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

² From the moment of its first publication, the Turkish Spy was a literary sensation throughout Europe. Among the most popular works of the period, read by adults and children alike, it was published in Italian, French, English, German and Russian; reissued at least thirty times and was still being read more than a century later, not least by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.³

      Part of its popularity was due to its position at the vanguard of a new literary genre: the novel. Widely imitated, the Turkish Spy spawned a rash of fabricated collections of letters such as Charles Gildon’s The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail: or, the Pacquet Broke Open (1692), and was a forerunner of Samuel Richardson’s novels. Numerous other copy-cat spy thrillers rolled off the press, including the Golden Spy, Jewish Spy, German Spy, London Spy, York Spy, and Agent of the King of Persia. Mahmut’s role as an outsider in Europe also mirrored that of della Valle and Bernier in their travel narratives which were themselves written in the form of letters and from which the Turkish Spy occasionally copied whole chunks verbatim. Indeed, the Turkish Spy’s sceptical comparison of different cultures was a logical progression from the voice Bernier developed in his travelogues. From this point on, the satirical foreign observer became a standard figure of European literature, perfected, for example, in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Voltaire’s Letters of Amabed (1769) and Eliza Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796).⁴

      Particularly curious given its popularity is the fact that the Turkish Spy is one of the most radical assaults on established religion to have made it past the censors into print – apparently providing a rare glimpse of the openness to scepticism and even closet deism in Europe.⁵ In the interests of the plot, Mahmut himself vacillates between the extremes of devout mystical enthusiasm and Epicurean atheism,⁶ going so far as to suggest that the world is no more than a random conglomeration of atoms ‘Tack’d, and Stitch’d, and Glew’d together, by the Bird-lime of Chance’.⁷ But the most sustained philosophical position constructed by the Turkish Spy as a whole is revealed when Mahmut declares his allegiance to ‘a Sort of People here in the West, whom they call Deists, that is, Men professing the Belief of a God, Creator of the World, but Scepticks in all Things else’. In a remarkable display of the authors’ knowledge of Islamic history, Mahmut aligns himself and the European deists with the tenth-century coterie of irenic Neoplatonist Muslims based in Basra and Baghdad, the Ikhwan al-Safa. Mahmut says correctly that the ‘Sincere Fraternity’ (as he calls them) made inviolable pacts and met in secret clubs to discuss all topics ‘with an Unrestrained Freedom … without regarding the Legends and Harangues of the Mollahs’.⁸

      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