Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism

UROPEAN MEDIEVAL representations of the Prophet Muḥammad and of the beginnings of Islam were uniformly negative, as Norman Daniel showed in his magisterial Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960). Although Nicholas of Cusa described the Prophet as merely a man in error (Cribratio Alkorani, ca. 1458–64), European writers always viewed Muḥammad and the Qur’ān from an oppositional perspective. John Tolan has shown that from Theodor Bibliander’s Machvmetis Sarracanorvm principis vita (Basel, 1543)¹ to Humphrey Prideaux’s The true nature of imposture fully display’d in the life of Mahomet (1697) there was not a single European text that attempted to present a historically accurate biography of the Prophet and of the beginnings of Islam.² Rather, and as the conflict among Christian denominations surged in Western Europe—Catholics, Lutherans/Protestants, Socinians, Deists, and others—writers dragged Muḥammad into the fray treating him as a forerunner of the Protestant heresy, an ally of the pope, a proto-Socinian, or an “atheist.” Which is why Henry Stubbe (1632–76) is important: he was the “exception” to all early modern writers on Islam.³

This little-known physician who spent the last years of his life in between Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath undertook a Copernican Revolution (in Kant’s use of the phrase) in the study of Islam. For Kant, the phrase served as a metaphor for the shift in the position of the observer that made possible a new astronomy and for him a new epistemology. In the study of Islam Stubbe moved away from Euro-Christian sources to the canon of Arabic histories and chronicles in Latin translation, instituting thereby a sharp methodological and historiographical break with the past. In just under sixty thousand words, Stubbe presented the first heavily annotated biography of the man who had given birth to “Islamism” as well as the first English description of ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin. But, Stubbe knew that it was the message in “Alkoran” that was of paramount importance: his encomium on Islam in the last pages of his treatise is unparalleled in early modern European writing.

Many were the readers who perused and copied Stubbe’s treatise, as evidenced by the numerous manuscript versions of the treatise that have survived and the others that are known to have been lost. But, to date, all scholars who have written about Stubbe’s treatise have relied on the Lahore 1911 edition of the work, The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, published by Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani—with the exception of J. A. I. Champion’s 2010 study. This edition was the composite of three “authors”: the original text by Stubbe, “improvements” on the text by Charles Hornby in 1705, and the editorial excisions by Shairani of passages which were deemed “not polite.” This mix of hands renders the edition unreliable. Only by focusing on the earliest complete manuscript of The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, which I am renaming The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism, ca. 1701, will it be possible to examine the actual words, or close to the actual words, that Stubbe wrote. Because this manuscript is not an autograph, there can be no absolute certainty, but the sections that Charles Blount copied in 1678 and included in letters to Thomas Hobbes and to the earl of Rochester (which appeared in print in 1693 and 1695) and the three manuscript fragments that survive from the latter part of the century at the British Library all correspond exactly to this manuscript, with inevitable scribal variances.

A century before Edward Gibbon, Stubbe recognized how integrated “Muslim history [was] with that of the Roman and Byzantine empires.”4 Islam was not an appendage to Greco-Roman civilization, but a fresh start, “a revolucion” in world history (fol. 48). It was a religion that returned to the purity of monotheism that had been lost amidst the theological controversies of the “Jews Judaizing Arabians Judaizing Christians … Jacobites Nestorians Arrians Trinitarians Manichees Montanists Sabeans & Idolaters” (fol. 119).⁵ In this respect the importance of Stubbe should not be underestimated: he was the first writer in English to use Arabic and non-Chalcedonian sources to develop a largely accurate interpretation of the beginnings of Islam and of the life of its founder. Although he fell into some of the errors and misrepresentations about Muḥammad that were endemic among European writers, he carefully referenced his sources to show where he had found his information. Toward the end of the treatise, and perhaps after further reading, Stubbe corrected some of his views and presented a heroic portrait of a “great prophet,” thereby refuting the “foolish relations our authors give of their [Muslim] prophet and religion” (fol. 126). To a very large extent, Stubbe realized this goal in his treatise not by discovering new manuscripts or by learning new languages but by reading what was already available in print, in Latin, and in the libraries and bookstores. Thus his “Copernican Revolution.”

Henry Stubbe was born on 28 February 1632 in Partney, Lincolnshire, to “anabaptistically inclin’d” parents, as his first biographer, Anthony Wood, recalled.6 At the age of ten, and after fleeing with his mother from Tredagh, Ireland, in the wake of the Uprising (1641), he was admitted to Westminster School where he studied under Richard Busby. Through the patronage of Sir Henry Vane the younger, one of the leaders of the Independents, he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1649, and, along with Humphrey Prideaux, future dean of Norwich, “presumably attended [Edward] Pococke’s Arabic lectures.”⁷ After graduating BA in 1653, he joined up with the Cromwellian army in Scotland until 1655. On his return to England, he settled in Oxford, and in a number of letters to Thomas Hobbes he praised Leviathan, “so great a work,” which he had “read all over.” On 13 January 1657 he reported to Hobbes that he was dedicating four hours “each day to ye translation of ye Leviathan” into Latin.⁸ With the help of John Owen, the Independent Dean of Christ Church (1651–58), Stubbe was appointed Second Keeper at the Bodleian Library, serving under Thomas Barlow. He remained in office “as a hired hand of Dr Owen” until 1659, when he was ejected, after which he moved to Stratford-upon-Avon “to practise the faculty of physic.”⁹

By then Stubbe had become active in writing. His first letters and publications show him as a confrontational and rather pedantic man, with some interest in English literature, citing in the course of his treatises Abraham Cowley’s poetry and the plays of Ben Jonson. He was, as Wood wrote in Athenai Oxonienses (1691–92), “the most noted Latinist and Grecian of his age.”¹⁰ In this early stage of his writing career, Stubbe did not show an interest in Islam, but, in 1659, upon disagreeing with William Prynne, the Presbyterian polemist, he ridiculed him for supporting monarchy and associated his ideas with practices of the Ottoman government: “I hope the Assembly of Lincolns-Inne will keep a Fast for the good success and prosperity of the Turke, that so they may have the best of Governments, a Monarchy.”¹¹ Stubbe published other treatises in that year, revealing a knack for extensive citations from a wide array of sources. He had, as Wood explained, “a most prodigious memory.”¹² Stubbe proved faithful to his patron, Sir Henry Vane, who was maligned in the dangerously transitional year of 1659 (he would be executed in June 1662) and wrote to defend him against the accusation of “Socinianism.”¹³

After the Restoration Stubbe conformed to the Anglican establishment and became an ardent supporter of the Stuart king and of the Church of England. In 1661 he went to practice medicine in Jamaica, having secured the posting through the assistance of Sir Alexander Fraizer, the king’s first physician.14 After his return to England in 1665, he pursued his “practice in the Countrey” of Warwick, while keeping himself informed about the intellectual changes in the metropolis. Stubbe rejected the new scientific method promoted by the Royal Society because of its emphasis on utilitarian experimentation and its total disregard of historical learning, and he set out to refute the ideology that Thomas Sprat promulgated, in History of the Royal Society (1667), and which was taken up by Robert Boyle and Joseph Glanvill in the latter’s Plus Ultra (1670). The result was a series of acrimonious exchanges that appeared in print in the late 1660s and early 1670s. “I was sensible of the injuries he [Glanvill] doth unto the dead,” Stubbe wrote, “the affronts he puts upon the living, the contempt wherewith he decries the University Learning and those Studies by which Christianity hath been supported against the Arrians, the Jews, the Mahometans, and of late the Papists and Socinians.”¹⁵ Stubbe emphasized that the universities, with their historical traditions of knowledge, were crucial to science—contrary to the views of the Royal Society that saw the universities as antiquated. The “Utility of the Ancient and Established Method of Medicaments used in Physick,” Stubbe asserted, revealed how much the “innovations” of the “Institution of the Royal Society” were really not innovations at all, but reworkings of past demonstrations. The desire to show that he was au courant with, although opposed to, the new “virtuosi” and his intense zeal to challenge them drove Stubbe to conduct experiments even on himself. Thus, “in January last 1669, I had another occasion to bleed … I took also some of the pure citrine Serum of my blood, which tasted not very salt.”¹⁶ He was not against the experimental method, he proclaimed, just against the skepticism it generated regarding the past.

In June 1670, Stubbe wrote to his friend N. N. how “during the late times, because I would joyn with no party in a Church, they imagined that I could be of no Religion.”¹⁷ Perhaps in his attempt to show that he did have religion, Stubbe combined his attacks on the Royal Society with a strong defense of the Anglican establishment and its theological appeal to the first “Three Creeds, and four general Councils, or thirty nine Articles.”¹⁸ Stubbe feared that the importance given by the Latitudinarian members of the society to reason in theological matters would expose England to Catholicism and “furnish the Spaniard with better and more advantageous Opportunities.”¹⁹ And so, he vehemently defended the “Monarchy and Religion of this land, the welfare of the Church or State” while continuing his attacks on Sprat, Glanvill and others for affronting him in their writings.²⁰ These attacks may help to explain why he was the butt of satire in Samuel Butler’s “The Elephant in the Moon” (ca. 1671).²¹

In the course of his attacks Stubbe reminded his adversaries of Muslim contributions to learning. Instead of disposing with the knowledge and languages of the ancients, as the new scientists urged, “the King,” wrote Stubbe, “should erect certain Schools in all the principal Cities, wherein the Arabick tongue should be taught: that so by this means there may be such among his Subjects, as shall be able to Dispute with the Turks, Moors, and Persians.”22 Knowledge about the languages and heritage of other civilizations was needed in the defense and consolidation of England. That was why, continued Stubbe, medieval monks had fervently studied the “learning of the Sarracens”²³—in order to refute them—a position that recalled the words of Alexander Ross in justifying his 1649 translation of the Qur’ān to English.²⁴

When the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) broke out, Stubbe turned away from the Royal Society and its danger to attack the Dutch. Conscripted by Secretary of State Arlington to write in defense of the king’s policy, Stubbe published a treatise showing how the Protestant Dutch had been more harmful to England than the Muslim North Africans. In A Justification of the Present War against the United Netherlands (1672) he stated: “If we look upon the number and quality of the injuries which we have received from the Dutch, the Turks of Algiers and Tunis are less offensive, and less perfidious. If we consider the courses by which the Dutch attacque us, the Algerines are the more supportable to an English spirit, since they act by force, and open piracy; what the Hollanders do by finess and deceipt.”25 To defend the king, Stubbe marshaled his usual flare for citations from learned tomes and presented arguments explaining and justifying the king’s actions—not only in waging war on Holland but also in issuing the Declaration of Indulgence (both took place in March 1672).²⁶ The declaration generated so much opposition that the king had to withdraw it a year later, at which time Stubbe wrote a second treatise, A further iustification of the present war against the United Netherlands illustrated with several sculptures (early 1673). Stubbe denounced the “Sectaries” who were opposed to the declaration and turned to the history of the early church in search of quotations, allusions, and references that would justify the actions of his king.²⁷ He selected passages from the declaration and demonstrated how, in each passage, Charles II was following the “Declaration of Constantine the great, concerning a general Indulgence.”²⁸ Stubbe highlighted the doctrinal confusions of early Christians and how important Constantine and Theodosius were in enforcing religious authority during times of fissure and heresy. The second part of the treatise was a vitriolic attack on Holland, in which Stubbe surveyed the history of anti-English Dutch activities dating back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In praising the courage and enterprise of English seamen, he described them as “our Legionaries, our Janizaries, and Mammelucks.”²⁹

While writing Further iustification and earlier preparing An Epistolary Discourse Concerning Phlebotomy for publication (1671), Stubbe started The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism. The reference in the latter treatise to Lancelot Addison’s West Barbary, or A Short Narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco (Oxford, 1671) shows that Stubbe started writing after that date; and the reference to Wilhelm Schickard’s Jus regium hebraeorum. E tenerbris Rabbinicis erutum, & luci donatum, which reappeared in 1674 (with heavy annotations, unlike the 1625 edition), suggests that he was still working on the treatise then. Islamic history was becoming part of his study, and in his attack on Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) he referred in his opening to “Saracenical Histories” and rejected the allegation that “Mahomet” had had “two Companions, which clubb’ed with Him, in making the Alchoran.”³⁰ Clearly, Stubbe had become steeped in Latin texts about Islam, for not only did he defend the Prophet, but in the opening of Originall he praised the (unnamed) man who had given rise to “Mahometanism”:

Nothing was more mild than his Speech nothing more courteous & obliging {than his carriage} he could dexterously accommodate himself to all Ages humours & degrees He knew how to pay his Submissions to the great without Servility and to bee complacent to the meaner Sort without abasing himself. He had a ready wit {a penetrating and discerning Judgemt} & such an Elocution as no Arabian before or since hath ever equaled when he pleased he could be facetious without prejudice to his Grandeur; he pfectly understood the Art of placing his favours aright he could distinguish betwixt the deserts the inclinations & the interests of men he could penetrate into their Genius’s & intenciõns without employing vulgar Espialls or Seeming himself to mind any such thing.

(Fol. 2)

After this opening, Stubbe moved to the two parts of his study of Islam. Part 1 focused on the beginnings of Christianity, from its messianic origins in Judaism and its subsequent doctrinal fissures to the century that saw the birth of Muḥammad (fols. 1-49). In writing this part, Stubbe relied on the “higher criticism” of the Bible by the foremost exegetes of his century, both continental and English, and presented an alternative history of the “original and progress” of Christianity—one that differed markedly from the account in Further iustification. The parallels in style and references between Further iustification and Originall are clear, especially the long discussion of the Novatians, the Donatists, and the Arians, as well as some of the turns of phrases. Stubbe was working on the two treatises simultaneously, but with different goals in mind—perhaps confirming what Wood said about him: “So dexterous was his pen, whether pro or con, that few or none could equal, answer or come near him.”31 In Originall Stubbe turned the material about Constantine around and presented a devastating critique of Christian historiography in the centuries before the rise of Islam.

Similar critiques had been written by Anglican clerics about early Christian historiography, but always with the Church of Rome as target. The polarization between Anglicans and Catholics intensified during the Restoration over the place of reason and of authority in religion. Taking their lead from continental biblical scholars such as Isaac Casaubon, and form English polemists such as William Chillingworth, especially his influential The Religion of Protestants (1638), Anglicans emphasized the place of reason over the infallible authority of the pope. In such a context the study of church records and councils became central for Anglicans as they tried to prove the errors in Catholic claims. Thomas Traherne, a contemporary of Stubbe’s (and also from Oxford, Brasenose College) published (anonymously) his Roman Forgeries in 1673 in which he criticized the claims of the Catholic Church to ecclesiastical preeminence, arguing that the first 420 years of the Christian Church had been reliably documented, until the subversions and forgeries of the papacy. In his work Traherne built on the foundations of formidable Anglican apologetics such as Bishop John Jewel’s Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (1567) and Thomas James’s A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture (1611).

Stubbe was a rationalist, but not a Socinian,32 and, unlike John Milton in Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration (1673), he was not interested in attacking “popery” much as he feared Catholic influence on the king. Instead, and armed with a rationalist/Hobbesian approach, he turned to examine the origins of Christian theology through the writings of the earliest church historians. His was not a theological but a historiographical battle, which is why he consulted the writings of Eusebius, Socrates, Zosimus, and other historians because they showed, in his view, how the Christianity of the first centuries so “degenerated into such a kind of paganism” (fol. 41) that it lost its original message. “All that is written contrary hereunto are palpable untruths” (fol. 33), he asserted, supported by the scholarship of the Dutch classicist, Gerard Vossius, who had discovered many a “forgery” in the records of early Christianity (fol. 44). While in Further iustification Stubbe praised Constantine, in Originall, and in direct opposition to Anglican sentiments in favor of the emperor and the veracity of early church councils (as expressed by Traherne and later by Andrew Marvell in the 1676 A Short Historical Essay), Stubbe described Constantine as a “Bastard” whose “Sword was his title” (fol. 32). The records of the councils, he stated, were completely unreliable, as Eusebius demonstrated (fol. 43). Roman imperial power, in the persons of Constantine and Theodosius, had consolidated Christianity by force, thereby diverting the Gospel message to the variety of sects and schisms that plagued the six centuries before the birth of Muḥammad:

Having completed the first part of Originall (fols. 1–49), and using the same revisionist methodology, Stubbe turned to the second part—to study Islamic history in the manner he had studied early Christian history. This second part focused on Muḥammad and the revelation of Islam and it is in two sections:

b. The second section of the University of London manuscript, fols. 107–142, also survives in two fragments in BL Sloane 1786. Like BL Sloane 1709, these fragments are written in the same hand, on the same quality of paper, and stand as units on their own, each with its own title: fols. 107–113: “Concerning the Justice of the Mahometan Warrs & that Mahomet did not propagate his Doctrine by the Sword/with a vindication of Mahomett’s Carriage towards the Christians”; fols. 114–128: “Concerning the Christian Additions”; and fols. 129–142: and “As to their opinions concerning God, purgatory, Judgmt & paradise they are these.” In this section Stubbe relied heavily on the work of his friend and mentor Edward Pococke, who had been translating and commenting on Arabic histories for the previous twenty years. Heavily annotated with references to al-Makīn and Abū al-Faraj, , this second section focuses on the errors of “European Xtians” regarding the history of Islam (fol. 121). Importantly, and while the first section saw Stubbe including a few negative references to the Prophet, in this section Stubbe presents the Prophet and the revelation of Islam in wholly admiring terms: although his emphasis remained on the Prophet as a political and military leader, Stubbe showed how Muḥammad’s actions had been determined by his historical context and by his goal of inspiring his followers towards empire. In so doing, Stubbe rebutted Euro-Christian errors about the Prophet and the miracles that were falsely ascribed to him: “Behold the simplicity of the Christians then who were deluded, and thought to delude by such fopperies as these” (fol. 122). In writing this part Stubbe often replaced Mahometanism with the term Islam/Islamism and Mahometan/Mahometans with Moslemin.33

While working on Originall, and in July 1672, Stubbe wrote but did not publish “An enquiry into the Supremacy spiritual of the Kings of England, occasioned by a proviso in the late Act of Parliament against conventicles.”34 Stubbe was serving as the king’s publicist (and receiving handsome payments for his services), and he was clearly in total support of the king’s policies.³⁵ But his opposition to Catholic influence on King Charles II was so intense that, after the passing of the Test Act and the removal of the duke of York as lord high admiral (June 1673), Stubbe published, anonymously in the Paris Gazette, a two-page attack on the marriage of the duke to the Catholic Mary of Modena (between 20 and 27 October 1673).³⁶ Like many of his Anglican compatriots, Stubbe feared Catholic power and, while remaining supportive of the royal and ecclesiastical establishments of the monarchy and the Anglican Church, he feared that the king’s brother would beget Catholic children to inherit the throne from his heirless sibling.³⁷ As a result of this publication, on 30 October 1673, a warrant was issued to John Dawson “to take into custody Dr. Henry Stubbe for seditious discourses and printing and publishing unlicensed papers.”³⁸ Anthony Wood explained that Stubbe was “hurried in the dark from one private prison to another, threatened with hanging, and was put to a great deal of charge.”³⁹

After his release, Stubbe quickly tried to ingratiate himself with the secretary of state and on 30 November 1673 he published a translation of Jaques Godefroy’s The History of the United Provinces of Achaia, a third attack on the Dutch and a further defense of the king. The brush with the law might have alienated Stubbe from political involvement, for in the years that followed he dedicated himself to his medical practice and to the local scene. In 1674, he described in letters to the earl of Kent some of the ribaldries in Bath: The Duchess of Portsmouth “is frolicksom in the Bath shews her feet & leggs above water.⁴⁰ He also wrote about the wines of the spa city.⁴¹ Meanwhile, he kept up his scholarship, visiting the Bodleian to consult books he did not own and meeting with Pococke, whom he often mentioned by name in Originall.⁴² Wading into Christian and Islamic history to work on his treatise must have taken much of his time, but he continued living and working in Stratford-upon-Avon, in summer maintaining a practice in Bath. On 12 July 1676, while traveling from Bath to Bristol to care for a patient, having had a bit too much to drink, he fell off his horse and drowned. He was buried in St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Church in Bath. Joseph Glanvill, his intellectual archenemy, who a few years earlier had described him as “this crackt Fop of W … rwick,”⁴³ gave, according to Wood, an “indifferent” funeral sermon. Not surprising, neither gravestone nor memorial has survived of Henry Stubbe in the abbey.⁴⁴ But there is one of Glanvill.

Stubbe has received well-deserved attention in studies of Islam in modern scholarship and has been recognized for the boldness of his thought.⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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,”⁴⁸ and belongs in the trajectory that led to the Socinian tracts of the 1690s and to John Toland’s Nazarenus (1718).⁴⁹ Humberto Garcia argued that the beginnings of the Enlightenment in England can be traced, in some measure, to Stubbe and his views on Islam.⁵⁰

These views are cogent, but they do not explain Stubbe’s fascination with the Prophet Muḥammad. Nor do they explain his attack on the sectaries whom Marvell had defended and his implicit alignment with Samuel Parker, the formidable Anglican conservative, whom Marvell had ridiculed in his Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672 and 1673). Neither is it clear how Stubbe’s position regarding the Prophet could reflect the “religious and theological exuberance of the Interregnum” (Holt),51 when the printing of the first English translation of the Qur’ān in 1649 caused an angry reaction from Interregnum authorities—along with the vicious attack on Muḥammad in the “Caveat” by Alexander Ross.⁵² Nor why Stubbe’s supposed “radicalism” extended to praising Islam: after all, Stubbe wrote in praise of Muḥammad in a manner that no other Restoration writer did—not even Milton. On the contrary, in Paradise Lost, Milton demonized Islam by comparing Satan to the Ottoman Sultan.⁵³ No other English writer who upheld politically “radical” views about English politics wrote about Islam and Muḥammad with the same admiration and scholarly erudition that Stubbe did, nor did any other writer, either in England or on the continent, establish a place for Islam in the historical sequence of monotheism as interpreted in the Qur’ān: from Abraham through “Ismael” to Muḥammad. By deliberately ignoring Isaac, Stubbe upheld the Muslim narrative of prophetic history.⁵⁴

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.⁵⁵ 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.”⁵⁶ 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.”⁵⁷ But there is no evidence in any work that Stubbe admired Socinianism: actually, he attacked it from the time he defended Sir Henry Vane to shortly before he began writing Originall: “The Socinians multiply upon us,” he complained in 1670.⁵⁸ That Stubbe would laboriously research a vast corpus of writings about Islam, that he would openly and unambiguously praise “Mahomet” and the Qur’ān, that he would elaborate on the role of ‘Ali as the missionary of Islam, and that he would do all that to present Islam as a “standard against which to measure current Christian practice and the current conduct of Christian princes—and no doubt Charles II and the English church,” as Jacob urges⁵⁹—is unlikely. After all, Stubbe bluntly praised the Prophet as an able legislator, admired Muslim toleration of minorities, and defended the laws of the Qur’ān against usury and wine. Nor did Stubbe write an imaginary satire in the manner of later texts that used an Islamic mouthpiece to criticize contemporary Europe, such as Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters writ by a Turkish Spy (1684–86) or Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721).⁶⁰ Originall is a work of meticulous historical revisionism, presenting “a thorough defence of their [Muslims] sentiments,” as Thomas Magney wrote about the treatise just under half a century after Stubbe’s death.⁶¹

Further, Stubbe’s attitude toward Islam went beyond anything that even the Socinians proposed to the Moroccan ambassador in 1682. As the surviving account shows, the Socinian delegation did not praise the Qur’ān but rather wanted to show the Muslim visitor the common errors in the Bible and in the Qur’ān.62 But Stubbe did not criticize Islam or the Qur’ān in his treatise. At the same time, had he written his treatise to advise Charles II, Stubbe would not have hesitated to state that openly. He was “a very bold man,” as Wood confirmed, and “utter’d any thing that came into his mind, not only among his companions, but in public coffee-houses (of which he was a great frequenter) and would often speak his mind of particular persons, then accidentally present, without examining the company he was in.”⁶³ He did not mince his words, nor did he appeal to the “rhetoric of subterfuge” or the “art of theological lying”⁶⁴ or treated Islam as “a beating stick with which to attack Christian revelation and the clerical establishment.”⁶⁵ He wrote about Islam because he came to see Islam and the Prophet in a new light.

In regard to Deism: Stubbe’s discussion of Islam led him to statements about religion that could have been taken from the pages of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate (1624): “He taught his followers to abolish Idolatry every where And that all the world was obliged to the profession of these truths that there was one God, that he had no Associates, that there was a providence & a retribution hereafter proportionate to the good or evil Actions of Men” (fol. 108). But, no writer before Stubbe had argued for a “Unitarian-Islamic syncretism.”⁶⁶ The first Deist and Socinian writers in England argued for a religious system based on reason: but they did not appeal to Islam as a model. And when Restoration Anglican theologians like Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, and Joseph Glanvill wrote to show that the Bible and “science” were compatible, not a single one of them praised Islam or Muḥammad. On the contrary, Barrow wrote a savage attack on the Prophet.⁶⁷ Perhaps most revealing of Stubbe’s intellectual and theological position is the absence of reference in Originall to any of the aforementioned English theologians, nor, for that matter, to any Socinian writers.⁶⁸ Rather, his constant references were not to “radicals” but to his mentor at Christ Church, Edward Pococke, a nonradical of deep Anglican piety; to al-Makīn, Ibn al-Baṭrīq, and Abū al-Faraj; and to “Judicious Protestants” (fol. 45) like Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, Johann Hottinger, Claudius Salmasius (of anti-Milton fame), and G. J. Vossius.⁶⁹ Had he been a generation younger, Stubbe might well have been part of the “republic of letters” that included many of those authors whose works he admired and cited.⁷⁰

In 1678 Charles Blount, an avowed Deist, lifted pages from Originall and included them in two letters, one to Hobbes and the other to the earl of Rochester.71 Significantly, in neither of these letters did Blount use any material from the Islamic sections of the treatise, nor did he allude to a “Unitarian-Islamic” association. At the end of the century, Humphrey Prideaux associated Islam with Deism and attacked them both; if he had Stubbe’s treatise in mind, it is strange he did not mention it, since he was meticulous in referencing his sources.⁷² Critics have associated Stubbe with the anti-Trinitarianism of Deism because of the treatise that appears after Originall in the 1701 University of London manuscript, An Epistle from Achmet Benabdalla a Learned Moor concerning the Christian Religion. This refutation of Trinitarian Christianity—which appeals for evidence to the Qur’ān and to the various doctrinal conflicts of European Christendom—was written in 1612 by “Ahmet Ben-Abdala” in Latin and addressed to the Prince of Orange who had hosted the Moroccan ambassador.⁷³ But the treatise was added in the manuscript after Stubbe’s death; earlier Thomas Erpenius had thought of publishing it and John Selden had owned a copy of a Latin portion of the manuscript without them becoming accused of Deism.⁷⁴

At the outset of the Originall, Stubbe presented the goal of his treatise: to study Islam in its historical context. To do so, he explained his methodology. There was always “a series of preceding causes which principally” contributed to change. History, he wrote, worked according to the laws of causality: “This is certain that when the previous dispositions intervene, a slight occasion oftentimes a meer casualty, opportunity taken hold of & wisely prosecuted, will produce those Revolutions which otherwise no human Sagacity or Courage could accomplish” (fol. 4). And so to understand Islam there was need to examine the Jewish and Christian background that gave rise to it. While other writers about Islam had been aware of that history, Johann Hottinger in particular, only Stubbe viewed that history as a heterodox cause to a monotheistic end.75 As he explained, late Judaism developed expectations of a temporal Messiah to rule over Jew and Gentile, to which early Petrine Christianity adhered. But from Paul on and with Constantine and Theodosius, Christianity changed in regard to the belief in the Messiah, the theology of the sacraments, the role of the clergy, and the godhood of Christ. Christianity, wrote Stubbe, was corrupted by imperial power and diverted from the message expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, the only extant document that captured the ideals of the Christ movement. Such causes gave rise to Islam—not as anti-Christian, as European theologians viewed it, but as post-Christian.

Stubbe knew that such views were dangerous, but he was clearly growing angry with some of his Anglican compatriots who were waxing lyrical about the purity of the church: Thomas Traherne, Paul Rycaut, and others.⁷⁶ Stubbe emphasized that the Anglican Church, which he fervently defended, recognized the problems in the foundational documents of Christianity. These writings were “so depraved that the Church of England and generally the Protestants reject the authority of them and admit no general councils after that of Chalcedon under the Emperor Martianus.” And, to make matters worse, there had never been a study of the earliest sources of Christianity: “I must add that the Church History of ye primitive times seems mainly deduced from the Latin & Greek writers who give no Acct. either of the Syriack or Judaizing Churches so that we hear no news of the latter till St. Jerom & Epiphanius came to represent them as Hereticks for adhering to the same Doctrine & Discipline wch St. Peter & St. James & all the Apostles (except Paul) had instructed them in” (fol. 44). And to those who would disagree with him, Stubbe answered: “what soever is alledged agt me must be out of suspected or spurious Writers partiall in their own case & ignorant either for the want of learning or want of books & Opportunities to be informed aright or a prejudicate opinion blinding their Judgmts: I conceive the Credit of what I write ought to seem most valid, because ‘tis consonant to ye Acts of the Apostles & the reall existence of things” (fol. 43).

It is in the light of the extensive exposé of Christian historiography that Stubbe’s discussion of Islam should be read. Islam was not a religious aberration or an erratic heresy, but part of the logic of history that had started with Judaism and Christianity. And it was a logic that Stubbe discovered after reading of Christian Arabic chronicles (in Latin translation).

The seventeenth century witnessed an increase in the Arabic, and, to a lesser extent, Turkish and Persian, manuscripts that became available to English and continental writers.77 The first catalogue of the Bodleian Library in 1605 included only a few works by Averroes and Avicenna,⁷⁸ and in 1615 the Arabist William Bedwell complained that the only copy of the Qur’ān he could consult “was so badly imprinted, that in verie many places, I was constrained to diuine and guesse.”⁷⁹ By mid-1630s, however, and as Samuel Hartlib mentioned in his Ephemerides, the “world” of Arabic manuscripts had been “brought thither,” that is, to Oxford.⁸⁰ The change occurred during the tenure of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury and vice-chancellor of Oxford. Laud encouraged the purchase of Eastern manuscripts for the Bodleian and established a chair of Arabic in 1636. From 1655 to 1670 the first professor of Arabic, Edward Pococke Sr., was able to train “almost single-handedly a new generation of Arabists” at the university.⁸¹ Pococke, who died in 1691, was at the center of a group of English thinkers who wrote about (and against) Islam. He was the student of William Bedwell (d. 1632) and Matthias Pasor (d. 1658); the friend of John Gregory (d. 1646), John Selden (d. 1654, whose collection of oriental manuscript augmented the Oxford collection after his death), and John Greaves (d. 1652); and the teacher of Henry Stubbe (d. 1676), John Locke (d. 1704), Humphrey Prideaux (d. 1724), and Samuel Clarke (d. 1729). His Specimen also influenced the French orientalist Richard Simon (d. 1712).

The Laudian oriental collection and the disciplines that were developed to study it showed Britons, including Stubbe, what the swarthy “Moors” and the “Mahometan Turks” and sword-wielding “Saracens” had produced: a vast civilization that had adopted and adapted the same Greco-Latin legacy that Britons claimed as their own classical patrimony. Archbishop Laud, although not a scholar himself, recognized that there was a “great deale of Learning and that very fit and necessary to be knowne,”82 a view upheld by Pococke: “the Progress” that the Arabs had made “in ingenious Studies,” he wrote, “was so great, that they hardly came behind the Greeks themselves.”⁸³ In the polyglot Bible prepared by Brian Walton in the mid-1650s, there was praise for the intellectual legacy of the Arabs in “Marocum, Gessum, Septae, Hobbedae, Constantinae, Tuneteum, Tripoli, Alexandria, Alcairo, Basor, & Cusa in quibus millia studiocorum omnium facultarum”/in which there were thousands eager to learn every discipline. Not only did the libraries in those cities contain Arabic books, wrote Walton, but Greek and Latin, too, that had been translated into Arabic.⁸⁴ The importance of Arabic could not be ignored—which explains the attraction to the language and its output not only in Britain but also on the continent, ranging from Thomas Erpenius’s use of Arabic to write to Bedwell—and signing his name, Touma ibn Erpin—to the three-thousand-page Lexicon Arabico-Latinum by his Dutch compatriot Jacob Golius in 1653.⁸⁵

Earlier, in 1645, the Maronite priest, Abraham Ecchellensis/Ibrahīm al-Ḥaqilānī, published his Concilii Nicaeni Praefatio in which he showed how Arabic texts had preserved much that had been lost in Latin and Greek and that the “Oriental tradition is much stronger” than the Western one regarding accuracy in church records and history.⁸⁶ Al-Ḥaqilānī corrected the errors of scholars ranging from Nicholas of Cusa to Cardinal Bellarmin who, ignorant of Arabic, had mistakenly understood a number of Qur’ānic verses as urging Muslims to worship the Prophet.⁸⁷ Like his fellow Maronites, Jibrā’īl al-Ṣuhyūnī/Gabriel Sionita and Yūḥanna al-Ḥaṣrūnī/John Hesronita, al-Ḥaqilānī introduced Arabic writings about Islam to Christian European readers. Such emphasis on the value of the Arabic legacy was confirmed by an Egyptian Copt by the name of “Yusuf al-Misri al-Gibti” who coedited, and published in 1672 through the Sheldonian press in Oxford, a huge tome of early church council resolutions. Stubbe referred to al-Gibti in Originall (fol. 116).⁸⁸

The Christian Arabic writers were a great discovery to Stubbe. “It is certain,” Stubbe wrote, “that the Christians which lived under the Mahometans, as Elmacin & others, do mention Mahomet w^th great respect as Mahomet of glorious Memory, and Mahumetes sup quo pax & benedictio”—unlike the European “others” who see in him the “Antechrist” (fol. 118). Stubbe determined that the study of the beginnings of Islam should be conducted through sources written in the language of Islam and by writers belonging to the world of Islam. But, for a non-Arabic reader, there were no Latin translations of Islamic history and theology by Muslim authors. Although there were numerous geographical, alchemical, and medical treatises by Muslim writers that were available in Arabic and in Latin translation, there were no oriental sources on the Prophet Muḥammad available in Latin other than the chronicles by the Christian Arabic authors. These writers described the prophetic calling of Muḥammad without the kind of vituperation that dominated medieval and early modern Euro-Christian writings. While an uninformed writer like Samuel Purchas could well believe that a “Christian Arabian” would attack the “words and Phrases” of the Qur’ān,89 Stubbe realized that the Christian Arabic writers had no reason to calumniate Muḥammad who was a “great Honorer of Isa so he [Muḥammad] alwaies express’d a great Reverence for them, And ’tis concerning them that he Sayes that Isa their prophet shall save them in the last day” (fol. 114) Since Muḥammad respected Christ, the Christians living among the Muslims respected Muḥammad, who in turn respected them. “That the Arabian Xtians were men of just Strict deportm^t appears from hence, that Mahomet Saith of them that one might safely intrust them w^th any sume of money they would restore it again” (fol. 114–15).⁹⁰

And so Stubbe turned to these Christian Arabic authors, all of whom drew on a non-Latin tradition of Christian history and, in two cases, non-Chalcedonian. These authors were the following—in the order of their seventeenth-century appearance in print:

Sionita (1577–1648) was a Maronite priest from Lebanon who had studied in Rome at the Maronite College (est. 1584), and later moved to France. Together with a fellow Maronite, Yūḥanna al-Ḥaṣrūnī (d. 1626), he translated the abridged geography of al-Idrīsī (d. 1166) which had been published in Arabic in Rome (1592). Their translation appeared in Paris in 1619, confusedly entitled Geographia nubiensis.⁹¹ They then added a treatise, “De Nonnvllis Orientalivm Vrbibvs, Nec non indigenarvm Religione ac moribus tractatus brevis,” of sixteen short chapters about oriental religions and mores as well as about cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, “De Bochara Avicenna patria,” Mecca and Medina, along with their native Lebanon and its Maronite patriarchate. They relied, as they stated, on a number of Muslim scholars, notably Muḥammad ibn Qāsim (whom Stubbe often mentions). They included descriptions of the theology and culture of Islam: thus the chapters on the “origo, fraus, dominium, sepulchrum, vxores, liberi, socij”/origin, fraud, rule, tomb, wives, children, allies of Muḥammad, on the Jacobite and Nestorian heresies in the east (and the Greek “schisma”), and on the funerary rites of Muslims and Christians.⁹²

Sionita and Hesronita’s description of Muḥammad was hostile: perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given that their book was published in Paris under royal auspices, “Summa Priuilegij.”93 But the two authors expressed great pride in the Arabic language and the intellectual legacy that had been developed throughout Islamic history, in “philosophiae, Medicinae, Astrologiae, legum, [and] Rhetorices.”⁹⁴ They recorded the names of many great historical figures who had flourished and written in Arabic. What is significant is that they mixed Muslim with Christian Arabic writers without distinguishing them. Thus there were Muslims such as “philosophi nobilissimi, Auerroes, Algazeles, Abū-Becr, Alfarabius” as well as Christians, such as “Abu-Zaid Ben-Honain, qui Euclidem in Arabicam linguam translutit, & Thabet Ben-Corra, qui eundem Euclidem à, multis mendis correxit, atque commentariis anno ab Hegyra 282 illustrauit”/who [corrected?] many mistakes from this same Euclid and showed in his commentaries it was the 282nd year after the Hijra. The Lebanese authors presented the two groups of writers as part of the intellectual legacy to which they belonged, and which they were eager to present to their European coreligionists.⁹⁵ Two decades later, in 1641, and in line with the Maronites’ eagerness to present Arabic learning to European readers, Ibrahim al-Ḥaqilāni translated and published in Paris Synopsis propositorum sapientiae Arabum philosophorum.⁹⁶ He dedicated the book to Cardinal Richelieu.

In 1630 Sionita translated from Arabic into Latin a short text that had been brought to Europe by the Capuchin Pacifique Scaliger: al-‘Ahd wa-l-shurūṭ al-latī sharra‘ahā Muḥammad rasūl Allah li-ahl al-milla al-nuṣrāniyya/Testamentum et pactiones initae inter Mohamedem et Christianae fidei cultores (Paris, 1630, reprinted in 1638 and 1655).97 It consisted of treaties between the early Muslim armies and the Christians of the Byzantine East. Interestingly, in his translation Sionita used the phrase “Mahomedem Apostolum Dei”/Muḥammad the Apostle of God (which was removed by the printer from the title page), and he opened with “Mahomedes à Deo missus ad omnes homines erudientos”/Muḥammad sent by God to instruct all mankind. Nevertheless, the treaties were not about the Prophet, but about the history of Islamic protection of Christians during the early conquests, a protection that had allowed for the continuity of Christian society in the Islamic polity. Stubbe, who mentioned Sionita in the Originall, specifically referred to those treaties because they supported the view that Islam did not spread by the sword and that Muḥammad had made a place for the Jews and the Christians within the bounds of his “dominion”: “There is extant a Compact or League betwixt Mahomet & the Xtians, published in France by Gabriel Sconita & reprinted by Johannes Fabricius a Dantzicker, w^ch. is by him afirmed to be mostAuthentick, & mention’d by Selden tho Grotius takes it to be but a figment of the Xtians, that they might gain favour w^th the Moselmen” (fol. 110). Significantly, Stubbe did not accept the authenticity of the treaties, judging them “Suppositious” (which scholars also question today).⁹⁸ But he saw that they confirmed the spirit expressed in the Qur’ān which contained “Sundry passages … wherein he [Muḥammad] permits the unbelievers to hold their own religion, & declares that every of them [sic] Jew Xtian or other might bee Saved if he hold that there was one God Creator, a day of Judgem^t.. & lived justly & uprightly” (fol. 110). Notwithstanding the dubious history of those treaties, Stubbe wanted his English readers to consult them, which is why he directed them to the English translation in Paul Rycaut’s “Relacion of the Turkish Governm^t l. 2, c.2” (fol. 110). Like his mentor Pococke, Stubbe admired Sionita (whom Pococke had met in Paris),⁹⁹ and he relied heavily on al-Idrīsī’s geography for information about Arabia.¹⁰⁰ But Sionita and Hesronita remained less useful to his project than other Christian Arabic writers who had belonged to non-Catholic backgrounds: al-Makīn, who was a Copt, Ibn al-Baṭrīq, who was a Melkite, and Abū al-Faraj, who was a Jacobite. Importantly for Stubbe, these writers had been part of Islamic society in the medieval East, and it was in the Eastern traditions of Christianity, which had developed their own and differing theologies, that Stubbe met with a view of Muḥammad that was found nowhere else in Western Christian thought. Specifically, from al-Makīn and Abū al-Faraj Stubbe was able to compile an account of the last ten years in the life of the Prophet—the first ever in English to present the battles, strategies, and negotiations of Muḥammad, with considerable admiration.

Al-Makīn (ca. 1205–73) was the author of Tārīkh al-Muslimīn/History of the Muslims, which had been translated into Latin by Thomas Erpenius, the Dutch orientalist (who had been introduced to Arabic studies by William Bedwell), and published in 1625 in Leiden as Historia Saracenica, the “first historical work in Arabic to be published in Europe.”101 Al-Makīn wrote a history of the world, starting with the creation, and ending with the accession to power of the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Baybars, in 1260. In the Latin translation Erpenius did not include the parts preceding the life of the Prophet Muḥammad and began his text with his birth,¹⁰² giving the subtitle (which is not al-Makīn’s) as Res Gestae Mvslimorvm, a inde Mvhammede primo Imperij & Religionis Muslimicae auctore. Al-Makīn stated at the outset that he followed the account of the Prophet by al-Ṭabarī, the ninth-century historian whose Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk/History of Messengers and Kings was, and remains, one of the most important histories of early Islam. As Pococke wrote, al-Ṭabarī was thiqat fī naqlihi wa tārīkhihi/an authority in his historical writings.¹⁰³ What is striking is that al-Makīn’s section on the Prophet is not very long, but it was intensively quoted by Stubbe, as also by Pococke, John Gregory, and Johann Hottinger.¹⁰⁴ Al-Makīn’s work was a standard reference among scholars from Oxford to Basel.

Erpenius opened his translation of al-Makīn’s account by keeping the Islamic invocation, “In nomine Dei misericordia miseratoris” an opening that Christian Arabic writers sometimes used.¹⁰⁵ Adopting the words from Islam, al-Makīn found no problem in proclaiming with his fellow Arabic-speaking Muslims the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Al-Makīn then turned in the first chapter to the “Primus Muslimorum Imperator”/the first emperor of the Muslims, with Erpenius oddly translating the plural umarā’ as the singular “Imperator,” a word that has no Arabic root, about “Muhammed Abūlcasimus, gloriose memorie”/of glorious memory, a close but not literal translation of ṣalla Allah ‘alayhi wa sallam (Muḥammad was known as Abū Qāsim). Al-Makīn continued with information about the life of the Prophet, emphasizing famous events mentioned in al-Ṭabarī about “nativitatem ejus, genealogiam, & res gestas, donee fugit Medinam: deinde autem bella ejus, & victorias, omnemque fortunam, donee é vita excessit”/his nativity, genealogy, and other events leading to his flight from Mecca: then his wars and victories, and all the fortunes of his life, until his death.¹⁰⁶ It was Muḥammad, according to al-Ṭabarī, and al-Makīn repeated unreservedly, who first revealed the religion of Islam/azhara dīn al-Islam: “Religionem Islamisimi … primum manifestavit & observavit.” Notwithstanding his Christian faith, al-Makīn carefully described the prophetic calling of Muḥammad, confirming how Khadīja, the Prophet’s wife, had been first to accept his prophethood, “Prima in prophetiam ejus credidit Chadiga”/Khadīja was the first to credit him with prophecy.

Al-Makīn used the Hijri calendar, and only sometimes the Coptic calendar (starting in AD 284), and he took the side of the “Arabs” as he described their wars with the Byzantines. Such commitment on the part of al-Makīn to Islamic history did not surprise Stubbe: al-Makīn had been “Secretary of State to one of their [Muslim] Princes” (fol. 110), and early in his life he had commanded Muslim armies in Egypt and Syria. Al-Makīn confirmed for Stubbe that the Prophet “was, God’s prayer and peace on him well mannered, gentle in speech. He visited his companions as they visited him, and he kissed their faces as they kissed his. He consoled the weak and praised the strong and was compassionate to the poor, and whoever asked him for anything, received what the Prophet could give him, or received a helpful word.”107 Of the Arabic Christian writers, al-Makīn furnished Stubbe with the longest, and most “Islamic,” perspective on the Prophet. Towards the end of Originall where Stubbe turned to a year-by-year life of the Prophet after the Hijra, he followed al-Makīn’s chronology and description (as did Pococke and Hottinger, too).

Very important for Stubbe was the history of the Christian community during the early years of Islam. Al-Makīn emphasized how favorable the Prophet was to the Christians of Arabia who came to see him: “A dignitary from among the Christians came to him [the Prophet], so he stood up to welcome and host him. They asked him about that [his action] to which he replied ‘Treat well the Copts of Egypt, for you have relatives from among them’ [since one of his wives was a Copt]. And he said, ‘He who mistreats a dhimmī will be punished on the day of judgment.’ And he said, ‘He who hurts a dhimmī hurts me.’”¹⁰⁸ The Arabic text missed a few prepositions in the printing, which may explain why the translation into Latin omitted some words. Also the Latin added some marginalia that did not appear in the Arabic, although they served to emphasize Muḥammad’s protectiveness of Christians: “Affectus Muhamadis erga Christianos.” In his Originall, Stubbe echoed those views about the treatment of Christians, because he found the information about the Prophet’s openness to Christians (and to Jews) very important in the context of his presentation of Islam:

Ibn al-Baṭrīq (877–940) was the author of annals of the Church of Alexandria, Kitāb al-Tārīkh al-Majmū‘. A short selection about the history of the Alexandrian patriarchs had been translated by John Selden and published in a bilingual Arabic and Latin text, with copious notes, in London in 1642 (the first substantial Arabic printing in England).109 Selden, “the chief of learned men reputed in this land,” as John Milton described him in Areopagitica (1644), urged his friend Pococke to translate the whole text because it was “considered by learned Men abroad [Erpenius and Casaubon] as a very useful Work.”¹¹⁰ Pococke did not agree since he viewed the history as unreliable; still, he went ahead and in 1654 produced a translation of Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini Annalium, followed by another edition with the title Nazm al-Jawhar/Contextio gemmarum, sive, Eutychii patriarchae Alexandrini annales (Oxford, 1656).¹¹¹ Another Oxford edition appeared in 1658/59.¹¹²

Sa‘īd ibn al-Baṭrīq was an Egyptian Melkite and patriarch of Alexandria. Disagreeing with Pococke, Stubbe viewed him as a “Historian of good Credit” (fol. 31), perhaps echoing Selden, who had described Ibn al-Baṭrīq as the “Egyptian Bede.”113 Ibn al-Baṭrīq’s history covered the time from Adam to AD 938, with specific focus on the Christian Eastern (in his case, Egyptian) communities and their encounters with the expanding empires of the Persians, the Byzantines, and the Muslims. Although he had little to say about the Prophet Muḥammad—but always added words of praise whenever he mentioned him—he started the history of the rise of Islam with reference to the migration to Yathrib/Medina, correctly recognizing the historical decisiveness of that event. He summarized the lives of the first four caliphs and later dynasties, focusing in great detail on the actions of the second caliph ‘Umar, since it was during his reign that pivotal contacts with Christians occurred.

Ibn al-Baṭrīq described the many theological controversies that had bedeviled Christian history. After all, as the brief biography stated, he had lived at a time of much “dissidia”/conflicts.¹¹⁴ He then described the confrontations between the Monophysites and the Melkites and the plots and collusions of bishops and patriarchs as they vied for ecclesiastical office and doctrinal supremacy. Stubbe quoted him: “Ismael Ibn Ali a Mahometan Historian, that at the Nicene Council in the 20th year of the Raign of Constantine there were assembled 2048. Bishops out of wch he Chose 318. … It is granted by ye Orientall Historians of the Church that Such a Number of Bishops was sumoned as the Mahometans specify, So Saith Eutychius & Josephus an Egyptian Presbyter in his preface to the Arabick version of the Councils” (fol. 116). In his attempt to learn about the beginning of Islam, Stubbe was turning to historians other than those recognized in the Western Latin legacy. The fact that those historians were Christians of the Arabic tradition gave him ammunition for his argument: that the forgeries on which some church doctrines had been based can be exposed by the Christian historians who had lived among the Muslims. Ibn al-Baṭrīq showed how the divisions, disputations, and conflicts among the various Christian communities were resolved by Constantine’s imperial authority, resulting in the alienation of the non-Melkite Christians from the centralizing power of the Constantinople-based patriarchate.¹¹⁵ The history of Ibn al-Baṭrīq showed Stubbe the Christian doctrinal confusions that preceded, and explained, the rise of Islam—a chief argument in Originall.

Ibn al-Baṭrīq presented Stubbe with a historiography that emphasized the continuing distinctiveness of the Christians in the context of the rise and expansion of Islam. The Egyptian writer saw Christianity within the continuum of the Islamic empires (Umayyad and Abbasid)—so much so that in his writing he adopted numerous phrases and images from the Arabic of the Qur’ān.¹¹⁶ Very importantly, Stubbe found in Ibn al-Baṭrīq historical descriptions about how Christians interacted with the early Muslim conquerors: Ibn al-Baṭrīq emphasized how the Byzantines fought against the Arabs, while other Christians, including the Copts, did not.¹¹⁷ Muslim-Christian relations had been more accommodating than the battles that Stubbe witnessed during the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland: which is why he must have paused at Ibn al-Baṭrīq’s account about the peace that “Chaledo Ebn Walid”/Khālid ibn al-Walīd granted to Damascus and how much the Muslim leader tried to put an end to bloodshed.118 Most striking for Stubbe would have been the meeting between the Caliph ‘Umar and the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sofronius, and the subsequent treaty of peace: “In the Name of God Mercifull & gracious, from Omar ye Son of Alchittabi to the Inhabitants of the City Elia Security & protection is granted as to their psons Children Wives Estates. & all their Churches that they bee neither destroyed alienated nor prohibited the Xtians to resort to” (fol. 109).¹¹⁹

Ibn al-Baṭrīq presented Stubbe with information about Islamic protection of Christians and their religious holy places, institutions, and traditions. The history of Islamic conquest had set the tone for accepting the Christians and granting them “securitate ipsis & pace pacta”/security to these very people and an agreed-upon peace,¹²⁰ and although violations occurred, as Ibn al-Baṭrīq bitterly noted, Christian life continued—as the thirteenth-century Christmas sermon published in Arabic and in Latin in 1656 showed. The beautiful Arabic and the rhyming prose of the “Homile in Natalem Chrsiti” by “Petre Sancto, Catholico, Patriarcha. D. Elia Tertio, vulgo dicta Ibn Hadit” was lost on Stubbe, but the translation conveyed a deep emotional intensity on the part of the celebrant and his congregation—all of whom were living in the midst of the Islamic polity.¹²¹

Abū al-Faraj (1226–86), author of Tārīkh mukhtaṣar al-duwal/A Short History of Dynasties, was so respected in his Muslim society that although “Christianus erat,” wrote Edward Pococke, “à quo tamen didicerunt multi è Muslemorum eximiè doctis”/although he was a Christian, many of the fuḍalā’ al-Muslimīn/the dignitaries of the Muslims revered his work.122 He was of “the Sect of the Jacobites,” wrote Humphrey Prideaux in 1697, “an Author of eminent note in the East, as well among Mahometans as Christians.”¹²³ From Gregorios/Abū al-Faraj/Ibn al‘Ibri/Bar Hebraeus, Edward Pococke had published a translation of thirty pages in 1650: Specimen historiae Arabvm: sive, Gregorii Abul Farajii Malatiensis, de Origine & Moribus Arabum (Oxford), to which he added over two hundred pages of dense notes, producing a scholarly compendium about early Islam. Over a decade later, Pococke translated the whole book, Historia compendiosa dynastiarvm authore Gregorio Abul-Pharajio (Oxford, 1663), which was reproduced in 1672 under the title of Historia Orientalis: Authore Gregorio Abul-Pharajio (Oxford).¹²⁴

Abū al-Faraj included a historically balanced description of the life of the Prophet Muḥammad, confirming for Stubbe the traditional Islamic narrative about birth, parentage, marriage, flight, and consolidation of the Islamic polity. Abū al-Faraj lived in Aleppo for some time, supported in his bid for the patriarchate by the Damascus-based al-Mālik al-Nāṣir. In 1258 Hulago attacked Aleppo, and so Abū al-Faraj was sent to implore him to spare the city. Hulago did not heed him. After witnessing the horrors of conquerors, he, like the other Christian Arabic writers, realized how benevolent Islamic rule had been and therefore, in his history, conveyed a respectful view of Muḥammad, “Author Legis Islamitica Mohammed Ebn Abdallah.”¹²⁵ And so, like al-Makīn, he opened his volume with the Islamic invocation, “In nomine Dei Miseratoris Misericordes” and then, as he recounted the life of the Prophet, he mentioned the famous episode from the Sīra/biography about the monk Bahīrā, who declared that the boy Muḥammad would be famous all around the world: “In the future, he said, this boy will enjoy greatness, and his fame will spread in east and west, for when he arrived here, a cloud covered him with its shade.”¹²⁶ Quite striking a few lines later were the words that Abū al-Faraj used regarding the prophetic revelation: “azhara al-da’wa,”¹²⁷/“prophetae munus sibi arrogavit”—the same verb that had been used by al-Makīn, “azhara.”¹²⁸ Two pages later Abū al-Faraj cited the words of Abū Sufyān to ‘Abbās after Muḥammad’s entry into conquered Mecca in 630. Abū Sufyān, the erstwhile enemy, converted to Islam in order to save his life, and when he saw the armies of Muḥammad he turned to the Prophet’s uncle, ‘Abbās, who had also initially opposed him and told him: “‘Your nephew has become a great king.’ To which the uncle replied, ‘Be quiet [wayḥak], it is Prophecy’/‘Imo vero, Prophetia est.’ And he replied, yes. Respondit ille, ‘Esto igitur.’”¹²⁹

Like the other writers, Abū al-Faraj did not question the prophetic role of Muḥammad. After all, Muḥammad was nearly taken by his followers to be buried in Jerusalem, “locum scil.in quo sepulti essent Prophetae”/where prophets are buried.130 This Arabic admission, coupled with the history of inter-Christian rivalries which Abū al-Faraj described, produced in Stubbe the conviction that the Christianity which Muḥammad encountered had been corrupted and corrupt: that is why Stubbe compared the Qurayshites to the Sadducees (fol. 69), and the early Muslim victims of Qurayshite persecution to the early Christian martyrs. As Jesus sought to “reform” Judaism (a verb that Stubbe used consistently), so did Muḥammad seek to correct the errors of the Jews and the Christians.¹³¹ And to protect them: “the Christians who had been so persecuted by Cosros & finding their Condition very uncertain among the Arabians according to the humours or interests of the Government were very Glad of his [Muḥammad] rise & magnified his undertaking” (fol. 66).

No other seventeenth-century writer about Islam or about the Prophet Muḥammad used the Arabic Christian writings in the informative manner that Stubbe did. Neither great poets like Milton or Dryden, nor great theologians like Barrow, Baxter, Tillotson, nor travel writers like Rycaut and Maundrell, nor historians of comparative religion like Pagitt and Ross were willing to give credit to the Arabic historians—even though their works had been edited, translated, and published. On the contrary, even those who are known to have read the Arabic/Latin sources persisted in their hostility to Islam. Thomas Smith, who read Ibn al-Baṭrīq and Abū al-Faraj, attacked Islam violently in his Remarks upon the manners, religion and government of the Turks (London, 1678; Latin versions in 1672 and 1674); Lancelot Addison, an Anglican clergyman, who wrote about Morocco after serving as chaplain in Tangier, and who mentioned al-Makīin and Abū al-Faraj, produced a vicious biography of the Prophet in 1679, as did Humphrey Prideaux, bishop of Durham, in 1697, whose The True Nature of Imposture fully display’d in the Life of Mahomet (London, 1697) was a vitriolic attack on the Prophet, notwithstanding Prideaux’s reading and quoting of the Arabic writers.

The Arabic/Latin texts demonstrate that there was a scholarly body of writings in the seventeenth century in England and on the continent that diverged markedly from the negative representation of Muḥammad and Islam. These writings could have played a significant role in disaggregating hostile representations and in furnishing new information based on fresh scholarship. But only Henry Stubbe turned to those texts that drew “on the narration of the Mahometans or Arabick Xtians” and not on “the European Xtians” (fol. 121) and rewrote the history of Islam. By giving credence to the Christian Arab writers, Stubbe brought them to the center of Islamic-Christian history, making them indispensable interlocutors who challenged Western historiography and the Western canon.

At the end of Originall there is a crossed out paragraph in which Stubbe showed how God could not have expected believers to subscribe to such an “impossible” doctrine of “Father the Son & the Holy Spirit” (fol. 142). Stubbe was thinking in terms of the Qur’ānic Jesus whom he met in numerous texts against Islam. But as was his wont, Stubbe selected from these attacks the information that supported his point of view: that Jesus was historically closer to the Qur’ānic portrait than to the theological doctrine that had developed around him in the Christian church. In this context of an anti-Trinitarian Jesus, the originality of Stubbe becomes striking: while his contemporary John Milton was writing his De Doctrina Christiana and invoking Christian history in his defense of a nonincarnational Jesus, and while Socinians appealed to “reason,” Stubbe turned to Islamic sources for support.

One writer whom Stubbe read carefully in regard to the figure of Jesus in the Qur’ān was Levinus Warner and his Compendium Historicum Eorum quae Mahummednai de Christo (1648).¹³² Warner wrote to challenge the Muslim view of Christ (the title continues, Et praecipuis aliquot religionis Christianae capitibus tradiderunt/They relate in particular chapters some things [about] Christian religious practice), but still, he gave a detailed description of the “Muslim” Jesus: the meaning of his name, the virginity of his mother, his disciples/al-ḥuwariyyūn, his prophetic lineage from Abraham, and the conundrum of his execution—all from passages in the Qur’ān. Using an Arabic text of the Qur’ān (alongside a Latin translation), and focusing on the verses that dealt with Jesus and the naṣārā/Christians, Warner “amass’d abundance of Testimonys of some Mahometan Doctors, who make honourable mention of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as the Dutch orientalist, Adrian Reeland, explained over half a century later.¹³³

In his address to the reader, Warner stated that although the Qur’ān rejected the Christology of Jesus, it did not reject his prophetic/messianic role in history. Warner did not accept the refutations of the divinity of Jesus that appear in the Qur’ān and in other Muslim sources, but in presenting those refutations he emphasized how the Qur’ān still recognized that Jesus was “natus non sit, nisi solo Dei verbo”/was not born except by the word of God alone. Warner also linked the annunciation to Mary that appears in the Sura of ‘Imrān (“ô Maria, Deus tibi annunciate VERBUM suum: nomen eius Christus”/O Mary, God announces to you His word, whose name is Christ) to the first verse of the Gospel of John, “In principio erat verbum/In the beginning was the word.”134 Throughout his short treatise Warner added various stories from the vast compendium of the Hadith about the ascetical piety of Jesus.¹³⁵ The Muslims had been “blind” to the doctrine of the incarnation, but they had many “vestiges” of truth regarding the prophetic role of Christ. It is from Warner, whom he mentions specifically, that Stubbe borrowed some of the sayings and proverbs of Jesus in the Originall.

Stubbe noted the high regard accorded to Jesus in the Qur’ān, and perhaps because he wanted to distance himself from the Nicene Jesus, he used the Qur’ānic name, ‘Īsa, throughout his treatise: “(So they call Jesus Christ & So I shall name him in the subsequent story)” (fol. 59). At no point did Stubbe use the name Jesus. For a scholar who was quite familiar with the apocryphal literature about Jesus in the Christian tradition, it may well be that the Hadith stories confirmed his suspicions: that the Jesus of the Arabian tradition, who found his way into the prophetic revelation in Mecca and Medina and subsequently into Islamic piety, was the nondivine figure venerated by the Christian Arabs at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. That is why, Stubbe believed, Muḥammad continued the teachings of Jesus and why the Qur’ān confirmed that “Isa was his predecessor [Muḥammad’s] & taught y^e same doctrine” (fol. 120). At the same time, Jesus spoke in language that invokes the Qur’ān: at the end of an invocation by ‘Īsa ibn Maryam that Selden reproduced in his edition of Eutychius, Jesus appeals to God in words that are Islamic in their resonance: “Neque praesice mihi eum qui non miserebitur mei, Pro misericordia tua, O Miserantissime miserescentium”/Do not send against me those who are not merciful to me, you who are most merciful and compassionate.136 Since Muḥammad did not bring a new revelation, and since the Qur’ān confirmed the original teachings of Jesus, then, concluded Stubbe, it was “but Justice to stile him a Xtian” (fol. 120).

In the vast corpus of Hadith about ‘Īsa, from the eighth century on, the unwavering emphasis of the tradition is on the poverty of Jesus, his humility and contempt of the world, his celibacy and love of God—the same Jesus whom Stubbe advocated.¹³⁷ Quite striking in this context of the Islamic ‘Īsa is Stubbe’s summary of a story that recalls Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” about the three men who found a treasure and in their greed killed each other for it. Jesus commented at the end: “Behold how these three suffered by it these are deceased & left behind what they thought to bee owners of woe unto him that seeks riches in this world” (fol. 117). Stubbe found this story in another text by Warner: Proverbiorum et sententiarum Persicarum Centuria collecta.¹³⁸ Even more striking is that it is the same story about Jesus that al-Ḥasan al-Yūsi, a contemporary jurist in Morocco (1631–1691), used.¹³⁹ The same Jesus was in the Maghrib and in Stratford-upon-Avon—and in much of Islamic piety. It is very unlikely that Stubbe knew much about the image of Jesus in contemporary Islam other than what he read in Latin translation, but it is significant that all the stories about Jesus he included in his treatise came from the Islamic tradition, with very few references to the Gospels.

So how does the Prophet Muḥammad appear in the Originall?140 Stubbe presented the first historical biography of the Prophet in English, based on the Qur’ān and on “the formal words in w^ch ye Mehometans express themselves” (fol. 127), very likely meaning the Hadith and the biography (all of which had been excerpted and discussed in the works of Selden, Pococke, Hottinger, and others). It was the first account of Muḥammad in England that was chronologically presented and not theologically argued. Stubbe ignored the hostile literary and dramatic representations of Muḥammad in European writings and concluded his treatise with a year-by-year description of events until the death and burial of the Prophet. Influenced by Hobbes and the secular view of history (as Jacob noted), Stubbe showed that Muḥammad and the beginnings of Islam should be contextualized in Arabia’s sixth/seventh-century religions and societies: thus his emphasis on continuity between many Judaic and Islamic teachings and on the fact that the military victories of Muḥammad and the consolidation of the new faith were a result of intelligent and inspired leadership, as had been the case with the Hebrew prophets. Stubbe showed that Islam made perfect sense as a religion: it was not the “scourge of God” to sinful Christians, but a continuation of revelation, a monotheism that prevailed over polytheism as a result of the Prophet’s tenacity, the “heavenly wisdom” of the revelation (fol. 70), the support of the four successors, especially his cousin ‘Ali, and the perseverance of the “Moslemin.”

From the outset, Stubbe was interested in examining how the Prophet, “a fiercely opposed” man of low social standing (“mean estate,” fol. 1), was able to transform the Arabs from tribes to empire through the power of revelation. Stubbe wanted his English readers to view the Prophet in the manner in which he had been seen by Arab Christians, who had deeply respected him. That is why the Christian Arabic writers became for Stubbe the measure of truth: whatever they did not mention, he did not accept. None of them, for instance, ever mentioned the frequently repeated “Fable” that Muḥammad had been inspired by a pigeon that he claimed as the “Holy Ghost” (fol. 121). Following Pococke, who in his notes to Specimen had rejected this allegation, or the other allegation about Muḥammad’s tomb being suspended in midair, Stubbe denounced such credulity in European writers. He also added his own insights: no pigeon, he explained, could have been trained to perch near Muḥammad’s ear without rousing the suspicion of his followers and detractors. What clinched Stubbe’s “empirical” refutation of this allegation, however, was that no “Christian of the Arabians mention it” (the pigeon) (fol. 121).

Stubbe was highly selective in his information. Although he carefully read the universal history of Marcus Boxhornius (published 1652), for instance, he picked what he thought fitting, ignoring the derogatory material that was always included in European texts about Muḥammad. Some of these denigrations included references to Muḥammad as a camel driver, poor and illiterate: “homo pauper & mercaturam exercens cum camelis,” wrote Boxhornius.141 In regard to the last, Stubbe reminded his readers of the humble backgrounds of many of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus and his carpentry. He emphasized also how the Prophet had been theologically and intellectually versatile by mentioning the journeys of Muḥammad, all the way to Egypt and Spain, regions that had not been associated with the Prophet during his lifetime.¹⁴² Given such travel and exposure, Muḥammad was not as outlandish a man as he appeared in the “great untruths” of Euro-Christian sources. Rather, added Stubbe, he was like any of the “Nobles of Venice or Genoa” (fol. 57),¹⁴³ a merchant and a traveler with acute observation. For Stubbe, these Renaissance cities were not much different from the cities of Arabia: Sionita had described Mecca as “vrbs Arabiae Matrix nobilissima,”¹⁴⁴ while Erpenius had observed in his 1613 oration on the dignity of the Arabic language that Mecca was comparable to Amsterdam “Meccam, Amsterdami nostri magnitudine emporium.”¹⁴⁵ Stubbe repeated the analogy by Erpenius.

In following this line of argument, Stubbe was using the method that his contemporary Edward Stillingfleet had used in historicizing the Prophet Moses. In Origines Sacrae or, A rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, as to the truth and divine authority of the Scriptures, and the matters therein contained (1662), the Anglican divine wrote against the skeptics who were raising questions whether a man as uncouth and unexposed as Moses could have written the Pentateuch. In chapter 2 of the second book, Stillingfleet examined the early education of Moses, emphasizing the latter’s mastery of “Mathematical, Natural, Divine, and Moral learning of Egypt, their Political wisdom most considerable.” Although there is no scriptural information to support this view, Stillingfleet emphasized that Moses was a historian and a law-giver, thereby proving the “certainty” of his writings, and the divine “truth of Scripture.”¹⁴⁶ Stillingfleet confronted the detractors who rejected the Mosaic authorship of the Scriptures in the same way that Stubbe argued against those who attacked Muḥammad’s role in the Qur’ān, and, as Stillingfleet did not doubt that the Pentateuch was the divine Scripture written by Moses, neither did Stubbe doubt that the Qur’ān consisted of “Surats” which “the angel Gabriel presently” brought him, as he had earlier brought them to “Edris Noah Abraham Ismaell Moses Isa” (fols. 100, 84).

It is in this context of approximating Muḥammad with Moses that Stubbe’s challenge to the illiteracy of the Prophet should be read. From the start, Muslim exegetes had appealed to the illiteracy of the Prophet in confirmation of the divine revelation of the Qur’ān. Stubbe mentioned this view, emphasizing that the Arabians believed him to be “Nabian Ommian, that is the illiterate prophet” (fol. 123). But Stubbe knew that European authors always used this reference to illiteracy as proof of the falsity of “Alcoran”: since Muḥammad was illiterate, writers argued, he could not but have sought help in formulating his revelation from local Jews and Christians. Since “the Author himself being no Linguist or Scholar, nay, not able to read or write,” wrote Alexander Ross in 1649, Muḥammad could not but have sought help from the Nestorian monk Sergius in formulating his “lyes and sensless follies.”147 Because Muḥammad was “illiterate,” wrote Sir William Temple contemporaneously with Stubbe, he produced “a wild Fanatick Rhapsody of his [Muḥammad’s] Visions or Dreams.”¹⁴⁸ It did not help that very few men of those who attacked the Qur’ān could read it in Arabic, but rather relied on the poor Latin translation by Robert of Ketton (in the twelfth century), the poorer translation into French by André du Ryer (in 1647), and the poorest of all translations, to English by Alexander Ross in 1649, which Stubbe denounced (fol. 139).¹⁴⁹

Nor could Stubbe read Arabic. But he was intent on refuting such accusations. And so, to turn the tables on the detractors, Stubbe argued for a literate and cultured Prophet. He did so by showing his readers that in Muslim exegesis the adjective umiyy could refer not only to illiteracy but also to Mecca, mother of the villages, “ommal koras” (fol. 123). He learned this information from the careful discussion by Pococke (which he summarized).150 But, whereas Pococke was the philologist searching for alternative meanings to umiyy, Stubbe was the polemist. Stubbe knew that illiteracy was a sine qua non in Muslim historiography, and thus, he continued, notwithstanding the Prophet’s literacy, the Qur’ān was still a revelation from God. He recalled the words in the translation of the Sūra of Yūsuf/Joseph by Erpenius earlier in the century: “per verbum Dei intelligent suam quae Coranum ipsis dicitur, & quàm Muhamed ijs persuasit coelitus ad se demissam”¹⁵¹/“by the word of God they understand their own [biblia/book], which they call the Coran and which Muḥammad persuaded them had been sent down to him from heaven.” Also, in Pococke’s Porta Mosis, Stubbe came across a reference to al-Ghazali’s discussion of Muḥammad’s “luminis prophetici”/nūr al-nubuwwa/light of prophecy.¹⁵² Stubbe concluded that, whatever the level of the Prophet’s literacy, it remained separate from authorship because the Qur’ān was “inimitable,” a word that he repeated twice in the treatise (fols. 100, 138). It was a word that recalled the description of the Qur’ān by Abū al-Faraj, “eloquentissimi,” and a doctrine that was upheld by all Muslims.¹⁵³ All the early companions of the Prophet, confirmed Stubbe, believed the “Coran” to be “derived from God” and full of “heavenly wisdom” (fols. 61, 70). Toward the end of the manuscript, Stubbe affirmed that for Muslims only what was mentioned in “the Alcoran” was foundational to Islam (fol. 140) because the Qur’ān was a “Standing Miracle” (fol. 141).

The three BL Sloane fragments are especially important in this context because they show a transformation in Stubbe’s view of the Prophet. It is quite possible that after Stubbe finished the first fragment (BL Sloane 1709, fols. 94r–115r) he circulated it among readers, who objected to his largely favorable view of the Prophet. Although he had mentioned some of the medieval falsities about Muḥammad, Stubbe had still presented an admiring portrait. So, and not untypical of Subbe, he wrote the second two fragments (BL Sloane 1786, fols. 181r–185r and 186r–190r) in response to those readers where he confronted them with a totally positive view. These latter fragments show Stubbe in an argumentative mode, sometimes reminding readers that he had already mentioned some of the discussion points earlier. Mostly, he was eager to show his readers a more accurate view of the Prophet from what he had earlier written.

Without having access to Arabic primary sources that would furnish a more accurate view, Stubbe made some mistakes in this fragment, such as claiming a Qur’ānic origin for a dialogue between Muḥammad and a Jew (fols. 81–82), which was mentioned in many of the texts he read,154 or treating Abū Bakr as the Prophet’s uncle. Eager to present a “secular” view of the Prophet, in the manner he viewed other prophets, Stubbe emphasized the personal initiative of Muḥammad and his astuteness of “designe” (fols. 63, 64, 66). But he mentioned that the Prophet had concocted prophecy (fol. 60), “intitling God and the angel Gabriel to his dictates” (fol. 65); on another occasion, he wrote of “venery” (fol. 63), although a scribe could have made a mistake in this particular case.¹⁵⁵ Such views were not uncommon among European orientalists: even the learned Hottinger, whose study of the Prophet’s history was both detailed and extensive, called Muḥammad, on every page of the printed text, the “pseudopr..” Stubbe was not immune to such views, and in this fragment there is a sense that he was still searching for a full interpretation of the Prophet. Chiefly, however, Stubbe was trying to approach Muḥammad as a historical figure: his interest was more in the religious and military achievement than in the prophetic background. What he wanted to show his readers was that Muḥammad’s actions could be perfectly understood from a historical perspective: the Prophet had been a great strategist, warrior, and negotiator, whose success lay in harnessing the power of revelation to create the Islamic polity.

Stubbe continued searching and, in the two fragments which conclude Originall, he arrived at his final view of Islam. He started by demolishing the widely held belief that Islam spread its message by the sword by referring to the Christian Arabic writers who had left important documents about Islamic history. He also brought in stories that demonstrated Islamic reverence to Jesus and he defended Muḥammad against accusations of sensuality, emphasizing the “stoical” element in Islam, as in Christianity (fol. 134). In these fragments Stubbe gives the impression that he had a list of all the criticisms that had been leveled at him—and he was refuting them, one after another. He praised Muḥammad for opposing usury, wine, and divination, and he discussed the thorny issue of the Prophet’s miracles, which were commonly ridiculed in contemporary European writings. While some believed those miracles, so much so that Abū al-Faraj referred to them,¹⁵⁶ Stubbe emphasized that the Qur’ān did not confirm them and that many Muslims rejected them because the only miracle that was to be credited to the Prophet was the Qur’ān (fols. 140–141). Earlier, Stubbe made the case for Muḥammad as a legislator superior to Moses (fol. 136) and praised him in the highest terms that a Christian writer in the seventeenth century could: in his piety before God, Muḥammad was like the historical (not theological) Jesus, for he, Muḥammad, told Christians “that such as beleived in Isa ought to live according to his pcepts with great humility piety & unconcernedness for ye pomp and Vanities of this world” (fol. 115). Stubbe then introduced a number of sayings by Jesus from the Hadith which had been preached to Christians by the Prophet (fol. 117). Perhaps thinking of this analogy between Jesus and Muḥammad, where the latter confirmed the teaching of the former, Stubbe described Muḥammad toward the end of the treatise as “a great prophet” (fol. 137)—the same phrase that described Jesus in the Gospel of Luke 7:16. No English writer had ever made that analogy—twice (fol. 61).

Nor had any writer praised the Qur’ān as did Stubbe. A contemporary such as Richard Baxter was willing to concede that “God hath made use of Mahumet as a great Scourge of Idolaters of the World,” but he had produced “an Alcoran” that was “a Rhapsody of Nonsence and Confusion.”157 Stubbe moved beyond such invective to open praise, and, having learned from Pococke that the Qur’ān was revealed in “Arabic verse,” he used the only word available to him in English, “poem,” as a translation of “surat.”¹⁵⁸ But, the “poem” was not “Nonsence”; rather, affirmed Stubbe, “God by Mahomet took a better Course by leaving to Mankind one lasting Miracle, the truth whereof should in all ages bee Satisfactory & Convincing” (fol. 138). Cognizant of the criticisms that European Christian writers leveled against the Qur’ān, he asserted: “I have often reflected upon the Excepcõns made by the Xtians ag^t t the Alcoran & find them to bee no other than what may be argued w^th y^e same strength against our bible. And what the Christians say for themselves will fully Justify the Alcoran” (fol. 139).

Interestingly, Stubbe paraphrased various verses from the Qur’ān and sometimes integrated them into his text:

That God is one God that there is none other that he hath no equall no Son nor Associate. That his Eternity hath neither beginning nor end that ’tis impossible to explain properly his Attributes and yt no intellect can comprehend the Extent of his Dominion. That contemplative Men may conjecture at his being by the daily occurents on earth, but never understand his Essence. That ye Heavens are his Throne, the Earth his footstool, but that the Governmt. of both is no trouble to him: That he is Omnipotent Omniscient Omnipresent, who sits upon the Universall Throne by his Essence, & by his Understanding penetrates into all things: That his providence disposeth of all Affairs below, neither doth any thing fall out not the Corn grow not the Grass wither but according to the Decrees of his eternall pdestination That whatsoever Man doth ascribe to him or imagine to bee in him it is eternall, & those attributes do not argue any Composition or istinction [of] {in} his being: That all things in this World good or evill befall us according to his Will: that the beginnings progress & Conclusion of all Emergencies depend absolutely upon him: and that he determined from all Eternity whatsoever should come to pass, That his knowledge extends to the deepest Secrets, That nothing happens agt or not according to his pleasure, that in all Matters to think to Will to do depends upon him. That the Souls of Men are imortall, That those who are pserved by Faith & the intercession of the Apostles of God, Moses Isa Mahomet from Sin) do upon death live in happyness untill ye resurrection & day of Judgemt that those who are more or less wicked, must in the Grave in a kind of Purgatory undrgo some torments until the last day and there wth more or less difficulty they shall be Saved, but that nothing of Evil how little soever shall escape unpunished nor any thing of good how small soever pass unrewarded.

This is the Sum of the Mahometan Religion.

(Fol. 129)

Stubbe’s description of ‘Ali is both fascinating and unusual: fascinating because Stubbe dramatized the activities of ‘Ali during the initial stages of Islam’s development, a dramatization that recalls the ‘Ali of the Morisco warrior saga of the sixteenth century.¹⁶⁰ Stubbe was also unusual because he described the Prophet’s cousin without associating him with Persia and its tradition of Shi‘ism—the theological and political locus for ‘Ali. Pococke included some notes about Shi‘ism and the concept of the imamate in his notes to Specimen, and in the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1670) Paul Rycaut wrote about “Mahomet and Hali, that is, the Turk and the Persian.”¹⁶¹ But Stubbe ignored such references which dominated English plays, chronicles, and travelogues as he ignored the supposed rivalry in prophetic calling that some writers claimed between the two cousins.¹⁶² Actually, Stubbe’s ‘Ali united Muslims—and ignited in them the spirit of religious unity to fight their enemies: the Byzantines and the Sassanids. ‘Ali was not the divider between Turk and Persian, but the pan-Islamist calling on all Muslims to confront those who had subjugated them: “lett us not live devided under more petty princes then we have tribes lett us all unite into one monarchy as we are all of one language and one parentage we are all ageien’s all Ismaellites the Same Hegira will suite with all the Same Crescents is our comon Standard” (fol. 86).

An important influence on Stubbe’s view of ‘Ali was Pococke, who had found in ‘Ali “a man of such account with that impostor [Mahomet], not only for his valour, but knowledge too, that he was wont to declare, that if all the learning of the Arabians were destroyed, it might be found again in ‘Ali, as in a living library.”163 Earlier, Sionita had also praised ‘Ali, “simul cum Mohamede Moslemannica lege fuit imbutus, quam ob causam saepe dicere solebat, ego sum primus Moslemannus”/‘Ali was instructed in Muslim law with Muḥammad, for which reason he was accustomed to say often, ‘I am the first Muslim.’¹⁶⁴ And also al-Makīn:

Abū al-Faraj mentioned the story about ‘Ali carrying the gates of Khaybar,¹⁶⁶ while Hottinger listed the miracles associated with ‘Ali: “ei multa miracula tribuunt.”¹⁶⁷ In 1651 the work of Ibn al-Rāhib was published in Latin in Paris by Hesronita. Ibn al-Rāhib, another Jacobite Arabic writer of the thirteenth century (a contemporary of al-Makīn), wrote a history that was translated as Chronicon Orientale. In describing the rise of Islam, after having written about the Rūm and others, Ibn al-Rāhib presented a chronology of events, starting with the migration of the Prophet, but with only a few words about Muḥammad. Although Ibn al-Rāhib was noncommittal about Muḥammad, he praised Abū Bakr as a pious ascetic, renouncing worldly pleasures and taking from the treasury only three dirhams per day. ‘Ali, however, received the highest praise; he was a man contemptuous of worldly things, dedicated to the free bestowal of alms, and a fierce advocate of his religion.¹⁶⁸

This image of ‘Ali holding the world in contempt was repeated by Stubbe: “Aly … had a contempt for the world it’s glory & pomp, he feared God much gave many Alms” (fol. 60). But the ‘Ali of the Originall is much more than the model of a God-fearing man. Stubbe turned for information about ‘Ali to Adam Olearius, who had traveled between 1633–1639 to Moscow/Russia and Isfahan/Persia as part of a commercial mission. During his travels Olearius learned about the meanings and histories of Shi‘ite rituals, especially “Auschur, or solemn Feast, in memory of Haly, their great Saint and Patron,”169 which he described with a high degree of accuracy. Because Olearius had read al-Makīn, he drew a line of demarcation between the historical ‘Ali and the ‘Ali of Persian veneration—a line that Stubbe also observed. “Aly,” wrote Olearius, “did not change anything in the Alcoran, and though he gave several Interpretations to the words of Mahomet, and explicated the sense of his Law, yet did he submit to his Authority, where it was clear, and where the Text admitted no explication, in so much that this occasion’d no change in the Religion.”¹⁷⁰ In similar vein, Stubbe confirmed ‘Ali as a fellow fighter with Muḥammad against the idolaters. Even the Turks, noted Olearius, acknowledged ‘Ali “a near Kinsman of Mahomet’s, that he is truly an Imam, or Saint, and that he led a very exemplary life; and particularly that he was valiant.”¹⁷¹

‘Ali also came to Stubbe’s attention through his proverbs in the collection of his works by al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (AD 970–1015), later known as Nahj al-Balāgha. The proverbs are in the hundreds, and in 1629 Jacob Golius published a selection of them in Arabic without a Latin translation: Shadhra min kalām ‘al-‘Arab ayy ba‘ḍ amthāl ‘Ali al-khalīfa/Proverbia quaedam Alis, imperatoris Muslimici. Golius treated the proverbs as moralistic aphorisms, without theological content, and so he presented them to readers as part of the wisdom of the “imperator” of Araby. His publication may have been instrumental in alerting Pococke to the importance of ‘Ali. As the 1740 biography of Pococke by Leonard Twells shows, the Oxford Arabist became deeply interested in the proverbs: “The book, which he first undertook to read on, was the Proverbs of Ali, the fourth Emperor of the Saracens, and the cousin german and son-in-law of Mahomet: a man of such account with that impostor, not only for his valour, but knowledge too, that he was wont to declare, that if all the learning of the Arabians were destroyed, it might be found again in Ali, as in a living library.”¹⁷² Pococke translated many proverbs, and, soon after his appointment to the chair of Arabic at Oxford in 1636, he lectured on them¹⁷³—although he did not publish the translation, nor did another later translator, Thomas Smith.¹⁷⁴ But a large number of these proverbs were included by Hottinger in Historia Orientalis under headings such as piety, humility, patience, justice, and others.¹⁷⁵ Stubbe knew Hottinger’s work well and may have been thinking of him when he referred to the proverbs in his manuscript: “Mahometan sayings having some of them ascribed unto Aly” (BL Harleian 1876, fol. 133).

Stubbe realized that ‘Ali, unlike Muḥammad, whose prophetic revelation could prove objectionable to his readers, would not provoke a kneejerk reaction from worried Christians. Stubbe thus turned to ‘Ali as a “neutral” medium by which to present Islam. In the rather long speeches that Stubbe put in the mouth of ‘Ali in Originall, the echoes of the proverbs ring clear: If you prefer the next world to this one, you win; friendliness in a face is a second beauty; reliance on God is enough; the ornament of men is their civility; belligerence in a man will destroy him; fear of God clears the heart; the best wealth is that which is spent for God; and many others. ‘Ali became Stubbe’s mouthpiece of Islam: where Muḥammad was the political and prophetic leader, ‘Ali was the commentator and teacher. He was the pious observer who accepted the revelation to his cousin and eloquently propagated it.

‘Ali continued to attract orientalists long after Stubbe’s death. In 1717, a selection of ‘Ali’s proverbs was translated and published by the professor of Arabic at Cambridge, Simon Ockley: Sentences of Ali Son-in-Law of Mahomet (London). Ockley had great admiration for the Arabic legacy and repeatedly denounced his countrymen for their ignorance of that legacy. “What we here present the Reader with,” he wrote in his preface to the translation, “is a little Collection of Wise Sentences, calculated for the Direction of a Man’s Conduct in Affairs of the greatest Consideration, and are of the same Nature as the Proverbs, and Ecclesisasticus. / / They are called the Sentences of Ali the Son of Abu Taleb. The whole Book is, as near as I can guess, not much less than our New Testament.” As an Arabic scholar, however, Ockley was aware that ‘Ali had not been the author of all the proverbs. Still, he explained, the proverbs are important because even if ‘Ali had just collected them, he was a contemporary of the Prophet Muḥammad. He concluded: “The Sentences are full, and to the Purpose: They breathe a Spirit of pure Devotion, Strictness of Life, and express the greatest Gravity, and a most profound Experience in all the Affairs of Human Life. … There is enough [in the Sentences], even in this little Handful, to vindicate, in the Judgment of any Man of Sense, the poor injured Arabians, from the Imputation of that gross Ignorance fastned upon them by Modern Novices.”176

It was an imputation that Stubbe had rejected in his Originall, and, in presenting a devout, heroic, committed, and decisive ‘Ali, Stubbe showed his admiration for the man most closely associated with the Prophet Muḥammad and the rise of Islam. ‘Ali’s was a piety that continued to be admired by English orientalists: George Sale, in his commentary on Sura 76, mentioned the abstinence and poverty of ‘Ali, who did not have enough provisions at home to fulfill a vow to God after his children, Hasan and Hussayn, were cured of sickness.177 Edward Gibbon, impressed with Ockley’s translation, wrote that ‘Ali “united the qualifications of a poet, a soldier, and a saint: his wisdom still breathes in a collection of moral and religious sayings; and every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour.”¹⁷⁸ Their views were in line with the writings of Henry Stubbe, the first English writer to “fancy Aly.”

Many Euro-Christians who visited, or did not visit, the Ottoman Empire wrote about the plight of the Christian minorities and how they were living in fear and ignorance; others expressed hostility, describing the Eastern Christians as intellectually and theologically superstitious, which is why they needed to be converted to Protestantism or Catholicism.¹⁷⁹ Stubbe quoted from Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christianae a long passage about the deplorable conditions of the Eastern Christians under “Mahomet [who had] propagated his Doctrine by the Sword” (fols. 115–116), but he did not use the London 1632 English translation perhaps because the frontispiece showed a “Turke” with a sword in his hand. The caption read: “The Turke stands with his sword in his hand, by which he defends his Religion, that sprang from Mahomet, a false Prophet, foretold in general by Christ, Mat. 24:5-24 also a halfe Moone.” The author of the preface to the 1649 translation of the Qur’ān had also invoked this treatise for exactly the same reason: that Islam was a religion of the sword.¹⁸⁰ But, unlike the author of the preface, Stubbe did not turn for his information about Eastern Christians to theologians, but to travelers such as Adam Olearius, Paul Rycaut, and Henry Blount, all of whom included descriptions of the Christian populations of the Persian and Ottoman empires in their works.¹⁸¹ Stubbe thus repudiated Grotius (who had not traveled east) by introducing into the discourse about Eastern Christians an unusual contrast: between the condition of the American Indians under the Iberians, and of other slaves whom “wee keep,” and the condition of Christians under Muslim rule.

Stubbe did not need to elaborate on the plight of the Indians or the slaves under the Spaniards; such knowledge had become widely familiar in England.182 It was usual to compare the tyranny of the Spaniards “towards the poore Indians who neuer offend them” with the tyranny of the Turks towards all “those fall into their hands.”¹⁸³ Stubbe differed, and instead he contrasted the plight of the Indians with the “Musarabick Christians”/Arabized Christians under Muslim rule in Spain, “who alwaies lived quietly & Safely under them & others in their other Kingdoms & Dominions, An inviolate Justice being preserved towards them, and tho’ the rich & potent Nobility & Rulers were destroyed or reduced to nothing w^ch was don to prevent future Rebellions.” Not only did Muslims protect Christians at the time of the early conquests by the caliphs, but also in current times, as confirmed by one of the greatest scholars of Europe, Joseph Scaliger: “Yet ’tis observed by Scaliger,” continued Stubbe, “& ’tis an assured truth that the vulgar Greeks live in a better Condiciõn undr the Turk at present then they did under their own Emperors when there were perpetuall Murders practiced on their Princes & tyranny on their people, But they are now Secure from Injury if they pay their Taxes” (fols. 109–10).¹⁸⁴ Such protection, as well as Muslim concern for Christian well-being, was not, Stubbe realized, a matter of Muslim whim but of binding Qur’ānic law. John Selden, whose De Jure Naturale et Gentium he often cited, praised Qur’ānic theology, which promised mercy and reward for the Christians: “mercedem autem ibi memoratam nuncupat ille … compensationes operum suorum.”¹⁸⁵ Stubbe concluded with a view that proved prophetic: “& ’tis more the interest of y^e princes & Nobles then of the people at present w^ch keeps all Europe from submitting to the Turks” (fol. 110). Contemporary Christian communities in Europe were being attracted to Islam, and, just a few years after Stubbe’s death, some Protestant groups supported the Turks in their attack on Vienna (1683).

The Arab and Ottoman Empires had been spread by war and the sword, but, unlike the European empires, which had also spread by war and the sword, they had not forcibly converted the native populations. Rather they had protected them. Stubbe recognized that his was the age of empires and that England might just be starting to think in such terms, especially after the celebration of England’s future glory in John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667). Christian and Muslim, Spanish and Ottoman and Persian—all had built, and were continuing to expand, empires. But where the Christian empires enslaved and deculturalized the conquered populations, the Ottoman Muslims did not. Although slavery was practiced by all empires and all religions, at least Muslims did not enslave fellow Muslims, and “the successors” of the early European empires, presumably the English, should not be casting the first stone since they deliberately prevented Indians from finding Christ in order to keep them as slaves. Though “the principles of the Xtians seem to condemn Slavery, yet in Portugall & other places, it is frequently practiced and perhaps the Xtian Laws & Customs ag^t. such usage had no higher rise then Ecclesiasticall & civil policy, which the successors have indiscretely (& not out of Conscience duly inform’d) retain’d still” (fol. 113).

Stubbe learned that the acceptance on the part of Muslims of the religious Other was an ongoing practice. In Olearius he read about Armenian Christians in the Persian Empire of the 1630s—about patriarchs and congregations, all enjoying freedom to trade, pray, and increase, walking in processions with bishops parading their crosses and banners and wearing “Pontifical Robes; with Wax-Candles in their hands.”186 Acceptance was also a matter of commonality of belief: Muslim rulers shared with their Christian subjects the expectation of the return of ‘Īsa—a messianic finale that must have resonated with the eschatological and millenarian excitement of Britons during the civil wars. Pococke, ever Stubbe’s mentor, described the signs of the end in Islamic eschatology and noted that the final moment would witness “Descensus Jesu in terram … apud turrim albam ad parté Damasci orientalem”/the descent of Jesus to earth near the white minaret east of Damascus.¹⁸⁷ It was perhaps that Islamic openness to Christ/Christians that, Stubbe observed, made European princes willing to join forces with Muslim armies and to invade Christian regions. Religion, observed Stubbe sardonically in Further iustification had never been a divisive factor when it came to the advancement of empire. “How often,” he asked rhetorically, “did the Emperours of Constantinople, the Kings of Spain and France, contract for the assistance of the Saracens against Christians?”¹⁸⁸ It was hypocritical to trade and cooperate with Muslims and then denounce their religion, or to praise their “government” but decry “Mahometanism,” as Robert South preached in his 1660 London sermon, “Ecclesiastical Policy the Best Policy: or Religion the Best Reason of State.”

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.189 It may well be that in Originall Stubbe was addressing Locke, and other proponents of toleration, as Christopher Hill argues, by writing the history of Muḥammad, a wise legislator, who had established an empire with absolute toleration.¹⁹⁰ Whether Locke read Stubbe’s treatise or not is not known, but it is significant that, thirty years after disagreeing with Stubbe over toleration, he wrote his Letter on Toleration, which became one of the cornerstones of the Enlightenment. In the Letter, and in the sequels, Locke argued for the toleration and endenization of Muslims in the Stuart monarchy—for granting Muslims (and Jews and pagans) the same status that Stubbe had so admired about Muḥammad’s toleration of Christians and Jews.¹⁹¹

Stubbe showed how long-held bigotries could be overcome by consulting indigenous sources, thereby decentering the historiographical perspective. It may well be that Stubbe shifted away from the Eurocentric sources of knowledge about Islam because he was not a clergyman. In the seventeenth century, experts on the Christian and Islamic East, with its various languages and religious communities, were ordained clergymen, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and restricted in their writings by their (Anglican) church allegiance.193 Stubbe was a physician, and in his last years he seemed to have been a successful one. And so, as he treated the maladies of patients, he turned to treat the malady of ignorance which he diagnosed, as he would have a disease, through careful examination of symptoms. On many occasions in the treatise, Stubbe used his medical knowledge to support his arguments: for him, the historian, like the physician, was to rely on research: and as the treatment of diseases did not discriminate on the basis of culture or geography, so the treatment of history. As he pored over the tomes of English Edward Pococke, Swiss Johann Hottinger and Isaac Casaubon, French Claudius Salmasius, English John Selden, Dutch Thomas Erpenius, and the chronicles of al-Makīn, ibn al-Batrīq, and Abū al-Faraj, Stubbe became the physician trying to find the cure for the disease of ignorance. It is no coincidence that the Panarion of Epiphanius, that fifth-century compendium of pre-Islamic Jewish and Christian heresies, which Stubbe constantly cited, was subtitled Contra octoginta haereses opus, Panarium, sive Arcula, aut Capsula medica appelatum/the Medicine Chest [panarion] against Heresies.

Henry Stubbe belongs to that century in English and continental history when Arab-Islamic manuscripts made an impact on European thought. They were collected, edited, translated, and integrated into early modern intellectual activity, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected, and sometimes adapted into discussions of biblical history, philosophy, philology, law, geography, and mathematics. But the Arabic/Latin histories of al-Makīn, Ibn al-Baṭrīq, and Abū al-Faraj were the first published sources about Islam to become available to non-Arabic readers in Western Europe. All previous information about Islam had derived from Greek and Latin sources, which is why these indigenous Arabic texts presented a view of Islam that was different from everything before them. Still, no English theologian or playwright, poet or Sunday preacher, translator or chronicler of world religions turned to them for an alternative view of Muḥammad and Islam in the manner Stubbe did. Perhaps it was difficult to do so: Britons of Stubbe’s generation had experienced civil wars of fierce religious polarization, massacre, and desecration, and during the Restoration period the “Great Persecution” was inflicted on the nonconformists, with draconian laws curtailing mobility, education, and livelihood. A few years after Stubbe’s death, England was gripped by the hysteria of the Popish Plot and the intimidation, false accusation, torture, and execution of Catholics. In 1682 three witches were burned.