Tristram Stuart - The Bloodless Revolution - Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

The Turkish Spy evaded prosecution for irreligion partly by disavowing its most execrable opinions as belonging to the ‘Muslim’ writer. 9 But even the moments when Mahmut professes pious adherence to Islam – despite his denials that there is any solid basis for doing so – are surreptitious rhetorical devices used by the authors to show that dogmatic faith in any religion (including Christianity) is absurd. His argument for the authenticity of the Qur’an is a mirror image of the Christian defence of the Bible; if European readers were to dismiss one, they had to dismiss the other. Likewise, his withering demolition of Judaeo-Christian mythology, his fears of the Inquisition’s lethal persecution, and his passionate yearning to share his religious doubts, are neatly consistent both with Mahmut’s Muslim identity and with the anonymous free-thinking authors who spoke through him. 10

Religions are human inventions, and ceremonial prayers, declares Mahmut, are nothing but ‘ Hocus-Pocus-Whispers ’. 11 ‘What signifies it,’ he asks in a classic statement of indifferentism, ‘whether we believe the Written Law or the Alcoran ; whether we are Disciples of Moses , Jesus , or Mahomet ; Followers of Aristotle , Plato , Pythagoras , Epicurus , or Ilch Rend Hu the Indian Brahmin ?’ 12 With its liberal Muslim hero arguing that religious affiliation was little more than social conformity, 13 the Turkish Spy opened the door to an unusually favourable view of Ottoman Islamic culture (which, it showed, was no more or less legitimate than European Christianity). 14

Having cleared the ground with the bulldozer of scepticism, Mahmut proceeds to display an astonishingly fervent admiration for one particular religious group: the Indian Brahmins. 15 An ardent reader of Indian travelogues, and frustrated with the biased accounts of Jesuit missionaries, he begs his masters to send him as their agent to the Great Mughal so he can interview the Brahmins himself. ‘There is nothing that I have a greater Passion for these many Years,’ he declares, ‘than … to converse with the Bramins , and pry into the Mysteries of their Unknown Wisdom, which occasions so much Discourse in the World. I know not what ails me, but I promise my self more Satisfaction from their Books … or from the Lips of those Priests … than from all the Prophets and Sages in the World. ’ 16

Indeed, it transpires that the Brahmins are a linchpin in the Turkish Spy ’s attack on Christianity, for Mahmut snidely points out that their ancient Sanskrit scriptures – as the recent travelogues had revealed to the discombobulation of Christians – described events that happened many thousands of years before the biblical beginning of the world. The realisation that Indian history pre-dated everything in the Bible struck a blow to Christianity, and it gave powerful ammunition to the sceptics’ argument that religions were products of history’s tangled thicket and not transcendent truths. 17

Having loosened Christianity’s stranglehold over moral norms, and also established India as an alternative moral platform, the seven anonymous volumes of the Turkish Spy then launch into an attack on one of Europe’s most basic tenets: man’s right over nature. 18

Putting Europeans to shame by contrasting them to the humane Indians, Mahmut declares that ‘ India is at Present the onely Publick Theatre of Justice toward all Living Creatures.’ The idea of applying justice to animals flew in the face of all expected norms. And yet, Mahmut intends to convert his readers to this cause: ‘I have been long an Advocate for the Brutes , and have endeavour’d to abstain from injuring them my self, and to inculcate this Fundamental Point of Justice to others.’ 19 Mahmut’s effusions about Indian vegetarianism often replicate passages in John Ovington’s Voyage to Suratt (which, strangely, was not published until 1696); but the Turkish Spy transformed the dreamy utopian tradition of prelapsarian harmony into the much more radical demand for real legislative or moral reform. 20

In Mahmut’s opinion, Hinduism had preserved what was once a universal law of nature to which all cultures bear vestigial testimony. 21 Beginning with Islam, Mahmut claims that Muhammad the Holy Prophet charmed animals and discoursed with them just like Orpheus, Apollonius or St Jerome. In repayment for his kindness, wild animals listened to Muhammad’s preaching and a leopard guarded his cave ‘and did all the Offices of a kind and faithful Servant’. 22 Mahmut concedes that the Prophet ‘did not positively enjoin Abstinence from Flesh ’, but insists that he recommended it and that his first disciples refrained ‘from Murdering the Brutes’. Transposing onto Islam arguments familiar from vegetarian Bible glosses, Mahmut adds that the Qur’anic food laws were designed to make it as difficult as possible to eat flesh. 23

Turkish ‘charity’ to animals was by then a familiar trope: Francis Bacon compared the Turks to Pythagoras and the Brahmins for bestowing ‘almes upon Bruit Creatures’, while George Sandys described their universal ‘charitie’ of which Samuel Purchas had commented that ‘Mahometans may in this be examples to Christians.’ 24 Other commentators were more critical of their soft-heartedness, and, as a Turk himself, Mahmut lamented that bigoted Europeans ‘censure the Mussulmans , for extending their Charity to Beasts, Birds and Fishes … who, in their Opinion, have neither Souls nor Reason’. 25 Mahmut’s aim is to isolate Western Christians with regard to their rapacious treatment of animals.

Next, Mahmut enrols Judaism to the cause, writing to his Jewish confederate that the Mosaic law ‘obliges all of thy Nation to certain specifick Tendernesses towards the Dumb Animals’. (That the law contradicts itself by also instituting barbaric sacrifices, argues Mahmut, only shows that the Bible is a hopelessly unreliable ‘Collection of Fragments patch’d up’. 26 ) The true original law, explains Mahmut, having heard the story from the legendary ‘wandering Jew’, was still maintained by the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This isolated stock, he says, reside beyond a mountain range in northern Asia living off the fruit of the land, adhering to the common oath: ‘I will not taste of the Flesh of any Animal , but in all things observe the Abstinence commanded by Allah to Moses on the Mount.’ While the Christians and Jews had debased their Bible so much that they believed that the law ‘ Thou shalt not Kill ’ only applied to humans, the lost tribes (and to some extent the modern Muslims) had not forgotten that ‘This Prohibition … extends to all Living Creatures. ’ 27 At the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mahmut identifies a long-lost vegetarian dictate.

Christianity too, ventures Mahmut, was originally vegetarian. Like Thomas Tryon and Roger Crab, he invokes John the Baptist (who did not eat ‘locusts’ as the translations of the Bible stated, but, as a true rendering of the Greek revealed, ‘plant buds’ like asparagus 28 ), Jesus’ brother James, and even Jesus himself, who ‘was the most Temperate and Abstemious Man in the World’. 29 Jesus, he claims, was a member of the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish sect who ‘would rather suffer Martyrdom , than be prevail’d on to taste of any Thing that had Life in it’. 30

Mahmut doesn’t stop there. He finds vegetarianism in all cultures: ancient Egyptian, Persian, Athenian, Druidic, Lacedemonian, Spartan, Manichean and ‘almost all Nations of the East’. His taxonomic collation of the world’s civilisations is a stepping stone between the Renaissance prisci theologi and eighteenth-century Orientalism. Making Neoplatonism and deism bedfellows, he fervently declares that he is ‘inflam’d afresh with Pythagorism , Platonism , and Indianism ’. 31