Following the sixteenth-century Reformation, Protestant polemicists in England increasingly emphasised the corruption of the Church of Rome, and the extent to which it had abandoned the primitive purity of the early Church, which Christ had bequeathed to the Apostles. It was argued that successive popes had taken over Christ’s role as head of the Church, and that the spiritual essence of Christianity had been lost following the imposition of ceremonies, theologies and traditions of entirely human origins, which were designed simply to increase the power and wealth of the Roman clergy. Various Catholic doctrines and ceremonies came under attack from English Protestants on these grounds, including transubstantiation, auricular confession, purgatory, indulgences and prayers for the dead. In their quest for money and power, Catholic clerics were said to neglect the truth of the Gospel, and to promote countless deceitful, even sacrilegious theologies, most notably that of justification by works over justification by faith, which was said to belittle Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. In order to mask their trickery, Roman clerics were alleged to keep the laity in ignorance, partly by denying them access to the Bible in the vernacular. They were also accused of distracting the laity with rich but ultimately superficial ceremonies and images, and central to the English Protestant attack on the Church of Rome was the charge of idolatry. According to English Protestants, the papacy encouraged the worship of idols through the promotion of a cult of saints, as well as of the idea that the Eucharistic elements were transformed into the blood and body of Christ, leading to what Protestants referred to contemptuously as ‘bread worship’.

By the mid-seventeenth-century, hostility to Catholicism was therefore widespread in England, and deeply rooted within the national psyche. According to John Miller, it had been ‘embedded in the consciousness of all kinds of Protestants by generations of teaching, discussion and propaganda’, and ‘provided a reservoir of common ideas and prejudices to which Protestant polemicists could appeal.’[1] Within this context, it was not uncommon for English Protestants to use the practices and beliefs of Muslims to probe and criticise the Church of Rome. This anti-Catholic dynamic took several forms, though perhaps the most obvious was a tendency to identify similarities between the supposedly irrational religious practices and beliefs of Muslims, on the one hand, and those of Catholics, on the other. The implication in each case was clear: that much of what Catholicism entailed was distinctly non-Christian, and part of a broader continuum of religious error affecting humankind. Some of these similarities were relatively subtle. Take Edward Terry (c. 1590-1660), for instance, a Church of England cleric who served as an East India Company chaplain in Mughal India between 1616 and 1619.[2] In his Voyage to East-India, which he published in 1655, Terry observed that Muslims had ‘a set forme of prayer in the Arabian tongue, not understood by many of the common people, yet repeated by them as well as by the Moolas [mullahs]’.[3] This remark recalled a comment which Terry had made earlier in the same work, when he argued that Catholics ‘have the Truths of God sealed up in an unknown tongue [that is, Latin], to keep, and to continue them in ignorance’.[4] It also pre-empted a later remark, which Terry made in the conclusion to Voyage, that before the Protestant Reformation, English Christians had ‘[t]he book of God … sealed up from them, in an unknown tongue [again, Latin], which they could neither understand nor read, but for us at this present day, our Temples are open, we may come, our Bibles are eng[li]shed, we may read, our Pulpits frequented[,] we may heare’.[5] Some of the alleged similarities between Catholics and Muslims were more explicit, however, such as Terry’s assertion that Muslims ‘rehearse the Names of God and of their Mahomet certain times every day upon Beads, like the miss-led Papists, who seem to regard more the Number, then the weight of prayers.’[6]

Thus English Protestants frequently viewed Islam through the lens of anti-Catholicism, insofar as their understanding of and opposition to Catholicism provided them with a ready intellectual framework within which to probe and criticise Islamic worship and belief. In some ways, this is hardly surprising, given that English Protestants had generally been brought up to believe that Catholicism was the greatest existential threat to their faith, and a pre-eminent example of religious corruption, against which other forms of religious error might be measured. If historians wish to paint a more complete picture of early modern English views and particularly criticisms of Islam, they should therefore seek to more fully understand this post-Reformation English Protestant tradition of anti-Catholic tropes. In other words, we cannot hope to fully understand what the English thought of Islam in this period, without first appreciating what they thought of other forms of religious error, closer to home.

Title Image: map from A Description of East India, accessed here

[1] John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 71.

[2] https://memorients.com/articles/to-love-thy-one-true-god-and-countrey-best-edward-terrys-voyage-to-east-india-1655

[3] Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London, 1655), 271.

[4] Ibid., 117.

[5] Ibid., 486, recte 516.

[6] Ibid., 271–72.