Tolerating ‘mahomet’: Or, thinking about then, now

Abstract

The moment at which I write seems a fairly propitious one to be reflecting on early modern ideas of toleration in relation to Islam, but also to be questioning what the study of early modern attitudes to Islam might mean for the present. The scholarly field of ‘encounter’ in this period, and specifically of the Christian-Islamic kind, has grown considerably in the last ten or 15 years, from the publication of Nabil Matar’s Islam and Britain in 1998.’ A rich seam of scholarship on different aspects of this topic now runs through early modern studies.2 In one obvious sense, then, the field is well established, but in others - questions of methodology, in the extent and scale of a corpus of primary source material and the development of a coherent sense of the implications of this study for twenty-first-century culture and politics - remain indistinct and disputed.