VOLTAIRE'S 'MAHOMET,' THE PERSISTENCE OF CULTURAL MEMORY AND PRE-MODERN ORIENTALISM
By David Hammerbeck, UCLA

Agora: Online Graduate Humanities Journal
Vol. 2, No. 2
April 20, 2003

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/agora/Articles.cfm?ArticleNo=154

Since the earliest encounters between Christianity and the Islamic world, for Westerners Islam has often appeared as a beguiling and antagonistic cipher of otherness. From the writings of the Medieval French Cluny school to present-day public proclamations by Western politicians, the many faces of Islam have alternately threatened and appealed to the Judeo/Christian world.[1] When Islamic figures take to the Western stage (or, in the present epoch, the screen), they often appear as figures culled from the Orientalist trope. They embody "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident'." (Said 2) The staged Muslim inhabits a particular space in the topos (from the Greek to-poi) or place(s) of memory. And throughout much of the history of the Orientalist trope in the Prophet Muhammad has been represented as the Islamic figure par excellence.

In 17th- and 18th-century France, Western critics "still vied to discredit it [Islam] as a religion and set it in opposition to the 'true religion.' But anathema and insult were replaced by arguments and explanatory accounts of a historical, geographical, climactic, sociological, or political nature. If Mahomet was able to install this power wherein an entire people were enslaved to the letter of his Law, it was because he was able to turn skillfully to his own advantage a situation of division, and exploit the character and natural inclinations of those who heard him: a burning-hot climate, making them tend towards a laziness of mind and a lasciviousness of body, had ever prepared them to accept the doctrine of predestination, and to propel them fiercely towards a belief in a purely carnal paradise, to the point where they wished to die for their religion in order to reach it all the more quickly" (Grosrichard 106).

Neoclassical and Enlightenment thought tended to discredit Islam, if not condemning it outright. The religion was viewed as a departure from Christianity, a faith formulated by a duplicitous leader (Muhammad), who in creating Islam specifically manipulated the inherent racial traits of Arabs. According to Alain Grosrichard, whose book The Sultan's Court surveys French Orientalist texts of the 17th and 18th centuries, these same Western critics formed a homogeneous strategic front against Islam that othered Muslim religion, culture, and politics, representing it as the moral negative of Christianity. Furthermore, the ontological antecedents of this "barbaric" East extend further back into Western history and consciousness, to Aristotle's Politics and Homer's Iliad.

This article focuses on Voltaire's Mahomet: tragédie as an index of French and Western ethnocentric thought on Islam since the Middle Ages. Mahomet (1741) plays a pivotal role in Western representation of the Islamic Other by reiterating and thus perpetuating key ideological and cultural strategies in the ongoing tensions between the Christian and Islamic worlds. It condenses certain elements of Western ontology concerning the Islamic Other, recapitulating conceptualizations and essentializations that have been transmitted from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and that continue today to represent the many cultures of Islam. As part of what Edward Said refers to as the "historical phenomenon" of Orientalism, Mahomet articulates persistent Western and French memories of encounters with Islam. While the play can be argued to be anti-Semitic and anti-Christian as well, my intent in this paper is to examine the play's historical antecedents, and the ramifications of Voltaire's version of the Prophet's life, in order to locate Mahomet in the history of Orientalism in Western theatre. Voltaire represents heterogeneous systems of belief, and different Muslim cultures and histories, through his stage representative, the Prophet Muhammad. As a significant example of Enlightenment perceptions of the Islamic Other, Voltaire's tragedy reinforces a strategic location that provides justification for later French and European colonial incursions into the Levant and North Africa.[2] Though imbedded in Enlightenment ideas concerning reason, tolerance and a search for moral universals, the play exemplifies an ontology that negates cultural difference while (ironically) attempting to embody these same concepts.

Voltaire composed and staged this tragedy in order to counter what the author viewed as the hypocrisies of organized religion and its associated ills: superstition, dogma, and fanaticism, as practiced in Catholicism in particular. However, Voltaire targeted not only the Papacy. He challenged the theological and metaphysical basis of all organized religions, counterposing his own "natural" religion based in part on the skeptical rationalism of Hume, Shaftesbury, and Leibniz. Voltaire's tragic vision of the Prophet embodies previous Western biases against Muhammad and Islam, while updating these cultural preconceptions in the then-current dramaturgical codes.

Mahomet, as an example of Enlightenment strategies in theatre, straddles the threshold between Foucault's Classical and Modern epistemes. It anticipates what Said refers to as "modern Orientalism," a process he identifies as the "standardization and cultural stereotyping [which] have intensified the hold of the 19th-century academic and imaginative demonology of the 'mysterious Orient'" (Said 22, 26). The transition between these epistemes, occurring in the latter half of the 18th century, forms the shift from pre-modern to modern Orientalism. Mahomet represents a strain of virulent anti-Islamic thought from the field of pre-modern theatrical "Islamic" Orientalism of the mid-18th century, a strain that included Voltaire's Zaire (1738), Charles-Simon Favart's Les Trois Sultanes (1761) and de la Noue's Mahomet II (1741). Many new "Islamic" Orientalist works appeared during this period, including novels by Crebillon fils (Le Sofa, 1742) and Diderot (Les bijoux indiscrets, 1748); Boulainvillier's histories Histoire des Arabes and Vie de Mahomet (1730 and 1731, respectively); Gagnier's biography (Vie de Mahomet, 1732) and George Sale's translation of the Qur'an into English in 1734. These works were preceded by Barthélemy d'Herbelot's encyclopedic catalogue of the Near East, the Bibliothèque Orientale (1698) and Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French (1704-1717).[3] These works formulate a part of what Said termed the institutionalization of knowledge concerning the "Orient." This process coalesced around the mid-18th century, when "the Orient was revealed to Europe in the materiality of its texts, languages, and civilizations" and embodied onstage in "Islamic" characters such as the Prophet Muhammad and the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman II (Said 76-77). As such, these texts formed the discursive field from which the Orientalist trope was formed, one which in the mid-18th century was more commonly founded on theatre and novels than in previous centuries.

Continuing this literary and theatrical trend, Mahomet represents a theatricalized vision of Muhammad's return to Mecca from Medina in 629-630 CE. However, Voltaire filters his version of events filtered through several sources, most prominently the English theologian Humphry Prideaux's polemicized biography of the founder of Islam. The play briefly covers "the surrender of Mecca [which] symbolized, in the eyes of Voltaire, the foundation of a new religion and the assumption of power by an impostor" (Badir 131). The play's alternate title, Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète, sheds light on Voltaire's critical stance towards organized religion. He represents Muhammad as a Machiavellian manipulator of those around him, a man motivated by sexual desire and political ambition. Voltaire's selective use of available sources reveals that the playwright viewed the Prophet's return from the hijrah (Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina) not as a series of relatively undramatic historical incidents, but instead as a mythopoetic source from which to construct an alternative history, a history that had deep roots in French and Western cultural memories of the Islamic Other. In particular, Mahomet centers upon one incident from the Prophet's life which Western critics, from the Middle Ages onwards seized upon as an example of Muhammad's willingness to fabricate a religion based upon his sexual and political desires: his marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh after her divorce from Zayd ibn Háritha.

The Western ontological and theological perception of the Prophet Muhammad as the antithesis of Jesus, or the Antichrist, originated during the early Middle Ages. The French medievalist, Phillipe Sénac, describes Alvare and Euloge, two Spanish monks living in Umayyad Muslim Toledo of the ninth century CE: "Euloge et de son compagnon Alvare sont impitoyables à l'égard du régime dont ils dépendent. ['Euloge and his companion Alvare were relentless in regard to the regime which they depended on.']"[4] They referred to Islam as 'Une secte trompeuse, fondée par un homme néfaste, un faux prophète, un tissu de mensonges promettant à ses adeptes un paradis polygamique et pervers ['a false sect, founded by an evil man, a false prophet, a tissue of lies promised to his adepts a polygamous and perverse paradise']' (Sénac 28; translation mine).[5] Sénac continues by observing that, despite pertinent observations such as the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and the call to prayer: "Au-delà de quelques observations pertinentes, telles que le pèlerinage à La Mecque, la pratique du jeûne ou l'appel à la priere, la religion musulmane est dépeinte sous des traits grossiers, toujours très critiques. Au cours du IX siècle, l'association se fit plus fréquente. Alvare de Cordoue comparait les musulmans à la bête à dix cornes dépeinte dans l'Apocalypse et dans le Livre de Daniel. Une Vie de Mahomet, au IXe siècle encore, alla plus loin en identifiant la bête de l'Apocalypse, 'dont le chiffre est 666,' avec le prophète de l'Islam lui-même puisqu'il était mort cette année-là, comme on le croyait généralement." ['Beyond some pertinent observations, such as the pilgrimage to Mecca, rules for the young or the call to prayer, the Muslim religion is depicted with gross traits, always very critical. . . . During the course of the ninth century, the association[s] became more frequent. A Alvare of Cordova compared Muslims to the beast with 10 horns depicted in the Apocalypse and in the book of Daniel. A Life of Mahomet, during the ninth century, went further in identifying the beast of the Apocalypse "of which the number is 666," with the prophet of Islam himself as he had died that year, as it was generally believed.'] (28, 30-31; translation mine)

The Crusades calcified these negative associations with the Islamic Other. Medieval Christianity branded Islam as the worst of all heresies, with "the Prophet of Islam the worst of all heretics" (Ahmad 188). Furthermore, identification of individuals, or groups, as Muslims guaranteed marginalization and exclusion, the same fate that awaited Jews, Cathars, and pagans, especially following the "brutal violence" of the Crusades of 1320 and 1321 in southern France and northern Spain (Goodich 10). In turn, this would associate Muslims (and the other religious groups mentioned here) with other types of groups and individuals who lived outside of the pale of Christianity: the excommunicated, the poor, the sick, the crippled, lepers, prostitutes, actors, jongleurs and many others whose "other-ness" not only branded them as heretics, but also carried within them the danger of physical and moral contagion.

Late Medieval theologians, such as Nicolas of Cusa, Denys van Leeuwen, John of Torquemada, and Alfonso a Spina, all based their opinions on Islam via a reductionist argument centered upon the: "'fraudulent' or 'hypocritical' character of Muhammad's claim to prophesy, while he was an ambitious schemer, a bandit and a lecher; the emphasis on Islam as a falling short of Christianity, a sum of heresy . . . the general lines, if not all the details, of the most unflattering biography of Muhammad, particularly . . . the enormous importance given to two moral questions, the public reliance on force and the supposed private laxity in sexual matters" (Daniel 276).

Though Cusa has been lauded by critics such as Maxime Rodinson for his attempt at a sympathetic analysis of the Qur'an in his Cribatio Alchoran (1460), Said views Cusa as a precursor to Modern Orientalism, one who contributed to the identification and definition of the key figures, ideas, and language of the Orientalist trope (61). Cusa's attempts at reaching a détente between Christianity and Islam failed, most probably due to his inability to understand the religion on its own terms, rather than through the filter of Christian theology.

However, the historical phenomenon of Orientalism has not always taken a homogenous approach towards the formulation of the Other, though a marked inability to perceive the world by non-Western ontologies predominates. Many Western writers, especially from the 16th century onwards, questioned the trope's fundamentally negative conception of Islam and its founder. But in contrast to this movement in favor of what perhaps can best be described as cultural relativism, in the late 17th century, an especially virulent anti-Islamic telos would be proposed by the English theologian Humphrey Prideaux in The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display'd in the Life of Mahomet (first published in English in 1699 and translated into French in the following year). Prideaux defined the mission of his treatise as stopping the "great prevailing of Infidelity in the present Age." He conceived his history of Muhammad as an "antidote," since the English minister intended to disabuse "those who have cast of Christianity as an Imposture, to make them see the Error of their Apostasy, I shall then obtain the full End I propose; If not, at least I shall discharge my Conscience, and my Duty, in doing the best I can in order thereto" (Prideaux i-ii). Prideaux viewed Muslims as God's punishment against the Christian Church for its divisions and dissension: "So that at length having wearied the patience and long-suffering of God, thus turning this Holy Religion into a Firebrand of Hell for Contention, Strife and Violence among them . . . he raised up the Saracens to be the Instruments of his Wrath to punish them for it; who taking advantage of the Weakness of Power, and the Distractions of Councils, which these Divisions had caused among them, soon over-run with a terrible Devastation all the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire. And having fixed that Tyranny over them, which hath ever since afflicted those Parts of the World turned every where their Churches into Mosques, and their Worship into an horrid Superstition; and instead of that Holy Religion which they had thus abused, forced on them that abominable Imposture of Mahometism, which dictating War, Bloodshed and Violence in Matters of Religion, as one of its chiefest Virtues, was in truth the most proper for those, who had afore by their Schism and Contentions resolved all the Religion they had thereinto" (viii-ix).

For Prideaux, the exterior danger of the Muslim Other parallels the internal danger of the Deists, atheists, and libertine thinkers in the West. Both the exterior and interior dangers posed as frauds, apostates, and heretics: the former, an Oriental threat that claimed to supersede the authority of Jesus Christ and the Bible, and the latter, the non-believers who doubted the authority of the Bible and refused Jesus as a prophet.

Voltaire revives certain aspects of Prideaux's argument. He amplifies secular animosity towards Islam and Muslims and resurrects Muhammad for 18th-century theatregoers as a Tartuffe in "Arab" garb, flourishing a sword. Ironically, Voltaire rearticulated and redirected Prideaux's anti-Islamic strategies in order to bolster his own tactics of eradicating religious dogma and superstition while championing the Deist's belief in a universal and "rational" religion free of corruption, based on goodwill rather than on fear of a transcendent authority. Moreover, this strategy would furnish intellectual and rhetorical proof of Voltaire's ability to clarify the nature of philosophical and religious truth in his role as the supreme "writer-jurist" of the Classical Episteme (Dreyfus 202).

As I previously mentioned, the dramatic events of Mahomet centered upon Muhammad's return to Mecca following his exile from this, his native city, and his clan, the Qurayshites. Muhammad's character, the moral crux of the play, reveals itself via his relations with Zopir (the Sheikh of Mecca and a believer in an older, polytheistic Arab religion), and two slaves who belong to the Prophet, Seid and Palmira. Seid embodies the dangers of religious intolerance and zealousness: manipulated by Muhammad, he assents to the assassination of Zopir as an act of political and religious brutality, echoing the assassination of Henry IV by Ravaillac in 1611. Palmira functions as the object of Muhammad's sexual desire and jealousy. The Prophet observes Palmira's and Seid's developing intimacy early in the play. Reacting to this nascent attraction, Muhammad steers Seid away from her, indoctrinating the young man in political and religious fanaticism while saving Palmira for himself. Eventually, Muhammad poisons Seid. The course of the play's action reveals Seid and Palmira as Zopir's long-lost offspring, a fact known to Muhammad but unknown to Seid, Palmira, and Zopir. These revelations, however, cannot deter the course of events that Muhammad manipulates in order to secure the defeat of the Qurayshites and the fall of Mecca, with events that culminate in the murders of Zopir and Seid, and Palmira's suicide at the close of the play.

Voltaire's depiction of Muhammad, Seid, and Palmira departs radically from their historical models. According to critic Magdy Badir, "A défaut d'incidents dans le fait historique, il introduira dans sa tragédie un ensemble de circonstances, d'obstacles et de périls dont le but sera de tenir les spectateurs en haleine et d'exciter la pitié et la terreur" ['Because of a lack of incidents in the historical facts, he introduced in his tragedy an ensemble of circumstances, obstacles and perils where the goal would be to capture the spectator's attention and excite pity and fear'] (Badir 131-132).

This "lack of incidents" refers to the fact that, according to reliable historical sources (Albert Hourani, Maxime Rodinson, and others), there was little to any struggle involved in the "fall" of Mecca: it seems to have been a fairly peaceful and somewhat prolonged negotiation which secured the city for Muhammad. Moreover, in creating his duplicitous avatar of evil, Voltaire acknowledged that his stage creation countered more sympathetic accounts of the Prophet's life: "I have made Mahomet in this tragedy guilty of a crime which in reality he was not capable of committing. The count de Boulainvilliers, some time since, wrote the life of this prophet, whom he endeavored to represent as a great man, appointed by Providence to punish the Christian world, and change the face of at least one-half of the globe. Mr. Sale likewise . . . has given us an excellent translation of the Koran into English. . . . [But] for a driver of camels to stir up a faction in his village; to associate himself with a set of wretched Koreish . . . to boast that he was carried up to heaven, and there received part of that unintelligible book which contradicts common sense in every page; that in order to procure respect for this ridiculous performance he should carry fire and sword into his country, murder fathers, and ravish their daughters -- this is surely what no man will pretend to vindicate, unless he was born a Turk, and superstition had totally extinguished in him the light of nature" (Morley, "Mahomet" 10).

In this statement Voltaire reveals his ethnocentric and anti-Islamic bias: only a "Turk" lacks the faculties of reason to discern the "true" from the "false" prophet and mistakes the "impostor" for a virtuous figure.[6] Furthermore, according to Voltaire, Muhammad is not a Prophet, nor the founder of a religion, but instead a "driver of camels"; the Qur'an in Voltaire's mind is illogical and undecipherable and Muhammad becomes instead a murderer and a rapist (or a terrorist). These characterizations fall in line with the worst ethnocentric stereotypes of Arabs in Western literature and drama since the Middle Ages. In contrast to these racist stereotypes, though Christ was never mentioned in the play, it would have been clear to audience members (and readers) that Voltaire's stage Prophet was the direct opposite of the chaste, peaceful and humble Jesus.

Modern critics have juxtaposed Voltaire's anti-Islamic bias against the more sympathetic or balanced accounts of some of his contemporaries. Ian Richard Netton, in his article "The Mysteries of Islam," compares 18th-century English Orientalist George Sale's more informed position on Islam with Voltaire's hostility towards Muslims. Netton summarizes Voltaire's strategic position towards the Orient and the Islamic Other as representative of "the three aspects of the Enlightenment Paradigm -- distaste for the alien, fear of the threat, and fascination with the exotic" and lacking "any genuine sympathy for his subject" (Netton 33). Describing Voltaire's Muhammad, Badir writes "le Mahomet de Voltaire devenait fourbe, ingénieux, un vrai prince de Machiavel, un cousin de César Borgia, duc de Valentinois, et sans grand[']chose [en] commun avec le vrai Mahomet" ['Voltaire's Muhammad becomes a swindler, ingenious, a true Machiavellian prince, a cousin of Caesar Borgia, Duke of Valentine, and nothing like the real Muhammad'] (Badir 132; translation mine).

Critic Angela Pao qualifies her criticism of the play's participation in the Orientalist trope by acknowledging its self-reflexive criticism of French religion and politics, a strategy common in French Orientalist theatre and literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Pao identifies the play as a successor to Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes. She acknowledges "not only . . . its use of the Orient to criticize aspects of contemporary French society but . . . its participation in a pre-colonial Orientalist discourse that would eventually be used to support the French invasion and colonization of the Middle East and North Africa" (Pao 59). I argue that this pre-colonial, or pre-Modern, Orientalist discourse manifests itself in the stage Muhammad's embodiment of the worst aspects of Prideaux's anti-Islamic tract. Voltaire selects and distills recurring stereotypes of the Prophet into a theatrical representation that serves as a Western template for the Islamic Other, in the same manner as Shakespeare's Othello does. In creating the image of an uncivilized and undemocratic Islamic world (again, according to Western standards), the justification for a Western ideological agenda to "humanize" or "civilize" the non-West is created, in order to institute the "Good."

Mahomet's lust for Palmira, a character loosely based on the historical figure Zaynab bint Jahsh, Muhammad's cousin, contrasts with her pious and felicitous character, a moral opposition constructed by Voltaire to evoke pity from the audience. Palmira recounts her childhood, in service as a slave to Mahomet, as one of happiness and learning: "He formed my soul; to Mahomet I owe/The kind instruction of my earlier years;/Taught by the happy partners of his bed,/Who still adoring and adored by him/Send up their prayers to heaven for his dear safety,/I lived in peace and joy!" (Voltaire, "Mahomet" I, II, 21).

"Her naiveté forms no match for Voltaire's theatrical incarnation of lust and megalomania. His Prophet's ascetic sojourns in the desert, rather than tempering the flesh, instead inflame it: ". . . on the burning sand/Or desert rocks I brave the inclement sky./And bear the seasons' rough vicissitude;/Love is my only solace, the dear object/Of all my toils, the idol I adore,/The god of my ambition: know midst all my queens,/Palmira reigns sole mistress of my heart . . . ." (Voltaire, "Mahomet" II, IV, 37).

Western writers believed that the effect of the hot climate on an individual's physiological development lead to, in Arabs, an over-active imagination, an over-passionate nature, and a susceptibility to sexual arousal. Of particular importance in these two passages are the references to polygamy. Palmira receives her early education not from the prophet, but from his many "partners." Whether these "partners" are wives or concubines is left to the viewer's imagination. Muhammad's ideals are not noumenal, religious, or philosophical notions such as tolerance, equality, or charity. He instead grasps at phenomena, the objects of his desire.

Furthermore, Voltaire's depiction of a salacious prophet is just one example of the Western infatuation with polygamy in Islamic society, which manifested itself in the travelogues, histories, plays, and other literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Michel Baudier, in his Histoire Generale du Serail, published in 1631, dwells on the women's quarters of the seraglio or the slave market, where women were purchased to stock the Sultan's harem, more than he examines the structure and functioning of the Porte (the center of government within the Seraglio of Constantinople). The title page of the book, four nude women of the harem bathing the Sultan, frames Baudier's overriding interest in the carnal pleasures of the Sultan's palace, as does his description of an archetypal Sultan's intrinsically passionate nature. According to Baudier, three primary desires governed the Sultan's psyche: love, cruelty and avarice (Baudier iii-iv). Voltaire, like many pre-Modern Orientalist writers before him, deletes any rational or humanistic notions of the Prophet, typifying his stage-Prophet as being motivated solely by carnal appetites. Voltaire's depiction of Muhammad's longing for Palmira reveals this carnality as just another set of characteristics that typified a fixed "Arab" psychology and physiology. Most importantly, the character's infatuation with his female cousin also embodies how Voltaire rewrote an important moment from Islamic history, as well as how he rearticulated Christian polemics that tarred the Prophet as a man of unalloyed sensual appetites. This incident resonates deeply in Western representations of Muhammad and Islam; as critic Norman Daniel notes: "Probably the favorite medieval story of Muhammad was that of his marriage to Zaynab bint Jahsh after her divorce from Zayd ibn Háritha. The story has [the] popular appeal of a police-court character, if told with the imputation of police-court motives, as it always was: the all but incestuous adultery with the wife of an adopted son; Muhammad's inability to resist fleshly temptation; the use of a special revelation to justify what he had done. The story was told so often that no attempt can be made here to trace its literary history" (119).

Zaynab bint Jahsh entered the Prophet's care at an early age. According to Maxime Rodinson, she was "a girl of great piety, some say a widow, a certainly very lovely in spite of her age which, at rising thirty-five, was no means young for an Arab" (Rodinson 205). She married Zayd ibn Háritha, the historical model for Seid, though apparently the marriage was troubled. In a chance occurrence, the Prophet Muhammad, looking for Zayd, knocked on the door and encountered Zaynab in a state of undress. She, in honoring her parental bond and duty to Muhammad, invited him in while dressing. According to legend, a wind lifted the curtain separating the two, and the Prophet, mortified at the sight of her partially clad body, fled in confusion, muttering "Praise be to Allah the Most High! Praise be to Allah who changes men's hearts!" (Rodinson 205). Zayd, learning of the inadvertent yet morally inappropriate meeting between Zaynab and Muhammad, ceased relations with his wife. He lived apart from her, in defiance of the Prophet's instructions to remain with his wife. According to shari'a (the Islamic code of conduct, based on the Qur'an and the Hadith), having seen Zaynab undressed, the Prophet should have married her. However, as Zaynab, his adopted daughter, had married his adopted son, for Muhammad to marry her would have been tantamount to incest.

Soon after this incident Muhammad, in the company of his wife A'isha, fell into a trance, and voiced a revelation received from Allah: "It is not for true believers -- men or women -- to order their own affairs if God and his apostle decree otherwise. . . . You said to the man whom God and yourself have favored: 'Keep your wife and have fear of God.' You sought to hide in your heart what God was to reveal. You were afraid of man, although it would have been more proper to fear God. And when Zayd divorced his wife, we gave her to you in marriage so that it should become legitimate for true believers to wed the wives of adopted sons if they divorced them. God's will must needs be done" (Koran 296).[7]

Thus, in the eyes of both Western and non-Western critics, the revelation that would become part of the Qur'an seemed oddly propitious. Rodinson notes that objectors found it "odd . . . that the rule should have been so exactly calculated to satisfy desires which were for once in conflict with social taboos" (Rodinson 207). But Syrian-born biographer of Muhammad M.A. Salahi disagrees, viewing the Zaynab-Muhammad affair and the ensuing vision and proclamation as "an indication that the matter was no longer in his or Zaynab['s] hands. Allah ordered this marriage which was ordered by Allah for, among other things, legislative purposes" (Salahi 455). The Zaynab-Muhammad affair, which has been analyzed and interpreted variously, ultimately defies hermeneutics. This controversial moment from Muhammad's life elicited vituperative criticism from Western critics, who saw it as proof not only of Muhammad's insatiable sexual appetites, but also of his willingness to fabricate a religion and its laws in order to fulfill his desires. In conclusion Rodinson, perhaps the most widely respected French authority on Islam in the latter part of the 20th century, ultimately concurs with Salahi. He asks whether one should "conclude from this that Muhammad invented these verses . . . that he was, in fact, a classic impostor in the Voltarian sense of the word? I do not think so" (208).

In contrast, Voltaire's representation of the Zaynab-Muhammad relationship bears little relation to the incidents related in the Qur'an, or to the accounts offered by critics Rodinson and Salahi. In Mahomet, Seid and Palmira are brother and sister rather than husband and wife; their love for each other reflects Voltaire's theatrical desire to amplify the pity and terror of the situation. This tactic also forms a contrasting pair of love relationships in order to frame "true" or "natural" love (that of brother and sister, and of these two for their biological father) against "false" or "unnatural" love (that of Mahomet for Palmira). Mahomet, in this instance, embodies Baudier's description of the "lustful" sultan, or the "lecherous" Muhammad of the Medieval writers Cusa and Alfonso a Spina. As Grosrichard notes, "the Mahomet of legend. . . was endowed with incomparable sexual prowess. The precise number of his wives, those in law and others, is not known. It does not matter, since God had given him that unique privilege of having as many of them as he desired" (Grosrichard 100-101).[8] Voltaire's Mahomet embodies medieval essentializations of the meaning of the Prophet's life[;] as Norman Daniel notes, "[v]iolence, salacity and humanity were what his pretence to receive revelation was used to justify. Muhammad was the great blasphemer, because he made religion justify sin and weakness" (130). Furthermore, Voltaire continues the Western tradition of rewriting Muhammad's life, condensing it into an ethnocentric and sexual stereotype that reduplicates Medieval Christian polemics, fixing the Prophet as a moral inversion of Christianity and Jesus. As Homi Bhabha observes: "An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy, and daemonic repetition" (66).

In Mahomet, Voltaire denies the Prophet Muhammad access to both sacred and secular mediums of history. His character Mahomet spatially inhabits a place that has been frozen in Western ontology since the early Middle Ages, outside of sacred or secular notions such as salvation or progress. According to anthropologist Johannes Fabian, Voltaire's approach to "philosophical history" follows the example of the 17th-century French historian Jacques Bénigne Bossuet. In condensing and rewriting history to serve his ideological ends, Voltaire "sermonized" history into discourse. And in this discourse, the Prophet resided in a distanced space, equivalent to a pagan world, or the "there" and "then" of an uncivilized world removed from the "here" and "now" of progressive modernity and civilization (Fabian 5, 27).

From Cusa and Alfonso a Spina to Baudier and Prideaux, this fixed identity of Muhammad as an "impostor," a charlatan of low birth and a ruthless political manipulator, continued.[9] Moreover, this essentialization of the Prophet as a tyrannous ruler paralleled Western images of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, the rulers of Persia, and the Moghul Empire. Thus an ahistorical Oriental despot emerged, differing little from Biblical legends of Oriental potentates and other "despots" from the East who had threatened the West, such as Xerxes, Salah ad-Din, and Tamurlaine. They all served as cultural templates of the "eternal," despotic Other who ruled over an empire of slaves -- a dynamic expressive of not only an "Asiatic" political system, but template that was also indicative of inherent racial characteristics. Additionally, this trend predominated in the late Renaissance and Classical epistemes, despite a growing counter-movement of French and European writers who sought to present more balanced, researched, and sympathetic accounts of the founder of Islam, as well as accounts of the various cultures and customs of Islamic nations. In this relativistic trend, represented by Jean Bodin and Guillaume Postel in the 15th century to the Comte du Boulainvilliers, Richard Simon, and Adrianus Reeland in Voltaire's time, Western writers saw in Islam a religion of tolerance, charity, and dutiful observance free from the corruption and empty idolatry which they perceived in the Catholic Church at home. As Grosrichard notes: "At a point when the studies of Orientalist endow the person, the life and the teachings of Mahomet with an image increasingly in keeping with historical truth, it is surprising to see Voltaire still treating him as 'a rogue, a rascal, and a fool, and -- after the first performance of his tragedy Mahomet, in Lille in 1741 -- congratulating himself on the acting of Lanoue, who 'with his monkey's face played the role of Mahomet' to perfection" (107).

Voltaire's approval of the actor's simian appearance complemented character descriptions of the Prophet within the tragedy. Late in the play, when her eyes have been opened to his machinations, Palmira rejects Muhammad, calling him a "bloody savage. . . . infamous seducer" and a "monster" (Voltaire, "Mahomet," V, ii, 80-81). At the opening of the play, Zopir glosses the Prophet as a leader of an Asiatic horde: "But now he is a conqueror and a king;/Mecca's impostor at Medina shines/A holy prophet; and nations bend before him,/And learn to worship crimes which we abhor./Even here, a band of wild enthusiasts, drunk/With furious zeal, support his fond delusions,/His idle tales, and fancied miracles" (Voltaire "Mahomet," I, i, 17).

Zopir's description of Muhammad's followers recalls the Asiatic Dionysian revelers in Euripides' The Bacchae, or, in a different historical context, the marauding Catholic or Protestant extremists from France's religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. All three examples illustrate potential danger that that one, or a few, fanatics can pose.

However, Voltaire lauded this "impostor" some 26 years after the composition of Mahomet in Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers. In this treatise, Voltaire reverses his moral stance as constructed in the earlier tragedy. In comparison to Christianity's impostures, Islam's "lies have been more noble, and its fanaticism more generous." Voltaire adds to these observations, suggesting that "Du moins ses mensonges ont été plus nobles, et son fanatisme plus généreux. Du moins Mahomet a écrit et combattu; et Jésus n'a su ni écrire ni se défendre. Mahomet avait le courage d'Alexandre avec l'esprit de Numa; et votre Jésus a sué sang et eau dés qu'il a été condamné par ses juges" ['At least his lies were more noble, and his fanaticism more generous. At least Mahomet wrote and fought; Jesus did not know how to write nor how to defend himself. Mahomet had the courage of Alexander . . . and your Jesus sweated blood and water as soon as he was condemned'] (Voltaire, Dictionnaire 832; translation mine).

In the intervening years since the play's composition, Voltaire's antipathy for the Christian Church became more overt: he no longer disguised his criticism of the Church as an attack on Muhammad and Islam as in Mahomet. Though written as a condemnation of the Papacy, Mahomet was also viewed as a criticism of Islam. Pope Benedict, the target of Voltaire's criticism, approved of the play. He "praised Voltaire for his 'admirable tragedy,' and much to the confusion of Voltaire's detractors (those who perceived Catholicism as the true target within the play) bestowed on him an apostolic benediction and two gold medals" (Carlson 56). These two points, Voltaire's lessening antipathy towards Islam in later years, and the fact that Christianity was his stated target, frame how Mahomet has played a role in shaping Western representations of Islam since the play's premiere. Because this play is one of the most prominent examples of 18th-century Orientalism in theatre, there are several questions that should be asked in order to assess its influence. What are the eventual outcomes of a strategic location that constructs a barbaric and megalomaniac Muhammad? What are the consequences of a continued polemical assault upon a non-European religion that has been almost continually under attack since its inception?

In the words of critic Ronald S. Ridgeway, "Voltaire a eue l'idée ingénieuse d'attaquer l'Église en se conformant strictement aux opinions orthodoxes concernant Mahomet" ['Voltaire layed siege to the Church while strictly conforming to orthodox opinions concerning Muhammad'] (122; translation mine). Voltaire continued the tradition of medieval Christian polemic against Islam in constructing an "Islamic" stage-world that lacked the complexity of some 17th-century stage representations of Islam, such as Tristan l'Hermite's Osman (1654) or Jean Racine's Bajazet (1672). Tristan's approach, which placed Islam in a closer proximity to Christianity by establishing parallels (while acknowledging differences), or that of Racine, who used recent Ottoman history to critique French Absolutism, were discarded perhaps because they were too nuanced or contradictory in regard to the relative merits of Christianity and Islam. Though Voltaire's target may have been the Roman Catholic Church, Islam and Muhammad served as dialectical fodder, subsumed within a universal and "natural" philosophy that operated through a Christian ontology. Unlike in Racine's play, where the creation of a neutral space leaves the identity of the dramatic topos in question, in Mahomet, "Mecca" (due to its several specific settings and its use of inherited ideology) was a less effective double for a Western site of power. It remained more specifically "Arab," foreign and exterior to the West, marked as a site of danger and duplicity, and subservient to a fictionalized historical figure whose "other-ness" threatened Western notions of morality and polity.

Thus, as a marker of the general trajectory of French theatrical pre-Modern Orientalism, Mahomet indicates an abandonment of almost two centuries of attempts at forging a dialogue with Islam and Muslim countries. The play suggests that future Western fictional and theatrical forays into the world of Islam would be more closely aligned to traditional theological and political discourses, as would future colonial colonial discourses. Like Charles-Simon Favart's Les Trois Sultanes (1761), Mahomet critiqued the alleged arbitrary despotism of Oriental countries, unmasking supposed hypocrisies and depravities via the strategies of Western rationalism and Enlightenment humanism. In the process, both authors naturalized national and gendered roles while de-naturalizing the Islamic Other. Palmira and Zopir, the only two sympathetic (or "natural") characters in the play, are non-Islamic: Palmira is a captured Christian slave, and Zopir, as mentioned previously, holds pre-Islamic, Arabian animist beliefs. But the two primary representatives of Islam, Mahomet and Seid, display characteristics which would have been construed as being anti-Christian, and opposed to Enlightenment ideals such as "natural" and "good."

Mahomet displays its caricatures of Islam like figurines in a Western colonial exhibition of the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Fabian notes that in "Bossuet's historical method, the notion of epochs ("places to stop and look around") is undoubtedly identifiable as a theory to give firm foundations to his discourse, i.e., his oration on history" (Fabian 111). Using this analysis, from the privileged, temporalized space where Voltaire critiques the course of history, he creates in Mahomet a theatre of tragedy that resurrects the memories of a time when European countries feared the Islamic threat to their survival. Voltaire and other authors served up to their audiences images of an Islam based not on piety, charity, and tolerance (one need only compare Ottoman tolerance of religious minorities during the 16th through the 18th centuries to the treatment of religions minorities in France and Western Europe during the same era), but of warfare and unchecked passions. As a theatre or topography of memory, Mahomet resonates less as a critique of the then-current Papacy than of the accumulated grievances Western Christianity had chronicled against Islam and Muhammad. Voltaire's tragedy serves as a reminder that texts are contexts: they are not frozen in time, but change in meaning depending on the viewer's (or reader's) approach to theatre, history and culture.

In conclusion, on the contemporary world stage, it often appears that little progress has been made since the composition of Mahomet. We receive media images of a hyper-zealous and intolerant Islamic world, ranging from the madrasas of Lahore, to accounts of suicide bombers and anti-Western demonstrations in the streets of the West Bank, Jakarta, and Cairo. We also witness the round-up of suspected foreign nationals in the United States, many of non-Islamic origins, a government running secret courts, and the suppression of individual rights within the United States, all in the name of the "fight against terrorism." Little has changed over the past few centuries: in fact, this current "threat" of Islam has brought the Western world closer to the kind of polemic-filled invective that characterized the West's relations with the Islamic world during the "Ottoman threat" of the 16th and 17th centuries, or the Crusades. When Jerry Falwell states "I think that Muhammad was a terrorist," he wittingly or unwittingly presents to his followers the same sort of extreme characterization of the founder of Islam that Voltaire did.[10] And other American religious groups take even more extreme stances against Islam, echoing Prideaux's strategic location that equated Islam with "the devil" ("Is Islam a Threat" 7).[11] Surely, other voices must be heard, other approaches assayed in order radically [to] change this ideologically charged crisis, a dialectical stalemate which reifies the fundamentalism of Islamic countries as well as the militarism of the West, in particular the United States. Western politicians and social and religious leaders must shun the tradition of demonizing certain aspects of the Islamic world and its customs, and instead search for the roots of the West's antagonism against the Islamic world: an antagonism that, to a great extent, issues from a tradition of Western mis-representation of Muhammad.

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ENDNOTES

[1] We need think only of President George W. Bush's contradictory statements concerning Muslims around the world: he professes respect for the religion, and its customs, yet routinely refers to segments of Muslims as "evil-doers", and his labeling of Iran and Iraq as two poles of his "Axis of Evil" only serves to reify manichean and extremely negative associations with Islam.

[2] I use the term strategic location in the same sense as follows, defined by Said: "a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about" (20). In this sense, Voltaire is simply rearticulating and reinforcing a historically prevalent Western strategic location that speaks for Islam and delimits the religion and its cultures (in Mahomet) as the antithesis of "natural" religion and morality.

[3] There are, of course, many other works of the 17th and 18th century in French literature which constitute the pre-modern Orientalist trope. Travelogues by Baudier, Tavernier, Thévènot, and others re-articulated the places, characters, and figures stereotypically associated with the Islamic Orient; the seraglio, harems, Oriental despots, veiled women, eunuchs, muftis, and so on.

[4] Arabs and Berbers began the first Islamic incursions into Iberia around 710 CE.

[5] The accepted year of his death is 632 CE, or year 11 AH.

[6] "Turk" was an indiscriminate term that, in the period under consideration, is synonymous with Muslim just as today many Westerners label all believers of Islam, from Morocco to Iran and Afghanistan, "Arabs."

[7] Rodinson's translation of the Qur'an (from Book 33, "The Confederate Tribes," lines 36-40) uses "ceased having intercourse with his wife" for "divorced" in the passage I have quoted. I assume Rodinson is trying to make the usage of "divorce" more contextually specific.

[8] Grosrichard cites other examples; he quotes from Belon's Les Observations de plusieurs singularites et choses mémorables . . . [1554] that "It is written in an Arab book whose title is On the Good Ways of Mahomet, that he boasted of exercising his eleven wives in a single hour, one after the other," and from Baudier's Histoire . . . de la religion des Turcs that "God had given him the grace to equal in the lustful power of his loins the strength of forty lubricious fellows who are the sturdiest in all the world." This "idealized" sexual body was paired with an abject opposite in Christian lore; "Mahomet was a frenzied lover of women, but was not above consorting with his she-ass; he drank wine to the point where he fell into a drunken stupor" (101).

[9] Albert Hourani states that Muhammad's "family belonged to the tribe of Quraysh, although not to its most powerful part" (15).

[10] Falwell's comments, echoed by fellow Christian right-wing ideologue minister Pat Robertson and conservative Richard Pipes of Harvard, were uttered on the October 3, 2002 edition of the CBS program "60 Minutes."

[11] The Philadelphia Church of God, in their monthly magazine The Philadelphia Trumpet, states: "the anti-American, anti-Israel passions we see today are building towards the unparalleled hatred described in this prophecy [Psalm 83]. Hatred on that scale could only by motivated by Satan the devil" ("Is Islam a Threat" 7). This evangelical church is located in Edmond, Oklahoma.

--David Hammerbeck, University of California, Los Angeles, pereubu2000@yahoo.com