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

Abstract

Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today by John V. Tolan Peter Heinegg Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today. By John V. Tolan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xii + 309 pp. $29.95. There are many stories told about, and words attributed to, the great religious founders, the Buddha, say, and Jesus, and Muhammad, although very little of all this material is verifiable history in the strict sense. Professor Tolan teaches history at the University of Nantes; but in any case his subject is not the actual person of Muhammad, but “Mahomet,” the construct or fantasy or caricature created by western writers from roughly the twelfth to the twenty‐first century. It's safe to say that no other major religious figure has been as distorted and vilified as the Prophet—though there are some important exceptions to this wrongheaded record. But Tolan's dense, briskly moving summary (which could well have been far longer) tells us not about Islam, but the various cultural agendas of Europeans reacting to what they thought Islam was or looking to gain some sort of polemical mileage out of their misguided notions. For medieval crusade chroniclers, “Mahomet” was a golden idol, a false god worshiped by the “Saracens” (= Arabs, but connected by a folk etymology to Sarah), a term Muslims never used to describe themselves. Or else, he was a master heretic who seduced Christians into the toils of a false faith, and was thus consigned by Dante to the ninth trench of Hell in a gory scene that Tolan oddly skims over. Such gross distortions lingered on for ages, but in the sixteenth century Miguel Servet (1509 or 1511–1553), better known as Michael Servetus, like later “Unitarians,” drew upon the Qur'an for arguments against the Trinity, only to be burned at the stake in Geneva for his troubles. As wars between Catholics and Protestants began to tear Europe apart, some critics cited the tolerant view of religious diversity in the Qur'an and the Ottoman Empire. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anti‐clerical writers praised Muhammad as a “reformer who abolished the privileges of a corrupt and superstitious clergy.” In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Muhammad was sometimes treated as “a sort of Arab national hero, bringing law, religion, and glory to his people.” Voltaire (1694–1778) tried to have it both ways. In Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet: A Tragedy (1736), he uses the old cliché of Muhammad the imposter as a stalking horse to attack targets closer to home. But in his huge Essay on the Manners and Thinking of the Nations (begun in 1756), he takes a much more broad‐minded view, comparing him favorably to Alexander the Great, calling him not a fanatic, but an “enthusiast.” “As a conqueror, legislator, monarch, and pontiff, he played the greatest role that can be played on earth in the eyes of the common people.” Note the culminating swipe, which Voltaire couldn't resist. To be sure, Voltaire prefers Confucius to Muhammad because Confucius was a purely rational sage who foreswore the Prophet's modes of worldly power, just as he prefers the Chinese to the Arabs because he thought they were more “civilized.” Still, though parts of the Qur'an may be contradictory, absurd, or confused, other passages are “sublime.” All things considered, Voltaire considers Muhammad a great man and a hero. Figures as disparate as Goethe, Napoleon, and Thomas Carlyle would strongly agree. Eventually, as time went on, the work of scholars, translators, and other western experts, sometimes unfairly tarred as “Orientalists,” made it possible to arrive at a fairer assessment of Muhammad. In the English‐speaking world, ground‐working was done when George Sale produced a serviceable, unbiased translation of the Qur'an (1734), with a prefix validating the Prophet as a righteous enemy of superstition and overweening clerical privilege. Before Sale, in 1671 Henry Stubbe, who knew no Arabic and read most Islamic documents in Latin translation, published his Originall & Progress of Mahometanism with a preface that hails Muhammad as “a religious reformer, beloved and admired...