirit of thought, the ideals of Liberal
democracy, freedom of thought and critical thinking. The transformatory
role of Muslim intellectual tradition in this process is confined to transfer of
Greek thought through their Arabic translations. The scholarly work of Dr
Zulfiqar, Islam and the English Enlightenment: The Untold Story is an
evidence based exceptional and valuable contribution to the world of
knowledge on the foundational role of the Muslim thought in the
intellectual development of the so-called Western enlightenment
Anis Ahmad
Meritorious Professor and President/Vice Chancellor
Riphah International University, Islamabad

I
In this compelling and comprehensive study, Dr Zulfiqar Ali Shah responds
with clarity and precision to those who continue to maintain that Islam is in
need of some form of rational ‘enlightenment.’ Against such uninformed
and Eurocentric accusations, Dr Shah convincingly demonstrates the central
role that Islam – grounded in scientific enquiry, religious toleration and
rationalist thought – played in shaping the values and ideas of the very
Enlightenment reformers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton who helped
to produce the modern world. While centrally focussed on examples from
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Islam and the English
Enlightenment ranges widely, engaging global connections to Europe from
the Renaissance that illustrate debts to the emergence and development of
Islamic philosophy and science. This study provides an indispensible guide
to how Islam and Muslim thinkers provided the principles and ways of
thinking that challenged the superstitions of the medieval era and without
which there would have been no Enlightenment.
Gerald MacLean
Emeritus Professor
University of Exeter

I
Although traditionally underexplored, the relation between Enlightenment
and Islam is crucial to appreciating the complexity of the making of the
modern world. With this book, Zulfiqar Ali Shah offers a significant
contribution toward a better understanding of the role that Islamic religious,
philosophical, scientific, legal, and political ideas played in the Age of
Enlightenment. This impressively erudite book indeed shows that many
important English thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
including religious enlighteners as well as radical Enlightenment
philosophers, were deeply interested in Islamic concepts and, to a certain
extent, were also influenced by Islamic views on scientific investigation,
communal life, natural religion, and primitive Christianity. Thus, this book
accomplishes a twofold purpose, as it sheds new light on the impact of
Islamic intellectual traditions on Enlightenment culture and it provides a
thought-provoking reassessment of Islam in itself, which Dr. Shah depicts
as compatible with Enlightenment principles, values, and practices.
Diego Lucci
Professor of Philosophy and History
American University in Bulgaria
 Contents
Foreword – 19
Introduction – 21
Weber’s Eurocentrism – 23
Critique of Eurocentrism – 27
From Dark Ages to Medieval Renaissance – 35
Islam and Latin Scholasticism – 39
Italian Renaissance – 44
Renaissance Art – 47
Venice and Islamic World – 50
Sixteenth-Century Protestant Reformation – 53
Radical Reformation – 61
CHAPTER 1
Roman Christianity and Its Socio-Political Thought – 75
Augustinian and Cappadocian Models – 78
The Divine Right Church and Salvation – 80
The Divine Right State – 82
Heresy and Divinely Sanctioned Terror – 84
Augustine and Religious Coercion – 86
CHAPTER 2
Islam and the SouthernReformation of Christianity – 93
Islamic Anti-Trinitarianism and Its Natural, Republican Implications – 94
Islam and Human Salvation – 101
Unity of God and Unity of Creatures – 105
Islam and Democracy – 107
Islam and English Enlightenment – 112
CHAPTER 3
Seventeenth Century England, Overseas Trade and English Identity Formation – 117
Anglican Church and State – 120
Charles I and Archbishop Laud’s Authoritarianism – 123
Overseas Trade and Intellectual Transformation – 126
Puritanism, Biblicism and Restorationism – 131
Religious Roots of English Revolution – 137
Economic Causes of English Revolution – 140
Overseas Trade and English Revolution – 144
Piracy and Barbary States – 147
Capitulations and Muslim Soft Empire – 149
The East India Company – 153
Trade and Cultural Exchanges – 157
Overseas Trading Companies and Domestic Politics – 162
Travelogues and Acculturation Process – 164
 Islamic World and Scientific Revolution – 168
Natural Philosophy and Natural Theology – 180
Overseas Trade and Scientific Revolution – 185
Arabic and Oriental Manuscripts – 187
Overseas Trade and Royal Society – 191
Royal Society, Westminster School and Oriental Languages – 196
The Baconian John Beale and Islamophilia – 198
Alchemy, Arabs and English Natural Philosophers – 207
Spiritual Alchemy – 210
Respublica Mosaica, Prisca Sapientia and Prisca Theologia – 213
Near Eastern Knowledge and Biblical Hermeneutics – 219
Overseas Trading Companies and Cross-cultural Diffusions – 221
The Allure of Islamic World and English Identity Formation – 225
Commonwealth Radicalism – 230
Restoration of Monarchy and Dialectical Struggles – 236
The Glorious Revolution, Anglican Monarchy and Church – 242
Turkish Coffeehouses – 245
Levant Trade and Coffee – 247
The Centers of Dissent – 250
Coffeehouses and Stuart Monarchy – 256
CHAPTER 4
Enlightenment: A Religious Revolution – 259
Enlightenment and Destruction of Old Regime – 260
The Anthropomorphic Shift – 264
Anti-Trinitarianism and Enlightenment – 268
Anti-Trinitarianism and Islam – 269
CHAPTER 5
English Enlightenment and Unitarian Islamic Syncretism – 281
Muhammad, the Prophet of Enlightenment – 285
Overseas Trade, Piracy and Turning Turk – 287
CHAPTER 6
Islam and the Early English Enlightenment – 299
Henry Stubbe and John Locke:The Pococke and Shaftesbury Pedigrees – 303
CHAPTER 7
Henry Stubbe and Muhammadan Christianity – 307
Stubbe, the Father of Muhammadan Christianity – 309
Muhammad, the Protestant Prophet – 313
Muhammadan Christianity and Natural Law – 320
Muhammad, the Machiavellian Prince – 323
Stubbe and English Deism – 323
Stubbe and English Civil Religion – 325
CHAPTER 8
John Toland and Mohammadan Christianity – 331
 Toland and New Testament Criticism – 335
Toland and Primitive Christianity – 336
Toland and Gospel of Barnabas – 337
Toland and Mahometan Christianity – 341
CHAPTER 9
John Locke: The Unitarian Heretic – 345
Locke and Travel Literature – 347
Muslims in Locke’s Horizons – 350
Locke and Islamic Minimalism – 354
Locke and Christ’s Pre-existence: Some Discussions – 358
Locke’s Messianic Christology – 366
Locke’s Islamic Christology – 373
Locke’s Popular Sovereignty – 380
Locke and Religious Tolerance – 383
CHAPTER 10
Socinianism: The Muslim Bridge – 389
The Racovian Alcoran – 390
Miguel Servetus: The Martyr of Liberty – 393
Servetus and the Quran – 394
CHAPTER 11
John Milton: The Pious Muslim? – 399
Milton’s Christology – 400
Milton’s Scripturalism – 403
Milton and Middle Eastern Culture – 406
CHAPTER 12
Isaac Newton: The Enraged Anti-Trinitarian – 411
Newton’s Biblicism – 412
Newton and Primitive Christianity – 414
Newton and Early Christian Apologists – 416
Newton and Unitarian Theology – 422
Newton and Nicaean Christology – 428
Newton’s Heterodoxy – 435
CHAPTER 13
English Unitarians: Pinnacle of Islamic Hybrid – 442
Stephen Nye: The Roaring Unitarian – 444
Arthur Bury’s Naked Gospel – 447
William Freke: The Mystic Unitarian – 449
Epistle Dedicatory: The Culmination ofUnitarian Islamic Imagination – 453
Unitarian’s Turkish Faith – 460
The English Abdulla Mahumed Omar and “Mahomet No Imposter” – 465
Historica Monotheistica and Islamic Republicanism – 470
Endnotes – 476
Bibliography – 623
 Foreword
Robert F. Shedinger, Ph.D.
Luther College

Over the past twenty years I have had the great privilege to introduce scores
of students to the Islamic tradition. The most meaningful assignment I give
them is to research an area of medieval Islamic culture to present to the
class. Some groups report on advancements made in mathematics by
Muslim scholars like al-Khwarizmi. Others report on areas like biology and
medicine, physics and engineering, art and architecture, astronomy and
more. Students never fail to be amazed by the great cultural achievements
of the medieval Islamic world, especially when they encounter
achievements they thought (and were taught) resulted from the work of
European Enlightenment thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci or Nicolaus
Copernicus. Could Ibn Khaldun really have developed a theory of evolution
centuries before Charles Darwin? Could Muslim astronomers really have
calculated the circumference of a round earth before Columbus discovered
that the earth was not flat? Could Muslim physicians really have been
removing cataracts so many centuries before modern Western medicine?
Nothing impresses on my students the bias inherent in Western education
more than this assignment. How is it possible, they want to know, that they
never learned any of this before. They soon come to realize how important
it has been for the West to deny its cultural roots in the Muslim world in
order to maintain an image of Islam as a primitive force in the world. The
primitive nature of Islam then becomes a mirror in which the West sees its
own cultural superiority reflected back. With the ongoing rise of
Islamophobia in the West, breaking down this stereotype has never been
more important, and Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah with his new book Islam and the
English Enlightenment makes a major contribution to doing just that.
Dr. Shah has produced perhaps the most comprehensive and deep analysis
of the Islamic influence on the English Enlightenment ever produced. While
Western scholarship presents figures like Isaac Newton and John Locke in
cultural isolation, as if they developed their ideas in a complete cultural
vacuum, Dr. Shah documents the deep and abiding influence of Islamic
ideas on these and many other English Enlightenment figures. Far from
being a primitive force, Dr. Shah demonstrates how Islamic ideas provided
an important foundation for English Enlightenment thinkers as they broke
away from the mysterious theology and authoritarian structure of medieval
Christendom. If you think the English Enlightenment was a positive thing,
then you just might have Muslims to thank!
Never before to my knowledge has the cross-fertilization of Western and
Islamic ideas been so encyclopedically documented as it is here. In reading
Islam and the English Enlightenment, you will never see the relationship
between Islam and the West the same way again.
 Introduction
Islam, Muslims and Islamic civilisation are under siege in the West.
Subsequent to the tragic incidents of France and President Macron’s
misplaced reaction to it, Islam as a religion and community has witnessed
some of the worst attacks upon its heritage and legacy. To President
Macron, Islam is in crisis all over the globe and in dire need of
enlightenment. The President is perhaps unaware of the historical fact that
Islam played an important role in the French, English and American
Enlightenments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is the
Muslim world, and not Islam as a faith, which needs enlightenment and
revival.
Islam-bashing has become a lucrative profession; Islamophobes portray
Islam as a barbaric faith that breeds nothing but violence, ignorance and
superstitions. It is a set of irrational dogmas which promote theodicy,
theocracy, barbarism, totalitarianism and terrorism. As such Islam is
antithetical to rationalism, progress, modernity, liberty, freedom,
democracy, enlightenment, republicanism and constitutionalism. Islamic
civilisation is depicted as an alien culture with no or minimal contributions
to human civilisation and progress, especially in the Western context.
Islamophobes forget that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was
marred with internal strife, religious wars, instability, insecurity, economic
stagnation, irrationality, absolutism and persecutions. Europe’s transition
from its medieval absolutist Old Regime to enlightened republicanism
passed through the Islamic world - its religion, wealth, sciences,
institutions, ideas and practices. The Islamically inspired Unitarian, rational,
theological, radical reformation of Michael Servetus, Socinians, Unitarians,
Deists and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century overseas trade with the
Muslim East (both Atlantic and Mediterranean) played a fundamental role
in such a transition. The Whiggish Eurocentric historians tend to ignore
these historical facts.
On the other hand, Western civilisation is presented as the superior mother
of all civilisations, the true blessing to mankind. The West has achieved this
climax on its own without any external non-Western help. Eric Wolf
observes: “We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that
there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as
a society and civilisation independent of and in opposition to other societies
and civilisations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a
genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat
Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance
the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the
industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the
United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.”1 Colonial Europe and its institutions are directly linked to
ancient Rome without any intermediaries or interlocutors. According to
Anthony Pagden, “the theoretical roots of the modern European overseas
empires reached back into the empires of the Ancient World. It was, above
all, Rome which provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain,
Britain, and France with the language and political models they required.”2
The superiority of Western civilisation, Judeo-Christian traditions and
European manifest destiny are some of the underlying ethos of Euro-
centrism and American specialism. It is argued that the West in general, and
Europe in particular, is the cradle of democracy, modern science and
civilisation while the East in general, and the Muslim world in particular,
are the sources of ignorance, barbarism, paganism, irrationalism, economic
stagnation, despotic feudalism and institutionalised patrimonial and
parochial value system that impedes modernity in all its forms and
expressions. Europe’s so-called unique restless, rationalism,3 liberal
individualism, democratic value system, capitalism, moral ethos and
manifest destiny are depicted as fundamental roots of the rise of Europe and
regression of non-Europeans including the Muslims who lack the above-
mentioned special traits and cannot keep up with the pace of European
progress.4 The process of modernisation and intellectualisation is unilateral
and unilineal. It started with the Antiquity, moved through European
Feudalism, crossed over to Enlightenment through medieval Renaissance
humanism and resulted in Western Capitalism and Scientific/Industrial
Revolution. Therefore modernity, science, mercantilism and capitalism all
are the products of European rationalism, intellectualism and
exceptionalism, and unique to Western mind and conditions; in fact, it is in
European DNA. It is hereditary and an integral element of Europe’s
manifest destiny, imperialism and superiority.
Weber’s Eurocentrism
The renowned sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) specified “a number of
fundamental socio-economic and religious factors which distinguished the
European experience from that of the Muslim world, India and China, and
which were of crucial importance to the emergence of modern capitalism.”5
He emphasised the Protestant, Calvinist, Puritan ideological foundations for
North European capitalism, democracy and modernity. The critical point in
Weber’s argument was that seventeenth-century “dogmatic-predestinarian
Calvinism confronted the believer with a crisis of proof on his prospects for
salvation. Yet so deeply felt was the need for redemptive assurance by the
doubt-stricken soul that the pastoral literature of Puritan divines responded
to this cry by inserting good works in a mundane calling as a sign of grace.
Private profit is hereby the recipient of Weber’s ‘psychological sanction’
and is equated with eternal bliss, creating an ‘ideal’ stimulus for capitalist
acquisition.”6 To Weber, capitalism was an unintended, indirect and
psychological consequence of Calvinistic, Puritan ethos and not their
theology. There was dogmatic uncertainty about salvation due to strict
divine predestination, a crisis of proof which was met out not by Calvin or
Calvinist theology but by English Calvinist pastoral literature such as that
of Richard Baxter, which emphasised a psychological sanction for worldly
calling, resulting in a capitalistic lifestyle. “This entrepreneur was filled
with the conviction that Providence had shown him the road to profit not
without particular intention. He walked it for the greater glory of God,
whose blessing was unequivocally revealed in the multiplication of his
profit and possessions. Above all, he could measure his worth not only
before men but also before God by success in his occupation as long as it
was realised by legal means.”7 This psychological premium for labour was
a religious, transcendental cause for eternal perfection and felicity. It was
not meant for worldy power or pomp, but for ethico-religious reasons,
supplemented by other socio-economic factors. Weber emphasised the
“separation of the productive enterprise from the household which, prior to
the development of industrial capitalism, was much more advanced in the
West than it ever became elsewhere.”8 He highlighted the “development of
the Western city. In postmediaeval Europe, urban communities reached a
high level of political autonomy, thus setting off ‘bourgeois’ society from
agrarian feudalism. In the Eastern civilisations, however, partly because of
the influence of kinship connections that cut across the urban-rural
differentiation, cities remained more embedded in the local agrarian
economy.”9 Weber pinpointed the “existence, in Europe, of an inherited
tradition of Roman law, providing a more integrated and developed
rationalisation of juridical practice than came into being elsewhere.”10 This
tradition of rational Roman law was the main factor in “making possible the
development of the nation-state, administered by full-time bureaucratic
officials, beyond anything achieved in the Eastern civilisations. The
rational-legal system of the Western state was in some degree adapted
within business organisations themselves, as well as providing an overall
framework for the co-ordination of the capitalist economy.”11 He also
identified the “development of double-entry bookkeeping in Europe.”12 In
Weber’s view “this was a phenomenon of major importance in opening the
way for the regularising of capitalistic enterprise.”13 The above sketched
characteristics were “genetically the special peculiarity of Occidental
rationalism.”14 They produced a unique tradition of European rationalism,
which was genetically absent from all other non-European civilisations.
This unique rationalism resulted in the superior European civilisation. This
civilisational superiority was the manifest destiny of West, due to its unique
humanitarian and geographical circumstances, and could not have been
achieved anywhere other than Europe.
This unique sense of superiority was then roundly connected with Judeo-
Christian traditions, with the exclusion of any possibility of Islamic, Hindu
or Buddhist contributions to modernity or European civilisation. “For
though the development of economic rationalism is partly dependent on
rational technique and law, it is at the same time determined by the ability
and disposition of men to adopt certain types of practical rational conduct.
When these types have been obstructed by spiritual obstacles, the
development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner
resistance. The magical and religious forces, and the ethical ideas of duty
based upon them, have in the past always been among the most important
formative influences on conduct.”15 In fact Weberian sociology excluded
even the European Catholic Church from this unique rational tradition. “In
this case we are dealing with the connection of the spirit of modern
economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism.”16 Weber
pinpointed Protestantism as the main source of vibrant capitalism and
specified the Puritans as the heralds of modern global capitalism. “Taken
together, these represent a mixture of necessary and precipitating conditions
which, in conjunction with the moral energy of the Puritans, brought about
the rise of modern Western capitalism.”17 Democracy, science and
modernity were the outcome of this Puritan, Calvinist and Protestant ethical
lifestyle.
This narrow, idealist, teleological and moral interpretation of history and
civilisation is too simplistic, dubious, sketchy, arbitrary, fictitious, fanciful
and Whiggish. There was a time when Europe and Christiandom including
Protestant churches were marred with irrationalism, internal wars, religious
intolerance, persecutions, trade restrictions, absolutism and superstitions.
Christendom, from the Dark Ages to the premodern times, was a
persecutory society while the Muslim world promoted relative religious
freedom, republican ethos, free trade, limited monarchy and rational
discourse. Muslim theology overly emphasised simple Unitarianism and
good works as the foundation of eternal salvation and divine grace -
Christianity was orthodoxy while Islam was more orthopraxy. The Prophet
of Islam, Muhammad, was himself a merchant and sanctified trade, profit
and wealth accumulation by lawful means. Richness, profit and wealth were
not condemned the way Christianity, including Puritanism, Calvinism,
Lutheranism and Protestantism as a whole, berated Mammonism over the
centuries. Islam brought God and Mammon together within the moral
confines, and moral worldly pursuits were sanctified as foundational
spiritual acts. Man was not arbitrarily destined to Paradise or Hellfire based
upon divine whims, but depending upon his good or bad actions in this
worldly life. Christianity in all its forms, Catholics and Protestant included,
insisted upon absolute predestination, selection and grace. The relative
Catholic encouragement of good works was negated by insistence upon the
atoning death of Christ, sacramental efficacy, confessions and indulgences.
Both Luther and Calvin utterly demolished the need for good works,
insisting upon absolute predestination, selection and grace; good works
were useless, and divine grace through the atoning death was considered
supreme. The Anglican Church’s Calvinist theology was not much different
from Calvin’s diatribes against orthopraxy, and total dependence upon
orthodoxy and right beliefs were highly emphasized by Anglican leaders. A
long quote from M. H. Mackinnon is due here. Calvisnist Synodal “doctrine
is one of utter gloom and despair, complete with an omniscient and
vengeful deity who has decreed for eternity the fortunate few for election,
whereas the unfortunate majority has been doomed to perdition. Weber thus
sees dogma in much the same way as Calvin, reporting that one’s standing
before God is made impossible by Calvin’s system, of which Anglo-dogma
is a complete reflection. Calvinism is unable to incorporate knowledge of
assurance because of the complete transcendentality of its God and the
inability to fathom His secret decrees. By Weber’s account, unadulterated
predestinarianism of this sort spurns the use of means (works): Man is the
passive recipient of salvation. In Weber’s mind the ‘pure doctrine of
predestined grace’ was never entirely eliminated from Calvinism, inasmuch
as acts of the individual could in no way influence God’s election. By
extension, the devout can never know their calling, which is ‘both
impossible to pierce and presumptuous to question’; personal salvation
always; remains ‘above the threshold of consciousness,’ forever shrouded in
‘divine mystery.’ The elect are and remain God’s invisible church.”18
Additionally, capitalism, science and modernity did not flourish in many
areas where Calvinism was in the helms of affairs. Even the aesthetic
Puritanism of Richard Baxter was far less insistent upon good deeds than
Islam’s positive reinforcement. Baxter’s indirect, negative and foggy The
Aphorismes of Justification (1649) was more directed towards free-spirited
antinomians and their justification by grace alone reformed theology than
positive insistence upon good works and profit accumulation. Baxter’s
emphasis upon human depravity, Christ’s atoning death, grace-based
salvation scheme and condemnation of Mammonisn was no less emphatic
than the Calvinist Anglican Church. His emphasis upon good works was
relative, and did not fully reject the essential principles of Anglican
predestinarian theology and grace-based salvation. He promoted “a
modified ‘neonomian’ version of Calvinism.”19 Weber confessed overall
Christian (including Puritan) exhortations against usury, riches and wealth
accumulation, but still concluded that modern capitalism somehow
originated with Puritans.20 He somehow ignored the fact that Catholics,
Jews, Muslims and Hindus were into private profit and money-making as
anybody else. Many took it as their religious calling and profession to make
money and be generous, charitable and kind to those in need. “It is a grim
twist of irony that Weber would choose such a spiritually worthless vehicle
to realise his causal ambitions.”21
 Due to a multitude of theological and socio-economic reasons scholars
such as Mackinnon, F. Rachfahl,22 L. Brentano,23 W. Sombart,24 G.
Simmel,25 H. M. Robertson,26 K. Samuelson,27 A. Hyma,28 R. H. Tawney,29
Trevor-Roper,30 H. Luthy31 and many others have rejected Weberian
Eurocentric, Puritan theories of modern capitalism, democracy, science and
modernity.32 Mackinnon, after a long discussion of various rebuttals of
Weber’s theory concluded that Weber’s “thesis is ultimately wrong.”33
Samir Amin has amply demonstrated the absurdity of Weberian
“Christianophilia of Eurocentrism.”34 He noted that the “arguments Weber
advances, in this respect, are confused, despite their apparent precision.”35
But Weber’s thesis has its own life and followers.
Following Weber’s lead, many contemporary Eurocentric historians do not
hesitate to put Europe and Christianity at the centre of global prosperity and
influence.36 For instance David Landes argues that “as the historical record
shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime
mover of development and modernity.”37 Trevor- Roper maintains that
Christendom had “in itself the springs of a new and enormous vitality.”38 To
a certain extent the same Eurocentrism and exceptionalism is reflected in
the otherwise very objective works of Joseph Needham39, M. Elvin40 and F.
Braudel.41 They see European exceptionalism in the highly institutionalised
forms of European democracy, freedom, capitalism and individualism. They
also see a specifically European historical developmental scheme, from
Renaissance to Reformation to Enlightenment to Scientific Revolution to
modernity.
Critique of Eurocentrism
To Eric Wolf such “a developmental scheme is misleading. It is misleading,
first, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in
which each runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay.
History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about
how the virtuous win out over the bad guys. Frequently, this turns into a
story of how the winners prove that they are virtuous and good by winning.
If history is the working out of a moral purpose in time, then those who lay
claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history.”42 He
argues that “the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of
interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into
bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like ‘nation,’
‘society,’ and ‘culture’ name bits and threaten to turn names into things.
Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by
placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we
hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of
understanding.”43 Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson,
Saumitra Jha44 and many other contemporary historians, economists and
political scientists reject Weberian Eurocentric postulates and emphasise the
significance of overseas trade and its impact on religio-political, socio-
economic and scientific institutions of Europe in general and England in
particular. For instance, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James
Robinson state: “The evidence presented […] has established a significant
relationship between the potential for Atlantic trade and post-1500
economic development, and suggests that the opportunities to trade via the
Atlantic, and the associated profits from colonialism and slavery, played an
important role in the rise of Europe. This evidence weighs against theories
linking the rise of Western Europe to the continuation of pre-1500 trends
driven by certain distinctive characteristics of European nations or cultures,
such as Roman heritage or religion.”45 The overseas trade transformed
English economy, society, politics and religion. Initially it contributed to
deformation of the Old Regime’s absolutist religio-political theology by
questioning its scholastic, supernatural and authoritarian underpinnings and
instead emphasizing the rational, natural, utilitarian, pragmatic, sort of
republican reformation in conformity with simple and minimalistic message
of Jesus and his early disciples. The overall Puritan frustration with the
existing institutions and millenarian eschatology rooted in the books of
Daniel and Revelation was initially fueled by the ruins, destructions and
social dislocations of the Thirty Years’ War and later on aggravated by the
English Civil War. The unprecedented devastation was taken as a Biblical
prediction that the golden age of Saints would be preceded by terrible
destruction. Charles I and Archbishop Laud’s persecuting religious and
restrictive trade policies were used to portray them as agents of anti-Christ,
overseas trade with its voyages, discoveries, explorations and profits
reflected Daniel 12:4’s promises of golden age of social justice and
scientific progress, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased”, Puritan theocentrism, mercantilism, utilitarianism, pragmatism,
work ethics and humanitarianism were all elemental to the Puritan and
overseas traders’ Holy War against the anti-Christ monarchical powers of
Charles I and ecclesiastical debacles of Archbishop Laud. This utopian,
idealistic and chiliastic Puritanism coupled with virtues of mutual help,
justification by works and terrestrial gains as the bases of celestial
prosperity translated into overseas explorations, discoveries and profits and
played a fundamental role in the English Civil War and the subsequent
Revolution, Restoration and Glorious Revolution giving urgency to socio
economic, religio political and epistemic reforms. In the long process, the
overall Puritan sense of disgrace at home and chiliastic zeal coupled with
overseas trade reformed English religio-political theology on broader
radical, natural, utilitarian, rational, republican, Unitarian, Deistic lines. The
Trinitarian religio-political theology was absolutist, divine right,
hierarchical and persecutory, and overseas trade helped in fomenting an
alternative worldview and a new middle class of merchants which resisted
the hierarchical, absolutist Church and monarchy, gradually transforming it
into a limited monarchy and stifled episcopacy. Later democracy, religious
tolerance, Scientific Revolution and modernity were all products of this
multifaceted, multipronged seventeenth century dialectical struggles against
the Old Regime. The English trade with the Muslim world, the global
Muslim bridge to other civilations and alternative worldview was just one,
but instrumental, factor in this transformation of the Old Regime. The
frustrations, aspirations and urgencies were homegrown but some of the
intellectual solutions and thought patterns were stimulated and influenced
by outside ideas, appropriations and assimilations. This is the nature of
dialectical struggles and Europe was no exception.
Civilisations do not crop up in vacuums;46 they build upon other’s
achievements, though very often the credit is not given to the rightful
contributors. This is exactly the case with Muslim contributions to the
Western civilisation. For long medieval centuries Islam remained a
dominant culture while Europe was experiencing regression. Muslims
greatly borrowed from other civilisations such as the Greeks, Persians,
Indians and Chinese but then in turn created a dynamic synthesis of
philosophical thought, cultures and sciences. Europe during the medieval
centuries was surrounded by mighty Muslim empires and prone to
appropriate itself to their theological-philosophical thought, cultures and
policies. The dominant European narrative tends to downplay and mostly
obliterate any sense of Islamic contributions to the European civilisation;
Europe is always portrayed as the lender while the Islamic East is always
the borrower. Such a narrative was consciously constructed in post-
medieval centuries and reflected the old European insecurities. Jack Goody
observes that “the tendency to reject the eastern connection goes back to
more general problems of ‘roots’ and of ethnocentrism, aggravated by the
expansion of Islam from the seventh century and the defeats involved in the
Crusades and the Christian loss of Byzantium. At that time the opposition
between Europe and Asia took the form of one between Christian Europe
and Islamic Asia which inherited the earlier stereotypes of ‘democratic’ and
‘despotic’ respectively. Islam was conceived as a threat to Europe, not only
militarily, which it became early on in the Mediterranean, but also morally
and ethically; Muhammad is consigned by Dante to the eighth circle of the
Inferno. At the broadest level, ethnocentrism divides all of us from the
others and so helps to define our identity. But it is a bad guide to history,
especially to world history.”47 This is nothing short of theft of history. The
same theft was committed by the Whiggish eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century European historians48 when they intentionally ignored Eastern
contributions in the making of modern Europe. They portrayed the past in
light of the progressive present49 while they should have attempted to
understand the past in terms of the past.50 The theft of history “refers to the
take-over of history by the west. That is, the past is conceptualised and
presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe,
often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world. That
continent makes many claims to having invented a range of value-laden
institutions such as ‘democracy’, mercantile ‘capitalism’, freedom,
individualism. However, these institutions are found over a much more
widespread range of human societies.”51
This imperial usurpation of history has serious consequences for inter-
civilisational relationships.52 The unique sense of Europe’s calling is one of
the main sources of old and modern colonial mentality, hegemonic agendas
and discrimination in the modern world. The resultant resentment and
radical blowback are equally disturbing. Non-Europeans, especially
Muslims, feel that their history has been hijacked by some of the European
historians, as their lands and resources were - and currently are - colonised
by European masters. This sense of intellectual and physical imperialism
breeds hatred, and has dire consequences for the future relations. “Europe
has not simply neglected or underplayed the history of the rest of the world,
as a consequence of which it has misinterpreted its own history, but also
how it has imposed historical concepts and periods that have aggravated our
understanding of Asia in a way that is significant for the future as well as
for the past.”53 China’s current assertive foreign policy, grievances and
rhetoric well illustrate the situation.
Like Asia, negative sentiments towards Muslims are overwhelming due to
the distortion of Islamic history and usurpation of Muslim resources and
lands. Euro-centrist Islamophobes and neo-cons forget that Islam was a
power to be reckoned with from 634 to 1800 AD, and at the pinnacle of
human civilisation and global economy for almost 1000 years from the
eighth to the eighteenth century, having its own systems of limited
monarchy, republicanism, constitutionalism, capitalism, humanism,
freedom of conscience and religion, tolerance for dissent whether temporal
or religious, well-developed and crafted socio-economic, politico-religious
and scientifico-cultural institutions.
From the medieval to early modern ages Christendom was marred with
internal strife and civilisational backwardness while passing through long
centuries of the so-called Dark Ages. It clearly lacked a rational discourse
too deeply delving itself into irrational, superstitious and theoretical Church
dogmas and divine right monarchical fists. It obviously practiced
collectivism at the expense of individualism and in reality, discouraged and
punished individual liberty in so many ways and forms. There was no sign
of democracy or even limited monarchy in medieval Europe, as the divine
right absolute monarchy was the norm, all the way to the eighteenth
century. Catholic and Protestant blocks practiced absolutism and suffered
from same civilisational and economic stagnation. The dogmatic,
authoritarian, supernatural, superstitious, traditionalist, persecutory and
interventionist Church controlled all avenues of knowledge making and
allowed no rival, competing, alternative epistemologies, ideologies, theories
and knowledge mechanisms.
The medieval ecclesiasts purged Christian world of the so-called pagan
Greco-Roman sciences, philosophies and ideas. Since Justinian times
Aristotle and Plato became the pagan enemies; their philosophical thought
was considered antithetical to divine revelation and morality. Only those
aspects of their philosophy were incorporated which supported the
Trinitarian, supernatural, hierarchical theology. Theology was the queen of
all sciences, and all philosophy and natural science was subordinated to
theology.54 The Church leaders centered their life, culture and sciences upon
their specific understandings of Biblical teachings and cosmology, shielding
themselves from every possible foreign or non-Christian influence. The
Greek philosophical, rational and scientific treatises were publicly burned,
and the dissenting Arians and Nestorians were excommunicated and exiled
into the Near East. That resulted in a philosophical, intellectual and
scientific conundrum paralyzing civilisational growth in the Christendom.
The Europe’s Dark Ages were the outcome of such an intellectual
stagnation. Christendom was not heir to Greco Roman rational,
philosophical and utilitarian heritage but mostly to its paganistic,
supernatural and mysterious theology.
The traditional, authority based medieval Church Christianity mostly
barred Europe from independent scientific discoveries, philosophical and
intellectual rationalism, universal humanism, political, social and economic
liberalism. Its supernatural Trinitarian religious and political theology long
preserved an awe-inspiring absolutist religious and political system, which
curtailed individual freedoms, liberty and agency. Peace, security, dignity
and the lives of many Christians were violated in the name of the Prince of
peace. Individual and collective dissent were harshly punished, total
obedience was required and uniformity was imposed by civic and
ecclesiastical means. The Trinitarian hierarchical theology was equally
imposed upon nature, natural philosophy and sciences. The medieval
hierarchies in Church and state were reflections of Trinitarian hierarchy in
the heavens.55 The seven heavens were hierarchical, and the natural
phenomenon was governed by hierarchical angelic beings as the Bible
stated. Heavens were higher and superior than the earth while the highest
heavens were superior to lower heavens. This concept of hierarchy was
“rooted in the idea that the world was peopled by a graded chain of beings,
stretching down from the Deity in the Empyrean heaven at the periphery of
the universe, through the hierarchies of angelic beings inhabiting the nine
heavenly spheres concentric with the earth, to the ranks of men, animals,
and plants, of the base terrestrial sphere at the centre of the cosmic
system.”56 A given creature enjoyed hierarchical dominion over the lower
creatures while it served those above it in the scale of beings.57
In spite of all claims against it, God was Triune, and the Holy Trinity was
hierarchical. God the Father had begotten God the Son and God the Holy
Spirit proceeded from God the Father and God the Son.58 God the Father
neither proceeded from the Son or Holy Spirit nor was begotten by them.
There was a time when the Son was begotten of the Father. The Son’s
eternity was relative to the eternity of the Father. Also, God the Father did
not create the material world directly but through His Word, Jesus Christ
who was Lord over everything. The Holy Trinity was supreme and at the
head of the heavenly pyramid. The Earth reflected the heavenly hierarchy
and the Church, the earthly representative of Jesus Christ, was Lord over
earthly pyramid. Lower beings were subordinated to higher realms;
submission to monarchs, civil magistrates and clergy was integral to the
Trinitarian theological model. The social order of Christendom was
hierarchical.
St. Thomas Aquinas synthesised Aristotle’s principles inherent in nature as
divine powers, installed by God to cooperate and assist him in the works of
providence. “God cooperated with natural powers in a way that respected
their integrity while accomplishing his purposes.”59 The concerns that such
cooperation with natural phenomena and man would make God dependent
upon them, and jeopardise his absolute sovereignty, were mitigated by the
interpretation that nature and man were under God and served divine
purposes. God participated in nature intrinsically through participating
beings and not extrinsically as Supreme Lawgiver impressing natural laws
on matter.60 The nature was sacramentally expressing higher being of God
as man was expressing God’s providence through obedience to Church
sacrements.61 Nature and man were immanently divine sharing in the
incarnation of Christ, the man God. S. F. Mason well summarised the
medieval Trinitarian hierarchical world view. “Such a scheme was a
particular manifestation of the general medieval view that the hierarchy of
natural things was ordered triadically at every level - classes, orders,
genera, species, and individuals within those species. All of the beings of
the universe fell into one or other of three general classes - those that were
wholly material, such as minerals, plants, and animals, those that were
wholly spiritual, such as the angelic beings, and those that were mixed,
namely human beings. Each group and sub-group divided triadically. Thus
there were animals of the land, the sea, and the air, men of labour, men of
prayer, and men of war, according to early medieval versions, or labourers,
burghers, and nobles, with a separate ecclesiastical triadic hierarchy,
according to late medieval versions, whilst above mankind were three
triadic orders of angelic beings, and at the head of the scale of all beings in
the universe was the supreme Trinity.”62
Unitarian ideology, whether religio-political or scientific, was severely
punished. The divinity, nature, cosmos, social order, human body and
Church were all hierarchical. Even the human body was Triadic and
Trinitarian, with natural, vital and animal spirits in it. It had three
physiological fluids (two kinds of bloods and a nervous fluid); Liver was
the source of dark red blood, heart of whitish red blood and brain the seat of
nervous fluid.63 Any discussions of divine simplicity, human equality,
natural or body unity were banned and persecuted. Medieval Christendom
was a persecutory society, persecuting Unitarianism in matters of social
order, natural cosmos and human body. Independent scientific research,
republican political ideology and Unitarian theology were taboos.
The long medieval centuries witnessed the absolute iron fists of the
Church and monarchical abusive powers in matters of religion, politics,
society and science. The Catholic Church, the only religious power during
these long centuries, became the largest land owner, employer and power
house of the European continent. Popes and bishops’ power struggles within
the Church (as well as outside the Church with local princes), their moral
decadence and worldly pomp made many believers distrustful of both the
spiritual and temporal authorities. Christendom was marred with internal
strife, mistrust, scepticism and lack of direction. The Italians, Germans and
French vied for papal offices and promoted their monarchical and national
interests through spiritual means. Papacy moved between Rome and France
and represented the interests and designs of its French, Norman or German
sponsors.64 The eleventh-century Crusades were used to bring about a
European unity by pitching them against the Muslim East.65
Meanwhile, the Muslim Baghdad and Cordoba66 were bustling with street
lights, religious tolerance, rational inquiry and scientific pursuits while
Geneva, Paris and London were sunk in darkness, religious persecutions,
magic, witchcraft and irrational mysteries.67 The Islamic simple, Unitarian
theology, cosmology, anthropology and republican ethos emphasised upon
God’s simplicity, transcendence, incorporeality, direct sovereignty over
everything as the First Cause, creator, nourisher and lawgiver, universal
human dignity, equality and rights based on human soul, human dignity,
rational discourse, natural inquiries, economic prosperity, competition and
profit, social justice and human accountability. Medieval Christendom was
exposed to some of these diverging traits due to its close proximity, warfare
and interactions with Muslims. The thirteenth-century Muslim Spain and
Sicily served as Europe’s global bridge to science, technology and trade,68
“at the turn of the second millennium. The reader might be surprised to
learn that the only region in sustained direct contact with all the others at
this time was the Islamic World, then undergoing its “Golden Age” under
the Abbasid, Fatimid, and Umayyad caliphates based in Baghdad, Cairo,
and Cordoba, while the one with the least contact with the others was
Western Europe.”69 Europe was able to break away from its persecutions
and intellectual stagnation, with the help of external resource portfolios and
tributaries. The global Muslim bridge to other civilisations was a key
element in this historical breakthrough.
From Dark Ages to Medieval Renaissance
The transition from Dark Ages to Medieval Renaissance began in the
twelfth century, partly due to the translation of countless philosophical and
scientific Arabic manuscripts to Latin. Charles Homer Haskins, the Harvard
historian of the Middle Ages, and advisor to U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson, noted that in Europe “a library of ca. 1100 would have little beyond
the Bible and the Latin Fathers, with their Carolingian commentators, the
service books of the church and various lives of saints, the textbooks of
Boethius and some others, bits of local history, and perhaps certain of the
Latin classics, too often covered with dust.”70 But the twelfth century
witnessed a Latin campaign to translate books of “philosophy, mathematics,
and astronomy unknown to the earlier mediaeval tradition and recovered
from the Greeks and Arabs in the course of the twelfth century” ushering in
the “Twelfth Century Renaissance”.71 Haskins stated that the “Renaissance
of the twelfth century, like its Italian successor three hundred years later,
drew its life from two principal sources. Each was based in part upon the
knowledge and ideas already present in the Latin West, in part upon an
influx of new learning and literature from the East. But whereas the
Renaissance of the fifteenth century was concerned primarily with
literature, that of the twelfth century was concerned even more with
philosophy and science. And while in the Quattrocento the foreign source
was wholly Greek, in the twelfth century it was also Arabic, derived from
Spain and Sicily and Syria and Africa as well as from Constantinople.”72
Early Muslims were heir to Greek scientific and philosophical traditions,
long lost in the Western world. They also absorbed the Egyptian, Persian,
Chinese and Indian traditions of knowledge and created an Islamic
synthesis in conformity with the fundamental principles of their faith.
Steven P. Marrone stated that “taken in its entirety, the evolution of
speculative thought in the Muslim world marked a considerable enrichment
of the philosophical heritage of late Antiquity. And Arabic achievements in
mathematics and natural philosophy, especially astronomy, laid the
foundations for later medieval science in the West and ultimately set the
stage for the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.”73 E. J.
Holymard observed that “During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there
was a scientific renaissance in Europe, and scholars from Christian
countries journeyed to Muslim universities in Spain, Egypt, Syria and even
Morocco in order to acquire knowledge from their foes in religion but
friends in learning. Arabic science soon began to filter through, and by the
middle of the thirteenth century the trickle had become a river.”74 England’s
‘first scientist’, Adelard of Bath, explained what he had learned from his
Arab masters in these words: “From the Arab masters I have learned one
thing, led by reason, while you are caught by the image of authority, and led
by another halter. For what is an authority to be called, but a halter? As the
brute beasts, indeed, are led anywhere by the halter, and have no idea by
what they are led or why, but only follow the rope that holds them, so the
authority of writers leads not a few of you into danger, tied and bound by
brutish credulity.”75 Haskins observed that the Muslims “with no native
philosophy and science of their own, but with a marvellous power of
assimilating the culture of others, quickly absorbed whatever they found in
Western Asia, while in course of time they added much from their own
observation and from the peoples farther to the East. Arabic translations
were made directly from the Greek, as in the case of Ptolemy’s Almagest
(A.D. 827), as well as from Syriac and Hebrew. Certain of the caliphs
especially favoured learning, while the universal diffusion of the Arabic
language made communication easy and spread a common culture
throughout Islam, regardless of political divisions. The most vigourous
scientific and philosophical activity of the early Middle Ages lay in the
lands of the Prophet, whether in the fields of medicine and mathematics or
in those of astronomy, astrology, and alchemy. To their Greek inheritance
the Arabs added something of their own: observation of disease sufficiently
accurate to permit of identification; large advances in arithmetic, algebra,
and trigonometry, where we must also take account of Hindu contributions;
and the standard astronomical tables of the Middle Ages. The reception of
this science in Western Europe marks a turning-point in the history of
European intelligence. Until the twelfth century the intellectual contacts
between Christian Europe and the Arab world were few and unimportant.”76
Muslim Spain played a major role in this transmission process.77 “Spain’s
part was to serve as the chief link with the learning of the Mohammedan
world; the very names of the translators who worked there illustrate the
European character of the new search for learning: John of Seville, Hugh of
Santalla, Plato of Tivoli, Gerard of Cremona, Hermann of Carinthia, Rudolf
of Bruges, Robert of Chester, and the rest. Christian Spain was merely a
transmitter to the North.”78 Haskins further observed that “when, in the
twelfth century, the Latin world began to absorb this Oriental lore, the
pioneers of the new learning turned chiefly to Spain, where one after
another sought the key to knowledge in the mathematics and astronomy, the
astrology and medicine and philosophy which were there stored up; and
throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Spain remained the land of
mystery, of the unknown yet knowable, for inquiring minds beyond the
Pyrenees.79
The European pursuit of the Arabic and Islamic knowledge continued for
the next few centuries, culminating in an insatiable philosophical and
scientific curiosity in France, Italy and many other areas of Northern
Europe.80 Haskins notes that “this Spanish tide flowed over the Pyrenees
into Southern France, to centres like Narbonne, Beziers, Toulouse,
Montpellier, and Marseilles, where the new astronomy appears as early as
1139 and traces can also be found of the astrology, philosophy, and
medicine of the Arabs on into the fourteenth century.”81
In Italy, the cultural and philosophical revival first started in the South.
Sicily had been under Muslim rule from 902 to 1091.82 Additionally, Italian
City States such as Amalfi, Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence were in
constant close relations with the Muslim Spain, Sicily, North Africa, Syria
and Egypt. Their lucrative international trade with the Middle East was on
going long before the Crusades, and flourished during the two centuries of
Crusader’s presence in the Holy Land and continued afterwards. The Italian
merchants transmitted a host of skills, sciences, arts and values to the Italian
Peninsula. For instance, “Leonard of Pisa, son of a Pisan customs official in
North Africa, acquired there a familiarity with Arabic mathematics which
made him the leading European mathematician of the thirteenth century.”83
The Sicilian contributions to the translation and transmission movement
were far greater than any other Italian state. The process was not impeded
by the Norman conquest of Sicily; it was the other way around, as it greatly
enhanced and facilitated the transmission process. Huskins states that there
was “one Italian land which took more direct part in the movement, namely
Sicily. Midway between Europe and Africa, Sicily had been under Arab rule
from 902 to 1091, and under the Normans who followed it retained a large
Mohammedan element in its population. Moreover, it had many commercial
relations with Mohammedan countries, while King Roger conducted
campaigns in Northern Africa and Frederick II made an expedition to
Palestine. Arabian physicians and astrologers were employed at the Sicilian
court, and one of the great works of Arabic learning, the Geography of
Edrisi, was composed at King Roger’s command. A contemporary scholar,
Eugene the Emir, translated the Optics of Ptolemy, while under Frederick II
Michael Scot and Theodore of Antioch made versions of Arabic works on
zoology for the Emperor’s use. Frederick also maintained a correspondence
on scientific topics with many sovereigns and scholars of Mohammedan
lands, and the work of translation went on under his son and successor
Manfred, while we should probably refer to this Sicilian centre some of the
versions by unknown authors.”84
Western Europe learned, understood and digested many Greco-Roman
sciences through the Muslim medium. It does not make sense that Europe,
which for centuries had no or minimal contact with Greco-Roman sciences
and philosophy, suddenly woke up to understand, digest, master and apply
these sophisticated philosophical concept and scientific precincts. The
Europeans needed a continuous philosophical and scientific tradition with
relevant contemporary vocabulary, concepts, explanations and
understandings to make sense of an old philosophical legacy and scientific
heritage. This legacy was well-preserved, explained, adapted and
synthesised by the Muslim culture and tradition, as George Saliba very well
demonstrated.85 Latin Europe received a well-preserved and cooked
scientific tradition from the East, initially absorbing it as it was and then
expanding upon it with the passage of time. The assimilation and expansion
process left its indelible imprint upon the ultimate outcome. Haskins noted
that the “indebtedness of the Western world to the Arabs is well illustrated
in the scientific and commercial terms which its various languages have
borrowed untranslated from the Arabic. Words like algebra, zero, cipher tell
their own tale, as do ‘Arabic’ numerals and the word algorism which long
distinguished their use as taught by al-Khwarizmi. In astronomy the same
process is exemplified in almanac, zenith, nadir, and azimuth. From the
Arabic we get alchemy, and perhaps chemistry, as well as alcohol, alkali,
elixir, alembic, not to mention pharmaceutical terms like syrup and gum
arabic. In the field of trade and navigation we have hazar and tariff, admiral
and arsenal, and products of Mohammedan lands such as sugar and cotton,
the muslin of Mosul and the damask of Damascus, the leather of Cordova
and Morocco. Such fossils of our vocabulary reveal whole chapters of
human intercourse in the Mediterranean. If Arabic learning reached Latin
Christendom at many points, direct translation from the Greek was in the
twelfth century almost wholly confined to Italy, where the most important
meeting-point of Greek and Latin culture was the Norman kingdom of
Southern Italy and Sicily.”86
Islam and Latin Scholasticism
Islam was also a vital part of Latin Scholasticism, Italian Humanism and
Renaissance,87 the three intellectual medieval movements which were the
tributaries of the sixteenth century Reformation. The scholastics were
original schoolmen who themselves engaged with dialectics to systematised
Christian theology with the help of philosophy. Additional studies such as
logic, grammar and rhetoric equipped them with extra skills. That is why
scholastics mostly filled important theological positions at the universities.
That is also the reason that unlike humanism scholasticism was mostly
popular at the universities.88 Kraye observed that the “centres of
scholasticism were the universities, where philosophy teaching was based
on the Aristotelian corpus, in particular the works of logic and natural
philosophy.”89 George Makdisi argued that the scholastic method had
already been used in the Islamic East, a century or so previously.90 The
Muslim orthodoxy used this scholastic method to establish their
authenticity, vitality and relevance. Islam had its scholastic renaissance in
the eighth and ninth centuries. The Muslim influenced Jewish interlocutors,
philosophers, theologians and intelligentia such as Moses Maimonides
played an important role in transmitting the Muslim philosophical and
scholastic culture to the Latin Christendom.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the most known medieval philosopher-theologian
and the stalwart of scholasticism, was greatly influenced by Muslim
synthetic thought.91 He widely quoted from Muslim philosophers and
theologians such as Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali and acted
and reacted to them in a number of ways.92 In the estimation of E. Renan
“St. Thomas owes practically everything to Averroes.”93 E. Gilson, Majid
Fakhry and Edward Booth totally agreed. A. M. Giochon, David Burrell,
John Wippel, Jon McGinnis held that Aquinas and his teacher Albert the
Great were highly indebted to Ibn Sina. A. M. Giochon noted that “There is
not one thesis on one of our medieval philosophers which does not examine
his relations with Avicennan philosophy. And the deeper these examinations
go, the more clearly one sees that Avicenna was not only a source from
which they all drew librerally, but one of the principal formative influences
on their thought.”94 Robert Hammond maintained that Thomas’s
metaphysics were totally Farabian. Herbert Davidson, Alfred Guillaume,
Frank Griffel and others showed close affinities between St. Thomas, al-
Ghazali, al-Razi and al-Shahrastani. St. Thomas was clearly indebted to
Muslim thought; he read Latin translations of their works and incorporated
many of their ideas, thoughts and arguments into his synthetic projects. He
was a professional theologian who used philosophy to support his theology
assimilating many philosophical ideas in the process of reconciling
theology with philosophy. Muslim philosophers and theologians had
undertaken the same project centuries before St. Thomas; consequently, he
found a model in them to emulate and benefit from. He mostly preferred
Aristotelianism against the Platonism of St. Augustine and other Church
Fathers and ventured to reconcile Christian theology with it.95
He initially studied Aristotle’s philosophy at the University of Naples
which was part of Norman Sicily. Sicily was ruled by Muslims for close to
three centuries (831-1072) and countless Muslims stayed behind even after
the Norman conquest of it. The Norman rulers especially Frederick II had
patronised Muslim sciences and encouraged translation of scientific works
from Arabic to Latin. Transmission of Aristotelian philosophy constituted a
major bulk of these inter-cultural endeavours. Muslim philosophers such as
Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Abu Ali Sina and Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd had long
studied Aristotle and extensively commented on his philosophy. The
Muslim Aristotelian tradition was well established before the times of St.
Thomas, and the twelfth century witnessed the peak of translation and
transmission of this tradition from Arabic to Latin as seen above. St.
Thomas was very close to the epicenter of this movement as Southern Italy
in general and Naples in particular was exposed to the Muslim
philosophical ideas. The Muslim philosophy and scholasticism trickled to
the Christendom from thirteenth century onward through interactions of
giants like Aquinas.
Islam also experienced its phase of humanism long before the Latin
West.96 Human dignity, equality, freedom of will and choice, salvation
through moral actions, freedom of expression and dissent, government
through selective consent, limited monarchy, rhetoric and eloquence were
all important parts of Islamic civilisation. Islam was not another worldly
religion; it allowed enough room for material pursuits and accumulation of
wealth. There were no restrictions on public displays of wealth, as long as
wealth was shared with less fortunate members of the society through
obligatory alms-giving. Trade was considered a prophetic profession;
Prophet Muhammad was the model businessman who engaged in local,
national and international trade. Cultural expressions of individuality,
prosperity and power were not prohibited as long as they did not encroach
upon others’ dignity by exhibiting arrogance. Additionally, there were no
ecclesiastical establishments, clerical impositions, papal political ambitions
and corruptions, irrational mysteries, medieval filters to original scriptures,
multiple layers of Church traditions, decrees, councils and sacraments.
There was not much of a gap between the classical sciences (including the
Arabic language) and contemporary Islamic discourse. There was no
absolute divine right monarchy having the right to make or break laws;
Islamic Shari’ah was to be followed by the clergy and laity, the elites and
commoners. Knowledge and wisdom were thought to be the lost
commodities of all believers; Muslims were encouraged to seek knowledge,
even if they had to travel to far distant areas such as China - and indeed,
they did. Muslims were trading with China and Western Europe by the
middle of ninth century. There were cross-cultural transmissions of sciences
and technologies from an early period of Islamic caliphate. Indian, Persian,
Chinese and Greek sciences were all sought after. Muslims had already
assimilated the so-called pagan Greek sciences and philosophy into their
religious narrative Islamising them wherever needed. Jack Goody observed
that “Islam itself experienced humanistic phases in the Magreb during
which non-theological studies were developed, and scientific and secular
knowledge was allowed a freer hand. After all Islam was a culture that
sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically, transmitted ‘pagan’
Greek ideas as well as Islamic ones, by means of schools of higher
education, madrasas and academies.”97
Islam as a dominant medieval culture, with its developed scholastic and
humanist approaches, was the model emulated by the Latin West. George
Makdisi in his The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian
West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism has amply demonstrated that
the medieval scholastic tradition, Italian Humanism and Renaissance had
vital Islamic origins. Makdisi, after an exhaustive study of the Italian
Humanism, stated that “I have come to the conclusion that classical Islam
appears to have provided the model for Italian Renaissance humanism.”98
Jack Goody noted that in “Europe the process of liberation had its tentative
roots in the humanist activity of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, much
influenced by Islam.”99 Michael G. Carter noted that although “at first sight
the terms humanism and Islam might seem incompatible, there is good
evidence that they are not. The highly developed urbanism of Islam, its
elaborate bureaucracy, wealthy courts and associated patronage, and a
universal respect for learning all combined to provide a fertile environment
for the emergence of a kind of humanism analogous to that which arose in
the West. The supreme importance of Arabic on the religious, cultural,
administrative, and commercial levels made it inevitable that whatever kind
of humanism appeared, it would have to give a special place to
language.”100 Carter then identified the five distinct kinds of Islamic
classical humanism namely the philosophical, religious, intellectual, legal
and literary.101
In addition to demonstrating the historical fact that the medieval
scholasticism and humanism had its origins in the Classical Islam, Makdisi
showed that a major part of the Western intellectual culture owed its origins
to Arabo-Islamic contributions, including the medieval universities and
centers of learning. The Latin West borrowed many of its educational
institutions from the Muslim Spain and Sicily. This fact is well presented in
his book The Rise of Colleges.102 Jack Goody argued that nobody should
“neglect the fact that the rise of the universities was accompanied by a
revival of learning between 1100 and 1200 when an influx of knowledge
arrived from what had been Muslim Sicily (until 1091) but mainly through
Arab Spain. Moreover, although the universities were said to be different
from the madrasas which had been established throughout the Muslim
world in the tenth and eleventh centuries, there were significant parallels
between the system of education in Islam and that of the Christian West.”103
He further noted that “the college ‘as an eleemosynary, charitable
foundation was quite definitely native to Islam’, based on the Islamic waqf.
Paris was the first western city where a college was established in 1138 by a
pilgrim returning from Jerusalem; it was founded, probably copying a
madrasa, as a house of scholars, created by an individual without a royal
charter. So too was Balliol in Oxford before it became a corporation.”104
Goody maintained that “Clearly Islam did have important institutions of
higher learning for religious and legal education from an early period.
Whether or not these stimulated Western Europe is a moot question but
there were clear parallels as there were in other advanced written cultures.
But perhaps more importantly, in Islam these institutions were more or less
exclusively devoted to religious studies, whereas in Europe, although
religion initially dominated, other subjects were allowed to grow up within
the university domain. Gradually forms of secular knowledge became
increasingly important. In Islam such forms of learning had to take place
elsewhere.”105 In conclusion, he stated: “let us look not at origins so much
as parallels of which there are many between Islam and Christian learning.
Indeed in many ways it may have been Islamic methods that preceded the
founding of the first European University at Bologna, teaching law, as did
the Badras school in Byzantium. The sic et non (central to the work of the
scholastics like Aquinas), the questiones disputatae, the reportio, and the
legal dialectic could have their earlier Islamic parallels.”106 There is
sufficient historical proof then, to conclude with J. Riberea, that “the
medieval university owed much to the collegiate institution of Arab
education.”107
Italian Renaissance
The Renaissance, or rebirth, of classical antiquity’s lifestyle and learning in
many ways went through the Arab and Muslim medium. Renaissance
leaders looked back at antiquity, through many Arabic books and sciences.
Muslim philosophers, natural scientists, astronomers and physicians such as
Ibn Sina, al Farabi, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Shatir, al Razi were read, analysed and
well assimilated.108 The Renaissance also involved more than just the
intellectual stimulations; it needed financial means, intellectual tools and a
change in the overall outlook.
Later Renaissance scholarship and interpretations mostly highlighted the
intellectual, philosophical, liberal, individualistic, political and rational
elements in the Renaissance. They were more Eurocentric than historical,
and “rather than offering an accurate historical account of what took place
from the 15th century onwards” they looked more like “an ideal of 19th-
century European society. These critics celebrated limited democracy,
scepticism towards the church, the power of art and literature, and the
triumph of European civilisation over all others. These values underpinned
19th-century European imperialism.”109 This Whiggish interpretation of
Renaissance ignored the fact that European society as a whole - including
the Italian Peninsula - was a collective, persecutory and suffocating society
where Church and state severely censored and persecuted dissent,
individualism and freedoms. The projection of nineteenth-century
democrated values and freedoms on an undemocratic and suffocating
society of the sixteenth century is nothing short of bigotry. The Muslim East
was far more prosperous, free and tolerant than the Italian city states or
European Empires.
Jerry Brotton, while rejecting European hijacking of the Renaissance,
argued that the “trade, finance, commodities, patronage, imperial conflict,
and the exchange with different cultures were all key elements of the
Renaissance. Focusing on these issues offers a different understanding of
what shaped the Renaissance. It also leads us to think of the creativity of the
Renaissance as not confined to painting, writing, sculpture, and
architecture. Other artefacts such as ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and
furniture also shaped people’s beliefs and attitudes, even though many of
these objects have since been neglected, destroyed, or lost.”110 The medieval
Renaissance was a cross-cultural phenomenon, even though multicultural
aspects of it are quite often ignored by the Eurocentric narratives. Islam was
an important part of the medieval Europe’s Renaissance.
It is commonly agreed that the Renaissance first occurred in Southern
Italy, Florence being the centre of it, and then traveled to the rest of Europe.
The Italian Renaissance was no doubt the birthplace of the broader
European Renaissance. Jacob Burckhardt, in his famous book, The
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy111 has shown Italy as the birthplace
of the Renaissance. He has maintained that the Italian states were the
originating point of European Renaissance.112 The Italian Renaissance
followed the Greeks and Arabs;113 there were Renaissances in Greek and
Arab lands before the Italian Renaissance, and the latter took its cue from
the formers. Brotton maintained that “the Renaissance was a remarkably
international, fluid, and mobile phenomenon.”114
Why would Renaissance and Humanism originate and flourish in Italy?
Why was Renaissance developed in Southern Italy long before Northern
Italy and why was Florence the epicenter? The answer lay in the region’s
geographical affinity, trade and cultural exchanges with the dominant and
vibrant Muslim culture and civilisation. John Hobson put the point in the
nutshell: “for behind Italy lay the more advanced East.”115
The sixteenth-century Renaissance was the result of intercontinental trade
and interactions, “trade, finance, commodities, patronage, imperial conflict,
and the exchange with different cultures were all key elements of the
Renaissance.”116 The Italian trade with Muslim East played a major role in
the opulence and prosperity connected with the Italian Renaissance. A small
fragmented Italian Peninsula with its small city states could not have
pioneered the global economy, art and Renaissance on its own. To Hobson
“the image of ‘Italian pioneer’ is but a myth.”117 Italy found itself in a
strategic geographical position, and located itself in an already well-defined
culture, civilisation and economy to transform itself. “It was not that Italy
found the world and then transformed it; rather that the more advanced
Eastern world found Italy and enabled its rise and development […]
virtually all the major innovations that lay behind the development of
Italian capitalism were derived from the more advanced East, especially the
Middle East and China, and diffused across the Islamic Bridge of the World
through Oriental globalisation. Moreover, Italy indeed led the inferior or
backward European subcontinent it was none the less a mere bit-player in
the larger global arena, at all times playing second fiddle to the more
advanced Islamic polities and merchants of the Middle East and especially
North Africa.”118
In addition to Italy’s geographical proximity to Muslim Spain and Sicily,
Italy’s Mediterranean contacts played an important part in its’ role as the
birth place of European Renaissance. The Renaissance was dependent upon
economic prosperity, which in turn was dependent upon the Muslim world.
Janet Abu-Lughod observed that “this direct entrée to the riches of the East
changed the role of the Italian merchant mariner cities from passive to
active. The revival of the Champagne Fairs in the twelfth century can be
explained convincingly by both the enhanced demand for Eastern goods
stimulated by the crusades and, because of the strategic position of the
Italians in coastal enclaves of the Levant, the increased supplies of such
goods they could now deliver.”119 The Southern, Central and Northern city
states were mostly reliant upon trade with and through the Muslim world.
Abu-Lughod showed that the trade success of Venice, Milan, Genoa and
Florence was contingent upon Anatolia, Fertile Crescent, Egypt and North
Africa.120 Up until the second half of the thirteenth century, the Italian
merchants from Venice and Genoa used the gold coins of Ottoman
Constantinople and Egypt’s Cairo showing “their semi-peripheral status in
world trade.”121 It was Italy’s access to Muslim ports that saved them
financial constraints and agonies of the Dark Ages of Europe.122
It is often argued that the discovery of the New World, and the treasures of
Americas, stimulated the European economy and made it independent of
the Muslim East and its resources. It is also argued that the resultant
economic growth and prosperity ushered in the era of the Renaissance,
independently of Eastern influences. Gerald MacLean argues against such a
line of thinking. He instead maintains that the gold and silver “from the
New World both fuelled and accelerated the rates of cultural exchange. The
question is not whether, despite differences and disagreements, there was
commercial and cross-cultural exchange between Muslim and Christian, or
whether Renaissance artists and intellectuals engaged with eastern
aesthetics and Islamic ideas. The question is rather how to describe and
assess those widespread cultural exchanges that were taking place.”123
Renaissance Art
Renaissance art is given considerable significance by modern students of
that period. The art was reflective of Renaissance humanistic philosophy.
The paintings, sculptures and other modes of decorative art made a
transition from classical tradition to incorporate contemporary humanistic
and philosophical ideas. These paintings reflected the inner thoughts and
thinking processes of the artists, and gave important clues to their
worldviews and outlooks. Renaissance art facilitated Europe’s transition
from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to modern times. There are significant
and visible clues of Eastern and Islamic influences upon both the Southern
and Northern Renaissance art. It places Europe in the centre of the globe,
and then looks towards the Islamic East and its luxuries to model Italian and
European society accordingly.
Hans Holbein (1460–1524) was a German painter who, along with his son
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), represented the Northern
Renaissance. Holbein the Younger was a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam,
and also helped in propagating sixteenth-century Reformation ideas through
his paintings. On Erasmus’s recommendation Holbein the Younger travelled
to England and worked with many English humanists. He became the
King’s Painter for King Henry VIII and in 1536 produced the famous
portrait of King Henry VIII. He also helped the King and his confidant
Thomas Cromwell in their struggle against the clerical establishment. The
English Reformation was well-propagated by Holbein’s paintings.
Holbein’s famous masterpiece The Ambassadors124 portrayed Jean de
Dinteville, an ambassador of Francis I of France in 1533, and Georges de
Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, who visited London in the same year.125 Francis I
was badly defeated by the Hapsburg King Charles V in the Battle of Pavia
on February 24, 1525 and was forced to give up Duchy of Burgundy126 and
the Charolais to Charles V, reluctantly signing the humiliating Treaty of
Madrid, relinquishing his honours to Constable de Bourbon who actually
betrayed him. Francis was imprisoned in Madrid and his mother Louise de
Savoie started sending envoys to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent127 for
help. The first envoy was lost in the Balkans or killed.128 A second mission,
under the leadership of John Frangipani, managed to reach Istanbul on
December of 1525. Frangipani was able to secure the Sultan’s positive
response to Francis I and his mother’s desperate appeals for help.129
On the incentives of Francis I, the Ottomans defeated the Hungarian King
Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in the Battle of Mohac in 1526, killed the
King,130 divided Hungary and put direct pressure on the Hapsburg
Monarchy by appointing King Zapolaya as an Ottoman Hungarian vessel.
The battle of Mohac was “related to the Habsburg-Valois rivalry between
Charles V and Francis I. When Charles V defeated and captured Francis I at
the Battle of Pavia in northern Italy (1525), the French king sought
Suleyman’s help. Suleyman chose to inflict harm on the Habsburgs […]
through Hungary, whose king Louis II was the brother-in-law of Habsburg
Ferdinand and Charles V.”131 Francis I later admitted to a Venetian
ambassador that the Ottoman Empire was the only factor that prevented
Charles V from creating a Europe-wide empire under Habsburg authority.132
Francis I formed a Franco-Hungarian Alliance in 1528 with King
Zapolaya.133 In 1529, Sultan Suleiman besieged Vienna with the help of
many Protestants and Catholics, exerting direct pressure upon the Hapsburg
Empire. Consequently, the first non–ideological134 modern Ottoman-French
alliance was formally signed in 1536 leading to 300 years of French
Ottoman commerce, diplomacy, religio scientific and cultural exchanges,
Orientalism, Turkism, Turquerie (lit. “Turkish stuff”) and Eastern
obsession. In 1533, Ambassador Dinteville was in London to convince
Henry VIII to become part of the Franco-Ottoman alliance.
Jerry Brotton observes that Dinteville and de Selve were in “London to
broker a new political alliance between Henry, Francis, and the Ottoman
Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, the other great power in European
politics of the time. The rug on the upper shelf of the table in Holbein’s
painting is of Ottoman design and manufacture, suggesting that the
Ottomans and their territories to the east were also part of the cultural,
commercial, and political landscape of the Renaissance. Selve and
Dinteville’s attempt to draw Henry VIII into an alliance with Francis and
Suleyman was motivated by their fear of the growing strength of that other
great Renaissance imperial power, the Habsburg empire of Charles V. By
comparison, England and France were minor imperial players: the
terrestrial globe in the painting says as much.”135 In fact the “Oriental Rugs”
along with Kufic script were commonly used in the Renaissance paintings
to depict Muslim luxurious lifestyle.136 The Venetian paintings in particular
were known for their incorporation of Eastern styles, themes and carpets.
The Ottoman Muslim Empire, along with strong Muslim Moghul Empire
of India and Safvid Empire of Persia, constituted the dominant Muslim
civilisation that surrounded Europe. The small European powers such as
France, England and Netherland were recipients of many elements of that
glorious civilisation. Islamic concepts, symbols and arts were heavily
deployed during the early Renaissance period; even Christian religious art
and paintings incorporated Islamic prayer mats, mihrab (Mosque arch) and
known symbols like Ka’aba.137 Such incorporations dissipated after 1550 as
a result of knowledge about their close connections with Islamic religion.
Islamic influences upon Renaissance art are well demonstrated by The
Ambassadors, which reflects many Islamic symbols and themes. Brotton
observes that many of “the objects in Holbein’s painting have an eastern
origin, from the silk and velvet worn by its subjects to the textiles and
designs that decorate the room. The objects in the bottom section of
Holbein’s painting reveal various facets of the Renaissance – humanism,
religion, printing, trade, exploration, politics and empire, and the enduring
presence of the wealth and knowledge of the east.”138 The objects on the
upper shelf “deal with much more abstract and philosophical issues. The
celestial globe is an astronomical instrument used to measure the stars and
the nature of the universe. Next to the globe is a collection of dials, used to
tell the time with the aid of the sun’s rays. The two larger objects are a
quadrant and a torquetum, navigational instruments used to work out a
ship’s position in both time and space. Most of these instruments were
invented by Arab and Jewish astronomers and came westwards as European
travellers required navigational expertise for long-distance voyages.”139 In
short, the Northern Renaissance paintings were equally influenced by
Islamic symbols and themes.
Gentile Bellini (1429-1507) was a renowned Renaissance painter who
belonged to a well-known family of Venetian painters. Venice was Europe’s
gateway to the Muslim Africa and Asia, and Venetian merchants enjoyed
close business ties to Egyptian Muslim community, with separate Venetian
quarters both in Alexandria and Cairo. St. Mark, the patron Saint of Venice,
was born in Alexandria; The Venetians built a magnificent basilica of San
Marco to honour St. Mark. Bellini’s famous painting “St. Mark Preaching at
Alexandria” is considered a masterpiece of the Renaissance art. This piece
is also an embodiment of Islamic influences.
Bellini was known for his affinity with the Eastern Islamic art. That was
perhaps the reason that he was selected by the Venetian senate in 1479 to be
the ambassador of Venice to Muslim Istanbul. Bellini saw the results of
peace settlement between the Ottomans and Venice, lived in Istanbul and
polished his Islamic art skills. Sultan Mehmed II was a patron of Italian art,
and happily asked Bellini to paint his portrait. The historical portrait of
Mehmed II is now in the National Gallery of London. Bellini, the official
painter of Sultan Mehmed II, incorporated a host of Islamic symbols, icons
and ideas into his St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria. The painting was
completed by his brother Giovanni at Gentile’s death.
The San Marco painting portrays St. Mark preaching to a group of
audience including women wearing white Islamic veil, featuring minarets,
mihrabs and domes as well as Egyptian Mamluks, North African Moors,
Ottomans, Persians, Ethiopians, and Tartars. Brotton observes that the
“drama of the action takes place in the bottom third of the painting; the rest
of the canvas is dominated by the dramatic landscape of Alexandria. A
domed Byzantine basilica, an imaginative recreation of St Mark’s
Alexandrian church, dominates the backdrop. In the piazza Oriental figures
converse, some on horseback, others leading camels and a giraffe. The
houses that face onto the square are adorned with Egyptian grilles and tiles.
Islamic carpets and rugs hang from the windows. The minarets, columns,
and pillars that make up the skyline are a mixture of Alexandrian landmarks
and the Bellinis’ own invention. The basilica is an eclectic mixture of
elements of the Church of San Marco in Venice and Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople, while the towers and columns in the distance correspond to
some of Alexandria’s most famous landmarks, many of which had already
been emulated in the architecture of Venice itself.”140
Venice and Islamic World
Venice was surrounded by the vast Ottoman Empire, and enjoyed strong
business ties with the Ottomans and Mamluk Egyptians. The mighty
Muslim empires were far greater and powerful than a small city state such
as Venice; therefore, the Venetians considered Muslims as an intrinsic part
of their economy and civilisation. They were truly fascinated with the
Muslim civilisation, and the Bellini family presented that fascination with
Islamic culture very well through their Renaissance paintings. Brotton
explains that the “Bellinis were fascinated by both the myths and the reality
of the world to the east of what is today seen as Renaissance Europe. Their
painting is concerned with the specific nature of the eastern world, and in
particular the customs, architecture, and culture of Arabic Alexandria, one
of Venice’s long-standing trading partners. The Bellinis did not dismiss the
Mamluks of Egypt, the Ottomans, or the Persians as barbaric. Instead, they
were acutely aware that these cultures possessed many things that the city
states of Europe desired. These included precious commodities, technical,
scientific, and artistic knowledge, and ways of doing business that came
from the east. The painting of St Mark in Alexandria shows how the
European Renaissance began to define itself not in opposition to the east,
but through an extensive and complex exchange of ideas and materials.”141
Venetian prosperity was dependent upon their trade with the Muslims;
their merchants were able to access business from China to North Africa
and from Balkans to Persia through the permission and security of the
Muslim empires. They also monopolised the European market due to the
same privileged position. The Bellinis and their comrades did not hide their
appreciation of the Muslim East. “The Bellinis’ Venetian contemporaries
were explicit about their reliance upon such transactions. Venice was
perfectly situated as a commercial intermediary, able to receive
commodities from these eastern bazaars, and then transport them to the
markets of northern Europe. Writing at the same time as the Bellinis worked
on their painting of St Mark, Canon Pietro Casola reported with amazement
the impact that this flow of goods from the east had upon Venice itself.”142
The Islamic goods and exports’ “impact upon the culture and consumption
of communities from Venice to London was gradual but profound. Every
sphere of life was affected, from eating to painting. As the domestic
economy changed with this influx of exotic goods, so did art and culture.
The palette of painters like the Bellinis was also expanded by the addition
of pigments like lapis lazuli, vermilion, and cinnabar, all of which were
imported from the east via Venice, and provided Renaissance paintings with
their characteristic brilliant blues and reds. The loving detail with which the
Bellini painting of St Mark reproduces silk, velvet, muslin, cotton, tiling,
carpets, even livestock, reflected the Bellinis’ awareness of how these
exchanges with the east were transforming the sights, smells, and tastes of
the world, and the ability of the artist to reproduce them.”143
W. Montgomery Watt, in his The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe,
has elaborated the point that by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the
trade and political presence in Spain and Sicily had made the superior
culture of the Arabs gradually known throughout Western Europe. Watt’s
conclusion, that “the influence of Islam on western Christendom is greater
than is usually realised” is being realised by many contemporary scholars.144
Montgomery Watt also noticed that “because Europe was reacting against
Islam, it belittled the influence of the Saracens and exaggerated its
dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today, an important task
for our Western Europeans, as we move into the era of the one world, is to
correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab
and Islam world.”145 Even the so-called Greco-Roman heritage was
transmitted to Europe through the Ottoman inheritors of the Byzantium
Empire, its institutions and policies. Constantinople was the true heir to
Roman Empire, and the Ottomans were the true heirs to Constantinople.
The overpowering Ottoman Empire ransacked Constantinople in 1453 and
besieged Otranto and Rhodes Island by 1480, not far from Rome. Pope
Julius II (1503–1513) issued a bull on July 18, 1511, calling for a Church
Council meeting at the Lateran Palace in April of 1512. The Archbishop of
Spalato, while addressing the first session, warned about the Turkish threat
in the following words: “Within the confines of Europe they have usurped
no mean dominion with the effusion of much Christian blood. They could
easily transport themselves to the gates of Rome in the space of one night
from their domain in Dalmatia.”146 By 1529 the Muslims were knocking at
the gates of Vienna, under the leadership of Sultan Suleiman the
Magnificent; the German princes felt the brunt through Alpine Turkish
raids. Hungarian Protestant Christians, along with a host of continental
Christians, supported the Ottomans against their oppressive Hapsburg
Catholic opponents. The real Rome (Constantinople) of the early modern
times controlled one third of the European Continent and all the ins and
outs of the Eastern Mediterranean. Western Europe was too divided and
instable to be a threat to the mighty Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth
century; its main Christian rival was the Habsburg monarchy and its
Catholic Church, and both were battling against regional princes, monarchs
and dissenting religious sects. Both the Church and monarchy were
absolutists, persecuting, corrupt and self-serving, using the medieval
Crusade rhetoric and corrupt religious practices to fill their coffers. In spite
of Scholasticism, Humanism and Renaissance the Church and monarchy
barred Europe from true freedom, liberty, republicanism and individualism.
By the late Renaissance and early modern period, the two contending
worldviews were waring for universal hegemony. The Catholic Habsburg’s
absolutist monarchy employed Christian religion, divine right theology,
uniformity, persecutions and crusades to usher a new millennium of
Catholic universal monarchy and world dominion and the Ottoman Ghazis
used Islam, religious diversity, tolerance, freedom and reformation to
realize their hopes of millennial prosperity and world dominion. The East
European princes and their contact zone Western neighbors were caught up
between these two rival religio political ideologies. Both the Ottomans and
Habsburg dynasties were missionaries, using religious propagation to
expand the empire, though their missionary methodology and style diverged
from each other. While the Habsburg used Roman Christianity to unify the
Christendom and crusade against the Ottoman infidels by imposition of
religio political uniformity, the Ottomans used claims of Catholic
corruptions of the original Christianity, Islam’s true representation and
reformation of Christianity, multiculturalism, tolerance, liberties and
mercantilism to divide the Christendom and to avoid the possibility of a
Europe wide crusade. The Protestant Christian’s rapprochement to Islam
and affinities with Ottoman tolerant religio political structures through trade
and military alliances were two cornerstones of the Ottoman foreign policy.
Highlighting Christian internal strife, Church and state’s persecutions,
corruptions, impositions, abuse of religion for political gains and the
possibility of Ottoman millennial reformation of the Catholic Christianity
were elemental to the Ottoman foreign policy. The spiritual and physical
conquest of Rome was a real goal and possibility during Sultan Sulieman’s
reign. He wanted to conquer Western Europe to liberate Christians from the
oppressing yoke of Catholicism.147
Sixteenth-Century Protestant Reformation
Such was the socio-political situation which led many Christian reformers
of the sixteenth century such as Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and John
Calvin to look inward as well as outward, to identify Christian problems
and their possible remedies. Islamic theology, rituals and history were quite
known to these reformers, especially Martin Luther due to close travel and
trade connections between Europe and the Muslim East, specifically due to
Central Europe’s proximity to the Ottoman Transylvania.148 The Christian
Holy Lands, the Classical lands of Egypt and Greek and the Oriental
treasures were all controlled by the Muslim Empires; Christian Europe had
essential knowledge of the Muslim East through their classical and biblical
knowledge. Pilgrimage to the Holy Lands and recent history of Crusade
states were handy tools for Western Europeans to know about Islam, its
teachings, culture, history and threat.
Additionally, many Christians, especially in Transylvania, had converted
to Islam and the flow was just one way. They were fascinated with Ottoman
minimalism, rationalism, scripturalism, religious diversity and tolerance.
Islam’s simple creed, rational doctrines, piety, morality, simplicity and
tolerance of dissent were among the main reasons for such a widespread
Christian conversion. Of course, the economic prosperity and political
allure of the Ottoman Empire were no less attractive but theological
rationality, moral purity, religious tolerance, pluralism and republicanism
were perhaps among the leading factors of this one-way conversion traffic.
These converts or renegades enthusiastically defended their conversions,
highlighted superiority of Islam over Christianity, reached out to their
friends and foes and publically preached Islamic doctrines, institutions and
practices. The Ottoman imperial machine encouraged and supported such a
missionary zeal with Muslim millennial prophecies and impending Ottoman
hope for a universal, rational, republican and tolerant monarchy. The new
converts’ missionary overtures, Ottoman ideology of Ghazis (the
propagaters and defenders of Islam against Christianity), religio intellectual
and military warfare with Christendom and messianic mantles of Sultans
such as Suleiman the Magnificent made the Turko Islamic threat urgent and
imminent. The threat was accompanied by countless theological discussions
and tropes. Tijana Krstic noted that interest in “the original Christian and
Jewish scriptures, as well as the nature of spiritual authority, the possibility
of spiritual renewal, and the proper role of the emperor and pope in
religious and political life, was not confined to early modern European
Christian humanists. On the contrary, the Ottoman and other Muslim
polemical narratives testify to a much more significant interest and
involvement of Muslim literati and politicians in the religious debates
among sixteenth-century Christians as a consequence of the Ottoman
emperor’s aspirations to unite the world under the banner of Islam and
arbitrate on matters of religion in his role as world ruler. Converts to Islam
were particularly important participants in these debates. In their writings
many discuss the veracity of religious scriptures, salvation, spiritual
renovation, and the Day of Judgment as well as the Ottoman sultan’s role in
these matters.”149 The resonance of such debates and polemic were felt all
over Europe especially the Mediterranean basin. The reformers including
Luther, Calvin and Erasmus were forced to address Turkish military,
religious and intellectual threats. As their expertise and abilities lay mostly
in the theological and intellectual spheres, they thoroughly engaged
themselves with Islamic theological heritage, acted upon and reacted to it
with varying degrees and purposes and in the process absorbed, wittingly or
unwittingly, a great deal of Islamic ideas and concepts. Theirs was the
second, alternative Christian voice on the Continent which established its
independent identity in opposition to the Catholic Church but also in
conjunction with the Ottoman anti-Catholic rhetoric. The common enemy
somehow led to some common agendas, ethos and tropes. For instance the
German Baroque poet and mystic Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651-1689)
supported unification of Protestants and Turks, attempted audience with
Sultan Mehmed IV, encouraged religious union between Muslims and
Protestants against Catholics and a Utopian Kingdom of Jesus. The
distinguished Moravian Hungarian philosopher, theologian and pansophic
pedagogue Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), whose ideas were
extremely influential all around the Protestant Europe including England
and America, was an ardent enemy of social inequality and persecutions. He
appreciated Ottoman justice and toleration and encouraged unified fight
against the persecutory Catholic Habsburgs. He prophesied divine help for
anyone willing to destroy the hegemonic Habsburg dynasty including the
Muslim Turks. The Transylvanian and English Protestants’ participation in
Ottoman anti-Catholic wars are well documented.150
The sixteenth-century magisterial reductionist Reformation produced a
metamorphosis of Islamic and Christian theologies. The reformed churches
and theology were closer to Islam than to the Catholic Christianity in many
ways.151 Luther was accused especially by the Catholics of being a
“Muhammadan” who replaced Christianity with Muhammadan faith. In
fact, Luther’s anti-clerical, anti-saints and images, anti-church hierarchy,
anti-tradition, anti-sacraments, anti-iconoclasm and solo scripture
Christianity more resembled Turkish152 faith than Papal faith, and so it was
branded by the Pope.153 Ottoman Muslims felt special affinity with Luther’s
struggles against the Catholic Church; special prayers for Luther’s success
were offered in mosques across the Ottoman Empire. Islam and
Protestantism were considered allies. The Ottomans militarily pressurised
the Habsburg monarchy to release pressure from the Protestants. “Ottoman
intervention was thus not only a decisive factor in the rise of national
monarchies, as in France, but also in the rise of Protestantism in Europe.”154
The Romanian American historian Stephan A. Fischer-Galati noted that in
1530 “Charles with the support of Ferdinand and the Catholics, pronounced
a death sentence on Protestantism at the Diet of Augusburg […] But the
Protestants won a reprieve, primarily because of a powerful Ottoman
offensive against Hungary and the Empire. Charles and Ferdinand could
interdict Lutheranism at Speyer and Augusburg but could not dispense with
its assistance when their secular interests in Eastern Europe and the very
security of the Empire itself appeared in grave danger. In return for support
against the Turks the Emperor was prepared to guarantee the existence of
Lutheranism until the meeting of a council.”155 The Ottoman activities in
Hungary and the Mediterranean, and their ally the French Emperor Francis
I’s aggression in Italy, forced Charles to renew and extend the guarantees
which the Lutherans had received from him in the 1530s.
It is pertinent to note that there had been numerous efforts before Luther to
reform the Christian tradition from within.156 The eleventh- to thirteenth-
century Catharism, Peter Waldo’s Waldensians, the French Albigenses and
John Huss and Hussites were almost all annihilated by Papal orders. There
were numerous crusades directed at the dissenting Christians throughout the
Middle Ages; the history of the Inquisitions is well known, and there were
thousands of Christians who were burned at the stake as a result of mere
doubt about their orthodoxy. Luther and his Reformation would not have
succeeded without sympathy of the Muslim Turks and their unrelenting
pressure on the Holy Roman Empire. Kenneth Setton in Europe and Levant
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance observes that “It is often said that
the Reformation aided the Turks; certainly the Turks aided the Reformation;
without them Protestantism might conceivably have gone the way of
Albigensianism.”157 Emperors Charles, and Ferdinand of the Habsburg
family inheritance, were threatened by Ottoman pressure; they gave priority
to defending their inheritance over Protestant affairs in Germany. They also
gave recognition to Lutheranism in 1555, because they needed German
support against the dreaded Ottomans. The Lutherans very much
appreciated the indirect Ottoman help, as their fortunes were directly linked
with the military pressure and successes of the otherwise-despised
Ottomans. Fischer-Galati concluded that the “consolidation, expansion, and
legitimisation of Lutheranism in Germany by 1555 should be attributed to
Ottoman imperialism more than to any other single factor.”158 Ottomans, to
Fischer-Galati, were the “saviour of Protestantism in Germany and the
ultimate guarantor of Protestant interests in Hungary and Transylvania.”159
Jae Jerkins, in Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination, observed
that “European commercial relations with the Ottomans flourished across
Europe as different nations saw the advantage that could be gained from
Ottoman support. France and England independently sought alliances with
the Ottomans against Catholic Spain. With Suleiman’s siege of Vienna in
1529, the Lutherans were placed in a favourable position to force
concessions from the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Feeling
pressure from the Lutherans within, the French to the west, and the
Ottomans to the east, Charles V sought a truce with the Ottomans in 1539.
This indirect relation of power between the Lutheran Protestants and the
Ottoman Muslims is typical of the Islamicate–Christian relations of the
period. Typically, it was Catholic forces and funds that resisted the advance
of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the anti–Islamic and anti–Muhammad
rhetoric of theologians like Luther and Calvin, Islam was the best thing to
happen to the Protestant cause, qua Catholic hegemony. Luther’s struggle
with Charles V could have gone very differently had Suleiman’s armies not
been knocking at Germany’s door.”160
The Ottoman and early Protestant alliances were not confined to mere
political and economic spheres; in fact, they extended to theological and
religious affinities. This is how the reformed leaders, politicians and masses
described it. The very Christian and Protestant English Queen Elizabeth 1
of England wrote a personal letter to Ottoman Sultan Murad III in an effort
to forge an alliance against the so-called idolater Habsburg Catholic
Emperor Charles V of Spain.161 In the letter she tried to show more affinity
with Muslim Unitarianism than the so-perceived Catholic polytheism. To J.
Goody, Elizabeth was daring enough to send her ambassador William
Harbourne to Constantinople to bargain with Sultan Murad III to charter the
Levant Company.162 She wrote: “Elizabeth, by the grace of the most mighty
God, the three part and yet singular Creator of Heaven and Earth, Queen of
England, France and Ireland, the most invincible and most mighty defender
of the Christian faith against all the idolatry of those unworthy ones that
live amongst Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ”163 Jerkins
notes that Queen Elizabeth “framed her hopes of political alliance as being
a partnership between the pious monotheists of England and Turkey against
the idolatrous Spanish Habsburgs.”164 Brotton noted that Elizabeth wrote
from a “position of subjection”165 to establish commercial relationships and
political alliance with the mighty Ottomans. She wanted the Sultan to
intervene against the aggressions of Habsburg Spain on the English coast.166
She emphasised the theological and devotional similarities between Islam
and Protestantism to forge an effective alliance between the Ottoman and
Tudor dynasties. Her trade and military alliances of 1600 with the Morrocan
King Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud and other Barbary States greatly
annoyed Spain.167 The Catholic Christendom (including Pope Sixtus V)
viewed her and her subjects as “New Turks”, as Matthew Dimmock’s book
New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern
England demonstrates. To the Catholic commentator, publisher and
antiquarian Richard Verstagen (1548-1636), England was involved not only
in dividing Christendom and undermining its long crusade against the
Ottoman Muslims but actively engaged in the counter crusade of Ottomans
to establish universal Muslim monarchy in Europe. The English would soon
exchange their Geneva Bible for the Turkish Alcoran. The charge was so
damning that the English government commissioned the philosopher-
stateman Francis Bacon to refute Verstagen’s polemics. Bacon’s response,
entitled “Certain Observations Upon a Libel” was written in 1592,
presumably within months of Verstegan’s “A declaration”. Elizabeth
effectively used the religious affinity between Islam and Protestantism to
leverage her interests in the Muslim World, following Martin Luther in this
respect. The shared iconoclasm between Protestants and Muslims can be
traced back to Luther’s 1528 tract, where he speaks of the “Turk’s holiness,
that they tolerate no images or pictures,” commending Muslims as being
“even holier than our destroyers of images” who still tolerate images on
rings and ornaments, while “the Turk tolerates none of them and stamps
nothing but letters on his coins”.168 In the 1580s, Queen Elizabeth utilised
this shared iconoclast ideology when she reminded Murad in her diplomatic
correspondence that both Protestants and Muslims shared a religious
rejection of icons. With Elizabeth, the Protestant religio political
accommodation of Islam began in England. Sultan Murad III was to exploit
that accommodation and affinity in his correspondence with other
Protestants such as in Flanders and Spain. Her successor, King James I,
originally a Turco-phobe and champion of Christian unity, under the
influence of his Levant and East India Company friend Sir Thomas Smyth,
his dire financial needs to support his Protestant son in Law Frederick, the
Elector of the Rhineland Palatinate and leader of the German Protestant
Union in the Thirty Year’s War (1618- 1648), his loans from the Levant
Company, his diplomatic efforts to prevent the truce between Ottomans and
Habsburg to avert mounting military pressure from Frederick and multiple
other factors caused him to continue Ottoman-Islamic accommodations like
Elizabeth. Additionally, he had to devise an ideological strategy to ward off
unrelenting Habsburg polemics against English-Protestant heresy,
illegitimacy and treason. He wittingly or unwittingly, incorporated Ottoman
anti Catholic tropes of Catholic corruptions, interpolations and
manipulations into his scheme of refuting the Catholic Habsburg
propaganda of Protestant treason and Anglican betrayal of true Catholic
Christian faith. His insistence upon Erastian Church Settlement,
scripturalism, bypassing the Catholic traditions, Church Councils,
Settlements, absolutist claims and instead direct appeal to Antiquity, pre-
Catholic first three century’s original, pristine Christianity and Erastian
church somehow reflected the long Ottoman reformative propaganda
against Roman Christianity and so it was branded by the Catholic Habsburg
propaganda machine. His purer English Bible spurred biblical criticism. To
the Catholic leadership, Anglican King and Church were playing the
Muslim cards to establish their independent Protestant English identity and
monarchy. King James’ publication of a purer English Bible in conjunction
with Eastern manuscripts, promises of equal treatment and support of
Eastern Orthodox Church based in Istanbul and plans for a unifying
ecumenical council without authorization of Pope were no less dangerous
than Sultan Suleiman the Magnificant’s plans for Catholic reformation and
an ecumenical council to bring the warring Catholics and Protestants under
Suleiman’s leadership to resolve the ongoing Christian strife and bloodshed.
Suleiman “saw a role for himself in the religious turmoil that ripped
Europe: as his grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha told the Habsburg envoy to
Istanbul in 1534, Suleyman planned on convoking and presiding over an
ecumenical council where the pope and Martin Luther would come together
to resolve their conflict. Like Constantine, from whose city he aspired to
rule the world, Suleyman was going to bring about the unification of
religions under imperial and presumably Islamic auspices. Active
involvement in religious issues was from Suleyman’s perspective central to
his role as emperor-a concept that he would insist upon even more
rigorously later in his reign.”169
England’s close diplomatic relations with and overseas trade especially to
the warring Ottoman Empire was a proof of Ottoman support of English
subversive agenda. To the Catholics, England had somehow become a prey
to the Ottoman designs of a universal Muslim empire at the expense of
Habsburg Christian universal monarchy. The raw Protestant England’s
identity was formed in opposition to the Catholic Church while
appropriating the useful ingredients from the lesser enemy, the Ottomans,
due to their support and trade.
The Hungarian Protestants perhaps were the biggest beneficiaries of the
Ottoman support and interference.170 The Hungarian academic historian
Bela K. Kiraly, in Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern
Europe,171 stated that “the simultaneity of Luther’s rupture with Rome and
Ottoman penetration of Hungary’s underbelly prefigured one of the most
striking characteristics of the spread of Protestantism through Hungary: the
interdependence of the Ottoman conquest in central Hungary and the
dissemination of the new faith.”172 The Ottoman Empire conquered the
Hungarian heartland during the sixteenth century. Consequently,
Protestantism also grew rapidly, and during the second half of the century
Catholic Hungary became a Protestant land. To Kiraly, the Protestant
successes in Hungary and Transylvania were dependent on the Ottoman
conquest of these lands and their favourable treatment of the Protestants.173
The Ottoman Muslims did not burn, kill and maim Protestant Christians as
the Catholic Church did in the Habsburg areas. The Ottoman allowed them
religious freedom, financial support and political stability, supported
reformed churches against their Catholic foes and greatly helped them in
developing their political and religious identity.174 Islam and Muslims were
an integral part of this identification and differentiation process, and left a
subtle but visible impact upon the outcome.175
Radical Reformation
The radical reformation of Michael Servetus (1509-1553), Socinians and
Unitarians were shaped by this Muslim support and experience. Their
radical Unitarian reformation was the second and parallel Protestant
reformation, along with the moderate, magisterial reformation of Luther and
Calvin.176 The overall reformed Christian identity, outlook and orientation,
especially of the radical Unitarians, were more Muhammadan than the
medieval Church Christianity. The later European anti-Trinitarians,
Unitarians and Socinians would all emerge from Transylvania and play an
extremely important role in disseminating the Islamic anti-Trinitarian
rational theology and republican political outlook all across the European
Continent. Socinians and Unitarians would play an important role in early
seventeenth century Holland and English religious debates, engage both
clerical and lay theologians and shape the anti-Trinitarian, rational and
republican trends in Holland, as well as pre–Civil War and post-Revolution
England.177 Sarah Mortimer observed that “Scholars from every
confessional and political background read and engaged with Socinian
writing, developing their own thoughts and programmes in the process.
Socinianism was a central part of early modern political and religious
debates and … those debates can look very different when the Socinian
dimension is restored to them.”178 Italian and Heidelberg anti-Trinitarian
rationalists would seek refuge and flourish in Transylvania and German
Unitarian theologians, and clergy such as Adam Neuser would go to
Constantinople through Hungary to convert to Islam.179 The first Protestant
edict of religious tolerance would be enacted here in Hungry.180 The
Ottoman support, tolerance and empowerment of Protestantism had long
religious and political consequences.
The Italian anti-Trinitarian Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the Hermetic
occultist, mathematician, philosopher, cosmologist and Dominican friar,
also struggled to rid Catholic Christianity of its supernatural extravagances
such as the Trinity, incarnation, Christ’s divinity, Consubstantiation and
triadic cosmology.181 Inspired by Servetus’ heterodoxy and courage,182
alchemy tradition of Hermeticism,183 Arabic astrology, theology especially
Averroes’ philosophy184 Bruno considered Christianity as a human
fabrication to be discarded or totally reformed. The famous Renaissance
philosopher, religionist and historian Alfonso Ingegno put the point in a
nutshell. “Bruno’s reform, therefore, is not only philosophically significant
but also has religious consequences. It challenges the developments of the
Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity,
and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind.”185 Bruno, like
Servetus, argued that the Trinitarian supernatural philosophy had
tremendous negative impacts on religion, society, man and cosmos. His
Unitarian, Arian revision of the Christian theology, atomist materialistic
revision of old philosophy and cosmology and Hermetic experimental
alchemy would usher in a new reformative scheme which would radically
change the world. “The consequences of this new philosophy are wide-
ranging and radical because this new vision of the cosmos changes our
relationship with the divinity, and this, in Bruno’s eyes, transforms the very
meaning of human life. He claims that this new vision will reconcile us
with the divine law which governs nature, and free us from the fear of
imaginary divinities, cruel and unfathomable, who look down from
heavenly heights, controlling the sublunary world in a mysterious way.”186
Bruno was burned on the stake by the Catholic authorities as Servetus was
burned by Calvin before him. Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches
were hell-bent against radical, rational reformation of theology, politics,
society and nature; they did not want to relinquish their absolute powers
and divine right authority.
Sixteenth-century Trinitarian reformers focused more upon the Church
structure, politics and abuses and less upon religio-political theology and
natural cosmology. They kept intact some fundamental Christian dogmas
such as the Trinity, Jesus’ divinity, original sin, no salvation outside the
Church, infant baptism,187 predestination and justification through faith,
along with their cosmological and political implications. “The Reformation
was not even the most radical form of the ideological rupture with the
European past and its “feudal” ideologies, among others its earlier
interpretation of Christianity. It was, on the contrary, its primitive and
confused form.”188 This continuity was perhaps necessary though for the
sake of historical continuity and to ward off Catholic allegations of Luther
Muhammadanism. Consequently, the triadic hierarchical worldview, divine
right king and Church with their absolutist persecutory policies remained
intact. The newly-established Protestant Churches, such as Lutheran,
Calvinist and Anglican, struggled to establish their orthodox beliefs and
curtail heterodox doctrines.189 They resorted to civil authorities for
imposition of their orthodoxies and persecution of heterodoxies.190 In reality
the Catholic Inquisitions and persecutions multiplied after the Protestant
Reformation, and were copied by the Protestant national Churches. Some
radical reformers, such as Michael Servetus, Bruno, Transylvanian
Unitarians and Socinians, felt that the Reformation needed further
theologico-political and scientific reformation, but they were rebuffed and
persecuted by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. They pushed the
Reformation ideas to their logical conclusions; if the Catholic Church was
the perpetrator of the ecclesiastical fraud and corruption, then what was the
guarantee that it did not corrupt the Christian theology, natural philosophy
and political thought? “The spirit of scepticism, which at the Reformation
extended only to the authority of particular Churches or to the justice of
particular interpretations of Scripture, had gradually expanded till it
included the whole domain of theology, and had produced a series of
violent attacks upon the miracles.”191 The radicals did not find Original Sin,
Trinity, Jesus’ divinity, atoning sacrificial death, authoritative Church and
absolute monarchy expressly delineated in the scriptures the way Church
traditions had laid them down. They did not see the triadic hierarchy in
divinity, cosmos, social order and human body; they instead experienced
simplicity, unity and harmony in the natural phenomena, equality among
the humans and unity in the physiological system. For instance, Servetus in
his book The Restoration of Christianity (1553) emphasised the Unitarian
reformation of Christianity in theology, social order and natural realms. He
rejected the Trinity in theology as well as physiology. “Just as he denied the
supreme Trinity, so Servetus denied the general concept of triadic hierarchy.
In particular, having had a medical training, Servetus criticised the
application of the concept to physiological theory, claiming that the natural,
vital, and animal spirits in a human body were one and the same, as ‘In all
of these there is the energy of the one spirit and of the light of God’. Thus
there were not two kinds of blood, the venous and the arterial, differentiated
by the natural and the vital spirits, but only one blood containing a single
spirit, since ‘The vital is that which is communicated by the joins from the
arteries to the veins in which it is called the natural’. This single spirit of the
blood was the soul, or rather ‘The soul itself is the blood’, a view which
Servetus supported with texts from the Old Testament.”192 Servetus’
theological and physiological Unitarianism was punished by Calvin and
Servetus was burned alive on the stake.
The Muslim contacts, cultural exchanges and debates in Spain, Eastern
Europe and Italy had highlighted the disparities between the Trinitarian and
Unitarian worldview, and radical reformers had aspired for a radical
Unitarian reformation. But the demands of these reformers were too radical
for the Protestant clergy and princes whose authorities were dependent upon
the traditional, supernatural, Trinitarian theology and political outlooks.
Consequently, they suppressed theological radicalism of Unitarians and
Socinians with united zeal and enthusiasm. The political structures were
equally threatened by Unitarian political and rational theology, and
supported Trinitarian theologians in their persecution of Unitarians.
The partial doctrinal continuity of Protestants, without the long traditional
foundations of Catholicism, led to countless confessional wars between the
Protestants and to a myriad of diverging doctrinal interpretations. The
Reformers were willing to grant individual access to the scriptures, but not
individual liberty to understand or interpret the scriptures. They stifled
unrestrained rational inquiry, logical inferences and demonstrations from
the nature of things. They instead continued the old Catholic doctrinal
tradition with metaphorical - and at times allegorical - interpretations of
scripture, which appeared artificial and arbitrary to many rationally-oriented
radical reformers such as the Unitarians and Socinians.193 The sixteenth-
century Reformation replaced the absolute and persecutory Catholic
Habsburg monarchy with equally absolute and persecutory national states,
and churches which merged confessional uniformity with political fidelity.
Religious tolerance and liberty of conscience were considered as anarchic
and evil as in the Catholic block; religious and political uniformity was
imposed with iron fist and persecutory zeal.
The inter-Protestant scuffles, in addition to the long Catholic Protestant
wars, had debilitating effects upon Europe and forced the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century reformers to face the dividing dogmas head on. They felt
that the sixteenth-century Reformation required further reformation.
“Whereas magisterial Protestants had (in the words of Lancelot Andrewes)
embraced ‘one Canon. . .two Testaments, three Creeds, the first four
Councils, five centuries’, radical Protestants were dismissive of creeds,
councils, and patristic authorities, especially after the watershed of
Constantine’s conversion in 312 and the Council of Nicaea in 325.”194
While the Reformers appealed to the Patristic Church of the first five
centuries, the radicals appealed only to the Apostolic Church of the first
century because, to them, the Church was compromised soon after the
initial generations. Religious persecutions were the inventions of
compromised church. The Reformation did not resolve the problems
connected with Church and state abuses. The supernatural, Trinitarian,
Augustinian political theology, with its absolutist tones, suffocated the
European society by hampering religious freedom, curtailing rational
discourse and combating republican empowerment of masses. That
Trinitarian belief system needed to be dismantled or reformed for its
hierarchical and persecutory policies to subside. The overseas trade, mid-
century English Revolution, abolition of Anglican Church and monarchy,
subsequent religious proliferation, relative tolerance, restoration of a
weaker monarchy, dialectical struggles between various segments of
English society especially between monarchy and parliament, and the
Trinitarian controversy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
proved to be turning points in the history of Europe in general and England
in particular. Islam, Muslims, Turks, Persians and Mughals were constant
fixtures through all these crises. Muslims were used and abused but never
ignored or discarded, as Nabil Matar, Gerald MacLean, Matthew
Birchwood, Humberto Garcia, James Mather and others have shown. Islam
featured prominently in the intense battle of early seventeenth century
English intellectual warfare and later Enlightenment ideas becoming the
voice of religious freedom, tolerance and inclusivism in so many ways and
forms.
Through trade, diplomacy, drama, stage and press England encountered
Islam, its theology, culture, civilization, history, empires, people and
institutions and constructed its identity, aspirations, directions, institutions
and policies in conjunction with as well as in opposition to it. The news
from Istanbul, Isfahan and Agra were well circulated and digested in
London. As the Ottoman and Mughal Empires were experiencing the
climax of their civilizational heights, the nascent British aspirations for an
empire were being laid in the constitutional transformations, religious
reformations and socio cultural and scientific regeneration. The Ottoman,
Mughal and Persian Muslims were elemental in shaping the English nation
which emerged from the late seventeenth century “Glorious Revolution”,
limited monarchy, relative religious toleration and diversity. Throughout the
long seventeenth century, the English ties with the old Catholic foundations
and its religio political theology were gradually weakened and
preoccupations with, representations and appropriations of things Islamic
were increasingly accelerated. They permeated almost all aspects of the
English society from political, religious, commercial, diplomatic and social
discourses in limitless ways and forms. Islam was requisitioned in countless
discussions about religious dogmas such as the Trinity, Christ’s divinity,
original sin, satisfaction through Crucifixion, predestination, free will,
divine revelation, miracles, Church governance and structure, monarchical
sovereignty, tyranny, persecution, liberty of conscience, religious toleration,
rights of the rulers and subjects, natural religion, human rights and trade
policies. Islam was repeatedly summoned to analyze, evaluate, criticize and
reform many English ideologies, policies, emergencies and challenges. The
level of engagement with Islam and Muslims depended upon the level of
English anxieties. The more the uncertainties such as the English Civil War,
Regicide, Interregnum, Restoration, Exclusion Crises, Trinitarian
Controversy, Glorious Revolution, the more the eruptions of things Islamic
along the ideological fault lines. Through multitudes of actors, networks
and mechanisms the ideas of Islam were transmitted to almost every
stratum of English society. The English fascination with Islam and Muslims
to the extent of obsession was a long-lasting phenomenon throughout the
turbulent seventeenth century. It had its religio political and cultural impacts
as the encounter with Muslims took a central stage in English identity
formation process both positively and negatively. By the end of the
seventeenth century, many Islamic ideas, debates, ideals and institutions
were totally domesticated, assimilated, appropriated and Anglicized.
Through these processes of cultural diffusion, assimilation, appropriation
and mirroring, the radical reformation of Servetus, Bruno, Socinians and
Unitarians became relevant, palatable and was gradually appropriated by
the English intelligentsia.195
The mid-century Puritan Revolution was the watershed moment. J. Scott
noted that “England’s troubles began … as a struggle for reformation, first
on the European and then on the local stage. With the collapse of religious
and then civil magistracy, civil war radicalism emerged as the radicalisation
of that cause. In England, unlike in Germany, the radical army was on the
winning side. Consequently the English revolution unleashed in the 1640s
became the last and greatest triumph of the European radical
reformation.”196 John Coffey has well demonstrated this fact in his chapter
“The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation’?
Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Anti-Trinitarianism in the English
Revolution.”197 The rejection of Trinity was the first step towards denying
the clergy and kings’ claims to absolute power and triadic hierarchical
cosmology. The anti-Trinitarian man Christology brought Jesus from the
supernatural realms to the terrestrial moral realms. The Church and
monarchy and their triadic natural interpretations came crumbling down,
along with eradication of supernatural Trinitarian foundations. The anti-
Trinitarians insisted upon the human nature of ecclesiastical and
monarchical authority, interpretations and institutions. Purging Christianity
of its Trinitarian and incarnational supernaturalism meant the demolition of
supernatural foundations of clerical/monarchical authority and old
educational systems, structures and hierarchy. Divine sovereignty,
simplicity, unity and Unitarianism were emphasised; man and nature were
directly connected with the One and Only God, bypassing the intermediary
beings and institutions. The invisible magical powers and miracles of
priests and kings were scrutinised, while miraculous divine and angelic
interventions in the natural world were analysed and rejected. Fixed,
universal natural laws were hailed and rational, mathematical, empirical,
experimental and scientific discourse was encouraged.198 Man was released
of the torturous guilt of original sin, tainted nature, absolute predestination,
arbitrary grace-based salvation scheme and ensuing Church and King’s
absolute prerogatives. Man was dignified, exalted, empowered and
incentivised to engage in good works and work towards his felicity.
The gradual socio-economic, religious, scientific and political changes
were extensions of the same revolutionary zeal which overtook England
during the 1640s. Reason was pitched against Christian mysteries, natural
law and religion against supernatural, unintelligible, miraculous, dogmatic
Christianity, universal faith against localised particular Christian tradition
and moral against ritualistic way of life. To Barbara J. Shapiro, the
seventeenth century was the century of “culture of fact” and natural
investigation against the medieval culture of mere meditative,
contemplative, imaginative, supernatural and miraculous discourse.199 The
nature of Church and King’s authority was theological, so the problems of
power and authority were resolved by theological alternates. This transition
was made possible by the overseas Atlantic and Mediteranean trade with
Muslim East, and its drastic impact on religious and political theology and
institutions. The rise of an increasingly wealthy merchant middle class
diminished the investigative and persecutory powers of Church and state
and allowed spread of heterodox doctrines and views. The Muslim world of
the sixteenth and seventeenth century was not the marginalized but the
dominant other. The overseas trade forced England to adapt itself to the
Muslim world. The overseas trade with Muslim empires dictated the terms,
conditions and relations and the trade became a central mechanism of
cultural exchange between East and England. In Izmir, Aleppo and Istanbul
the English engaged in a complex web of cultural negotiations and
interactions not only with Eastern Muslims but also with Eastern Christians,
Jews and Hindus and rival Western Christians. The outsiders were English
merchants and not the Ottomans or Mughals. This experiential inventory
and international exposure were instrumental in cross cultural diffusions
and cultural hybridity. The English religio political and cultural identity was
formulated through these complex webs of encounters, experiences,
negotiations and assimilations. I am not referring here to Edward Said’s
Orientalism thesis which emphasizes the role played by the “Orient” in
Western ideology, politics and logic of power albeit negatively but to S. C.
Chew, Nabil Matar, Gerald MacLean, Daniel Vitkus, Linda McJannet,
Matthew Dimmock, Matthew Birchwood, Jonathan Burton and others
thesis of “Ottomania”, “Turkophilia” and “Islamophilia” which showcases
the positive, emulative, apish, mimic and grudging effects Islam and
Muslims had upon the English trade, politics, religion, culture and society,
as will be elaborated throughout this book. The English identity was
formulated both in opposition to and in conjunction with this fascinating
Muslim “Other”. Mark Greengrass has extended the same hybridization and
Levantinization to the entire Continent of Europe.200 The overseas traders,
factors, chaplains, councilors and travelers infused the English public
sphere with discussions, arguments and precedents of religious tolerance,
diversity, freedom of conscience, social cohesion, wall between Church and
state, Unitarian rational theology, moral anthology, ensuing peace, stability
and prosperity effecting overall English identity, culture, race, and religion.
The internal English response, both negative and positive, to things Islamic
was tremendous to the extent of obsession. From the Elizabethan Settlement
to the Glorious Revolution discussions about Turkism, Islamism and
Ottoman Empire were the vehicles as well as conceptual field of the
English national debates. The Ottoman Sultan spoke various dialects and
the English listened with full care and attention, as Linda McJannet has
shown. The evolving Anglo Protestant identity and character was both
directly and discursively shaped as a result of these encounters. Robert J.
Topinka stated that “as England increasingly interacted with Islam, Islam
increasingly played a role in shaping English identity.”201 The post
Reformation anti-Catholic enthusiasm of the English Crown, parliament,
intelligentsia, natural philosophers and dissenters to return to the pristine,
primitive Christianity, to certain extents, passed through the Islamic
sciences, institutions, religion, history, theology, languages and regions.
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century reformers like John Locke, Isaac
Newton, Henry Stubbe, John Toland and Deists were influenced by the
radical Unitarian strain of reformation championed by Servetus, Bruno and
Socinians. John Coffey noted that “by the late seventeenth century the most
intellectually distinguished anti-Trinitarians were Isaac Newton and John
Locke, closeted within the establishment and afraid to broadcast their
manuscript heterodoxies in print.”202 They dissimulated their heterodox
beliefs to avoid persecutions. The seventeenth century was the century of
Nicodemism as Perez Zagorin has amply demonstrated. He further stated
that “anti-Trinitarianism that had flourished among certain radical Puritans
would in due course exercise its greatest appeal among members of the
established church, including John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Samuel
Clarke (though the most radical speculations of Locke and Newton
remained unpublished). In the eighteenth-century Church of England,
Arianism and Socinianism would provoke fierce controversy. Radical
Reformation had entered the bloodstream of English Protestantism.”203
English and French Unitarians and Deists such as Henri Boulainvilliers,
d’Argenson, Du Marsais, jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, Nicolas Boindin, jean
Levesque de Burigny, Louis de Brehant, comte de Plelo (1699-1734), the
Chevalier de Ramsay and other known French deists204 purged Christianity
of the remaining incarnational reservoirs, the remnants of ancient Christian
Platonic grafting, and brought it in line with the pristine moral Christianity
of Jesus Christ and his original followers, the Nasara or Nazarenes.205
Moral Christianity required the clergy and royality to showcase moral
leadership instead of claiming supernatural God-given rights and privileges
based on direct communication with God. This moral, anti-Trinitarian
Christianity was in total opposition to the supernatural, Trinitarian,
Incarnational, miraculous and abnormal Christianity. There was no room in
it for Trinity, original sin, justification through faith and grace,
predestination, ecclesiastical hierarchy and clerical abuses. It replaced the
miraculous abnormality with normal, natural and moral laws.206 This
Christianity was nothing but a moral tradition in line with the universal
monotheistic prophetic tradition. In other words, it was a Muhammadan
Christianity, as Henry Stubbe and John Toland termed it, in direct
opposition to the traditional Church Christianity. The seventeenth-century
reformation of Roman Christianity was made possible by the century-long
cross-cultural exchanges, experiences and interactions between countless
Levant and East India Company’s overseas traders and Muslims, causing a
commercial consumer culture, a paradigm shift from supernatural to
natural, from authority based miraculous knowledge to experimental,
empirical knowledge leading to a scientific revolution, as well as the
creation of a public sphere and egalitarian public places such as Turkish
coffeehouses, which contributed to British internal instability. It was
politically facilitated by English merchants, overseas trading companies’
stake holders all across Britian, including gentry and members of
parliament, who curtailed and balanced the Crown’s authority.
Intellectually, natural philosophers such as the fellows of Royal Society
provided an alternate natural, rational, impartial, universal and empirical
method of certitude through data collection and experimentation. The
authority based Aristotelian scholasticism and old Ptolemaic cosmology
was challenged and corrected by experience, experiments and overseas
explorations especially to the Near East. Their rational discourse was a
welcome addition to a culture of religious scepticism, anxiety and
uncertainty created by radicals such as Socinians, Unitarians and Deists.
The scientific rational discourse and data-driven experimentation
supplanted the Church claims of Christian mysteries over and beyond
reason. The theological discursive rationalism of Unitarians and Socinions
was supplemented by the scientific and philosophical rational certitude of
Boyle, Newton and Locke and Anglican Latitudinarians;207 they were two
sides of the same coin in matters of theology. The main difference between
the radical secretaries, Unitarian, Socinian and Deist radicals and moderate
reformers such as Locke, Newton, Royal Society fellows and
Latitudinarians was that the radical reformers aspired and intended to
abolish hierarchical social order, absolutist church and monarchy and
replace it with republican, voluntarist and egalitarian religio-political and
social institutions. The moderates, on the other hand, did not intend to
abolish Church and monarchy in an effort to preserve social order, stability,
peace and hierarchy. The socio-economic and political upheavals caused by
the mid-century English revolution were appalling enough to be avoided at
all costs. The moderates vouched for an internal reformation which
struggled to rationalise theology, curtail and constitutionalise monarchy,
empower parliament and support a commercial, mercantile and capitalist
market economy with social hierarchy and stratification.208 The moderates
were more calculated, catious and systematic than the radical reformers and
their subversive strategies, but their moderate internal reformation was
quite radical in its ambitions and ultimate goals, in addition to being
Unitarian and republican. This way, the reformation of Reformation, aspired
by Michael Servetus, Bruno and their intellectual disciples such as
Socinians, Unitarians and Deists with the help of Oriental manuscripts and
exposure and their absorption by the English natural philosophers, brought
about the early English Enlightenment (1650-1720) and a limited monarchy
which led to High Enlightenment and later democratic systems. The late
Renaissance period and seventeenth century were crucial landmarks and
flash points of this radical reformation and transition. Throughout this
crucial period both Muslims and their legacy were integral to English
identity and self-definition. From trade to fashion, theology to politics,
domestic to foreign affairs, preachers to renegades, churches to
coffeehouses, soldiers to sailors, international merchants to local weavers,
the Ottoman, Mughal and Persian Empires, their people, cultures, policies
and affairs were hotly debated, analyzed, discussed, described, accepted and
rejected. The Briton’s engagement with things Islamic especially from 1558
to 1685 was unprecedented. No other single non-Christian civilization left
such a mark on England as the Muslim civilization did during this long and
crucial period of English identity formation. Therefore, the English
Renaissance and Enlightenment were inter-Mediterranean and inter-
religious affairs. Islam, Muslims, Muslim thought patterns were useful both
in religio political theology. England did not engage Islam and Muslims for
the love of them but because they were too relevant to be ignored. They
were “useful enemies” as Sir Noel Malcolm’s recent book Useful Enemies
amply demonstrates. “The East was not only too important to be ignored; it
was too interesting—and, most of all, too useful.”209
To truly grasp the scope and depth of this transformation we need to
delineate the nature of divine right monarchy and Church, its theological
foundations and its long medieval history. The absolutist Church and
monarchy were integral parts of the socio-religious consciousness and
imagery of Christendom from the fourth to the eighteenth century. Its roots
were very deep, its branches were widespread and its overwhelming
religious power and political reach did not allow any serious internal
intellectual or political challenge. It was only due to the Protestant
Reformation that the constituent elements of such an absolutist supernatural
ideology were indirectly weakened, allowing the possibility of penetration
through its porous borders. The Protestant slogan Sola Scriptura posed
serious challenges to the Church traditions. The new emerging national
states and churches did not have enough time and tradition to construct a
full-fledged or well thought-out doctrinal system and political theology.
Their existence was hinging on opposition to Catholicism, and they could
not afford to transport Catholic doctrines and ideas into the new system.
The ensuing doctrinal instability, fluidity and uncertainty allowed the
emergence of radical interpretations and unorthodox understandings, and
the individual approach to the Scriptures opened a floodgate of new
interpretations and directions.210 The absence of overwhelming
ecclesiastical and overpowering state establishments exasperated the
situation. The inter Catholic and Protestant and intra Protestant wars
additionally drained resources and increased instability, insecurity and
radicalism. The foreign Muslim ideas of religious tolerance, pluralism,
limited monarchy and rationalism appropriated and propagated by the
Levant and East India Company influential merchants added fuel to the fire.
The extra ordinary geo-political and religious circumstances of seventeenth-
century Western Europe facilitated the intellectual and theological
revolution, which eroded the foundations of the Old Regime absolutism and
allowed further reformation of Protestantism on Islamic rational, natural
and republican lines. The outcome was the Muhammadan Christianity of
Henry Stubbe, John Toland, John Locke and others.
We need to understand the process of Islamic reformation of Church
Christianity to fully grapple the contours and long-term impacts of this
Muhammadan Christianity upon the Roman Christianity.
 Chapter 1

Roman Christianity and Its Socio-Political

Thought
The Christian faith is very unique and complex; it revolves around a
historical person Jesus Christ who is simultaneously considered God and
man.211 Its Trinitarian metaphysics and faith-based salvation scheme is very
distinctive. Its incarnational theology is supernatural, top-down,
hierarchical, absolutist, paradoxical and mysterious. Its concept of human
nature, society and human destiny is amazingly arbitrary, puzzling and
complex.212 It is a faith which is neither fully Semitic nor fully Hellenistic,
but a metamorphosis of Jewish and Roman traditions. The historical
Christian faith system is supernatural where God, heavens, cosmic threats,
sacrifices, atonements and salvation are emphasised often at the expense of
man, nature, society, terrestrial realms and utilitarian sphere of now and
here. Man is a small pawn in the cosmic scheme of things. This celestial,
supernatural Christian faith system is antithetical to the terrestrial, natural,
moral, ethical, monotheistic Semitic consciousness.213
Historical Jesus lived among the Jews and inherited the Semitic
monotheistic consciousness.214 The occupying Roman Empire was ruled by
pagan emperors. The egalitarian Jesus and his early followers were at a loss
to fight the overpowering absolutist Roman authorities and were severely
persecuted by the Roman officials. The moral, natural and simple
monotheistic faith of Jesus was pitched against supernatural, complex,
polytheistic and mystery religions of the Roman elites.
The Greco-Roman world was filled with mystery religions and cults
which preached mystical cleansing of sins through sacrificial death of a
saviour. The tragedy and sacrificial ritual narratives were central to Greco-
Roman culture, drama and religious landscape. The Early Christian Church
had difficulties in winning over the Roman pagans to Semitic monotheism.
Its long conflict with mystery religions left an indelible impact upon the
Church theology. It is impossible to deny such a long-lasting influence.215
Consequently, the Church developed a number of dogmas, using biblical
vocabulary but Greco-Roman imagery and concepts, to win over the Roman
masses; the result was a Roman Christianity, at odds with the original
Semitic monotheistic consciousness of Jesus and his surroundings.
The central Christian dogmas such as the cosmic threat to man due to
inherent human depravity (fallen nature, original sin), need for a cosmic
saviour and substitutionary sacrifice, incarnation, belief in the saving acts of
the saviour, initiation in the cult and salvation through the atoning death
were reflections of the dominant Greco-Roman culture. Once incorporated
they rendered human participation in the Christian scheme of salvation
insignificant, while emphasising divine incentive and grace; outward moral
virtue, good actions and righteousness played second fiddle to inward belief
and knowledge. Faith in the mystery of Trinity, incarnation and atoning
death was required over and beyond knowledge, reason and human actions.
Faith and salvation were dependent upon true knowledge of supernatural
realities and doctrines; that knowledge was not earned but a gift given to a
selected few due to divine selection and predestination. The Church stood at
the top of pyramid as the repository of divine knowledge, the revelation.
True faith and knowledge were reflected through the interpretations given
to divine revelation by the Church Fathers. These understandings made up
the “tradition” of the Church, the lens through which the Christian faith and
salvation were to be mirrored. The Church was central to human salvation
as the dispenser of divine knowledge and grace; there was no salvation
outside the Church and there was no authentic knowledge outside the
Scriptures and Church tradition. The Church enjoyed sole interpretive
authority, due to its supposed direct link with the Holy Spirit. Theology was
the queen of sciences and all sciences, including natural sciences, were to
submit to it. Any deviation from the Church dogmas and interpretations was
heretical and punished by God. The Church was hierarchical and its clerical
establishment enjoyed absolute authority, privileges and honours due to its
transcendental dimensions.
The Christian religion was distinctive in the sense that it diminished
human dignity, ethico spiritual capacities and self-esteem. The Christian
dogma of original sin and depraved human nature downplayed human
autonomy, freedom and dignity. Man was too evil, childish and wretched to
be left on his own, and needed God via the Church and rulers to keep
himself in line. It diminished larger human participation in salvation, socio-
political and civic arena. The social order was hierarchical, top-down and
absolutist. The Christian notion of God was equally beyond the
comprehension of man due to his tainted fallen nature. The Trinitarian
Godhead was mysterious, complex and paradoxical, and only the Church
could fully grasp it. It was to be believed and obeyed, in conformity with
the Church interpretations, without asking questions or delving deep into its
mysteries.
The Christian dogmas about creation, human nature, virtues, salvation,
justice and love were equally arbitrary; they were solely God’s incentives
mostly beyond human logic and comprehension. Man was to believe in
these lofty, mysterious and unintelligible dogmas to attain his eternal
salvation. The supernatural completely dominated and absorbed the natural,
logical and rational realms. Man was truly depraved and deprived.
Additionally, the central dogmas of Christianity were understood and
interpreted divergently, even within the Church tradition. The diversity of
opinions, interpretations and implications was mind-boggling. The
authentic, sanctioned and genuine was to be determined by the Church
without much participation from believers who were supposed to blindly
follow the Church teachings under spectacles of dire punishments. The
Church Christianity was an absolutely top-down system of submission,
conformity and obedience.
God created Adam and Eve with omniscience to live in the Garden of
Eden and commanded them to abstain from eating fruits of the forbidden
tree. The Serpent deceivingly persuaded them to eat the forbidden apple,
with the promise that they would live for eternity. Eve, the weaker partner,
succumbed to the plot and not only ate the forbidden fruit but also gave it to
Adam. God expelled them both from the Paradise. This was called the
original “Fall” due to original sin. Man was destined by God to live for
eternity, but Adam’s sin brought upon man death, ignorance and perdition.
Consequently, all children of Adam were born with that original sin and
fallen nature. Man, as a result of that fallen nature, was depraved, wretched
and destined to hellfire; his human nature was tainted, and man was born as
sinful, lustful and wretched. He did not have the capacity to differentiate
between right and wrong, between good and bad and was always inclined
towards evil, if left to himself. There was no exception to this rule. All
mankind, all children of Adam inherited the original sin and tainted nature
and were liable to its evil consequences and eternal punishments. In short,
all were condemned to hellfire.
 The Merciful God could not see that happening. He thought of forgiving
Adam and his progeny, but his sense of justice did not allow him to forgive
mankind without exacting punishment. His boundless love on the other
hand demanded forgiveness. God could not see countless children of Adam
eternally condemned to hellfire. Therefore, he came up with a plan to save
humanity of its original sin and its eternal evil consequences. As the sin was
against God and of cosmic nature it needed a cosmic solution. No man
could be part of that solution as all men were equally tainted, depraved and
wretched. Consequently, God decided to sacrifice his only begotten Son for
the sake of mankind. Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Second Person of
the Holy Trinity took on the flesh to understand the human conditions, to
unite with humanity in everything other than sin and to die on the Cross for
their sins as satisfaction of human debt to God. This way both God’s love
and justice were satisfied. God could justly forgive human sins out of his
love by accepting the sacrificial death of his only begotten, sinless, cosmic
Son of cosmic significance.
Consequently, anybody who believed in the Trinity, divinity of Jesus
Christ, his Lordship, atoning death and resurrection was saved and those
who denied Christ’s divinity, Lordship, Incarnation or Crucifixion were
condemned.
The Christian tradition was a Trinitarian faith where monotheism was
reflected through the prism of a triune God. God the Holy Father, Son and
Holy Spirit made up the Godhead.216 They were considered equal in
Godhead, from the same divine substance, having three different persons,
identities and consciousness. They were three in one and one in three.
Augustinian and Cappadocian Models
The Trinity meant different things to different schools of Christian
thought.217 The Cappadocian Trinitarian paradigm was considerably
different from the Augustinian model. The Cappadocian model emphasised
distinction of persons, a sort of diversity within divine unity, while the
Augustinian model underscored unity of persons, will and substance. The
Cappadocian social unity leaned more towards three independent, self-
conscious persons while the Augustinian Trinity gravitated more towards
Unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, differing only in modes. The
Cappadocian model was accused of tri-theism while the Augustinian model
was blamed for Modalism, a blurring of the difference between the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. Both parties accused each other of compromising the
spirit of true doctrine, but there were countless unresolved issues inherent in
both of the classical models. Was the internal unity of three persons a social
unity of independent persons, wills, actions or a unity of substance? Were
the three persons of the Trinity the three individual modes of existence of
the one and same God, consisting in their mutual relationship, or did it refer
to three distinct individuals, separate centers of consciousness, three self-
conscious personal beings? In both scenarios the question remained the
same. On the Cross (Matt. 27:46), was God calling upon Himself for help
or was one independent person of Godhead calling upon another
independent person of Godhead for help? In the first scenario it was
“Modalism” or “Docetism”, a total absurdity. Why would God call upon his
own self for help? In the other scenario it was a “vulgar tritheism”, to use
Karl Rahner’s term,218 or at least “Subordinationism” i.e., a lesser god was
seeking a higher God’s help. Centuries of Church Councils, controversies
and solutions could not resolve this puzzle and finally it was declared a
mystery. This Trinitarian, supernatural mystery was too complicated,
mysterious and unintelligible to many believers; it needed civic power to
impose it. That became the herald of a long-lasting intolerant, persecutory,
inquisitorial, abusive, supernatural, hierarchical and offensive system of
Christian Church and state.
The supernatural incarnational theology and Bible were used as the
foundational stones for the absolute political theology and hierarchical
social order. A divinely appointed political order was made essential to
direct man and his world. The world was divided into sacred and profane;
the sacred was the realm of spirituality supervised by the priests and clerics,
while the profane was directed by the kings and magistrates. The depraved
man needed constant supervision otherwise evil, anarchy and oppression
would prevail. Man, his rights, freedoms, participation in the affairs of
society, culture and government were all trampled in the name of depraved
fallen nature, evil disposition and uncivilised manners. The democratic and
republican political models of Greco-Roman world were replaced with the
absolute Church and state. Man was merely a recipient of divine grace
facilitated through the good offices of the Church and monitored by the
monarchy. It was an absolutely top-down system of religious and political
theology. God, cosmos, salvation and redemption were too complicated and
mysterious for a common person to understand; therefore, blind imitation of
the Church was the only way out. Society was organised based upon this
supernatural worldview.
It was hierarchical, just like the natural order and universe. The Church as
the sole dispenser of divine knowledge and grace stood at the top of the
spiritual pyramid. Monarch and nobility followed the clergy. Everybody
else was the laity, the commoners and the followers. This way human
participation, in both the spiritual and political realms, was limited mostly
to submission and obedience. The limited elites, including the ecclesiastical
and monarchical establishments, ruled the society with iron hands and
absolute laws. They ruled in the name of God, and were responsible only to
Him. Christendom became an authoritarian, close and suffocating society
for long medieval centuries. The Church dogmas, especially the Trinitarian
incarnational theology with its absolutist political theology, were directly
responsible for this mystery filled, anti-intellectual, anti-republican
persecutory culture.
The supernatural faith system completely devoured the natural realms.
The revelation dominated reason, faith suppressed intellectual inquiries and
divine right monarchy inhibited democratic and republican values. Demand
for religious and political uniformity curbed diversity, creativity, freedoms,
rights and tolerance. Politico-religious intolerance led to persecution of
dissent, diversity and individualism. All paths to individual liberty,
independent thinking, initiatives, creativity, competition and growth were
systematically, religiously and transcendentally closed. The Christian belief
system emphasised success in the hereafter mostly at the expense of this
worldly life. The Church was the sole proprietor of eternal salvation, and
hence submission to Church dogmas was central to salvation.
The Divine Right Church and Salvation
Success in the life to come was far more significant than success in this life.
Eternal salvation was not attained via morality, good actions or human
incentives; it was a gift of God. The original sin of Adam and Eve was
transmitted to their progeny and humanity shared that tainted, depraved and
wretched nature. Man was unable to achieve salvation, perfection and
happiness by his finite knowledge, capacities and incentives. It needed
divine intervention of cosmic level. God incarnated in the material world to
save humanity of its wretchedness.
The salvation began with belief in the saving acts of Lord Jesus Christ and
the act of human cleansing ensued. Self-purification, moral reformation and
righteous acts were not the foundations of Christian salvation. Rather, moral
reformation was an automatic consequence of faith in Christ. The gift of
eternal life was also not the result of human efforts but of divine grace.
Therefore, salvation was selective, predestined and in a sense arbitrary; it
was as mysterious and foggy as the Holy Trinity. It was God who bestowed
the gift of salvation upon the sinful by forgiving them (Acts 13:26, 46;
28:28; Eph 4:32; Col 2:13) and reconciling them to Himself (Rom 5:10; 2
Cor 5:18-19; Eph. 2:8-10; Luke 15:11-32; 19:10)
In spite of multiple controversies and divergent interpretations, the official
Christianity, remained faithful to the dogma of original sin and man’s
depravity. St. Augustine theorised219 it further and entrenched it in the
Christian faith.220 The sixteenth-century Reformation stayed close to these
understandings of original sin,221 redemptive crucifixion of Christ and
predestination.222 The Catholics and Protestants (Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anglicans and Evangelicals) insisted upon the grace, at the expense of good
works and human efforts. The whole Trinitarian, incarnational and
substitutionary sacrificial scheme was promoted to atone for the so-called
“Original Sin” or later human inequities. The end result was a total sense of
guilt consciousness, lack of confidence in human abilities and sheer
dependence upon Church and polity for success and salvation.223
The Trinity, incarnation and resurrection were mysteries and could not be
grasped by limited human reason; they needed faith and grace, and the only
source of true faith was the revelation. God had spoken to us through His
Word, Jesus Christ, and the spoken word of God was preserved in the Bible.
Therefore, the only thing one needed to attain salvation was the Bible; there
was no need for additional thinking, sciences and knowledge. All truth,
wisdom, morality and common sense were contained in the revelation. In
short, to succeed, one needed to understand the divine revelation, digest its
precepts and live one’s life accordingly. Nobody had understood the
revelation more than the Early Church Fathers, as they were closest to the
times of Christ. The Catholic Church, or the Church, was the repository of
their teachings. Therefore, obeying the Church was tantamount to obeying
the Church Fathers and obeying them was tantamount to obeying Christ, the
God. Therefore, instead of wasting time in studying the pagan Greek
philosophical writings, one was required to study the Church traditions and
willingly submit to the Church. There was no salvation outside the
Church.224 The Church, according to the favourite image of the Fathers,
“was a solitary ark floating upon a boundless sea of ruin. Within its pale
there was salvation; without it salvation was impossible. ‘If any one out of
Noah’s ark could escape the deluge,’ wrote St Cyprian, ‘he who is out of the
Church may also escape.’ ‘Without this house,’ said Origen, ‘that is without
the Church, no one is saved.’ ‘No one,’ said St. Augustine, cometh to
salvation and eternal life except he who hath Christ for his head; but no one
can have Christ for his head except he that is in His body the Church.’
‘Hold most firmly,’ added St. Fulgentius,’ and doubt not that not only all
pagans, but also all Jews, heretics, and schismatics who depart from this
present life outside the Catholic Church, are about to go into eternal fire,
prepared for the devil and his angels.’ So prominent and so unquestionable
was this doctrine deemed, that the Council of Carthage, in the fourth
century, made it one of the test questions put to every bishop before
ordination.”225
The Divine Right State
In addition to ecclesiastic authority, God also established the civic authority
to manage affairs of the world. Unqualified submission to worldly
authorities was as essential as submission to the Church. The smooth,
secure, peaceful and stable society was the prelude to spiritual stability and
that depended upon unqualified submission to worldly laws and authorities.
The New Testament books in general (for instance 1 Peter 2:13-17) and
the Pauline corpus in particular were the most precise, pinpointed and
unequivocal proponents of such a submission.226 Paul was highly interested
in peace and order and provided religious undergirding for a stable society.
In Roman 13:1-7 Paul clearly equated obedience to higher authorities with
divine submission. The political, social, moral and legal authorities were
not manmade but God-made, and hence absolute submission to them was
divinely ordained. The Epistle of Paul to Romans 13:1-7 clearly laid down
the fundamentals of Paul’s exousiology. This passage had the contours of
divine right monarchy and absolutism cherished by later Christian
communities; it was crystal-clear in its aims and implications.227 God was
the sole authority in the world, and nothing happened without his
permission and plans; Paul’s doctrine of absolute predestination was at full
play here. The kings, monarchs and magistrates were voluntarily appointed
by God and did not have the capacity to usurp the authority from him. This
was in conformity with overall theology of the Bible.228 Obeying the rulers
was equal to obeying God, and resisting them was tantamount to resisting
God. Christianity was no politics.229 This was the duty of each soul. Civil
and political revolt or unrest was divinely proscribed and punished.230 The
civil authorities had a religious role in implementing God’s plan for peace,
order and security. God was the creator of an orderly cosmos. The political
and civil authorities were a prototype of the divine realms in creating order
in the temporal society.
The Pauline passage was generic, universal and unqualified; it did not
differentiate between good and bad, Christian or non-Christian, monarchical
or democratic, consultative or dictatorial power structures. It demanded an
absolute submission to the higher authorities whosoever they were.231 Any
relativity, qualification or restriction on their power was superfluous.232 Paul
insisted that the existing power structures embodied the will of God by
rewarding goodness and punishing evil.233 This was an extension of Jesus’
command of rendering unto Caesar what was due to Caesar.234 (Mk. 12:17;
Matt. 20:21) Jesus’ trial and crucifixion were interpreted as a voluntary
submission to the temporal authorities; Jesus presented himself to the
Roman court and accepted the crucifixion as a token of submission to their
authority. Jesus also told the persecuting Pilate that his authority was from
God. The idea of unqualified submission to human authorities even at time
of persecution was augmented by the Pauline treatment of the subject. Paul
in reality Hellenised Christianity. The idea of an absolute submission even
to the persecuting evil dictators was equal to paganisation of Christianity.
The early Church from Constantine’s times onward and both the Catholic
and Protestants down the centuries all had accepted this interpretation of the
New Testament as official. Therefore, the doctrine of absolute submission to
the worldly authorities was considered religious, official and orthodox. In
short, historical Church Christianity was totally imperial, absolutist and top-
down. There was no room in it for Greco-Roman rationalism,
individualism, self-pride, pagan, anarchist democratic institutions,
republican values, rights and freedoms. Church Christianity was antithetical
to individualism and republicanism. The divinely-sanctioned Church and
state had the right of disciplining the sinful, depraved and wretched masses
to the extent of physical torture, maiming, killing and other kinds of
persecutions.235 The Christian Church became known for its persecution of
heretics.
Heresy and Divinely Sanctioned Terror
The idea of heresy was found in the New Testament, but no concept of
punishment, coercion or silencing was attached to it; coercion against
heretics was the creation of later orthodoxy.236 There was no heresy in
Christianity of the first century as there was no established orthodoxy, New
Testament Canon, Catholic or Orthodox hierarchical Church, Pope or a set
of orthodox doctrine. The Roman Empire pretty much tolerated all sorts of
religious sects, and early Christianity was quite diversified.
The efforts to unite Christians upon a unitary Christian doctrine
concerning Jesus and his relationship with God had to wait till 325 AD
when Emperor Constantine struggled to rein in the warring bishops in the
Council of Nicaea. Initially, Constantine was not inclined towards coercion
or persecution of heretics; he encouraged dialogue and toleration for the
sake of unity. Constantine turned the previously persecuted Christian
church into an imperial Church, and the wealth and power brought envy,
jealousy and rivalries. The processes of identification and differentiation
were intensified.237 In spite of his efforts to restore peace and unite
Christians on a unitary doctrine, Constantine did not use torture or physical
coercion to rein in the so-called heretics. The theological controversies
continued after his death. The West was mostly Nicene and the East mostly
Arian, and Constantine’s son emperor Constantius II (emperor from 337-
361) was pro-Arian. He, through a number of councils, rehabilitated the
heretic Arians at the cost of the Nicene party, rendering them virtually
powerless. His successor Julian ruled by dividing the warring Christian
factions further. The Christological controversies had rocked the entire
Roman Empire by the time of Theodosius, Roman Emperor from AD 379 to
AD 395. Constantinople was a city where everyone was a theologian.
Gregory of Nyssa observed that “this is a city where every slave and artisan
is a profound theologian. Ask one of them to change some silver and he
explains instead how the Son differs from the Father. Ask another the price
of a loaf of bread and he replies that the Son is inferior to the Father. Ask a
third if your bath is ready and he tells you that the Son was created out of
nothingness.”238
Theodosius was a different kind of emperor. He was a child of the Mother
Church, seeing everything through the prism of his eternal salvation. As a
staunch believer in the Nicene Creed, he allowed the Church to use the
political arm of the state to impose the Nicene Christology. Under the
influence of Ambrose of Milan, he prohibited all sorts of heresies and
enacted laws to punish them. In Salonica, in February of 380, Theodosius
issued as decree establishing the Apostolic Creed and religion of Peter as
the sole authority in his empire.239 He further ordered that “we command
that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic
Christians. The rest, however, whom we adjudge demented and insane,
shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not
receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine
vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own initiative, which we
shall assume in accordance with divine judgement.”240
This edict transformed the concept of heresy in Christianity requiring
punishment both spiritual and temporal.241 Such a strict and abusive concept
of heresy was a Christian invention not found in Judaism or the early
Roman laws. Arians and other anti-Nicene Christian sects were
persecuted.242 Previously the dissenting actions and practices were
proscribed, but Theodosius extended it to intent and belief. Harbouring
wrong belief was detrimental to the soul and its salvation. Saving the soul
was a Christian duty. The emperor as the chief Christian was supposed to
help the Church in saving the lost souls to ensure divine pleasure and grace
for the empire. Therefore, submission to the orthodox Nicene Christology
and Creed was in reality a submission to the state and rebellion against the
established official Church was tantamount to rebellion against the state.243
The resultant hierarchical, absolutist social order well suited the divine right
Church and monarchy.
Theodosius created a new religious order, uniting the Roman imperial
power closely with the Catholic Church. The Bishop of Rome was also
exalted as the supreme religious authority in the empire.244 Persecution of
heretics entailed mostly economic and social sanctions until the fourth
century; the theological formulations for the use of physical coercion were a
later development. It was St. Augustine (354–430) who provided the
theological foundations for religious persecution and coercion.245
Augustine and Religious Coercion
St. Augustine initially believed in religious freedom and shunned religious
persecution. Later on, he changed his mind after seeing a great number of
Donatist heretics returning to the Catholic Church as a result of imperial
laws. He felt that civil coercion was a useful tool in maintaining religious
orthodoxy and uniformity. The history changed along with the change of
Augustine’s mind.246
Augustine around 400 A. D. seemed to accept and encourage religious
coercion. In a letter to the Donatist bishop Parmenian, he justified use of
imperial power to coerce Donatists into Catholicism. Quoting Romans
13:1-7, Augustine established the God-given right of the emperor to
persecute those responsible for schism. He used Matthew 13:24-30 (parable
of weeds) to authorise physical coercion against the heretics. The parable
was usually interpreted as permitting religious pluralism and differing
opinions leaving the judgement to God on the Day of Judgment. Augustine,
however, drew from it a very different lesson, “if the bad seed is known, it
should be uprooted.”247 Augustine argued that the Lord Jesus Christ used
physical coercion and compulsion to make Paul submit and believe.248 To
Augustine, fear was a category of love, and absolutely permitted to save the
soul from eternal condemnation.249 The Catholic Church as mother must
coerce its children to follow its creeds and practices, and the fear of
flogging might keep the sheep together.250 He insisted that “Paul was
compelled by Christ; therefore the Church, in trying to compel the
Donatists, is following the example of her Lord.”251 These pastoral
metaphors “allowed Augustine and like-minded colleagues to rationalise
policies that forced people, willing or not, toward the good. Charity—the
Christian duty to love one’s neighbour—demanded no less.”252 Augustine
and the Catholic Church demanded the charity of submission and
reconciliation on its own terms without any regard to the neighbour and his
needs of charity and reconciliation. To reinforce his view, he quoted the
parable of the feast in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 14:21-23); in the parable of
the feast Jesus is reported to have asked the disciples to compel people to
come in. Augustine required forcing heretics and others to join the fold of
orthodoxy.253
Augustine combined the spiritual reasons with the needs of the empire to
construct a comprehensive doctrine of religious coercion and persecution.
The emperors had always considered peace as the foundation of imperial
prosperity and dissention as the source of divine wrath. The Catholic
Church was doing nothing short of realising peace by dint of religious
coercion.254
The Saint seems to have a bad legacy. The world might have not
witnessed the killing, maiming, burning and torturing of countless
Christians and non-Christians throughout the late antiquity and medieval
world had Augustine not provided the scriptural basis for religious coercion.
The medieval Inquisitions255 took their lead from the Saint and did the most
unholy crimes in the name of the Most Holy. The Saint might not have
thought of this legacy, but the outcome of his theorising has been
barbaric.256 The historian Peter Brown, who has extensively studied and
written about St. Augustine, noted that Augustine was the only Church
Father who had discussed the subject of religious coercion with such
precision and length.257 Brown argued that Augustine’s prophetic
interpretation of human history, close interactions with the harsh theology
of the Old Testament and peculiar concepts of grace and predestination
played a role in his attitude towards religious coercion.258 The Saint had a
totalitarian vision; unqualified imperial support for the Church, continuous
retreat of paganism and scathing pursuit of the Jews and heretics by the
state substantiated his dream that the kingdom of God was at hand, and a
new era of absolute and universal submission to the gospel was about to
commence. All people and nations must praise the Lord, and any deviations
from the Catholic Church and its creeds were nothing short of belligerence
that needed to be uprooted. The Saint intended to expedite the kingdom by
his attitude of religious coercion and reformation. This was an expression of
his ultimate love for the heretics as he wanted to compel them to enter the
kingdom. Unfortunately for the heretics, he was nothing short of the
Antichrist. They lost their personal properties, churches, jobs, businesses
and at times their lives due to Augustine’s attitude and doctrine.259
Unfortunately religious coercion and persecution were Augustine’s horrible
legacies for future generations. Both the state and Church adopted them as
official policies without many changes or modifications. The emperors
initiated the persecuting laws and the bishops made their implementation
certain.260
Religious persecution - especially those of pagans and Christian heretics -
had become an intrinsic part of the emperor’s responsibilities by the time of
Justinian.261 Inward and outward conformity to the Catholic Church and its
creeds was required of all citizens, and outsiders were persecuted.262 Jews,
pagans and Christian heretics were “barred from schools, court jobs, public
offices, inheritance and even charity. They were really despised as
pestilence. The traitors of the Church and Lord were the traitors of the
empire. Justinian would personally oversee the execution, burning and
drowning of many heretics. One orthodox observer would exclaim that “the
dux has lately become a Christian by zeal of the Christ-loving emperor.’”263
The following Christian centuries were well-known for their persecution of
heretics and dissenters, and the medieval Inquisitions well-illustrated the
persecuting impulses of the medieval Church. Religious persecution
continued in the Christendom all the way to the eighteenth century.
Over the centuries, the Roman Christianity manifested itself into
antinomianism, irrationalism, monarchism, absolutism and religious
intolerance.264 These tendencies were to become the legacy of Roman
Christianity to the medieval world all the way to the eighteenth century. The
Habsburg Monarchy of the sixteenth century (in the person of Charles V)
represented this post Constantinian Roman ideology of universal monarchy
of “one king, one law and one religion”, supplemented by the sixteenth
century apocalyptic, messianic prophecies and imperial millennial
propaganda based on astrological prognostications. This hegemonic
ideology was enhanced by profound changes and upheavals in the world.
The Church schisms, spectacular Ottoman rise to the power, vast and
countless opportunities in the New World, inter-cultural and inter-
continental navigations, communications, outbreak of plagues, wars,
destructions and expulsion of Jews from Spain all fueled the fans of
apocalyptic, messianic millennium. A missionary zeal, craze for uniformity,
divine right monarchy and church, doctrinal purity, unity, obedience and
second coming of Jesus accompanied the imperial millennial propaganda.
Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches inherited the above sketched
historical Christianity and equally believed in its central dogmas, thought
patterns, worldview and political theology.265 The main difference was the
Church settlement. The Catholic Habsburg settlement was non-Erastian and
the Church and Pope were autonomous, independent and supreme in
ecclesiastical matters while the Protestant world tended towards an Erastian
Church settlement where the king or prince consolidated both religious and
civic powers and the state was supreme in ecclesiastical matters. The
Christendom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in spite of Catholic
and Protestant divide, was pretty much unified on the central Christian
dogmas such as the original sin, divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, Crucifixion,
atoning death of Jesus, predestination, grace-based salvation scheme,
ecclesiastical and monarchical absolutism. Jonathan Israel notes that
“admittedly the Reformation had earlier engendered a deep split in western
Christendom. But throughout the Sixteenth century and the first half of the
Seventeenth, there was still much, intellectually and spiritually, that the
western segments of Christendom shared. Mid-seventeenth- century Europe
was still, not just predominantly but overwhelmingly, a culture in which all
debates about man, God, and the World which penetrated into the public
sphere revolved around ‘confessional’-that is Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed
(Calvinist), or Anglican issues, and scholars fought above all to establish
which confessional bloc possessed a monopoly of truth and a God-given
title to authority. It was a civilisation in which almost no one challenged the
essentials of Christianity or the basic premises of what was taken to be a
divinely ordained system of aristocracy, monarchy, land-ownership, and
ecclesiastical authority.”266
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment reformers felt that
“the ‘corrupted’ religion prevailing in both Catholic and Protestant Europe
had been thoroughly muddled and muddied by ‘superstition’, bogus
doctrines, and false ‘miracles’, as well as superfluous notions of
ecclesiastical authority; and while the chief offender in all respects was the
Catholic Church, and especially the papacy, all the other major and minor
churches, including the Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Greek
Orthodox, were in varying degrees likewise at fault.”267 The countless lives
lost during the Wars of religion, Inquisitions, witch hunts, continuous
instability, insecurity and destruction led many elites to think that
Christianity in all its forms and institutions was a problem, which needed to
be replaced with something minimalistic, rational, republican and civic.
Social peace, harmony, human betterment, prosperity and improvement
were the fundamental goals and concerns of the Enlightenment and its
leaders.268 John Robertson placed “the commitment to understanding, and
hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this
world”269 as the core of the Enlightenment. The early Enlightenment was
predominantly theologico-political, mostly aimed at the authoritarian
Church and monarchy.270 It was Antichristian, anti-clerical and anti-
dogmatic but not anti-faith as such.271 The Enlightenment leaders targeted
reformation of both the Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity
because the Christian politico-religious theology was equally fundamental
to the Catholic Habsburg monarchy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
century as it was to the Protestant Anglican Church and its patron, the
British Crown. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was intrinsically
against this version of absolute religious and political authority and
institutions. The Scientific Revolution, natural theology and cosmology
were an outcome of such a sea change of mindset. The seventeenth-century
political upheavals in England were the results of overseas trading
companies, their stake holders and increasing middle class’ struggle for
protection of capital, distribution of power and previleges. As the Crown
enjoyed executive powers over state and Church properties, courts and
institutions and used absolute powers in the name of God, the opposition to
divine right church and monarchy also took a religious garb.
The Enlightenment war against Old Regime and structures of authority
was fought on the religious turf. In 1690s “there began in England a
concerted attack both on the central doctrines and on the external proofs of
orthodox Christianity. From one quarter, the divine inspiration of the Bible
was questioned. Thereby the historic context and cosmological significance
of Christ’s mission were made to tremble. From another, the doctrine of the
Trinity, which had become the badge of orthodoxy in the fourth century,
and had been defended by fire and faggot ever since, was openly
challenged. With it, not only the authority of the Fathers who had invented
and imposed it, but the divinity of Christ himself, was put in doubt. These
challenges were not indeed new, but they were now delivered far more
forcefully than before, from inside as well as outside the established
Church; and they aroused a forceful response. In that last decade of the
Seventeenth century, ‘Arian’–that is, anti-Trinitarian–works were ritually
condemned in both universities; new Blasphemy Acts were passed by
Parliament in a vain attempt to stay the infection; and the alarm of the
establishment was increased by the appearance of an alternative religion
only loosely connected with traditional Christianity and quite incompatible
with Trinitarian doctrines: ‘the religion of Nature’, or ‘deism.’”272 This
transition to a more rationalistic, natural and minimalistic, civic religion
was facilitated by Europe’s encounter with Islam in general, and British
encounters with Islam in particular. These encounters served as a catalyst to
resolve the ongoing confessional disputes and dogmatic controversies with
some sense of serenity, to increase internal stability and external
commerce.273 The Enlightenment was the result of these transitions,
appropriations and accommodations. It was a reformation of the sixteenth-
century Reformation, especially in Britain where Christianity was reformed
but not discarded. Both the French and American Enlightenments were a
sort of extension of the early British Enlightenment.274 The Continental
religious Enlightenment transformed the religious landscape and thought
patterns of Europe and America on the way to a total transformation of
political system and economy. The Islamic reformative scheme was handy
and well-placed to be appropriated by the reformers. The Christian dogmas
of original sin, Trinity, grace-based salvific scheme, incarnation, Jesus’
divinity, atoning death, mediatorial role of Jesus, Church and Monarchs and
hence divine right Church and Monarchy all were analysed, dissected and
finally rejected. The Enlightenment was a total reformation of the Church
Christianity on Unitarian, moral, rational and republican lines.
 Chapter 2

Islam and the Southern Reformation of

Christianity
Islam, as the rival faith, had long ago dealt with the same Christian
supernaturalism, absolutism, blind dogmatism, antinomianism,
Trinitarianism and grace-based salvationism which the Enlightenment
leaders were handling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike
Roman Christianity, Islam insisted upon good human nature, human
rational capabilities, reformation, training and growth through sense
experience, experimentation, practice, moral discourse and education. It
also warned against mythical traditions, authority-based knowledge,
unintelligible dogmas and emphasized upon rationality and common sense
in matters of faith and action. John William Draper has noticed that Islam
was the “first or Southern Reformation”275 of Christianity long before the
Northern Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe.276 To Lecky, Islam
resolved the Christian problems of idolatry and was a total break with
previous civilisational patterns. “It must, however, be acknowledged that
there is one example of a great religion, reigning for the most part over men
who had not yet emerged from the twilight of an early civilisation, which
has nevertheless succeeded in restraining its votaries from idolatry. This
phenomenon, which is the preëminent glory of Mahometanism, and the
most remarkable evidence of the genius of its founder, appears so much at
variance with the general laws of historic development […] one of the great
characteristics of the Koran is the extreme care and skill with which it
labours to assist men in realising the unseen.277 Islam rectified the Church
excesses in areas of monotheism,278 rationalism, nomianism, monarchism,
clericalism and religious intolerance. Islam introduced the rule of many
instead of a few, and incorporated the largest possible numbers of people in
matters of religious knowledge, socio-political and civil affairs. It was a
commoner’s revolution against the religious and political elites. Martin
Pugh notes that “Islam appeared as a purified and simplified form that
superseded Christianity. This was felt to be necessary, because Muslims
believed that Christians had introduced into the practice of the religion all
kinds of dubious notions, elaborations and misunderstandings that had not
been part of the original. Islam provided a clarification and a return to a
truer, simpler, stricter form. This was a view that many Christians
themselves were to welcome, especially during the Protestant Reformation
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries (although it was to overlook the
central disagreement about the divinity of Christ).”279
Islam brought its rival, simple, rational, natural and ethical monotheism;
human, prophetic, anti-Trinitarian Christology; natural cosmology with
direct divine sovereignty without any intermediaries, cooperating natural
forces or quasi-divinities; ethical anthropology, teleology and soteriology;
rational epistemology and republican exousiology (political thought). The
ethical monotheism, rational Unitarianism, divinely ordained natural order
and design, divinely installed natural laws and divinely inspired moral laws,
human, prophetic Christology, virtue-based salvation, human reformation,
participation and initiative and final reward and punishment were so
emphasised and simplified by Islam that a cursory reader of its Scripture,
the Quran, would not have missed it. Islam replaced the Christian
supernatural, interventionist, overly miraculous, changing, irregular,
abnormal and mutable cosmos with natural, regular, harmonious,
immutable, orderly and hinged cosmos with fixed, unbroken and explorable
laws.
The rival Islamic theology, cosmology, anthropology, sociology, political
thought and soteriology were too relevant to the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European society and its religious, political and
scientific challenges that they could not be overlooked or ignored by the
Enlightenment leaders. Overseas trading companies’ exposure and close
dealings with Muslim East were to play the central role in cross-cultural
fertilization.
Islamic Anti-Trinitarianism and Its Natural, Republican
Implications
Islam especially reformed Trinitarianism by restoring the pristine
transcendental ethical monotheism of the Semitic consciousness. It also
rejected original sin, atoning death of Christ and all its incarnational
antecedents from intermediary role of Jesus, Church, state and natural
forces. Divine absolute sovereignty with direct authority over man, nature
and salvation was categorically established, beyond any sense of
compromise. In this way, doors were opened for greater human
participation in matters of religion, politics, science and society. Human
dignity, self esteem and moral agency were restored and the pillars of Old
Regime (divine right Church, monarchy and triadic natural hierarchy) were
all shaken.
Islam contended that the Christian incarnational and redemptive scheme
was arbitrary, unjust and mythological. It compromised God’s unity,
sovereignty, self-sufficiency, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience and
cosmos’ unity and integrity, and led humanity to an idolatry of persons and
dogmas. Anthropomorphism, corporealism, fetishism, frequent miraculous
interventionanism, abnormalism, supernaturalism and divine incarnation
made God (the Father) and his natural laws obsolete.280 Jesus and nature’s
intermediary cooperative roles made God too transcendent, aloof and
irrelevant. It also made man too evil, depraved, ignorant and dependent on
Church, state, natural phenomena and random grace.
God was too loving and just to eternally taint the human nature due to a
single mistake of one man, Adam.281 The hereditary guilt and collective
punishment was inappropriate, unjustified and unwarranted.282 God was too
just to punish all children of Adam for a sin they did not commit or had no
control over. He was too merciful and just to crucify Jesus as expiation for
the sins that he had not committed; God did not need to shed blood to
forgive human beings. Islam found too many loopholes in the Christian
scheme of incarnation and salvation. Adam committed the mistake and got
punished by expulsion from the heavens. That was sufficient of a
punishment. The incarnational scheme instead made God continue
harbouring grudges against Adam and eternally punish not only him but
billions of his innocent children for the little bite of an apple. It tied God too
tightly to arbitrary understandings of justice and love and in the end, God
could not maintain either of them. The sin was against God and he could
have easily forgiven that without any demand of bloodshed, especially after
Adam’s expulsion from the heavens and his ensuing repentance. Otherwise,
he could have sent his supposed sinless Son, Jesus Christ, at the very
beginning of humanity if it was essential for God to shed the blood for
forgiveness, but he did not. Why would he wait for centuries and let many
people suffer in perdition, including the beloved patriarchs like Abraham,
Moses, David and many other righteous men and women, before sending
his only begotten Son as a sacrificial lamb? If the animal sacrifice practiced
by the Jews was sufficient for protection of billions of men from perdition,
as the Church Christianity claimed, then that could have been the way out
for the rest of humanity. There was no need for crucifying a sinless man -
Jesus Christ - to accomplish a goal which was already achieved by animal
bloodshed. If God’s intention was to cleans the evil effects of original sin
and let humanity live a moral life through the atoning death of Jesus, then
he should have sent his Son at the very beginning of humanity to spare
humanity of countless horrible crimes. The time selection for Jesus’
inauguration and cosmic intervention was odd and arbitrary; why during the
Roman era and why not during the earlier oppressive eras of Pharaoh, for
example? Additionally, the cosmic intervention and bloodshed did not make
much difference in regards to humanity’s sinful nature and crimes.
Humanity, including Christian believers, continued the same moral
infractions as their predecessors, even after the atoning death of Jesus. What
did God accomplish by such a merciless crucifixion? It was not just to
crucify the sinless Jesus for the sins he had not committed any way, and it
was no love either to crucify his only Son for the supposed love of his
enemies; the forced crucifixion was no spiritual expiation. Jesus’ recorded
anguish on the Cross and desperate cries for help highlighted the fact that
his crucifixion was not voluntary or consensual. How could the involuntary
crucifixion be accepted as a spiritual, universal, cosmic expiation for
universal sins? Surprisingly enough the atoning death and its antecedent,
the salvific scheme, did neither diminish immorality nor connect salvation
with virtue but with divine grace and mere attestation of it. In reality, such
an arbitrary salvation scheme in certain ways increased and encouraged
moral infractions; instead of emphasising the need for moral reformation it
emphasised belief in a set of dogmas about divine nature, crucifixion and
resurrection. It made God as erratic in his choice of forgiving the sinners as
in his original condemnation of entire humanity due the sin of one man,
Adam. The grace-based predetermined and selective salvific scheme in fact
boosted moral infractions by the guarantees of eternal success, due to faith
in the Trinity, incarnation and redemptive death of Jesus. It neither reformed
the tainted human nature nor curbed its evil consequences, but gave a
wrong hope of felicity in spite of it. It diminished the need for human moral
incentive and agency to heighten the scope of divine grace and sacrificial
acts. It was too supernatural, metaphysical and arbitrary, and made man
solely dependent upon the divine initiative, selective grace and upon
Church, the sole dispenser of that grace and knowledge. It also fogged
human mind and blurred human clarity due to its supernatural, mysterious
and illogical premises. Such a supernatural salvific scheme had no
precedent in the Jewish faith, or in the long prophetic tradition enumerated
in the Jewish scriptures; it was a total break with the established
monotheistic, moral and logical principles. Additionally, it was not fully
supported by the Christian scriptures. The idea of God incarnating in a
feeble historical man and dying on the Cross in a state of helplessness was
too novel for the Semitic consciousness of Jesus and his Jewish culture. The
Triune notion of Godhead was a construct too foreign to the Jewish milieu
of Jesus and his early disciples. The Trinitarian theology, with its triadic
divine, natural and social order hierarchy, diversity of persons, roles and
natures, was too drastic for Semitic Unitarian consciousness and
sensibilities; it was anti reason, experimental science and republican
political thought. It was totally mysterious, paradoxical and circular. The
end result was mental confusion, intellectual bewilderment, scientific
stagnation, moral numbness and human paralysis. God, priests, kings and
magistrates ruled the masses in the name of God, Trinity, grace and
salvation and Christendom was marred with absolutism both in the spiritual
and material realms. Divine arbitrariness was translated into arbitrary,
dogmatic religious and political theology.
Islam rejected the original sin, the depraved human nature, the Triune
conception of God, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, divine incarnation,
atoning death and predetermined, selective salvific scheme to usher an era
of human individual freedom, moral agency, initiatives and capacities,
mental and rational clarity and human participation in the spiritual as well
as material realms. The mediatorial role of Jesus, church and state in the
saga of salvation was strictly banned to connect man directly with God
through moral laws, conduct, virtue, reflection, research and
experimentation. God connected with man directly through his revelation
and creation, and the book of revelation and the book of creation embodied
divine revelation. The fixed natural and moral laws were two sides of the
same coin; no church, intermediaries or spiritual entities were allowed to
meddle in these laws. Both books supplemented each other and led man to
God, as the source of both books was God Almighty. Hence natural study
and exploration were equally meritorious and encouraged. Man was to
explore, study and master the nature, as he was not intrinsically subservient
to it. The triadic hierarchy in theology, political science, sociology and
cosmology were all rejected; God’s direct and absolute sovereignty over
man and nature was pinpontedly established, and God was extrinsically and
transcendently established as the supreme lawgiver, both natural and moral
but ontologically different to man and cosmos. The sacramental and
intermediary role of Jesus, nature, angels, saints, heavenly hierarchical
beings and the earthly Church and state structures were all obliterated, to
connect man and cosmos directly with the Sovereign God. Man was
completely freed from all intermediary hierarchical shackles to explore the
natural phenomena, master it and also master his own destiny by moral
initiatives. The comprehensive Islamic reformative scheme insisted upon
anti-Trinitarianism, anti-rationalism, anti-nomianism, anti-clericalism and
anti-republicanism by emphasising ethical monotheism, absolute and direct
divine sovereignty, moralism, rationalism and constitutional republicanism
whether in the shape of limited monarchy, parliamentarian monarchy or
popular sovereignty.
Islam from the outset claimed to be a reformation of the Church
Christianity and its absolutist religious and political theology. Islam did not
consider itself to be a new religion, but a restorer of the universal
monotheistic prophetic tradition of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. It believed
in the successive reformative prophetic histories and claimed to be an heir
to this moral, reformative tradition. Islam was the submission to the moral
commandments of God and peace with one’s neighbour. All those who
engaged in such a submission were muslims with small “Ms.” The universal
Islamic tradition of all the prophets was a moral scheme of human virtue,
empowerment, participation, initiative, rights and duties. It was simplistic,
minimalistic, rational, moral and republican, highlighting human equality in
front of God and moral commandment, equal opportunities of salvation,
understanding, participation, happiness and rewards. There were no
ecclesiastical, monarchical or cosmological hierarchies in it. All humans
were created in the image of God, and were equally capable of
comprehending his essential moral message. Nature was the embodiment of
divine laws, like moral laws. Both laws of nature and laws of moral were
explorable, malleable and workable. Islam was a bottom-up revolution
against the top-down Christian religious, political and cosmological
theology. Man and God were directly connected ushering infinite human
freedoms, incentives, explorations and possibilities.
The Islamic moral, rational and natural revolution was refreshing for many
Christians, as they welcomed the needed correction. Martin Pugh notes that
Islam “looked askance at the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, because it
suggested a deviation from the key principle of monotheism. This, too, was
a criticism accepted by many Christians. Similarly, the majority of Muslims
rejected the idea of saints as being inconsistent with monotheism, and saw
the worship of saints as superstition. Although Muslims, like Christians and
Jews, recognised Adam as the first human being, they rejected the claim
that he passed on his original sin to the rest of humanity: their view was that
Adam and Eve repented and God forgave them. For Muslims, the notion of
original sin was a ‘doctrine of despair’, as an individual could achieve
salvation through genuine repentance, without any need for confession to a
religious intermediary.”283 Islam presented a simple, straightforward and
logical concept of the One and Unique God. It absolutely rejected the
incarnational jargon and established strict parameters to safeguard God’s
proper relationship with Jesus, Mary and cosmos. Muhammad, notes
William Draper, was “horrorstricken at the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus,
the worship of Mary as the mother of God, the adoration of images and
paintings, in his eyes a base idolatry. He absolutely rejects the Trinity, of
which he seems to have entertained the idea that it could not be interpreted
otherwise than as presenting three distinct Gods. His first and ruling idea
was simply religious reform—to overthrow Arabian idolatry, and put an end
to the wild sectarianism of Christianity. That he proposed to set up a new
religion was a calumny invented against him in Constantinople, where he
was looked upon with detestation, like that with which in after ages Luther
was regarded in Rome.”284 Muhammad was a “Protestant Prophet”285 long
before Martin Luther; unlike Luther, his reformation of the Church
Christianity was exhaustive and complete.
The Muslim Scripture insisted that one of its main purposes was to rectify
the Trinitarian, Incarnational and redemptive Christian theology.286 All
problems connected to divine incarnation, diffusion or confusion were
eliminated by Islamic concept of divine otherness. Draper observes that
Islam was “the first or Southern Reformation. The point in dispute had
respect to the nature of God. It involved the rise of Mohammedanism. Its
result was, that much of Asia and Africa, with the historic cities Jerusalem,
Alexandria, and Carthage, were wrenched from Christendom, and the
doctrine of the Unity of God established in the larger portion of what had
been the Roman Empire.”287 Islam released man of his alleged
wretchedness, depravity and total dependence upon divine mercy and
initiative. It liberated man of his metaphysical, supernatural and dogmatic
shackles, and allowed him freedom, empowerment and moral capacities.
Man, once freed of centuries’ suffocation, unleashed his rational, natural
and moral capacities and reached the pinnacles of human progress, dignity
and civilisation. Draper states that “this political event was followed by the
restoration of science, the establishment of colleges, schools, libraries,
throughout the dominions of the Arabians. Those conquerors, pressing
forward rapidly in their intellectual development, rejected the
anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remaining in their popular
belief, and accepted other more philosophical ones.”288
This reasoned approach to religion was made possible by reformation of
Christian incarnational salvation scheme. The Christian faith, by its
supernatural Trinitarian interpretations, had rendered Jesus so lofty, unique
and transcendent that he became really irrelevant to humanity except in
spiritual realms of submission and repentance. He, in his divinity, was
unapproachable and inimitable. Human beings had to rise to titanic moral
heights to equal his co-eternal, co-equal, sinless Godhead. In view of this
unsurmountable challenge, Jesus and his moral message became irrelevant
to humanity. It was so ideal, angelic and lofty that only an angelic, divine
person could rise up to it or realise it. Moreover, the Christian dogma of
original sin and fallen nature weakened human self-confidence and self-
belief in human abilities, killing all possibilities of human initiatives and
hard work. Islam by attacking the Trinity as well as the original sin restored
human self-esteem and provided them with a human model of excellence in
man, Jesus, to pursue their moral and intellectual capacities without
restraint. Islam made Christianity a rational, simplistic, moral and universal
faith by removing its local, artificial, supernatural scaffolding and by
connecting it with the universal, moral, monotheistic prophetic tradition of
Abraham, Noah, Moses and Muhammad. This humanisation of Jesus
resulted in moral, rational and intellectual empowerment of humanity.
Islam’s total rejection of Trinity, original sin and redemptive crucifixion
was vital to this transformation. Islam demolished the Christian need for
divine incarnation and crucifixion by denial of original sin and its
antecedents. It was replaced with the concept of original love and
forgiveness. (Quran 2:37; 7:23) Islam remedied the problems related to the
notion of human depravity by launching a concept of pristine, pure human
nature. (30:30) Islamic God was not the wrathful, unjust, arbitrary,
condescending, irrational, conniving and impotent deity but the Most
Merciful, Loving, Compassionate and Benevolent God. He did not taint the
entire humanity for the bite of Adam but taught them repentance,
forgiveness and morality through that original experience of expulsion from
the heavens. Man was born pure, innocent and dignified. Izutsu states: “In
fact, the Quran offers an entirely different picture of the human condition.
All of a sudden, the sky clears up, the darkness is dissipated, and in place of
the tragic sense of life there appears a new bright vista of the eternal life.
The difference between the two worldviews on this problem is exactly like
the difference between Night and Day.”289
Islam and Human Salvation
Human salvation was directly connected with human endeavours. Human
capacities, hard work and participation in the saga of salvation were
highlighted. Righteous acts, morality, good intentions were mixed with
divine grace to realise the salvation. (2:82) This way, man was at once
relieved of the shackles of supposed cosmic threats, divine wrath,
redemptive death and arbitrary predestination. Man was granted
independence, innocence, freedom of choice and dignity, and made the
crown of God’s creation and God’s representative and vicegerent on earth.
Man was empowered to self-govern, self-discipline, self-reform and self-
determination. They were invited to fully participate in the rough and
tumble of this life, and to equally share the responsibilities of his
reformation and felicity. Franz Rosenthal accurately captured the essential
feature of Islam when he stated that “man was seen by Islam as the center
of action in this world.”290 Lawrence Rosen showed the level of trust Islam
placed in the rational and moral capacities of man so that man can control
his passions and destiny.291 Instead of being left to the mumbo-jumbo of
cosmic threats, divine incarnation and the redemptive death of Jesus, man
was enabled to take charge of his own life and surroundings; He was to
work through the ups and downs of this earthly life with a rational outlook
and moral bent to master his own destiny. The mediational agencies of
Christ and priests were absolutely abolished; there was no inherent human
wretchedness that needed cosmic interventions, divine redemptions, clerical
intercessions or monarchical supervision. Spiritual realms were equally
open and available to all through good works, righteousness and piety. God
was not far off from man to necessitate priestly interventions; Islam put
man in direct contact with God and nature through the moral examples of
prophets such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, all coming
from the same God with the same universal message of ethical monotheism
and human equality. Abraham’s struggles against Nimrud, Moses’ fight
against Pharaoh, Jesus’ challenge to the Roman authoritarianism and
Muhammad’s fight against the Byzantium and Persian totalitarianism were
the one and same struggle for human equality, empowerment and justice.
Islam like the early Christianity and original Judaism was an egalitarian
ideology of human dignity, equality and moral agency.
The salvation scheme of Islam was homocentric. It revolved around
human potentials, capacities and participation in the moral reformation here
and now. Salvation was personal, moral and spiritual but its fruits were
collective, a just moral system. The same human confidence, freedom292 and
empowerment were to be reflected in human society and state. Man was
given the equal opportunities of doing good or bad, with human will and
choice determining the outcome. Prophets, scriptures, religious and political
institutions were meant to educate, civilise and empower man to make the
right moral choices, and these inner civilisational and educational aspects
contributed to the wellbeing of society. The church and state were equal
participants in educating, civilising and encouraging man to behave morally
and to contribute to a public, civil sphere of virtuous sociability. The church
and state were not allowed to impose dogmas, inner beliefs or outward
holiness but to inculcate a minimal public moral sensibility so that all
citizens could equally enjoy the fruits of their labour, without
discrimination, injustice or inequality. The rulers were not ordained by God
to punish human depravity; rather, they were to preserve human dignity,
equality and fair dealing. Justice was the fundamental religio-political
responsibility. Patricia Crone states that “contrary to what medieval
Christians said, coercive government did not develop among humans as a
result of the Fall. All God’s created beings were subject to His government,
directly or through Intermediaries, whether they sinned or not […]
Disobedience, ma’siya, is the Muslim word for what the Christians call sin,
and the archetypal act of disobedience is Iblis’ refusal to bow down to
Adam, not Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, which only plays a
limited role in the Muslim explanation of the human condition and none at
all in the Muslim account of the origin of states.”293 She further observes
that to Islam “government was the inseparable companion of monotheism,
and since humans had originated in a monotheist polity, the problem was
not how they had come to live in states but rather why government had so
often been corrupted thereafter, or disappeared altogether. The answer was
that human disobedience repeatedly caused things to go wrong so that God
had to send messengers to set things right again.”294 The pristine good
nature of man was often veiled by the dust of lust and sin. The divine
guidance was a reminder, a proof and a cleansing agent that dusted off the
effects of lust and sin rendering man and his heart to God, morality and
spirituality. Revelation, Prophets and even belief in God and his goodness
would not bring salvation until and unless man responded to them and acted
upon their incentives; man was not to get anything except the fruits of his
efforts. (53:39) God’s mercy, grace and assurance were the outcome of
these efforts and not a prelude to them. The Quranic dictum that “But he
will prosper, Who purifies himself,” (87:14) well summarised the above
discussion. This scheme of salvation was the total opposite of what the
Church Christianity preached.
The Islamic salvific scheme was founded on God’s grace of revelation,
human response to that through hard work, morality and reformation and
God’s ultimate grace to infinitely multiply the rewards. God guided
whosoever he wanted and misled whomsoever he wanted based upon
human response to his incentives of revelation, and not on arbitrary
selection or predestination. The divine will was ultimate while the human
efforts were relative but not insignificant. Righteousness and morality were
directly connected with good deeds within the framework of Islamic
devotional295 and doctrinal systems.296 Good intention, sincerity, humility,
true spirituality and God consciousness were cherished to reduce the harms
of dry legalism and ritualism. All systems of Islamic life, such as socio-
economic and political, were directly connected with Islamic soteriology
and human salvation, heightening the sense of human accountability before
God rather than just the immediate human agencies such as police and
judiciary.297 The mediational agency of bishops, priests and kings was
abolished and man was directly connected with the Omnipresent and
Omniscient Loving God. (2: 186; 50:16) Equality before law and God and a
strong sense of Taqwa (God’s presence) was universally preached.
Intercessions, indulgences and shortcuts were proscribed.
In spite of its strict ethical monotheism and moralistic salvific scheme,
Islam was not an exclusivist religion; it was an inclusive faith with
universal appeal and implications. It included the simple, monotheistic faith
of all previous prophets and generations, relegated beliefs to the personal
realms and did not permit religious coercion in any way or form. Faith was
a very private and personal phenomenon; nobody could be forced to believe
in something contradictory to one’s reason, logic, feelings and
understandings. The Quran used scriptural and rational arguments to
substantiate its core tenents. Man could use his reason and logical
inferences to look at the content, language, concepts, compilation,
preservation, historical authenticity and continuity of the Quran and reach
to the conclusion that it was an authentic revelation of God or could use
demonstrative, data-driven, empirical knowledge, reason and knowledge to
look at the Quranic belief system, law and morality to guage its authenticity
and moral efficacy. There was nothing beyond human comprehension,
mysterious or unintelligible in Islamic doctrinal or moral system. It was
simple, Unitarian, natural, rational and universal. Man was encouraged to
contemplate, understand and comprehend God’s will through the Book of
Revelation as well as the Book of Creation. Faith was substantiated by
reason and not threatened by it. As reason was the common denominator in
humanity, discursive analytical reason was a universal tool to elucidate and
strengthen the true faith. A manipulated, unintelligible, forced or distorted
faith was no faith at all. True faith was tantamount to one’s totality of inner
being and deep held convictions. That was why it could not be imposed
from outside. Rather, it was the other way around; it traveled from the
inside outward. External factors could influence faith in a number of ways,
but could not create its facts or realities. That was why the Quran
vehemently prohibited any compulsion in the matter of faith and religion.
Unity of God and Unity of Creatures
Al-Tawḥīd, the Unity of God, also meant unity of God’s creatures in the
ultimate sense. All humans were dignified creatures of God irrespective of
their religion, colour or creed. Pugh observes that “despite the common
origins of Islam and Christianity, Islam has long been misunderstood and
misrepresented in Western societies, particularly over such matters as
women, polygamy, sex, sexuality, slavery and jihad. Westerners today are
largely unaware that Islam is a relatively egalitarian religion which does not
endorse differences of birth, caste, wealth or race. In fact, it denounces
privilege as un-Islamic, though this has not prevented the emergence of
elites and aristocracies over time. Converts often find the egalitarianism a
refreshing change. In this spirit, a number of Muslim states have, in modern
times, adopted policies of socialist Islamism. And while Islam has always
recognised differences between men and women, believers and unbelievers,
and slaves and freeborn, historically the differences were significantly less
under Islam than in other societies, especially as regards women and
slaves.”298 Islam insisted that all human beings were created in God’s moral
image and were recipients of divine gift of soul. This universal divine gift
entitled them to God-given universal human rights irrespective of their race,
colour and creed. Respecting these inalienable rights of man was
tantamount to loving man, and loving man was equal to loving God. The
contemporary Muslim human rights violations, top-down state systems,
religious and political absolutism, hierarchical society, discriminations and
strict censoring of opinions are an aberration to the original Islam, and not a
reflection of it. The ideal, Quranic Islam was and is a champion of human
liberty, dignity and rights.
The fundamental human rights emanated from the dual Islamic concepts
of transcendental monotheism and human dignity. All humans were created
by the same God with equal dignity. The divine law was prescribed to
preserve and guarantee ensuing human equality. The objectives of Islamic
Law (Shari’ah) (preservation of life, faith, property, family,
reason/honour)299 were a reflection of God-given inalienable human rights.
Amina Wadud noted that “The purpose of the Quran […] is to establish
social justice. In the eleventh century, Ibn Jawziyyah agreed with this
notion when he described shari’a [...] He asserts that the maqasid of
shari’a, the goal, or ultimate intent, is justice. Justice is both a social and
moral term, as well as a principle, a virtue. It is not an abstraction. It is
woven throughout the entire Quran and as such becomes the basis for
establishing the idea in Islam of the five freedoms or rights: life, religion,
intellect, family (or genealogy) and property.”300 Therefore the role of
Islamic religion in the worldly reformation, improvement and betterment of
man was as important as his felicity in the life to come. Worldly happiness
preceded happiness in the life to come. The secular and material realms
were integral to the spiritual realms; both realms belonged to God. as God
was nothing short of justice and fair dealing. In reality He was the other
name of justice. (Quran 4:135; 5:8) Consequently, religion was not mere
holiness but morality and virtuous sociability.
Islam insisted upon human equality, universal human dignity, rights of
life, property, privacy, family, religious, socio-economic and personal
freedoms as God-given rights.301 These fundamental rights were
independent of both Church and state. Democratic values such as mutual
consultation (Shura),302 social contract (Bay’ah),303 rulers’ accountability
(Muhasabah)304 and service-based authority were introduced and
practiced.305 “The political system in Islam can be understood as a
consultative rule, that is, rule by shurah (consultation). Consultation is a
basic principle in all spheres of Islamic political and social systems. It is
also essential for the proper function of the organs of the state, its overall
activity and Islamic identity. The Quran commands Muslims to take their
decisions after consultation in both public and other matters. This makes
consultation mandatory, by virtue of it being the subject of a direct Quranic
command as specific as those requiring obligatory prayers and tax
(zakat).”306
The field and scope of mutual consultation was wide open, as the Shari’ah
included only a small number of fixed commandments and detailed
prescriptions. Its generic prescriptions, as well as the non-prescribed areas,
allowed a wide range of human interpretations and legislation. Even the
form and method of consultation was not fixed by the Quran: “The
deliberate silence of the shari‘ah about the form of consultation is
suggestive of the need for continuous temporal legislation. This legislation
would relate to administration and other affairs not touched upon by the
shari‘ah, as well as the affairs for which the shari‘ah has provided only
broad basic principles with no detailed laws.”307 The flexible and generic
Islamic principles of governance necessitated a great deal of human
participation, intellectualisation and appropriation in the form, method and
direction of the state and government. “It would thus appear that the form
of government, the form of consultation, the kind of legislature, and the
procedures to be used all could have some alteration and adjustment from
time to time without any compromise to their Islamic nature. In the view of
this context, many scholars view the Islamic system of government as
similar to a democratic system.”308
Islam and Democracy
It is often argued that Islam and democracy are antithetical, that the
democratic system assigns sovereignty to people, while Islam reserves that
for God only. That is not true. The sovereign God does not descend to the
earth to rule people; he sends laws to facilitate justice and equality, and the
laws are understood, interpreted and implemented by people in conformity
with their times, situations and cultures. The divine sovereignty means the
sovereignty of laws, “‘sovereignty’ is not ‘God’, but it is vested in the law
by God. An Islamic state is limited both by and to the law. It follows that
the sovereignty of an Islamic state is practically the sovereignty of the law,
and that the law limits the governmental power and regulates its functions.
Limiting governmental power to the law does not imply autocracy, but
implies democracy in its widest sense because the law requires consultation.
In this way, the idea that ‘sovereignty belongs to God’ does not make the
political theory in Islam differ from that in democracy but increases the
elements of similarity and compatibility between the two systems.”309
The humans share in that sovereignty in their role as interpreters,
facilitators and administrators of the divine laws. Islam encourages the full-
fledged human participation in matters of state and authority, but within the
established parameters of the divine law and its spirit. Khatab and Bouma
state “the claim that ‘God is the only legislator’ does not make the Islamic
system against democracy where the ‘people legislate’ for themselves. This
is because of the fact that the shari‘ah did not give detail on everything in
this life, but kept silent on some issues, including the method of
consultation and other matters at the heart of the structures and functions of
state, and between state and its subjects, between the subjects themselves,
and between state and other states in the world community. The silence of
the shari‘ah about these affairs is suggestive of the need for continuous
temporal legislation. Muslims are allowed to legislate for affairs not
touched upon by the shari‘ah, as well as the affairs for which the shari‘ah
has provided only broad basic principles with no detailed laws. This means,
first of all that all, human legislation is temporal and interpretive and not
absolute. Second, in Islam, people legislate to people, as people legislate to
people in a democracy. In either case, human beings will use their talent and
expertise to legislate in ways suited to their situation.”310
The head of an Islamic state is its chief executive, bound by the laws like
any of his subjects. The Islamic state is a constitutional form of governance
rather than a divine right monarchy. J. Wellhausen calls it a theocracy
founded upon the notion of justice. “The theocracy may be defined as the
commonwealth, at the head of which stands, not the king and the usurped or
inherited power, but the Prophet and the Law of God. In the idea of God
justice, and not holiness, predominated. His rule was the rule of justice.”311
This was the fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam - that
the notion of divinity in Islam was justice, while in Christianity it was
holiness. Christianity was anti-nomian, while Islam insisted upon actions
and moral law. This aspect of Islamic polity was most attractive to
seventeenth-century English reformers such as Henry Stubbe, John Toland
and John Locke who wanted to limit the divine right monarchy and
Anglican Church.
The absolute divine right monarchy of Church Christianity was totally
abolished and the Quran/Shari’ah/law was established as the ultimate
constitutional authority, over and beyond human reach. The Quranic
constitutional powers reserved the sovereignty and dominion for God while
giving the Caliphs derivative and secondary powers within the established
parameters of Quranic law.312 The Muslim masses were thus empowered
with the election and oversight process. The Christian clerical establishment
and elitism was replaced with socio-religious egalitarianism. The Quran
was the constitutional authority over and beyond the rulers, and all Muslims
were required to understand and implement Quranic teachings. The
constitution of Islamic state, the Quran, was understood and applied by the
masses, just like the head of state and ministers. The authorities’ executive
and legislative powers were extremely limited by the constitutional powers
of the Quran, and made conditional to their conformity with the universal
egalitarian principles of the Quran. The Muslim obedience to the state
authorities was qualified; (4:59) there was no obedience to the state in the
matters of disobedience to God and morality. The moral, duty-bound and
voluntary submission to the Islamic state with religious intent and zeal was
highly encouraged; it was a social contract founded on bilateral
commitments. But rebellion and revolt were encouraged if the authorities
did not fulfill their part of the commitment and crossed the limits by
persistently going overboard. Mass participation in the matters of state was
aspired, and a communal sense of belonging to the new religious order, and
commitment to its missionary zeal, was inculcated. The masses were
charged with a new sense of mission and enthusiasm to galvanise the largest
possible participation in the historical reformative scheme of Islam.
Imperialism, clericalism and elitism, the hall marks of Christendom, were
fought against with utmost vigour and courage.
The Prophet did not allow hereditary kingship or appoint a successor; he
left it to the Muslim community to choose their leader. None of the first
four rightly guided caliphs appointed their successor from among the ruling
families.313 Four different methods of election were exercised by the Rightly
Guided Caliphs, making the election process flexible. The presidential,
parliamentarian and other possible democratic forms of government could
easily be deduced from the early models. Two main characteristics, non-
hereditary and public contractual allegiance, were the hallmarks of these
state models. The Khilafah or Caliphate was vicegerency and not a divine
right monarchy.314 The Caliph represented God’s laws as understood and
interpreted by the Prophet of Islam for the wellbeing of the Muslim
community. Therefore, the Caliph represented God, his Prophet and people
at the same time. Some members of the Muslim community revolted
against the third Caliph Othman when they alleged nepotism, killing him in
spite of his magnificent past and close ties to the Prophet. The early Muslim
community was truly egalitarian, with active vigilance over their rulers. The
transition to the hereditary form of government was an Islamic aberration
and very much contested by the Muslim community of the first Islamic
century. Imam Hussian, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, resisted the
transition to a limited monarchy and paid with the lives and blood of his
entire family in the battle of Karbala.315
In spite of secularisation of the Islamic state, the Umayyad and later
Muslim dynasties were not considered divine right monarchies. The caliphs
were not divinely ordained, but usurpers of state power through force and
corruption; they were true perverters of divine wisdom due to their wrong
use of freedom and power. The Ulema (religious scholars) often opposed
the political authorities, dubbing them un-Islamic dictators. The strong
Muslim opposition to - and persistent struggles against - the monarchies
resulted in a unique power-sharing Muslim paradigm where the executive
and legislative powers of the Caliph and state were limited by the Quranic
laws and scholarly engagement. The Ulema, or religious bodies, were
granted the powers to interpret and legislate laws as well as oversee their
implementation. The Caliph’s legislative authority was especially limited
through Islamic laws, norms and practices and relegated mostly to the areas
where Islamic law was silent. He headed the executive branch of the
government, while relegating the legislative and judiciary to the religious
circles. The three branches of the government were required to work within
the framework of Islamic Shari’ah and Shura (mutual consultation),
curtailing and balancing their executive, legislative and judiciary powers.
Therefore, the Islamic caliphate was neither a divine right monarchy nor a
theocracy, but a limited constitutional monarchy where the powers of the
caliph, shura or parliament and judiciary were thoroughly restricted by
Qura’nic laws and juristic principles. The Caliph derived his political
authority from the fact that he was to be the chief guarantor of the Islamic
law’s thorough implementation. He was Amir al-Mu’mineen, the chief of
believers. His leadership was dependent upon him following the moral path
delineated by the Islamic teachings and in no way or form God-given
permanent privileges.
The authority of the Islamic state never extended to faith, intentions, inner
convictions or private practices, as was the case in the Roman and
Byzantine Christian empires. There was a wall between the Church and
state in Islam. The Quran separated and differentiated between religion as
institution and religion as a system of beliefs. The Islamic state’s authority
was limited to the outward public practices of the subjects.316 The relative
outward civil, socio-moral conformity rather than doctrinal unity was the
aspired goal. Religious diversity and pluralism were generally tolerated.
The state was governed by the Muslim rulers but their politics was not
Islamic. All religions were allowed free practice and semi-independence.
Atheists, agnostics and sceptics were not persecuted but allowed debates
and public conversations. The People of the Book enjoyed special status
among the minorities; they paid the state tax (Jizya) like all other religious
minorities, but enjoyed greater freedom and privileges. They had their own
independent courts, communities, business entities, temples, Churches and
hierarchical clerical establishments. Had the politics of the Islamic state
been Islamic they would have never enjoyed such independence and
freedoms. Christendom did not allow religious diversity or pluralism,
because its politics were merged with religion. The public discourse and
decorum of the Islamic state was a sort of agreed-upon policy between the
Islamic state and its religious minorities. Public consumption of wine,
gambling and other un-Islamic activities were prohibited, while the same
were allowed within non-Islamic settings and private places. There was a
sort of minimal, agreed-upon civic religion practiced in the public square,
while the full expression of faith was relegated to specific religious settings
such as mosques, temples and churches. Such pluralism, religious tolerance,
civic religion and religious autonomy were extremely attractive to the
seventeenth-century English reformers, including Thomas Hobbes, Henry
Stubbe, John Toland, John Locke, Unitarians, Socinians and Deists. John L.
Esposito observes that “theologically and historically Islam has a long
record of tolerance.”317 The Quran embraces pluralism on the level of
salvation but inclusivism at the level of theology. He further states that
“Muslims regard Jews and Christians as “People of the Book,” people who
have also received a revelation and a scripture from God (the Torah for
Jews and the Gospels for Christians). The Quran and Islam recognise that
followers of the three great Abrahamic religions, the children of Abraham,
share a common belief in the one God, in biblical prophets such as Moses
and Jesus, in human accountability, and in a Final Judgment followed by
eternal reward or punishment. All share the common hope and promise of
eternal reward: “Surely the believers and the Jews, Christians and Sabians
[Middle East groups traditionally recognised by Islam as having a
monotheistic orientation], whoever believes in God and the Last Day, and
whoever does right, shall have his reward with his Lord and will neither
have fear nor regret” (2:62).”318
In brief, Islamic Unitarian theology, cosmology and republican pluralistic
outlook was the exact opposite of the Christian religious, political and
natural theology. Islam claimed to have come to reform Christian religious,
political and cosmological accesses. The seventeenth-century English
reformers found Islam handy in their reformative scheme of the Old
Regime. Their appropriations of anti-Catholic (uniformity) and pro-diversity
Ottoman themes facilitated their reformation of Reformation.
Islam and English Enlightenment
Islam rose in the seventh-century Arabian Desert, achieving territorial
expansion with unprecedented speed, and overrunning much of the Middle
East Christian world as well as crucial parts of the Church of North Africa
within a few short years, following the death of its founder. This brilliant
success was enormously threatening to the Christian Church and state. As a
result, the initial seeds of hostility were sown as opposition to and
propaganda against Islam and the Prophet mushroomed, becoming harsh
and vociferous. Islam was depicted as Antichristian, heathenistic, idolatrous
and superstitious while Muhammad was nothing short of the Antichrist
prophesied in the Book of Revelation. And, from the time of Rudolph de
Ludheim (620) through the medieval centuries, this antipathy had remained.
For example, Nichlas de Cuse (1401-1464), German philosopher and
bishop, Joan Lluís Vives (1493-1540), Theodore Bibliander (1506-1564),
Valencian Spanish scholar and humanist, Louis Maracci (1612-1700),
Johann Jakob Hottinger (1652–1735), and many other reputed figures down
the centuries presented the Prophet as an impostor, Islam as a cluster of all
heresies, the Muslims as brutes, and the Quran as a tissue of absurdities.319
Christendom was totally closed to Islamic anti-Trinitarian theology and
republican political thought. Both the monarchs and Church severely
punished any discussion against the Trinity or divine rights of monarchs.
Islam was Antichrist and needed to be confronted and eliminated. Those
elements of Islamic philosophy, theology and political thought that could be
utilised to support Christian Trinitarian Orthodoxy were allowed, but any
and all discussion against the supernatural Trinitarian Church theology and
its Augustinian political theology and cosmology were made totally off-
limits.
Late medieval Christian encounters with the Islamic world were mostly
concentrated in Eastern Europe and Italian city states such as Venice, Genoa
and Amalfi. Scholars of Mediterranean interactions and intersections have
emphasized a shared history of widespread cross-cultural diffusions,
religious syncretism and cultural hybridization between Christians,
Muslims and Jews on both sides of the Mediterranean which helped in
shaping religious identities, renovated religious traditions, and patterned
religious cultures of the Mediterranean. The impact of relatively tolerant,
diverse and open Muslim World upon the intolerant, insular, uniform and
persecutory Latin Christendom and its gradual but slow transformation is
well documented by this group of scholars. Filomena Viviana Tagliaferri in
her “Tolerance Re-Shaped in the Early-Modern Mediterranean Borderlands:
Travellers, Missionaries and Proto-Journalists (1683–1724)” has
underscored the process of multi-culturalism, hybridization and
Levantinization by which the Muslim Ottoman ideas such as religious
tolerance had impacted the Italian Catholics. The Ottoman tolerance of
diversity and encouragement of conversions to Islam were processes of
“syncretism”, “latitudinarianism”, “politicized differences” and “contact
and reconciliation”. The Transylvanian encounters led to some
consequential syncretism, hybridization and Levantization leading to
significant changes in Protestant theology, cosmology and political outlook.
Many Hungarians, East and West European converts, renegades and
Turkophiles enthusiastically engaged in Muslim missionary activities,
polemics, interfaith debates, pamphleteering, Ottoman apocalyptic,
messianic and millennial propaganda. The Ottoman war machine utilized
the socio-economic allure, military might, intellectual warfare, state policies
and Christian internal debacles to promote their version of a tolerant,
diverse, prosperous, rational, civil and flexible world order. They also
attempted to make contacts and forge alliances with persecuted,
marginalized Christian minorities and oppressed sects within rapidly
disintegrating Christendom to foment disunity, conflict, strife, internal
disturbance, disruption and chaos among the Christian states. The Sultans,
grand viziers, ministers, religious leaders and local officials all propagated
“soft world empire” through state policies, rituals and ceremonies. The
Ottoman state was not solely engaged in territorial expansions, acquisitions,
occupations, taxations and revenue collections but also heavily invested in
religious ideology, missionary zeal, economic allure, communicative
strategies, power plays and social expressions of magnanimity, altruism and
charity. The sixteenth and seventeenth century Ottoman Sultans showcased
widespread conversions to Islam as proofs of their millennial hopes and geo
political efficacies. The conversion ceremonies, gifts and resultant cultural
transitions such as circumcisions and official turbans were publicaly
orchestrated to convey a strong millennial message to European
ambassadors, councils and merchants. The capitulation privileges, rituals
and ceremonies were also brilliantly orchestrated to divide, contain and
impress European diplomatic missions, merchants, consuls and to expand
Ottoman “soft world empire” based not on territorial expansion, but instead
on overtures of trade, mutuality, communication and religious ideology. The
converts’ softer agenda combined with hard Ottoman imperial strategies
ushered an environment and public space of Muslim Christian polemics,
debates, dialogues and exchanges which was quite effective. The millennial
date of 1591 and hopes of a new world order under Ottoman universal
monarchy made the interfaith debates more urgent and imminent. The
Ottoman claims that the Catholic Church had corrupted the original, simple,
Unitarian message of Jesus and Gospel with the help of Constantinian
Roman state and Church Councils and introduced pagan Trinitarian
incarnational theology, absolutist Roman divine right monarchy and Church
along with their persecutions, miraculous, supernatural, interventionist and
incarnational cosmology, antinomianism, monasticism, hierarchical
clericalism, burdensome ceremonies, mythologies and mysteries, all these
anti-Catholic tropes got a great deal of traction both in Eastern Europe and
Western Protestant areas. The widespread propaganda detailed that Islam
purged Roman Christianity of its Roman superstitions by restoring the
pristine, simple, Unitarian, rational, moral, diverse, tolerant and republican
message of Prophet Isa (Jesus) and was not a new religion but an extension
of the original message of Jesus and his disciples. Islam was the reformed
version of Christianity and not an anti-Christian faith. The implicit message
was that Muslims were in reality true Christians. During the sixteenth
century millennial fervor and Ottoman military expansions, the imminent
revival of the original Unitarian Christianity under the auspices of Ottoman
Empire and the demise of Catholic Habsburg dynasty were given a great
deal of push and credence.
The Hungarian anti-Trinitarians, Unitarians and Socinians gravitated
towards Ottoman scripturalism, moralism, rationalism, Unitarianism,
religious pluralism, man Christology and constitutional, limited monarchy.
Their persecutions by later Polish Catholic authorities forced them to
migrate to Holland, England and other Protestant areas. Likewise, the
Italian (mostly Venetian) anti-Trinitarians were too close to Rome to avoid
persecution. They flourished like their counterparts when they migrated to
Transylvania. They also migrated to various Protestant cities after the
Reformation and established Italian anti-Trinitarian clusters in Geneva,
Basil, Heidelberg and later on in Amsterdam and London.320 Their anti-
Trinitarian, pluralistic and republican ideology was suppressed due to the
persecutory policies of the Protestant national states and churches. The
situation became a little favourable when the Levant and East India
Company merchants, workers and officers traveled to the Ottoman, Safvid
and Mughal Empires and personally interacted with tolerant Muslims. Once
out of the suffocating, persecutory and supernatural Trinitarian
environment, some converted to Islam while many others became anti-
Trinitarian, tolerant, republican, independent Congregationalists.321 The
seventeenth-century English inner instability, Civil War and religious
dissent were the results of such an exposure and transition. The Crown’s
abuse, manipulation, customs, taxations, demands for loans, gifts, and
briberies caused alarm to overseas trading companies and their stake
holders including gentry all over Britain. The struggle between merchant
and gentry supported parliament and absolutist abusive monarchy heralded
the Civil War and English Revolution.322 The overseas traders made enough
fortunes to withstand the pressures of monarchy and to challenge the divine
right king and church through the parliament. Their demands for civil and
religious liberties and balance of power between the Crown and parliament
safeguarded merchant’s financial interests and further progress. The initial
radical Interregnum period facilitated relative tolerance of religious dissent,
better fiscal policies and allowed radical views to flourish. The continuous
cross-cultural reinforcement from the Muslim world, radical missionary
zeal of dissenters, consumerism and commercialism of Levant and East
India merchants and religious and political instability of England created an
atmosphere within the public sphere, congenial to religious and political
dissent. The English Civil War and Revolution initially abolished the
persecutory Anglican Church and monarchy, allowed qualified dissent and
liberty of conscience but at a later stage tried to impose a sort of Puritan,
Presbyterian national church in its palce. Oliver Cromwell curtailed
republican civil liberties just like an authoritarian monarch, leading
nonconformists, Protestants and dissenters alike to accept Charles II for
stability’s sake as an enlightened replacement with hopes of religious
tolerance, liberty of conscience and constitutional monarchy. Charles II and
James II’s failed attempts at religious tolerance of nonconformists and
Catholics, their gradual support for an absolutist Anglican Church,
persecutory policies and divine rights of king politics thoroughly
disappointed the republican dissenters, merchants and Whig idealogues.
They threw their support behind James II’s Protestant daughter Mary and
her Dutch husband William III, and brought about the so-called bloodless
Glorious Revolution of 1689. The Revolution was the climax of the
century’s republican, dissenters, traders and Whig efforts to curtail the
Church and monarchical powers, abuses and privileges. The Islamic
Unitarian republicanism and religious pluralism, along with its political and
economic allure, was initially adopted by the Unitarians and Socininas and
then promoted by a sizeable influential Levant and East India related
merchant community, garnering great political clout and transforming the
English community from within by the end of the seventeenth century. Let
us discuss seventeenth-century England, its geo-political landscape and
overseas trading companies to properly understand the discussed
transformation.
 Chapter 3

Seventeenth Century England, Overseas

Trade and English Identity Formation
Early seventeenth-century England was a small country with a population
of around 3 million (by the middle of the century around 5 million) while
just one of the three Muslim Empires, the Indian Mughal Empire had a
population of 150 million in 1608. England was known for its bad weather,
monotonous foods, dietary deficiencies, agrarian impoverished economy,323
under-nourished ignorant population, limited natural resources, premature
deaths,324 bubonic plagues,325 primitive living conditions,326 instable society,
dull politics, drunkenness,327 gambling, and absolutist Church and state.328 It
was highly stratified, divided, instable, insecure, persecutory and an upside-
down society.329 The difference between rich and poor was conspicuous;
wealth was concentrated in the upper five percent of the population.330
Tensions between the Crown, gentry, nobility and merchants were the norm.
This continuous tug of war was the main source of English instability and
anxiety. There was not much state building, science, medical facilities,
trained physicians, industrialisation, secular colleges, universities or other
educational outlets. England was a medieval, under-developed and isolated
isle. The English religio political identity was fluid, broadly based upon
anti-Catholic sentiments and ethos.
Religious tensions were as high as the socio-economic disparities. The
Elizabethan Settlement had identified religious conformity with political
allegiance, and from 1559 onwards “subjects in England had to subscribe to
the two Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the first declaring the monarch
as head of the state and the second determining worship under the monarch
as head of the Church.”331 The monarch’s sovereignty extended to the
Church, doctrine and practice. This placed state and Church properties
under the authority of the Crown. Freedom of worship and liberty of
conscience were proscribed, and all sorts of political and religious dissent
were persecuted. The imposed religious faith and uniformity were no
solutions to natural inquiries and inner anxieties caused by the Reformation.
The Protestants in general lacked confidence in Church teachings, rituals,
traditions and harboured doubts about the way Christianity was developed
by Catholic Church under the corrupting influences of the Roman Empire.
The top-down imposition of religious, political and cosmological
uniformity, and the resultant persecutions, were considered extensions of
the same Catholic corruptions highlighted by the Reformation leaders.
Elizabeth’s successor James I pretty much continued her religious policies,
Near Eastern affinities due to political reasons and divine right ideology to
bolster his monarchical authority and appeal. His carefully crafted religio
political ideology of “Antiquity”, claims of direct inheritance of the original
Christian institutions, bypassing the Catholic corruptions in scripture,
dogma, and church settlements and directly connecting with the pre-
Catholic simple Church of the first three Christian centuries through
original Middle Eastern languages, Near Eastern Churches, manuscripts and
Bibles but concurrent insistence upon the divine rights of King like
Catholics accelerated English suspicions about their Christian heritage and
boosted longing for further reformation of Roman Christianity. Many
thinking Protestants believed that the Reformation needed further
reformation based upon the pre-Catholic original Christianity of Jesus and
his early disciples. The late Reniassance attitude of looking back to
antiquity for purer forms of theology, ecclesiology, political systems,
sciences, wisdom and knowledge was prevalent among the English
intelligentsia of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The
Puritan ideology of exploring pristine, original and simple Christianity was
pitched against the medieval scholasticism of the absolute Church and
monarchy. Puritanism was a multifaceted movement with many variants
and sects. Scepticism about, and distrust of, existing religio-political
structures and restoration of original forms, doctrines and institutions were
the common denominators. The longing for civil and religious liberties and
the problems of authority were at the core of this constant puritanical
struggle. Seventeenth-century England was a God-driven society, so all
disputes and controversies were couched in religious language. The whole
seventeenth century was marred with religious disputes, persecutions and
wars. England, like the Europe of the seventeenth century, was a divided,
upside-down and persecutory society.
From the perspective of the then pluralistic and opulent Muslim East,
China and Japan, Britain was considered a third world country.332 The
English historian William Dalrymple observed that “At that time England
was a relatively impoverished, largely agricultural country, which had spent
almost a century at war with itself over the most divisive subject of the
time: religion. In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest
minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut
themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning
themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah
nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were
forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further
afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.”333 It was the “drabness
and boredom at home […] the monotony”334 which forced them out of
Europe to Asia, Africa and Americas. The transition was facilitated by
Elizabeth’s Protestant politics and aggressive trade policies, as briefly
discussed above.
Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant outlook caused alarm to the Pope and French
neighbours. Her Anglican Church was a hybrid of Protestant theology and
Catholic worship, reformed in doctrine, traditionalist and hierarchical in
government and discipline, and a mixture of Catholic and Protestant
ceremonies and forms of worship.335 It was “crypto papist” neither fully
Catholic nor fully Protestant. It was elastic, fluid, malleable and Erastian.
For Puritans, it was only half reformed. Her trade overtures to Ottoman
Sultan and expressions of religious affinities with Muslim Unitarianism
were sufficient enough to outrage the Pope who had banned any trade with
Ottoman Muslims. A number of plots by the Catholics to kill Elizabeth were
foiled and the plotters were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered.336
Elizabeth never married and had no heir,337 so the Protestant Stuart King
James of Scotland took over the throne. His strict divine right Church and
monarchy caused growing discontent and brushed away many of his
religious and cultural achievements, such as publication of the King James
Bible (1611), efforts of Christian reconciliation and establishment of
Jamestown colony in Virginia (1607). The Catholic Gunpowder Plot of
1605 to blow up the parliament and King only made him more authoritarian
and persecutory.338 Discontent with persecutory Church of England and
monarchy spilled over to the reign of Charles I who was more radical in his
divine right prerogatives, primitivism, antiquarianism, Near Eastern
languages, knowledge, manuscripts and ancient wisdom than his father
James I and resulted in the English Civil War between the royalists
Cavaliers and parliamentary forces called the Roundheads. Consequently
the “middle decades of the seventeenth century saw the greatest upheaval
that has yet occurred in Britain.”339 Sir Robert Walpole, the renowned early
eighteenth-century British Prime Minister, observed that “in the seventeenth
century men killed, tortured and executed each other for political beliefs;
they sacked towns and brutalised the countryside. They were subjected to
conspiracy, plot and invasion. This uncertain political world lasted until
1715, and then began rapidly to vanish.”340 The early seventeenth-century
England was chaotic, disoriented and in all sorts of crisis. Jonathan Scott
noted that “during the seventeenth century every serious political disorder
that could befall a kingdom did befall England and its Stuart-governed
neighbours. Parliamentary crises immobilised English politics in the 1620s,
1640s, 1670s and 1680s. There were successful foreign invasions in 1640
and 1688, and other ineffectively opposed incursions in 1659, 1667 and
1685. There was civil war which, during the period 1640–51, resulted in
casualties the extent of which are only now beginning to be understood. If
England lost 3.7 per cent of its population between 1640 and 1660 (190,000
people), a greater percentage than in either of the twentieth century’s world
wars, Scotland may have lost 6 per cent (60,000) and Ireland a chilling 41
per cent (660,000).”341 Countless people were killed, maimed and burnt due
to their religious and political beliefs. Neither the state nor the Church was
stable, secure and mature.342 The English philosopher John Locke lamented
that in his times religion had served as “a perpetual foundation of war and
contention: all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in
Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many
millions, have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.”343 Locke
complained living in a whirlpool of storm for his entire life due to internal
English anarchy and chaos.344 The English, like their European counterparts,
killed each other with religious zeal and passion. Political and religious
authority was the main bone of contention.
Anglican Church and State
Severed from the long tradition of Catholic Church and united
Christendom, the seventeenth-century English monarchy and Anglican
Church struggled to define its scope, authority, institutions and directions.
The monarchs tried to impose Catholic versions of rituals, sacraments,
hierarchical ecclesiastical structure and divine right monarchy upon mostly
Protestant, Calvinist and a sort of reformed Arminian English society which
hated Catholicism, its rituals and structures with passion. Historians have
even suggested that “with respect to these two supposedly all-important
issues of religious persecution and ecclesiology, there were fundamental,
revealing likenesses between the ‘sacerdotalist’ religious ideology of
conformist Anglicans and the Catholic clerical leadership in France”345 For
instance, Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), the English metaphysical poet,
argued that most conformist Anglicans were in fact agents of popish
tyranny and Counter-Reformation.346 But such a formally elaborate church
was extremely important to Charles I due to its political functions.
“‘Religion is the only firm foundation of all power,’ Charles I had said. The
church and state do mutually support and give assistance to each other,’
wrote Bishop Goodman. The state pays them [the clergy], and thus they
have dependence upon the state,’ as Hugh Peter more brutally put it. The
function of a state church was not merely to guide men to heaven: it was
also to keep them in subordination here on earth. Different societies,
different churches: but to want no state church at all seemed to
traditionalists a denial of all good order.”347 Charles I was convinced that
Bishops were the foundational stones of monarchy; no bishop, no king. The
Anglican Church and monarchy wanted Protestant Englishmen to obey the
Church and monarch with a Catholic religious zeal, while the Englismen
had already lost confidence in the religious authenticity and validity of the
Catholic religious and political theology. King James I and Charles I’s
efforts to legitimize their absolute divine right prerogatives through direct
appeal to the Old Testament Temple theology and Kingdom of David via
original Near Eastern Bibles, manuscripts, churches and cultures were
unsuccessful. This was a tough nut to crack.
England had neither the resources of the Habsburg monarchy nor the
socio-political grip of the Bourbon French dynasty, but English monarchs
intended to rule like their Catholic models. The English monarchs did not
have a standing army or coercive state power, and their militias were no
matches to the standing armies of Spain and France. Even in 1661, when
Charles II decided to have a standing army, it was minimal due to lack of
resources and parliament’s resistance. In 1685 there were fewer than 9000
soldiers in the English Army, in addition to low-funded disorganised
Scottish and Irish troops. During William III’s reign, especially from 1695-
1697, the paper numbers rose to about 100,000 men but the parliament
reduced the cadre to 7000 in 1697 while in 1608 the Indian Mughals kept a
staggering 4 million men under arms348 and the Ottomans in the 1670s kept
over 225,000 men in arm.349
The English monarchs mostly depended upon the Church and religious
sense of obligation to preserve unity, order and king’s divine right
prerogatives. Conrad Russell observed that “a government with
overwhelming military force may survive without a generally accepted
theory of obligation, though few have wished to make the attempt. But
Tudor and Stuart governments were conscious of their lack of coercive and
investigatory powers, and correspondingly felt the greater need for a theory
of obligation. The standard point that fear was not enough to rely on was
true: if obedience were not of conscience, it was unreliable […] Charles I
was quite right in maintaining that ‘if the pulpits teach not obedience, the
king will have but small comfort of the militia.’”350 Archbishop William
Laud absolutely subscribed to this maxim of religious conformity and
national unity. The Augustinian theory of obligation in household and state,
as discussed above, was preached from the pulpit and implemented through
the parish courts. Anglican Church was an important arm of the English
state. “The simplest theory of obligation in use was that of Romans xiii, ‘the
powers that be are ordained of God’. The subject, wife, child or servant
obeys the immediate superior because in doing so he or she is obeying God,
whom all are bound to obey. In the words of Ponet’s gloss, ‘neither is that
power and authority which kings, princes, and other ministers of justice
exercise only called a power; but also the authority that parents have over
their children, and masters over their servants, is also called a power: and
neither be the parents and masters the power itself, but they be the ministers
and executors of the power, being given unto them by God.’”351 This was
the religious and moral conscience ingrained in every believing Christian.
The innate idea of God was invoked to propagate the innatism of divine
rights of kings and bishops. Submission to Christ was in reality submission
to the monarch and bishop, the vanguards of Christian faith.
Charles I and Archbishop Laud’s Authoritarianism
Charles I and Archbishop Laud felt that Reformation, with its anti-clerical
overtones and individualistic sola scriptura doctrine, had compromised the
Christian conscience and theory of obligations. To remedy the problem,
Laud imposed a uniform Church with elaborate rituals, ceremonies and
prayer books on Protestant England which hated Catholic Church, its
cumbersome ceremonies, elaborate sacraments and authoritative
ecclesiastical structure.352 Charles I and William Laud were hell-bent on
imposing uniformity, unity, order, manners and obedience.353 Laud played
the role of an Anglican Pope for Charles I’s divine right pretensions, over-
meddled in state affairs and consequently caused divisions within the
Anglican Church - and frustrations to Charles I.354 Laud’s efforts of
connecting his episcopal authority and King’s divine right prerogatives
directly to the ancient patristic foundations circumventing the long Catholic
centuries was unsuccessful but unintentionally substantiated the puritan
impulses of going back to the pre-Catholic, pre-Romanised pristine Church
and original apostolic Christianity.355 It played well into the general puritan
rhetoric that the historical Church and monarchy were corrupted due to
Catholic innovations; persecutions and religious strife were the
consequences of that corruption, that religious wars and destructions were
prophesised in the Scriptures, that Europe and England were passing
through the Apocalyptic period delineated by the Bible and that the Second
Coming of Jesus - as well as the ushering in of a new millennial- were at
hand. The resistance to the corrupted ecclesiastical structures, teachings and
rituals and its replacement with simple, original, pristine and egalitarian
message of Jesus (the new temple and new Jerusalem) were necessary to
realise the messianic and millenarian hopes. Two different Christian
ideologies were undercutting each other with religious zeal and playing
further havoc to an already disoriented English society. The King and
Church were persecuting dissenters with absolutist religious convictions,
imposing uniformity, good manners, piety and obedience to usher the
expected millennial Protestant Stuart universal monarchy and the dissenters
were fighting back with millennial religious enthusiasm. Two different
schemes of eternal salvation were at war with each other.
Charles I (1600-1649) was absolutely convinced of his divine gifts,
intellectual, spiritual and political acumen. He imprisoned, tortured and
killed opponents with religious zeal and certitude.356 He lacked flexibility,
alliance building and financial resources. He was “a king so insecure,
incompetent and malevolent as to constitute a complete monarchical self-
destruction package.”357 In spite of not having any dynastic rivalry, “far
greater security of title to the throne and an end to disputed successions,”358
a quiverful of children for succession, a unified and imposing Anglican
Church, a rebellion free England,359 a supportive parliament, stable prices,
surplus supply of grain and no immediate threat from the Habsburg military
machine,360 Charles I felt insecure because of the erosion of traditional
religious foundations of monarchy due to Reformation’s anti-clericalism
and anti-traditionalism. He was paranoid about the Reformation’s negative
effects upon the English monarchy, and instead of state-building, focused
more upon public obedience and manners. He was trying to impose the
divine right monarchy and Church on a Protestant intelligentsia who had
mostly lost trust in the religious foundations of such a medieval ideology.361
The same arguments of corruption used by the Protestant Reformation
leaders against Catholic Church and Habsburg monarchy were being used
by the English dissenters against the Anglican Church and English
monarchy. Charles I and Archbishop Laud were heretical Christians
persecuting the dissenters while Jesus and his disciples never persecuted
anybody but were themselves persecuted. Jesus never had this worldly
kingdom; therefore, the persecuted dissenters were in reality following the
original message of Jesus while Charles I and Bishop Laud were reflections
of Roman corruptions. No obedience to Church and monarchy was required
if it violated the commnadments of God. Charles I’s persecutory policies
and absolutism was heretical. Within the first fifteen years of his reign the
King alienated almost all segments of his population due to his eratic
authoritarianism.362 The imposition of religious unity and manners was too
much for an already anti-Catholic English society which was now
additionally exposed to Eastern Muslim anti-Catholic rhetoric, subtle
missionary overtures, millennial propaganda, pluralism, religious tolerance,
freedom of conscience and bottom-up Presbyterian like mosque structures
since the 1580s, through overseas trade. Both King James I and Charles I’s
antiquarian enthusiasm for Near Eastern theology, languages and wisdom
added to English anxieties about Christian heritage, biblical authenticity
and King’s divine right prerogatives. Charles I and Archbishop Laud’s craze
for Near Eastern languages including Arabic, Eastern wisdom, manuscripts,
sciences, philosophy, Bibles, coins and Churches was meant to consolidate
their religio political powers as true inheritors of the original ancient
Church of Near East and its primordial theology and philosophy. Assisted
by a circle of theologians, the King stressed that the Anglican Church was a
direct continuation of the “Primitive Church” that took shape in the first
four centuries of the Christian church in the Near East. That pre-Catholic
pristine Church was the original source of authentic theology, thought
patterns and languages. That is why research of, speculation on and mastery
of the Near Eastern languages, Bibles and manuscripts were essential to
ward off Christian religio political differences and interpretive
controversies. The King felt that the Old Testament Temple theology and
political model of Davidic Kingdom were more congenial to his intended
consolidation of powers, Erastian Church and absolutist Monarchy. He tried
to superimpose such an ancient power structure on the Anglican Church and
society. His enthusiasm for Near Eastern languages, texts, manuscripts,
Bibles, coins and edifices was geared towards construction of such a
consolidated power structure. That need was met by the Levant Company,
its merchants and chaplains, as will be detailed in the coming pages. But the
paradigm shift backfired as the appeal to primordial Eastern theology,
scriptures, dogmas and structures opened the pandora box of scriptural
corruptions, theological manipulations, Church and state’s abuses and
supernatural impositions. This played well into the long Ottoman religio
political rhetoric, reformative claims and millennial prophecies. The
Ottomans ruled the significant historical, sacred and political Christian
landmarks such as Jerusalem, Constantinople, Nazareth, Mount Sinai and
were patrons of ancient Christian Churches. Their claims of being the true
heirs to pre-Catholic tolerant Roman Empire and pristine theology of Jesus
seemed relatively genuine and plausible. Their material prosperity, military
successes, multicultural allure, freedoms, diversity and reformative claims
mesmerized some disgruntled English merchants and their persecuted
friends at home. A gradual theological transformation accompanied English
explorations to the Near East, overseas trade and subsequent material
revolution.
Overseas Trade and Intellectual Transformation
The Levant and East India Company trading complex had transformed
English material culture. The decade of the 1630s was the time of Indian
cotton, calico and colourful textile’s revolution in England. The Oriental
obsession, in so many ways and forms, was quite visible in various
segments and dimensions of the English material culture. Charles I himself
was fond of Oriental fashions; the foreign material culture eroded the bricks
and mortar of the old socio-economic hierarchical system. The Earls of
Bedford, Warwick, and Essex, John Pym, overseas merchants and religious
dissenters actively sought to transform England into a limited monarchy
like the Mughals, Ottomans and Persians, a sort of aristocratic, quasi-
republican oligarchy - like the Venetian monarchy - in which parliament
occupied a prominent role, but the balance of power effectively laid with
the nobility and merchants.363 This was too radical for Charles I, as well as
for many Englishmen.
The ideology of religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, separation of
Church and state and rebellion against the immoral, corrupt and unruly
kings was imported along with the Oriental material culture. Such ideology
of religious diversity and tolerance had been totally absent from
Christendom. Medieval and pre modern Christianity, in all its forms,
imposed uniformity, persecuted heretics and punished dissent. The Dutch
reformer D. Erasmus was no less punishing of heresies than Luther and
Calvin. He considered killing of heretics necessary for the maintenance of
state. The so called seventeenth century tolerant Dutch Republic and
Church persecuted many Christian sects and were not open to other
religious faiths, as John Marshall, Perez Zagorin and others have
demonstrated. In the Mughal, Ottoman and Persian Empires on the other
hand, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and
athiests all lived together, engaged in business and contributed to prosperity
and social cohesiveness. The state neither imposed its Islamic theology
upon the non-Muslim subjects nor demanded uniformity from its Muslim
populace. The interfaith and intra-faith diversity and toleration were the
norms. The Church and state, civil and religious authorities were separated.
The English also learned that religious tolerance and liberty of conscience
were not antithetical to social peace, order and unity, and political
allegiance did not require religious conformity. The civil realms were quite
different from the spiritual realms. Additionally, the Sultan was neither
divinely ordained nor permanently appointed. The Ottoman Sultan Mustafa
I was deposed in 1618 and again in 1639, his nephew Sultan Osman II was
deposed and murdered by the janissaries in 1622 and Sultan Ibrahim was
publicly strangled in 1648 as a result of the Grand Mufti’s fatwa. The news
of these regicides was widely circulated in England through newsletters,
newspapers and gossips not only in London and other big cities but also in
small towns and villages. The Englishmen and women learned from Turks
that revolt against a corrupt and authoritarian ruler was not only possible
but required in certain situations. The single event continually remembered
and rehearsed by English writers was the regicide of Sultan Osman II.
These political shocks left a unique and indelible print on the imagination
of seventeenth-century Englishmen. The royalists completely identified
Cromwell with the rabble rouser “Muhammad” and the Model Army with
Janissaries. Such an uprising or regicide was unheard of in England or in
Europe. The same lessons of and discussions about political resistance were
repeated in 1680’s, 1690’s and 1700’s when Sultan Mehmed IV was
deposed in 1687 after the defeat at the Second Battle of Mohac and Sultan
Mustafa II was deposed in 1703. Some persecuted dissenters,
nonconformists and Whigs insisted that rebellion and even regicide was
permitted if the ruler acted contrary to the law while the High Churchmen,
royalists and Tories argued that this Turkish ideology of rebellion and
regicide was totally un-Christian. Many overseas European and English
merchants, factors and visitors were witness to these realities. The
Augsburg physician and traveller Leonhard Rauwolf (1535?-1596) who
lived in Levant from 1573 to 1576 as an employee of the Augsburg
merchant firm of Melchior Manlich and his associates, and visited the
Syrian and Mesopotamian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, wrote
extensively about it.364 His “remarkable parable on religious toleration and
the coexistence of various nations in one realm reads like an early precursor
of seventeenth and 18th-century writings that pointed to religious diversity
in extra-European empires in order to confront European readers with their
own intolerance. Indeed the variety of religious beliefs in 16th and
seventeenth-century western and central European monarchies was much
more restricted than in the contemporary empires of the Ottoman sultans or
the Indian moguls. European rulers typically sought to impose confessional
conformity on their subjects, and where conformity proved impossible to
enforce, granted only a grudging tolerance to certain Christian minorities.
Jews were still banned from many European countries, and where they were
accepted they often faced severe legal, political and economic
restrictions.”365 William Biddulph, the English Levant Company chaplain
from 1600-1608, noted that “the Turks give liberty of conscience to all men,
and like well of every man that is forward and zealous in his own language”
hence making them better trading partners than the “Papists”. He added that
Muhammad declared that excepting apostates, “every man shall be saved by
his own religion.”366 In the early 1620s, the Levant Chaplain Charles
Robson was struck by the religious diversity in Ottoman Empire.367 Levant
chaplains such as Dr. Edward Pococke, ambassadors such as John Finch
and English visitors such as Henry Blount conspicuously highlighted
Ottoman pluralism and loathed Europe for its religious persecutions.
Radical Protestants, who harboured hatred towards the Catholic Church
due to its long historical corruptions, ecclesiastical and theological
dissipations, came to the conclusion that religious persecutions in the name
of unity, peace and prosperity were also Church’s interploations into the
primitive, original and peaceful faith of Jesus and his earliest disciples.
Jesus and his disciples were persecuted but never persecuted others.368 The
Constantinian politics and Augustinian theology of persecution, loving
torture and merciful punishment were rejected and long medieval
inquisitions and persecutions were all viewed as anti-Gospel, Church
inventions to instill fear and exact obedience.
The puritan religious zeal was supplemented by overseas trading
companies’ complaints against the Crown’s fitful authoritarianism and
erratic extortions.369 Their charters, custom duty, taxation and privileges all
depended upon the Crown and “unlike domestic property rights that were
governed by common law precedent, foreign trade was governed by civil
law, administered by the Crown in the Admiralty courts [...] English rulers
also could grant and revoke charters to companies overseas, impose
customs, and create monopolies of newly introduced goods, as commerce
and innovation was believed to be protected by the king’s foreign policy.”370
The Crown extorted overseas merchants through taxes, forced loans,371
interlopers,372 gifts and bribes. The King and Levant Company continuously
fought over the strangers’ consulage fees from the 1630’s to the early
1640’s and the King had the upper hand. The Levant Company took the
matter to the Ottoman court and Charles appointed his loyal ambassador Sir
Sackville Crowe to replace the Company’s ambassador Sir Peter Wyche and
to seek help and secure loans from the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim (r. 1640-
1648) against his parliamentarian enemies, a pattern, of rival ambassadors,
loan requests and seeking Ottoman intervention in English affairs, followed
by his son Charles II. This was a microcosm of Charles I’s manipulative and
extorting attitude towards his subjects in general. The Levant Company was
£20,000 in debt as a result of the seizure of the strangers’ consulage. S. Jha
noted that “prior to the Civil War, even those joint stock companies that
enjoyed initial profits faced not only foreign predation but also Crown
expropriation through rising customs charges or the revocation of their
charters. These setbacks eventually led to a decline in enthusiasm for
investment in the 1630s. In contrast, the contribution of overseas customs to
total Crown revenues rose from 5.2 percent in 1552 to 52.5 percent on the
eve of the Civil War in 1642.”373 Charles I’s exaction of overseas trading
companies diminished his dependence upon the parliament, but disgruntled
the trading companies and their countless gentry and parliamentarian stake
holders.374
The troubles for Levant or East India Comapy meant troubles for England.
Philip Lawson noted that “when the EIC experienced its worst troubles,
there was matching instability in national politics.”375 The overseas trading
companies and their parliamentarian allies pushed back and carved a special
niche for them through the parliament. “Not surprisingly then, attempts to
bargain over the control over rights over customs and foreign policy played
a pivotal role in parliamentary debates from 1603 to 1625, with joint stock
investors playing prominent roles.”376 Parliament wanted control over
customs, but the King was not to surrender “the fairest flowers for profit
and command in all his garland.”377 Traders and parliamentarians joined
hands with puritan and religious dissenters against the Crown and its
religious arm, the Anglican Church. “In November 1641, investor-reformers
penned the Grand Remonstrance, a manifesto aimed at instituting
parliamentary authority over remaining Crown rights, including over
foreign policy, finance, and the armed forces. This led the king to illegally
enter the House of Commons to arrest the Five Members considered the
ringleaders of the parliamentary opposition in January 1642. Parliament
summoned London’s citizen militia in its defense. The king abandoned the
city and, in June 1642, raised his war banner, threatening to use force in
defense of Crown rights.”378 This was the beginning of the English Civil
War. The Anglican Church was Charles’ influential religious arm and an
integral part of his military campaign while the overseas trading companies
were elemental to the parliament’s rebellion. The overseas traders praised
Ottoman Sultan’s charity and fairness against the unjust extractions of
Charles I. In spite of Ottoman internal fiasco of 1640’s and financial
troubles, and unlike the English King, the Sultans did not extort English
merchants. Subsequently, the parliamentary struggles against the Crown,
Charles’ regicide and subsequent publication of Turkish Alcoran were
depicted as English extensions of Ottoman religious, intellectual and
military invasion. To the Royalists, the new republic was anti-Christian. The
Parliamentarians gave a millenarian slant to Charles’ defeat at the battle of
Naseby and Catholic defeat at Crete. Ottoman military victories and cultural
accomplishments were accommodated and appropriated by the
parliamentarians for domestic consumption.
The new English Commonwealth protected overseas trader’s interests at
home and abroad, increased English Navy’s armament, made necessary
administrative adjustments to protect and enhance Levant trade, added forty
five vessels to the fleet and not only defended Levant trade against the
foreign invaders such as Spain, Portugal, pro Stuart French Navy and
pirates but also against the slain King’s nephew, the Duke of Ormonde and
Prince Rupert who was harassing Commonwealth ships and Levant
Company vessels. The Commonwealth’s aggressive trade policy well suited
the Levant Company and they opened their wallets and supported it with
customs, donations and loans. The English Revolution was a watershed
moment for the Levant trade and the Levant merchants’ support of the
Commonwealth was depicted as Ottoman intervention in and invasion of
England. Cromwell was a rabble-rouser Muhammad. The Revolution had
turned England upside down.
Some Puritan radicals felt the need to sieze the opportunity “to realise a
more godly reformation (that is to create church structures and patterns of
worship and discipline more wholeheartedly based on a Protestant
understanding of the commands of the Bible). This meant the repeal of the
Elizabethan statutes setting up the Church of England; the abolition of
Bishops and the system of church courts which had survived from pre-
Reformation days; the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer, which was
full of ceremonies and prayers which were Catholic in origin; and a ban on
the celebration of Jesus’ birth (Christmas), and of his death and resurrection
(the Easter Triduum) as of all Saints’ Days and ‘superstitious’ observances
(with a contrasting emphasis on a more solemn and austere observance of
the Sabbath day [Sunday]). This ‘puritan’ drive was not common to all
parliamentarians, but it was characteristic of most parliamentarian
activists.”379 The puritans were divided between conservative and radical
tolerationists.380
Puritanism, Biblicism and Restorationism
Puritanism in a sense was primitivism, Biblicism and restorationism,
meaning elimination of Catholic scaffolding to go back to the original,
peaceful and otherworldly biblical faith of Jesus and his persecuted
disciples. The term “Puritan” applied to a varying multitude of sects,
ideologies and people. The General Baptists, Levellers, Presbyterians,
Unitarians and Independents all were primitive restorationists, in one sense
or the other. They were united in their appraisal of Catholic corruptions of
the pristine Christian faith and the tarnished nature of Church and
monarchy, but divergent in their restoration schemes. The Presbyterians
focused upon ecclesiastical structure,381 the Levellers on socio-economic
order, constitutional reforms and popular sovereignty, the Fifth Monarchists
on the judicial laws of Moses,382 the General Baptists on Godly rule and
millennial holism,383 the Unitarians on Trinitarian theology, rational
discourse and religious tolerance and the Independents on constitutional
republicanism and limited monarchy. The language of socio-political
change was religious, and the idiom was biblical. Puritanism was
multifaceted and multi-pronged primitivism, Biblicism and restorationism.
“Primitivism - the desire to restore an original pattern that has been lost -
had always been one of the most powerful impulses of the puritan
movement. Puritans were devoted to restoring the purity of the primitive
church, a purity corrupted during the great popish apostasy, and now being
recovered in a latter-day restoration.’! Cartwright and the Presbyterians, for
example, were convinced that they were restoring the true pattern of church
government laid down for posterity in the Acts and the epistles.”384 The
Puritan theologian and American colonist Roger William argued that
“Christianity fell asleep in the bosom of Constantine.’’ The mission of
Williams and other radical puritans was to wake the church up, to call it
back to the patterns of the New Testament.”385 Paul Best and John Biddle
insisted that Trinitarian incarnational theology was a Roman invention, and
antithetical to the Unitarianism of Jesus and his disciples. The Apocalyptic
upheavals of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe were the final stages
of the corrupted Church and theology and the harbingers of a new
Millennium founded upon the original, Unitarian, simple and moral
message of Jesus. The aspired primitive godly order and saintly community
of Puritans was void of Church pomps, traditions, rituals, ceremonies,
tithes, prerogatives, fines, courts and persecutions. It consisted of religious
freedom, liberty of worship and conscience and a pluralistic civil order
accommodating Jews, Turks, multiple Christian sects, heretics and even
athiests just like in the pluralist Muslim East.
The General Baptists and Levellers originaly led the way for this radical
toleration tradition. For example, Thomas Helwys, who established the first
English Baptist church, published his pluralistic views in A short
declaration of the mistery of iniquity (1612). He emphasised that the king’s
power extended to all the goods and bodies of his servants but not to their
spirits. Helwys extended toleration to all peaceable religions: “Let them be
heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it appertynes not to the earthly
power to punish them in the least measure.”386 In 1620 John Murton’s An
humble supplication to the kings majesty argued that the king was lord and
lawgiver to the bodies of his subjects, but that Christ alone was lord over
conscience, so that “no man ought to be compelled to a worship by
persecution, even were he to `walk in falsehood’.”387 Roger William stated
that “it is the will and command of God that, since the coming of his Son
the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-
Christian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations and
countries: and that they are only to be fought against with that sword which
is only, in soul matters, able to conquer: to wit, the sword of God’s Spirit,
the word of God.”388 He further argued that “God requires not a uniformity
of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced
uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of
conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy
and destruction of millions of souls […] An enforced uniformity of religion
throughout a nation or civil state confounds the civil and religious, denies
the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh.”389 His friend John Milton could tolerate the Turks and Jews but
not the Catholics whom he called “a mixed rabble, part papists, part
fugitives, and part savages, guilty in the highest degree of all these
crimes.”390 Toleration of Catholics was a perversion of true religion. “He
[…] who makes peace with this grand enemy and persecutor of the true
church, he who joins with him, strengthens him, gives him root to grow up
and spread his poison, removing all opposition against him, granting him
schools, abbeys, and revenues, garrisons, towns, fortresses [...] he of all true
protestants may be called most justly the subverter of true religion.”391
Contrary to that, Charles I and the Stuart monarchy were fond of the
Catholic Church and its absolutism.
The Quaker Samuel Fisher, in Christianismus redivivus (1655), deplored
the fact that Protestants would exclude people of other faiths from
citizenship and was convinced that heretics and Papists, “’heathens, Jews,
Turks or Pagans’, should be `lawfully licensed to live in civil states, or in
any Commonwealth under the Sun’. The magistrate should `leave all men to
worship God according to their severall ways’, and concentrate on his real
business-running the civil affairs of the state.”392 Levellers such as John
Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn presented arguments in
favour of toleration of all religions, notions of self proprietorship, social
contract, annual elections, office term limits, free trade and severe restraints
on the powers of parliament as well as monarchy. These religio-political
ideas of the 1630s were to influence the thinking of later Whig leaders, such
as Shaftesbury and John Locke. Richard Ashcraft noted merchants, traders,
Green Ribbon Club members and Levellers connections and influences on
John Locke and Shaftesbury’s political views.393 Ashcraft showed that
Leveller Major John Wildman and Locke simultaneously worked for Earl of
Shaftesbury.394
Lilburne wrote that God alone was Lord over conscience, and that “no
Parliament, Councell, Synod, Emperor, King, nor Majestrate hath any
spiritual authority or jurisdiction over this Kingdome.”395 Leveller
pamphleteer and writer William Walwyn was a silk man who highly praised
Islam and Turks for piety and tolerance. In his Just Defence (1649) Walwyn
stated: “Compare but our manners unto a Turk, or a Pagan, and we must
needs yeild unto them: whereas in respect of our religious superiority, we
ought by much, yea, by an incomparable distance out-shine them in
excellency, And well might a man say. Are they so just, so charitable, and
so good, then must they be Christians.”396 In 1641 he called for toleration of
all professions whatsoever, including Socinians and papists, whilst he later
declared that even those “so far mis-informed as to deny a Deity, or the
Scriptures” 397 should be tolerated. Don M. Wolfe noted that “fellow-
Leveller with Overton and Lilburne, William Walwyn occupies a unique
place among the tolerationists […] Walwyn anticipated by several years the
extreme tolerationist views of The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Lover of
Montaigne, Seneca, and Plutarch, urbane critic of Puritan theological
excesses, Walwyn approached the toleration controversy with a sincere
secular faith in the appeal of understanding and the efficacy of love. Alone
with Lord Brooke among the tolerationists, he pamphleteered for the cause
without bitterness or rancour, projecting into his tactics the principles of his
creed. ‘God onely perswades the heart,’ he writes to Edwards: ‘compulsion
and enforcement may make a confused mass of dissembling hypocrites, not
a Congregation of beleevers.’”398 Overton, in The arraignement of Mr
Persecution (1645), presented the same case arguing that “Turckes, Jewes,
Pagans, and Infidels’ should all be allowed to live together in society.”399
Within a few years, “the conviction that false religion should be tolerated
had moved from being an eccentric opinion held by a handful of General
Baptists to a genuine theological option embraced by a substantial minority
within English puritanism.”400
The mainstream Puritan leadership such as John Tombes and John Owen
wanted toleration limited only to the godly, the saints,401 the people of
God402 and not the unregenerate like Quakers, Unitarians and Socinians, but
a vocal minority extended it to all loyal and peaceful citizens. There was “a
minority of radical puritans who broke decisively with the mainstream
puritan view and maintained that religious toleration should be extended to
all who did not endanger the civil peace and safety of the commonwealth.
This view first emerged among the godly in the reign of James I, and its
earliest proponents were General (or Arminian) Baptists.”403
The pluralistic knowledge transmitted by the overseas traders, and the
examples of East India and Levant companies, were often on the minds of
some Puritans. Roger William insisted that the state had no right to interfere
in the matters of religion, conscience and worship and that church was a
voluntary organisation like East India and Turkey companies. The Church
was “like unto a Body or College of Physitians in a Citie; like unto a
Corporation, Society or Company of East Indie or Turkie merchants, or any
other societie or company in London.”404 Independent Congregationalism
was espoused.405 The independent Quakers, Unitarians and Socinians all
vouched for such a voluntary and tolerationist church and society where
faith, religion and worship were left to individual conscience, and church
organisations were consensual and voluntary. They extended tolerance,
even to rejection of central Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and
incarnation. “This revolutionary vision of a multi-faith society united
around amoral code discerned by natural reason ensured a very wide degree
of toleration indeed. Disbelief in the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ,
for example, could not be punished since they were by no means obvious to
the conscience by the light of nature.”406 The Quakers, influenced by
Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel Hayy bin Yaqzan as
translated by Levant Company chaplain Edward Pococke, emphasised a
great deal upon the inner light, even at the expense of Bible and its
exegetical traditions. The individualistic, tolerationist and republican
ideology received traction during the 1630s.
A purer form of Christianity, void of Catholic excesses and centered
around Gospal morality, was pitched against Laudian regime and Catholic
looking episcopacy. This struggle for reformation of historical Christianity
on primitive lines, messianic millenerianism, along with overseas trading
companies’ complaints against the Crown, were among the main causes of
the English Civil War. There was “a genuine conviction that the civil war
was a religious crusade to drive out old corruptions, and to establish new
patterns of evangelism. In 1642, there was a self-confidence and energizing
faith in religious renewal for which there is no secular equivalent.”407 The
Presbyterians mostly focused upon the Church structure and services and
insisted upon a new national church with Presbyterian leadership. The
Quakers, following Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufyl’s philosophical novel
Hayy bin Yaqzan,408 insisted upon the inner light and conscience at the
expense of organised Church, liturgy and religion. The Unitarians, such as
Paul Best and John Biddle, blasted the whole Trinitarian, incarnational
supernatural theology and demanded its replacement with Unitarianism.
The Socinians emphasised upon rational discourse, man Christology,
religious tolerance, morality and scripturalism. The Levellers extended
religious equality to social inequities and oppressions of the social order,
insisting upon a sort of social contract between the rulers and the ruled.409
The merchants and parliament struggled to curtail monarchical and Church
powers. The divergent religio-political ideologies converged upon the fact
that the historical Christianity was corrupted, religious and civil
persecutions, abuses and manipulations were anti-Christian, return to
pristine Christianity of Jesus would usher a new era of peace, stability and
prosperity prophesised in the Bible. The end result will be Parousia, or the
Second Coming of Jesus. Their deconstructive outlook at the past was
unitary, but their constructive forward-looking schemes were incoherent.
The ensuing anarchy, competition, religious pluralism and social levellism
generated an alarm and fear in the minds of English elites.
Unfortunately, the religious and social reformists, who were united on the
destruction of authoritative church and state, were divided on the
construction of potential alternates. Freedom of conscience and religious
tolerance (both civil and religious liberties) and limited monarchy were the
main points which glued them together.410 Even freedom of conscience,
religious liberty and constitutional monarchy meant different things to
various Protestant radical sects.411 The proto-democrat or ‘quixotic’
libertarian412, “free born Englishman,”413 nascent, evolving, unspecified and
simmering Unitarian republican ideology414 - which stemmed neither from
the persecuting Catholic nor from suffocating Protestant Churches, but
mostly from the pre-Christian ancient Roman model prompted by the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English exposure to Oriental pluralistic
model - was too nascent to be cooked properly. Its foreign outlook, Oriental
connections, Muslim ingredients and rebellious aspirations were easily
highlighted as Antichristian, anti-Church and anti-monarchy by the royalists
and severely crushed by Laud’s Church and Charles I’s state unifying
policies.
Archbishop Laud’s415 Anglican Church resembled the Catholic
eccelesiastical structure and rituals moreso than the reformed churches, and
was accused of returning to persecutory Catholicism. Laud struggled to
elevate the Church over and beyond the civil authorities, including the
monarchy, resulting in an era of constant tensions. He created an
ecclesiastical state within a state. Charles I’s failed efforts to marry the
Catholic Habsburg Princess Maria Anna (instead marrying the Catholic
Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria of France), his failure to aid the
Continental Protestant forces during the Thirty Years Religious Wars,
Catholic-leaning insistence upon the divine rights of kings, demands of
absolute submission to the state and Church, support for High Church
Anglo-Catholic formalism and popular ritualism, reformation of manners
(to bolster public obedience and uniformity) to the extent of intrusion of
privacy, severe persecution of dissent and quarrels with merchants and
English Parliament caused the Scottish Wars of Bishops and then the
English Civil War.416 The Protestant Puritans, Scottish Covenanters and
emerging nonconformist sects, as well as English gentry and merchants,
mistrusted, feared and disdained Charles I’s religious, financial and political
moves. Consequently, he was executed by parliament in 1649 along with
his Archbishop Laud (1645). The monarchy, House of Lords, Parliament
and Church of England were all abolished in one shot and the English
Commonwealth Republic was ushered in, under the military leadership of
Oliver Cromwell. “The years following the regicide saw the publication of
an English translation of the Koran in 1649, the ‘blasphemous’ pamphlets of
the Ranters, Thomas Hobbes’ss Leviathan (1651), John Goodwin’s full-
scale defence of Arminianism, Redemption Redeemed (1651), and the anti-
Trinitarian Racovian Catechism.”417 The dissenting voices were finally
given some room to breathe.
Religious Roots of English Revolution
The English Revolution was a religious revolution, promoted in part by the
overseas trading companies; it abolished the corrupted absolutist
Christianity along with its medieval power structures. It struggled to restore
the puritan, primitive and egalitarian Christianity of Jesus and his early
disciples. The parliament and Crown’s battle for power and balance was
fought on religious turf. Thomas Hobbes noted that the cause of the civil
war was “nothing other than the quarrelling about theological issues.”418
John Coffey stated that “the English Revolution was a theological crisis, a
struggle over the identity of British Protestantism.”419 Many traders,
politicians and common folks engaged in religious debates, theology and
ecclesiastical discussions. “Theology in the 1640s and 50s was far too
important to leave to the ordained ministry. This was the great age of lay
theologians. In 1644, one of them – the Londoner John Milton – imagined
many ‘pens and heads’ in ‘this vast city’, ‘sitting by their studious lamps,
musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present,
as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation.’”420 The
constructive phase of restoration was far more complex, difficult and
bloody than the destructive phase of abolition of corrupted forms. The
overseas trading companies and their local allies were instrumental in the
destructive phase but they could not create a consensus about the exact
religio-political alternates.
The English Civil War - and ensuing Commonwealth Revolution - was
made possible by “the specific connections between economic
developments and the momentous political overturning of the 1640s.
Contemporary commentators writing before, or at the time of the Civil War
were in no doubt that a great socio-economic transition had taken place in
England. It was generally observed that there had been a transfer of
property power from the king and the high nobility to ‘the people,’ or the
middle ranks. This thesis was propounded most notably by James
Harrington in the 1650s, but similarly held by all ‘the best thinkers among
his predecessors and contemporaries’—including Walter Raleigh, Sir
Francis Bacon, James I, John Selden, Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Thomas
Wilson, Spelman Bishop, Francis Quarles, Godfrey Goodman, Henry
Parker, Henry Ireton, Gerrard Winstanley and Thomas Hobbes. Many of
them believed that the change in the balance of landowning and wealth
created a platform for the parliamentary challenge to the crown.”421 The
overseas trade especially with the Muslim East and the resultant Oriental
material and cultural revolution of 1630s was one of the main contributing
factors. The domestic financial transformations and overseas personal
experiences were the catalysts of English socio political and religious
transfigurations.
Islam and Muslims were well known to 1630’s England. The
preoccupations with Turks, allusions to Islam, the Quran and Muhammad
were proportionated to English anxieties at home. The more the tension the
more Englishmen turned to Muslim texts, histories, models and precedents.
The Muslim (Turkish) examples were frequently quoted to analyze, criticize
and reform English religio political institutions. The rhetoric of the “Turk”
was an important element of contemporary discussions, negotiations and
navigations. For instance, the English Essayist Francis Osborne (1593 –
1659) deployed the Turks as a barometer of Christian – and specifically
English – failings such as ambition, selfishness, corruption and cruelty. He
used Islam and Turks as a mean of warning and transforming the chaotic
English society of 1640’s and 1650’s. Islam, Muslims, their ideologies and
institutions were used as godly instruments in catalyzing reformation of
English Reformation. In his “Political Reflections upon the Government of
the Turks” of 1656, the parliamentary sympathizer Francis Osborne
criticized English customs, ideas and institution by using Ottomans as a
whip. His pointed, piercing and critical social commentary loathed English
society, religio political institutions and overall outlook with corruption,
greed, ritualism, enthusiastic extremism and lack of directions while
praising Prophet Muhammad, Islam and the Ottoman Empire for its
balanced spiritual, moral, doctrinal and political approach. Influenced by
the positive commentary of Henry Blount’s popular travelogue, Osborn’s
“Political Reflections” was one of the most remarkable texts on Islam and
the Ottoman Empire of the early seventeenth century. He preferred
Muhammad’s political ideas, institutions and policies over Alexander the
Great and declared them the foundations of praiseworthy Muslim unity,
fellowship, rationalism and empire building. Islamic devotional activities
were celebrated as the most significant socio-political cohesive forces and
Islamic governing model was highly appreciated as an ideal. Osborne hailed
Islamic principles and their socio-political ramifications while lamenting
the unceasing Christian internal strife, blood shedding and persecutions. He
also highlighted the Muslim unity in diversity and toleration of dissent.
Muslim separation of Church and state, civil liberties, religio political
arrangements, rationalism, minimalism, tolerance and spirituality were the
secrets of Ottoman civility, unity, morality, prosperity, good governance and
expansions, “once you accept the premises of this way of looking at politics
and religion, you will not be able to deny the advantages, in those terms, of
the Ottoman system, and this will force you to think in a new way about the
disadvantages of your own.”422 Islam could serve English interests very well
and solve its problems of religious schisms, political anarchy, extremism
and supernatural dogmatism. This shame-praising was widespread among
English Protestant moderates as well as radicals.423 The parliament was
mostly supported by the religious radicals, independents, merchants,
shopkeepers and gentry.424 The parliament’s struggle for limiting church and
monarch’s powers was not a mere teleological, constitutional development
for its own sake, a solemn fight for civil liberty as the Whig historians
portray it, but a reflection of socio-economic and religious upheavals on the
ground which caused a communal longing for transfer of power from the
monarch and bishops to the parliament and people. The mid-century
English Revolution was the culmination of such a widespread longing and
things Islamic intensified by Levant trade were integral to this transition.
The revolution marked the highpoint of such an Islamic appraisal,
fascination and collaboration. The early seventeenth century enthusiasm for
Middle Eastern manuscripts, middle century cross cultural exchanges and
late seventeenth century outbursts of “reasonableness of Christianity”,
church and monarchy were reflections of the same fascination, mirroring,
appropriation, emulation and collaboration. The actors varied but the
agenda was pretty much the same.
Economic Causes of English Revolution
Contemporary economists have focused on three key explanations of the
English Revolution. D. C. North and Weingast’s groundbreaking work
argues that “a coalition formed to defend property rights in response to a
political shock in the form of excessive executive greed by the Stuart
monarchs led to the Revolution.” The “successful removal of kings yielded
a credible threat that enabled future rulers to commit not to expropriate
property, leading to dramatic financial and fiscal development in
England.”425 Others suggest that the overseas trading related economic
shocks created new commercial middle classes that then sought to protect
their newly acquired wealth from executive predation. For Karl Marx,
England’s Civil War was the ‘‘First Bourgeois Revolution.’’ “Marx and
Engels were the first to suggest that the English Civil War of the
seventeenth century marked a stage in the shift from feudalism to
capitalism. There were three semi-independent parts to the argument. The
first was that the opposing forces represented two different attitudes
towards labour and property. The second was that the Parliamentarians
consciously willed the resulting destruction of feudalism. And the third was
that the outcome was a distinctively bourgeois society characterised by the
ideal of possessive individualism.”426 Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson,
Brenner, Rajan and Zingales427 suggested that this wealth was acquired by
new merchants involved in trade across the Atlantic with Asia and America
which gave them the financial capabilities to withstand the Crown’s
onslaught and demand religio-political reforms.428 B. Moore429 and R. H.
Tawney430 propose, in contrast, that the revolution was led by newly
commercialised gentry that acquired land due to the dissolution of
monasteries from 1536–1541.
The overseas traders increased in number and wealth, and purchased land
and nobility with their financial fortunes. Religious liberties, freedom of
worship and conscience were propelled to the forefront by the socio-
economic changes produced by the overseas trade and ensuing economic
imbalances. The relative economic empowerment of the middle classes
resulted in their longings for religious and civil empowerment. Fights for
combined civil and religious liberties were prompted by socio-economic
and religious changes; the medium of change was religious. Even Sir Henry
Vane Jr., the most emphatic constitutional republican and heterodox
Christian431 who paid with his life during Restoration, fought against the
Anglican Church’s excesses and used biblical language to convince others
of his pronounced republicanism.432 Civil liberties and constitutional
developments were exacted through religious idioms and terminologies. A
different, alternative, anthropomorphic and republican Christian narrative
vied against the traditional supernatural Christian dogmatism.
This was the beginning of anthropomorphic transition from supernatural
theology, divine right monarchy and Church, hereditary privileges and
hierarchical social stratification to empowerment of man, people, natural
theology and natural social order. This was what the republican ideologue
James Harrington (1611–1677) meant when he said that “the economic rise
of the people and the weakening of the force of the nobility undermined the
position of the crown, to the effect that “the dissolution of this government
caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government.”433 This was
the beginning of Harrintonian republicanism. It sparked a fire for communal
empowerment, freedom of conscience and religious liberties, even though it
did not realise it fully, during the Commonwealth Revolution. The
Commonwealthism was a bit different than the aspired republicanism; it
allowed rule of an individual ruler or a government, with the approval and
consent of the community. Republicanism was more radical than
Commonwealthism as it assigned sovereignity to people rather than a wise
godly ruler. Cromwell’s Commonwealth did allow restrictions upon the
ruler’s authority, highlighting a public sense of accountability and rights.434
Cromwell was accepted as a sort of limited monarch and a wise
Machiavellian prince, a Muhammad.435 The period witnessed the birth of
Islamic republicanism in England, as will be demonstrated in the coming
sections.
The regicide of Charles I dissipated the religio-political sanctity and allure
of both the monarchy and Church and enlightened people to the possibilities
of a limited, constitutional monarchy and ultimately the popular
sovereignty. The Islamic republicanism of the Ottoman Empire, where the
Sultan’s executive powers were limited by the Islamic Shari’ah laws,
Muslim scholars’ legislative, interpretive and judiciary powers and Islamic
commands of no coercion in the matters of religion, served as the initial
model of the limited monarchy and republicanism in England. The
republican ideology was more pervasive among the religious radicals,
nonconformists, independents, merchants, shopkeepers and some
enlightened gentry, but not quite popular among the rural areas, where
religious uniformity and monarchy carried the day. The country was equally
divided between the Royalists and the Commonwealth supporters.
The struggle for limited monarchy was also successful in Protestant areas
with close Muslim connections, such as England and Holland, where the
Catholic Church was despised due to its absolutist religious and political
theology, and the local Church did not have unlimited financial and political
means like those of the Catholic Church. Here the Crown and Church were
not as entrenched, solidified and absolutist as in the Catholic Spain,
Portugal and France. The Spanish and French overseas trade profits filled
the coffers of monarchs and gave them capital and means to instill fear and
further their absolutism, while in Holland and Britain the overseas
initiatives were privately-owned. The huge overseas trading profits went to
individual merchants, mostly outside the Crown’s circle, enabling them to
demand religio-political reformation and institution-building. “The critical
political institutions were those that constrained the power of the monarchy
and allied groups. Checks on royal power and prerogatives emerged only
when groups that favoured them, that is commercial interests outside the
royal circle, became sufficiently powerful politically. From 1500, and
especially from 1600, onward, in countries with nonabsolutist initial
institutions and easy access to the Atlantic, the rise in Atlantic trade
enriched and strengthened commercial interests outside the royal circle and
enabled them to demand and obtain the institutional changes necessary for
economic growth. Although profits from Atlantic trade were small relative
to GDP, they were still substantial, and much larger than previous trading
profits […] The recipients of these profits became very rich by the
standards of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and typically
politically and socially very powerful.”436 The struggle between the Crown,
its Church and loyals and the overseas traders, along with their religious
and parliamentarian allies, caused havoc to England.
The first half of the seventeenth century, including the Interregnum, was
full of turmoil, uncertainty and chaos. Contrary to that, the sixteenth
century was relatively calm. “The sixteenth century can look remarkably
unradical. Strongly bound by hierarchy and an emphasis on order and social
degree, successive regimes seem to have had an unlimited capacity to
preach the virtues of obedience to established authority.”437 How can we
explain a sudden outburst of religious and political radicalism in a society
that valued unity, order, tradition, conformity and obedience conceptualised
by Robert Filmer (1588–1653), preached and implemented by Archbishop
Laud and James I?438 How could we explain a sudden gushing of republican
language, a language of popular sovereignty, commonwealth, limited
monarchy and rights instead of long traditional language of absolute, true,
pure, complete and unlimited divine right monarchy? How could we
explain a sudden regicide, the demise and exceution of a well settled, un-
opposed, undisputed, un-challenged King Charles I ruling over a united
England?439 “The act of 1649 was so uniquely shocking that on hearing of
it, we are told, ‘women miscarried, men fell into melancholy, some with
consternations expired’. Men, that is to say, do not break lightly with the
past: if they are to challenge conventionally accepted standards they must
have an alternative body of ideas to support them.”440 Christopher Hill
wonders about such a sudden revolutionary atmosphere. “The thinking of
all Englishmen had been dominated by the Established Church. Yet, within
less than a decade, successful war was levied against the King; bishops and
the House of Lords were abolished; and Charles I was executed in the name
of his people. How did men get the nerve to do such unheard-of things?”441
These are complex questions and the answers could vary. Any monocausal
explanation for the English Revolution and later economic growth and great
divergence will leave out many socio-political aspects. One possible answer
could be the English exposure to the Muslim East and its material and
intellectual implications. English overseas trade with the alluring,
prosperous and pluralistic Muslim East could have served as a catalyst to
stir pluralistic, rational, natural and republican impulses during the first half
of the seventeenth century, as it certainly did during the second half of the
century.
Overseas Trade and English Revolution
Inspired by the Spanish and Potuguese overseas routes to Asia and America,
the English merchants started the Russia Company in 1552. The explicit
purpose of this Company was to find the shortest sea route to the East
Indies. This venture languished until September of 1580, when Francis
Drake was able to break Spanish and Portuguese monopolies over India
trade and returned with fortunes, which made him a national hero and
triggered an Eastern trade mania in England. “Indeed, mentions of trade,
Indies, and the Americas in published tracts in English experienced
particularly large boosts in 1580 and 1585, thereafter achieving levels
comparable to and often exceeding written mentions of Pope, Catholic,
papist, and bishop and of rights, privileges, liberties, and freedoms in the
years preceding the Civil War.”442 Starting in the 1580s Oriental trade
increased to peak by the1630s, affecting a material revolution in England
often termed as the “Oriental Obsession.”443 “Enthusiasm for shares in these
companies spread beyond merchants to encompass a broad spectrum of
political elites. The more than 6,366 investors between 1575 and 1630
included 23 percent of all members of Parliament seated in that period.”444
Almost 23.5% of members of Long Parliament (125 members) were
overseas shareholders. They came from all over Britain.445 The shareholder
MPs supported the parliament against the Crown, gave loans to the
parliament, defended its foreign policies and their own overseas
investments. This way a broad, formidable and lasting coalition against the
Crown and Church came into being.446 A strong and politically engaged
middle class, with capital and resources, drove the movement for religio-
political reform and aggressive trade policies.447 These politico-economic
reforms, coupled with religious reformation, propelled Britian to its later
imperial heights.
Multiple Puritan sects’ misgivings about the Church’s theological
foundations, scriptural corruptions, anti-traditionalism, zeal for original
message of Jesus via Oriental traditions - coupled with socio-economic
utilitarian changes caused by overseas trade - and millennial hopes could
have very well brought about this sudden revolutionary change. Merchants,
shopkeepers and artisans - “the middling sort” people - were crucial to this
change.448 “Freeholders and tradesmen are the support of religion and
civility in the land,” Richard Baxter wrote.”449 The expansion of this middle
class in numbers and wealth was the obvious new social factor. The
merchants’ free schools provided an alternative to the Church-dominated
education and ideology. Individualism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, liberty
of conscience and an urban way of republican life were stressed and
traditional ideas of King, Church and nobility were in retreat. The
supernatural ideology was giving way to natural, egalitarian and pragmatic
outlook. “The vision of reality that had supported the rational consciousness
of man for a thousand years was fading.”450
Individual merchants and explorers initiated global projects while the
Crown and Church were busy extorting and persecuting citizens.
Corruption, adultery, sodomy and incest were rampant at the Court; national
and international “disgrace caused or at least accompanied the change.”451
Merchants and Puritans glorified Queen Elizabeth for her Protestant
ideology, aggressive trade and foreign policies while criticising James I and
Charles I’s betrayal of Protestant cause and squeezing of traders through
custom and taxes. Overseas trade with Muslim East and its ripple economic
effects in England, including the consolidation of middle class, cross-
cultural exchanges of ideas, Eastern manuscripts, puritan distrust of the
Church Christianity and a longing for return to the original Christianity of
Jesus with the help of Middle Eastern languages, imagery, philology,
theology, Oriental allure, national disgrace and millennial hopes, were some
of the main factors of the sudden radical upheavals in England.
Overseas trade with the Muslim East was perhaps the main difference and
the success story of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
Prosperity breeds independence, autonomy and a sort of moral laxity.
Opulence (especially in the absence of a policing Church and state as
happened during the Civil War) was a recipe for religious divergences and
free-thinking. English exposure to pluralistic Ottoman, Mughal and Persian
society and its egalitarian mosque environment and organisational
structures added fuel to the fire. Interregnum resulted in religious diversity,
free-thinking and a sort of tolerance often connected with material success,
culture and Oriental influences. It could not have been the result of the
sixteenth-century Reformation or the resultant Protestant Churches, as these
Churches were equally persecutory and uniform. It could not have been
instigated by American colonisation, as the Native Americans lacked any
such ideology or the modeling capacity. The early American adventures and
colonisations were unsuccessful due to local resistance. For instance, the
original London Company and Virginia Company of London were
bankrupted due to warring with native Americans and corruption,452 and the
Crown revoked the Virginia Company Charter in 1624.453 The American
colonisation experience was totally different to trade arrangements in the
Muslim world, as the colonisation process was marred with inter-European
warfare and jealousy. The Spanish, French, Dutch and English cutthroat
competition cost countless lives, colonies and resources, instilling mutual
fear, anxiety, instability and uncertainty. The American experience was
different than the Orient, even when successful colonies were established.
The Native Americans were not prosperous, civilised and mighty like the
Ottomans, Mughals, Persians or Chinese. Sir Thomas Roe, the first English
ambassador to the Mughal court (1615), made this clear to East India
Company directors in London.454 Unlike the American experience, the
experience in the Orient was not imperial. It was alluring, exciting,
profiting, gratifying and challenging. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Oriental experience of a superior, sophisticated and prosperous
civilisation definitely impacted the English mind and imagination.
The early English merchants in the Muslim world were nothing but
subdued traders, focused on profit and learning rather than colonisation.
They left England between the age of fifteen and eighteen, and their Eastern
experiences were formative. They learned the languages, business,
communicative and social skills and acculturated themselves with a global,
diversified and pluralistic society. They made fortunes in the Muslim world.
Early sixteenth-century English voyages were not successful, but later
voyages initiated a long chain of overseas opportunities. “Although the
English had initiated direct trade to the Levant as early as 1511, a final
English voyage in 1552 in the wake of clear Ottoman ascendancy had
signaled the end of English commercial aspirations at least for a while.”455 It
was in 1581 and 1592, when England received the permission
(capitulations) to trade in the Ottoman Empire, that the Levant Company
was initiated. The Company brought England to the Levant and the Levant
to England. The English Crown did not have the desire or the means to fund
an English Ambassador in Istanbul; the Levant Company merchants had to
bear the burden.
The superior Islamic world certainly changed the English perceptions of
Islam, Muhammad and Muslims, contributing to religious anxieties at
home. “Expanding commercial engagement with the Ottomans, Morocco
and Persia pressed their representatives (and their faith) to an increasing
cultural prominence in the later sixteenth century, particularly following the
official codification of those relationships that began with the Anglo-
Ottoman ‘capitulations’ in 1580. Large numbers of Christian converts to
Mahometanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only made the
refutation of Mahomet more urgent.”456 The premodern allure of the Islamic
East is often diminished by the modern historians but it was real, as will be
discussed further in the coming pages. It suffices here to quote Allison P.
Coudert who states that “the Eurocentric nature of most European history
writing minimises or obscures altogether the fact that Europe was not a
dominant power in the early modern period, just as it obscures the role that
Islam played in shaping European identities. Few people realise how
terrifying and threatening, but at the same time how awe-inspiring, Islam
appeared to early modern Europeans.”457 Early modern Europe’s mystique
of Islam was real;458 it was Europeans who went to the Orient for business
and not the other way around. Had Europe been prosperous and superior, as
it became in the nineteenth century onward, the sixteenth- to eighteenth-
century Europeans would not have been flocking to the East. The journey to
the Muslim East was infinitely dangerous, treacherous and perilous; the
mortality rate was extremely high. The conditions on the sea and land were
exceedingly unfriendly, especially after the Spanish expulsion of Moriscos
in 1492. The conditions at home must not have been congenial to prosperity
or profitability as compared to the Muslim East. The long-distance trade
voyages, along with their perilous conditions and potentials, testify to this
fact.
Piracy and Barbary States
In addition to inter-European piracy, the Barbary pirates played havoc to
Europe. Over 3,000,000 Muslims were expelled from Spain between 1492
and 1610 and many of them joined Barbary pirates to avenge the wrongs
done to them by Catholic monarchs. These pirates were truly menacing for
the Europeans, as the Europeans were menacing for West Africans. Millions
of Spanish, Italian, Dutch and English were enslaved by Muslim pirates,
English being the least among them. To give an example from the British
Isles alone, “between 1600 and 1640 Muslim corsairs captured more than
800 English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish trading vessels in the Mediterranean
and Atlantic, enslaving some 12,000 English subjects. The attacks were not
confined to the sea but extended to port towns and inland villages. In
August 1625, for example, Muslim pirates stormed the church in Monts’
Bay, Cornwall, capturing 60 men, women, and children. In 1631 they
captured 140 people in Baltimore, County Cork, which means they had
become brazen enough to enter the waters of the Irish Sea. Even more
brazen were the raiders who roamed the English Channel and traveled up
the Thames estuary. According to the minutes of Parliament the fishermen
are ‘afraid to put to sea, and we are forced to keep continual watches on all
our coasts.’ The powerlessness felt by the English was summed up by the
Vice Admiral of Devon Sir John Eliot, who lamented that the seas around
Britain ‘seem’d theirs.’ Between 1660 and the 1730s another 6,000 men,
women, and children were captured. Hence some 20,000 or more British
were enslaved in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire during the
seventeenth and first third of the eighteenth centuries, but this was only a
fraction of the total number of Europeans who found themselves in the
same predicament.”459 Nabil Matar and Matthew Birchwood have shown
that problems related to the captives and renegades were major contributors
to the English Civil War.
Robert C. Davis claims that by 1570, “enslaving Christians had been
elevated to something approaching state policy in North Africa and
Ottoman Empire.”460 European coastal areas, and islands all across the
Mediterranean, were devastated. “Enormous flotillas attacked Christian
shipping and devastated coastal areas of Spain, Italy, France, England, and
the Mediterranean islands. On occasion the size of the fleets consisted of
over 100 galleys and 10,000 soldiers, enabling the Ottomans to blockade
major ports such as Genoa and Naples, threaten Rome, and sack coastal
cities. In a diary kept between 1679 and 1685 Thomas Barker, the English
Consul in Tripoli, frequently noted galleys setting off to go ‘a Christian
stealing’ or ‘a men-stealing.’ In one entry he noted that the corsairs had set
off ‘Westward to Fish for Dutchmen, whom [...] they hope to meet in Great
Schools.’ Some corsair attacks became legendary like the 7,000 captives the
Algerians took in the Bay of Naples in 1544; the 6,000 taken when the
Algerians sacked Vieste in Calabria in 1554; the 4,000 men, women, and
children seized in Granada in 1566; the 1,200 men and women captured in
Madeira in 1617; the 400 seized in Iceland in 1627; the 700 taken in
Calabria in 1636, followed by another 1,000 in 1636 and still another 4,000
in 1644. Between 1570 and 1606 Sicily was attacked at least 136 times,
with some raids penetrating inland as far as 10 to 20 miles.”461 The Turks
were a ruining, destructive and dreaded power in Europe.462 The Muslim
world presented a challenge as well as allure to the emerging but instable
English state. The challenges were not worth the extreme dangers if the
allure of profit had not outweighed it.
Capitulations and Muslim Soft Empire
The overseas trade with Ottomans was initiated by the capitulations or
permission to trade in the Ottoman territories. The capitulations were gifts
granted to evolving weaker Protestant states after several repeated requests
and valuable gifts to the Sultan and his establishment;463 they were neither
reciprocal nor negotiables.464 The Sultan even paid token salaries to the
European ambassadors as his guests. The capitulations were integral to the
grand Ottoman strategy of expanding influences, extending religio political
ideology and millennial hopes of universal Ottoman monarchy. They were
part of Ottoman strategy of dividing and containing Christendom and
avoiding a united crusade. The Sultans effectively played competing
European missions and merchants against each other and instilled strife
between contending parties by wisely negotiating privileges and preferring
some over others. They carefully orchestrated capitulation rituals and
ceremonies to play one European nation against others. They also played
the “religious card” by playing Protestants and Eastern Christians against
the Catholics and persecuted Christian minorities against both Catholic and
Protestant religious and political power structures. For instance the
Moriscos, Flanders and other Protestants were sheltered and supported
against Catholic Habsburg dynasty, Protestant Huguenots against French
Catholic King and Socinian, Unitarians, Quakers and other minorities were
encouraged to demand rights from their Dutch and English power
structures. The Ottomans could afford to do so as they had the upper hand.
The early seventeenth-century Western Europe or England were in no
position to demand or impose terms on the mighty, dreaded Ottoman
Empire. The first English ambassador to the Ottoman court, William
Harbourne (1542-1617), went through many humiliating protocols to gain
the Sultan’s approval to trade in the Ottoman Empire.465 The humiliations of
the first English ambassador to Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe - who was
known for his diplomatic experience and credentials - were no less. He had
to wait for three years in perilous conditions to obtain a few limited, minor
and ungratifying privileges from Jahangir, the Mughal Emperor.466
Until the nineteenth century all “European ambassadors were introduced
formally to the Ottoman Sultan as “naked and hungry barbarians”, who had
ventured “to rub the brow of the Sublime Porte.”467 The Ottoman Sultan
dictated the trade and diplomatic policies. The Europeans were there to
follow rules, not to dictate. In Aleppo for example, every night European
merchants were locked down in a Khan, a walled enclave with security and
janissaries. Other cities allowed more freedom, but there was no sense of
superiority or pretension. They knew that they were subdued, there to make
profit and obey the law. The merchants, consuls and ambassadors were
arrested and molested by the Ottoman authorities if found guilty of
capitulation violations or Ottoman laws. The Dutch ambassador De Keyser
was imprisoned in 1617 for months in Algiers.468 The Dutch Republic could
not get him released except through the efforts of a Dutch convert to Islam
and a corsair pirate. In 1860, the well-connected high end English
ambassador Sir John Finch469 whose family was in the helms of affairs in
England was tried in Ottoman court for bribery charges and threatened
many times with imprisonment without much diplomatic influence or
recourse.
The Turks, for their part, disdained and belittled the Europeans. “While
the blond European may have appeared as a God to native Americans, for
Muslims their reddish skin recalled the unclean pig. James Irving, who was
held captive in Morocco for a year, noticed how the local inhabitants
‘would never use any vessel that had touched our lips: so great was their
detestation and contempt for us.’ When Sir Daniel Harvey arrived in
Istanbul in 1668 as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, he had to wait a full
year for an audience with the Sultan, so little did the Sultan think of him or
the country from which he came. Muslims considered European dress with
its tight waists for women and tight trousers for men obscene, if not
immoral. Elizabeth Marsh describes a Moroccan woman who was
extremely ‘curious in examining my dress and person, and [...] highly
entertained at the appearance I made.’”470 Nabil Matar notes that “no
Muslim fell on his knees before a Briton: rather he humiliated the “Goure”
(Kafir, infidel) who could not but submit to the indignity. The Muslim not
only did not fear the Englishman: he did not even recognise him [...] From
whichever angle a Briton reflected on the Muslim perception of the
Christians, he realised that Muslims saw themselves in power and
certitude.”471 The Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa laid plain the Sublime Porte’s
most cynical view regarding Europeans, stating to English Ambassador Sir
John Finch that all ambassadors were “sent hither by your representative
princes to answer for the lives and estates of all Muslims all over the world
that are damaged or suffer by your respective subjects, and you are here a
hostage to answer for all damage done by English all over the world.”472
In the Indian Mughal court, England was also considered small and
unworthy. James I was painted even below the feet of Jahangir in the
paintings of Mughal artist Bichitr.473 In 1636, an English factory in Surat
was seized, and all factors were imprisoned and threated with torture,
because some English ships - not even East India Company vessels - had
plundered some merchantmen of Surat in the Arabian Sea. The English
were released only when the full compensation was paid.474
The Ottoman influence, power and might were well recognised475 until
1774, when Europe in general - and England in particular - asserted itself,
and the Ottoman Empire’s shortfall became evident. Even then, the
Ottomans were not to be fooled around; even a smaller independent Muslim
state such as Morocco was considered mighty. “Only in the nineteenth
century did the separation between West and East become clearer as a result
of the establishment of supposedly scientific racial ideologies and the
scientific and technological advances made in the West. Before 1750 what
characterised advanced and powerful societies was the state of their towns
and trade, both of which flourished in Islamic societies. Travellers to North
Africa were stunned by the vastness and magnificence of Muslim
architecture. The palace built by the Sultan Moulay Ismaïly was, according
to one British traveller, the ‘largest he had ever seen,’ and the stables, which
were some three quarters of a mile long ‘the noblest of the kind perhaps in
the world.’ In size this Muslim palace did indeed dwarf Hampton Court and
even Versailles. Because of his reputation as a fierce warrior and his love of
grandeur Moulay Ismaïly was compared to Louis XIV, but in actual fact he
was far grander.”476
The seasoned diplomate Sir Thomas Roe, who had experienced the
Spanish, Dutch and English courts, was dazzeled by the Mughal opulence
and grandeur. Writing about the Emperor’s birthday celebrations in 1616
Roe noted that “Here attended the Nobilitie all sitting about it on Carpets
until the King came; who at least appeared clothed, or rather laden with
Diamonds, Rubies, Pearles, and other precious vanities, so great, so
glorious! His head, necke, breast, armes, above the elbowes, at the wrists,
his fingers each one with at least two or three Rings, are fettered with
chaines of dyamonds, Rubies as great as Walnuts – some greater – and
Pearles such as mine eyes were amazed at […] in jewells, which is one of
his felicityes, hee is the treasury of the world, buyeing all that comes, and
heaping rich stones as if hee would rather build [with them] than wear
them.”477 Roe was vexed to discover that the Mughals regarded relations
with the English as a very low priority. On arrival he was shoved into a
substandard accommodation: only four caravanserai rooms allotted for the
entire embassy and even they were “no bigger than ovens, and in that shape,
round at the top, no light but the door, and so little that the goods of two
carts would fill them all.”478 More humiliatingly still, his slightly shop-
soiled presents were soon completely outshone by those of a rival
Portuguese embassy who gave Jahangir “jewels, Ballests [balas spinels] and
Pearles with much disgrace to our English commoditie.’”479
Contrary to Roe’s fascination, the local Indians’ contempt, derision and
low estimation of the English was an open secret. The later rowdy,
uncivilised and immoral Englishmen were openly derided by the locals.
William Dalrymple well depicted the contemptuous environment of
eighteenth-century India: “Their private whorings, drunkenesse and such
like ryotts […] breaking open whorehouses and rackehowses [i.e., arrack
bars] have hardened the hearts of the inhabitants against our very names,’
wrote one weary EIC official. Little wonder that the British were soon
being reviled in the Surat streets ‘with the names of Ban-chude and Betty-
chude which my modest language will not interpret.’”480 The Dutch,
Potugues and French were equally despised and kept to their limits.481
The East India Company
While the East India Company directors were controlling the English
Crown and parliament with their loans, briberies and corporate lobbying,482
a company officer wrote in 1681 to his superiors that “‘here every petty
Officer makes a pray of us, abuscing us at pleasure to Screw what they can
out of us.’ We are, he wrote, ‘despised and trampled upon’ by Mughal
officials.”483 They were considered low, base, quarrelling and fool dealers in
India, while in London they were making fortunes for the company. The
EIC was taught a humiliating lesson when its haughty and monied governor
Sir Josiah Child (1630-1699),484 a confidant of King James II, with the
permission of the King and London company directors, tried to assert
himself. In spite of a considerable English Royal naval fleet which sailed
from London to teach a lesson to the Mughals of Bengal, the English were
crushed beyond imagination. “The Mughal war machine swept away the
English landing parties as easily as if it were swatting flies; soon the EIC
factories at Hughli, Patna, Kasimbazar, Masulipatnam and Vizagapatam had
all been seized and plundered, and the English had been expelled
completely from Bengal. The Surat factory was closed and Bombay was
blockaded.”485 EIC, the most powerful English corporation “had no option
but to sue for peace and beg for the return of its factories and hard-earned
trading privileges. They also had to petition for the release of its captured
factors, many of whom were being paraded in chains through the streets or
kept fettered in the Surat castle and the Dhaka Red Fort ‘in insufferable and
tattered conditions […] like thiefs and murders.’ When Aurangzeb heard
that the EIC had ‘repented of their irregular proceedings’ and submitted to
Mughal authority, the Emperor left the factors to lick their wounds for a
while, then in 1690 graciously agreed to forgive them.”486 In 1757, when
EIC Calcutta Governor Roger Drake showed hesitation in demolishing an
un-authorised fortification to Company’s fort, the Bengal Nawb Siraj ud
Daula came thundering on Calcutta with 30,000 troops and inflicted an
exacting punishment on 200 English factors and soldiers. The cowardly
Drake escaped from the backdoor, leaving all the English factors at the
mercy of Nawab. The chief English factor William Watt, who later became
the de facto East India Company ruler of Bengal and had notable
descendants including a British Prime Minister, had to kneel in front of the
Nawab to seek his forgiveness. An English eyewitness report stated that
“Upon Mr Watts’ going before the Nabob, with his hands across and a
handkerchief wrapt round his wrists, signifying himself his slave and
prisoner, he [Siraj] abused him very much.” Watts was made to hug the
Nawab’s feet, and cry: “Tomar ghulam, tomar Ghulam” – “I am your slave,
your slave.”487 The Fort was opened, and the English were imprisoned.
“Upon opening the Factory gates, the enemy immediately entered in great
numbers, and demanded the keys of the godowns [warehouses] both
publick and private; they no sooner took possession of the arms and
ammunition, but they behaved in a most insolent manner, threatening the
gentlemen to cut off their ears, slit their noses and chabuck [whip] them,
with other punishments, in order to extort compliance from them […] Then
he [Siraj] ordered all the Europeans out of the Factory, and put them under a
strong guard. All the prisoners were sent to Murshidabad Cutcherry [gaol],
and put in irons, where they remained.”488 The story of the English dying in
the Black Hole of the fortress is too graphic to be narrated here.489 “William
Lindsay wrote to the future historian of the Company, Robert Orme, that it
was ‘a scene of destruction and dissolution […] and makes me tremble
when I think of the consequences that it will be attended with, not only to
every private Gentlemen in India but to the English nation in General. I
hardly think all the force we have in India will be sufficient to resettle us
here into any footing of security, we now being almost as much in want of
everything as when we first settled here.”490 Colin Newbury has noted that
“it is abundantly clear that initial contact through maritime trade left the
East India Company in a condition of dependency on Indian rulers, brokers,
and financiers until the last decades of the eighteenth century.”491 It was not
London, but the Muslim Agra and Instanbul, which dictated the terms.492
It was for the first time in 1758, and mostly in the later part of the
eighteenth century, when the English, due to the central Mughal
government’s collapse, provincial autonomies, English bribes, mercenary
activities and superior military technology,493 were able to create anarchy
and finally divide and rule India. By that time, the early and high
Enlightenment was already complete. The English from the 1580s to the
1760s, while very successful in America and Siberia, were mostly tamed,
subdued - and at times, humiliated - traders in the Muslim East.494 The
Mughal and Safvid Empires495 were more welcoming than Ottomans of the
merchants, but in no way under any political or diplomatic pressure to grant
them concessions.496 The subdued English traders mainly focused on trade
and profit, without many imperial designs.497 The English throughout the
early (1680-1720) and high Enlightenment period (1750s) were mostly at
the receiving end. The later British Empire was the outcome of the high
Enlightenment, and not the source of it.
The Dutch, French and British merchants and diplomates competed with
one another to earn the favours of Sultan.498 Their entry into the world
economic systems was late and dependent upon the Muslim world. “The
north European countries entered into regular relations with the world
overseas only after 1600.”499 Before that England was a tiny, isolated,500
marginal kingdom.501 The Protestant Western Europe in general, and Britain
in particular, got connected with the world through its Muslim
neighbours.502 The Early Turkey Company (1581),503 Levant Company
(1592-1825)504 and East India Company (1600-1874)505 merchants lived and
traded in the Muslim East, assimilated ideas, expertise, wealth506 and
utilised it to launch the Virginia Company507 and American colonisation.508
For instance, Sir Thomas Smythe (Smith, 1558 – 1625) the governor of
Levant and East India Companies in 1600 was also the founding governor
of the Virginia Company chartered in 1609, deputy governor of Somers
Isles or Bermuda and original supporter, promoter and financiar of North-
West Passage in North America. Alison Games noted: “It was in the
Mediterranean that the English acquired their first significant experience
with large-scale, long-distance trade in an alien and inhospitable
environment. The crucial skills learned there anchored and shaped
subsequent English enterprises around the world.”509
The Levant and East India company governors were extremely influential
in London, but relatively powerless players in the Muslim World of the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For instance Sir Thomas Lowe,
Sir Hugh Hammersley and Sir Henry Garraway were all Lord Mayors of
London, and others went on to become the Sheriffs and members of the
parliament. Its ambassadors came from influential English families and
went on to become members of House of Lords, parliament and foreign
office. Its merchants were from rich and influential business families. Its
chaplains were highly educated graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. They
played a significant role in cross-cultural cultivations, collection of
countless manuscripts, their translations and dissiminations. Their long
exposure to the Muslim East was extremely helpful to English evolution
into a commercial, political and imperial giant.510
The Levant English traders, consuls and ambassadors lived in Istanbul,
Izmir,511 Aleppo, Cairo, Cyprus and many other Ottoman cities for over 244
years.512 The long overseas interactions with powerful Unitarian Muslims
exacerbated the already heterodox impulses of the rich, opulent and
relatively liberal cosmopolitan London traders. “Business in the seventeenth
century was often equated with heresy or irreligion. Traders were suspect
because they had both the opportunity and the means to challenge dogma
and credulity; they were mobile, self-employed, literate, individualist,
competitive and less wedded to the communal traditions of an agrarian
society. Heresy did spread through commerce; although few notable
businessmen had been prominent among the Lollards and Protestant
martyrs, they may have found it easier to avoid prosecution.”513 A great
majority of London and other city merchants were already Presbyterians,
independent Congregationalist and Arian or Unitarian-leaning Arminian
Calvinists, who doubted the Trinity and insisted on human free will.514 Their
further exposure to simple Islamic Unitarian theology added fuel to the fire.
Young traders were more susceptible to Islam and Turkish influences; they
brought back pluralistic religious ideas, arts, architecture, poetry, stories,
expertise, ideas, observations and feelings along with silk, pepper and
cotton. The dissenters were well represented in the London merchant
community and city politics, as Richard Grassby has demonstrated.515 The
Levant and East India companies were equated with Independent
churches.516 “Merchants took risks by distributing seditious and heretical
books; several suffered for their faith or went into exile whether under Mary
Tudor or James.”517 We will later see that Thomas Firmin, a known London
merchant, was pressurised and persecuted by Charles II and James II.
Firmin supported the Father of English Unitarianism John Biddle during
Cromwell Republic and helped in Unitarian and Socinian publications
during the 1690s until his death in 1697. He was known to London
merchants for his philonthrophic works and was a close friend and patron of
John Locke and many other Unitarians. Likewise Mercer’s Company
merchant Henry Robinson (1604-1664) wrote about religious tolerance,
freedom of trade, freedom of conscience and dissent and suffered due to his
heterodox views. Robinson sponsored John Milton’s publications. John
Locke and Henry Stubbe’s close relations with Bristol merchants are well-
documented.
Trade and Cultural Exchanges
The intensity of trade, interactions and cultural exchanges can be gauged
from the English activities in a relatively small Ottoman city like Aleppo.
“Surprise is the usual reaction when people hear that 24 Church of England
priests served as chaplains to the English Levant Company factory in
Aleppo from 1597 to 1782. For two centuries this succession of Church of
England clergy lived and worked in this most cosmopolitan of cities in the
Arabic-speaking world that had a foreign community of around 5,000.
These Anglican clerics included the greatest English Arabist of the
seventeenth century, as well as a number who were to take high office as
bishops and royal chaplains, fellows of the Royal Society and friends of
notables such as Samuel Johnson and Robert Boyle.”518 They were there
along with Dutch and French merchants and chaplains. The sophisticated
and highly educated Anglican chaplains were sent to stop conversion of
Levant merchants to Islam or Islamising effects, gather information, spy,
collect manuscripts and write diaries about Ottoman religion, culture and
government.519 They were also integral to King James I and Charles I’s
antiquarianism, search for Eastern prisca theologia and prisca sapientia,
Near Eastern manuscripts, languages, coins, measurements, histories,
Bibles, apocalyptic prophecies and union with the Eastern Churches. The
Early Stuart kings, with the help of English theologians, formulated an
English Protestant Erastian political theology where the king and state ruled
supreme over the Church and subjects and which projected them as the
heralds of a new Protestant millennial prosperity, dominion and world
dominance in apposition to Habsburg Catholic and Ottoman Muslim
millennial claims. Many Levant Company learned chaplains enjoyed
patronship of Archbishop Laud and King Charles and researched for
Eastern manuscripts, correct measurements of sacred time, spaces,
longitudes and latitudes to properly understand the biblical chronology,
space-time and millennial prophecies. Using Aristotelian scholasticism and
Ptolemaic geographical astronomy, the chaplains like John Greaves
compiled data and manuscripts to construct and expand the Stuart
millennial theology and hopes for Anglican universal monarchy. The appeal
of the “Near East” was not primarily for the love of Muslims or to learn
about the “Near East,” but was part of a search for the original sources
required to resolve various contemporary religious and political
controversies. Some chaplains did far more than that. They collected
manuscripts of all sorts, learned multiple languages, gathered religio
scientific knowledge, histories and intelligence. This quest for Arabic
manuscripts began almost simultaneously with the beginning of an English
trading presence in Ottoman lands.
For instance, the erudite, learned and highly qualified Dr. Edward Pococke
learnt Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew, read the Quran, its commentaries,520
Hadith (Prophetic sayings, actions and approvals), Islamic history,
biographies and languages, collected manuscripts on religion, medicine,
astronomy, mathematics, geometry, chemistry, philosophy, philology,
geography, literature and engaged with Muslim, Hebrew and Christian
scholarship.521 His local Arab friends supplied him manuscripts and
information even after his return to England. On his return to England, he
translated many of these manuscripts to Latin and English and became an
international luminary whose scholarship was well recognised all across
Europe. As the Arabic Chair at Oxford, he taught and interacted with high
caliber Continental intelligentsia. His rational, anti-Trinitarian tendencies,
objective Islamic sympathies and acknowledgements of Muslim
contributions to science and human civilisation were translated to his
Oxford students and colleagues such as Henry Stubbe, John Locke, Robert
Boyle and others. His close coordination with Archbishop Laud and
collection of Oriental manuscripts supplemented the Oxford Bodleian
Library.522 In 1692 the Library purchased four hundred Oriental volumes
from Pococke’s library.523 He purchased a variety of manuscripts for the
Royal Society of London’s fellows and helped in translation of many into
Latin. He also collected manuscripts for Archbishop Laud, who between
1635 and 1640 donated over a thousand Oriental manuscripts to the
Bodleian Library.524 Laud had obtained a royal letter to the Levant
Company requiring that each of their returning ship must bring one Arabic
or Persian manuscript. Laud’s collection was second only to John Selden,
who donated eight thousand volumes of manuscripts to the Library in
addition to donating medical manuscripts to the College of Physicians.
Pococke, along with John Greaves, mostly coordinated purchase of these
manuscripts from Aleppo and Istanbul.525 England had no scientific
tradition, chairs in mathematics, astronomy or chemistry as both Oxford
and Cambridge shunned these sciences as useless. Pococke and Greavas’
translations were helpful resources for Oxford, Cambridge, Gresham
College and especially for the Royal Society fellows.
Other Chaplains such as Charles Robson, Nathaniel Hill, Robert
Frampton, Robert Huntington526 and others were actively engaged in
manuscript collections, cultural exchange and research. They learned Arabic
language, interacted with local scholarship and purchased manuscripts of all
sorts. For instance, in 1692 Robert Huntington sold six hundred Oriental
manuscripts to Bodleian Library with a record sum of over 1000 pounds.527
He also gave manuscripts to Oxford College, Royal Society and other
bodies. His was the best collection on Islamic philosophy, history,
lexigraphy, law, astronomy, mathematics, minerology, art, warfare and
Eastern Christianity.
Robert Frampton became well-versed in Arabic language and an expert in
manuscript collection. “In the 1650s Frampton studied Arabic in Aleppo.
Frampton’s biographer provides telling glimpses of Frampton using the
language for different ends. He apparently progressed so far in both reading
and speaking that he was able to compile a collection of Arabic proverbs, to
intercede with local officials in Aleppo, and to ward off a band of thieves on
the road to Istanbul.”528 He became an Anglican Bishop. “On his final return
to England, Frampton had a steady rise in career. In 1670, two months after
disembarking he was appointed preacher at the Rolls, and chaplain to the
Lord Keeper. In 1671 he was made prebendary of Gloucester cathedral, and
shortly afterwards of Salisbury cathedral. In 1673 he was made Dean of
Gloucester and on 27 March 1681 was consecrated Bishop of Gloucester by
Archbishop Sancroft in the chapel of All Souls’ College, Oxford.”529
Dr. John Covel travelled extensively in the Ottoman Empire, collected
scientific manuscripts of all sorts, exchanged ideas with religious and
political leaders and wrote extensive diaries.530 He extensively corresponded
with Locke, Newton and others while in Turkey. On his return to England,
he became Chaplain to the Princess of Orange in Hague and finally the Vice
Chancellor of Cambridge University. He was fully engaged with Isaac
Newton and Cambridge Neoplatonists such as Joseph Mede and Henry
More on multiple levels and capacities. Covel developed his heterodox
views while in Turkey and was critical of “Whiflers” understandings of the
Christian religion.531 Covel regularly corresponded with John Locke and
Isaac Newton from Istanbul, and was a close friend of these later luminaries
and many other Royal Society fellows.532
The Levant, East India and Barbary Company ambassadors and consuls
also played an important role in manuscript collection, cultural and
religious exchanges. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the Levant Consuls showed thorough knowledge of Islamic languages,
customs, culture and religion. “The Englishman George Sandys, who
visited the Levant in the early 1610s, thought the consul in Aleppo,
Bartholemew Haggatt, ‘expert in their language’. The French traveller the
Abbe Carre noted that Benjamin Lannoy, the English consul in Aleppo for
over a decade during the 1660s and 1670s, was ‘well versed in all
languages.’ Writing in the late 1720s, Daniel Defoe mentioned ‘a Turkey
merchant’ of his acquaintance who ‘had liv’d at Aleppo, at Constantinople,
and at Grand Cairo’ and who ‘spoke the Arabic in all its several dialects as
spoken by the Turks at all those places.’”533 Izmir factory Consul and
famous Ottoman historian Sir Paul Rycaut was indistinguishable from the
Turks. “Jezreel Jones, who served as British envoy to Morocco from 1704,
was well known for his fluency in Arabic, and later served as translator to
the Moroccan ambassador.”534 Later on Warren Hastings, the scholar and
linguist who was the first Governor of the Presidency of Fort William, the
head of the Supreme Council of Bengal and the de facto first Governor
General of India from 1773 to 1785, became a noted Indophile.535 He
learned Urdu, Bengali, Persian and other oriental languages,536 religion and
cultures and commissioned Oriental dictionaries, manuscripts, books and
university chairs.537
Levant merchants were equally enthusiastic; they learned Arabic, Turkisk,
Persian and other Oriental languages to increase their sociability, business
know-how, profitability and assimilation.538 Many of them resided in
Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul for decades, spoke Arabic, Turkish and Persian
and dressed in Oriental clothes. For instance, Roland Sherman lived close to
sixty years in Aleppo, spoke perfect Arabic and fully adopted the local
fashion, habits and culture.539 Sir Dudley North, a merchant who spent over
20 years in Istanbul, Izmir and other cities of the Ottoman Empire and
totally engrossed himself in Turkish life, habits and culture was elected as
the Sheriff of London540 on his return to England.541 His family was well-
connected with the Crown and Tory parliament and also to the closest
friends of John Locke. He was elected to the parliament twice, knighted in
1683, appointed a commissioner of customs, and later of the treasury, and
then again of the customs. He took the place of manager for the crown in all
matters of revenue. He played an active role during the Restoration period
faithfully executing the financial and political policies of Charles II and
James II. He was the London Sheriff during the famous trial of Whig
leaders involved in Rye House Plot and their executions.542 He continued to
trade in the Levant after his return to England and collected a great number
of manuscripts.543
Likewise, the English ambassador and merchant Sir John Finch was from
a noble English family which filled the highest offices in England.544 Sir
John Baines was also well connected with movers and shakers of his time.
Their detailed reports of and correspondence with high officials at home
about Islam, Ottoman government and culture steered many changes in
English state and society. Finch’s detailed accounts of Islam were the main
sources of his philosopher sister Anne Conway’s anti-Trinitarian tendencies,
open sympathies with Islamic Unitarianism, rationalism and universalism
and her conversion to rational and spiritual theology of Quakers.545
The East India Company’s merchants, workers, chaplains and
ambassadors equally played important inter-cultural roles.546 The East India
Company brought England to India, but also brought India to London and
Manchester. Indian textiles, colours and patterns changed English fashion,
culture and society, while Turkish coffee and Indian tea became national
novelties. Other colonies such as Tangier also contributed to the
intercultural exchanges. For instance, Lancelot Addison547 (1632–1703) was
English Chaplain in Tangier. He spent seven years in North Barbary States
and wrote detailed accounts of history, customs, culture and Religion of
West Barbary in his West Barbary, or a Short Narrative of the Revolutions
of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, (1671) and his Life and Death of
Muhamed (1679). On his return to England he was appointed royal
chaplain, or Chaplain in Ordinary to the King.548 In 1683 he became Dean
of Lichfield, and in 1684 Archdeacon of Coventry. His son Gulston
Addison became EIC Governor of Madras, in India.
In addition to English ambassaders, consuls and merchants there were
physicians and other supporting staff. For instance, two brothers Alexander
and Patrick Russell served overlapping terms as physicians in Aleppo (from
1740 to 1772), learned Arabic, spoke regional dialects to be able to treat
local Arabic speaking patients and collected medical and literary
manuscripts.549
Overseas Trading Companies and Domestic Politics
Both the Levant Company and its offshoot East India Company merchants
yielded great influence in the City of London, other provincial cities550 and
in national politics.551 The cash-depleted and war-driven English Crown552 -
and later on confrontational parliament - was highly dependent upon
merchants’ custom duty, taxes, financial support and loans.553 “In 1693, less
than a century after its foundation, the Company was discovered to be using
its own shares for buying the favours of parliamentarians, as it annually
shelled out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs and ministers. The bribery, it
turned out, went as high as the Solicitor General, who received £218, and
the Attorney General, who received £545. The parliamentary investigation
into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the EIC guilty
of bribery and insider trading and led to the impeachment of the Lord
President of the Council and the imprisonment of the Company’s
Governor.”554 The loans and donations came with strings attached, and
influenced policies.
The Levant Company traders intermarried among themselves and
maintained close family connections with East India as well as Virginia
Company owners and director.555 These overseas traders played major roles
in almost all political and economic events of the seventeenth century556,
“although they could be portrayed as an urban elite motivated by the all-
consuming eagerness for private gain, overseas traders were at the heart of
complex networks of mutually-dependent associates, the dimensions of
which stretched far beyond the mercantile profession. By dint of their
economic calling, merchants were middlemen in commercial, social, and
political terms, and thus can provide an excellent insight into the workings
of the late Stuart state.”557 They were actively involved in the English Civil
War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Restoration of Charles II and the
Glorious Revolution in various capacities and with different parties. The
vocal, republican, dissenter group was more active in soliciting donations
and giving loans to the Crown and parliament to influence policy.558 “It is
unsurprising, then, that City political authority rested on wealth and
overseas merchants. Having gained advantage due to the booming growth
of trade during the 1660s and 1670s, Levant merchants felt a need to protect
their new position, engaging in politics in hitherto unseen levels.
Consequently, of those active in City politics, Levantine traders made up
one-fifth of the whole. Only these elite rich, whether ennobled for their
commercial efforts or the cream of merchant society, could afford the costs
of political office. For example, they could satisfy the property
qualifications for a sheriff in London set at £10,000 in 1631. Or, the
qualifications for an alderman at the same amount, rising to £15,000 for the
same positions in 1711. With the advent of party politics by the end of the
seventeenth century, many of these political traders identified as Whigs
rather than Tories.”559 The East India trading complex was even more
influential in the city and national politics. Through them the Eastern trade,
money and ideas entered seventeenth-century English society and changed
it from within. They served as England’s bridge to the Islamic world and its
markets, cultures, sciences, religion and habits. Their influential role in the
socio-economic and political life of the seventeenth century English society
is well-documented560 and will be discussed further in the coming pages.
Ralph Davis observed that three “things were commonly said of Levant
merchants by their fellow-citizens of mid-eighteenth-century London: that
they were, in the main, very rich men; that the trade they carried on was an
exceptionally lucrative one; and that their wealth and large incomes were
the result of their exercise of monopolistic rights over the English trade
with the Levant.”561 These highly influential, rich and well-connected
English individuals, like countless other Levant and East India Company
traders, workers and ambassadors, were well aware of the Muslim religion,
culture and customs. Their lucrative trade opportunities depended upon
their knowledge of Islamic laws, religious and cultural sensibilities. They
had no choice but to understand the Islamic business laws, socio-religious
sensitivities and cultural norms. Many of them completely acculturated
themselves in the Islamic mold to guarantee business success; Sir Dudley
North and Sir Paul Rycaut were undistinguishable from the local Turks. The
centuries-long close business associations, cultural interactions and
religious intersections in the Islamic world were instrumental in the transfer
of Eastern ideas, habits and norms to the British society.562
The Levant and East India company governors in London were equally
engaged with the Islamic world, and their wealth and clout were directly
connected with that. They studied the sea maps, weather patterns, Muslim
ports, cities, pirates, corsairs, politics, princes, pashas and sultans to
ascertain the success of company voyages, businesses, traders, ambassadors
and workforce. They selected the imported commodities, maintained
contacts with overseas traders and their Eastern suppliers, negotiated deals,
maintained credit lines, loans and advance payments. They decided about
new projects, new ports, amount and nature of gifts to local rulers, taxes
and interest rates. London was fully engaged with Istanbul, Isfahan,
Bombay, Bengal and Calcutta.
Till the 1800s, the Levant and East India companies strictly resisted the
English missionaries or demands for proselytising Muslims. They focused
on profit, financial expansion and good relations with the Muslim
community and rulers. The majority of them shed their Englishness and
engrossed themselves into local cultures and habits and were more Turkish,
Persian and Mughals than some of the locals. The London merchants and
company governors dressed in Oriental clothes, drank tea and coffee and
invited their friends and families to their Oriental parties to launch,
advertise and sell their Oriental projects or to solicit funds. England’s
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “Oriental Obsessions” are well-
documented.
Travelogues and Acculturation Process
Travelogues were also popular during this period; regular English travellers
and their travelogues supplemented the acculturation process.563 These texts
“bear witness to new forms of knowledge and to an emergent identity-
formation that was shaped by the religious, political, and economic
conditions of the time.”564 The Turkish Empire was too mighty for the
Western Europeans to conquer or overcome, so the Christian rulers sought
friendly relations instead of mounting crusades; they sought emulation,
profit and strategic advantages rather than confrontation. English writers
followed the same strategy, by befriending and emulating the powerful
Muslims they encountered. Thomas Palmer, in How To Make Our Travailes
Profitable (1606), well represented this attitude of travelling
“intelligencers.” “[T]he very point which every Travailer ought to lay his
wittes about [is] To get knowledge for the bettering of himselfe and his
Countrie: This, being the object of their Countries defects and the subject of
Travailers.”565
The Royals,566 elites, intelligentsia, Royal Society fellows,567
Enlightenment luminaries and reformers used travel literature and Oriental
manuscripts in different capacities and for varying agendas to better
themselves, their knowledge and country. The Royal Society Secretary,
Henry Oldenburg, translated Francois Bernier’s four volumes of
descriptions of India and the Grand Mogul from German to English.
Michael Hunter has well demonstrated the fact that the Royal Society
fellows extensively devoted themselves to studying travel literature.568
Oldenburg identified Linschoten’s travels as his main source of information
on Surat and East Indies. Daniel Carey noted that these “examples alone
suggest that travel literature constituted an invaluable resource and mine of
information, assisting in the campaign for a comprehensive history of
nature.”569 The travel of merchants, chaplains, consuls, ambassadors, staff
and missionary and leisure travellers was incorporated by natural
philosophers into their study and accounts of natural phenomena becoming
its fundamental testimony and supplementing documentation of nature and
its workings. The travelogues became accepted sources of information,
queries, cross references, elimination of errors and advancement of
knowledge. The travellers and Royal Society fellows closely followed
Francis Bacon and Samuel Hartlib’s instructions regarding useful travel,
collections of man’s histories, trades, customs and habits.570 The early
travels to the Muslim East greatly contributed to English scholarship at
home.571 “The production of knowledge about Islam, Turks, Moors, and
Arabs was accelerated and dispersed to various sites of cultural production
and consumption, including popular ballads, the visual arts, public
pageants, court entertainments, public theater, as well as printed materials
such as travel narratives or ethnographies.”572 The material fascination and
envy of the Muslim East was conspicuous, but often marred with religious
contempt. “The wealth, order, and discipline of the Ottomans was
frequently admired and praised by writers who, at the same time, expressed
contempt. The contradiction between condemnation and emulation is
strongly apparent when these early modern travellers write about Jerusalem
and Constantinople, two sites of great ideological significance for
Christianity.”573 Quite frequently though the material allure, pluralistic
fascination and republican appreciations overrode the religious zeal,
enthusiasm and contempt.
For instance, the wealthy English traveller Henry Blount’s 1634 influential
travel account Voyage into the Levant popularised Turkey in the following
words: “He who would behold these times in their greatest glory could not
find a better scene than Turkey […] Turks are the only modern people, great
in action […] whose Empire hath so suddenly invaded the world.”574 Blount
was amazed by the Ottoman tolerance for religious diversity, and greatly
admired Ottoman military for its might, discipline and reach, “yet I
wondered to see such a multitude so clear of confusion, violence, want,
sicknesse, or any other disorder.”575 While traveling through the Danube
River valley Blount was asked by the local Pasha whether or not he would
fight with Ottoman Muslims against Habsburg Christians. Blount’s
response was startling. “I humbly thanked him, for his favour, and told him
that to an Englishman it was lawful to serve under any who were in League
with our King, and that our King had not only a League with the Gran
Signor, but continually held an embassadour at his Court, esteeming him
the greatest Monarch in the World: so that my service there [...] would be
exceedingly well-received in England; and the Polacke, though in name a
Christian, [was] yet of a Sect, which for Idolatry, and many other points, I
much abhorred.”576 This anti-Catholic and pro-Ottoman stance was a
standard attitude of almost all English travellers to Ottoman Empire
throughout the seventeenth century. Blount went on to extol “the Turkes,
whom we not only honoured for their glorious actions in the world; but also
loved, for the kinde Commerce of Trade which we find amongst them.”577
Earlier Richard Hakluyt expressed the same sentiments in his Principall
Navigations (1589, one volume) and Principall Navigations, Voyages,
Traffiques and Discoveries (1598-1600, three volumes). C. F. Beckingham
pointed out that “the establishment of commercial relations with the
Ottoman empire was, for [Hakluyt’s] purpose, the most important event in
the recent history of the Near East and much of his material is relevant to
it.”578
English visiters were captivated by the Ottoman might, prosperity,
opulence, luxury and pluralism.579 D. J. Vitkus well summarised the impact
of travelling intelligencers upon English knowledge and identity formation.
“Early modern representations of the Islamic “Other” helped to construct an
identity for Protestant England when English identity was developing a
proto-imperialist formation. Imperial envy, accompanied by anxiety about
religious difference, is often expressed in English texts describing the
Turks. Turkish power was a difficult reality to confront at a time when
English authors and readers sought to construct a self-image of
metropolitan masculinity. Fear and admiration of Turkish culture, and of
‘the Great Turk’ or ‘Grand Seigneur’ as the Ottoman sultan was called, were
often mixed with condemnation and loathing. And yet English Protestant
animosity for Spanish or Roman Catholic ‘superstition’ was usually
stronger than feelings of hostility toward the more distant Ottoman
Muslims. Some English narrators describing Turkish society are captivated
by the sophistication, order, and strength that they observe, a unified power
that they saw as a foil to a divided and corrupted Christendom. In any case,
it was commercial exchange, not imperialist confrontation or conflict,
which dominated Anglo-Islamic relations during the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.”580
The unity, prosperity, plurality, religious freedom and limited monarchy581
of the Ottoman Empire was constantly used by the majority of English
travellers to highlight English disunity, relative impoverishment, religious
persecutions, political corruptions and absolutism. These were the areas
where emulation was highly encouraged, throughout the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century.582 This ideology of “Ottomanism” preceded the
nineteenth-century “Orientalism,” as Gerald MacLean has very well
demonstrated.583 Ottomanism reflected “the tropes, structures, and fantasies
by means of which Europeans sought to make knowable the imperial
Ottoman other: both the imperial dynasty and the vast maritime and
territorial areas that they governed. Ottomanism will be found to be both
strategic and interested. Like all systems of knowledge production,
Ottomanism arises from both lack and desire, and in this sense tells us
perhaps rather more about the desiring subject than about the object of
knowledge.”584 Daniel Goffman noted that “as more and more northern
Europeans visited the Ottoman domains, they also gained more profound
insight into that world. The personal experiences of such sojourners as John
Sanderson, George Sandys, Robert Bargrave, Thomas Bendysh, the
Chevalier de la Croix, Jean de Thevenot, and Paul Rycaut, distributed
across northern Europe through their writings, helped not only to diminish
irrational fears of the Ottomans as a civilisation of the ‘other,’ but also to
integrate that empire more securely into an emerging Europe.”585 He further
observed that “The Europe of Louis XIV and Charles II, however,
considered the Ottomans – as friend or foe – along with the other states of
Europe in their diplomatic, commercial, and military policies. This was an
Ottoman Europe almost as much as it was a Venetian or Habsburg one.”586
The Ottomans ruled one third of the European Continent; they were heir to
the Byzantium Empire and its institutions. Consequently, they directly
inherited the Roman Byzantium institutions, taxations and governing
policies far more than any other single European state. The pre-modern
Europe reached to the Byzantium and Roman legacy through the
Ottomans.587 Europe enormously benefited from the Muslim world
institutionally, financially and intellectually. For instance, at the height of its
trade the East India Company controlled almost 50% of English imports.
Both the Levant and East India Company provided the needed capital,
knowledge and expertise for the later expansions of the British Empire. In a
sense, the British Empire, Enlightenment and expansion were all facilitated
by the Muslim world and in the end, it became the victim of British colonial
designs.
Islamic World and Scientific Revolution
Muslim sciences, philosophical works and geographical tools were equally
employed by English natural philosophers, astronomers, explorers and
scientists to restore the Prisca theologia and Prisca sapientia. The Muslim
world was central to English movement towards the restoration of pristine
theology and science. Quantitative mathematical sciences were integral to
overseas trade, and hence readily employed by the traders. The Oriental
manuscripts on quantitative, natural, alchemical and medical subjects were
transferred from the East to the West especially to England by overseas
traders and well absorbed by the English mathematicians, physicians and
natural scentists. Natural science was constructed in the British metropolis
as a result of English overseas exposure to the Orient, Oriental commerce,
knowledge, expertise and incentives. The authority based Aristotelian
scholasticism, biblical interpretations of nature, Ptolemaic geography and
astronomy were replaced with experimental geography, empirical natural
philosophy and quantitive mathematical sciences with the help of Eastern
mathematical sciences, overseas trade related exploration voyages,
observations and subsequent corrections to the old Ptolemiac system. The
European pursuit for prisca sapientia was supplemented by things Eastern
and the Muslim world stood at the center stage of such a quest.
Manuscripts, recipes, plants, instruments and countless other objects of
knowledge were transferred to English centers of knowledge and digested,
appropriated and incorporated by the English natural philosophers and
scientists as Kapil Raj, Pamela H. Smith and many others have amply
demonstrated.588 The local, regional and national protoscience of the early
modern era was supplemented by global knowledge. The Scientific
Revolution was a consequence of the global encouters, cross-cultural
diffusions, assimmilations and constructions.
The historians of philosophy, intellectual history and discrete histories of
science are divided about the complex origins and causes of modern
science. The Marxists locate them in socio-economic ideas and realms,
while the Weberians connect them with religion and capitalism. A great deal
of scholarly effort has been spent to show the antagonism between religion
and science in general, and Christian Church and science in particular.
There has been an explosion of interest in early modern science since the
1930s, leading to multiple appraisals and theories regarding its origin,
causes and expansion. Many historians apply the post-modern narrow
categories of the twenty-first century on the protoscientific phase of early
modern science to construct a teleological, genealogical, evolutionist, local
and internal progression of science from Greeks to modern science.589 The
devil is in the details though. Some argue that science started in High
Middle Ages (1277), others suggest that it began in the fourteenth century
with “via moderna,” while others see its origin in the Italian renaissance.
The time period between Copernicus and Newton is then pinpointed as the
main era of scientific flourishing. Some maintain that the seventeenth
century was the century of Scientific Revolution, while others contend that
there was no Scientific Revolution590 in the seventeenth century but an
explosion of theoretical and practical natural philosophy. Sometime a
second Scientific Revolution is considered to have taken place in the first
quarter of the twentieth century.591 The field is quite saturated with
divergent theories of rise of modern science.
This Eurocentric, heuristic, heroic and genius-based interpretation of
science has its loopholes and drawbacks. It must be recognised that there
was a huge gap between the Greek science and that of the Middle Ages, and
between the seventeenth century onward and the Middle Ages. The
Aristotelian atomistic, organistic science and deductive syllogistic
rationalism was originally lost in the Latin Christendom and then refound
with the help of Arab, Muslim medium in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The Aristotelian epistemology was quite different from the
Newtonian mechanistic science, inductive, mathematical and experimental
epistemology.592 That was perhaps the reason that the revisionists held that
the seventeenth-century natural philosophy was a radical break with
previous centuries,593 and must be contextualised in its proper socio-
economic and cultural settings. The revisionists also have their differences.
The evolutionists argue that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century was a natural evolution from previous centuries of scientific
endeavours. The internists contend that the universe changing paradigm
shift was the outcome of local, internal natural and scientific explorations,
experiments and precise, controlled methods without much help from
external world.594 H. Butterfield’s classic work is still popular among
historians of science. He observed that “the so-called ‘scientific revolution,’
popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but
reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line to a period much earlier
still. Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of
the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the
eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian
physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces
the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere
internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.”595 The
conflict theorists argue that there was a constant warfare between religion
and science, and the Scientific Revolution was made possible only when
religion and theology were defeated and secularised.596 Some revisionists
claim that religion was among the fundamental influences which provided
the necessary ideological tools and social legitimation for modern
science.597 The majority among this group of historians emphasise
Protestant origins of modern science like modern capitalism.598 A minority
includes the Catholic Church and its counter reformation in the dialectical
struggles, which finally led to the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth
century.599 Those who vouch for Protestant origins are further divided into
various camps. Some maintain that it was the general religious outlook of
Reformation, but not its supernatural theology, which steered the Scientific
Revolution.600 Others insist that Calvinist theology and work ethics were
particularly important factors.601 Some emphasise the role of Anglican
Church,602 others pinpoint the Puritans603 or Latitudinarian influences604
while others emphasise apocalyptic millenarianism.605 The field is uneven,
bumpy, complex, saturated and sort of messy.606
These local, internal and Eurocentric theories have been challenged and
refuted by the globalist historians, who argue that the British or European
Scientific Revolution was inconceivable except in a broader global context.
Britain was a small, impoverished and isolated isle before its participation
in the world trade circles through its overseas adventures. Its capitalism,
commercialism, natural philosophy, educational systems, and religio-
political theology were all shaped by and constructed through encounter
and dialogue with the superior Eastern civilisations of early modern era.
That era belonged to the dominant Ottoman, Mughal, Persian and Ming
dynasties and not to European national states. The later British mechanical
and industrial revolutions were facilitated and propelled by the demands
and needs of overseas trade, its global corporations and their power and
profit. The East served as the catalyst and springboard for the West’s
reformation, reconstruction, purification and propulsion to the global
leadership. Therefore, the developed world of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (Islamic World and China) cannot be excluded from the Scientific
Revolution.607
Contemporary historian of science Kapil Raj refutes the Eurocentric
interpretations of science in the following strong words: “Recent
scholarship tends to belie these commonly considered articles of faith.
Indeed, in the past two decades the claimed unity of modern knowledge
practices across European space has been convincingly demolished. In
place of a unique ‘modern science’, it is now accepted that there are many
national and local knowledge traditions and dynamics spread across most of
North and West Europe, with diverse, and at times contradictory,
intellectual agendas and influences throughout the early-modern and
modern periods.”608 He further rejects the Whiggish narrative of history and
notes that “a number of prominent imperial historians, although focusing
primarily on the British empire, have called into question the concept of a
simple diffusion to the rest of the world of the fundamental values of
modernity—values such as democracy, justice, and the welfare state. They
have argued that modernity and its institutions are not simple emanations
from a pre-existing centre, but are rather the result of ‘a complex saga of the
collisions, compromises, and comings together’ of England with the many
countries it came to dominate, including Ireland, Scotland, and India. By
focusing on the processes of construction, they thus imply that Great
Britain, its modern institutions, and its empire were co-constituted.”609
Modern science was no exception to this global cross-cultural diffusion.
The English natural philosophers and scientists, such as the fellows of
Royal Society, were closely connected with the overseas trading companies,
their navy and military complexes,610 and guided English sailors, captains,
merchants and company officials to collect specific manuscripts, recipes,
plants, herbs, instruments, data, habits and statistics, building their lab and
research works with the help of that information.611 R. K. Merton has amply
demonstrated that “the needs generated by military technology influenced
the foci of scientific interests to an appreciable degree.”612 The external
socio-economic and political factors played a fundamental role in the rise of
modern science.613 Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Halley, Locke, Shaftesbury and
many other natural scientists, philosophers and politicians emphasised the
utilitarian aspect of science.614 It was the commercial, utilitarian and market
economy and resultant capitalism created by the English overseas trading
companies which shaped and facilitated the English political, religious and
scientific revolutions.615 The Royal Society was the social microcosm of the
greater macrocosm, struggling to unite the politically and religiously
disunited English society by means of empirical experimentation, creating
private profit opportunities through science and trade to increase public
good, freedoms and autonomy. The Royal Society fellows tacitly argued
that unlike their Catholic, Spanish absolutist counterparts, the British
monarchy and Church should be more tolerant, rational and inclusive. There
should be a balance between the powers of king, bishop, lords, commons,
gentry and merchants. Such a balance would increase the trade, bring more
revenues to the monarch, strengthen the empire and further the Protestant
Reformation. The Church and Monarchical absolutism and exclusivism
were detrimental to the state, monarchy and social cohesion. Intellectual
exchange and competition of ideas in the market-place, within the
established bounds, was the road to progress. Such was the Protestant way
in contrast to the Catholic authoritarian model.
Therefore the Scientific Revolution was not an isolated, internal,
controlled and teleological phenomena but an expression of the overall
cultural milieu of seventeenth-century England. The “historians,
sociologists, and philosophers of science have in the past decades radically
undermined the traditional understanding that modern science has its own
logic of development based on rigorous, immutable, explicit, and
empirically tested rules and methods which lie beyond the pale of social
and historical analysis. Moving away from a conception of science as a
system of formal propositions or discoveries, these recent studies seek to
understand the making, maintenance, extension, and reconfiguration of
scientific knowledge by focusing equally on the material, instrumental,
corporeal, practical, social, political, and cognitive aspects of
knowledge.”616
It is quite a task to categorically pinpoint or identify one cause, sect,
denomination, ideology, region or church as the sole cause of the Scientific
Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are pros and
cons in every historical theory; these partial truths can be combined in a
socio-cultural and global interpretation of the Scientific Revolution. There
is no doubt that the natural philosophy, protoscience and inductive
reasoning progressed leaps and bounds during the seventeenth and
eighteenth-century Europe and especially Britain. This so-called Scientific
Revolution was the outcome of revolution in religious and political
theology, the main crisis of the Old Regime.617 Modern historian of science
Steven Shapin observed that “Some markers of that continuing crisis
include the breakdown of the feudal order and attendant rise of strong
nation-states from the thirteenth century onward, the discovery of the New
World and both the cultural and the economic shocks emanating from that
expansion of horizon; the invention of printing and consequent change in
the boundaries of cultural participation; and the fragmentation of a unified
Western European religious order that followed from the Protestant
Reformation of the sixteenth century.”618 The religio-political crises
shattered the medieval institutions of authority and knowledge-making. The
Protestant reformers eroded the Catholic Church and Habsburg’s absolutist
authority. The subsequent nation states especially the English monarchy
furthered that erosion by bypassing the whole Catholic tradition and
directly connecting itself with ancient pre-Catholic Church of Near East, its
simple theology and church structure, and the English dissenters, radicals,
Latitudinarians and natural scientists weakened the Stuart grip on authority
and knowledge making by including merchants, natural scientists,
dissenters, gentry and parliament in the overall process of knowledge
making with the help of Eastern theology and wisdom. The Reformation
wittingly or unwittingly heralded a new era of scepticism. It “eroded the
authority and the effective scope of institutions that had regulated human
conduct for preceding centuries. The Roman Catholic papal authority that
had-formally at least- unified Western Europe under a single Christian
conception of authority gave way to split sources of authority: clashes first
between divine and secular notions of political authority, then between
different versions of Christianity and their proper relation to secular
political authority. The wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants
that raged across Europe from the Reformation onward, but particularly the
Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48, were the immediate occasion for changed
view of knowledge and its role in ensuring or subverting order.”619 The
ensuing mistrust resulted in general scepticism in religious and political
power structures and their efficacies. Natural philosophy and science of the
seventeenth century was a reflection, extension and outcome of the socio-
political, economic and religious upheavals. The same instability, disorder
and revolution which destabilised, challenged and transformed the Old
Regime in theology, politics and society transformed the Aristotelian,
supernatural, scriptural, traditional and miraculous natural philosophy into
natural, rational and mechanistic science. “The permanent crisis of
European order was then the general backdrop to debates over natural
knowledge and its relation to state power and social order.”620
The seventeenth-century reformation of the sixteenth-century Reformation
was the backdrop of sudden, radical explosion in the field of natural
philosophy and protoscience. The Scientific Revolution was an unintended
consequence of Reformation ethos and not Reformation theology or
political ideology.621 The Reformation leaders rejected the old Church
authority and tradition and insisted instead on sola scriptura. The radical
reformers took the trend to its logical conclusion by rejecting the authority
and tradition of Protestant Reformation wherever and whenever it
contradicted natural, rational, logical and utilitarian discourse. As there
were radical reformers among the political and religious theorists, there
were also radicals in natural philosophy and science. For instance, Newton,
Boyle and Locke were as radicals in their religious and political theology as
revolutionary in their natural philosophy. The reformation of Reformation,
universal reformation of Old Regime in theology, politics, social order and
cosmology, was the common denominator in multitudes of revolutionary
groups, ideologies and systems which demolished the Old Regime of
Catholic and Protestant Churches along with their absolutist supernatural
power structures. The mid seventeenth-century English Civil War and
Revolution was the culmination and violent outburst of such a simmering
fire, which eventually engulfed and abolished the Anglican Church and
monarchy. The Puritans, overseas traders, some nobles, middle class,
parliament and natural philosophers were all part of that revolutionary
reformative scheme. The Puritan, Protestant, Calvinist, Presbyterian
theology was not fully in line with and supportive of radical, rational,
natural theology and philosophy, but their desire to topple the Old Regime
political theology and social order was radical enough to give them the
leadership role in the revolutionary era. R. K. Merton, Christopher Hill and
many other sociologists and historians who insisted on puritan origins of
modern science have amply demonstrated and documented this fact. For
instance, Merton noted that “it is thus to the religious ethos, not the
theology, that we must turn if we are to understand the integration of
science and religion in seventeenth century England.”622 Puritanism did not
cause science; rather, it provided a cultural and social support for a not yet
institutionalised science.
Puritanism was a multifaceted, multi-sectional, multi-dimensional and
multi-pronged revolutionary movement which incorporated multitudes
disgruntled with the Old Regime. Thomas Edwards enumerated 180
sects.623 The subsequent gradual reformation of Anglican religious and
political theology and power structures led to Latitudinarian moderate,
rational, natural, accommodative and broader theology which facilitated,
legitimised and propagated natural theology, philosophy and morality at the
expense of old supernatural dogmatic theology and cosmology.624
Latitudinarianism, in a sense, was an indictment of the High Church
dogmatic Christianity and supernatural, absolutist religious and political
theology of Reformation.625 It extended reasonable doubt and scepticism to
central Christian dogmas and even to the scriptures. It exalted morality,
pious living and human reason beyond and over the dogmatic faith and
traditional scriptural interpretations. It was a tacit confession of relevance of
the parallel rational reformative scheme of Michael Servetus, which was
vehemently censored and persecuted by Protestant churches. The parallel
rational and natural reformative scheme of Servetus, Bruno, Socinians,
Deists and Unitarians gradually permeated the knowledge-making
structures and reformed them from within without destroying their outer
skeleton and facade. The seventeenth-century Royal Society historian and
fellow Bishop Thomas Sprat highlighted this reformative nature of natural
science and Anglican Church. “They both have taken a like course to bring
this about; each of them passing by the corrupt copies, and referring
themselves to the perfect Originals for their instruction; the one to the
Scripture, the other to the huge Volume of Creatures. They are both accused
unjustly by their enemies of the same crimes, of having forsaken the
Ancient Traditions, and ventured on Novelties. They both suppose alike that
their Ancestors might err; and yet retain a sufficient reverence for them.
They both follow the great Precept of the Apostle of trying all things. Such
is the harmony between their interests and tempers.”626 The modern British
historian H. F. Kearney underscores the significant role played by this
parallel reformation in the rise of modern science. While concluding that
there was no simple connection between Puritanism and science Kearney
noted: “But this need not rule out alternative theories of a relationship
between religious radicalism and scientific discovery… a more critical
attitude towards religious authority created a climate of opinion which
predisposed some men to be equally critical of dogma in science…To this
movement, scientists such as Galileo and Kepler maybe said to have
belonged, and even Francis Bacon. The religious views of the Cambridge
Platonists, of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton may also be traced back to
the same tradition. If we are seeking a connection between the Reformation
and the Scientific Revolution, this ‘Major Reformation’ seems likely to
provide it.”627
The natural reformative scheme was more successful in Protestant Holland
and England because, unlike their Catholic counterparts, the newly
established national Protestant Churches and traditions were not historically
and intellectually entrenched enough to withstand the intellectual,
theological and cosmological challenges caused by overseas trade and
cross-cultural infusions. The power struggles between the Crown, Anglican
Church, parliament, nobility, merchants, religious sects and other
contending parties effectively weakened the institutions of authority and
knowledge. Alternative mechanisms of patronage, knowledge-making and
dissemination diminished the need and authority of the Old Regime, and
gradually allowed alternative ideologies, theologies and cosmologies to
flourish. Natural philosophy, theology and social order were the outcomes
of this dialectical struggle, and this transition was mainly facilitated by the
overseas commerce to the Muslim world. “Indeed, corporate commerce was
quick to recognise that the continued existence and expansion of European
overseas trade was largely dependent on scientific expertise and associated
material practices. Thus, right from their inception, the trading companies
supported and even employed mathematicians, practical astronomers, and
hydrographers for navigation, and medics for treating crews and identifying
commercially viable plants or derived products overseas. They were thus
key actors in the early modern enterprise of knowledge-making and use.”628
The natural philosophers, scientists and astronomers were fully engaged in
the commercial adventures financially, intellectually and socially. “Men of
science invested substantial sums of money in international commerce […]
a number of eminent Fellows of the Royal Society, like Robert Boyle, Isaac
Newton, and Joseph Banks, to name but some of the most well known,
counted among the directors or major shareholders of the likes of the
English East India Company […] the longest lasting and most powerful of
the British trading groups—or the South Sea Company. Initially enticed by
the attractive dividends, reaching up to 20 per cent, offered by these
investments, such men also found in it a sure means of raising their
credit.”629 Their prestige was connected with the prestige and influence of
these overseas companies.
 Additionally, the information and data collectors such as the English
merchants, sailors and company officials were not experts in the scientific
fields. They learned, polished and expanded their natural and commercial
knowledge through their Eastern interlocutors, intermediaries and
partners.630 “It is important to stress that most of these men left Europe
between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and their years spent in distant
lands were crucially formative. As they moved across seas and continents
and encountered different skilled practitioners, their own interests,
ambitions, and skills were transformed. As representatives of commercial,
and later colonial, institutions, the skills they embodied were also
incorporated into these institutions, and, in that sense, their expertise did not
impact on metropolitan science alone, but simultaneously produced effects
on a global scale.”631 The British merchants and business elites learned a
great deal from their Muslim, Hindu and Eastern Christian teachers,
facilitators and interlocutors.632 These historical facts impel us to take the
“early-modern science as part of the market economy that partakes of the
larger political economies of burgeoning nation-states, of early-modern
mercantilism, and of nascent European colonialism.”633 Knowledge and
science moved in the commercial, economic and utilitarian trajectories. “In
the early modern period, knowledge of nature moved not just
geographically, but also epistemically, as knowledge systems of different
social and cultural groups intersected.”634
The Columbia University contemporary historian of science, Pamela H.
Smith, has amply noted that “the commercial and territorial expansion of
Europe and the Ottoman Empire and the formation of long-distance trading
networks in East and Southeast Asia led to an unprecedented movement of
people and of knowledge. European merchants, backed by territorial
powers, expanded into the Atlantic, down the coast of Africa, and to the
Americas, as well as entered into well-established trading networks in
South and Southeast Asia. Knowledge moved along with trade: with
individuals as they migrated, or were resettled in new territories, and with
sailors, soldiers, and merchants as they pursued trade and war. Knowledge
traveled in objects, instruments, manuscripts, and printed books as trade
routes opened up and collectors avidly sought rare and beautiful things, and
it moved as factors and agents sent back information to the metropolis.
Economic historians and art historians have begun to articulate just how
much the period depended upon the flow of goods, ideas, and people from
outside Europe.”635
The European Renaissance in general, and the English epoch in particular,
did not happen in a vaccum; it was facilitated by the Muslim East. The
“flow and interaction of goods and ideas between Eurasian societies was
masked until recently by the subsequent period of European dominance that
began in the nineteenth century. This realisation about the impact of global
commerce on the European Renaissance makes clear that changes in the
period we call the Renaissance did not develop in isolation and cannot be
viewed as the start of a distinctively European modernity.”636
The early modern English exposure to the Muslim East set later English
science, modernity and global empire in motion. “Just as British historians
have begun to understand the ways that Britain and its empire were co-
constituted, these historians of science argue that the material and social
practices of science did not simply move outward from a metropolitan
center, but rather, that science emerged through a complex process of
negotiation, assimilation, and coproduction between coloniser and
colonised, set in motion by the global encounters of the early modern
period.”637 Modernity, science and modern institutions were a global, well
coordinated and well connected production of countless global contributors.
“The construction of new modes of knowledge-making about nature was a
distributed, collective process, often involving large numbers of anonymous
people: medical practitioners in the Americas, Southeast Asian informants,
European herb women, artisans, and many others.”638 The story of science
and Scientific Revolution is not the sole property of Copernicus, Newton
and some other individual geniuses, but a narrative of global history,
economy, natural sciences, arts, religio-political theologies and
epistemologies. The “history of science must be integrated with social
history, economic history, art history, and the history of technology and
medicine. Moreover, while changes in theories of the cosmos are, of course,
exceedingly important in the long run, in the period from about 1400 to at
least 1650, I believe the real story lies in changing attitudes to nature, to
natural knowledge, and to knowledge-making. The centrality of alchemy,
astrology, and medicine; the technical engagement with nature, commerce,
and the movements and intersections of knowledge; as well as the
interaction with new environments and new knowledge systems that global
movement engendered, have all displaced the account of the changing
disciplinary content of astronomy at the heart of the story of science in the
early modern period.”639 The English science - and Scientific Revolution -
was an integral part of and extension of the overall English revolution in
religio-political theology640 which was shaped by overseas trade and
experiences. T. K. Rabb “one of the sharpest critics of the Puritan-science
thesis, has stated that the encouragement of science was the result of the
revolution, not of Puritanism.”641 The revolutionary ferment as an important
factor in the rise of science was confessedly recognised by Bishop Sprat in
the seventeenth century itself. In his History of the Royal Society he wrote:
“The late times of Civil War, and confusion, to make recompense for their
infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr’d up
mens minds from long ease, and a lazy rest, and made them active,
industrious and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon
Tempests, and Thunders in the State, as well as in the Skie, that they purifie,
and deer the Air, which they disturb.”642 Thomas S. Kuhn has amply
demonstrated the parallelism between political and scientific revolutions.643
Natural Philosophy and Natural Theology
Science, natural philosophy, theology and politics were all enmeshed and
intertwined in seventeenth-century England for the purposes of divinity and
divine providence.644 The seventeenth century was a God-driven society;
restoration of true natural philosophy and true religion were two sides of the
same coin.645 They represented a move away from the supernatural,
miraculous, unintelligible theology of the Church to natural philosophy,
natural theology and reasonable Christianity. Stephen Gaukroger noted that
a “good part of the distinctive success at the level of legitimation and
consolidation of the scientific enterprise in the early-modern West, derives
not from any separation of religion and natural philosophy, but rather from
the fact that natural philosophy could be accommodated to projects in
natural theology: what made natural philosophy attractive to so many in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the prospects it offered for the
renewal of natural theology. Far from science breaking free from religion in
the early modern era, its consolidation depended on religion being in the
driving seat.”646 The natural, rational and scientific reformation was closely
linked with the natural, rational and moral reformation of Christian
theology. The interventionist Trinitarian theology and unpredictable,
uncertain and abnormal hierarchical cosmology was gradually replaced
with normal, natural and predictable cosmology and anti-dogmatic rational
and moral theology. There was no conflict between faith and science as
such.647 The universal religious concepts such as the divinity, unity of truth,
simplicity of divinity and cosmos, divine providence, sovereignty,
creationism, morality, human accountability, reward and punishment were
all confirmed and reinforced, but supernatural Trinitarian theology, the hall
mark of Christianity over the centuries, was avoided, shunned and finally
rejected. Peter Harrison observed that “in the seventeenth century ‘divinity’
and ‘theology’ did not mean the same thing as ‘religion’ in general. The
kinds of topics, regarded as off-limits to fellows of the Royal Society, were
those dispute-engendering doctrines which, in the wake of the Reformation,
had divided Europe and, closer to home, England itself.”648 The
seventeenth-century natural philosophy and science was antithetical to
overarching, supernatural, Church theology but not against God, theology
and faith as such. Theological disputations, complexties and red herrings
rather than theology per se were the perceived problems. Phrases such as
“meddling with Divinity” expressed “a desire to avoid becoming entangled
in unnecessary doctrinal disputation, without necessarily implying a desire
to avoid making more broad religious claims.”649 The simplistic, Unitarian,
rational and natural theology of Michael Servetus, Socinians and Unitarians
was implicitly or tacitly appreciated and incorporated by individuals such as
Locke and Newton. The Royal Society fellows and natural philosophers
retained the outer theological skeleton, phrases and terms but transformed
their meanings, conceptual parameters and implications. This was a
paradigm shift from the supernatural to immutable natural laws and natural
theology.
The English intelligentsia and many early Enlightenment leaders
considered England a relatively under-developed, divided country due to its
medieval, supernatural Church educational system and its suppressive
policies. They had their cues in the sixteenth-century natural philosophers’
misgivings about the church authorities. The Church’s triadic hierarchical
cosmology, biblical interpretations of natural phenomena, theological
supremacy over other sciences and persecution of dissent were all suspected
by astronomers, alchemists and natural philosophers such as Nicolas
Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, John Baptist
van Helmont and many others.650 Both Catholic and Protestant Church were
suspicious of natural sciences. “The findings of science conflicted with
early Lutheran theology, and with that of Calvin too.”651 Impelled by the
growing discrepencies between their astronomical experimentations and
scholastic Aristotelian philosophical thought of both Catholic and Protestant
churches,652 they promulgated new scientific axioms, methods and research
models at odd with Church theology. This way theology was dethroaned.
Immanuel Kant observed that “There was time when metaphysics was
called the ‘queen’ of all the sciences, and if the will be taken for the deed, it
deserved this title of honour, on account of the preeminent importance of its
subject. Now, in accordance with the fashion of the age, the queen proves
despised on all side; and the matron, outcast and forsaken, mourns like
Hecuba: ‘Greatest of all by race and birth, I now am cast out, powerless’
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13:508–510).”653
The natural philosopher’s argument, that theology dealt with salvation
while science treated mundane nature, was an effort to release science from
the tutelage of Christian supernatural theology. The alchemists contended
that God was as much manifested in the material natural phenomena as
much in the heavens; discovering nature through alchemical experimention
was in reality as meritorious as studying the Bible.654 They exalted
experimental mechanical philosophy over authority-based theological
cosmology.655 Kepler contended that “I have just one thing to say: while in
theology it is authority that carries the most weight, in [natural] philosophy
it is reason.”656 Copernicus argued that literal meanings of the Bible, and
distortions of its passages, could not discount or denounce rational facts.657
Galileo insisted that no theologian “will say that geometry, astronomy, and
medicine are much more excellently contained in the Bible than they are in
the books of Archimedes, Ptolemy, Boethius and Galen.”658 The Church
geocentric system was replaced by astronomers’ heliocentric system. The
new sciences and philosophies were threatening to the Church authorities
arrogating “to themselves an authority in interpreting Scripture that
belonged properly only to the Church, speaking through its bishops and
theologians.”659 The Church persecuted such rational, mechanical and
experimental tendencies. The sixteenth-century Continental conflict
between the Church and natural philosophers was transferred to
seventeenth-century England.
Many seventeenth-century English religious radicals, nonconformists,
independently thinking Puritans such as Samuel Hartlib, Cambridge
Paltonist theologians such as Joseph Mede, Henry More, and natural
philosophers such as Robert Boyle, John Locke and Isaac Newton were
heirs to the experimental mechanical cosmology. They were thoroughly
influenced by Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel Hayy bin Yaqzan’s
emphasise upon autodidictism, natural discourse and antidogmatism. They
believed that God had revealed the book of revelation and the book of
creation to supplement each other,660 and that the original revelation
included knowledge of natural phenomena and its workings. Newton stated
that “so then twas one designe of the first institution of the true religion to
propose to mankind by the frame of the ancient Temples, the study of the
frame of the world as the true Temple of the great God they worshipped.
And thence it was that the Priests anciently were above other men well
skilled in the knowledge of the true frame of Nature & accounted it a great
part of their Theology.”661 The knowledge of natural philosophy and correct
interpretations of scriptures were interrelated. “The most important thing to
be discovered in the Biblical records is that God has laid down the plan of
human history, as well as the plan of natural history. The latter is to be
studied primarily in the Book of Nature, through scientific researches. The
former is to be studied in the central prophetic statement about the course of
human history, the books of Daniel and Revelation.”662 That knowledge was
originally compromised due to Adam’s fall, restored by Noah’s prophetic
agency but lost again during the Flood due to human sins.663 Moses restored
that divine wisdom and Jesus replenished it, but the Catholic Church and
Roman emperors corrupted, compromised and misdirected that bulk of
knowledge to create a tarnished absolutist Christianity which emphasised
supernatural incarnational elements and suppressed natural theology, trial
and error based innovatory experimentalism and sciences.664 So the
restoration of natural philosophy was in reality a restoration of true religion;
alchemy, science and theology were intertwined.665 The natural scientists
insisted upon the experimental natural data, explorations and observations
instead of authority based Aristotelian scholasticism, Church and
monarchical authoritarian interpretations and divine magical prerogatives.
Natural science was an extension of the religio political natural ideology
which moved away from the divine right Church and monarchy towards
natural rights, rationality and intelligibility. Return to the original, pre-
Catholic universals, (puritanism) in science, theology, politics and piety
constituted the essence of such a movement.
Puritanism and restoration required returning to the original message of
Jesus and Moses through Middle Eastern (pagan, Jewish, Zoroastrian and
Muslim) theology and sciences; the internal religious reformation and
external natural transformation were one and the same idea. Both were
directed against the supernatural and persecuting Church and state
structures, and both wanted to purge Christianity of its intermediary
arbitrators, forces and beings to assert direct divine sovereignty in nature
and religion. It was a Unitarian revolution in metaphysics, physics and
social order. The same One and Only God was supreme in the heavens, in
the cosmos by dint of his natural laws and in humanity by his moral laws.
Man could directly reach him through his moral laws, explore and master
his cosmos by natural laws without any intercessors, in betweens or
intermediaries. They just needed to bypass the Church and state
authoritarianism to rediscover and realise the pristine, simple and Unitarian
message.
Isaac Newton and his fellow natural philosophers subscribed to “the
Renaissance view of history as a declination from an original golden age, a
time in which there had existed an original pure knowledge of things both
natural and supernatural, a prisca sapientia subsequently lost or garbled
through human sin and error and through temporal decay.”666 That natural
theology and sciences, the prisca sapientia tradition (knowledge of God and
nature), was preserved by the Egyptians, Jews - and later on by the Middle
Eastern priests and scholars - in a mostly symbolic language.667 Orient was
the origin of Occident. “Certainly, the seventeenth century saw some crucial
moments in the way scholarly Europeans have thought about the oriental,
and in particular about the oriental as a category that should shape their
understanding of their own religions.”668 Therefore Middle Eastern
manuscripts, knowledge, wisdom, languages, symbols and sciences were
essential to return to the original prophetic wisdom, the revival of prisca
sapientia. Rabbinic and Middle Eastern knowledge and wisdom was
required to understand the pre-Catholic pristine Biblical teachings and early
Christianity. The quests for Middle Eastern alchemy, medicine/anatomy,
mathematics, algebra, geometry, astronomy, physics, astrology, entomology,
meteorology, mineralogy, theology, law and politics were all parts of the
same search for prisca sapientia and prisca theologia.669
Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662),670 a Polish grandson of a famous English
merchant, a friend of anti-Habsburg, pro Ottoman Hungarian Johann Amos
Comenius, who was born in Poland where the Ottoman, Unitarian and
Socinian influences were quite visible, migrated to England in 1628,
married and settled there. His European intellectual connections, anti-
monarchy (anti-Charles I), anti-Church (anti-Archbishop Laud), anti-
scholastic and anti-Aristotelian, Puritan, republican tendencies, close
associations with Commonwealth leaders such as Lord Brooke, Francis
Rous, John Pym, the revolutionary republican leader whose arrest started
the English Civil War, the Commonwealth leader Oliver Cromwell and
other parliamentarian affiliations propelled him to overcome English
supernatural, supra rational, doctrinal differences, internal strife and civil
war by means of natural, rational, utilitarian, vocational, mechanical,
technical, mystical, scientific, and pedagogical training,671 Baconian
empiricism, utopian, boundless enthusiasm for natural history, history of
philosophy, utilitarianism, Protestant unification, scientific progress,
universal reformation and political renewal.672 His Chichester Academy,
“Invisible College”, Utopian Universal Reformation,673 Solomon’s House,
Universal Padagogical Language,674 Philanthropic, idealistic, chiliastic
Puritanism, quest for prisca sapientia and prisca theologia took him to
Arabic language as the language in which ancient prisca sapientia and
prisca theologia were preserved.675 His correspondence indicated that he
was somehow connected with some English efforts to translate the Quran
into English language. His frantic, radical, grandiose projects in reform,
social regeneration, education, political economy, agriculture, husbandry,
coinage, communications, mining, medicine, experimental philosophy,
humanism, hermeticism, ethics and religion connected him with people and
cultures of all sorts including the Eastern wisdom, sciences and cultures.
The Gresham professors, Royal Society Fellows and many other English
intelligencers were closely connected with Hartlib and his quest for Middle
Eastern knowledge, wisdom and languages. Almost all founding members
of the Royal Society were Hartlib’s associates and carried the same quest
forward.676 Robert Boyle was his “chemical son”677 and Boyle’s radical and
heterodox sister Katherine Boyle, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614–91) was
fully engaged in his circle678 which played an instrumental role in the later
Scientific Revolution. Hartlib circle’s thirst for the Eastern wisdom was
quenched with the help of Levant and East India companies, their chaplains,
merchants and directors.
Overseas Trade and Scientific Revolution
England was scientifically backward during most of the sixteenth century,679
except the last quarter when overseas trade began with the Muslim Levant
in thr early 1580s. R. K. Merton, the father of modern sociology, observed:
“It is hardly an historical accident that the last year of the sixteenth century
saw not only the publication of GILBERT’S De Magnete, the first
important scientific work produced in England and the augury of the new
era of science, but also the chartering of the East India Company, the first
English joint-stock company of importance and herald of the forthcoming
bourgeois age.”680 He further observed that the “relation between a problem
raised by economic development and technologic endeavour is clear-cut
and definite. It represents a connection which has frequently been observed
in contemporary society as well.”681 The transportation, communication and
navigational needs of Levant, East India and other overseas trading
companies were met by the scientists of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. Boris Hessen, the Soviet physicist, philosopher and
historian of science, noted that the merchants’ need for efficient
transportation and resolution of problems related to it set the modern
science in motion. Initially it looked at four main problems:
1. To increase the tonnage capacity of vessels and their speed,
2. To improve the floating qualities of ships,
3. To develop means for better navigation,
4. To improve the construction of canals and docks.682
The practical problems and challenges related to the overseas trade were at
the forefront of English scientific inquiries and research, and English
scientific progress was proportionate to its foreign trade and expansion.
Within the next sixty years, by 1640, England became one of the most
scientifically-advanced countries in Europe. Christopher Hill pinpointed
that “The science of Elizabeth’s reign was the work of merchants and
craftsmen, not of dons; carried on in London, not in Oxford and Cambridge;
in the vernacular, not in Latin.”683 It was the allure of East Indies gold that
took Columbus to the newland, America, still insisting that he was in India
and that the Native Americans were Red Indians. The same allure of the
prosperous Mughal India was the main cause of English navigational
adventures, which served as the foundations for later Scientific Revolution
in England.
The first English mathematician who popularised mathematics and science
was Thomas Hood (1556-1611). He was the son of a merchant, and his
1598 lectures on mathematics and navigational technology were sponsored
by Sir Thomas Smythe, the first Governor of the East India Company,
Governor of the Muscovy Company, and Treasurer of the Virginia
Company. Sir Thomas Gresham (1518–79), merchant and financier, as well
as the son and nephew of Lord Mayors of London, “built the Royal
Exchange and left the revenue from shops there jointly to the City of
London and the Mercers’ Company to endow a college. Despite pleas from
Cambridge that the money might more appropriately be left to the
university, Gresham followed the example set by many merchants who
endowed grammar schools in the sixteenth century, and was careful to put
control of his college in the hands not of clerics but of merchants like
himself. He endowed seven professorships: in Divinity, Law, Rhetoric,
Music, Physic, Geometry, and Astronomy, with higher stipends than Henry
VIII had given the Regius Professors of Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge.
Gresham College, like the Bodleian Library, was founded to combat
popery.”684
Anglican Church and its popish, supernatural and theoretical educational
system were considered antithetical to practical technology and sciences.
The natural, utilitarian and pragmatic nature of vocational sciences
supplanted the supernatural teachings of the Church and provided an
alternate system of education, especially to adults. Gresham College took
the lead in vocational mechanics and technologies.685 The College taught
basic geometry, astronomy, geography and mathematics to adult mariners to
enhance their navigational capabilities. It was a vocational college meant
solely to train adult overseas traders in matters of trade and related
technology. “The College brought together many groups of scientists.
Raphe Handson, a pupil of Briggs’s, was persuaded by Hakluyt in 1600 to
publish the first English textbook on Trigonometrie, a translation with
additions of his own. It greatly simplified the calculations necessary for
mathematical navigation. It was dedicated to the two Governors of the East
India Company who had founded Wright’s lecture on navigation.”686
Arabic and Oriental Manuscripts
Arabic and other Oriental languages, manuscripts and sciences were among
the most valued commodities of the Hartlibian circle, Gresham College
professors and natural scientists, not for the love of Islam or Muslims but
because of their cultural and scientific value. The English mathematician
and diplomat John Pell mastered Arabic language in the 1630s under the
influence of Hartlib.687 William Bedwell688 and John Greaves689 learned
Arabic due to Gresham influences. Later on, Oxford and Cambridge
imitated Gresham curriculum and established Arabic chairs. The importance
of Arabic and Arabic sciences can be gauged from the fact that the Oxford
Laudian Arabic Chair was established in 1636 when the Levant chaplain Dr.
Pococke690 was appointed the first professor of Arabic soon after his return
from the Muslim Levant (Syria). Cambridge Adam Professor of Arabic was
established in 1632 and Abraham Wheelock691 was appointed the first
professor. It is pertinent to mention that Cambridge established the Lucasian
Chair of mathematics in 1663, some 31 years after the Arabic chair, while
Oxford established the chemistry chair in the 1690s, appointing Robert Plot
as the first professor. These historical facts are sufficient to underscore the
significance attached to Arabic language and Arabic sciences in early
seventeenth-century England.
William Bedwell (1561-1632), the known European Arabist, an expert in
Oriental languages, mathematics and geometry was the conduit, translator
and connector of Greshamites. He was the enabler of Richard Hakluyt and
Sir Walter Raleigh, the initial American colonisers, having insisted upon
Arabic language as the vehicle of Arabic sciences. Bedwell was “a
distinguished Arabic scholar, translator of the Authorised Version and of
Ramus’s Geometry (1636), who wrote popular science manuals for the use
of carpenters and produced almanacs. Bedwell is said to have been a friend
and admirer of Thomas Hood. So close was Bedwell’s association with the
Gresham group that Aubrey thought he had been a professor at the College.
Bedwell, who dabbled in astrology, forms another link with Raleigh’s
circle, since he helped with the chronology of the History of the World.”692
Sir Walter Raleigh, the first American coloniser’s History of the World was
the first global history book written in England. It was published in 1614
and was the most influential prose book of the seventeenth century. The
book was too saucy for the monarch, as it criticised the King’s ineptitude. It
was used by British explorers and read by English politicians; it was the
only book recommended by Oliver Cromwell to his son Richard. John
Milton dedicated his collections of sayings about liberty, The Cabinet
Council, to Raleigh, and the American revolutionary leaders named one of
their navy ships after him. The Arabist Bedwell helped in the books’
compilation and chronology, based on his readings of Arabic history and
geography. John Greaves (1602-1652), the famous English mathematician,
astronomer and antiquarian learnt Arabic and Persian, travelled to Turkey,
Syria and Egypt (1636-1640) along with Edward Pococke, collected
manuscripts for Archbishop Laud and was appointed professor of Geometry
at Gresham College and Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford in
1643. He reformed the Gregorian calendar, and his astronomical tools
greatly enhanced Oxford’s nascent astronomical lab and observatory.
Gresham College was central to advance sciences and adult education, and
John Greaves and William Bedwell were central to Gresham College due to
their knowledge of Arabic language and sciences.693
For forty years Gresham College, not Oxford or Cambridge, was the hub
of technical and navigational expertise, assisting overseas trading
companies Royal Navy and Trinity House. It was the allure of Muslim
India, Turkey and Persia, and the search for the shortest route to India,
which served as the springboard for English science and technology. The
existence and search of the North-West Passage to India was the top priority
of English explorers. “Its historical importance is that it led to scientific,
nautical, and commercial enterprises, which linked John Dee with Sir
Humphrey Gilbert and George Gascoigne, Gresham College (Briggs,
Gunter) with practical explorers like Foxe and James, with Hakluyt, with
the Virginia Company, with big City financiers like Sir Thomas Smith and
Sir John Wolstenholme, and with Parliamentarians like Sir Dudley Digges.
The discovery of a North-West Passage, John Davis argued in 1595, by
offering the speediest route for the import of Indian commodities, would
make England ‘the storehouse of Europe.’”694 The early seventeenth-
century English merchants, natural philosophers and politicians were
obsessed with Mughal India and Ottoman Levant due to their global
economic glamour. The Royal Society of London was an extension of the
same allure and the Greshamites were the foundational group who met in
Gresham College and Oxford since 1645 to transition into the Royal
Society in 1660. For the first twenty years of Gresham existence, no
astronomy, geometry or developed mathematics were taught either at
Oxford or Cambridge or taught badly and initially both universities resisted
Islamisation and Greshamization of knowledge. They emulated Gresham
College only when the gentry and Crown got mesmerised with the
prospects of overseas trade.695
The Crown and Anglican Church seized the opportunity in the late 1620s
and embarked upon Oriental manuscript collection and translation after
seeing their importance in the technical revolutions of East India, Levant
and other related overseas companies. The Crown also used ancient Near
Eastern languages, manuscripts and cultures to strengthen its claims of
divine right monarchy and hopes of millennial regeneration, as discussed
above. The Anglican chaplains of the Levant and East India companies
were specifically directed by Archbishop Laud and King Charles I to focus
on securing Oriental knowledge, manuscripts and languages. The Irish
Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) was also very enthusiastic about
Arabic learning and manuscripts. The German orientalist Christian Ravis
(also Ravius) during the 1640s, had travelled extensively in the East to
collect manuscripts for him and in 1648 published “A Discourse of the
Oriental Tongues in London.” Hungarian Protestant chemists such as Hans
Hunneades were connected with the Greshamite group by the 1630s and
assisted in many projects partly due to their knowledge of Ottoman
languages and sciences.
John Woodward, Gresham Professor of Physic, 1693–1728, writing
probably in the late 1720s, was lyrical about his College: “The fame of it
went over the whole world. The most important discoveries of those times
took their rise from Gresham College...” […]696 The East India Levant
trading complex, Muslim sciences, manuscripts and languages were an
integral part of this scientific transformation. The quantitative, empirically
sound, and predictive laws of motion and later Scientific Revolutions
caused by Newtonian Cosmology and synthesis were initiated, facilitated
and mostly financed by the overseas trading companies with the help and
knowledge of the Muslim East. The later speculative science (1625 onward)
was an extension of this earlier practical science when the rich virtuosi
(nobility and gentry) joined the bandwagon of science due to its socio-
economic esteem and reputation.697 Christopher Hill, Boris Hessen, George
N. Clark, P. M. Rattansi, G. R. Tylor and Robert K. Merton all have
highlighted the socio-economic roots of seventeenth-century science and
the role played by East India Levant trading complex, its capital and
patronage in the emergence, development and flourishing of both practical
and speculative sciences in England.698
Foster Watson singled out navigational commerce for special emphasis,
observing that England “owed the development of seventeenth-century
experimental study of science to the successors of the mighty merchants
and men of commerce who made possible the wealth and leisure for nobles,
gentlemen and scholars. Thus it was those navigational interests, through
whose needs English mathematics had been revived and directed into
practical matters, that produced the wealth that made possible not only
virtuosity but also the revolution in speculative mathematical science.”699
Oxford and Cambridge, the original seminaries, became interested in
speculative science only when the gentry and nobility got fully engaged in
them. Charles II established the Lucasian professorship in mathematics at
Cambridge in 1663 with the financial help of Henry Lucas. Its first chair
was Isaac Barrow, the teacher and mentor of Isaac Newton who had
extensively travelled in Turkey, learned Arabic and other Oriental languages
and collected many manuscripts. He was followed by Newton as the
Lucasian Chair in 1669. The Royal Society combined the Gresham College,
Oxford and Cambridge groups of Orientalists in one body.700 The number of
its members was restricted to fifty-five, but “any baron, Fellow of the Royal
College of Physicians, and public professors of mathematics, physics, and
natural philosophy could join.”701 The majority were not scientists. A
minority, around twenty or so original fellows, was committed to science
and controlled experimentations. Many clergy, gentry and virtuosi joined
the Royal Society when King Charles II took up its fellowship. Many
Anglican bishops were children of merchants and brought their broad,
rational, natural, Latitudinarian impulses to the Society and promoted,
legitimised and popularised the works of their fellow scientists.
Overseas Trade and Royal Society
The Royal Society merged practical and speculative science together. Boris
Hessen has effectively demonstrated that “the technical problems
experienced by the merchant capitalists, in dealing with transport, industry
and war, led to the development of two particular sciences, mechanics and
astronomy, that were united into a whole by the Newtonian synthesis.”702
Stephen F. Mason, the renowned British chemist, substantiated Hessen’s
thesis in the following words: “Thus the association between merchant
capital and the more mathematical sciences, astronomy and mechanics,
illustrated by Hessen, is substantiated both by the fact that scientific activity
sprang up in the geographical areas of mercantile prosperity during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the actual convergence and
interpénétration of mercantile and scientific-mathematical activities, as
exemplified in these men. Moreover, interest in science burgeoned in
England during the Revolution and in the period immediately preceding and
subsequent to it, as R. K. Merton’s statistical analysis of the English élite
testifies, and it was during this period that the English merchant capitalists
came into their own. They included such men as John Pym, treasurer of a
company trying to extend English trade in Central and South America, and
the City Fathers who had been deprived of their charter to settle
Londonderry by Charles I.”703
Science became an instrument and agent of the merchant community.
“Thus merchant capital as it developed and came to penetrate into
production from above, found in science an agent to serve its material
interests and to give content to a new world view. Science was freed from
its subordination to the theological picture of nature that had accompanied
religious ideals and values in earlier times, and finding first a harmony with
the new Protestant attitude, came to dominate over theological ideas of
nature.”704 Anne Winterbottom has demonstrated close intellectual,
scientific, administrative and financial ties between the East India Company
and the Royal Society. “In London, the EIC connected with the Royal
Society both formally and informally, through overlapping membership and
friendships and rivalries that spanned the organisations. From 1682,
members of the Royal Society held stocks in the EIC, as well as the Royal
African Company, on behalf of the Society. Many prominent members of
the Royal Society, including the diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys,
also held their own stocks in the Company. Members such as John Fryer,
Isaac Pyke, and Joseph Collet were elected to the Royal Society on the
basis of their positions in the EIC. The personnel of both the EIC and the
Royal Society also overlapped with members of the English parliament,
court, and navy: prominent examples include Samuel Pepys, Sir Joseph
Williamson, and William Petty.”705 The Royal Society became a prototype
of the East India Company.706 The Levant and East India finances,
manuscript collections, classifications, descriptions, translations and
assimilation of knowledge were as central to the Scientific Revolution as
the experimentations of the natural philosophers.707 Orient was equal partner
with Occident in matters of scienctific discoveries, political thought and
religious progress.
Both trade and science developed when the merchant middle class
increased in wealth and numbers and was able to withstand the pressures of
clergy, landed nobility and Crown. The overseas trade with Muslim East
facilitated that transition financially and intellectually. It was the drastic
socio-economic disruption of the 1630s, caused mainly by overseas trade,
which translated into religio-political mayhem of 1640s. The sudden demise
of Old Regime with its supernatural religious and political theology paved
the way for an alternative natural, rational and scientific worldview. Islamic
worldview, religio-political theology and business knowhow were the
catalysts of early seventeenth-century English socio-economic and religious
commotions.
Steven Shapin has emphasised upon the change of religious, political and
economic patterns which occurred during the early seventeenth century as
the main root causes of scientific change.708 Richard Ross concluded that:
“In the half-century, 1550-1600, overseas navigational interests revived the
mathematical sciences in England and directed them into practical and,
above all, navigational concerns... In the succeeding half-century, 1600-
1650, the overseas navigational interests, and the conditions of
mathematical activity that they had brought about, generated a new set of
conditions that favoured speculative mathematical science.”709 He further
observed that “a complementary development was the flow of wealth into
England through expansionist enterprise. This wealth made possible
increased opportunity and support for speculative mathematical science,
and also made possible virtuosity, under whose auspices speculative science
received further encouragement. As a result of these developments,
Gresham College, Oxford, and, later, Cambridge became centers for
speculative science. The Greshamites and Oxford’s experimental science
club stamped their character on the Royal Society, which was to be the
platform for the scientific revolution.”710
It is evident that there was no developed, specialised scientific body in
seventeenth-century England except the Royal Society of London, which
was founded in 1660 as a result of encounter with Oriental scientific
knowledge and mostly to enhance overseas trade with the Muslim East. It
was preceded by the accumulation of Islamic Oriental manuscripts,
establishment of Arabic chairs at Oxford and Cambridge and a network of
natural philosophers and Arabists to translate, study and discuss the so
accumulated knowledge. Like its French counterpart Academy of Science,
the Royal Society was heavily engaged with the Oriental knowledge. “The
creation of the Academy of Sciences in France in 1666 was closely tied to
previous contacts with Asia, as the study of travel and geography were at its
inception. More than a century after the royal chairs were established by
Francis I, all secular knowledge in France continued to be shaped and
influenced by Orientalism.”711 The situation in England was no different;
England started later in the game than France, but picked up the pace soon
after that.
The Royal Society fellows studied everything712 from Turkish coffee,
Indian tea, crops, fruits, exotic herbs,713 Persian silk, Chinese porcelain,
varnishes, masonry, paper, leather, tapestry, parchment, enamels,
engravings, red glass, the medical use of herbs in Aleppo, the method of
inoculation against smallpox in Aleppo, the manner of hatching eggs in
ovens in Cairo to Indian textile, colours and dyes.714 Since its inception they
discussed, analysed, interacted with and benefitted from countless Eastern
ideas and concepts. The world’s oldest, continuous scientific body, the
Royal Society, greatly benefited from Oriental manuscripts on a variety of
scientific and natural subjects. Its natural philosophers and founding
members - such as Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Robert Hooke (1635-1703),
Edward Bernard (1638-1697), John Wallis (1617-1703), Henry Oldenberg
(1617-1677), Edmund Castell (1606-1685) and others - read and digested
Arabic, Turkish and Persian Oriental manuscripts purchased by Edward
Pococke (1604-1691), Thomas Hyde (1636-1703),715 Edmond Halley
(1656-1742), John Greaves (1602-1652) and many other chaplains, consuls
and merchants716, and applied the extracted ideas in their socio-scientific
observations, experiments and researches.717 The close global networks
demonstrated “the ways in which specific global connections forged by
natural philosophers, merchants, and political renegades to further projects
of knowledge creation, profit making, and liberation from oppression
transformed the worlds within which they were constructed.”718 England did
not do it all by itself. It was helped and facilitated by Oriental knowledge,
wealth and wisdom.
Robert Boyle, the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, inventor, the
richest man in England, a director and investor of the East India
Company,719 was influenced by the famous Irish Orientalist and Archbishop
of Armagh James Ussher (1581-1656)720 and Samuel Hartlib. He learned
Arabic at the age of 50 to understand the Arabic manuscripts and sought the
help of Arabists such as Edward Pococke, John Greaves and Thomas Hyde
in translation.721 Boyle’s antidogmatic, natural, experimental and empirical
proto scientific approach was developed in conjunction with Eastern
manuscripts, ideas, sciences and cultures. The mathematician and
astronomer Edward Bernard learned Arabic and used Arabic observations
heavily in his astronomical research. John Wallis, the founding fellow of
Royal Society, the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford who taught
John Locke as an undergraduate722 translated Arabic manuscripts and often
quoted Arabic mathematicians in his lectures. “He included Nasir Eddin Al
Tusi’s five-page proof to Euclid’s fifth postulate in his book, Opera
Mathematica.”723 Victor J. Katz observed that “by the seventeenth century,
European mathematics had in many areas reached, and in some areas
surpassed, the level of its Greek and Arabic sources. Nevertheless, given the
continuous contact of Europe with Islamic countries, a steady stream of
Arabic manuscripts, including mathematical ones, began to arrive in
Europe. Leading universities appointed professors of Arabic, and among the
sources they read were mathematical works. For example, the work of Sadr
al-Tusi (the son of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi) on the parallel postulate, written
originally in 1298, was published in Rome in 1594 with a Latin title page.
This work was studied by John Wallis in England, who then wrote about its
ideas as he developed his own thoughts on the postulate. Still later,
Newton’s friend, Edmond Halley, translated into Latin Apollonius’s
Cutting-off of a Ratio, a work that had been lost in Greek but had been
preserved via an Arabic translation.”724 Edmond Castell725 spent eighteen
years developing extensive dictionaries of Oriental languages, including
Arabic.726 Edmond Halley (1656–1742), who gave his name to Halley’s
comet, also learned Arabic at the age of 50 to translate and digest the works
of Muslim astronomers such as al-Battani as well as Apollonius’s Conics,
the advanced mathematics in antiquity.727 Halley’s close scientific
coordinations with and funding of Newton’s works and astronomical
expertise are well-documented.728 In a paper published in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society in 1695 he wrote, “And if any curious
Traveller or Merchant residing there, would please to observe, with due
care, the Phases of the Moon’s Eclipse at Bagdad, Aleppo and Alexandria,
thereby to determine their longitude, they could not do the Science of
Astronomy a greater service.”729
Royal Society, Westminster School and Oriental Languages
Many fellows of the Royal Society came from the Westminster School of
London where Arabic was taught as a language. Westminster, a highly
reputable school, was frequented by both Royalists and Puritans. “In the
library of Westminster School is a first edition of the History of the Royal
Society. The copy epitomises the vitality and the central position of the
institution that was Westminster in the latter part of the seventeenth
century.”730 Richard Busby (1606-1695) was its Head Master for over 55
years. He was a graduate of Christ Church Oxford where he studied Arabic
with Matthias Paser (1598-1658). Paser like Edward Pococke and other
Orientalists hailed Arabic as the language of natural sciences, medicine,
mathematics, astronomy, geography, philosophy and Oriental wisdom. In
addition to other Oriental languages, the Arabic program at Westminster
was initiated with great enthusiasm probably by the 1650s when Pococke’s
Polyglot Bible was published. Busby himself compiled Arabic grammar
resource books and taught many of his students, even after hours, mostly at
the school library as well as at his home. Henry Stubbe, Robert Hooke,
Christorpher Wren and John Locke’s Arabic interests all began at
Westminster, which they further pursued in Christ Church Oxford under Dr.
Pococke. John Evelyn, the famous diarist reported “that Arabic too is
taught: ‘I heard and saw such exercises at the election of scholars at
Westminster School to be sent to the University in Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
and Arabic, in themes and extemporary verses, as wonderfully astonished
me in such youths, with such readiness and wit, some of them not above
twelve, or thirteen years of age.”731 Dr. Busby believed in widening the
availability of education; this led him to an interest in the wider social
context. He was engaged in a School at Lutton in Lincolnshire and in the
Green Coat Hospital in nearby Tothill Fields. He founded readerships in
Hebrew and Mathematics at Christ Church, and took his love of Oriental
languages with him wherever he went.
Busby was a dynamic academic figure who was well-connected and
respected within the academic and scientific world of seventeenth-century
England. His close connections with Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society
are well-documented. He was a go-between for many natural scientists,
mathematicians and astronomers; his friendships with John Pell, Dr. Isaac
Barrow, Isaac Newton’s teacher and predecessor at Cambridge, Isaac
Newton and Walter Needham are well known.732 In spite of his royal loyalty
and respect for Anglican leadership, he espoused unorthodox, mostly
Arminian theological views which were tolerated by the Church hierarchy
due to Busby’s hardwork, academic stature and reputation. “The biographer
of the Non-Conformist divine and diarist, Philip Henry writes: ‘I have heard
him tell how much he surprised the Doctor, the first time he waited upon
him after he was turn’d out by the Act of Uniformity: For when the Doctor
asked him, Pr’ythee (Child) what made thee a Nonconformist? Truly Sir,
saith Mr Henry, you made me one; for you taught me those things that
hindered me from conforming.’”733 The early eighteenth-century essayist
Sir Richard Steele was to say: “I must confess that I am of the opinion
Busby’s Genius for education had as great an Effect upon the age he lived
in, as that of any ancient Philosopher, without excepting one, had on his
Contemporaries.”734 Busby was the conduit through which several
collections of books and papers passed to the Royal Society. For instance,
John Pell’s collection of Oriental manuscripts and writings went to the
Royal Society through Busby.
The Royal Society had a huge collection of Muslim manuscripts and
elected three Muslim fellows in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century. They were Muhammad ibn Haddu, the Moroccan ambassador to
Charles II’s court who himself was son of an English woman and also
married to an English lady,735 Mohammed ibn Ali Abgali and Cassem
Alqiada Aga of Tripoli. M. B. Hall notes that “at first thought, it seems
unlikely that the Fellows of the Royal Society founded by the ‘new
philosophy’ in England in 1660 ‘for the promotion of natural knowledge,’
self-confessedly forward looking modernists, should have concerned
themselves with Islamic learning. That they did so throws further light upon
the complexities of the scientific revolution.”736 In short, the English
Scientific Revolution in many ways was facilitated by Muslim knowledge,
sciences and manuscripts. There was a widespreas fascination with Muslim
sciences, culture, empires and even faith among members of Hartlibian
circle, many fellows of Royal Society and some Latitudinarian clergymen.
John Beale, one of those responsible for the original ideology of the Royal
Society, well represents this widespread fascination with things Islamic as
he was an active member of all three above mentioned circles.
The Baconian John Beale and Islamophilia
John Beale (1608-1683)737 was an English clergyman, horticulturist,
scientific writer, and early Fellow of the Royal Society.738 He was a
utopian, Baconian reformer instrumental in Samuel Hartlib’s circle and
closely connected with Robert Boyle, his sister Lady Ranelagh, John
Evelyn, Henry Oldenburg and other influential fellows of the Royal Society
and Anglican establishment. His fundamental role in the Royal Society’s
agriculture and trade policies is well documented. His enthusiastic
engagement in multiple scientific fields, experimentation, data collection,
communication, socio economic and religious reformation place him among
the early models of Puritan, Baconian, Latitudinarianism who combined
scientific and religious reform for social regeneration with millenarian zeal.
His earnest search for Prisca Theologia and Prisca Sapientia and his closet
Unitarian radicalism exemplifies the overall directions and sentiments of
the early Hartlibian circle, Royal Society members and Latitudinarian
segment of the Anglican Church establishment, the early and mid-
seventeenth century “culture of fact” and “dissimulation”. He also
epitomizes the secret love affair which many Hartlibian, Royal Society
members and Latitudinarians had for the “Eastern Wisdom” in general and
Muslim civilization in particular. He symbolizes the overall English
Oriental obsession of 1630’s onward. Beale was a typical closet
Islamophile, dissatisfied with Church Christianity’s supernatural,
unintelligible dogmas, magisterial Reformation, Continental and English
sectarianism, internal strife, instability, backwardness; religio political
persecutions and overly hierarchical society. He believed that the sixteenth
century Protestant Reformation required further radical, rational
reformation on Islamic Unitarian, moral and rational lines. Unlike the other
radical Islamophiles such as Henry Stubbe, Beale kept his Islamic
fascinations to his close circles of Hartlibian, Royal Society and
Latitudinarian confidants such as Hartlib, Evelyne, Oldenburg, Boyle, Lady
Ranelagh and others. Beale also typifies the overall pattern of secret
oriental conversion which usually started with Renaissance humanism,
Socinianism and was further fueled by exposure to Eastern wisdom,
manuscripts, languages, sciences, alchemy, theology, philosophy and
cultural achievements.
Beale was a typical young staunch Calvinist Anglican who got exposed to
his Eton mentor Sir Henry Wotton’s international diplomatic experience and
preeminent humanist scholarship and heterodox theology of John Hales, the
“theological mentor of Chillingworth and-other eirenicists who gathered at
the Great Tew (Oxfordshire) estate of Lord Falkland. By his espousal of a
rational, tolerant and simplified Christianity in emulation of the early
Fathers, Hales reaffirmed the Erasmian tradition of Christian humanism
which Beale had studied at Worcester.”739 Members of the 1630’s Tew
Circle such as Lucius Cary (1610 –1643), Second Viscount Falkland and
King’s Secretary of State, the playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637), poets
such as Edmund Waller (1606–1687), Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), and
the divines Henry Hammond (1605–1660); Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677),
George Morley (1598–1684), William Chillingworth (1602–1644), Edward
Hyde, later the first earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) and traveler George
Sandys (1644-1578) were influenced by Renaissance humanism especially
through the writings of Desiderius Erasmus and Hugo Grotius and leaned
towards Socinian rationalism, minimalism, biblicism, anti-clericalism and
toleration. Lord Falkland was considered the first Socinian in England.
George Sandys, whose father Archbishop Edwin Sandys (1519-1588) was
known for his hatred of dissent and enthusiasm for uniformity, had traveled
to the Ottoman Empire and got inspired by its diversity. In spite of
misgivings about Islam and its Prophet, Sandys admired Islamic
rationalism, minimalism, religious diversity and toleration. John Hales
reinforced George Sandys’ overseas experiences with Renaissance
humanism. His rationalism, minimalism and heterodoxy were transmitted to
his brilliant student John Beale. Beale’s Worcester Erasmian radicalism was
augmented by his Cambridge mentor Abraham Wheelock, the distinguished
orientalist and the first Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at
Cambridge,740 who gave Beale open access to Cambridge University’s
recently acquired oriental manuscripts, a rarity in England of 1630’s.741
Beale’s thirst for Eastern wisdom, Prisca Sapientia and Muslim sciences
lead him to Arabic language, alchemy, alchemical experiments, scientific
pursuits, Baconian utopian universal reformation, Hartlib circle’s frantic,
grandiose projects, Royal Society, husbandry, overseas trade, discussion of
Levant and East India Company trade policies, radical Unitarian
reformation of Christianity on rational Islamic theological lines and
aspirations of replacing the persecuting English politico religious systems
with Muslim Turkish models and government. He did all this without losing
his clerical status, high chaplaincy appointments, lifelong Royal Society
membership and public calls for revival and spread of Gospel Christianity.
His Christianity was anti-Trinitarian, anti-dogmatic, natural, rational,
simplistic, minimalistic, moral, tolerant and illuministic but he masterfully
disguised it in Trinitarian, dogmatic, Anglican garbs, like many other
Latitudinarians, to the extent that Charles II appointed him as chaplain
extraordinary to his court. To Dmitri Levitin he resembled the sixteenth and
seventeenth century “Islamophile antritrinitarians such as Adam Neuser
(who ultimately converted to Islam) and Henry Stubbe”742 but to Charles II
he was an exceptional chaplain. His Islamophile heterodoxy was an open
secret to his close confidants in Hartlib Circle, Royal Society and Church
establishment but it did not cause them alarm as many of them shared his
sentiments in part or in toto. To grapple the intense appeal of this peculiar
early seventeenth century English phenomenon let us look at Beale’s
celebrated Anglican and Royal Society career.
Beale was born in 1608, educated at Worcester Cathedral School and
Eton, matriculate at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1629 and travelled the
Continent between 1636 and 1638. In spite of harboring some deviant
theological opinions, he stayed on as a fellow of Cambridge until 1640. He
was master of St. Catherine’s Hospital, Ledbury (1649-early 1650s), and
vicar of Stretton Grandison from 1656 onward. At the Restoration, he
became a vicar of Yeovil and rector at Sock Denis; in 1663 he was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1665 he was appointed chaplain
extraordinary to Charles II.
Beale’s radical vision of religious history, reformation and Islamism was
primarily outlined in his 1650’s personal letters written to Samuel Hartlib
and through him to John Evelyn, Lady Ranelagh and Henry Oldenburg.743
Beale believed that the original Christianity of Jesus and his early disciples
was simple, minimalistic and tolerant of diversity. “The first three centuries
of Christianity saw very little in the way of doctrinal orthodoxy. The true
primitive faith was even more doctrinally minimal than the Apostles’
Creed.”744 According to Beale “when men dare reade the Historyes & chiefe
writings of the Ages of first Martyrdomes impartially’, they will find that
‘twas best, when Symboles & Confessions were as short, or shorter, than
the Apostles Creede, as it is called.”745 The Apostles’ Creed was in fact a
later invention “not finished as now we have it, till Austins dayes’; in any
case, if one was to assess modern Christianity by its standards, one would
find that ‘Rome will get much ground against vs ... Our Apostles Creede in
our sense is as young as our Reformation; & more defective, than the
Romane Apostles Creede; & indeede not a symbole of faith, but a symbole
of Heresie.”746 The Christian heresy was fabricated by the Roman Church of
the fourth century with the help of pagan theology and for the sake of pagan
accommodations, “in the first plantacion of the gospell Christianity took
some alloy & was sullied partly by the intrusion of halfe converted
Philosophers & partly by the compliance of Christians to Gentile <Rites>
lawes & Customes.”747 This way the original Christianity of Jesus was
compromised and corrupted by the Roman Trinitarian Paganism, “yea for
300 yeares together, are undoubtedly the purest times of the Gospell that
have yet appeared, we find them [to] differ very much at least very far from
all nationall confessions, in the high points of the holy trinity, of the state of
the Soul after death, of Praedestination. Freewill & (to omit from
particulers) from the maine body of our positive Theologie. Some were
wholy for inspiracions as Tertullian & Origen, some were for Platonicall
Ideas & raptures as Sinesius, & other semi-christian Philosophers, some
soared aloft in the high straines of eloquence as Chrisostome & Nazianzene,
some stood more strictly to close reasonings as lustine ye Martyr, &
Clemens of Alexandria, yet in their severall ways & <with> severall
opinions they held firmer to bonds of unity & to the substance of Sanctitie
then wee doe.”748 The corrupted Christian Orthodoxy and Canon Law were
founded on the pagan foundations,749 supported and imposed by the mighty
arms of the pagan state.750 Therefore it was impossible to derive a
patristically grounded Christian Orthodoxy. “And for those primitiue
Fathers whose authority is soe much claymed & boasted, this I have many
yeares agoe undertaken & demonstrated, that all our authenticall
confessions as well of Protestants as of Papists, are spun of such a fine
thread of new distinctions as will utterly exclude all these old fathers, soe
that if they must be called fathers, the fathers & children are very much
unlike each other.”751 Dmitri Levitin observed that “the details of his history
were more ‘radical’ than anything developed by virtually any other person
in seventeenth-century England, if not Europe. On the other, the broader
religio-political vision that informed this historical vision was far more
complex than the ‘Erasmian label usually signifies…Beale was particularly
fascinated by the interaction between Christianity and paganism during the
earliest growth of the new faith, and that this led him to posit that the
earliest church fathers were already wrong about many matters of
doctrine.”752 Beale towed the lines of radical reformers such as Servetus,
Socinians and Unitarians. His was a standard Socinian, Unitarian and
Islamic stance widespread among the early seventeenth century English
radicals including the Hartlib and Tew circles.753 Sarah Mortimer noted that
“Indeed, the Socinians played a central role in Beale’s religious
journey…”754 and that “the Socinians did begin to find interested, even
sympathetic, readers in the 1630s. These were men who objected to several
aspects of both Reformed and Catholic theology and found in the Socinians
useful material with which to make their own religious choices.”755 Beale
like the Socinians insisted that “The most Judicious & most Learned, that I
have read, of Papists, Prelates & Zealous Protestants, (such as are called
Sectaries) doe affirme & undertake that our Saviour gave noe expresse
command concerning water-babtisme nor brought in any other rituall
precept concerning the breaking of bread the Cup or Supper of ye Lord or
any other elementary point of discipline.”756 He attributed his theologico
historical radicalism to his intense studies of “Eastern Wisdom” including
alchemy, astrology, mysticism, dreams and hermeticism. He contended that
Eastern asceticism, mysticism and self-discipline could prepare a seeker for
spiritual illuminations and divine revelations/intuitions. The history of the
‘eastern wisdom’ had shown that “one could condition oneself both to
receive such revelations, and to interpret them, through a ‘certaine
preparation of the minde & spirite, by humiliation of the flesh, & serene
attention, & humble reguard, & many other meanes & methods w=’’ may
bee layd downe ... to obtaine this intercourse of Heaven.”757 He like
Cambridge Platonist Joseph Mede and his successor Isaac Newton used
Achmet the Arabian’s famous text “Oneirocriticon” to decipher and
interpret dreams, pristine scriptural teachings and prophecies. 758 Beale, like
the hermit and mystics of his time Henry Hereford, believed in Prisca
Theologia, the pristine Unitarian, universal, cyclical theology and prophetic
tradition corrupted by pagan Christianity but preserved by the Middle
Eastern wisdom, the Islamic faith. Levitin noted that for Beale, “the figure
who everyone else would have agreed was the greatest enemy of early
Christianity turned out to be a better communicant with God than the early
Christians themselves. It is difficult to imagine an equally ‘radical’
historical claim in seventeenth-century Europe. And yet, Beale managed to
provide one, in his comments about Islam.”759 The Islamic faith was the true
heir to pristine, original Christianity of Jesus. He “wish[ed] that wee had
either more or lesse of Mahometanisme”.760 He further stated: “I confesse
their Doctrine more rationable, & their lives generally more righteous, than
many of the succeeding sects, that have rolld over one another in pretence
of confounding idoll Priests”.761 To Beale, Islam was not ideal but “morally
and theologically superior to modern, confessionalised Christianity.”762
Islam bore resemblance to Beale’s ideal of early pristine, rational, natural
and Unitarian Christianity, the faith which will be restored by Turkish
conquest of the Trinitarian, pagan Christendom. “I doe really expect, that
wee shall bee renderd vnder the feete of Turkes, both for our juste
chastisement & triall, & for their instruction & conversion. And in the
meane time I am resolvd to disowne any man to bee a Christian, or of our
sect, till hee bee an honest man mercifull, & [catchword: better].”763
Such sentiments were not confined to Beale but were widespread among
the English radicals. Many English were appreciative of Muslim morality,
rational discourse and devotions. “As for positive statements about the
morality and devotion of Muslims, these were relatively widespread, not
least among those associated with the Hartlib circle.”764 Many English
radicals accepted Muslims as the real inheritors of Patriarchal wisdom and
asceticism who rejected the supernatural, ceremonial Church Christianity
due to its pagan dogmas, cumbersome ceremonies and theoretical practices.
“Muslims, Beale contended, were to be considered Abrahamites’, who had
understandably revolted from Christianity, given the idolatry that had
infected it by the end of the sixth century, but who nonetheless ‘had yet
more of light by owr Lord Christ concerning the resurrection & future state
of felicity & hell, than was comon to all Abrahamites of old’. There was
thus a direct continuity between Islam and the ancient patriarchs whom
Beale so venerated. This idea, he told Hartlib, had been instilled in him by
Henry Hereford, the hermit of Buckberry Hill.”765 To many English
Protestants “Alcoran” proved Christianity.
Beale, the Anglican Chaplain of Charles II, was a closet Islamophile and a
radical Unitarian in 1650’s long before the radical Islamism of Henry
Stubbe (1670’s) and John Toland (1690’s). Levitin observed that “I am not
familiar with any other seventeenth-century thinker drawing such a direct
(and positive) relationship between the religion of the patriarchs and
Islam.”766 He further noted that “It is difficult to imagine a more ‘radical’
historical position in mid-seventeenth century Western Europe than one
which suggests that… Muslims had partially inherited true patriarchal
religion and that their conquest of European Christendom was both
imminent and, ultimately, positive. At this point, one might think that Beale
fits nicely into a standard definition of ‘radical’ Protestant: illuminationist,
individualist, tolerationist, and anti-clerical.”767 Beale wanted Unitarian and
Socinian reformation of both Catholic and Protestant Churches because of
their religio political affinity with Islam and with the original moral
Christianity of Jesus. “And this I have generally found, that such as are
touch’d with a dose of Socinianisme, (if scholars & studious) doe soone
become serious students & admirers of the first, & best Monuments of
Antiquity, I meane Christian. And since some Liberty must be indulged, tis
much safer yt wee take a relish of yt more authenticall Liberty, than addict
to ye wildnesse of novel phansy. And in this wee may with more reputation
keepe a safe distance from Rome ... then by bowing to Calvine, who hath
subverted the wholy body of old Religion, & utterly defaced the purity &
simplicity of Christianity. For hee it is, who hath corrupted all Power of
Evangelicall precepts, polluted & interrupted all streames of divine Love,
weakened all the promises, & disturbed all reasonableness of faith.”768
These mid-century radical traits were laid bare by the radical Islamophiles
such as Henry Stubbe and John Toland, as will be seen in coming pages,
and were permanently assimilated by John Locke and Isaac Newton into the
bloodstream of Anglican religio political theology, as John Coffey has
illustrated.769
Islam was part of English socio-political and religious revolutions. Paul
Hazard, the famous French historian of intellectual thought, summarised the
impact of Islam on the seventeenth century Europe very well. “They studied
the original texts and the result was that the Arab emerged in a completely
new light. They pointed out, these learned men, that so vast a section of the
human race would never have followed in the footsteps of Mohammed if he
had been no more than a dreamer and an epileptic. Never would a religion,
so crude and childish as his was reputed to be, have exhibited such vitality
and have made such progress. If, instead of giving currency to the falsest
and most misleading stories, people would go to the Arabs themselves for
information, they would perceive that Mohammed and his followers were
endowed with qualities of heart and mind that rendered them not a whit
inferior to the most illustrious heroes of the other races of the world. Look
at the evil things the Gentiles had reported of the Christian religion! Look at
the absurdities that were promulgated concerning it! So it is always when
things are judged solely from the outside. Doctrines which the
Mohammedans never professed were triumphantly refuted, errors they
never committed were exposed and condemned. But this sort of victory was
too facile by half. In point of fact, their religion was as coherent as it was
lofty and full of beauty. Nay more, their whole civilisation was admirable.
When the tide of barbarism swept over the face of the earth, who was it that
had championed the cause of the mind and its culture? The Arabs [...] The
change-over from repulsion to sympathy was the work of but a few years.
By 1708, the process was complete.”770 Hazard continued: “Then it was that
Simon Ockley gave utterance to an opinion […] Ockley denied that the
West was to be regarded as superior to the East. The East has witnessed the
birth of as many men of genius as the West; conditions of life are better in
the East. “So far as the fear of God is concerned, the control of the
appetites, prudence and sobriety in the conduct of life, decency and
moderation in all circumstances—in regard to all these things (and, after all,
they yield to none in importance) I declare that if the West has added one
single iota to the accumulated wisdom of the East, my powers of perception
have been strangely in abeyance.” This sort of thing gained ground. The
Comte de Boulainvilliers, with due acknowledgements to Herbelot,
Pococke, Reland and Ockley, compiled a Life of Mahomet in which the
change of attitude is seen to be complete. “Every nation,” he says, “has its
own peculiar type of wisdom. Mahomet symbolises the wisdom of the
Arabs. Christ symbolises the wisdom of the Jews.”771 Such was the
difference which Eastern wisdom and knowledge had made in Europe
during the long seventeenth century. The personal experiences of countless
merchants and Eastern manuscripts radically changed European perceptions
of Islam and Muslims.
The Church and state officials also greatly encouraged Arabic language
for missionary reasons, and Muslim scientific knowledge and manuscripts
due to their commercial and scientific value. Arabic study was also a
Christian theological affair. Arabic was considered indispensable for study
of Old Testament, philology and theology. Oxford Lord Chancellor - and
later Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud - spent his own money to
purchase Oriental manuscripts772, donated them to Oxford Bodleian Library
and established an Arabic press at Oxford.773 Even his enemy Oliver
Cromwell, and the parliament who hanged him, supported such a scholarly
endeavour under the influence of John Selden and Samuel Hartlib.774
“Cromwell’s parliament voted to give Cambridge University 500 pounds to
purchase a collection of Oriental books and another 40–50 pounds for
printing Arabic books. The heterodox puritan reformer and Oriental
manuscript collecter and distributer Samuel Hartlib was involved in these
purchases. One of his correspondents, Thomas Smith, wrote to thank him:
“not myself only but the whole Commonwealth of learning are eternally
obliged to you for your earnest & happy endeavours for the promotion of all
kind of learning especially Oriental.” At the time Hartlib was trying to
obtain Arabic and Syriac type faces for Cambridge, and a Marconite to read
difficult oriental manuscripts. Hartlib studied the Oriental books purchased
by Cambridge, along with ancient alchemical treatises as part of his attempt
to promote learning and restore the Garden of Eden, the goal of many of his
contemporaries. He was joined in these endeavours by Robert Boyle, John
Locke, and Isaac Newton, and a host of other early modern natural
philosophers, whose work contributed to the Scientific Revolution.”775
Hartlib was a close friend of John Milton who dedicated his tractate On
Education in 1644 to Hartlib.776 Both were students of Cambridge Platonist
theologian Joseph Mede. Hartlib was regarded as a “conduit-pipe” of
knowledge, the “hub of the axletree of knowledge” and as the “great
intelligencer of Europe.”777 He was a puritan reformer and a mystic,
interested in setting up egalitarian communities and schools of science. His
heterodox, pluralistic religious and political theology and republicanism
was suspected by the Crown. He was harassed and arrested in 1639 as a
puritan rogue plotting against the Church and Crown. In 1645 Hartlib was a
witness against Archbishop Laud for high treason. His anti-royalist role in
the English Civil War and Interregnum and extensive puritan circle was
appreciated and rewarded during the Commonwealth Republic.778 He
founded “the Office of Address in England through the financial support of
Parliament. The objective of this state-sponsored organisation was, ideally,
to arrange a system of intellectual correspondences with international
scholars and scientists who could supply rare books and manuscripts from
remote libraries. In this context, the aim of the Office of Address was,
according to Hartlib, to increase information on “matters of Religion,
learning, and all Ingenuities.”779 He was a close friend of Robert Boyle, Sir
Kenelm Digby, Seth Ward, John Wallis, Isaac Barrow, Henry More, John
Locke, Henry Stubbe, Isaac Newton and George Starkey.780 All were
enthusiastic about authentic ancient knowledge, uncorrupted revelation,
Eastern philosophy, theology and alchemy, universal Mana, mythical gold
making philosopher’s stone,781 a vegetative principle operating in the
natural world,782 magic and alchemy.783
Alchemy, Arabs and English Natural Philosophers
Alchemy of the seventeenth century was different than later scientific
chemistry;784 it was more occult than chemical and more Eastern than
Western. Alchemy was recognized in England as a science that had been
mastered by the Arabs. The allure of Eastern scientific knowledge,
especially of alchemy, was shared by the above sketched circle of natural
philosophers. The Hartlibian circle was the precursor and enabler of the
later Royal Society which continued alchemical pursuits.785 Francis
Bacon,786 Robert Boyle,787 Locke788 and Newton all shared this allure of
Eastern alchemy; in reality Boyle, Locke, Newton and some other Royal
Society fellows were obsessed with Eastern alchemy and knowledge. F.
Sherwood Taylor who, speaking about Newton’s alchemical attitude,
remarked that he was “in the fullest sense an alchemist. He conducted
alchemical experiments, he read widely and universally in alchemical
treatises of all types, and he wrote alchemy, not like Newton, but like an
alchemist.”789 William R. Shea noted that “R. S. Westfall offers striking
evidence that “Newton’s interest in alchemy continued unabated between
1670 and 1696, the year he left Cambridge to become Warden of the Mint.”
However, Newton “devoted merely two years, 1664-1665, to mathematics
and from that time on would only turn to it when solicited. He concerned
himself with optics for a brief period around 1670 but he never returned
seriously to it again. Mechanics and dynamics held his attention for a short
while in the 1660s and then only in the two and a half years that produced
the Principia. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this great work, which
we see as the culmination of Newton’s career, may have seemed to him as
an interruption or no more than a partial fulfilment of a much more
grandiose plan. Newton was convinced that there was an underlying unity
to alchemy and that a comprehension of the alchemical ‘work’ could be
achieved both by comparing the various symbols they used and by making
experiments.”790 Dobbs has shown that Newton’s interests in alchemy
continued until the last decade of his life. The philosopher’s stone,
transmutation of metals into gold, search for the animating vegetative
principle and control of natural phenomena through alchemical
experimentation were among the top priorities of these natural
philosophers; Middle Eastern, Arabic knowledge was considered central to
these pursuits.
Newton believed that Egyptian pyramids held the keys to profound
secrets; in the 1680s, he studied their units of measurement to unlock their
cubit in an effort to measure the circumference of the earth. Newton
supposed that the ancient Egyptions were experts in mathematics and were
able to measure the earth. He also believed that Solomon’s Temple carried
multiple secrets and symbolism for the future political events. Alchemy was
Newton’s gateway to occult ancient knowledge and wisdom. Other Royal
Society fellows followed suit. Sir Hans Sloane, who succeeded Newton as
President of the Royal Society, collected scores of alchemical books just
like Newton. Their printed works on alchemy were “but the tip of a very
large iceberg.”791
The Arabic books such as the Secret of Hermes792, also known as Emerald
Tablet, as Smaragdine Table, Tabula Smaragdina and the medieval best
seller Secretum secretorum - which was translated into English in 1528 by
Robert Copland - were very popular with the Royal Society’s natural
philosophers.793 They thought that “everything knowable was contained in
ancient sources. It appealed equally to Renaissance thinkers, who searched
for a prisca theologica (or prisca magia) as an alternative to what they
regarded as a bankrupt scholastic tradition. Moreover, books of secrets
promised to give readers access to secrets of nature and the arts which
might be exploited for material gain or for the betterment of the human
condition. Underlying them was the assumption that nature was repository
of occult forces that might be manipulated by using the right techniques.
The utilitarian character of books of secrets gave concrete substance to this
claim: unlike many of the recondite treatises on the philosophical
foundations of magic, alchemy, and the occult arts, which barely touched
base with the real world, books of secrets were grounded on a down-to-
earth, experimental outlook, and hence they held forth a real, accessible
promise of power.”794 This study of secrets of nature, alchemical
experimentation and occult magical powers led to later scientific revolution.
Medieval Muslim philosophers, natural scientists and medicinal experts
were models of merging theoretical sciences with practical endeavours.795
William Eamon noted that “Arab civilisation was itself the product of older
cultures, Syrian, Persian, and Greek, which in the course of imperial
expansion the indigenous culture assimilated through translation and
transformed by the dominating force of its official religion, Islam. Science
assumed a prestigious role in Islamic civilisation. Affirming the importance
of philosophy and natural knowledge in the hierarchy of knowledge, the
Arabs gave science a new legitimacy. By broadening its scope to include
practical disciplines that had not generally interested the ancients, they
reoriented science to serve new purposes. Mathematics aided commerce,
alchemy contributed to the development of chemical technology, and
medical theory forged a new alliance with pharmacy and public health.
Scientific method also changed. By incorporating the work of artisans and
instrument-makers, Arab natural philosophers enhanced their powers of
observation and measurement, applied mathematics to new problems, and
used experimentation as a methodological tool.”796 Francis Bacon, Newton,
Locke and others imitated the Muslim natural philosophers and scientists in
their utilitarian merger of natural philosophy with works of artisans,
methematicians and instrument makers. The early seventeen-century
scientific endeavours of London merchants, Greshamites and trademen
were closely identical to the Eastern patterns; the later science emerged out
of these alchemical and mundane experiments and efforts. Some of
Newton’s scientific discoveries, such as gravitational force, optics and
calculus were probably accidental consequences of his alchemical natural
and religious pursuits.797 Both Westfall and Dobbs have argued that
“Newton came to view gravity as an active principle by analogy with the
active alchemical agent.”798 The same is true about Boyle’s lifelong love
with alchemical experiments and their impact upon his scientific
discoveries and chemical procedures.
Boyle, using an old metaphor, “saw nature as a rare book of hieroglyphs,
containing many “veil’d truths” which might be read if we could decipher
the language; Robert Hooke spoke of peeping in at nature’s windows; while
Joseph Glanvill envisioned the opening up of an “America of secrets and an
unknown Peru of Nature.”799 The Baconian experimental science developed
out of occult natural and alchemical experimentation.800 The seventeenth-
century natural philosophers were not as precise, rational and scientific as
their later biographers have made them to be. They studied magical healing,
stroking, astrology, witchcraft, divination, sorcery, spirits, ghosts, fairies
and old prophecies as possible realities to be dealt with.801 Ann Talbot
observed that “it was by no means clear to natural philosophers of the
seventeenth century where the line lay between the natural and the
supernatural. Vast areas of the natural world such as biology, medicine and
even chemistry remained mysterious to them. Locke, Newton and Boyle all
engaged in alchemical experiments. From the perspective of the twenty-first
century their efforts may seem to have been at odds with their professed
aims as natural philosophers. If Newton was prepared to spend more time at
his alchemy than he did developing a theory of gravity then it might seem
that the scientific revolution owed more to mysticism and irrationalism than
it did to observation and investigation, and more to Neo-Platonism than to
classical atomistic theories.”802 The esoteric was integral to exoteric
knowledge, as B. J. T. Dobbs has well demostrated.803 Newton’s strong
belief in astrology finally led to his astronomy, and his alchemical
experiments were at the heart of his chemistry. The natural philosophers of
seventeenth-century England were products of their society which was
inundated with magic, sorcery, spirits and witchcraft.804 Boyle, Locke and
Newton believed in these invisible, irrational and misguided powers.805 To
the English virtuosity and natural philosophers nature was inundated with
occult forces; understanding such forces could enable them to control
natural phenomena. It was part of their religious curiosity as nature was not
independent of God but a manifestation of God’s signs and glory. The
nature hunt and curiosity became the hobby of the English virtuosity.806
Spiritual Alchemy
There was another side to alchemy. The Muslim philosophers, theologians
and natural scientists contended that alchemy had a spiritual dimension as
well. Spiritual alchemy purified and transmuted the human soul as natural
alchemy purified the metals and transmuted the base metals into gold. Ibn
Sina, al Farabi and al Ghazali used alchemical vocabulary to construct a
fully-fledged spiritual program of self purification; Al Ghazali’s famous
book The Alchemy of Eternal Happiness is a good example of such a trend.
Medieval Christendom also witnessed the same tendency regarding
alchemy. Martin Luther’s famous identification of alchemy with religious
pursuits and Biblical eschatological exegesis is telling.807 Francis Bacon’s
Utopia - Salomon’s House, Samuel Hartlib’s “Invisible College,” Newton
and natural philosophers’ alchemical pursuits were all geared towards
divine providence, religious felicity, self purification, eternal salvation and
religious reformation through experimentation, reason, revelation,
mathematics and ancient wisdom. They were doubtful about the spiritual
efficacy of Anglican Church’s supernatural, Trinitarian and incarnational
salvific scheme and elaborate system of rituals and ceremonies. They did
not see a Trinitarian, Triune God with three distinctive persons, wills and
consciousness in the unified nature; rather, they witnessed the hands of One
and Only God in all patterns and laws of nature and that One and Only God
they pursued through their alchemical and scientific experimentations.
Simplicity and unity, rather than Trinitarian multiplicity and confusion,
were their guiding principles. Dobbs has emphasised such a unitary, linear
and overarching purpose in all scientific and alchemical designs of Newton
and his fellows. “His goal was the knowledge of God, and for achieving
that goal he marshalled the evidence from every source available to him:
mathematics, experiment, observation, reason, revelation, historical record,
myth, the tattered remnants of ancient wisdom.”808
Alchemy went through such mystical and spiritual transformation during
the sixteenth and seventeenth century.809 E. J. Holmyard remarked that
during the late Renaissance period alchemical esotericism slowly developed
into alchemical praxis, into “a devotional system where the mundane
transmutation of metals became merely symbolic of the transformation of
sinful man into a perfect being through prayer and submission to the will of
God. The two kinds of alchemy were often inextricably mixed; however, in
some of the mystical treatises it is clear that the authors are not concerned
with material substances but are employing the language of exoteric
alchemy for the sole purpose of expressing theological, philosophical, or
mystical beliefs and aspirations.”810 The external natural and the internal
spiritual regeneration were one and the same truth sought by natural
philosophers, though natural regeneration was more pronounced at times.
Newton’s obsession with alchemy can be gauged from the fact that he
secretly obtained alchemical papers from the estate of Robert Boyle, who
was significantly invested in alchemy. Locke was executor of the Boyle’s
estate and provided Newton with the secret “loan” of these papers. Newton
was not the first of the age of reason but he was the last of the magicians.811
The occult alchemy was Newton’s chymistry. He was obsessed with
alchemy spending over 30 years of his life on alchemy related observations
and experimentalisation, far more than the time he spent on mathematics or
physics. He wrote over a million words on alchemy with his own hands,
and had perhaps the largest alchemy collection in England. He shared
Hartlib’s enthusiasm for occult hermeic and alchemical writings, and
engaged in secret alchemy fraternities and experimentation812, secretely
violating the laws against alchemy enacted by himself as the Master of
Royal Mint.813
Richard Popkin well explained what “Newton was doing in his most
puzzling papers on alchemy, astrology, theology, and various religious
subjects into the context of the mix of disciplines that existed and co-
existed all during the seventeenth century. In the period often interpreted as
the scientific ‘revolution’ when, according to long hallowed tradition,
rational science ‘rose’ and replaced medieval superstitions, we must
remember some facts. This was also the period when Johannes Kepler could
be one of the makers of modern astronomy as well as a leading astrologer;
when the prophetic interpreter, John Dury, could discuss how best to
discover a basis for certainty with Rene Descartes, whether in mathematics
or in the discovery of the proper method for interpreting Scriptural
prophecies; when Isaac Newton and Henry More could have had a
monumental falling out over how to interpret the vials and the trumpets in
the Book of Revelation; when Newton could undertake a trip to visit John
Locke just to present him a chart for interpreting the symbols in Revelation
and the chronological consequences thereof; and when Newton’s chosen
successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, William
Whiston, could deliver the Boyle Lectures on The Accomplishment of
Scripture Prophecy, using the best modern mathematical techniques to
estimate the probabilities as to when the remaining unfulfilled prophecies
would be fulfilled. All of these events probably seemed normal to the
seventeenth century participants though we today, now brainwashed by
Whiggish interpretations of the Enlightenment, may find it difficult to
fathom how our intellectual heroes of the past could have been so
misguided.”814
Respublica Mosaica, Prisca Sapientia and Prisca Theologia
Natural sciences, magic and religion were all lumped together. Avner Ben-
Zaken has demonstrated that Islamic Hermetical and magical manuscripts,
books and sources played a fundamental role in transforming discussions
about alchemy and magic into new concepts of rising inductive and
experimental philosophy. Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle
and Isaac Newton built on medieval Muslim literature and theories. The
philosophical foundations of modern science were laid down with the help
of Islamic civilization and concepts.815 Frances Yates argued that modem
science “rose” out of occultism. Yates had claimed that it was revived
Hermeticism which launched the modem scientific world.816 Her student A.
P. Coudert offered a different interpretation; she argued that “it was not
Hermeticism but rather a revived Gnosticism in combination with ancient
science which launched the outlook of Bacon, Comenius, Hartlib, and, later,
Newton. According to this revived synthesis of Gnosticism and science,
man was able to comprehend the universe by returning to a prisca theologia
or prisca sapientia uncorrupted by the centuries of pagan metaphysics,
kabbalah, etc.”817 Royal Society fellows such as Locke, Newton, Dury and
the Hartlibian circle’s misgivings about Biblical corruptions and historical
inauthenticity were at the core of this search for authentic prisca
sapientia.818 Their inductive philosophy and experimental natural science
was facilitated by the medieval Muslim alchemical and magical occult
literature.
Newton like Hartlib believed in a hidden prisca sapientia,819 a vast body
of pristine ancient knowledge in the occult Eastern philosophy, somehow
lost and forgotten during the centuries that came to be called the “dark
ages” of western civilisation and to be rediscovered with a scientific
approach and scriptural hermeneutics.820 They also believed in prisca
theologia, a doctrine about single, true, simple Unitarian ancient theology
which was also last during the Hellenisation and Romanisation of
Christianity.821 The famous Cambridge neo-Platonistic Joseph Mede, Henry
More, Newton’s Cambridge teacher Isaac Barrow, Newton and Hartlib
believed that “ancient knowledge from Egypt and Arabia was crucial in an
era of scientific discoveries and political changes; More, in other words,
was devoted to the alchemical tradition of the prisca sapientia supposedly
buried in eastern texts that predate the Mosaic account of creation. For
More and other Cambridge neo-Platonists, these mystical, non-Christian
sources, mostly hermetic and Arabic works from the twelve and thirteenth
centuries, can be reconciled with the basic monotheistic tenants of the true
apostolic Christianity.”822 Mede, More and Hartlib-like radical Henry
Stubbe were equally engaged in “a theological-political agenda in which the
eastern sciences were the key to restoring Christianity to its primitive
egalitarian condition, that of the Respublica Mosaica.”823 Hartlib laid the
foundations of Henry Stubbe and John Toland’s later quest for
Muhammadan Christianity, in collaboration with many Levant and East
India Company merchants during the 1640s. He was punished and isolated
during Restoration by Charles II due to his anti-royalist, Eastern republican
agenda and Cromwell connections. Robert Boyle dropped him from the
Royal Society under royalist pressure, because Hartlib was the ring leader
of anti-clerical natural scientists and reformers who believed that Trinitarian
Christianity was a corrupted form of the original Unitarian Christianity of
Jesus and that divine right monarchy and persecuting church was Roman
invention far from Jesus’ other worldly moral theology. Hartlibians wanted
to reform Christian Church and monarchy by rational education, pragmatic
tools and republican outlook; Eastern wisdom and knowledge were some of
their main reformative tools. They wanted to return to Moses’ Republic
through the uncorrupted Eastern wisdom embodied by Muhammad and his
followers. Religious radicals, natural scientists and Deistic looking puritans
were all part of this reformative scheme, with varying degrees and interests.
The 1670s obsession with Islamic monotheistic republicanism and 1690s
anti-Trinitarian controversies were extensions of 1630s and 1640s religio-
political radicalism. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 was in reality a
culmination of the 1640s English Revolution’s quest for limited monarchy.
The Respublica Mosaica, prisca sapientia, prisca theologia and Historia
Monotheistica were two sides of the same coin which promoted Islamic
monotheism, sciences and republicanism as the true reflection of that lost
body of knowledge and universal monotheistic prophetic tradition. This
radical ideology culminated in the works of Henry Stubbe and John
Toland’s Muhammadan Christianity, as will be discussed in detail in the
coming sections. John Locke and Isaac Newton were the silent partners in
this reformative scheme; to them all, Ottoman Islamic republicanism was
the reflection of Respublica Mosaica.824 Islamic Unitarian republicanism
was considered a solution to the European doctrinal disputes, ensuing
religious wars, supernaturalism, Church and state persecutions.
The Swiss-born, German-speaking physician-alchemist Theophrastus von
Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus (ca. 1493–1541), the English
alchemist’s ideal, once characterised Luther and the Pope as two whores
discussing chastity.825 European intelligentsia was weary of Christian
dogmatic supernatural theology as absolutist, divisive, irrational and
irrelevant. Alchemy, with its soteriological and natural functions, was
considered a viable alternate since the times of astronomers Johannes
Kepler and Tycho Brahe. English naturalists and natural philosophers found
religious solace in searching and demonstrating God’s wisdom in plants,
animals and countless other creatures of God as a movement away from
corrupted dogmatic, ritualistic and formal Church Christianity. Peter
Harrison aptly summarised that when “Thomas Sprat announced that the
members of the Society ‘meddle no otherwise with divine things’, he
immediately qualifies this by excepting from his prohibition considerations
to do with ‘the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator [as] display’d
in the admirable order, and workman-ship of the Creatures’. For Sprat, the
exclusion of discussions of ‘divinity’ was not motivated by a belief in the
irrelevance to experimental science of general religious concerns, but by the
desire to avoid unnecessary and pointless debates about technical and
indifferent points of theology and ritual. This stance, then, is entirely in
keeping with the Charter’s declaration that the Society’s endeavours would
promote ‘the Glory of God.’”826
The English alchemists collected and studied the alchemical works of Ibn
Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas,
Roger Bacon and other alchemists instead of Church Fathers and their
slippery slope Trinitarian theology. This trend climaxed in the early
members of Royal Society such as Boyle, John Dee, John Dury, Locke and
Newton. The occult nature of alchemical experiments granted them a sense
of freedom to pursue and develop their ideas away from the persecutions of
confused Church. Through alchemy they envisioned a universal
reformation, a spiritual enlightenment and a mystical revolution.
Individuals like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Comenius (1592-1670),
Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662) and Newton spent most of their time exploring
natural phenomena and conducting experiments at their laboratories. They
believed in a universal natural life force and energy such as “Mana,” “Light
of nature,” the vegetative force that permeated the universe and could
facilitate medical cure and maturation of metals into gold.827 It was a
“search for a unitary vision of the forces acting in the macrocosm and in the
microcosm, the belief on a hidden prisca sapientia in the occult philosophy
to be rediscovered with a scientific approach and the dispute with
materialistic philosophy.”828 Isaac Newton, in a letter of his
Correspondences, stated: “For alchemy does not trade with metals as
ignorant vulgars think, which error has made them distress that noble
science; but she has also material veins of whose nature God created
handmaidens to conceive and bring forth its creatures [...] This philosophy
is not of that kind which tends to vanity and deceit but rather to profit and
to edification inducing first the knowledge of God and secondly the way to
find out true medicines in the creatures [...] the scope is to glorify God in
his wonderful works, to teach a man how to live well [...] This philosophy
both speculative and active is not only to be found in the volume of nature
but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and
others. In the knowledge of this philosophy God made Solomon the greatest
philosopher in the world.”829
The Hartlibian circle, including Hartlib, John Dury, his son in law Henry
Oldenburg (Secretary of Royal Society), John Dee, John Evlyn, Robert
Boyle, Starkey, Locke and Newton, was actively engaged in alchemical
experimentation since the early 1660s. Arabic alchemical works and
theories were among the most discussed, analysed and practiced among this
elite group of natural philosophers. In reality alchemical pursuits and its
vocabulary were part and parcel of seventeenth-century English religion,
natural sciences and politics.830 The occult alchemical philosophy was well
employed by the radicals831 during the Civil War and Interregnum period,
but coopted by Charles II after the Restoration for different reasons. The
King initially wanted to portray himself as an enlightened figure and a
unifying force. He, like many other European princes, was heavily invested
in alchemy; he had his own chemist, laboratory and alchemical pursuits of
philosopher’s stone and tincture.832 He patronised Royal Society’s
alchemical-chemical experimentations due to several political and cultural
reasons.833 Alchemical pursuits, with their strong Eastern connections, were
royalist and radical priorities, but with different ends in mind. Charles II, a
secret Catholic, purportedly employed alchemy to intellectually and
financially support the Protestant Anglican Church and monarchy by
turning metals into gold, while the secret heterodox natural philosophers
used it to undermine the Anglican Church and Catholic-leaning Stuart
monarchy.
Boyle and Newton worked on mechanical explanations of alchemical
transmutations. Frustrated with Church’s theological squabbling, disputed
paths to eternal salvation and unintelligible doctrines, the natural
philosophers at times exaggerated the mystical and eschatolocial
significance of alchemy. Reform of natural knowledge, ideas about reform
of religion, man and society, collection of authentic knowledge through
experimentation and its proper dissemination became the aspired goals of
this enthusiastic group of natural philosophers. This new pattern of
socialisation and social cooperation gradually supplanted that of Church
socialisation and community.834 Natural scientists and reformists emerged as
the learned alternates for the confused, squabbling and irrational
theologians, the superstitious but absolute Church leaders. Christopher Hill
has noted that the scientists favoured the puritan, parliamentarian and
republican causes.835 John Brooke and Ian Maclean have demonstrated the
overwhelming religious heterodoxy, rational discourse and creative attitude
of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophers, scientists
and medical practitioners.836 This rationalisation trend led to purging of
alchemy from medieval quasi-religious aspects to more grounded objective
chemistry, even though the giants such as Newton and Boyle never even
hoped to transmute other metals to gold.837 Frances Yates noted that “As a
deeply religious man [...] Newton was profoundly occupied by the search
for One, for the One God, and for the divine Unity in nature. Newton’s
marvellous physical and mathematical exploration of nature had not entirely
satisfied him. Perhaps he entertained, or half-entertained, a hope that the
‘Rosicrucian’ alchemical way through nature might led him even higher.”838
The serach for prisca sapientia was truly a search for prisca theologia. S.
D. Snobelen and Rob Iliffe839 have amply demonstrated that such a religious
reformative scheme run through all of Isaac Newton’s scientific works.
“The General Scholium serves as public testament to Newton’s agendas for
natural philosophy and theology, even though these agendas are accessible
only to the highly adept reader. Not only is Newton at pains to champion an
inductive natural philosophy and to stress that ‘to treat God from
phenomena is certainly part of natural philosophy’, but he implies that a
correct understanding of God will jettison Trinitological formulations.
Ultimately for him, hypotheses in natural philosophy and religion lead to
corruption. Newton’s natural philosophy and his heretical theology are also
linked by this methodology. Just as a humble and inductive reading of the
Book of Nature leads one to the Creator, so a humble and inductive reading
of the Book of Scripture leads one to the One True God of the Bible. The
two reformations come together in the General Scholium.”840
The anti-royalist and anti-clerical republican ideology maintained that the
original knowledge of a universal matter, the common substance to all
bodies and forms, was revealed to Moses along with authentic monotheistic
revelation.841 The same universal knowledge was given to Jesus and his
disciples, but was corrupted by the Roman Church and Constantinian
politics. The knowledge was transmitted in parables, secret metaphors,
stories and tales and was preserved by the Arabs, especially from the ninth
century to the thirteenth century, in a figurative symbolic language.
Therefore, comprehension of Arabic neoplatonic and hermetical
manuscripts such as those of Jabir bin Hayyan were essential to decipher
the occult knowledge of alchemy.842 The mystical knowledge of Kabbalah,
Arabic Neoplatonism and hermetic corpus were essential to access the
original Respublica Mosaica and Historia Monotheistica. Deborah E.
Harkness observed that “Newton believed that such knowledge could be
increased by consulting ancient authorities who lived and worked when
human understanding had been less corrupted by the consequences of
Adam’s Fall. Newton hoped that his search through ancient texts would
yield a true religion and a true natural philosophy, both of which would help
to increase human understanding of the natural world as well as the
divine.”843
Near Eastern Knowledge and Biblical Hermeneutics
Newton, following his Cambridge predecessors and colleagues, did just
that. “In 1632, the English theologian Joseph Mede proposed a new avenue
for interpreting a text whose importance, for him and others, was literally
worldhistorical. The biblical Apocalypse, Mede announced, should be read
with the help of a Near Eastern book of ancient dream interpretations
attributed to ‘an Arab’ called Achmet. Once it was understood that John’s
prophecies were, on one level, an accurate prediction of the course of world
political history, Achmet’s book of symbols allowed the attentive reader to
cut with confidence through the Apocalypse’s morass of bloody seas,
horned beasts, and astronomical prodigies to determine exactly what part of
John’s prophecy was past and what was yet to come.”844 Achmet’s book and
interpretations reflected the authentic prisca sapientia.845 “Achmet’s
Egyptians, Persians, and Indians should carry the same exegetical weight as
the Greek-speaking Jews who translated the Septuagint, the Aramaic
speakers who made the Targums, or even the Arabic speakers of
Maimonides’ Spain.”846 Mede equated Arabian Achmet’s works with
Prophet Joseph’s dream interpretation expertise, explained the Hebrew
Bible through Achmet’s works and interpreted the Apocalypes with
Achmet’s symbolism. “If the Hebrew Bible could form a footnote for
Achmet, Mede was quite ready to turn Joseph and Achmet together into a
footnote for the Apocalypse.”847 Achmet became the established authority
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Indeed, Achmet’s
rapid rise to canonical stature – in the writings of Henry More, Isaac
Newton, Charles Daubuz, William Warburton, and others – suggests that he
answered a keenly felt discursive need for contemporary English
Protestants who would explain the meanings of Biblical prophecy.”848
Henry More, Newton and other English theologian’s techniques of dealing
with Biblical prophecies were completely shaped by Joseph Mede, and their
dependence upon Achmet was confessedly visible.849 Richard Popkin and
others have amply demonstrated this fact.850 Newton considered himself a
heir to Mede in millenaristic knowledge and biblical interpretations.851 His
sole dependence upon Achmet can be gauged from the following statement:
“Now although these interpretations by their analogy with one another &
resemblance to the things signified, may seem plain enough, yet that
nothing be wanting to establish them, I shall further show their consent with
the scriptures, & also with the translation of the Chalde Paraphrast & with
the ancient doctrin of the Eastern interpreters (of Dreams ) as it is recorded
by Achmet an Arabian out of the ancient monuments of Ægypt Persia &
India. For since these nations anciently bordering upon the Hebrews had
great affinity with them both in Language & manners, & therefore wee
scruple not to learn from them the use of words & phrases in the scripture,
much less need we scruple to learn from them the use of figurative
expressions wherin their severall nations were much better agreed than in
the language of the common people. For the Prophets without doubt spake
in a dialect then commonly known to the more understanding sort of men,
& many of their types & figures which are unusuall & difficult to us appear
by these records of Achmet to have been very familiar to those Eastern
nations; at least among the interpreters. And therefore esteeming it pertinent
to show the consent of our interpretations with the doctrin of these
interpreters next after their consent with the scriptures: I proceed.”852
The “Chalde Paraphrast” refers to the Aramaic Targums, paraphrases of
the Hebrew Pentatuech (Five Books of Moses) into Aramaic. Achmet the
Arabian refers to Achmet, son of Seirem, whose Oneirocriticon was a
compendium of dream-symbols and their various meanings to aid in the
prognostic interpretation of a ruler or official’s dreams.853 It was actually a
Christian Greek work based on Arabic dream books, as Maria Mavroudi
showed,854 but was wrongly attributed to and printed in the name of Ahmad
bin Sirien, the famous dream interpreter of Abbasid Caliph Mamun. Mede,
More and Newton knew it as the original work of Achmet bin Siriem. They
used the work as their gateway to unpacking the symbolic, figurative
biblical language and prophecies. Achmet and Middle Eastern language,
wisdom and knowledge were authoritative, established and authentic to
Newton.855 Paul T. Greenham observed that“ For Newton, this symbolic
prophetic language, the ‘Prophetic dialect’ was the key to understanding the
prophetic texts of Scripture, which were themselves keys to the rest of
Scripture. In his later discussion of the ‘Prophetick ffigures,’ in Keynes Ms.
5 (1680s), Newton stated that ‘John did not write in one language, Daniel in
another, Isaiah in third, & the rest in others peculiar to them selves; but they
all wrote in one & the same mystical language as well known without doubt
to the sons of the Prophets as the Hieroglyphic language of the Egyptians to
their Priests.’ Thus, ‘He that would understand a book written in a strange
language must first learn the language & if he would understand it well he
must learn the language perfectly.’”856 That language of both prisca
sapientia and prisca theologia was consolidated in the Middle Eastern
manuscripts like Achmet’s. Decoding that language and proper
understanding of the scriptures, natural sciences and Apocalypes would
usher the prosperous millennium increasing human knowledge, opulence
and spirituality. Middle Eastern alchemy, sciences, language, wisdom and
theology were central to such a universal reformation of decayed
Christendom. In short, Newton’s natural sciences were as much shaped by
the Middle Eastern wisdom and alchemy as was his Biblical hermeneutics
and theology.857
This reformative scheme of knowledge was a reaction to the unintelligible,
absolutist, persecutory dogmatic theology of both Catholic and Protestant
Churches and its replacement with mystical, tolerant, alchemical, rational
and observational natural knowledge.858 The simple Unitarian republicanism
of Islam was the true heir to Respublica Mosaica and Historia
Monotheistica859 and it was facilitated by the Oriental manuscripts solicited
and transported by the Levant Company chaplains, consuls and merchants.
The Levant and East India Companies enabled economic, intellectual,
mystical and religious enlightenment by transmitting Oriental knowledge,
ideas, culture and wisdom.860 They were integral part of “global early
modernity,”861 “connected histories”862 and Enlightenment.863 The British
Atlantic world was a “kaleidoscope movement of people, goods, and
ideas.”864
Overseas Trading Companies and Cross-cultural Diffusions
The Levant and East India Company facilitated such a trans-cultural
diffusion of Eastern knowledge and the travellers supplemented it with their
travelogues. Foreign travellers to the Muslim Orient were given fellowship
of the English Royal Society because of their knowledge and experience of
Orient. For instance, the French Huguenote traveller Jean Chardin865 settled
in England in 1681 as a result of Protestant persecutions by Louis XIV. He
was immediately appointed court jewller by Charles II because of his
knowledge of Oriental jewllery, knighted at Whitehall, married the daughter
of a famous merchant and elected a fellow of the Royal Society. “Upon his
arrival in London, Jean Chardin immediately became part of the most
prestigious scientific society formed in Europe. He received a visit from
John Evelyn, Christopher Wren, and John Hoskins, who asked him to
become a member of the Royal Society formed in 1660. The first written
trace of Chardin’s presence in London is his name, which is first recorded
in the minutes of the July 8 (or 18), 1680 meetings, in the Council Minutes
of the Royal Society of London for Improving of natural Knowledge. It is
within this learned society, devoted to science, that Chardin started his
writing project on Persia in the seventeenth-century scientific tradition.”866
He was involved in East India Company business, was sent to Holland as
Charles II’s envoy and became an authority in London on a number of
scientific fields. “His knowledge of exotic drugs, of Asian markets, and of
the flora and fauna of the East Indies was unsurpassed in England.”867 He
closely interacted with John Locke, Isaac Newton and other fellows of the
Royal Society, and was closest to Robert Boyle and John Evelyn. “He
discussed his thoughts on Persia with other fellows such as Isaac Newton
and Samuel Pepys, and it is documented that he participated in the new
scientific tradition that was being elaborated on by the fellows of the
recently founded Royal Society. Even if he did not frequent the Royal
Society very assiduously, he was in close contact with its intellectual
production.”868 This shows how valuable knowledge of Muslim Orient was
to the King, bishops, intellectuals and merchants. England was not yet a
power to be reckoned with and Orientalism was a prized subject. It was
very different type of Orientalism869 than the later nineteenth-century
Orientalism analysed and criticised by Edward Said in his famous 1978
book Orientalism.870 The England of the seventeenth century was importing
Eastern knowledge and wisdom along with silk, pepper and cotton. The
Orient was a source of Occident’s rise to power and global expansion, and
the Levant and East India Companies played a vital role in this
revolutionary transition.
The Levant Company greatly profited from the silk and spice trade; the
profit was worth the perilous treacherous trip from London to far distant
Muslim cities for these very young wealthy English merchants. The journey
was long, dangerous and full of risks; it took them months and years, and
countless hurdles, to make it to the Muslim East.871 Many died on the way.
Richard Grassby noted that “itinerant and overseas merchants were
particularly exposed to infectious diseases, like cholera, typhus, yellow
fever, malaria, dysentery and tuberculosis. Two-thirds of the factors in
Persia died within two years and in India, as Ovington put it, two monsoons
were the age of man […] It was merchant shipping which carried the
pandemic diseases; the cemeteries in commercial outposts all over the
world bore silent witness to careers cut short. Approximately 20 per cent of
merchants whose wills were proved at Canterbury died abroad or at sea,
though many of these would have lived a normal span.”872 The relative
despair and disgrace at home, the allure of the prosperous Muslim East, and
prospects of transformation and destiny propelled these rich Londoners into
long and perilous journies.
Foreign lands with strange people, culture, climate and religion were quite
risky. “Merchants who lived as resident aliens […] faced political coups,
rebellions, confiscation and requisition, interrogation as heretics and
massacre by lynch mobs. When travelling, they could be poisoned by
foreign competitors, captured by pirates and murdered or enslaved,
kidnapped by mutineers, imprisoned, often under harsh conditions, by
foreign governments as spies or hostages. Even in self-governing
settlements overseas, they lived behind fortifications; factors were expected
to defend their ships and goods and some died in the attempt.”873
Shipwrecks, piracy and captivity did not subside but increased by the
middle of the seventeenth century. The financial losses were cataclysmic.
“Some 390 ships were lost, 1625-30, 700, 1672-3, 4,000, 1688-97 and some
3,250 during the War of the Spanish Succession; the Johannah went down
with £70,000 in specie and the loss of the Levant fleet in 1693 was
catastrophic.”874 The financial situation in London must have been dire, and
the prospects of overseas profit must have been tantalising, for these rich
Englishmen to go through these perfidious ordeals. The present-day Muslim
world’s migration crises and the allure of the West are a sort of rehearsal of
the early modern European endeavours. The dangers involved in the
journey were worthwhile due to the prospect of profit.
The Levant Company “quickly became the richest and most powerful of
the London-based companies with the resources and authority to appoint
and fund the English ambassador to the Sublime Porte.”875 These traders
were as much involved in the business community of London as they were
engaged with the merchants of Aleppo and Istanbul. For instance, “The
merchants who engaged in the Aleppo trade represented some of the
wealthiest and most influential families in London and the same names
keep cropping up in the annals of the Company as directors, consuls and
factors. For a century the Levant trade was immensely profitable with
English woollen cloth and tin being traded initially for pepper and later for
cotton and silk. Aleppo was the source of raw silk, which was then
processed in England. In 1600 three hundred people were employed in
London in manufacturing silk cloth. By 1640 this number had grown to ten
thousand. However, as English trade with India and the Far East increased
so the Levant trade waned and petered out by the late 1700s. Throughout its
244 year history the English Levant Company had strong connections with
the Church of England.”876 Its merchants supported the Church
establishment and its chaplains supplied the Church leadership and English
intelligentsia with information about Ottomans, Islam, Eastern churches,
culture and trade. Quite a few of the overseas merchants’ children went on
to become bishops in the Church of England, and maintained close relations
with the merchant community. Some of the known Latitudinarian bishops’
close relations with known dissenting merchants are well-documented. For
instance, Anglican Archbishop John Tillotson (1630-1694) was son of a
puritan clothier and a tutor of Edmond Prideaux’s son. Prideaux was Oliver
Cromwell’s attorney general, the Commonwealth leader who abolished the
Church of England. Tillotson was a fellow of the Royal Society and a
Latitudinarian with rational, heterodox, Arminian tendeniec.877 Due to his
associations with Unitarian merchant Thomas Firmin, Stephen Nye, John
Locke and others Tillotson was accused of Socinianism, the charge he
denied in 1693.878
Many of the overseas merchants developed heterodox beliefs especially
anti-Trinitarian republican and pluralist thoughts as a result of their
interactions and discussions with their Eastern colleagues. Even the most
conservatives among them harboured anti-clerical and anti- persecutory
ideas, and strongly supported the reformation of Anglican Church and
monarchy.879 Their wealth, opulence and long international exposure to
Eastern Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims convinced them of
universally common moral elements in world religions, particularities of
regional religious traditions - including Christianity - and the overall
goodness of humanity. The Church claims of universality, monopoly of
truth and salvation and specific role in the salvation through Christ were all
analysed, debated and dissected. The Muslim interfaith and intrafaith
tolerance, acceptance and mutual appreciation were especially noted,
appreciated and propagated by these traders on their return to England. This
pluralistic republicanism was Islam’s gift to the persecutory Europe in
general, and England in particular. The same Islamic republicanism became
the subject of public outcry in England throughout the turbulent seventeenth
century. The radical as well as moderate religious, intellectual and political
leaders adopted it as their life mission and aspired goal, as Humberto Garcia
has well demonstrated.880
The Allure of Islamic World and English Identity Formation
The Muslim Empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served as
models of relative prosperity, diversity, mercantilism, cosmopolitanism and
republicanism. The Mughal Empire was the richest empire on earth when
Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador arrived there. “It was
certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any
comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached
Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’
due to Indian cloth imports. In comparison, England then had just 5 per cent
of India’s population and was producing just under 3 per cent of the world’s
manufactured goods. A good proportion of the profits on this found its way
to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making the Mughal Emperor, with an
income of around £100 million, by far the richest monarch in the world.”881
The Mughal capital was perhaps the largest city on Earth, with a population
of 2 million. Jesuit Fr Antonio Monserrate noted that with regards either to
size, population, or wealth it was second to none. “’Their cities are crowded
with merchants, who gather from all over Asia. There is no art or craft
which is not practised there.’ Between 1586 and 1605, European silver
flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a
year, for as William Hawkins observed, ‘all nations bring coyne and carry
away commodities for the same’. For their grubby contemporaries in the
West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping
in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning
that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.”882 The
Ottoman Empire was no less splendid and imposing. “Istanbul, described
by Fernand Braudel as an ‘urban monster,’ had a population of 700,000 at
the end of the sixteenth century. Naples reached 280,000 by 1595. Henry
Blount said of Cairo that it was “populous beyond all proportion.” In 1600,
London’s population was approximately 200,000 (and growing fast, thanks
to immigration from other parts of the kingdom). But other English ports
from which these Mediterranean-bound travellers sailed were tiny in
comparison; Bristol’s population hovered around 12,000 at the turn of the
century.”883 English, French and Dutch merchants were stunned by the
diversity, prosperity and breadth of the Ottoman, Mughal and Persian
Empires. To the English travellers the Ottoman Empire was “the greatest
that is, or perhaps that ever was from the beginning.”884 Rationalism,
commercialism, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and pluralism, which Max
Weber and others have identified as the bedrocks of modernity, were all
practiced by the Mughals, Ottomans and Persians before the seventeenth-
century European national states as Jack Goody has amply demonstrated.885
Islam and Muslims played an important role in the rise of the modern
West, especially Great Britain. The Britain of the early sixteenth century, as
seen above, was an isolated Isle with limited economic reach, systems and
resources. Its constant warfare with its Catholic neighbour France and
Protestant neighbour Dutch Republic in addition to Habsburg monarchy’s
hostilities had further drained its resources and potentials. Britain’s opening
to the Muslim world released that pressure and opened the doors of
prosperity and success. The accumulated wealth, cross-cultural experiences,
ideas, institutions and practices helped in stabilising Britain and propelled it
to its later imperial heights. The overseas traders played the role of an
intermediary and reaped the fruits of their hard work at home.
By 1650s, the overseas traders, especially the Levant-East India trading
complex, had risen to the highest leadership of the London merchant
community. Making their fortunes from the Ottoman, Safvid and Mughal
Empires for over the past seventy years, by the 1650s they had become
greatly rich and influential. They had encountered a Muslim world which
was far freer, open and pluralistic than the closed, uniform and persecutory
England. They tried to incorporate Muslim religious tolerance,
commercialism and egalitarianism to English society, playing an important
role in the civil war as well as in the Cromwell Commonwealth.886 John J.
Schroeder noted that “it is clearly evident that London was of paramount
importance in the financing of the First Civil War. London was not only a
wealthy city, but a city that had a ward organisation that could be used for
assessment and collection and which the authorities were willing to use.
London also controlled the surrounding suburbs and countryside, the
wealthiest area in the kingdom. Loans, willing or not, could be extracted
here on a large scale, and significant contributions could be obtained from
the livery companies. London was the administrative center for and the
richest source of assessments, sequestrations, and compounding. It
furnished trained administrators for the excise and the customs, and
although these men used their offices for their personal profit, they also
furnished money when Parliament needed it. Although it was the New
Model Army that finally brought the war to a close at Marston Moor and
Naseby, there never would have been a New Model Army without the gold
of London.”887 For instance, the anti-Royalist Lord Mayor, Isaac Penington,
the Levant Company Governer and a Puritan, raised a huge amount of
£130,000 in a short span of time (September of 1642) at the request of the
Model Army. “A further £100,000 was raised in London through loans in
1644, but by 1645, harassed by taxes and assessments, Londoners were
advancing money only for very special projects - for undertakings that
would contribute to an immediate ending of the war.”888 Alderman John
Langham, a Levant and East India Company man who lived and traded in
Turkey, was assigned treasureship of the Common Council and collected
huge amounts in taxes for the Army. “The customs, like the excise, were put
into private hands; Aldermen Thomas Andrews, John Fowke, and Richard
Chambers, and five London merchants were named as collectors of all
customs in England.”889 Thomas Andrews was deputy governor of the East
India Company (1657), John Fowke had adventures with East India
Company and Richard Chamber was a Turkophile who admired and
appreciated Turkish business ethics and severely criticised English business
practices. Chamber’s seditious assertations that ‘the merchants are in no
part of the world so screwed and wrung as in England; that in Turkey they
have more encouragement” were noted and punished by King Charles I.890
After the Revolution he was elected Alderman in 1642 and London Sheriff
in 1644. The Levant and East India Company merchants played a leadership
role during the Civil War and Commonwealth Republic. The famous
historian Robert Brenner noted that “indeed, in its formal republicanism and
its relative religious toleration, as well as in its militant commercial
imperialism, the Commonwealth was the near-embodiment of their interests
and ideals.”891
The Commonwealth Republic, along with its republican liberties, would
become the aspired goal and national slogan of the 1680s radicals and
Whigs, and merchants would be central to that pluralistic struggle for
inclusivism. The merchants, along with the gentry, benefited the most from
the English Revolution, as Christopher Hill has demonstrated.892 Religion
played a decisive role in the English Civil War and resultant
Commonwealth revolution. “While there were a host of economic, political
and social factors contributing to the civil wars, it was religious issues that
primarily drove the conflict.”893 The Commonwealth revolution was a
religious revolution894 against popery, idolatry and religious persecutions.
John Morrill, the renowned British historian of the English Civil War,
suggested that the English civil war was “the last of Europe’s wars of
religion.”895 The Revolution proscribed all the perceived monuments of
superstition and idolatry introduced by the Anglican Church.896 The
merchant groups were all for liberty of conscience, and leaned towards the
republican pluralism of the Muslim empires. Their independent religious
thinking, autonomous, voluntary modes of congregations, like the Ottoman
mosques, helped in breaking the monopoly of Anglican Church hierarchy
and increased their own participation in congregational matters.897 The early
English and Scottish Presbyterianism (from the Presbyterian form of church
government, which is governed by the representative assemblies of
elders)898 and its later radicalism and Unitarianism were reflections of
Eastern experiences.899
The merchants demanded religious tolerance and republicanism like the
Ottoman Empire, and pushed towards a freer, less hierarchical society.
Cromwell promised religious pluralism, freedom of conscience and
republicanism.900 To some historians such as Samuel Gardiner and Winthrop
Jordan, Cromwell was a champion of religious tolerance and the English
Revolution was a benchmark on the high road to liberalism and pluralism.
His religious settlements were antithesis of the Catholic and Anglican
establishments’ severe persecutory policies.901 With the Army victory,
religious independence became semi-official state policy.902 Initially the
Church of England was abolished, independent, autonomous congregations
were allowed and religious diversity was tolerated to an extent.903 To the
royalists and conservatives this was an Islamic, Ottoman and republican
revolution which destroyed the Christian Church and divine right
monarchy. Cromwell was behaving like Muhammad904 and the Puritans and
other dissenting sects were infidels bent on their international Ottoman
hegemonic conspiracy. To Cromwell tolerant, pluralistic religious outlook
was a reflection of “Godly Rule”, an achievement of the highest level and
Cromwell was Machiavellian Godly Prince, a good constable and a
Constantine.905
Cromwell was undecided about the manner of government causing
constitutional instability and political anxiety.906 His initial aggressive
commercial policies, novel religious outlook and anti-Anglican and
monarchic establishment directives turned the old society upside-down. It
was not free for all society though. Persecution of religious dissent was still
there, but lesser than the previous periods. The imprisonment of open anti-
Trinitarian Unitarian John Biddle and later banishment with pension instead
of hanging well demonstrates the difference between Cromwell and Charles
I. The relative “freedom of those years did allow a wide variety of religious,
political and social views to circulate across society […] while in 1640 just
22 tracts were printed, in 1642 the total was nearly 2,000. And the potential
of these to subvert good order was not lost on those concerned to see it
upheld, one writer noting in 1641 that the ‘ink-squittering treacherous
pamphlets’ produced by sects operating outside of the established church
‘are the main prop and pillar to uphold the sovereign unsavoury power of
their factious conventicles.’”907 William M. Lamont noted that “The Civil
War left a vacuum at the centre: one that the Presbyterians had wished to fill
with their discipline, and one that their Erastian opponents had wished to
fill with Parliamentary action. Now for the first time – under Cromwell-
there was a deliberate vacuum at the centre. Cromwell did not use this
authority to impose doctrine, but he did use his authority to prevent others
from imposing their doctrines. What one writer has described as ‘a curious
kind of ecclesiastical anarchy’ prevailed, in which there was wide variety in
the doctrine preached and in the organisation adopted.”908
Commonwealth Radicalism
The ensuing religious, social, economic and political instability brought an
explosion of divergent radical religious groups such as the Quakers,
Baptists, Diggers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Levellers and
Seekers raising radical questions about Christianity, Church, state and
society.909 The socio-religious storm was supplemented by the overseas
trade establishments and their changed perceptions of role of religion and
society. The overseas traders shared their personal experiences of the
Muslim world and how religious freedom and pluralism contributed to
freedom of conscience, social cohesion, peace, security and prosperity. The
radical religious groups popularised freedom of conscience and hatred of
imposed religious conformity, clergy and monarchy.910 To Orthodoxy, the
Quakers and Fifth Monarchits were anti Christian radicals like
Muhammad.911 By the 1650s they turned English society upside-down,
revolting against almost all established religious values and social norms.
Religious tolerance and republicanism were the declared common goals of
all radical groups and these egalitarian/republican goals were disdained by
the monarchists, High Churchmen and conservative nobility. The Army
kept things under control, while radical merchant groups and radical
religious sects supported the Army.
The early seventeenth century was also the time of cultural and material
revolution. The Levant and East India Company merchants had radically
transformed the English culture and society with their Eastern imports. The
“trade in material goods from the Islamic world changed life in early
modern Europe [...] Currants and carpets, coffee and tobacco, silk and
cotton, horses and weaponry, were all commodities that had wide cross-
cultural circulation and influence […] tobacco, sugar, coffee and tea;
currants, raisins, sweet wine and oil; cotton, wool and silk, both raw and
finished; carpets and cushions; dyes, spices and drugs; jewels and precious
stones; saltpetre for gunpowder […] members of the landed and leisured
classes in England were entertaining themselves by dressing up in ‘Turkish
habits.’”912 Islamic, culture, habits and imports were everywhere; countless
Indian, Persian and Ottoman words, both good and bad, were incorporated
into English language.913 Richard Eaton noted that “This was the height of
the so-called ‘calico craze’, when India’s cotton textiles were in feverish
demand in England and across Europe generally. Indeed, England’s
sustained commercial connection with India is seen in the many textile-
related Indian words that entered the English language in this period – for
example, dungaree, chintz, seersucker, calico, pyjamas, shawl, khaki,
cummerbund, taffeta, jaconet and bandana.”914
England became obsessed with Oriental stuff. “Imports from the Islamic
world were changing the ways that people in England lived. Drinking
coffee, imported from the Ottoman Empire, and tea, imported from the Far
East, became national habits. Textiles—English wool, Persian silk, Turkey
carpets, Indian cottons—were crucial commodities linking people in Britain
with residents of the Islamic world that changed the ways people dressed
themselves and how they decorated their houses.”915 The profit-driven
merchants imported every profitable item and the closed hierarchical
English society became intoxicated with Eastern novelties. The material,
cultural invasion and “Oriental Obsession” caused anxieties, especially to
the conservative royalists. The Indian cotton, designs, patterns, tea, tobacco,
Persian carpets and luxury items and Turkish attires, silk and coffee all
amplified the English uniformist and moralist anxieties. “The reasons for
those anxieties are perhaps not hard to find, for the consumption of these
novel and addictive drugs swiftly and irrevocably introduced new patterns
of economic, social, and cultural activity that challenged traditional ways of
life, redesigned urban spaces, and opened up unprecedented forms of public
encounter and sociability.”916 New eating, drinking and dressing habits
modified English identity, social positions, ethical values, religious ideas,
business principles, aesthetic qualities and socio-religious connotations. The
pious moralists railed against this revolution with religious zeal, obsession
and weapons.917 They connected the Eastern importations, imitations and
domestications with Islamic religion, imputing centuries of fears,
animosities and stereotype to loath the English consumer with Islamic
derogatory epithets. The pervasiveness of cheap, colourful Eastern textiles,
with huge varieties of patterns, earned their utmost scorn. “The traditional
English textile trades of the Tudor period were transformed by contact with
the Islamic world. Both an increasing range and quantity of imported raw
and finished materials, as well as developments in production and design
techniques, brought work and wealth, comfort and colour, to the daily lives
of Britons across the social ranks. Between 1590 and 1630, the number of
women working in silk production within greater London was estimated to
have risen from 300 to 14,000.”918 The gentry were as addicted to these
relatively cheap colourful patterns, as were the masses;919 the textile
revolution920 diminished traditional social classes, status and practices.
“What one historian has called a ‘“feverish” demand for indiennes,’ or
painted Indian cottons, raged throughout the century and sparked off
predictable controversies. Calico threatened domestic industries and was
considered morally suspect since Eastern imports were invariably luxuries,
and luxuries threatened traditional practices ‘and hence [...] virtue itself.’”921
The English public and private spaces were inundated with Islamic
imports. “We saw our Persons of Quality dress’d in Indian Carpets, which
but a few Years before their Chamber-Maids would have thought too
ordinary for them; the Chints were advanc’d from lying on their Floors to
their Backs, from the Foot-Cloth to the Petticoat [...] Nor was this all, but it
crept into our Houses, our Closets, and Bed-Chambers, Curtains, Cushions,
Chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes.”922 Calico
and printed cotton fashions became popular all over Europe, including the
Queen of England. “Calicoes, printed cottons, became fashionable
throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century, so much so that Daniel
Defoe exclaimed that even the queen of England was wearing the cotton
prints that had ordinarily been reserved for bed covers and for children and
maids.”923 Defoe noted that “these people’s obsessions with products from
India has now reached the painted calicos, which were formerly used for
quilted blankets and the clothing of lower class children. Today they are
even used by our finer women. The power of fashion is so great that we see
persons of rank wearing Indian cloths even though only the maids were
allowed to use them before. The queen herself has been seen in Chinese silk
and calico.”924 Seventeenth-century England was modernised by Mughal,
Persian and Ottoman fashion, knowledge and modernity.925
The Levant and East India company businessmen justified the change due
to economic benefits and financial gains; their influence and profits
continuously soared due to public consumption and support. These
controversies initiated discussions about legitimacy of wealth, luxury, profit
and commercialism. The merchants justified their worldly material projects
by quoting the Islamic religious concepts of lawful earnings, wealth
accumulation, expression and circulation, while the English conservatives
challenged the so-perceived anti-Christian devilish material impulses of the
Levant and East India company merchants with talks and sermons against
luxury and for humble living and earnings. The otherworldly Christian
teachings and saintly models were implied to stop the immoral Eastern
invasion but the consumer culture, inner strife and religio-political past and
persecutions of orthodoxy impeded the progress. Gradually the religious
dissent, radicalism and plurality gained strength, popularity and resources.
The merchant community stood for liberties, liberal socio-economic and
political policies while the orthodoxy vouched for uniformity, humility,
good moral English past and Christian way of life. Seventeenth-century
England was the Saudi Arabia of the twentieth century, and the English
orthodoxy was like the council of conservative ulamas (Muslim scholars)
hell-bent against Western and American cultural invasion. The imported
commercial consumerism and aggressive advertisement culture was too
threatening to the old cause, the English Christian way of life.
The resourceful and influential London merchant community was divided
into two main groups; the upper tier of the Levant and East India
establishments were pro-monarchy conservatives who supported stability
and peace, while the middle-class lower tier radical group aided anti
monarchy revolution. However, both groups agreed on religious pluralism,
pro-trade policies, as well as less formal, less ritualistic, less authoritative
and low-church ecclesiastic formulations. The Elizabethan strict policies of
required Sunday service attendance, religious police and courts flogging of
minor infractions, hefty fines and imprisonments were no longer acceptable.
Faith was a private matter, left to individual conscience and incentives like
the Ottoman world. Business deals were not dependent upon religious
affinities or uniformity; offices and public positions were to be given to the
most qualified and effective individuals, irrespective of their religion or
spiritual levels. Such was the Ottoman, Safvid and Mughal culture where
Jews, Christian Arminians and Greek Orthodox all were active partners in
the market economy, national and international trade. The English society
had very few foreigners and businessmen. Cromwell permitted Jewish
resettlement in England (1655-56) after a long absence with the hope of
converting them to Christianity. They were still hated and socially cornered.
That suffocating, persecutory and monolithic England needed to change.
The merchants and radicals insisted on a pluralistic society with freedom of
worship, movement and opportunities. They pushed for an egalitarian,
republican and freer society like the Ottomans. They got push back from
nobility and conservative royalists. The author of “The Famous Tragedie
King Charles I” bellowed:
“No marvell they lap bloud as milke and glory
To be recorded, villaines, upon Story.
“For having kill’d their King, where will they stay
“That thorow God, and Majestie, make way,
“Throwing the Nobles, and the Gentry downe
“Levelling, all distinctions, to the Crowne.926
Cromwell wanted union of believers and not pluralism or tolerance of
differing beliefs.927
Horrified by the socio-religious radicalism, instability and internal warfare
between Puritans, radical Protestants, Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and
Anglican conservatives Cromwell shifted towards authoritative impulses.
The hierarchical nobility was alarmed by the classless egalitarian,
pluralistic designs of merchants and radical secretaries. This radicalism was
stifled by the hierarchical nobility with the help of Cromwell
Commonwealth oligarchy. “If they had not been impeded in this, England
might have passed straight to something like the political settlement of 1688
- Parliamentary sovereignty, limited monarchy, imperialist foreign policy, a
world safe for businessmen to make profits in.”928 The history of England
from the middle to the end of seventeenth century was a history of
nobility’s struggles against the Popish, Louis XIV-like divine right
monarchy’s overarching authoritarianism on the one hand and merchants,
middle-class and radical dissenters’ zeal for real democratic, republican
empowerment of people or popular sovereignty on the other. Both extremes
were detrimental to hierarchical nobility’s authority and previleges and they
confronted them with enthusiastic unison. The so-called Glorious
Revolution was not that revolutionary for radicals or popular sovereignty.929
It was a transition of power from one monarch James II to a joint monarchy
of Mary and William III. It was the victory of nobility (parliament) over
popish monarchy, but not the triumph of popular sovereignty over
parliament and moanrchy. It did not abolish monarchy, but only limited its
scope and powers; it just restored old rights and previleges of nobility and
did not initiate new ones.930 It did not grant religious tolerance to dissenters,
but persecuted them.
Many overseas traders and radicals were for popular sovereignty and
religious tolerance instead. Both groups of overseas traders (elites as well as
middle class radicals) frequently quoted the Ottoman pluralistic model, its
ensuing socio-political stability and economic prosperity. They were fully
supported by the American colony merchants. In fact, the later American
merchant confederation took over the radical leadership and pushed for
more autonomy and liberty. The so-called pluralistic Islamic republicanism
and revolutionary egalitarian agenda of the 1650s continued throughout the
latter half of the seventeenth century, but mostly clandestinely. Radicals
such as Henry Stubbe, who fought in the Crowell Army and was a protégé
of the republican Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1613-1662) (the
Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor, the leading republican
parliamentarian of the Civil War and a confidant of Cromwell) was a
connection between the American and Eastern merchant’s republicanism
and Turkism. He defended religious tolerance based on economic factors
and heterodox, dissenting traders’ roles and contributions to English
economy. He would keep the egalitarian fire alive till his death in 1676. The
radical pluralist republicans such as Shaftesbury, the first Earl, his protégé
John Locke; Algernon Sidney, Lord William Russell and other moderate
and radical Whigs and dissenters such as the Socinians and Unitarians
would lead the movement to the end of the seventeenth century and
beyond.931
On the other hand, the High Church monarchist party vehemently opposed
religious pluralism as leading to anarchy and insisted upon religio-political
uniformity of One King, One Church and One Nation. “Religious toleration
is the greatest of all evils, thought Thomas Edwards in 1646. It will bring in
first scepticism in doctrine and looseness of life, then atheism. If a
toleration be granted, all preaching will not keep heresies out. ‘No man
knows where these sectaries will stop or stay, or to what principles they will
keep.’ Later he wrote the considered words: ‘We are in a far worse
condition than when the enemy was in the height of his success and
victories at the taking of Bristol, or ever since the Parliament began.’”932
They blamed Cromwell as the new rabble-rouser “Muhammad,”933 his
tolerant religious policies and permission of publication of English Quran
as Turkish conspiracy against the Christian religion and nation.934
The Cromwell Commonwealth failed to fulfill its promised religious
pluralism and republicanism935, and Cromwell became the Lord Protector of
England936 dissolving the Rump Parliament by force in 1653 and imposing
his strict policies in a military,937 dictatorial fashion,938 “leading to a
restoration of the rule of the gentry, and then of King and bishops in
1660.”939 The radical theology of religious radicals and radical
republicanism of political activists was too threatening to the gentry’s desire
for status quo. John Milton, the great supporter of pluralism and republic,
wrote his The Readie & Easie Way 940 but his Paradise was Lost941, as will
be discussed in details in the later part of this book. Cromwell died in 1658,
but his son Richard was not cut for leadership942 and 1659 saw enormous
anarchy and persecutions.943 The Levant-East India trading complex, and
even radical Whigs like Shaftesbury, turned their loyalties to monarchical
restoration for the sake of stability and balance of power,944 went to Holland
to invite the King and helped in restoring Charles II to the English throne945
with promises of religious toleration, freedom of conscience and
indulgences. De Krey has observed that the “restoration of monarchy in
England was as much an effort to re-establish ‘parliamentary government’
as it was an effort to re-establish the crown […] The royalist settlements in
England, Scotland, and Ireland were partial and punitive settlements that
failed, almost from the beginning, to resolve the political and religious
instability they were intended to overcome.”946
Restoration of Monarchy and Dialectical Struggles
The Restoration was facilitated by the republicans and radicals to ensure
parliamentarian rule and Protestant tradition. It was an extension of the
republican agenda of the 1640s. “What was restored in England in 1660
was, in fact, the unsteady partnership between crown and parliament that
the Long Parliament had sought to impose on Charles I in 1641, after a
decade without sessions. The English Restoration may have been a reaction
against sectarianism, republicanism, the Army, and the fiscal excesses and
‘arbitrary government’ of partial parliaments; but it was not a reaction
against much of what the Long Parliament had achieved, in its first session,
against Charles I’s mode of government.”947 The monarchy returned in 1660
bringing Charles II in power after nine years of exile in France, Netherland
and Spain.948 The King showed an unrelenting hatred for his father’s
murderers; he had Cromwell’s corpse dug up, hung in chains, and
beheaded. Cromwell was defeated, but the love for republicanism,
rationalism, religious tolerance and freedom were not. The Revolution and
Interregnum had intellectually and permanently transformed England, and
English society was divided into numerous ideological groups. The
religious and political radicals demanded abolition of Anglican Church and
divine right monarchy, restoration of religious tolerance and popular
sovereignty. The religio-political moderates strove to establish a Venetian-
type oligarchy where parliament, gentry and merchants played active roles
in limiting the Crown and Church’s authority. The center-right
conservatives could live with a mildly authoritarian Church and monarchy
for the sake of continuity, stability and peace but limiting it by the
parliamentarian authority. Both groups advocated religious tolerance,
rationalism and low-church natural theology. The extreme right royalists
attempted to establish divine right monarchy, High Anglican Church,
supernatural dogmatic theology and elaborate ritualism. The far-left radical
republicanism and popular sovereignty were defeated due to their
destablising effects; stability, security and peace were preffered through
restoration of a relatively limited monarchy. The ensuing warfare between
the parliament and Crown resulted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
later constitutional victory of the parliament that heralded the
enlightenment. Science, enlightenment and modernity were all products of
English Revolution and Interrgenum. Christopher Hill noted that “the
radicals were defeated, but science survived. ‘All before 1650 is ancient,’
the historian of technology declares, ‘all after modern.’”949
Charles II promised religious tolerance but could not deliver it; he was an
opportunist who rode popular sentiments for his political gains. The
monarchy was demystified due to the English Civil War and Charles I’s
execution. The Crown maintained public support with an image of
moderation, respect for constitution, parliament, local governments, civil
liberties, urban citizenship and charity. This was just the façade. For Charles
II and a number of his powerful courtiers “toleration was a tactic for
controlling the population, and it was usually wedded to a long-term
conformist policy.”950 He also restored the Anglican Church lock, stock and
barrel, again an opportunistic move to galvanise support of Anglicans and
preserve his divine right prerogatives. The alliance between the King and
Anglican Church proved fatal for the dissenters. Charles II longed for an
authoritative Catholic England just like his father Charles’, and his 1662
Act of Uniformity and the 1664 Conventicle Act crushed religious
dissent.951 The Anabaptists, Seekers, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and
Socinians were imprisoned, slaughtered and tortured.952 In 1672 he flexed
his muscles against the parliament, but was resisted by Shaftesbury and
Anglicans. After realising his army’s disloyalty and parliament’s pressure,
Charles offered tolerance for both Catholics and Protestant dissenters,
excluding radical dissenters such as Socinians and Unitarians. He wanted to
release pressure from his Catholic co-religionists by his tolerant policies,
along with the Protestant nonconformists to increase support among the
Catholics and nonconformist Protestants. The move was blocked by the
Anglican Church and Parliament. “For eighteen months he fought for this
moderate settlement only to be defeated by the determination of the rigorist
Anglican majority in the Cavalier Parliament, by the lukewarmness of his
advisers, and by the self-destructive behavior of Richard Baxter and the
Puritan leaders.”953 The Parliament enacted the Clarendon Code to shore up
the position of the re-established Church of England. “The Church of
England was effectively restored as well, with trappings such as church
courts. Many Presbyterian and Independent clergymen were ejected from
their pulpits, and members of all Protestant churches except the Church of
England became known as Nonconformists. Efforts by the king to relieve
pressure on Catholics were thwarted by Parliament with measures such as
the Test Act of 1673, which required Church of England orthodoxy from all
officeholders. Panics such as the Popish Plot of 1678 led to the execution of
many Catholics. Much of the rest of this reign and that of James II, who
came to the throne in 1685, was spent in jockeying for position between
Protestants and Catholics.”954 The decades of the 1670s, according to N. H.
Keeble “quickly slipped into disappointment, disillusionment and
resentment,”955 and brought England’s old troubles back to the forefront.
Socio-political and religious instability were the norm inside England,956
while outside England the traders and colonisers focused on business and
expansion. Religious coercion was the norm inside England, while the
Levant and East India company merchants were enjoying religious
tolerance and freedom of liberty in the Muslim world. Mark Goldie has
stated that “Restoration England was a persecuting society.”957 De Krey
observed that the “most violent persecution of Protestants since the 1550s,
in both England and Scotland, actually occurred in the mid-1680s. The fact
that this persecution was carried out by other Protestants made it no easier
for dissenters to bear.”958 Debates about religious tolerance and coercion
inundated England during the 1680s. The Crown as well as Anglican
Church’s insecurity led to severe persecutory policies. A large number of
nonconformists and dissenters, over a million according to Algernon
Sidney, supported the Whig parliamentarians due to Charles’s religious
persecutions.959 The Presbyterians, Independents joined the Baptists,
Quakers, Unitarians and Socininas to secure a freer denominational future.
The Anglican Church and Protestant politicians were wary about Charles
II’s secret Catholic leanings. The patriotic MP’s and parliamentarians felt
that Protestantism was under siege due to Catholic universal monarchical
designs of Louis XIV. Charles II’s support of Louis XIV’s war of 1772-
1774 against the Dutch quicly became unpopular. Many Reformed
Protestants, within and without the Anglican Church, maintained that the
Anglican clergy also preferred coercive Catholicism over Protestantism.
They felt that Charles II was repeating the pro-Catholic authoritarian
policies of his executed father. Sir Robert Filmer’s pro-divine right
Patriarcha and Tory authors Sir Roger L’Estrange and John Dryden’s
royalist wrtings were opposed by the works of John Locke, James Tyrrell,
William Penn, Henry Neville, Slingsby Bethel and others. A storm of anti-
Catholic and anti-monarchy pamphleteering gripped England during the
1680s. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Letter Concerning
Toleration were the products of 1680s. The Whig opposition of 1679-1681
to Charles’s arbitrary government and anti-Protestant agenda were meant to
stop French Catholic popery and influences.960 Jurgen Habermas “located
the first fully functioning modern public sphere in the commercial and
political world of post-1689 England.”961 The print, publications and
coffeehouses facilitated merchandising of politics and engaged the public
attention to possible Catholic French interventions. Charles ruled without
the parliament after 1681. He purged the government of Whig sympathisers,
manipulated London Sheriff’s elections, installed loyalists in county
governments and severely persecuted Whig republicans such as Algernon
Sidney and Lord Russell. The Levant Company merchant Dudley North -
who spent over 20 years in Turkey - was installed as London Sheriff,
oversaw the trials of Sidney, Russell and other dissenters and later on
monitored and developed Charles and James II’s fiscal and trade policies.
East India Company Governor Josiah Child was another loyalist who
played a significant role in securing loans, formulating trade policies and
financial instruments for Charles and James II. They supported Charles and
James II’s tolerationist policies though, and might have been a force behind
such pluralistic and relatively republican actions. Their support of the King
divided the Company into loyalist Tories and opposing Whigs. The
successful trade ventures of Levant, East India and other overseas
companies and their custom and tax money enabled the Crown its long-
running financial shortfalls. Charles II flexed his muscles to an arbitrary
style of government, just like his Catholic French cousin Louis XIV.
Charles II’s secret promises of conversion to Catholicism,962 his being on
six million French livras salary of Louis XIV to thawart Dutch policies,963
his brother and heir James, Duke of York’s open Catholicism and Charles’s
persecutory policies sparked the Exclusion Crises in which the Whigs
insisted on excluding James from the throne and the Tories supported his
inclusion. England was divided between polar political tendencies of Whigs
and Tories. Shaftesbury964 and other radical Whig’s desperate Rye House
Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683 resulted in the brutal execution of
many Whig leaders such as Sir Thomas Armstrong, Sir William
Russel,965Algernon Sidney, James Holloway, John Ayloffe and exile of
others such as Sir John Cochrane, Robert Ferguson, Earl of Shaftesbury,
John Locke and many others.966 The conservative royalists, Anglican and
monarchical establishments blamed Whigs of executing the international
conspiracy of Islamic republicanism, overthrowing the monarchy and
Anglican Church to replace it with Ottoman Unitarianism and pluralism, as
Humberto Garcia has amply demonstrated.967 Charles dissolved the
Parliament in 1681 and ruled with an iron fist till 1685, when he died as a
childless Catholic. He was succeeded by his openly Catholic, hardheaded
but brave brother James II (1633-1701) who ruled with absolutist mindset in
the name of divine right monarchy. “James was in fact a bigot. His
government of Scotland in the early 1680s had seen a most severe
repression and extensive use of judicial torture against Protestant Dissenters
(‘conventiclers’). Worse still, James believed himself to be a moderate.”968
He tried to use popular radical pluralistic sentiments to galvanise support
for his monarchy; the Catholic King decreed tolerance of Catholics and
Protestant nonconformists such as Quakers, Baptists and
Congregationalists,969 a tiny minority in the Protestant majority country
seeing “an opportunity to transform the English nation and to liberate his
co-religionists by leading a public campaign for liberty of conscience.”970
This was by far the most liberal treatment of dissent. “To win over the
Dissenters, a Declaration of Indulgence was issued giving them full
religious freedom.”971 He also tried to install Catholics and loyalists to city,
town and county offices by hook or by crook. His active military duties in
the Catholic French and Spanish armies against the Protestant English
armies of Cromwell, his open Catholicism and authoritarianism made him
suspect from the outset and his pro Catholic toleration policies added fuel to
the fire.
James’s toleration policies had profound impacts in the decades to come,
but backfired during his time.972 He required the Anglican bishops to read
the decree publicly in the Church services. This was a bad time to impose
Catholicism or toleration of dissent on the Protestant majority. His French
Catholic cousin Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685,
persecuting and maiming thousands of French Protestant Huguenots and
expelling between 200, 000 to 400,000. Around 50,000 of them settled in
London as refugees. Considering the move of James II as a Catholic anti-
Reformation hegemonic plot, seven Anglican bishops petitioned to be
excused. “The great majority of the English clergy followed the lead of the
seven bishops in refusing to read the king’s Declaration during divine
service.”973 The historian Mark Goldie has dubbed this earlier phase the
“Anglican Revolution.”974 The Bishops were imprisoned in the Tower of
London but soon released as a result of public and Whig pressure. The birth
of James’ son James Francis, conspiracy theories about the botched birth,
and his potential of inheriting the English Crown and continuing the
Catholic absolutist monarchy enraged the anti-Catholic rioters and Whig
MPs.975 They demanded his removal and replacement by his Anglican
daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. Prince William
was invited976 to replace James as the English King. William landed in
England on November 5 of 1688 with 35000 men, supported by Protestant
army officers and nobility, and was declared a joint monarch with Mary.
The Parliament abolished the monarchy by birth, exiled James II to France
and established William of Orange and Mary as the sovereigns appointed by
the parliament.
The Glorious Revolution, Anglican Monarchy and Church
The bloodless Glorious Revolution977 ended the long English Catholic
dynasty and declared that no Roman Catholic would ever be ascending to
the English throne and no English monarch would be allowed to marry a
Roman Catholic wife. This way “the substantive acceptance of
parliamentary monarchy was achieved.”978 It was not a real republican
revolution, with popular sovereignty and religious tolerance for all, but it
curtailed monarchical absolutism and gave parliament authority in the
scheme of governance. The result was a limited, constitutional monarchy. It
took England almost a century and countless human lives to replace
Catholic divine right monarchy with a limited parliamentary monarchy, and
it would take another century or so before England gave religious tolerance
and liberty to non-Protestant dissenters such as Catholics, Unitarians and
Socininans. The Penal Law against them was lifted in 1770 and Catholics
were allowed to vote for and sit as Members of Parliament in 1829, and
(along with other nonconformists) to take up Oxford and Cambridge
fellowships in 1871. “In 1974, the law was changed to clarify that Roman
Catholics were once again permitted to hold Wolsey and More’s office of
Lord Chancellor, and in 2013 changed again to allow a (hypothetical)
Catholic to marry the heir to the throne.”979 England was not as enlightened
until the nineteenth century as Whiggish historians have made it to be.
The monarch was still powerful but not the sole authority. It was a limited
monarchy, an extension of the English Civil War and Revolution’s
Commonwealthism. The parliament, with its upper and lower houses,
shared the authority. For the first time in English history the monarch was
to be under the legislative powers of the parliament; this was considered
revolutionary. “The Glorious Revolution involved three basic issues: who
should be king of England? What should be the nature of the kingship or in
what ways should the government be reformed? And what should be the
relationship between the Anglican Church and other Protestant groups?
Also important was the question of the nature of the Convention, that is, the
body irregularly elected in January 1689 to settle the nation’s affairs.
Underlying these issues were theoretical questions concerning succession
theory, allegiance, consent, conscience, and the concepts of trust and
original contract.”980
Henry Stubbe in the 1670s and John Locke, Deists, Socinians and
Unitarians in the 1680s responded to these fundamental questions in light of
the century long English debates about Ottoman Islamic republicanism and
religious pluralism, as will be detailed in the coming pages. This way a
century-long struggle between the Catholic minority and the Protestant
majority, between an absolutist monarchy and republican leaning
parliament and between the absolutist Old Regime and republican outlook
came to an end. It also mitigated the century-long uncertainty, division,
mistrust, instability, insecurity and religious polarisation. The Glorious
Revolution was a “turning point. It may have achieved little that any of the
parties sought after or fought for. It may have done even less to transform
political and social institutions. But it deeply affected the intellectual
values, at least of the political élite.”981
The Church of England lost its old triumphalism, self-assurance, pomp
and might. “Unable to punish those who were not its members, and unable
to compel men and women to be its members, the Church of England was a
spent spiritual force.”982 Milton’s Lost Paradise was at least partially
regained. The republican cause achieved partial triumph over the theocracy.
“John Milton heroically confronted a God who appeared to have guided his
people in the 1640s and 1650s only to betray them in 1660. Paradise Lost
looked at the Omnipotent Creator who let man fall, Paradise Regained
looked at the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, at the false worldly
ways in which Man might proclaim the gospel. Perhaps republicans had
been tempted into the wrong paths. Samson Agonistes, most poignantly of
all, studied a man given great gifts by God who failed to use them in His
service. Just as Samson dallied with Delilah and was shorn of his strength,
so the republicans had been distracted by the things of the flesh in the 1650s
and had missed their chance to do God’s will.”983 In the 1680s, the
republican cause was partially triumphant.
During the long half-century since the Interregnum, Henry Stubbe and
John Toland Islamised Christianity. Toland and John Locke demystified
Christianity and Locke and Newton rationalised and naturalised
Christianity. The processes of Islamisation, demystification and
rationalisation of Church Christianity were mutually interconnected,
interrelated and intertwined through the persons of Henry Stubbe and
Shaftesbury and groups such as Deists, Unitarians and Socinians. They all
agreed that the historical Church Christianity was the root cause of all
problems; the original Christianity of Jesus was nothing but a moral
anthology. Consequently, the Christian faith was uprooted from its
supernatural, Trinitarian, Incarnational, Augustinian and medieval
foundations, depoliticised, anthropomorphised and moralised. “Christianity
was being depoliticised and demystified. The characteristic Anglican tracts
of the late seventeenth century had titles like The Reasonableness of
Christianity and Christianity not Mysterious. Where God had been in the
very warp and woof of nature and life, he now became the creator who set
things going, and the spirit who worked within the individual and kept him
obedient to moral rules. Sermons stressed the merits of neighbourliness and
charity.”984 Instead of Church doctrinal uniformity the Ottoman pluralism
was propagated. Religious tolerance was demanded and defending and
religion was privatised and sort of secularised. “From the Dissenting side,
John Locke, pleading for religious toleration, defined a church as a
voluntary society of men, meeting together to worship God in such fashion
as they deemed appropriate. Religion had become an unthreatening matter,
almost a hobby. The authorities need not concern themselves with what
consenting adults did in private meetings. The Puritans of previous
generations could not have conceived anything so anaemic.”985
An absence of monarchical abuse and Church policing allowed English
Protestants to think for themselves, decide for themselves and make use of
their will, power and energy. The anthropomorphic revolution brought focus
to man and his immediate surroundings, and diminished the power and
reach of persecuting Church and monarchy. The focus was transferred from
the heavens to the earth, from supernaturalism to naturalism and from
unintelligible mysteries to rational moralism. This was an intellectual and
theological revolution. “When John Locke wrote in his second Treatise of
Government (1690) that ‘all men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom
to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they
think fit without asking the leave or depending upon the will of any man’ he
was proclaiming a message only made possible by the disillusionment with
old ideals, but a message which was to make much possible in the decades
to come.”986 The reformation of Reformation was partially complete. It
removed the last hurdle by demolishing the theological scaffolding of the
supernatural absolutism both secular and spiritual. This theological and
intellectual revolution was facilitated by the Islamic anti-Trinitarian, moral
and republican belief system espoused by English merchants, traders,
politike, intellectuals, dissenters and philosophers due to specific English
circumstances and conditions.
The seventeenth century, due to its religious and political instability, was
ripe for ideas of stability, peace, prosperity and religious accommodations.
Religious tolerance and freedom of conscience were the two main themes
discussed throughout the long seventeenth century,987 and were championed
by different groups at different times for different goals and agendas.988 In
the early part of the century, it was used by the merchants, Protestant
nonconformists and Catholics against the hegemonic and persecutory
designs of the Anglican Church of Archbishop Laud989 and absolute
monarchy of Charles I, while in the later part of the century it was
employed by Charles II and James II to galvanise support of Protestant
nonconformists, some pro-diversity Anglicans and to release pressure from
the Catholics. The kings’ tolerant policies were now opposed by the
Anglican Church establishment and Whig parliament. The debate about
religious tolerance and pluralism which was fueled by the Levant and East
India merchants’ experience in the Muslim world remained an integral part
of English social, intellectual, religious and political landscape throughout
the century. It was internalised and domesticated to the extent that by the
end of the century it became an integral part of English social imagination
and religio-political vocabulary. The Levant and East India company
merchants’ long experience with Ottoman, Mughal and Safvid religious
pluralism and republicanism was handy and provided helpful ideas and
tools to English politicians, intelligentsia and religious leaders to analyse,
dissect, appropriate and reject according to their specific needs and
agendas.
Religious tolerance was the bedrock of the early English Enlightenment
and its debates, arguments, examples and precedents were reflected through
the Muslim world’s realities, experiences, religious concepts and moral
philosophy.990 The seventeenth-century early English Enlightenment and its
foundational principles were reflection of such a cross-cultural
metamorphosis. To understand the nature and extent of this cross-cultural
exchange and assimilation process let us look at some of the seventeenth-
century English institutions such as Turkish coffeehouses, their Islamic
connections, their egalitarian impacts and how they were equally
popularised and demonised in the English society.991
Turkish Coffeehouses
Coffee came to England along with Eastern silk, spices, cotton, tobacco,
sugar, horses and other exports. The Eastern wealth, imports, cultural habits
and ideas revolutionised the English culture, society and thought patterns.
The popular English culture of seventeenth-century coffeehouses
epitomised the “Oriental Obsession” and ensuing social, cultural and
political transformations.
Soon after its introduction in the 1650s the Turkish berry and
Muhammadan soup became symbols of republican dissent and
egalitarianism. “How does one explain the rapid proliferation of
coffeehouses in Restoration and Augustan England? The political
turbulence of the period was partly responsible. The coffeehouse arrived in
England three years after the execution of Charles I, and its growing
popularity coincided with the Stuart restoration, the Exclusion Crisis, the
Glorious Revolution, the bitter partisan struggles of Anne’s reign, and the
explosion of political journalism that marked the Augustan era. Born in an
age of revolution, restoration, and bitter party rivalries, the coffeehouse
provided public space at a time when political action and debate had begun
to spill beyond the institutions that had traditionally contained them.”992 By
the 1680s, coffeehouses had become the centres of political activism.
“During the Exclusion Crisis, as is well known, each political move that
was made, and some that were not, was revealed, debated, celebrated, and
vilified in the coffeehouses.”993 Cities, universities, towns and villages were
engrossed in coffee culture and consumerism; this exclusively Ottoman
novelty had stormed English markets and sociability. During the Exclusion
Crisis it was estimated that throughout England, 100 tuns of coffee were
consumed per year. Coffee had “so generally prevailed” within three
decades of its introduction “that bread itself, though commonly with us
voted the staff of life, is scarcely of so universal use.” One pamphleteer
marveled that “the dull planet Saturn has not finished one revolution
through the orb since coffee-houses were first known amongst us, yet ‘tis
worth our wonder to observe how numerous they are already grown, not
only here in our metropolis, but in both universities and most cities and
eminent towns throughout the nation.”994 Scotland and Ireland were as
fascinated with coffeehouses as the mainland England. “Coffeehouses
existed not only in the metropolis but also in the universities, county towns,
and trading centers throughout the three kingdoms.”995 Coffee represented
the extent of cross-cultural exchanges and transformations which resulted
from the overseas trade.
Levant Trade and Coffee
The Levant merchants, chaplains, ambassadors and English travellers
consumed Turkish coffee while in the Ottoman Empire and brought it to
England along with their pluralistic and republican ideas. William
Biddulph,996 Dr. Edward Pococke,997 Henry Blount and others wrote about it
and popularised it among the virtuosi. The first coffeehouse “Angel” was
opened in Oxford in 1650, along with the Oriental scholarship and vibrant
experimental, alchemical and scientific community.998 The first London
coffeehouse was established in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee, the Greek servant of
renowned Levant Company trader Daniel Edward who lived and traded in
Izmir, Turkey during the 1640s. Edward was known for his Puritan anti-
royalist tendencies and resisted royalist policies and faction in Izmir.999 On
his return home, Edward used to invite his big circle of family and friends
to his place, entertain them with Turkish coffee and delights and share with
them his Ottoman experiences and stories. He opened the first London
coffee shop in his servant’s name as the Company rules did not permit his
retailing business.1000 It became a sudden hit, both as a medical cure as well
as a facilitator of social interactions. There were over 2000 coffee houses in
London by the end of the seventeenth century, in addition to countless
others all around the country.1001 “No wonder John Houghton thought that
“there are few trades in London that employ more houses, and pay greater
rents,” than coffeehouses.”1002
The coffeehouse was not just another alehouse, tavern or inn but a novel
institution in itself.1003 It was a specifically Turkish place with hanging signs
of “the Turk Head”, “the Sultan Head,”1004 “the Sultaness-head”, Turkish
tobacco pipes, sherbet, tea, chocolate and even opium.1005 Francis Bacon,
Thomas Herbert, Henry Stubbe, William Petty, Robert Southwell and other
virtuosi leaders praised opium, its soothing energy, virtues, potentials,
medicinal uses and admired the ways in which “the drug putatively made
the Turks ‘strong and long in Venus exercises.’”1006 Stubbe also wrote
extensively about the medical benefits of chocolate served at the
coffeehouses. “Unlike ‘hot’ coffee, chocolate was thought to be cold and
dry, and prone to provoking the blood flow, all of which were conducive to
the stimulation of sexual ardor in Galenic physiology.”1007 Stubbe, in his
The Indian Nectar, Or a Discourse Concerning Chocolata,1008 refuted the
puritanical critics of chocolate on medical bases.1009 The medical discussion
around coffee, chocolate, tea, sherbet and opium revolved around Turks,
Ottoman and Mughal Empires. Some of the coffeehouses were named after
Ottoman cities such as Smyrna. The seventeenth-century London coffee
houses closely resembled the coffeehouses of Istanbul with their roasted
coffee’s special aroma, Turkish Sultan’s portrait, Quranic verses and Islamic
symbols.
The Englishmen were exposed to Turkish Islamic culture and symbolism
while in the coffee shop. They represented the Anglo-Ottoman cross-
cultural metamorphosis blurring the geographical separation into a virtual
cross-cultural experience and interaction. The burgeoning and bustling
coffeehouses epitomised the allure of Islam and Ottoman power in an
instable, insecure and impotent post revolution England of 1649-50. The
egalitarian, non-hierarchical, cross-cultural and diverse atmosphere of the
coffeehouses with their entertaining stories and narrations of egalitarian
pluralistic Ottoman society and religious freedom were threatening to a
hierarchical English society inundated with religious, social and political
persecutions.1010 The coffeehouse clientele included people from diverse
social backgrounds including virtuosi, scholars, intellectuals, journalists,
parliamentarians, lawyers, poets, merchants, city workers, sailors, patrons
and gentry without any social distinction or discrimination.1011 First come
first serve policy and causal seating arrangements empowered many lower
class individuals and gave them a sense of freedom. Coffeehouses became
the Noah’s Ark of London. All sat like their Ottoman counterparts, sipped
the Turkish berry and shared their ideas, experiences and concerns.1012
These “Penny Universities”1013 transformed the socio-political and
intellectual landscape of Restoration England;1014 England was turbaned.
“The 1650s had introduced coffee houses into England, and with coffee
came the turban, since coffee house keepers often wore turbans as an
advertising ploy.”1015 Gerald MacLean noted that “sometimes proprietors
dressed as Turks or Arabs; sometimes these proprietors were Levantines. It
was not uncommon to see even English coffee house customers wearing
turbans, and indeed, Ottoman headgear became a fashionable alternative to
the ubiquitous wigs sported by post-Restoration men of fashion. The
portraits of many writers and artists such as Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope
and William Hogarth show these men wearing turbans.”1016 Countless
Levant Company traders, workers, officers, travellers and converts put on
their Turkish dress with turban and headed every night to their favourite
coffeehouses.1017 In “1663 Edmund Verney was keen to obtain an authentic
turban via his brother in Aleppo […] In November 1666, Samuel Pepys was
evidently surprised to find Sir Philip Howard ‘dressing himself in his night-
gown and Turban like a Turke; but one of the finest persons that I ever saw
in my life’. Clothing clearly continued to signal national and religious
identity, yet John Evelyn was evidently pleased when, in October the next
year, King Charles appeared at court in ‘the Eastern fashion of Vest [...]
after the Persian mode.’”1018 The so-called “turned Turk” phenomenon
increased already existing English anxieties due to its connection with
conversions to Islam.
“When Coffee once was vended here,
The Alcoran shortly did appear:
For our Reformers were such Widgeons,
New Liquors brought in new Religions”1019
For the Anglican Church leadership, monarchists and proponents of socio-
religious conformity, the coffeehouses, the Mahomettan berry and Turkish
symbolism were nothing short of a cultural and intellectual invasion.1020
“This was the means by which the Great Sultan, still very much a pretender
to universal monarchy in high church rhetoric, could undermine the English
polity by perverting English religiosity.”1021 Coffee bewitched the English
consumer, turning them into Turks.1022 The Turk Heads represented Islam’s
dynamism and cultural vitality in the face of a divided, instable and
insecure England both politically and religiously. The cheap, causal,
inclusive coffeehouses with their Turkish habits, religion and cultural
invasion had dramatically transformed the English socio-cultural landscape
of the 1650s as the Indian textile, tobacco, spices and Barbary horses and
sugar had done in the 1630s. To some, it compromised English national
cultural identity,1023 and the coffee-drinking apes compromised English
identity and religion.1024 “The “hot love” between the brown “Groom
[coffee] […] [a] Turkish Renegade” and its “fair [...] Christian […] Bride”
bewitched the whole of the nation and turned it into “Whore[s]” in “Bawdy-
houses [coffeehouses].”1025
The coffeehouses provided a sober alternate and emancipatory
environment to the hierarchical and suffocating English society, serving as
democratic bodies and pluralistic sociability places. They enhanced English
civility, polity, manners, socio-communicative skills, general knowledge
and specialised skills. To their opponents the “heathenish liquor”, the
“smoke hole” had turned the Englishmen into “perfect Turk” denying
“Divinity,” abandoning their “morality [...] piety and virtue.”1026 The
supporters contended that the coffeehouses provided them with an escape
mechanism from socio-cultural and religious constraints of their suffocating
society. They talked about the cultural, religious and intellectual superiority
of the Turks over English, who were marred in supernatural unintelligible
dogmas and restrained by their Church and state. This was threatening to
both English Church and state especially because the religious dissenters
such as the Quakers, Seekers, Socinians and Deists frequented the
coffeehouses. They used this public sphere for their clandestine ideas and
plans.
The Centers of Dissent
The coffeehouses were also the meeting place of political dissenters and
trouble makers. For instance, the republican James Harrington and his Rota
Club daily “met at Miles’s Coffeehouse in the New Palace Yard. James
Harrington, along with his friend and fellow traveller in republican politics,
Henry Neville, were both early aficionados of the new coffeehouses and
they quickly saw the new institution as a suitable venue for the propagation
and discussion of their ideas and their politics.”1027 The coffeehouses were
the new public sphere of freedom and dissent. “A prototype of the
coffeehouse as public sphere was the Turk’s Head in London, where the
arch-republican James Harrington founded the Rota Club in 1659. The club,
whose other members included John Milton, took its name from
Harrington’s proposal in his utopian Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) to
establish term limits for Members of Parliament. The club met around an
oval table and debated political issues of the day. Samuel Pepys, a frequent
visitor there, described how in the heat of debate the members would decide
an issue by casting their votes in a ballot box. The radicalism and proto-
democratic sociability of the Rota Club helps explain why Restoration
coffeehouses came to be viewed as havens for political and religious
dissent. Puritan writers reinforced this reputation by repeatedly praising the
sobering virtues of coffee over the intoxicating effects of alcohol. These
very qualities led royalist critics to associate coffeehouses with incessant
talk, places where irresponsible chatterboxes subjected the affairs of church
and king to relentless criticism.”1028 Harrington’s republican state ideal was
discussed and cooked in the coffeehouse environment and in the company
of overseas traders, travellers and officers who had firsthand experience of
the Ottoman pluralism and republicanism.
The Anglican Church leadership and royalists encouraged the alehouses
“for its mellowing and tranquilizing effects”1029 while the republicans, anti-
clerical and anti-monarchy radicals lauded the coffeehouses for their
soothing and sobering qualities. One poet complained that “by this Arabian
berry, / Comes the neglect of Malago and Sherry.” It was said that “an
honest drunken cur” - a common Restoration type - “hates coffee as
Mahometism, and thinks it a lesser sin to be drunk, than to drink to make
him sober.”1030 The Church and Crown wanted people drunk, easy-going
and busy with sports because it enabled them to rule the masses with
ease.1031 The egalitarian, republican, Muhammadan, emancipatory coffee
culture was detrimental to the Church and Crown’s absolutists policies. The
subversive, radical and clandestine coffee culture was totally identified with
- and hated like - Muhammadanism. Coffeehouses remained the hotbeds of
anti-Anglican Church and anti-monarchy sedition throughout the second
half of the seventeenth century. “This discursive ideal provided a model for
coffeehouse conversation for the rest of the Stuart era.”1032
The subtle, subversive, radical culture of the Rota Club was carried to
other scholarly bodies such as the Royal Society. Michael Hunter has
estimated that “eleven out of twenty seven, or nearly 40 percent, of the
identifiable Rota-men went on to become Royal Society Fellows,”1033 the
Society which was established by Charles II in opposition to Rota Club and
its republican politics.1034 Henry Stubbe chastised the Royal Society
members due to their perceived royalism and clericalism.1035 He was too
Muhammadan and radical to countenance royal loyalties or clerical
establishments as the Royal Society Fellows tolerated. The exclusion from
the Royal Society of Thomas Hobbes, Stubbe’s model and friend, was
another bone of contention. On the other hand, the Royal Society members
did not consider themselves as courtiers but independent scholars and
scientists. Fellows like Robert Boyle engaged with Stubbe on multiple
levels, but did not subscribe to his religio-political radicalism. They
intended a gradual, systematic, invisible, epistemological transformation
without radically breaking with traditional religio-political structures. They
were far more calculated, cautious and scrupulous than Stubbe’s firebrand
radicalism. They equally populated the coffeehouses, though. For instance,
John Locke, Christopher Wren, Peter Staehl of Strasbourg, Dr. John Wallis
and some other Royal Society members were all independent coffeehouse
habitué from their Oxford days.1036 “Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Henry
Oldenburg, and other members of the Royal Society could often be found in
coffeehouses, particularly Garraway’s, discussing ‘philosophy.’”1037 The
Royal Society Fellow’s saturation with Eastern manuscripts, languages,
alchemical experiments, natural sciences and strong business ties with the
East India and Levant companies were further supplemented by Turkish
coffeehouses. Coffee houses were like “a kind of Athenian school.”1038
Their intellectual, clandestine reformation efforts were discussed in the
coffeehouse environment. They researched about the health impacts of
coffee, assembled in coffeehouses and shared the alternative society of the
coffee culture.
Their Oxford fellow and later critic Henry Stubbe was also addicted to
coffeehouses. “The physician and polemicist Henry Stubbe scoffed at the
naivete of the foreign inquiries and armchair speculations made by the
incipient Royal Society, calling them ‘‘newe speculators’’ with little
experience of foreign lands or cultures.”1039 He ridiculed and criticised both
the Royal Society and the Rota Club members for indulging in theoretical
speculations without proper knowledge and experience of the foreign lands,
unlike the overseas traders.1040 Henry Stubbe, who fought in the army of
Oliver Cromwell, was a coffeehouse habitué who used the coffeehouses as
springboards for his subversive anti-Trinitarian, anti-clerical, anti-
monarchy, anti-absolutist religious pluralism, political republicanism,
Islamism and Turkism. He came across countless turbaned Turks, anti-
Trinitarian merchants, Muhammadan Christians and disgruntled English
virtuosi in his daily visits to various coffeehouses over a long period of
time. His firsthand knowledge of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, Turkish
religious pluralism and republicanism through his frequent encounters with
turbaned Turks in the coffeehouses was supplemented by his access to
Oxford Bodleian Library’s Arabic and Islamic manuscripts - where he
worked for a while - and his exposure to Dr. Edward Pococke’s relatively
pro-Islamic objective teachings and works. John Toland, another radical
enlightenment leader, was notoriously connected with coffeehouses which
he abandoned only very late in his life due to severe chastisement from
friends and foes. The subversive activities of the so-called Muhammadan
fanatics dressed in Turkish attires, frequenting the coffeehouses decorated
with Turkish symbolism and inundated with discussions of religious
pluralism, rationalism and republicanism, to the conservatives, was nothing
short of Antichristian cultural and religious revolution. Unable to stop the
repulsive Ottomania, the Anglican and monarchist opponents regarded the
foreign coffee places as dangerous, sheltering vermin like “the mad Fifth-
monarchy [...] Harringtons Rota,” [and] virtuosi,”1041 and “antichrist[s],”
undermining Christian culture.”1042 To them, these aspiring Turks were anti-
Christian and anti-England.1043
State officials reacted to this Islamic invasion of the English society by
ordering the burning of hundreds of copies of Alexander Ross’ English
translation of the Quran, Socinian Recovian Catechism, persecution of
Unitarians, Quakers and their parliamentarian, academician and knightly
sympathisers.1044 The widespread coffeehouse negative sentiments against
the Trinity, Bible, Church and monarchy were worrisome to the religious
and political authorities and they suppressed them with strict blasphemy
laws.1045 The coffeehouses became the Internet, Reddit and Google of the
seventeenth century. The English inflammatory Islamophobic anxieties,
anti-Turkish, anti-Oriental and anti-republican rhetoric culminated in
Charles II’s 1675 ban on coffeehouses.1046 But the republican, Whiggish
coffee culture was so widespread and powerful that the ban was rescinded
just a week later.
Coffeehouses all across Britain were the center of Francophobic, anti-
Catholic and anti-popery propaganda. Shaftesbury’s fight for constitutional
monarchy, Protestant succession, civil liberties and religious toleration were
all waged from St. John’s coffeehouse. The Whig republicanism of
Shaftesbury, Earl of Salisbury, Thomas Papillon, Samuel Barnardiston and
their pedigree like Henry Stubbe and John Locke was introduced,
organised, disseminated and popularised from their base in St. John’s
Coffeehouse. Shaftesbury’s 1670s neo-Harringtonianism,1047 Whig politics
and toleration philosophy were all cooked in the coffeehouse. It replaced
Harrington’s balanced republic of the Few (the King) and the Many (House
of Lords) with a “three-way balance between the One (the king), the Few
(the House of Lords) and the Many (the House of Commons). The Lords
would play an especially crucial role, preserving the balance between the
king and the Commons by preventing the possible corruption of the
Commons by royal patronage. Playing this role, the Lords would be the
representatives and purveyors of ancient prudence, preventing the court, the
representative of modern prudence, from destroying the constitution and
establishing monarchical absolutism.”1048 Neo-Harringtonianism was not
geared towards establishment of a democratic republic but towards a
reformed, curtailed, limited constitutional monarchy. It was an extension of
the mid-century English Revolution, and its political juntas aspired Venetian
style oligarchy. Both Henry Stubbe and John Locke sought for limited
monarchy, worked for Shaftesbury and compiled letters and pamphlets for
him. John Locke’s A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the
Country (1675) written for Shaftesbury and owned by Shaftesbury was
distributed in all coffeehouses.1049 Stubbe’s Further Justification of the
Present War with the Netherlands (1673), A Further Justification of the
Present War against the United Netherlands, Newberry Case (1673)1050 and
“The History of the United Provinces of Achaia,”1051 all written on behest of
Shaftesbury were discussed, distributed and popularised at London
coffeehouses. Shaftesbury, the Founding Father of the Whig opposition
party along with his pedigree, such as Locke and Stubbe, were fully
engaged in demanding religious tolerance, freedom of conscience and
limited monarchy, the fundamental themes of later Enlightenment. The
bedrock fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment were probably pushed by
overseas traders, owned by their Whig ideologues and cooked and
disseminated through the public sphere of the Turkish coffeehouses.
The royalists, High Church leaders and the Crown all joined their efforts
to stop the radical agenda. “Convinced that coffeehouses were hotbeds of
anti-royal, anti-Anglican sedition, Charles II and his ministers launched a
campaign to suppress them. In a letter to parliament (1673) Charles
condemned coffeehouses as ‘pernicious and destructive,’ places where
people ‘sit half the day, and discourse with all companies that come in of
State matters, talking of news and broaching of lies, arraigning the
judgments and discretion of their governors, censuring all their actions, and
insinuating into the ears of the people a prejudice against them.’ In 1675, as
the earl of Shaftesbury and his Whig followers plotted opposition strategy
from their headquarters at John’s Coffeehouse in London, the crown issued
a proclamation closing the city’s coffeehouses. But the measure provoked
such a storm of protest, both inside and outside parliament, that the crown
was forced to revoke it ten days later.”1052 Both Charles II and James II1053
went to great length to suppress the sadistic, seditious, rebellious,
antichristian, atheistic and heterodox culture of the coffeehouses.1054 They
were fully supported in this by the High Church leadership and high-flying
royalists. To them, it became a national security issue, as they blamed the
coffeehouse owners of participating in the international republican
conspiracy, and blamed some of leaking national security secrets to
Algerian pirates and English renegades.1055
Contrary to that, Whig historians, leaders and later on David Hume,1056
considered the ban as absolutists’ efforts to suppress freedom of conscience,
liberty, rational discourse and pluralistic world view. The historian James
Ralph thought the goal was “to extinguish the light of reason, [and] subdue
the power of reflection.”1057 Coffeehouses fostered a culture of sobriety,
clarity, alertness and hard work in the drunken English society, and
popularised a culture of freedom, liberty, rationality, pluralism and
importance of public sphere. The authority of the Church and state was
challenged and finally subdued by this culture. It also created a mercantile,
business and commercial culture like Istanbul, Cairo and Izmir
coffeehouses. “Coffeehouses also belonged to the world of commerce,
which is another reason why coffeehouses had become so popular in
London by the early eighteenth century.”1058 The Lloyd’s coffeehouse
transitioned into Lloyd’s of London and the Jonathan Coffeehouse
supplemented the London Royal Exchange.
They also served as the print media centers of the seventeenth century.1059
The English frequented the “coffeehouses to find jobs, conduct business,
exchange information, or celebrate important events of their lives. These
were places where baptisms and marriages were celebrated, newspapers
circulated, stock traded, crimes plotted, votes solicited, ministers attacked,
labourers employed, wars debated, freemasons initiated […] principle
public space, open to anyone who could pay for their drink.”1060 They were
the modern British pubs of the seventeenth century. The coffeehouses
became the “bourgeois public sphere”1061 and the “public sphere of the
Enlightenment”1062 diffusing Enlightenment ideas through the print media
and open sociability. They promoted English Enlightenment and its
republican values.1063 It represented a decisive break with the Old Regime’s
religious and political persecutory policies and forged the way for a more
inclusive, pluralistic and republican society.1064 The London coffeehouses
were firmly identified with radical pluralism, republicanism and anti-
monarchism. The identification was so close that the end of republicanism
looked like the end of coffeehouses too. The Muhammadan berry became a
republican allegory.
Coffeehouses and Stuart Monarchy
The coffeehouses and their rich merchant owners played an important role
in the overthrow of Stuart monarchy.1065 The new monarch Prince William
of Orange was no less concerned with the radical environment and foreign
culture of the coffeehouse. “The accession of the Protestant and Stuart
Queen Anne in March 1702 did not quell anxieties about the role of public
opinion among the kingdom’s political elite, but the early eighteenth-
century state could afford a greater degree of complacency with regard to its
coffeehouses than the more seriously embattled regimes of Charles II,
James II, and William and Mary.”1066 The Turkish coffeehouses played a
significant part in fomenting the social, political and religious diversity so
cherished by the Enlightenment leaders. Dorinda Outram’s “Coffee Houses
and Consumers: The Social Context of Enlightenment”1067 highlights the
important role played by the overseas trade1068 and coffee houses in
formulating and disseminating the Enlightenment ideas in England and
Europe.
Henry Stubbe, who would later champion Islamic republicanism and
Muhammadan Christianity, was a product of Levantine heritage, Oriental
scholarship, Cromwell Commonwealth’s republican pluralism, religious
tolerance, anti-Church and anti-monarchical establishments, coffeehouse
culture of Islamism, Turkism, Orientalism, Shaftesbury’s Whiggism, radical
resurgence and resistance. His radical republican journey started with his
Puritan family, Westminster Head Master Dr. Busby’s fascination with
Oriental languages including Arabic, Dr. Pococke’s Oxford lectures,
Levantine Oriental scholarship and Islamic works, and Sir Henry Vane
Junior and later Shaftesbury’s patronage. This egalitarian ideal took him to
Cromwell’s anti- monarchy army, later working for Puritan efforts to de-
monopolise worship and knowledge, religious tolerance and pluralism, his
defense of republican parliamentarian and Commonwealth leader Sir Henry
Vane the Younger,1069 his pamphleteering for the rights of dissenting traders
and sects, his close coordination with radical leaders such as Shaftesbury,
his compilation of An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism,
and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the
Christians, his defenses of Islamic republicanism and his propagation of
Turkish government model as an ideal for English limited monarchy, civil
religion and revolution. Stubbe epitomises the long seventeenth century’s
struggle against the absolutism of Church and monarchy which culminated
in the early Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century. Stubbe is the connection between Dr. Busby’s Orientalism, Dr.
Pococke’s Levantine scholarship, Interregnum, the wealthy merchants and
shippers,1070 Restoration, religious radicalism of Deists, Socinians and
Unitarians, relative republicanism of Harrington, radical republicanism of
Henry Vane Junior and political radicalism of Whigs like Shaftesbury and
Sidney, as James Jacob has very well demonstrated. Stubbe is the epitome
of social, cultural, religious and political radicalism which ushered the
English Enlightenment. He is also the model of Islamism, Turkism and
Orientalism, which shaped and steered the long seventeenth-century socio-
religious and political debates. Stubbe, along with Locke, Toland and many
other Enlightenment figures, was the product of these debates and
controversies and not the founder of them. He worked through the English
thought patterns, which were prevalent during the seventeenth century, and
strove to realise a pluralistic republic and enlightened monarchy, like that of
Muhammad. Eighteenth-century enlightened European monarchs such as
Frederick II of Prussia were the outcome of this limited monarchy ideology.
The enlightenend monarchies applied the Stubbian and Lockean republican
principles in their states, which culminated in the later High Enlightenment.
Muhammad, the wise legislator and enlightenment Prophet, was equally
popular with the eighteenth-century enlightenment figures as he was with
the seventeenth-century intellectuals. The French philosophes of the 1750s
used the Oriental manuscripts, travelogues, examples and ideas as much as
the early enlightenment figures did. Muhammad was as much revered by
eighteenth-century Romantists as was he invoked by Stubbe, Toland and
early Unitarians. Humberto Garcia’s treatment and analysis of Edmund
Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Mary Shelley and other
eighteenth-century intellectual’s thoughts and works well substantiate the
claim.1071 The seventeenth-century exposure to Islam and Muhammad was
more pronounced due to special geo-political circumstances of the century.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Northern Europe was more
intertwined with the Muslim East than the previous two centuries. As
discussed above, the Dutch, French and English traders, merchants and
workers were all over the Muslim World. Their long interactions with
Muslim world furnished them with enough knowledge of Islamic anti-
Trinitarianism, anti-Fall, anti-Incarnational man Christology and limited
republicanism. Many of these merchants, chaplains and workers acquired
influential positions in Dutch, French and English societies. They implicitly
and publicly encouraged reformation of persecuting European society based
on Islamic tolerant model.1072 Their overseas interactions with Muslims
played a major role in bringing about the reformation of Reformation.
Additionally, the migration of Transylvanian Unitarians and Socinians to
Amsterdam, London and other European cities supplemented the cross-
cultural transmission of ideas. Englishmen such as Paul Best,1073 who
travelled to Transylvania and championed anti-Trinitarianism, religious
liberty and freedom of conscience and worship along with English
dissenters since the Interregnum, pushed for religious reforms and plurality.
The Ottoman Unitarian, pluralistic and republican model was aspired and
quoted by all. Europe was able to break away from its intellectual
stagnation with the help of external resource portfolios and tributaries; the
global Muslim bridge to other civilisations was a key element in this
historical breakthrough. Europe’s transition from the incarnational,
supernatural and abstract transcendental theology to anthropomorphic,
universal moralism and prophetic, messianic, moral Christology was
fundamental to early and later high Enlightenment. The modernity project
was made possible with the resultant human empowerment, participation
and initiatives. Islamic theology, philosophy, sciences, political thought and
spiritual moralism were helpful tools for the enlightenment leaders and
were well absorbed, appropriated and re-oriented by many of them. The
Enlightenment, in a sense, was a religious revolution.
 Chapter 4

Enlightenment: A Religious Revolution

Enlightenment scholars have long argued that the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment was a complete reformation of the sixteenth-century
Reformation. First and foremost, it was a theological revolution as theology
was central to early Enlightenment in spite of its outward varieties and
expressions. J. G. A. Pocock noted that the “Enlightenment cannot be
understood apart from theology.”1074 J. C. D. Clarke, Charles Taylor,
Jonathan Israel, D. Van Kley and many other leaders in the field have
emphasised the religious nature of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
debates which led to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment leaders
completely overhauled the Church Christianity by rejecting its central
supernatural dogmas and its practical insistence upon the worldly kingdom.
The Enlightenment was a series of ideological struggles against the central
problem related to the absolute Church and monarchy. “In close but
extremely various relations with an indictment of Nicene theology – and
ultimately of the central doctrines of the Incarnation, the Atonement and the
Trinity – as encouraging the belief that a kingdom not of this world might
nevertheless be exercised in it, there went a series of programmes for
developing a culture of the mind, founded on method and manners, letters
and law, and the critical capacity of reading the texts of European
civilisation, which should enable it to function independently of Christian
theology and anchor the life of the mind in the life of civil society. This
repudiation of theology is, however, intimately related with the theology it
repudiates and varies in character as it appears in, and attempts to substitute
itself for, cultures enduringly Catholic or Protestant, Anglican, Calvinist or
Lutheran.”1075 William Lecky has well summarised this ideological struggle
between Christian theology and Enlightenment moral vision.1076
The Enlightenment was an action upon - and reaction to - the old Christian
system of belief, and in the end served as a rejection of it and advocated for
its replacement with a Unitarian, moral, rational, natural and republican
theology. “If we examine the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, we
find it almost exclusively occupied with minute questions concerning the
manner of the co-existence of the two natures in Christ. If we examine it in
the middle ages, we find it absorbed in ritualism and pilgrimages. If we
examine it at the Reformation, we find it just emerging beneath the pressure
of civilisation from this condition; yet still the main speculative test was the
doctrine concerning the Sacrament, which had no relation to morals; and
the main practical test on the Continent, at least, was the eating of meat on
Fridays. In the present day, with the great body of laymen at least, such
matters appear simply puerile, because they have no relation to morals.”1077
It was a total break with old thought patterns and a reformation of
Christianity on rational, moral and republican lines. Three distinct classes of
change were visible. The first was “the gradual evanessence of doctrines
that collide with our moral sense. The second is the decline of the influence
of those ceremonies, or purely speculative doctrines, which, without being
opposed to conscience, are at least wholly beyond its sphere. The third is
the substitution of the sense of right for the fear of punishment as the main
motive to virtue.”1078
Enlightenment and Destruction of Old Regime
The Enlightenment in a sense was the destruction of the Old Regime
Trinitarian and monarchical Christianity. Margarete Jacob argued that the
clandestine writings of radical thinkers “fed the flames of […] massive
conflagration intended to destroy the Christian Churches and their
doctrines.”1079 Voltaire’s letter to Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose
name and nearly half-century reign from 1740 to 1786 were “virtually
synonymous with the advent and advance of the Enlightenment in
Prussia,”1080 summarised the sentiments of the Enlightenment leaders. “Your
majesty will do the human race an eternal service in extirpating this
infamous superstition [Christianity]. I do not say among the rabble, who are
not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say
among the well-bred, among those who wish to think.”1081 Frederick II’s
“sceptical, antagonistic attitude towards the Church as an institution.” […]
“demythologised Christian faith,”1082 and his rejection of “the chief
doctrines of Christianity, such as the Trinity, Christ’s divinity and humanity,
and redemption,”1083 was a practical manifestation of the aspired
enlightenment. This was the Enlightenment which Kant envisaged. “What
is enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asserted that enlightenment could be
partially conceptualised as a temporal epoch, one whose salient
characteristics, especially in regards to religion, were manifested in the
personal opinions and public policies of his royal Prussian sovereign. “We
do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment – the
century of Friedrich.”1084
Therefore, Enlightenment with all its complexity, diversity, multifaceted
approach and designs universally focused upon dismantling the Church
dogmatic Christianity.1085 The Enlightenment leaders all across Europe
focused upon three central Christian dogmas: original sin, Trinity, divine
right king and clerical establishment. These were the pivots around which
the Enlightenment reformation of Church Christianity mostly revolved.
Matthew Kadane, in his Original Sin and the Path to Enlightenment, makes
it crystal-clear that the difference between the pre-Enlightenment
confessional Europe and Enlightened Europe was “the rejection of the
doctrine of original sin […] antagonism to the doctrine of original sin
helped to define the Enlightenment.”1086 Isaiah Berlin noted that “what the
entire Enlightenment has in common is denial of the central Christian
doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either innocent
and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or environment,
or, at worst, deeply defective but capable of radical and indefinite
improvement by rational education in favourable circumstances, or by a
revolutionary reorganisation of society.”1087 Ernst Cassirer identified “the
concept of original sin’ as ‘the common opponent against which all the
different trends of the philosophy of Enlightenment join forces.”1088 There is
a scholarly consensus, then, that rejection of original sin was central to
eighteenth-century Enlightenment.1089
Matthew Kadane, Justin Champion and others have shown that anti-
Trinitarian struggle was also central to the Enlightenment.1090 Champion has
noted the centrality of anti-clericalism in the Enlightenment struggle.
Champion’s book The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken addresses this important
aspect of Enlightenment. Therefore, total rejection of the central Christian
tenets such as the Trinity, Incarnation, Original Sin, Atoning Death, Grace-
based Salvific Scheme, Divine Right Monarch and Church were the main
tributaries of the early eighteenth-century Enlightenment. J. Israel stated
that “Theological debate, then, lay at the heart of the Early Enlightenment.
Theology dominated the correspondence between Newton and Locke, and
was the exclusive topic of conversation when they first met; for while they
shared what has been called ‘a rationalistic approach to religion’, vast work,
it seemed clear to both, lay ahead defining precisely what this meant for
Man, religion, and society in the new context.”1091 He further observed that
“It was neither science, then, nor new geographical discoveries, nor even
philosophy, as such, but rather the formidable difficulty of reconciling old
and new in theological terms, and finally, by the 1740s, the apparent
collapse of all efforts to forge a new general synthesis of theology,
philosophy, politics, and science, which destabilised religious belief and
values, causing the wholly unprecedented crisis of faith driving the
secularisation of the modern West.”1092 The anti-Christian religious
Enlightenment preceded the republican, democratic, liberal political
Enlightenment, and was the main backdrop of it. “The redefinition of
human nature; the stress on sociability, rationality, moral conduct and
improvement; the deflation of religion’s mysteries — these notions add up
to a definition of the Enlightenment that twenty-first century historians
would easily recognise.”1093
Continental Socinians,1094 Unitarians, Deists and other heterodox radical
dissenters played a central role, especially from 1670s to 1720s, in realising
the early Enlightenment.1095 The Protestant nonconformist dissenters were
included in the toleration acts of William and Mary but the Unitarians,
Socinians and Catholics were excluded and mostly suffered the persecutory
consequences. They led the debates about heterodoxy, religious liberty and
freedom of conscience. All the foundational debates of later Enlightenment
were initially launched, discussed, debated and hashed out from the 1650s
to the 1720s. The later High Enlightenment of 1750s and onward was an
offshoot and consolidation of early Enlightenment revolutionary ideas.
Jonathan Israel notes that radical enlightenment figures “represent the
extreme, most uncompromising fringe of the general trend in culture and
ideas towards rationalisation and secularisation. But their less radical
colleagues undoubtedly had a far greater impact on attitudes and popular
culture. In fact, neither the Reformation of the sixteenth century nor the so-
called ‘High Enlightenment’ of the post-1750 period - often little more than
footnotes to the earlier shift - even begins to compete with the intellectual
upheaval of the Early Enlightenment in terms of sheer impact, and the depth
and extent of the intellectual and spiritual changes it brought about. It may
be that the story of the High Enlightenment after 1750 is more familiar to
readers and historians, but that does not alter the reality that the later
movement was basically just one of consolidating, popularising, and
annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier. Consequently, even
before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s, the real business
was already over.”1096 This was a period (1650s to 1720s) of break with the
past medieval Christian system and ushering of a new era of freedom,
liberty and rationalism. During this phase, the absolutist Church lost it
monopoly on religion and accommodated dissenting Protestant sects and in
the 1770s the non-Protestant dissenters such as Socinians and Unitarians
were accommodated. Israel states that “the period 1650-80 is designated the
phase of transition or ‘crisis of the European mind’ preceding the onset of
the Enlightenment, and the period 1680-1750 the more dramatic and
decisive period of rethinking when the mental world of the west was
revolutionised along rationalistic and secular lines. By the 1750s, all major
intellectual innovations and accomplishments of the European
Enlightenment were well advanced if not largely complete.”1097
The Enlightenment was a doctrinal reformation of Christianity on
monotheistic, rational and moral grounds ushering an era of subjective,
individualistic and rational approach to faith and religion. The enlightened
rational approach dissolved the supernatural, dogmatic and incarnational
Christianity of the medieval times into a Unitarian, rational and moral
Christianity of the posterity. Faith and religion were not discarded but
transformed.1098 The process of transformation was long and bloody. The
absolute Church did not give in that easily; it kept on resisting the change
by multilayered and multi-faceted responses, and tried to re-orient, re-
interpret, co-opt, adopt and manipulate enlightenment ideas - such as
reason,1099 rational discourse, liberty, freedom of conscience, morality,
virtue, justice, consent, faith and accountability - to maintain its power and
allure. The process of Reformation and counter-reformation, enlightenment
and counter-enlightenment spanned over centuries and finally resulted in
the religious tolerance, acceptance of diversity and difference of opinion,
“by putting so much pressure on the category of belief, reformers turned
articles of faith into objects of critical reflection and debate, setting into
motion a tortuous, bloody, and still unfinished historical process enabling
the emergence of a secular sphere of toleration […] As a consequence of
these developments, Western civilisation is now characterised by a degree
of ideological diversity and social atomisation that would be considered
intolerable by the generations that lived before secularism’s triumph.”1100
Many Europeans digested, absorbed and appropriated a great deal of these
conflicting ideals, beliefs and practices, and the medieval, totalitarian,
supernatural and dogmatic Christianity was reformed in the process.
The Anthropomorphic Shift
Charles Taylor, one of the most influential philosophers and social scientists
of our times, noted that “belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500
and 2000.”1101 Modern man still believed in God but that God was quite
divergent from the medieval Orthodox Christianity. The focus was brought
from the supernatural, creedal, incarnational Christianity to more natural,
moral, utilitarian and human faith. The pendulum now swung all the way to
exclusive humanism where God was looked at from the perspective of
human sense of self fulfillment. This anthropomorphic shift1102 highlighted
man, his worldly happiness, good and goals as part of the divine plans. A
balance between the hereafter and now and then was realised at times,
gravitating more towards happiness in this material life. This transcendental
anthropomorphism brought the focus on man as the crown of God’s
creation, dignity, realities, concerns and happiness; human happiness and
felicity were not antithetical to faith and religion, but a fundamental part of
God’s plan. Success and happiness in this life was as significant of a
religious duty as success in the life to come. God’s plan and cosmos was
rational, natural, purposive, moral and comprehensible. It was not
mysterious, supernatural, mutable, dogmatic and unintelligible. Reason was
the universal gift of God; its proper use facilitated the true understanding of
the book of creation as well as the book of revelation. The irrational,
unintelligible, paradoxical, supernatural and incomprehensible was
antithetical to God’s plan for humanity. Man was the most important part of
God’s religious plan and in the saga of salvation. His moral participation in
the affairs of communal reformation and transformation was necessary for
his eternal salvation; this salvation was not solely dependent upon the
atoning death of Christ and mediation of Church but more upon human
virtue and righteousness.1103
This anthropomorphic shift was against the bare transcendentalism of the
medieval Christianity where man was totally at the mercy of the
transcendental God, predestined, depraved, in desperate need of salvation
through God’s sacrificial acts. “Orthodox Christianity sees us as needing
rescue. In this it can seem to treat us as children. Mercy, as a personal
connection conflicts with the supremacy of a high code. Christianity seems
not compatible with human dignity.”1104 Both the incarnational scheme,
central Church role in the salvific scheme and its alliance with the abusive
monarchs were sufficient enough proofs that historical Christianity was
subversive to human dignity, morality and freedom. “From here it would be
easy to take the step that orthodox, communion-defined Christianity really
belongs to an earlier age; that it makes little sense, and is hard to sustain
today.”1105
The break with the Roman Christian past was a sort of transcendental
anthropomorphism, where God and faith were employed to increase human
freedom, participation and happiness. “If God’s purposes for us encompass
only our own good, and this can be read from the design of our nature, then
no further mystery can hide here. If we set aside one of the central
mysteries of traditional Christian faith, that of evil, of our estrangement
from God, and inability to return to him unaided, but we see all the
motivation we need already there, either in our self-interest well
understood, or in our feelings of benevolence, then there is no further
mystery in the human heart.”1106 Even the seventeenth-century Anglican
Latitudinarian Bishop John Tillotson (1630-1694), a close friend of the
Unitarian John Locke and Thomas Firmin, noted that “nothing is more
likely to prevail with wise and considerate men to become religious, than to
be thoroughly convinced, that religion and happiness, our duty and our
interest, are but one and the same thing considered under different
notions.”1107
Man still believed in a transcendental reality but, a different kind of
transcendence;1108 it was a sort of attenuated Deism, a bit degraded or de-
intensified form of Providential Deism. “Exclusive humanism in a sense
crept up on us through an intermediate form, Providential Deism; and both
the Deism and the humanism were made possible by earlier developments
within orthodox Christianity.”1109 It also led some to a total disenchantment
with God as an idea but the majority made a smooth transition from
medieval creedalism to human moralism. This anthropomorphic shift was
the foundation of early modernity1110 and was most pronounced among the
Unitarians. “Parallel to and overlapping with Deism was a drift towards
Unitarianism. The temper […] and even a lot of the theological beliefs,
were found in other churches as well, but the defining theological beliefs of
Unitarianism reflect the shift clearly […] Unitarianism, like the Arianism
which inspired it, can be seen as an attempt to hold on to the central figure
of Jesus, while cutting loose from the main soteriological doctrines of
historical Christianity.”1111
This Unitarian shift away from incarnational theology of historical
Christianity to human, moral and prophetic Christology was the cornerstone
of the later Enlightenment. Their human Jesus was approachable, imitable
and moral; he allowed human freedom, initiative, participation and
empowerment. “What is important about Jesus is not that he inaugurates a
new relation with and among us, restoring or transforming our relation to
God. That is not what salvation can mean. What it properly amounts to is
our acceding to rational principles of conduct in law and ethics, and our
becoming able to act on these. Jesus’ role in this is that of a teacher, by
precept and example. His importance is as an inspiring trailblazer of what
we will later call Enlightenment. For this he doesn’t need to be divine;
indeed, he had better not be, if we want to maintain the notion of a self-
contained impersonal order which God in his wisdom has set up, both in
nature and for human society. Incarnation would blur the edges of this.”1112
This anthropomorphic shift did not deny the Crucifixion, but diminished its
metaphysical significance. “Of course, the Crucifixion can’t be read out of
the story […] but it has to be an accident de parcours; not the main point.
This fits well with the whole shift within the anthropocentric climate in the
significance given to the life of Christ: what is important is not what he
does (atone, conquer death, take captivity captive), but rather what he says
or teaches. The slide to Unitarianism, and then beyond this to a humanism
of which Christ can be one of the ‘prophets,‘ belongs to this massive shift in
the centre of gravity of the life of Jesus.”1113 The Islamic, prophetic and
messianic Christology was finally appropriated and glorified as a liberal
and moral approach to religion.
The later Unitarianism and early Socinianism, in this attenuated sense,
was fairly widespread in England especially among the elites since the
Interregnum. It influenced the clergy as well as laity. Countless dissenting
heterodox as well as non-dissenting orthodox leaders either subscribed to it
or tacitly sympathised with this theological shift. “Unitarianism wasn’t
confined to Unitarians. But it is not surprising to see that the members of
this confession were among the social élites of Dissent, both in England and
America; and also that they contained a disproportionate number of the élite
figures involved in reform of various kinds in nineteenth-century Britain
(closely followed by the Quakers).”1114 Many Presbyterians, Calvinists,
early Baptists, Quakers and other confessing Christians subscribed to this
human, moral and prophetic Christology.
Paul Hazard had noted that the French religious landscape was equally
infected with Unitarian/Socinians. “Nowhere could a single synod succeed
in stemming the tide of Socinianism. If there was any truth in what was
alleged about the diminution of the sect, qua sect; if to the outward view it
seemed to have contracted, that was only in its superficial aspect. Inwardly,
its influence had greatly increased. Its ideas were seeping insensibly into
men’s minds, leading them to substitute a rationalistic for a religious view
of things.”1115 The French Catholic Biblicist Richard Simon noted that the
Socinians believed that “’Calvin and the other early Reformers left their
work but half-done’ […] Richard Simon saw one thing clearly enough, and
that was that the Reformation continued to reform itself.”1116 Likewise,
Holland, Germany and many other countries were infatuated with rational
discourse of Socinianism/Unitarianism. Great scholars such as Poiret,
Pufendorf and Jurieu “saw Socinianism everywhere; and perhaps after all
he was not far wrong, so widespread and so unmistakable was the general
lapse into rationalism.”1117 The Unitarian impact in regards to rational
thinking was tremendous; David Martin observed that “relative to their size,
which was never very great, Unitarians have acquired more entries in the
Dictionary of National Biography than any other body.”1118
The same anthropomorphic shift continued in the eighteenth century. The
Socinian, Unitarian and Arminian rational discourse was “destined to
prevail throughout the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century. Past
and gone are the days when Descartes, conscious that his views were
calculated to bear him away into vague, uncharted regions, voluntarily
imposed on himself some prudent restraints […] The day of heterodoxy has
dawned, of every kind of heterodoxy, the day of the malcontents, the rebels
who during the reign of Louis XIV had multiplied out of sight and had been
awaiting the hour of their emancipation; of learned men, who declined to
accept tradition at its face value, and insisted on enquiring into its
credentials; of the Jansenists, who were to kindle new fire from their dim
but never wholly extinguished embers; of the Biblical exegetists; of the
philosophers; the day of Pierre Bayle!”1119 Once divorced from the long
Church tradition and encouraged to think for themselves, the Protestants
diversified tremendously. Consequently, Protestantism went through a
“perpetual and progressive disintegration.”1120 Many new and foreign ideas
were welcomed, appropriated and absorbed.
Some French Philosophes and pantheistic Deists stretched it too hard
towards materialism and a sort of atheism, but the majority of radical - as
well as moderate - enlighteners kept it within the boundaries of faith, God,
salvation and morality. The same struggle continues to this day; currently
“the multi-cornered debate is shaped by the two extremes, transcendent
religion, on one hand, and its frontal denial, on the other.”1121 The story of
this transformation and struggle is too complex and multifaceted; mine is
but one account of that complex story.
The resultant anti-Trinitarian ethical monotheism or humanistic moralism
with its emphasis upon republican values was so drastically un-Christian
that the Orthodoxy called it un-belief, infidelity and atheism, while in
reality it was no atheism at all.
Anti-Trinitarianism and Enlightenment
The Unitarian ethico-rational monotheism freed Europe of supernatural
Christian mysteries with its absolutist abusive policies and allowed
religious pluralism and diversity. This theological revolution was as
significant as the scientific revolution in the natural sciences. For instance,
Isaac Newton was as revolutionary in his Unitarian theology as in his
natural sciences. In reality, his scientific works were reflection of his strict,
monotheistic, Unitarian theology. The resultant Enlightenment was a
theological rupture with the Trinitarian Christian past. “This was the second
revolution in religious knowledge, the birth of modern belief, perhaps no
less important a rupture in Western thought than the scientific revolution
with which it occasionally intersected.”1122 It ushered in an era of personal,
individual, subjective and private belief, based upon rationalistic credibility
rather than upon religious or political authority.1123 This freedom of thought,
subjectivity and individualism constituted the core of later liberalism,
modernity and democracy. G.W.F. Hegel observed that “the principle of the
modern world at large is freedom of subjectivity.”1124 The freedom,
subjectivity and rational credibility were greatly hampered by the pre-
modern Catholic and Protestant Churches. The Enlightenment was a
revolution against both Churches and their dogmatic hegemony. Shagan
noted that “while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants
disciplined populations of unbelievers. Modern belief did not emerge from
either of these models, but rather in reaction against the stark regime they
jointly created.”1125
The end result was neither disbelief nor atheism but an endless plurality
and diversity of belief. It was a sort of relativised, personalized and
privatised belief. “Western modernity is characterised not by a decline of
belief but by its boundless proliferation: today belief is everywhere, but in
forms that would not have been recognised as belief in previous eras. This
proliferation of belief does not imply that religion remained the cornerstone
of Western civilisation; on the contrary, modern belief was the sharp edge
that perforated Christianity, breaching the wall that had separated religion
from profane ways of knowing. This is […] a considerable revision of the
ordinary view that in modernity religion has been relegated to a separate,
private sphere. Secularisation in the West was not about the segregation of
belief from the world, but the promiscuous opening of belief to the
world.”1126 The end product of Enlightenment was the liberal, secular
Christianity with its rational, natural and moral bent far removed from the
supernatural, dogmatic and incarnational Christianity of the medieval
Church. The contemporary anti-liberal doctrinal evangelism and right-wing
extremism is detrimental to Enlightenment principles and philosophy;
medieval history is repeating itself. The Enlightenment reformation of the
Church Christianity was more in line with Islamic Unitarian rationalism
than the medieval Trinitarian Christianity.
Anti-Trinitarianism and Islam
Islam had already offered reformation of the dogmatic Christianity in the
seventh century, and continuously loathed Christendom for its supernatural,
paradoxical and absolutist fallacies. The long, historical, well developed
and well couched Islamic reformative scheme was a helpful tool for the
Enlightenment leaders and they skillfully used it for their specific struggles
and agendas. Islam, Muhammad and the Islamic world played a vital role in
Europe’s transition from the Trinitarian Incarnational theological and
absolutist political outlook to an anthropomorphic, natural, moral and
republican outlook. The Enlightenment leaders acted upon and reacted to
many Islamic beliefs, concepts, ideas and intentionally or unintentionally
appropriated, absorbed and reoriented some of them as a whip to indict the
historical Christianity. The Islamic “Other” was too relevant and
overwhelming to be ignored.1127
The later part of the seventeenth century was also the period when both
radical and moderate enlightenment leaders, consciously or unconsciously,
interacted with the Islamic ideas and themes the most due to close trade,
economic and political interactions with the Muslim world. They closely
interacted with Islamic faith and tradition to create a rational, monotheistic,
republican “Unitarian-Islamic syncretism,” to use Justin Champion’s term,
which was absorbed in so many ways by various dissenting parties
including the Socinians, Unitarians and Deists and through them by the
European elites. Muhammad, the “Unitarian Prophet,”1128 as John Tolan
names him, was owned and appropriated by the Unitarians, Socinians and
early Deists and through them by the radical as well as moderate
enlightenment figures.
The founders of Socinianism, Unitarianism and Deism all had their
Islamic connections. Paul Best, the early English Unitarian’s Transylvanian
visit and connections are well-documented. The Socinians and Unitarians’s
close connection with Ottoman Transylvania are well recorded. The English
Deist Charles Blount’s father Henry Blount travelled through the Ottoman
Empire, engrossed himself in Turkish life style, wrote about Islam, Ottoman
culture and customs and helped his son in compiling deistic treatises. John
Locke’s best friend James Tyrrell (1642-1718), a known Whig political
philosopher and historian, was Charles Blount’s brother-in-law. His sister
was married to Blount and Locke frequently lodged at Tyrrell residence.1129
John Locke, Henry Stubbe and many other known leaders of Enlightenment
studied under Dr. Edward Pococke, the Oxford Arabic Chair. Dr. Pococke’s
long diplomatic stints in Muslim Aleppo and Constantinople, as well as his
thorough interests in Islamic history, theology, law, political system and the
Arabic language made him the most erudite, authentic and proficient
authority of his time on Islam. His multiple books on Islam were probably
the main source of Locke, Stubbe and other Oxford graduates’ knowledge
of and interactions with Islam in addition to a multitude of other books
available at that time. Other Levant Company chaplains such as Dr. John
Covel and Robert Huntington were John Locke and Isaac Newton’s friends,
supplied information and manuscripts especially scientific ones to Locke,
Robert Boyle and other Royal Society fellows who are known to have used
the travelogues and Oriental manuscripts in their writings.1130 The overseas
chaplains’ detailed diaries and works were filled with eyewitness accounts
of the Ottoman Empire, its people, culture, religion and government. Dr.
Covel was Cambridge vice chancellor and Newton worked under him.
Newton’s Cambridge politics was closely coordinated with Dr. Covel.1131
These Islamic interactions and the overall English milieu facilitated the
transition of Locke, Newton, Stubbe and many others from Anglican
Protestant Christianity to their heterodox Unitarian Islamic outlook. They
became thorough Unitarian heretics.1132 Islam, Socinianism and
Unitarianism were so intermeshed during the second half of the seventeenth
century and early eighteenth century (in England, France, Germany and
Holland) that instead of using the term “Islamic” the writers of that period
just used the term “Unitarian” to talk about Islam. For instance, Edward
Gibbon used Unitarian instead of Islamic in many places of his history
monograph The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.1133
Eighteenth-century English, French and American Enlightenment leaders
were heir to this rational, republican, monotheistic Unitarian Islamic
syncretism. The process began with the Protestant Reformation.
The sixteenth-century Reformation’s “upshot was rather that Roman
Catholicism, even at its best, was a perverted form of Christianity.”1134 The
Reformers opened a floodgate of scepticism, rendering centuries of Church
traditions, culture and authority suddenly null and void. The theological
upheavals caused by the Reformation, and the ensuing doctrinal
controversies and religious wars, resulted in a total loss of traditional
structures of authority and references of meaning.1135 The resultant
frustration, instability and insecurity created an atmosphere of acceptance
of foreign ideas, including Islamic ones, to resolve internal problems. “The
Reformation endured and brought endless doctrinal controversies in its
wake— about Christ, the sacraments liturgy, sin and grace, salvation, the
church, ministry, scripture, and authority. The controversies obliterated the
existing, shared framework of beliefs within which new intellectual
challenges and influences might be confronted, appropriated, and
discriminatingly assimilated, as neo- Platonism had been in early medieval
monasteries or Aristotelianism in thirteenth-century universities.”1136 The
Islamic anti-Trinitarian republican ideas, starting with Michael Servetus,
filled the vacuum in so many ways, especially for the persecuted dissenters.
The Islamic model of religious tolerance was extremely attractive to the
abused, sola scriptura individualistic dissenters. Their century’s long
struggles for liberty facilitated the separation of Church from state, and the
subsequent privatisation of faith and worship was cherished by the later
generations.1137
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe was marred by
Habsburg/Catholic hegemonic designs and fledgling Protestant Churches
and nation state’s efforts to assert themselves. Inter-Protestant strife was no
less chaotic, destructive and apocalyptic; the Protestant states and Churches
were as absolute and persecutory as their Catholic counterparts.1138
Religious and political dissent was heavily punished as a crime against the
society and Crown. Citizenship, property and other basic rights were
dependent upon membership of national churches, while non-conformists
were severely tortured and persecuted. Margarete Jacob notes that “in the
1680s the promotion of absolutist policies in France and Britain threatened
the stability of all of northern and western Europe and the religious
independence of Protestants in England, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, and
potentially in the German states west of the Rhine.”1139 The persecutions of
Protestants in Catholic France resulted in countless human miseries. Louis
XIV’s policies of forced conversion through financial incentives, socio-
economic and finally military pressure filled Protestants with fear and
horror. They sent a wave of Protestant refugees all around Western Europe.
“After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 thousands of exiled
French Protestants fled to the Dutch Republic and England—to name only
the countries with the highest concentrations—and they carried with them
experiences of persecution vivid and shocking to the modern imagination.
Children deemed convertible were detained by the French authorities; the
laity was actually forbidden to emigrate thus forcing families to separate as
escape routes were found for some and not others. Elderly Protestants were
thrown in prison; the clergy was expelled sometimes with two days’ notice
or that was how long it took a leading and endangered Protestant
clergyman, Jean Claude, to leave France.”1140 The French authorities “strung
up their victims, men and women, by their hair or by their feet, to the rafters
in the roof, or the hooks in the chimney, and then set fire to bundles of
moldy hay heaped up beneath them [...] They flung them into huge fires
which they lit for the purpose, and left them there till they were half-
roasted. They fastened ropes underneath their arms and lowered them into
wells, pulling them up and down till they promised to change their
religion.”1141 Paul Hazard inquired: “Was the King of France then unaware
that Faith is a gift that comes from on high, and that nothing that man can
do can make or destroy it; that violence and coercion can only create
unbelievers, or hypocrites, or else engender in the hearts of the sincere a
staunchness, a longanimity that no suffering which man can inflict will ever
avail to overcome? Does he not know that by perpetrating such atrocities he
has put himself beyond the pale, in the eyes of every European country: and
that having scandalously violated both the solemn covenant of his
predecessors, and the law of nations, his promises and his treaties will
henceforth be credited by none?”1142
Such a torturous, inhumane and un-dignifying treatment of Protestants in
the Catholic areas and Catholics in the Protestant areas was commonplace.
The French brutalisation of Protestants was perhaps the harshest of all.
“Well over 200,000 French Protestants made the journey out of France, and
those who stayed behind were imprisoned or submitted to conversion.
These were the events that form the essential background to understanding
the Enlightened critique of Christianity as it emerged with virulence in the
period of the 1680s. From that moment onward, the critique only became
more pointed, more strident, sometimes less anonymous, but always
suspicious of clerical authority and often bitter. It lay at the heart of the
crisis provoked by monarchical absolutism.”1143 Persecution of dissenters in
England was no less torturous.
Both the Church and state were equally oppressive of dissent.1144 This
constant abuse and torturous persecution produced anger, resentment and
radicalism, especially among the dissenters, their families and
sympathisers.1145 The Christian religion and history had provided the
foundations for such an oppressive society. As the problem of human rights,
empowerment and religious tolerance was directly connected with the
Christian religion, and as theology was the cornerstone of power structures,
enlightenment efforts had to deal with the Christian religion, its theology
and institutions to bring down the scaffolding of that oppressive society and
oligarchy. The problem of power was really a problem of religious nature,
and that needed a religious solution. Therefore, the political abuse and
chaos resulted in a sort of theological radicalism. The radical anger was
further fueled by a stifling censorship machine.
The Christian Europe was a suffocating society where religious freedom,
public debate and printing were closely monitored and supervised. “From
the mid-Sixteenth century onwards, Europe was a civilisation in which
formal education, public debate, preaching, printing, book-selling, even
tavern disputes about religion and the world, were closely supervised and
controlled. Virtually nowhere, not even in England or Holland after1688,
was full toleration the rule, and hardly anyone subscribed to the idea that
the individual should be free to think and believe as he or she thought
fit.”1146 People were spied on, and their private, personal and confidential
conversations were used to indict them of blasphemy, to torture and burn
them alive on the stake. It was a suffocatingly inhumane society; absolute
submission to the Church and state was required of all.
The radical and moderate dissenters demanded a reformation of Protestant
Reformation by allowing religious liberty and freedom of publication and
conscience. The Ottoman liberties of freedom of worship and religious print
were quoted, and the Islamic reformative scheme came in handy to
European Enlightenment figures dealing with debilitating supernatural,
mysterious, irrational, absolutist and intolerant Church Christianity and
aiming to reform it on lines of simplistic, tolerant, minimalistic, republican
primitive Christianity of Jesus. That primitive Christianity was the ideal
model of the enlightenment figures because the problem of Christian
persecutions, heresies and inquisition was heralded by the Church and state
alliance of the fourth century when the Roman empirical structures and
Christian religious institutions were merged in an unholy alliance. As seen
above, the Islamic faith blamed the same on the Roman Christianity and
claimed itself to be the reformer of that absolutist, Trinitarian, dogmatic and
supernatural Christianity. The Enlightenment figures accepted Islam as the
heir to that original, simplistic and republican Christianity. Islam became
the enlightened ideal and Muhammad became the enlightened Prophet.
“Indeed, the figure of Muhammad and the text of the Qur’ān could inspire
interest and esteem, particularly from those who criticised the power of the
Church in European society or who deviated from its accepted dogmas.
Sixteenth-century Unitarian Michael Servetus mined the Qur’ān for
arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity; condemned by the Catholic
inquisition, he escaped only to be burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva. In
the midst of bloody confessional wars that were tearing Europe apart, some
looked to the introduction toleration of religious diversity grounded in the
Qur’ān and practiced by the Ottomans as a model Europeans should follow.
Various authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England,
France, and elsewhere, portrayed Muhammad as a reformer who abolished
the privileges of a corrupt and superstitious clergy, showed tolerance to
Jews and Christians, and reestablished the true spirit of monotheism. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he is increasingly portrayed as a ‘great
man,’ a sort of Arab national hero, bringing law, religion, and glory to his
people. Many of these authors are interested less in Islam and its prophet
per se than in reading in Muhammad’s story lessons that they could apply to
their own preoccupations and predicaments.”1147 The Enlightenment
reformation of the Reformation went through the Islamic faith and tradition
back to the first-century Jewish, Unitarian Christianity, the supposed
original Christianity of Jesus.
Additionally, Islamic republicanism was a living reality in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman, Safvid and Mughal
Muslim empires were minimalistic, tolerant, overpowering and alluring,
especially in the seventeenth century. The Mediterranean was an Ottoman
lake and the gateway to the Muslim East. The English, Dutch and French
Protestants were heavily engaged in the Muslim empires and an eye witness
to the tolerance given to interfaith as well as intra-faith dissent. Protestants
in Hungary and other East European countries were enjoying religious
freedom under the Ottoman Millet system, while Protestants in Catholic
areas and Catholic and Protestant dissenters in the Protestant areas were
persecuted. That is why the Ottoman Islamic minimalistic and republican
model was very attractive to the persecuted European dissenters, such as
Socinians and Unitarians, whose historical connections with the Ottoman
Empire were well-documented. In fact, the Hungarian and East European
Unitarians fought in Ottoman armies against the Habsburg Catholics during
the long siege of Vienna. Even the Protestant English ambassador to the
Sublime Porte Sir Edward Barton participated in Ottoman military
expeditions (1596) against the Catholic Habsburg Empire in Hungry and
Eger.1148
 Moreover, the French-Ottoman alliance against the Habsburg Empire was
a popular topic of discussion throughout Europe. Catholics across Europe
blamed the Protestants of allying themselves with Ottoman-Muslim
republicanism against the divinely-sanctioned, Bible-preserving Habsburg
monarchy and Christian Catholic Church. As the Catholics blamed all
Protestants of Turkism, the Protestant Churches and states accused local
dissenters of Turkism. They accused republican-leaning dissenters such as
the Unitarians, Socinians and Deists of Turkish affiliations against the
Christian authoritative Church and monarchies. They blamed the dissenters
for Christian disunity, anarchy and chaos. Consequently, both the Catholic
and Protestant authorities implied heavy-handed policies against the
dissenters in the name of maintaining Christian unity. They depicted the
Islamic republicanism as the archenemy of Christian unity, and a leading
factor of internal anarchy and disunity. This way, the internal European
socio-political power struggle was transformed into warfare between the
Christian absolute Church and monarchy and Islamic republicanism,
cherished by the free-thinking freedom fighters and secular libertarians. It
was a strange alliance, but a reality created by the historical circumstances.
The dissenters used Islamic republicanism to analyse, dissect, criticise and
reject Christian traditions to make room for themselves in European society
on equal footing. The centuries-long debates and controversies provided
enough fodder and material for both the dissenters and monarchical
vanguards to appropriate and digest Islamic religious and political themes
to the extent that by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the
Islamic ideas and concepts were mostly internalised and Christianised.1149
Catholics used Islam to substantiate some of their doctrines rejected by the
radical Protestants such as the Immaculate Conception. The Protestants
used Islam to indict Catholics of idolatry and saint worship. Islam was
Europeanised, Christianised, used and abused but not neglected.
Muhammad and Turks were the most discussed, used and abused figures
from the sixteenth century onward Europe.
Europe appropriated these Antichristian ideas, in accordance with its
specific cultural needs and conditions, and was enlightened, partially based
upon many ready-made Islamic ideals. Of course, the appropriation process
and its intensity varied with different European reformers; eighteenth-
century radical reformers such as Henry Stubbe, John Toland, Socinians,
Unitarians and early Deists were the closest to the Islamic reformation
scheme. They equated the pristine, original Christianity of Jesus with Islam,
and reformed the historical, Church Christianity based on that Islamic
reformative model. They openly quoted Muslim scriptures, Islamic history,
Christology and republicanism to delineate their reformative designs. On
the other hand, moderate enlightenment leaders such as John Locke,
Newton and others changed the Christian dogmas from within, rarely
referring to Islam or its scriptures directly; however, the end result was the
same. Their strain of reformed Christianity was freed from the so-called
fundamental Christian dogmas such as the original sin, justification through
the atoning death of Jesus Christ, Trinity, divinity of Jesus and absolute
determinism or salvation through grace and election. These reformers
believed that Christ was a role model, a law-giver rather than a grace-giver,
a messiah and a prophet, an heir to long universal monotheistic prophetic
tradition and nothing but an exalted human being who could be called Lord
and Son of God like rabbis and kings of antiquity. They contended that the
pristine Christianity of Jesus and early Nazarenes was thoroughly corrupted
by the Roman era priestcraft, with the help of various Church Councils and
Synods.1150 The resultant Trinitarian, incarnational and ecclesiastical
Christianity became a useful tool in the hands of power-hungry church
leaders and their royal allies. The absolute church and monarchs subdued
the Christian masses by imposing irrational doctrines such as the Trinity
and original sin, and by monopolising both the sacred and profane public
spaces. Severe punishments were introduced, such as burning alive on the
stake, to curb any possible dissent - whether religious or temporal - while
the boundaries between the sacred and profane were effectively blurred.
The tyrannical monopolisation of both religious and secular realms led to a
concentration of knowledge and its interpretations in the hands of a few
elites - mostly the religious pundits. Christianity needed a thorough
reformation to allow rationalism, monotheism and republicanism to take
their due course. Both the moderate and radical Enlightenment figures
shared the same reformative scheme with its broader thematic elements, but
differed only in the tactics. They were two sides of the same coin.
Seventeenth-century reformers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, Henry
Stubbe, John Toland and many English and French Deists such as Henri
Boulainvilliers, d’Argenson, Du Marsais, jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud,
Nicolas Boindin, Jean Levesque de Burigny, Louis de Brehant, comte de
Plelo (1699-1734), the Chevalier de Ramsay and other known French deists
such as Voltaire1151 contended that the sixteenth-century Reformation
needed additional doctrinal reformation. They purged Christianity of the
remaining incarnational reservoirs, the remnants of ancient Christian
Platonic grafting, and brought it in line with the supposed pristine
Christianity of Jesus Christ and his original followers, the Nasara or
Nazarenes.1152 This Christianity was nothing but a moral tradition in line
with the universal monotheistic prophetic tradition. Their Christianity was a
Unitarian, Socinian, Deistic and Islamic syncretism. In other words, it was a
Muhammadan Christianity, as Henry Stubbe and John Toland termed it, in
direct opposition to the traditional Church Christianity. This hybrid rational
monotheism, along with its natural outlook, republican government system,
ethical anthropology, moral soteriology and rational teleology was the
hallmark of the Continental Enlightenment. The national Enlightenments
were quite complex and multifaceted processes with unique characteristics,
salient features and specific directions. But the Unitarian religious and
republican political transformation was elemental to all these national
Enlightenments, and hence Continental in nature. Therefore, the early
Enlightenment, secular liberalism, republicanism and modernity project
owed more to the Unitarian Islamic syncretism than Spinoza’s supposed
materialism, as Jonathan Israel insists, or on John Locke’s liberal works, as
the majority of scholarship in the field of Enlightenment studies contends.
Both Spinoza and Locke were the products of the Unitarian Islamic
theology, scriptural criticism, anti-clericalism and republicanism. They
worked through Islamic republican tropes and cultural enmeshments to
support the ongoing struggle of dissenters such as the Unitarians, Socinians
and Deists. I agree with Humberto Garcia, Justin Champion and others’
wonderful corrective works of such a misplaced, Eurocentric, dominant
scholarly narrative and agree with their interpretation of Historia
monotheistica and Islamic republicanism as the main source of English
Enlightenment. These were the two main themes implied - openly or tacitly
- by radical and moderate enlightenment figures in England and France. The
leading Founding Fathers of the French Republic and American Republic
such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson and Thomas Paine inherited this Unitarian, Deistic, Islamic strand
of the English Enlightenment and its reformed Christianity, and built the
French and American republics on the moral and political foundations of
this newly reformed Christianity. Let us now turn to this Unitarian Islamic
syncretism which was realised in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England.
 Chapter 5

English Enlightenment and Unitarian Islamic

Syncretism
The Unitarian Islamic syncretism was a hybrid of Islamic ethical
monotheism, prophetic Christology, biblical criticism, anti-Trinitarianism,
anti-clericalism and anti-monarchy couched in a Christian vocabulary, with
due respect to and considerations of Christian cultural sensitivities. This
hybrid was realised by the collective efforts, struggles and sacrifices of the
Socinians, Deists, Unitarians and overseas merchants of the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe. This was a mixture of internal as well as
external influences. The Islamic catalyst was pretty visible though.
Shaftesbury, Stubbe, Toland, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Harrington,
Middleton, Bolingbroke, Milton, Unitarians, Socinians, Deistics and many
other anti-clerical and anti-monarchy individuals and sects in part or in total
participated in this long seventeenth-century struggle modeled on Islamic
republicanism. Europe’s long march against the oppressive Church and
monarchy, and its transition from absolutist to liberal, democratic, modern
project passed through a long love affair with the Islamic republican model.
The powerful Catholic Church, which resisted the anti-Trinitarian and
republican influences of the Islamic world throughout medieval times, was
initially weakened by the Church and state struggles for authority, failed
Crusades and Protestant Reformation, while the Protestant national
churches and states were crippled by internal struggles for power, freedom
and liberty. The English Civil War, Interregnum, overseas trade, emergent
middle class of traders and continuous conflicts between the Crown and
parliaments facilitated the transition.
The paradigm shift was made possible by the constant warfare between
the Christian sects, the ensuing chaos, deformation, destruction of
Christendom and the resultant socio-cultural shock, instability and
insecurity. The Church both Catholic and Protestant and multiple Protestant
sects were directly blamed for this destructive chaos which touched almost
everybody’s life in Europe. It forced the Europeans to accept one another
and tolerate religious differences. However, this acceptance of religious
plurality needed to be intellectualised, and the theorisation and
legitimisation process of toleration greatly helped the Enlightenment
Project. Moreover, European’s encounter with other nations, especially the
neighbouring Islamic Orient gave them an access to an alternate religio-
historical narrative. Many European travellers were fascinated with the
Moghul and Ottoman empires and wrote detailed accounts of Muslim
religion, customs, habits, culture and politics; these accounts helped in
making the Christian claims to divine authority relative rather than absolute.
As the Europeans were exhausted by the religious warfare and Christian
scaffolding, the alternate Islamic narrative and arrangements were
refreshing and attractive. The external “other” was helpful in mirroring the
internal fiasco and was used as a whip to indict the perceived internal
enemy and to realise the needed internal changes. On the way, many of its
ideas, ideals and outlooks were intentionally or un-intentionally absorbed,
appropriated and owned.
Seventeenth-century radical enlightenment figures such as Stubbe, Toland,
Deists such as Charles Blount and Unitarians such as Stephen Nye and
Arthur Bury did not hesitate to quote the Quran, Prophet Muhammad,
Islamic history and teachings during their deconstruction process as well as
the reconstruction process. They openly demanded a change based on the
Islamic/Muhammaden model. They rejected the suffocating, intolerant and
absolutist traditional Church Christianity, and instead desired a pristine,
rational, natural, minimalistic and tolerant Muhammadan Christianity,
epitomised by the Ottoman Empire’s pluralism and republicanism. The
radical agenda was furthered by the dissenters such as the Socinians,
Unitarians and Deists. Both the moderate and radical enlighteners had close
Socinian or Unitarian links, but some hesitated to publicly confess such
links to avoid Church persecutions. John Locke and Isaac Newton were too
cautious, calculated and prudent to sacrifice their careers and social clout to
go through the humiliating persecutions and tortures unleashed upon
Unitarians, Socinians and other dissenters. The brutal, tortorous and
barbaric hanging, drawing and quatering death of the 20--year-old
Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead in 1697 was a constant reminder for
them.1153 This was too much of a punishment for tacit anti-Trinitarianism
and Islamism.
The Socinians and Unitarians were openly called “crypto-Muslims”,
“Turks”, “Moors” and “Muhammadens”, the terms denoting Muslims in
sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe.1154 Many moderate as well as
radical enlighteners were named by their opponents as “Turks”,
“Socinians”, “Unitarians”, Mahometen” and straightforward Muslims. For
instance, Locke, Newton, Blount, Stubbe and Toland were named “Turks,”
“Socinians,” “Unitarians,” “Arians” and “Muhammadan Christians” by
their opponents. Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson for instance were
called straightforward Muslims.1155
The mainstream moderate enlightenment figures, such as Locke and
Newton, were able to bring about a partial change in England that resulted
in a mixed monarchy sharing political powers with the parliament and the
gentry through the mechanism of a constitution. This enlightenment trend
neither broke with the traditional monarchy nor with the traditional
Christianity, but tried to reform it from within while using outside - mostly
Islamic - models. The Islamic doctrines and ideas were Christianised and
contextualised; this moderate trend was the source and the aspired model of
the American Revolution. The moderate enlighteners were less effective in
the French arena where the Most Christian King and hegemonic Catholic
Church ruled with iron fist, meting out swift and harsh punishments to any
and every kind of dissent. The French monarchical and clerical radicalism
was met with equal brutality by the French radical revolutionaries. The
French de-Christianisation and use of monotheistic, rational, Islamic hybrid
was open and violent. Ali Bonaparte epitomised this strand of radicalism.
Radicals like Henry Stubbe, Henri de Boulainvilliers, and later on
Napoleon Bonaparte did not hesitate to publicise their sheer appreciation
for Islamic monotheism, rationalism, constitutionalism and ethical
republicanism. They graciously admired Prophet Muhammad as the
enlightenment hero who brought about the perfect reformation of the
corrupted traditional Christianity, far ahead of the partial 16th century
European Reformation. Jonathan Israel observes that “the Radical
Enlightenment […] entertained a curiously schizoid view of Islam and
Mohammed. On the one hand, from the late Seventeenth century and
culminating in Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed (‘Londres’, 1730), a work
widely diffused through Europe-and republished in English (London, 1731)
and Italian (Venice, 1744)-Islam is viewed positively, even enthusiastically,
as a purified form of revealed religion, stripped of the many imperfections
of Judaism and Christianity and hence reassuringly akin to deism.”1156
Muhammad was the model of English Whiggism; John V. Tolan noted that
“over the course of the seventeenth century […] various Whig intellectuals
came to see the prophet Mahomet as a model reformer, one who smashed
‘priestcraft,’ the grasping greed of a clerical class that built its power on the
ignorance and superstition of the masses. Mahomet, far from establishing a
new religion, offered a purified monotheism stripped of abstruse doctrines
and idolatrous rites. He abolished the privileges of the clergy and
reestablished a direct relationship between God and his believers. In all
these things, reason was his supreme guide. This vision, most fully
expressed by Stubbe and Toland, met fierce opposition from those who
defended the privileges of Anglican Church, who reaffirmed the traditional
view of Mahomet as a dangerous impostor and did not hesitate to paint their
opponents as new Mahomets. In the eighteenth century, Mahomet plays a
similar role in France; opponents of the wealth and power of the Catholic
Church present Mahomet’s purified, anticlerical monotheism as an antidote
to French ills.”1157
Islam and Muhammad were ideal models, but contemporary Muslims
were not, due to their human shortcomings. In reality, the constant
seventeenth-century struggle between Whiggish republican and Tory
conservative ideologies was in a sense a fight between Turkish Muhammad
and the Church hegemonic Christianity. From Shaftesbury to Stubbe,
Toland to Locke, all republican-leaning enlightenment figures employed, in
one way or the other, Muhammad, Turks and Islam as a whip as well as a
model to correct the English problems. Henry Stubbe and Napoleon
Bonaparte are reported to have declared their conversion to Islam;
Napoleon became “Ali Bonaparte” and declared his conversion in a public
statement while in Egypt. Many academicians try to highlight the political
motives behind Napoleon’s conversion to Islam1158 but his last words of
total appreciation of Islamic ethical monotheism, rationalism and Prophet
Muhammad’s splendid legal, political and moral legacy refute or at least
mitigate such claims of political expediency.1159 It suffices to quote Juan
Cole, a contemporary authority on Bonaparte, who confirms that
“Bonaparte’s admiration for the Prophet Muhammad, in contrast, was
genuine.”1160 Even if his conversion is accepted as a political stunt, it still
substantiates the close links maintained and affinities harboured by the
radical Deists and Unitarians with the Unitarian faith of Islam. Islam and
Muhammad were used as catalysts of sweeping changes during the early
and high Enlightenment periods. Muhammad was the Prophet of
Enlightenment, as John Tolan has noted.
Muhammad, the Prophet of Enlightenment
Islam, Muhammad, the Quran and Turks were some of the most discussed
terms and concepts in Enlightenment-era Europe. The Prophet of Islam,
Muhammad, can be described as the most discussed and quoted figure
during the Enlightenment centuries. Matthew Dimmock notes that
“Mahomet was well known in early modern England. Routinely rejected,
reclaimed, defamed, defended and used as a polemical tool, in his various
forms Mahomet could be imagined as French, Spanish, German, Arabian or
Persian, and he might be Muslim, Protestant or Roman Catholic – but most
importantly […] he was repeatedly imagined as English, and summoned to
appear in England. The bewildering variety of guises in which Mahomet
appears in English writings presents a distinctively new perspective on this
period.”1161 Prophet Muhammad was widely invoked all over Christendom.
In the “early modern period between 1450 and 1750, Mahomet becomes a
defining and often divisive figure. Aside from those celebrated individuals
in the interconnected theological and political worlds of Christendom –
Biblical patriarchs, saints, potentates – he is the most well known and
frequently invoked in this three-hundred-year span. Almost everyone knew
of Mahomet. He is depicted in numerous divergent forms in poetry, drama
and prose of different genres; he is invoked from pulpits, related in stories,
declaimed by travellers and polemically paralleled with Christ, Luther,
various popes and almost every English monarch of the period. His image
appears in political and religious tracts and pamphlets, in chronicle histories
and in English prayerbooks, and hangs on the wall of at least one noble
household. In early modern and enlightenment England he is ubiquitous to
the point that his invocation becomes a shorthand for a whole range of
associations.”1162 John V. Tolan’s recent book Faces of Muhammad well
demonstrates the point. Dimmock further illustrates that “Mahomet and
‘his’ religion were not simply something alien or ‘other’ but might be
imagined as mutually reinforcing monotheism or even, in some early
enlightenment writing, as an authentic true Christianity. Shared Abrahamic
roots connected the two religions, making Mahomet and his doctrine
uncannily familiar. What we now call Islam became the ‘dark bubble’ of
Christianity, an encroaching other world, a mirror image enabling a
sustained reflection on Christian faults and Christian depravity.”1163
Muhammad’s erastian church and state model was highly relevant to Henry
VIII’s England. In a “post-Reformation English context he [Muhammad]
gains an extraordinary vitality because – like Henry VIII and most of his
successors – Mahomet was simultaneously a spiritual and secular leader.
Writing about Mahomet and Mahometanism in England in these years was
never simply about engaging with those beyond Christendom. It offered a
means of cementing and projecting, but also critiquing, English political
and religious structures.”1164 In addition to Prophet Muhammad, the Muslim
scripture Quran was also very popular during this period.1165
The same can be said about France and many other continental countries.
Ian Coller notes that “From the mid-Sixteenth century onward, France
joined a loose alliance with the Ottoman Empire, fostering ongoing contacts
in diplomacy, military training, and trade with a Muslim power. Beginning
in the 1720s, philosophers began to investigate the life and teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad in new ways that undermined older theological
understandings. Trade and diplomacy produced travellers’ accounts that
shaped the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers. Radical philosophical ideas
about Islam came together with diplomatic and commercial knowledge of
Muslim societies to produce a sea change in conceptions about Muslims
and Islam that would become entangled with the revolutionary
transformation.”1166 The landscape was the same in Germany, Italy and even
Spain, albeit secretly.
Muslim presence was felt all over England and France, and Muslim
names, relatives, connections and stories were all across France.
“Connections could be more intimate. Places and families across France
carried names like Le Turc and Sarrazin, traces of medieval Muslim
presence in Languedoc and Provence, or the Ottoman fleet that wintered in
Toulon in 1543. Members of many French families—among them the
Rousseau, Chénier, and Laclos families—spent extended periods living in
Muslim cities for trade or diplomacy. Some—like Louis XVI’s foreign
minister, the Countde Vergennes, former ambassador to Istanbul, and Louis
de Chénier, father of revolutionaries André and Marie-Joseph Chénier—
brought Ottoman Christian wives back to France. Others, like the famous
Count de Bonneval, moved to Istanbul and converted to Islam. At the other
end of the social ladder, convicts and Protestants sentenced to serve in the
galleys of Marseille and Toulon found themselves labouring alongside
‘Turks’—Muslims purchased from slave traders in Malta or Italy. Muslims
were, in the words of a recent historian, Europe’s ‘familiar strangers.’”1167
The Muslim world and society was “the most expansive and influential in
the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere.”1168 Marshall Hodgson, the famous historian,
noted that a visitor from Mars visiting at that time “might well have
supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim.”1169
Overseas Trade, Piracy and Turning Turk
Hundreds of thousands of French, Dutch and Englishmen worked in the
Muslim Ottoman, Safvid and Mughal Empires, Africa and the Far East
(English, Dutch and French Levant and East India Companies),1170 dealing
with Muslims on land and on sea.1171 They turned many parts of the Muslim
East into “a little England,”1172 France and Netherlands. “From the Atlantic
coast to the Valley of the Nile, and from Istanbul to Salee, Britons lived and
worked among the Muslims.”1173 Fernand Braudel noted that there “was
suddenly an invasion of the East by the West.”1174 Britain was not yet a big
power and early British merchants, workers and travellers were mesmerised
by the Muslim world, its society, prosperity and systems.1175 For the early
modern English, the Ottoman Empire was “the fabulously wealthy and
magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his
great and powerful army.”1176 Captivity was another main source of
interactions, inter-cultural and inter-faith exchanges.
Many Europeans were captives of the Barbary States. Robert C. Davis has
shown that “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million
and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European
Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.”1177 Many
accepted Islam to avoid slavery or to benefit from the financial
possibilities.1178 “Britons held in North Africa converted to Islam and lived
on, or died in captivity, unless they escaped or were ransomed and returned
home.”1179 Many of them rejected offers of safe return to their homelands
due to new realities and opportunities, but kept regular contacts with their
relatives and friends back home.1180 “Religiously and culturally changed as
they were, their compatriots could not but believe that they had continued to
retain something of old England or Spain in their hearts—and if not
something of their previous Christianity, then a clear memory of their
country’s customs.”1181 The European diplomates, merchants and workers
kept in touch with the renegades and utilised their experience, clout and
networks to enhance their opportunities and successes. M. Pugh notes that
during “the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries an estimated 20,000
Englishmen were captured by the corsairs, most of them ending up as
slaves.”1182
Maartje van Gelder, in The Republic’s Renegades: Dutch Converts to
Islam in Seventeenth-Century Diplomatic Relations with North Africa, has
demonstrated that many Dutch renegades and converts played an important
diplomatic role between the Dutch and the Barbary States. “Dutch converts
to Islam acted as informants, intermediaries, and at times even informal
diplomats, thereby facilitating and shaping cross-confessional diplomatic
relations between the North African polities and the Protestant Dutch
Republic, a relative newcomer to Mediterranean affairs.”1183 Voluntary
conversion to Islam was widespread among the Dutch. “Whereas coerced
conversion fitted European narratives of an aggressive Islam, voluntary
apostasy did not; yet it was a pervasive phenomenon in the Ottoman Empire
and the independent kingdom of Morocco. Conversion by pronouncing the
shahada (declaration of faith), and usually circumcision if the convert was
male, was often followed by taking a new name, gifts of clothing and
money, marriage to a Muslim spouse, and integration into local patronage
networks. Changing faith was not just a religious but also a social and
political practice during which converts constructed ties with their new
religious community.”1184 Likewise, Algeria and Tunis attracted many Dutch
converts. “A similar pattern is discernible in North Africa: men, often with
maritime experience, moved to its ports, converted, and joined the
corsairing fleets searching for economic gains, social ascent, and perhaps
levels of political power that they could never hope to obtain in their native
countries.”1185
Some of the known corsairs came from England and Dutch Republic.
Asan Agha and John Ward1186 were English converts,1187 and had a huge
contingent of English renegades at their disposal. Dutch converts such as
Admiral Joseph Rais, born as Gerrit Jacobsz in the town of Enkhuizen,
represented Tunis during negotiations with Dutch authorities. The
Dutchmen Danseker,1188 Claes Compaen, Moerad Rais (Jan Jansz), Vice-
Admiral Matthijs van Bootel, Soliman Rais (De Veenboer), Xabano
Flamengo, Fendri Shaban, Hendrick Jansen, Murat Picinino Rais and many
other Dutch converts reached the height of their power and prestige in the
Barbary States.1189 “In April 1611, the States of Holland discussed the fact
that one Simon Maartenszoon Stuijt served as the captain of several
corsairing ships in the Bay of Marmora; in 1613, a Dutch captive related
that eight of the thirty-five ships of the Algerian corsairing fleet were
commanded by Dutch rais; in 1625-1626, a Dutch envoy reported that eight
of the fifty Algerian rais hailed originally from the Low Countries,
including Seffer Rais alias Thomas the Pickpocket, from Harlingen, Regeb
Rais from The Hague, and Seliman Buffoen alias Jacob the Brothelkeeper,
from Rotterdam.”1190 Indeed “several were so successful in their pursuits as
North African pirates that they became the objects of keen interest in the
popular Dutch press.”1191 Ibn abi Dinar, the famous seventeenth-century
Tunisian historian, attributed the success of the Tunisian fleet to Dutch,
English and other European converts.1192
These “converts maintained business relations or correspondence with
Christian family members and friends […] the liminal position of converts
and their ability to cross and recross not just religious but also political and
social boundaries. It is this ability that has seen them cast as yet another
category of cultural intermediaries or brokers”1193 They visited their
families, closely helped the Dutch ambassadors in North Africa and
corresponded with the State General and Prince Maurice of Orange.1194
“During a career that spanned three decades, the privateer Jan Jansz became
Moerad Rais, the North African corsair who evolved from aggressor to
protector, adviser, and diplomatic mediator to the Dutch.”1195 The Dutch
converts, like their French and British counterparts, aggressively engaged in
proselytisation, converting multitudes of their countrymen to Islam.1196 They
married in the Muslim world, lived with their Muslim spouses and children
and brought some of their Dutch and British family members to live with
them.1197 At times they spent entire winters in the Dutch Republic, had
religious debates with their friends and relatives and refused to change their
Islamic religion or to return to Christianity.1198 Van Gelder after quoting
many examples stresses “how common such encounters between the
converted and their Christian kin and former compatriots could be. These
examples indicate the frequency and apparent ease with which these
interactions took place, whether in the Dutch Republic or in North Africa.
Renegades continued to engage with Christian Dutchmen and to be
identifiable by their Dutch origins.”1199
Likewise, there were countless Muslims slaves in Europe and America.1200
“That the Barbary corsairs captured thousands of Europeans is not in
question; but then, the Europeans captured and enslaved more. That the
actions of the Barbary corsairs were motivated by greed and economic need
are not in question; but they were also undertaken in retaliation for the
violence committed against them by Europeans—government-sponsored
acts of empire as well as disparate attacks of pirates and privateers.”1201 The
East and West especially the Mediterranean basin were intersected in so
many ways and their cultures, customs and religions were quite familiar.
Nabil Matar1202 and Gerald MacLean have shown close interactions and
intersections between Europeans and Muslims of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Matar noted that “throughout the Elizabethan and
Stuart periods Britons had extensive interaction with Turks and Moors.”1203
He further noted that “so extensive was the commercial and diplomatic
coordination between the queen and the sultan that Europeans suspected her
of planning to offer him ‘safe port in England, by means of which to set his
foot also into the Western Empire.’ In 1590 King James VI of Scotland was
‘perswaided that no Christian Prince [except Queen Elizabeth] ever had in
the Turk suche great estimation’; and by the end of the century, the Pope
viewed Elizabeth as “a confederate with the Turk.’”1204 Francis Bacon, the
father of English empiricism, strongly defended English ties with the Grand
Turk and hailed Muslim anti-saint images, and other idolatrous practices of
the Catholic Church.1205
Nobody can exactly gauge the type of information transmitted back to
England, but one thing is certain; that the Englishmen knew a great deal
about Islam and the Muslim world. “But there is little doubt that the
information about Muslims that was available to Britons in the Age of
Discovery provided them with a window on an un-Christian but powerful
empire with an unchallenged but challenging religion that was both
unthreatened and threatening. It was not an empire England could possess,
but one it had to watch and guard against. While Britons traveled and traded
between London and Salee, or Plymouth and New England, or Bristol and
Guinea, and as they expanded their ‘discovery’ of the world, they were
constantly aware of the Muslim Other, as buyer and seller, partner and
pirate, captive and captor.”1206 The Muslim Barbary States were
instrumental and integral to such close and intimate interactions, “until the
middle of the seventeenth century, the Barbary States and the rest of the
Islamic Mediterranean were instrumental in refashioning the British self-
image and determining historical, political and commercial choices.”1207 The
influence of the Barbary States on English literature, culture, politics,
religion and identity was tremendous.1208
Pugh observed that “it is now clear that in 1619, in Algeria alone, there
were 200,000 Christian converts – ‘Renegados’ or ‘Levantines’ as they
were known, with a further 500 joining them each year. Christians who did
not believe in the Trinity were often called ‘Mahometans’, which created
the impression of even more Muslims. All this was embarrassing.
Contemporaries asked whether it meant that Islam was the superior
religion.”1209 The Levant Compnay chaplain - and later vice chancellor of
Isaac Newton’s Cambridge University - Dr. John Covel’s observations
about a single day of large Christian conversions to Islam in the Ottoman
Empire were telling.1210 “It is our shame, for I believe all Europe have not
gained so many Turkes to us these 200 yeares; for, though the Ch. of Rome
boast their Emissaryes here (as, indeed, there are many, many), Jesuits,
Dominicans, Franciscans, yet, believe me, they have other designes than
converting of Turkes.”1211 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries Europeans flocked to the Muslim East and converted in bands;
merchants, skilled workers, soldiers, clergy and high officials succumbed to
the allure of the Islamic world. The renowned French historian F. Braudel
observed that “Men flocked from Christendom to Islam, which tempted
them with visions of adventure and profit […] On coming into contact with
Islamic countries, Christians were often seized with the urge to turn
Moslem. In the presidios on the African coast, Spanish garrisons were
decimated by epidemics of desertion. On Djerba in 1560, before the fort
surrendered to the Turks, a number of Spaniards had already joined the
enemy, ‘abandoning their faith and their comrades’. Not long afterwards at
La Goletta, a plot to surrender the position to the Infidel was uncovered.
Small boats frequently left Sicily with cargoes of candidates for apostasy.
At Goa the same phenomenon was observable among the Portuguese. The
call was so strong that it even reached the clergy. The ‘Turk’ who
accompanied one of His Christian Majesty’s ambassadors back to France,
and whom the Spanish authorities were advised to capture en route, was a
former Hungarian priest. It cannot have been such a very rare occurrence: in
1630, Pere Joseph was asked to recall the Capuchins living in the Levant,
‘lest they turn Turk’. From Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria, Genoa,
Venice, Spain, from every point in the Mediterranean world, renegades
converged on Islam. There was no comparable flow in the other
direction.”1212 Pugh asked: “Why were there so many converts from
Christianity to Islam and so few from Islam to Christianity? Despite a
widespread belief in England that the Turks practised forcible conversion,
in fact generally they did not seek converts from vanquished opponents,
preferring simply to collect taxes, fines or services from them. The idea was
spread by slaves who had been ransomed or escaped, and then claimed to
have been the victims of compulsory conversion. In fact, converts were
usually willing, especially if they had experienced religious persecution in
Europe. Protestants were especially appreciative of Muslim society; it was
relatively tolerant, had no idols or monastic orders, and was based on
individual study of the religion instead of passive acceptance of it from
priests. But the main advantage lay in linking oneself to a more powerful
empire and a superior civilisation. Converts found that the relatively
egalitarian spirit of Islam allowed employment and advancement for those
from modest backgrounds. In Morocco, the royal executioner was one
‘Absalom’; as a former butcher from Exeter, he evidently had the right
skills!” 1213
Some converts, like English John Ward, became extremely wealthy and
influential.1214 Many Christian converts reached the pinnacle of their power
and influence in the Ottoman Empire, as Tobias P. Graf has amply
demonstrated. They kept closely connected with their relatives back in
Europe, and many of their friends, relatives and colleagues visited them in
Istanbul, Aleppo and Budapest.1215 Adrian Tinniswood has shown that
countless English, Dutch and French Christians had turned Turk1216 and
Matthew Dimmock,1217 Matthew Birchwood,1218 Daniel J. Vitkus, Samuel C.
Chew1219 and Nabil Matar in his Islam and Britain and many others have
demonstrated the height of alarm it caused in London and elsewhere.
Jonathan Burton, in English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion:
Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,1220 has amply
shown that many of these converts were impressed by the superior, rational
and systematic Islamic religion rather than just secular interests. The
scholars of this period tend to trivialise these spiritual and religious
dimensions. Burton raises the possibility that “Christians could have been
moved by theological debate.”1221 Burton demonstrated that the Muslim
Christian theological debates occurred both in England and France, and
involved the high echelons of society,1222 and that some of the converts
belonged to high noble families and clergy. The Moorish delegate Ahmad
Ibn Qasim al-Hajari’s 1611 debates all over France1223 and Moroccan
ambassador to Low Countries Ahmad bin Abd Allah’s dialogue with
Maurice, Prince of Orange and his brother-in-law Immanuel of Portugal,
and his subsequent polemic text Muhamedani Epistola, are good examples
of such high-level discourse.1224 Nabil Matar noted that religious dialogue
between Muslim kings and their Christian counterparts was not
uncommon.1225
Consequently, there were many Muslim converts in France, Netherland
and England. “In 1611, Thomas Coryate wrote about the numerous
Muslims in London who could be identified by the ‘rowle of fine linen
wrapped together upon their heads’—their turbans.”1226 Another English
writer in1641 decried these “Divelish and Demnable” London Muslims
along with 29 other heretical sects. These Muslims along with their many
other anti-Trinitarian “Christian Turks” and “Mahometan Christian” fellows
were permanent fixtures in the early seventeenth century London.1227
Ottoman Turkish and Barbary cultures, customs, clothes and expressions
were pretty common in London and Paris.1228 “Clearly the Moors and Turks
were “everywhere,”—not just in the literary imagination of English
dramatists and poets, but in the streets, the sea towns, the royal residences,
the courts, and the jails of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England and
Wales.”1229 As noted above, the coffeehouses with Turkish turban and
“Muhammadan berry” were all around London.1230 They were the Starbucks
of that time and were frequented by many turbaned Englishmen.1231 Such
Ottomania and Orientalism was a long lasting English tradition.
 King Henry VIII used Turkish clothes on special occasions. “Turbans
were worn at the Tudor court. On Shrove Sunday in 1533, the youthful king
Henry VIII, along with the Earl of Essex, hosted a banquet at Westminster
‘for all the Ambassadours, whiche then wer here’. Henry and his companion
presumably aimed to startle the foreign envoys when they ‘came in
appareled after Turkey fasshion, in long robes of Bawkin, powedered with
gold, hattes on their heddes of Crimsoyn Velvet.’”1232 Queen Elizabeth
frequently dressed in the special dress sent to her from Istanbul by
Roxelana (Hurrum Sultana), Sultan Sulayman the Magnificent’s wife,
including hijab. “She was so fascinated by things Islamic that she requested
from her ambassador in Istanbul some Turkish clothes; like her father, she
wanted to dress in the oriental fashion.”1233 The Turkish clothes and
Ottomania validated English monarchs’ anti-Catholic and anti-Habsburg
sentiments and policies. Many English and Scottish travellers ventured into
the Islamic world especially for pilgrimage to the Holy Lands and returned
with Islamic dresses and habits. “Meanwhile, travelling Englishmen started
returning from the Levant fully ‘attired in Turkish dress complete with
turban’: after all, whenever they went into the domains of Islam, they
dressed in Muslim attire. The first engraving that survives of a Christian
from Britain dressed in Muslim clothes and turban shows the Scottish
traveller William Lithgow who visited the Levant in 1612. ‘I clad in Turkish
manner,’ wrote Henry Blount in his 1636 account of his Voyage into the
Levant.”1234
Turkish clothes were fashionable among the royals and elites. King
Charles II (1630 – 1685) was known for dressing up in Persian and Turkish
clothes.1235 “At the same time, the first coffee shop selling the ‘Turkish
berry’ opened in Oxford; a few years later, King Charles II started wearing
clothes designed in the ‘Persian’ fashion. In 1681–2, the Moroccan
ambassador was widely feted and taken to see the Royal Society— where
he signed his name on the visitors’ chart—and the University of Oxford.”1236
Later on we will see that the Unitarians tried to present to this Ambassador
a detailed letter about Islamic Unitarian similarities against the calumnies of
Trinitarians. Countless English merchants, consuls and even ambassadors’
Eastern fascinations and assimilations have already been discussed above.
Islam, Muslims and Muslim culture were a known commodity, as the
“leisured classes in England were entertaining themselves by dressing up in
‘Turkish habits’[…] Imports from the Islamic world were changing the
ways that people in England lived. Drinking coffee, imported from the
Ottoman Empire, and tea, imported from the Far East, became national
habits. Textiles—English wool, Persian silk, Turkey carpets, Indian cottons
—were crucial commodities linking people in Britain with residents of the
Islamic world that changed the ways people dressed themselves and how
they decorated their houses. The intimate adoption of these commodities,
their penetration into everyday lives, represents a largely unacknowledged
relationship between Britain and the Muslim world.”1237 Some English
ladies were married to Muslim rulers and converts. “In the second half of
the Seventeenth century one of the wives of the dey of Algiers was English,
and so too was one of the harem of Mulay Ismail, the powerful ruler of
Morocco. She bore him two sons. In 1682 a Christian convert to Islam by
the name of Hamed Lucas accompanied the Moroccan ambassador
Mohammad bin Hadou to London, and during his stay married an English
servant girl.”1238 Matar further noted that “in numerous plays there are
references to Muslim-Christian and Muslim-English marriages—marriages
that could not have taken place or even been dramatised between
Britons/Christians and unconverted Jews or American Indians.”1239
Christian-Muslim marriages were also widespread in the Mughal Empire;
many East India Company officials, employees and workers were married
to their Indian Muslim wives. The same is reported of some European
workers in Levant1240 and the Barbary States. These officers and workers
must have converted to Islam, otherwise marriage with a Muslim woman
would have not been permitted. French, Dutch and English merchants and
officers dressed in Eastern clothes, adopted Eastern habits, cultural
expressions and even wrote poetry in Eastern languages. It is pertinent to
note that many merchants who made their fortunes in the Muslim East
especially those who broke the monopoly of the early East India Company
Royalists since 1648 were anti-Trinitarian, anti-clerical Whig radicals who
supported the anti-monarchy revolutions of 1649 and then the Glorious
Revolution of 1688-1689.1241 The English dissenters, radical merchants,
Low Churchmen and Whig parliamentarians worked closely against the
royalist elite merchants, High Churchmen, nonjurors and Tories.1242
Many merchants and officers practiced polygamy and maintained large
harems while in the Muslim world.1243 “When in the Indian capital,
Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula
(Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman: every
evening all thirteen of his consorts used to process around Delhi behind
their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. With his fondness for
hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop
Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting
on a divan wearing a ‘choga and pagri’ while being fanned by servants
holding peacock-feather punkhas. To one side of Ochterlony’s own tent was
the red silk harem tent where his women slept, and on the other side the
encampment of his daughters, all, according to the Bishop, ‘hung around
with red cloth and thus fenced in from the eyes of the profane.’”1244 General
Ochterlony’s wife Mubarak Begum went to perform Hajj in Mecca.1245
They brought their wives and children back to Europe; this practice
continued until very late in the nineteenth century, when after the general
mutiny of 1857 the British were prohibited from such practices. The
contemporary British historian William Dalrymple’s White Mughals well
substantiates this Muslim Christian hybrid.1246 He showed that “of the
Bengal Wills from 1780 to 1785 preserved in the India Office, one in three
contains a bequest to Indian wives or companions or their natural children.
It can safely be assumed that many more kept Indian mistresses without
wishing to leave a formal legal record of the fact.”1247 He further noted that
“for nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent
had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different
ways.”1248 These Christian Muslim families, on their return to England,
moved in the high echelons of British society, enjoying high-profile
connections and influences. One such family was the Kirkpatrick family;
Kitty Kirkpatrick, the daughter of Kirkpatrick and his Muslim wife Khair
un Nisas, was born as Muslim. “She had initially been brought up as Sahib
Begum, a Muslim noblewoman in Hyderabad, before being shipped off to
England at four years old, baptised on her arrival in London and thenceforth
completely cut off from her Matarnal relations. Instead she had been
absorbed into the upper echelons of Victorian literary society, where she
had fascinated her cousins’ tutor, the young Thomas Carlyle, and formed
the basis for the heroine Blumine, ‘a many tinted radiant Aurora […] the
fairest of Oriental light-bringers,’ in Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus.”1249
The cultural and political influence of the Muslim empires in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was immense. “The Turks and Moors
belonged to the most powerful of all the non-Christian civilisations with
which Britons were engaged. They also belonged to the international
community of trade, diplomacy, and military rivalry that marked England’s
foray into the age of Mediterranean and Atlantic discovery. Although from
the Elizabethan period on the English were beginning to develop their
anglocentric view of the world, they were deeply aware that they had to
contend with a powerful and sometimes confrontational and aggressive
islamocentrism—from Salee to London, from Tunis to Istanbul, and from
Bristol to New England, Turks and Moors reminded them that the world did
not revolve around Albion.”1250
The situation in France was pretty much the same.1251 The French leaders
were willing to replace obsolete and irrational Christian dogmas and
practices with more enlightening and liberating Islamic teachings, but were
hesitant to elevate the contemporary Muslims to that level of sophistication
and enlightenment. The role of Islam was more symbolic, fluid and
multifaceted.1252 The Muslim enemies were too useful to be discarded.
Islam, Muhammad, Islamic Unitarianism, ethical salvation schemes,
republicanism and religious tolerance were employed by almost all
segments of European religious and political landscape to propagate or
defend their ideals or to attack, ridicule or berate their opponents’ Islamic
republicanism. Indeed, Islam and Ottomans were the obsessions of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe both positively and negatively.
They were the “others” against whom Europe mirrored its failures,
successes and aspirations.
In the eighteenth century, many Europeans - especially some of the known
radical enlighteners - began to see Muhammad as a statesman, a legislator
and a true messenger of God and his religion, Islam, as the rational religion
of justice, good will and republican values. Their main predicament was
organised Christianity and the Old Regime, with their mysterious
interpretations of man, God, politics and universe. The royals and clergy
claimed special knowledge of those mysteries and hence superiority over
the masses; those challenging that superiority, whether religious or political,
were severely persecuted. The reformers needed an alternate interpretation
of man, God and universe to replace the irrational, mysterious Christian
interpretations; Islam, Muhammad and Quran were their best bet, due to
their relative historical authenticity and relevance. Consequently, the
reformers turned to them. Islam was equally an element of subversion,
deformation, destruction and at the same time reformation and
reconstruction. It was the “other” that defined and mirrored the
enlightenment in so many ways and forms.
 Chapter 6

Islam and the Early English Enlightenment

Radical and moderate English enlightenment figures alike agreed that Islam
was a genuine heir to the universal, monotheistic, prophetic tradition and
republicanism. Islam was the antidote to Christian theological and political
excesses and cure for the abusive political and religious hierarchy.
Mainstream English enlighteners, such as Locke and Newton, were
neither as public as their radical English fellows such as Stubbe or Toland,
nor as radical as the French revolutionaries. They were more cautious,
subtle, calculated and thoughtful, and did not throw out the baby along with
the bathwater. J. Israel states that “among its primary spokesmen were
Newton and Locke in England, Thomasius and Wolff in Germany, the
‘Newtonians’ Nieuwentijt and ‘s-Gravesande in the Netherlands, and Feijoo
and Piquer, in Spain. This was the Enlightenment which aspired to conquer
ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionise ideas,
education, and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to
preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older
structures, effecting a viable synthesis of old and new, and of reason and
faith.”1253 Israel noted that Locke and Newton were moderate in their tactics
but radical in their theology and philosophy.1254 Their Christian reformation
scheme was no less radical than Stubbe, Toland, Socinians and Unitarians;
in reality, they were closet Unitarians.
They felt that the God of the Bible and Church Christianity was
inadequate for their rational religious and democratic political needs. That
God was intolerant of dissent, religious plurality and freedom, claiming to
be the only political sovereign, granting governmental authority at whims
without any considerations of qualifications, accountability and mutuality.
He did not recognise natural human rights, freedoms and liberties, his
commandments, instructions and covenants were tyrannical, autocratic and
draconian, and his ways were arbitrary, selective and discriminatory. He
preferred certain people over others, and preferred faith, submission and
obedience over morality, righteousness and virtue. They wanted instead a
God, faith and Bible that allowed diversity, toleration, morality, human
rights and equality. They deconstructed and decoded the Christian God,
Bible and theology to reconstruct it on relatively liberal, democratic and
republican lines. The politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
accelerated the theological transformation. The new Christianity was totally
at odd with the old, Church Christianity; it was more rational, less
supernatural, authoritarian and persecutory. They built the new
Enlightenment culture based on this revised and reformed belief system,
purging the traditional Christianity and its systems from supernatural
elements, irrational dogmas and persecutory instincts without discarding the
outer shell. They accomplished this in the name of a return to the original,
pristine and simple Christianity of Jesus and the first-century Church. They
did not de-Christianise England like their French counterparts, but re-
Christianised it on the original, simple and pure lines. The end product was
not the historical, traditional Church Christianity practiced in Europe for
centuries, but a totally different animal, far removed from the dogmatic,
irrational, intrusive and abusive Church Christianity and closer to the
monotheistic, ethical, liberating, universal prophetic tradition. It was rather
a simple, minimal, tolerant, egalitarian, rational, Unitarian, Muhammaden
Christianity; crafted, couched and suited to English needs, culture and
society.
They were neither irreligious nor atheists but infidels who rejected the
Christian dogmas, institutional authority and scriptural foundations. It is not
appropriate to call them Christian rationalists, Christian Deists or Christian
liberals, as they did not subscribe to the fundamentally-central tenets of
Christianity; their belief system was not a subset of Church Christianity.
They demolished the fundamental roots of the word “Christianity” by
rejecting Christ’s divinity, atoning death and salvific efficacy. If denying
every fundamental belief of Christianity does not make them un-Christian
then what does? In the eighteenth century there was no such thing as
Christianity by association; adherence to the fundamental dogmas of
Christianity in conformity with the Church interpretations was required.
They appropriated the word Christianity, Jesus, Scripture and salvation to
their peculiar understandings and hybrid belief system, totally divergent
from the historical Christianity. They were neither fully Christians nor fully
Deists per strict, narrow and official definitions of the categories. Their
theological and political views were more akin to Muslim thought patterns.
This is how their opponents described them as crypto-Muslims and Turks.
The assimilation and appropriation of Islamic ideas was intentional,
conscious and calculated.
Islam was a known commodity to the English Protestants; English
encounters with Islam and Muslims in the Holy Land during the Crusades
were not trivial. Later on, the Ottoman armies were at the doorsteps of
Vienna, the gateway to Western Europe by 1529, and continued the push
until the 1680s. The Protestant Hungarian rebel Imre Tokoly (1657-1705),
the Prince of Transylvania, known as Count Teckely in England, had sought
out Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV’s protection and help against the Catholic
Hapsburg monarchs. He fought along with the Ottomans against the
Catholics until the battle of Zenta in 1697, and lived under the Ottoman
auspices until his death in 1705. He, like the Hungarian King John
Sigismund Zápolya (1540 -1571), preferred the Unitarian Islamic faith and
relatively tolerant Islamic law in opposition to the Trinitarian and intolerant
Catholic Austrians.1255
The Euro-Ottoman affairs had their resonance all around Europe,
including England. The Protestant alliances with Ottoman Muslims were
widely discussed in Europe, and the Anglo-Ottoman alliance was widely
discussed in English drama. In England the Muslims and their so-called
secret hegemonic agendas were connected with the Whig parliamentarians;
for instance, Count Teckely was often identified with the English
republicans, the Whigs who were dubbed as seditious “Teckelites” or as the
Protestant allies of the Turco-Islamic cause. The anonymous writer of The
rebels association in Hungary for reformation of religion and advancement
of Empire (1682), invoked such a close collaboration in the following
words: “The Teckelites are in Discipline and Principles much the same with
those they call Whigs in England, Religion being the ground of their
Exorbitances. Under pretence of Religion (which is indeed but Rebellion,)
they will Levy Arms against the Emperour, and for Defence of the Gospel,
join with the Turk against their Christian Sovereign.”1256 Shaftesbury,
Stubbe, Locke and other dissenting Whigs were all depicted as Turk
infidels, bent on overthrowing the Christian Church and monarchy and
replacing it with Turkish republican model.
Matthew Birchwood and Nabil Matar have consistently shown that
“images of Islam and the dreaded Ottoman Turk have played a crucial role
in the formation of national identity and religious difference in Restoration
England.”1257 Humberto Garcia has proven beyond doubt that “English
radical Protestantism achieved historical, philosophical, and ideological
coherence, in part, through its sympathetic identification with what I am
calling Islamic republicanism, a flexible and malleable trope that casts
Mahomet’s revolutionary reestablishment of the Christian prophetic
monarchy as the epitome of English constitutional virtue.”1258 He has also
noticed that the above mentioned satire The rebels association “seeks to
expose the defense of a limited Protestant monarchy as a false pretense for
concealing an international conspiracy between radical Protestants and
Muslims intent on overthrowing Christendom, renewing the English Civil
War, and welcoming an Ottoman invasion.”1259 To the Royalists Muhammad
was “a rabble-rouser and a revolutionary; he is Cromwell […] Indeed,
Mahomet is Cromwell, or perhaps Cromwell is Mahomet.”1260 Islam, Quran
and Muhammad were integral to the intellectual landscape of seventeenth-
century England. The Whigs were accused of extending the Ottoman
universal monarchy to England.
Garcia further noted that “with the formation of the Hungarian-Ottoman
alliance, English representations of Islam became central to ideological
debates regarding monarchal and religious authority.”1261 It confirmed “Tory
fears about a Muslim-Protestant alliance on the brink of establishing a
revolutionary regime in England.”1262 Garcia showed how Islamic
republican model anticipated the Glorious Revolution and hence the
English Enlightenment. “Tory burlesques offer a crucial site for
investigating how the trope of Islamic republicanism lent narrative
coherence to a series of national crises that, in historical hindsight,
anticipated the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Radical Protestants deployed
Islamic republicanism as a way of rewriting Christian prophetic history in
tolerationist and constitutionalist terms, providing them with a convenient
ideological framework with which to make sense of national crises as they
arose. In reducing radical Whiggism to a vulgar obsession with the
Mahometan ‘good old cause,’ Tory burlesques were, in effect, publicising
‘secrets’ about Islam’s ubiquitous impact on England’s political
unconscious.”1263 Shaftesbury’s circle, including Stubbe and Locke, was the
representative of this Islamic republican model, Stubbe being the radical
stalwart of it. Garcia has demonstrated that the “satirical figuration of
English reformers as Teckelite infidels has its political and literary roots in
Henry Stubbe’s defense of Islam—The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism
(circa 1671; published in 1911).”1264 James Jacob has shown the originality
of Stubbe’s Islamic hybrid.
Henry Stubbe and John Locke:The Pococke and Shaftesbury
Pedigrees
John Locke and Henry Stubbe were the exact contemporaries. Both went to
Westminster School, Christ Church College, and were Dr. Pococke’s
students and colleagues at Oxford. The historical Westminster School was
the most reputable school of London, where Arabic was part of the
curriculum along with Latin and Hebrew. Its headmaster, Richard Busby
(1606-1695), was a graduate of Christ Church Oxford where he studied
Arabic with Matthias Paser (1598-1658). Paser hailed Arabic as the
language of natural sciences and Oriental wisdom, while Busby compiled
Arabic and Hebrew grammer and incorporated them into the school
curriculum with great enthusiasm. All students of Westminster School were
required to take Arabic and all the celebrated alumni - and the list is very
long1265 - who played significant role in English politics, clerical circles and
business were exposed to the Arabic program. Both John Locke1266 and
Henry Stubbe learned Arabic as part of school curriculum, even though
Stubbe’s proficiency was greater than Locke.1267 Both Arabic and Hebrew
were part of selecting King’s Scholars for Oxford and Cambridge
Universities. G. Russell has shown that Locke was King’s Scholar to
Oxford and must have had Arabic for his minor and major election
competition, though he used Latin and Hebrew more often.1268 Edward
Pococke, the rationalist Arabist and renowned Continental Orientalist, was
Locke’s ideal of knowledge, scholarship and humility.1269 Locke had the
utmost respect and admiration for Dr. Pococke as his friend and mentor.1270
Likewise, Henry Stubbe was a product of Pococke and quoted his works on
Islamic history, theology and philosophy in his writings. In spite of his
royal loyalties, Anglican commitments and pragmatic missionary overtures
Pococke was known for his objective treatment of the Muslim history,
theology, law and civilization. Locke, Stubbe and other students of Pococke
were heirs to this relative objectivity.
Both Locke and Stubbe worked for Shaftesbury, the First Earl; Locke was
Shaftesbury’s secretary while Stubbe worked as a pamphleteer. Even
though Locke’s father was a puritan who fought in the English Civil War,
Locke mostly remained royalist and against religious tolerance until he met
Shaftesbury who advised him to “apply himself to the study of
ecclesiastical and political affairs, which might have some relation to the
business of a minister of state. And Mr. Locke succeeded so well in these
studies, that his Lordship began to consult him on all occasions of that
nature. He not only took him into his library and closet, but brought him
into the company of the Duke of Buckingham, my Lord Halifax, and other
noblemen of the greatest wit and learning, who were pleased as much with
his conversation as my Lord Ashley.”1271 Locke’s biographer, Maurice
Cransto, noted that Locke learned his political liberal views from
Shaftesbury. “I have searched in vain for evidence of Locke’s holding
liberal views before his introduction to Lord Shaftesbury in 1666. There is
much to show that Locke held such views soon afterwards; and I cannot
help wondering if he learned them from Shaftesbury. For it is certainly not
the case... that Shaftesbury learned his liberalism from Locke.”1272 Richard
Ashcraft showed the type of profound respect, adulation and unmatched
loyalty Locke showed to Shaftesbury for the sixteen years he worked for
him.1273 Ashcraft attributed Locke’s radical political and republican views to
Shatesbury’s companionship and training and Leopold van Ranke observed
that “Locke’s principles are those of Shaftesbury.”1274
Shaftesbury was well acquainted with the Continental geopolitics and
deeply involved in English political affairs. Shaftesbury was connected with
the merchant circle of Levant and East India Company through his
stepmother Mary Moryson, one of the daughters of wealthy London textile
merchant Baptist Hicks and co-heir of his fortune.1275 Hick was a friend of
Sir Thomas Smythe, the Governor of the Levant and East India Company, a
Mercer to Queen Elizabeth and King James I and an active politician in
London politics. Both had Chipping Campden connections, the famous
wool trading center and market town in Cotswold
district of Gloucestershire. Hick’s famous mansion of Campden was burned
to ashes by the Royalists in the Civil War. Both Smythe and Hicks were
buried in Chipping Campden Wool Church of St. James. Through his
stepmother, Cooper (Shaftesbury) gained wealth and an important political
connection in the form of her grandson, the future 1st Earl of Essex.
Shaftesbury himself was involved in overseas trade and plantation,1276 and
was well connected with London merchants. Sir Thomas Pilkington (died
1691), the London merchant elected as London Sherriff in 1681, showed
great partiality in returning the grand jury in Shaftesbury’s trial of high
treason (24 November 1681) and was reprimanded by the judges and the
Court. Shaftesbury was given shelter and a secret hiding place in a London
merchant Watson’s Wood Street house when the Rye House Plot was
exposed, and another Levant Company merchant Sir Dudley North was
installed by royalists as London Sherriff to arrest Shaftesbury and other
plotters.1277
Shaftesbury believed in “’a secret universal Catholic league carried on by
the clergy for the utter extirpation of the Protestant religion out of the
world.’ This design, so far as it pertains to England, it is noted, ‘cannot be
carried on without the full concurrence of the English Court.’ It is
Shaftesbury’s leadership in organising the opposition to both these forces
which establishes the political dimensions for the theoretical arguments
contained in the exclusionist pamphlets and tracts of the 1680s.”1278
Alliances with or sympathies for the enemies (Ottomans) of your enemies
(Catholic Habsburg) was quite natural in the world of geopolitics, even
though we do not have direct evidences of such propensities from
Shaftesbury’s own writings - which are very rare anyway, as he burned all
his papers to avoid persecution during his high treason trial. However, we
have substantial circumstantial evidence, especially from the Tory
dramatists, that Shaftesbury was the head of seditious English “Teckelites,”
the masterminds of anti-monarchy Islamic republican consipiracy. His
grandson James Harris (1709–80) was a known Turkophile and Arab
historian. In his Posthumous Philological Inquiries (1781) he dedicated
three chapters to Middle Eastern matters, written in a spirit of open-
mindedness and generosity.
 Chapter 7

Henry Stubbe and Muhammadan Christianity

Both Henry Stubbe and John Locke were the best reflections of
Shaftesbury’s religious and political ideas. Just like Stubbe and Locke’s
Unitarianism, Shaftesbury died in exile in Amsterdam as an anti-Trinitarian
Arian. Arianism was a generic seventeenth-century category used to
represent Unitarians, Socinians and other anti-Trinitarians. We do not have
many written works of Shaftesbury, because he burnt all his papers when
arrested on the charges of high treason and put in the Tower of London, as
well as all proof of his anti-Crown subversive activities, but Stubbe and
Locke were a good reflection of his ideas and ideals. Stubbe and Locke also
shared Robert Boyle’s friendship; Boyle was Stubbe’s patron and friend1279
and Locke’s close working relationships with Boyle and Royal Society
fellowships are well-recorded. Both Stubbe and Locke also shared Boyle’s
fascination with alchemy. Stubbe and Locke pretty much shared the
common connections and circle of friends since their childhoods, moving in
the same socio-political elite circles. Nabil Matar observed that “the two
men were exact contemporaries: both were born in 1632, studied at
Westminster School, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, and were
pupils of the orientalist Edward Pococke; indeed, both were at Christ
Church between 1656 and 1660, Stubbe as a librarian at the Bodleian, and
Locke from 1652 as the beneficiary of a studentship (effectively a life
fellowship), taking his BA in 1656 and his MA in 1658.”1280
Islam and Muslims loomed large on the horizon of Shaftesbury, Henry
Stubbe and John Locke’s century. The Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry and its
impact upon the emergence, continuity and subsequent victory of
Protestantism, the so-called Calvino-Turkism,1281 the flourishing of
Protestantism, anti-Trinitarianism and finally radical Unitarianism of Ferenc
David in Transylvania under the auspice of Ottomans,1282 the Franco-
Ottoman alliance and joint naval ventures against Charles V, Francis I of
France’s efforts to convince Henry VIII of England to join that alliance,
Queen Elizabeth’s correspondence and friendly overtures to Sultan Murad
III, Mehmed III and his mother Safiye Sultan, her suggestions of a natural
religious affinity between the Ottoman Muslims and English Protestants
and an Anglo-Ottoman alliance against the Catholic Spain,1283 the indirect
role that Ottoman fleet played in the English defeat of the Spanish Armada
of 1588,1284 the Levant and East India Companies, their embassies, factors
and trade with the Ottomans, Mughals and Persians,1285 the Ottoman-Dutch
contacts in the early phases of Dutch revolt against Philip II of Spain,
William of Orange’s requests for help and Sultan Suleiman’s subsequent
expressions of religious affinity and support,1286 the Dutch slogan “Rather
Turkish than Papist”1287 and use of Turkish flag on their warships, French,
English and Dutch capitulations and ensuing multiplications of trade
opportunities in the vast Ottoman Empire,1288 the embassy of Sir Thomas
Roe and subsequent East India Company’s significant trade with the
Mughal Empire,1289 the English overtures to the Persian Safavid Empire,
English struggles against and treaties with the Barbary States,1290 the
problems connected with piracy, slavery, apostasy and conversion, Spanish
Inquisition and forced conversion of Muslims and Jews in Spain and, later
on their expulsion and the Dutch Inquisition1291 were all political realities of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. John Locke and Stubbe lived
these realities and could not have escaped their broader implications. The
erratic internal English affairs and political upheavals of the seventeenth
century must have caused unrelenting sense of instability, insecurity and
fear in the British society of Locke’s era. Seventeenth-century England was
yet to be an empire of international scope, and the terrible Turks were still
in a dominant position, knocking at the gates of Vienna. The Protestant
alliances with Ottoman Muslims against the Christian Catholics were
widely discussed in the European newspapers and theater. In England, the
Tories connected Muslims and their so-called secret hegemonic agendas
with the Whig parliamentarians. Count Teckely was often identified by the
English dramatists with English republicans, the Whigs who were dubbed
as seditious “Teckelites” or as the Protestant allies of the Turco-Islamic
cause. The English coffeehouses, visible and pervasive Indian, Persian and
Ottoman material culture, constant and continuous invocation of Islam,
Muhammad and Turks for or against republican Whigs and in religious
debates, captives, converts and merchants were all frequent reminders of
things Islamic to seventeenth-century English society. Stubbe and Locke
were at the center of these politico-religious storms.
Stubbe, the Father of Muhammadan Christianity
Henry Stubbe was the father of early Whig Islamic republicanism and
Muhammadan Christianity. He, unlike the indirect subtle Islamic influence
upon Locke, represents the direct Islamic influence. Stubbe (1632–1676),
the most radical reformer and influential English thinker, is believed to have
converted to Islam.1292 Stubbe completed in 1674 his famous book An
Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, and a Vindication of
Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians. He was closely
working with Shaftesbury at that time. Its parts were in circulation among
the freethinkers since 1671, and both Justin Champion and J. R. Jacob place
this work in the “broad context of the Unitarian-Islamic syncretism.”1293
Stubbe was a radical reformer who wanted to eradicate the supernatural,
absolutist and hierarchical Church Christianity and replace it with Islamic,
rational, simple, minimal, ethical monotheism and limited republicanism.
He was a sort of wing leader of the so-called international, Protestant and
Muslim republican conspirators who supposedly wanted to replace the
English monarchy with Ottoman republicanism and Christianity with
Turkish faith. Stubbe propagated a return to the primitive Christianity of
Jesus via the authentic channels of Islam, advocating for a policy of full
toleration for dissenters, as practiced by the Muslim Ottomans and
popularised by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury
(1621-1683). Shaftesbury, the patron of Stubbe and Locke fought for a
limited monarchy, toleration and religious freedom.1294 He was arrested for
a number of times for high treason, escaped to Amsterdam and died there.
Locke followed him to Amsterdam. James R. Jacob shows that “Stubbe’s
career rests on his defense of Mahomet, depicted as a wise legislator who
founded a tolerant republican monarchy.”1295 These might very well have
been a reflection of Shaftesbury’s views, as the founder and father of the
opposition Whig party and its main ideologue.
Stubbe was a revolutionary who changed the long anti-Muhammad and
anti-Islamic European landscape and introduced Muhammad and Islam
with a balanced, nuanced approach. Nabil Matar noted that “This little-
known physician […] undertook a “Copernican Revolution (in Kants use of
the phrase) in the study of Islam.”1296 Stubbe introduced Muhammad and
Islam as the monotheistic reformers of the Christian excesses and Islamic
civilisation as a fresh, independent and glorious civilisation.1297 Stubbe used
Islam as a whip to indict the Christian Church, religion and society and to
bring about a radical, natural, rational, monotheistic and republican
revolution.1298 “Far from corrupting or deforming Christianity, ‘Mahomet’
tried to return to its purest expression.”1299
Stubbe argued that the Islamic concept of divine unity was the pristine
message of salvation preached by all the Prophets starting with Adam and
Noah and culminating in Muhammad.1300 The Unitarian Christianity of
Jesus was corrupted by the Roman Church of the fourth century and the
ensuing Trinitarian controversies weakened the Christian community. The
intolerant Eastern Christian community was chaotically divided on
sectarian lines “so Mahomet happily perceived the opportunity in Christian
division to re-establish true religion and abolish idolatry. Mahomet,
convinced of the unity of God, ‘accomplish’d himself in civil and military
prudence’ through his travels and converse, and erected a ‘new religion and
empire’ amidst the decay and debauchery of Eastern Christianity. Stubbe
continued to note that the theology Mahomet established was compatible
with original Nazarene and Arian Christianity.”1301 Muhammad transformed
the superstitious Arab culture on natural, rational lines and protected them
from supernatural mysteries and cumbersome ceremonies. Muhammad
“‘did ingeniously accommodate to his ends those superstitious usages
which were imprinted in the breasts of the Ismaelites’, towards the worship
of one God. The Koran was the embodiment of ‘rational belief’, and
Mahomet commended for ‘on the one hand not clogging men’s faith with
the necessity of believing a number of abstruse notions which they cannot
comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of reason and
commonsense; nor on the other hand loading them with the performance of
many troublesome, expensive and superstitious ceremonies.’”1302
Stubbe vehemently attacked the Christian dogma of the Trinity and
divinity of Jesus and - just like Michael Servetus - called it tri-theism and
paganism. “Christianity was then degenerated into such a kind of paganism
as wanted nothing but the ancient sacrifices and professed polytheism, and,
even as to the latter, there wanted not some who did make three gods of the
Trinity. Others made a goddess of the Virgin Mary. The reverence to the
saints differed little from that of the pagans to their heroes and lesser gods,
and images were brought into churches then, though not by public authority.
And it is no less remarkable that obscure persons had several times been
promoted by fraud or indifferent means to the Empire.”1303 He argued “that
all the first Christians, and even the apostles themselves, were taught and
did teach that Christ was a mere man (which was their tenet) and that the
truth of this doctrine was continued in the church until the days of Pope
Victor who was the thirteenth bishop of Rome after Peter, and that
Zephyrinus his successor did alter and corrupt that truth—if it be true which
the Arians said that none but idiots and simple persons believed any such
thing, and that till the decision at Nicaea the more knowing Christians did
not hold him to be really God.”1304 The Apostles “taught that there was but
one God, and that they were too dull to comprehend or invent those subtle
distinctions of essence and person, consubstantiation, eternal generation,
and if it be certain that the Fathers after the Nicene Council were not agreed
concerning the meaning of those uncouth words, and that the world was
long after dissatisfied with the use of them, and that such as Gregory
Nazianzen and Basil were shy how they taught the deity of the Holy Ghost
or of Christ or touched upon the Trinity […] if we take notice how
differently the Fathers explicate themselves upon that point, and how much
the other works of Athanasius do differ from the Creed which goes under
his name, we may very well doubt concerning their judgment if not
conclude the contrary.”1305 The Roman paganistic beliefs, rituals, priests and
institutions were Christianised, turning Christianity into a paganistic
religion.1306 He noted that Prophet Mohammad was sent by God to rectify
Christian corruptions, and his theology was in line with the original
message of Jesus and his original followers, the Nazarene (Quranic
Nasaara). Prophet Muhammad “told them […] that […] the introduction of
idols was a novel practice, that the prophets and patriarchs, especially
Abraham, Isaac, and their father Ismael, did worship God without
associating any with Him; that all associating of others with the great God,
either in worship or in essence or both, was idolatry and therefore the
Coreischites and other Arabians that did worship these idols were idolaters.
So were those Christians who either held a trinity of persons or trinity of
gods or did hold the deity of the Virgin Mary. So also were the Jews who
did associate Ozair or Ezra to the great God, saying that he was the son of
God.”1307 Stubbe’s Originall was a comparative study of Islam. It was “not
just a history of Mahomet but a history of religion culminating in Mahomet,
and organised around four ‘great revolutions’ – the acceptance of Christ by
a number of Jews as the messiah; the Jewish rebellion against the Romans
in Jerusalem and Alexandria, resulting in a greater divide between Jewish
and Christian traditions and practises; Constantine’s revolution, reducing
Christianity to the Nicene Creed; and Mahomet’s revolution, re-establishing
an original purity.”1308 The decline of original Christianity, especially the
corruptions of Christian scriptures and the introduction of irrational dogmas
such as the Trinity and Church abuses, spurred the advance of Islam. While
“most of Christianity was sunk in superstition and internecine war,
Mohammed accomplished the fourth revolution, the invention,
establishment and expansion of Islam.”1309
The Muhammadan republican revolution served as a reformation of both
the Jewish and Christian excesses in the matters of law and doctrines.
Mohammed’s intelligence and thoughts are “not to be scorned but
admired.” Jacob sees in Stubbe a synthesis of “Mohammed’s simple creed,
Hobbes’s natural religion and the deistical confessions of Cherbury and
Blount.”1310 As noted above, Stubbe was a connection between Islam’s
Unitarian republicanism detailed in Pococke and John Seldon’s works,
Hobbes’s natural religion and enlightened monarchy, Harrington’s republic,
Lord Cherbury and Charles Blount’s deism and Shaftesbury’s anti-
Trinitarian Whig republicanism. His subversive republican career stretched
from English Civil War to the late 1670s, early Exclusion Crises and later
the Rye House plot to assassinate King Charles II and his brother James II.
His sudden accidental death deprived him of an active participation in the
later upheavals which led to the Glorious Revolution, but he was
ideologically and spiritually there. Stubbe was the luminary of early
Enlightenment ideas, and his radical manuscript clandestinely moved
among Whig as will as Tory freethinkers and reformists.
Stubbe gave a detailed and accurate account of Muslim concept of al-
Tawhid (Oneness and Unity of God), Islamic acts of devotions, Shari’ah
laws, customs and practices. He defended the Quran’s eloquence.1311 The
Quran was the greatest miracle of Muhammad. Stubbe counted and
defended some of the miracles of Prophet Muhammad,1312 and noted the
way Muslims interpreted the Christian Bible to substantiate Muhammad’s
coming.1313 He concluded his Account observing that: “This is the sum of
Mahometan religion, on the one hand, not clogging men’s faith with the
necessity of believing a number of abstruse notions which they cannot
comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of reason and
common sense: nor on the other hand loading them with performance of
many troublesome, expensive, and superstitious ceremonies, yet enjoining a
due observance of religion, as the surest method to keep men in the bounds
of their duty both to God and man.”1314 Muhammad’s religion was a
reflection of Jesus’ command of loving God and neighbour.
In addition to being a spiritual leader Muhammad was also a wise civic
leader. Stubbe argued that Prophet Muhammad was a wise legislature,
leader and a spiritual prince who ushered Islamic republicanism.
Muhammad was the “wisest legislator that ever was.”1315 Garcia noted that
“Islamic republicanism begins with Henry Stubbe’s The Rise and Progress
of Mahometanism (c. 1671), a subversive work that portrays Mahomet as a
wise legislator who reinstituted primitive Christianity’s republican order.
Accordingly, Christianity began as egalitarian Jewish sect with Ebonite and
Arian leanings that refused the corrupt doctrine of Trinity as decreed by the
Nicene Council in ad 325.”1316 Matthew Dimmock noted that “Stubbe’s
Mahomet is a pragmatic visionary, a benevolent leader of multiple talents
prepared to compromise in order to achieve the greater good – someone
whom we might call an ‘Enlightenment man’.”1317
Muhammad, the Protestant Prophet
Stubbe considered Prophet Muhammad a true reformer of Christianity
centuries before Luther’s partial reformation. “Mahomet, though he did not
force the Christians to his religion, yet he told them that such as believed in
Isa ought to live according to his precepts with great humility, piety, and
unconcernedness for the pomp and vanities of this world, that they ought
neither to seek nor retain honour nor riches or go to war, or intermeddle
with state affairs—these things being inconsistent with the doctrine of Isa;
such as pursued those courses not being really Christians, since Christianity
lies not so much in open profession of reverence and worship as in the
practice of a holy life.”1318
Muhammad, the Protestant Prophet, promulgated religious pluralism,
tolerance, acceptance and civil public arena with civilising effects. John
Tolan observed that “Stubbe’s work is not merely an academic exercise in
the history of religion, of course; it is a polemical work aimed at the
Anglican Church and the monarchy. Like Mahomet, the king should strip
the priests of their power and ban superstitious doctrine, returning to the
simple, rational monotheism of the early Christians. He should also allow
for the practice of diverse cults, just as the ‘Mahometans’ do. Charles II
should become a new Mahomet.”1319 Stubbe, knowingly or unknowingly,
was internally supporting the external Ottoman and Barbary leader’s call to
Charles and James II to convert to Islam and implement universal, Islamic,
tolerant, republican government system in England. The Ottoman and
Moroccan leaders’ inviting and proselytizing letters to Kings Charles and
James II are well documented. Islam was the intended solution for the
Anglican restrictive dogmatic and suffocating policies, and Muhammadan
civic republicanism was the needed cure for English persecutions.
“Mahometanism is modeled after the egalitarian teachings of the ‘Judaizing
Christians,’ the first practitioners of Christ’s simple faith. As such,
Mahomet granted liberty of religion to Jews and Christians living in his
empire after paying a small tribute. He began the Reformation eight
hundred years before Luther. Appearing in Coleridge’s ‘Mahomet’ over a
century later, Stubbe’s Protestant Prophet resurrected civic republicanism.
In solving the problem of particularity, Islam offers an attractive
counterpoint to the restrictive policy of Anglican toleration.”1320 Islam was
the aspired natural and civic religion. “According to Stubbe,
Mahometanism is a natural faith worthy of admiration. The Prophet’s civic
laws have accomplished in less than a century what Trinitarian Christians
could not in over a millennium: his laws have anchored a state-sponsored
(rather than ecclesiastical) toleration policy for all religious minorities on a
solid constitutional foundation that originated with Noah’s covenant as
prophetically renewed by Abraham, Moses, and Christ. Like Teckely,
Stubbe treats Islamic toleration as the antidote to the religious and political
contentions that have plagued Europe and England since the Protestant
Reformation.”1321
Stubbe’s work was transpired and influenced by the Ottoman Hungarian
alliance and he sincerely wanted that experience repeated in England.
“Stubbe promoted such an agenda during the same period that Protestant
Hungarians were interested in forming an alliance with the Ottomans. The
Rise and Progress of Mahometanism makes three controversial claims: (i)
Islam revived Arian Christianity, an anticlerical version of messianic
Judaism that upheld Christ as a human prophet and, as a result, was
marginalized by the persecution of corrupt Trinitarian churches; (ii) the
decline of Christianity and the rise of Islam are a result of the combined
influence of trinitarianism and the clergy, political ideologies that serve to
legitimate the rise of despotic monarchies; and (iii) Mahomet, a wise
legislator, replaced Christian dogmas with popular myths pertaining to the
restoration of constitutional law. For Stubbe, Islam is a natural religion
worthy of admiration. The Prophet’s civic laws have accomplished in less
than a hundred years what Trinitarian Christians have failed to achieve in
over a millennium: his laws have anchored a state-sponsored (rather than
ecclesiastical) model of toleration for all religious minorities on a solid
constitutional foundation that originated with Noah’s covenant as
prophetically renewed by Abraham, Moses, and Christ.”1322
Stubbe was less of an Islamic missionary and more of an English reformer
who, like countless other concerned leaders, was more interested in
religious tolerance and European unity. “Stubbe treats Islamic toleration as
the much-needed antidote to the religious and political contentions that
have plagued Europe and England since the onset of the Protestant
Reformation. Not surprisingly, Anglican polemicists attacked Teckelite
politics as an instance of Protestant conversion to Islam under the pretense
of promoting toleration. Indeed, Stubbe’s manuscript lacks the kind of
proselytising rhetoric that typically accompanies Anglican polemics on
Islam. Rather than suggesting that Muslims must be converted to the true
Protestant faith, he foregrounds the need for Christians to come closer to
Islam’s pristine tolerationist principles.”1323 Stubbe, employing Islamic
terminologies, concepts and history presented a complete model of
European reformation based upon the Islamic republican model. “His work
suggests that Christians have more to gain from Islam’s reformist outlook
than Muslims do from the false teachings of Trinitarian Christology. In this
case, his heretical views can be interpreted literally as his de facto
conversion to Islam.”1324 This republican model, with all its antecedents,
would resonate well with the later moderate and radical enlightenment
figures, with certain diverging subtleties.
Stubbe was extremely impressed by the Islamic concept of religious
pluralism and toleration for other religious traditions, “it is manifest that the
Mahometans did propagate their empire, but not their religion, by force of
arms, and, albeit they did not permit others than Musulmen to enjoy any
military or civil commands in their territories or entire conquests, yet the
Christians and other religions might peaceably subsist under their protection
if they paid the tribute demanded. In Spain the Mozarabick Christians
always lived quietly and safely under them, and others in their other
kingdoms and dominions, an inviolate justice being preserved towards
them; and though the rich and potent nobility and rulers were destroyed or
reduced to nothing, which was done to prevent future rebellions, yet it is
observed by Scaliger—and it is an assured truth—that the vulgar Greeks
live in a better condition under the Turk at present than they did under their
own emperors when there were perpetual murders practiced on their princes
and tyranny on their people. But they are now secure from injury if they pay
their taxes, and it is more the interest of the princes and nobles than of the
people at present which keeps all Europe from submitting to the Turks.”1325
Stubbe, who was actively involved in the politics of his time and well
connected with the English elites, underscored the level of appreciation for
Muslim Ottoman Turks and their republican government system in
England. He further noted that “Mahomet did give protection and security
to the pagans, Magicians, and Jews, and Christians also which swore fealty
to him and paid him yearly tribute. Moreover, that he sent Omar to the
Christians to assure them that they should live securely under his dominion,
and that he would esteem their lives as the lives of his Moslemin and of
their goods as the goods of those others: to this purpose, there is extant a
compact or league betwixt Mahomet and the Christians, published in France
by Gabriel Sionita and reprinted by Johannes Fabricius a Dantzicker, which
is by him affirmed to be most authentic, and mentioned by Selden […] The
sum of it is that the Christians submitting to him and paying their tributes
duly shall live and enjoy the liberty of their religion without any
molestation, and that there shall be a perpetual amity betwixt the Musulmen
and them.”1326 Stubbe emphasised that Mohammad never imposed his
religion upon others, as long as they were not idolatrous or paid a moderate
tribute (jizyah). “The security which he gave to the Jews and Christians that
they might live quietly under him without molestation brought a great deal
of riches into the publick treasury, and those securities were observed with
so inviolate a faith that it was a great invitation to the next neighbours to
come under his government.”1327
Stubbe wanted Europeans to follow the tolerant path of the Muslim
Turkish Empire and allow freedom of religious beliefs, expression, worship,
and freedom of conscience. “So favourable are the conditions of Muslim
rule […] that Christians in contemporary Europe would prefer, if given the
choice, Muslim rule to their own.”1328 Stubbe was close to the dissenting
merchant community and wrote pamphlets about religious tolerance, based
upon economic reasons and benefits. He was well aware of the English
dissenters’ desire to implement Turkish Islamic government model in
England. The royalists and Tories were also conscious of the Whig allure
with Ottoman republicanism and they highlighted, pinpointed and exposed
it at every possible opportunity. To Stubbe, the interests of the kings and
princes “at present keeps all Europe from submitting to the Turks.”1329 Had
it not been to the persecutory policies of the national monarchs and if the
choice was given to the masses, they would have chosen the pluralistic,
freer, powerful and prosperous Ottoman government over the suffocating
English monarchy and Church. Stubbe represented in 1670’s the popular
English sentiments against their church and state which John Beale
expressed in 1650’s. Muhammad’s government system was the ideal for the
waring Europe; the long-lasting sectarian wars, conflicts and destruction
could be stopped by the tolerant, republican and democratic policies of
Islam. Muhammad did not accomplish the task of diversity and pluralism
by dint of force but by means of persuasion. His government was not
despotic, tyrannical and autocratic but inspiring and prophetic. “Stubbe also
praises the sort of government Mohammed established. It was rule by one
man but it was not government by a monarch, an emperor or an army
general. Rather it was government by a prophet, an inspired leader. As such
his power was absolute but not tyrannical because he ruled by a natural
prudence that freed men from superstition, injustice and onerous exactions,
and instead nurtured learning, tolerance and prosperity: he is far from
depriving any Ismaelite [Arab] of his liberty, that he would set even a bird
free if he saw him encaged, and so remote from ambition and avarice that
the greatest pleasure he takes in having anything is that he may give it away
to some more indigent Moslemin.”1330 Therefore Muhammad’s religion and
his government must be a Christian ideal, “a government based upon
natural prudence to match ‘the religion of Noah’ and of nature.”1331 Stubbe
saw Islamic egalitarian republicanism as the solution to Restoration
England’s thorny problems. “Stubbe’s republic was to be ruled by the
virtuous who were seen to be inspired men in the same sense that
Mohammed was – at once dedicated, worthy and shrewd. The new
prophetic rule and the old republican and civic ideal were both intended to
set up governments in which virtue would rule; power would be harnessed
in both to virtue; and the result would be to create not only virtuous rule but
also virtuous men and women, public virtue and a virtuous state, if not
republican virtue. The emphasis in Stubbe’s Account upon almsgiving and
the resulting levelling up and down is probably also a holdover from his
pre-Restoration attack on tithing and his republican egalitarianism.”1332
Hobbes’ enlightend monarch was a reflection of Stubbe’s Muhammad.
Stubbe was not alone in his desire to assimilate Islamic religious and
political ideals to English society,1333 and he had many influential partners
in this movement. “Nor is Stubbe’s manuscript the only example of an
attempt to bring Muslim ideas and institutions to bear on English affairs in
the 1670s. There was considerable interest at court in the 1670s and 1680s
in things Islamic, from coffee to costumes to religious doctrine. Viscount
Conway, who was a Privy Councillor for Ireland at the time, commissioned
his brother-in-law, Sir John Finch, Ambassador to Constantinople, to write a
series of reports concerning Muslim customs and culture with a view to
suggesting the ways in which they might be applied in England to the
reform of political and religious institutions. In 1675, Sir John complied
after some delay, and the letters exist in manuscript in the British
Library.”1334 John Finch’s philosopher sister Anne Conwey, a student and
colleague of Cambridge Platonist and theologian Henry More and a well-
connected figure among the Continental intelligentsia, was interested in
Islam, Ottoman culture and Kabbala. She converted to Quakerism and died
as a Quaker. Sarah Hutton attributed Anne Conway’s anti-Trinitarian
Islamic sympathies to Henry Stubbe and her brother John Finch.1335 It is
interesting to note that Viscount Conway, Secretary of State for the
Northern Department, was the principle patron of Henry Stubbe.1336 His
family connections with Islam, Ottomans and reformation in England on
Ottoman lines may very well have shaped Stubbe’s Islamism and
Ottomanism. Conway tried to purchase Stubbe’s library immediately after
Stubbe’s sudden accidental death.1337 Stubbe’s original patron Sir Henry
Vane the Younger - the staunch republican, pluralist governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, the friend of Roger William, one of the
founders of Harvard College, the confidant of Oliver Cromwell and later
critic of Cromwell’s authoritarianism - was himself engaged in trade, and
was closely connected with English merchants. Vane championed religious
tolerance in the American colony, fought against the imposition of the
Presbyterian Church as the official Church of England during Cromwell
Protectorate and worked towards religious and political reforms. He
vouched for universal religious tolerance including Jews, Muslims and all
Catholic and Protestant dissenters. In 1659, a Royalist satire against Sir
Henry Vane castigated him as ‘Alcoran Vane’; in a 1661 satire, Vane was
again caricatured as one who had sought to change the laws of Britain into
laws of “Mahomet. Stubbe was heavily engaged in Sir Vane’s religious and
political reforms and pamphleteering campaigns. Mordechai Fiengold noted
that “by mid-1659 Stubbe was conscripted by Sir Henry Vane into heavy
political and religious pamphleteering.”1338 His other patron Robert Boyle
was fascinated with Eastern alchemy, natural sciences and Arabic language.
Boyle’s natural, anti-dogmatic and moral Christianity might have resembled
Stubbe’s Muhammadan Christianity. John Finch was a fellow of Royal
Society and a fellow alchemy seeker; he, along with Robert Boyle, Henry
Stubbe, Henry More, William Harvey and renowned physician, natural
philosopher, chymist, Christian kabbalist and court diplomat Francis
Mercury Van Helmont, tried to cure Anne Conway.1339 Stubbe’s other
patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was a republican Whig accused of
championing Ottoman Islamic republicanism. It will not be far-fetched to
conclude that Stubbe’s pro Islamic and pro Ottoman views were a product
of these patrons with diverging interests but united in a general religio-
political reformative scheme based on Eastern, Islamic knowledge, wisdom
and experiences. Muslim ideas were sought after equally by the natural
philosophers, intellectuals and policymakers for implementation in Stubbe’s
England; Stubbe very much embodied and championed that reformative
trend. Levant Company ambassadors, merchants and workers were equally
interested in the Ottoman government model and pluralistic society. John
Finch, the Levant company ambassador in Istanbul, wrote detailed reports
about Ottomans and Islam and sent them to his influential sister Ann
Convey and his high-ranking cousins and uncles. Finch seemed to be in
possession of Stubbe’s manuscript, as he quoted portion from it in his
reports. Stubbe represented the influential, republican leaning but reserved
English intelligentsia in their Islamism, Ottomanism and reformism.
Stubbe’s Account was a theological and political prescriptive critique of
European religion and government. “England would be better off if
religious authority were vested in the civil sovereign, as under Islam, just as
Mohammed did; moreover, the sovereign should enforce a rational religion,
a ‘Mahometan Christianity’ which would represent a return to the Apostolic
church. Again just as Mohammed did, the sovereign should allow for
toleration of opinion beyond the enforcement of this doctrinal minimum,
this rational religion of nature.”1340 Stubbe was reflecting upon the English
challenges from the prism of Islam and suggesting Islamic solutions to
England’s theological, political and social problems. His Islamic
republicanism was particularly attractive to the English dissenters who were
discriminated against and persecuted due to their heterodoxy. The dissenters
could not own property, hold state offices or benefit from tax laws. Garcia
noted that “Stubbe’s account offers a reassuring message for English
nonconformists: in an age dominated by Trinitarian persecution, only
Islam’s tolerant principles can guarantee a constitutional republicanism that
would allow them to become citizens equally entitled to rights, property,
and privilege. These ideas are revolutionary because they implicitly suggest
that Islamic law should replace and supplement ineffective Christian
regimes.”1341
Muhammadan Christianity and Natural Law
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Toland and many other Deists,
Socinians, Unitarians, Quakers, Presbyterians and other dissenters struggled
for the same goals; it is therefore no wonder that their natural law, civic
religion and theories of reason were strikingly similar to Henry Stubbe’s
Muhammadan Christianity. “From Stubbe to Reid, Mahometanism was a
useful bricolage medium for a diverse group of writers from various
political and religious backgrounds. John Toland, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley
variously understood Mahometanism to provide both a model and an idiom
for the definition of political liberty. In this context, English radicalism is
defined not as a linear history of ideas but as a series of subversive practices
and eclectic discursive techniques that are culturally situated.”1342 Henry
Stubbe set the stage for the later Unitarian, Islamic republicanism, set its
agenda and provided it with adequate material and directions; Stubbe was a
nation in himself.
Jacob rightly observes that in his Account, Stubbe “turns true religion
inside out. Trinitarian Christianity is dismissed as hopelessly corrupt and
false in favour of Islam, which is represented as the religion of Christ and
the Apostles. There are some striking similarities between Stubbe’s
‘Mahometan Christianity’ and Hobbes’ natural religion set out in Chapter
31 of Leviathan. There Hobbes says that men can reasonably acknowledge
God’s existence as creator and governor of the universe and that he should
be worshipped further through prayer and thanksgiving. Men are not to
inquire into the nature of God because finite beings cannot comprehend the
infinite. Such efforts in the past have led to ‘volumes of disputation’ rather
than truth - to heat, not light. Hobbes also speaks of God’s ‘natural
punishments.’ To wit: ‘he that will do anything for his pleasure, must
engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it.’ Hobbes and Stubbe
have both produced a pared-down faith.”1343 Hobbes criticised the
theologians (Schoolman) for deceiving the common men with absurd terms
such as the Trinity, transubstantiation and the nature of Christ, “let him take
a Schoolman into his hands and see if he can translate any one chapter
concerning any difficult point; as the Trinity, the Deity, the nature of Christ,
transubstantiation, free will, etc., into any of the modern tongues, so as to
make the same intelligible […] When men write whole volumes of such
stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make others so?”1344 He doubted the
authenticity of the Christian scriptures and called God, Moses and the
Apostles the real Trinity. To Hobbes, the greatest worship of God is
conformity to His laws and not belief in the Trinity or God’s atoning death,
“obedience to His laws (that is, in this case to the laws of nature) is the
greatest worship of all. For as obedience is more acceptable to God than
sacrifice; so also to set light by His commandments is the greatest of all
contumelies. And these are the laws of that divine worship which natural
reason dictateth to private men.”1345
It is pertinent to mention that Stubbe and Hobbes were close friends and
Stubbe translated chapters of Hobbes Leviathan to Latin.1346 On “occasions
Hobbes even incorporated Stubbe’s critique.”1347 John Tolan noted that
“Stubbe was a friend and admirer of Thomas Hobbes, with whom he
corresponded frequently; in the 1650s, Stubbe was at work on a Latin
translation of Hobbes’ss Leviathan. His Mahomet fits well the model of the
benevolent monarch portrayed in the Leviathan, using the precepts of a
simple, natural religion to enforce morality and uphold authority, without
handing over power to a caste of grasping priests. Hobbes proposed a civic,
natural religion devoted to the honour of the one God, in which vain
disputations about his nature would be prohibited, since ‘volumes of
disputation about the nature of God [...] tend not to His honour, but to the
honour of our own wits and learning; and are nothing else but inconsiderate
and vain abuses of His sacred name.’ Stubbe’s Mahomet is a Hobbesian
monarch who returns to a simple form of natural monotheism in accordance
with the religion of the primitive Christians.”1348
It is therefore no wonder that Hobbes’ ideas about natural religion were
strikingly close to Stubbe’s ‘Mahometan Christianity,’ which was Stubbe’s
ideal civil religion. Jacob has shown that Stubbe’s central doctrines
consisted of “the beliefs of ‘the most primitive’ Christians, revived by
Mohammed.”1349 Stubbe might have influenced Hobbes’s ideas of natural
religion, law and social contract in light of Stubbe’s perceptions of Prophet
Muhammad’s religion, law and governing principles. Both Hobbes and
Stubbe were trying to get rid of the corrupt priests and kings and replace
them with a just spiritual prince. Hobbes indebtedness to Stubbe on this
point is unquestionable. Stubbe contrasted “the religious policy of Islam
with that of the Christianised Roman empire. In the latter for political
reasons the emperors from Constantine onwards had allowed the clergy to
claim a spiritual authority separate from their own civil authority, and this
had led to ignorance, superstition, contention and a weakening of the
empire. Mohammed, on the other hand, placed control of religion in the
hands of the civil ruler and the result was the opposite […] ‘What a
discourse might be made upon his [Mohammed’s] uniting the civil and
ecclesiastical powers in one sovereign!’ This of course is Hobbes’s
prescription, set out in the last half of Leviathan, and the influence of that
book on Stubbe is again unmistakable.”1350
Muhammad, the Machiavellian Prince
To Stubbe, Prophet Muhammad was that Machiavellian prince who had
accomplished the task of combining the sacred and civil authority.
Muhammad’s historical model could save England of its religious and
political ills. “For Stubbe, Mahomet’s Machiavellian republic can help
guide a Country politics determined to protect England’s virtuous
commonwealth from corrupt ministers, despotic kings, intolerant Anglicans,
parasitic aristocrats, monied interest, and standing armies.”1351 Garcia
further observed that “Stubbe has no qualms about justifying Islam’s rise to
geopolitical domination, because the true opponents to the Christian faith
are the Trinitarians, the ‘enemies to all human Learning‘: St. Athanasius, for
his false teachings about the ‘son of God,’ and Emperor Constantine, for
rigging the Nicene Council elections in favour of the Trinitarian heresy.
Stubbe argues that Islam was spread not through the sword but by the
word.”1352
Stubbe and English Deism
Stubbe was also the source of Charles Blount’s deism. Blount’s father Sir
Henry Blount, who according to Charles Gildon was “the Socrates of the
Age for his aversion to the reigning Sophisms, and Hypocrisies, Eminent in
all Capacities, the best Husband, Father, and Master, extreamly ageeable in
Conversation, and just in all his dealings,”1353 had extensively traveled in
the Ottoman Empire and stayed long in Muslim Levant. His A Voyage Into
the Levant was “reprinted seven times before 1671.”1354 Henry Blount was
well-versed in Muslim religion, habits and culture. He “became famous for
abstaining from any drinks other than water and coffee. ‘For the first forty
years of his life he was a boon companion,’ one biographer reports, ‘and
much given to railery; but in the other forty, of a serious temper, and a water
drinker.”1355 He dressed in Turkish clothes and abstained from alcohol. He
helped Charles Blount in compiling his Deistic works. Charles Blount
himself intended to compile a biography of Prophet Muhammad, as
reported by Pierre Bayle in his Dictionary; the father of English Deism was
an Islamophile, like his friend Henry Stubbe.
Henry Stubbe read the Voyage and benefitted from it. Stubbe, a friend of
Charles Blount, helped in refining Blount’s Unitarian deism; This Unitarian
Deism would later become the predominant religious ideology of many of
the Founding Fathers of French and American republics. Jacob observes:
“There are more striking similarities between Stubbe and the early deism of
Charles Blount.”1356 Blount’s natural religion consisted of the following
points. “Natural religion is the belief we have of an eternal intellectual
being, & of the duty which we owe to him, manifested to us by our reason,
without revelation or positive law: The chief heads whereof seem contained
in these few particulars.

1. That there is one infinite eternal God, Creator of all things.

2. That he governs the world by Providence.
3. That ‘tis our duty to worship & obey him as Creator and
Governor.
4. That our worship consists in prayers to him, & praise of him.
5. That our obedience consists in the rules of right reason, the practice
whereof is moral virtue.
6. That we are to expect rewards and punishments hereafter, according
to our actions in this life; which includes the soul’s immortality, and
is proved by our admitting providence.
7. Seventhly, that when we err from the rules of our duty, we ought to
repent & trust in God’s mercy for pardon.”1357

This seems to be an exact summary of the Islamic articles of faith. Jacob

notes that “Blount’s formulation shares with Stubbe’s ‘Mahometan
Christianity’ all of the points that Hobbes’s natural religion does, and more
besides.”1358 Blount’s Deism and Hobbes’s natural religion were closely
identical with Stubbe’s “Mahometan Christianity.” Therefore, early Deism
and the natural, civic religion of Blount, Hobbes, Locke and other
Unitarians was closely identified with the Mohammadan Christianity of
Stubbe and John Toland. Jacob notes that “These strong similarities
between Stubbe’s ‘Mahometan Christianity’ and Blount’s natural religion
argue, however, for a close connection between the two thinkers, especially
as they were contemporaries.”1359 After a detailed discussion of these
striking similarities and Blount’s friendship with Stubbe, Jacob concludes
that “Stubbe must now be reckoned as one of the founders of English
deism, though his creed wore the guise of ‘Mahometan Christianity.”1360
Therefore, the close affinity of early Deism with Muhammadan Christianity
is not an accident.
Jacob also shows that Bristol Quaker leader George Bishop, in his article
A Looking-Glass for the Times published in 1668, recognised Stubbe as “the
source of many of his own Quaker ideals.”1361 Early Quakers had historical
connections with Islam; the Quaker leader George Fox quoted many verses
from the Quran, and later on Thomas Paine would combine his Quaker
upbringing with his radical deistic ideology because of their similarities.
Early “English Deism” was a proto-copy of Stubbe’s “Mahometan
Christianity.” Stubbe’s ideal of ”Mahometan Christianity” resonated with
many other English dissenters in addition to Quakers, Deists, Socinians, and
Unitarians. This Deistic, Unitarian, rational “Mahometan Christianity” will
become the rallying cry of the Enlightenment period against the abusive
Trinitarian Christianity of the Church and monarchy. The comprehensive
“Mohamoten Christianity” had all ingredients of the Enlightenment and
offered solutions to Christendom’s religious as well as political problems
such as Trinitarianism, depraved human nature and religious persecutions.
Stubbe and English Civil Religion
Likewise, the English civil religion tradition also started with Stubbe. James
A. Jacob has shown that Stubbe, borrowing mostly from John Selden,
Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington “developed and advocated a civil
religion which would survive the Restoration, undergoing several mutations
in the course of the 1660s and 1670s. Stubbe’s civil religion was based
upon a “deistical minimum, common to the Jews, the Muslims and the
primitive Christian.”1362 Stubbe had argued that Moses and Jesus were civil
republican monotheists like Muhammad; the original Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic messages were the one and same Unity of a transcendent, just God
and equality of his creatures. Stubbe, in An Account, argued that Jesus was
sent to rectify Jewish excesses and that Prophet Mohammad came to
“revive ancient Christianity.”1363 Henry Care (1646/7-1688), the famous
anti-Catholic Whig propagandist, English writer and journalist, was also
influenced by Stubbe. Care’s the Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, the
English Liberties (1680) and The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty (1687)
reflected Stubbe’s Turkophilism and Islamism. Care’s praises of Islamic
rationalism, minimalism, limited republicanism, toleration, diversity and
empire building against the persecuting, irrational, dogmatic, absolutist
popery of both the Catholic and Protestant churches echoed Stubbe’s
Muhammadan Christianity and Turkophilism. Care made the Turks appear
the more civil – even more “Christian” – power.1364
Stubbe was very influential in many ways. Matar observed that “P. M.
Holt saw Stubbe’s interest in Islam as a product of the mid-seventeenth-
century civil wars, while James R. Jacob argued that Originall reflected the
change in Restoration England that gave rise to a ‘secular conception of
history’ inspired by Hobbes. Stubbe, added Jacob, wrote his treatise after he
began to identify with the radical movement in English religious thought
that included figures like John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Algernon Sidney,
and Lord Shaftesbury. For Jacob, Originall was intended as a message to
Charles II about proper governance at the same time that it could be viewed
as the link between ‘radical Protestantism’ and Deism. Citing Jacob,
Christopher Hill agreed, as did Justin A. I. Champion: the Originall is part
of the ‘radical’ religious developments that led to the early English deists,
and belongs in the trajectory that led to the Socinian tracts of the 1690s and
to John Toland’s Nazarenus (1718). Humberto Garcia argued that the
beginnings of the Enlightenment in England can be traced, in some
measure, to Stubbe and his views on Islam.”1365 Stubbe’s reformative
scheme included all the ingredients of early Enlightenment; it rejected
Church Christianity with all its central dogmas, insisted upon religious
tolerance and pluralism and offered a republican model of governance and
civic society. His Mohammadan Christianity was the model of early Deism,
natural religion and rights and civic religion. John Locke, Isaac Newton and
other moderate enlightenment figures tacitly incorporated these themes into
their reformation plans, and the resulting Enlightenment was a product of
such an appropriation.
It was mainly due to Stubbe that from early on Islam was considered, as
H. Garcia argues, “the natural ally of the Radical Enlightenment, an
underground international movement that tended to borrow the legends,
stories, and motifs associated with various prophetic strains of near-eastern
monotheism in order to define its theological and political heterodoxy in
republican-constitutionalist terms.”1366 Stubbe heavily influenced later
radical dissenters such as Socinians, Deists and Unitarian’s views of Islam
and Muhammad. “C. E. Bosworth argued that Stubbe’s rejection of
Trinitarianism stemmed from admiration of the Great Tew Circle, especially
Lord Falkland and William Chillingworth, both of whom are mentioned in
Originall. Although they may not, as H. John McLachlan observed, ‘have
been antitrinitarian in theology, their Latitudinarianism may be regarded as
a step in the direction of Arianism and Socinianism.’ Jacob and Champion
concurred with Bosworth, confirming Stubbe’s place within the rising
trends of Socinianism, Deism, and Whiggism in the Restoration period. As
Champion noted, Socinian tracts were widely available in the 1660s and
70s, and writers in the 1690s such as Arthur Bury, William Freke, and
Stephen Nye identified ‘Unitarianism with monotheistic Islam.’”1367 Stubbe
was a link between the later radical enlightenment figures and Dr. Edward
Pococke and other authors of “Republic of Letters”.1368 Stubbe was the
“Father of Unitarian Islamic syncretism”1369 and Islamic republicanism, the
two main themes and ideologies of the early Enlightenment in England
which lingered well into the eighteenth century. Stubbe, like John Selden,
was influenced by Islamic Unitarian theology,1370 and- also like John Selden
- praised Islamic theology, republican values and religious tolerance.
Stubbe was among the founding propagators of religious tolerance and
pluralism in Britain. He supported a full-fledged policy of religious
tolerance for all sects just like the Ottoman Empire, at a time when leaders
like John Locke considered toleration a taboo leading to social disruption,
violence and anarchy.1371 Stubbe encouraged Locke to accept the religious
tolerance as early as 1659, but Locke refused to join the movement.
Stubbe’s insistence upon the Muslim Ottoman example of total religious
freedom, in line with Islamic religion and history, was perhaps an
addendum to his previous efforts. Matar observed that “it is tempting to
treat Stubbe’s Originall as a continuation of the letter exchange with John
Locke. After reading Stubbe’s Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause
(1659), Locke wrote Stubbe a letter in which he expressed “admiration” for
the “strength and vigour” of the style, but complained about the extent to
which Stubbe was willing to go in advocating toleration (in this case for the
Quakers). At that point in time, Locke still believed that religious
differences in the state would result in anarchy and violence.”1372 It took
John Locke almost thirty years to publicly agree and write about a truncated
version of Stubbe’s religious tolerance, which even then did not extend
tolerance to Catholics and atheists.1373 Stubbe’s treatise on Muhammad and
Islam’s republican, tolerant and rational policies might have been a
response to leaders like John Locke, who initially opposed religious
tolerance as anarchic.1374 It is the irony of fate that Stubbe, with his
comprehensive appeal for religious tolerance, was mostly ignored by the
historians of religious freedom while Locke with his late, attenuated appeal
is considered the founding father of religious pluralism, tolerance and
Enlightenment. Likewise, the long Islamic history of religious tolerance and
pluralism is seldom acknowledged while the late, partial and ambiguous
eighteenth-century European policies of religious tolerance are underscored
as the foundations of human liberty, republican values and democratic
systems.1375 This is how the Whiggish, linear, arbitrary and biased historical
narratives are created to fan specific historical agendas. The Whiggish
naratives make the past subservient to the demands of progressive present,
as H. Butterfield has well demonstrated.
In their efforts to glorify the present they intentionally or subconsciously
mutilate the past, make the crooked straight, the rough places plain,
refurbish the lost causes, reinvigorate failed arguments, fabricate noble
sacrifices, artificially open unopened doors, untried passages and dark
narrow alleys, create fanciful characters, destroy historical characters and
facts to replace them with malleable trops and figures. Whiggish modern
historians committed theft and played havoc to the real history in their
efforts to rewrite history on Eurocentric lines. Real heroes were destroyed,
suppressed and ignored to create and highlight characters and mythologies
congenial to Eurocentrism. The modern political spinning and intellectual
red herring is nothing new; it has precedents in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Whiggish British and American historiography of
teleological Christian, Protestant, Anglican, constitutional, libertarian,
scientific, progressive, modern and miraculous Eurocentric world.1376
Additionally, the seventeenth century was the century of Arabic
translations to Latin and English. The Arab and Islamic influences were
rampant. The modern historians are hesitant to give Islam and Arabs their
due place in the history of ideas and want to present England and Europe as
the sole proprietors of Enlightenment and modernity projects. They totally
ignore the Islamic contributions, burying those who were at the forefront of
such a movement.1377 The contemporary historians of that period are willing
to give all credit to ancient Greco-Roman writers such as Aristotle, Plato
and Cicero but are at a loss to acknowledge their Muslim interlocutors,
commentators and interpreters who transmitted that knowledge with
fundamental additions, modifications and assimilations to Christendom.
They tend to ignore centuries of Muslim contributions to human civilisation
and progress including close encounters and appropriations from the
sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. This is nothing short of theft of
history, as Jack Goody demonstrates.1378 Stubbe along with Islamic faith
deserves a rightful place in the unfolding of the English Enlightenment.
To Anthony Wood, the earliest biographer of Stubbe, he was “the most
noted person of his age that these late times have produced.”1379 Stubbe died
in 1676, but his influence continued through the remainder of the
Restoration and after the Revolution of 1688–1689, until at least 1720.
“Perhaps the influence of the Account was more profound than it initially
appears.”1380 He was the source of “the early English deism of Charles
Blount and the civil religion or ‘Mahometan Christianity’ of John Toland,
and hence charted the intellectual links between the radical Protestantism
and subversive naturalism represented by Stubbe and the deism and
vitalistic materialism or pantheism (to use Toland’s words) of the early
Enlightenment. Stubbe is a key connection between the radicalism of the
mid-century English revolution with the radicalism of the early eighteenth
century. The principal medium of this connection […] was Stubbe’s
manuscript ‘An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism,’
which circulated underground between the 1670s and 1720.”1381
Charles Blount copied and transmitted Stubbe’s manuscript to other
freethinkers and radical Whigs. “Charles Blount, one of the most active of
the radicals during the Exclusion, crisis and a prominent member of the
Green Ribbon Club, had read and copied at least portions of Stubbe’s
Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism by 1678. In that year
he wrote a letter to Hobbes and another to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
himself a notorious libertine and freethinker, which consisted mainly of
extracts from Stubbe’s manuscript.”1382 Stubbe’s manuscript exerted
tangible influence upon Blount’s “Oracles of Reason” and upon the writings
of other members of Shaftesbury’s circle, such as Albertus Warren and
Clifford. There is a crystal-clear line stretching from Shaftesbury to Stubbe
to deistic, radical Whigs. James Jacob noted that “there is then an
ideological continuity between Stubbe, the sometime court pen, sometime
‘country’ spokesman, and the radical Whigs of the Exclusion crisis - so
profound in fact that one wishes he had lived to take part in the campaign
organised by the Green Ribbon Club, for one knows that he would have
been there, alongside Blount and the others, at its active center. Indeed the
evidence - Stubbe’s all but certain collabouration with Shaftesbury in the
autumn of 1673, the publication of A Caveat for the Protestant Clergy
under his name in 1678, the clandestine circulation of Stubbe’s manuscript,
and the writings of Blount and Warren - all points to more than an
ideological affinity and influence but a continuity of actual political
organisation emanating from and revolving around the First Earl
himself.”1383 John Locke was an important member of Shaftesbury’s circle,
and continued Shaftesbury’s reformation after his sudden death in
Amsterdam.
 Chapter 8

John Toland and Mohammadan Christianity

John Toland (1670–1722) furthered Stubbe’s historical thesis of
Mohammadan Christianity in his famous book Nazarenus: or Jewish,
Gentile and Mahometan Christianity, Containing the History of the Ancient
Gospel of Barnabas [...] Also the Original Plan of Christianity Explained in
the History of the Nazarens [...] with [...] a Summary of Ancient Irish
Christianity, written in 1718. Toland was a known Deist, Socinian and
republican radical reformer; Justin Champion observed that “throughout the
1690s, and the early 1700s, working closely with powerful political figures
like the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Robert Harley and Sir Robert
Molesworth, Toland became one of the most consistent and vocal publicists
for Protestant liberties and the Hanoverian succession. During the 1700s he
continued this public role writing (amongst many contributions) detailed
defences of […] the Toleration Act, as well as fierce attacks upon the
‘popery’ of the High Church party in Convocation and Parliament.
Alongside this explicitly political writing, Toland was involved in the
production of works of profound erudition and scholarship. Much of this
material was circulated in clandestine form amongst a circle of elite figures
that included Sophia of Hanover (the successor apparent to the British
Crown), Prince Eugene of Savoy (leading military strategist of the
Protestant cause), and English gentlemen like Anthony Collins. Ultimately
this erudition, which was also published in print form, earned Toland a
significant and contentious reputation in the European ‘republic of
letters.’”1384
Toland was an activist of international connections, scholarship and
repute,1385 and his works and thought were important reflections of the
eighteenth-century intellectual landscape.1386 His main focus was to
demolish the dominant traditional Christian system of absolute Church and
monarch. He made “a mighty shout of defiance”1387 against traditional
Christianity, and broke the nexus between sacred knowledge and Church
authority.1388 The absolute submission to both Church and king was
demanded in the name of God, as promulgated by St. Augustine, and
continually followed over the centuries by Christendom. Toland aimed at
the theological roots of the whole Christian system to replace it with
Islamic Unitarian republicanism.1389 Toland engaged all levels of authority
(Biblical, Sacerdotal, political, cultural and social) to shake up the entire
Christian system of power and authority: “Rupturing, capturing and
transforming the logic of such cultural procedures was a discursive
manoeuvre that had profound and explicit social and political
consequences…Toland conducted a sustained and public assault upon the
clerical cultural system for making authority. By embroiling his priestly
opponents in public debate he dislodged the mortar that bound the stones of
Christian order.”1390 He accomplished the difficult task with a mixture of
scholarship, sincerity and subterfuge, and was more influential than some of
his Deistic and Socinian compatriots.1391 Toland was very influential in a
number of important ways; his ideas and thoughts provoked many local
controversies and initiated national and international upheavals. He was
well read all across Europe as well as in Istanbul.1392 Toland’s “writings had
‘alarm’d all sober well-meaning Christians, and set the whole clergy against
him.’”1393 Toland, like Stubbe, realised an anti-Church Christianity
revolution.
Huge Trevor-Roper notes that in the 1690s “there began in England a
concerted attack both on the central doctrines and on the external proofs of
orthodox Christianity. From one quarter, the divine inspiration of the Bible
was questioned. Thereby the historic context and cosmological significance
of Christ’s mission were made to tremble. From another, the doctrine of the
Trinity, which had become the badge of orthodoxy in the fourth century,
and had been defended by fire and faggot ever since, was openly
challenged. With it, not only the authority of the Fathers who had invented
and imposed it, but the divinity of Christ himself, was put in doubt. These
challenges were not indeed new, but they were now delivered far more
forcefully than before, from inside as well as outside the established
Church; and they aroused a forceful response. In that last decade of the
Seventeenth century, ‘Arian’ – that is, anti-Trinitarian – works were ritually
condemned in both universities; new Blasphemy Acts were passed by
Parliament in a vain attempt to stay the infection; and the alarm of the
establishment was increased by the appearance of an alternative religion
only loosely connected with traditional Christianity and quite incompatible
with Trinitarian doctrines: ‘the religion of Nature,’ or ‘deism.’”1394 Deistic
Christianity was identical to Toland’s Muhammadan Christianity and
infected English society like a bush fire; unfortunately, many historians of
the period tend to minimise its reach, influence and implications.1395 “Anti-
Trinitarianism was more pervasive and spread more diversely in Europe and
in England than any other single unorthodox view. It was seemingly
everywhere and came from every quarter. It was part of the armory of
unlearned religious radicals and also educated divines and laymen.”1396 It
spread like a storm.
John Toland was the immediate instigator of the above sketched storm. In
1696 he had published Christianity not Mysterious to debunk the Christian
mysteries, supernatural dogmas and their clerical guardians.
Trevor-Roper credits this book with causing the deistic uproar.1397 It
“shattered the complacent ‘reasonableness’ of mainstream Anglican
theology.”1398 Paul Hazard noted that Tolad was a “queer personage indeed,
this John Toland! He had got drunk on ‘reason’; it had gone to his head.
Christianity not mysterious was his war cry, in the book that made him
famous in 1696. ‘No mystery about Christianity,’ he gave out, and that for
the plain and sufficient reason that there are no mysteries, they simply don’t
exist. Mystery—the very word is pagan, like so many others we have clung
to. It either means a superstition of some sort, and should be stamped out, or
it denotes some problem by which we are temporarily baffled, but must
sooner or later resolve. Either Christianity is reason, and is part and parcel
of the universal order, sloughing off all that is extraneous thereto—
tradition, dogmas, rites, creed, faith; or else it could not exist, since nothing
in the world can be above reason, or contrary to it.”1399 Indeed, this was a
huge storm against the historical Christianity, which centered on
supernatural mysteries. The Christian Church, its dogmas, monarchy and
absolutism were all exposed and targeted.
The work was “published without Toland’s name or details of either
publisher or bookseller between December 1695 and June 1696. Draft
‘papers’ had possibly been sent to John Locke in late March 1695, via his
friend John Freke. Reports about Toland’s work were widespread in Oxford
through the year […] By early June the book was being attacked from
London pulpits for its ‘most arrogant and impudent treatment of God and
the Holy Scriptures’ […] By August the book had been announced on the
Continent. To accompany this revelation a ‘second edition enlarg’d’ was
published with Toland’s name on the title-page. He revelled in the
celebrity.”1400 In mid-May 1697 the Grand Jury of Middlesex condemned
Christianity not mysterious in the company of two other anonymous works:
The Reasonableness of Christianity and A Lady’s Religion. Toland’s book
especially provoked an angry response from the Church of England,
Parliament and both monarchs William and Mary. The swift and harsh
response showed how the publication of Christianity not mysterious
“perturbed the authority of public religion.”1401 Ultimately a Blasphemy Act
was officially enacted in 1698.
Both Locke’s “Reasonableness of Christianity” and Toland’s “Christianity
not Mysterious” were taken as subversive works against the Holy Trinity
and other Christian mysteries.1402 Bishop Stillingfeet “attempted to tar
Locke’s work with Toland’s intellectual consequences […] Locke merely
commented that Toland ‘says something which has a conformity with some
notions in my book.’”1403 Locke was an active part of the anti-Trinitarian
storm but prudent enough to avoid its persecutory consequences. Toland
like Stubbe was an open canon.
Toland had a bigger target in mind other than just rejecting the Trinity; he
wanted to shake up the very foundations of the politics of knowledge, and
tried to replace all supernatural Christian mysteries with things simple,
reasonable and accessible to all men. Toland “had declared that ‘religion is
a plain & easy thing, & that there is not so much in it, as Priestcraft would
persuade: taking it for granted to be part of this Doctrine, that what is to be
done in order to Salvation, is as easy, as what is to be known, is plain.’”1404
The motive was to unpick “deference and tutelage to the clerical ‘Doctor.’
The combination of epistemological confidence (every man may believe
according to his own sense) and political liberty (establishing toleration)
would establish a system of intellectual liberty. This was central to Toland’s
lifetime project. Importantly, for Toland the liberty enshrined in this process
of enlightenment was prompted by the act of reading.”1405 He wanted the
Christians to think for themselves and to read and understand the Bible by
themselves, as their Muslim counterparts did, without the manipulative
medium of the clergy.1406 To accomplish this goal of individual liberty and
comprehension, Toland rejected the Christian mysteries and dogmas which
inhibited the truth from the second century all the way to the eighteenth
century. “Toland established how manipulation of the concepts of mystery
had been institutionalised by the Christian clergy after the second century.
As he commented ‘here’s enough to show how Christianity became
mysterious, and how so divine an institution did, through the craft and
ambition of priests and philosophers, degenerate into mere paganism.’
Priestly fraud monopolised ‘the sole right of interpreting scripture and with
it [a] claim’d infallibility, to their body,’ unfortunately, as Toland noted,
‘and so it continues, in a great measure, to this day.’”1407 Toland’s book
destroyed both biblical as well as clerical authority to liberate Christians of
centuries’ suffocations. Some called it a Deistic work, while the others
dubbed it as Socinian;1408 both deists and Socinians stood for anti-
Trinitarian republicanism.
Toland and New Testament Criticism
In Amyntor: Or a Defence of Milton’s Life (1699) he went further by clearly
denying the authenticity and validity of the New Testament itself. He
classified the New Testament material into three categories: orthodox,
apocryphal, and fictitious. Jonathan C. Birch noted that Toland, borrowing
from the pioneer researches of French Richard Simon and German Johan
Albrecht Fabricius, doubted the historicity and authenticity of Bible and
anticipated the later German and Continental schools of biblical
criticism.1409 Toland anticipated the Eighteenth century German pietism and
related textual, source, form and literary biblical criticisms of Johann
Salomo Semler (1725–1791), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–
1827), Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), and Georg Lorenz
Bauer (1755–1806) and G. E. Lessing (1729–1781), Ferdinand Christian
Baur (1792–1860), Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) and others’ quest for
historical Jesus.1410 Like the Quran and Muslim theologians, Toland accused
the Church of corrupting and compromising the Bible. The old Quranic
criticisms of the Bible were getting acceptance in Europe, due to
Reformation debates about the sola scriptura, Catholic efforts to uphold
Church tradition and authority by insinuating scriptural insufficiency and
literal incompetence in matters of doctrine and faith. Radical reformers like
Toland were furthering Catholic arguments to bring down both Church and
Bible; to them, both Catholic and Protestant clerical establishments were
corrupt, like the corrupted scriptures.
Toland maintained that the present New Testament was canonised
centuries after Jesus or his original followers and was not a reliable source
for Jesus’ life, theology, politics and preaching. He blamed the fourth-
century Christian priests for grafting heathenistic supernatural, mysterious
dogmas on the simple monotheistic message of Jesus. He also blamed the
following clerical generation for maintaining the sacred fraud. “To the
priests fell the honour, not of establishing heathenism, but of maintaining it,
and of introducing its various rites. The modes of worship of the gods, says
Toland, ‘were afterwards manag’d by the Priests so as to make their
imagin’d Intimacy with Heaven more valu’d, and to get Revenues settled
on themselves’. ‘Moreover’, he adds, after the manner of Blount, ‘there was
not wanting sometimes a mutual Compact between the Prince and the
Priest’, which bound the priests to preach the absolute power of the prince
and the fear of hell, to contribute to the stability of the state.”1411 Charles
Blount’s deism and Toland’s Muhammadan Christianity were both directed
against the Anglican Trinitarian royalist establishment’s claims to authentic
revelation and authority.
Toland and Primitive Christianity
After demolishing the foundations of Christian system of knowledge,
authority and politics, Toland re-established them on the basis of the
primitive Christianity of Jesus. Toland contended that the original followers
of Jesus were “Nazarenes” who followed the Gospel of Barnabas.1412 This
Gospel “offered proof of this close correspondence between pure primitive
Christianity and early Islam.”1413 These primitive Christians followed the
Law of Moses in conformity with the universal law of nature propagated by
all the prophets since Adam. Radical reformers such as Stubbe, Toland and
Deists, as well as moderate reformers such as Locke and Newton, used
Primitive Christianity as a model of reforming the historically corrupted
Church Christianity. Diego Lucci noted that “in their attempts to revive
“true religion,” Locke and several English deists, such as Toland, Tindal,
Chubb, Morgan, and Annet, focused on the relationship between the Law of
Nature, the Law of Moses, and Christ’s teaching […] Locke and the English
deists aimed to recover true religion from long-lasting distortions. However,
their rethinking of the relationship between the Law of Nature, the Mosaic
Law, and Christ’s message led to different conceptions, uses, and
appropriations of natural religion, Mosaic Judaism, and primitive
Christianity in their attempts to restore what they perceived as true
religion.”1414 These Deists regarded “the religion of nature as universal,
eternal, necessary, and sufficient. Accordingly, they argued that Christ had
merely confirmed natural religion. Though, they claimed that the religion of
nature had suffered from frequent distortions throughout the centuries, both
before and after Christ’s reaffirmation of the Law of Nature. Appropriating
Christ’s message to his own philosophy, each of these deists identified
primitive Christianity with his own version of natural religion. In describing
Jesus as a moral philosopher who had simply restated the Law of Nature
without adding anything to it, these authors aimed to grant historical dignity
to their respective versions of deism, which they maintained against the
ecclesiastical traditions, priestly frauds, and abstruse doctrines that had
perverted what Toland called ‘the original plan of Christianity.’”1415 Toland
portrayed Mosaic Judaism “as being on a par with primitive Christianity,
given that both the Law of Moses and Christ’s precepts were compatible
with, and indeed based on, the Law of Nature.”1416 This natural, Mosaic and
Christian law was preserved by Muhammad in the Quran. Therefore, the
original message of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad was the one and the same
ethical monotheism. This line of thought was in opposition to the Pauline,
Augustinian and Church insistence upon Christian unique Trinitarian
salvific scheme and Church’s unique role in the grace-based universal
salvation. Ethical laws of Moses and Jesus were complemented by the
natural laws understood and comprehended by human reason, and hence in
no need of the atoning death of Jesus or the mediatorial offices of Church
and clergy. Toland, like the Deists, destroyed all Christian claims of
scriptural, ecclesiastical and monarchical authority and connected man
directly with God through reason and moral laws.
Toland and Gospel of Barnabas
In 1709 Toland discovered a manuscript of the Gospel of Barnabas in
Amsterdam through his acquaintance with Prince Eugene of Vienna who
possessed that manuscript. Toland began work on Nazarenus in 1710 based
upon his study of the Gospel of Barnabas. Justin Champion showed that
Toland “readily employed this text as evidence, following Stubbe’s
argument, of the continuity of Judaic, Christian and Islamic theology.”1417
James Jacob totally agreed.1418 Toland, like Stubbe, believed that the pristine
message of divine unity, charity, and moral responsibility was a common
thread between all the Prophets, starting with Adam,1419 and successive
prophets came to rectify periodic human excesses and omissions. Jesus
came to correct Jewish excesses, and Mohammad came to rectify Christian
corruptions. He insisted that the “fundamental doctrines of Mahometanism
to have their rise, not from Sergius the Nestorian monk (a person who has
hitherto serv’d for a world of fine purposes) but from the earliest
monuments of the Christian religion.”1420 Muhammad rectified St. Paul’s
supernatural, apostatic grafting upon Christianity. Toland maintained that
the original followers of Jesus were Nazarene or Ebionites who were
“mortal enemies to Paul […] whom they stil’d an Apostate […] and a
transgressor of the Law […] representing him as an intruder on the genuine
Christianity…a stranger to the person of Christ, yet substituting his own
pretended Revelations to the doctrines of those with whom Christ had
convers’d, and to whom he actually communicated his will.”1421 Toland
concluded, “Mahometans believe concerning Christ and his doctrine, were
neither the inventions of Mahomet, nor yet of those Monks who are said to
have assisted him in framing of his Alcoran but that they are as old as the
time of the Apostles having been the sentiments of whole sects or
Churches.”1422 Muhammad did not borrow the so-called heretical Arian
Christology from Syrian monks of his time, but was a proper heir to the
universal prophetic tradition of ethical monotheism preached by Jesus and
preserved by his immediate disciples. To Toland, Muhammad was a true
Christian. “‘Mahometans’ to be ‘a sort of Christians, and not the worst sort
neither.’”1423 Muhammad was a Protestant, Unitarian Prophet, as Stubbe had
contended before him.
Harrison summarises Toland’s position on Islam and Gospel of Barnabas
in the following words: “It was from this document, he believed, that the
Mahometans derived their doctrines. Islam was a religion much maligned,
said Toland, there being many myths and fables about it ‘to which the
Musulmans are utter strangers’. The truth was that Islamic doctrines were
based not on the heterodox opinions of a Nestorian monk, as Medieval
tradition would have it, but on ‘the earliest documents of the Christian
Religion’. The document in question was, of course, the Gospel of
Barnabas, which Toland declared was ‘in a very great part the same book’
as the ‘Gospel of the Mahometans’ (presumably the Qu’ran). The
Mahometans, moreover, ‘openly profess to believe the Gospel: tho they
charge our copies with so much corruption and alteration’. Toland’s
reasonings led him to the conclusion that the ‘Mahometans’, like the Jews,
were really ‘a sort or sect of Christians’, and he even hinted that they were
closer to the original plan of Christianity than was historical Christianity
itself, the latter having suffered alteration through contact with paganism
and being in addition based upon corrupted documents. It is not hard to see
how Toland got his reputation for being a ‘Mahometan’ Christian.”1424
The title “Mahometan Christians” got popularised in the later part of the
seventeenth century to denote those anti-Trinitarians who called for a return
to the original Unitarian Christianity of Jesus and his early disciples. The
Unitarian phenomenon was quite widespread, as seen above, extending to
dissenters as well as non-dissenting conformists and Church leaders. Toland
greatly popularised the idea of Muhammadan Christianity due to his
scholarship, erudition and sincerity. He sincerely believed that Islam was
the true heir to the original Christianity of Jesus. Jacob notes that “like
Stubbe, Toland argued that this first Christianity of Jesus and his immediate
followers survived in pockets in the late Roman empire and was eventually
appropriated by Mohammed to become the basis of Islam.”1425 Toland like
Stubbe drew a straight historical line from Jesus to Muhammad, excluding
the entire Roman Christian tradition from this legitimate Unitarian
Christianity.
Islam was identical with the natural religion which allowed natural human
reason to connect with God through divine signs, symbols and
manifestations prevalent in the book of creation; Christendom needed to
follow suit. “Ideal Christianity, Toland had insisted, did not coincide with
the Church of England, or any other form of positive Christianity, but was
to be identified with a practice of natural religion which could take place
under the guise of any number of religious traditions. This equating of
genuine Christianity with natural religion became a platform of later deist
thought. The classic statement of this thesis is Matthew Tindal’s
Christianity as Old as the Creation: or the Gospel, a Republication of the
Religion of Nature (1730.”1426 Paul Hazard noted that Toland wanted to
replace Christianity with a more rational, republican and less supernatural
religion; he wanted to be a Muhammad. “His dream was to become the
founder of a religion, a sort of Mahomet; but he lacked the power and
prestige. Yet what a hater he was, using all the resources of a ready tongue
and a nimble wit to envenom his vituperations. And how he loathed priests,
every single one of them, from the tribe of Levi onwards; for the Levites,
too, were tricksters, nothing more nor less. On the priesthood he poured
forth all the vials of his wrath. He denounced them for liars and
malefactors; he was anti-clerical to the marrow of his bones.”1427 The
Church of England, which considered itself the repository of all truth, could
not tolerate Toland’s sheer anti-clericalism and total opposition to its’
“totalising theological dogma and religious exclusivism.”1428 The Church
leaders dubbed him an absolute infidel and a Mahometan. “John Toland, in
particular, was singled out as an infidel. One ‘Dr South’ apparently dubbed
him ‘a certain Mahometan Christian’, while John Norris, in his critique of
Christianity not Mysterious, thought him a Socinian who might as well be a
Mahometan. Jean Gailhard, who thought to dismiss both Toland and the
Socinians with one protracted stroke of the pen, noted that the Jews were
‘enemies to our Lord Jesus’, who with Mahometans and Socinians join in
blasphemy.”1429
It is pertinent to note that the Quran relayed a successive prophetic
monotheistic history in which prophet after prophet followed each other as
rectifiers of immoralities, sins and human transgressions. From Adam to
Noah to Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad they conveyed the same
Unitarian message of divine unity, human morality, accountability and final
reward and punishment. The Quran also claimed that Jesus had prophesised
the coming of Muhammad and his reformation of Christianity; Toland
propagated the same Quranic narrative.1430 Champion observes that “Toland
deployed the Islamic notion of the succession of the prophets as the authors
of new institutions each increasingly perfect, ‘tho’ in substance it still be
one and the same religion.’” Toland accepted the Islamic charge that Jesus’
prophecy of Mahomet, that he would come ‘to complete or perfect all
things,’ had been erased from Scripture by the priests.”1431 Here again
Toland was following the Stubbean arguments, as discussed above. Toland
considered the Muslims as the true followers of pristine Christianity and
reformers of corrupted Church Christianity. He was keen to see Muslims
tolerated in Europe as Christians and Jews were tolerated throughout the
Muslim Empire. Muslims “might with as much reason and safety be
tolerated at London and Amsterdam, as the Christians of every kind are so
tolerated at London and Amsterdam, as the Christians of every kind are so
tolerated at Constantinople and throughout all Turkey.”1432
Toland, at the time of writing his Nazarene, was a Unitarian who believed
in a linear prophetic monotheism, culminating in Prophet Muhammad.
Islam was the most refined, reformed and pure form of the original Jewish
and Christian ethical monotheism. Champion rightly observes that “Stubbe
and Toland can thus be seen to place the historical past of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam into a Polybian framework.”1433 Furthermore, “both
works set out to present an unbiased view of Islam, rejecting the slanders of
the medieval canon identified in Prideaux’s work. It must be remembered
that especially when Toland’s work was published it was into a public arena
which had perceived Islam through the distorting lens of Prideaux’s
polemic.”1434
Toland and Mahometan Christianity
Both Stubbe and Toland used Islam or ‘Mahometan Christianity’ as their
ideal for a civil religion that would eliminate the corrupted Trinitarian
Christianity, its stifling dogmas and absolutist political theology. “There
was a close link between Stubbe’s civil religion and Toland’s. In both
Christianity could and should be divested of its adventitious mysteries -
‘unintelligible jargon,’ as Toland said - and made to yield a Scriptural
minimum in harmony with natural law, which could then serve as the basis
of ‘a natural religion,’ tolerant, reasonable and dedicated to civil ends rather
than priestly ones - the advancement of learning, national power and
prosperity.”1435 Jacob further notes that “what was prescribed, instead, was a
religion enjoining toleration, in which people would be instructed in the
wisdom of the ancients for the pursuit of moral and political goals in this
life. Much of the inspiration for this was Harringtonian, and Stubbe must be
credited with reviving civil religion, couched in Harringtonian language,
during the Restoration.”1436 The rector of St. Nicholas Church in Guildford,
Thomas Mangey (1688–1755), condemned Toland’s work: “His expression
of the Mahometan Christianity is the only passage in this book which I do
not condemn, provided he would mean by it not the Muselmans on the
other side of the water, but the Socinians here. These may truely and
properly be termed Mahometan Christians.”1437 To the Church and
monarchical establishments, the widespread anti-Trinitarian, rational,
natural law, civil religion, tolerant and republican movement of
seventeenth-century England, with all its varieties, was an offshoot of the
Ottoman conspiracy, directed at promoting anarchy, instability and
degradation of state and Church authority to be replaced with Islamic
republicanism of the Ottoman Empire. The merchants, nonconformists,
Deists, Socinians and Unitarians all were part of the same international
conspiracy; their demands of a return to the primitive Christianity were the
veneer of a bigger subvervise and heinious plot of the international Islamic
caliphate.
The identification of Jesus’ primitive Christianity with Islam became a
standard after Stubbe and Toland. It was often argued “that Mahomet was a
better Christian than most, that he properly understood the relations
between state power and clergy, that he had happily stripped power away
from a corrupt and grasping clerical elite, and that he put into place a policy
of toleration that was still practiced by the Ottomans and that should be
imitated by enlightened European monarchs. Stubbe transformed the
prophet of Islam into a republican revolutionary, and subsequent writers
(Bury, Nye, Toland, and others) would confirm and elaborate upon this
transformation. In the eighteenth century, several French intellectuals will
use Muhammad in the same way to attack the preeminent place of the
Catholic Church in France.”1438 Stubbe and Toland’s Mohametan
Christianity was embraced by the Socinians, Unitarians and Deists of the
Eighteenth century; they were often called Muhammadan Christians.
John Locke, Isaac Newton and Milton’s Socinian and Unitarian beliefs
were a product of this Unitarian, Socinian, Deist and Islamic syncretism, in
which Islamic theology and religious thought patterns were pretty visible.
This Unitarian-Islamic hybrid was the rational theism which influenced the
later generations of Deists, Unitarians and Socinians in England, France and
America. This monotheistic and republican syncretism constituted the
foundations of the English, French and American Enlightenments. Both its
radical and moderate leaders agreed upon some broader points. They
agreed: (1) that the supernatural, Trinitarian and incarnational Christianity
was a corrupted version of the original, Unitarian, natural and moral
Christianity of Jesus and his disciples. (2) This corruption occurred in the
fourth century when the Christian religion was coopted by the Roman
Empire. (3) The Bible was compromised in various ways. (4) The Church
tradition and Church Fathers’ writing were neither a genuine reflection of
the original, monotheistic message of Jesus nor of the biblical text. (5)
There was a universal, moral, successive prophetic tradition. (6) The
Trinitarian Christian belief system was irrational, paradoxical and
absolutist. (7) The vanguards of historical Christianity (both clerical and
monarchical establishments) were usurpers of authority and betrayers of the
Lord. (8) The Christian divisions into Catholic, Protestant and confessional
national churches and the resultant wars were detrimental to the Christian
faith and society. (9) Christian religious persecutions were inhumane,
irreligious and abusive. (10) The incarnational scheme of original sin and
redemptive death of Christ was antithetical to human freedom, dignity and
morality. (11) Historical Christianity needed theological as well as political
reformation and a total break with the medieval past. (12) Islamic ethical
monotheism, nomianism, naturalism, rationalism and republicanism were
true heirs to the original Jewish, Christian and prophetic traditions. (13)
Islam was the ideal but the contemporary Muslims were not. (14) The
Ottoman Empire, in spite of its shortcomings, was a good republican model
to be pursued, especially in regards to religious tolerance and pluralism.
(15) Christianity must be reformed but not destroyed. (16) Reason was the
arbiter to resolve the countless theological confusions and confessional
jargons. (17) A stable, natural and rational order was needed in natural
sciences and theology to empower the individuals and to avert the
manipulation of priests and princes. (18) Church and knowledge must be
democratised and anthropomorphised. (19) Clerical mediation between man
and God was unnecessary. (20) No absolute monarchy and Church were
promulgated by the Scriptures. (21) The human, prophetic and messianic
Christology was the alternate. (22) A minimal, civic and all-embracing
religion was the way out of religious conflicts, persecutions and debacles.
(23) Faith and religion were private entities and could not be imposed from
outside. (24) Virtuous sociability and not faith was publicly required. (25)
Church and state should focus on social virtues rather than creedal
uniformity. Almost all reformers agreed with give and take on the above
points. This moral, theological and political consensus would form the basis
of later English, French and American Enlightenments and both American
and French republics.
Stubbe’s ideal of “Mahometan Christianity” and his works were highly
influential among the English thinkers of his time. Champion wrote: “We
know that Charles Blount plagiarized a section in his Oracles of Reason
(1693) and also that he sent Rochester extracts of the Account […] An
unnoticed influence can be found in Sir John Finch’s correspondence with
Lord Conway between 4 and 14 February 1675. These letters give a
‘politic’ account of the growth of Islam including a presentation of the
Islamic notion of the unipersonality of God [...] Mahomet is referred to as
both a wise prince and legislator. There also may be the possibility that
William Temple read and adopted Stubbe’s work.”1439 Toland’s works
furthered that influence into multiple directions and popularised it in the
public arena and sphere. These public debates coupled with material culture
of “Oriental Obsessions” played havoc to the traditional institutions of
ecclesiastical and monarchical establishments.
Nabil Matar, in Islam in Britain,1440 and Jacob in Henry Stubbe have
proven beyond doubt that an interest in Islamic ideas, philosophy, sciences,
and institutions was prevalent among the English intelligentsia since the
1660s. G. A. Russell, in her book The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural
Philosophers in the Seventeenth-Century, has shown that the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were the age of Arabic in England, when thousands of
Arabic manuscripts were translated into Latin and English for multiple
purposes by a variety of scholars and scientists. John Tolan noted that “in
England as elsewhere in Europe, the study of Arabic, and the translation of
key texts, had taken root over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) in Paris, Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) in
Leiden, Pococke (1604– 1691) in Oxford, and others had breathed new life
into the study of Arabic letters and Muslim history and had translated key
texts.”1441 This direct Islamic influence, Socinian missionary zeal, Deists
and Unitarian controversies and a culture of “Oriental Obsession”
apparently influenced many English thinkers of that era, including John
Locke, Isaac Newton and many others. Their reformative scheme was
broadly Unitarian in which Stubbean Mohammadan Christianity was quite
visible.
 Chapter 9

John Locke: The Unitarian Heretic

John Locke (1632-1704), the Unitarian heretic, was an integral part of
Unitarian republican movement. His educational background, intellectual
associations, political affiliations and social interactions were closely
identical to Stubbe. Locke was introduced to the Arabic language at
Westminster, along with Latin and Hebrew; his Oxford exposure to Dr.
Edward Pococke1442 may have strengthened that connection. Pococke’s long
diplomatic stints in Aleppo and Constantinople, his command of Islamic
theology, history, law and his erudition1443 may well have enhanced Locke’s
insatiable curiosity for knowledge of other religions and cultures, especially
that of Islam. Pococke was Locke’s model and mentor, as seen above.
Locke was also well connected with a number of other Levant Company
chaplains, and commissioned them to collect manuscripts from the Muslim
world.1444 Chaplain Robert Huntington was Locke’s fellow in Oxford and
collected manuscripts for Locke while in Aleppo and Istanbul. Chaplain
John Luke, who later became the chair of Arabic at Cambridge, was also
actively involved in securing manuscript for Locke and Robert Boyle.1445
Locke was acquinted with John Finch and Paul Recaut, the fellow Royal
Society members and longterm Levant Company officials to the Ottoman
Empire.
Locke’s Westminster and Oxford colleague and one-time close friend
Henry Stubbe’s radical views especially regarding Unitarian primitive
Christianity, post-Constantine Nicaean Church’s abuses, corruptions and
absolutism, subsequent Islamic reformation of Christian dogma and Islamic
republicanism could have impacted Locke’s outlook. Both were
simultaneously at Oxford, moved in the circle of Shaftesbury and worked
for him. Stubbe’s correspondence with Locke on toleration is well-
documented.1446 His An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism,
and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the
Christians may well have been read by Locke, though there is no surviving
evidence that he possessed a copy or read it; many of Locke’s Deist and
Unitarian friends had access to it. It might very well have been written on
behest of Shaftesbury, who also commissioned Locke to write about
government and religious toleration. It supplemented Pococke Junior’s
English translation of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel Hayy bin Yaqzan
(1671) which was highlighted by the Royal Society in 1674. Both Locke
and Ibn Tufayle insisted upon autodidacticism, self- education, natural state,
antidogmatic rational discourse and liberal, tolerant religious approach.
Stubbe’s antidogmatism, rationalism and tolerationism were quite identical
to Locke’s overall approach. Stubbe and Locke’s 1670s works were two
sides of the same coin.
The possibility of Locke glancing over the more radical and synthetic
works of John Toland is greater and recorded. Toland visited him at Oates,
even though Locke seemed to have aversion to some of his personality
traits.1447 Locke’s reading of Deistic corpus, his close friendship with
Matthew Tindal and Anthony Collins (he “numbered his days by Collins’
friendship.”),1448 his substantive interactions with the Socinian and
Unitarian writings and his ensuing partial or total subscription to their
theological outlook are historical facts. The bulk of Locke’s library
consisted of theological works, and the Socinian/Unitarian works
constituted perhaps the most important part of this library. In reality
Locke’s transition from an orthodox Anglican to a Unitarian heretic went
through the writings of Deists, Socinians and Unitarians.
John Marshall has documented the proof of Locke’s immersion in the
Socinian and Unitarian writings of contemporary figures such as Bury,
Freke and Nye, who in turn were quite sympathetic to Islamic tradition.1449
He possessed almost all the works of major Socinian intellectuals of his
time. Marshall observed that “Locke possessed works by all of the major
Socinian writers, including eight titles by Faustus Socinus himself, nine
works by John Crell, perhaps Socinus’s most important follower, seven by
Jonas Schlichting, five by Valantin Smaltz, joint editor of the Racovian
catechism—the closest that the Socinians, who explicitly supported varying
interpretations of Scripture, came to an official statement of doctrine—and
two books by JohnVolkel, including his compendium of Socinian thought,
De vera religione. He possessed no less than three editions of the Racovian
catechism. His collection of especially Socinian, but also of occasional
Arian works included the Arian ecclesiastical history of Christopher Sand,
the Socinian-influenced work of George Enyedi, and various Socinian
works by John von Wolzogen, Martin Ruar, Samuel Przypkowski, Samuel
Crell, and Andreas Wissowatius the younger, and the Bibliothe cafratrum
Polonorum, a nine-volume collection of the major writings of Socinus,
Crell, Schlichting, and von Wolzogen.”1450
John Marshall is the renowned authority on Locke’s silences, aberrations,
deletions and unorthodox interpretations of Trinitarian texts. Like
Socinians, Locke’s denial of Christ’s divinity, plurality of persons in the
godhead, co-equality, pre-existence in the orthodox sense, incarnation, and
utterly unorthodox interpretations of Christ’s messiahship, all led to his
clandestine Unitarianism. In these central theological precincts, Locke is
evidently closer to the Unitarian Islamic syncretism, to use Justin
Champion’s phrase,1451 than to the Trinitarian theology. Locke is as radical
in his theology as is he in his political thought, though he is more conscious
of the dangers involved and cautious of his position and surroundings than
some other radical enlightenment figures. Allison Coudert notes that “John
Locke left an unfinished manuscript surveying Islamic doctrine. He realised
that since Charles II was expanding trade with Muslim North Africa the
prevailing prejudicial view of Islam was neither accurate nor helpful. He
asked his friend James Tyrrell for a description of the Moroccan
ambassador’s visit to England, which had caused a great stir because the
ambassador had defied stereotypes and shown himself to be extraordinarily
polite, erudite, and, in a word, civil.”1452 Jonathan Edward and Charles
Leslie were broadly correct in identifying Locke’s Islamic affinities and
sources, especially the Quran, which Locke possessed.1453
Locke and Travel Literature
In addition to the above sketched sources on the Islamic faith, Locke
possessed many contemporary travel writings containing firsthand
information about Islamic world, especially the Ottoman and Mughal
Empires. Locke was engrossed in travelogues; like Robert Boyle and other
Royal Society fellows, Locke had one of the largest collections of travel
literature in his library.1454 Ann Talbot noted that “Locke valued it highly
because in a library of 3,641 books he had 275 works that could be
classified as travel or geography. Locke’s library was mainly theological in
character, and only 269 of his books could be classified as what we would
regard as philosophy, making the travel books a considerable proportion of
the whole, and it is difficult to believe that this does not reflect Locke’s
intellectual interests. If we want to know the historical Locke then we have
to understand what travel literature meant to him. It is clear that it was
important to him.”1455 David Paxman described Locke as omnivorous reader
of travel books.1456
Locke was extremely interested in other nations’ cultures, habits, beliefs
and morals, and his intense study of travelogues seemed to have helped him
transition from a Trinitarian royalist to an anti-absolutist revolutionary
advocating for active resistance.1457 Locke was a product of local,
supernatural and absolutist tradition, and through most of his life subscribed
to this limited ideology.1458 His evolution to a universal, natural and
republican outlook, well-reflected in his mature writings, was partly
facilitated by his exposure to global societies, especially the Orient.1459 In
fact, the Royal Society fellows, the French Philosophe and almost all
Enlightenment leaders read, analysed and quoted the travel literature, and
owed much to it. There was a strong connection between travel literature
and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European natural philosophy,
sociology, anthropology, theology and political thought. The detailed
travelogues about the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal Empires constituted the
major bulk of this genre. “Travellers to the Ottoman Empire often described
a thriving, prosperous state where subjects of different faiths and languages
lived in harmony; shouldn’t England follow this example?”1460 As seen
above, Englishmen were fascinated with Islamic Orient and obsessed with
its material luxury, prosperity, vastness, pluralism and religious tolerance.
Albrecht Classen noted that “no European country or culture could truly
match up with the Muslim world to the East. In many respects life in the
Turkish lands proved to be much more sophisticated, well established, more
orderly, better protected, and secured from external problems than in the
West […] even a number of major intellectuals raised trenchant questions as
to the alleged superiority of Christianity over Islam, such as Locke and
Newton, but they could not afford to speak up more explicitly and had to
guard themselves against immediate repercussions from the courts in their
own country, especially because the Church closely guarded its absolute
supremacy also in legal and political terms.”1461 Locke had to be especially
careful, as he was suspected of religious and political heterodoxy and being
spied on.
 Travel accounts of Richard Hukluyt (1553–1616),1462 Samuel
Purchas (1577? –1626),1463 Thévenot, Roe, Terry, Coryat and Pyrard1464 all
contained ample information about Muslim religious, political, social,
cultural and economic institutions. Locke owned Paul Rycaut’s “The
Present State of the Ottoman Empire”1465 and befriended Rycaut. Both were
members of the Royal Society. He also read Terry’s detailed accounts of
East Indies.1466 Locke was enthusiastic about these narratives and
incorporated some of the information into his writings, as Ann Talbot has
shown.1467 All these sources agreed-upon the universal religious toleration
practiced by the Ottomans and Mughals based upon Islamic teachings.
Terry and Coryat’s early seventeenth-century (1616) Multan and Agra
encounters1468 and Coryat’s aggressive anti-Muhammad outbursts in a local
mosque were quite telling of the ease with which they could berate and
barrage the Islamic faith with full immunity in the Mughal Empire,1469 while
in 1697 Edinburgh a young Thomas Aikenhead was tortured and hanged for
confiding in his friends of possible heterodoxy.1470 Locke was horrified and
shaken by Aikenhead’s dismemberment and mutilation. Throughout his
mature writings Locke would quote the truboned nations1471 (Muslims) for
their sobriety, sincerity of worship and religious tolerance.1472
Since the inception of Oriental trade in the 1580s, travelogues and English
writers had used the Muslim Orient as a whip to highlight English religious
persecutions, internal strife and absolutism.1473 For instance, Richard
Knolles used Ottoman prosperity, military might and pluralism as a whip to
indict Christendom of its internal disunity, religious persecutions and
immoralities. In his 1603’s The General1 Hisforie of the Turkes Knolles
greatly admired the Turks while criticising the Christendom. At the end of
the second edition of 1610, “Knolles added a ‘Discourse on the greatness of
the Ottoman Turkes’, summarising the conclusions he drew from his work.
Here, as throughout the Historie, the mirror of Ottoman organisation and
personal humility is held up to reflect the disunity, the incompetence and
the general sinfulness of Christian Europe. Knolles’ frame of reference is
religion. For him, Ottoman superiority is due primarily to ‘the Just and
Secret Judgement of the Almighty’, brought down by ‘the small care the
Christian Princes [...] have had of the common state of the Christian
Commonweal’ in continually warring amongst themselves. Only after
placing the blame fairly and squarely upon Christian shoulders, does
Knolles acknowledge the strengths of the Turks.”1474 Since then, the
travellers and writers fascinatingly highlighted the religious tolerance and
coexistence prevalent in the Muslim world to indict Europe’s religious
persecutions in the name of unity and social cohesiveness, “many of these
travellers were impressed by the sophistication and wealth they saw and
expressed admiration at the tolerance shown to a confusing mix of Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim communities speaking a Babel of languages. And
travellers noted that some of the English and other Europeans who gained
their freedom (or who came voluntarily) were happy to stay on and did
quite well in the Ottoman army and administration. Indeed, the Ottomans
and their Barbary allies seemed to offer more possibilities for advancement
and enrichment than many European societies.”1475 Erasmus, Costello,
Servetus, Grotius, Stubbe, Toland, Deists, Socinians, Unitarians and even
politicians such as William of Orange and Maurice of Nassau had quoted
the tolerant Turkish model and its positive ramifications for societal
harmony.1476 The cautious Locke had no hesitation in repeating the same
example in his Letter Concerning Toleration.1477 Tolan noted that “while
Locke, unlike Stubbe and other Deists and Unitarians, offers no theological
assessment of Islam or Muhammad, he clearly sees Islamic religious
tolerance as a positive model for Anglican England.”1478 John Marshall has
recognised that Islam became “central to tolerationist debates in England in
the late seventeenth century because of the similarities alleged between
Islam and anti-Trinitarianism.”1479 Locke was also well aware of the tolerant
Torda Edict and the Ottoman role in its facilitation.1480
Muslims in Locke’s Horizons
Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean have depicted the cultural milieu of
seventeenth-century England, and Muslim presence therein, well.1481
Matthew Dimmock has shown that Islam and the Turks took a central
position in so many aspects of English life in the sixteenth century.1482
Matthew Birchwood has consistently shown that “images of Islam and the
dreaded Ottoman Turk have played a crucial role in the formation of
national identity and religious difference in Restoration England.”1483
Humberto Garcia has analysed the sympathetic literary and cultural
representations of Islamic republic and its significant contributions to
evolving English self-definition. He has skillfully demonstrated how the
“Islamic republicanism reinvents English revolutionary history, providing
sociopolitical empowerment for marginalized ‘mute witnesses’: deists,
Unitarians, Gnostics, and Arians, among other forgotten heretics, and
heterodox women who championed female-friendly versions of the
prophetic past. Islamic republicanism’s political reinvention—enabled
through reprinted republican tracts and recirculated subversive manuscripts
—creates a historical continuity among the 1640s, 1688, 1776, and 1789.
This imaginative process ties together the various events that took place
between the Eighteenth-century revolutions.”1484
John Tolan shows the role on the central stage which Muhammad took in
the English intellectual discussions of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.1485 Tolan noted that “Europeans’ views of Islam and of
Muhammad tend to reflect their own preoccupations close to home more
than any real interest in or engagement with Muslim history. In England in
the seventeenth century, we see fierce debates about Muhammad or the
Qur’ān, which in fact are coded polemics about the English kings, the civil
war, the role of the Anglican Church, and the place of radical Protestants in
English society […] Muhammad and his primitive community of Muslims
came to represent for some Englishmen […] exemplary anticlerical radical
republicans, a free society in which the power and privilege of the Church
was abolished and religious freedom was granted to members of different
faith communities. The fierce reactions of Prideaux and others, who upheld
the traditional negative view of Mahomet, have as much or more to do with
their abhorrence of republicanism as they do with their defense of
Anglicanism (although clearly the two were closely linked for them).”1486
Sir John Finch’s correspondence with Lord Conway between 4- 14
February 1675 illustrates the situation.1487 These letters give a “politic”
account of the growth of Islam, including a presentation of the Islamic
notion of the unipersonality of God, and the description of Muhammad as
both a wise prince and legislator.1488 Jane D. McAuliffe does show the same
significance given to Islamic scripture, the Quran.1489 Long ago Archibald
H. Christie and others had highlighted the Turkish influences upon early
modern English costumes, textile, fashion and design.1490 Deborah
Howard,1491 Lisa Jardine,1492 Rosamond Mack1493 and Stefano Carboni1494
have skillfully documented the importance of Islamic luxury items such as
carpets, textile and jewelry in early modern British society.
G. A. Russell clearly shows that the seventeenth century was the “Age of
Arabik” in England; her demonstrations of possible influences of Hayy b.
Yaqzan upon Locke are quite substantial.1495 The philosophical novel
originally written by Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl was translated by
Edward Pococke and published in the name of his 21-year-old son Edward
Pococke Junior. Locke was Pococke Junior’s tutor. Robert Boyle, the
Cambridge Platonist Henry More, Levant Company Ambassador Sir John
Finch, his anti-Trinitarian Quaker sister and philosopher Ann Conway,
Samuel and John Worthington all knew about the translation.1496 Locke used
Hayy bin Yaqzan to refute innate ideas and need for organised religion and
church. The novel was very well-received by dissenters all over the
Continent. Locke was an outcome and a beneficiary of the cross cultural
globalization of England.
Jerry Bentley,1497 Jack Goody,1498 Janet Abu Lughod,1499 Samir Amin1500
and John Hobson’s revisionist approach to Eurocentric interpretations of
history1501 have highlighted the globalisation of Europe rather than
Europeanisation of the globe. John Sweetman1502 and Jerry Brotton1503 show
the Islamic influences upon English art, architecture and paintings. John
Locke’s influential colleague, Royal Society’s founder and president,
Christopher Wren determined that the Gothic architectural style was not
Gothic but purely Saracenic.1504 He confessedly incorporated Islamic
architectural motifs in the design of St. Paul’s cathedral and countless other
religious buildings.1505 Locke was surrounded by things Islamic.
In the English political arena, Prophet Muhammad’s ideas were used to
redefine Whig principles and to challenge Anglican establishment. James R.
Jacob, Nabil Matar and Justin Champion, H. Garcia and John Tolan, as
discussed above, demonstrate the role played by Henry Stubbe in this
respect and the way he impacted the English discourse on Unitarian
theology, civil religion and moral theology. The clandestine defenses of
Islamic faith were often published during the Trinitarian controversy of the
1690s, Socinian and Unitarian controversies of 1700 and afterwards. “These
debates then, must be examined against the backdrop of key events: the
civil war, which culminated with the execution of Charles I in 1649 (the
same year that saw the publication of the first English translation of the
Qur’ān); the Restoration, which brought Charles II to the throne in 1660;
the (unsuccessful) Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother
James in 1683 (the same year as the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna); James
II’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1687 (granting freedom of worship to
Catholics and dissident Protestants), the Glorious Revolution that deposed
James the following year.” 1506 John Locke was heavily engaged with these
politico-religious events and debates; he could not have escaped them at all.
Consequently, he could not have escaped the Unitarian responses to these
events and controversies. In reality he actively participated in those
controversies, albeit secretly siding with the Socinians and Unitarians who
were called Muhammadan, Turks and crypto-Muslims by their opponents.
Therefore, Locke’s engagement with things Islamic was a given fact.
In short, Locke’s society and surroundings were almost certainly engaged
with the Islamic tradition and many of his acquaintances had acted and
reacted to Islam and in the process appropriated many Islamic ideas,
themes, motifs and beliefs to their reformative schemes. In a sense, there
were numerous theological, philosophical and political elements derived
from Islam in Locke’s surroundings, both good and bad, and he could not
have ignored them altogether. Appropriation of Islamic themes, just like
Stubbe, Toland and Unitarians, was also a real possibility for Locke; after
all, Locke worked with and around them. Locke’s interaction with Islamic
history, culture and religion stretches from his early school to his Oxford
days under Dr. Pococke to Shaftesbury’s circle to his Socinian, Unitarian
and Deistic associations. Let us not forget that Anthony Collin, the
articulate Deist of his time, was among Locke’s closest friends during the
last days of Locke. Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to state that
Locke had a lifelong affair with Islam in various capacities both positive
and negative.
There is thus a considerable likelihood that Locke’s theological outlook,
when gleaned through the backdrop of the above sketched milieu, was to
some extent ‘Turkish,” to use Jonathan Edward’s phrase. His relatively
radical Unitarian theology may thus in many ways have been far more
Islamic than orthodox. His reasonable Christianity was more Mohammaden
than the unreasonable Nicaean or Chalcedonian Christianity, which Locke
tried to reform. Locke’s mature writings purged Christianity of the orthodox
incarnational reservoirs, the remnants of ancient Christian Platonic grafting,
and brought it in line with the pristine Christianity of Jesus Christ and his
original followers, the Quranic Nasara or Nazarenes. There was no room in
it for the traditional sense of Trinity, original sin, justification through faith
at the expense of good works, absolute predestination, ecclesiastical
hierarchy and clerical prerogatives. Locke’s Christianity was nothing but a
moral tradition in line with the universal monotheistic prophetic tradition.
In other words, it was a Monotheistic Christianity, like Judaism and Islam,
as Henry Stubbe and John Toland envisaged, in direct opposition to the
traditional Trinitarian Christianity. He accomplished the task by sticking to
the scriptural text, at the expense of later Church traditions and Councils. In
this scriptural hermeneutic Locke was preceded by his Muslim
counterparts. For instance, Locke’s full trust in the scripture, and the role
assigned to reason in understanding it had a well-established precedent in
Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali1507 and other Asha’rite
theologians.1508 Stubbe quoted these Muslim theologians in his Account and
Dr. Pococke analysed them in his works; they were a known commodity to
Locke’s circle of friends.
Locke and Islamic Minimalism
There was an echo of minimal Islamic credo in Locke’s minimal creed for
salvation. Locke’s Messiah, as a spiritual king, lawgiver and moral teacher,
was closer to the Islamic concept of a reformative Messiah (Jesus) than the
orthodox Christian Messiah of divine substance and propositions. Tolan and
Garcia have amply demonstrated that Prophet Muhammad was idealised by
many European thinkers as the spiritual king, lawgiver and moral teacher,
the true prince of Machiavelli.1509 Muhammad was made equal to Moses
and a true heir to his religio-political legacy. Locke seemed to be following
the suit.
Interestingly, Locke believed that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity,
possessed a genuine divine revelation and was an heir to the monotheistic
message of Jesus Christ. Locke stated in his Discourse on Miracles that “of
such who have come in the name of the one only true God, professing to
bring a law from him, we have in history a clear account but of three, viz.
Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet. For what the Persees say of their Zoroaster, or
the Indians of their Brama (not to mention all the wild stories of the
religions farther East) is so obscure, or so manifestly fabulous, that no
account can be made of it.”1510 Locke’s inclusion of Muhammad in the
authentic, divine, monotheistic message at par with Moses and Jesus was
the single most important point proving Locke’s Islamic affinities; this was
a thunderous indictment of the historical Christianity and a bold but
disguised assessment of Islam’s authenticity. Muhammad, throughout
Christian history, was depicted and berated as the archetype, Antichrist
perverter who perverted the original Trinitarian message of Jesus into
abstract Unitarianism. Contrary to that, Locke placed Muhammad on the
pedestal of authentic monotheism, on par with Jesus and Moses, while
placing the fourth-century Church Fathers and the subsequent Trinitarian
Church tradition (both Catholic and Protestant) as perverters of Jesus’
monotheism. They were heretical, and far removed from the original
message of Jesus, but not Muhammad. This was a revolution in line with
the radical views of eighteenth-century Socinians, Unitarians and Deists
such as Henry Stubbe, John Toland, Arthur Bury, Stephan Nye and others.
Indeed, Locke was an active member of the radical Unitarian and Socinian
Islamic syncretism, albeit clandestinely. He, like the Unitarians, wanted
historical Trinitarian Christianity reformed on Islamic monotheistic lines.
Locke was a follower of this Muhammadan Christianity, as Stubbe and
Toland would call it. He was a Unitarian heretic, as John Marshall noted.
In his Reasonableness of Christianity Locke observed that Islamic
monotheism was derived from Jesus. He said that “since our Saviour’s time,
the ‘belief of one God’ has prevailed and spread itself over the face of the
earth. For even to the light that the Messiah brought into the world with
him, we must ascribe the owning and profession of one God, which the
mahometan religion hath derived and borrowed from it.”1511 The Quran,
which Locke owned, clearly stated that Muhammad had not introduced a
new religion but had come to revive the pristine message of Jesus and
Moses. To Locke, Muhammad was no heretic nor was the Turk heretic.1512
Islamic borrowing from the pristine monotheistic faith of Jesus and its
reformation of Trinitarian Christian faith was in conformity with Locke’s
reformatory scheme; it was a reflection of Stubbe, Toland and Unitarians’
corrective history.
Islam, Locke thought, was defective due to a lack of miracles, not because
of its strict monotheistic theology and messianic Christology. “Now of the
three before- mentioned, Mahomet having none to produce, pretends to no
miracles for the vouching his mission; so that the only revelations that come
attested by miracles, being those of Moses and Christ, and they confirming
each other; the business of miracles, as it stands really in matter of fact, has
no manner of difficulty in it; and I think the most scrupulous or sceptical
cannot from miracles raise the least doubt against the divine revelation of
the Gospel.”1513
I am not sure whether Locke, by this miracle argument, was indirectly
proving the authenticity of Muhammad’s message or really denying it.
Locke published his “Reasonableness of Christianity” during 1695 when
the Trinitarian Controversy of 1690s was at its peak. During this period of
hot Deistic, Socinian, Unitarian and Orthodox controversies, the Unitarians
and Socinians refuted the Orthodox claims of Christian authenticity based
on its miraculous missionary success by quoting the faster, larger,
comprehensive and lasting Islamic victories against the Byzantium
Christianity continued by the Ottoman Empire all the way to the pre
modern times. Locke’s friend and student Anthony Collins, a known deist,
and many others Deists and Unitarians such as Matthew Tindal, Stephen
Nye, Arthur Bury and William Freke had objected to the Christian claims of
supernatural miracles and mitigated the power behind this Lockean claim of
Christian authenticity by emphasising the miraculous spread of Islam.
Locke was known for his natural and rational interpretations of miracles. It
is quite conceivable that Locke’s argument of miracles was indirectly aimed
at rebutting the Orthodox arguments against his Unitarian, Socinian and
Deistic friends.
The most outstanding miracle of Christianity, to Locke, was its worldwide
spread. “The marks of his over-ruling power accompany it; and therefore to
this day we find, that wherever the Gospel comes, it prevails to the beating
down the strong holds of Satan, and the dislodging the prince of the power
of darkness, driving him away with all his lying wonders; which is a
standing miracle, carrying with it the testimony of superiority.”1514
Regarding this argument of a standing miracle, Locke’s Unitarian
contemporaries such as Bury and Nye argued that the same or even more
miraculous evangelising conquests were attributed to Islam. For instance,
Bury argued: “So the victories of the Alcoran over the Gospel must be
evidence, that as the religion of Moses was better than that of the
Canaanites, and the religion of Christ better than that of Moses; so must the
religion of Mahomet be better than that of Christ. Thus may a Mahometan
either disarm us of St. Augustine’s argument, or restore it against us; for
either it is of no force at all or of so much more force for Mahomet, by how
much more he hath prevailed over the Churches of Christ.”1515 Locke was
well aware of this line of argumentation, as the argument was frequently
used during the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s by the Unitarians. With
the standing miracle argument, Locke may well have intended to disarm the
orthodox establishment, who since the times of St. Augustine had used this
approach to prove the providential support for their ecclesiastical
institution. This evangelising miracle, providence and resultant superiority
applied more to the Islamic than Christian tradition, as Bury contended.1516
Locke’s argument of the Gospel’s superiority based upon evangelisation
becomes more intriguing when placed in the proper historical context.
Henry Stubbe had used this argument since the 1670s to dislodge Christian
claims of superiority based upon worldwide spread, in favour of Islam’s
superiority over clerical Christianity. Stubbe used this argument to connect
Islam with the pristine Christian message, and to connect the post
Constantine Church with pagan corruptions. Islam’s rapid spread in the
Christian lands and Muslims’ continuous dominance over the traditional
Christians was used to prove the validity of true monotheistic faith over the
Trinitarian tradition. The worldwide speedy spread and continuity of Islam,
to Stubbe, was a standing miracle of Islam. Stubbe’s Westminster and
Christ Church colleague, the then Dean of Norwich, Humphrey Prideaux,
vehemently opposed Stubbe and other Deists of his time and their defenses
of Islamic faith. He declared Muhammad an absolute impostor. His The
True Nature of Imposture fully display’d in the Life of Mahomet was
initially published in 1697.1517 In this book Prideaux chastised Muhammad
and his English Socinian, Unitarian and Deist followers. Locke’s Discourse
on Miracles was written in 1701, four years after Prideaux’s publication.
Locke possessed a copy of Prideaux’s book and was aware of his argument
that Muhammad was an imposter, and that his success was not a sign of
providence or Islam’s superiority over Christianity, but God’s scourge
against the sins of Eastern Christianity; Muhammad was the devil, used by
God to punish Eastern Christianity’s heresy, sectarianism and moral
decadence. Locke, by declaring Muhammad as a genuine bearer of divine
revelation and as an heir to Christ’s monotheism, must have refuted
Prideaux’s claims or at least did not want to share his sentiments. In his
earlier book Reasonableness of Christianity Locke was a little restrained
and allowed that whilst the Muslim religion was true, for it requires ‘the
Profession of One God”, this was something that was “borrowed or
derived” from Christianity. In his Discourse on Miracles Locke removed
that clause and allowed Muhammad an un-restrained, unqualified and
independent authenticity of a divine revelation, just like Moses and Jesus.
I am not sure whether Locke was aware of an inherent contradiction in his
standing miracle and related superiority argument. That argument, as seen
above, had been frequently used by the radicals and Unitarians to vindicate
Islam against the calumnies of Christians, to use Stubbe’s phrase, and was
historically more applicable to Islam than Christianity. Was Locke
imperceptibly following the radical/Unitarian trope or unintentionally
falling into self-contradiction? The first possibility is greater than the
second, given the meticulous nature of Locke’s mature writings. Moreover,
by accepting Muhammad’s authentic revelation, was Locke’s refuting the
Christian claim of finality of Christ’s message or again falling into self-
contradiction? I prefer the first possibility over the second, even though any
categorical proof for my assumption is not available; there is plenty of
likely circumstantial evidence. In any event, it is quite evident that Locke
did not share Prideaux’s impostor sentiments, and showed reserved respect
for the Prophet of Islam, though believing in the superiority of pristine
Christianity over Islam based upon miracles. This was a likely middle
position between the two extremes of radical enlightenment figures, such as
Stubbe, and orthodox Muslim-bashers such as Prideaux, though I prefer the
idea that Locke was indirectly aiding his Deist and Unitarian friends by a
dialectic subterfuge. In his Third Letter Locke himself refuted the same
miracle argument by diminishing the role of miracles in the spreading of
Christianity. John Marshall noted that “a significant portion of the Third
Letter was devoted to a diminution of the role of miracles in the early
church by arguing that very few early Christians were ‘wrought on’ by
miracles because most had been converted to Christianity by preaching and
the report of miracles. Locke therefore constructed an argument in 1693 that
the Gospel had prevailed then and prevailed still ‘by its own beauty, force
[of argument], and reasonableness.’”1518
Locke and Christ’s Pre-existence: Some Discussions
Some scholars argue against the view that Locke’s theological outlook was
more Islamic than Chalcedonian, and that his Jesus was a human Messiah
and not divine or God; they contend that Locke confessed Christ’s pre-
existence and a sort of limited divinity. They confuse Locke’s mere use of
lofty phrases with either Nicaean Trinitarian contents or with Arian semi-
divine interpretations, which a detailed study of Locke’s interpretations and
elaborations totally refute. For instance, Arthur Wainwright,1519 Victor
Nuovo and others argue that by the end of his life Locke had come to
believe that Christ was a pre-existent person to historical Jesus. Nuovo
contends that “in the Paraphrase, Locke explicitly asserts Christ’s pre-
existence.”1520 They insinuate that Locke’s concept of preexistence was
gravitating towards an Arian semi-divine Christ with divine exaltations and
glorifications, albeit secondary and derivative. This interpretation of
Christ’s preexistence is against the man Christology of Islam. A detailed
analysis of Locke’s understanding of preexistence makes it crystal-clear that
he was not an orthodox believer in the soft or hard divinity of Christ. His
sense of preexistence was reverential and not metaphysical.
Firstly, Locke was not fond of emphasising Christ’s preexistence.
Paraphrase is perhaps the only place where he applied preexistence to
Christ. The main question is what type of preexistence? Whether
Athanasian, Arian or Socinian? I argue that it was neither Athanasian nor
Arian, but Socinian and Unitarian in line with Stephen Nye and Isaac
Newton’s sense of preexistence, both being close friends of Locke.
Secondly, such a notion of preexistence would pitch Locke against the
Islamic and Socinian point of view if we only accept orthodox
interpretations of metaphysical pre-existence (as co-equality and co-eternity
with God in substance). Even the Arian semi-reverential, in time, secondary
and derivative preexistence may not be totally far from the reverential
preexistence of the Socinians.
The Socinians - as well as Newton - maintained that Christ was not pre-
existent in this orthodox, eternal, literal sense but in the monarchical and
dominion sense. Locke, like the Socinians, had believed that Christ existed
in God from eternity as God’s Word and not as a distinct person. By shifting
the definition of “person” from substance to “person” as word and
consciousness, Locke removed any possibility of co-equality or co-eternity
between the persons of Christ and the One and Only God. Christ’s pre-
existence was relative and not absolute as it related to God’s plan of
salvation, creation and mercy and in no way or form to God Himself.
Christ’s generation was before the world and not from eternity. He was
created and not begotten; he was called the firstborn of everything and not
the unbegotten, unborn eternal God. Victor Nuovo observes that “the
Messiah is the second Adam, whose spirit exists before his appearance in
the flesh and whose coming was foretold by the prophets.”1521 God created
Christ’s spirit after the original sin was committed by Adam and Eve and
after they were pushed out of the heavens. The “Fall” facilitated the
creation of Christ’s spirit as the second Adam. Christ’s spirit remained with
God (and not in God ontologically) until his historical birth as Jesus of
Nazareth. “Immediately subsequent to the Fall and coincidentally with the
first intimation of the gospel to Adam and Eve, God the Father created the
intellectual nature or soul of the Messiah.”1522
God wanted to save mankind with the divine law and not by the
crucifixion of his only begotten Son, as Orthodox Christians claim; God’s
plans of human salvation were totally moral and not incarnational. “In its
residence in the divine bosom united with the Word, the Messiah’s
intellectual soul must have been informed with the divine law, of which the
Messiah, once incarnate, became a perfect teacher, and with the plan of God
to save mankind, which included the life of the Messiah in the flesh which
the prophets foretold.”1523 Christ’s pre-existence was before the creation of
other creatures and after the creation of Adam and not from eternity. His
creation and preexistence were parts of the divine plans for human
salvation, an office and mission, and not due to his divine essence or
substance, co-eternity or co-equality. There was no sense of eternity in
created beings, even if they were created before the other creatures;
otherwise Adam, who was also called the son of God in the Gospels, would
be a bigger God created before the second Adam, Jesus Christ. Jesus was
Messiah and son of God in this very sense. “The phrase ‘Son of God’ was
explained as indicating the Messiah, but not as signifying that Christ was
God. The union of Jesus and God was described as ‘such a union that God
operates in him and by him.’ Locke declared that Jesus ‘being conceived in
the Womb of a Virgin (that had not known Man) by the immediate Power of
God, was properly the Son of God.’ This paralleled the sonship of Jesus
with that of Adam, avoiding subscription to an eternal generation.”1524
Therefore, Christ’s pre-existence was related to God’s plan of human
salvation, reconciliation of humanity with God through moral law, Jesus’
voluntary crucifixion for God’s pleasure, as a sign of total submission to
God’s plans, for Jesus’ own rewards as crucified Messiah and exaltation by
God after resurrection, and to lead humanity by his moral model to
salvation. There is nothing much in it for the Orthodox Nicaean or
Chalcedonian Trinitarian Christology, or much against the
Unitarian/Socinian Christology of exaltation after Crucifixion and
Resurrection. Locke, like Newton, seemed bent on exalting Jesus as Lord
after resurrection. Nuovo noted that Jesus’ “unequivocal affirmation of the
preexistence of Christ” is “in a reconsideration of the office of Christ as
priest”1525 and not as God or divine. The whole saga of preexistence is
situated in the drama of the Fall, Satan’s rebellion against God and enmity
towards Adam, God’s moral plans for human salvation and Jesus being the
moral Lamb of God, voluntarily dying as a moral model of total
submission. His God-given dominion over creation is neither eternal nor
everlasting; it went through various phases and ups and downs, finally
being restored after Jesus’ resurrection by God and as an act of reward by
God Almighty for his sacrifices and obedience. “Locke’s paraphrase states:
‘Until the Coming of the due time of that dispensation wherein he had
predetermined to reduce all things again, both in Heaven and Earth under
one Head in Christ’ [italics mine]. ‘To reduce all things again’ is Locke’s
translation of the Greek verb άνακε- φαλαιώσασθαι. He spells out his
meaning in his notes: ‘‘T is plain in Sacred Scripture, that Christ at first had
the Rule and Supremacy over all, and was head over all’. This unitary
headship of ‘all’ under Christ was ended by the rebellion of Satan who took
with him ‘great Numbers of Angels’. They established their own kingdom
in opposition to Christ’s kingdom, and exercised sway not only over
themselves but also over ‘all the Heathen World’ as their ‘Vassals and
Subjects’. Christ’s ancient kingdom was supposed to have been restored
through the death and resurrection of Christ.”1526
Locke’s use of lofty phrases such as preexistence, dominion and Christ
creating things in the heavens and earth must not be taken as indications of
Jesus’ divinity, eternal dominion or co-equality with God in any way or
form. Locke has given these lofty terms somewhat attenuated
interpretations totally free of incarnational, Trinitarian and metaphysical
contents. “Still, Locke’s gloss is undeniably scriptural and it is unequivocal
in its expression of the Messiah’s pre-existence, if not his divinity.
However, this clear assertion is muted somewhat when, in the same
explanatory note, Locke tentatively suggests that ‘things in heaven’ and
‘things on earth’ might signify Jews and Gentiles, which implies that,
notwithstanding his title, Christ’s kingdom might be a merely terrestrial
one.”1527 The main difference between his Reasonableness of Christianity
and his later Paraphrase is that in Reasonableness, Locke diminished the
significance of Jesus’ priestly offices due to his overall anti-clerical, moral
tendencies and in the “Paraphrase” he restored that significance, most
probably due to Newton’s influence. Locke’s overall Messianic, prophetic
Christological scheme remained stable, but his concept of Messiah went
through some evolution over time. Jesus the Son of God and Messiah was
sometimes connected with his immediacy in creation as the first born of
creation, sometimes with his virgin birth1528 and finally with his immediacy
in resurrection after death. “In the final draft of the Paraphrase, however,
the emphasis is clearly placed on the resurrection as the distinguishing mark
of being the son of God. This indicates a subtle but clear theological shift
from the Reasonableness.”1529 Locke’s final settled position was that all the
advantage, glorification and exaltation given to Jesus by God was “through
the death and resurrection of Christ and, as a consequence of it.”1530 Parker
noted that “in Locke’s final draft of his Paraphrase and Notes on Romans,
‘spirit’ comes to mean merely a contrast to the flesh (i.e. not an eternal
spirit), and ‘son’ comes to mean that Jesus was the first to be resurrected
(i.e. sonship was not to imply that Jesus was not literally the ‘son of God’
through a miraculous birth). The orthodox trinitarian connection between
the Father, Son and Spirit is thus subtly undermined in Locke’s rewriting of
his manuscript, a rewriting that bears the influence of his Arian friend.”1531
In the last years of his life Locke, under Newton’s influence, gravitated
more towards the Socinian/Unitarian position of Jesus’ exaltation after the
resurrection. This God-given post-crucifixion and resurrection glory,
dominion and kingdom were rewards totally void of any Trinitarian,
incarnational, supernatural and metaphysical pretensions. It was thoroughly
moral, spiritual, derivative and secondary exaltation in conformity with the
general Socinian, Unitarian and Newtonian position. Nuovo noted that
“Locke interpreted the death of Christ in much the same way.”1532 In the
words of John Marshall “his religious position in the Paraphrase was still
predominantly Socinian, or one which was more Socinian than Arian (or,
even if this one part of this note is read in a trinitarian sense, one which was
more Socinian than trinitarian).”1533 Marshall further noted that “Locke’s
view similarly focused on Christ’s death and resurrection as leading to him
being ‘given’ all power. Some of the texts mentioned by Locke in this note
and tied to the resurrection and the bestowal of ‘all power’ on Christ were
those which Newton elsewhere discussed in emphasising Christ’s
resurrection and lordship. Newton’s vision of Christ was centrally moral
and monarchical, not metaphysical, as was that of Locke in the
Reasonableness and still in the Paraphrase.”1534 Nuovo agreed that Locke’s
opinion was Socinian, but his agenda was not.1535 Marshall categorically
placed both his opinion and agenda in the Unitarian camp.1536
In short, Locke’s moralist union and Christ’s pre-existence as “Word or
Command of God” was very much in line with the Socinian and Quranic
model1537 once the co-equal of the same divine substance and co-eternal
clause was removed from the equation. To the Quran, Jesus was the Word
of God and a spirit from Him.1538 The Quran, like Locke, insisted that all
souls were pre-existent to their historical manifestations.1539 They existed in
the spiritual realms long before their union with the material, historical
bodies,1540 and came into being with the command of God,1541 pre-existed
the body and continued into eternity1542 without ceasing to be, as was the
case with human body at death. The prophetic souls enjoyed increased
preexistence and eternity as they constituted an important part of God’s
master plan. Prophet Muhammad is considered pre-existent in this sense.1543
Similarly the Quran, the Word of God like Jesus, is also considered
uncreated and pre-existent.1544 Orthodox Jews maintain the same for the
Torah. “To the Rabbis the Torah existed even before the world was created.
It is regarded as one of the six or seven things that were created before the
creation of anything in the world and it even preceded the throne of God’s
glory […] God consulted the Torah in regard to the creation of the world as
an architect consults a blue print.”1545 The Rabbis stated that the “Torah
which God had kept by him in heaven for nine hundred and seventy-four
generations was a hidden treasure.”1546 This notion of pre-existence is
reverential and not ontological.
This qualified reverential and metaphorical glory is very different from the
Trinitarian notions of Christ as a distinct person, co-equal with God in
eternity and essence. Christ’s essence is not of the divine substance and his
relative eternity, like other souls, is not absolute like the eternity of God.
Locke does differentiate between the two substances as well as eternities;
this is clear from his interpretation of 1 Cor. 15:28: “When he has done this,
then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under
him, so that God may be all in all.” He absolutely rejects the Trinitarian
interpretation that Jesus possessed two natures, and that Christ’s human
nature will subject to God and not the divine nature. Locke, like his friend
Isaac Newton, does not see such a concept of two natures presented by the
scripture; Locke cannot believe that there are two persons (consciousness)
in Jesus that one person will submit to the second person. Jesus has only
one human nature, which is conscious of its divinely assigned functions; he
is called divine as much as he fulfills those divine functions of reconciling
humanity to God through his moral example and not through his atoning
death. The reverential divine epithets are functional and connected with
Christ’s office and relative dominion rather than his divine being and
ontology. Christ, the subject of these divine appellations, after fulfilling the
divinely assigned functions, will ultimately subject himself to God
Almighty who bestowed upon him the divine glory. Therefore, Christ’s
derived, secondary and finite glory and pre-existence is totally different
from the absolute, original and infinite glory of God. Locke’s pre-existent
Christ is quite void of the Trinitarian embellishments. Marshall notes that
“It is important to stress […] that it is not necessarily therefore a trinitarian
position, because it does not indicate that Christ was pre-existent to the
world, let alone eternally God.”1547 We will see in the coming pages that
Newton’s concepts of Christ’s pre-existence were also reverential and not
ontological. Both Locke and Newton exhibited identical views on Christ’s
pre-existence and were identical to the general Unitarian/Socinian
framework.
Diego Lucci contended that Locke’s position was neither Socinian nor
Arian, but a result of his scriptural hermeneutics and epistemology. Locke
“expressed, unsystematically and at times ambiguously, his views on
Christ’s nature and mission in his public writings on religion, including The
Reasonableness of Christianity and the unfinished A Paraphrase and Notes
on the Epistle of St Paul, and in various theological manuscripts. Moreover,
he focused on Trinitarian issues in ‘Adversaria Theologica,’ ‘Lemmata
Ethica,’ and several other manuscripts. Like Socinus and his followers,
Locke put a strong emphasis on Christ’s resurrection and exaltation.
Furthermore, his analysis of Ephesians 1:10 in the Paraphrase indicates
belief in Christ’s pre-existence, thus denoting an incipient Arianism.
Conversely, Locke’s writings on religion indicate no belief in the Trinity.
Briefly, Locke’s Christological reflections and his consideration of
Trinitarian issues denote a Messianic and non-Trinitarian Christology,
which, although presenting Socinian and Arian elements, was essentially
grounded in his own reading of Scripture.”1548 Lucci further noted that “this
does not mean that he believed in Christ’s eternal pre-existence and, thus,
this does not make him a Trinitarian. Locke’s endorsement of the theory of
Christ’s pre-existence, in the Paraphrase and possibly in ‘Adversaria,’
might actually denote an Arian notion of Christ as pre-existent but created –
namely, begotten by God the Father at a point in time and, hence, not co-
eternal with the Father.”1549 After a lengthy discussion of various options
and minute Christological intricacies, Lucci concluded that “in the
Paraphrase it is essentially Christ’s resurrection that distinguishes him as
the Son of God. Thus, the Paraphrase echoes the Socinian emphasis on
Christ’s resurrection and exaltation, instead of focusing on his virgin birth.
However, there is still a significant difference between Socinianism and
Locke’s Christology, in that the Socinians conceived of Jesus as created
mortal and then made immortal by divine miracle upon his death, while
Locke, in the Reasonableness, affirmed Christ’s immortality since birth, and
he never recanted this position. At any rate, what really counts, in the
Christology of the Paraphrase, is Christ’s resurrection and exaltation, not
his pre-existence or miraculous birth; and this is certainly a Socinian
leitmotif.”1550 As seen above, the spiritual preexistence and immortality is
not against the Islamic notions of preexistence and immortality of soul. The
Socinian insistence upon Christ’s feeble humanity was meant to diminish
the Orthodox over exaltation of Jesus as divine.
We will conclude this part of discussion with John Marshall, who
observed that “the note itself includes emphasis on Christ’s death and
resurrection as reinstating him in his power, and leading to his position as
head of the Church as what was significant for humans to know. Focus on
that exaltation and on Christ’s lordship following the resurrection – his
headship of the Church and position as lord in the kingdom of God – was
thus what this note itself made most important, and the issue of his pre-
existence only came up in this one note and nowhere else in the text. Such
focus was more distinctive of Socinian emphases than of Arian or trinitarian
emphases.”1551 In short, Locke’s mention of Christ’s preexistence was
momentary, non-Trinitarian, non-incarnational, non-supernatural and non-
metaphysical. It was totally antithetical to the Orthodox Trinitarian scheme,
and too close - if not totally identical - with the Socinian/Unitarian
Messianic Christology.
Locke’s Messianic Christology
Locke argued in his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) that Jesus was
neither God nor divine, but just a Messiah. “Whereby it is plain, that the
Gospel was writ to induce men into a belief of this Proposition, that Jesus
of Nazareth was the Messiah; Which if they believed, they should have
life.”1552 This was a transition from an Anglican theological position to a
Socinian/Unitarian position. It was heretical, as Jonathan Edwards noted
that “he makes our Saviour a Coward, he turns the Epistles of the Apostles
into wast paper, he perverts the plain words of the Gospels, and he
misrepresents and doubts of the most Fundamental Articles of the Christian
Religion. One would wonder that such wild conceptions should possess any
thinking head. It is strange that any serious man can believe these things,
and frame such thoughts of Christianity. It is true, that Fundamental Articles
of our Belief are few; but there is a difference between a few and but one
only.”1553 Edwards was correct in his argument that Locke’s Messianic
Christology was antithetical to the Christian faith as elaborated by the
Church for centuries; Locke’s Christology was totally Socinian, but Locke
denied the charges of being Socinian or having read their books. “Locke’s
refusal to be branded as having taken his positions because of reading
Socinian authors was not merely pragmatic, and probably partly sophistical,
however.”1554 Locke’s response added fuel to the fire. “I satisfied myself
against those heats, with this assurance, that, if there was anything in my
book against what any one called religion, it was not against the religion
contained in the gospel. And for that, I appeal to all mankind.”1555 Locke
turned the table on Edwards, insisting that the Trinitarian and incarnation
jargon was not found in the Gospel and was fabricated; this fact could be
witnessed by mankind through the use of simple reason and common sense.
Locke’s indictment of Orthodox irrational, un-scriptural prepositions and
creeds was more scathing than the original Christological divergence; it
indicated a huge gap between Locke and Edwards’ understandings of
orthodoxy. Locke’s orthodoxy had gone through some fundamental
changes; it was confined to the scriptural text which did not contain the
incarnational, Trinitarian and supernatural jargons, while Edwards’
orthodoxy was thoroughly dependent upon the Church interpretations,
traditions and Councils - which to Locke were superfluous.
David Wooten noted that “Locke’s main critic was John Edwards who
argued that The Reasonableness was entirely silent on the doctrine of the
Trinity; it attacked original sin and said nothing about the atonement; it
reduced (as Socinians did) the Gospel message to a simple, rational creed,
and identified it with the single principle - that Jesus is the Christ – that
Hobbes had singled out in Leviathan; it emphasised the Gospels alone and
paid virtually no attention to the Old Testament and the Epistles. In short, it
was Socinian, and a work that was not an antidote, as Locke claimed,
against unbelief, but a dangerous ally to Christianity not Mysterious,
written by Toland, a former friend of Locke’s who claimed to be arguing
from Lockean principles, and who employed them to undermine orthodox
Christianity.”1556 Locke was clandestinely promoting the Socinian and
Unitarian agendas of Stubbe, Toland and Nye. Wootton further observed
that Locke’s position was simply Socinian: “Locke’s The Reasonableness
does come uncommonly close to Socinianism […] Locke’s defences of The
Reasonableness were based on a lie: he owned numerous Socinian works,
had obviously read them, and had been influenced by them. To claim that
they were arguing not as the members of a sect but as honest Christians was
a standard ploy (though something more than a ploy, for it reflected a
commitment to open debate and honest argument) of Unitarian
propagandists, some of whom were amongst Locke’s friends and associates.
Some have therefore felt it right to conclude that Locke was to all intents
and purposes a Socinian.”1557
Bishop Stillingfleet accused Locke of being a total Unitarian and
Socinian, not only because of his Reasonableness but also due to his
Essays. “In a series of works in the 1690s, Bishop Edward Stillingfleet
suggested that Locke’s epistemology indirectly favoured Unitarianism,
focusing not upon the Reasonableness, but upon An essay concerning
human understanding.”1558 Locke’s lengthy defenses against Stillingfleets’
charges reinforced the anti-Trinitarian arguments. Maurice Wiles noted that
“by showing that Stillingfleet had failed in his attempt to offer an
intellectually convincing account of the Trinity, Locke strengthened the two
main planks of his own defence. His demonstration of the weakness of
Stillingfleet’s presentation of Trinitarian doctrine enhanced the credibility
of his own contention that it was very difficult to know what the received
doctrine of the Trinity to which he was supposed to conform really was, and
in doing so it served also to reinforce his long-held conviction that
faithfulness to Scripture was the only reliable norm. He rested his case on a
readiness to make public retractation of anything in his book that he could
be shown ‘contained or implied any opposition in it to anything revealed in
Holy Writ concerning the Trinity’. But the effectiveness of his argument
had a longer-term implication too. It also reinforced the more general
conviction of antitrintarians that the doctrine of the Trinity that they were
opposing was not just false, but meaningless.”1559 Clearly Locke’s agenda
was Unitarian, but his tactics were subtler than them.
In 1709, Leibniz also accused Locke’s Essays of Socinianism. Nicholas
Jolley noted that it was “not revealed theology but natural theology and
metaphysics which Leibniz has in mind when he accuses Locke of inclining
to the Socinians.”1560 Leibniz accused Locke of denying the immateriality of
the soul, like the Soncinians. “The equation of immateriality with
indestructibility is so fundamental to Leibniz’s metaphysics that he does not
always feel the need to argue for it or even explain it; for this reason he
sometimes refers to Locke’s doctrine as a denial of the soul’s immateriality
and sometimes as a denial of its natural immortality. To argue, as Locke and
the Socinians do, that the soul is an accident inhering in the body as a
subject, is to render it naturally mortal.”1561 This was a serious charge, and
Locke dreaded it.1562 Edwards went further than Leibniz, and accused Locke
of being straightforward Muslim and Turk. Justin Champion observed that
“the complicity between Locke and Islam according to Edwards was the
notion of the nature and divinity of Christ; the Koran treated Christ purely
as a prophet, ‘as a great man, one commissioned by God, and sent by him
into the world. This is of the like import with our good Ottoman writer the
Vindicator saith of our saviour, and this he holds is the sum of all that is
necessary to be believed concerning him’. Edwards insisted that Locke was
‘confounding Turky with Christendom.’”1563 Edwards was able to identify
Locke’s Islamic Christological underpinnings which the scrupulous Locke
was willing to propagate but not to confess.
During the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Socinians, Unitarians
and Muslims were lumped together as one system of metaphysics. Locke
had so many Socinian, Unitarian and Islamic affinities that a cursory reader
of his mature writings could obviously identify them. “There were many
features of Locke’s thought which provoked the charge of Socinianism and
which have led modern scholars to follow his contemporaries in
comparisons between his writings and Socinian or Unitarian thought,
including his credal minimalism, his advocacy of religious toleration, and
his views on original sin, on innatism, on eternal torments, and on the
possible materiality of the soul. Central to the accusation of Socinianism,
however, were two theological concerns. Locke’s omission from the
Reasonableness of Christ’s satisfaction for sin, when discussing a series of
advantages of Christ’s coming, provided the basis for much of the
vituperation. Edwards declared that Locke ‘gave proof of his being
Socinianiz’d by his utter silence about Christ’s satisfying for us, and
purchasing salvation by vertue of his Deafh.’ As serious for Locke’s
accusers was the possibility that he disbelieved in the Trinity. They feared
that, for Locke, Christ was not a person of the coequal, coeternal, and
consubstantial Godhead, but instead a divinely inspired prophet, who had
come to teach morality and to offer greater or clearer incentives for its
practice.”1564 Edwards was not totally wrong in calling Locke an outright
Muslim and Turk. The Socinian rational discourse and human, moral
Christology were in the air. Many Latitudinarian Bishops and high official,
such as John Hales, William Chillingworth and John Tillotson were also
accused of Socinianism.1565 Their Christology was also more Islamic than
Chalcedonian; the Socinian insistence upon the Unitarian Islamic
metaphysics and Christology was widely known and appreciated. By the
end of the seventeenth century, the Socinians started calling themselves
“Unitarians.”1566 Locke’s Unitarian theology evolved and passed through his
Socinian readings and affiliations.
From 1661–1662, Locke recorded his belief in the Trinity in his Essay on
Infallibility, where he also stated he did not comprehend its arguments or
how it was true; the truth of Trinity could not be grasped by the mind or
expressed in words other than those God had used to express it in His own
words - i.e., in revelation.1567 By 1682 he had become possibly Arian and
Socinian. “Twenty-five years after Shaftesbury’s death in 1682, it was
asserted by Robert Ferguson that on his deathbed Shaftesbury had declared
himself an Arian, believing that Jesus Christ was ‘the first creature that God
made, and that by him He made the world, rejecting the doctrine of the
satisfaction by Jesus Christ’s death.’ It was said, in an account derived from
Ferguson, that Shaftesbury had ‘talked all over Arianism and Socinianism,
which notions he confessed he imbibed from Mr Locke and his tenth
chapter of ‘Human Understanding.’”1568 Locke was Shaftesbury’s reader of
books. Marshall notes that “it is possible that both Locke and Shaftesbury
were Arians, or that Locke had influenced Shaftesbury to positions
identified with both Arianism and Socinianism, and that this dated from the
1670s or early 1680s. It should be noted that in his translation of Pierre
Nicole’s Essais de morale, a work whose meaning he felt free to change to
its diametric opposite on other topics, Locke maintained in 1676 the
description of Christ as ‘God himself dying for them’ (and to a double
eternity of happiness and misery). If Locke became Arian or Socinian
before 1682, it would thus be likely to have been after 1676.”1569 By the
1690s, when Locke had revised his published Essay, his views of the
Trinity had drastically changed as a result of his reading Socinian works.
Marshall argues, “indeed, given his apparently contemporaneous Socinian
reading and composition of the Essay […] Locke had the Trinity in his
mind in composing the Essay, a series of linked arguments about the
difficulties of assenting to a true faith.”1570 Locke was quite aware of the
Socinians’ theological and scriptural arguments against the Trinity, as well
as their public opposition to the dogma, and most likely had extended his
Socinian sympathies to denying the dogma of the Trinity. Locke had
followed the Unitarian Controversy since his return to England from
Holland in 1689. He extensively read antitrinitarian Socinian and Unitarian
books and struck a close friendship with the antitrinitarian Isaac Newton,
shortly after his return from Holland.
Newton shared with Locke two lengthy manuscripts criticising biblical
texts that were often cited by the clergy to support the Trinity;1571 Newton
declared such texts were fraudulent insertions into the Bible. Maurice Wiles
noted that “the first letter included a short treatise entitled ‘An Historical
Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture.’ The two texts in
question were 1 John 5:7 and 1 Tim. 3:16, and, although formally a purely
textual discussion, it carried clear antitrinitarian implications.”1572 Locke
copied these criticisms and forwarded them to friends such as Jean le Clerc.
John Marshall observes “it is quite possible that Newton’s willingness to
send Locke his manuscript criticisms of Trinitarian texts as early as 1690
indicates that Locke had revealed to Newton that he was antitrinitarian by
that date.”1573 Marshall also argues that the absence of any discussion of
Trinity in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity was “the result of lengthy
and detailed consideration of the Trinity, and that in issuing the
Reasonableness Locke was consciously willing to give succor to the
Unitarian side in the Unitarian Controversy, albeit anonymously.”1574 He
further notes that “in October 1694, just before commencing composition of
the Reasonableness, Locke was surely thinking that the Trinity was not
expressed in clear and express words and was not part of the simple truth of
the Gospel, and that it should not be imposed; and he was thinking this in
connection with thinking about the persuasion of non-Christians to
Christianity, one of the central purposes—directed at deists—that he later
recorded for the Reasonableness.”1575 Arthur Wainwright has also
concluded that by the end of his life, especially in his Paraphrase, Locke
was unequivocally antitrinitarian.1576
Just like Stubbe, Toland and the Unitarians, Locke believed in a
monotheistic prophetic tradition, and insisted that since times gone by, the
unity of God was the only crucial foundation of true faith and that the same
unity of the One and Only God must be cherished now. “We must,
therefore, examine and see what God requires us to believe now, under the
revelation of the gospel; for the belief of one invisible, eternal, omnipotent
God, maker of heaven and earth, was required before, as well as now.”1577
Locke insisted upon the divine justice and required good deeds for
salvation; mere faith was not sufficient for attaining the needed salvation.
“Neither, indeed, could it be otherwise; for life, eternal life, being the
reward of justice or righteousness only, appointed by the righteous God
(who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity) to those who only had no taint
or infection of sin upon them, it is impossible that he should justify those
who had no regard to justice at all whatever they believed.”1578 Jesus did not
come to die for man’s sins but “to reform the corrupt state of degenerate
man; and out of those who would mend their lives, and bring forth fruit
meet for repentance, erect a new kingdom.”1579 Locke further argued that it
was “not enough to believe him to be the Messiah, unless we also obey his
laws, and take him to be our king to reign over us.”1580
Locke strongly bonded the belief in Unity of the One and Only God and
Jesus’ Messiahship with morality; morality was nothing but following the
laws promulgated by the revelation, and these laws were neither abrogated
nor suspended by Jesus. Locke totally rejected the Pauline claim that Jesus
had abrogated the law, and that salvation was based upon grace and faith in
the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus. Locke instead contended that the eternal
rewards - and punishments - were dependent upon conformity to these
moral laws. “Open their eyes upon the endless, unspeakable joys of another
life, and their hearts will find something solid and powerful to move them.
The view of heaven and hell will cast a slight upon the short pleasures and
pains of this present state, and give attractions and encouragements to virtue
which reason and interest, and the care of ourselves, cannot but allow and
prefer. Upon this foundation, and upon this only, morality stands firm, and
may defy all competition. This makes it more than a name; a substantial
good, worth all our aims and endeavours; and thus the gospel of Jesus
Christ has delivered it to us.”1581 In short, Locke promoted a moral, working
faith deeply oriented towards and anchored in the life hereafter, a faith in
total opposition to both the traditional Catholic as well as Protestant
churches. It was far closer to the Islamic salvation scheme than the faith
based Christian incarnational scheme.
Locke’s Reasonable Christianity then was fundamentally different from
both the Catholic and Protestant versions of the incarnational, Trinitarian
and redemptive faith. The traditional Christianity revolved around the
central Christian doctrines of Trinity, justification through grace, original
sin, crucifixion and atonement. Locke had strong aversion to these central
Christian dogmas, and in total opposition to the traditional dogmas held that
the original sin did not taint the good nature of humanity. A child was born
with a clean slate without any innate ideas, and learned things and
constructed ideas through senses and experience; it was the education and
not the original sin which contributed the most to human personality.
Therefore, neither the concept of God nor divine rights of kings and bishops
were innate to human beings. Both political and religious structures were
voluntary human organisations in which human free will and consent were
instrumental. Unlike Luther and Calvin, Locke believed that man was
neither predetermined nor predestined by God but enjoyed free will;
salvation was based upon good deeds and moral choices rather than the
atoning death of Christ or arbitrary grace of God. Locke’s understandings of
the human self, essence and person were too individualistic to
accommodate any idea of Trinitarian unity of the Godhead with allowance
of distinction in persons or consciousness. Locke was a rationalist and had
neither room nor tolerance for irrational mysteries such as the Trinity, or the
divinity of a feeble historical man, Jesus of Nazareth. He was not an
orthodox Christian as he totally rejected the fundamental Christian
doctrines; he was a Unitarian heretic.
Marshall observes that “between the early 1660s and the 1690s he
changed from being a trinitarian who very probably held a strong view of
the Fall and of original sin — in common with almost all of his
contemporaries — to becoming at the least heterodox in his expressions
about the Trinity and original sin and very probably in private an Unitarian
heretic”1582 Marshall argues that his Unitarianism might have gravitated
more towards Arianism with emphasis upon Christ’s reverential pre-
existence but not co-eternity or co-equality. “The evidence, however, of
Locke’s reading, friendships, correspondence, failure to proclaim belief in
the Trinity, and careful phrasing about the issue, his interpretation of the
atonement, his non-trinitarian interpretations of biblical texts […] still seem
sufficient to suggest that Locke was probably unitarian personally. His final
work suggests that, if he was unitarian, then a Unitarianism divergent from
Socinianism in an Arian direction on pre-existence, but similar in other
emphases on Christ, was the most probable kind of Unitarianism with
which he ended his life, and this may have been true of his earlier beliefs.
Ferguson may have been correct in suggesting that Shaftesbury was Arian,
but even more revealing in apparently suggesting that Shaftesbury talked all
over Arianism and Socinianism under Locke’s influence.”1583 As discussed
above, Locke’s leaning towards Arianism based upon his understanding of
Christ’s pre-existence shall not be over emphasised, as it was more
reverential than ontological. His Christology differed in so many ways from
historical Arianism and was so close to Islamic Socinian hybrid that it may
well be called Socinian and Islamic with few minor divergences.
Locke’s Islamic Christology
Locke’s Christology resembled the Islamic Jesus so much that a cursory
read of the Quran or Islamic theology would reveal the striking similarity.
Almost all Christian sects, including the most heretical such as the Arians
and Monophysites, believed that Jesus possessed some sort of divinity or
divine nature. Throughout history, the prevalent dispute over the nature of
Jesus has occurred mainly between the advocates of hard and soft divinity.
Arius, a Christian ascetic presbyter in Alexandria (250 or 256–336 AD),
said Jesus the divine Logos was pre-existent and “performed an essential
mediatorial role in the relation of God to [the] world.”1584Arius, observed
Hilaire Belloc, “was willing to grant our Lord every kind of honour and
majesty short of the full nature of the Godhead [...] He was granted one
might say (paradoxically) all the divine attributes – except divinity.”1585 To
Arius, Jesus did not have a human soul. “The soul of Christ was the Logos;
only his body was human. As a consequence all that he did and suffered
was done and suffered by the Logos.”1586 As a result of Jesus’ actions during
his earthly life and unswerving devotion to divine will, the Son was given
glory and lordship, and would even be called “God” and worshipped; yet to
identify him with God’s essence is to commit blasphemy. We can conclude
with historian William Bright’s assertion that Arius was then “speaking of
Him as, after all, only the eldest and highest of creatures; not denying to
him the title of God, but by limitations and glosses abating its real
power.”1587 The Council of Nicea opposed Arianism by maintaining that
“the Father and the Son are of the same substance” (homoousios).1588 The
main difference between Arian and Orthodoxy was that Arian insisted upon
identity and unity of nature, while the Orthodox Fathers insisted upon unity
of substance. Locke insisted upon separation of both nature and substance,
as his Jesus had only one human nature and substance, totally divergent
from divine nature and substance. Locke stated that “concerning his Son
Jesus Christ our Lord, who according to the flesh, ie as to the body which
he took in the womb of the blessed virgin his mother, was of the posterity
and linage of David, according to the spirit of holyness ie as to that more
pure and spiritual part, which in him over-ruled all, and kept even his frail
flesh holy and Spotless from the least taint of sin and was of an other
extraction with most mighty power declared to be the son of god by his
resurrection.”1589 The divinely gifted spirit of holiness guided and assisted
his body to remain righteous and pure without modifying his human
essence and resultantly earned the title of son of god through his death after
his resurrection. It was the divine guidance, grace (the Spirit of God, the
Holy Spirit) rather than divine essence which purified Jesus’ human nature
from sinful acts.1590 Maurice Wiles has noted that “it is also noteworthy that
the main questions he poses are in the form of a sharp dichotomy between
Christ’s absolute divinity and straightforward humanity. The midway Arian
proposal of a lower order of divinity is not brought into consideration at
all.”1591 Locke’s human Jesus, with human nature and essence, was different
from the Arian Logos, with divine nature and attributes but human essence.
Arian’s Jesus was taken over by the divine nature and attributes while
Locke’s Jesus was a purely human person who was exalted due to his
moral, human choices. His human nature did not change, but was purified
by absolute submission to the moral commandments of God. This position
was more Islamic, Socinian, Unitarian than historical Arianism.
Likewise, the Alexandrian Monophysites of the fourth and fifth centuries
did not reject Jesus’ divinity or the dogma of the Holy Trinity; they only
denied that Jesus had two natures. In opposition to the School of Antioch,
which emphasised Jesus’ human nature, the Alexandrian Monophysites
believed in the merger of the divine and human natures in Jesus at
incarnation. To both kinds of Monophysitism (Eutychianism as well as
Appollinarianism), at incarnation the human nature of Jesus was “dissolved
like a drop of honey in the sea.”1592 Therefore, the Lockean Christology of a
pure human, prophetic messiah diverted from all known Christian
Christologies except the adoptionist Christology of Dynamic Monarchians
such as Theodotus (c. 190) Paul of Samosata,1593 the Bishop of Antioch.1594
It mostly resembled the Islamic Christology of a man, prophet and Messiah
Jesus. There was no room in it to call Jesus as God or divine, as Arius
suggested, or to worship him as God. It was also against the Monophysites,
who contended that the divine Logos had dominated the human nature and
finally dissolved it. Locke’s Jesus was fully human, with full human nature,
and without any stretch of divinity or divine nature. Jesus was glorified by
God due to his absolute moral submission and given dominion as a result of
total unison with God’s will. This total human, prophetic, Messiah
Christology had no exact precedent in the historical Christianity; it was
totally in line with the Quranic Christology. Newton will exhibit the same
restrictions and situate Christ’s pre-existence and glory in the realms of
knowledge, submission and dominion. Additionally, Locke’s man was not
depraved due to the original sin. Therefore, the need for Trinity or divine
intervention for human salvation was absolutely un-necessary. To Locke,
Jesus reconciled humanity with God through morality and not by divine
nature or satisfaction by Crucifixion. By de-emphasising Jesus’ divinity and
re-emphasising his humanity, Locke brought Jesus to the terrestrial realms
and empowered earthly men to the moral heights. Locke’s insistence upon
human free will, and the necessity of morality for salvation coupled with
total rejection of predestination, dispelled the need for Trinity, Incarnation
and atoning death. This was a revolution, turning the historical Christianity
upside-down in line with Islamic Christology and anthropology. Even
though Locke’s Christology showed some unique scriptural elements, it was
definitely more Socinian and Islamic than Orthodox Christianity. This
rational Christology was the foundation of the eighteenth-century early
Enlightenment as seen above.
Historians of this period usually credit the Dutch Arminians for their anti-
Calvinist free will theology.1595 Locke was more radical in denying the
predestination, selection and grace in matters of faith and salvation than
Arminians. Locke’s strong emphasis upon free will and human choices, and
his insistence upon human efforts rather than the grace of God in attaining
salvation, was at odds with the Dutch Arminian theology. The Arminians,
including Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), focused more upon the grace of God
while giving less prominence to human agency.1596 Locke was both anti-
Calvinist and anti-Arminian; his theology was rather closer to the Polish
Socinians than the Dutch Arminians.1597 The crypto-Muslim Socinians, like
Locke, were anti-Trinitarian rationalist who emphasised human free will
and moral agency. Like Muslims they denied Jesus’ divinity, emphasised
salvation through human efforts and declared Jesus to be a model prophet
and messiah.
Locke, Hobbes, Newton and Stubbe knew Islam and its theology very
well. Their Oxford teacher Dr. Edward Pococke’s1598 Arabic History of Bar-
Hebraeus(Greg. Abulfaragii historia compendiosa dynastiarum) was well-
received in England. Martin Pugh observed that “Pococke shared the
fashionable desire to study religion in a rational and informed manner and
was sceptical about Christian mysteries, such as the Trinity. In 1650, he
published the Specimen Historiae Arabum, which discussed the culture,
literature and history of Islam in a sober, scholarly way for the first time.
Taken with the 1649 English translation of the Quran, the book enabled
people in England to study an objective account of Islamic thought and
civilisation, a huge advance over the absurdities of the medieval era.”1599
The Islamic, human, prophet and Messiah Christology was a common
denominator in Socinians, Locke, Hobbes, Newton and Stubbe. Locke then
was quite aware of Islamic theology and religion; he also owned a copy of
the Quran. Justin Champion and others have shown that John Locke’s
adversaries saw him as a Muslim who interpreted the Christian Gospel in
light of the Koran (Quran). Justin Champion stated that “indeed Edwards in
his Socinianism Unmasked (1696) had confronted John Locke, the author of
The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), firstly as a Socinian, and then
by implication as a Moslem. He wrote […] ‘It is likely I shall further
exasperate this author when I desire the reader to observe that this lank faith
of his is in a manner no other than the faith of a Turk.’ Edwards objected to
Locke’s assertion that there was only one necessary defining credal belief in
Christianity accessible to all understandings; i.e., that Jesus is the Messiah.
Edwards slyly commented that Locke ‘seems to have consulted the
Mahometan bible.’ We know that Locke possessed an edition of the
Quran.”1600 Locke’s adversaries, while vilifying his anti-Christian beliefs,
also identified the sources from where he derived his Christological
doctrine. His adversaries genuinely believed that Locke consulted the
“Mahometan bible,” rather than the Christian Bible, to formulate his
Christological scheme.
As mentioned earlier, Locke rejected the fundamental Christian dogma of
original sin in the very beginning of his Reasonableness of Christianity. In
his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he at once rejected the
Cartesian understanding of innate ideas and the Augustinian understanding
of original sin. “It is an established opinion amongst some men, that there
are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primary notions,
koinai ennoiai, characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man; which
the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It
would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this
supposition, if I should only show […] how men, barely by the use of their
natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the
help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at certainty, without any
such original notions or principles.”1601 This was at once a rejection of both
innatism and tainted fallen nature due to original sin. Innatism was an
“anathema to the ethics of rational discipline.”1602
Locke’s rejection of innatism was also a denial of Trinity and atoning
death of Jesus. David Wooten noted that even “Locke’s friend Molyneux
was somewhat surprised at the account of moral responsibility that Locke
gave in the first edition of the Essay, in discussing liberty and necessity; by
making all sins proceed from defects of understanding Locke had seemed to
leave no scope for a theory of human depravity, or (one could add) for
original sin, atonement, and predestination.”1603 There was no need for
Jesus’ atoning death if there was nothing to atone for; it was totally in
opposition to the fundamental sacrificial role assigned to Jesus by the
orthodoxy. Edwards noted that Locke “gave proof of his being Socinianifd
by his utter silence about Christ’s satisfying for us, and purchasing
Salvation by vertue of his Death, when he designedly undertook to
enumerate the Advantages and Benefits which accrue to mankind by
Christ’s coming into the World.”1604 Locke’s response was infuriating.
“There is not any such word in any one of the epistles, or other books of the
New Testament, in my bible, as satisfying, or satisfaction made by our
Saviour; and so I could not put it into my ‘Christianity as delivered in the
Scripture.’”1605 Trinity, Original Sin and Satisfaction by atoning death: none
of these central Christian dogmas were original to the scriptures, but later
fabrications. This was a huge indictment of the Church Christianity by
Locke, just like his friends Stubbe and Toland before him. If the Trinitarian
Incarnational theology of atoning death was not intrinsic and innate to
human conscience, then the divine rights of kings and bishops which were
founded on that supernatural theology were also null and void. Categorical
and unqualified submission to monarch and church were not natural but
voluntary consensual prepositions. The king and Church’s arguments for
obedience from morality, unity, order and uniformity were at once rebutted
by Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and fallen nature.1606 There was no
innate conscience in man;1607 rather, it was the result of human education
and experiences. Locke argued that human beings were born innocent,
without the supposed tainted nature due to men’s fall in Adam. Even those
who never heard of Jesus or believed in him could learn morality and
repentance by the help of natural reason, and attain salvation through good
works and repentance. “God had, by the Light of Reason, revealed to all
Mankind, who would make use of that Light, that he was Good and
Merciful.”1608 People were born in the original state of nature.
Locke’s idea of the original state of nature had no resemblance to
Christian concept of original sin and fallen nature. Man lived in God’s
world for God’s purposes and the governments were constructed to protect
and enhance those God-given rights of life, liberty, property and health.
Locke’s agents were free with some God-given rights restrained only by
natural law; these free agents formed human society based on voluntary
consent.1609 Locke’s emphasis upon the individual and collective consent
was antithetical to divine right monarchy and absolute Church; Locke
empowered man at the expense of monarchy and Church. He advocated
popular sovereignty and liberal democracy,1610 and truly empowered
mankind on equal bases by legitimising the role of collective consent in
establishing boundaries for civil rulers. The ruler’s authority stemmed from
people and not from God; people were sovereign. Locke’s rational theology
and natural religion was the foundation of his liberal, republican political
theology. This was a debilitating and destabilising blow to both the Church
and monarchical hierarchy.
Locke harmonised the scripture with the liberal democratic theory by
rationalising the above discussed Pauline texts and epistles such as 1 Peter
2:13-14 and Romans 13:1-1. He made them republican instead of absolutist,
contending that Paul did ask for obedience to the genuine authority, but did
not define the lawful authority. This was neither Paul nor Jesus’ business to
define the political authority as political and civil authority was of this
world while Jesus’ kingdom was other worldly. Therefore, determination of
lawful authority was to be done by the people, the subjects of that authority.
He further argued that Paul did not promulgate a political commandment in
his epistles, but just showed prudence to avoid Roman persecutions. Locke
did not refuse a limited monarchy, as long as the monarch followed a law
and was responsible to the parliament.1611 He used scriptural hermeneutics
and rationalisation to render Romans 13:1-1 as a republican verse rather
than supporting absolute monarchy. He differentiated between the Gospels
and Acts of Apostle and St. Paul’s epistles, emphasising the significance of
Gospels over the epistles in the areas of beliefs and salvation. He tacitly
questioned the coherence of various segments of the Bible, morally and
semantically critiqued it and diminished the universal, spiritual efficacy of
Paulin Epistles. The epistles were historical, addressing many
particularities, and must be read in light of St. Paul’s overall philosophy and
Gospel’s overall message. The later theologians and exegetes’ overzealous
departmentalisation of epistles and fanciful interpretations were too
convoluted and torturous to convey the true intent of Paul. Therefore
simple, literal and historical meanings of the epistles must be understood in
light of the overall message of the scripture.
Locke’s Popular Sovereignty
Locke’s popular sovereignty led to the right of self-determination in regards
to the form of government and delegation of power and authority. So, it was
not God who determined the form of civil government, but the people. This
interpretation was antithetical to the Augustinian divine right monarchy
believed and practiced by Christendom over the centuries. Throughout the
seventeenth century, clerics like Sir Robert Filmer and others were insisting
upon the divine rights of kings based upon the Book of Genesis, English
history and logic. Filmer’s Patriarcha, which was probably compiled in the
1620s, was posthumously published in 1680 to support Charles II’s
absolutist and arbitrary policies. Locke wrote his Two Treatises of
Government to debunk Filmer and other’s arguments, and to support
Shaftesbury’s revolutionary plans and exclusionary designs.1612 Ashcraft
observed that Locke was not a mere closet political philosopher, but
practically engaged in radical revolt against Charles II; Locke was a link
between the Civil War radicalism of the Levellers and the post-Restoration
radicalism of Shaftesbury. “Locke’s political theory is much more clearly
linked with the political ideas of the Civil War radicals than we have been
taught to believe. The Two Treatises viewed in its historical context is, in
other words, a good deal more Janus-faced than most interpreters of
Locke’s political thought have recognised. I shall […] place the emphasis
on the more disturbing and hidden face of Locke’s radicalism rather than
the familiar one that smiles benignly in anticipation of the triumph of the
moderate Whiggism of the eighteenth century.”1613
Locke’s popular sovereignty, and the right of resistance, were as radical as
his anti-Trinitarian theology; this was as blasphemous as denying the
divinity of Jesus. It was alleged to be Turkish rather than English or
Christian. Locke, English and Continental Protestants and the Grand Turk
were all members of the same dissenter, disobedient and rabble rouser
league, as the satirical “Dialogue Between the Pope and a Phanatick
Concerning Affairs in England” emphasized.” “The Mufti is of the same
mind with our Presbytery concerning Princes, ‘That whatsoever Prince
obey not the Law of God, he is no true Muscelman or Believer, and being
become by his filthy Actions an Infidel, he is ipso facto fallen from his
Throne, and no farther Capable of Authority and Government,’ and with
this Divinity our Turkish Brethren strangled Sultan Ibrahim, in the same
year Forty Eight, when we by the same Maxim cut off Charles the First.”1614
The royal, Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704) in his the
Observator equated the Whig’s rebellion against Charles II and his brother
James II as Turkish plots and “Pacqueteers Apology for Turcism”, while the
Whig propagandist Henry Care in his Weekly Pacquet hailed the Turco
Islamic ideaolgy of resistance as the essence of true Christianity and
Muhammad as the better Christian than the Anglican clergy and Tory
royalists. The Tories alleged that the Whigs out-Turked the Turks. Locke,
the Whig leader, was a rabble rouser in line with his overall Turkism.1615
Locke’s insistence upon the “social contract” and the right to resist the
tyrant was a bombshell. Taylor noted that “it is Locke who first uses this
theory as a justification of ‘revolution,’ and as a ground for limited
government. Rights can now be seriously pleaded against power. Consent is
not just an original agreement to set up government, but a continuing right
to agree to taxation.”1616 Many orthodox religious and political authorities
resisted it as a sin against God and Christ.1617 How could rulers be
accountable to people while the Bible categorically stated that their
authority stemmed from God, and they were accountable only to him?1618
Locke’s theory of popular sovereignty, social contract and natural laws had
long-lasting impacts on modern political thought. Charles Taylor noted that
“in the next three centuries, from Locke to our day, although the contract
language may fall away, and be used only by a minority of theorists, the
underlying idea of society as existing for the (mutual) benefit of
individuals, and the defense of their rights, takes on more and more
importance. That is, it both comes to be the dominant view, pushing older
theories of society, or newer rivals, to the margins of political life and
discourse; and it also generates more and more far-reaching claims on
political life. The requirement of original consent, via the halfway house of
Locke’s consent to taxation, becomes the full-fledged doctrine of popular
sovereignty under which we now live. The theory of natural rights ends up
spawning a dense web of limits to legislative and executive action, via the
entrenched charters which have become an important feature of
contemporary government.”1619
Locke also proposed that the government was formed mainly for the
protection of common good and interest. This was in total opposition to the
Augustinian biblical dogma, which stated that the government and civil
authorities were divinely established to curb the violent nature and evil acts
of the fallen man. Locke blotted out the original sin, depraved and fallen
nature, and the concept of innate ideas to establish the fact that by nature,
man was not evil but good. Man was born with a clean slate, and his
identity and ideas were formed by his experiences.
Locke did not always have the same anti-innate ideas propensity. He
evolved into it after reading the Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl’s
writings, as Russell has demonstrated. Following Ibn Tofayl’s novel Hayy
bin Yaqzan, which was translated to English as The Self-Taught
Philosopher, Locke argued that a child was born with a clean slate (Tabula
Rasa) and one’s identity, ideas, and beliefs were the result of one’s
experiences, society, and education, “of all the men we meet with, nine
parts of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine of one hundred, are what they are, good
or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great
difference in mankind.”1620 This perspective contrasted with both the
Catholic and Protestant position that original sin had corrupted Adam’s
posterity, and that all humans were prone to sin and had no natural tendency
to goodness and morality.
Locke’s views on human nature conformed to Islamic teachings, as Islam
propagated original forgiveness rather than original sin. The Quran, the
Muslim scripture, clearly stated that Adam and Eve repented to God after
their original mistake and God forgave them. “They said: Our Lord! We
have wronged ourselves. If thou forgive us not and have not mercy on us,
surely we are of the lost!” (7:23) Then Adam received from his Lord words
(of revelation), and He relented toward him. Lo! He is the relenting, the
Merciful. We said: Go down, all of you, from hence; but verily there
cometh unto you from Me a guidance; and whoso followeth My guidance,
there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve.” (2:37-38)
Prophet Muhammad explained that all children were born in a state of
nature and goodness; their immediate environment from parents, teachers,
and society made them good or bad. Therefore, human beings were capable
of realising morality and righteousness.
Locke did not deny that men were sinful; he argued that their sinfulness
resulted from their “vices, Passions, and domineering Interest.”1621 These
vices did not need a supernatural or divine treatment, such as Christ’s
crucifixion, but proper contemplation and education. Further, most men
followed the standards of their society and ignored contemplation. They
were not inherently deficient in their knowledge and understanding of
moral values due to their supposed corrupted nature; they just needed
adequate education and strong will to discipline their passions, caprices and
desires to make the right moral choices. Taylor noted that “As we move
from the Cambridge Platonists through Tillotson to Locke and the
eighteenth century, apologetics, and indeed, much preaching, is less and
less concerned with sin as a condition we need to be rescued from through
some transformation of our being, and more and more with sin as wrong
behaviour which we can be persuaded, trained or disciplined to turn our
backs on. This concern with a morality of correct conduct has been
observed by many historians of the period. Religion is narrowed to
moralism.”1622 Locke’s position on the role of education, and man’s
capability of individual moral choices without supernatural intervention,
opposed central Christian doctrine, and was in line with the Socinian and
Islamic positions. No wonder that in the 1690s, Bishop Edward Stillingfleet
vehemently attacked the Essay as supporting Socinianism.1623
Locke and Religious Tolerance
Locke also advocated religious tolerance and a complete separation
between the church and state. As noted earlier, John Marshall, in his
magisterial work on Locke and toleration, recognised that Islam was
“central to tolerationist debates in England in the late seventeenth century,”
in part because “the practice of Muslim toleration for Christianity was
repeatedly rehearsed by many authors.”1624 Religious tolerance was the
“principal mark of the true church,”1625 because “care of souls cannot
belong to the civil ruler, because his power consists wholly in compulsion.
But true and saving religion consists in an inward conviction of the mind;
without it, nothing has value in the eyes of God. Such is the nature of the
human understanding that it cannot be compelled by any external force. You
may take away people’s goods, imprison them, even inflict physical torture
on their bodies, but you will not achieve anything if what you are trying to
do by this punishment is change the judgement of their minds about
things.”1626 The struggle for religious tolerance was the struggle for
restoration of pristine, primitive Christianity and an enlightened future void
of Church (both Catholic and Protestant in all its varieties including the
seventeenth century Erasmian, Arminian and Dutch trends) and monarchy’s
abusive constraints. Religious toleration was the cornerstone of true
reformation of the Protestant Reformation. Faith needed inner light and
persuasion and not force and compulsion. “To accept a doctrine or a form of
worship for the salvation of one’s soul, one must believe sincerely that the
doctrine is true, and that the form of worship will be acceptable and
pleasing to God, but no penalty has any force to instil this kind of
conviction in the mind. It is light that is needed to change a belief in the
mind; punishment of the body does not lend light.”1627
He insisted that men were obliged to think for themselves, and that “the
care of each man’s salvation belongs only to himself.”1628 Further, the search
for truth was a sublime duty and a meritorious act rewarded by God, and the
sincerity of efforts and search received more recompense than the objective
truth sought. Locke encouraged everyone to seek the truth on their own
rather than from society, church, tradition, or customs, because God did not
give anyone authority over others to compel them in matters of faith and
religion. Jesus convinced people with the Gospel and not with swords or
spears. “If they sincerely desired the salvation of souls, as he did who is the
Captain of our salvation, they would walk in his footsteps and follow the
excellent example of the Prince of Peace. He sent out his troops to subdue
the nations and compel them to come into the church not with swords or
spears or any other weapon of violence, but with the Gospel, with the
message of peace and with the exemplary force of holiness.”1629
Locke clearly rejected the Roman Church’s claims from Matthew 16:18
that the Church had the authority to interpret the scripture, and that people
must follow Church interpretations and traditions to avoid heresy and
idolatry. He equally denounced claims by the Church of England and
Puritans that they were duty-bound to establish the true religion and
implement Christian teachings and dogmas with the help of civil authority.
He maintained: “It appears not that God has ever given any such authority
to one Man over another, as to compel any one to his Religion.”1630 The
Gospels never approved of such a policy, “the Gospel everywhere testifies
that the true disciples of Christ must expect persecution and bear it, but I do
not remember reading anywhere in the New Testament that the true church
of Christ should persecute others or harass them, or compel them to adopt
their own doctrines with violence, fire, and sword.”1631 Salvation, faith and
belief required voluntary will and consent. Even God cannot force people to
believe, let alone the Church. “No one can be compelled to be healthy or
prosperous against his will. Even God cannot save people against their
will.”1632 The Church arrogance was appalling. “I cannot help but wonder at
the unholy arrogance of those who think that they can teach what is
necessary to salvation more clearly and plainly than the Holy Spirit, who is
the infinite and eternal wisdom.” 1633
Locke argued that religious imposition and lack of religious freedom led
to communal confrontation and civil unrest. Civil authority or government
must not interfere in religious matters, but focus only upon safeguarding
and guaranteeing human external interests such as life, liberty, health,
property, and general human welfare. The Church must not intrude in man’s
privacy and general welfare, as its realms were connected with internal
interests such as human salvation. Therefore, the Church and the State were
two separate entities with two very different functions and roles. “Church
itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the
commonwealth.”1634 Church use of violence was contrary to its nature and
role as it could gain true followers only through “exhortations, admonitions,
and advices.”1635 To Locke “churches have neither any jurisdiction in
worldly matters, nor are fire and sword any proper instruments wherewith
to convince men’s minds of error, and inform them of the truth.”1636
Civil authorities, magistrates, princes, and kings had no business with
saving souls or imposing religious dogmas. “This would be the case at
Constantinople; and the reason of the thing is the same in any Christian
kingdom. The civil power is the same in every place. Nor can that power, in
the hands of a Christian prince, confer any greater authority upon the
Church than in the hands of a heathen; which is to say, just none at all.”1637
Beliefs and inner thoughts could never be changed by civil authority or
coercion. “There is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a
Christian commonwealth.”1638 It is against human nature to change their
beliefs or conform their faiths to the dictates of others. “If the magistrate
thinks to save men thus, he seems to understand little of the way of
salvation. And if he does it not in order to save them, why is he so solicitous
about the articles of faith as to enact them by a law?”1639 Religion had
nothing to do with civil liberties: “No private person has any right in any
manner to prejudice another person in his civil enjoyments because he is of
another church or religion. All the rights and franchises that belong to him
as a man, or as a denizen, are inviolably to be preserved to him. These are
not the business of religion. No violence nor injury is to be offered him,
whether he be Christian or Pagan. Nay, we must not content ourselves with
the narrow measures of bare justice; charity, bounty, and liberality must be
added to it. This the Gospel enjoins, this reason directs, and this that natural
fellowship we are born into requires of us. If any man err from the right
way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to
punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be
miserable in that which is to come.”1640
There was no coercion in matters of religion and faith. This Lockean
principle of toleration1641 was in line with the Islamic teachings1642 and
antithetical to the Church history, policies, and practices. Locke repeatedly
quoted the example of the Ottoman Empire’s tolerance towards followers of
other faiths, and advocated religious tolerance for Muslims in England.1643
“Would anyone say that either church has the right to take away the liberty
or property of those who disagree with them (as we see happens elsewhere),
or to punish them with exile or death because they have different doctrines
or rituals? The Turks meanwhile say nothing and laugh up their sleeves at
the cruelty of Christians beating and killing each other.”1644 He insisted that
Muslims were sincere truth seekers, and must be given religious freedom to
worship the way they wanted to. “Do not think all the world, who are not of
your church, abandon themselves to an utter carelessness of their future
state. You cannot but allow there are many Turks who sincerely seek truth,
to whom yet you could never bring evidence sufficient to convince them of
the truth of the Christian religion, whilst they looked on it as a principle not
to be questioned that the Alcoran was of divine revelation. This possibly
you will tell me is a prejudice […] This though you blame it as an ill way,
yet you can allow in one of your own religion, even to that degree that he
may be ignorant of the grounds of his religion. And why then may you not
allow it to a Turk, not as a good way or as having led him to the truth; but
as a way as fit for him, as for one of your church to acquiesce in; and as fit
to exempt him from your force as to exempt anyone of your church from
it?”1645
The Church of England’s leading figures, such as Thomas Lang and Jonas
Proast, roundly rejected such notions of toleration and separation of Church
and State,1646 and charged Locke with Socinian affiliations and Islamic
orientations.1647
It becomes evident from the above discussions that Locke’s religio
political theology evolved overtime. He was engrossed in religious, spiritual
and theological purification as John Dunn, Jeremy Waldron, and many
others have shown. His religious orientation and peity were genuine and not
a mere façade as Leo Strauss, Thomas Pangle, Michael Zuckert, and others
contend. His Christian religious loyalty was sincere but his Unitarian
Christianity differed from the Orthodox supernatural and dogmatic
Christianity. In the later part of his life he did not have orthodox Christian
views; he almost entirely rejected the fundamental Christian doctrines and
gave them heterodox interpretations. He engaged in biblical criticism,
denied original sin, Trinity, incarnation, atoning death, absolute Church,
monarchy and many other central Christian supernatural dogmas. His
Christology of Jesus as a human, prophetic Messiah was neither Arian, with
all its variations, nor Chalcedonian; it was squarely Islamic. Locke had a
copy of the Quran, studied under scholar of Islam Dr. Pococke and showed
knowledge of Arabic language and Islamic history, law and theology. He
befriended Muslim-leaning Deists, Socinians and Unitarians and sided with
them during the long anti-Trinitarian controversies of the 1690s. In reality,
he did exactly what Stubbe, Socinians and the Unitarians had espoused and
propagated. Therefore, this similarity should not be shrugged off as mere
coincidence. He was far removed from the official Christianity and very
close to Islamic theological and political outlook. His “Turkish” Messiah, as
his opponents dubbed it, was the result of his close Socinian and Unitarian
associations, who in turn had close historical and theological Islamic
affinities. His public rejection of Socinianism and Unitarian Islamic
syncretism should not be taken at face value. He hid his associations,
affiliations and sympathies to avoid persecutions and un-necessary
distractions, and was scrupulously secret, as David Wootton has observed:
“Locke had a great capacity for secrecy. He had first sought to conceal his
political commitments from his colleagues in Oxford and had then been
obliged not only to go into exile, but to go into hiding to avoid being
kidnapped or assassinated. He was used to writing letters in cipher and took
elaborate precautions to prevent his private papers from falling into the
wrong hands. He was also capable of lying. He lied in an effort to hold on
to his Oxford position in 1684. He lied when he told Edwards he had read
no Socinian books. He was capable of believing that the Church Fathers had
practised a systematic economy with the truth in their exposition of
Christian doctrine.”1648 Locke’s public ambivalence towards things Islamic
could very well be part of his overall strategy of dissimulation to avoid
persecutions and distractions. Locke’s disguised Islamism is as marked as
his Socinian inclinations.
Let us now turn to the Socinians and their Islamic connections.
 Chapter 10

Socinianism: The Muslim Bridge

Locke’s Islamic connection could possibly be traced back to his Socinian
association. H. J. McLachlan and John Marshall have clearly proved that
Locke was an outright Socinian.1649 J. Israel and many others considered
them the heralds of early Enlightenment, and the main tributaries of the
radical and high enlightenments.1650 Israel stated: “For the modern historian,
all this powerfully poses the question of whether, and especially how,
Socinianism may have aided and abetted the rise of philosophical Deism
and hence of the Enlightenment both moderate and radical, particularly in
its Dutch, Huguenot, German, and Anglo-American contexts. Even if, as
seems likely, many contemporaries overstated the links and affinities
between Socinianism and the diverse strands of Deism, prima facie it would
still seem that Socinianism in significant ways lent added impetus and many
new recruits to all wings of the Enlightenment. If, moreover, the more
extreme variants of Socinianism were only marginally distinguishable from
Deistic ‘natural religion’, consisting mainly, apart from a drastically
reduced minimum of core mysteries, of a spiritually intense moral teaching
based on Christ’s example, and if Socinian Collegiants like Pieter Balling
(d. 1669), Jarig Jelles (c.1620–83), and the Amsterdam publisher Jan
Rieuwertsz (c.1616–87) were undoubtedly disciples and allies of Spinoza,
is there not a clear case for reckoning Socinianism among the chief factors
generating radical no less than the Arminian and Voltairean currents of the
Enlightenment?”1651
Socinianism was a system of Christian doctrine named for Fausto Sozzini
(Latin: Faustus Socinus), which was developed among the Polish Brethren
in the Minor Reformed Church of Poland during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.1652 Influenced by the humanist commentaries of Erasmus, radical
Unitarian theology of Servetus and Ottomans, they pushed biblical
criticism, antitrinitarianism and primitive biblicism to their logical
conclusions. The Socinian anti-clericalism, antitrinitarianism, scripturalism,
rationalism and moralism was totally identified with Islam. Martin Mulsow
observes that “Socinianism […] or, broader: anti-trinitarianism was often
paralleled to Islam: both the Christian heresy and the Muslim religion reject
the doctrine of the Trinity and regard Jesus only as a prophet, not as a god.
There are indeed numerous historical connections between both currents.
From Michael Servetus onward, the Qur’ān and islamic writings had an
impact on the emerging Socinian critique. Antitrinitarians tried to establish
a historical genealogy from early (Ebionite) Christianity through Islam
(which preserved the true monotheistic idea) to the present.”1653
In Transylvania, theologian Peter Melius had already warned in 1568 that
anti-Trinitarians preached a “Turkish Christ.” Theologian Johann Heinrich
Hottinger of Zurich published his Historia Orientalis in 1660. He dedicated
a full chapter to demonstrate Socinian affiliations with Islamic teachings.
“It dogmatically explicitly spelled out the parallels between Socinianism
and Islam, mainly based on authentic Muslim documents. Already before
Hottinger, the latter’s teacher Jacob Golius, Johannes Hoornbeck, and
others had in some passages in their works emphasised this similarity.1654 J.
Israel observed that “since the Reformation, there had indeed been various
recorded instances of Italian, Polish, and German Socinians fleeing
Christian for Ottoman lands and embracing the, to them, supposedly
familiar tenets of Islam.”1655
The Racovian Alcoran
The Socinian statement of faith, as manifest in the book Racovian
Catechism, emphasised the significance of human reason and preferred
rationality over revelation. It declared the dogma of the Trinity as irrational,
and maintained the uni-personality of God. It also denied Jesus’ divinity,
emphasising his humanity and messianic role. The book, dedicated to King
James I of England, was first published there in 1609, and later was
publicly burned. In 1640 the Laudian Canon was introduced by the King of
England to curb Racovian’s impact. John Biddle, the founder of English
Unitarianism, translated it into English and published it in 1652. The
Racovian theology was so similar to the Islamic outlook that prominent
English Presbyterian Francis Chennell (1608–1665), President of St. John’s
College, Oxford, called it a “Racovian Alcoran.”1656
Thomas Calvert observed that when Christians turn to Islam, “they begin
with Arianism and Socinianisme, and then Turcism [Islam] is not so strange
a thing.”1657 Such a transition was a commonplace in many areas of Europe,
including Holland and England. Consequently, Socinianism and
Unitarianism were so closely associated with Islam that all those “who
ventured into anti-Trinitarian theologies were viewed as crypto-Muslims: as
a result, orthodox theologians started seeing Muslims wherever they saw
Unitarians. A high number of Christians and Britons was reported in
English writings to have converted to Islam.”1658
Therefore, this widespread conversion to Islam was perceived as a serious
threat to the English and European political and spiritual realms, and as a
precursor to Muslim religious and political dominance. Ecclesiastical and
monarchical authorities took the threat seriously and sponsored polemical
literature against Islam, Turks, and all those who subscribed to Islamic
political outlook or theology, such as Socinians and Unitarians.
The anonymous author of the Historical and Critical Reflections upon
Mahometanism and Socinianism did a thorough search of the Islamic and
Socinian sources to show they were “impossible to distinguish.” 1659 After a
detailed discussion of the Islamic doctrines, the author concluded that in the
Islamic “Confessions of Faith which I have related, the Socinians find
anything that, according to their own Principles, they can condemn as
erroneous or impious. Nay, I am persuaded, that if they acted with Sincerity,
they would own that Mahometans are Orthodox: And indeed they must be
so by the Principles of all those who have embrac’d the Socinian Religion.
The two sects are proud to be call’d Unitarians; a name that signifies the
same thing with both Parties […] The chief of the Sect has acted herein
with more Sincerity […] he owns, that the Alcoran speaks of the Unity of
God in the same sense, that he spoke of it himself, and that his Predecessors
in Poland and Transylvania had spoke of it before him.”1660
The author further showed that the Socinian arguments against the Trinity
are the same common Islamic rational arguments. He wrote that Muslims
contended no “human Understanding can perceive or comprehend, that the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are at the same time, and in the same Essence,
one and the same God; and the Omnipotent God never requir’d nor
commanded Man to believe what can neither be perceiv’d nor understood.
On the contrary, he hath given Man an Understanding apt to conceive
whatever was possible and necessary, and to deny and not conceive what is
impossible. We shall see presently the Socinians making use of the same
Sophism. Indeed ‘tis what they insist most upon.”1661 He clearly denounced
the Socinians’ tendency to elevate human reason and rational arguments
over Christian mysteries substantiated by Christian revelation. To him, this
was the old Islamic discourse quite known to Christian scholarship.
He further analysed the Socinians’ acceptance of Jesus’ crucifixion that the
Mahometans deny “puts no great difference between them; since the
Socinians don’t own the Fruits and Necessity of that Death […] To deny
this Satisfaction, and to deny the Death that made it, is the same.” He
claimed that the Socinians can never deny the Prophetic mission of
Mahomet because “an able Mussulman will shew them the necessity of it,
by Principles that are common to both Sects.”1662
He presented a geographical and historical connection between
Socinianism and Islam by observing, “Poland and Germany shar’d with the
Turks the Ruins of Dispersion of Venice; but the Turks had the greatest Lot;
and indeed they seem’d to have the best Right to it. Michael Servetus, who
was the first that dogmatiz’d in the Sixteenth Century against the Mystery
of the Trinity, had dip’d into the Alcoran, upon the Briars of which (they are
words of Lubinietski) like a Bee, he gather’d the Honey of his Doctrine. He
had travel’d from Spain to Africa, doubtless with a design to communicate
his Sentiments to the Mahometan Doctors, and profit by their Instructions.
We ought not therefore to be surpriz’d, if the Unitarians of Transylvania, in
the Infancy of their Sect, cited the Alcoran as one of the Classic Books of
their Religion.”1663
The author further observed that other antitrinitarians such as Francis
David who otherwise was an anti-Socinian “made no scruple of citing the
Alcoran, to support what he advanc’d concerning the Divinity and
Adoration of Jesus Christ. Certainly, says he, as ‘tis not without reason said
in the Alcoran, that Jesus Christ can give no Assistance to those who
worship him, because they would have him pass for God, contrary to the
Doctrine which he taught.”1664 The Muslims and Hungarian Unitarians were
less dangerous than the English Unitarians and Socinians. “Indeed,
Socinianism was often described as even worse than Islam from the
perspective of orthodox Christians. Although both made use of similar
arguments against the trinity theologically, Unitarianism could be judged as
even more inadequate in its understanding of such things as Christology or
predestination; as Whitaker put it, in his The Origin of Arianism, written
towards the end of the Eighteenth century, ‘The truth is, that even Mahomet
himself, weak and wicked as he was, never ventured out into the high
blasphemies of Socinianism.’ It was also thought worse because it was
potentially more dangerous than Islam, causing Christianity to be destroyed
from within.”1665
The original connection between the Quran and Socinian teachings is
historically credible. Lelio Francesco Maria Sozzini (1525–1562), the uncle
of Faustus Socinus, knew Arabic and Hebrew and gave a copy of the Quran
to Theodore Bibliander (1509–1564), the Swiss orientalist who published
the first printed Latin edition of the Quran, in Basel in 1543, based on the
medieval translation of Robert of Ketton. Miguel Servet, the original
thinker of antitrinitarianism, read and quoted Robert Ketton’s Quranic
translation. Meggitt notes that “indeed, as some of their critics accurately
observed, founding figures within Socinianism more generally had been
happy to both acknowledge that the Quran contained the same message of
the unity of God that they proclaimed, and to make use of the Quran to
support their case. Francis David, for example, used it support his non-
adorationist understanding of Jesus, and both Servetus and Socinus made
some use of it too. As the Unitarian historiographer of the Polish radical
reformation, Stanislas Lubieniecki, could say of Servetus, he ‘sucked honey
even out of the very thistles of the Koran’ in arriving at his doctrine, and in
his famous trial in Geneva in 1553 he had to defend his use of the Quran to
support his theological thought. La Croze, the French critic of Socinianism,
could claim, with some justification, that Unitarians, in the infancy of their
sect, ‘cited the Alcoran as one of the Classick Books of their Religion,’ even
if later followers were rather more reticent in acknowledging this debt.”1666
Miguel Servetus: The Martyr of Liberty
Miguel Servet (Serveto, 1511–1553)1667 was a Spanish theologian,
physician, and humanist. He anticipated the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment by denying Jesus’ divinity, co-equality with God, original
sin, redemptive death, satisfaction by grace and predestination. He argued
that Jesus was a human prophet and Messiah, to be emulated in morality.
According to Michael Allen Gillespie, Servet was the founding father of
modern anti-Trinitarianism, ensuing liberalism and liberty, “it was the anti-
Trinitarianism that he defended that ultimately provided the answer to the
intolerance and fanaticism at the heart of the Reformation conflict.
Moreover, it was his thought, transmuted and transmitted by Italian
humanists to Transylvania and Poland that came to play a decisive role in
the development of a more liberal outlook in Holland, Britain, and America.
In short […] Michael Servetus was an unacknowledged father or at least
forefather of liberalism.”1668 Huge Trevar-Roper, like many other scholars,
considered Servet the father of later Socinians who played an important role
in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. “Calvin himself might have
Servetus, an early Socinian, burnt in Geneva, but Calvin’s followers raged
in vain against the followers of Servetus in Holland.”1669 Trevor-Roper
observed that the anti-Trinitarian movement, originally initiated by Erasmus
and fueled by his student Servet, was older than Calvinism and more
comprehensive, lasting and relevant than it. “The tables had been turned on
history, and the Socinian Servetus had triumphed in the very capital of his
grim enemy, Calvin.”1670
Miguel Servet came from Spain, where Islamic rule prevailed for
centuries, and where still hundreds of thousands of Moriscos lived. Marian
Hillar,1671 Peter Hughes1672 and S. Ritchie1673 declare Michael Servetus as an
authority on the Quran. They have demonstrated Servetus’ interest in and
dependence upon the Quran to substantiate his anti-trinitarian theology.
John Tolan agreed.1674 We know that he quoted the exact chapters and verses
of the Quran in his Restoration and other works. Calvin used this charge,
among others, against Servetus to burn him at the stake.
Servetus and the Quran
Servet’s work De trinitatis erroribus (1531) mentions the Quran several
times. In 1543 “Servet read Theodor Bibliander’s Latin translation of the
Quran that was based on the medieval translation of Robert of Ketton
(1143), and quoted Surahs 3, 4, and 5 in his main work, Restitutio
Christianismi (1553).”1675 According to Peter Hughes Servetus showed
surprising familiarity with the contents of the Quran and it affected his
analysis of what was wrong with Christianity.1676 He considered the doctrine
of Trinity as polytheism and used the Quran to refute it. He used the
Quranic chapters with their original Arabic names.1677 Servetus quoted the
unreserved Quranic condemnation of Trinity in Surahs 11, 12 and 28 to
show that the traditional Trinitarian formula was basically polytheism,
making partners with God, and that the Trinity was a later invention as it
was unfound in the disciples’ generation.1678 He quoted the exact Quranic
words, such as Ruhullah (Spirit from God), while referring to Christ and
noticed that the claims of Christ’s divinity were the main reasons that
Muhammad denied Christ’s sonship.1679 Hughes declares him as an
“interfaith liberal” who was open to “reading wisdom in the Quran.”1680
“The doctrine of the Trinity, he affirmed, was without warrant of Scripture
and without support of reason. He ridiculed it as a piece of nonsense and a
fable [...] a being who was three Gods in one was an impossible existence,
he held.”’1681 Servet noted: “How much this tradition of the Trinity has,
alas! been a laughing-stock to the Mahometans, only God knows. The Jews
also shrink from giving adherence to this fancy of ours, and laugh at our
foolishness about the Trinity; and on account of its blasphemies they do not
believe that this is the Messiah who was promised in their law. And not only
Mahometans and Hebrews, but the very beasts of the field, would make fun
of us did they grasp our fantastical notion, for all the works of the Lord
bless the one God. Hear also what Mahomet says; for more reliance is to be
given to one truth which an enemy confesses than to a hundred lies on our
side. For he says in his Alcoran that Christ was the greatest of the prophets,
the spirit of God, the power of God, the breath of God, the very soul of
God, the Word born of a perpetual virgin by God’s breathing upon her; and
that it is because of the wickedness of the Jews toward him that they are in
their present wretchedness and misfortune. He says, moreover, that the
Apostles and Evangelists and the first Christians were the best of men, and
wrote what is true, and did not hold the Trinity, or three Persons in the
Divine Being, but men in later times added this.”1682 Servet, like Locke and
Newton after him, was a scripturalist who depended solely on the scriptures
for central doctrines of Christianity; the Catholic Church’s tradition, like the
later reformists, was no authority in the matters of faith and doctrine.
“Servetus was the fruit of the freethinking of his time grafted upon the basal
principle of Protestantism, namely the supreme and final authority of the
Scriptures.”1683 The Quran substantiated the original monotheistic intent of
the Christian scriptures. “The Qur’ān […] offers a more correct assessment
of Christ than do the Trinitarian theologians. Servet subsequently came
across a copy of Bibliander’s Qur’ān and made extensive use of it in his
Christianismi Restitutio, published in Vienne in 1553 as an expanded
broadside against Trinitarian doctrine that was to provoke the ire of
Catholic and Protestant authorities and would eventually cost him his
life.”1684 Tolan further noted that “the Qur’ān confirms and complements
Servet’s antitrinitarian arguments, notably showing how the Trinity was a
blasphemous innovation of the early Church and quite alien to the teachings
of Jesus and his apostles. Moreover, Muhammad’s antitrinitarianism
prevented him from recognising Jesus as the Son of God: ’Because of the
misguided teachings of the Trinitarians, he dissented from Christianity,
which was truly an unfortunate tragedy for the world.’”1685 To Servet,
Muhammad was the real reformer of Christianity and its Trinitarian
excesses. “For Servet, Mahomet is better than all of them, Catholic or
Protestant, because he is closer to the teaching of Christ; he is a reformer
who preaches the unity of God. This does not mean that Servet approves of
Islam; Mahomet’s dissent from Christianity is a ‘tragedy,’ but a tragedy for
which the responsibility lies with those who preached the absurd doctrines
of the Trinity. Obviously it comes as no surprise, he says, if the Turks laugh
at us more than at asses and mules, since we have been made like the horse
and the mule, which have no intellect.”1686 Such an indictment was too
much for Calvin.
Under the leadership of John Calvin, the Turk Servetus was burned at the
stake as a heretic, in accordance with the sixth-century Justinian code
against anti-trinitarianism. Reformists like Calvin, who originally aimed for
religious tolerance, quickly became as intolerant as the old Roman church.
Both branches of Christianity persecuted hundreds and thousands of so-
called heretics who deviated from or questioned accepted dogmas such as
the Trinity. Servetus had denied original sin, predestination, and satisfaction
through crucifixion. He valued human dignity, good nature, reason, and
good works and through them human autonomy in moral decisions.
Servetus insisted that all humans have the right to think individually,
express their religious views, and follow their consciences.
Servetus further advanced that the Biblical God had wrongly chosen the
Jewish people and graced them with his special covenant. This was
arbitrary predestination antithetical to the justice of true God. Both
Catholics and Protestants, following the biblical notion of the covenant,
extended that supposed God-given grace to certain individuals at the time of
creation rather than to a nation or a people such as the Jews. For instance,
Calvin completely ruled out that a man can attain salvation through good
works, and rather insisted that eternity and salvation was completely
determined by God. Servetus vehemently opposed the doctrine of arbitrary
predestination and grace while emphasising upon salvation based upon
good works and morality. Servetus paid with his life for opposing Calvin
and traditional Christian dogmas, but left a legacy of anti-trinitarianism,
religious freedom, toleration, and salvation through good works. To John
Tolan, he was the martyr of Unitarianism.1687 Unitarians, such as Ferenc
David and Giorgio Biandrata, followed Servet’s theology. The Socinians
followed them in opposing Orthodox dogmas and emphasising human
autonomy, religious tolerance, freedom of religious expression, and
conscience.
The same Socinian/Unitarian influence is seen in the writings of Locke,1688
Newton and other Enlightenment thinkers, through Joseph Priestley and
others - all the way to the Founding Fathers of America, such as Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Ethan Ellan and
others.1689 Islamic teachings regarding religious pluralism, original sin, free
will, salvation through good deeds, individual moral responsibility, limited
monarchy and republicanism were handy instruments for Servetus,
Socinians, and Enlightenment thinkers, especially radical reformists such as
Henry Stubbe and John Toland.
Martin Mulsow observes: “Throughout the entire Seventeenth century, it
(Socinianism) became the specter of all Christian denominations until it
slowly transformed into unitarianism and liberal theology during the
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Further, “more interestingly,
Socinianism was in fact a precursor to the Enlightenment – and to the
Radical Enlightenment as well. Its rationalist opposition to everything that
seemed illogical in doctrine, its interpretation of the teachings of Jesus – he
was simply viewed as a human being – as some kind of moral philosophy,
and its arguments for religious tolerance foreshadow the views of the
Eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Indeed, especially during the second
half of the Eighteenth century it is possible to see a continuity between
Socinians such as Andreas Wissowatius, Samuel Przypkowsky, and Samuel
Crell on the one hand, and early Enlightenment figures such as John Locke,
Jean Le Clerc, Philipp van Limborch – even Isaac Newton and William
Whiston – on the other.”1690 In brief, Michael Servetus and Socinians were
the precursors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. German theologian
Klaus Scholder puts the Socinians alongside the Copernican revolution in
its influence on modem critical theology.1691 Even Voltaire exalted
Socinian’s countless contributions towards enlightening the intellectual
landscape of the Continent.1692 The Socinians’ close, historical and
intellectual connections with Islam are well-documented. Therefore, the
Islamic influences upon the enlightenment figures cannot be shrugged off as
mere accidents. Socinians/Unitarians, even to their worst enemies, were the
pathway to Islam. “To Protestant and Catholic critics, the fact that
Unitarians cited the Qur’ān and flourished in an Ottoman protectorate
confirmed their worst fears. A century later, in 1660, Johann Heinrich
Hottinger wrote: “those teachings that have been called from the abyss of
the old anti-Trinitarians may pave a way for Islam within the boundaries of
Europe.” The “Socinians [Unitarians],” he says, “are in fact even worse
than Islam.”1693 The constant fight of both Catholic and Protestant
leadership against the Socinian/Unitarians opened the Pandora’s Box of
Islamic refutations of Church Christianity, and facilitated the reach of
Islamic ideas to European elites and common readership. Islam was equated
with Unitarian rationalism, humanism and republicanism. The “turban
wearing Socinians”1694 were quite influential in Europe. “Sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Europeans could not be indifferent to Islam and its
prophet. The danger of much of Europe falling under Ottoman dominion
was quite real. The possibility that Europeans would be seduced by
Ottoman opulence, by the relative peace that reigned among its numerous
religious communities, by the simplicity and rationality of its doctrines, was
ominous to both Protestants and Catholics. The intellectual tools they
forged to fight this menace, such as Bibliander’s Qur’ān, were being used
against them by dissident Christians and risked weakening and dividing
Christian Europe even further, or so it seemed to some.”1695 Many European
elites who fought for the rational and republican values - wittingly or
unwittingly -absorbed things Islamic. John Milton was one of those
adventurist souls.
 Chapter 11

John Milton: The Pious Muslim?

John Milton1696 (1608–1674) was at first an Arminian, a sixteenth-century

soteriological sect of Protestant Christianity, but at his death he left a
manuscript On Christian Doctrine, not discovered and published until 1825,
which showed that he had become a Socinian/Unitarian in belief.1697 In On
Christian Doctrine, “Milton rejects the Trinity, denies creation ex nihilo,
and insists on the common materiality and mortality of body and soul (CP
VI: 590). It seems absurd that the idiosyncratic Christian revealed by de
doctrina – who also opposed infant baptism, scorned paid clergy, renounced
state interference in religious affairs, defended divorce, and approved of
polygamy — could be heard as a voice of orthodoxy.”1698 Milton, like
Locke and Newton, tried to avoid clerical and monarchical persecutions by
hiding his heterodoxy, anti-clerical and anti-monarchical radical impulses.
Paul Best, John Biddle and other anti-Trinitarians were constantly
imprisoned, tortured and persecuted during Milton’s life. Constant calls
were made for execution of Thomas Hobbes. Milton himself was
interrogated about licencing of Socinian Racovian Catechism. “The outright
denial of the Trinity was indeed a far more serious position: from it would
follow, in the eyes of the Calvinists, a complete unraveling of Christian
society, beginning with an anarchy of doctrine, and ending with a depraved
society, via the idolatry of worshiping Jesus as a person, and the
lawlessness implicit in a world without original sin, divine punishment, or
Christ’s atonement.”1699 But his early commentators, like John Toland and
Daniel Defoe, were certain that the poet was anti-Trinitarian.1700
On the other hand, he supported Socinian heterodoxy wherever he could.
Milton was the government licensor during Cromwell’s Commonwealth
government and licensed publishing of Socinian Racovian Catechism, the
central Socinian religious tract sometimes called the Socinian Bible.
“Indeed Milton’s licensing of the Socinian Racovian Catechism helped
introduce antitrinitarianism into public discourse.”1701 He popularised the
radical (both political and theological) themes of John Selden, Samuel
Purchas, Herbert of Cherbury, Henry More, and Socinians. His anti-
Trinitarian, republican, historical and rational critique of the Judeo-
Christian tradition was well-reflected in his Paradise Lost, Paradise
Regained and Samson Agonistes.1702 These works were precursors to the
Enlightenment’s rational critique and re-evaluation of the Christian religion
when placed in their historical context of Socinian, Unitarian and Deist
debates about Trinity, original sin, predestination, Christian salvific scheme
and religious tolerance. They are clearly anti-Trinitarian, anti-Fall with its
antecedents, pro free will and religious tolerance.1703 “Paradise Lost is
about the angelic rebellion and the fall of man. But both of these, Milton’s
language implies, can be viewed as parts of a struggle between polytheism
and monotheism.”1704 In Paradise Regained Milton’s questions, answers,
vocabulary, ideas and insinuations are all monotheistic and anti-
Trinitarian.1705 “Antitrinitarianism seems indeed to have been early readers’
common complaint. Charles Leslie in 1698 condemned Milton for making
‘the Angels ignorant of the blessed Trinity.’ […] John Dennis, commenting
in 1704 on Book 3.383-95, claimed that “Milton was a little tainted with
Socinianism, for by the first verse ‘tis evident that he looked upon the Son
of God as a created Being.” When Bishop Charles Sumner published his
translation of the treatise, he listed Newton, Trapp, Todd, Symmons,
Warton, and Calton as previous readers who, without ever having seen de
doctrina, regarded Milton’s poetry as heretically Arian. Finally, Thomas
Macaulay, commenting on Milton’s Arianism just after the treatise was
published, asserts that “we can scarcely conceive that any person could
have read Paradise Lost without suspecting him of [it].”1706
Milton’s Christology
Milton’s Jesus is definitely a created being, void of all divine pretentions
and absolute attributes. God the Father is eternally One, self-existent and
self-sufficient, while the Son is not co-eternal but contingent and existent in
time.1707 The Son is limited, mutable and localised.1708 Depending upon the
Father’s will the Son increases in power, dominion, stature, authority and
knowledge; this would not be the case had he been eternal, immutable,
infinite and unlimited. His powers, creation and dominion are derivative
and secondary. Milton concludes that the Son was begotten not from
eternity but “within the limits of time.”1709 This was in line with Arianism:
“Arians deny the Son the essential divine attribute of unbegottenness - or
eternal existence - and also deny him related attributes such as
omnipotence, omniscience, and ubiquity. Inferior to the Father, the Son is
not ‘very’ or ‘true’ God, but instead, per the formulation in de doctrina, ‘a
God who is not self-existent, who did not beget but was begotten, is not a
first cause but an effect, and is therefore not a supreme God’ (CP VI: 263-
64).”1710 William Empson observed that “the poem makes the Son and the
Father about as unidentical as a terrier and a camel.”1711 Michael Bauman
makes a strong case for Milton’s Arianism and heterodoxy;1712 how can the
created, finite and derivative Son be equal with God, the infinite eternal
Creator?1713 There is crystal-clear disparity of substance, nature, office,
agency, subsistence and function. The derivative, secondary, soft dominion
and time-bound reverential pre-existence is antithetical to the everlasting
eternity and absolute, non-derivative and self-subsistence divinity of God
Almighty. Milton, Locke and Newton are all Socinian heretics in their
Christology and attribution of preexistence to Jesus in a reverential
manner.1714 Newton’s “arguments are close to those presented in de
doctrina. He is also, like Locke, a prime example of the wave of
antitrinitarian heresy that swept over late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-
century England. For Newton as for the author of de doctrina, trinitarianism
confused causes and as a species of polytheism, was an instance of the
gravest sin, idolatry. Both insisted on the Arian position primarily because
each viewed God as indivisibly one. As the author of de doctrina wryly
observes, ‘it would have been a waste of time for God to thunder forth so
repeatedly that first commandment which said that he was the one and only
God, if it could nevertheless be maintained that another God existed as
well’ (CPvi: 212).”1715 God’s eternal and omnipresent absolute essence,
casual priority and universal everlasting dominion are in sharp contrast with
the Son. Milton makes God say of Himself, “Who am alone/ From all
eternity, for none I know/ Second to me or like, equal much less.”1716 God is
far superior and the Son is far inferior in nature, substance and powers.
Adam’s answers indicate that the truth of God’s numeric unity, unique
substance and infinite nature are essential truths, needing no further
substantiation: “No need that thou shouldst propagate, already infinite;/And
through all numbers absolute, though one.”1717 To Maurice Kelley and
Michael Bauman this is a clear anti-Trinitarian statement.1718 Maurice
Kelley observes that Milton “holds a consistent, anti-Trinitarian view of
God during all the last period of his life. In the De Doctrina (1658-1660) he
holds that the Son is neither coessential nor coeternal with the Father,’ and
Ruth Kivette shows the persistence of this anti Trinitarianism in Milton’s
Artis Logica (1672) and Of True Religion (1673). In this context, Paradise
Lost (1667) should be assumed as also anti-Trinitarian; and parallels
between Milton’s systematic theology, his epic, and his textbook on logic
affirm this assumption.”1719
Like Locke and Newton, Milton exalts Jesus as a result of his willing
sacrifices, divinely assigned and sanctioned redeeming acts and unfettering
obeidence, “in Paradise Lost, once the Father has determined to show
humanity mercy, the Son volunteers to act as redeemer and rescue
humankind from death and the Father enables him to do so: ‘all Power / I
give thee’ (3.317-18; see also 203-302). Similarly, the Father assigns him
the task and provides the means of defeating the rebel angels: ‘Two days are
therefore past, the third is thine; / For thee I have ordain’d it [...] / [...] Into
thee such Virtue and Grace / Immense I have transfus’d’ (6.699—704).
Creation, too, occurs at the Father’s pleasure, through the Son: ‘thou my
Word, begotten Son, by thee / This I perform’ (7.163-64).”1720 This pre-
creation and post-resurrection exaltation is neither eternal nor everlasting.
The orthodox emphasis on atoning death and crucifixion is diminished.
John Rogers noted that “it is Christ’s having offered himself, not actually
having died, that reconciles man and God.”1721
The Paradise Regained’s subtle anti-Trinitariansm is reflective of Paul
Best, John Biddle and Socinians’ minimalistic monotheism, as well as the
controversies surrounding Milton and his society.1722 The Unitarian Paul
Best (1590 - 1657) was imprisoned several times, and finally died in prison,
due to his strong anti-Trinitarian writings. Best contended “that of three
coequall persons to be but the Chappell of Rome, for the Church of Christ,
and that which keepeth the rest of the world in the Pope’s Pownd [...] both
the Jews that believe the Old Testament, the Turk, and the Great Mogull,
etc., according to the dictate of common intelligence, not corrupt in this
kind by a contrary habit, who cannot be brought to believe in a Trinity
implying Polytheosie, or Apotheosie, i.e., many gods or man-god. So that
the denying of a second Deity or Godhead is not destructive of faith, but
onely removes it from a false foundation to a true.”1723 Milton’s continuous
insistence upon monotheism and derivative time bound existence of Jesus
was a clear reflection of the Socinian/Unitarian Christology and a
clandestine support to Biddle and Best. Modern scholars who try to impose
Orthodoxy upon Milton because he used Orthodox scriptural terms are
misplaced.1724 He, like Locke, did not see the Trinity, satisfaction through
grace and atoning death, divinity of Jesus and absolute predestination in the
scriptures. Kelley states that “Milton disliked the doctrine of the Trinity: he
considered it unscriptural (XV, 262), hastily adopted on the authority of
almost a single, dubious text (XIV, 402), and supported by strange and
absurd hypotheses that have no foundation in holy writ (XIV, 378). Milton
would not appreciate the false aura of orthodoxy with which these anti-
Arian phrases invest his views, for his views, a comparison with Earl Morse
Wilbur’s A History of Unitarianism will show, are not Trinitarian at all.
Rather, they constitute a classic example of Renaissance anti-
Trinitarianism.”1725 Milton’s scriptural phrases are totally void of Trinitarian
Incarnational content.
In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton repeatedly insisted upon the numerical
Oneness of God Almighty. His anti-Trinitarian impulses were abundantly
clear: “The numerical significance of ‘one’ and ‘two’ must be unalterable
and the same for God as for man. It would have been a waste of time for
God to thunder forth so repeatedly that first commandment which said that
he was the one and only God, if it could nevertheless be maintained that
another God existed as well, who ought to be thought of as the only
God.”1726 Milton extended John Selden’s work on polytheism and Lord
Bolingbrook’s works on monotheism. He like Deists, Socininas, Unitarians
and Locke insisted upon rational treatment of monotheism and theology to
make Christianity reasonable. Both internal and external worship belonged
to One and Only God. He analysed the fact that the worship could be for
one God, or no God or multiple gods. He rejected the logical plausibility of
the last two prepositions to insist upon the monotheistic worship and love.
“Internal worship means, in the first place, acknowledgement of the one
true God and devout affection for him [...] Opposed to this is atheism [...]
And polytheism, which means acknowledgment of more than one God.”1727
Milton’s Scripturalism
Milton insistently stuck to the scriptures at the expense of Trinitarian
tradition of the Church.1728 “For my own part, I adhere to the Holy
Scriptures alone-I follow no other heresy or sect. I had not even read any of
the works of heretics, so-called, when the mistakes of those who are
reckoned for orthodox, and their incautious handling of Scripture first
taught me to agree with their opponents whenever those opponents agreed
with Scripture.”1729 His literal and sole dependence upon the scripture was
no less emphatic than Michael Servetus or Socinians. Both Servetus and
Socinians claimed that the Trinity, selective predestination, religious
persecutions and total human wretchedness were not substantiated by the
scriptures. Milton agreed with all these prepositions.
Milton was against religious intolerance, persecution and absolutism; he
actively preached republican revolt against persecuting power structures.1730
Both Biddle and Best were persecuted for their anti-Trinitarian views. The
sceptical world of Samson Agomstes relayed the Deistic/Socinian love for
pluralism and toleration, and a critique of the Christian tradition. “In
Samson Agonistes, Milton experiments with Edward Lord Herbert of
Cherbury’s radical expression of the discourse of monotheism, which
replaces revelation with rational insight – with an epistemology that
supports natural religion. This extreme and proto-deist version of
monotheism, like Cherbury’s abstract God in the geometric godhead […]
resists narration. With the continued absence of revelation in Samson
Agonistes, as Samson’s despairing ‘sense of heaven’s desertion’ […] goes
unremedied, the possibility of theodicy, the poem’s ability to claim with the
Chorus that ‘just are the ways of God/ and Justifiable to men’ […]
collapses. And with the fall of theodicy, the poem opens itself, at least
momentarily, to the subversion of the Mosaic distinction—to a reevaluation
of the Judeo-Christian revelation itself.”1731 His Arianism indicted the
Athanasian Nicaean Creed of corruption and fraud against the original
Unitarian message of Jesus and his disciples.
J. B. Pittion showed that Milton’s views, scriptural methods and derivative
schemes were totally Socinian. He used Socinian arguments against Christ’s
co-eternity and co-equality with God the Father, and blamed Orthodoxy for
wrongly attributing scriptural divine attributes to Jesus. “The intellectual
evolution which led Milton to hold anti-trinitarian views was of course
entirely his own. But his handling of La Place in chapter v shows that when
he wrote the chapter, he was committed to Socinian views against the
doctrine of the Trinity.”1732 Martin A. Larson contended that Milton’s
thoughts were Socinian, but his overall system of belief was a copy of
Michael Servetus.1733 After a lengthy analysis and comparison of their
writings, Larson concluded that “there is some kind of relation between
Milton and Servetus I am unable to doubt […] the parallels which have
been traced in the present paper are of value in enabling us to define more
clearly Milton’s theological conceptions and to relate them to the history of
Christian dogma. They also illustrate the similarity of result produced when
humanistic ethics, Renaissance philosophy, and scriptural Christianity unite
in sincere, progressive, and profound minds.”1734 Milton was an heir to the
enlightened legacy of Servetus, Unitarians and their Islamic hybrid.
Dennis Danielson explained that Milton was totally against the Calvinist
dogma of predestination and popularised human free will. “Milton in
Christian Doctrine, that ‘neither God’s decree nor his foreknowledge can
shackle free causes with any kind of necessity’. For otherwise, God himself
is made ‘the cause and author of sin’; and to refute this conclusion ‘would
be like inventing a long argument to prove that God is not the Devil.”1735
God’s foreknowledge did not mean predestination and imposition. “We
should feel certain that God has not decreed that everything must happen
inevitably. Otherwise we should make him responsible for all the sins ever
committed, and should make demons and wicked men blameless. But we
should feel certain also that God really does foreknow everything that is
going to happen.”1736 To Milton, the Fall with all its implications of human
depravity and total dependence upon God’s grace and Jesus’ crucifixion for
salvation “was not necessary.”1737
Abraham Stoll well summarised the scholarly assessment of Milton’s
theology and outlook. Milton “has been associated with Arianism, with the
anti-trinitarian reformers Michael Servetus and Bernardino Ochino, with
Unitarianism and Socinianism, with subordinationism, and with orthodoxy
[...] Most frequently, Milton has been called an Arian: Kelley calls Paradise
Lost ’an Arian document’ […] Hunter and Patrides assert orthodoxy by
arguing against Arianism. Recently, Michael Bauman has devoted a book
full of meticulous detail to defending the Arian label. Ultimately, I agree
with Christopher Hill, who shrugs at the ‘great pother’ made over how to
label Milton’s theology, arguing that it is too ‘eclectic’ to fit a single heresy
[...] Here, therefore, Milton will simply be called an antitrinitarian. Yet
attention to the fine distinction between Arianism and Socinianism will
prove crucial to understanding both Milton’s anti-trinitarianism and
Paradise Regained.”1738 To the majority of scholarship, Milton was an anti-
Trinitarian heretic. I agree with Herbert McLachlan that Milton, like Locke
and Newton, was a Unitarian heretic.1739
Milton and Middle Eastern Culture
Milton was profoundly invested in Middle Eastern culture and imagery.1740
Muhammad Inani, who translated “Paradise Lost” into Arabic in 1928,
molded Milton into an Islamic, Middle Eastern, heterodox poet due to
Milton’s use of words of Arabic and Persian origin, Islamic imagery and
Ottoman motifs.1741 As discussed above, Islam, Muslims, Quran and
Ottomans were well known to the English society of Milton and his
“mature works show occasional use of Arabic sources, or at least use of
sources themselves dependent upon Arabic material.”1742 The Levant
Company merchants, chaplains like William Biddulph, Charles Robson, Dr.
Edward Pococke, Thomas Pritchett, Bartholomew Chapple,1743
ambassadors, Barbary captives and renegades transmitted a great deal of
knowledge about Ottomans, their religion and culture to England. The
seventeenth century was also the century of Arabic, Persian and Turkish
manuscript collections and their translations into Latin and English. The
rational, anti-Trinitarian, human Christology of the Ottomans was well
known and oft debated in England of Milton times. “Milton could have
learned a great deal about Islam and the culture of Muslim peoples from
reading works such as Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks
(1603), George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey (1615), and Andrew More’s
Compendius History of the Turks (1660) as well as Samuel Purchas’s
Hakluytus Posthumous.”1744 The Islamic critiques of Christian Trinitarian
monotheism and alternative Islamic Unitarian monotheism were employed
by English dissenters to dislodge Orthodox Anglican establishment of its
absolutist claims; Milton was an integral part of that deconstruction. David
Currell noted “there were in the seventeenth century two principal
discourses bringing a historically and doctrinally grounded engagement
with Islam into English theological contexts: the discourse of monotheism
and the discourse of anti-Trinitarianism. One discourse is apparently
ecumenical and the other apparently sectarian, although the difference may
at times be a matter of perspective, as both challenged the orthodox view of
Jesus as the coequal and coeternal Son of God whose mediation is essential
to human salvation, and were therefore at the centre of a polemical
environment in which Milton was an important participant.”1745 The anti-
Trinitarian deconstruction was aimed at the Church and King’s claims to
supernatural connections and authority. The alternative human Christology
was geared towards bringing down the Church and monarch to earthly
prepositions of limited constitutionalism and democratisation. The mature
Milton was a republican heretic with radical theological and political
agendas, just like Stubbe, Toland and Locke after him.
Milton’s Trinitarian orthodoxy evolved, just like John Locke’s, as a result
of anti-Trinitarian and anti-clerical controversies in which Islam and
Ottomans were employed as a whip and a corrective measure to internal
English fiascos.1746 Milton’s Paradise Regained can be reflected through the
prism of Socinian, Unitarian Islamic monotheistic hybrid. “Monotheistic
narrative” is nevertheless a very enabling rubric through which to encounter
a text such as Paradise Regained in the light of Islam, which rules Jesus
decisively to the far side of the Mosaic distinction. “This is not Milton’s
object, but the degree to which his Jesus is cut off from both the Son of
Paradise Lost and the divine scaffolding of Paradise Regained—the
heavenly and diabolic councils, but even the angelic cheerleaders—is
thrown thereby into high relief.”1747
Additionally, Milton’s constant efforts to avoid satisfaction through the
atoning death of Christ and total censorship of discussion about the
Crucifixion has convinced many scholars of Milton’s Socinian Islamic
Christology. “Many critics have explored the influence of anti-
Trinitarianism’s ‘new theology of the Son of God’ and ‘consequent denial
of an atonement occasioned by his Crucifixion’ upon Milton’s ‘extravagant
avoidance of the subject of Crucifixion’ as the indispensable satisfaction for
sin required by God, with particular reference to Socinianism. Both the
challenge to the orthodox theology of Sonship and the de-emphasis upon
crucifixion and satisfaction in evaluating Jesus’ importance to humanity
constitute homologies between Socinianism and Islam, and some
scholarship has pressed beyond homology to explore the historical
influence between the Qur’ān, Islamic thought and the development of
Socinianism.”1748 Milton was an heir to the Islamic anti-Trinitarian
Christology, which was quite prevalent and influential in Milton’s milieu.
“Anti-Trinitarianism, then, was another vector along which Islam entered
Protestant discourse, and not always with a negative valence.”1749 Islamic
theology was employed for internal apologetic concerns.1750 Currell notes
that “Islamic theology and Milton’s poetry can be seen to participate in this
movement, their very discordancy suggesting not a potential completeness
so much as a method of probing the tension established by the very
structure of monotheistic narrative. Productive conjunctions between
Milton and the Qur’ān are possible even at a textual level. The episodes of
Satan’s rebellion and the war in Heaven and their causal association with
the begetting of the Son are largely untethered to scriptural authority, and
Milton’s licence here takes him very close to the motifs, if not the precise
narrative, of the fall of Iblis in the Qur’ān,”1751 Paradise Lost (e.g. 1.582–7,
1.763–6, 9.33–38) rejected the old animosity of the Crusades and envisaged
an interfaith union and assimilation. “Milton deliberately figures the
Parthian empire as proleptically Islamic. The ‘half moons’ (PR 3.309) of the
Parthian muster suggest the ‘Turkish crescent’ formation in the briefer
snapshot of Eastern military prowess in Paradise Lost (10.434). More
significantly, the long geographical survey of the ancient Assyrian,
Babylonian, Persian, Emathian and Parthian empires, from ‘Indus East,
Euphrates West […] to South the Persian Bay’ and a host of major cities
tracks closely the extent of contemporary Islamic empires, Ottoman,
Persian and Mughal (3.269–93).”1752 Milton’s profound interactions with
Eastern imagery, vocabulary, history and motifs along with his anti-clerical,
anti-Fall, anti-Trinitarian, ethical monotheistic and republican reformation
scheme is identical with the reformative schemes of radical and moderate
enlightenment figures, in which Islamic Christology and political thought
were quite visible. Milton’s Jesus was no less an Islamic Jesus than the
human Jesus of Stubbe, Toland and Locke. David Currell identifies Milton’s
Jesus with the Muslim Jesus.1753 “As David Quint comments: “Milton
invites the reader of book 3 to hear a quiet question and appeal lurking
beneath the Son’s confidence: surely God will not leave him in the
loathsome grave, will he? […] The confident Son shares his faith directly
with the Father, but it is still the same act of faith in which every Christian
partakes against doubt before the physical fact of death.” It is that question,
amplified and focused thanks to Jesus’ humanity, that lends Paradise
Regained its poignancy and drama. For many readers, the narrative frame or
a personal or projected orthodoxy militate against these qualities, but
reading through Islam it is plausible to hear Milton’s Jesus echoing his
Muslim counterpart: “I do not know whether he will save me or not.”1754
Luwis ‘Awad, the distinguished scholar and former professor of English
literature at the University of Cairo, in 1967 declared Milton’s works to be
entirely in accordance with the teachings of Islam. “When we read Paradise
Lost, we feel that Milton is a devout Muslim. This is reflected in his
rejection of Prelates and their mediation between God and His creatures.
You also find Milton as a lover of life on earth. He interprets the Bible in
practical and personal ways. He advocates divorce and considers man
superior to woman. He also hates the rituals of church and the icons. He
draws on the Old Testament, not the New Testament. For these reasons, I
have already said that Milton was not Christian, but rather a pious
Muslim.”1755 Gerald MacLean is not that sure, but is condescending in a
way. “In revising the story of the double fall for his own purposes, he seems
to have come close to reproducing key elements of the Quranic version of
how evil entered into the human world. The question then follows: how can
we be sure that Luwis ‘Awad was wrong to claim that Milton was, in many
respects, ‘a pious Muslim?’”1756
 Chapter 12

Isaac Newton: The Enraged Anti-Trinitarian

Isaac Newton (1642-1727), a close friend of John Locke and a “fellow
heretic,”1757 was also a Socinian and a Unitarian, with minor diverging
Arian leanings. He was a friend and colleague of Dr. J. Covel (1638-1722)
who was Levant Company’s chaplain in Constantinople in 1670, travelled
extensively in the Ottoman Empire and collected a lot of manuscripts.
Covel probably developed his heterodox views while in the Ottoman
Empire.1758 Covel became chaplain to Princess of Orange in Hague on his
return from Constantinople, and then vice chancellor of Newton’s
Cambridge University. Newton’s extensive correspondence with Dr. Covel
while in Constantinople is well recorded.1759 His regular discussions with
Dr. Covel were helpful sources of Newton’s knowledge about Ottomans,
their religion and habits. His Cambridge teacher, mentor and friend Dr.
Isaac Barrow had also spent years in Istanbul and other parts of the
Ottoman Empire, and was well versed with Islamic religion, theology and
culture. Newton succeeded him as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge. Newton’s alchemical enthusiasm and dependence upon
Achmet’s Arabic dream book and metaphorical interpretations in biblical
prophecies have been discussed in the previous pages. Newton’s searches
for Prisca theologia and Prisca sapientia were two sides of the same coin.
His anti-claricalism, anti-ritualism, anti-traditionalism, anti- supernatural
dogmatism, Whiggish republicanism and pluralistic tendencies are well-
documented.1760
Newton’s Unitarian monotheism and anti-Trinitarianism1761 were more
emphatic than even Locke and Milton. Like Locke, he rejected innatism,
original sin and the Trinity; his reverential pre-existent Jesus was a human
prophet, Messiah and the metaphorical Son of God due to his virgin birth
and immediate resurrection after death. He was exalted by God in creation
and resurrection, but was neither co-equal nor co-eternal with God. There
was only One God and Jesus was His prophetic Messiah. “To be a Christian
one had to believe only that Christ was the Messiah prophesied in the
Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, the Son of God who had died on the Cross
and then been resurrected on the third day.”1762 Rob Iliffe noted that Newton
“believed that the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity was a diabolical
fraud, and that all of modern Christianity was tainted by its presence. Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, was not equal in any sense to God the Father,
although he was divine, and was worthy of being worshipped in his own
right. Newton did not arrive at these beliefs as a result of pursuing some
dilettantish hobby; nor were they the result of studies he pursued at the end
of his life. Instead, they lay at the heart of a massive research programme
on prophecy and church history that he carried out early in his career. This
was at least as strenuous, and, in his eyes, at least as “rational” as his work
on physics and mathematics.”1763 Newton believed in the genuine primitive
Unitarian Christianity which was corrupted by the Church and Fathers in
the Fourth century. Newton also believed that Prophet Muhammad was a
genuine prophet sent to the Arabs.1764 He implemented his Unitarian
monotheistic theology of the One and Only Supreme God through his
natural philosophy and scientific works.1765 The Orthodoxy very well
recognised Newton’s subversive anti-Trinitarianism and scolded him for
that.
Newton’s Biblicism
Newton was an avid reader of the Bible and theological works; John Locke
described Newton as “a very valuable man not onely for his wonderful skill
in Mathematicks but in divinity too and his great knowledg in the Scriptures
where in I know few his equals.”1766 This was a tremendous testimony about
Newton’s scriptural and theological erudition from a scrupulous
scripturalist and philosopher like John Locke. Newton was extremely
interested in Christian theology and dogmatic history. Frank Manuel noted
that Newton wrote over one million words on theology and scripture and
perhaps much more.1767
His biographer Richard Westfall observed that “in a notebook he entered a
number of headings that summarised Christian theology: ‘Attributa Dei,’
‘Deus Pater,’ ‘Deus Fili us,’ ‘Incarnatio,’ ‘Christi Satisfactio, & Redemptio,’
‘Spiritus Sanctus Deus,’ and the like.”1768 Newton was obsessed with works
related to the Trinity and Christ’s person. He labouriously studied the
Christian Fathers, their arguments about Trinity and other central Christian
doctrines, a “period of intensive study was devoted not just to Scripture, but
to the writings of the Fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries. The
volume of his reading was prodigious, and he made extensive notes on his
findings.”1769 After a detailed analysis of the central Christian doctrines,
Newton rejected them all.1770 Iliffe observed that “Newton’s extensive
writings on the Trinitarian corruption of Christianity are among the most
daring works of any writer in the early modern period, and they would
merit careful study even if they had not been composed by the author of the
Principia.”1771 He was truly a Christian infidel and a Unitarian heretic. His
anti-Trinitarianism and Unitarianism was more pronounced than Locke and
he was “part of a Radical Reformation or Radical Enlightenment.”1772
He was especially focused on the Trinitarian controversy of the fourth
century when the Trinitarian saga began, and on the figures of St.
Athanasius and Arian who fought it. “More than the doctrine interested him.
He became fascinated with the man Athanasius and with the history of the
church in the fourth century, when a passionate and bloody conflict raged
between Athanasius and his followers, the founders of what became
Christian orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Arius and his followers, who
denied the Trinity and the status of Christ in the Godhead, on the other; and
he read extensively about them.”1773 Maurice Wiles observed that Newton
was “passionately anti-Athanasian rather than pro-Arian. Arius is a figure of
no great interest to him. But Athanasius was the prime cause of that
doctrinal corruption of the church, which caused such practical
embarrassment to Newton personally as well as frustrating the purposes of
God. Positively, Newton saw himself as a faithful follower of primitive
Christianity, which was taught by Scripture and to a large degree practised
by the church of the second and third centuries. And that primitive
Christianity was, as Whiston observed with reference to Newton in a way
Newton would have been reluctant to do, not very different from what had
for many centuries been designated ‘Arianism.’”1774
He fully concentrated upon Christ’s relationship with the Father;1775 his
thorough research of the Bible and Church Fathers lead him to doubt the
authenticity of both Scripture and dogma. “There was no single one of
importance whose works he did not devour. And always, his eye was on the
allied problems of the nature of Christ and the nature of God. The
conviction began to possess him that a massive fraud, which began in the
fourth and fifth centuries, had perverted the legacy of the early church.
Central to the fraud were the Scriptures, which Newton began to believe
had been corrupted to support trinitarianism.”1776 He charged Athanasius
with forgery, whose crime “was the corruption of evidence to make it
appear that the new doctrine was much older than it really was. The two
scriptural texts whose authenticity Newton had discussed with Locke were
both key texts used in support of Trinitarian doctrine. In an accompanying
letter Newton listed a further twenty-eight texts, almost all of which had, he
believed, been changed to give a Trinitarian sense in the fourth century in
the course of the Arian controversy […] Newton frequently charges
Athanasius with forgery.”1777 Newton believed that the “corruptions of
Scripture came relatively late. The earlier corruption of doctrine, which
called for the corruption of Scripture to support it, occurred in the fourth
century, when the triumph of Athanasius over Arius imposed the false
doctrine of the trinity on Christianity.”1778
Newton and Primitive Christianity
Newton observed that the original Christianity of Jesus was Nazarene
Unitarian, which later got corrupted by the idolatrous Trinitarian
Christianity. The Trinity was idolatry, the gravest of all the sins. “In
Newton’s eyes, worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, to him the
fundamental sin. ‘Idolatria’ had appeared among the original list of
headings in his theological notebook. The special horror of the perversion
that triumphed in the fourth century was the reversion of Christianity to
idolatry after the early church had established proper worship of the one
true God. ‘If there be no transubstantiation,’ he wrote in the early 1670s,
‘never was Pagan Idolatry so bad as the Roman, as even Jesuits sometimes
confess.’ Newton held that the pope in Rome had aided and abetted
Athanasius and that the idolatrous Roman church was the direct product of
Athanasius’ corruption of doctrine.”1779 Trinity was the utmost disgrace to
the One and Only God and hence the gravest of all the sins.1780 “To Newton,
idolatry represented the fundamental sin”1781 and “the most grievous version
of idolatry was to turn the Son of God into God himself.”1782
Newton, after an exhausted study of the so-called Trinitarian verses in the
New Testament and their interpretations by the Church Fathers, concluded
that the Fathers manipulated the original words and imposed Trinitarian
jargon on the verses, which were not supported by the text. This linguistic
fraud and textual violence was the source of the Trinitarian grafting on the
simple, Unitarian belief of Jesus Christ. The Roman Church, with its
clerical establishment, was solely responsible for this enormous corruption.
“In the end- and the end did not wait long- Newton convinced himself that a
universal corruption of Christianity had followed the central corruption of
doctrine. Concentration of ecclesiastical power in the hands of the hierarchy
had replaced the polity of the early church. The perverse institution of
monasticism sprang from the same source. Athanasius had patronised
Anthony, and the ‘homousians’ had introduced monks into ecclesiastical
government. In the fourth century, trinitarianism fouled every element of
Christianity. Though he did not say so, he obviously believed that the
Protestant Reformation had not touched the seat of infection. In Cambridge
of the 1670s this was strong meat indeed. It is not hard to understand why
Newton became impatient with interruptions from minor diversions such as
optics and mathematics. He had committed himself to a reinterpretation of
the tradition central to the whole of European civilisation.”1783 For this
reason, for a while Newton diverted his attention away from his natural
philosophy and scientific works to concentrate on the Church theology and
its corrupted foundations, to help in reforming Christianity on the original,
simple and Unitarian foundations. He became an Arian denying Jesus’
divinity and exalting his humanity, reverential dominion and moral efficacy;
there was no God but the One and Only Father Who created Jesus, glorified
him and bestowed upon him the honourific titles. Jesus was honoured by
God before the creation and glorified after his death. Newton collected
scriptural texts to emphasise God’s unity and Jesus’ humanity. “On the
scriptural side, a small number of texts or short passages stand out as
controlling influences on his understanding of the person of Christ. By and
large it is the same selection of scriptural evidence that had shaped Arian
understanding in the fourth century. Most formative of all is 1 Cor. 8: 5-6,
which speaks of ‘the one God, the Father, from whom are all things [...] and
the one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.’ This provides
Newton with his basic monotheistic premiss: there is one God, the Father.
Newton generalizes the point by insisting that ‘whenever it is said in the
Scriptures that there is one God, it means the Father.’”1784
Newton and Early Christian Apologists
Newton, like the second-century Christian Apologists such as Justin Martyr,
Theophilus, Tatian, Aristides and Athenagoras,1785 differentiated between
the ineffable, transcendent and eternal God and finite, begotten and
subservient Jesus. Justin, the most renowned of them, for instance insisted
that “though Jesus had come from God he was not identical with God.”1786
Jesus was Son of God, Logos and Angel of derivative, secondary and
subservient nature. “Justin’s God was a transcendent being who could have
not come into contact with the utilitarian sphere of man and things. To
Justin, it seemed altogether absurd that such a transcendent God could be
born of a woman, eat, drink and eventually be mercilessly crucified.
However, strict belief in God’s transcendence did not stop Justin from
thinking of Jesus as divine, and to defend Christ’s relationship with God he
made use of the then current Christian phraseology calling Jesus the Son of
God, Logos and also the Angel. Indeed according to him, Christ was worthy
of these titles on account of his wisdom, virgin birth and because he was
God’s first begotten Logos.”1787 Jesus’ divinity was “derivative, and for that
reason inferior to the one God [...] In Justin’s system there truly was, in the
last resort, only one ultimate God. The Logos represented a slightly lower
level of divinity, something between the pure divinity of God and the
nondivinity of creatures. Justin had made sense of the incarnational picture
of Jesus by adopting a hierarchical picture of the world-order in which the
Logos stands as a kind of bumper state between God and the world, and it is
this fact that makes Justin’s Christology problematic.”1788
Jesus was a pre-existent Logos, God’s agent in creation, through whom all
creatures were created. Therefore, he could be called Lord and worshipped
as divine but in terms of being of second rank. In his Dialogue with the
Jewish Trypho, he argued the matter at length: “I will give you, my friends,
another testimony from the Scriptures certain rational power which is called
by the Holy Spirit now Glory of the Lord, again Wisdom, again Angel,
again God, again Lord, and Logos. Also he called himself Captain of the
host when he appeared to Jesus the Son of Nave in the form of a man. For
he can be called by all these names since he serves the Father’s will and
was begotten of the Father by will.”1789 The unity of purpose and will was
antithetical to the later claims of unity of essence and substance. Alois
Grillmeier observed: “In calling the Logos the servant, the apostle, the
angel of the absolutely transcendent Father, Justin gives him a diminished
transcendence, even if he does not make him a creature. He compares the
Logos with Herms, the Logos-interpreter of Zeus [...] There is a deus
inferior subordinate to the theos hypsistos.”1790
Other apologists, such as Tatian and Hippolytus, followed Justin in his
ideas of God’s transcendence, ineffability, immutability and otherness while
maintaining his inferior Logos Christology. J. N. D. Kelly underlined the
two most important points that were common among all the Apologists: “(a)
that for all of them the description ‘God the Father’ connoted, not the first
Person of the Holy Trinity, but the one Godhead considered as author of
whatever exists; and (b) that they all, Athenagoras included, dated the
generation of the Logos, and His eligibility for the title ‘Son’, not from His
origination within the being of the Godhead, but from His emission or
putting forth for the purposes of creation, revelation and redemption. Unless
these points are firmly grasped, and their significance appreciated, a
completely distorted view of the Apologists’ theology is liable to result.”1791
The Logos had a beginning in time, a specifically assigned mission and
reward. He was not God in essence or substance but divine in his moral
efficacy, exaltation, glorification and dominion. The credit of his exaltation
and dominion went to God Almighty, who bestowed it upon him.
The Apologists clearly portrayed the Logos as required for the work of
creation in subordination to God the Father. They also manifestly limited
the Logos as compared to God Himself, to safeguard the indispensable idea
of monotheism. There were residuals of Middle Platonism in this Logos
interpretation of the Apologists. The Logos was understood in relation to
the cosmos and the world to stress God’s absolute transcendence,
invisibility and unknowableness. Almighty God was too transcendent to
directly deal with men and the world. The Logos, a product of God’s
creative will, was a subordinate mediator, a derivative god. The idea of
subordination was fortified by the close linking of the creation of the world
with the procession of the Logos, and then by the scheme of salvation or
man’s redemption through his intermediate agency. Therefore, worship of
Jesus as Logos was permitted, like the worship of angels, but not like the
worship of One and Only God.
Newton followed Justin Martyr in his derivative, secondary and
subservient Christology. He believed that Jesus was the Word of God, the
Logos begotten by God in time and used for the purposes of creation and
redemption. This created, pre-existent Logos was not co-equal with God in
substance or eternity but in moral will and obedience. “In any case the
stress is always on the distinct, personal, entitative character of the pre-
existent Logos, who is the agent of creation.”1792
Newton laid down fourteen Argumenta in Latin to show God the Father’s
ineffability, transcendence and eternity against Jesus’ begotten, finite and
derivative nature. Louis Trenchard More argued that these arguments
demonstrated that for Newton, the Son was neither coeternal with, nor equal
to, the Father. More listed Newton’s salient points as follows: “(2) Because
the Son is called the Word: John 1.1.; (4) Because God begot the Son at
some time, he had not existence from eternity. Prov. viii. 23, 25; (5)
Because the Father is greater than the Son. John XIV, 28; (6). Because the
Son did not know his last hour. Mark XIII, 32- Matt. XXIV, 36- Rev. 1.1
and V.3.; and (7) Because the Son received all things from the Father; and (
9). Because the Son could be incarnated. In the second manuscript Newton
offered seven Rationes against the traditional formulation including: (1)
Homoousian is unintelligible. ‘Twas not understood in the Council of
Nice… nor ever since. What cannot be understood is no object of belief; (6)
The Father is God, creating and a person; the Son is God, created and a
person; and the Holy Ghost is God, proceeding and a person; et tamen non
est nisi unus Deus; and (7) The Person is intellectual substance [substantia
intellectualis], therefore the three Persons are three substances.”1793
Jesus’ unity with God was nothing else but his sanctification and creation
by God. More insisted that Newton was a Unitarian. “His Unitarianism is, I
think, even more pronounced in the following: ‘Jesus therefore by calling
himself the Son of God and saying I and the Father are one meant nothing
more than that the Father had sanctified him and sent him into the
world.’”1794 Newton totally denied the Trinity and the Triune concept of
Godhead by rejecting the multiplicity of persons. “Personally, Newton was
an Arian since he states definitely that the Father and the Son are not one
substance; that the Son was created and therefore of a different substance
for, if they were of one substance then, the Father having created the
substance of the Son, He must have created his own substance. Having
placed the source of authority in the Bible and not in the Councils, he shows
that the Holy Ghost is not a person or substance by calling the two passages
in the New Testament spurious which specifically mention the Holy Ghost
as a person.”1795 Newton was totally Unitarian in insisting that Jesus was a
Prophet and not ontologically God or divine. “But Newton goes much
farther than merely to deny the doctrine of consubstantiation. He had
rationally adopted the Unitarian position that Jesus was sent by the Father
into the world as a Prophet who differed from the other Prophets only in the
immediacy of the message delivered to him. Thus he explains the claim that
‘I and my Father are one’ as a unity of purpose and not one of identity. Like
so many other Unitarians of the day, such as Locke, he here makes a break
between reason and practice, since he maintained his affiliation with the
Church of England. But, as I have remarked before, I find in this the cause
of his refusal to take orders; as a private worshipper he felt he was justified
in making reservations which his conscience was too tender to permit him
to make as a priest.”1796
Like the Apologists, Newton allowed reverential worship of Jesus based
on God-given dominion. “Tis not consubstantiality but power and dominion
which gives a right to be worshipped.’”1797 Jesus Lordship was not eternal;
it was granted to him by God after his crucifixion and resurrection. God
was eternally God, but Jesus was made Lord in time. God was worshipped
as eternally God, while Jesus was venerated as Lord in time. “‘Equality
with God’ […] is understood to refer to his ‘being worshipped as Lord’; and
that was not true of him earlier but something assumed only after the
incarnation and crucifixion. So in distinguishing the worship due to the ‘one
God’ and the ‘one Lord’, Newton regularly distinguishes between the
primary grounds for the offering of each of those two forms of worship: that
offered to the one God or Father is for his creation of all things, that offered
to the one Lord or Son is because he is the Lamb of God who was slain for
us.”1798 God’s worship was absolute, while Jesus’ veneration was relative.
Newton painstakingly insisted upon the distinction between God and Lord
in many ways. to avert any possibility of consubstantiality. “And therefore
as a father and his son cannot be called one King upon account of their
being consubstantial but may be called one King by unity of dominion if the
Son be Viceroy under the father: so God and his son cannot be called one
God upon account of their being consubstantial.”1799 He argued that such
exalting titles and reverential worship was permitted by the first
commandment. Newton limited the role of Jesus merely to creation and
redemption to avoid over-exaltation and other Orthodox ambiguities related
to the Son’s role. “Even the traditional understanding of the intermediary
role of the Son is somewhat diminished in Newton’s scheme […] There we
find that while we may call Jesus ‘God’ without transgressing the first
commandment, he is not to be worshiped as ‘God Almighty,’ but only in
relationship to his office as Monarch, as ‘Lord, the Messiah, the Great King,
and the Lamb of God.’ Christ is not worshiped on the basis of his ontology
according to Newton’s theology but on the basis of his christological
office.”1800
Even this worship, glorification and exaltation in reality belonged to God,
who glorified Jesus. Newton left no stone unturned to differentiate between
God and Jesus, and to place Jesus lower than God and a bit higher than man
due to his immediacy. “The worship wch we are directed in scripture to
give to Jesus Christ Respects his death & exaltation to the right hand of
God & is given to him as our Lord & King & tends to the glory of God the
father. Should we give the Father that worship wch is due to the Son we
should be Patripassians & should we give the Son all that worship wch is
due to the father we should make two creators and be all guilty of
polytheism & in both cases we should practically deny the father & the Son.
We may give blessing & honour & glory & power to God & the Lamb
together but it must be in different respects, to God as he is God the father
Almighty who created the heaven & earth & to the Lamb as he is the Lord
who was slain for us & washed away our sins in his own blood & is exalted
to the right hand of God the father. In worshipping them we must keep to
the characters given them in the primitive creed then we are safe.”1801
The Father is eternal, self-sufficient and self-sustaining while the Son is
finite, dependent upon and derived from God. “The Father is the ancient of
days and has life in himself originally essentially and independently from
all eternity, and has given the Son to have life in himself […] Because the
Word of God received life from the Father immediately, both before the
world began and at his resurrection from the dead, therefore he is the Son of
God in a sense peculiar to himself.”1802 Newton’s peculiar, detailed
insistence upon Jesus’ secondary, derivative and finite nature, his exaltation
of Jesus as the first born of creation and the first resurrected of the creation
and his emphasis upon Jesus’ prophetic mission make him more
Socinian/Unitarian than Arian. Like Locke, Newton’s terminologies are
traditional and more Arian-looking, but their explanations and contents are
more Socinian/Unitarian, even moreso than Locke’s. We are mostly dealing
with his private writings where Newton is mostly interacting with his own
thoughts rather than explaining himself to others or for the intent of
publications. Newton, even in these condensed private notes and writings, is
more Unitarian, Socinian and Islamic-leaning than John Locke. His God is
Unique, Eternal, Transcendent and Unitary without equals, partners and
resemblance, and his Jesus is nothing but an exalted creature by dint of his
office, and not substance or divine essence. This is a totally Unitarian
position, more emphatic than historical Arianism. Maurice Wiles observes
that “reflection on the scriptural teaching about Christ led Newton into
much bolder and more detailed affirmations than it did Locke. And those
affirmations are predominantly ‘Arian’ in character, in the sense that they
understand the pre-existent Christ as a distinct being of a secondary divine
nature. But they also lay great stress on a worship of Christ as Lord, which
is focused more on the dignity awarded to him after and on the basis of his
redemptive death […] On occasion it is emphasised to the exclusion of any
reference to Christ’s pre-existence in a manner that helps to explain why he
might sometimes have been regarded as more Socinian than Arian.”1803
Scott Mandelbrote1804 and Rob Iliffe have shown Newton’s relative use of
Unitarian authors such as John Biddle,1805 Stephen Nye1806 and similarities
with Deists authors such as Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount.1807
Newton’s insistence upon Jesus’ humanity, in time creation, natural revival
after death, prophetic and messianic role and reverential exaltation, all place
him squarely in the Unitarian/Socinian and Islamic camp. He is too
emphatic of a Unitarian to be confused with Orthodoxy or Trinitarian.
“Jesus Christ a true man born of a woman was crucified [...] and by the
same power by which God gave life at first to every species of animal being
revived, he appeared to his disciples and explained to them Moses and the
Prophets concerning himself, as that he was the Sun of righteousness
spoken of by Malachi, the son of man and the Messiah spoken of by Daniel,
the servant of God and lamb of God and Redeemer spoken of by Isaiah [...]
and is gone into the heavens to receive a kingdom and prepare a place for
us, and is mystically said to sit at the right hand of God, that is, to be next to
him in dignity, and is worshipped and glorified as the Lamb of God.” 1808
Wiles especially noted that “here Christ is portrayed not as the Word who
spoke through the prophets, but simply as the man about whom the prophets
spoke. As a careful student of Scripture, Newton found the pre-existence of
Christ inescapable, but religiously it does not seem to have been of great
importance to him. He enunciates the general principle that ‘God does
nothing by himself which he can do by another.’ The Son is his agent for the
tasks of creation and judgement. His distinctive title of ‘only begotten Son’
derives from the fact that he alone has received life directly from the Father.
But he is simply the agent of God, and ‘all other beings formed by the Son
may be considered as the works of God’s hand’. It was his redemptive
death that was distinctively Christ’s work, and the reason for his special
worship.”1809 Therefore, it was not the death of God which saved the sinful,
but the voluntary death of an exalted man. This was absolutely a
Socinian/Unitarian position, totally in opposition to everything the Church
Christianity had ever taught. “Newton seems content to see the crucifixion
as the death of a man subsequently raised to the dignity of God’s right hand,
and made by God the legitimate object of our secondary worship. At such
times a Socinian Christ seems to be all he feels the need to affirm. That
such a measure of prima-facie inconsistency should appear in jottings made
over many years and never prepared for publication or integrated into a
single coherent treatment of the theme is hardly surprising. But though one
might describe his religious position as predominantly Socinian, there is no
doubt that his overall theological position is Arian rather than Socinian. Nor
indeed is there any logical inconsistency in an ‘Arian’ belief in the pre-
existence of a divine being, the agent of the Father’s creative work, which
none the less places its main religious stress on that divine being’s
redemptive self-giving in crucifixion and on the even greater glory given by
the Father as the outcome of it.”1810 This sort of in-time, finite glory is at
odds with the eternal, co-equal, Trinitarian glory of Jesus rehearsed in the
Nicaean and Chalcedonian formulas.1811
Newton and Unitarian Theology
To Newton, the Unitarian theology of One and Only God was truly
Christian while the Trinitarian, Incarnational theology was heathenistic.
“Such opinions did not derive ‘from the Apostles by tradition’; they were
‘brought into the Church from the theology of the heathens or Cabbalists in
which learned men happened to be educated and instructed before they
became Christians.’”1812 The Roman, paganistic and idolatrous engrafting
turned the metaphorical, reverential Son of God into a real ontological Son
of God, the reverential titles used for Jesus into a Triune Godhead and a
monarchical dominion into a metaphysical dominion.1813 “If the Father or
Son be called God: they [men skilled in the learning of heathens, cabbalists,
and schoolmen] take the name in a metaphysical sense, as if it signified
God’s metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent:
whereas it relates only to God’s dominion over us to teach us obedience.
The word God is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King
but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the
supreme Lord, the Lord of the earth [...] so we say my God, our God, your
God, the supreme God, the God of the earth [...] but we do not say my
infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the supreme infinite, the infinite of the
earth [...] When therefore the Father or Son are called God, we are to
understand it not metaphysically but in a moral monarchical sense.”1814 The
transfer of the metaphor of incarnation into a metaphysic of incarnation was
categorically paganistic and heathenistic; Newton went further than that in
differentiating between God and Lord. “The word God usually signifies
Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being
which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a
true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his dominion it follows that the
true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other
perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite,
omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to
eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and
knows all things that are or can be done.”1815 The Son, begotten in time with
finite derivative powers and exaltation, can never be equal to God who is
absolutely perfect, eternal, everlasting, omnipotent and omniscient.
The Almighty God is neither anthropomorphic nor corporeal; he is self-
existing and the necessary being, the First Cause, the uncaused Cause of
everything, the Necessary through Himself while Jesus, the contingent
being, is necessary through God. God is “not eternity and infinity, but
eternal and infinite, he is not duration or space, but he endures and is
present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and, by existing
always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space [...] It is allowed
by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity
he exists always and everywhere. Whence also he is similar, all eye, all ear,
all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a
manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner
utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no ideas of colours, so we have
no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands
all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore
neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought he to be worshipped
under the representation of any corporeal thing.”1816
Newton’s above arguments resemble the Islamic transcendental notions of
God,1817 to the extent that it seems as if they were copied from the
arguments of Muslim philosophers and theologians such as Ibn Sina, al-
Farabi, Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali.1818
Ibn Sina, for instance, states that “every being, if considered from the
point of view of its essence and without consideration of other things, is
found to be such that either existence necessarily belongs to it in itself or it
does not. If existence belongs to it necessarily, then it is the truth in itself
and that whose existence is necessary from itself. This is the Independent
Reality. If, on the other hand, existence does not belong to it necessarily, it
is not permissible to say that it is impossible in itself after it was supposed
existing. But if, in relation to its essence, a condition is linked to it, such as
the condition of the nonexistence of its cause, it becomes impossible or,
such as the condition of the existence of its cause, it becomes necessary. If
no condition is linked to its essence, neither existence nor nonexistence of a
cause, then there remains for it in itself the third option, that is, possibility.
Thus, with respect to its essence, it would be a thing that is neither
necessary nor impossible. Therefore every existent either has necessary
existence in essence or has possible existence in essence.”1819 Shams Inati
explains the concept in a simple fashion: “The existence of a thing is either
necessary or possible (contingent). Necessary existence is such that if the
thing to which it belongs is assumed to be non-existent, an impossibility
arises. Possible existence is such that if the thing to which it belongs is
assumed to be non-existent or existent, no impossibility arises. Ibn Sina
mentions that in other contexts ‘possible existence’ could also be used in the
sense of ‘being in potentiality.’ Necessary existence is either that which
always belongs to a thing through that thing itself, or that which always
belongs to it through another.”1820
Causality is the main difference between the two categories (necessary
and contingent) of being; the necessary being is not caused while the
contingent is caused.1821 God, the First Mover, is the only necessary being
hence not caused.1822 The creation is contingent and caused by God.1823 Ibn
Sina further states that “if this chain includes an uncaused thing, then this
thing is an extremity and a limit. Therefore every chain terminates in that
whose existence is necessary in itself.”1824 This transcendental,
philosophical and Unitarian argument propounded by Ibn Sina and
popularized by the later Muslim philosophers and theologian might have
reached Newton through the writings of Moses Maimonides or St. Thomas
Aquinas. Both employed it in their theologico philosophical writings.
Richard H. Popkin observed that Newton was influenced by Moses
Maimonides.1825 “Another major and serious influence on Newton’s
theological views was that of the great medieval Jewish theologian, Moses
Maimonides.”1826 Popkin extended the thesis of John Maynard Keynes who
gave a lecture on the occasion of the three-hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Newton, entitled ‘Newton the Man,’ Keynes ended the lecture by
saying that “Newton was not just a closet Unitarian Arian, but ‘was rather a
Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.’”1827 To Abraham Shalom
Yahuda “Newton was a Maimonidean. Among Yahuda’s Newton
manuscripts is one entitled On Maimonides. This work consists of notes
which Newton took when he read portions of the 17th century Latin edition
of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Maimonides also appears as a frequently
cited source throughout Newton’s religious writings.”1828 This is not
surprising, given the close common Semitic monotheistic consciousness
shared by Judaism and Islam, and the close historical connections between
the works of Maimonides and his Muslim predecessors.1829
Both the Jewish Master Moses Maimonides and the medieval Christian
stalwart Thomas Aquinas took the Muslim philosopher’s arguments of God
as the necessary being and incorporated them into their philosophical
schemes. One should not overlook the influence Islamic theology and
philosophy had upon medieval Jewish thought, especially that of Karaites,
Saadia Gaon, Jacob al-Qirqisani, Isaac Israeli, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Bahya
Ibn Paquda, Abraham bar Hiyya, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah
Halevi, Abraham Ibn Daud, Moses Maimonides, Samuel Ibn Tibbon, Shem
Tov Ibn Falaquera, Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), Moses Narboni, and
Hasdai Crescas. E. Renan noted that the “Arabic philosophy was never
really taken seriously except by the Jews [...] whose literary culture in the
Middle Ages is merely a reflection of Muslim culture.”1830 To Arthur
Hyman, “by and large Jewish philosophy was a continuation of the
philosophy which flourished in the Islamic world”1831 Oliver Leaman notes
that “it is difficult to overemphasise significance which Islamic philosophy
had for Jewish thinkers who were working at the same time in the Islamic
world, or who were influenced by such work. Many Jewish thinkers wrote
in Arabic and their main philosophical authorities were Arabic authors,
which is hardly surprising given the pervasiveness of Arabic culture within
the Islamic Empire.”1832
Islam, like Judaism, was an ethical monotheistic tradition where law and
theology were crowned as highly prized sciences. There was so much
common between the two faith traditions that theological insights, inquiries,
concerns and even the legal theories and framework were almost identical.
Leaman states that “when we look at the works of thinkers such as Saadiah,
Halevi, Maimonides and even Gersonides we can observe the curriculum of
Islamic philosophy quite fully represented. They did not just take some of
the leading ideas and try to see how far they could use them to make sense
of their own philosophical concerns, as was very much the case with many
of the major Christian philosophers. The Jewish philosophers went much
further than this in their work, often working well within the tradition of
Islamic philosophy itself, albeit just as often using it to develop points
which were of specifically Jewish concern. Perhaps one of the reasons why
Jewish philosophy came to rely so much on Islamic philosophy lies in the
proximity of the religions.”1833 Steven Wesserstrom agrees that “another
reason for common cause on the part of Jewish and Muslim philosophers
was their joint monotheistic opposition to a common pagan adversary. The
ostensible impetus of this joint counterforce remains a leitmotif of
scholarship on Jewish-Muslim symbiosis.”1834 The transcendental
monotheistic tradition of Judaism and Islam were pitched against the
Trinitarian tradition of Christianity. The Jewish and Islamic philosophical-
theological collaborations against Incarnational, corporeal and
anthropomorphic Christian theology were the hallmark of medieval Jewish
Muslim symbiosis. Newton sided with the Jewish Muslim transcendental
monotheism against the Trinitarian Christianity. Newton was a product of
Islamico-Hebraic civilisation. The medieval Jewry was a true reflection of
the majority Muslim community in so many ways that it would not be
wrong to call the resultant civilisation as an Islamico-Hebraic civilisation,
as Mauro Zonta states. “We might speak of ‘Hebrew-Arabic’ philosophy
while considering the great influence of Islamic thought on much of the
Jewish philosophical legacy written in the Hebrew language during the
thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.1835
Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), confessed in a letter addressed to his
disciple, Joseph Ben Juda, written in Cairo in 1191, that “he had received
lately everything Averroes had written on the works of Aristotle and found
that he was extremely right.”1836 Majid Fakhry states that “the two
Aristotelians had so much in common, especially in their attitude to
Ash’arite Kalam, that readers of Maimonides tended to find Averroes
particularly intriguing and to look upon the former as the disciple of the
latter.”1837 Maimonides was born and raised in the Muslim Cordoba of Ibn
Rushd, and died in the Muslim Cairo. He worked for the Muslim rulers and
elites, studying and absorbed many Muslim philosophers and theologians
along his studies of the Rabbinic corpus. Maimonides, to Alexander Brodie,
“was steeped in Islamic philosophy.”1838 L. V. Berman in his Maimonides,
The Disciple of Alfarabi, argues that Maimonides was an avid disciple of al-
Farabi.1839 A. Eran shows similarities between al-Ghazali and Maimonides’
works on spirituality and soteriology.1840 S. Harvey illustrates the influence
of al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali upon the fourteenth-century Jewish
philosophers and theologians.1841 To Majid Fakhry, Maimonides was a pure
disciple of Ibn Rushd.
St. Thomas Aquinas,1842 the most known medieval philosophical
theologian and the stalwart of scholasticism, was also greatly influenced by
Muslim synthetic thought. He widely quoted from Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, al-
Farabi, al-Ghazali in his writings, acting and reacting to them in a number
of ways. He read Latin translations of their works and incorporated many of
their ideas, thoughts and arguments into his synthetic project. In short,
Newton’s arguments about God’s necessary being, the cosmological
arguments from design and overemphasis upon divine transcendence and
total rejection of anthropomorphic and corporeal depictions of God were
reflections of Muslim philosophers and theologians, whether assimilated
directly through Dr. Pococke’s works or via Moses Maimonides or St.
Thomas Aquinas. Newton’s Christology and overall theological systems
were too Islamic and Unitarian to be ignored; his verbiage was orthodox
Christian, but the detailed contents were more Islamic than mere Arian.
Newton gravitated more towards Jesus’ humanity, prophetic mission and
moral efficacy than Arians and at times even more than ambivalent
Socinians. His exalted Jesus was more natural, human, finite and
subservient than the semi-divine, relatively supernatural and omnipotent
Christ or Logos of early Arians. Newton’s insistence upon eternal,
transcendental and unique absolute attributes of God and total separation of
Jesus from anything ontologically divine and derivative finite nature,
mission-based secondary exaltation and many other non-divine attributes
were far more marked and pronounced than Arians, and at times even more
than Socinians and Deists. His derivative, natural, prophetic and angelic
Christology was in line with the radical Unitarians such as Stephen Nye and
early Muhammadan Christians such as Henry Stubbe. It was thoroughly
transcendental, monotheistic and natural, and in total opposition to the
anthropomorphic, corporeal, supernatural and Trinitarian Christology of the
historical Christianity.
Newton and Nicaean Christology
Newton’s Christology was a total indictment of the Orthodox Christianity.
This was a total deviation from the Church Nicaean Christology and a full
swing to the Arian, Unitarian and Socinian camp, though he kept his beliefs
to himself and to his selected confidants to avoid the social, financial and
religious persecutions common during his times. “It is useful to set
Newton’s behavior in the early 1670s against the background of his
Arianism. He identified himself with Arius, both intellectually and
emotionally. He relived the terrible struggles of the fourth century, when
doctrine counted for more than charity, came to see Athanasius as his
personal nemesis, and learned to hate him fiercely. When questions, which
look legitimate to us, about his theory of colours seemed to drive him
frantic, the pattern that disagreement took in the fourth century may have
determined his conduct. He wished to avoid controversy at all costs. On the
most important question of all, he had to avoid controversy.”1843 Newton’s
boss was an enthusiastic and vocal Trinitarian; he was aggressively anti-
Arian and anti-Socinian. Newton concealed his beliefs to avert the
confrontation. “Since any discussion was fraught with the danger of ruin,
Newton chose silence […] Newton concealed his views so effectively that
only in our day has full knowledge of them become available.”1844
Newton, a zealous student of prophecies - especially in the Books of
Daniel and Revelation - interpreted them as confirming the Trinitarian
apostasy and emperor Theodosius’ persecutions of original Unitarian
Christians. It was Emperor Theodosius who, after the initial peaceful period
of coexistence and Arian ascendancy, patronised the idolatrous Trinitarians,
unleashing the state and Church persecutions against the anti-Trinitarian
Christians. “The seventh seal, within which the seven trumpets (which also
represent successive periods of time) are included, began with the year 380
[…] Until then, trinitarian doctrines, though formulated by Athanasius, had
been professed only by a few western bishops led by the Pope. At that time,
however, Theodosius became its patron and called the Council of
Constantinople in 381 to ratify it.”1845 This was the “Beast” which destroyed
the pristine Christianity of Jesus and turned it into the Trinitarian idolatry.
Newton considered the Trinity as the utmost injustice to God and Jesus.
“The mere thought of trinitarianism, the ‘false infernal religion,’ was
enough to fan Newton into a rage. With it had come the return of idolatry in
a more degraded form […] Superstitions of every sort, fanned and spread
by monks with feigned stories of false miracles, accompanied the new
worship. ‘Idolaters’, Newton thundered at them in the isolation of his
chamber, ‘Blasphemers & spiritual fornicators.’ They pretended to be
Christians, but the devil knew ‘that they were to be above all others ye most
wicked wretched sort of people […] the worst sort of men that ever reigned
upon the face of ye earth till that same time.’ ‘The first six trumpets and the
six vials of wrath corresponding to them represent successive invasions of
the Empire,’ ‘like Furies sent in by the wrath of God to scourge ye
Romans,’ repeated punishments of an apostate people who whored after
false gods.”1846
Newton reserved the utmost hatred and the worst of epithets for the
Trinitarians. It was not the worth or strength of the arguments which carried
the Trinity so far and wide, but the arm of the state and base human motives
which perpetuated this sacred fraud. “As the passion with which Newton
expressed himself suggests, his early treatise on the prophecies was a very
personal document. In his view, the triumph of trinitarianism had stretched
beyond the limits of doctrine. It had won dominance by allying itself with
base human motives, such as ‘covetousness & ambition.’”1847 Christianity
was deformed by the corrupt priests and kings; only the Second coming of
Jesus was to reform it to its pristine nature. “Only with the second coming
will there be a final conversion of the kingdoms of this world to the
kingdom of Christ forever.”1848
Newton was a reformer and proselyte of a private sort; he converted his
closest friends and colleagues to his anti-Trinitarian Christianity. Stephan
Snobelen, in his Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite,
greatly highlights Newton’s reformatory and recruiting strategies. He
observed that “Newton was indeed preaching his faith. It was a strategy of
proselytisation carried out almost completely in the private sphere and done
so […] not only for legal and social reasons. This reconstruction of
Newton’s actions tallies well with his belief that the deeper things of
theology should only be handled by the experienced and mature members
of the remnant and, even then, only in private […] men like Humphrey
Newton, Locke, Gregory, Haynes, Clarke and Whiston were either given
access to, or had knowledge of, Newton’s theological manuscripts, thus
suggesting one of the uses Newton intended for some of his theological
writings, and possibly explaining.”1849 Newton’s job, position and work
environment prohibited him from publicly berating the Trinitarian
theology.1850
Newton, like Stubbe, Toland and Locke believed in the successive,
monotheistic, prophetic tradition. This fundamentally Islamic, universal,
historical narrative of original monotheism through the successive prophetic
offices of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad was a
common thread between the eighteenth-century Deists, Unitarians and
Socinians. Even a careful writer like John Locke insisted that Muhammad
borrowed monotheism from Jesus and Islam was heir to the original
Unitarian message of Jesus. This was a clear indication of authenticity of
Islamic monotheism against the Trinitarian usurpers of Jesus’ message.
Newton followed the same line of argument and declared Muhammad to be
the prophet sent to the Arabs in line with Jesus’ monotheistic tradition.
Newton brought down Jesus from the high offices of Godhead to the human
offices of a moral prophet and situated him right in the successive,
monotheistic prophetic history. “More significant was the implicit
deemphasis of the role of Christ, a step which came readily enough to an
Arian. Instead of the agent of a new dispensation, Christ was a prophet, like
Moses before him, sent to recall mankind to the original true worship of
God. As he revised the ‘Origines,’ Newton set down a number of chapter
headings, the last of which was for chapter 11. What was the true religion of
the sons of Noah before it began to be corrupted by the worship of false
Gods. And that the Christian religion was not more true and did not become
less corrupt. In this setting, trinitarianism with its encouragement of the
worship of saints and martyrs, indeed with its worship of Christ as God,
took on a new meaning. What was trinitarianism but the latest manifestation
of the universal tendency of mankind to superstition and idolatry? Through
Athanasius, Egypt once again played its nefarious role as the corrupter of
true religion. By universalising the Christian experience of the first four
centuries, Newton denied it any unique role in human history. The Christian
religion rightly understood was not more true than the religion of the sons
of Noah, which was founded upon the recognition of God in His
creation.”1851 Prisca theologia and prisca sapientia were one and the same
since the beginning of humanity. God’s book of revelation and book of
creation highlighted divine unity, simplicity, uniqueness and transcendence.
The same direct divine sovereighnty was preached by all the successive
prophets. The ethical monotheism, simple, natural and rational theology
was the hallmark of all prophets. The Christian supernatural, Trinitarian and
abnormal theology was an aberration and not the norm. Islam was in line
with that Unitarian, natural theology. Newton believed in the authenticity of
Prophet Muhammad, and the Quranic monotheistic message. Snobelen
notes that “a report deriving from Newton’s Cambridge period has him
believing that God had sent Muhammad to reveal the One God to Arabs,
which echoes the Unitarian historia monotheistica of the 1670s-1710s.”1852
This report is cited in J. Edleston, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and
Professor Cotes..1853
As noted above, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Unitarians,
Socinians and Deists believed that Islam was the true heir to the original,
primitive, monotheistic Christianity of Jesus, and that the corrupted
Orthodox Trinitarian Christianity of the Church must be reformed on the
Islamic lines. Muhammad did not bring a new religion, but revived the
original, universal, moral, prophetic, monotheistic message preached by
Jesus, Moses and all other prophets. Newton subscribed to this line of
argument and was a part of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century Unitarian Islamic syncretism “historia monotheistica” hailed by
Henry Stubbe, John Toland, Arthur Bury, Stephan Nye and other Unitarians,
Socinians and Deists. John Locke and Isaac Newton were the silent
supporters of this hybrid rational monotheism. Justin Champion’s Pillars of
Priestcraft Shaken has a complete chapter explaining and delineating this
Unitarian Islamic syncretism, and we will return to it in the coming pages.
Locke’s antrinitarian human Christology, biblical criticism and anti-clerical
tendencies were identical to those of Newton. They regularly corresponded
and met, cementing their friendship based on mutual religious bonds.
“Religion provided what was easily the dominant theme of the
correspondence and apparently of their conversation when they met. Locke
later told his cousin, Peter King, that he knew few who were Newton’s
equal in knowledge of the Bible.”1854 Newton privately shared with Locke
his total rejection of Trinity and corruption of scriptures, beliefs which
Locke totally agreed with.1855 Locke sent Newton’s antitrinitarian work
Origins of Gentile Theology to his Socinain friend Jean Le Clerc in
Amsterdam for publication, but later on Newton stopped the publication for
fear of persecution.1856 Locke shared his third Letter on Toleration with
Newton and Newton commented on it. Both agreed on the dire need for
religious tolerance and accommodation, and that the essence of Christianity
was not Trinity but the humanity of Jesus. Loving God and loving one’s
neighbour summarised that essence. “When Jesus was asked what was the
great commandment of the law, he answered that it was to love God, and he
added that the second commandment was to love your neighbour. This was
the religion of the sons of Noah established by Moses & Christ & still in
force.”1857
Newton contended that “Loving God and Loving one’s neighbour” was
the universal religion revealed to all the prophets from Noah to Jesus.
Trinitarianism or incarnation were not part of this pristine universal
religion; therefore, persecuting those Christians who denied Trinity was
equal to waging war on Christ. “To impose now any article of communion
that was not such from the beginning was to preach another gospel. To
persecute Christians for not receiving that Gospel was to make war on
Christ. The two great commandments, he insisted over and over, ‘always
have & always will be the duty of all nations & The coming of Jesus Christ
has made no alteration in them.’ As often as mankind has turned from them,
God has made a reformation - through Noah, Abraham, Moses, the Jewish
prophets, and Jesus. Now that the gentiles had corrupted themselves, men
must expect a new reformation.”1858 Church Christianity, with its centuries-
long persecution of anti-Trinitarian Christians, was an open war against
Christ and his Unitarianism. That war needed to stop; therefore, Newton
asked for reformation of the corrupted Church Christianity in conformity
with the original prophetic tradition. Newton said “and in all the
reformations of religion hitherto made the religion in respect of God & our
neighbour is one & the same religion (barring ceremonies & forms of
government which are of a changeable nature) so that this is the oldest
religion in the world.”1859 The knowledge of this ethical monotheism was
universal; all humans could identify the moral commandments with the help
of natural reason. The salvation depended on following the moral
commandments of God, and not on Trinitarian or incarnational belief.
“Thus you see there is but one law for all nations the law of righteousness
& charity dictated to the Christians by Christ to the Jews by Moses & to all
mankind by the light of reason & by this law all men are to be judged at the
last day.”1860 This is exactly what Stubbe and Locke emphasized upon. The
same Islamic insistence upon the moral laws was very much on the mind of
Newton.
As discussed above, Newton did address Jesus as “Lord” as a token of
respect and glory, without any divine designations. “Newton argued, we are
to believe in one God and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, who is next to him in
power and glory. All this was taught from the beginning in the primitive
church.”1861 He, like Locke, entertained the pre-existence of Christ in a
reverential fashion and in no way or form in the ontological sense. His
Jesus was a full human, who was dignified and glorified by God Almighty
for a dignified ethical mission. This unity was not the unity of essence,
substance or Godhead but a unity of purpose, will and dominion. Jesus’
Lordship was God-given and not begotten. “The Arian features of Newton’s
christology continued to be evident. Although we are to worship Christ as
Lord, “yet we are to do it without breaking the first commandment.” The
true manhood of Christ was important to Newton, who believed that
trinitarianism effectively denied his manhood, and with it the reality of his
suffering on the cross. However, “he was not an ordinary man but incarnate
by the almighty power of God & born of a Virgin without any other father
then God himself.” That is, Newton had reached back to the primitive
church to resurrect a concept of Christ as a human body animated by a
divine or semidivine spirit. He rejected any notion of a unity of substance
between God the Father and Christ the Son, and asserted instead what he
called a monarchical unity “a unity of Dominion, the Son receiving all
things from the father, being subject to him, executing his will, sitting in his
throne & calling him his God, & so is but one God with the Father as a king
& his viceroy are but one king. For the word God relates not to the
metaphysical nature of God but to his dominion.”1862
He did not accept Jesus or any other mediator between man and God; only
Almighty God deserved the worship. Newton was emphatically elaborate
on this point: “We are therefore to acknowledge one God infinite eternal
omnipresent, omniscient omnipotent, the creator of all things most wise,
most just, most good most holy: & to have no other Gods but him. We must
love him feare him honour him trust in him pray to him give him thanks
praise him hollow his name obey his commandments & set times apart for
his service as we are directed in the third & fourth commandments. For this
is the love of God that we keep his commandments & his commandments
are not grievous 1 John 5.3. These things we must do not to any mediators
between him & us but to him alone, that he may give his Angels charge
over us who being our fellow servants are pleased with the worship which
we give to their God. And this is the first & principal part of religion. This
always was & always will be the religion of all Gods people, from the
beginning to the end of the world.”1863
Newton’s Christianity was free of mysteries, paradoxes, superstitions and
supernatural jargons. He desired to revive the simple, original, monotheistic
Christianity by purging the Church’s Christianity and its scriptures of their
corruptions and returning to the original purity of the Gospel of Jesus.
“Newton set out at an early age to purge Christianity of irrationality,
mystery, and superstition, and he never turned from that path. His study of
the prophecies, the work most frequently cited in support of a contrary
interpretation of his religion, was in fact one of the cornerstones of his
program. True, he undertook to purge Christianity in the name of Gospel
purity, but in the light of the role that Arianism played in the early church
and the role that it and its offspring played in the Eighteenth century, one
cannot view Newton’s Arianism in isolation from the intellectual currents of
his day. Rather we do him more justice and acknowledge anew his manifest
genius by allowing that here too he stood in the van, although the very
reform of Christianity he sought to foster was already, in his old age,
surging far beyond the limits he had envisaged.”1864
Newton’s Bible mostly consisted of two books: Daniel and Revelation.
The rest of the Bible was mixed up with man’s words, and was dubious in
nature. “He justified himself in terms of the Bible, but the Bible as he
understood it was far removed from the Bible of traditional belief. Where
that Bible contained truths beyond reason, Newton summed up true religion
in terms that effectively dispensed with all of revelation beyond the
prophecies. Christians for centuries had understood divine revelation in
terms of a new dispensation foretold in the Old Testament and fulfilled in
the New; divine revelation as Newton understood it centered on two books,
Daniel and Revelation, which revealed the almighty dominion of God over
history as natural philosophy revealed His dominion over nature. Newton
questioned the plenary inspiration of the received canon of books and
regarded the historical books of the Old Testament as the compilations of
men.”1865 His Christology was humanistic, his soteriology moralistic and his
monotheism was simplistic. “Though he wrote at some length about Christ,
his interest largely exhausted itself in proving that Christ was not God. His
soteriology, the focus of traditional Christian concern, was uninspired and
jejune, substituting a mere legal pact for the reconciliation of fallen man to
the majesty of God which generations of theologians had explored. The two
fundamental duties of true religion, to love God and to love one’s
neighbour, seem to present the opportunity for spiritual insight.”1866
Newton’s Heterodoxy
Newton refused to take sacraments, seldom attended Church services and
kept his heterodox theological views to himself or to his close circle of
confidants.1867 Snobelen noted that “Isaac Newton was a heretic. But like
Nicodemus, the secret disciple of Jesus, he never made a public declaration
of his private faith-which the orthodox would have deemed extremely
radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his
personal beliefs.”1868 He camouflaged conformity to the Church of
England’s articles of faith in public. “Whereas Newton published
statements of his belief in God, he not only kept the unorthodox aspects of
his religion to himself, but he exercised some care in London to mask his
heterodoxy behind a facade of public conformity.”1869 But his infidelity was
not that hidden from the Orthodoxy.1870 Thomas Hearne noted in 1732: “Sir
Isaac Newton, tho’ a great Mathematician, was a man of very little
Religion, in so much that he is ranked with the Heterodox men of the age.
Nay they stick not to make him, with respect to belief, of no better
principles than Mr. Woolaston [corrected later to Wolston], who hath
written so many vile books and made so much noise.”1871
Stephen David Snobelen, in Isaac Newton, Socinianism and the One
Supreme God, has proven beyond doubt that Newton was an Arian leaning
towards Socinian.1872 “Newton’s Christology was […] further from
orthodoxy than Socinianism.”1873 There are “Socinian parallels in Newton’s
theology, historiography, textual criticism, biblical hermeneutics and even
his natural philosophy.”1874 He further states that “Newton denied the Trinity
and the Socinians were the most intellectually sophisticated anti-
Trinitarians of his time.”1875 In addition to Locke, Newton associated with
Samuel Krell, the grandson of the known Socinian Jonathan Krell,
patronised him, possessed eight Socinian books, had access to his friends
Samuel Crell, John Locke and Bishop John Moor’s huge Socinian
collections, like Socininas wanted to reform the Church Christianity in
conformity with the primitive, monotheistic Christianity, used Socinian
scriptural hermeneutics, reflected their theological influence in his writings
such as General Scholium and Optics and believed in religious tolerance,
just like them. Snobelen advises that “scholars of Newton’s theology and
natural philosophy must take seriously his use of Socinianism —
particularly because it helps explain so much of his thought. One suspects
that the last word has not been said on Isaac Newton and Socinianism.”1876
Just like Locke, Newton rejected the doctrines of original sin, satisfaction
through crucifixion, and clerical authority. In his church history Newton
stated, “the nature of the satisfaction made by Christ” among a list of
adiaphora “more difficult to be understood and not so absolutely necessary
to salvation.”1877 Newton believed in the alternate monotheistic and
republican narrative; he, like the Socinians, wanted reformation of
Reformation on primitive Unitarian principles. “Both the Socinians and
Newton were keen to restore the original doctrines of Christianity, and both
desired a ‘second’ reformation.”1878 Newton was more radical in his
reformatory scheme than even some of his Socinian fellows.1879 Snobelen
noted that “Newton’s Nicodemite strategy of outwardly confirming to
orthodoxy while secretly harbouring heretical beliefs mirrors that of such
crypto-Unitarians as Stephen Nye, who came of age at the same time as
Newton. And Newton’s Nicodemism was both passive and active, as he was
not only a secret heretic, but his ‘Two notable corruptions’ and General
Scholium reveal that he was also actively engaged in an antitrinitarian
reformist programme. His actions thus show that he was directly or
indirectly a player in the subversive Socinian-Unitarian agenda in both the
1690s and the 1710s.”1880
Moreover, Newton’s beliefs show affinity with radical and dissenting
theologies of Stubbe and other dissenters like the continental radical
Reformists and British non-conformists, especially the Unitarians. Snobelen
notes that “Much of the antitrinitarian argumentation of writers like John
Biddle, who is often termed ‘the father of Unitarianism,’ and Stephen Nye,
is isomorphic with that of Newton. Additionally, Newton’s near intervention
in the Trinitarian controversy of the late 1680s and early 1690s reveals that
he shared some common reformist goals with the British Unitarians.
Newton’s anti-Athanasian Paradoxical questions is part of the same genre
as the Unitarian Tracts of the 1690s. Newton owned at least one collection
of the Unitarian Tracts and would have been familiar with the teachings of
the movement that produced them – a movement that developed its
theology contemporaneously with Newton.”1881
Newton’s close friends knew about his Unitarianism. “Richard Baron, an
abrasive unitarian who described Haynes years later as ‘the most zealous
unitarian; he had ever known, reported that Haynes had told him Newton
held the same views, and Haynes himself criticised Newton for not leading
a new Reformation.”1882 Maurice Wiles noted that “despite his secretiveness
about his theological views, the heretical tendency of Newton’s beliefs was
not unknown to some of his contemporaries. William Whiston, his
successor as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, described him as one whose
study led him to recognise that ‘what has long been called Arianism is no
other than old uncorrupt Christianity’. Hopton Haynes, on the other hand,
Newton’s close associate over many years at the Mint, is reported to have
said of Newton that he did not believe in Christ’s pre-existence, being in
that respect a Socinian, and that he much ‘lamented Mr Clarke’s embracing
Arianism, which opinion he feared had been, and still was, if maintained by
learned men, a great obstruction to the progress of Christianity.’”1883 This
statement substantiates the fact that Newton and William Whiston were
more radical in their human Christology and anti-Trinitarianism than many
Arians of their time.1884 Even the slightest postulate of Jesus’ semi-divinity
in the sense of Godhead was totally preposterous to Newton.
Newton’s close friends and students went public with their heretical
Unitarians views, and were persecuted by the Church of England.1885 The
Orthodoxy blamed Newton for his students’ heresies. “When Joseph Hallet,
alarmed by the spread of Arianism, published in 1735 An Address to
Coriform-to convince them of their hypocrisy and to lead them to repent, he
named two men as the source of the infection, William Whiston and Samuel
Clarke. Both were Newton’s disciples and known as such. Later another
disciple, Hopton Haynes, would publish unitarian tracts, and a more
aggressive unitarian, Richard Baron, would lament that Samuel Clarke, who
had performed good work in purging Christianity of much absurdity and
rubbish, had stopped short in Arianism when a fully rational Christianity lay
only another step beyond. But Newton’s extended quest, barely hinted at in
his published works, had to enter the stream of religious controversy
through disciples more daring than he.”1886 Just like his friend Locke,
Newton was attacked by Jonathan Edwards as a “Turk” and a “Socinian.”
“Edwards’ attack demonstrates, a theologically-astute contemporary
observer had no trouble identifying Newton’s theology with
Socinianism.”1887
It is astonishing to see some Orthodox leaders and writers ascribing
Trinitarian1888 beliefs to Newton in the face of such an exhaustive number of
solid proofs. Wiles noted that “in the years after his death, a host of
orthodox Trinitarians, unwilling to admit that so respected a figure could
have been tainted with heresy, did their best to deny his antitrinitarianism.
In 1831, when he wrote his Life of Sir Isaac Newton, David Brewster had,
as he was later to admit, ‘no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that he
was a believer in the Trinity’. He argued that when, in his discussion of the
inauthenticity of 1 John 5:7, Newton pointed out that ‘for a long time [...]
the faith subsisted without this text,’ the context required that ‘faith’ there
must mean ‘faith in the particular doctrine of the Trinity.’ But that
conviction was rudely overthrown by Brewster’s examination of Newton’s
unpublished manuscripts in 1836, where he found expressions of opinion
adverse to his own, and, as he judged, to those of the great majority of
Newton’s admirers.”1889
In spite of such Orthodox subterfuge and violence to Newton’s thought
and theology, the majority of contemporary scholarship in the field counts
him among the Arians, Socinians and Unitarians of his time.1890 Newton was
an integral part and a product of his seventeenth-century milieu in which
Socinians, Unitarians, Muhammadan Christians, Deists and anti-Trinitarian
Church leaders played havoc to the Church establishment and English
monarchy. Newton, like Locke, was an integral part of this theological
revolution against the Old Regime and its theological foundations. This
anti-Trinitarian, anti-Incarnational and anti-absolutism revolution changed
the way Englishmen looked at the Christian religion, theology, insitutions
and monarchy. They gradually replaced the Trinitarian God of historical
Christianity with a totally different God of ethical monotheism. The
theological revolution was as significant as the Newtonian revolution in the
natural sciences; in fact, the Newtonian scientific revolution was a result of,
and an implementation of Newton’s theological revolution, as Stephen
Snobelen has amply demonstrated.1891 Newton’s scientific discoveries were
a reflection and embodiment of his Unitarian, monotheistic revolution
against the the Trinitarian, paganistic and tri-theistic Church Christianity.
Newton’s famous scientific works such as The General Scholium, and
the Principia were as much subversive critique of the Trinity and other
Christian corruptions as his theological treatises.1892 Jonathan Ewards was
appalled at Newton’s subtle attacks on the Trinity and the Christian religion
as a whole.1893 Newton’s Unitarian revolution was too much to be ignored
by the Orthodoxy. Both the theological and scientific revolutions changed
the intellectual landscape of Europe, ushering in a new era of rationalism,
liberty and republicanism. Newton must be credited with the historical anti-
Trinitarian theological revolution as is he credited with revolution in natural
sciences. Europe’s break with the suffocating absolute Church and
monarchy of the Middle Ages and its transition to modernity passes through
Locke and Newton, and they shall be credited for that. Their
Socinian/Unitarian monotheistic and republican ideologies greatly
contributed to ensuing religious tolerance, liberty, constitutional monarchy
and human rights.
 In England during the Restoration period in 1660, as observed by Justin
Champion, Clark1894 and J. G. A. Pocock, Socinianism and Unitarians1895
appear to have extended its influence to the highest levels due to their
financial power.1896 As Unitarians and Socinians were not allowed the public
and state offices, they were forced to join business and trade. They received
help from the middle tier of the Levant, East India and Puritan American
merchants who supported Puritan republican theology. Many known,
resourceful and well-connected merchants of the later seventeenth century
subscribed to the Unitarian/Socinian outlook. Pocock noted that “from the
days of John Locke and Archbishop Tillotson there existed a Socinian
undercurrent within the church itself, and a hierarchy willing to recognise
its presence so long as it confined itself to the serious and by no means
clandestine sphere of private discussion as distinct from public
profession.”1897 The coterie surrounding the philanthropist Thomas Firmin
(1632–1697),1898 an “avowed Socinian and a Unitarian, included Locke,
Tillotson (the future Archbishop of Canterbury), and minor members of the
Anglican Church, such as Stephen Nye (1648–1719) and Henry Hedworth
(1626–1705). Such was the ubiquity of the movement that Andrew Marvell
was able to comment in the same year that ‘the Socinian books are tolerated
and sell as openly as the Bible.’”1899 Perhaps the most widespread of
Socinian influences was reflected in the Anglican Church’s direction of
broad religious toleration, and in the tendency of some leading Church
leaders to reduce the essentials of Christianity to the minimal important
elements such as the Messianic role of Christ, the trend usually referred to
as Latitudinarianism.1900 Many members of the clergy publicly recited the
Trinitarian Athanasian Creed, as required by the Church in public worship,
thirteen times a year but with a twinge of conscience and without much
faith in its validity or authenticity. Reflecting the Socinian/Unitarian
theological impact, even Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson (1630–
1694) said “I wish we were well-rid of it.”1901 Pocock observed that this
dialectical environment was the foundational source of early
Enlightenment. “Tensions within the established church, between
establishment and dissent, and within dissent itself, provide the context in
which English Enlightenment must be seen.”1902 The Socinians and
Unitarians, along with other rational dissenters, were the instigators and
facilitators of the early Enlightenment, and hence of later liberty, democracy
and modernity, as G. M. Trevelyan, W. E. H. Lecky and many others have
noted.1903 Newton’s connections with the overseas trading companies, their
military pursuits and with dissenting merchants of London are well-
documented by Merton and others, as discussed above. Newton was an
integral part of the Unitarian religio-political and scienctific reformative
scheme.
 Chapter 13

English Unitarians: Pinnacle of Islamic

Hybrid
The Unitarians since the times of Servetus had believed that Prophet
Muhammad was a “Unitarian Prophet” and Islam was a Unitarian
reformation of the Roman Christianity. This close connection was made
public by the eighteenth-century English Unitarians. John Tolan noted “in
the wake of the toleration act, English Unitarians wrote pamphlets
defending their beliefs as consistent with primitive Christianity; they of
course published these pamphlets anonymously. Like earlier Unitarians
such as Miguel Servet, they took antitrinitarian arguments from the Qur’ān
and saw Muhammad as a Unitarian reformer. The Naked Gospel (1691),
probably by Arthur Bury, asks rhetorically ‘whether Mahomet or the
Christian doctors have more corrupted the Gospel?’ His charge against
Christian Trinitarian theologians makes clear what the answer is for
him.”1904 Other Unitarians, such as Stephen Nye, went further than that. “In
the same year, A letter of resolution concerning the doctrines of the Trinity
and the Incarnation, probably by Stephen Nye, presents Mahomet as closer
to the truth of the Gospel than Trinitarian Christianity, in a passage that
shows familiarity with Stubbe. Mahomet, he affirms, did not try to create a
new religion, ‘but to restore the Belief of the Unity of God, which at the
time was extirpated among the Eastern Christians, by the Doctrines of the
Trinity and Incarnation.’ Muslims affirm that they are ‘the true Disciples of
the Messias or Christ,’ while ‘Christians are Apostates from the most
essential Parts of the Doctrine of the Messias; such as the Unity of God.’
God is to be worshipped without use of images. Muslims and Jews ‘are
perpetually and without hope of regaining them, alienated from us, that they
suppose the Trinity to be the Doctrine of all Christians; and from thence
conclude, that modern Christianity is no better nor other than a sort of
Paganism and Heathenism.’”1905 Nye was a close friend of Locke; Locke’s
extensive notes taken from the works of Biddle and Nye demonstrate the
level of influence the Unitarian writings had upon Locke.
Like his Socinian associations, Locke’s Unitarian affinities are also well-
attested. He befriended Anglican theologians such as Arthur Bury (1624–
1714), Stephen Nye (1648–1719), and William Freke (1662-1744), who
willingly acknowledged the prescriptive value of Islamic reformation, wrote
about its validity, and never hesitated to share their thoughts and writing
with other thinkers, including Locke. These Unitarians were fully engaged
in the Unitarian controversy of 1700 and Locke was also absorbed in it,
siding with the Unitarians. “By 1700 Locke possessed eight works by
Stephen Nye, including the Brief History of the Unitarians. He owned a
shoal of slim anonymous tracts like the 1690 Brief Notes Upon the Creed of
St Athanasius, and its redaction The Acts of Great Athanasius, which
assaulted Athanasius, the fourth-century credal formulator of co-equal,
coeternal and consubstantial persons in the Godhead. More significantly,
Locke owned five works by Arthur Bury, including the Naked Gospel. In
the 1690s Locke owned John Biddle’s The Apostolical and True Opinion
Concerning the Trinity’, perhaps most famous for its assault upon
trinitarians’ delusions of ‘personalities, moods, subsistencies, and such-like
brain-sick notions’ hatched by Platonists to pervert the worship of God.”1906
Locke especially read Nye with great enthusiasm, and Nye was the most
voluble about Unitarian Islamic syncretism. These Unitarian Muslim
sympathisers insisted upon Christian reformation in conformity with
Islamic monotheism and republicanism. Therefore, Locke was an essential
part of that reformatory scheme.
John Marshall notes that “between 1687 and approximately 1700 there
was a major debate over the Trinity in England which became known as the
‘Unitarian Controversy’. This controversy began when the Unitarians took
advantage of the relaxation of the press under James II to disseminate their
views and it burned particularly fiercely in the early 1690s when many
Anglicans, including leading Latitudinarian Anglicans such as Tillotson,
Fowler, Burnet and Stillingfleet, wrote lengthy accounts defending the
Athanasian Trinity and in turn provoked further Unitarian works. The
Unitarian Controversy was sparked by publication of Stephen Nye’s
(anonymous) Brief History of the Unitarians, which first gave the term
‘unitarian’ prominence in England to indicate all those who accented the
superiority of God the Father to Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, and thus
joined the Arians who believed after Arius in a pre-existent but not eternal
Christ with the Socinians who followed Socinus in believing that Christ was
neither pre-existent nor eternal.”1907
 Locke sent Nye’s Brief History of the Unitarians to Jean le Clerc in
Amsterdam, who reviewed it positively in Bibliotheque Universelle. Locke
collected the Unitarian books for Benjamin Furly, as is clear from his
correspondence with Furly. He discussed these works with Isaac Newton,
who himself was heavily engaged in the Unitarian controversy. “In 1690
Locke’s notes show that he either discussed three Unitarian works with
Newton or procured them for him. It is quite possible that Newton’s
willingness to send Locke his manuscript criticisms of Trinitarian texts as
early as 1690 indicates that Locke had revealed to Newton that he was
antitrinitarian by that date.”1908 Moreover, Locke was closely affiliated with
the Unitarian publisher Thomas Firmin who had commissioned Stephen
Nye’s book. “Locke had known the Unitarian merchant Thomas Firmin
since 1671 at the latest, and was probably a member of the circle of
intellectuals that Firmin hosted in the 1670s and 1680s. In the late 1680s
and early 1690s Firmin was the ‘great promoter of Socinianism’ who
commissioned Stephen Nye’s Brief History of the Unitarians and many of
his other works, financed several collections of Unitarian tracts, and almost
certainly financed their free distribution as well.”1909 Therefore, Locke was
well aware of the Unitarian Islamic syncretism, well absorbed in the
Unitarian controversy of 1690s to 1700 and well appreciative of their
struggles totally siding with them against their orthodox detractors.
Stephen Nye: The Roaring Unitarian
Stephen Nye (1648–1719), an English clergyman and “rector of Little
Hormead for a period of forty years,”1910 perhaps was the most emphatic
Unitarian to refute the Church dogmas, mysteries, and abusive authority. In
his Brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians, first published in
1687 and republished in 1691, Nye categorically denied that the
Christianity of his time had anything to do with the original message of
Jesus Christ; Trinitarian Christianity was a degradation and depravation of
the genuine Christian message of One and Only God. “Nye claimed that the
Scriptures were clear that God is one person. In the Scriptures God is
referred to in the singular: I, thou, me, him. To interpret these pronouns as
referring to a Trinity of persons is ‘contrary to custom, grammar and sense’.
He dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity as ‘absurd, and contrary both to
Reason and to itself, and therefore not only false, but impossible. To claim
that there are three persons and yet one God was simply “an error in
counting.’ The ‘Letter’ concluded by tracing a pedigree for unitarianism
back to the New Testament, and attempted to demonstrate how the original
apostolic doctrine had been corrupted!”1911
Nye’s extensive publications were sponsored by Thomas Firmin, the
Socinian/Unitarian philanthropist who also supported Locke and other
Latitudinarian Bishops’ works. As seen above, Locke was the other milder
side of Henry Stubbe in the 1670s while both were working for Shaftesbury.
In the 1680s and 1690s he became the milder side of Stephen Nye’s radical
revolution while in patronage of Thomas Firmin. Locke was the moderate
propounder and expositor of the same radical Unitarian revolution.
Nye was more pronounced Unitarian than Locke, Newton, Socinians and
other anti-Trinitarians; he called a spade a spade. “Nye was opposed to
what he took to be the tritheism of most contemporary orthodox
Trinitarianism, to Arianism which he dismisses ‘as only a more absurd and
less defensible Tritheism’ than the orthodox view, and to the teaching of
Socinus whom he describes as ‘having not the least tincture of academical,
much less of theological learning’. Socinianism was a misnomer for the
Unitarianism he himself professed. His own position was of a modalist or
Sabellian nature; claiming the authority of Augustine’s non-personalized
understanding of the Trinity, he believed himself justified in presenting his
own Unitarian understanding of the person of Christ as true to traditional
Christian teaching.”1912 He argued that Christ can be called God as the
embodiment of God’s will and absolute submission to God’s
commandments. The Trinitarian language was reverential rather than
metaphysical. “Christ is God, and Man [...] God in respect of God in him
[...] not only occasionally assisting [...] but [...] always in Christ,
illuminating, conducting and actuating him. More than this is the heresy of
Eutyches.”1913
Nye refuted Old Testament texts cited as proof for the doctrine of the
Trinity. He denied that any of the Old Testament books ever predicted the
coming of a divine Messiah or a Trinitarian incarnational system of belief.
“Nye comments slyly that the ‘more learned and judicious trinitarians,’ such
as Jerome and Bellarmine, agreed with him on this. Moreover, it would be
inherently odd, argued Nye, that the Jews were not corrected by Christ for
believing God to be one person if God were really three.”1914 He also noted
that all New Testament texts quoted to prove Trinity did not prove it and
carried alternate Unitarian meanings. Like Newton, Nye blamed St.
Athanasius and his priestly party of corrupting the pristine message of
Jesus.
The original followers of Jesus were Nazarenes who, like the original
Apostles, maintained the unipersonality of God. Nye “invoked the pattern
of the Nazarenes, an early Judaeo-Christian sect, as the legitimate ancestors
of the Unitarian movement.”1915 That pristine message had only survived in
the Turkish or Mahomaten tradition. The “historical model of pre-Nicene
Unitarianism, and its links with Islam, was reiterated and reinforced by Nye
in his Letter of Resolution Concerning the Doctrines of the Trinity and
Incarnation (1695).”1916 He strongly criticised Church teachings such as
worship of Mary, saints and images, ecclesiastical authority and tradition,
papal supremacy, indulgences, the mystery of transubstantiation, original
sin, and satisfaction through crucifixion. “The Apostles’ Creed and the
Nazarene faith were both the most ancient beliefs and ‘the very doctrines
that are now called Socinian’. The Athanasian Trinity established at Nicea
was the historical font of all Christian corruption. The supremacy of the
papacy, worship of the Virgin Mary, saints, images, the mystery of
transubstantiation, the authority of Church tradition, papal indulgences and
the theology of Christ’s satisfaction, were all doctrinal accretions grown out
of the corrupt Trinitarian Christology.”1917
To Nye, all these corruptions were post-Nicean extensions of the corrupt
Trinitarian theology, the major stumbling block between Judaism, Islam and
Christianity. “Nye insisted that Trinitarianism was a corruption of heathen
Platonism which confused ‘properties of the Divine nature for persons, or
willfully and affectedly allegoris’d them into persons’. The doctrines of the
Trinity and Incarnation, according to Nye, were the main obstacles between
Christianity and Islam and Judaism.”1918
Nye defended Islam and Mohammad as true reflections of Jesus’ message:
“Mahomet had ‘no other design in pretending himself to be a prophet, but
to restore the belief of the Unity of God. Mahomet proclaimed himself
disciple of the ‘Messias or Christ’ aiming to restore the Unitarian ‘true
intent of the Christian religion’. Mahomet’s success in converting Asia,
Africa and part of Europe was not to be attributed to the force of arms but
to ‘that one truth in the Alkoran, the unity of God. ‘”1919 Locke’s claims of
Muhammad borrowing the Unitarian belief system of Jesus, as discussed
above, were a moderate form of Nye’s radical argument.
Locke used Nye’s and other Unitarian works to defend himself against
Bishop Stillingfleet’s attacks.1920 Locke was an ardent reader of Nye taking
careful notes and well appreciative of his strong Unitarian arguments
against Trinity, original sin, satisfaction by atoning death, predestination,
Jesus’ humanity, human liberty and freedom, content of natural religion
known by reason and many other important Unitarian theological views.1921
Locke commented on Nye’s books and views in his correspondence with
friends; in brief, Locke was the moderate side of Nye’s radical coin
Arthur Bury’s Naked Gospel
Locke was also well acquainted with Arthur Bury, read his works and
shared them with friends. For instance, he discussed Bury’s Naked Gospel
with James Tyrrell, Locke’s best friend and brother-in-law of Deist Charles
Blount. Locke frequented Tyrrell’s residence, especially before leaving for
Amsterdam.
Bury’s 1690 anti-trinitarian work, The Naked Gospel, first published
anonymously, was commanded to burning at Oxford, and in a complex
sequence of events involving legal action, Bury lost his position as rector of
Exeter College, Oxford after being expelled initially in 1689. He contended
that Christianity had changed so much ”that were any Apostle to return into
the world, he would be so far from Owning, that he would not be able to
understand it [...] Whether Mahomet, or Christian Doctors have more
corrupted the Gospel, it is not so plain by the light of Scripture, as it is by
that of Experience [...] For when by nice and hot disputes (especially
concerning the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity) the minds of the
whole people had been long confounded, and by the then late stablishment
of Image worship, the scandal was encreased; so that the Vulgar
Understandings of the Doctrine of the Trinity appeared no less guilty of
Polytheism, than that of Image-worship did of Idolatry.”1922
Bury’s Naked Gospel indicted the Christian Scriptures, dogmas, mysteries,
as Church corruptions.1923 He demanded purification of Christian Scripture
by purging them of human additions and Church manipulations. This action
would clear Christianity of irrational mysteries invented by the priestcraft
after the Council of Nicea. Dusting off mysteries would let the original
message of Jesus and the Gospel shine. To Bury, that essential message was
to love your God and love your neighbour or “repent and believe.”1924 “The
result of this would be that, rather than the mysteries of faith which he
considered the product of the historical rise of priestcraft after the post-
Nicene Athanasian Creed, the simple dogma of the Gospel in its largest
edition would be ‘repent and believe.’”1925 Morality and charity, rather than
the mysterious dogmas, were needed to attain salvation. The Church was
neither the mediator nor the dispenser of grace and salvation; everybody
had direct access to God and salvation through love, charity and morality.
He concluded his book observing that the “end of all is to determine
between Faith and Love […] Give unto Faith the things that are Faith’s and
the Love that are Love’s […] Do good to all especially to those that are of
the household of Faith.”1926
In the preface of this book, Bury refuted the Church establishment’s
claims that Mohammad was an imposter and that Islam was spread with the
power of sword rather than God’s providence. As seen above, it has been
argued since St. Augustine’s time that due to merit and divine providence,
Christ’s message prevailed over the old Jewish message; although Jesus
came from a meek background and his early followers were illiterate
fishermen, his message succeeded against educated philosophers and
powerful kings due to divine providence. Bury used the same argument to
defend Islam and Mohammad. He argued: “So the victories of the Alcoran
over the Gospel must be evidence, that as the religion of Moses was better
than that of the Canaanites, and the religion of Christ better than that of
Moses; so must the religion of Mahomet be better than that of Christ. Thus
may a Mahometan either disarm us of St. Augustine’s argument, or restore
it against us; for either it is of no force at all or of so much more force for
Mahomet, by how much more he hath prevailed over the Churches of
Christ.”1927 Muhammad’s reformation of Trinitarian Christianity succeeded
due to divine providence. He noted “that to suggest the rise of Islam was
not the product of divine providence was in effect to deny the existence of a
divine guide […] Mahomet was ‘not an apostate, but a reformer’: his task
was one of purification. The Islamic prophet was cast in the mould of
Christian reformer, professing Christian and monotheistic articles of
belief.”1928 Bury rejected Alexander Ross and Humphrey Prideaux’s
contention that Muhammad was a divine scourage, and insisted on the
positive reformatory designs of Muhammad’s message. “Bury’s analysis
was a clever piece of insinuation. Christianity in the East had become
corrupt through the manipulation of the Gospel; it was Mahomet’s good
fortune to re-institute the true gospel, which in Bury’s view was Unitarian.
In opposition to Ross’s providential scheme which presented Islam as a
scourge and deformed image of pristine Christianity, Bury considered Islam
within its own terms. Islam was not a misshapen mirror image of
Christianity, but an object of commendation.”1929
The positive and reformatory approach of Bury was scolded by the
Orthodoxy as the most destructive conspiracy against the Christian religion
and world, the epitome of Christian destruction. They accused Bury of
being a Quranic exegete and a Muslim conspirator. John Meggitt notes that
“On the one hand early Unitarians regularly found themselves described as
being virtually synonymous with Muslims, as ‘more Mahometan than
Christian,’ with the Racovian Catechism dismissed as the ‘Racovian
Alcoran’. An important antitrinitarian writing, Arthur Bury’s Naked Gospel
(1690), could be accused of being so like the Quran that it amounted to no
more than ‘a Commentary on that Text’. There was a clear attempt to
associate this form of dissent with a religion that was largely viewed as a
work of ‘imposture,’ something dangerously alluring but blasphemous,
diabolical, and – given the dominance of the Ottoman empire and anxiety
about the depredations of Barbary slavers – physically threatening.”1930 The
Orthodoxy and its vanguard played on public fear by using centuries-old
stereotypes against Islam and Muslims by highlighting Ottoman hegemonic
designs against England. Unitarian Islamic republicanism was a danger to
both Christian faith and politics.
William Freke: The Mystic Unitarian
William Freke (1662-1744) was an English mystical writer, of Wadham
College, Oxford and a barrister of the Temple. He was also a friend of John
Locke. He suffered at the hands of Parliament in 1694 for his anti-
Trinitarian beliefs. William Freke sent his Brief but Clear Confutation of the
Doctrine of the Trinity to both Houses of Parliament, which fined him and
burned the book in response. Justin Champion noted that “William Freke
[…] who suffered at the hands of Parliament in 1694 for his anti-Trinitarian
beliefs, emphasised the connection between the Unitarian insistence on the
unity of God and Islamic monotheism.”1931
In his Vindication of the Unitarians, Freke “subtly equates the Unitarian
creed with Islamic monotheism and ‘the unity in the Alchoran,’ while
maintaining that orthodox Anglicans, in their support of the corrupt pagan
doctrine of the Trinity, are actually endorsing an oppressive ‘popery.’
Because of their belief in God’s unity and their toleration of other non-
Muslim religions, the Mahometans have experienced more prosperity,
politically, economically, and spiritually, than have the adherents of Western
Christendom, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican.”1932 Like Stubbe
and Toland, Freke connected Ottoman might, prosperity and success with
their Unitarian pluralistic republicanism. This insinuation was detrimental
to the authority of Anglican Church and state; both came hard on Freke, and
persecuted him with passion.
Freke noted that he had “fallen into ‘Arianisme’ while searching the New
Testament for scriptural evidence for the Trinity. Adopting a commonplace
Unitarian argument, he insisted that there was as just a case for the truth of
the Trinity as there was for the absurd Catholic mystery of
transubstantiation. The notion of a triple Godhead offended all ‘Jews,
Turks, and Pagans’: it was the ground on which Mahomet had based his
division from Christianity. As Freke noted, the Koran contained ‘above a
hundred’ indictments of the dogma. One of the central historical arguments
was that the Trinity had only become part of Christian creed some three
hundred years after Christ’s death.”1933 The Quranic criticism of the Trinity,
and its detailed arguments, had been employed by the Unitarians since the
time of Michael Servetus and were internalised by the Socinian/Unitarians
and Deists by the middle of the seventeenth century. Freke was referring to
this long tradition of Unitarian Islamic hybrid.
The Trinity was nothing but “the Platonick Philosophy made
Christian.”1934 The mankind was at a loss to comprehend it, “the World is
made too giddy by this Mystery, to bear such, or any other Reasoning.”1935
It was imposed upon Christians by Roman might and manipulations.1936
They fabricated the supernatural Church tradition against the simple
scripture, manipulated the Councils and created the facts which were not
part of the divine truth, “You must excuse me therefore, if I think Tradition
to be too much a Nose of “Wax, to be alledg’d against Scripture.”1937 Freke
was appalled that the Church of England had de-emphasised the role of
good works and re-emphasised repetition of unintelligible creedal formulas:
“See how your Mystery has missed you, Sir, that Men should be sav’d, only
by parrotting over a few unintelligible words.”1938 Christianity’s focus upon
original sin and fallen nature at the expense of God’s forgiveness and love
is “fitter for paganism than Christianity” and can be preached only “by a
dead anathematising implicit Faith.”1939 Unlike the Church’s riches and
resources, the Unitarians had only the truth on their side; they neither
showed the arrogance of knowledge nor practiced the politics of
knowledge. They had truth as clear as the day light, but the Church was
afraid of that truth.1940 The Church had made a nonsense of the First
Commandment and introduced the absurdity of multiple persons in the
Godhead. The Protestant scriptural evidences for the Trinity were as feeble
as the Catholic evidence for transubstantiation.1941 Both Churches
maintained and preserved the mysteries by persecutions and not by the
force of the argument. “Mystery and Persecution are the Devil’s Twins, and
stand and fall both together; Persecution without Mystery were too cruel,
and Mystery without Blood too much Nonsence to be born; ‘tis these two
are Popery, and the worst of Popery, Transubstantiation without these were
an innocent Error.”1942
Freke criticised the Christian dogma of Christ’s two natures and showed
the inherent absurdity of making Jesus look like a split personality. “So,
what an Answer you have there, that the Son was tempted as to his
Manhood, but not as to his Godhead; And pray then where was the
Godhead all the while, like Baal’s asleep; or was the Man Christ now and
then as it were possessed by Fits? Methinks I am assum’d to handle the
Absurdities of this Hypothesis, they make me giddy when I consider
them.”1943 Consequently he recommended replacing this confusing
Trinitarian jargon with the simple Unitarian faith of Islam. Meggitt observes
that “it is also important to note that although the claims about the affinities
between Unitarianism and Islam were intended to be damning, they were
not always understood that way by Unitarians themselves. Although some
could be ‘enraged’ by the association with Islam, William Freke, for
example, was happy to praise Muhammad and the Quran for defending the
unity of God against the errors of trinitarian Christians, and Stephen Nye
could talk favourably about Muhammad as someone who set out ‘to restore
the Belief of the Unity of GOD, which at that time was extirpated among
the Eastern Christians, by the Doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation [...]
Mahomet meant not his Religion should be esteemed a new Religion, but
only the Restitution of the true Intent of the Christian Religion’. Bury could
say that ‘Mahomet professed all the articles of the Christian faith.’”1944
Anti-Trinitarianism was closely connected with Islam since Michael
Servetus’s time. This close identification became a norm by the eighteenth
century to the extent that they were used interchangeably by the Orthodoxy,
as well as by the leading writers of that time. “Such language reflected the
common assumption, found even on occasions where they were not targets
of polemic, that antitrinitarian Christianity had a strong affinity with Islam.
Indeed, somewhat later, we can find Gibbon using the term ‘Unitarian’, in
his famous The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to
refer to Muhammad, picking up on language that can be found at the
beginning of Eighteenth century, if not before.”1945 There was a direct and
continuous line of Muhammadan Christians from Henry Stubbe, John
Toland to Stephen Nye, Arthur Bury, William Freke and many other
Unitarians and Socinians. These Christian infidels were highly involved in
the religious controversies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century. These were well supported by the moderate enlighteners such as
Locke, Newton and Milton. The master plan of Church Christianity’s
reformation was a shared concern of both the radicals and moderates, and
the end result of their struggles against the Orthodoxy was also identical;
the only difference was tactics.
The moderates maintained an outward façade of Orthodoxy and an
artificial social distance from the radicals, to avoid controversies and to
preserve their time and energies for the bigger reformatory project. They
were genuinely afraid of instability, chaos and anarchy caused by radicals
during the English Civil War, Revolution and even during the Interregnum.
The moderate reformers were further divided into three main groups. The
far-right Latitudinarians employed dogmatic terminologies such as the
Trinity, incarnation, grace, crucifixion, redemption, episcopacy, salvation
through the Church, divine right monarchy etc., but rationalising,
relativising, diluting and broadening their meanings, conceptual parameters
and implications. The center-left reformers, such as Locke and Newton,
minimised use of dogmatic theology and phrases, shunned the Trinity,
rejected original sin and incorporated heterodox interpretations of orthodox
dogmas. Both groups avoided any link or connection with Islamic religious
or political theology or open confrontation with Anglican Church. The far-
left Unitarians and Latitudinarians, such as Nye, Arbury and Freke, did
exactly what Locke and Newton did in secret and with an abundance of
caution. They did it publicly and in a confrontational manner. They also
identified their Islamic affiliations, sympathies and sources. “Divided
among themselves into three main separate factions contending for the
middle ground, they were at the same time engaged in fending off
traditionalists on one flank and radicals on the other. Hence it became a
typical feature of intellectual conflict that moderates endeavoured to shield
themselves against conservatives by stressing, even exaggerating, the gulf
dividing them from the universally reviled and abhorred radicals while,
simultaneously, traditionalists sought a tactical advantage, in their public
discourse, by minimising the gap separating the latter from the moderates as
much as possible.”1946 The English Enlightenment was the result of this
tripartite struggle. The Unitarian Islamic hybrid of the radical and moderate
enlightenment figures gradually succeeded and won over the hearts and
minds of some enlightened monarchs, intellectuals and traders finally
oozing into the greater European community.
Epistle Dedicatory: The Culmination of Unitarian Islamic
Imagination
The Epistle (1682), which was presented to the Moroccan ambassador was
a culmination of this Unitarian Islamic syncretism, which in turn was
central to the reformatory movement of this period. Justin Champion
observed that “the historical connection between the Nazarenes and Islam
was to form the central theme in the work of both Henry Stubbe and John
Toland. While the work of Arthur Bury, William Freke and Stephen Nye
displays no reluctance to identify Unitarianism with monotheistic Islam, the
most radical case of Unitarian-Islam syncretism is to be found in the
enigmatic Epistle Dedicatory to his Illustrious Excellency Ameth Ben
Ameth (1682).”1947 The Muslim ambassadors and emissaries were a
commonplace in London since the early seventeenth century. Their visits
were well publicised, sermonised and ceremonised. “The visits of Muslim
ambassadors and emissaries to London, along with Jewish and Christian
subjects sent by Muslim potentates, produced magnificent processions and
exhibits of horses, slaves, turbans, scimitars, priests, jurists, and cuisines.
The majority of visitors came from North Africa, with Ottoman, Safavid,
and Indian emissaries trailing behind. The most elaborate procession was
described in The Arrivall and Intertainements of the Embassador, (1637)
Alkaid Jaurar Ben Abdella (an emissary from Morocco, whom king Charles
preferred to meet rather than the Polish ambassador whom he kept
languishing for months.”1948
The 1681 visit of Moroccan ambassador Muhammad bin Haddu to
London was lengthy and significant.1949 The ambassador was accompanied
by English Muslim converts such as Lucas and James, stayed in England
for six months, intermingled with English leaders, merchants and
commoners, visited chapels and cathedrals and received exceptional
welcomes from top officials as well as common people. His secretary was
awarded an honourary degree from Cambridge University as a token of
respect.1950 Matar observes that “he had learned enough to change his views
about the Protestant religion and to take those changes back with him to
Morocco. As much as Londoners were learning about Islam from him, so
was he learning about Christianity from them.”1951 He further notes that “the
visit of the Moroccan ambassador to London on 29 December 1681,
Muhammad bin Haddu, raised expectations of improved relations between
Mulay Ismail and King Charles II. Indeed, such were the hopes that a group
of Unitarians approached the ambassador with an indictment of Trinitarian
Christianity and praise for Islam. They believed that if the Moroccans
would see eye to eye with them over matters of religion, there would ensue
fruitful cooperation between the two countries. Religion, for the Unitarians,
did not have to be a separator, for they and the Moors were not too
dissimilar given their rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and the
godhood of Jesus.”1952 The Epistle was the preface to a bundle of three
papers delivered to the Ambassador by Nöel Aubert de Versé. John Meggitt
states that “Sometime in the summer of 1682, just as a Moroccan
ambassador was about to leave for home after a lengthy and successful visit
to England, some Unitarians in London attempted to deliver a bundle of
papers to him. On hearing that they were concerned with religious matters,
he declined to accept them, and so, unread, they passed into the hands of the
Master of the Ceremonies, Sir Charles Cotterell, and from him to a Church
of England priest, Thomas Tenison. When, over a decade later, Tenison
became Archbishop of Canterbury, they found their way into the holdings
of the library of Lambeth Palace, where they can still be consulted
today.”1953
Nöel Aubert de Versé was an intriguing figure with Unitarian/Socinian
affiliations. He “was born in Le Mans, France, sometime between 1642 and
1645, to a moderately wealthy Catholic family. Initially educated at an
Oratory college in Le Mans, he went to Paris to pursue medical studies.
Whilst there, he encountered Protestantism, and in 1662 he converted to the
Reformed faith. He subsequently abandoned his medical training to enrol in
the Protestant Academy of Sedan, where he encountered anti-Trinitarian
and Socinian works. He was to be associated with these ideas for the rest of
his life.”1954 De Verse was active in Amsterdam, Paris and London. He was
well acquainted with both moderate and radical enlightenment figures such
as Pierre Bayle, Jean le Clerc, John Locke and actively participated in the
ongoing intellectual debates of his time. “Settling in Amsterdam, he worked
for the Elzevier press and produced a Latin translation of Richard Simon’s
Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). During this period he also
wrote of number of works, including Le protestant pacifique (1684), an
argument for religious toleration; L’impie convaincu (1685), a critique of
Spinoza; and Traité de la liberté de la conscience (1687), a defence of
liberty of individual conscience.”1955 He authored the Dedicatory Epistle
and came to London to deliver it to the Ambassador. “He also made a
number of trips, including one to England in 1682 in order to present the
Moroccan ambassador with Unitarian papers, among them the so-called
Epistle dedicatory, a text of which he was the sole or chief author.”1956 The
Epistle, written on behalf of the Unitarians, was “concerned with the
relationship of Unitarian Christianity to Islam. In addition to explaining
why the three accompanying treatises are being presented to the
ambassador, it describes the state and nature of Unitarian Christianity,
emphasises the commonalities between Islam and Unitarian Christianity
over and against Trinitarian Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, and
ultimately claims that Unitarian Christianity is superior to Islam which, in
the letter’s view, contains a number of defects that the writers offer to
correct.”1957
The Unitarian authors wrote: “Be pleased to observe that all ye Christians
throughout Persia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, those called of S. Thomas, &
some Hollanders & Portugases in Asia, these yt lieu among ye Greecks in
Europe, even your neighbouring Christians in Nubia, all those together, wch
farr exceed ye Trinity- Asserting Christians, doe maintaine with us that
Faith of one Soverain God, one onely in Person & Essence. And why
should I forget to add you Mahumetans who also consent with us in ye
Belief & worship of an one onely Supreme Deity, to whome be glory
forever, Amen.”1958 Justin Meggitt observed that “the authors then identify
themselves as belonging to ‘the Sect of Christians called Unitarians’ (p. v)
and congratulate the ambassador and his retinue for being ‘fellow
Worshippers of that sole Supreme Deity of the Almighty Father and
Creator,’ and for preserving, unlike Christians in the ‘Western part of the
world,’ ‘the excellent Knowledge of that Truth touching a belief on an only
Sovereign God (who hath no distinction or Plurality in Persons)’ (p. v). The
ambassador is informed of a letter written some years earlier by another
Moroccan ambassador in answer to some queries about his religion from
two Christian princes, one Protestant and one Catholic, the Latin text of
which they have included as the second document in their collection (the
Epistola Ameth Benandala Mahumetani). This letter both expounds Islamic
beliefs and criticises the failings of the faith of Catholics and Protestants.
However, the authors complain that ‘such errors, we Unitarians do abhor as
well as the Mahumetans, in which we must agree in such even against our
fellow Christians.’”1959
The Epistle underscored the historical, theological and intellectual
affinities between Islam, Unitarians and general anti-Trinitarian Christians.
Justin Champion noted that letter was “a succinct account of the perceived
links between the theologies of Islam and the Unitarians […] they shared
the necessary common truth in accepting ‘the religion of an only one
Godhead’ which brought them to a closer fraternity with each other than
with Trinitarian Christianity. The defence of one God ‘without personalities
or pluralities’ was a pristine and original tradition that included, ‘not only
all the patriarchs down from Adam until Moses, not only all the Jews under
the written law and the Old Testament to this very day, were still
worshippers of an only one God (without a Trinity of persons), but that also
all the Primitive Christians, in and after Christ and his Apostles’ time’. In
distinction from the post-Constantinian ‘backsliding Christians’ who
believed in ‘three co-equal and self-subsisting persons, whereof everyone is
an absolute and infinite God’, original Unitarians like Paul of Samosatus
and Marcellus Bishop of Ancyra upheld a monotheism that was maintained
by Mahomet.”1960 Further, the authors explained, “‘in the West and North
we are not so numerous, by reason of the inhumanity of the clergy’ (p.xi);
there are many in Poland, Hungary, Holland and England, but the threat of
persecution means that they cannot be open (p. xii).”1961 The Unitarians
were willing to be the ambassadors of Islam in the West, and worked to
extend the political power of the Ottoman Sultan in Northern Europe. “The
writers plead with the ambassador to make the documents known to ‘the
fittest Persons of your Countrymen’ (p. xiii) – even though they contain
only ‘a Scantling of what the more learn’d of our Unitarian Brethren cou’d
say’ (p. xiii), and to become an ambassador ‘in the Cause and the Religion
of the Supreme Monarch of the World’ (p. xiii).”1962 The author of the
Epistle clearly subscribed to the so-called Stubbian international conspiracy
of Islamic republicanism, which wanted to replace the English and
European monarchies with Ottoman republicanism and Christianity with
Islamic Unitarianism. Shaftesbury, Locke, Unitarians, Socinians and radical
Whiggs were all suspected of that international republican conspiracy.
The letter was a reflection of perceived affinity between the Unitarians
and Muslims and their disdain of Trinitarianism. “The Epistle Dedicatory
clearly reflects the major tropes that characterised the relationship between
Unitarianism and Islam as understood by early Unitarians. It is, in most
respects, not innovative but rather representative of early Unitarian views,
notably in the way it identifies fundamental commonalities between the two
religions, embracing rather than rejecting something central to anti-
Unitarian polemic.”1963 The perceived notions of similarity, and their active
use by the early Unitarians, were significant indications of Islam’s centrality
in the Unitarian/Socinian’s reformatory scheme. This enlightend
reformation of Christianity was founded on Islamic lines. Meggitt noted
that “the Epistle is significant because it is the first time that we see Islam
as foundational in the genesis of a major Christian denomination and the
formation of its emergent identity. The Epistle has been called the ‘Primary
document of English Unitarianism’ by the influential Unitarian
historiographer Alexander Gordon (‘Primary document’, p. 464) and,
although it is not the case that it is the first time the word ‘Unitarian’ was
used in English (it appeared almost a decade earlier in H. Hedworth,
Controversy ended, London, 1673, p. 53), it represents a significant
moment in the development of Unitarian self-consciousness, a key point in
the movement’s transition from the ‘sporadic Antrinitarianism’ of preceding
years to becoming a ‘comprehensive school of thought’ (Gordon, Heads of
English Unitarian history, p. 13). Clearly Islam was in some sense central to
this transformation.”1964
The centrality of Islam in the Unitarian/Socinian anti-Trinitarian
theological scheme was unparalleled in Christian history. “There is no other
example of the genesis of a major Christian movement in which Islam, or
indeed any other non-Christian religion, was a central, defining interlocutor,
other than the birth of the early Christian church itself – although even there
the parallel breaks down, as Christianity was initially a messianic sect
within Judaism. At the very least the story of the origins of early English
Unitarianism is not solely one of intra-Christian struggles, of arguments
about reason and the scripture – or rather not solely Christian scripture.”1965
It was a total break with the supernatural Christianity’s dogmatic past. Islam
was as central to Unitarianism as Unitarianism was central to the early
Enlightenment. The Epistle provides “evidence of the rhetorical weight of
Islam in intra-Christian polemics.”1966 The same applies to the Socinians,
early Deists and other anti-Trinitarians. They used, abused, acted upon and
reacted to Islam and Muslims in so many ways that on the way many
Islamic concepts, ideas and ideals were appropriated and internalised by
them. Islam became their obsessive “other.”
Like Stubbe, Toland, early Deists and Unitarians, the Epistle was full of
praises for Prophet Muhammad and his preservation of the original Gospel
of Jesus, “the text indicates a high estimation of Muḥammad, even if it is
one that would not find favour with Muslims. He is not only someone
raised up by God as a ‘Scourge of those idolising Christians’ (p. vii) – a
common trope in Christian interpretations of Muḥammad since the
emergence of Islam – but is also recognised as a ‘Preacher’ of the ‘Gospel
of Christ’ (pp. vii-viii). Indeed, the authors’ high estimation of Muḥammad
provides grounds for their unusual theory of interpolation: as a man of
‘judgement that had proved itself in other things so conspicuously,’
Muḥammad could not be responsible for the ‘many and frequent
repugnancies, as are to be seen in those Writings and Laws that are
nowadays giv’n out under his name’ (p. viii).”1967 The Epistle chided the
later Muslim cultural engraftings upon the pristine, simple, rational and
compassionate teachings of Muhammad represented in some books of
Muhammad’s biographies. Muhammad was too pure and lofty to have
preached such mythological precincts.
 Islam was truly an aspirational model for both the Socinians and
Unitarians, due to its simple monotheism, republican values such as
religious tolerance and moral salvific scheme and Prophet Muhammad was
the model lawgiver. The early Unitarians looked at this closeness in a total
positive way. Meggitt states that “indeed, as the authors of the Epistle
Dedicatory had noted, Socinianism had thrived under Islamic rule, and
rather than this being evidence of the intolerance of trinitarians, as the letter
and other Unitarian literature claimed, their critics saw this as conclusive
proof that the Unitarians were Muslims in all but name. For its opponents,
Socinianism was virtually indistinguishable from Islam, the differences
largely ‘imperceptible.’”1968 This historic fact was well recognised by their
Orthodox opponents. The Trinitarians considered the Socinians and
Unitarians as the bridge and gateway to Islam, “it was claimed that
Unitarianism ‘makes way for Mahometanism’ that Unitarianism inevitably
led from Christianity to Islam. As Thomas Calvert remarked, ‘If any
Christians turne Mahometans they begin with Arianisme, and Socinianisme,
and then Turcisme is not so strange a thing’. And, as conclusive proof of
this, famous converts from antitrinitarianism to Islam were paraded as
proof, notably Adam Neuser and Paul Alciat – although actually it was only
true of the former, a prominent Reformed Protestant theologian from
Heidelberg. Such a perception does not seem to have been one held solely
by trinitarian Christians, as Ottoman Muslims expressed much the same
view. Leibniz, for example, recounted reading about how a Turk, on hearing
a Polish Socinian talk about his faith, wondered why he did not get
circumcised and become a Muslim.”1969
The undelivered letter was printed in newspapers and books to cause an
alarm against the Unitarian, Socinian, Whiggish, Republican and Islamic
conspiracy against Christianity, Anglican Church and British monarchy. The
Socinians and Unitarians were allying themselves with the “Mahometans
magnifying the Koran in considering it reconcilable with the Gospel if the
doctrine of the Trinity was laid aside. The Socinians were in ‘mere
complacency with those infidels’.”1970 Jonathan Edwards championed the
orthodoxy’s cause, blaming John Locke and his Socinian, Unitarians
accomplices of preaching and promoting the “Turkish” faith at the expense
of Christian faith. Bishop Stillingfeet’s attacks on Locke’s Socinian motives
were no less piercing.
Unitarian’s Turkish Faith
Francis Fullwood blamed the Unitarians of exhibiting more enthusiasm for
Turkish faith than the faith of Christians. They were fanatics and enthusiasts
like Mahometans.1971 Charles Leslie was aghast by this unholy alliance
between the Unitarians and Muslims. He “treated the Unitarians ‘as scouts
amongst us for Mahomet’. The Unitarians could ‘in no propriety be called
Christians; that they are more Mahometans than Christians and far greater
enemies to Christianity than the Mahometans.’”1972 The Unitarians were
more dangerous than Muslims as they were integral to the Christian society.
“Leslie insisted that Islam was less corrosive of Trinitarian Christianity than
the English challenge. The Unitarians were reviled for representing the
‘Mahometans as the true Christians, and our Christianity as mere paganism
and Heathenism’. Contrary to the Unitarian interpretation, where Mahomet
was applauded for re-establishing a primitive and pure Christianity, Leslie
suggested that the ‘Alkoran is a system of Arianism’ and therefore ‘vile
heresy.’”1973 Socinians went further than even the Muslims, recalled Leslie,
in uprooting the Christian faith by degrading Christ’s redemptive role and
by humanising Jesus to mere moral model of no divine pretensions.
“Leslie’s ironic argument that Mahomet was a more orthodox ancestor than
the Nazarenes or Ebionites. The Alkoran certainly applauded Christ as
Messiah, but the Socinians overstated this applause, ‘as Mahomet improved
Arianism, so the Socinians have exceeded even the Alkoran in their
contempt of Christ.’”1974 The Socinians’ human, moral Christology
naturalised the role of Christ’s to the extent that he was no different than
Muhammad. Leslie “pointed out the dangers of the Unitarian elision of
Mahomet and Christ: many ‘say that there is no greater ground to believe in
Christ than Mahomet’.”1975
Anglican Orthodoxy’s fight against the Unitarians and Socinains was a
fight for survival of Trinitarian Christian faith, orthodoxy and episcopacy. It
was “incumbent upon Anglican controversialists to neutralize the moral
value of such pasts.”1976 The Anglican Church hierarchy, with all its might
and resources, were pitched against the Unitarian, Socinian and Deists anti-
Trinitarian, anti-clerical and anti-monarchy republican alliance. Archbishop
Tenison, Bishop Edward Stillingfeet, Bishop Wettenhall, Bishop Trelawny,
William Sherlock, John Williams, John Tillotson, John Willis, William Jane,
Henry Aldrich, Gilbert Burnet, Daniel Whitby, Edward Fowler, Francis
Fullwood, Robert South, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Leslie and many other
high ranking jurors and non-jurors were fully engaged in refuting the anti-
Trinitarians.1977 They were supported in various capacities by the Royalty,
Parliament, educational establishment and lay mobsters. The continuous,
long lasting controversy called “Anti-Trinitarian Controversy,” or “Socinian
Controversy or “Unitarian Controversy,” was a multifaceted,
comprehensive and exhaustive movement.1978 It threatened the core of
Christianity, Anglican Church, British political institutions and society.
Brent S. Sirota notes that “the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s was
never simply a contest over the doctrine of the Church of England. The
theological imperative to vindicate Trinitarian orthodoxy was from the
beginning embedded in what might be thought of as a disciplinary crisis, a
series of constitutional and ecclesiological controversies over precisely
which civil and religious institutions bore responsibility for undertaking
such vindications. The trinitarian controversy was distinctive for the sheer
variety of public authorities involved. No less than five sitting bishops
participated in the controversy alongside a host of lay and clerical writers.
The matter was taken up by the convocation of the province of Canterbury
and elicited two separate condemnations from Oxford University
convocations, a royal directive to the episcopate, and a parliamentary
statute within the space of a decade. For all the attention paid to the
controversy as a crisis in English theology and epistemology, this
institutional dimension has largely gone unstudied.”1979
The controversy, and its far-reaching arms, underscored the depth of crises
prevalent in the Protestant Church in general, and the Anglican Church in
particular. The Reformation severed the Protestants from centuries-old
Church traditional authority, and the sola scriptura encouraged
individualism and autonomy, shattering the monopoly of Church and state
in the matters of faith and worship. The political upheavals of the 1640s to
the 1690s turned everything upside-down, to use Christopher Hill’s
phrase.1980 The multiple anti-Trinitarian controversies shook the very
foundations of the Anglican Church demanding a concerted effort from the
Church authorities. “The trinitarian controversy must be understood not
simply as a doctrinal dispute but as a disciplinary crisis: a far-reaching
debate over not only the content of orthodoxy but also the constitutional
apportionment of responsibilities for its enforcement.”1981 The blame of
“turning Turk” was tossed between the Orthodoxy and dissenters of all
kinds. To defend Trinitarian absolutism was in fact a defense of Anglican
Church and State. Anti-Trinitarian controversies of the late seveneteenth
and early eighteenth century were directed at Church and state authority and
subsequent persecutions. They were an extension of the early seventeenth-
century English Civil War and Commonwealth revolution. From the early
seventeenth-century merchants to Paul Best, John Biddle, Henry Stubbe,
John Toland, Shaftesbury, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Socinians, Unitarians
and Deists all participated in this republican struggle in various capacities
and forms. The goal was same, but the means and methods were different.
The Enlightenment was a product of such a long and bloody dialectical
struggle. It was not the love of Islam or Ottomans but the longing for an
inclusive, tolerant and republican England which steered the century long
struggles.
Catholic writers blamed the entire Protestant faith, especially the Anglican
Church, of turning Turk and Socinian.1982 This was a time of crises for both
the Church and state. Many Anglican leaders believed that Unitarians like
Nye, Locke, Firmin and Socinians were part of an international Islamic
conspiracy, bent on destroying the entire Christian faith. “Henry Maurice,
Archbishop William Sancroft’s domestic chaplain, predicted that Firmin
and his ilk would not be satisfied until the Nicene Creed, ‘the spring of all
the doctrines, which makes up your mystery and their abomination,’ was
similarly struck out.”1983 Humphrey Prideaux’s famous anti-Muhammad
diatribe was meant to halt this local, English, Deistic, Unitarian and
Socianian conspiracy against the Christian faith. “The historical
interpretation of Islam as a triumph of empire was given extended treatment
in Humphrey Prideaux’s The True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in
the Life of Mahomet (1697) which addressed the Unitarian assaults upon
Trinitarianism of the 1690s. The work sold two editions in the first year of
publication, and a tenth edition was on sale by 1722 indicating its
popularity as the staple and ubiquitous Anglican defence against the
infidels.”1984 Prideaux, an Oxford fellow of Henry Stube and John Locke,
was trying to highlight Anglican and Protestant sectarianism and Unitarian
onslaught as an extension of the early seventeenth-century English Civil
War and the resultant Cromwell republic, which was tolerant and anti-
Church like Muhammad. Cromwell abolished the Anglican Church, excuted
Charles I and destroyed monarchy; the Unitarian onslaught of 1690s was an
extension of that Islamic republican conspiracy against the Church and
monarchy. “Prideaux drew an easy parallel between the sectarianism of the
1650s and 1690s, which in turn mirrored the confusion and disunity evident
in the Eastern Church at the time of Mahomet. The warning was to beware
that God might ‘raise up some Mahomet against us for our utter
confusion’.”1985 Tolan also noted that “although Prideaux does not say so, he
is responding to the claims of Henry Stubbe, who had presented the Muslim
prophet as a reformer and visionary who proposed a renewed monotheistic
revelation in a time when Jews and Christians, victims of bickering clerical
elites, had strayed from their pristine monotheism.”1986 The Orthodox anti-
Muslim rhetoric lumped together the English Socinians, Unitariansans and
Deists with the supposed Ottoman conspiracy to destroy Christiandom from
within. This was a common trope of the late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century Anglican establishment.
Adriaan Reelant’s Four Treatises concerning the Doctrine, Discipline, and
Worship of the Mahometans was published in 1712. Reelant totally lumped
together the Socinians, Unitarians and Muslims as one body and faith.
“Mahomet’s central doctrinal position was the ‘unity of God’ which was
merely a revival of the ancient anti-Trinitarian heresy of Paul of Samosatus,
Theodotian and Photinus. The Mahometans insisted upon calling
themselves ‘Unitarians’ in opposition to orthodox Christians whom they
termed ‘Associants’. The Socinians and Mahometans collaborated in
insisting upon the corruptions and forgeries in Scripture upon which the
Trinity was erected. The radical Unitarian Francis David in his polemics of
the 1590s had repeatedly cited the Alkoran against the Trinity. The
Racovian Catechism used identical definitions of the unity of God to the
Koran. The early heretic Ebionites had fled into Syria to become the first
Mahometan converts. The crucial charge against both Unitarian and
Mahometan, echoing Prideaux’s condemnation, was that they were Pelagian
heresies or human theologies, ‘more like the moral philosophy of the
Pagans, than the doctrine of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’”1987 Bishop
Edward Stillingfleet was no less emphatic. “We must examine the political
implications of these rival theologies. What were the challenges and issues
that the Islamic rhetoric masked? Socinian argument rejected the Christian
status of the Anglican establishment, considering it a corruption from the
veridical model of pre-Nicene Christianity. Contemporary Christianity in
the Unitarians’ view conflated the ritual and worship of the person of Christ
with the practice of religion. The Unitarians demanded a reform of the
ecclesiastical establishment to the pattern of primitive morality.”1988 They
demanded nothing short of a complete overhaul of the Christian faith.
“What they demanded was an alteration in faith to satisfy divine
prescriptions.”1989 The Socinians and Unitarian were bent on reforming the
dogmatic, Church Christianity on simple, moral and Unitarian Islamic
model.
The Anglican leaders were especially threatened by the Socinain,
Unitarian human Christology. This trend brought to the earth both Jesus and
the Church, and both theology and ecclesiology. “This Christology required
that sacerdos was to be present in the temporal Church, identified in the
priesthood. Elevating the competence of human reason to perceive the
example of Christ and follow its precepts undermined the Trinitarian
distinction between sacerdos and laity. The conception of Christ’s sacrifice
as a total propitiation of sins elevated the Church on earth to ministrators of
this divinity: to undermine the sacrifice of Christ was to undercut the
authority of the human priesthood.”1990 The Unitarians were literally there to
“‘subvert Christianity.’”1991 They subverted hierarchy in Church, monarchy
and social order; the hierarchical ideology was a matter of faith and
disbelief. Charles Leslie in the voluminous Socinian Dialogues, “stated,
with uncharacteristic succinctness, that the crux of the debate was ‘no less
whether what we worship is God or a creature, whether we adore the true or
false God, and are the grossest Idolaters in the world.’”1992 Newton, Toland,
Stubbe and Nye’s indictment that the Trinity was gross idolatry was now
ratcheting and resonating in Leslie’s defenses. To him, Socinian’s
humanistic moralism was atheistic. “His complaint was that this reduced all
to morality: if Christian behaviour was given such a wide circumference
then it could include anyone who acted in a virtuous manner. Leslie pointed
out, ‘so that if a Mahometan, Jew or Pagan, leads a good moral life, he has
the very essence of a Christian, and then no doubt is a Christian, let his
system of faith be what it will.’ This was the high road to subversion and
atheism.”1993
Leslie was correct in identifying a growing radical trend in England
which, unlike Locke, Nye and Bury, was propagating a total break with
Christian faith, institutions and culture. This trend was following the radical
ideas of Henry Stubbe, John Toland and some other Deists. “Stephen Nye
and Arthur Bury was not to overthrow Christianity but to reform its deviant
Trinitarianism. There was a more radical enterprise which, in appealing to
the history of Mahomet, suggested not just an end to Trinitarian theology
but also to the very idea of a ‘Christian’ society. In Mahomet No Impostor
(1720), written under the assumed Arabic name of Abdulla Mahumed
Omar, the Anglican denigration of Mahomet epitomised in Prideaux’s True
Nature of Imposture (1697) was subject to radical analysis.”1994
The Epistle Dedicatory, together with Stubbe’s Originall & Progress of
Mahometanism, were clandestinely distributed in England by 1701 and, by
1784, “the Epistle was employed to demonstrate that Unitarians were a fifth
column that would soon recognise Muhammad’s prophethood (Horsley,
Letters, p. 151), repeating Leslie’s claim at the begining of the century that
Unitarians were ‘Scouts amongst us of Mahomet’ (Socinian controversy
discuss’d, p. xxx), and drawing upon the common trope that Islam was a
political, as much as a religious, threat.”1995 In short, Socinians, Deists,
Unitarians and anti-Trinitarians were closely identified with Islam and
Muslims, called Muhammadan Christians, Turks, Moors and
straightforward Muslims throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. They were considered integral to an international Islamic
monotheistic and republican conspiracy against Christendom, its religious
and political institutions.
The English Abdulla Mahumed Omar and “Mahomet No
Imposter”
Some scholars have connected Mahomet No Imposter to George Sale, who
later translated the Quran to English.1996 The author of Mahomet No
Imposter seemed well-equipped with Islamic religion, history and customs.
He demolished the imposter artifice built by Prideaux, and constructed an
alternate positive portrait of Muhammad and his religion. It was Christian
faith which was paganistic, tri-theistic, ceremonial and idolatrous; contrary
to that, Islam was monotheistic, moralistic, simplistic and minimalistic. “As
Abdalla Mahumed Omar wrote to his fictional Moslem correspondent in
Mecca commenting on Prideaux’s work, ‘it is no new matter to find a
Christian author railing at the Great Prophet, and heaping together a
company of false and scandalous reflections, to render him and his religion
odious to their own people.’ According to Omar, Mahomet had re-
established an economy based upon faith in ‘one eternal God, the Creator of
all things.’ Opposed to this the Christians were more intent upon upholding
heathenish dogmatism, and promoting idolatry rather than establishing
‘moral institutions.’ The Islamic faith could be reduced to two central
doctrines, the unity of God and ‘the moral duties that are to regulate our
actions towards one another.’ The binary choice presented by Omar was
between a conception of religion which was primarily ceremonial, or one
which established a system of social duties and harmony.”1997 Islam was a
reflection of Newton, Locke and Nye’s minimal Christianity of loving God
and loving one’s neighbour.
As seen above, these Unitarian thinkers appreciated and were interested in
simple, minimalistic, rational and natural Islamic monotheism, morality,
religious toleration, rational and ethical scheme of salvation, republican
interpretations of man, state and society, and limited government and
monarchy. Orthodox Christianity not only excluded them from faith and
salvation, as well as from society and government, but also persecuted them
for their love of freedom, liberty, pluralism, republicanism and natural
theology. These persecuted dissenters looked outside the Christendom for
analysis, comparison and solutions and found a ready-made complete
system of theology, cosmology and politics in Islam; they wanted that
model implemented in England and Europe.
The Muslim world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not
weak like the modern-day Muslim world; it was powerful and threatening.
Many British citizens had the firsthand knowledge of the Muslim world and
its religious and political allures. Therefore, they struggled to reform
Trinitarian Christianity on Unitarian Republican Islamic foundations. The
dissenters, whether Deists, Socinians, Unitarians or others, owned Islam as
their own to bring about the revolution called the Enlightenment. The early
Enlightenment was really a religious and theological revolution, which
shattered the old Christian system of belief and politics and built it upon
natural, rational, Islamic republican lines. Islam was a constant, continuous
trope and theme in these long decades of struggle between the authoritarian,
persecutory and absolutist Church and monarchical institutions and the
English heterodox dissenters. The so-called secularisation project went
through this Unitarian Islamic republicanism and through the model of
Prophet Muhammad, as Garcia noted that “our secular predecessors often
hailed the Prophet an Enlightened Promethean hero.”1998 Garcia, in
opposition to the oft repeated, dominant, Eurocentric narrative, offers “an
alternative story about the emergence of Islamic-inspired secularisation in
Eighteenth-century Britain. This story should not be read as a subaltern
approach to “histories from below” or as a victimisation narrative about an
overpowering West and a correspondingly subjugated East. Rather, I
foreground Islam’s contribution to the English Enlightenment […] I
challenge an exclusionist Judeo-Christian Enlightenment by engaging with
precolonial perceptions of Islam.”1999 Garcia defines Islamic republicanism
as “a term that describes how radical Protestants in Eighteenth-century
England self-consciously recast Islam in constitutional-nationalist
terms.”2000
The expression Islamic republic “evokes the political disillusionment that
originally characterised the negative freethinking response to Latinate-
Roman Christianity.”2001 The Islamic republicanism was not an imaginary
construct but a real, firsthand experience. The “positive (and negative)
perceptions of Islam were conditioned by Anglo-Islamic encounters in
India, Ottoman Europe, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. As a result, the
radical Enlightenment was in constant dialectical engagement with
Islam.”2002 Garcia argued that “mid Seventeenth-century radical Protestant
dissent—plebeian and sectarian movements that spurned the Church of
England’s authority—informed country and commonwealthean opposition
to Britain’s Whig-Walpolean oligarchy in the 1730s and ’40s, the American
democratic upheavals, and French Jacobin politics despite its defeat in
1660. If 1789 or 1688 repeats history, then how does one account for the
transmission of radical ideas in this period? This […] argues that Islamic
republicanism is enabled by a heterodox biblical hermeneutics associated
with (but not confined to) the English deist movement. To think about what
lies between the revolutions involves long and complicated national debates
about Mahometanism, a supplementary prophetic faith that helped transmit
and renew radical ideas in England.”2003
The early Deists, like their Socinian and Unitarian compatriots, were
equally religious, pious and concerned Christians. They were neither
matarialists nor atheist, as is usually stated. The early Deists, such as
Charles Blount and others, agreed with Stubbe and Toland about the
possibility of reforming Church Christianity in conformity with Islamic
ethical monotheism and republican values. “By the Eighteenth century,
many deists preferred Mahometanism over the dogmatic Christianity
codified in the Anglican church and state. Thomas Morgan, Matthew
Tindal, and Peter Annet variously employed Islamic tawhid, or unity of
God, to discredit the scriptural basis of revelation, liturgical practices,
apostolic succession, the Trinity, the incarnation, miracles, and original sin.
In particular, they used Islamic toleration as a beating stick against English
toleration—the entitlement to freedom of conscience that, in practice,
excluded many nonconformists from citizenship. Because of the
Corporation (1662) and Test (1673) Acts—which remained in effect after
the 1689 Toleration Act—the Anglican state barred Unitarians, Quakers,
Catholics, and antitrinitarians from holding public office, obtaining legal
preferment, and earning degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.”2004 These
persecuted anti-Trinitarians formed a common cause with Islamic
republicanism to realise their liberty, freedom and rights. Their struggle for
human rights and religious freedom thrusted them close to Islamic world,
ideas and institution. For this reason, “deism not only implies a preference
for natural religion over scriptural authority and revealed truth but also an
open-ended investigation in which various primitive monotheisms—Arian,
Ebonite, Jewish, or Islamic—can be used to explore republican-democratic
models that promote civic equality despite confessional affiliation and
socioeconomic differences. By reading the scriptures beside profane
histories, deists helped shape the Historica monotheistica, a comparativist
study that challenges Christocentric history and politics. Radical dissenters
used this study to question the theological authority of an exclusionist
Anglican establishment. From Stubbe onward, deism implied a temper or
attitude toward England’s toleration policy and religious plurality rather
than a systematic creed.”2005
The simple, rational, minimalistic and universal Islamic monotheism
solved the problem of particularities and localism for the Deists. “The deists
solved this problem by insisting that a universal and reasonable religion, in
its ‘natural’ and simple form, would avoid ascribing a partial will to an
arbitrary God. This tidy solution would require not only an unbiased
comparative investigation of Judaism, paganism, and Islam, but also the
categorical denial of the belief that Jesus was the Son of God. Deists could
not accept that this divine mediator determined human history, and that his
sacrifice has atoned for humanity’s original sin through God’s forgiveness.
The deist solution to the problem of particularity requires the wholesale
rejection of original sin, the Trinity, the incarnation, divine revelation, and
the atonement. In their imagination, these erroneous ‘pagan’ doctrines were
concocted by priests, popes, and kings to dupe their subjects into voluntary
submission.”2006 Once free of the localised, specified and brutalised
Trinitarian faith system, the reformers were able to connect with the
universal monotheistic history epitomised by Muhammad. “For deists […]
Christendom’s fragmentation from within and without its porous borders is
not a problem, because Mahometanism and the Protestant Reformation
symbolise the providential unfolding of the Historica monotheistica.
Mahomet, as well as Christ, is one among many prophets belonging to
Abraham’s natural religion. In other words, if Christian Europe is to
overcome religious pluralism as the subject of political and theological
contention, it must abandon its obsession with a particular time and event: a
diachronic history that is grounded on Christ’s incarnation in first-century
Jerusalem. Instead, deists concluded that, ideally, religious plurality is the
universal essence of history: a synchronic monotheism that interprets
Islam’s worldwide triumph as anticipating the Protestant Reformation. In
their imagination, Muhammad is an earlier and more radical reformer than
Luther.”2007
Muhammad’s reformation was in conformity with the moral schemes of
Moses and Jesus; therefore, pristine Judaism, Christianity and Islam stood
for the same ethical monotheism and democratic value system. Islam was a
bridge between true Judaism and Christianity, and the true voice of the
voiceless dissenters. “In English political life, Islam is one of the principal
mediums for imagining cultural transmission and transformation.
Converting to a Mahometan is therefore a process of radical self-fashioning
for those who believe that England’s constitutional model has excluded
them from participating in the symbolic rites of Anglican citizenship. For
many English nonconformists, Islam offers a renovated constitutional idiom
for reclaiming political subjectivity and national identity, reworking the
universal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity into a new vocabulary for
redefining the power struggle among state sovereignty, church authority,
and the people. Employed in this manner, Islamic republicanism augments
English nonauthoritarian liberty while dispensing with exclusionist and
oppressive Christian policies.”2008
 Islamic natural, earthly and ethico-moral, egalitarian ideals were the
aspired goals of the downtrodden, pressurised, demonised, deprived and
persecuted by the oppressive Church and state alliance. “Islamic
republicanism reinvents English revolutionary history, providing
sociopolitical empowerment for marginalized ‘mute witnesses’: deists,
Unitarians, Gnostics, and Arians, among other forgotten heretics, and
heterodox women who championed female-friendly versions of the
prophetic past. Islamic republicanism’s political reinvention—enabled
through reprinted republican tracts and recirculated subversive manuscripts
—creates a historical continuity among the 1640s, 1688, 1776, and 1789.
This imaginative process ties together the various events that took place
between the Eighteenth-century revolutions. Mythical accounts about
Mahometanism’s worldwide triumph constitute a lived cultural heritage that
underwrites the English social imaginary.”2009
Historica Monotheistica and Islamic Republicanism
Islamic republicanism and Historica monotheistica were the two major
themes greatly discussed during Europe’s early Enlightenment. Islamic
republicanism, as discussed above, greatly contributed to English, French
and American Enlightenments, and hence to the French and American
Revolutions. The Historica monotheistica represented a universal Unitarian
prophetic tradition, and Islamic republicanism stood for its historical
preservation in the Islamic faith. The pluralistic Ottoman Empire stood as
its historical model; such a Unitarian Islamic republicanism was the general
conceptual framework of the early and high Enlightenment. “From the late
Seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Islamic republicanism
captivated the radical Anglo-Protestant imagination and redefined reformed
orthodoxy in England, North America, and the transatlantic world, only to
be silenced by the anti- Islamic sentiments that gripped Victorian culture
after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.”2010
It is commonly argued that Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke,
Newton, Stubbe, Toland and others were neither theologians nor
religiously-oriented, that they were secular political thinkers who wanted to
replace religion with reason. This Whiggish, modern secularistic
interpretation of early Enlightenment is misplaced. A detailed analysis of
writings of Locke, Newton, and other English thinkers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries shows that they were in fact religiously-oriented
pious theologians, who wanted to reform Christianity for religious reasons
rather than banish it altogether. The alliance between the Church and state
and the redefinition of this bondage were central to their desires for viable
political changes. Monarchical sovereignty and Church authority were
mutually interconnected; the idea of dismantling the theological
foundations of Church doctrines concurrently eroded the foundations of
ecclesiastical authority and monarchical sovereignty. In this viewpoint, a
correct conception of God, man, and human nature was a fundamental
premise for morality and good character, and a deviant conception of God,
man, and human nature was the source of immoral, capricious human
behavior. The reformers understanding of God and religion was based on
the central characteristic belief in the necessity of inducing a virtuous and
moral social, political, and economic life. Moral reformation of the
individual and society was elemental in their scheme of transformation.
Cumbersome rituals, irrational mysteries, and corrupt dogmas were
antithetical to morality and good character. They were not against
Christianity as such but against the supernatural, dogmatic and ceremonial
Roman Christianity. Therefore, these thinkers tried to reform Christianity
rather than throwing it out of the window. They tried to do so by importing
heterodox theological perspectives from outside. The Islamic model and
sources were helpful tools and they used them well for their reformation
agendas.
In short, Locke, Newton, Stubbe, Toland, Deists, Socinians and Unitarians
were anti-clerical, anti-dogmatic and anti-monarchy Christians. They
denounced fundamental Church dogmas such as the Trinity, Jesus’ divinity,
original sin, ecclesiastical authority, biblical inerrancy, and salvation
through the redemptive death and crucifixion of Christ. Their Christianity
was far removed from the official Church Christianity; in reality it was no
Christianity per orthodox definitions. It was also no Deism, as espoused by
some later radical deists, who rejected divine providence, revelation in all
forms, miracles, prayers, rewards and punishments in the afterlife and
spiritualism. Contrary to that, Locke, Newton and many other
enlightenment ideologues and early Deists believed in divine providence,
authentic rational revelation, partial scriptures, miracles, prayers, personal
relationship with God, spirituality, reward and punishment in the
afterlife.2011 They did not fit in the strict categories of Christians or
materialist Deists. They were rational Unitarian theistic in line with ethical,
rational, minimal and Unitarian monotheism of Islam. They were
Muhammaden Christians and so were they called by their opponents. This
conscious or unconscious Islamic subscription needs to be recognised and
appreciated.
In addition to rejecting the central religious tenants of Church Christianity,
they also scorned its socio-political framework. They hated its clerical as
well as monarchical hierarchy, its religious and political persecutions, its
interpretations of authority, man and government, its top-down government
system and its cumbersome ceremonies and practices. In short, they
demolished the entire Christian system from within to replace it with
rational, Unitarian monotheism; religious tolerance and pluralism; limited
republicanism and liberal, democratic and bottom-up government system;
confidence in man, his liberty, freedoms, human rights, equality, justice;
simple and straightforward morality, virtues and worship. This was their
understanding of the natural religion in opposition to the super natural
Christian system of God, man and society. They kept the outer skeleton of
the Christian system but replaced almost all the inner elements with
appropriated, modified and Christianised Islamic ideas and concepts. The
end result was the “Muhammaden Christianity” espoused equally by the
radical as well as moderate enlightenment figures.
This Unitarian Muslim hybrid continued throughout the long eighteenth
century, culminating in Joseph Priestley, Richard Price2012 and many other
Unitarians. The English Unitarians were closely identified with Muslims
and excluded from citizenship. “With the gradual formation of an Anglican
nationalism in Eighteenth-century England, orthodox polemicists used the
image of Unitarians as ‘Mahometans’ as a prime justification for their
exclusion from citizenship. Once again orthodox polemicists panicked
about a possible Muslim-Unitarian plot to thwart the state, especially after
the French Revolution. The Epistle to the Moroccan ambassador and A
Letter of Resolution continued to haunt the Unitarian psyche.”2013 Samuel
Horsley openly criticised Joseph Priestley as the epitome of Muslim
theology and an enemy of Christ. Joseph Priestley’s house, library,
laboratory and chapel were torched to ashes during the Birmingham riots.
“The most acute manifestation of this resurgence can be found in the
polemical exchanges between Joseph Priestley, who converted to
Socinianism during his ministry at Leeds and wrote prolifically in favour of
Unitarian theology, and Samuel Horsley, the archdeacon of St. Albans who
was elevated to Bishop of Rochester in 1793 for his defense of Anglican
dogmas. In this eight-year controversy (1783–91), Horsley launched a
smear campaign against the English Unitarian movement by maintaining
that Priestley, a prominent philosopher and scientist of the age, was secretly
preaching the Mahometan faith. To elucidate the subtle connections among
antinationalist sentiments, dissenting politics, and Islamic republicanism,
this renewed Mahometan-Unitarian conspiracy can be traced in the
theological writings of Priestley, whose mind, as one late-Victorian
historian puts it, charts ‘the mental pilgrimage’ of late-Eighteenth-century
Unitarianism.”2014 Horsley stigmatized Priestley “as a disguised Mahometan
who seeks to overthrow church and state […] In the Unitarian writings of
the last century, it is allowed of Mahomet, that he had no other design than
to restore the belief of the unity of God.—Of his religion, that it was not
meant for a new religion, but for a restitution of the true intent of the
Christian.—Of the great prevalence of the Mahometan religion, that it has
been owing not to force and the sword, but to that one truth contained in the
Alcoran, the unity of God.”2015 Horsley continued that “like their late-
Seventeenth-century predecessors, Priestley and his Socinian cohort are
involved in a new conspiracy with Mahometan enemies intent on
overthrowing England’s Christian rule. To support this latest conspiracy
theory, Horsley refers to the Unitarian Epistle printed in Leslie’s earlier tract
as indisputable proof, deploying an earlier polemical strategy bent on
discrediting dissenting claims to Anglican citizenship and property
rights.”2016 Priestley’s An history of the corruptions of Christianity (1782)
was dubbed a Muslim treatise against Christianity, because like Nye before
him, Priestley identified the fourth century’s clerical establishment as the
main culprits of the Christian fraud. They deviated from the original
message of Jesus by inserting Trinitarian jargon into the simple Unitarian
message of the original Nazerene. Reverend James Barnard “satirically
states that Priestley should acknowledge the Muslims as his ‘brethren’ and
include them in his next edition of An History of the Early Opinions
concerning Jesus Christ (1786). Some orthodox polemicists pointed out
that Priestley’s defense of Chris’s prophetic status must be proof that he
accepts the revealed truth of the Quran and that Islam is preferable to
Christianity. As one writer sarcastically puts it, “the real creed of the
Unitarian [...] is—There is one God, and Priestley is his prophet; and it is a
matter of moonshine to a Christian, whether Priestley or Mahomet be
exalted in that honour.”2017
Justin Meggitt well summarises the impact of the Epistle Dedicatory to
Unitarian Christian relationships throughout the Eighteenth century both in
England and America. “The contents of the Epistle continued to be used by
opponents of Unitarianism in both England and the United States to argue
that Unitarians were indistinguishable from Muslims, or indeed, worse than
Muslims (Whitaker, Origin of Arianism disclosed, pp. 399-400; Wilkins,
The trial of the Unitarians, p. 4), that they could not be judged Christians
(T.C.S., ‘Letter to a Mahometan ambassador’; Feltus, Historical
documents). The Epistle and its association of Unitarianism with Islam was
sometimes used to the material disadvantage of the former. For example, it
was quoted in evidence in the House of Lords to demonstrate that
Unitarians should be debarred from being either the trustees or beneficiaries
of Lady Hewley’s charities, a significant source of assistance to dissenters
(Gurney and Gurney, Lady Hewley’s charities, pp. 171–3). The text dogged
a number of Unitarian initiatives: a Unitarian version of the New Testament
published by Thomas Belsham in 1808 was referred to as the ‘gospel of
Mohammed’ and likened to the Quran, and the address to the Moroccan
ambassador was used to justify speaking about it in such a manner (Anon.,
‘Article XV’, p. 72; Norris, A practical exposition, p. 232).”2018 He also
demonstrates that the Unitarian Islamic identification and syncretism was at
times denied by some Unitarian leaders, but mostly acknowledged and
appreciated by the majority. “However, from the outset some Unitarians
acknowledged that the Epistle was genuine and that there was nothing in it
of which to be ashamed (Emlyn, An examination of Mr. Leslie’s last
dialogue, p. 21) and this was continued throughout the 18th century (Rutt,
Theological and miscellaneous works of Joseph Priestley, vol. 18, p. 248).
This more positive interpretation of the Epistle was clearly shared by
Gordon when, towards the end of the 19th century, he brought attention to it
once again after some decades of neglect by both Unitarians and their
critics, and identified it as the ‘primary document’ of Unitarianism.”2019
Joseph Priestley was an heir to this long tradition of Unitarian Islamic
syncretism. By 1790, he self-consciously knew that his detractors
considered him “half a Mahometan.”2020 Priestley had to escape to America
due to his support for French and American revolutions and for being a
Mahometan. In spite of his constant and continuous efforts to distance
himself from Islam, the charge of being an Islamophile remained stuck to
Joseph Priestley; he transmitted the same to the Founding Fathers of
America. This was the Christianity with its Socinian/Unitarian/Deistic bent,
theology and political outlook, which was transmitted to some of the most
influential Founding Fathers of America through Locke’s writings, Deistic,
Unitarian and Muslim associations but more importantly via Joseph
Priestley’s preaching. These Founding Fathers suffered the same fate and
were vilified as crypto-Muslims, Turks, atheists and infidels.
In conclusion, we can state that the Unitarian Islamic republican
syncretism was the fundamental source of English and the ensuing French
and American Enlightenments.
 Endnotes
1 – Eric R. Wolf, Europe And The People Without History, Berkeley, University of California Press,
2010, p. 5
2 – Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britian, and France, C.
1500-1800, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995, 11; and passim, ch. 1, ‘The Legacy of Rome,’
11-28; also David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, 195ff ; Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern
Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 276
3 – See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. By Talcott Parsons,
London and New York, Routledge, 2005, p. xlii (certain types of rationalisation have developed in
the Occident). See Joseph M. Bryant, “The West and the rest revisited: Debating capitalist origins,
European colonialism and the advent of modernity”, Canadian Journal of Sociology 31(4), 2006,
pp.403–444.
4 – See Weber, The Protestant Ethics for details.
5 – Weber, Ibid, p. xvi
6 – M. H. Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics” in H. Lehmann & G.
Roth (eds,), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1993, p. 212
7 – M. Weber, “Anticritical Last Word on the Spirit of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology,
83, v.5, (1978), p. 1124
8 – Weber, The Protestant Ethics, p. xvi
9 – Weber, The Protestant Ethics, p. xvii
10 – Weber, Ibid, p. xvii
11 – Weber, Ibid, p. xvii
12 – Weber, Ibid, p. xvii
13 – Weber, Ibid, xvii
14 – Weber, Ibid, xxxix
15 – Weber, Ibid, xxxix
16 – Weber, Ibid, xxxix
17 – Weber, Ibid, xvii
18 – Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics” in H. Lehmann & G. Roth
(eds,), Weber’s Protestant Ethic, p. 215
19 – JRD Coffey, ‘Religious Thought’, ‘in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution’ ed. by
M. J. Braddick, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 447-465, p. 453
20 – See details in Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis, p. 216
21 – Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis, p. 223
22 – See F. Rachfahl, “Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” inj. Winckelmann, ed., Die Protestant Ethik
II (Hamburg, 1972), 57-148; and, F. Rachfahl, “Nochmals Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus,” in
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23 – L. Brentano, Die Anjange des modemen Kapitalismus (Leipzig, 1916), 134, 136.
24 – W. Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the
Modern Business Man, New York,The Classics,1967, 105ff; W. Sombart, The Jews and Modern
Capitalism, New York, Martino Fine Books, 2015
25 – G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, New York, Routledge, 2011
26 – H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and
his School, New York, Kelley and Millman, 1959, 10ff
27 – K. Samuelson, Religion and Economic Action: The Protestant Ethic, the Rise of Capitalism and
the Abuses of Scholarship, Toronto, University of Tornoto Press, 1993
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29 – R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 1998
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21ff
31 – H. Luthy, “Once Again: Calvinism and Capitalism,” in R. W. Green, ed., The Weber Thesis
Controversy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1973, p. 98-99
32 – See details in Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics” in H.
Lehmann & G. Roth (eds,), Weber’s Protestant Ethic
33 – Mackinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics” in H. Lehmann & G. Roth
(eds,), Weber’s Protestant Ethic, p. 243
34 – Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy, A Critique of Eurocentrism
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35 – Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, P. 27. “The arguments Weber advances, in this respect, are
confused, despite their apparent precision. They are, moreover, perfectly reversible, analogous to
those previously advanced to explain the backwardness of China in terms of Confucianism, then fifty
years later to explain the take-off of that country in terms of the same Confucianism! Superficial
historians have explained the success of the Arab civilisation of the Middle Ages by way of Islam,
while contemporary journalists, even more superficially, explain the stagnation of the Arab world by
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36 – See John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West,
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37 – David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York, W. W. Norton and
Company1998, p. xxi
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39 – See Joseph Needham, Science and civilisation in China, Pt 2, vol VII, Cambridge, Cambridge
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40 – M. Elvin, The pattern of the Chinese past, London, Eyre Methuen, 1973

41 – F. Braudel, Civilisation and capitalism, 15th–18th century, London, Phoenix Press, 1979
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43 – Wolf, Ibid, p. 1
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45 – Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade,
Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jun.,
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46 – See John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge, Cambridge
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47 – Jack Goody, The Theft of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 61
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historians, London: Collins, 1957
49 – See Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history, p. 5
50 – See J. W. Burrow, A liberal descent. Victorian historians and the English past, Cambridge:
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intellectual origins of the American revolution, Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1965
51 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 1; ; J. M. Blaut, The Coloniser’s Model of the World:
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Eurocentric Historians, New York, Guilford Press, 2000
52 – See Samir Amin, Eurocentrism; J. M. Blaut, The Coloniser’s Model of the World
53 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 8
54 – See Avihu Zakai. The Rise of Modern Science and the Decline of Theology as the ‘Queen of
Sciences’ in the Early Modern Era, Reformation & Renaissance Review 9.2 (2007) 125–151,
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55 – See details in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being : A Study of the History of an Idea,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936; E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World
Picture, New York, Routledge, 2017
56 – S. F. Mason, “Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England” in The Intellectual
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58 – Depending upon diverging Catholic or Proetstant or Greek Orthodox views.
59 – David C. Lingberg and Ronald L. Numbers eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the
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61 – See details in Terence L. Nichols, The Sacred Cosmos: Christian Faith and the Challenge of
Naturalism, Eugene, WIPF & STOCK, 2003, p. 43
62 – Mason, “Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England”, p. 207
63 – See details in Mason, “Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England”, p. 206ff
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Medieval History. Volume VI c.1300–c.1415, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000,
pp. 653–673
65 – See Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard eds., A History of the Crusades, Vol. V: The Impact
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66 – See Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians
Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, New York, Back Bay Books, Little Brown and
Company, 2002
67 – See William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance:
Portrait of an Age, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1993
68 – See Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, P. 115ff
69 – Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke eds., Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World
Economy in the Second Millennium, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. xxii
70 – C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, London, Harvard University Press,
1955, p. 7
71 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 7; Charles Burnett, “Arabic into Latin: the
Reception of Arabic Philosophy into Western Europe” in Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor
(eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2006, p. 370ff
72 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 278 –
73 – A. S. McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 21
74 – Eric John Holmyard (ed.), The Works of Geber, translated by Richard Russel, London, Dent,
1928, digitalized by the University of Michigan on July 13, 2007, p. xv
75 – Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1977, p.54
76 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 281
77 – See Simon Barton and Peter Linehan (eds.), Cross, Crescent and Conversion: Studies on
Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher, Leiden, Brill, 2008, p. 53ff;
78 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 11
79 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 285; also see Eva R. Hoffman, Pathways of
Portability: Islamic and Christian interchange from the tenth to the twelfth century, Oxford,
Blackwell Publishers, Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 24 No. 1 February 2001 pp. 17-50
80 – See Charles Burnett, “Arabic into Latin: the Reception of Arabic Philosophy into Western
Europe” in Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 370ff
81 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 290
82 – See Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2002
83 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 283
84 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 284
85 – See George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of European Renaissance, London, MIT
Press, 2007, p. viiiff especially chapter 6 “Islamic Science and the Renaissance Europe: The
Copernican Connection”.
86 – Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, p. 290-291
87 – See details in Rena D. Dossett, The Historical Influence of Classical Islam on Western
Humanistic Education, International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 4, No. 2, March
2014
88 – See details in Erika Rummel (Ed.), Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of
Erasmus, Brills, Leiden, 2008, p. 1
89 – G. H. R. Parkinson (Ed.), The Renaissance and the Seventeenth-century Rationalism, London,
Routledge, 1993, p. 1
90 – George Makdisi, The Scholastic Method in Medieval Education: An Inquiry into its Origins in
Law and Theology, Speculum, v. 49, No.4, October, 1974, p. 648
91 – See Zulfiqar Ali Shah, St. Thomas Aquinas and Muslim Thought, Swansea, Claritis Books, 2021
92 – See David B. Burrell, Thomas Aquinas and Islam, Modern Theology, 20:1, Oxford, Blackwell,
January 2004; Jon McGinnis, Avicenna, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; Jean-Pierre Torrell,
Aquinas’s Summa, Background, Structure and Reception, translated by Benedict M.Guevin,
Washington D. C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2005, p. 82; Robert Hammond, The
Philosophy of al-Farabi and Its Influence on Medieval Thought, New York, Hobson Book Press,
1947
93 – Quoted in Hamid Naseem Rafiabadai and Aadil Amin Kak, The Attitude of Islam Towards
Science and Philosophy, New Delhi, Sarup and Sons, 2003, P. 43
94 – Quoted by Haider Bammate, Muslim contribution to Civilisation, Indiana: American Trust
Publications, 1976, p. 23
95 – See Muammer Eskenderoglu, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Thomas Aquinas on the Question of the
Eternity of the World, Leiden, Brills, 2002; Majid Fakhry, al-Farabi: Founder of Islamic
Neoplatonism, His Life, Works and Influence, Oxford, Oneworld, 2002; Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi,
Emerging From Darkness: Ghazzali’s Impact on the Western Philosophers, New Delhi, Sarup &
Sons, 2002; Joseph Owens: “Aquinas as Aristotelian Commentator,” in St. Thomas Aquinas. 1274-
1974. Commemorative Studies (Toronto: Pont. Ins!. Med. Stud., 1974) V. 1; Richard C. Taylor,
Arabic / Islamic Philosophy In Thomas Aquinas’s Conception Of The Beatific Vision In Iv SenT., D.
49, Q. 2, A. 11, The Thomist 76 (2012): 509-50, p. 540-541
96 – See Nakosteen, History of Islamic Origins of Western Education, A.D. 800-1350, Boulder,
University of Colorado Press, 1978
97 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 236
98 – Quoted in Asma Afsaruddin and A. H. Mathias Zahniser (eds.), Humanism Culture and
Language in the Near East, Winona Lake, Indiana, Eisenbrauns, 1997, p. 21
99 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 234
100 – Michael G. Carter, “Humanism and the Language Sciences in Medieval Islam” in Asma
Afsaruddin and A. H. Mathias Zahniser (Eds), Humanism Culture and Language in the Near East, p.
27
101 – Carter, Humanism, p. 28-38
102 – George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges, Institutions of Higher Learning in Islam and the West,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1981
103 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 228
104 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 228
105 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 231
106 – Goody, The Theft of History, p. 232
107 – Quoted in Goody, The Theft of History, p. 228
108 – See George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of European Renaissance
109 – Jerry Brotton, Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006,
p. 13
110 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 19
111 – Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore, revised
and edited by Irene Gordon, London, Macmillan, 1904, Part II, p. 122
112 – Burckhardt, Civilisation, Part II, The Development of the Individual, p. 122
113 – Burckhardt, Civilisation, Part II, The Development of the Individual, p. 122
114 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 8
115 – Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, P. 115
116 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 19
117 – Hobosn, Eastern Origins, p. 116
118 – Hobosn, Eastern Origins, p. 116-117
119 – Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, p.
108
120 – Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, p. 67
121 – Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, p. 67
122 – See Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, p. 67
123 – Gerald MaLean (Ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, New
York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 p. 6
124 – See John North, The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance, London,
Phoenix, 2004
125 – See details in Geraldine A. Johnson, Renaissance Art, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 70-74
126 – R. J. Knecht , Francis I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 187-190
127 – See Roger Bigelow Merriman, Suleiman the Magnificent 1520-1566, Worcestershire, Read
Books, 2007
128 – See Knecht, Francis I, p. 187
129 – See Knecht, Francis I, p. 187; Frangipani returned with the following answer from Suleiman,
on 6 February 1526: “I, the khan and sultan of Mediterranean, Black Sea, Anatolia, Karaman,
Kurdistan, land of persian, Damascus, Aleppo, Egypt, Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem and all of the
lands of arabian, yemen and all of many other countries; Son of the Bayezıd, Son of the Sultan Selim,
Shadow of the God, Sultan Suleiman Khan and you, governor of the France, Francis...You have sent
to my Porte, refuge of sovereigns, a letter by your faithful agent Frangipani, and you have
furthermore entrusted to him sundry verbal communications; you have informed me that the enemy
has overrun your country and that you are at present in prison and a captive, and you have here asked
aid and succors for your deliverance. (...) Take courage then, and be not dismayed. Our glorious
predecessors and our illustrious ancestors (may God light up their tombs!) have never ceased to make
war to repel the foe and conquer his lands. We ourselves have followed in their footsteps, and have at
all times conquered provinces and citadels of great strength and difficult of approach. Night and day
our horse is saddled and our saber is girt. May God on High promote righteousness! May whatsoever
He will be accomplished! For the rest, question your ambassador and be informed…”
130 – Gabor Agoston and Bruce Master (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ottoman Empire, New York, Facts
On File, 2009, p. 542
131 – Encyclopedia of Ottoman Empire, p. 542
132 – A. Nuri Yurdusev et al., Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional?, New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 23
133 – See Knecht, Francis I, p. 214
134 – See Robert A. Kann, A History of the Hapsburg Empire, 1526-1918, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1980, p. 62
135 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 6-7
136 – See Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001
137 – See Mack, Bazaar, p. 84
138 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 7
139 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 7
140 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 21
141 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 22
142 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 22
143 – Brotton, Renaissance, p. 22-23
144 – W. M. Watt, Islamic Surveys: The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe, Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Press, 1972, p. 2; See also G. MacLean, Re-Orienting the Renaissance:
Cultural Exchanges with the East, p. 6
145 – Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe, p. 84; See also S. M. Ghazanfar, Medieval
Islamic Thought, New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003, p. 182
146 – Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and
Apologetics, Brill, Leiden, 2007, p. 40
147 – See Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed. Europe 1517-1648. London, Penguin Books,
2014, p. 45, 340, 540ff
148 – See Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and
Apologetics; D. D. Grafton, (2017), Martin Luther’s sources on the Turk and Islam in the midst of the
fear of Ottoman imperialism. Muslim World, 107: 665-683. doi:10.1111/muwo.12215; see F. Guerin
“Re-orienting the Reformation? Prolegomena to a History of the Reformation’s Connection with the
Islamic World” in N. R. F. Al-Rodhan (ed.), The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the
West, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p.38-60
149 – Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early
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150 – See Nabil Matar, Renaissance English Soldiers in the Armies of Islam. Explorations in
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151 – See Kaspars Klavins, The importance of Islamic civilization at the crossroads of European
thinkers: 16th and 17th centuries, “Scholarly Papers”/ University of Latvia // Oriental Studies, Vol.
803. Riga, 2015, p. 8
152 – See D. D. Grafton, (2017), Martin Luther’s sources on the Turk and Islam in the midst of the
fear of Ottoman imperialism. Muslim World, 107: 665-683. doi:10.1111/muwo.12215
153 – See Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power, New
York, Routledge, 2011, p. 54
154 – D Nițulescu, The Influence of the Ottoman Threat on the Protestant Reformation...,
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155 – Stephen A. Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism and German Protestantism, 1521-1555,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1959, p. 112
156 – See Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual And Religious History Of
Late Medieval And Reformation Europe, London, Yale University Press, 1980, chapter 8
157 – Kenneth Setton, Lutheranism and The Turkish Peril, in Europe and the Levant in the Middle
Age and the Renaissance, London, Variorum Reprints, 1976, 3.
158 – Quoted in The Armenian Review, Volume 42, Hairenik Association, 1990 - Armenia, digitalized
by the University of Virginia on June 26, 2007, p. 77
159 – Abraham Ascher, Tibor Halasi-Kun, Béla K. Király, The mutual effects of the Islamic and
Judeo-Christian worlds: the East European pattern, New York, Brooklyn College Press, 1979, p. 58
160 – Jae Jerkins, Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination, Eras, Edn 13, Issue 2, June
2012, p. 13
161 – See Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam, New
York, Penguin Books, 2016, p. 103ff
162 – Jack Goody, Islam in Europe, Malden: Polity Press, 2004, p.162.
163 – Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. Delaware,
University of Delaware Press, 2005. p. 64; Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen, p. 2
164 – Jerkins, Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination, p. 16
165 – Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen, p. 2
166 – Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project, New Haven: Cambridge: University Press,
2007, p. 40
167 – See Virginia Mason Vaughan Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (2005)
168 – Martin Luther, “War Against the Turk.” Works of Martin Luther, Volume V. Trans. C. M.
Jacobs. Cologne, Germany, Lindemann Press, 2007
169 – Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam, p. 87
170 – Kaspars Klavins, The importance of Islamic civilization at the crossroads of European
thinkers: 16th and 17th centuries, p. 9
171 – Bela K. Kiraly (ed.), Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, East
European Monographs, New York, Columbia University Press, 1976
172 – Kiraly, Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, p. 199
173 – Kiraly, Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, p. 200
174 – See D Nițulescu, The Influence of the Ottoman Threat on the Protestant Reformation ...,
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=arc; Stephen A.
Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism and German Protestantism, 1521-1555, p. 112; Kenneth Setton,
Lutheranism and The Turkish Peril, in Europe and the Levant in the Middle Age and the
Renaissance, p. 3.
175 – See F. Guerin “Re-orienting the Reformation? Prolegomena to a History of the Reformation’s
Connection with the Islamic World” in N. R. F. Al-Rodhan (ed.), The Role of the Arab-Islamic World
in the Rise of the West, 2012, p.38-60
176 – See George Huntson Williams, The Radical Reformation, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1962, p. xxxi.
177 – See details in Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson eds., The Intellectual Consequences of
Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750, Leiden, Brills, 2012; Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the
English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010,
p. 2ff
178 – Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, p. 2
179 – See details in Earl Morse Wilbur, Our Unitarian heritage: An introduction to the history of the
Unitarian movement, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963, p. 55ff; Bibliotheca dissidentium: The Heidelberg
antitrinitarians : Johann Sylvan, Adam Neuser, Matthias Vehe, Jacob Suter, Johann Hasler edited by
André Séguenny, Jean Rott, Irena Backus, V. Koerner, 1980 ;
http://pacificuu.org/wilbur/ahu/book1/index.html
180 – See Susan J. Ritchie, Children of the Same God: The Historical Relationship Between
Unitarianism, Judaism, and Islam, Boston, Skinner House Books, 2014
181 – See Michael White, The Pope & the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who
Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition, New York, William Morrow, 2002, p. 7ff
182 – See White, The Pope & the Heretic, p. 27ff
183 – Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1964
184 – Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 49ff, 450ff
185 – Cause, Principle and Unity, by Giordano Bruno edited by R.J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca,
with an Introduction by Alfonso Ingegno. p.x. Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. x
186 – Cause, Principle and Unity, by Giordano Bruno edited by R.J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca,
p. x
187 – See Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.1, p.
164ff
188 – Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, p. 27
189 – See details in John Coffey ed., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The
Post Reformation Era 1559-1689, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, vol. 1, p. 357ff
190 – See details in Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson eds., The Intellectual Consequences of
Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750, p. 9ff
191 – Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.1, p. 80
192 – S. F. Mason, “Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England”, p. 206-207
193 – See details in John Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, p. 392ff
194 – John Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, p. 392
195 – See Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640-1685,
Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2007, p. 182; See James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the
Islamic World, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 175ff; Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies:
Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2019; Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1998, p. 14-15; Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early
Modern England, New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 207ff; Christopher J. Walker, Reason and Religion
in Late Seventeenth-Century England: The Politics and Theology of Radical Dissent, London, I.B.
Tauris, 2013
196 – Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in
European Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 253
197 – In Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers eds., Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant
Reform, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017, p. 201ff
198 – See Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.1, p.
149ff
199 – See Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720, London, Cornell University
Press, 2000
200 – Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed. Europe 1517-1648, p. 46
201 – Robert J. Topinka, Islam, England, and Identity in the Early Modern Period: A Review of
Recent Scholarship, Mediterranean Studies, “https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40051739” Vol. 18 (2009).
p. 114; see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance,
New York, Octagon Press, 1937, vii; Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: from Alcazar to
Othello, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; Nabil I. Matar, Britain and Barbary,
1589-1689, Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2005; and Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation:
Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008
202 – Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, p. 391
203 – In Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers eds., Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant
Reform, p. 223
204 – See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-
1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 573
205 – See Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its
Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) 1st Edition, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2014
206 – See Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.1, p.
121ff
207 – See details in Margaret C. Jacob, Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720, New
York, Cornell University Press, 1976, p. 22ff
208 – See Jacob, Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720, p. 271ff
209 – Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies, p. 417
210 – See John Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, p. 377ff
211 – See Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology, John Bowden, trans. (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1971; John N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, New York, Harper and Brothers,
1958; Charles F. D. Moule, The Origin of Christology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977
212 – See John Hick, “A Remonstrance in Concluding,” Jesus in History and Myth, R. J. Hoffmann,
G. A. Larue, eds., Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1986; John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate,
Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1977
213 – See details in Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Islam’s Reformation of Christianity, Swansea, Claritis Books,
2021, chapter 1 & 2.
214 – See Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, Minneapolis, Fortress
Press, 1981
215 – See S. Angus, The Mystery Religions: A Study in the Religious Backgrounds of Early
Christianity, New York, Dover Publications, 1975; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, Fortress
Press, Philadelphia, 1984; Arthur Darby Nock, Early Gentile Christianity and its Hellenistic
Background, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1964
216 – See details in Zulfiqar Ali Shah, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible
and Quran: The Concept of God in Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions, London, International
Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012, p. 189 ff
217 – See Shah, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Quran, p. 232 ff
218 – See Shah, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Quran, p. 265
219 – See Augustine, ‘Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian’, in Answer to the Pelagians III (The
Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, volume I/25), introduced, translated and
with notes by Roland J. Teske, New City Press, New York, 1999; Augustine, On Christian Teaching,
translated, introduced and with notes by R. P. H. Green, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008; R.
A. Markus, Sacred and Secular: Studies on Augustine and Latin Christianity, Ashgate Variorum,
Farnham, 1994
220 – See James Boyce, Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World, Black Inc.,
Collingwood, Australia, 2014
221 – Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700, Penguin, London,
2003; Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (second edition), Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2012, p. 15; Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings, Paulist
Press, New York & Mahwah, 2002; Hieko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil,
translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989
222 – See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by John Allen, First American
Edition, London, 1813

223 – See Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th to 18th
Centuries translated by Eric Nicholson, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1990
224 – See R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western
Europe AD 950–1250, Oxford, 1986, Wiley-Blackwell, p. 6; see also Edward Peters, Heresy and
Authority in the Middle Ages, London, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980; Edward Peters,
Torture, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985
225 – William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism
in Europe, v. 1, p. 156
226 – See John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, Cambridge, William B. Eerdmans, 1994, p. 142
227 – See Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule eds., Jesus and the Politics of His Day, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 374
228 – See Cornelius M. Stam, Commentary on the Epistle of Roman, Steven Point, WI, Berean
Literature Foundation, 1984, p. 267-268
229 – See Bammel and C. F. D. Moule eds., Jesus and the Politics of His Day, p. 374
230 – See Cornelius M. Stam, Commentary on the Epistle of Roman, p. 268
231 – See Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Albany, Books For The Ages,
1997, p. 631-632
232 – See Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, Grand Rapids, MI, William B. Eerdmans,
1996, p. 790
233 – Moo, The Epistle to Romans, p. 791
234 – See Bammel and C. F. D. Moule eds., Jesus and the Politics of His Day, p. 263
235 – See details in Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.
1, p. 146ff
236 – Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman eds., Heresy in Transition,
Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005, p. 1; for a useful overview, see John B.
Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early
Christian Patterns, Albany, SUNY Press, 1998
237 – See David M. Gwynn, Christianity in the Later Roman Empire: A Source Book, London,
Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 50
238 – Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, Theodosius, The Empire at Bay, London, Routledge, 1994,
p. 31
239 – Clyde Pharr trans., The Theodosian Code, London, Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 440
240 – Clyde Pharr trans., The Theodosian Code, P. 77
241 – Ian Hunter, Heresy in Transition, p.1
242 – Williams and Gerard Friell, Theodosius, 38
243 – See Richard Lim, “Christian Triumph and Controversy” in G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and
Oleg Grabar eds., Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World, London, Balkan
Press of Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 208
244 – See Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, New Jersey,
Princeton University, 2003, P. 23
245 – Richard Lim, “Christian Triumph and Controversy” in G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and
Oleg Grabar, Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World, p. 208
246 – Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2005, p. 133
247 – Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration, p. 29
248 – Philip Schaff, Augustin: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists,
New York: The Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890, p. 817
249 – See Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-
1700, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 2 ff
250 – Schaff, Augustine, p. 817
251 – Schaff, Augustine, p. 817
252 – Gaddis, There Is No Crime, p. 134
253 – Schaff, Augustine, p. 817-818
254 – See Zagorin, How the Idea of Toleration, p. 30
255 – See Edward Peters, Inquisition, New York, Free Press, 1988
256 – Zagorin, How the Idea of Toleration, p. 32; W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration.
Studies in Church History, 21, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.
257 – See Peter Brown, “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion.” The Journal of Roman
Studies, vol. 54, 1964, pp. 107–116., www.jstor.org/stable/298656, p. 107
258 – Brown, Augustine’s Attitude, p. 110
259 – See Karen Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic. Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French
Literature, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; W. L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and
Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250, London, Allen & Unwin, 1974,
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260 – See William Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, Boston, Brill, 2007, p. 335
261 – See J. A. S. Evans, The Age of Justinian, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 246
262 – See Evans, The Age of Justinian, p. 240
263 – Evans, Age of Justinian, p. 249
264 – See Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans and
Christianity in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009
265 – See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, New York,
Routledge, 2000; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England
1500-1700
266 – Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity1650-1750,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 4
267 – Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of
Man 1670-1752, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 69
268 – See William J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in
England and its Empire, 1648-1715, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 4
269 – John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 28
270 – See Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, p. 4
271 – See Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, p. 31; see Ole Peter Grell and Roy Potter eds.,
Toleration in Enlightenment England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 1ff
272 – Huge Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, London, Yale University Press, 2010, p.
71
273 – See Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, p. xii-xiii
274 – See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American
Enlightenments, New York, Vintage Books, 2005, Preface
275 – John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, p. xiii; also see
Alfred G. McKinney, Mohammed, The Myths, New York, i Universe Inc, 2007, p. 28
276 – See Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Canter, and Stephen Pumfrey (eds.), Science and Religion: New
Historical Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 113
277 – Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v. 1, p. 98
278 – See Draper, History of the Conflict, chapter III, p. 68-101
279 – Martin Pugh, Britain and Islam: New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019, p. 4
280 – See details in Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v.
1, p. 92ff
281 – See Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v. 1, p.
150ff
282 – Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v. 1, p. 148ff
283 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 7
284 – Draper, History of the Conflict, p. 84
285 – See John V. Tolan, Faces of Muhammad: Western Perception of the Prophet of Islam from
Middle Ages to Today, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019
286 – See Surah al-Kahf, verse 4 “And to warn those who say, “God has begotten a son.” (18:4)
287 – Draper, History of the Conflict, xiii
288 – Draper, History of the Conflict, xiv
289 – Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the Quran: Semantics of the Quranic Weltanschauung,
Tokyo, Keio University, 1964, p. 136
290 – Franz Rosenthal, Man Versus Society in Early Islam, edited by Dimitri Gutas, Leiden, Brill,
2015, p. 565
291 – See L. Rosen, Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2000 p. 70
292 – See details in Rosenthal, Man Versus Society in Early Islam, chapter II, “The Muslim Concept
of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century”, p. 21ff
293 – Patricia Crone, God’s Rule, Government and Islam, New York, Columbia University Press,
2004, p. 6
294 – Crone, God’s Rule, p. 14
295 – See Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, What is Right With Islam, New York, HarperCollins, 2004, p.
45ff
296 – See Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’án, McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2002; Fazlur Rahman, Major Theme of the Quran, Minneapolis, Bibliotheca Islamica, 1994
297 – See Mohammad Omar Farooq, Towards Our Reformation: From Legalism to Value-Oriented
Islamic Law and Jurisprudence, London, International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2011, p. 36ff; for
a different perspective see Jacques Ellul, Islam and Judeo-Christianity: A Critique of Their
Commonality, Translated by D. Bruce MacKay, Eugene, OR, Cascade Books, 2015, p. 69ff
298 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 10
299 – Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Defining Islamic Statehood, Measuring and Indexing Contemporary
Muslim States, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 67ff
300 – Amina Wadud, “Freedom and Responsibility: An Islamic Perspective” in Freedom and
Responsibility, Christian and Muslim Explorations edited by Simone Sinn and Martin L. Sinaga,
Minneapolis, Luther University Press, 2010, p. 27
301 – See C. G. Weeramantry, Islamic Jurisprudence, An International Perspective, London,
Macmillan Press, 1988, p. 113-125; David Pearl, A Textbook on Muslim Personal Law, London:
Croom Helm,1979, pp. 41–57, 77–84, 100–120; Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in
Islam, New York, Routledge, 2007, p. 24-25
302 – See Muhammad Shafiq, The Role And Place of Shura In The Islamic Polity, Islamabad, Islamic
Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter 1984), pp. 419-441
303 – Ilyas Ahmad, The Social Contract and the Foundations of the Islamic State, The Indian Journal
of Political Science, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October—December, 1942), pp. 132-169
304 – Feisal Abdul Rauf, Defining Islamic Statehood, p. 63ff
305 – See details in Azizah Y. al-Hibri, Islam and American Constitutional Law: Borrowing
Possibilities or a History of Borrowing, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law
1.3 (1999): 492-527.
306 – Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 18-19
307 – Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 19
308 – Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 19-20
309 – Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 20
310 – Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 20
311 – J. Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, translated by Margaret Graham Wier, Calcutta,
Calcutta University Press, 1927, p. 8-9
312 – See M. H. Kamali, Caliphate and Political Jurisprudence in Islam: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives. Muslim World, 106, 2016, p. 384–403. doi:10.1111/muwo.12145; For
Shi’ite concept of “Deputyship of Imam” see Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, The Just Ruler (al-Sultan
al-‘Adil) in Shi’ite Islam, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 29ff
313 – See Hugh Kennedy, Caliphate, The History of an Idea, New York, Basic Books, 2016, p.
chapter 1
314 – See details in Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam, p. 7-23
315 – See details in Anis Ahmad, Islam’s political order: the model, deviations and Muslim response
: al-Khilāfah wa al-mulūkīyah, Islamabad, Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, 2018
316 – See Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Defining Islamic Statehood, Measuring and Indexing
Contemporary Muslim States, p. 30ff
317 – John L. Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2002, p. 70; Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, New York,
Nation Books, 2018. p. 172, 181; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in
Comparative Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 153; Karen Barkey,
Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model, International Journal of Politics,
Culture, and Society, (2005), 19:5-19
318 – Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, p. 70-71
319 – See details in Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, San Francisco,
Harper Collins, 1992, p.11; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1989, p.297 ff
320 – See Charles D. Gunnoe Jr., Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance Physician in
the Second Reformation, Leiden, Brills, 2011; Christopher J. Burchill, The Heidelberg
Antitrinitarians. Bibliotheca Dissidentium, vol, XI, ed., Andre Seguenny. Baden-Baden: Editions
Valentin Koemer, 1989
321 – See Zachary W. Schulz, The English In The Levant: Commerce, Diplomacy, And The English
Nation In The Ottoman Empire, 1672-1691, A Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue
University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2018, p. 130
322 – See details in Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from
Revolutionary England, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2015), 1485–1545.
doi:10.1093/qje/qjv019; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, ‘‘The Rise of
Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,’’ American Economic Review,
95 (2005), 546–579.
323 – See William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, New
York. Bloombury, 2019, p. 3ff
324 – F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London, new edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1963
325 – See J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1970
326 – See C. Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, Oxford, Oxford University Press,1968
327 – See details in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, London, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 21ff
328 – See William Manchester, A World Lit only by Fire
329 – See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside-down: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution, London, Penguin Books, 1972
330 – See details in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, p. 3
331 – Nabil Matar, “England and Religious Plurality: Henry Stubbe, John Locke and Islam”,
https://www.cambridge.org/core. https://doi.org/10.1017/S042420840005018X, p. 181
332 – See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Century England, p. 3. Even the more prosperous and progressive Dutch were
considered so. See Claudia Schnurmann, “Wherever profit leads us. To every sea and shore. . .’: The
VOC, the WIC, and Dutch Methods of Globalisation in the Seventeenth Century,” Renaissance
Studies 17 (2003): 474–93; here 483. Cf. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the
Asian Age, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.
333 – William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, 3
334 – Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind: 168-1715 translated by J. Lewis May, New
York, New York Review Books, 2013, p. 5
335 – See John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 2-3
336 – See Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, Minneapolis, University
of Minnesota Press, 1981, p. 332
337 – See Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England

338 – See B. Coward, The Stuart Age – England, 1603–1714 5th edition ch.4. New York, Routledge,
2017
339 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 13
340 – J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725, London,
Macmillan,1967, p. 13
341 – Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in
European Context, p. 47
342 – See Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 90. “For the fact that in crucial respects, moreover, it was
religious passions that drove political ones there were several reasons. One was that, weak though the
monarchy may have been, the English protestant church was more recent. It was a product of the still
unfolding and embattled reformation. If the national boundaries of politics were therefore permeable
and half-formed, those of religion were frailer still. Not all members of the Church of England agreed
with one another. All agreed, however, that they were protestants: participants in a European
reformation process and identity.”
343 – John Locke, Two Tracts, ed. Philip Abrams, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967,
p.160–1.
344 – See The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols., Oxford 1976–89), vol. I, p.
82; W. Spellman, John Locke, London, Springer, 1997.
345 – William J. Bulman, Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England, History
Compass 10/10 (2012): 752–764, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2012.00873.x, p. 755
346 – See Bulman, Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England, p. 755
347 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 98
348 – Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988, p.
135, Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 15
349 – See details in Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700, New Jersey, Rutgers University
Press, 1999; Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the
Ottoman Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005; Mesut Uyar, and Edward J.
Erickson. A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk, Wisconsin, Pleager Security
International, 2009.
350 – Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642, London, Hambledon Press, 1990, p.
183
351 – Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642, p. 184
352 – “Under Charles I and Archbishop Laud, however, there was a concerted campaign to remodel
the British churches. In matters of doctrine, the Laudians rejected the predestinarianism of Zwingli
and Calvin, preferring the teaching of the Greek Fathers and the Dutch Arminians who had
emphasised the synergy of divine grace and human freewill in salvation. In matters of worship,
Laudians sought to infuse ‘the beauty of holiness’ into Protestantism through choral music, elaborate
vestments, liturgical rites and restoration of altars. Communicants were to kneel at the altar rails, and
receive the elements from the priest, thus imbibing a high view of both the eucharist and the priestly
office. In matters of discipline and government, the Laudians asserted the authority of the higher
clergy over parish pastors, often justifying this by a divine right (jure divino) theory of episcopacy
that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the ministry in Europe’s non-episcopal Reformed churches.
These policies involved a fundamental realignment of the Ecclesia Anglicana.” JRD Coffey, ,
‘Religious Thought’, ‘in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution’ ed. by M. J. Braddick, p.
447
353 – See JRD Coffey, ‘Religious Thought’,
354 – See Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess eds, England’s Wars of Religions, Revisited,
Burlington, Ashgate, p. 47; Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century
England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007;
Johann P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “iure divino’’, 1603–1640’, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1984): pp. 548–58.
355 – See Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess eds, England’s Wars of Religions, Revisited, p.
100; also see Theodore D. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, Chapel Hill, University of North
Carolina Press, 1988, p. 26
356 – See John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 9
357 – Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 52
358 – John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, p. 2. “After chronic instability and civil war for
much o f the fifteenth century (the consequence o f the complicated marital affairs of Edward III and
John of Gaunt and the consequence of the Lancastrian coup d’etat o f 1399), the country teetered on
the brink of civil war for much o f the sixteenth century as the doubtful legitimacy o f H enry VIII’s
daughters and the childlessness of all three of his children made a War of the English Succession an
ever-present threat. In 1559 a heretic bastard Queen (three damning qualities) was trying to secure
the throne and was faced by a formidable rival in Mary o f Scotland, married to King Francis II o f
France. If Francis had fathered a child by Mary before he died unexpectedly of an ear infection at the
age o f nineteen, there would have been a single heir to the thrones of France, Scotland and England,
a circumstance that would have ensured that the great Habsburg/Valois struggle would have been
fought out on British soil.” P. 2
359 – “The period from 1569 to 1642 was the longest period ever without a major rebellion; the
period 1605 to 1641 the longest without the conviction of a peer of the realm for treason; the number
of trials for treasons declined decade by decade from the late sixteenth century through to the 1630s.
Where else in the early seventeenth century were few or no royal officials killed in discharging their
duties? Was not England alone in not having no-go areas for unaccompanied tax-collectors? Were
there not more dead bodies on stage at the end of a production of Hamlet than following any
collective act of violence in the period up to 1642? Where else was the arbitration o f the royal courts
so completely accepted? Riots declined in number, in the num ber of those involved and in intensity
after the turn o f the sixteenth century. Englishmen were notorious throughout Europe for being
litigious. They were litigious because they were law-abiding.” Morrill, Nature of English Revolution,
p. 5
360 – “By the 1620s, the centre o f gravity o f European power politics had moved eastward again, to
the Rhineland and to Bohemia: invasions o f the British Isles, even assistance to rebels, were not on
the agenda o f over-com m itted continental m onarchs.” Morrill, Nature of English Revolution, p. 3
361 – See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590-1640, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1987; Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face
of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007; Anthony Milton,
Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600-
1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England
and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2009.
362 – See John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, p. 10
363 – See details in JOHN ADAMSON: The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007

364 – See Mark Häberlein, A 16th-Century German Traveller’s Perspective on Discrimination and
Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire, 2008,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237274589_A_Sixteenth-
Century_German_Traveller’s_Perspective_on_Discrimination_and_Tolerance_in_the_Ottoman_Emp
ire and his K.H. Dannenfeldt, Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-Century Physician, Botanist, and
Traveller, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press,1968. “During his stay in the Syrian city of
Aleppo in the mid-1570s, the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, a physician from the imperial city
of Augsburg, heard a remarkable story about the Ottoman sultan Suleyman. According to Rauwolf,
Suleyman once discussed with his advisers whether the Jews in his territories should be tolerated or
exterminated. Most members of his council expressed the opinion that the Jews did not merit
toleration since they burdened the people with their abominable usurious practices. The sultan then
asked his councillors to regard the forms and colours of the flowers that were arranged in a bouquet
in their midst. Did they share his opinion that each flower in its particular shape and colour added to
the beauty of the others? When the councillors agreed, the sultan pointed out to them that he ruled
over many different nations – Turks, Moors, Greeks and others. Each of these nations contributed to
the wealth and reputation of his kingdom, and in order to continue this happy situation, he deemed it
wise to continue to tolerate those who were already living together under his rule. His advisers liked
this proposition so well that they unanimously accepted it.” Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-Century
Physician, p. 202-203

365 – Häberlein, A 16th-Century German Traveller’s Perspective on Discrimination and Tolerance in

the Ottoman Empire, p. 120; G. Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685-1787. The
Enlightenment Debate on Toleration, Waterloo, Ontario 1991, pp. 63-64; O.P. Grell, B. Scribner
(eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. On the situation of Jews, see J.I.
Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750, Oxford, Oxford University
Press,1985.
366 – Andrew Lake, The First Protestants in the Arab World: The Contribution to Christian Mission
of the English Aleppo Chaplians 1597-1782, Melbourn School of Theology, 2015, P. 32; William
Biddulph, The Travels of Certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia and to the Blacke Sea London:
Aspley, 1609; Theophilus Lavender, “The Travels of Four Englishmen and a Preacher “. Chap. 12 In
A Collection of Voyages and Travels, edited by Anon. Voyages and Travels Published from the Earl
of Oxford’s Library. London: Thomas Osborne, 1745, p. 794-95
367 – See Simon Mills (2011) The English Chaplains at Aleppo: Exploration and Scholarship
between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1760, Bulletin for the Council for British Research
in the Levant, 6:1, 13-20, p. 13; Charles Robson, Nevves from Aleppo: A letter written to T. V. B. of
D. Vicar of Cockfi eld in Southsex· By Charles Robson Master of Artes, fellow of Qu: Col: in
Oxford, and preacher to the Company of our English Merchants at Aleppo. Containing many
remarkeable occurrences obserued by him in his iourney, thither (London, 1628), 14–15
368 – See details in John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited : The Case For Toleration In The
English Revolution, The Historical Journal, 41, 4 (1998), pp. 961-985, p. 973ff
369 – Extortion was common, “there is evidence that some monarchs extorted money by demanding
loans or presents in return for renewing or extending the EIC’s trading monopoly during the period of
royal control in the 1600s. Also some monarchs encouraged ‘interlopers’ to enter the EIC’s market
undermining its profits. Moreover, the narrative history suggests that renegotiation of the charter,
bribes, and the like often occurred in the wake of a monarch change, implying such events raised the
risk of extraction.” Dan Bogart and Marco Del Angel, Monarchs, institutional change, and the trade
of the English East India Company, http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dbogart/eic_shipping_oct212019.pdf,
P. 2
370 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1494; Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to
English Political Thought, 1603–1642, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992;
Samuel Rawson Gardiner ed., Parliamentary Debates in 1610, Edited, from the Notes of a Member
of the House of Commons, vol. 81, London: Camden Society, 1862.
371 – “The loan in 1641 to Charles I came just before the Civil War between the monarchy and
parliament. The loan in 1643 to the Long Parliament happened just after the start of the Civil War.
The loan in 1659 to the Council of State was made shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell,
England’s leader during its brief Republic. Finally, the loan in 1662 to Charles II came two years
after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.” Dan Bogart and Marco Del Angel, Monarchs,
institutional change, and the trade of the English East India Company, p. 7
372 – See Dan Bogart and Marco Del Angel, Monarchs, institutional change, and the trade of the
English East India Company, p. 7-8
373 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1494; Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in
the Expansion of England, 1575–1630, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 71-75
374 – See Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from
Revolutionary England, p. 1502ff
375 – Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History, New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 74
376 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1494; Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714, New York: Routledge,
1961, p. 48-50; T. K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998.
377 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1495; David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689, London: Arnold, 1999, p. 53-
55
378 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1496; James D. Fearon, ‘‘Bargaining over Objects that Influence Future Bargaining
Power,’’ Mimeo, APSA general meetings, 1996, p. 48-49
379 – John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, p. 14
380 – See John Coffey, “The Toleration Controversy during the English Revolution” in C. Durston
and J. Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England, Manchester University Press, 2006. P. 42-68.
381 – See details in John Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Part 1, p.
41-73
382 – See John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 978ff
383 – See J. C. Davis, Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution, The
Historical Journal 35,3 (1992), p. 507-530
384 – John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 973; Franklin Hamlin Little, Anabaptist
View: A Study in the Origins of Sectarian Protestantism, p. 47, 54; Bard Thompson and George H.
Bricker, eds. Lancaster Series on the Mercersburg Theology, vol. 1, The Principle of Protestantism,
by Philip Schaff, United Church Press, 1845.
385 – John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 973
386 – Quoted In John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 964
387 – Quoted in John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 965
388 – Roger Williams, The bloudy tenent of persecution [1644], ed. E. B. Underhill, London, 1848,
p. 2.
389 – Roger Williams, The bloudy tenent of persecution, p. 2; also Oscar S. Straus, Roger Williams:
The Pioneer of Religious Liberty, New York, Century Co, 1894
390 – Quoted in Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, New York, Humani­ties Press,
1963, p. 87
391 – Quoted in Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, p. 87
392 – S. Fisher, Christianismus redivivus, Christendom both unchrist’ned and new christ’ned (1655),
pp. 533-51, quotations at pp. 534, 537
393 – Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Governemnt, New
Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1986, chapter 4, p. 143ff
394 – Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government:
Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory, Political Theory , Nov., 1980, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Nov., 1980),
pp. 429-486 p. 458
395 – Quoted in John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 969
396 – https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A67478.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext, p. 11; also
The Writings of William Walwyn, (eds) Jack R. McMichael & Barbara Taft, University of Georgia
Press, Athens, Georgia, 1989, p. 26; Peter Richard Pick, Interjections Of Silence: The Poetics And
Politics Of Radical Protestant Writing, 1642-1660, Ph.D. dissertation submitted to The University of
Birmingham, School of English, 2000, p. 52
397 – The writings of William Walwyn, ed. J. R. McMichael and B. Taft, Athens, GA, 1989, pp. 57-9,
164.
398 – Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, p. 76
399 – Quoted in John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 969
400 – John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 970
401 – See details in Blair Warden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver
Cromwell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 73ff
402 – See details in Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver
Cromwell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 64ff
403 – John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 964
404 – Williams, Bloudy tenent, p. 46.
405 – For Congregationalism see Zakai, Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent
Divines and the Issue of Toleration during the English Civil War, Albion: A Quarterly Journal
Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 1-33, p. 31
406 – John Coffey, Puritanism And Liberty Revisited, p. 976
407 – John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, p. 16
408 – See H. Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
2012, p. 133ff; On the Quaker fascination with Ibn Tufayl’s book, see Nawal Muhammad Hassan,
Hayy Bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe: A Study of an Early Arabic Impact on English Literature,
Baghdad: Al-Rashid House, 1980, 5–6. In The True Christian Divinity (1678), the Quaker apologist
Robert Barclay identifies the views expressed in Hayy ibn Yaqzan with the Quaker teachings of the
“inner light.” On the connection between Quakerism and Mahometanism, seen as two heresies that
share the same republican spirit, see Francis Bugg, Hidden things brought to light, whereby the Fox
is unkennell’d: and the bowells of Quakerism ript up, laid open, and expos’d to publick view
(London, 1707), 175, 202, and Life and Actions of Mahomet in Four Treatises concerning
Mahometanism (London, 1712), 29. A discussion on Islam and Quakerism in seventeenth-century
England is provided in Nabil Matar, “Some Notes on George Fox and Islam,” The Journal of the
Friends’ Historical Society 55 (1989): 271–76.
409 – “Campaigns (mainly peaceful and impractical) were launched for the abolition of the rights of
primogeniture, for granting security of tenure to tenant farmers, for the return to common use of the
ancient common lands which had been enclosed over the previous century by landlords and larger
farmers, and for strengthening the position of independent small producers and craftsmen at the
expense of entrepreneurs and proto-capitalist merchants. Underpinning such demands for social
reform was a radical extension of notions of social contract. The leaders of the Levellers argued that
rulers were not appointed by God (as Charles I had argued) nor in agreement between king and
people (as many Parliamentarians had argued) but in an agreement among the people themselves.
The Levellers asserted that abuses of power by all existing institutions (the standing Parliament as
well as the king) invalidated their right to govern. What was needed was a new social contract - what
they called (in a very literal sense) the Agreement of the People - by which all who wished to enjoy
political rights opted into an agreement by which limited powers to maintain order would be
accorded to elected governors. The mechanism of selection (the extent of democracy) was less
important than the end - the accountability of all who exercised authority, the rigidly fixed and non-
renewable terms of office which would prevent the concentration of power in particular hands, a
hatred of ‘professionals’ in government (e.g. lawyers and judges who claimed to be able to mediate
justice through their mastery of arcane legal language and procedures).” John Morril, The Nature of
English Revolution, p. 19
410 – See Blair Worden, “Oliver Cromwell and the Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty” in Charles
W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess eds., England’s Wars of Religions, Revisited, p. 231 ff
411 – See J. C. Davis, Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution; also Zakai,
Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Tolerationduring the
English Civil War
412 – See Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon eds, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the
Constitutionl Crises of the English Revolution, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 51
413 – See Rachel Foxley, John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-Born Englishmen, The
Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 849-874
414 – See Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon eds, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the
Constitutionl Crises of the English Revolution, chapter 2 & 3
415 – See details in Huge Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573-1645, London, Macmillan Press,
1988
416 – See details in Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 18ff
417 – JRD Coffey, , ‘Religious Thought’, p. 452
418 – Qouted in Coffey, ‘Religious Thought’, p. 447
419 – Coffey, ‘Religious Thought’, p. 447
420 – Coffey, ‘Religious Thought’, p. 452
421 – George Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War: Freedom of Trade and the
English Revolution, New York, Routledge, 2020, p. 1
422 – Quoted in Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies, p. 301
423 – Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies, p. 302
424 – See Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War, p. 2-3
425 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1486; Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast, ‘‘Constitutions and Commitment:
Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice,’’ Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), 803–
832.
426 – Stone, Lawrence, ‘‘The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth Century England Revisited,’’
Past and Present, 109 (1985), 44–54, p. 44
427 – Raghuram G. Rajan, and Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing
the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity, New York, Crown
Business, 2003
428 – Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade,
Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jun.,
2005), pp. 546-579; Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, Past
& Present, No. 58 (Feb., 1973), pp. 53-107 and his Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change,
Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653, London, Verso, 2003
429 – Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World, Boston: Beacon, 1966
430 – R. H. Tawney, ‘The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640,’’ Economic History Review, 11 (1941), 1–
38.
431 – See Martin Finch, Animadversions upon Sir Henry Vanes Book, entituled The Retired Mans
Meditations: Examining his Doctrine concerning Adam’s Fall, Christs Person, and Sufferings,
Justification, Common and Special Grace; and Many Other Things in his Book (1656).
432 – See Margaret A Judson, The Political Thought of Sir Henry Vane the Younger. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969; George Sikes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, Kt.
London, 1662
433 – Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War, p. 12
434 – John Morril, The Nature of English Revolution, p. 22-23
435 – See John Tolan, https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/muhammad-republican-
revolutionary
436 – Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade,
Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, p. 550
437 – Stephen Alford, “A Politics of Emergency in the Reign of Elizabeth I” in Glen Burgess and
Matthew Festenstein eds., English Radicalism 1550-1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2007, p. 19
438 – See Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess eds., Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern
Europe, New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 8ff
439 – See Morril, Nature of English Revolution, p. 2ff
440 – Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 7
441 – Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 7
442 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1493
443 – See John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art
and Architecture 1500-1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Mark Hutchings, Turks,
Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Maxine Berg,
‘New Commodities, Luxuries and their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Maxine Berg
and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850
(Manchester, 1999), pp. 63-85; Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the
Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991
444 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1493; Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion
of England, 1575–1630
445 – Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from Revolutionary
England, p. 1505ff
446 – See Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic
Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, p. 564ff
447 – See Saumitra Jha, Financial Asset Holdings and Political Attitudes: Evidence from
Revolutionary England, p. 1539-40
448 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 7ff
449 – R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (ed. M. Sylvester, 1696), i. p. 89.
450 – M. H. Carré, Phases of Thought in England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949, p. 224
451 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 12
452 – See Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial
Experiment. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964; The Virginia Company of London, 1606–
1624. Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957; Karen Ordahl
Kupperman, The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007
453 – See Samuel M. Bemis, The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London, Baton Rouge,
Louisiana State University Press, 2009
454 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 15ff
455 – Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560-1660,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 49; See Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and
Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 194 ff
456 – Matthew Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 9-10; Birchwood, Staging Islam in England:
Drama and Culture, 1640-1685, p. 96
457 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, in Albrecht Classen ed., East Meets
West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern
World, Boston, De Gruyter, 2013, p. 718
458 – See Maxine Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, London, I. B. Tauris, 2002
459 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 718
460 – Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The
Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Early Modern History: Society and Culture, London,
Macmillan Palgrave, 2004, p. 28
461 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 719
462 – See Francis Knight, Relation of Seaven Years Slaverie Under the Turks of Argeire suffered by
an English captive merchant (London: printed by T. Cotes, for M[ichael]. S[parke]. Iunior, 1640),
19.\; Francis Knight, Relation of Seaven Years Slaverie Under the Turks of Argeire suffered by an
English captive merchant (London: printed by T. Cotes, for M[ichael]. S[parke]. Iunior, 1640), p. 19;
Joseph Morgan, A Complete History of Algiers (1728–1729; New York: Negro University
Press,1970), p. 617ff; Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 720ff
463 – See F. Ahmad, “Ottoman perceptions of the capitulations 1800-1914,” Journal of Islamic
Studies, 11,1 (2000), 1-20; Maurits H. van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal
System: Qadis, Consuls, and Beraths in the 18th century. Leiden: Brill, 2005; Despina Vlami, Trading
with the Ottomans: The Levant Company in the Middle East, Bloomsbury, 2014
464 – See Michael Talbot, British Ottoman Relations, 1661-1807: Commerce and Diplomatic
Practice in Eighteenth Century Istanbul, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2017, p. 25ff, “In the past, the
chief of the nobles of the queen of the said province [vil.yet] [of England] came to and arrived at our
threshold of the workings of felicity – which is the refuge of asylum of the sultans of the world and
the place of retreat of the sovereigns of the globe – with her gentlemen and her ships with her tribute,
and the gifts that she had sent were gladly accepted. In the time of my ancestor who dwells in heaven
in the paradise of the mercy of the merciful protector of all things, Sultan Murad Khan (may his tomb
be pleasant to him), a man was sent to our Threshold of Felicity manifesting friendly, sincere, and
agreeable affection, asking that their gentlemen might come and go at the Porte, [and] a positive
response was given. In the time of the same aforementioned [sultan], noble commands were given,
saying that ‘at the stopping places and stations, at the crossings and at the gateways, at sea and on
land, no one should trouble them’. P. 25
465 – See Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, p. 155ff
466 – See Beni Prasad, History of Jahangir, Allahabad, 1962, Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 15ff
467 – Andrew Lake, The First Protestants in the Arab World: The Contribution to Christian Mission
of the English Aleppo Chaplians 1597-1782, p. 17
468 – See Maartje van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades: Dutch Converts to Islam in Seventeenth-
Century Diplomatic Relations with North Africa, Journal of Early Modern History 19 (2015) 175-
198, p. 190-91
469 – See Thomas Malloch, Finch and Baines: A Seventeenth Century Friendship. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1917, p. 62-63; Marjorie Hope Nicholson, ed. Conway Letters: The
Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642-1684, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1930, 458-59; Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company, New
York, Barnes and Noble, Inc, 1964, 98
470 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 724
471 – Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685, p. 4
472 – George F. Abbott, Under the Turk at Constantinople: A Record of Sir John Finch’s Embassy,
1674–1681, London, Macmillan, 1920, p. 303.
473 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 18
474 – See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, p. 108
475 – “The Grand Signior possesses such vast territories… It being a great mistake to say that his
territories lie waste, and are not populous. Asia Minor… that is now entirely in his possession, is as
full of people, as ever it was. Smyrna is very populous; and Aleppo counts within its walls thirty
thousand fighting men. Constantinople, its advantageous situation being more convenient and
suitable for so great a monarchy, then any other city of the known world, has its number of
inhabitants answerable to its vast extent… As for his treasures, they are very considerable, for he is
the most absolute monarch in the world, and disposes sovereignly of whatever his subjects, or rather
his slaves, are possessed of. The trade of Constantinople brings him in vast sums of money… The
Christians, to get favour with the Grand Signior in order to promote their trade with the infidels, are
often at exceeding great, and sometimes unwilling, expenses. For nothing is done at Constantinople,
but by money. And money, which is powerful everywhere, is their Almighty.” David Abercromby,
The Present State of the German and Turkish Empires (London, 1684), 51-53
476 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 729-30
477 – Sir Thomas Roe and Dr John Fryer, Travels in India in the 17th Century, London, 1873, p. 103-
104; also Sir William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–9, as Narrated in his
Journal and correspondence, New Delhi, 1990, Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 17
478 – Quoted in Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 17
479 – Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the
World, 20 vols, Glasgow, 1905, part 1, IV, pp. 334–9, Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 18
480 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 22-23
481 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 15ff
482 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 23
483 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 23
484 – See William Letwin, The Origin of Scientific Economics, London, Economics, 1963, p. 37.
485 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 24
486 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 24
487 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 24; also see Narrative of the Capture of Calcutta from April 10 1756 to
November 10 1756, William Tooke, BL, OIOC, O.V. 19, Bengal 1756, pp. 5–46; Rajat Kanta Ray,
The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism, New
Delhi, 2003, p.233.
488 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 24; Narrative of the Capture of Calcutta from April 10 1756 to
November 10 1756, pp. 5–46
489 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 106
490 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 106; Concerning the Loss of Calcutta, BL, OIOC, HM vol. 66, pp.
821–4; G. J. Bryant, Emergence of British Power in India 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic
Interpretation, Woodbridge, BOYE6, 2013, pp. 118–21
491 – Colin Newbury, Patrons, Clients and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-Rule in Asia, Africa, and
the Pacific, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 12.
492 – See details in Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World,
London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 13. “Thus, the history of the Company at the beginning of this
period was directed more by the local political realities in which each settlement was embedded than
by commands from and events in distant London.”
493 – See Parker, Military Revolution, p. 135ff
494 – See Parker, Military Revolution, p. 117ff

495 – See Michael Harrigan, Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th Century French
Travel Literature, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2008; See “The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors”,
Adam Olearius, translated by John Davies (1662)
496 – See Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World 1558-1713, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 91 ff
497 – See Alstair Maeer, “Instruments of Acquisition and Reflections of Desire: English Nautical
Charts and Islamic Shores, 1650-1700” In Justin Quinn Olmstead ed., Britain in the Islamic World:
Imperial and Post-Imperial Connections, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 27ff
498 – See Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p. 195 ff
499 – James D. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern
World 1350-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 103
500 – See Nicolas Canny, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the
Seventeenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 1
501 – See Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 47
502 – See Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West,
London, Reaktion Books, 2000, p. 60ff
503 – See Canny, The Origins of Empire, p. 60 ff
504 – See Ralph Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square: English Traders in the Levant in the
Eighteenth Century, London: Macmillan, 1967; Geoffrey Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey,
1583 to the Present, Leiden, Brill, 2009; Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company, New
York: Barnes and Noble, Inc, 1964; Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant, Trade and
Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, Tauris Academic Studies,
2010; Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, Vol. II, ed. Augustus Jessopp, London, Gregg
International Publishers Limited, 1969; Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo and Parts
Adjacent, Vol II, London, Gregg Publishing, 1969; A.C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1935
505 – Mortimer Epstein, The English Levant Company: Its Foundation and its History to 1640, New
York: Burt Franklin, 1968; James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2009
506 – See Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 51 (“The first important pragmatic advantage that
the English gained from their earliest trade forays in the Mediterranean came from the experience
merchants acquired through their work in the Levant Company. Merchants learned in the
Mediterranean how to secure trade privileges from a powerful empire, and they mastered the
challenges of organising a complex and multifaceted trade over long distances. Th e East India
Company subsequently acquired its leadership and much of its capital from the Levant Company and
experienced Levant traders applied their knowledge to later trade eff orts in the Indian Ocean.”
Games, The Web of Empire, p. 51-52
507 – Wesley Frank Craven,. The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624. Williamsburg: Virginia
350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957; Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia
Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964
508 – Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic
History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973; Morgan, Edmund S. American
Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1975; Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 53 (“In India, in Japan, and elsewhere we find
the English adhering to this Mediterranean model. And, indeed, we find it in America, where the
English first ventured for purposes of trade, and where many of the first colonial leaders came with
experience in the Levant. This Mediterranean model endured for generations in places where the
English were a minority and where trade depended on local alliances, from the cold waters of
Hudson Bay to West African trading ports.” Games, p. 53
509 – Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 47
510 – See Zachary W. Schulz, The English In The Levant: Commerce, Diplomacy, And The English
Nation In The Ottoman Empire, 1672-1691, A Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue
University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2018
511 – See Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine world, 1550–1650, Seattle, WA, University of
Washington Press, 1990)
512 – See Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters eds., The Ottoman City Between East
and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999
513 – Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 271
514 – See Andrew Thompson, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II:
The Long Eighteenth Century c. 1689-c. 1828, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 11-12;
Grassby, Business Community, p. 271-273
515 – “Dissent was disproportionately represented in London. They constituted 15-20 per cent of the
electorate, 35 per cent of Company directors, 32 per cent of importers, three-eighths of the aldermen,
27 per 20 cent of holders of short-term debt and 25 per cent of bank subscribers.20 It also proved
hard for the Established Church to compete in the provincial 21 towns with Dissenters In addition
there was a substantial community of alien Protestant immigrants and refugees.” Grassby, Business
Community, p. 273
516 – See Grassby Business Community, p. 273-74; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 2, The
Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 271
517 – Grassby Business Community, p. 276
518 – Andrew Lake, First Protestants, p. 1
519 – See Wood, A History of the Levant Company, p. 222-3
520 – See P.M. Holt, ‘The Study of Arabic Historians in Seventeenth Century England: The
Background and Work of Edward Pococke’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,
19.3, 1957, pp. 444–55
521 – See details in Colin Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodlian Library: The Seventeenth
Century Collections” in G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in
Seventeenth-Century England, Leiden, Brill, 1994, p. 134ff
522 – At the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, there were hundreds of Arabic manuscripts, as
well as dozens of Persian and Turkish ones, available during the 17th century. These included works
on Islamic law and Arabic grammar; the lexicography of Al-Firuzabadi and Al-Jawhari; works on
Arabic poetry; the Indian literary work Kalila and Dimna; the proverbs of Al-Maydani and Maqama
of Al-Hariri of Basra; the medical works of Al-Razi, Avicenna, Ibn al-Baitar, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Al-
Majusi, Ibn al-Jazzar, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, Ibn Zuhr, Maimonides and Ibn al-Nafis; the
astronomical works of Ibn al-Banna, Ibn al-Shatir, Al-Farghani and Alhazen; the Masudic Canon by
Abu Rayhan Biruni and the Book of Fixed Stars by Al-Sufi; several Ottoman scientific works by Taqi
al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf; occult and alchemical works; the Secretum Secretorum; Al-Safadi’s
biographical dictionary Al-Sihah; the historical works of Al-Tabari, Al-Isfahani, Al-Makin, Ibn
Khallikan, Al-Dhahabi, Al-Waqidi, Ibn al-Shina, Al-Utbi, Ibn al-Jawzi, Ibn al-Athir, Sibt ibn al-
Jawzi, Ibn Abi Usaibia, Bar-Hebraeus, Al-Tunaynai, Ibn Duqmaq, Ibn Taghribirdi, Al-Suyuti, Al-
Jannabi, Ibn Hayyan, Ibn Miskawayh, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and Al-Maqrizi; the History of Time by
Al-Masudi and volume five of Ibn Khaldun’s historiographical work Kitab al-Ibar; the historical and
geographical works of Abu al-Fida; the Sahih al-Bukhari and Quranic commentaries; the Algebra by
Al-Khwarizmi and the mathematical works of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi; the Encyclopedia of the Brethren
of Purity and Avienna’s The Book of Healing; the works of Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Tufail; geographical
works of Ibn Khordadbeh and Ibn Hawqal; .[37] A Latin translation of two of Ali Qushji’s works, the
Tract on Arithmetic and Tract on Astronomy, was published by John Greaves in 1650.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Reception_of_Islam_in_Early_Modern_Europe; G. A. Russell, The
‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-century England, p. 162
523 – See Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodlian Library: The Seventeenth Century
Collections”, p. 134
524 – See Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodlian Library: The Seventeenth Century
Collections”, p. 130
525 – See Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodlian Library: The Seventeenth Century
Collections”, p. 130-31
526 – See Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 281ff
527 – See Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodlian Library: The Seventeenth Century
Collections”, p. 135
528 – Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English” in Jan
Loop, Alastair Hamilton and Charles Burnett eds., The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early
Modern Europe, Leiden, Brills, 2017, p. 280; see also D. Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire
1642–1660, Seattle, 1998, p. 216.
529 – Andrew Lake, First Protestants, p. 56
530 – John Covel, “Dr. Covel’s Diary (1670-1679),” in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, ed.
Theodore Bent, New York, The Hakluyt Society, 1964
531 – See Alie, Remi, “‘Empire without end’: John Finch, Orientalism, and Early Modern Empire,
1674-1681” (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository, p. 121; Jonathan Israel, Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2001, 8
532 – See Zachary W. Schulz, The English In The Levant: Commerce, Diplomacy, And The English
Nation In The Ottoman Empire, 1672-1691, P. 90ff
533 – Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English”, p. 277
534 – Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English”, p. 283
535 – William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, New York.
Bloombury, 2019; Alfred Mervyn Davies, Strange destiny: a biography of Warren Hastings (1935)
536 – See Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, London, Macmillan, 1954, pp. 1–11; Jeremy Bernstein,
Dawning of the Raj: The Life & Trials of Warren Hastings, Chicago, I. R. Dee, 2000, pp. 32–5.
537 – See P.J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron’, Statesmen, Scholars and
Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, eds A.
Whiteman, J.S. Bromley, and P.G.M. Dickson, Oxford, 1973, pp. 242–62
538 – See Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English”, p.
236ff; C. Ravis, A Discourse of the Orientall Tongues, London, 1648, p. 30.
539 – See Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English”, p. 278
540 – Anonymous, A True Account of the Irregular Proceedings at Guild-Hall, About the Swearing
the Two Pretended Sheriffs Mr. North and Mr. Rich, London, 1682
541 – See Richard Grassby, The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley
North, 1641-1691, Oxfor, Clarendon Press, 1994; Linda T. Darling, “Ottoman Politics through
British Eyes: Paul Rycaut’s ‘the Present State of the Ottoman Empire’,” Journal of World History 5,
no. 1 (1994): 71-97; Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London,
1642-50, Burlington, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004
542 – See Suzanne J. Farmer, “Sir Dudley North in Loyal Principle Exceeding: A Political Merchant
in the First Age of Party, International Social Science Review: vol. 92, Issue 2, article 1 and her Ph.
D. dissertation “Sir Dudley North: Merchant Politics In The First Age Of Party” submitted to The
University of Mississippi, department of History, 2011
543 – See Roger North, The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North (London, 1744)
544 – “Finch was part of an extensive, politically influential clan. His older brother was Heneage
Finch, first Earl of Nottingham and Lord Chancellor from 1675-1682 under Charles II. Heneage’s
son, Sir Daniel Finch, was a frequent correspondent with his uncle John, and later became Lord
President of the Council under George I. John’s first cousin, Heneage Finch, third Earl of
Winchelsea, and his other first cousin, Sir Daniel Harvey, both served as previous ambassadors to the
Levant. Indeed, Finch was replacing Daniel Harvey as ambassador. Rounding out his familial circle
of notables was Anne Conway, his sister and famed Cambridge Platonist philosopher, who had
married Sir Edward Conway, first Earl of Conway and eventual Secretary of State for the Northern
Department.” ; Zachary W. Schulz, The English In The Levant: Commerce, Diplomacy, And The
English Nation In The Ottoman Empire, 1672-1691, A Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2018, p. 130
545 – See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Women Philosopher, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2004, p. 107
546 – See Daniel O’Connor, The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601-1858, London,
Continuum, 2012; Penelope Carson,The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858, Woodbridge,
Boydell Press, 2012
547 – https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-
1900/Addison,_Lancelot

548 – See John Julian: Dictionary of Hymnology, 2nd edition, London: John Murray, 1907, p. 19
549 – See Simon Mills, “Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English”, p. 279
550 – See Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England, p. 219ff
551 – Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, Past & Present, No.
58 (Feb., 1973), pp. 53-107, p. 54ff; Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in
State and Society, 1660-1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
552 – See Richard Grassby, English Merchant Capitalism in the Late Seventeenth Century. The
Composition of Business Fortunes, Past & Present, No. 46 (Feb., 1970), pp. 87-107, p. 101
553 – See Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, 77ff
554 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 23
555 – See Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, 72ff
556 – See Gary S. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of
Charles Ii and the Glorious Revolution, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 101, 12-16
557 – Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660-1720, p. 9
558 – See Gary S. De. Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party
1688-1715. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 76-81, 101, 116; Zachary W. Schulz, The English In
The Levant, p. 71ff
559 – Schulz, The English In The Levant, p. 68
560 – See Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660-1720;
Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community
561 – Ralph Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square, p. 222
562 – Paul Hazard noted: “It was an East gravely distorted by the European view of it; nevertheless,
it retained enough of its original impressiveness to loom forth as a vast agglomeration of non-
Christian values, a huge block of humanity which had constructed its moral system, its concept of
truth, on lines peculiarly its own. This was one of the reasons why the conscience of the old Europe
was stirred and perplexed, and why, seeking to be thrown into confusion, it obtained what it sought.”
Crisis of Eropean Mind, p. 28
563 – See Ivo Kamps and Jyotsana G. Singh eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the
Early Modern Peried, New York, Palgrave, 2001; Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel:
English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire 1580-1720, New York, Palgrave Macmillian, 2004; Samuel
Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1937; Brandon H. Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the
Ottoman Empire to 1715, New York, P. Lang, 1987; Orhan Burian, “Interest of the English in Turkey
as Reflected in English Literature of the Renaissance,” Oriens 5 (1952): 208-29.
564 – Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman Empire
During The Early Seventeenth Century” in Ivo Kamps and Jyotsana G. Singh eds., Travel
Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Peried, p. 35
565 – Quoted in Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman
Empire During The Early Seventeenth Century”, p. 37
566 – See Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman Empire
During The Early Seventeenth Century”, p. 48ff
567 – See Daniel Carey, Compiling nature’s history: Travellers and travel narratives in the early
royal society, Annals of Science, 1997, 54:3, 269-292, DOI: 10.1080/00033799700200211
568 – Michael Hunter. The Royal Society and its Fellows, 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early
Scientific Institution. (British Society for the History of Science Monographs, Volume 4.) Oxford:
The Alden Press. 1994, p. 118-121Michael Hunter, The Royal SocieO’ and Its Fellows 16601700, 2nd
edn (London, 1994)
569 – Daniel Carey, Compiling nature’s history: Travellers and travel narratives in the early royal
society, p. 282
570 – See Daniel Carey, Compiling nature’s history: Travellers and travel narratives in the early
royal society, p. 273ff; Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge, p. 141ff
571 – See Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire,
1580–1720; Jas Elsner, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of
Travel, London: Reaktion Books, 1999; Muzaffar Alam, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian
Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University
Press, 2007; K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in
South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Harold J. Cook,
Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven, CT,
Yale University Press, 2007.
572 – Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman Empire
During The Early Seventeenth Century”, p. 38
573 – Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman Empire
During The Early Seventeenth Century”, p. 35
574 – Sir Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant:A Breife Relation of a journey, Lately Peiformed
by Master H[enryJ B[lountJ, Gentleman,Jrom England by the way of Venice, into Dalmatia,
Sclavonia, Bosnia, Hungary, Macedonia, Thessaly, Thrace, Rhodes and Egypt unto Gran Cairo: With
Particular Observations Concerning the moderne condition of the Turkes and other people under
that Empire (London, 1636), p. 2
575 – Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant, p. 3
576 – Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant, p. 15
577 – Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant, p. 15
578 – C. F. Beckingham, “The Near East: North and Northeast Africa,” ch. 14 in vol. 1 of David B.
Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook, London, Hakluyt Society, 1974, p.184.
579 – See Samuel Chew,The Crescent and the Rose, chapter 3&4
580 – Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking With The Turk: English Travellers In The Ottoman Empire
During The Early Seventeenth Century”, p. 39
581 – See James J. Porter, ed. By Sir George-Larpent Bart, Turkey: Its History and Progress: From
The Journals and Correspondence of Sir James Porter, Fifteen Years Ambassador at Constantinople;
continued to the Present Time, with A memoir of Sir James Porter, London, Hurst and Blackett
Publishers, 1854, v. II, p. 27-33
582 – See Frederick G. Whelan, Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-Western Societies: Sultan
and Savages, New York, Routledge, 2009, p. 82ff; James J. Porter, Turkey: Its History and Progress,
v. II, pp. 27ff, 65ff, 71ff
583 – Gerald MacLean, “Ottomanism before Orientalism? Bishop King Praises Henry Blount,
Passenger in the Levant”in Ivo Kamps and Jyotsana G. Singh eds., Travel Knowledge: European
“Discoveries” in the Early Modern Peried, p. 85ff
584 – MacLean, “Ottomanism before Orientalism”, p. 86
585 – Goffman, Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p. 224
586 – Goffman, Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p. 225
587 – See Goffman, Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p. 228 ff
588 – See Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science
and Art in Early Modern Europe, New York, Routledge, 2002; Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the
Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 62, no.
2, 2009, pp. 345–375; Kapil Raj, ‘‘Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and
National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,’’ in Nature and Empire: Science and the
Colonial Enterprise, ed. R. M. MacLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001; and Raj,
Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and
Europe, 1650–1900, New York, Palgrave, 2007; Joseph Needham, ‘The Roles of Europe and China
in the Evolution of “Ecumenical Science”’, in idem, Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 397; George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western
Science’, Science, no. 156 (5 May 1967), pp. 611–22; and idem, ‘The Spread of Western Science
Revisited’, in Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and María Luisa Ortega, eds, Mundialización de la
ciencia y cultura nacional (Aranjuez, Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993), pp. 599–603.
589 – See R. Hooykaas (1987). The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?, The British Journal
for the History of Science, 20, pp 453-473, doi:10.1017/S0007087400024225, p. 453-454
590 – See David Washbrook, “From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in
the Pre-History of Modernity.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 40, no.
4, 1997, pp. 410–443
591 – See details in R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, Edinburgh, Scottish
Academic Press, 1972; R. Hooykaas, Selected Studies in History of Science, Coimbra,
Coimbra University Press, 1983
592 – See R. Hooykaas, ‘Pitfalls in the historiography of geological science’, Nature et Histoire,
(1982), 19-20, pp. 21-33;
593 – See Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of Modern Science in the
Seventeenth Century, New York, Dover Publications, 1982
594 – See Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, New York, Free Press,
1957; Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, New York, Harper, 1958;
idem, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1968; A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution 1500–1800: The Formation of the
Modern Scientific Attitude, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1954, published in its second edition
as The Revolution in Science, Harlow: Longman, 1983; Robert S. Westfall, The Scientific Revolution
in the 17th Century: The Construction of a New World View, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992; and
Marcus Hellyer, ed., The Scientific Revolution: The Essential Readings, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003.
For a critical appraisal of this quest for origins, see Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-
centring the “Big Picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science’,
British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 26, no. 4 (1993), pp. 407–32; and Steven Shapin, The
Scientific Revolution, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
595 – Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, p. 7
596 – See John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, New York, D.
Appleton and Company, (1875); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom, 2 volumes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009; William
Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe,
London, D. Appleton and Company, 1919
597 – Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2000; Gary
Ferngren, (editor). Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002; Richard H. Jones, For the Glory of God: The Role of Christianity in the Rise
and Development of Modern Science. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2011; David
C. Lindberg, and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter
Between Christianity and Science, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986; Lindberg and
Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and
Science,” Church History 55 (1986): 338–354; Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in
Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958;
598 – S.F. Mason, (1953) The scientific revolution and the protestant reformation.—I, Annals of
Science, 9:1, 64-87, DOI: 10.1080/00033795300200033
599 – Don O’Leary, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History, New York, Continuum,
2006; Benjamin Wiker, The Catholic Church & Science: Answering the Questions, Exposing the
Myths, Charlotte, Tan Books, 2011
600 – See details in Blair, Ann. 2004. “Science and Religion.” In Cambridge History of Christianity,
Vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500-1660, edited by Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
601 – See Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,
Bruges, St. Catherine Press, 1938; The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century edited by
Charles Webster, New York, Routledge, 1974; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English
Revolution Revisited, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997
602 – See James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob, The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The
Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution: Isis, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 251-267
603 – See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration, Science, Medicine and Reform,1626-1660,
London: Duckworth, 1975; Lotte Mulligan, Puritans and English Science: A Critique of Webster,:
Isis, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 456-469; Perceptive criticisms of the analyses have been made
by M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1939, 478; James
Conant, “The Advancement of Learning during the Puritan Commonwealth,” Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, LXVI (1936- 41), 29-30; and Theodore K. Rabb, “Puritanism and
the Rise of Experimental Science in England,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, VII (1962), 50ff.
604 – B. J. Shapiro, ‘Latitudinarianism and science in seventeenth-century England’, Past and
Present, (1986) 40, 16-41;
605 – See William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660, New York, Macmillan,
1969; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration
606 – See “Introduction” of The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century edited by Chales
Webster
607 – See Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science
and Art in Early Modern Europe, New York, Routledge, 2002; Kapil Raj, ‘‘Colonial Encounters and
the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,’’ in
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, ed. R. M. MacLeod, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2001; and Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, New York, Palgrave, 2007; Joseph Needham,
‘The Roles of Europe and China in the Evolution of “Ecumenical Science”’, in idem, Clerks and
Craftsmen in China and the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 397; George
Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science, no. 156 (5 May 1967), pp. 611–22; and idem,
‘The Spread of Western Science Revisited’, in Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and María Luisa
Ortega, eds, Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional, Aranjuez, Madrid, Doce Calles, 1993,
pp. 599–603.
608 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 6-7; see also Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds, The
Scientific Revolution in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; and idem,
eds, The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
609 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 7; see also David Washbrook, ‘From Comparative
Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity’, Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 40, no. 4 (1997), pp. 410–43; Christopher Alan
Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989)
610 – See Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,
chapter IX, p. 543ff . “This insistent reiteration of the economic significance as well as the practical
applications of scientific and mathematical theory is a noteworthy reflection of that spirit of
economic rationalism which has become increasingly apparent since at least the seventeenth century.
Scientists seek not only technical efficiency, but consider as well the economic advantages of a
strictly rational adaptation of means to ends. It is an expression of the attitude justly ascribed to
Newtonians of instituting an “ active and practical science having for its end the assurance, by the
knowledge of natural laws, of our domination over nature,” plus the conception of a rationalised
economy (as found in the discussions of HOBBES and LOCKE).” Merton, p. 553
611 – See Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 28ff; see also Jan Golinski, Making Natural
Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1998. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985; Adir Ophir and Steven Shapin, ‘The
Place of Knowledge. A Methodological Survey’, Science in Context, vol. 4, no. 1 (1991), pp. 3–21;
and Steven Shapin, ‘Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the
Location of Science’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 23 (1998), pp. 5–12.
Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London, Sage,
1985, p. 143.
612 – Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 556
613 – See Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 557ff
614 – See Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 589ff
615 – See See Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 596ff
616 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 8
617 – See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p.
123-124
618 – Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 123-124
619 – Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 124
620 – Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 125
621 – See Ann Blair, “Science and Religion.” In Cambridge History of Christianity; Draper, History
of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
622 – Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 461
623 – See details in Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p.
416ff
624 – See B. J. Shapiro, ‘Latitudinarianism and science in seventeenth-century England’
625 – See M. C. Jacob, Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689-1720, p. 22ff

626 – Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, 2nd ed, London, 1702, p. 371
627 – Kearney, “Puritanism, Capitalism and Scientific Revolution” in Intellectual Revolution of the
Seventeenth Century edited by Webster, p. 240
628 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 16
629 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 16
630 – “Because of their commercial activity, European trading companies were obliged to develop
intimate connections with traders and trading groups in other parts of the world, particularly in the
Indian Ocean world, where Europeans were one of many players in the thriving regional commercial
networks which pre-existed their appearance in the region. This gave rise to new groups of
specialised intermediaries only through whom did European trading houses have access not only to
local commodities, but also to specialised knowledges crucial to their survival and to sustained
trade.36 These knowledges included the identification and value of potentially lucrative products,
ranging from plants, herbs, and animals, to manufactured commodities, their geographical
distribution, accounting and trading conventions, the maintenance and repair of ships and navigation,
to name but a few. It is important to notice that the geographies of trade and knowledge networks
thus largely overlapped not only in Europe but also in the Asian and Indian Ocean worlds, and it is
this crucial shared connection which underwrote the intercultural knowledge encounter in the
region.” Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 18-19
631 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 18
632 – “Attracted to the East initially by the lucrative spice and luxury-commodity trade, Europeans
discovered a world that was, all said and done, familiar to them, one already dominated by trade and
the presence of Muslims, their perennial, yet well-known, rivals. However, it was also a world in
which they formed but one very small commercial group among many long-established trading
communities of different racial, religious, and regional origins, who constituted an intricate and
dynamic world of commerce—based largely on botanical products—extending across the Indian
Ocean.6 European survival in the region thus depended on the development of an ongoing and
durable relationship between their merchants, missionaries, and travellers, and various regional
agents—rulers, merchants, bankers and interpreters, but also skilled workmen and savants. For in the
Indian Ocean world, specialised knowledge, particularly relating to botany, medicine, and alchemy,
was already formalized and circulated from the Arabian peninsula to China within constituted
specialised communities, each with its own civility. And early-modern European physicians,
surgeons, and, later, naturalists in the region readily acknowledged this fact.” Raj, Relocating Modern
Science, p. 30-31
633 – Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p. 57
634 – Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern
Science.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, 2009, pp. 345–375, p. 368. The Israeli Historian of
early modern era and Science Avner Ben-Zaken has also emphasized the “cross- cultural account of
early modern science. “With the expansion of empires, establishment of trading companies in the
East, and extension of print culture, early modern intellectual practices went beyond monastic
contemplation in a closed room. Scholars extensively exchanged books, manuscripts, letters, and
instruments, and traveled to other intellectual centers to study and to historical sites and exceptional
geographic locations to do further research. Merely an exchange of material objects could set off
unintended and uncontrolled processes of circulation, such that scientific ideas and practices
traversed cultural boundaries.” Avner Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern
Mediterranean1560-1660, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 3
635 – Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science, p. 368
636 – Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science, p. 369
637 – Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science, p. 371
638 – Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science, p. 375
639 – Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science, p. 375
640 – See T. K. Rabb, “Religion and the Rise of Modern Science” in Webster, The Intellectual
Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, p. 262-279
641 – Richard L. Greaves, Puritanism and Science: The Anatomy of a Controversy, Journal of the
History of Ideas, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1969), pp. 345-368, p. 368
642 – Quoted in Greaves, Puritanism and Science: The Anatomy of a Controversy, p. 368, also in
Jones, Ancients and Moderns, p. 228-29. For a stimulating discussion of the parallel between
political and scientific revolutions, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 91-109. Kuhn observed that “One aspect of the
parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often
restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to
meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way,
scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow
subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately
in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In
both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is
prerequisite to revolution.” Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 92
643 – See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 92ff
644 – “True knowledge was all in some sense a knowledge of God; Truth was one, its unity
guaranteed by the unity of God. Reason and revelation were not in conflict but were supplementary.
God’s attributes were recorded in the written Word but were also directly reflected in the nature of
nature.Natural philosophy thus had immediate theological meaning for Newton and he deemed it
capable of revealing to him those aspects of the divine never recorded in the Bible or the record of
which had been corrupted by time and human error. By whatever route one approached Truth, the
goal was the same. Experimental discovery and revelation; the productions of reason, speculation, or
mathematics; the cryptic, coded messages of the ancients in myth, prophecy, or alchemical tract - all,
if correctly interpreted, found their reconciliation in the infinite unity and majesty of the Deity. In
Newton’s conviction of the unity of Truth and its ultimate source in the divine one may find the
fountainhead of all his diverse studies.” (B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of
Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 6
645 – See details in Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius
646 – S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005,
P. 23
647 – See Peter Harrison (2008) Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science, Theology and
Science, 6:3, 255-271, DOI:10.1080/14746700802206925, p. 5ff; Peter Harrison, ‘Physico-theology
and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy’, in Peter Anstey
and John Schuster (eds.), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, Dordrecht, Springer,
2005, pp. 165-183; Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the
Late Renaissance’, Isis 91 (2000), 32-58.
648 – Harrison, Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science, p. 5
649 – Harrison, Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science, p. 6
650 – See Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions. Trans. Edward Rosen. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978; God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between
Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers; Peter Dear,
Revolutionising the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions,1500–1700. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001
651 – Stephen F. Mason, Some Historical Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Science & Society, Vol.
14, No. 3 (Summer, 1950), pp. 237-264, P. 255; Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society
in Seventeenth Century England, Bruges, St. Catherine Press, 1938, p. 433 and 459.
652 – See John Calvin as cited in John H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical
Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 96
653 – Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 99
654 – See Gary B. Deason, ‘Reformation theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,’in
God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, eds. David C.
Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, p.169–170; Harold P. Nebelsick, The Renaissance, The
Reformation and the Rise of Science, Edinburgh:T & T Clark, 1992
655 – See Ernan McMullin, ‘Galileo on Science and Scripture,’ in The Cambridge Companion to
Galileo, ed. Peter Machamer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 300ff
656 – J. Kepler, New Astronomy, 1609. Trans. by William H. Donahue, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1992,p. 66
657 – See Copernicus, On the Revolutions, p. 4–5
658 – Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina ... Concerning the Use of Biblical
Quotations in Matters of Science, 1615. In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo trans. Stillman
Drake. New York: Anchor Books, 1957, p. 192–193
659 – E. McMullin,“Galileo on Science and Scripture,” p. 300
660 – See Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation
in Early Modern Science, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002
661 – Yahuda MS. 41, f. <7r>, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. The manuscript,
written mainly in English with some Latin parts and Greek quotations, is dated back to the early
1690s and consists of c. 28,550 words, 47 pp. on 29 ff. A complete transcription of the manuscript is
available online at: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00077.
662 – Richard H. Popkin, “Newton’s Biblical Theology and His Theological Physics,” in Scheurer
and Debrock (eds.), Newton’s Legacy, pp. 81-97, p. 87.
663 – See Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, p. 74, 76, 202, 237
664 – “Primitive Christianity is a simplistic and natural religion intent upon establishing morality
rather than worldly advancement. Christ’s yoke was easy and innocent of persecution. From this
pristine original the priesthood with the corrupt apparatus of pagan philosophy and scholastic
‘jargon’ turned religion into a trade. False miracles, idolatry, ghosts and goblins created a priestly
empire over the minds of the laity. The clergy ‘deified their dreams’. In this manner the sacerdotal
order set up an independent interest, creating a double kingdom upon which they forged a tyranny
that extended to civil affairs. It was this triple analysis (of an original primitive natural religion, of
priestly corruption and priestly tyranny) that was to form the backbone of the Freethinking
impeachment of the Church.” (Justin Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p. 136)
665 – James E. Force noted that, “Newton’s theology, not just his religion, influences his science
every bit as much as his science influences the rigorous textual scholarship of his theology.” (James
E. Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political
Thought,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Essays on the Context, Nature, and
Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, pp. 75-102 , p.
78
666 – Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, “Newton’s Alchemy and His ‘Active Principle’ of Gravitation,” in
Scheurer and Debrock (eds.), Newton’s Scientific and Philosophical Legacy, Dordrecht, Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1988, p. 56; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob (eds.), Newton and
the Culture of Newtonianism, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Humanities Press International, 1995
667 – See details in Lawrence M. Principe,“Reflections on Newton’s Alchemy in Light of the New
Historiography of Alchemy.” In J. E. Force and S. Hutton, eds. Newton and Newtonianism.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, p. 214; his The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his
Alchemical Quest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 and Chymists and Chymistry: Studies
in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History
Publications, 2007
668 – Kristine Louise Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual): Joseph Mede, the Interpretation of
Prophecy, and the Dream Book of Achmet, September 2010, The Seventeenth century 25(2):215-39,
p. 231
669 – See details Principe, Aspiring Adept, 159-61; Paul Timothy Greenham, A Concord of Alchemy
with Theology: Isaac Newton’s Hermeneutics of the Symbolic Texts of Chymistry and Biblical
Prophecy, Ph. D. dissertation submitted to Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and
Technology (IHPST) University of Toronto, 2015, p. 37ff; Irene Zanon, The Alchemical Apocalypse
of Isaac Newton, Ph. D. dissertation submitted to Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2013, p. 143ff
670 – See Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and
Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press,1994; Charles Webster, Great Instauration, p. 501ff
671 – See G.H. Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib: A Sketch of his Life and his Relations to J.A. Comenius,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1920; his Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s
Papers, Liverpool, University Press, 1947; his “Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the Early History of
the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 10 (1952-3), 101-30; R.H. Syfret, “The
Origins of the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 5 (1947-8), 75-137; Charles
Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660, London, Peter Lang
Publishing,1974 and his”Introduction,” in Webster, ed., Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of
Learning, London, Cambridge University Press, 1970; Dictionary of National Biography (repr.,
London: Oxford University Press, 1949-50), 9, 72-3. Dorothy Stimson, “Hartlib, Haak, and
Oldenburg: Intelligencers,” Isis, 31 (1940), 309-26; and
http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/hartlib.html
672 – See details in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and
Universal Reformation, p. 95ff
673 – See Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and
Universal Reformation, p. 213ff
674 – See Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and
Universal Reformation, p. 151ff
675 – See Daniel Andersson, Learning Arabic and Learned Bilingualism in Early Modern England:
The Case of John Pell in Jens Braarvig and Markham J. Geller eds., Studies in Multilingualism,
Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra, Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of
Knowledge - Studies 10, Open Access, January 1, 2018, p. 214-15
676 – See R.H. Syfret, “The Origins of the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 5
(1947-8), 75-137; John J. O’Brien, Samuel Hartlib’s influence on Robert Boyle’s scientific
development, Annals of Science, 1965, 21:1, 1-14;
677 – See Andrew J. Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England 1649—1665.” Past & Present,
no. 135 (May 1992): 30–78, p. 51
678 – See details in Sylvia Brown ed., Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern
Europe, Leiden, Brill, 2007, p. 285ff
679 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 16
680 – Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 498
681 – Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England, p. 503
682 – See detailed analysis in Gidion Preudenthal and Peter Mclaughlin eds., The Social and
Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Borris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, New
York, Springer, 2009, p. 4ff
683 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 16
684 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 33
685 – See details in Francis R. Johnson, Gresham College: Precursor of the Royal Society, Journal of
the History of Ideas, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Oct., 1940), pp. 413-438
686 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 39
687 – See Daniel Andersson, Learning Arabic and Learned Bilingualism in Early Modern England:
The Case of John Pell, p. 214ff
688 – See details in David Thomas and John Chesworth eds, Christian Muslim Relations, A
Biographical History, Leiden, Brill, 2016, vol. 8, p. 52ff
689 – See David Thomas and John Chesworth eds, Christian Muslim Relations, A Biographical
History, vol. 8, p. 445
690 – See details in David Thomas and John Chesworth eds, Christian Muslim Relations, A
Biographical History, vol. 8, p. 445ff
691 – See David Thomas and John Chesworth eds, Christian Muslim Relations, A Biographical
History, vol. 8, p. 54 and 302
692 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 41; Bedwell recommended the study of Arabic, among other
reasons, because of the importance of Arabic science (J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge
from…1626 to the decline of the Platonist Movement, 1911, pp. 93–94)
693 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 42
694 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 44
695 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 49ff
696 – Qouted in Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 56
697 – See Richard P. Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution in the Mathematical
Sciences in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England, p. 56ff
698 – See Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England; Eva G. R.
Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485-1583 (1930; reprint, New York, Octagon Books, 1968); A. R. Hall,
Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 1-58; Eva
G. R. Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press 1954, pp. 7-25, 165-92, 311-51; David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England
in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, London, Hollis & Carter, 1958, pp. 78-250; Henry J. Webb,
Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1965. p. 9
699 – Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution, p. 60-61
700 – See Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution, p. 65
701 – Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution, p. 65
702 – Stephen F. Mason, Some Historical Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Science & Society, Vol.
14, No. 3 (Summer, 1950), pp. 237-264, p. 237
703 – Mason, Some Historical Roots of the Scientific Revolution, p. 253-254
704 – Mason, Some Historical Roots of the Scientific Revolution, p. 256
705 – Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World, p. 15-16
706 – “The Royal Society shared many other features with the EIC, including its Baconian
commitment to keeping detailed vernacular records of all meetings and correspondence. Both
institutions kept libraries including numerous works of travel in other European languages and
collections of material objects sent from abroad. In London, the EIC had a storehouse or museum of
specimens sent to them in this period by their servants abroad. Though references to it are rare, it
seems to have been a considerable collection according to a contemporary account of the visit of an
Italian duke.83 The Royal Society also had a ‘repository’ of curiosities, animal, vegetable, and
mineral, sent to them from around the world, a collection that was eventually transferred to the
British Museum.84 It is clear that objects flowed freely between the collections of the two
organisations, which in some cases overlapped. Between 1672 and 1675, the Royal Society shared
Gresham College with some of the EIC’s collections.85 On occasion, the Royal Society was
consulted by agents of the EIC to interpret some of these objects. This was the case in 1680, when
the fellows were asked to determine the ‘virtues’, or useful properties, of a bezoar stone that had been
presented to the EIC by the Sultan of Bantam, Abdulfatah Ageng.” Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid
Knowledge in the Early East India Company World, p.16
707 – See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, 2nd
edn., Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2005; Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the
Early East India Company World, p.16
708 – See Stevin Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 4
709 – Richard P. Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution in the Mathematical
Sciences in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn,
1975), pp. 46-66,, p. 66
710 – Ross, The Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution, p. 66
711 – Ina Baghdiantz MaCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Euraasain Trade, Exoticism
and the Ancient Regime, Oxfordf, BERG, 2008, p. 115; also see Nicolas Dew, Orientalism in Louis
XIV’s France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 168ff
712 – See M. B. Hall, Arabick Learning in the Correspondance of the Royal Society, 1660-1676” in
G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 147
713 – See Anna Winterbottom, Producing and Using the “Historical Relation of Ceylon”: Robert
Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society, The British Journal for the History of Science,
Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 2009), pp. 515-538
714 – See Royal Society. Philosophical transactions: giving some accompt of the present
undertakings, studies and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world. London:
Printed by T.N., begun in 1665; Peck, Linda Levy. Consuming splendor: society and culture in
seventeenth-century England. Cambridge, UK; New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
715 – See Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 248ff
716 – See Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of English East India Company,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. xvii ff
717 – See details Royal Society, Arabic Roots, Curator Rim Turkmani, June 2011,
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/exhibitions/arabick-roots/2011-06-08-arabick-roots.pdf; Rim
Turkmani, Arabic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, https://muslimheritage.com/arabic-root-sci-
revolution/; Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of English East India
Company, p. xviii ff
718 – Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of English East India Company, p. 4
719 – See details in Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of English East India
Company, p. xv ff “Within his extensive correspondence we do indeed find that Boyle’s world was
also the world of the English East India Company.” Also see Michael Hunter (ed.) Robert Boyle by
Himself and His Friends with a Fragment of William Wotton’s Lost Life of Boyle, London, William
Pickering, 1994
720 – See Michael Hunter, Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627-
1691), Burlington, Ashgate, 2015, p. 84
721 – See details in M. B. Hall, Arabick Learning in the Correspondance of the Royal Society, 1660-
1676” in G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-
Century England, p. 147ff ; Michael Hunter, See Michael Hunter, Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life
and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), p. 92
722 – See Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 234
723 – Royal Society, Arabic Roots, Curator Rim Turkmani, June 2011,
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/exhibitions/arabick-roots/2011-06-08-arabick-roots.pdf; Toomer,
Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 247
724 – Victor J. Katz ed., The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamie, China, India and Islam: A Source
Book, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 4
725 – See Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 255ff
726 – See details Royal Society, Arabic Roots, Curator Rim Turkmani, June 2011,
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/exhibitions/arabick-roots/2011-06-08-arabick-roots.pdf; Rim
Turkmani, Arabic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, https://muslimheritage.com/arabic-root-sci-
revolution/
727 – See M.B. Hall, ‘Arabick Learning in the Correspondence of the Royal Society, 1660–1677’, in
Russell, The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in 17th-Century England, p.154
728 – See Angus Armitage, Edmond Halley, London, Thomas Nelson, 1966; Noel Coley, “Halley and
Post-Restoration Science”. History Today. 1986, 36 (September): 10–16; Alan H. Cook, Edmond
Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998; Michael N. Fried,
Edmond Halley’s Reconstruction of the Lost Book of Apollonius’s Conics: Translation and
Commentary, New York, Springer-Verlag, 2012
729 – Royal Society, Phil. Trans. 1695 19:160-175; doi:10.1098/rstl.1695.0023; see details in
Raymond Mercier, “English Orientalists and Mathmatical Astronomy”, in G. Russell (edit.), The
‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 158-214.
730 – Michael Hunter and Michael Cooper eds., Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies, New York,
Routledge, 2006, p. 219
731 – William Bray (Ed.), Diaries of John Evelyn. London, 1852, Vol I, p352: 11 May 1661
732 – See details in Michael Hunter and Michael Cooper eds., Robert Hooke, p. 227ff
733 – Michael Hunter and Michael Cooper eds., Robert Hooke, p. 221
734 – Richard Steele, The Lover. London, 1714, 27th April 1714, No 27
735 – See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 38
736 – M. B. Hall, Arabick Learning in the Correspondance of the Royal Society, 1660-1676” in G. A.
Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, p.
147
737 – See Mayling Stubbs, John Beale, Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: part I, Prelude to
the Royal Society (1608-1663), in: Annals of Science 39 (1982), pp. 463-89; id., John Beale,
Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: part II, The improvement of agriculture and trade in the
Royal Society (1663-1683), in: Annals of Science 46 (1989), pp. 323-63; Michael Leslie, The
Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale, in: Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England, eds,
Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 151-72; Rhodri
Lewis, ‘The Best Mnemonicall Expedient’. John Beale’s art of memory and its uses, in: The
Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), pp. 113-44; and William Poole, Two Early Readers of Milton: John
Beale and Abraham Hill, in: Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), pp. 76-99, at pp. 77-88
738 – See Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of New Science: Histories of Philosophy in
England, c. 1640-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 476ff
739 – Mayling Stubbs (1982) John Beale, philosophical gardener of Herefordshire, Annals of
Science, 39:5, 463-489, p. 468
740 – See David Thomas and John Chesworth eds., Christian-Muslim Relations: A Biographical
History, vol. 8, p. 302
741 – See details in Mayling Stubbs, John Beale, p. 473 ff
742 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale” in
Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, p. 190
743 – For recent work on Lady Ranelagh’s religious attitudes, see Ruth Connelly, A Proselytising
Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess
Ranelagh, in: The Seventeenth Century, 23 (2008), pp. 244-264; id., ‘A Wise and Godly Sybilla’:
Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism, in: Women, Gender and Radical
Religion, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden, 2007), pp. 285-306. For Evelyn, see John Spurr, ‘A sublime and
noble service’: John Evelyn and the Church of England, in: John Evelyn and his Milieu, eds, Frances
Harris and Michael Hunter (London, British Library, 2003), pp. 145-163.
744 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 177
745 – Beale to Hartlib, 26 March 1659, Hartlib Papers 51/102; Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History
Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale” in Radicalism and Dissent in the World of
Protestant Reform, p. 177
746 – Quoted in Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John
Beale”, p. 177;
747 – Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [1659?], Hartlib Papers 27/16/12
https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?
docset=main&docname=27A_16&term0=transtext_plantacion#highlight
748 – Ibid., HP27/16/ir-12
749 – See Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p.
179
750 – See Ibid., HP 27/16/9’’-10; Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The
Case of John Beale”, p. 179-80
751 – Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/17
752 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 181
753 – See Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p.
178 and for Socinian influence on Beale Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English
Revolution, p. 59ff
754 – Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, p. 60
755 – Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, p. 62
756 – Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated (c. 1659), HP 27/16/3^ See also Beale to Hartlib, undated,
HP 62/7/r
757 – Quoted in Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John
Beale”, p. 185
758 – See details Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John
Beale”, p. 185-186
759 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 188
760 – Quoted in Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John
Beale”, p. 188
761 – Beale to [Evelyn?], 18 November 1658, HP 39/2/68’’-69 https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?
docset=main&docname=39B_02_068&term0=transtext_rationable#highlight
762 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 188
763 – Beale to [Evelyn?], 18 November 1658, HP 39/2/68’’-69 https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?
docset=main&docname=39B_02_068&term0=transtext_rationable#highlight
764 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 189;
see Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 vols., ed. and trans. A. Rubert
Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), vol. 1, p. 410; Nabil
Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 106; The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 46; Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 107
765 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 190
766 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 190
767 – Dmitri Levitin, ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale”, p. 190-
91
768 – Beale to Evelyn, undated [1664], BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 20
769 – See John Coffey ed., Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, p. 391
770 – Paul Hazard, Crisis of European Mind, p. 16-17
771 – Paul Hazard, Crisis of European Mind, p. 17
772 – See details in G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning: The Study of Arabic in
Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 108ff
773 – Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 114
774 – See Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning, p. 191ff
775 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 749; On the role of alchemy in
fostering the scientific revolution, see Betty Jo T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy: or,
“The Hunting of the Green Lyon”, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; eadem, The Janus
Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1991; Richard S. Westfall, “Newton and Alchemy, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the
Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lawrence M.
Principle, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998); Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the
Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); William R. Newman,
Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
776 – See Michael Hunter ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of
Ideas in the Seventeenth-Century Europe, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1998, p. 43
777 – Michael Hunter ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of
Ideas in the Seveneteenth-Century Europe, p. 35
778 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 90ff
779 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 132
780 – See William R. Newman, and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey,
Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.
781 – See Stanton Marlan, The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemical Imagination and the Soul’s Logical
Life. Doctoral dissertation. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University, 2014
782 – See Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, p. 5
783 – “Great efforts went into dissolving gold for transmutation, and Robert Boyle would quote the
alchemical saying:
“It is harder to destroy gold than make it”. The possibility of transmutation of the noble metal was
accepted by such distinguished seventeenth century scientists as Johannes Kepler (1571-1630),
Robert Boyle (1627-1691), G W [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz (1646 -1716), and, for at least thirty
years of his life, Sir Isaac Newton (1642 -1727).” Good as gold: Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemy,
Perception, 1989, volume 18, pages 697-702
784 – See Eric John Holmyard, Makers of Chemistry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.See Matar,
Islam in Britain, p. 93; also see Kavin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet
of Science, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009
785 – See Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 95; Louis Trenchard More, Boyle as Alchemist, Journal of the
History of Ideas, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1941), pp. 61-76, p. 63ff
786 – See Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of
Modernity 1210-1685, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 360ff
787 – See William R. Newman, ‘The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular
Philosophy’, Annals of Science 53 (1996), 567–85; Louis Trenchard More, Boyle as Alchemist, p.
62ff
788 – Locke’s corresspondance with Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton about alchemical recipes, plants
collections and experimentations for gold are well-documented in his letters to them. See E. S. De
Beer, The Correspondence of John Locke, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),vol.1, p. 230;
Louis Trenchard More, Boyle as Alchemist, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan.,
1941), pp. 61-76, p. 73
789 – F. Sherwood Taylor, “An Alchemical Work of Sir Isaac Newton,” in Ambix, Vol. 5, (1956), pp.
61-64, p. 62.
790 – Both quotations here are from William R. Shea, “Introduction: Trends in the Interpretation of
Seventeenth Century Science,” in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (eds.), Reason,
Experiment, and Mysticism, New York, Science History Publications, 1975, p. 6
791 – William Eamon, Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science, Sudhoffs Archiv,
Bd. 69, H. 1 (1985), pp. 26-49, p. 27
792 – See William Eamon, Science And The Secrets Of Nature: Books Of Secrets In Medieval And
Early Modern Culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 18ff
793 – “Secretum secretroum extolled the practical benefits of knowledge of nature, and it implied
that knowledge of human invention and of nature was an essential part of understanding God. It also
advanced the idea of an ancient knowledge that had come down to the sons of Seth (Adam’s son),
which was subsequently lost and only partly recovered by the Greeks, the Arabs, and now the
Christian academics. The book persuaded Bacon the greatest attainment of any truth-seeker was to
regain that pristine understanding, or prisca sapientia […].” (Philip Ashley Fanning, Isaac Newton
and the Transmutation of Alchemy: An Alternate View of the Scientific Revolution, Berkeley,
California, North Atlantic Books, 2009, p. 7.) Actually, this last sentence could be also applied to best
describe the ultimate aim of Newton and other natural philosopher’s research into alchemy and
human knowledge.
794 – Eamon, Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science, p. 27
795 – See E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy, Toronto, Penguin Books, 1957, p. 58ff; Kaspars Klavins, The
importance of Islamic civilization at the crossroads of European thinkers: 16th and 17th centuries, p.
12
796 – Eamon, Science And The Secrets Of Nature, p. 38
797 – See Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, p. 253-255. “That religious rationale for the study of
nature may in turn have sustained and validated the nascent scientific enterprise in a still Christian
Europe until the time arrived when science no longer had need of such support.” (Dobbs, The Janus
Faces of Genius, p. 255)
798 – Dobbs, “Newton’s Alchemy and His ‘Active Principle’ of Gravitation,” in Scheurer and
Debrock (eds.), Newton’s Legacy, p. 73; see also Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, pp.
210-213. Richard Westfall’s reference books, also quoted by Dobbs in “Newton’s Alchemy and His
‘Active Principle’ of Gravitation” (note 63, p. 80), are: Richard S. Westfall, Force in Newton’s
Physics. The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century, London: Macdonald; New York:
American Elsevier, 1971; pp. 323-423; Idem, “Newton and the Hermetic Tradition,” in Science,
Medicine and Society in the Renaissance. Essays to honour Walter Pagel, ed. By Allen G. Debus (2
vols.; New York: Science History Publications, 1972), II, pp. 183-198.
799 – Eamon, Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science, p. 47-48
800 – See Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, p. 255ff; See Keith Hutchison,
‘What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?’, Isis 73 (1982), 233–53; Ron
Millen, ‘The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution’, in M. J. Osler and P. J.
Farber, eds, Religion, Science, and Worldview (Cambridge, 1985), 185–216; John Henry, ‘Occult
Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory’,
History of Science 24 (1986), 335–81; idem, ‘Robert Hooke, The Incongruous Mechanist’, in
Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer, eds, Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge, 1989), 149–80;
and J. E. McGuire, ‘Force, Active Principles and Newton’s Invisible Realm’, Ambix 15 (1968), 154–
208.
801 – Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 241ff
802 – Ann Talbot, Great Ocean of Knowledge, p. 45
803 – “Isaac Newton studied alchemy from about 1668 until the second or third decade of the
eighteenth century. He combed the literature of alchemy, compiling voluminous notes and even
transcribing entire treatises in his own hand. Eventually he drafted treatises of his own, filled with
references to the older literature. The manuscript legacy of his scholarly endeavour is very large and
represents a huge commitment of his time, but to it one must add the record of experimentation. Each
brief and often abruptly cryptic labouratory report hides behind itself untold hours with hand-built
furnaces of brick, with crucible, with mortar and pestle, with the apparatus of distillation, and with
charcoal fires: experimental sequences sometimes ran for weeks, months, or even years. As the
seventeenth- century epithet “philosopher by fire” distinguished the serious, philosophical alchemist
from the empiric “puffer” or the devious charlatan or the amateur “chymist,” so may one use the term
to characterise Isaac Newton. Surely this man earned that title if ever any did.” (Dobbs, The Janus
Face of Genius, p. 1
804 – See Daren Oldridge, The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England, New York, Routledge,
2016
805 – See details in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
806 – See William Eamon, Science And The Secrets Of Nature, Introduction, p. 1-12
807 – “I very much like the science of alchemy which is, indeed, the philosophy of the ancients. I
like it not only because, by melting metals, and decocting, preparing, extracting, and distilling herb
and roots, it produces profits; but also because of its allegorical and secret meaning. This is quite
excellent and touches upon the resurrection of the dead at the Last Day. For, just as in a furnace the
fire extracts and separates the various parts of a substance, and carries upwards its spirit, life, sap and
strength, leaving behind at the bottom the unclean matter, the dregs, like a dead, worthless corpse; so
God, at the day of Judgment, will separate everything with fire, the righteous from the unrighteous.
The Christians, the righteous, will ascend to Heaven, where they will enjoy everlasting life; but the
wicked and the unrighteous, like dross and dirt, will remain in Hell, and there they will be damned.”
(Martin Luther, Tischreden oder Colloquia, (published 1556), quoted in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.),
The Occult in Early Modern Europe. A Documentary History, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, p. 202)
808 – Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, p. 7
809 – “During the sixteenth century alchemy underwent an important change. Dee and others still
tried to make gold; but the alchemical terms were increasingly used to express a mystical rather than
a practical experience – they were considered hieroglyphics for the soul’s search and for ultimate
union with God. The philosopher’s stone is Christ, the union of the male and female principles is the
union of the soul with God, and so on for all alchemical terms and symbols.” (Liselotte Dieckmann,
“Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 9, No. 4 ( Autumn, 1957), pp. 308-
321, p. 316.)
810 – E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy, p. 14 ; also see Arthur E. Waite, The Secret Tradition in Alchemy: its
Development and Records, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd.; New York, A. A. Knopf,
1926, p. 405. Waite stated: “[…] it should be remembered that the work of metallic transmutation has
been compared by alchemists themselves to that of God in the cosmos and that the staged of the one
are affirmed to be an exact reproduction or counterpart of the other. We should remember also that
Alchemy in all its departments is dealing with subjects – whether spiritual or material – which are ex
hypothesi fallen, and that this is true indifferently of so-called base metals and of humanity in the
base life. The thesis is that regeneration is an analogous process in every kingdom – that metals are
reborn, transmuted or redeemed, and that what happens in their case is in correspondence – mutatis
mutandis – with the higher work of God in the soul.”
811 – See Sam Kean, Newton, The Last Magician: The great man of science had more than a passing
interest in alchemy, Humanities, January/February 2011, Volume 32, Number 1
812 – See V. Schettino (2017) Isaac Newton and Alchemy. Substantia 1(1): 69-76. doi:
10.13128/Substantia-12
813 – See Andrew J. Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England 1649—1665.” Past & Present,
no. 135 (May 1992): 30–78.
814 – Richard Popkin, Introduction, I.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion:
Context, Nature, and Influence, Amsterdam, Kluwer Scientific Publ;ishers, 1999, p. xi-xii
815 – See Avner Ben-Zaken, “Intellectual, Scientific and Technological Relations between Christian
and Muslim Civilizations 1580-1822” in David Thomas, & John Chesworth, Christian-Muslim
Relations. a Bibliographical History. Volume 13 Western Europe (1700-1800), Boston: Brill, 2019, p.
38
816 – Popkin, Introduction, I.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature,
and Influence, p. xiii
817 – Popkin, Introduction, I.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature,
and Influence, p. xiii
818 – See J. A. I. Champion, “Acceptable to inquisitive men”: Some Simonian Contexts for
Newton’s Biblical Criticism, 1680-1692, I.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion:
Context, Nature, and Influence, p. 77-96
819 – See Schettino, Isaac Newton and Alchemy, p. 74: “The underlying idea in Newton’s
understanding was that of a prisca sapientia. Newton believed that in the earliest times the truth
about the natural world was revealed and was in the possession of mankind and that, dissipated in the
arcane philosophy, was to be sought in the wisdom of the ancients by a correct interpretation of the
occult language of alchemy andthe accurate interpretation of the sacred scriptures.”
820 – See Paul Timothy Greenham, A Concord of Alchemy with Theology: Isaac Newton’s
Hermeneutics of the Symbolic Texts of Chymistry and Biblical Prophecy, doctoral thesis submitted to
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto,
2015
821 – See R. Markley, “Newton, Corruption, and the Tradition of Universal History”in I.E. Force and
R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, p. 121-144
822 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 133
823 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 133
824 – See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture,
1696-1722, Manchester University Press 2003, p. 165-235
825 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.48
826 – Harrison, Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science, p. 5
827 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.48-60
828 – Schettino, Isaac Newton and Alchemy, p. 69; see also Gaukroger, The Emergence of a
Scientific Culture, p. 468ff
829 – Quoted in Schettino, Isaac Newton and Alchemy, p. 70-71
830 – See J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Alchemy and Politics in England 1649-1665, p. 32ff
831 – See Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-
1680”, in Vickers (ed.), Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 108; Lyndy Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy
Brookfield, VT, Aldershot, 1990; Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, esp. pp. 122-3,
148-9; P. M. Rattansi, “Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution”, Ambix, xi (1963), pp. 24-32; Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, Penguin, 1971, pp. 227, 270-1; Charles
Webster, “English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: A Background to the ‘Society of
Chymical Physitians’ “, Ambix, xiv (1967), pp. 16-41.
832 – See details in J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Alchemy and Politics in England 1649-1665, p. 30ff and
62ff
833 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.78 and Mendelsohn, Alchemy and
Politics in England, p. 73
834 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.91
835 – Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1997, p. 3
836 – See Heterdoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion
837 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.91-92
838 – F. A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, Routledge,1972, p. 257
839 – See Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2017, p. 121ff
840 – S. Snobelen, “The True Frame of Nature,” in John Brooke, and Ian MacLean eds., Heterodoxy
in Early Modern Science and Religion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005 p. 257
841 – See Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.108ff
842 – See Eamon, Science And The Secrets Of Nature, p. 42ff
843 – Deborah E. Harkness, “Alchemy and Eschatology: Exploring the Connections between John
Dee and Isaac Newton” in I.E. Force and R.H. Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion:Context, Nature,
and Influence, p. 1
844 – Kristine Louise Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual): Joseph Mede, the Interpretation of
Prophecy, and the Dream Book of Achmet, p. 215
845 – See details in Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 228ff
846 – Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual), p. 223
847 – Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual), p. 225
848 – Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual), p. 232
849 – See Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual), p. 232-233
850 – Richard H. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-century Thought, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1992,
pp. 181-182
851 – Newton stated: “It was the judiciously learned & conscientious Mr Mede who first made way
into these interpretations, & him I have for the most part followed. ffor what I found true in him it
was not lawful for me to recede from, & I rather wonder that he erred so little then that he erred in
some things. His mistakes were chiefly in his Clavis, & had that been perfect, the rest would have
fallen in naturally.” Yahuda MS. 1.1, f. <8r>
852 – Yahuda MS. 1.1, f. <1r>,
http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THEM00136
853 – See Steven M. Oberhelman, ed., The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and Arabic
Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams, Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1991
854 – Maria V. Mavroudi, The So-Called Oneirocriticon Of A C H M E T: A Byzantine Book On
Dream Interpretation And Its Arabic Source, doctoral thesis presented to Harvard University, 1998;
Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its
Arabic Sources, The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 4001453, vol. 36,
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002
855 – “I call it established, ffor such the exact consent of the afforesaid three Nations in these records
argue it to be, since there uses not to happen any such consent in doctrines which severall nations or
severall men in the same nation frame according to their privat imaginations. To which consideration
may their consent with such interpretations as are to be collected out of Scripture may be added as a
pledge of their certainty|legitimatenes in the rest.” Yahuda Ms. 1.1a, fols. 1r-2r. See details in Paul
Timothy Greenham, A Concord of Alchemy with Theology: Isaac Newton’s Hermeneutics of the
Symbolic Texts of Chymistry and Biblical Prophecy, p. 129ff
856 – Greenham, A Concord of Alchemy with Theology, p. 141
857 – “I received also much light in this search by the analogy between the world natural & the
wor[l]d politique. ffor the mystical language was founded on this analogy & will be best understood
by considering its original.” Newton, Keynes Ms. 5, fols. Ir-IIr; also see J. Andrew Mendelsohn,
Alchemy and Politics in England 1649-1665, Past & Present, No. 135 (May, 1992), pp. 30-78
858 – See details in Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p. 48ff
859 – See details Garcia , Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 134ff
860 – See details in Anna Winterbottom, Producing and Using the “Historical Relation of Ceylon”:
Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society, p. 523-24 and 538
861 – Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World, p. 6; John
Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, 8 (1997), 197–209;
Lynn A. Struve (ed.) The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2004); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2005
862 – See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From the Tagus to the Ganges
863 – See Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many?, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2010
864 – David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction’, in Armitage and Braddick (eds.) The
British Atlantic World: 1500–1800, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 1.
865 – Paul Hazard stated: “…nowhere are there to be found records of travel more engrossing,
despite their leisurely style, than the narratives of Chardin. This man, a jeweller and the son of a
jeweller, who went to Persia to look for a market for his watches, his bracelets, his necklaces and his
rings, this Protestant who found himself an exile from France as a consequence of the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, was by Nature of a roving disposition. He knew Ispahan better than he knew
Paris, and, what was more, he liked it better. The upshot of it all was that any man, however narrow
and unimaginative, must have had it borne in upon him from his narrative that far away in distant
Asia there were human beings in no way inferior to himself, however widely their mode of life might
differ from his own. The notion of “superiority” on which he had hitherto been brought up, as it were,
was now no longer valid. Henceforth he must think in other terms. “Difference” not “superiority”
was now the appropriate word; a striking psychological readjustment. Yes, in Persia everything is
different; those meals you take by the roadside, the strange remedies prescribed by the native
physician, the caravansary where you put up for the night, everything is different—clothes, festivals,
funerals, religion, justice, laws, all different! Now, these Persians are not barbarians. On the contrary,
they are people of extreme refinement, civilised, perhaps almost over-civilised, and, maybe, a little
weary of having been so for so long. Chardin underlines the reality, the genuine character of this
“other world”. He acquaints his reader “with everything that merits the attention of this Europe of
ours concerning a country which we might well call another world, not only because it is so far away,
but also because its customs, its standards of life, are so different from our own.” Crisis of European
Mind, p. 18
866 – MaCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Euraasain Trade, Exoticism and the Ancient
Regime, p. 113
867 – MaCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Euraasain Trade, Exoticism and the Ancient
Regime, p. 113
868 – MaCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Euraasain Trade, Exoticism and the Ancient
Regime, p. 113
869 – See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires 1500-1800, London,
Harvard University Press, 2017, especially “Introduction: Before and Beyond “Orientalism”;
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theater of the East, 1576-1626, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2003
870 – See Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage, 1979
871 – See Richard Grassby, The Business Community, p. 91ff
872 – Richard Grassby, The Business Community, p. 93
873 – Richard Grassby, The Business Community, p. 92
874 – Richard Grassby, The Business Community, p. 92
875 – Andrew Lake, First Protestants, p. 8-9
876 – Andrew Lake, First Protestants, p. 9
877 – See Wallace, Dewey D. “Socinianism, Justification by Faith, and The Sources of John Locke’s
The Reasonableness of Christianity.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 45, no. 1, 1984, pp. 49–66.
878 – See https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A47737.0001.001?view=toc
879 – See Andrew Lake, First Protestants, p. 32
880 – See details in Humberto Garcia, Islam in the English Radical Protestant Imagination 1660-
1830, Ph. D. dissertation submitted to University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2007, p. 8.
““Islamic Republic” functions as a metaphorical substitute for frustrated political desires from within
England’s metropolitan culture: the failure of Cromwell’s Interregnum government followed by the
restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the high Anglican Church; the loss of civil liberties for many
nonconformists barred from holding public office, property rights, and legal preferments due to the
enforcement of the Test and Corporation Acts; and, later on, the growing disillusionment with the
setbacks of the French Revolution in conjunction with the mounting of a reactionary conservatism in
England during the 1790s and the Napoleonic Wars. During these moments of political anguish,
radical dissenters who wish to replace the ancien regime with the “good old days” of revolution look
toward Islam as an alternative repository of secular values. As such, Islam embodies a “rational”
theo-political ideal that, in their imagination, is not only more historically accurate than the dubious
teachings of the Church and the Bible, but more durable, dependable, and equitable than the
“universal” doctrines of “human rights,” Lockean individualism, and liberal-Anglican toleration. For
many Englishmen and (especially) Englishwomen, disappointed with the “false universals” of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, the Islamic East—rather than Europe, England, or America— marks the
symbolic site of a secular, progressive modernity.”
881 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 14
882 – Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 14
883 – Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 54-55
884 – Alison Games, The Web of Empire, p. 64
885 – See Goody, Theft of History, chapter 7, p. 180ff
886 – See Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, p. 63ff
887 – John J. Schroeder, War Finance in London, 1642-1646, Historian, 1959 Vol. 21; Iss. 4, p. 371;
see also his “London and the New Model Army, 1647,”, The Historian, Vol. 19, No. 3 (May, 1957),
pp. 245-261
888 – Schroeder, War Finance in London, p. 361
889 – Schroeder, War Finance in London, p. 370
890 – https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-
1900/Chambers,_Richard
891 – Robert Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, p. 97
892 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 13 “Although there was considerable popular support
for Parliament in the 1640s, the long-term consequences of the Revolution were all to the advantage
of the gentry and merchants, not of the lower fifty per cent of the population…”
893 – Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the
English Civil War to the End of Commonwealth, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2011, p. xiv
894 – See Glen Burgess and Matthew Festenstein eds., English Radicalism 1550-1850, p. 12 “It is
arguable that all significant political conflict in the early modern period occurred between groups
whose difference was primarily confessional. In this world, what we take to be radicalism was most
often the dramatic political impact of extreme religious beliefs, beliefs that were followed sometimes
without regard for political and social order. What distances this from modern radicalism is the fact
that it was often unpolitical or even antipolitical, relying not on human agency but on God to
transform the world. It was animated not by a vision of human freedom and equality, but by a vision
of community with God.”
895 – John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, New York, Routledge, 1993, p. 68.
896 – See details in Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England, p. xiv
897 – See Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, p. 100
898 – See Walter L. Lingle, and John W. Kuykendall, Presbyterians: Their History and Beliefs,
Atlanta: Westminster John Knox Press, 1978; James H. Smylie, A Brief History of the Presbyterians.
Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 1996
899 – “In theological terms, the Calvinist ‘orthodoxy’ that generally prevailed in 1689 was
abandoned.
In its place, ministers developed Arminian understandings of salvation, in which human free will had
a central role, and Arian definitions of God, according to which Christ was subordinate to God the
Father. As the century advanced, ‘[s]tep by step the descent was made from the highest Arianism to
the lowest Socinianism’, entailing a more complete denial of the Trinity. Without adequate church
courts, Presbyterians were unable rigorously to scrutinise candidates for ordination, and the ministry
was filled with men of increasingly heterodox opinions.” Andrew Thompson, The Oxford History of
Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II, p. 11
900 – See Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English
Civil War to the End of Commonwealth.”
901 – See Jeffrey R. Collins, The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell, History, Vol. 87, No. 285
(January 2002), pp. 18-40, p. 19; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate,
1649–1656 (4 vols., 1903 reprinted by Witney, Windrush Press, 1988), v. iii, p. 24; W. A. Jordan, The
Development of Religious Toleration in England (4 vols., Cambridge MA, 1932–40), v. iii. P. 144–7;
William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660, New York, Macmillan, 1969, p.
143.
902 – See Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England, p. xiii
903 – See details in Collins, The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell, History, p. 20ff
904 – See John Tolan, https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/muhammad-republican-
revolutionary
905 – See William Lamont, Godly Rule, p. 141ff
906 – See Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 158
907 – Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England, p. xiii
908 – William Lamont, Godly Rule, p. 143
909 – See Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 14; Bradstock, Radical Religions in Cromwell’s
England, p. 1ff
910 – See Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 18ff; Joyce Lee Malcolm ed., Struggle for
Sovereignty: Seventeenth Century English Political Tracts, (2 volumes) Indianapolis, Liberty Fund,
1992
911 – See Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture, p.
176ff; Andrea Bernadette, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008. p. 58
912 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 199
913 – See Dalrymple, Anarchy, p. 14;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Hindi_or_Urdu_origin
914 – Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765, London,Penguin Random House,
2019, p. 373
915 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 199
916 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 200
917 – See details in MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 200ff
918 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 209
919 – See P.C. Floud, ‘The origins of English calico printing’, Journal of the Society of Dyers and
Colourists, 76 (1960); A.I. Tchitcherov, India: Changing Economic Structure in the Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries: Outline History of Crafts and Trade (New Delhi, Manohar Publishers, 1998);
S. Robinson, A History of Dyed Textiles, London, Studio Vista, 1969
920 – R. Chenciner, Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade. Plant Dyes and Pigments in World
Commerce and Art, Richmond, Curzon, 2000; N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting, (eds.), Textile History
and Economic history: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann, Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 1973; S.D. Chapman, (ed.), The Textile Industries. II. Cotton, Linen, Wool and
Worsted, London and New York, 1997; D.A. Farnie and D.J. Jeremy, (eds.), The Fibre that Changed
the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600-1990s, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2004; T. Osumi, Printed Cottons of Asia: the Romance of Trade Textiles, Tokyo, Charles E.
Tuttle Company, 1963; J. Irwin and P.R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History,
Ahmedabad, Calico Museum of Textiles, 1966; Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, How India
Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, Leiden, Brills, 2009; Jennifer
Harris ed., A Companion to Textile Culture, New Jersey, Wiley Blackwell, 2020
921 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 210
922 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 213
923 – Ina Baghdiantz MaCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Euraasain Trade, Exoticism
and the Ancient Regime, p. 223
924 – Quoted in Robert Chenciner, Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade, London, Curzon,
Caucasus World, 2000, 186
925 – See Eaton, “Conclusion and Epilogue” in India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765
926 – Quoted in Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640-1685, p. 56; The
Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (London, 1649), A4r
927 – See Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell.
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p.69-70
928 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 14
929 – See details in Gary S. De Krey, Political Radicalism in London after the Glorious Revolution,
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 585-617, p. 585ff; Thomas B.
Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 5 vols. (London, 1849-
61); George M. Trevelyan, The English Revolution, 1688-89 (London, 1938); and David Ogg,
England in the Reigns of James II and William III, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955; Lucile
Pinkham,William III and the Respectable Revolution: The Part Played by William of Orange in the
Revolution of 1688, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954; Maurice Ashley, The
Glorious Revolution of 1688, London, Scribners, 1966; and John Carswell, The Descent on England:
A Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and Its European Background, London, John Day, 1969; J.
R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972; and J. P.
Kenyon, Revolution Principles, The Politics of Party 1689-1720, Cambridge, Cambridge University
press, 2009
930 – See details in J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England, p. 7ff
931 – See Humberto Garcia, Islam in the English Radical Protestant Imagination; also Gary S. De
Krey, Between Revolutions: Re-appraising the Restoration in Britain, History Compass 6/3 (2008):
738–773, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00520.x
932 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 98
933 – https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/muhammad-republican-revolutionary
934 – “(Christian Reader) though some, conscious of their own instability in Religion, and of theirs
(too like Turks in this) whose prosperity and opinions they follow, were unwilling this should see the
Press, yet am I confident, if thou hast been so true a votary to orthodox Religion, as to keep thy self
untainted of their follies, this shall not hurt thee: And as for those of that Batch, having once
abandoned the Sun of the Gospel, I believe they will wander as far into utter darkness, by following
strange lights, as by this Ignis Fatuus of the Alcoran. Such as it is, I present to thee, having taken the
pains only to translate it out of French, not doubting, though it hath been a poyson, that hath infected
a very great, but most unsound part of the Universe, it may prove an Antidote, to confirm in thee the
health of Christianity.” https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/muhammad-republican-
revolutionary
935 – See C. Hill, Century of Revolution: 1603-1714, London, T. Nelson, 1961, pp. 154-5.
936 – See details K. O. Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 276ff. ““By executing Charles,
Cromwell cut himself off from justifications of political authority rooted in the past; by
acknowledging that a free vote of those who held the franchise would restore the king, that is by
refusing to base his authority on consent, Cromwell cut himself off from arguments of the present.
His self-justification lay in the future, in the belief that he was fulfilling God’s will. But because he
believed that he had such a task to perform, he had a fatal disregard for civil and legal liberties. To
achieve the future promised by God, Cromwell governed arbitrarily. He imprisoned men without
trial. When George Cony, a merchant, refused to pay unconstitutional customs duties, Cromwell
imprisoned him and his lawyer to prevent him taking his case to court. When Parliament failed to
make him an adequate financial provision, he taxed by decree. When the people would not respond
voluntarily to the call to moral regeneration, he created Major-Generals and set them to work. Hence
the supreme paradox. Cromwell the king-killer, the reluctant head of state, the visionary, was begged
by his second Parliament to become King Oliver.” P. 276
937 – Winston Churchill, A History of English Speaking Peoples, London, Dodd, Mead & Company,
(1956), p. 314
938 – David Sharp, Oliver Cromwell, Portsmouth, Heinemann, 2003, p. 60
939 – Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 15
940 – See Joyce Malcolm, Struggle for Sovereignty, v. 1, p. 506ff
941 – See John Broadbent, Paradise Lost: Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1972; C. A. Patrides, Approaches to Paradise Lost: The York Tercentenary Lectures,
University of Toronto, 1968
942 – See Gary De Krey, London and the Restoration: 1659-1683, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2005, p. 4
943 – See John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society, p.
264ff
944 – See Tim Harris. “Cooper, Anthony Ashley,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
edited by H. C. J. Matthew and Brian Harrison, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 202-203
945 – See Brenner, The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community, p. 107
946 – De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 744
947 – De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 744
948 – See Gary De Krey, London and the Restoration: 1659-1683, p. 3ff
949 – Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 112
950 – Bulman, Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England, p. 754
951 – See Kenneth O. Morgan ed., The Oxford History of Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2010, p. 379ff
952 – See Albert Cassell Dudley, “Nonconformity Under the ‘Clarendon Code’,” The American
Historical Review 18, no. 1 (Oct., 1912): 65-70.
953 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 379
954 – John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society, p. 173; see
also J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot, London, St. Martin’s Press,1972 and The Stuarts, London, B. T.
Batsford, 1958
955 – N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, p. 5
956 – See Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 380ff
957 – M. Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’ in Grell et al. (eds.),
From Persecution to Toleration, p. 331
958 – De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 748
959 – See De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 749-50; Letters of the Honourable Algernon Sydney, to
the Honourable Henry Savile (1742), 165; [William Popple], Some Free Reflections upon Occasion
of the Public Discourse about Liberty of Conscience (1687), 7 [my attribution]; J. Locke, ‘An Essay
on Toleration’ (1667) in [ J.] Locke, Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie, Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 156; Some Necessary
Disquisitions and close Expostulations (1688), 8.
960 – See De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 755
961 – De Krey, Between Revolutions, p. 757; see J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger with the assistance
of F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989
962 – See Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 380ff
963 – See J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crises, 1677-1683, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2002, p. 35ff
964 – See Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 383ff
965 – See Lois G. Schwoerer, “William, Lord Russell: The Making of a Martyr, 1683–
1983.” Journal of British Studies 24.1 (1985): 41-71.
966 – See Doreen J. Milne, (1951). “The Results of the Rye House Plot and Their Influence upon the
Revolution of 1688: The Alexander Prize Essay”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 5. 1:
91–108; Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,
Princeton, Princeton University Press,1986, pp. 376
967 – See Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England: Henry Stubbe, Radical Islam, and
the Rye House Plot, The Eighteenth Century, Volume 51, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer, 2010, pp. 1-
25
968 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 384
969 – See Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, p. 3ff
970 – Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 3; Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 385
971 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 386
972 – “The long-term effects of James’s policies were profound. Among the most significant was the
legislative enactment of religious toleration for Protestant nonconformists in England in May 1689,
six months after James’s departure from England and three months after the enthronement of William
and Mary. This shift should not be attributed to John Locke’s writings on toleration, which first
appeared in print that same year. Although Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia was published at Gouda a
few weeks before the passing of the Toleration Act, it was not translated into English until several
months afterward and had no demonstrable effect on the parliamentary debate. Rather, it was James
II ’s toleration campaign that forced the hand of the almost entirely Anglican parliament and led it to
grant a set of concessions to nonconformists.” Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 10
973 – Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 7
974 – Mark Goldie, “The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution,” in Robert Beddard, ed., The
Revolutions of 1688, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, 107–108.
975 – See Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 386ff
976 – See details Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 6ff
977 – See Geoffrey Holmes ed., Britain after the Glorious Revolution: 1689-1714, London,
Macmillan, 1969; David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the
Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; Lois
G. Schwoerer, Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution, Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1990), 531-548.
978 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 401
979 – Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, London, Yale
University Press, 2017, p. 577
980 – Schwoerer, Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution, p. 532
981 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 398
982 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 393
983 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 394
984 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 395
985 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 395
986 – Morgan ed., Oxford History of Britain, p. 398
987 – See Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, p. 1 ff
988 – See For introduction to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates, see O.P. Grell and B.
Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1996; O.P. Grell, J.I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration:
The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991; W.K. Jordan, The
Development of religious Toleration in England, 4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1932–40; reprint Gloucester, Mass., 1965; E. Labrousse, ‘Religious Toleration’, in P.P. Wiener
(ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 5 vols., New York, Macmillan, 1974: IV, 112–21; H.
Kamen, The Rise of Toleration, London, McGraw-Hill, 1967; J.C. Laursen and C.J. Nederman (eds),
Beyond the Persecuting Society, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. See also R.I.
Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe AD 950–
1250, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 1986.
989 – See Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama eds., Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to
Religious Freedom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 9.3 “The Emergence of a
Modern State in England”
990 – See Karen Bird, The Concession of Toleration, Muslims and the British Enlightenment,
Limina, volume 22.2, 2017, p. 15ff ; Karen Barkey, Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman
Imperial Model, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1/2, The New
Sociological Imagination II (Dec., 2005), pp. 5-19: DOI 10.1007/s10767-007-9013-5; K. Abou el
Fadl, The place of tolerance in Islam. In J. Cohen & I. Lague (Eds.), The place of tolerance in Islam
(pp. 3–23). Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002; T. Ali, Theological distractions. In J. Cohen & I. Lague
(Eds.), The place of tolerance in Islam (pp. 37–41); Juan Pablo Domínguez, Introduction: Religious
toleration in the Age of Enlightenment, History of European Ideas, 2017, 43:4, 273-287, DOI:
10.1080/01916599.2016.1203590
991 – See Mary Lynn Pierce, Controversy In Seventeenth-Century English Coffeehouses:
Transcultural Interactions With An Oriental Import, Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
Department of History, the University of Arizona, 2015; Alexander Mirkovic, From Courtly
Curiosity to Revolutionary Refreshment: Turkish Coffee and English Politics in the Seventeenth
century, A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts,
Department of History, University of South Florida, 2005
992 – James Von Hon Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 241
993 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 821
994 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 812
995 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 833
996 – See Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of British Coffeehouses, London,
Yale University Press, 2005, p. 5ff
997 – See Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 23
998 – See Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 25
999 – See Paul Rycaut, The History of the Turkish Empire, from the Year 1623, to the Year 1677
(London: J. D., 1687), pp. 67–74. See also Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1935), pp. 90–2; and Gwilym Prichard Ambrose, The Levant
Company mainly from 1640–1753 (B. Litt dissertation, University of Oxford, 1932), pp. 241–57
1000 – See S. D. Smith, “The Early Diffusion of Coffee Drinking in England,” in Le commerce du
café avant l’ére des plantations coloniales, ed. Michel Tuchscherer (Le Caire: Institut Français
D’archéologie Orientale, 2001), 245-68; Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 49
1001 – See Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 813ff
1002 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 813
1003 – See Brian Cowan, The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered, The Historical Journal, Vol.
47, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 21-46, p. 21
1004 – See Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 115ff
1005 – See Endless Queries: or, An End to Queries (London: n.p. 1659), pp. 3–4.
1006 – Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 39
1007 – Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 43
1008 –
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Indian_Nectar_Or_a_Discourse_Concern/QyhVAAAAc
AAJ?hl=en
1009 – See Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 43
1010 – See Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, p. 102. “Unlike the formal social interactions
prescribed by a visit to the great house, coffeehouse visits were more spontaneous and less rigidly
ritualized. The protocols of recognising rank and precedence were abandoned within the coffeehouse,
a convenient social fiction which was celebrated in a broadside which proclaimed the ‘‘Rules and
Orders of the Coffee-House’’: ‘‘First Gentry, tradesmen, all are welcome hither, / And may without
affront sit down together: / Preeminence of place, none here should mind, / But take the next fit seat
that he can find: / Nor need any, if finer persons come, rise up to assigne to them his room’’ (Figure
15). This convention was not meant to promote social ‘‘leveling,’’ as many of the early detractors and
modern historians of the coffeehouses have assumed, but it was rather a means by which the genteel
manners of the new metropolitan ‘‘Town’’ were to be distinguished from what were perceived to be
the excessive and stifling formalities of the past.”
1011 – “These secular establishments were places where the authority of the church did not reach,
and yet they were places to which people were inevitably drawn - to eat and drink, to play and revel,
to talk, argue, exchange views.49 Worse still, they attracted men of every status, even the poor,
whom the alehouses especially catered for.50 The fear then was that such places were indeed lay
conventicles, levelling in tendency, where all men were priests and one man’s opinion was as good as
another’s. In such an environment heresy, irreligion and sedition, Glanvill and others maintained,
might and would flourish.” Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 84
1012 – See Anon., News From the Coffee- House; In which is shown their several sorts of Passions,
Containing News from all our Neighbour Nations, A Poem (London: E. Crowch, 1667), The British
Library, London, and EEBO; Anon., The Coffee-House of News-Mongers Hall (London: 1672).
English coffeehouses, also known as penny universities, were cheap. Customers could afford to
frequent them daily and sometimes several times a day.
1013 – John Houghton of the Royal Society confided that “a worthy friend of mine (now departed)
who was of good learning” was convinced that the “coffee houses had improved useful knowledge as
much as” both universities.” Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create, p. 833
1014 – See Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities; A History of the Coffee-houses. London: Decker &
War-burg, 1956.
1015 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, p. 221
1016 – Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 59
1017 – See Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 59ff. Several illustrations, as in The Coffee House by
Markman Ellis, show some of the men wearing a turban. Samuel Pepys, one of the regular patrons of
London coffeehouses, and some of the Turkey merchants, based on some illustrations, are believed to
have worn turbans on occasions when attending the coffeehouses. Even in France, upon the
introduction of coffee during the reign of Louis XIV, imitating Turkish robes and turbans had gained
enthusiasm among the upper classes. See Bennet and Bealer, The World of Caffeine, 71.
1018 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, p. 221
1019 – Anon., The Character of a Coffee-house wherein is contained a description the persons
usually frequenting it, with their discourse and humors, as also the admirable vertues of coffee, By an
Eye and Ear Witness (London: 1665), 2. Available in the British Library and in Early English Books
Online (EEBO).
1020 – See venom against heretics in Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683, ed.
Alan Macfarlane, New York, Oxford University Press, 1976, 366ff; John Spurr, The Restoration
Church of England, 1646-1689, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991, 26ff
1021 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 826
1022 – See Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624, Newark,
University of Delaware Press, 2005
1023 – See Anon., A Cup of Coffee, London, 1662. In Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance
and Crisis, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, 65-67
1024 – See M.P. John Starkey, A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London, 1661), 1; Anon.,
The Coffee Scuffle, Occasioned by a Contest Between a Learned Knight, and a Pitiful Pedgogue
(London, not dated), 6, 8, 12; M.P., A Character of a Coffee and Coffee-Houses, 8-9.
1025 – Anon., A Broad-side against COFFEE; Or, the Marriage of the Turk (London: 1667), 1.
Bowdy house was a slang for brothels.
1026 – The Character of a Coffee-House, 4-5. Similar to coffeehouses in the Ottoman cities, smoking
tobacco was commonplace in English coffee establishments.
1027 – Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 96
1028 – James Melton, Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 241-42
1029 – James Melton, Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 242
1030 – Poor Robins Character of an Honest Drunken Curr (London, 1675), p. 7.
1031 – See Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 825ff
1032 – Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 97
1033 – Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981, 77.
1034 – See details in Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 98ff
1035 – See Cook, H. (1989). Physicians and the new philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the virtuosi-
physicians. In R. French & A. Wear (Eds.), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (pp.
246-271). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511897078.010
1036 – See Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 91
1037 – Steve Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834, p. 820; Henry
Oldenburg to Robert Boyle, October 6, 1664, Oldenburg Correspondence (n. 34 above), 2:249;
1038 – Samuel Butler: Characters, ed. Charles W. Davis, Cleveland, Case Western Reserve
University Press, 1970, p. 257
1039 – Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 12
1040 – See Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 98
1041 – Anon., The Coffee Scuffle, Occasioned by a Contest Between a Learned Knight, and a Pitiful
Pedgogue (London, not dated), p. 6, 8, 12.
1042 – Anon, The Coffee Scuffle, p. 5, 8-10.
1043 – Anon.,The Character of A Coffee-House. With the Symptoms of a Town-Wit (London, 1663),
2. The source also refers to such proprietors as apes imitating the Turks
1044 – See Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, 88.
1045 – See Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 99ff
1046 – “Whereas it is most apparent, that the Multitude of Coffee-Houses of late years set up and
kept within the Kingdom, the Dominion of Wales, and the Town of Berwick on Tweed, and the great
resort of Idle and disaffected persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well
for that many Tradesmen and others, do therein mis-spend much of their time, which might and
probably would otherwise by imployed in and about their Lawful Callings and Affairs; but also, for
that in such houses, and by occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, diverse False, Malitious
and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majesties
Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; his Majesty hath thought it
fit and necessary, That the said Coffee-houses be (for the future) put down and suppressed.” See
http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2006/12/king-bans-coffee.html
1047 – See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Contexts for the Study of James Harrington/ II Pensiero Politico, 2
(1978), pp. 20-35; The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, Introduction and chapters 12-14
1048 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment, p. 117
1049 – See Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create, p. 828; Steve Pincus, A Letter from a Person of
Quality in “The English Debate over Universal Monarchy,” in A Union for Empire, ed. John
Robertson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 48-50.
1050 – https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Justification_of_the_Present_War_Again/--
dCAQAAMAAJ?hl=en
1051 –
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_of_the_United_Provinces_of_A/p8FCAAAAcA
AJ?hl=en
1052 – James Von Hon Melton, The Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 242, see also Aytoun
Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-House, London, Martin Secker & Warburg
Ltd, 1956, p. 91.
1053 – See Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, chapter 7, p. 209ff
1054 – See Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, chapter 7, p. 193ff
1055 – See Cowan. Rise of Coffeehouses Reconsidered, p. 199
1056 – “The King observing the people to be much dissatisfied yielded to a petition of the coffee-
men. .. and the proclamation was recalled.” David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis,
1983) 6:296
1057 – James Ralph, The History of England, 2 vols. (London, 1744), v.1, p. 297.
1058 – James Von Hon Melton, The Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 244
1059 – See James Von Hon Melton, The Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 245
1060 – James Von Hon Melton, The Rise of Public in Enlightenment Europe, p. 226
1061 – Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 11
1062 – Outram, The Enlightenment, p. 20
1063 – See Cowan. Rise of Coffeehouses Reconsidered, p. 22ff
1064 – See Cowan. Rise of Coffeehouses Reconsidered, p. 23ff
1065 – See Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, Ashland, OH, Poenix, 2005 and
his Eighteenth Century Coffee-House Culture: Restoration Satire, New York, Routledge, 2006
1066 – Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, p. 216
1067 – Outram, The Enlightenment, p. 10ff
1068 – See Outram, The Enlightenment, p. 62ff
1069 – See details in Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English
Civil Wars and Interregnum. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004, p. 82
1070 – See Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment, p. 114
1071 – See Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670-1840
1072 – See Karen M. Bird, The Concession of Toleration, Muslims and the British Enlightenment,
Limina, Volume 22.2, 2017
1073 – See Nigel Smith, “And if God was one of us”: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-Trinitarian
heresy in seventeenth-century England” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall eds., Heresy,
Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2006, p. 160ff
1074 – Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, v.1, p.8; See Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’ in
Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1981, p. 1–18; also David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century
Britain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990; B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in
Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debates from Locke to Burke, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1998; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from
London to Vienna, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 3ff
1075 – Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, v.1, p.7-8
1076 – “Generation after generation the power of the moral faculty becomes more absolute, the
doctrines that oppose it wane and vanish, and the various elements of theology are absorbed and
recast by its influence. The indifference of most men to dogmatic theology is now so marked, and the
fear of tampering with formularies that are no longer based on general conviction is with some men
so intense, that general revisions of creeds have become extremely rare; but the change of belief is
not the less profound. The old words are indeed retained, but they no longer present the old images to
the mind, or exercise the old influence upon the life. The modes of thought, and the types of
character which those modes produce, are essentially and universally transformed. The whole
intellectual atmosphere, the whole tenor of life, the prevailing enthusiasms, the conceptions of the
imagination, are all changed.” Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe, v. 1, p. 145
1077 – Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v. 1, p. 130
1078 – Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, v. 1, p. 130
1079 – M. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, London,
George Allen and Unwin, 1981, p. 27.
1080 – Andrew Kloes, Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great
and his Confession of Faith, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816015000504
1081 – Quoted in D. Daily, Enlightenment Deism. The Foremost Threat to Christianity,
Pennsylvania, Dorrance, 1999 p. 44.
1082 – Andrew Kloes, Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great
and his Confession of Faith, p. 116
1083 – Andrew Kloes, Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great
and his Confession of Faith, p. 116
1084 – Andrew Kloes, Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great
and his Confession of Faith, p. 102
1085 – See D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. From Calvin to the Civil
Constitution, 1560–1791, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996; D. Outram, The
Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; B. Young, Religion and
Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Theological Debate from Locke to Burke, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1998; J. A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists. The Discourse of
Scepticism, 1680–1750, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997; J. Walsh and S. Taylor:
‘The Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, in C. Haydon, J. Walsh and S.
Taylor (eds), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993;
M. Jacob, The Enlightenment. A Brief History with Documents, Boston, Mass., St Martin’s/Bedford,
2001, p. 12; D. Berman, in his A History of Atheism in Britain, New York, Croom Helm, 1988; J.
Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken; G. R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason 1648–
1789, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970
1086 – Matthew Kadane, Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment, Past & Present, Volume
235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 105–140, p. 108
1087 – Quoted in Matthew Kadane, Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment, p. 110
1088 – Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and J. P.
Pettegrove, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951, p. 141
1089 – See John Robertston, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper, Intellectual History and ‘‘The Religious Origins of
the Enlightenment’’, English Historical Review, cxxiv, 511 (2009), 1389–1421. Cf. the chapter ‘Sin
and Hell’ in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside-down: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution (London, 1972). J. G. A. Pocock elaborated on Trevor-Roper’s point in the case of
Eighteenth century Arminianism: J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge
1999–2015), i, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, 8–9, 50–71. Also see Michael
Heyd, ‘Original Sin, the Struggle for Stability, and the Rise of Moral Individualism in Late
Seventeenth-Century England’, in Philip Benedict and Myron P. Gutmann (eds.) Early Modern
Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark, 2005); and Michael Heyd, ‘Changing Emotions? The
Decline of Original Sin on the Eve of the Enlightenment’, in Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (eds.),
Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Burlington,
2005), 123–38. Original sin is just as central to the Enlightenment in twentieth-century anti-
Enlightenment thought. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 2005) and Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,
trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 2007).
1090 – Kadane, Matthew, “Anti-Trinitarianism and the Republican Tradition in Enlightenment
Britain.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 1
(December 15, 2010): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/68; Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft
Shaken; Stuart Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric, 1770–1814, New York, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 2, The Expansion of Evangelical
Nonconformity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995
1091 – J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 65
1092 – Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 65
1093 – Matthew Kadane, Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment, p. 110
1094 – See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 7 ff
1095 – See J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the
Ancient Regime, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 319 ff
1096 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 7
1097 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 20
1098 – See Ethan H. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages
to the Enlightenment, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018, p. 1
1099 – See John Spurr, “Rational Religion” in Restoration England, Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1988), pp. 563-585
1100 – Joanna Picciotto, “Implicit Faith and Reformations of Habit.” JMEMS 46, no. 3 (2016): 513–
43.” p. 513
1101 – Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, p.
13
1102 – See Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 222
1103 – For Islamic take on the subject see Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Al-Tawhid: Its Implications for
Thought and Life, 2nd edn. (Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992)
1104 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 283
1105 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 289
1106 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 223
1107 – Quoted in Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 226
1108 – See Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 20
1109 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 19
1110 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 290
1111 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 291
1112 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 291
1113 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 650
1114 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 291
1115 – Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind: 168-1715 translated by J. Lewis May, New
York, New York Review Books, 2013, p. 95
1116 – Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 96
1117 – Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 95
1118 – David Martin, Christian Language and Its Mutations, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, p. 173.
1119 – Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 97-98
1120 – Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 96
1121 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 20; see also Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam and Modernity, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003; Asad, Geneologies of Religion:
Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, John Hopkins University
Press, 1993
1122 – Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, p. 4
1123 – See Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, p. 5; See also George Lindbeck, The Nature of
Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Louisville, Westminister John Knox Press,
1984; Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam. Baltimore, John Hopkin University Press, 1993
1124 – G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Edited by Allen Wood, Translated by H.
B. Nisbet. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
1125 – Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, p. 10
1126 – Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, p. 29
1127 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 2
1128 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammd, p. 113
1129 – See Philip Milton, John Locke and the Rye House Plot, The Historical Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3
(Sep., 2000), pp. 647-668, p. 650ff
1130 – See T. Birch, History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1756-7); Robert D. Purrington,
The First Professional Scientist: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London, Boston, Birkhauser,
2009
1131 – See “Newton: The Making of a Politician”,
http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/contexts/CNTX00002
1132 – See John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 414
1133 – See Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols,
London, William Hallhead, 1788, v., pp. 204, 221, 679.
1134 – Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society,
‎London, Belknap Press, 2015, p. 86
1135 – See Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration
in Early Modern Europe, London, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007, p. 15-47
1136 – Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, p. 43-44
1137 – See Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, p. 129
1138 – See Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 28ff
1139 – Margarete C. Jacob, “The Enlightenment Critique of Christianity: The crisis provoked by
monarchical absolutism and established churches” in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett eds., The
Cambridge History of Christianity: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, v. VII, p. 265
1140 – Margaret. Jacob, “The Nature of Early-Eighteenth-Century Religious Radicalism.” Republics
of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009), p. 1:
http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/42.
1141 – Jean Claude, An Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France,
London, J. Norris, 1686, 19–21, quoted in John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early
Enlightenment Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 63–64. See also M. C. Jacob,
The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, London, Allen and Unwin,
1981; see also Hazard, Crisis of European Mind, p. 84
1142 – Hazard, Crisis of European Mind, p. 84
1143 – Margarete C. Jacob, “The Enlightenment Critique of Christianity: The crisis provoked by
monarchical absolutism and established churches”, p. 266
1144 – See Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 1ff
1145 – See Ryan K. Frace, The Foundations Of Enlightenment: Transformations In Religious
Toleration, Orthodoxy, And Pluralism In Early Modern Scotland, 1660-1752, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago, Chicago, 2005
1146 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 17
1147 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 2-3
1148 – See Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, p. 159
1149 – See Al-Rodhan (eds), The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the West, London,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 and also Gene W. Heck, Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of
Capitalism, New York, Walter de Gruyter, 2006 C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth
Century, London, Harvard University Press, 1955, p. 7
1150 – See Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism,
edited and introduced by Nabil Matar, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, p.102ff
1151 – See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 573
1152 – See Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its
Enemies, 1660-1730
1153 – See Michael Graham, The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the
Eve of the Enlightenment. Edinburgh, 2013
1154 – See J. Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam: revisiting a ‘primary document’, Unitarian
Theology II. 2018, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.21403
1155 – See Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: Islam and the Founders, New York:
Knopf, 2013, p. 200ff
1156 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 702. The word “Deism” will be used a lot during this book.
So I will mostly use the generic definition given to the term by Pierre Viret (1511-1571), the author
of “Christian Teaching on the Doctrine of Faith and the Gospel”. As a reformed preacher and close
friend of John Calvin, Viret separated deism from theism and defined deists as persons who “. . .
profess belief in God as the creator of heaven and earth, but reject Jesus Christ and his doctrines.”
Viret identified “Deism” with Turkish faith. A century later, Viret’s definition was republished in
Pierre Bayle’s (1647- 1706) 1697 Historical and Critical Dictionary, which became widely popular
in Europe. Deists accepted Jesus as a human, moral and prophetic model but denied his divinity, pre-
existence and redemptive death along with almost all supernatural, incarnational dogmas of
Christianity. Islam will absolutely fit under this definition of Deism. It will not be far-fetched to
claim that the European Deism which played a major role during the Enlightenment centuries was a
reflection and a proto-copy of the simple Unitarian creed of Islam.
1157 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 155
1158 – “I confess that Bonaparte frequently conversed with the chiefs of the Mussulman religion on
the subject of his conversion; but only for the sake of amusement. The priests of the Koran, who
would probably have been delighted to convert us, offered us the most ample concessions. But these
conversations were merely started by way of entertainment, and never could have warranted a
supposition of their leading to any serious result. If Bonaparte spoke as a Mussulman, it was merely
in his character of a military and political chief in a Mussulman country. To do so was essential to his
success, to the safety of his army, and, consequently, to his glory. In every country he would have
drawn up proclamations and delivered addresses on the same principle. In India he would have been
for Ali, at Thibet for the Dalai-lama, and in China for Confucius.” Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte
by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne edited by R.W. Phipps. Vol. 1, New York, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1889 p. 168-169 Top of Form Bottom of Form
1159 – See Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, New York, Palgrave Macmillan,
2007, p. 294
1160 – Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, p. 294
1161 – Matthew Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English
Culture, p.1
1162 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture, p. 7
1163 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 1
1164 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad, p.1-2
1165 – See Noel Malcolm, The 1649 English Translation of the Koran: Its Origin and Significance,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2012, Vol. 75 (2012), p. 288; Nabil Matar, Islam in
Britain, p. 83; Nabil Matar noted that from “sectary to antiquarian to Lord Protector, the Quran was a
text widely consulted and quoted: it had legitimacy for addressing not only Muslims overseas but
Christians in England and the rest of the British Isles. The Quran had become a text on a Briton’s
reading list… Associated with ‘Alcoran” was the Arabic civilization in which Islam had first
developed. This civilization had interacted with Christendom throughout the medieval period and the
Renaissance: Arabic translations and interpretations of Aristode and Arabic developments in
mathematics, astronomy and medicine -the three areas in which the Arabs had excelled - had left
their mark on the evolution of European thought… In the seventeenth century, English and Scottish
writers frequently praised the usefulness of Arabic to statesman and trader, traveler and scholar
alike.” (Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 83) Matar further noted that “From the late Elizabethan until the
Restoration periods, Islam was invoked and engaged at various intellectual and social levels.
Numerous English and Scottish writers translated and prepared texts about Islam, while the reading
public turned to “Alcoran” and learned about Muslim political and religious institutions. Islam
entered the English discourse in a manner that superseded every other non-Christian civilization
which Britons encountered from the Elizabethan until the Restoration periods.” (Matar, Islam in
Britain, p. 118)
1166 – Ian Coller, Citizens and Muslims: Islam, Politics and the French Revolution, London, Yale
University Press, 2020, p. 15
1167 – Ian Coller, Citizens and Muslims, p. 16
1168 – Ian Coller, Citizens and Muslims, p. 16
1169 – Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “The Role of Islam in World History,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 1.2 (1970): 99
1170 – See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and
London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653, London, Verso, 2003
1171 – See James D. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early
Modern World 1350-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Sanjay Subrahmanyam
ed., Merchants Network in the Early Modern World, New York, Routledge, 2016
1172 – Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 146-47
1173 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 66
1174 – Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
translated by Sian Reynold, New York, Collins, 1972 p. 799
1175 – See Noel Malcolm, “Positive Views of Islam and of Ottoman Rule in the Sixteenth Century:
The Case of Jean Bodin,” in The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, ed. Anna Contadini and Claire
Norton, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, 197; Anders Ingram, Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in
Early Modern England, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 7–9;
1176 – MacLean, Looking East, P. 21.
1177 – Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the
Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 23; David, Holy War
and Human Bondage: Tales of Muslim Christian Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean,
Oxford, Praeger ABC-Clio, 2009 also see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 301 ff; Charles Sumner, White
Slavery in the Barbary States, Enhanced Media, Reseda, CA, 2017
1178 – See Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689, Gainesville, University Press of Florida,
2005, p. 101 ff; Davis, Christian Slaves, p. 22
1179 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 126
1180 – See Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 102
1181 – Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 103
1182 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 56; see Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 42
1183 – Maartje van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades: Dutch Converts to Islam in Seventeenth-
Century Diplomatic Relations with North Africa, Journal of Early Modern History 19 (2015) 175-
198, p. 179
1184 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 181
1185 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 181

1186 – See Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th
Century Mediterranean, New York, Riverhead Books, 2010, chapter 2 and 3
1187 – See Stephen Clissold, 1976. “Christian Renegades and Barbary Corsairs.” History Today 26,
no. 8: 508–515. Historical Abstracts; C. S. Forester, The Barbary Pirates. New York, Random
House. 1953
1188 – See Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary, chapter 4
1189 – See Virginia W. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherland, New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 56
1190 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 186
1191 – Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherland, p. 56
1192 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 182
1193 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 182-183
1194 – See van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 184
1195 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 194
1196 – See Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherland, p. 57
1197 – See van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 187
1198 – See van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 189ff
1199 – van Gelder, The Republic’s Renegades, p. 189-90
1200 – See Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 113 ff
1201 – Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 113
1202 – See Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 16-17, 22
1203 – Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1999, p. 19
1204 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, p. 20
1205 – See Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, p. 158
1206 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 81-82
1207 – Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 167
1208 – See Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 167
1209 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 59; also see Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of
Mitrowitz, ed. A. H. Wratislaw (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), p. 53; Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain,
p. 16-17
1210 – See John Covel, “Dr. Covel’s Diary (1670-1679),” in Early Voyages and Travels in the
Levant, ed. James Theodore Bent, Burlington, Ashgate, 2010, p. 210
1211 – John Covel, “Dr. Covel’s Diary (1670-1679),” in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, p.
210
1212 – Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, p. 799-800. Nabil Matar observed
that “Converts to Islam both embarrassed and provoked some of the most important writers and
theologians of the European Renaissance. While the “direct encounter” with Islam affected the
“small men” of Christendom -sailors, fishermen, merchants and soldiers-the intellectual and religious
impact of that encounter challenged men whose writings and influence have been instrumental in
defining early modern European culture: from Pope Pius II to Martin Luther and John Locke, from
John Calvin to Christopher Marlowe, from John Foxe to George Fox, from Cervantes to
Shakespeare, Massinger and Dryden - all reflected, to varying degrees in their writings, on the
interaction between Christendom and Islam. Furthermore, all recognized that Christians were
converting to Islam more often than Muslims were to Christianity and that the “infidels” challenged
Europe not only by their sword but by their religious allure.” Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 19
1213 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 59
1214 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 77; Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary:
Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th Century Mediterranean, chapter 2 & 3
1215 – See Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the
Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575-1610, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017

1216 – See Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th
Century Mediterranean, New York, Riverhead Books, 2010, chapter 3 and 4; The Austrian Baron
Wenceslas Wratislaw (1576—1635), “who had been imprisoned by the Turks, noted in 1599 that
converts to Islam were so numerous that they “regulate the whole dominions of the Turkish
emperor.” (Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz, ed. A. H. Wratislaw (London:
Bell and Daldy, 1862), p. 53) There were more renegades “in Turkie and Barbary,” confirmed in
1614 the barber-surgeon William Davies who had also been imprisoned by the Turks, than “naturall
Turkes.” (Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 16-17)
1217 – Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatising Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern
England, New York, Routledge, 2005
1218 – See Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640-1685,
Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2007
1219 – See Daniel J. Vitkus, ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. Cambridge:
Columbia University Press, 2000; Vitkus ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity
Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2001; Turning Turk: English
Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (New York: Paigrave, 2003); Samuel C.
Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Octagon
Press, 1937; Filiz Barin, “Othello: Turks as “the Other” in the Early Modern Period,” The Journal of
the Midwest Modern Language Association 43 No. 2 (Fall, 2010): 37-58; Matthew Dimmock, “The
Tudor Experience of Islam.” In A Companion to Tudor Literature ed. Kent Cartwright. (Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell 2010): 49-62; Matthew Dimmock, “Converting and Not Converting “Strangers” in
Early Modern London,” Journal of Early Modern History 17 (2013): 457-78; Jonathan Burton,
Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624, Newark, University of Delaware Press,
2005; Matthew Dimmock, “materializing Islam on the Early Modern Stage,” In Early Modern
Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures ed. Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller,
and Ralf Hertel, Burlington, Ashgate, 2012: 115-132; Jerry Brotton, “Shakespeare’s Turks and the
Spectre of Ambivalence in the History Plays,” Textual Practice 28 No. 3. (2014) 531-4; Jerry
Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. (St. Ives: Penguin Random
House, 2016); Masood, Hafiz Abid. “Islam in Early Modern English Literature: A Select
Bibliography.” Islamic Studies 44 (2005): 553- 629;
1220 – Jonathan Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives
on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts”, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies,
Spring/Summer 2002, Vol. 2, No. 1, A Special Issue on Representations of Islam and the East
(Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 35- 67; See Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 40ff
1221 – Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion, p. 61
1222 – Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion, p. 62 onward
1223 – See Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion, p. 62 onward; Nabil
Matar, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, New York,
Routledge, 2003, p. 5 onward
1224 – See details in Gerard Wiegers, “The Andalusi Heritage in the Maghrib” in Poetry, Politics and
Polemics: Cultural Transfer Between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa edited by Otto
Zwartjes, Atlanta, Rodopi, 1996, p. 121
1225 – Nabil Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727, New York, Columbia University Press,
2009, p. 9
1226 – Gerald Maclean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713, p. 20
1227 – See Discovery of 29 Sects, here in London all of which, except the first are most Divelish and
Damnable, being these which follow (1641), p. 4; Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 46
1228 – See Elisabeth A. Fraser, “Dressing Turks in the French Manner”, Mouradgea d Ohssons
Panorama of the Ottoman Empire, in ARS Orientalis volume 39 “Globalising Cultures: Art and
Mobility in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood,
Washington, D.C, Smithsonian Institution, 2010
1229 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 39
1230 – See Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of British Coffee Houses, New
Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005
1231 – See Ralph Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the
Medieval Near East (Seattle, WA, 1985); [Charles II], By the King. A Proclamation for the
Suppression of Coffee-Houses (1675); Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic
World 1558-1713, p. 221ff
1232 – Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World 1558-1713, p. 216;
Mirkovic, Alexander, “From Courtly Curiosity to Revolutionary Refreshment: Turkish Coffee and
English Politics in the Seventeenth century” (2005). Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/774; Lillywhite, Bryant, London Coffee Houses: A Reference
Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George
Allen, 1963; Pincus, Steve, “Coffee Politicians Does Create: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political
Culture” in Journal of Modern History, 6:4 (1995), 807-834; Robinson, Edward Forbes, The Early
History of Coffee Houses in England. London, 1893; Dana Sajdi, Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee:
Leisure And Lifestyle In The Eighteenth Century, London, New York, Tauris Academic Studies, 2007
1233 – Matar, Turk, Moor and Englishmen, p. 34; see more details in Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and
the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam
1234 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, p. 216; Brotton, The Sultan and the
Queen, p. 2ff
1235 – See Esmond S. de Beer, King Charles II’s Own Fashion: An Episode in Anglo-French
Relations 1666-1670, Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1938), pp. 105-115
1236 – MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, p. 20
1237 – MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, p. 199-200
1238 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 41; Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 103
1239 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 42
1240 – See for Levant Company Despina Vlami, Trading with the Ottomans: The Levant Company in
the Middle East, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2015; Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant: Trade
and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2010, p.
169 ff
1241 – Robert Brenner, “The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550-1650” in
Merchant Networks in Early Modern World, p. 361 ff especially p. 384 onward; Robert Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders,
1550-1653, part III
1242 – See Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p. 91, 120
1243 – G.V. Scammell, ‘European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of
Asia c.1500-1750’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1992), pp.641-61; Edward Thompson’s
The Life of Charles Lord Metcalfe (London, 1937), p.101
1244 – William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India, New
York, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 30
1245 – Dalrymple, White Mughals, p. 183
1246 – See Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India; William
Dalrymple ed., Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, London, Eland,
2012
1247 – Dalrymple, White Mughals, p. 34
1248 – Dalrymple, White Mughals, p. 54
1249 – Dalrymple, White Mughals, p. xxxix
1250 – Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 42
1251 – Ian Coller, Citizens and Muslims, p. 17
1252 – Ian Coller, Citizens and Muslims, p. 14
1253 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 11
1254 – See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 43
1255 – See details in Gabor Karman and Lovro Kuncevic eds., The European Tributary States of the
Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Leiden, Brills, 2013, p. 375 ff
1256 – Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, p. 41
1257 – Humberto Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England: Henry Stubbe, Radical
Islam, and the Rye House Plot, p. 1
1258 – Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, p. 30
1259 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England, p. 2
1260 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 139
1261 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England, p. 11
1262 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England, p. 11
1263 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England, p. 20
1264 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 2
1265 – See John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School, London, 1898; G F Russell Barker,
Memoir of Richard Busby, London, 1895; A. Bolton, and H. D. Henry, eds., The Wren Society Vol
XI. Oxford, 1934; William Bray ed., Diaries of John Evelyn, London, 1852; Edward Smith, Hooke
and Westminster, https://www.westminster.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Robert-Hooke-and-
Westminster.pdf
1266 – See Maurice Cranston, John Locke, A Biography, London, 1957
1267 – See Gerald James Toomer, Easterne Wisedome and Learning, Oxford, 1996
1268 – See details in G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in
Seventeenth-Century England, p. 237ff
1269 – See Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 239ff
1270 – See Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 240ff
1271 – Quoted in Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 433
1272 – Maurice Cranston, “The Politics of John Locke,” History Today (September 1952): p. 620
1273 – See Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 432ff
1274 – Leopold von Ranke, The History of England. 6 vols. (Oxford), 1875, v. 4, p. 166
1275 – See Tim Harris. “Cooper, Anthony Ashley,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
p. 199-200
1276 – See Tim Harris. “Cooper, Anthony Ashley,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
p. 202
1277 – See Tim Harris. “Cooper, Anthony Ashley,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
p. 202ff
1278 – Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 434
1279 – See Martin Mulsow, “Henry Stubbe, Robert Boyle and the Idolatry of Nature” in Sarah
Mortimer and John Robertson eds., The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600-
1750, p. 121ff
1280 – Matar, England and Religious Plurality, p. 183
1281 – See D. Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p.111; Aziz al Azmeh,
Islam and Modernities, New York, Verso, 1993, p. 127
1282 – See Istvan Gyorgy Toth, “Old and New Faith in Hungary, Turkish Hungary, and
Transylvania” in R. Po-chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion To The Reformation World, Oxford, Blackwell,
2004, p. 205-222
1283 – See Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam
1284 – Neil Hanson, The Confident Hope of a Miracle. The True History of the Spanish Armada,
New York, Knopf, (2003)
1285 – See Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant, Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman
Empire in the Eighteenth Century, London, I. B. Tauris, 2010
1286 – See Yosef Kaplan, The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and Netherlands in Modern History,
Leiden, Brill, 2008, p. 7ff; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations
and Realities of Religious Toleration, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University, 2006
1287 – Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence abroad: the Dutch imagination and the New World, 1570-
1670, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch seaborne
empire, 1600-1800, Abingdon, Taylor & Francis, 1977; U. Ryad, (2017), “Rather Turkish than
Papist”: Islam as a political force in the Dutch Low Countries in the Early Modern Period. Muslim
World, 107: 714-736. doi:10.1111/muwo.12218
1288 – Goffman The Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe, p. 196ff
1289 – https://archive.org/details/embassysirthoma00fostgoog
1290 – See Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary 1589-1689, Gainesville, University Press of Florida,
2005; Gerald McLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World 1558-1713, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2011, p. 79ff;
1291 – Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, (1998)
1292 – See Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 38
1293 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.121.
1294 – Charles K. Rowley, Bin Wu, Britannia 1066-1884: From Medieval Absolutism to the Birth of
Freedom under Constitutional Monarchy, Limited Suffrage, and the Rule of Law, New York,
Springer, 2014; John Spurr (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683,
Surrey, Ashgate, 2011
1295 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 2
1296 – Nabil Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of
Mahometenism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 1
1297 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 3; aslo see Tolan, Faces of
Muhammad, p. 142 ff
1298 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 133 ff
1299 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 142
1300 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.121-22
1301 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.122
1302 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.122
1303 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 102
1304 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 89
1305 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 89-90
1306 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 89-90
1307 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 128
1308 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 195
1309 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.69.
1310 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.70.
1311 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 57
1312 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 211
1313 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 211
1314 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.71.
1315 – Quoted In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 13. Western
Europe (1700-1800), edited by David Thomas and John A. Chesworth, 75–76. Leiden: Brill, 2019, p.
28
1316 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 5
1317 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 193
1318 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 186
1319 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 146
1320 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 9
1321 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 37
1322 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 8
1323 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 8
1324 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 9
1325 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 179
1326 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 180; see also Tolan, Faces of
Muhammad, 146 ff
1327 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.74.
1328 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 74
1329 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 74
1330 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.75.
1331 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 75
1332 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 76
1333 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 146
1334 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.76-77
1335 – “One area where Finch’s Turkish sojourn may have been decisively influential on Anne
Conway was in her awareness of Islam and in her developing an open mind towards Islamic culture.
One of the striking features of Anne Conway’s religious eirenicism is that it extended not just to
Judaism, but also to Islam. She no doubt shared the tolerant view of Henry More who condemns the
‘false Zeal’ of those who attack non-Christians ‘by vilifying and reproaching all other Religions, in
damning the very best and most conscientious Turks, Jews and Pagans to the Pit of Hell’. But Anne
Conway goes beyond More in her concern to emphasise the common ground between faiths, and to
remove Christian doctrines that non-Christians found offensive. In her Principles she singles out the
doctrine of the Trinity as ‘a stumbling block and offense to Jews, Turks, and other people’.” Sarah
Hutton, Anne Conway: A Women Philosopher, p. 107
1336 – See Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 77
1337 – See Hutton, Anne Conway, p. 22
1338 – Mordechai Fiengold, “Henry Stubbe” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, v. 53, p.
200
1339 – See Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, translated by
A. P. Coudert and Taylor Corse, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xff
1340 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 75
1341 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 40
1342 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 10
1343 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.71.
1344 – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical
and Civill, London, Andrew Crooke, 1651, p. 50-51
1345 – Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 225
1346 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 18ff
1347 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.11.
1348 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 144-145
1349 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.71.
1350 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.72-73
1351 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 49
1352 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 7
1353 – Quoted in Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman
Empire 1580-1720, p. 122
1354 – MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel, p. 122
1355 – MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel, p. 118
1356 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.72.
1357 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.72
1358 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.72
1359 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.72
1360 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p. 72
1361 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.105.
1362 – James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.2.
1363 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.65.
1364 – See Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration Publicist, Baltimore &
London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001; Laura Perille, A Mirror to Turke: “Turks” and
the Making of Early Modern England”, Ph. D. thesis submitted to the Department of History at
Brown University Providence, Rhode Island, May 2015, p. 269
1365 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 12
1366 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 2
1367 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 13
1368 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 14
1369 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 13
1370 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 31
1371 – See details in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Potter eds., Toleration in Enlightenment England,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 102 ff; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and
Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early
Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006
1372 – Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 46
1373 – See Marlies Galenkamp, Locke And Bayle On Religious Toleration,
www.erasmuslawreview.nl Erasmus Law Review, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2012); Perez Zagorin, How the
Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, p. 240 ff
1374 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 46
1375 – See for instance Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, p.
289 ff
1376 – See Ernst Mayr, (1990). “When Is Historiography Whiggish?”.Journal of the History of
Ideas. 51 (2): 301–309; J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian historians and the English past.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 and his “The Crisis of Reason: European Thought,
1848–1914”, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000
1377 – See Matar, Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam, p. 47
1378 – See Jack Goody, The Theft of History
1379 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.9.
1380 – Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 198
1381 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.139.
1382 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.140
1383 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.143
1384 – Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisi of Christian Culture 1696-
1722, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 3
1385 – See Hazarad, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 148 ff
1386 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 4
1387 – Hazarad, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 149
1388 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 13
1389 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 13
1390 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 14
1391 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 14
1392 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 17-18
1393 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 69
1394 – Huge Trevar-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010,
p. 71
1395 – See Nigel Smith, Best, Biddle and Anti-Trinitarian Controversy, p. 161
1396 – Nigel Smith, Best, Biddle and Anti-Trinitarian Controversy, p. 160
1397 – Trevar-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, p. 71
1398 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 69
1399 – Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, p. 148
1400 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 70
1401 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 71
1402 – See Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth Century England: A Subtle Art
of Division, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, p. 178 ff
1403 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 79
1404 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 69
1405 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 83
1406 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 84
1407 – Champion, Republican Learning, p. 85
1408 – See Robert Rees Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career of John Toland, New York, Peter Lang,
1991; Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland, his methods, manners and mind, McGill-Queen’s University
Press 1984; Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture,
1696-1722; Margaret C. Jacob, review of R.E. Sullivan’s John Toland and the Deist Controversy, in:
American Historical Review, Vol. 88, no.2, Apr. 1983.
1409 – See Jonathan C. Birch, Cracking the Canon: John Toland’s ‘Lost’ Gospels and the Challenge
to Religious Hegemony, in A.K.M. Adam and Samuel Tongue eds. Looking Through a Class Bible,
Postdisciplinary Biblical Interpretations from the Glasgow School, Leiden, Brill, 2014, p. 99 ff
1410 – See William Baird, History of New Testament Research, Volume One: From Deism to
Tübingen. Fortress Press. 1992; Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of
Historicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; David R. Law, The Historical-Critical
Method: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: T&T Clark, 2012; James A Herrick,.”Characteristics
of British Deism”. The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Scepticism, 1680–
1750, Studies in rhetoric/communication. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina
Press, 1997; Robert B. Stewart, “Introduction”. In Stewart, Robert B. (ed.). The Reliability of the
New Testament: Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue. Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Fortress Press, 2011; Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians
View the Man from Galilee. Westminster John Knox Press, 1998; Gerd Theissen, Annette Merz, The
Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, , 1996
1411 – Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 75
1412 – See Diego Lucci, The Law of Nature, Mosaic Judaism, and Primitive Christianity in John
Locke and the English Deists, Entangled Religions 8 (2019), er.ceres.rub.de, DOI:
10.13154/er.8.2019.8354
1413 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 150
1414 – Diego Lucci, The Law of Nature, p. 1
1415 – Diego Lucci, The Law of Nature, p. 3
1416 – Diego Lucci, The Law of Nature, p. 3
1417 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.126.
1418 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.154
1419 – Toland, Nazarenus, p.139.
1420 – Toland, Nazarenus, p.135.
1421 – Toland, Nazarenus, p.153.
1422 – Toland, Nazarenus, p.192.
1423 – Harrison, Religion and Religions, p. 166; Noel Malcolm stated that for “centuries, Western
writers had portrayed Islam as a religion to be explained in terms of human motivation, and their own
faith and Church as divine. Toland’s radical historicizing of both religions reversed that pattern in a
truly shocking way.” Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies, p. 326
1424 – Harrison, Religion and Religions, p. 166
1425 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.158
1426 – Harrison, Religion and Religions, p. 167
1427 – Hazard, The Crises of the European Mind, p. 150
1428 – J. C. Birch, Cracking the Canon, p. 85-86
1429 – Harrison, Religion and Religions, p. 144
1430 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammd, p. 153
1431 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.126.
1432 – Toland, Nazarenus, p.135.
1433 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.122.
1434 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.121.
1435 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.160
1436 – Jacob, Henry Stubbe, p.160
1437 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.127.
1438 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 154
1439 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.106; see more details in Alie, Remi, “‘Empire
without end’: John Finch, Orientalism, and Early Modern Empire
1440 – Matar, Islam in Britain, pp.21.
1441 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 142
1442 – Leonard Twells, Zachary Pearce, Thomas Newton, Samuel Burdy, (1816). The Lives of Dr.
Edward Pocock: the celebrated orientalist, Volume 1. London: Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, by
R. and R. Gilbert. Retrieved on August 30, 2018
1443 – P. M. Holt, Edward Pocoke (1604-91), the First Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford
http://oxoniensia.org/volumes/1991/holt.pdf
1444 – See E.S. de Beer, ed. The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 352-54; Simon Mills, “The English Chaplains at Aleppo: Exploration and
Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1760,” Bulletin of the Council for
British Research in the Levant 6, no. 1 (2011), p. 246.
1445 – See details in Zachary W. Schulz, The English In The Levant: Commerce, Diplomacy, And
The English Nation In The Ottoman Empire, 1672-1691, a dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of
Purdue University, 2018, p. 119. He stated: “Working in the 1670s, Chaplains Robert Huntington and
John Luke acted on orders from John Locke and Robert Boyle to collect further manuscripts,
artifacts, and assorted data to expand the sciences and humanities, both at the universities and for
these individual men’s libraries. For example, in 1670, Huntington sailed to Aleppo to take over
Pococke’s appointment. Before departing, Huntington received correspondence from both Robert
Boyle and John Locke encouraging him to continue Pococke’s practice of collecting manuscripts. In
his reply to Locke, he asserted that he was eager to fulfill the “commands” and “instructions” both
luminaries made of him to obtain various eastern tracts. Moreover, Pococke, Luke, Huntington, and
other chaplains went as far as to learn Arabic while in Aleppo. With these language skills, these men
sought to better understand the confessional differences that existed between Eastern Christians,
Muslims, and Protestants in England. Moreover, they provided them with the ability to further
comprehend the society they had immersed themselves in. All the while, these chaplains continually
reported their findings to John Locke and others.”
1446 – Frederick C. Giffin, John Locke and Religious Toleration, Journal of Church and State, Vol.
9, No. 3 (Autumn 1967), pp. 378-390, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23913736; John William Tate,
Liberty, Toleration and Equality: John Locke, Jonas Proast and the Letters Concerning Toleration,
New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 66
1447 – John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, p. 409; Hazard, The
Crises of the European Mind, p. 149
1448 – Marshall, John Locke, p.454
1449 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 409
1450 – John Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism” in M. A. Steward
(ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 118
1451 – Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, p. 121
1452 – Allison P. Coudert, “Orientalism in Early Modern Europe”, p. 726
1453 – See Marshall, John Locke, p. 415 onward
1454 – See John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1971)
1455 – Ann Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, The Influence of Travel Literature on the
Work of John Locke, Leiden, Brill, 2010, p. 3-4
1456 – See David B. Paxman, “ ‘Adam in a Strange Country’: Locke Language Theory and Travel
Literature,” Modern Philology, vol. 92, No. 4 (May, 1995): 460–481
1457 – See Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 10
1458 – See Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 19
1459 – See Ivo Kamps and Jyotsana G. Singh eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in
the Early Modern Peried, p. 1ff
1460 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 133
1461 – Albrechet Classen, “Encounters Between East and West”, in Albrecht Classen ed., East Meets
West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times:Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern
World, p. 207
1462 – https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28Hakluyt+OR+Hackluyt%29
1463 – https://archive.org/search.php?
query=%28%28subject%3A%22Purchas%2C%20Samuel%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Samuel%
20Purchas%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Purchas%2C%20Samuel%22%20OR%20creator%3A%
22Samuel%20Purchas%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Purchas%2C%20S%2E%22%20OR%20title
%3A%22Samuel%20Purchas%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Purchas%2C%20Samuel%22%2
0OR%20description%3A%22Samuel%20Purchas%22%29%20OR%20%28%221577-
1626%22%20AND%20Purchas%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29
1464 – See Ann Talbot, “Locke’s Travel Books,” Locke Studies, vol. 7 (2007): 113–136.
1465 – See The history of the Turkish empire from the year 1623 to the year 1677 containing the
reigns of the three last emperours, viz., Sultan Morat or Amurat IV, Sultan Ibrahim, and Sultan
Mahomet IV, his son, the XIII emperour now reigning / by Paul Rycaut, Esq. ...Rycaut, Paul, Sir,
1628-1700. London: Printed by J.M. for John Starkey ..., 1680.
1466 – See Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 119ff
1467 – See Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 108-109
1468 – See Edward Terry, A voyage to East-India. Wherein some things are taken notice of in our
passage thither, but many more in our abode there, within that rich and most spacious empire of the
Great Mogol (London: T. W. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655)
1469 – Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 119ff; Jerry Bentley, “Europeanisation of the
World or Globalisation of Europe?” Religions 2012, 3, 441–454; doi:10.3390/rel3020441, p. 449ff;
“But to returne againe to those Mahometan Priests, who out of zeale doe so often proclaim their
Mahomet. Tom Coryat upon a time having heard their Moolaas often (as before) so to cry got him
upon an high place directly opposite to one of those Priests, and contradicted him thus. La alla illa
alla, Hasaret Eesa Ben alla, that is, no God, but one God, and the Lord Christ the Son of God, and
further added that Mahomet was an Impostor: and all this he spake in their owne language as loud as
possibly he could, in the eares of many Mahometans that heard.” (Thomas Coryat, Mr Thomas
Coriat to his friends in England sendeth greeting from Agra the capitall city of the dominion of the
great Mogoll in the Easterne India, the last of October, 1616 (London: I. Beale, 1618), p. 271-72
1470 – “That ... the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a
rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and
partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the
Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he
had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called
miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses
was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy
Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the
stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity
as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.” Howell, T. B., ed.
(1816). “Proceedings against Thomas Aikenhead for Blasphemy”. A Complete Collection of State
Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest
Period to 1783, with Notes and Other Illustrations. Vol. 13. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown
– via Google Books
1471 – See Nabil Matar, John Locke and the Turbaned Nations, Journal of Islamic Studio 2:1 (1991)
pp. 67-77
1472 – See Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”, p. 108-109
1473 – See Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, p. 119ff
1474 – Christine Woodhead, ‘The Present Terrour of the World’? Contemporary Views of the
Ottoman Empire c1600, History, vol. 72, issue 234, 1987, p. 20-37, p. 23
1475 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 134
1476 – See B. J. Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early
Modern Europe, p. 240 ff; Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West,
Princeton, p. 93ff
1477 – See Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings,
Indiana, Liberty Fund, 2010, p. 21ff
1478 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 147
1479 – John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious
Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’
Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 p. 393
1480 – See Susan J. Ritchie, Children of the Same God: The Historical Relationship Between
Unitarianism, Judaism, and Islam, Boston, Skinner House Books, 2014;
http://www.minnslectures.org/archive/Ritchie/RitchieLecture1.pdf
1481 – See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558-1685, p. 1ff
1482 – Matthew Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English
Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013
1483 – Garcia, A Hungarian Revolution, p. 1; See Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England
Drama and Culture 1640-1685, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2007; Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk:
English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003
1484 – Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, p. 11-12
1485 – J. V. Tolan, “European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life”, in Jonathon E. Brockopp (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, p. 226-250
1486 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 135
1487 – See Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 18ff; 82ff; 112ff
1488 – See Alie, Remi, “’Empire without end’: John Finch, Orientalism, and Early Modern Empire,
1674-1681” (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4932.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4932
1489 – Jane D. McAuliffe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Quran, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2006
1490 – See Archibald H. Christie, The Development of Ornament from Arabic Script, London, 1922;
Traditional Methods of Pattern Designing; An Introduction to the Study of the Decorative Art,
Amazon, CHIZINE PUBN, 2018; Pattern Design, New York, Dover Publications, 2011
1491 – See Deborah Howard, Scottish Architecture: From the Reformation to the Restoration, 1560-
1660 (Architectural History of Scotland), Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995; Venice & the
East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500, New Haven,Yale
University Press, 2000
1492 – Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West,
London, Reaktion Books, 2012
1493 – Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2001
1494 – Stefano Carboni and David Whitehouse, Glass of the Sultans, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 2001; Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2007
1495 – G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 224ff; “Hayy Ibn- Yaqzān raised the possibility of learning without any guidance and
teachers, and then Locke came along and propagated it more widely… The autodidact became a role
model for new educational programs with universal claims… a process of exchange and borrowing
from sources both near and far combined to construct the edifices of experimentalism and
empiricism. The economic network of the Levant Company … allowed for the circulation of cultural
and scientific works that, as oracles of the past, played roles in reinforcing the experimentalist
argument still being negotiated, before the canon of empiricism solidified in the form of Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding … This particular medieval work appealed to English
experimentalists because it carried within it traces of earlier intellectual and cultural ideas about
empiricism, which ranged from the question of self- reliance and self- directed learning to
spontaneous generation. The affair of the publication of Philosophus autodidactus also tapped into an
already extant history of a utopian literary genre with sources in medieval times” Ben-Zaken,
Reading Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, p. 124
1496 – See Michael Nahas, A Translation of Hayy B. Yaqzān by the Elder Edward Pococke (1604-
1691), Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 16 (1985), pp. 88-90, p. 88
1497 – Jerry H. Bentley, The Oxford Handbook of World History, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2012; “Europeanisation of the World or Globalisation of Europe?”; Kenneth R. Curtis and Jerry H.
Bentley (eds.), Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past, Oxford, Willy Blackwell,
2014
1498 – See Jack Goody, The Theft of History
1499 – Janet Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250-1350
1500 – Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South, Oxford, Pambazuka Press, 2011;
Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy, A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism,
New York, MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, 2009
1501 – See Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation
1502 – John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and
Architecture 1500-1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991
1503 – Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: from the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2003
1504 – Christopher Wren, the Junior, ‘Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the family of the Wrens’, viz. of
Mathew Bishop, printed for T. Osborn; and R. Dodsley, London, 1750; Miles Danby, ‘Moorish style’,
London. Phaidon, (1995), James Elmes,`Christopher Wren’, London, Chapman & Hall.1st edition,
1852; F. Grose, (ed.) `Essays on Gothic architecture by the Rev. T. Warton et al., 3rd ed., London, J.
Taylor, at the Architectural Library, 1808
1505 – “Christopher Wren and the Muslim Origin of Gothic Architecture”
http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/christopher-wren-and-muslim-origin-gothic-architecture;
Tonia Raquejo, The ‘Arab Cathedrals’: Moorish Architecture as Seen by British Travellers, The
Burlington Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 1001 (Aug., 1986), pp. 555-563
1506 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 135
1507 – See Michael E. Marmura, “Al-Ghazali” in the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy
edited by Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005; Hamid
Naseem Rafiabadi, Emerging From Darkness: Ghazzali’s Impact on the Western Philosophers, New
Delhi, Sarup & Sons, 2002; Thomas Arnold and Alfred Guillaume eds., The Legacy of Islam, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1931; John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative
Perspective, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011
1508 – See H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1976; Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Lois L. al-Faruqi, The Cultural Atlas of Islam, New York,
MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986; Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, translated
by Michael E. Marmura, Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Press, 2002; Frank Griffel, Al-
Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; Andrew Rippin, Muslims:
Their Religious Beliefs & Practices (New York: Routledge, 1990
1509 – See Tolan, “European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life”; Garcia, Islam and English
Enlightenment, p. 48ff
1510 – John Locke, The Works of John Locke, London, William Taylor, MDCCXXII, v. III, p. 452
1511 – Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity: With A Discourse of Miracles and part of A Third
Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by I. T. Ramsey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1958, p.
59; Walker further observed that “Locke’s positive attitude to Islam raises an interesting idea. Since
the philosopher’s ideas played a large part in the formulation of the American Constitution, could it
be argued that there is an Islamic dimension to that significant document? Perhaps a case can be
made for the notion that the United States of America is, at heart, if not an Islamic state, a state with
an Islamic dimension to it.” Christopher Walker, Islam and the West: The Dissonant Harmony of
Civilizations, Stroud, Gloucestershire, History Press, 2013, chapter 7, p. 199
1512 – See John Locke, A letter concerning toleration humbly submitted (London: for Awnsham
Churchill, 1689, p. 57; Christopher Walker explained that to Locke, the “Islamic monotheism grew
from the Christian gospel; the teaching of both is of the one and the same God. Locke, who never
referred to the Trinity in any of his writings, was saying here that Islam is in effect a cousin to our
own belief system and culture, and its view of the divine is similar to that of Christianity. There need
be no opposition. We all believe approximately the same thing. We are all on the same side.”
Christipher Walker, Islam and the West: The Dissonant Harmony of Civilizations, Stroud,
Gloucestershire, History Press, 2013, chapter 7, p. 199
1513 – Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 81
1514 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, p. 261
1515 – Arthur Bury, Naked Gospel, 1690, part 1, preface reprinted by Book on Demand, 2015
1516 – See Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p. 108
1517 – See Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 51ff
1518 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 406
1519 – See Marshall, John Locke, p.425ff
1520 – Victor Nuovo, Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment: Interpretations of Locke, New
York, Springer, 2011, P. 25
1521 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 199
1522 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 200
1523 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 200
1524 – Marshall, Socinianism and Unitarianism in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 165
1525 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 210
1526 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 205
1527 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 205
1528 – See details in Kim Ian Parker, Newton, Locke and the Trinity: Sir Isaac’s comments on
Locke’s: A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans, Scottish Journal of
Theology / Volume 62 / Issue 01 / February 2009, pp 40 – 52, p. 49
1529 – Parker, Newton, Locke and the Trinity, p. 49
1530 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 207
1531 – Parker,Newton, Locke and the Trinity, p. 50
1532 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 194
1533 – Marshall, Socinianism and Unitarianism in in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 176
1534 – Marshall, Socinianism and Unitarianism in in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 176
1535 – Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 211
1536 – Marshall, Socinianism and Unitarianism in in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 178
1537 – Quran, 7:172; 4:171
1538 – “O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion, and do not say about God
except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, is the Messenger of God, and His Word that He
conveyed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not say,
“Three.” Refrain—it is better for you. God is only one God. Glory be to Him—that He should have a
son. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and the earth, and God is a sufficient Protector.”
(Quran 4:171)
1539 – See Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694-1704” in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 188
1540 – Quran 7: 172-173
1541 – Quran 17: 85
1542 – Quran 83:7-18
1543 – See Abu Abdullah al Hakim, al Mustadrak a’la al Sahihayn, Beirut, al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah,
1990, Hadith number 4175
1544 – See Shah, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Quran, p. 551 ff
1545 – Shah, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Quran, p. 62
1546 – George Moore, Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol.1, p.247.
1547 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 426
1548 – Diego Lucci, “Locke and the Trinity,” Studi Lockiani. Ricerche sull’età moderna, 1 (2020),
pp. 9-36, p. 11
1549 – Lucci, “Locke and the Trinity,” p. 16-17
1550 – Lucci, “Locke and the Trinity,” p. 31
1551 – Marshall, Socinianism and Unitarianism in Stewart ed., English Philosophy, p. 175
1552 – Locke, Reasonableness, chap., 4, 24.
1553 – Edwards, The Socinian Creed: or, A Brief Account Of the Professed Tenents and Doctrines of
the Foreign and English Socinians. London, 1697, p. 127
1554 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 170
1555 – Locke, Vindication of The Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. from Mr. Edwards’s
Reflections, 1695. In The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures edited by
Victor Nuovo. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1997, p. 166
1556 – David Wooten, “John Locke: Socinian or natural law theorist?” in Religion, Secularisation
and Political Thought, Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill, edited by James E. Crimmins, New York,
Routledge, 2013, p. 44
1557 – Wootton, John Locke: Socinian of natural law theorist?, p. 48
1558 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 111
1559 – Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1996, p. 73
1560 – Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz on Locke and Socinianism, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39,
No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1978), pp. 233-250, Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708777, p. 234
1561 – Jolley, Leibniz on Locke and Socinianism, p. 240
1562 – Jolley, Leibniz on Locke and Socinianism, 233
1563 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.112
1564 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 111-112
1565 – See Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 112
1566 – See Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 113
1567 – See Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 141 ff
1568 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 143
1569 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 143
1570 – Marshall, John Locke, p.350.
1571 – See Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 111
1572 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 76
1573 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 390.
1574 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 413.
1575 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 139
1576 – Arthur Wainwright, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1
and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, Introduction, pp.37–39.
1577 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, v. II, p. 517
1578 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, v. II, p. 563
1579 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, v. II, p. 563
1580 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, v. II, p. 563
1581 – Locke, The Works of John Locke, v. II, p. 582
1582 – Marshall, John Locke, p. xv
1583 – Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism”, p. 178
1584 – Richard A. Norris, Jr., ed. and trans., The Christological Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1980), pp.17–18.
1585 – Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, New York, Sheed & Ward, n.d., p.33.
1586 – Arthur C. McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought, New York, Scribner’s Sons, 1949, vol.1,
p.248.
1587 – William Bright, The Age of Fathers, New York, AMS Press, 1970, vol.1, p.57.
1588 – See details in Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions, p. 327 ff
1589 – Quoted in Marshall, John Locke, p. 424
1590 – Diego Lucci stated that “The anti-Trinitarian arguments in “Adversaria Theologica” endorse
the theory that Jesus had only a human nature – a theory consistent with Socinian Christology.”
Lucci, “Locke and the Trinity,” p. 16
1591 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 75; John Marshall noted that Locke paraphrased the famous
Trinitarian Pauline text “without avowing a divine nature in Christ… One of Locke’s notes expanded
that the spirit of holiness meant “that more spiritual part he was in him, which by divine extraction he
had immediately from God”.” This was “unequivocally an antitrinitarian view.” Diego Lucci stated
that “The anti-Trinitarian arguments in “Adversaria Theologica” endorse the theory that Jesus had
only a human nature – a theory consistent with Socinian Christology.” See Marshall, John Locke, p.
427 and Lucci, “Locke and the Trinity,” p. 16
1592 – Linda Edwards, A Brief Guide to Beliefs: Ideas, Theologies, Mysteries, and Movements,
Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p.327.
1593 – “Redeemer and Saviour of the human race, and at the same time entered into an eternally
indissoluble union with God, because his love can never cease. Now he has obtained from God, as
the reward of his love, the name which is above every name; God has committed to him the
Judgment, and invested him with divine dignity, so that now we can call him “God” [born] of the
virgin.” See Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, p. 322
1594 – See Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, p. 320 ff
1595 – See J.G.A Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, v.1, p.8; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration
and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in
Early Modern and ‘‘Early Enlightenment’’ Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.
234–35.
1596 – See F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation, Nashville, Randall
House, 2011; Robert Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation, Nashville,
Randall House, 2002
1597 – See Marshall, John Locke, p. 333 onward
1598 – See Edward Pococke and P. M. Holt, The Study of Arabic Historians in Seventeenth Century
England: The Background and the Work of Edward Pococke, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London, Vol. 19,No. 3 (1957), pp. 444-455
1599 – Pugh, Britain and Islam, p. 55
1600 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.112.
1601 – John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, University Park, Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1999, p. 27
1602 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 257
1603 – Wootton, John Locke: Socinian or natural law theorist?, p. 44
1604 – Socinianism Unmask’d. A Discourse shewing the Unreasonableness of a Tate Writer’s
Opinion Concerning the Necessity of only One Article of Christian Faith; A n d of his other
Assertions in his late book, Entitled, The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the
Scriptures, and in his Vindication of it. London, 1696. P. 4
1605 – Locke, Second Vindication of The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1697. In The
Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures edited by Victor Nuovo, p. 267.
1606 – See Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, p. 191ff
1607 – “Laud, compressing much of the religious unity case, maintained: ‘it is impossible in any
Christian commonwealth that the church should melt, and the State stand firm. For there can be no
firmness without law; and no laws can be binding, if there be no conscience to obey them: penalty
alone could never, never, do it. And no school can teach conscience, but the church of Christ’.
Hooker regarded the desire to achieve unity in one true religion as an innate idea: ‘the generality of
which persuasion argueth that God hath implanted it by nature, to the end it might be a spur to our
industry in searching and maintaining that religion, from which as to swerve in the least points is
error, so the capital enemies thereof God hateth as his deadly foes, and without repentance, children
of endless perdition’.” Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionar England, p. 191-192
1608 – Locke, Reasonableness, chap. 14, p. 139
1609 – See John Dunn, “Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke”, The Historical Journal,
1967, 10(2): 153–182. Reprinted in his Political Obligation in its Historical Context: Essays in
Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 29–52; Richard Ashcraft, Richard,
Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1986
1610 – See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1988
1611 – See Mark Goldie, “John Locke and Anglican Royalism”, Political Studies, 1983, 31(1): 61–
85. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1983.tb01335.x
1612 – See Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 436ff
1613 – Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 431
1614 – Qouted in Laura Perille “A Mirror to Turke”: “Turks” and the Making of Early Modern
England”, Ph. D. thesis submitted to the Department of History at Brown University Providence,
Rhode Island, May 2015, p. 292
1615 – See A Dialogue Between the Pope and a Phanatick Concerning Affairs in England, London,
Printed for H. Jones, 1681, 10ff; See Laura Perille A Mirror to Turke, p. 292-299
1616 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 160
1617 – See Hoff Shannon, “Locke and the Nature of Political Authority”, The Review of Politics,
2015, 77(1): 1–22. doi:10.1017/S0034670514000813
1618 – See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 160 ff
1619 – Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 160
1620 – Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe: In the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and
Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, v.2, p.183.
1621 – John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 540
1622 – Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 225
1623 – See Marshall, John Locke, p. xviii
1624 – John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious
Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment”
Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 393.
1625 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration translated by Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 3
1626 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 8
1627 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 8
1628 – John Locke, The Works of John Locke, London, (C. and J. Rivington, 1824), v.5, p.41.Top of
Form Bottom of Form
1629 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 5
1630 – Locke, Works, p.123.
1631 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 11
1632 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 18
1633 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration, p. 45
1634 – Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 2004, p.54.
1635 – John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration
(Digireads.com Publishing, 2005), p.155.
1636 – Locke, Two Treatises, p.157
1637 – Locke, Two Treatises, Ibid.
1638 – Locke on Toleration, p. xv
1639 – Locke, Two Treatises, p.168.
1640 – Locke, Two Treatises, p.156.
1641 – See details https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-a-letter-concerning-toleration-and-other-
writings
1642 – “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256).
1643 – See Karen M. Bird, The Concession of Toleration, Muslims and the British Enlightenment,
Limina, Volume 22.2, 2017
1644 – Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration translated by Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 14
1645 – Vernon (ed.), .), Locke on Toleration, p. 154-155
1646 – See Marshall, John Locke, p. 361 ff; Mark Goldie, “John Locke, Jonas Proast and Religious
Toleration 1688-1692” in The Church of England c. 1688-c, 1833, p. 143ff
1647 – See details in Discourse In Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity: With An Answer to the
Date Socinian Objections Against it from Scripture, Antiquity and Reason. And A Preface concerning
the different Explications of the Trinity, and the Tendency of the present Socinian Controversie.
London,1697.
1648 – Wotton, John Locke: Socinian or natural law theorist?, p. 58. Perez Zagorin also observed
that Locke had “an obsessive concern with secrecy. Till the end of his life he took extreme pains to
conceal his authorship of his Two Treatises of Government and certain other writings. As a rationalist
and independent thinker in religion he rejected trinitarianism like his friend Newton, and was
sympathetic to Socinian arguments against the divine sonship of Christ. To escape accusations of
Socinianism, however, which its opponents identified with infidelity and unbelief, he denied any
knowledge of Socinian books, a claim that was certainly untrue. In politics too he was sometimes less
than honest. As a supporter of the Whig cause in the reigns of Charles II and James II, an intimate of
the proscribed Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury, and a political exile and conspirator before the
revolution of 1688, he prevaricated on various occasions concerning his opinions and conduct.
Nothing but a keen and justifiable fear of persecution could have induced Locke, who held strong
moral principles, to dissemble any of his convictions.” Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 328
1649 – See Marshall, John Locke, p. 342ff; also see Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”,
and Unitarianism” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke edited by Michael Alexander Stewart,
Oxford, Clarendon, 2000, p. 111ff . To Noel Malcolm, Socinianism, Deism, or Quakerism are “the
modern equivalent of Islam.” The famous German polymath and philosopher G. W. Leibniz and the
famous French Orientalist M. V. de La Croze maintained in the seventeenth century that Socinians
and Deists were Muslims. See Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies, p. 330 and see Maria Rosa
Antognazza, Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth
Century, translated by Gerald Parks, London, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 139; Daniel J. Cook,
Leibniz and “Orientalism”, Studia Leibnitiana, Bd. 40, H. 2 (2008), pp. 168-190, p. 185; Daniel J.
Cook: “Leibniz’s Use and Abuse of Judaism and Islam”, in: Leibniz and Adam. International
Colloquium [...] held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, from December 29, 1991 to January 2, 1992, ed. by
Marcelo Dascal and Elhanan Yakira, Tel Aviv 1993, pp. 283-297.
1650 – See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 121ff
1651 – Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 121
1652 – See Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, New York, Columbia
University Press, 2005, v. 1, p. 144 ff
1653 – Martin Mulsow, Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship, Al-Qantara,
31(2), July-December 2010, p.549.
1654 – Mulsow, Socinianism, pp.559–560.
1655 – Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 131
1656 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.106.
1657 – Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558-1685, p.48. Socinianism and Unitarianism were so closely
associated with Islam that all those “who ventured into anti-Trinitarian theologies were viewed as
crypto-Muslims: as a result, orthodox theologians started seeing Muslims wherever they saw
Unitarians. A high number of Christians and Britons was reported in English writings to have
converted to Islam.” Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 48
1658 – Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 48
1659 – David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Century Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984, p.270.
1660 – Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions, p.270–271.
1661 – J. Darby, Four Treatises concerning the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Mahometans:
An Abridgment of the Mahometan Religion: A Defence of the Mahometans, A Treatise of Bobovious,
Reflections on Mahometansm and Socinianism (London: B. Lintott, and E. Sanger, 1712), p.188.
1662 – Pailin, Attitudes, p.271.
1663 – Darby, Four Treatises concerning the doctrine, p. 188
1664 – Darby, Four Treatises, pp.189–190.
1665 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 4
1666 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 5
1667 – See Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, Out of the Flames, New York, Broadway Books, 2002.
1668 – Michael Allen Gillespie, The Anti-Trinitarian Origins Of Liberalism, p. 2
https://www.academia.edu/4175803/The_Anti_Trinitarian_Origins_of_Lliberalism?auto=download
1669 – Hugh Trevar-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and
Social Change, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2001, p. 190
1670 – Trevar-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 191
1671 – Marian Hillar, The Case of Michael Servetus (1511-1553) - The Turning Point in the Struggle
for Freedom of Conscience, Lewiston, N.Y; Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997; Hillar,
”From the Polish Socinians to the American Constitution,” A Journal from the Radical Reformation.
A Testimony to Biblical Unitarianism, 1994, no. 3, pp. 44-51. Marian Hillar, “The legacy of Servetus:
Humanism and the beginning of change in the social paradigm: From Servetus to Thomas Jefferson,”
in Miguel Servet. Luz entre tinieblas, ed. Sergio Baches Opi, Huesca, Instituto de Estudios
Sijenenses, 2006, pp. 109-124. Matteo Gribaldi, Declaratio. Michael Servetus’ss Revelation of Jesus
Christ the Son of God, translated by Peter Zerner, edited by Peter Hughes and Peter Zerner,
Providence, RI: Blackstone Editions and Michael Servetus Institute, 2010. Marian Hillar, “Laelius
and Faustus Socinus Founders of Socinianism: Their Lives and Theology.” Part 1. Journal from the
Radical Reformation. Testimony to Biblical Unitarianism, Vol. 10, No. 2. Winter 2002. pp. 18-38.
Marian Hillar, “Laelius and Faustus Socinus Founders of Socinianism: Their Lives and Theology.”
Part 2. Journal from the Radical Reformation. Testimony to Biblical Unitarianism, Vol. 10, No. 3.
Spring 2002. pp. 11-24
1672 – Peter Hughes, “In the Footsteps of Servetus: Biandrata, David, and the Quran”, ’ Journal of
Unitarian Universalist History, Cambridge (Mass.), 31 (2006-2007), p. 57-63
1673 – Ritchie, Children of the Same God, p. 27ff
1674 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 113
1675 – P. Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran,’ Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, Cambridge
(Mass.), 30 (2005), pp.55–70.
1676 – Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran’, p. 55
1677 – Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran’, p. 58
1678 – Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran’, p. 61; see also Michael Servetus, The Two Treatises of
Servetus on the Trinity: On the Errors of the Trinity, 7 books, A.D. 1531; Dialogues on the Trinity, 2
books; On the Righteousness of Christ’s Kingdom, 4 chapters, A.D. 1532, trans. Earl Morse Wilbur,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932; Michael Servetus, Christianismi restitutio, Vienne
en Dauphine, Balthazar Arnollett, 1553
1679 – Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran’, p. 66
1680 – Hughes, ‘Servetus and the Quran’, p. 67
1681 – Martin A. Larson, Milton and Servetus: A Study in the Sources of Milton’s Theology, PMLA,
Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1926), pp. 891-934 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/457453,
1682 – Quoted in Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 114
1683 – Quoted in Martin A. Larson, Milton and Servetus: A Study in the Sources of Milton’s
Theology, PMLA, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1926), pp. 891-934 Published by: Modern Language
Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/457453,
1684 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 114
1685 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 115
1686 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 115
1687 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 115
1688 – See Marshall, John Locke, pp. 344–346.
1689 – See Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology,
Louisville, Kentucky University Press, 1998, pp.10–18.
1690 – Mulsow, Socinianism, p.553.
1691 – See Klaus Scholder, The Birth of Modem Critical Theology: Origins and Problems of Biblical
Criticism at the Seventeenth Century. John Bowden, tr. Philadelphia, Trinity Press, 1985, p. 26-46.
1692 – Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p.121.
1693 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 116
1694 – See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 117
1695 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, 119
1696 – Herbert McLachlan, The Religious Views of Milton, Locke and Newton Manchester,
University of Manchester Press, 1941; David Masson, The Life of John Milton. Gloucester, Mass:
Peter Smith, 1965
1697 – See details in Abraham Dylan Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, Doctoral dissertation submitted
to Princeton University department of English, 2000, chapter 4, p. 153 ff; Michael Bauman, Milton’s
Arianism. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1986; John Toland, The Life of John Milton,
London, 1698. Reprinted in Early Lives of Milton, Helen Darbishire, ed., London, Constable, 1932
1698 – Stephen B. Dobronski and John P. Rumrich, “Heretical Milton” in Stephen B. Dobranski and
John P. Rumrich eds., Milton and Heresy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1
1699 – Nigel, Best, Biddle and Anti-Trinitarian Controversy, p. 163
1700 – Denis Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker (1925; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1975), p. 117–8,
176–7, 257–8, 274; see also George N. Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton, New York:
King’s Crown Press, 1949
1701 – Stephen B. Dobronski and John P. Rumrich, “Heretical Milton”, p. 5

1702 – See Stanley Fish, Surprised By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd edition. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997
1703 – See details in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner Eds., Milton and
Republicanism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth
Sauer, Milton and Toleration, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007; also Stephen B. Dobranski and
John P. Rumrich eds., Milton and Heresy
1704 – Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 1; for monotheism and it implications see E.g. James Henry
Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, NY: Scribner, 1933; Richard Niebhur, Radical Monotheism and
Western Culture, New York, Harper and Row, 1960
1705 – See Michael E. Bauman, Milton’s Arianism: “Following The Way Which Is Called Heresy”,
Doctoral Dissertation Submitted To The Department Of Theology At Fordham University New York,
1983 especially p. 48 onward
1706 – John P. Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters” in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P.
Rumrich eds., Milton and Heresy, p. 76
1707 – See John Rogers, “Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ” in Loewenstein and
Marshall eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics, p. 203 ff
1708 – See Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 81; Russell Hillier, M. Milton’s
Messiah: The Son of God in the Works of John Milton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011
1709 – See Maurice Kelley, Milton and the Trinity, Huntington Library Quarterly , Aug., 1970, Vol.
33, No. 4, pp. 315- 320, p. 318
1710 – Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 80
1711 – Quoted in Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 82
1712 – Michael Bauman, Miltons Ariansm. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1986
1713 – See details in Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 82ff
1714 – See Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 83ff
1715 – Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 84
1716 – Quoted in Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 154
1717 – Quoted in Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 154
1718 – Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1941, p. 86; Michael
Bauman, Milton’s Arianism, p. 262-67
1719 – Kelley, Milton and the Trinity, p. 319-20
1720 – Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: why it matters”, p. 85
1721 – John Rogers, Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ, p. 213
1722 – See Nigel Smith, Best, Biddle and Anti-Trinitarian Controversy, p. 176ff

1723 – Paul Best, Mysteries Discovered, 4th ed. London: 1647,5; see Stoll, Milton and Monotheism,
p. 35
1724 – See James H. Sims, “paradise Lost: Arian Document or Christian Poem?” Etudes Anglaises
20 (1967):337-349; Sister / Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., “Orthodoxy in Paradise Lost,” Laval Theologique
et Philosophique 8 (1952):243-284; and Joseph W. Morris, John Milton: a Vindication Specially
From the Charge of Arianism (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1862; reprint ed., Folcroft,
Pennsylvania, Folcroft Library Editions, 1970
1725 – Kelley, Milton and the Trinity, p. 318
1726 – Quoted in Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 6
1727 – Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 7; also Abraham Stoll, Milton and Monotheism. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2009.
1728 – See Milton and the Scriptural Tradition, ed. James H . Sims and Leland Ryken, Columbia,
University of Missouri Press, 1984
1729 – Quoted in Martin A. Larson, Milton and Servetus: A Study in the Sources of Milton’s
Theology, PMLA, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1926), pp. 891-934 Published by: Modern Language
Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/457453,
1730 – See David Loewenstein Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries:
Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2004
1731 – Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p. 211
1732 – J. B. Pittion, Milton, La Place and Socinianism, p. 145 Downloaded from
http://res.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on July 19, 2015
1733 – Martin A. Larson, Milton and Servetus: A Study in the Sources of Milton’s Theology, PMLA,
Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1926), pp. 891-934 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/457453,
1734 – Martin A. Larson, Milton and Servetus: A Study in the Sources of Milton’s Theology, PMLA,
Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec., 1926), pp. 891-934 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/457453,
1735 – Dennis Danielson, “The Fall and Milton’s Theodicy” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton
edited by Dennis Danielson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, P. 150
1736 – Danielson, Companion to Milton, p. 150
1737 – Danielson, Companion to Milton, p. 152; see details in William Poole, Milton and the Idea of
Fall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005
1738 – Stoll, Milton and Monotheism, p.157
1739 – See McLachlan, The Religious Views of Milton, Locke and Newton
1740 – See Jeffrey Einboden, A Qur’a¯nic Milton: From Paradise to al-Firdaws, Milton Quarterly,
Vol. 43, No. 3, 2009, p. 183; Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The
Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
1741 – See Einboden, A Qur’a¯nic Milton, p. 184; [Paradise Lost: The Epic of the English Poet John
Milton]. Trans. Muhammad ‘Ina¯nı¯. Cairo: Al-Hay’eh al-Masriyyeh al’ammeh lil-Kita¯b, 1982;
Awn, Peter J. Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology, Leiden, Brill, 1983;
Dahiyat, Eid Abdallah. “Aspects of John Milton in Arabic.” Milton Quarterly 18 (1984): 5-13 also
John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture, Amman, Shukayr and Akasheh, 1987
1742 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation: John Milton and the Muslim Jesus, English
Studies, 2015, 96:1, 44-64, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2014.964563, p. 52
1743 – See Andrew Lake, The First Protestants in the Arab World: The contribution to Christian
Mission of the English Aleppo Chaplains 1597-1782
1744 – Gerald MacLean, Milton, Islam and the Ottomans” in Milton and Toleration, p. 291
1745 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 52-53
1746 – See David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 53
1747 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 54-55
1748 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 55
1749 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 55
1750 – See Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon,
Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2006., p. 104
1751 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 57
1752 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 59-60
1753 – See Tarif Khalidi, ed. and trans., The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; Neal Robinson, “Jesus in the Quran, the Historical
Jesus, and the Myth of God Incarnate.” In Wilderness: Essays in Honour of Frances Young, edited by
R. S. Sugirtharajah, London, Continuum, 2005
1754 – David Currell, Meditations on Mediation, p. 62
1755 – Quoted in Eid Abdallah Dahiyat, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture, p. 68
1756 – Gerald MacLean, Milton, Islam and the Ottomans” in Milton and Toleration, p. 298
1757 – Stephen D. Snobelen, Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite, British journal
for the history of science (BJHS), 1999, 32, 381±419, p. 402; Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 4
1758 – See Early Voyages and Travels in Levant, p. 271
1759 – See Sir Isaac Newton, Thirteen Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to J. Covel, D.D. [With a
facsimile. Edited by D. Turner.]
https://books.google.com/books/about/Thirteen_Letters_from_Sir_Isaac_Newton_t.html?
id=Y5lcAAAAcAAJ
1760 – See “Newton: The Making of a Politician”
1761 – See Rob Iliffe, “The Religion of Isaac Newton” in Cambridge Companion to Newton edited
by Rob Iliffe and George E. Smith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 485ff
1762 – Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 6
1763 – Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 4
1764 – See Snobelen, Isaac Newton; heretic, p. 388
1765 – See Rob Iliffe, “Newton, God, and the Mathematics of the Two Books.” In Mathematicians
and Their Gods. Edited by S. Lawrence and M. McCartney, 121–55. Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2015
1766 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton: Heretic, p. 409
1767 – See Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1974, p.
8-10
1768 – S. Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: The Life of Isaac Newton، Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1994, p. 310
1769 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 79
1770 – See Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 311 onward
1771 – Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 11
1772 – Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 11
1773 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 312
1774 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 92
1775 – See details about Newton’s heretical views in James Gleick, Isaac Newton, New York,
Pantheon Books, 2003, chapter 10
1776 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 31
1777 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 92
1778 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 314
1779 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 315
1780 – See details in Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 138ff
1781 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 354
1782 – Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 141
1783 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 315
1784 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 79
1785 – See Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, p. 309 ff
1786 – Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, p. 309
1787 – Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, p. 309
1788 – Richard A. Norris, Jr., ed. and trans., The Christological Controversy, Philadelphia, Fortress
Press, 1980, p.7.
1789 – Quoted from Arthur C. McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought, New York, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1960, vol.1, p.113.
1790 – Alois Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, John Bowden, trans., Atlanta, John Knox
Press, 1975, vol.1, p.110.
1791 – John N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1958, pp.100–
01.
1792 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 80
1793 – Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography 1642-1727, New York, Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1934, p. 642-43
1794 – More, Newton, p. 643
1795 – More, Newton, p. 644
1796 – More, Newton, p. 644
1797 – Quoted from Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 88
1798 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 81
1799 – Quoted from Thomas C. Pfizenmaier, Was Isaac Newton an Arian?, Journal of the History of
Ideas, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 57-80, University of Pennsylvania Press, URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653988; p. 71; Newton, Yahuda MS 15.7, fol. 154r;
1800 – Pfizenmaier, Was Isaac Newton an Arian?, p. 72
1801 – Pfizenmaier, Was Isaac Newton an Arian?, p. 72; Yahuda MS. 15, fol. 46, cf., fol. 68
1802 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 82
1803 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 83
1804 – See Scott Mandelbrote, “Eighteenth-Century Reactions to Newton’s Anti-Trinitarianism.” In
Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, edited by J. Force and S. Hutton, 93–111, London,
Springer, 2004
1805 – See Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 142
1806 – See Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 367
1807 – See Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 217
1808 – Quoted in Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 83
1809 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 83
1810 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 84
1811 – See Iliffe, Priest of Nature, p. 218
1812 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 87
1813 – See John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, London, S.C.M. Press, 1993; John Hick,
God and the Universe of Faiths, London, Macmillan, 1973; John Hick, “A Remonstrance in
Concluding,” Jesus in History and Myth, R. J. Hoffmann, G. A. Larue, eds., Buffalo, Prometheus
Books, 1986; John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1977
1814 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 89
1815 – Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the
World, Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729, the translations revised by Aorian Cajori, 2
vols., Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1934, v.2, p. 544
1816 – Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, p. 545
1817 – See details in Shah, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God, chapter 4, p. 399 ff
1818 – See Ian Richard Netton, Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic
Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology, New York, Routledge, 1995; Duncan B. Macdonald,
Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, Beirut, Khayats, 1965;
A. K. Kazi, J. G. Flynn, trans., Muslim Sects and Divisions: The Section on Muslim Sects in Kitab al-
Milal wa al-Nihal by Shahrastani, London, Kegan Paul International, 1984; H. A. Wolfson, The
Philosophy of the Kalam, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976; William M. Watt,
Early Islam: Collected Articles, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990; Majid Fakhry,
Averroes: His Life, Works and Influence, Oxford, Oneworld, 2001;
1819 – Shams Inati, Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions, Physics and Metaphysics, An Analysis and
Annotated Translation, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 122
1820 – Shams Inati, “Ibn Sina” in S. H. Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy,
New York, Routledge, 1996, P. 446
1821 – See Shams Inati, Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions, Physics and Metaphysics, An Analysis
and Annotated Translation, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 123
1822 – See details in Nasr and Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 446 onward
1823 – Inati, Ibn Sina’s Remarks, p. 124
1824 – Inati, Ibn Sina’s Remarks, p. 124
1825 – See details in Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, Dordrecht,
Springer Science+Business Media, 1998, p. 4ff
1826 – James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin eds., Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of
Isaac Newton’s Theology, London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, p. 1
1827 – James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin eds., Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of
Isaac Newton’s Theology, p. 1
1828 – James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin eds., Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of
Isaac Newton’s Theology, p. 1-2
1829 – Matt Goldish notes that Newton was neither interested in living Jews nor in Jewish theology.
“Newton, for example, appealed to Maimonides’Mishneh Torah for historical information on the
Temple, but he did not show interest in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed for theological ideas. He
used the ancient Jewish Christians as a central example for ecclesiastical serenity and strife, but he
made no effort to meet and understand contemporary Jewish Jews, so lately arrived in England.
Newton’s behavior was typical for his time, then-using Jews and their literature in pragmatic and
expedient ways. He was not so much a student of Jewish history and ideas as a consumer of them,
picking what fit his needs and ignoring the rest.” Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, p. 163
1830 – Majid Fakhry, Averroes: His Life, Works and Influence, Oxford, Oneworld, 2001, p. 132
1831 – Arthur Hyman, “Jewish Philosophy in the Islamic World,” in Nasr and Leaman eds., History
of Islamic Philosophy, p. 1200
1832 – Nasr and Leaman eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 1191
1833 – Nasr and Leaman eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, P. 1193
1834 – Steven M. Wesserstrom, “The Islamic Social and Cultural Context” in History of Jewish
Philosophy, edited by Daniel H. Frank and O. Leaman, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 73
1835 – See Mauro Zonta, The Relationship of European Jewish Philosophy to Islamic and Christian
Philosophies in the Late Middle Ages, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2000), pp. 127-140
1836 – Fakhry, Averroes, p. 132
1837 – Fakhry, Averroes, p. 132
1838 – Nasr and Leaman eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 1298
1839 – Zonta, Mauro, “Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic Thought”, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/arabic-islamic-judaic/>.
1840 – Zonta, Mauro, “Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic Thought”, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/arabic-islamic-judaic/>.
1841 – Zonta, Mauro, “Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic Thought”, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/arabic-islamic-judaic/>.
1842 – Fergus Kerr, Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2009
1843 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 318
1844 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 318-19
1845 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 318?
1846 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 323-24
1847 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 324
1848 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 330
1849 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton: Heretic, p. 407. . “The assumption that he was restoring some lost
and corrupted tradition lay at the heart of Newton’s aim to recover a pristine non- Trinitarian
Christianity… Newton implicitly placed himself in a line of restorers of the true Noachid religion
that included Moses and Christ himself.” Rob Iliffe and George E. Smith eds., Cambridge
Companion to Newton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 501
1850 – See Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 332
1851 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 355-56
1852 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton; heretic, p. 388
1853 – This report is cited in German in J. Edleston, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and
Professor Cotes, London, 1850, p. lxxx., https://archive.org/details/correspondenceof00newtrich
1854 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 489
1855 – See Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 491 onward
1856 – See Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 491 onward
1857 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 821
1858 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 821
1859 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 821
1860 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 822
1861 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 821
1862 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 824
1863 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 825
1864 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 826
1865 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 826-27
1866 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 827
1867 – See Gale E. Christianson, Isaac Newton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 83
1868 – Sobelen, Isaac Newton: heretic, p. 381
1869 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 828
1870 – See Snobele, Isaac Newton, p. 412-14
1871 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 829
1872 – See this chapter in Martin Mulsow and John Rohls eds., Socinianism and Arminianism:
Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Amsterdam,
Brills, 2005
1873 – Stephen David Snobelen, Isaac Newton and Socinianism: Associations with a Greater Heresy
(2003), www.isaac-newton.org.
1874 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton and Socinianism, p. 1
1875 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton and Socinianism, p. 4
1876 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton and Socinianism, p. 15
1877 – Quoted from Martin Mulsow and John Rohls eds., Socinianism and Arminianism, p. 263
1878 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton, Socinianism, and the One Supreme Giod, in Martin Mulsow and Jan
Rohls ed. Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in
Seventeenth-Century Europe, Leiden, Brills, 2005, p.266
1879 – See Snobelen, Isaac Newton in Mulsow and Rohls ed. Socinianism and Arminianism, p.269
1880 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton in Mulsow and Rohls ed. Socinianism and Arminianism, p.286
1881 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton in Mulsow and Rohls ed. Socinianism and Arminianism, p. 284
1882 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 593
1883 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 77
1884 – See details in Robert D. Cornwall and William Gobson eds., Religion, Politics and Dissent
1660-1832: Essay in Honour of James E. Bradley, Burlington, Ashgate, 2010, Chapter 1, p. 17 ff
1885 – See Cornwall and William Gobson eds., Relgion, Politics and Dissent 1660-1832, p. 17 ff
1886 – Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 929-30
1887 – Snobelen, Isaac Newton in Mulsow and Rohls ed. Socinianism and Arminianism, p.287
1888 – See details in Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 78 ff and Thomas C. Pfizenmaier, Was Isaac
Newton an Arian?, p. 57 onward; See Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and
Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855 ), ii. 340.
1889 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 77
1890 – See D. O. Thomas, Enlightenment and Dissent, Aberystwyth, Cambrian Printers, 2000, p. 154
ff; Richard Popkin’s Introduction in James Force, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge:
1985), p. xiv, and Force likewise in ch. 4; Stephen Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies
of a Nicodemite’ in The British Journal for the History of Science, 32/4 (December, 1999), p. 395
1891 – See various articles on https://isaac-newton.org/articles/
1892 – See https://isaacnewton.ca/newtons-general-scholium/
1893 – See “John Edwards’ comments on and translation from Newton’s General Scholium in Some
remarks on Clarke’s last papers (1714)”: https://isaacnewton.ca/newtons-general-scholium/
1894 – Clark, English Society, p. 319-320
1895 – See Andrea Greenwood and Mark W. Harris, An Introduction to the Unitarian and
Universalists Traditions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, chapter 3, p. 32 ff
1896 – See John Seed, “‘A Set of Men Powerful Enough in Many Things’: Rational Dissent and
Political Opposition, 1770–1790,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-
Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and
“Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and
1780s,” Historical Journal 28, no. 2 (1985): 299–325.
1897 – Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, v.1, p. 297
1898 – See Life of Mr. Thomas Firmin, late Citizen of London (London, 1698), including Sermon on
his death, and An Account of Mr. Firmin’s Religion; Alexander Gordon, ‘Thomas Firmin, Unitarian
Philanthropist,’ in his Addresses Biographical and Historical (London, 1922); Harold W. Stephenson,
‘A Seventeenth Century Philanthropist,’ U. H. S. (London), vol. vi; Wallace, Antitrin., iii, 272–389.
1899 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.107.
1900 – See The Church of England, c. 1689 – c. 1833, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen
Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 9, p. 209 ff
1901 – Robert Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography: or Sketches of the Lives and Writings of
Distinguished Antitrinitarians, London, E. T. Whitefield, 1850, p.275.
1902 – Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, v.1, p. 297
1903 – See G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1926, 474,
615; W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the 18th Century 2nd ed., 8 vols., London, Longmans,
Green and Co., 1879-1890, 1:177-81; 187-93; W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty 2nd ed. 2
vols., London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896, 1: 434-46, 438, 442.
1904 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammd, p. 147-148
1905 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammd, p. 148
1906 – Marshall, John Locke, p. 391-92
1907 – Marshall, Locke, p. 389
1908 – Marshall, Locke, 390
1909 – Marshall, Locke, p. 391
1910 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 67
1911 – Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot, p. 106
1912 – Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 67
1913 – S. Nye, Considerations on the Explication of the Doctrine of the Trinity by Dr Wallis, Dr
Sherlock, Dr S—th, Dr Cudworth and Dr Hooker (London, 1693 ), p. 7
1914 – Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century,
London, T & T Clark, 2003, p. 106
1915 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken,p. 109
1916 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.109.
1917 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.109-110
1918 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.110.
1919 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.110.
1920 – See Marshall, Locke, p. 394ff
1921 – See Marshall, Locke, p. p. 407ff
1922 – Dixon, Nice and Hot, p. 108
1923 – See Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England and America
Volume II, Boston, Beacon Press, 1945, chapter 12
1924 – Arthur Bury, The Naked Gospel, Internet archive, from Princeton Theological Seminary,
http://ia700306.us.archive.org/30/items/nakedgospeldisco11bury/nakedgospeldisco11bury.pdf
1925 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.8
1926 – Bury, The Naked Gospel, p.64.
1927 – Bury, The Naked Gospel, Preface.
1928 – Champion, Pillars, p. 108
1929 – Champion, Pillars, p. 108
1930 – Justin J. Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, Cambridge repository
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/275523/Meggittt%20%20Early%20Unitaria
ns%20and%20Islam.pdf?sequence=1%26isAllowed=y, p. 3
1931 – Champion, Pillars, p. 109
1932 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 162
1933 – Champion, Pillars, p. 109
1934 – William Freke, Vindication of the Unitarians, against the late reverend author on the Trinity
in a letter (London, 1690, p. 11; also see Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 68
1935 – Freke, Vindication, p. 23
1936 – Freke, Vindication, p. 23
1937 – Freke, Vindication, p. 24
1938 – Freke, Vindication, p. 25
1939 – Freke, Vindication, p. 25
1940 – Freke, Vindication, p. 26
1941 – Freke, Vindication, p. 26
1942 – Freke, Vindication, p. 27
1943 – Freke, Vindication, p. 8
1944 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 5
1945 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 4
1946 – Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 12
1947 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.110
1948 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 19
1949 – MacLean and Matar, Britain and Islamic World, p. 222
1950 – See details in Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 160
1951 – Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 160
1952 – Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 158-59
1953 – Meggitt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 1
1954 – Justin J. Meggittt, ‘Nöel Aubert de Versé’. In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical
History. Volume 13. Western Europe (1700-1800), edited by David Thomas and John A. Chesworth,
75–76. Leiden: Brill, 2019, p. 75
1955 – Meggittt, ‘Nöel Aubert de Versé’, p. 75
1956 – Meggittt, ‘Nöel Aubert de Versé’, p. 75
1957 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History.
Volume 13. Western Europe (1700-1800), edited by David Thomas and John A. Chesworth, 77–85.
Leiden: Brill, 2019, p. 79
1958 – Lambeth Palace Library, MSS 673, fol. 4, quoted in Matar, Britain and Barbary, p. 159
1959 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 79-80
1960 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.111; see more details in Meggittt, ‘Epistle
Dedicatory’, p. 80-81
1961 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 81
1962 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 81
1963 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 5
1964 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 83
1965 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 6
1966 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 82
1967 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 82
1968 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 4
1969 – Meggittt, Early Unitarians and Islam, p. 4
1970 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.111
1971 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.112.
1972 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.113
1973 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.113
1974 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.113
1975 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.114
1976 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.114
1977 – See Brent S. Sirota. The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the
Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England, 1687–1702. Journal of British Studies, 2013,
52, pp 26-54 doi:10.1017/jbr.2012.7; Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the
Trinity in the Seventeenth Century especially chapter 3, p. 66 ff
1978 – The bibliography of the controversy in John Hunt, Religious Thought in England from the
Reformation to the End of Last Century: A Contribution to the History of Theology, 3 vols. (London,
1870–71), 2:273–78, lists nearly seventy different pamphlets published between 1689 and 1699.
1979 – Sirota. The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State, p. 27
1980 – See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside-down, p. 15 ff
1981 – Sirota. The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State, p. 26
1982 – See H. J. Maclachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford, 1951; Gerard
Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England,
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 1985, 119–20; on the use of the term by Catholics,
see Martin Greig, “Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701,”
Historical Journal 37, no. 3 (1994): 569–92.
1983 – Sirota. The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State, p. 40
1984 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.114
1985 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.115; see also Kecia Ali, The Lives of
Muhammad, p. 36
1986 – Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 133
1987 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.116
1988 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.117
1989 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.117
1990 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.118
1991 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.118
1992 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.119
1993 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.119
1994 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.120
1995 – Meggittt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 83
1996 – See David Thomas and John Chesworth eds., Muslim Christian Relations: A Biographical
History, v. 13, Western Europe, 1700-1800, Leiden, Brills, 2019, p. 326-26
1997 – Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p.120
1998 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. xi
1999 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. xi
2000 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 1
2001 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 3
2002 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 3
2003 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 4-5
2004 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 5
2005 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 5-6
2006 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 6
2007 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 7
2008 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 11
2009 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 11-12
2010 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 12
2011 – See Hazard, The Crises of the Europen Mind, p. 253 ff
2012 – See W. Bernard Peach & D. O. Thomas ed., The correspondence of Richard Price, 3 vols.,
Durham, NC & Cardiff, 1983-1994; D O Thomas ed., Price: political writings, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1991
2013 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 165
2014 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 165
2015 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 165-66
2016 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 166
2017 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 168
2018 – Meggitt, Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 84
2019 – Meggitt, Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 84-85
2020 – Garcia, Islam and English Enlightenment, p. 168
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