With much fresher incursions of armed Muslim armies into Europe — and by 'fresher' I mean the Battle of Vienna in 1683 —, the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the hijackings of planes, and warfare along religious or ethnic boundaries in Britain's Commonwealth like the Siege of Khartoum in 1884-5 or the Indian Rebellion of 1857, there are of course far more recent events that prop up the set pieces for a stage of enmity. As Islam postdates Jesus Christ and the other events in the Bible by at least 500 to 600 years, the Bible itself clearly has nothing in particular to say about this religion. Admittedly, to be pragmatic, as a competitor to various Christian churches I am sure it has rarely been held in good odour even by modern religious authorities.
At any rate, the grounds for mentioning these Wikipedia'd findings are that I have been reading extracts from an early play by Voltaire: Zaïre. I suspect that it is almost entirely obsolete; but after running across it in an English novel from the dawn of the 19th century, I was very happy to find it in our bookshelves, and I am in fact re-reading it. As I reread it, its resemblance to a cross (pun unintended) between Othello and Lessing's Nathan der Weise grows.
Its heroine is enslaved under a Turkish sultan. She is a Christian who survived a fictional massacre in Jerusalem during the Crusades, when she was a baby, to be raised amongst Muslims in the harem. Many years later, she and the sultan Orosmane have fallen in love and are about to be married, permitting her to attain the rank of Queen. But, unfortunately, her duty as a Christian-born child enters galumphing into the plot like an elephant — an elephas ex machina if you will — trampling beneath it the vestiges of her innocent happiness. (Although I wonder whether Voltaire wasn't setting her up for a fall from hubris anyway.) No sooner have she and her long-lost father been reunited — he being an aged Christian prince and warrior who ruled Jerusalem until the massacre, whom the sultan had imprisoned due to the political threat he represented — than her father and brother are shocked at and insulted by her profession of the Muslim faith. That's as far as I've read.
The melodrama of the play — I am tempted to call it a soap opera — is (purposely) gripping and amusing. But the understanding of religious faith that Voltaire describes makes me wince — as if religion can be reduced to the physical act of baptism, as well as a willingness to designate one's self Christian and to vituperate any other religion. He casts the dogmatic nature of the Church on these kinds of points in an unflattering light, I think; in his second preface, he also mentions the unamiable habit of denying actors a burial in a Christian graveyard unless they recant their profession.
It is hard for me to reconcile the picture of early Islamic history that I received in university with the events of the play, by the way, although Voltaire (per the footnotes) did read up on the history of that period and place, and I don't doubt that he did it well.
Back to the religious aspects, as well as political: I do think that it's easy to read the play and to interpret into it criticism of more recent French politics. The King Louis of France in the drama is named as a saintly figure, but from a humanitarian perspective I wonder why. If we nonetheless do accept his virtues as given, there is at least an unflattering implicit contrast between the King Louis of the 12th century, the prolific warrior, and the King Louis of the
[Reinforcing the contemporary political dimension, I do wonder whether Voltaire had already been locked up in the Bastille when he wrote Zaïre, because then it would raise the question whether he was reflecting on his own imprisonment as he detailed the imprisonment of the Christian crusaders. (I still haven't bothered to look that up, unfortunately.)
The prisoners of war are, by the way, I think a poignant element of the surviving legends of the Crusades — Richard the Lionheart, for example, in Ivanhoe, even if he was actually kept in prison by Christian kings rather nearer home than Jerusalem. The murders and general carnage of the imaginary massacre in Voltaire's play are also fiercely alive, but he does have a long tradition in classical tragedies to draw upon even in absence of personal experience.]
Anyway, mentioning the play beside Othello and Nathan der Weise is unfair. I think that both of the other plays are far better. Zaïre was speedily written and, especially once it caught on, more of a 'crowd pleaser.' (It was written in order to satisfy the need for romantic plots in his feminine fandom.) A dashing Orosmane and an endearing, ingénue-like Zaïre were cast to bring his roles to life in France as well as in Britain, writes the French scholar in the introductory notes for the edition I'm reading. After the play had overcome a rough start, the 18th-century audience that flocked to its presentations in France and in Britain was frequently in tears.
A passage in Maria Edgeworth's romance Patronage describes a private theatrical: an unsympathetic, social climbing character plays Zaïre; the amateur actress is hedged about not by the latticed windows and armed guards of the harem, but rather by envious and critical ranks of young ladies who are her social competitors. The higher-minded protagonists of the book hold a conversation about the play's purposeful simplicity. (In general it's also strange to read things from Voltaire's less sexist phase, also in Patronage, for example this epigraph on Cupid: "Qui que tu sois voici ton maître. Il l'est, le fut—ou le doit être."*) But it has the same effect on the audience as the better professional performances.
(The fact that this play would feel so fresh and immediate to characters in a novel that was written in the first two decades of the 19th century, reminds me that the scholarly introduction in the edition that I'm reading also posits that Voltaire's use of the theme of the Crusades in fact anticipates elements of the Romantic period — seventy years in advance of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Combined with this ideal of 'simplicity' of style, I think he is quite right.)
Voltaire wrote two prefaces to Zaïre. In the later preface, added after his play had reached the British stage, he dissects the way Aaron Hill translated Zaïre into English. I think that, like modesty, 'simplicity' is a virtue that is dangerous to describe in one's self; it is contradictory. So I did smirk when he took up the discussion about his own play's 'simplicity,' and enclosed a brief list of the most 'simple' verses in it. As he used high-flown language and circular phrases to fit the dramatic quality and the verse lengths of his play — for example, nobody in his drama ever travels to/from plain France, but always hails to or from the rives de la France — his threshold for simplicity is not terribly high. I was also amused when he took issue with Aaron Hill's stage directions. One of the 'simple' highlights of Zaïre's dialogue comes as the sultan repudiates his beloved, and she begins to weep. 'Zaïre, you weep!' he observes in the French original, fairly and simply enough. In the English, she flings herself to the floor, and weeps there, and then he exclaims the same thing. That's ridiculous, declares Voltaire. Her flinging of self is far stranger than her crying, so if that horrendous stage direction must needs be kept in the play, at least it would make more sense for her beloved to exclaim, 'Zaïre, you are rolling on the ground!'
*It's apparently taken from his poetic works. Here it is on Bartleby.
The passage in Maria Edgeworth's Patronage is available here on Project Gutenberg.
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