Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (7 page)

In contrast, Voltaire portrays his Mahomet as a lascivious predator, who lusts after a beautiful young woman called Palmira, a name drawn not from Arabic but a pre-Islamic site in Palmyra, Syria. Captured by Mahomet as a child, Palmira grows up not knowing that her father, Zopire, is the leader of the Meccan pagan opposition. Although Palmira reveres Mahomet as a father figure, a ruler, and a prophet, she does not return his affections. Instead she loves Seide, who had also been taken captive as a child, but whom she does not know is her brother.

Mahomet commands Seide to assassinate Zopire, his own father. Out of loyalty to Mahomet, Seide carries out the order, but duplicitous Mahomet then poisons his rival. In the last scene, Palmira realizes too late that both her father and brother have died at the fanatic’s direction. Maddened with grief, she commits suicide, exposing Mahomet’s true nature with her final breath:

While the audience identifies with this suffering, Voltaire makes clear his vision of Mahomet, who alone on stage admits that he is a violent impostor: “The sword and the Alcoran in my bloody hands, / Will impose silence on the rest of humanity.”
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When his first choice to play Mahomet bowed out, Voltaire found another actor he said was even better than his original choice because of “his simian appearance.”
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On stage, the character of Mahomet was conceived by the playwright as both subhuman and inhumane.

But Voltaire’s caricature belies his knowledge of actual Islamic history and religious doctrine. By 1738, he too owned George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’an, which included a long expository section on history and religion.
⁹⁸
By ignoring this relatively accurate information available to him, Voltaire betrays a deliberate decision to distort Islamic history as a means of warning against religious persecution and despotism.

Although Voltaire’s condemnation of the Catholic persecution of Protestants was indirect, church authorities recognized the analogy and quickly banned the play after its Paris premiere in 1742. They correctly charged that Voltaire’s intent was to attack Christianity rather than Islam; some even contended that he was promoting Deism.
⁹⁹
Voltaire resented the Catholic censorship of his play, but he agreed that Ottoman ambassadors in Paris would have had legitimate reason to object.
¹⁰⁰
In this case, he admitted, “It would not be decent to blacken the Prophet while entertaining the envoy.”
¹⁰¹
But the calumny against Islam had proved too useful to abjure. In 1745, attempting to have the ban lifted, Voltaire wrote directly to
Pope Benedict XIV, paying homage to him in Italian as “the head of the true religion” and casting the Prophet,
unsurprisingly, as “the founder of that false and barbarous sect.”
¹⁰²
But his papal strategy failed, and the play would not be performed again in Paris until 1751.

When Voltaire’s play opened in London in 1744, under the new English title
Mahomet the Impostor
, it had undergone a few changes. Palmira’s father, named Alcanor instead of Zopire, was now styled not as an Arab leader, but as the head of an unhistorical “senate,” and Zaphna, rather than Seide, was Palmira’s love interest and brother. The changes had been made by two Protestant British authors, who translated and reworked Voltaire’s
Fanatisme
for the London production.
¹⁰³
The first, James
Miller (d. 1744), an Anglican minister, took charge of the first four acts. In his hands, the play became an attack on the oppressive Catholic regime in France, which stood in contrast to the “unique” tolerance of Protestant British freedoms. The idea that Islam and Catholicism were both violent faiths, spread by the sword, had already been a common Protestant claim, and was even used in a newspaper advertisement, which proclaimed, “The original was by Authority forbid to be played in France on account of the free and noble Sentiments with regard to Bigotry and Enthusiasm, which shine through it; and that Nation found as applicable to itself, as to the bloody propagators of Mahomet’s Religion.”
¹⁰⁴
The play thus served to characterize the freedom of religion and thought as innately British. This Whig view of individual rights would go on to inspire American revolutionaries twenty years later.

It was not a coincidence that the advertisement for
Mahomet the Impostor
echoed key concepts of
Cato’s Letters
. Both were the products of Whig thought. John
Hoadly (d. 1776), who stepped in to rework the play’s fifth and final act when
James Miller died in 1744, probably also wrote the advertisements and the new prologue for the piece. Hoadly has been described as a “libertarian pamphleteer,” but he was also the son of the famed Whig and Anglican bishop
Benjamin Hoadly (d. 1761),
¹⁰⁵
who’d been defended in 1717 by one of the authors of
Cato’s Letters
when he had preached about the king that “the Gospels provided no textual support for any visible church authority.”
¹⁰⁶
When controversy ensued, support for Bishop Hoadly’s views became a public affirmation of one’s Whig affiliation.
¹⁰⁷

Truly his father’s son, the younger Hoadly probably wrote a rhymed prologue for
Mahomet the Impostor
that praised British freedoms absent in repressive Catholic France. He also stressed his father’s Whig ideals of anticlericalism and toleration:

After some of the play’s extensive verses in the last act were excised in 1765,
Mahomet the Impostor
finally became a hit both as a stage production and a book. In the print editions from 1776 and 1777, the engravings of an actor named Bensley dressed in an approximation of Ottoman garb, with “the Alcoran” in one hand and a scimitar in the other, embodied in a single image the themes of religious fraud and violence.
¹⁰⁹
Frequently republished, the play would be widely disseminated in writing on both sides of the Atlantic.
¹¹⁰
And it was immensely popular as a London stage staple from 1776 and beyond.

In 1780, British officers besieged by American rebels performed
Mahomet the Impostor
in New York City.
¹¹¹
They penned a new rhymed prologue, which was recited by a member of the Royal Navy, dressed as a Native American chief, who condemned the American traitors as heretics:

The Indian chief goes on to predict Britain’s victory in America, her commercial domination of the world, and the defeat of her Catholic enemies Spain and France:

The British officers identified the American revolutionaries with the forces of Mahomet, an anti-Islamic condemnation of the enemy.
¹¹⁴

Two years later in Baltimore, the American revolutionaries presented their own production of
Mahomet the Impostor
. The Americans certainly did not identify with Mahomet, viewing the play as a parable of the dangers of tyranny.
¹¹⁵
Instead, they likened King George III to “the Impostor.” Advertisements in the local paper praised the French troops, still stationed in town since helping the Americans defeat the British at Yorktown the previous year, for their “great politeness,” and saw the play as an “Opportunity to declare, that the prejudices against the French Nation which the English so pertinaciously attributed to the Americans” were false.
¹¹⁶
Voltaire, a supporter of the American Revolution, might at last have been pleased with the reception of his play.

No special prologue exists from this first Baltimore performance of
Mahomet
, but one dedicated to George Washington for another contemporary production by the same theater company reflects the sentiments of the American audience in the wake of their recent victory over the British. The actress who declaimed the prologue celebrated the virile Revolutionary virtues of courage, liberty, freedom, and independence possessed by her imagined future husband:

Extant broadsides announce the Baltimore performances of
Mahomet
on October 1 and October 15, 1782.
¹¹⁸
The last American performance would be in 1796, when it may have served to criticize the violence of the French Revolution.
¹¹⁹

Broadside announcing the performance of Voltaire’s
Mahomet
in Baltimore. (
illustration credit 1.1
)

In 1797, the American lawyer and playwright
Royall Tyler (1757–1826) published
The Algerine Captive; or The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner among the Algerines
. By this time, the United States had suffered the captivity of its sailors for more than a decade, because independence from Britain had left the new country without naval protection or sufficient funds to establish treaties with North African pirate states. By 1793, more than one hundred Americans had been captured and imprisoned in
Algiers, but negotiations to free them stalled for lack of ransom.
¹²⁰
The earliest group of twenty-one Americans seized in 1785 was thus held for eleven years in Algiers. Two of them were rescued by private donations; almost half would die of disease waiting for their freedom.
¹²¹
In 1797, six months before the publication of Tyler’s novel, survivors of the earliest group along with more recently imprisoned Americans were released as the result of a treaty.
¹²²
By 1800, the United States had established peace treaties with all four North African powers: Morocco (1787), Algiers (1796), Tripoli (1797), and Tunis (1799).
¹²³
But the problem of piracy remained so serious that Thomas Jefferson chose military action as a response during his first term as president, from 1801 to 1805. With the exception of Jefferson’s attack against Tripoli and a final assault against Algiers in 1815, the so-called
Barbary Wars consisted, in effect, of North African fleets’ raids of American ships.