In this important and fascinating new book, Humberto Garcia makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the ways that English authors conceptualized Islam in the long eighteenth century. The book charts out a genealogy of radical English writers who crafted a discourse that Garcia dubs “Islamic Republicanism.” This genealogy starts with seventeenth-century figures such as Henry Stubbe, who wrote a radical treatise on Islam in the 1670s, and Samuel Hartlib, who promoted study of mystical Islamic writings during the 1640s and 1650s, and continues with a wide variety of political and literary writers, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Delarivier Manley, Edmund Burke, Walter Savage Landor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and both Percy and Mary Shelley. Garcia argues that each member of this diverse set of writers draws upon the same stock of radical ideas that drove Stubbe to write his own deistical-tinged appreciation of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam—for Stubbe, Muhammad stripped away pagan and superstitious elements of Christianity (the Trinity, the atonement, and the corrupting priesthood) and reformed the Abrahamic religious tradition, even as he instituted a tolerant position toward the “peoples of the book” who did not share his religious beliefs. Thus, for Stubbe and many of the other authors that Garcia examines, Muhammad is a figure of rationality, tolerance, and enlightenment that has much to teach the English people. In embracing this view of Muhammad, radical Protestants, deists, Quakers, Unitarians, and others turned to Islamic history, texts, and practices for inspiration in their own battles with or critiques of what they saw as a repressive Anglican state that relied, in part, on a corrupt priesthood to deny citizenship rights to dissenters and even more radical religious groups. If this view predominated in the later part of the seventeenth century, it was supplemented at the end of the eighteenth by a vision of Muhammad as a sublime revolutionary figure in the works or projected works of Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Blake.

Garcia argues that the Enlightenment in England, and in Europe more broadly, should be seen as part and parcel of a broader “Euro-Asian” movement that encompasses both Judeo-Christian and Islamic history, which itself contains many coeval “reformation” movements in the early modern period that were referenced by English writers. One of the real strengths of Garcia's book, in fact, is his careful attention to the history of Islam and the ways that English writers became interested in various sects or reform movements within Islamic religious history—one of the most fascinating chapters on this note deals with Percy Shelley's The Assassins, an unpublished work that was based, in part, on Shelley's interest in a radical Islamic sect in Syria.

Many of Garcia's later chapters neatly tie Romantic writers back to later seventeenth-century moments or authors that inspired their work—thus, the book achieves a coherent approach despite the fact that Garcia has relatively little to say about the middle decades of the eighteenth century. For example, in his chapter on how Coleridge's Unitarianism led him to propose an epic on Muhammad (which he never authored) and to actually write a shorter poem entitled “Mahomet,” Garcia circles back to one of the earliest and most prominent Unitarian controversies from the 1680s. This controversy erupted when two Unitarians presented an epistle to the Moroccan ambassador in 1682 in which they critiqued Trinitarian Christianity and espoused common cause with Islam. Garcia carefully charts the way this controversy over the relationship between Unitarians and Islam reverberated through the century in order to provide a convincing context for examining Coleridge's ideas. By exhibiting these continuities across the century, Garcia presents a convincing case for the persistence and importance of Islamic republicanism for a certain strain of English literary and political discourse.

In the end, Garcia's premise is that by turning to the ideas of these English radicals and their engagement with Islam, scholars can help bring about what Jacques Derrida has labeled an “Abrahamic” disruption of the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are “self-enclosed civilizations” destined for hostility and antagonism (1). This frame to his study provides a heartening and salutary call for contemporary scholars to join this English radical tradition and to remember that “a ‘radically heterogeneous’ history has stirred political reform in the global eighteenth century and could potentially do the same in the present and the future” (231). However, I also find this frame somewhat at odds with the materials Garcia has assembled, as he shows that so many of the authors he writes about found little if any audience for their ideas in their own lifetimes. Faced with actual or threatened persecution and seemingly drowned out by the more dominant anti-Islamic and antiradical discourses in English culture, most of the authors who Garcia assembles faced a variety of roadblocks and failures. Some never published their works in their lifetimes (Stubbe, Montagu, Percy Shelley); others presented their ideas only to have them largely ignored or pilloried (Manley, Burke, Landor); still others eventually abandoned or lost hope in Islamic republicanism in the later parts of their careers (Burke, Coleridge, Southey, Percy Shelley). Garcia shows that Islamic republicanism was generally a hard sell, a strenuously contested discourse that frequently had to move “underground among English radicals” (129) and that resulted in fragmented, unwritten, unpublished, or largely unsuccessful works that, as Garcia rightly notes, are also largely ignored today. Thanks to the publication of Islam and the English Enlightenment, they will now be much harder to ignore. I believe that Garcia's book will not only move these texts and this tradition of Islamic republicanism back into our scholarly conversations but also provide scholars and students with much to think about as we continue to examine the relationship between the Enlightenment and Islam in both the early modern period and in our own.