Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

Notwithstanding the regrettable and deplorable fact that the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) has been vilified in the West down the ages, it is indeed gratifying to note that recently a host of Western scholars, alive to this gross travesty of truth, have exposed and refuted many of the misconceptions and misperceptions about the Prophet. Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1961) holds the distinction of being the first such study which has been complemented and supplemented by John Tolan’s Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (1996) and Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), and more significantly, by the Episcopal priest and Professor of History at the University of Utah, Frederick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies (2008). The valuable book under review by Matthew Dimmock, Professor at the University of Sussex, however, surpasses all the earlier studies in both range and depth of coverage as well as in its judicious, sympathetic engagement with the subject. This epitome of scholarship stands out as a mine of information, tracking down almost all that there is to know about the “grotesque version” of the Prophet in the West, which he identifies as the “product of vilification, caricature, and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam.” Aptly enough, he brands his work as “a study of the misrepresentation of a biography, or perhaps, the biography of a misrepresentation.” (p. xii) Behind this “Christian construction of the Prophet” were the “Christian travellers in the Muslim lands and zealous propagandising clergy.” (p. xiii) Dimmock’s study is an amazing spectacle of substantial and insightful scholarship, as he recounts how the image of the Prophet was fabricated in early English literature, during the Reformation, on stage via Elizabethan plays, and in the seventeenth century religious and literary texts and popular culture.