John Locke and Muslim Endenization

Locke analyzed the political status of the non-Christian—the Muslim, as well as the Jew and the pagan. Unlike in Dar al-Islam, there had never been in Christendom the scriptural legitimization for the residence or settlement of the non-Christian. Regarding Muslims, nothing similar even to the exclusionary and divisive laws that governed the presence of the Huguenots in France before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 existed anywhere on the continent. Although Jewish and Muslim communities sometimes lived among the English or the Dutch, the Italians or the Iberians, either they were tolerated for financial or conversionist reasons or they were expelled. Nor had Christians venerated the Prophet of Islam in the manner that Muslims invoked the Prophet of Christianity in prayer and piety. Locke was charting a new path for the British monarchy in advocating legal rights, not just toleration, for non-Christians.

In his three epistles on toleration between 1689 and 1692 (the fourth and shortest appeared in 1706), Locke discussed, in passing, the status of Muslims in British society. To do so, he removed references to Muslims from the vehemence of theological discourse to the relativism of cultural diversity. As he looked at Muslims, Jews, and various sectaries in England and Holland (where he resided for a while in the early 1680s), Locke realized that religions and denominations always carried with them cultural markers—a different set of clothes, a specific modeling of facial hair (beards and side locks), specific linguistic peculiarities, and, most strikingly, the head-dress. Such markers often separated not only nationalities but also religions and even sects. In the case of Muslims, Locke focused on the turban that Muslim men wore, to show how such a religio-cultural custom did not threaten Christian unity or identity. It was impossible for a Muslim, he wrote, to worship without the turban, just as it was for a Christian to worship with a hat on. For Locke, every religion was interwoven with particular traditions that denoted pious, not political, commitment. In the same way that there were differences in custom and dress between a Quaker and an Anglican—and, in his time, Quakers were known for not doffing their hats—so were there between a Muslim and a Christian. And in the same way that the civil status of the Quaker or the Nonconformist was, in his view, not to be challenged because of differences in dress or creed or language (and the Quakers had a very identifiable way of speaking), neither should the status of the Muslim. Neither cultural markers nor the religion that they signified destabilized citizenship or threatened obedience to the crown.

Although Muslims had a distinctive culture, they shared with others in the harmony of religious belief. Muslims, Locke confirmed, possessed divine law through revelation: “The Alcoran of the Mahumetans … being taken for a divine law it would have served men who made use of it and judged of their actions by it to have given them notions of morality or Moral Ideas.”Footnote 6 Muslims, in obedience to the Qur’an, exemplified the moral ideas that Christianity proclaimed too. For that reason, Muslims, along with others who lived by “Moral Ideas,” argued Locke, should be accepted into the kingdom. After all, people upheld the same religion that their parents and community upheld. No religious group, therefore, had the divine authority to judge another since all men—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—were error prone, and judgment on their error did not lie with the state magistrate but with God. “In this,” he wrote, “whether and how far any one is faulty, must be left to the Searcher of hearts, the great and righteous Judge of all men, who knows all their circumstances, all the powers and workings of their minds; where it is they sincerely follow, and by what default they at any time miss truth: and he, we are sure, will judge uprightly.”Footnote 7 For Locke, religion could not and should not serve as an obstacle to full integration in the body politic.Footnote 8

Of course, Locke did not challenge the Christianity of his country, nor did he accept any faith except his own. His discussion of Muslims, Jews, and others was a side issue in his overall disagreement with Jonas Proast, an Oxford archdeacon, who had argued that non-Christians should be denied rights within the kingdom. Proast feared that if non-Christians enjoyed full rights they would seduce good English Anglicans away from their faith. Locke retorted, must “Jews, Mahometans, and pagans … for fear of infecting others, be shut out from the commonwealth”?Footnote 9 After a century of denominational and sectarian violence in his country, culminating in the civil wars and the Revolution of 1688, Locke asserted that the relationship between a subject and the crown was not predicated on belief. Having witnessed the aftermath of the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, and having seen the pluralist state in the Netherlands that allowed Reformed and Catholic, Mennonite and Jew to live in peaceful neighborliness, Locke was eager to rid the polity of the dangers of confessionalism, unless confessionalism could be used in support of pluralism. He wanted a community of a different religion to be accepted fully—but not so that members of that community would be enticed to renounce their religion and cultural habits and convert to Christianity and British habits. Non-Christians were to remain non-Christians, and, unlike in the Netherlands, where any external exhibition of faith was rejected by the Reformed authorities, Locke was not unwilling to allow the Muslim his turban in the public space. Going further than the Dutch, who firmly separated private worship from public demonstration or symbolism of that worship, Locke was not averse to a multicultural as well as a multiconfessional polity that was protected by the laws of the land and not just by commercial and theological expediency.

Locke believed that neither religion nor culture should delegitimize full admission into the body politic. “Live amongst you then Jews, Mahometans, and pagans may; but endenizened they must not be. But why?” he asked.Footnote 10 The use of “endenizened” is important since Locke specifically distinguished it from “naturalized.” Naturalization required a parliamentary bill, while endenization signified, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, admission of an “alien to citizenship by royal letters patent.” In this case, Locke was simply applying to Muslims what had been practiced on other non-Britons. During his brief reign, James II had endenizened a large number of people, mainly foreign-born Catholics: 104 in 1685, 153 in 1686, 1,036 in 1687, and 421 in 1688, nearly three times the number of endenizations in the previous four years.Footnote 11 Many foreigners had been endenizened since endenization depended on the monarch's decision and, unlike naturalization, did not require conformity to the Anglican Communion.Footnote 12 When Locke used the term in 1692, he applied to Muslims a term that had been applied to the foreign-born Catholics who had gravitated to the kingdom after the ascent of James II to the throne. If Catholics, who had been seen as enemies of the Anglican monarchy and allies of France and of the papacy, were endenizened, then surely, for Locke, could Muslims, as well as Jews and others.Footnote 13 Locke realized that naturalization would be difficult to apply to non-Anglicans: in April 1689 and April 1690, two attempts to introduce bills in Parliament for a general naturalization had failed at the same time that numerous pamphlets and treaties had been published against such an act.Footnote 14 Locke saw that the only venue for a Muslim to become a subject was through endenization and that there was no logical or legal reason why Muslims should not be treated as subjects of the crown in the same manner as foreign-born non-Anglicans. “Why might not,” asked Locke, “Jews, pagans, and Mahometans be admitted to the rights of the commonwealth, as far as papists, independents, and quakers?”Footnote 15 While his antagonist, Proast, feared that Nonconformists would seduce Anglicans into dissent, Locke pointed out that Nonconformists were accepted as subjects of the crown, as non-Christians should also be. There was no law in England, affirmed Locke, “that they who turn to any of those religions [Judaism, Islam, and paganism] forfeit the civil rights of the commonwealth.”Footnote 16

Endenization resolved for Locke the dilemma of the non-Christian in the Christian commonwealth. No other thinker in Britain or in any part of Europe had made the case for such citizenship more consistently before his Third Letter for Toleration (finished in June 1692). At a time when many European countries were not even willing to tolerate Christians of a different denomination—and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had expelled hundreds of thousands of Protestants from Catholic France—Locke redefined the monarchical commonwealth by reference to civic obedience, not religious faith, and to law, not scripture. The Muslim, the Jew, and the pagan, just like the dissenter and the French-born immigrant, all had a place in the body politic as long as they owed allegiance solely to the head of that multiconfessional body—the monarch.

That Locke the Englishman should have been the first European to propose endenization of Muslims (and others) is significant for two reasons. First, Locke focused his discussion on Muslims, not Islam, drawing a sharp line between people and religion. As far as he was concerned, the status of the individual was quite a different matter from the status of the religion of that individual. Actually, Locke may have known little about Islam as a theology or revelation: his library shows that he owned a copy of the French 1647 translation of the Qur’an, but he did not cite it nor engage any of its doctrines or themes in the manner, for instance, that his contemporary George Fox did, who showed detailed knowledge of the text.Footnote 17 Locke was interested in subjects, not beliefs. Second, Locke looked at the non-Christian—Muslim and others—from the perspective of a political economist. He published his first Letter on Toleration in the same year that he published his Two Treatises of Government (1689–90). In the treatises, he examined the relationship between human labor and property on the one hand and government, or the “commonwealth,” on the other. The emphasis on labor as the foundation of property echoed his insistence in the Letter on Toleration, just a few lines after the quotation cited at the beginning of this essay, that belonging to the commonwealth depended on the subject being “honest, peaceable and industrious.” Industry and productivity were more important to the commonwealth than religion was, even if that religion was Islam or otherwise.

The same conviction underpinned the “Addresse” that had been presented two years earlier (1687) to James II regarding his push for liberty of conscience, when various denominations in the city praised religious toleration for “the Improvement of Trade.”Footnote 18 Locke expanded the parameter of the “Addresse” to include Nonconformists, Catholics, and Muslims. In this respect, Locke may not have felt that he was proposing dangerous novelties: although there is no evidence that non-Christians were endenizened in England during his lifetime, voices had been raised in the middle of the century and earlier in support of toleration of Jews and Muslims. As a result, Jews were admitted to England (mid-1650s), and, in October 1655, Muslim sailors began docking at “Falmouth for provisions,” so much so that the Dutch grew worried that their trade in the Channel might be endangered because they feared having “pirates” docking so close to their trading routes.Footnote 19 There were many pamphlets that either supported or opposed the admission of the Jews: such discussion prepared for a climate of openness to diversity in England. And with James II promoting liberty of conscience, it may well be that such openness translated into agreements with Muslim countries that permitted Muslim sailors to dock in British ports to “sell such a Quantity of Goods so shall Supply them with Provisions and Necessaryes.”Footnote 20

Of course, Locke's theory of tolerating Muslims, Jews, and others did not necessarily translate into national approbation. In 1696, a few years after writing his third letter, all “Papists” were forced to keep ten miles out of London. It was unlikely that Muslims would be viewed any better than were Catholics, especially if they were to grow into as large and integrated a community as had the Catholics. Still, Locke's theory may have eased restrictions, thereby allowing Muslim traders and ambassadors and petitioners from North Africa to venture to London—to visit and negotiate the furtherance of commercial and diplomatic ties.Footnote 21

Muslims and the Beginnings of the British Empire

It may or may not be a coincidence that Locke published his first Toleration tract in the same year that the Nine Years' War broke out. That war, along with the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession, catapulted Britain onto the world's imperial stage. In the course of these two wars, with their theaters chiefly on the continent and in the Mediterranean (not ignoring, of course, North America), British strategists discovered that victory depended on close cooperation with, and reliance on, the Muslim countries of North Africa. Commanders and admirals needed firm agreements with the North African powers to provide supplies for British outposts such as Gibraltar (occupied in 1704) and Minorca (occupied in 1708), to ensure harbors where the navy could refit and victual, and to feed armies fighting on the European mainland on a scale that was totally unprecedented. The empire could not begin nor be sustained without the natural resources and the naval facilities of the Muslim coast. “Our Armies, and those of our Allies in Spain,” recalled Joseph Morgan in 1732, “must infallibly have perished, had they not been supported from Barbary; and Oran [in Algiers] is none of the worst Barbary Corn-Markets. Our Gibraltar and Port-Mahon (long may they remain ours) had constantly a great Provision of their daily Subsistence from this very Market.”Footnote 22 During times of famine in France or Britain, grain, corn, and other food supplies from Muslim North Africa were indispensable for the survival of the armies—especially since the price of grain in the European West was “mostly higher than in the territories of the [Ottoman] Empire.”Footnote 23 Britons found themselves trading and colluding with, as well as living among, those peoples whom Locke had sought to incorporate into the body politic.

A few examples of Anglo-Islamic cooperation during the War of the Spanish Succession will suffice to show the extent of British reliance on North Africa.Footnote 24 Once Britain declared war on France, the rulers in the regencies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, as well as the kingdom of Morocco, realized that they could play a decisive role in provisioning and supporting the European fleets and troops. In 1702, the Moroccan Commander Ali ibn Abdallah wrote to the admiral of the British Fleet in the Mediterranean, assuring him that his “Master esteems more the English than any other Nation of Europe.” He also assured the admiral that “on the Coast between Tangier & Ceuta, there is abundence both of Water & Wood which your Officers may send with all Security.”Footnote 25 Evidently, the fleet was too big and needed more supplies than those available in Tangier. Also, the Moroccans promised to sell the English (and the Moroccan correspondents always used “English” and not “British”) “any number of Horse & Provisions for the Subsistance of the armies on reasonable rates.”Footnote 26 After all, the Spanish were the “Common Enemy” of both England and Morocco, confirmed the English consul, and any war waged by England against Spain was conducive to Moroccan security.Footnote 27

British needs were dictating new terms of cooperation and engagement with the North African region at the same time that the rulers there needed the advanced military technology and consumer goods that Britain produced. As Muslim visitors returned to their deys and beys and diwans/governmental councils, they regaled the royal courts with reports about the “wonders” of the Christians, wonders that the rulers desired. In 1703, Mulay Ismail repeated his offer to the British navy for a port and depot outside Tangier where ships could dock and supplies could be stored.Footnote 28 Twenty years after having expelled the British contingent from the presidio, the Moroccan potentate was inviting Britons back—on his own terms. A treaty was negotiated to prevent seizure of captives and ships by both sides, but also to permit British ships to buy whatever provisions and “Refreshmts … in such quanititys or qualitys as they shall have occasion for, at ye Market Prices.”Footnote 29 To ensure Ismail's commitment, London was to send him the following presents: “A Marine Barrometer; A large Double Microscope with an Arabic Inscription on the Pillar of Brass (signifying God hath created strange and wonderfull things for Our Instruction, And his Power is in all Generations) … A Fine Repeating Clock with Numericall Arabic letters and figures on the dyall plate, and God is only True in Arabic on the top Plate at the houre of twelve set to Arabic Tunes.” Along with these gifts, the British also included six guns over five feet long with Qur’anic inscriptions in Arabic.Footnote 30 Eager to appeal to the Arab-Islamic sensibility of the North African ruler, Britons were crafting gifts specifically designed for the religious culture of their customers. Factors resident in Meknes communicated to manufacturers in England the style and calligraphy that was to be used on the gifts, and either these factors, having become proficient in Arabic, or any of the professors of Arabic at Oxford and Cambridge would have selected the appropriate Qur’anic verses that were subsequently inscribed on the presents. On the dial, “Allah-u-Haq” (God is truth) was carved; what the Arabic tunes were and how they were remembered and reproduced is unfortunately impossible to recapture. But the British were learning to deal with Muslims on culturally and religiously safe grounds.

As the war continued, British agents sent more bribes, especially after July 1704, when the British fleet seized Gibraltar from Spain. The small rock had no natural resources that could provision the military outpost. Since half the ships of the fleet were to operate in the Mediterranean, where they would remain until 1707, it was necessary to turn to Morocco, across the strait, for help.Footnote 31 From Lisbon, the English agent Jezreel Jones wrote that Gibraltar was short on provisions and that the army was in need of horses. The French and Spanish had bribed the Moroccans so they would refuse to sell horses to the British.Footnote 32 There was need for impressive presents to the North Africans, he urged. Soon after, on 2 August 1704, the Duke of Marlborough scored a decisive victory at Blenheim, followed by another victory in the naval battle of Malaga (24 August 1704) that forced the French Mediterranean fleet to withdraw to Toulon. As soon as it became clear to Mulay Ismail that the British were on a winning streak, he reiterated through Jones his offer to assist the queen against her enemies and to become part of what he would have seen as an anti-Catholic campaign led by England. The gifts that had been given to Mulay Ismail and his court were paying off. By September, an agreement had been reached over horses, and the Duke of Schombergh, the military commander of Queen Anne's forces, had brought “horses from Barbary … a great many of which no one hath suffered anything from ye Country & my Lord Portmore had some here likewise.”Footnote 33 A year later, in May 1705, Consul Methuen wrote to Commander Ali, requesting

Such dependence on North Africa continued unabated. In 1706, wood was “wanting so much at Gibraltar,” wrote Consul Methuen from Lisbon, “that if wee cannot gett it wee shall not be able to bake bread & ye souldiers will every day pull down ye houses to get timber to burn.”Footnote 35 Later that year, one Garven Nash procured from Gibraltar a large number of gun locks for Morocco. Unless we give them the locks, he explained, the garrison of Gibraltar “must expect no more refreshments from this country.”Footnote 36 Gibraltar and other bastions had nowhere to turn but to the Muslim regions. Jones assured Sir Charles Hedges, the secretary of state, that the Moroccan ruler was very favorable to the queen: if her “majesty desire ten thousand of His best Horses and their riders he would send them against Her Enemies.”Footnote 37 Whether Ismail could spare such a number is unclear, but at least the will was there to support the queen.

During the War of the Spanish Succession, Britons intensified their presence in the Mediterranean. Significantly, their dealings with the Muslim potentates and courts were not painted with a religious brush. Christian-Muslim relations had become British-Algerian, British-Tunisian, or British-Moroccan relations. Supplies, horses, and ports, not religion, were the crucial issues. In the making of empire, the Muslims of North Africa were no longer “infidels”; they were cobuilders of the glory of Britain and, as long as they fulfilled that function, were befriended and bribed with weapons and wines, children's toys and cutlery, chandeliers and mirrors. Bribes were the sinews of Britain's emerging empire. That the bribes were going to Muslims did not matter. Only empire mattered.

Joseph Morgan and Comparative Culture

The effectiveness of British coordination with the North African rulers was made possible by the arduous dedication of factors who lived in the region for decades, mastered the languages, built friendships, and learned the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. From Meknes in the mountains of the Atlas to Tunis on the Mediterranean shores, factors labored to advance their country's commercial and diplomatic standing as well as to build fortunes for themselves drawn from custom fees, bribes, and illicit trade. Such was the case of Joseph Morgan, who lived for twenty years in North Africa and, upon his return to England, began to write and publish on the culture and religion of the peoples of the region. Morgan remains an unknown figure in Anglo-Islamic history, with only a short entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Given the number of publications he produced, ranging from translations from Arabic and French to editorial works and original histories, he deserves an elaborate discussion.

Morgan reflects the transformation of the British attitude toward the Muslim/Turk/Mahometan in the post-Utrecht era. By then, as Henri Comte de Boulainvilliers wrote in his Vie de Mahomed in 1730 (translated into English the year after), two attitudes prevailed among Europeans regarding the Muslim world. The first ignored the Muslims because of their distance and difference in religion. The second group, according to Boulainvilliers, were scholars who urged the study of “Oriental languages, which are still living” in conjunction with “the histories of Greece and Italy” and Islamic history, the “grandeur of Mahomet.”Footnote 38 Whether they were deskbound authors, such as Simon Ockley, George Sale, and numerous anonymous others, or curious travelers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Morgan, and others who resided in Muslim countries for extended periods of time, figures in this second group disdained the Euro-Christian cultural superiority of their countrymen who “imagine that they know everything, when in reality they understand nothing,” as Ockley declared in 1717.Footnote 39 These men and women were also aware of the indebtedness of European civilization to the Islamic East, how it was the “Arabians” who had restored “knowledge” to Europe after “Barbarity had spread itself over the Western World.”Footnote 40 Among Morgan and his fellow writers, the study of Muslim society and civilization attained unprecedented breadth and accuracy.

Morgan's dates of birth and death are not known, but from the extant writings it is possible to construct a tentative biography. He served in Algiers as a “Canceller[i]a” (chancellery) assistant to Consul Robert Cole, whose second appointment stretched between 1694 and 1712.Footnote 41 Cole may have been responsible for engendering in Morgan an openness to the society of North African Islam: he had established such good relations with the local population that other consuls, envious of his success, spread rumors about his being “much inclin’d to a Turbant.”Footnote 42 In 1706, Morgan was taken prisoner of war by the Spaniards but was in Tunis in September 1710, where he bought a manuscript that he later translated.Footnote 43 He was in Algiers in 1716, after which he returned to England, where he began his publishing career (the first book appeared in 1723), but in 1729 he was back in Morocco as a vice-consul.Footnote 44 He was in London during the 1733 visit to the royal court of the Tunisian envoy, “Yusouf Hogia” (Yusuf Khoja), of whom he became a close friend. His last publication appeared in 1750. Typical of a man who lived in two worlds, Morgan remained ambivalent about the differences between Christendom and Dar al-Islam: “It is none of my Business,” he wrote early in his publishing career, “to discant; let every Reader judge as he pleases; nor shall I go about to give my own private Sentiments.”Footnote 45

The way in which Morgan presented his “Sentiments” was by speaking with, listening to, and then translating the words of Muslims. He emphasized that he saw and heard things himself and was not relying on hearsay or other travelers’ accounts. Such emphasis on personal witness was common in early modern writings about distant parts of the world, especially because advertisements for books did not always clarify whether accounts were authentic or fictitious. At the same time, some writers traveled to the Muslim world but described it not by reference to what they had actually seen but by what they had read in literary and classical sources. The preacher, Henry Teonge, who traveled on the English fleet in the Mediterranean in the mid-1670s, regaled the readers of his diary with details about the locations he visited—drawn from Orlando Furioso and the writings of Sir Philip Sidney.Footnote 46 This was also the age of authors as egregious liars: during her stay in the Ottoman Empire between 1717 and 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu repeatedly attacked in her letter the false information published in travelogues about the Levant, “which are generally so far removed from truth, and so full of absurdities.”Footnote 47 From the outset of his publishing career, exactly forty years before the publication of Lady Mary's letters in 1763, Morgan emphasized, like her, his corrective perspective: he had lived among Muslims and knew that they were not exotic or savage but that they shared with Christians in a common humanity, despite differences in custom and history. Morgan did not go as far as Lady Mary, who frequently upheld the superiority of the Turks over the English and other Europeans—perhaps because he never saw the majesty of Istanbul, only the feeble North African imitations. Still, the two writers, each with a geographically different exposure to the Muslims, firmly believed that Muslim foibles and cruelty were not much different from the foibles and cruelty of Christians.

Morgan showed his readers the Muslim world through Muslim eyes and words. In order to present some historical background, he turned to the rich oral tradition in North Africa: despite the absence of the printing press, the oral tradition preserved military and diplomatic history. On various occasions, Morgan demonstrated how much he could learn from talking to his local friends and the general public who invoked history in their daily conversations. In 1728, he included an account about Ali Pichtin, who had been alive in the 1630s, adding that the people “still tell this Passage at Algiers.”Footnote 48 When in 1732 he published an account about the struggle for Oran, he recalled the 1688 attack on the outpost, which, he stated, was “still fresh in every one's Mouth.”Footnote 49 Such an approach of listening to, remembering, quoting, and translating Muslim memories and news to English readers was quite new, which is why it was viewed with suspicion by an audience that felt either threatened or demeaned by having to listen to the actual words (albeit in translation) of the “Mahometans.” It was acceptable for Londoners to read what their compatriots pronounced about Muslims, or to peruse English authors who jovially posed as Muslims and described far-off lands and customs, as in The Turkish Spy, a multivolume series of letters purportedly written by a Turk about France. Morgan did not go for such subterfuge, thereby forcing his readers to reflect on British/European social and cultural peculiarities through real Muslim eyes.Footnote 50

Such was the case regarding the treatment of women in Islam. Where other authors would have promptly repeated the declamations of all civilized English society on the plight of women or invoked some Qur’anic statement with which to seal the fate of Muslim women, Morgan simply asked the Tunisian envoy, Yusouf Hogia, “a Person of no mean Capacity,” to explain the situation. He then listened to the envoy “speak” (in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's sense), and, since the envoy's words were verifiable to Morgan by his own experience in North Africa, he quoted them all—in five folio pages. The envoy not only showed how Europeans judged Muslim behavior without understanding it, but went on to ridicule European custom, especially “that abominable Khubba (Tent) they [women] wear, (meaning the Hoop Peticoat) and that, indeed, is what puts me out of all Patience; and surely, she who invented it, was a Woman-Hater, and had long been studying how to make the whole Sex ridiculous.”Footnote 51 As the Europeans did not understand Muslims, neither did Muslims understand them. Culture was relativistic, not absolute—a view that did not go down well with Morgan's compatriots, who were soon to sing that Britannia ruled the waves and the rest of the world. That is why, when Morgan tried to find sponsors for his publication in 1727, only a “generous, condescending Few” were willing to support him, because he told the whole truth without the usual falsity, bigotry, or exaggeration that was expected in descriptions of the non-British and non-Anglican world.Footnote 52

Such cultural relativism helped Morgan demonstrate that the two civilizations of Christendom and Dar al-Islam were not structurally far apart and shared many similarities. Again, the topic of relations between the sexes proved titillating, and Morgan was not displeased to bring it up again and again in his work. Northern Europeans, observed Morgan, declaimed against Muslim “Turkish Jealousy and Tyranny” without considering the “Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese” of Christendom who exhibited similar jealousy.Footnote 53 If behavior was to be judged, it had to be judged in a comparative context—in which case the result was not always favorable to Christians. To prove his point, Morgan told the story of a Frenchman who tried to seduce the wife of a Muslim dignitary: the best that the seducer could do to attract her was to sneak into her garden and, for an hour, dance “a Minuet, a Courant, a Reagdoon, and Spanish Saraband, all exquisitely well performed, to the Musick of his own Voice.” Noting that the Frenchman was caught and punished with a mere drubbing, Morgan warned his readers not to declaim against Muslim jealousy. After all, he added, “had this Gentleman's Case happened in any Part of Italy, Spain, or Portugal, I would not have given a Dish of Coffee for his Life.”Footnote 54 Nor was England spared from such cultural analogies. The insolent “Hubbub” exhibited by the Moors at the execution of a priest was not unlike that of “our London-Mob, at Elections, or such like popular Gatherings”; indeed, as the mob attacked the priest and tore away at his clothes, Morgan could not but reflect that “the Scene would be the very same, if a Franciscan Frier, or any of those Gentry, with Beards, Frocks and Shorn Crowns, were catched in London Streets.”Footnote 55 Mob brutality was depressingly human and had no national boundaries.

Perhaps the most striking corrective in Morgan's outlook was the separation of Islamic theology from Muslim politics and culture. Morgan urged that the societies of Dar al-Islam be evaluated not in light of revelation but of history, not in light of prophecy but of political developments—or the lack thereof. What made the North Africans reprehensible for their “Pride and Inurbanity,” Morgan explained, was not some Qur’anic injunction that theologians and armchair pundits invoked but “the very Constitution of their government, with the Character of those who compose it, drag and precipitate them, forcibly and insensibly, as it were, contrary to their Inclinations, into all the Outrages and Excesses which, from Time to Time, are there committed.”Footnote 56 Morgan conceded the “outrages” but explained that the determining factor that distinguished Muslim from Christian society was not religion but law. The divider between Algiers and London was not the difference between mosque and church, but the legal system that protected the English and not the Algerians: “were it not for the Rigour of our wholesome and equitable Laws, what Enormities are ever transacted in Barbary, which we might not suspect would, daily and hourly, be perpetrated in these pacific, well-governed Realms.”Footnote 57 It was too facile an explanation to credit everything among Muslims, from Fez to Istanbul, to religion, given that each community of Muslims related to its religion differently.

Even in the case of piracy, for which Algerians were clearly reprehensible, what prevented Britons from pursuing such careers at sea, declared Morgan, was not their Christian religion and superior culture but “the Edicts of their Princes.”Footnote 58 During the time that Morgan spent in North Africa, the Mediterranean was infested with pirates and privateers from all countries and religions. But English, French, Spanish, and other European writers always pointed at the Muslims, denouncing them for their enslavement of innocent Christian travelers and for their attacks on shipping.Footnote 59 Having lived in Algiers, Morgan would have seen returning North African corsairs with their booty and hapless captives, drudging along the streets to the bagnios of slavery. He could not but condemn such piracy, especially since his task as an assistant to the consul was to help liberate his countrymen and repossess their property.Footnote 60 But, as Morgan surveyed piracy, he again thought comparatively and turned away from Algiers and other Muslim regions to criticize the piracy committed by his own coreligionists: “Swedish Privateers have taken the Ships of Friends and Enemies indiscriminately; and those of Zealand, have seized and confiscated Dutch Vessels homeward-bound with their Lading from France, tho’ under the several Passports of France, and their own Admiralty. Now where is the great Difference between the Europeans and the Algerines?” Morgan implicitly gave voice to the Muslim response, asking the questions that Algerians must have raised when Europeans complained about Muslim pirates: “Does not the Order of Malta carry on a continual War against [us], and out of a religious Principle? Does not the Oath of the Order, at their Initiation, oblige them never to be at Peace with the Mahometans?”Footnote 61 Algerian piracy was undoubtedly nefarious, but so was Maltese and Spanish and English piracy, too.

Morgan saw Euro-Christian piracy not just in attacks on shipping but also in the imperial project of occupying and settling North African outposts. By means of piracy, Europeans had conquered the “East and West Indies” and had dispossessed the native population of land and freedom; and so had they tried to conquer Tangier and Oran, Tunis and Algiers, leaving behind them a trail of destruction and dislocation.Footnote 62 The horrors of piracy were the same, whether committed by Muslims or by Christians. But Morgan was amazed by a striking difference: Muslims exposed to Euro-Christian piratical attacks remained tolerant of Christians in their midst. “All the Attempts of the Christians to extirpate Mahometanism,” he noted, “have not set them upon repealing this Toleration,” which is enjoined in “several Passages in the Alcoran, the Substance whereof is, That every one, whether Christian, or Jew, who worships God, and leads a good Life, will certainly be blessed by God.” Muslims gloried “that whereas all other Nations oppress their Subjects on account of religious Differences, they allow of an universal Toleration.”Footnote 63

Conclusion

In A Letter on Toleration, Locke asked why the non-Christian could trade with the English in England but not worship God according to his own religion.Footnote 64 His polemic with Proast produced the first argument for the endenization of Muslims in the Christian commonwealth: henceforth, Muslims were no longer “Others” who could not be assimilated because of religious and cultural differences. Notwithstanding his rebuttal of Proast, Locke treated Muslims chiefly as tropes to discredit the inconsistency of his opponent: his argument was aimed at integrating non-Anglicans in the body politic, and Muslims, Jews, and pagans were simply part of the logical conclusion that he could not help but reach. Still, and unlike other proponents of naturalization and endenization who specified that only rich and skillful foreigners should be welcomed, Locke did not limit the inclusion of Muslims to a particular group or class. He was eager to establish the theoretical foundation of toleration rather than to specify who was to be tolerated. Importantly, Locke did not predicate endenization on religion or place of origin, presenting thereby the first argument in European political thought for the endenization of the non-Christian in the Christian commonwealth. That Muslims (and Jews and pagans) could become part of the body politic only through a royal, not a parliamentary, decision revealed Locke's cautiousness in keeping integration of non-Christians in the executive rather than legislative branch of government. Notwithstanding his opposition to absolutist monarchy, he did not want the admission of non-Christians to be determined by the parliamentary will of the people, but by the will of the ruler. Such admission was always to remain an act of exception rather than the rule.

Meanwhile, Muslims in North Africa and elsewhere in the expanding world of British navigation and discovery (to recall Hakluyt) were needed for commercial, military, and strategic cooperation. As religion did not matter in the endenization of economically (or politically) useful aliens, neither did it matter in transnational alliances and trade. What was crucial for Britons was the indomitable progress toward empire and the resources that were needed for that empire. Empire was British and Anglican, and if Muslims and their resources were the means to that glorious end, so be it. With such a vision, Morgan carefully described the military and commercial allies in the Muslim Mediterranean that his country critically needed. Like other Britons working in the trading and diplomatic outposts in North Africa, Morgan was primarily interested in the Muslims because of his desire to improve Britain's commercial and political standing. His contemporary, John Windus, who had gone to Morocco in 1721, gathered information about the region into a book because, as he explained, “the only Consideration of Trade, of which some Notice is taken in this Book, will convince the Reader how much it is in our Interest to be better acquainted with it [Morocco].”Footnote 65 Windus, Morgan, and others urged their countrymen to study Muslim culture, tradition, and history in order to improve their chances of success in diplomacy and exchange. What Morgan introduced into this imperialist ideology was the emphasis that the study of a different culture could not be conducted through academic research and manuscript consultation, but through engagement, interaction, and long years of cohabitation. Although Britons eager to master Arabic had traveled to Muslim lands to live and learn the language firsthand (as Edward Pococke had done in the 1630s), Morgan was the first writer to insist on total immersion in Dar al-Islam.

Neither Locke nor Morgan nor other writers and factors succeeded in eliminating the Islamophobia that prevailed in Christian circles. But they prepared for a theory of a multireligious “Christian” body politic at the same time that they charted the course of transnational economic and military expansion. While East remained East and West remained West, the twain met, as Morgan so often showed, at religious festivals and in political negotiation, in military cooperation and medical exchange, in cultural adaptations and economic assistance. Unfortunately, the openness that was expressed toward Muslims, legally for Locke and culturally for Morgan, coincided with Britain's imperial design to dominate Muslim regions and to seize their resources. As Locke argued for endenization, and as Morgan described Muslim customs and translated Islamic texts, the London strategists of empire coveted the wheat, corn, horses, leather, and ports of North Africa. “The general Product of the Country,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1628 about Algeria and the rest of the “Coast of Africa,” is “considerable as we find it to be, even now, under the Indolence and Sloth of the most barbarous People in the World, how may we suppose all those valuable things to be encreas’d in their Quantity, by the Industry and Application of the diligent Europeans, especially the French or Dutch, or English; all which nations joining in the Conquest, we might reasonably suppose should have their several and separate Allotments of Territory upon the Coast, and in the Country adjacent.”Footnote 66 Nothing mattered except the Euro-Christian progress toward empire, and if bombardment and conquest were needed to ensure access to supplies and strategic locations, then so be it.