The troubled history of putting Islam on stage

The past decade has been punctuated by controversies concerning the representation and denigration of the Prophet Muhammad. From the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of 2005 to the Charlie Hebdo crisis in January and the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” rally outside a mosque in Phoenix, Arizona last month, depictions of the Prophet have come to embody a faultline within secular western democracies between the cherished principle of free speech and the need to protect the deeply held religious beliefs of their citizens. This tension is further heightened by the violence, threats and chaotic demonstrations (domestically and internationally) that invariably accompany such controversies.

In a British context this generates an odd absence at the heart of national debate on the issue. Although—or perhaps because—any contentious depictions of the Prophet circulate rapidly and widely on the internet, from 2005 the British news media have almost unanimously resolved not to reproduce them. The rationale they give remains constant: all support the right of Charlie Hebdo and any other publication to print such provocative images, but none wish to overturn editorial procedure and circulate images they would normally reject. Nor do they wish to antagonise any religious group, and they have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their staff. As Amol Rajan, editor of the Independent, remarked, his first instinct was to publish in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, but he ultimately had to “balance principle with pragmatism.”

One thing no one seems likely to do in the current climate is place the Prophet Muhammad on the stage. Even 400-year-old plays on this or related subjects have become controversial, as demonstrated in the contentious cuts introduced to the Qur’an-burning scene in David Farr’s 2005 production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays (1587-8). Earlier periods were far less reticent in caricaturing and dramatising the Prophet, and the remarkable history of such stagings offers new perspectives on contemporary depictions and on the reactions they generate.

For at least four centuries various versions of the Prophet appeared on English stages, suggesting how familiar he became to English men and women. The earliest examples are now lost, but Henry VIII’s court poet and tutor John Skelton likens Cardinal Wolsey to “Mahound in a play,” suggesting “Mahound”—or Muhammad—played a prominent role in drama derived from the earlier great religious drama cycles. In those plays that do survive, the figure of Mahound does not appear on the stage, but instead occupies a curious comic position as an anti-Christian rival to Jesus. In the York, Chester and Townley cycles for instance, pharaohs, pagans, devils, Jews, the soldiers that crucify Jesus, Herod and Pontius Pilate are all conspicuously (and anachronistically) his devotees. For the audiences at these major civic events this would have confirmed what they already knew about the mysterious figure of Mahound—that he was a heretic who, frustrated in his desire for power in the Christian church, fraudulently created an elaborate religion of his own that catered to the basest of human desires, and was therefore everything Christianity was not. He came to epitomise all Muslims, and attacking Mahound offered a means of attacking Islam. This false polemical portrait gained real prominence in the wake of the 12th-century Third Crusade, and it was out of these core ideas that a whole pseudo-biography grew.

When, in the late 1580s, Robert Greene resolved to write a play that might emulate the considerable success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, it therefore made sense to turn to the figure of “Mahomet.” Marlowe had transformed English drama through a canny combination of a charismatic anti-hero, bombastic language and a newly global sense of geography. For him, Mahomet was the god of the Turks, a god whom Tamburlaine rejects, and the burning of the Qur’an is his final attempt to dare Mahomet out of heaven in order to avenge the slaughter of his believers and the destruction of “the abstract of their foolish laws.” Mahomet himself does not appear. Greene noticed this and went a step further in his Alphonsus, King of Arragon. The Turkish Sultan Amurath sends emissaries to consult the oracle of “mighty Mahomet.” What follows is one of the strangest scenes in Elizabethan drama: a huge brass head is placed on a plinth on the stage as drums rumble from within. Flames shoot from the idol’s mouth as it is tended by its priests. At first Mahomet petulantly refuses to prophecy, and when he is grudgingly persuaded to do so for the sake of his priests’ lives, he gives an intentionally false vision which ultimately leads an entire Turkish army to their deaths. Thereafter he is left alone in his “darksome grove.”

There were Christian romance traditions in which Mahomet was imagined as an idol or as one of a trinity of idols, and Greene draws heavily on such sources; but his version of Islam and Muhammad is also bizarrely modelled on the classical oracle at Delphi. His caricature seems to have had quite an afterlife. It had gained enough notoriety for “Mahomet’s Poo” (or poll, meaning head) to be referred to as an icon of the stage in a contemporary poem, and the same head reappears 20 years later as a prominent part of the conversion ceremony undertaken by English pirate John Ward as he embraces Islam in Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1611).

There is another equally odd Elizabethan example, indicating the confusion that continued to surround English perceptions of Islam. In this play, William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven (1601), Mahomet is not an idol but a comically absurd deity intimidated by his angels into sparing Arabia from destruction and allowing them to hunt for an example of virtue. After comic misunderstandings, unrequited love, villainy and some elaborate song and dance routines, everyone ends up in a heaven that looks conspicuously like classical Olympus, to be judged by Mahomet in a reprise of his role as a kind of Antichrist. The most curious element of this strange play, probably written to be performed in an aristocratic house rather than in public, is that it includes the first appearance of “Haly” or Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and first Imam for Shia Muslims. Percy, whose play is based around elaborate parodies of Genesis and Revelation, imagines a rivalry between Mahomet and Haly that exactly mirrors the Christian schism between Catholic and Protestant. In allowing Mahomet to bring Haly back to the true “Mahometan” religion, Percy uses Islam to play out a fantasy in which England returns to the true Roman Catholic faith.

The two remaining examples of staging the Prophet Muhammad in England both originate in France, but are adapted for English tastes. First staged in London in the season of 1743-4, Voltaire’s play Mahomet was a smash hit. It had been suppressed in France as a satire against the excesses of the Catholic church, with Islam again offering a means to critique domestic religion. In contrast, the Protestant English congratulated themselves that “no Clergy here usurp the free-born mind,” and that they need not fear this Mahomet, who stalks the seventh-century Arabian setting of the play like a malevolent Machiavel glorying in his own hypocrisy. Voltaire’s is the most popular of all depictions of the Prophet on the English stage. In the preface to the first edition (of over 14) of James Miller and James Hoadly’s English translation, Miller’s widow had written of the “favourable” opinion “of the Town” to the play. But this was only the beginning: the English translation of Mahomet was performed on London stages in every decade that remained of the 18th century, often through two or three seasons, with over 12 different productions. Its various lead actors were even celebrated in illustration and commemorative ceramic tiles costumed in their Arabian Nights-inspired finery.

In marked contrast to the Christian controversy generated by Voltaire’s Mahomet in France in the late 1730s, in April of 1890 the French government blocked the production of Henri de Bornier’s new play Mahomet to prevent “serious diplomatic difficulties” with Muslim countries. In England, de Bornier’s play had been acquired by theatrical impresario Henry Irving, keen to develop his own version into an oriental spectacular inspired by Victorian adventurer and translator of the Arabian Nights, Richard Burton. To create it, Irving turned to playwright and popular novelist Thomas Henry Hall Caine, who discarded the majority of de Bernier’s text and produced what he felt to be a profoundly sympathetic portrayal of Mahomet. Before the play was ready, however, events overtook them. Details concerning Irving’s intended production appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, triggering protests in both England and India. Prominent Muslim leaders including Abdul Luteef (founder of the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta) wrote to current and former viceroys to declare their opposition, while Raffiuddin Ahmad (vice-president of the Liverpool Moslem Association) wrote to The Times asking if it was right that a country that reigned over “a greater number of Moslems than any single ruler, Mahomedan or Christian, on the surface of the globe” should “hurt the religious feelings of so many of your fellow-subjects in the East, to satisfy the whims or fill the coffers of a theatrical company, however influential it may be?” A vigorous campaign of letter writing and petitioning prompted fears of colonial unrest, especially since the bloody Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 was still fresh in the memory. Action was required: the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Lathom, wrote to a mystified Irving that he could not license the play, since Britain “was obliged to consider the religious sensibilities” of its Muslim subjects.

This was the first coordinated Muslim campaign to prevent the staging of the Prophet and is a momentous moment, anticipating later protests against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the more recent controversies. It shows the profound changes that had taken place between the success of Voltaire’s Mahomet and the prohibition of Hall Caine’s play of the same name (although he and Irving later changed it to The Prophet in an attempt to placate protest). By 1890, Britain had its first mosques and an Empire that incorporated many millions of Indian Muslims, all now “fellow subjects.” Earlier examples show how placing a caricature of the Prophet on the stage allowed English playwrights to show their audiences alternative religious worlds while reassuring them that theirs was the truest. Muhammad and his followers were presented as absurd, violent, lustful and base by contrast. Later examples sought to factor in more and more “authentic” detail, but what changed in 1890 was the emergence of a powerful Muslim voice determined to oppose depictions of the Prophet altogether. Today we find ourselves negotiating between the legacies of both the caricature and this oppositional voice, with each increasingly pushed to extremes in the absence of any sense of the history that has produced them.

Matthew Dimmock will be speaking at a Prospect event at Glyndebourne Festival Opera entitled “Putting the East on Stage” on 16th July before a production of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. He is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex and the author of Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge University Press)