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

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 asparagus²⁸), 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

      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