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

For the most part, Mahmut recognises that cultural values are arbitrary; but if something occurred universally, it was reasonable to suggest that it was natural (a deduction not so far from those of modern sociobiology). In comparing world cultures, the Turkish Spy came to the same conclusion as Isaac Newton, Thomas Tryon and no doubt numerous other contemporaries: that the universal law of nature ‘to do as you would be done by’ applied to animals as well as humans. Vegetarianism, he concludes, is based on ‘the Fundamental Law of Nature , the Original Justice of the World , which teaches us, Not to do that to another , which we wou’d not have another do to us. Now, since ‘tis evident, That no Man wou’d willingly become the Food of Beasts; therefore, by the same Rule, he ought not to prey on them.’ 32 ‘In a Word,’ Mahmut declares, ‘let us love all of [the] Human Race , and shew Justice and Mercy to the Brutes. ’ 33

Thomas Hobbes had argued in Leviathan (1651) that ‘doing as one would be done by’ was a mutual contract which it was impossible to make with the beasts because they did not understand human speech. The Turkish Spy used its empirical analysis of world cultures and its ethnographic description of Hinduism to challenge the basis of Hobbes’ argument. In a scene reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne’s affectionate sport with his cat, Mahmut pointedly explains how the social contract can be undersigned without the use of verbal language: ‘I contract Familiarities with the Harmless Animals ,’ he explains. ‘I study like a Lover to oblige and win their Hearts, by all the tender Offices I can perform … Then when we once begin to understand each other aright, they make me a Thousand sweet Returns of Gratitude according to their Kind.’ 34 Identifying the reciprocal agreement as a natural law meant that the social contract was embedded in nature, and thus animals were bound by it too.

Western Christians, by contrast, had manipulated the Bible to give them authority for their abhorrent behaviour: ‘They assert, That all Things were made for Man, and style him Lord of his Fellow-Creatures ; as if …[they] were Created onely to serve his Appetite.’ 35 The Bible itself was not at fault. It had been wilfully co-opted to justify Christians’ gluttony, cruelty and pride, providing a mandate for the ‘ Epicurism of those, who ransack all the Elements for Dainties’. 36 The true Christian message, argued Mahmut, was encapsulated in the harmony of Paradise which was an image of the original state of the world when man and beast did as they would be done by. By decoding the prelapsarian myth as anthropological data, the Turkish Spy showed that even Christianity enshrined a mandate for the natural law regarding animals.

To show that adherence to nature’s laws was still a viable option, the authors of the Turkish Spy put Mahmut into regular correspondence with five living vegetarians. Most prominent of them is Mahmut’s spiritual guru, Mahummed the Hermit, who lives in a cave on Mount Uriel and has recreated harmony with the animal kingdom – just like the Prophet – converting the idea of saintly kindness to animals into a manifesto for interspecific egalitarianism. 37 Others include a Christian hermit, a Muslim monk and Mirmadolin the mendicant who ‘suck’d the Milk’ of Mother Earth like the first inhabitants of the world. 38 Mahmut writes to them about other vegetarian hermits such as ‘Ilch Rend Hu’, the centenarian miracle-working hermit of Kashmir described by François Bernier. 39

Mahmut repeatedly (about thirteen times) expresses his ardent desire to become a vegetarian hermit too, but in practice his ‘Voracious Appetite’ always tempts him back into eating flesh. He is perpetually racked by a crisis of conscience, ‘self-condemn’d for living contrary to my Knowledge’. 40 This is the subject of frequent lamentation:

the Divine Providence has scatter’d up and down the Surface of this Globe, an Infinite Variety of Roots, Herbs, Fruits, Seeds … as in a most pleasant Garden or Paradise of Health. But alas, instead we break the Rules of Hospitality; and rushing violently on the Creatures under his Protection, we kill and slay at Pleasure, turning the Banquet to a Cruel Massacre: being transform’d into a Temper wholly Brutal and Voracious, we glut our selves with Flesh and Blood of Slaughter’d Animals. Oh! happy he that can content himself with Herbs and other Genuine Products of the Earth. 41

Even with the added incentive that meat in Paris is not halal, Mahmut’s resolution to ‘taste of Nothing, that has Breath’d the Common Air’ is almost certainly short-lived, like his miserable attempt to abstain from alcohol. 42

Mahmut also thinks that ascetic abstinence from flesh elevates the intellect and is the path to spiritual restoration. 43 However, in moments of disillusionment, he sardonically reflects that his experiences of religious ecstasy while abstaining from flesh are really the physiological effect of fasting and hyperventilation induced by repeatedly saying prayers (a sceptical critique of asceticism that Bernier deployed in his comments on Indian yogis ). 44 But despite these scoffs at monasticism, Mahmut remains committed to the morality of vegetarianism and sees it as ‘the way of perfection’ and the route to Paradise. 45

His tumultuous wrestling between ethics and appetite is designed as a manual on how to become a vegetarian in real life. Addressing the social difficulties any aspiring vegetarian would have to contend with, Mahmut acknowledges that were his vegetarian sentiments publicly known, his neighbours ‘would censure me as a Heretick , a Fool , or a Madman ’. 46 Turning away from authorities and reasons, Mahmut ultimately appeals to his human instincts: ‘am I not obliged to obey the Inspirations of my Nature , or Better Genius , which tells me, ‘Tis a Butcherly and Inhuman Life, to feed on slaughtered Animals?’ 47 At the same time as being an emotional appeal, this also makes the subtle claim that the law of nature is inscribed in every human: this is the voice of nature speaking. There is no doubt that the Turkish Spy promoted the cause of vegetarianism across Europe; it opened the minds of its readers to the far-flung ethics of the Brahmins and recommended treating animals with high standards of justice. Unlike their mystical contemporary Thomas Tryon, the authors of the Turkish Spy advanced their case in a finely tuned voice which blended cool rationality with heartfelt human sympathy.

The Turkish Spy showed what could happen when European norms were abandoned for a fresh examination of man’s relationship with nature, especially when they were held up against the moral example of Indian vegetarianism. But the Turkish Spy was not an isolated case. The scriptural sanction for killing animals was the mainstay for justifying meat-eating. Indeed, one of the principal functions of religion was to create a fundamental distinction between man and beast. Once faith in Scripture was shaken, and people started turning to other ways of codifying behaviour, the ethics of meat-eating became more problematic. Even the defenders of meat-eating in the past had acknowledged that without the express permission from God in Genesis, the idea of eating animals would be repellent and one would do it, as Calvin said, with a ‘doubtful and trembling conscience’. 48 One critic of the deists, John Reynolds, realised that one of the worst aspects of dismissing Scripture was that it undermined man’s right to kill animals. He argued that everyone who denied revealed religion should logically be vegetarian. The intelligence of animals, our sympathy for them, the inferior nutritional quality of meat, and the practice of the Indian vegetarians, all suggested that it was wrong to eat flesh: if the Bible and with it God’s permission to kill animals was just a mythical invention, he said, then everyone would have to ‘let the Butcher’s Trade be cashier’d from off the Face of the Earth; let the Shambles be converted into Fruiterer’s Shops, and Herb-Markets …[and] have done with their Ragous, with their Fricassies, and Hashes, made of broken Limbs of dismember’d Brother-Animals.’ 49 The Bible was the meat-eaters’ greatest bulwark, and the foes of religion were also the biggest enemies of meat.