In the context of the Reformation, the Muslim figure was used as an emblem of infidelity by Protestants to qualify Catholics, and by Catholics to refer to Protestants: “‘Turkishness,’ as a metaphor to define ‘evil,’ was widely used in Protestant propaganda”^[1] (Barin 2010, 38). Using Mahomet as a racist rhetorical device^[2] seems to first appear with the premature Reformation of the Lollards[3]:“Around 1378, John Wycliffe, in affirming the primacy of scripture, had argued that Mahomet had polluted the Bible for his own carnal and self-aggrandizing purposes, and consequently referred to the papacy […] as ‘Western Mahomets’ who had done the same. Reformation meant that these associations acquired a strikingly new and popular vitality” (Dimmock 2013, 82). In the sixteenth century, the schism with Rome which started with Henry VIII and the excommunication of Elizabeth I intensified this trend.

The Reformation deeply changed the representation of Mahomet in English religious discourse: “[I]n Reformation disputes Mahomet and Mahometanism became polemically malleable to the shifting terms of religious disputation” (Dimmock 2013, 78). The Muslim believer then became a rhetorical weapon – a racist insult – that Protestants in particular used in their propagandist works in order to depict the Catholics as immoral as the Muslims: “Reinforced through different media, the image of the Turks as a threat, a deviation, and an emblem of immorality and heresy remained intact in England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Barin 2010, 39). The figures of the Pope and the Ottoman sultan were frequently “equated, conflated or compared in antipapal literature” (Vitkus 2003, 61). Both Catholics and Protestants rejected Islam as a false religion. However, both groups paradoxically used this similarity to distinguish each other. The infidel Muslim enemy was therefore used to refer to the new Christian infidel, whether Protestant or Catholic, in order to belittle them and make them embodiments of evil.

The polemic between Protestants and Catholics led to a redefinition of morality through a questioning of good and evil. The priority was to identify the Antichrist to attack it and defend one’s own true faith. In the Christian tradition, the Antichrist represents absolute evil, denies the divinity of Christ, and wants to assume Christ’s identity: “This is a deceiver and an antichrist” (2 John 1:7). The Antichrist is a deceitful manipulator and wants to make his lies sound true, and resorts to cunning schemes to do so: “Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all the deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:10). It is precisely to this symbolic figure of evil incarnate that Protestants connect the Pope and Mahomet. Luther does so in Table Talk (1566): “Antichrist is at the same time the Pope and the Turk. A living creature consists of body and soul. The spirit of the Antichrist is the Pope, his flesh the Turk. One attacks the Church physically, the other spiritually” (193). Likewise, in Actes and Monuments (1583), John Foxe resorts to the same analogy comparing Catholics and Muslims when concluding that “the pope’s sect [is] […] now degenerated into Turks” (763). Jean Calvin also develops this argument in A Harmonie Upon The Three Evangelists (1584) talking about the Pope and Mahomet as if they were two “Antichristes” (368). This equivalence between Catholics and Muslims thus relied on “Protestant polemics that condemned both papist Rome and Turks for reversing or ‘preposterating’ the biblical testament” (Parker 2002, 2) – recurrent in religious texts of the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Author Biography
Dr Nora Galland is a teaching and research fellow at the University Côte d’Azur of Nice in France where she teaches English literature and translation. Her PhD, entitled “Typology of the Racist Insult in Early Modern English Drama”,  took into consideration seventy early modern English plays; it was written under the supervision of Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and Jean-Christophe Mayer, Research Fellow CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and it was defended in December 2021. Nora Galland is currently working on premodern critical race studies and exploring the construction of identity and otherness in terms of race, gender, nation and class. Her research interests also include contemporary performances and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. She has published in Cahiers Élisabéthains, Cahiers Shakespeare en Devenir, Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus, and L’Œil du Spectateur.

Her Twitter can be found here.

Works Cited

Barin, Filiz. “Othello: Turks as ‘the Other’ in the Early Modern Period.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 43, no. 2, (Fall 2010): 37-58.

Dimmock, Matthew. Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Parker, Patricia. “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and its ‘Pauline’ Rerighting.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2002): 1-34.

Vitkus, Daniel J. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean. New-York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Title image: Life of Martin Luther by H. Breul (1874), accessed here.

^[1] For a thorough analysis of the religious rhetoric stigmatizing Turks in Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603), see Stephan Schmuck, “England's Experiences of Islam,” in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture,  Michael Hattaway, ed. (Singapore: Blackwell, 2010) 543-556.

^[2] According to Filiz Barrin, such a demeaning discourse “based on misinformation and prejudice” (40) can be traced back to the Crusades: “Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Catholic Church organized Crusades to retrieve Anatolia and the Holy Lands from the Seljuk Turks and the Arabs. At intervals, Catholic popes and priests in their sermons called for holy war against the Turks, Arabs, and Saracens. In this context, before each campaign to the East, Turks and other Muslims were portrayed in the most pejorative and denigrating manner possible. […] This long-standing negative image of the Turks on European consciousness was further strengthened after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which solidified the Turkish image as the enemy posing the most imminent danger to the West” (41-42).

[3] Lollardy was a proto-Protestant medieval heretical movement which was based on the writings of John Wyclif (1328-1384) who anticipated the actual Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demanding a reform of Roman Catholic Church and questioning transubstantiation. See Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.