The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

Under the scrutiny of their unflinching gaze, customary treatment of non-Europeans and the natural world came in for a dramatic reappraisal. This effort reached a pinnacle in the incredible eight volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, purportedly a cache of personal papers penned in Arabic by an Ottoman spy called Mahmut operating in Paris from 1637 to 1682. The letters unfold Mahmut’s story as he lives through this fraught period of Christian – Muslim relations preceding Europe’s final defeat of the Ottoman army in 1683 after narrowly escaping humiliation in the final siege of Vienna. Mahmut’s intelligence despatches to his political masters in Constantinople concerning the European courts’ military actions and political intrigues are interwoven with gripping stories about his escapes from assassination, his failed affair with a married Greek woman, his culture shock and psychological turmoil as a Muslim in Europe. The Turkish Spy is a deeply sympathetic political romance.

The first volume was in fact written by the Francophile Genoan journalist Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93) after his release from an Italian jail for sedition, and the subsequent seven anonymous volumes may have been the work of a coterie of British authors (with an aberrational sequel added in 1718 by Daniel Defoe).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 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 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

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.

Man’s dominion and superiority over nature had for millennia been framed by theology. When deists and free-thinkers came to challenge this framework, the distinct boundary between man and nature, which the Judaeo-Christian tradition had reinforced, either vanished or had to be redrawn. Contemplating vegetarianism became a fashionable way of articulating a rejection of orthodox Christianity as a whole. This trend was often coupled with interest in Eastern culture and the use of that perspective in attacking European norms. At the time of the Turkish Spy’s publication, there was a coterie of free-thinkers in Britain who were clearly willing to scrutinise the practice of meat-eating from a radical perspective.

Even before the Turkish Spy, those who questioned religious orthodoxy also often questioned dietary norms. The heretical sixteenth-century ex-Jesuit Guillaume Postel and his followers were among the first ever people to be accused of being ‘Deites’.50 The Inquisition imprisoned Postel for trying to prepare for the second coming by uniting all the world’s religions under his humanist banner and joining forces with the Family of Love. Postel influenced the heretic Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) whose challenge to Christian orthodoxy in turn inspired the Turkish Spy.51 Postel, like the Turkish Spy, was particularly interested in the vegetarian Indians. Poring over the travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ludovico de Varthema among others, Postel was overwhelmed by the virtue of the Indian Brahmins, who, he remarked, ‘abstain from everything that has life like the Pythagoreans’. The Buddhist holy men of Japan, he noted admiringly, also ‘never eat flesh, nor any animals, from fear that the flesh would make them unruly.’ This, he said, was a universal practice ‘approved of from all times’, in which, like the Pythagoreans, the Buddhists exceeded even the purest Christians. He concluded that the Buddhists had originally been Christians who had ‘bit by bit converted the truth of Jesus into the fable of Shiaca [Buddha]’; they and the Brahmins still held divine secrets that had been lost to the West and had constructed these into a perfectly adequate religion through their own superior reasoning faculties.52 Even though skewed by idealism, such syncretic impulses were like porous inlets through which Asian culture influenced the West’s construction of man’s relationship with nature. Renaissance Neoplatonists, India-loving deists and eighteenth-century Orientalists all contributed to changing European culture by importing the Indian perspective.

Most people holding radical anti-Christian views concealed themselves in anonymity, circulating their ideas in clandestine manuscripts, or using ruses like the Turkish Spy to air their ideas in print. Foremost in the British network of deists were Charles Blount (1654–93) and Charles Gildon (1665–1724) and it may be that these two even had a hand in writing the Turkish Spy. (If Charles Blount was involved, his decision to escape government spies and the harangues of his detractors by stoically hanging himself in 1693 would help to explain the embarrassing two-year delay between the publication of the Turkish Spy’s fifth and sixth volumes.53)

In 1680 Blount had used his study of paganism – particularly the writing on Hinduism by Rogerius, Bernier, Tavernier, Roth and Kircher – to assault Christian orthodoxy.54 Blount translated and copiously annotated Philostratus’ biography of the legendary vegetarian, Apollonius. But his critics quickly realised that his book was no simple reservoir of erudition, for beneath its placid surface lurked the serpent of sardonic scepticism.55 There was also a broadside critique of society’s bloodthirsty practices.