Mahomet
Nonetheless, it was quickly deemed scandalous and impious by Jansenist critics. After three otherwise well received performances, the Paris parlement brought a formal complaint against the play, which Voltaire chose to retire in order to avoid a greater scandal. Mahomet was not performed again for nearly a decade: Its next performance occurred on 30 September 1751; at that time Voltaire was in Prussia.
The play is an attack on religious fanaticism grounded in fictionalized accounts of events in the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The story takes place in the aftermath of the Conquest of Mecca and describes a brief period of truce between Muhammad’s forces and the Meccans they sought to Islamize. Zopir, the fictional leader of the Meccans, rejects Mohamet’s religious fanaticism in favor of a more Voltairean philosophy valuing free will, as well as religious and intellectual liberty. Mahomet is revealed to have secretly kidnapped and enslaved Zopir’s two children fifteen years before the events of the play begin.
Mahomet’s desire and attraction to Zopir’s daughter Palmira leads him to view her affection for her brother Séide as a threat. In a jealous rage, he orders her brother Séide to carry out a suicide attack and murder Zopir, hoping that such a move will allow him to both possess Palmira and dispose of his greatest enemy. Séide follows Mahomet’s wishes and assassinates Zopir, but is subsequently placed under arrest by Mahomet for the murder he had deceptively ordered Séide to commit. Confronted with the cruelties of her captor in the name of religion, Palmira renounces Islam and commits suicide.
Séide is presented as the very type of these creatures engendered by a conquered religion, a "totalitarian" system which turns young men (seduced and manipulated) into real monsters (Lagrave, 875). In modern French lexicography, the name Séide designates a person who displays a blind and fanatic devotion toward a leader, a party, or a sect.
On 24 september 1740 Frederick II wrote (D2317) to Charles Étienne Jordan[1]: “J'ai vu ce Voltaire que j'étais si curieux de connaître […] Il nous a déclamé Mahomet I, tragédie admirable qu'il a faite. Il nous a transportés hors de nous, et je n'ai pu que l'admirer et me taire.”[2]
That same year, in his 20 december 1740 letter to Frederick (D2386), Voltaire defines the ideas which have guided him: love of the human race and horror of fanaticism. He wished to instruct his public by revealing "the imposture which puts into practice the hypocrisy of some and the fury of others."
On avouë que la comédie du Tartuffe, ce chef d'oeuvre qu'aucune nation n'a égalé, a fait beaucoup de biens aux hommes en montrant L'ipocrisie dans toute sa laideur. Ne peut on pas essayer d'attaquer dans une tragédie cette espesce d'imposture qui met en oeuvre à la fois l'hipocrisie des uns, et la fureur des autres? Ne peut on pas remonter Jusqu'à ces anciens scélérats fondateurs illustres de la superstition, et du fanatisme, qui les premiers ont pris le couteau sur l'autel pour faire des victimes de ceux qui refusoient d'être leurs disciples?[3]
In Mahomet, Voltaire transposes the comic character of Molière on the tragic scene to create a "Tartuffe with weapons in his hand." In the correspondence of this period, Voltaire repeatedly uses the example Tartuffe to suggest that the target of attack is the religious hypocrite, not religion itself. Hence, beyond the religious imposture, Mahomet is depicted as a political impostor, a calculating usurper of royal power. This tragic representation of imposture highlights the dangers, but also the effectiveness (dramatic and political) of the alliance between power and illusion.
Evolution of Voltaire’s Thought on Mahomet
According to Garbouj (Garbouj, 873-74), from the Mahomet of tragedy to that of the Essay on manners, the distance is great. Hence we need to situate these two figures, each in its place, in the genesis of works. The dates show, indeed, an evolution. As noted above, in 1740, while composing his tragedy, Voltaire’s notes, in his letter to Frederick II (D2386): “Mahomet n’est icy autre chose que Tartuffe, les armes à la main” ("Mahomet is here nothing else but Tartuffe with weapons in his hand"). In 1748, Voltaire’s judgment is nuanced: Before Mohamet, the Arabs had “one hundred and eighty thousand prophets.” Mohamet is thus excused with regard to his trickety. By 1765 Voltaire was able get closer to the sources, especially in the "Sunah"[4]. In his 1765 publication of Remarques pour servir de Supplément à l’Essai sur les mœurs (Remarks to serve as a Supplement to the Essay on customs), every reticence seems to have disappeared: Mahomet was presented as a very great man; he always conquered [...]; he played the greatest role that can be played on the earth"(IXe Remark).
So Voltaire discovers, in stages, the history of Mahomet which, by 1765, he began to see as the encounter of a man and a "nation." If Mahomet knew how to put these peoples in motion, it was because he had understood their characters, rooted the new dogma in the soil of their ancient beliefs, and made of conquest an end and a means: victory extending the empire, and from then on constituting "in the eyes of Muslims" the strongest argument that the Divinity took specific care to assist their prophet. In all, a Mahommet "very learned", an "inimitable" poet, a master psychologist, a master strategist. Garbouj notes that it is on this point that Voltaire deviates most from the orthodoxy of Islam which holds the illiteracy of the Prophet for an irrefutable proof of the truth of Revelation. Danielle Mihram – April 2017
Sources
Bilis, Hélène. "Poétique Tragique et Pensée Politique: La Mise en Scène de La Souveraineté dans l'OEdipe De Voltaire." Symposium, vol. 64, no. 4, 2010, pp. 258-274.
Centre National de Resources Textuelles et Lexicales: Séide.
http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/séide
Garbouj, Béchir. “Mahomet.” Inventaire Voltaire, edited by Jean M. Goulemot, André Magnan, and Didier Masseau. Paris: Gallimard, 1995, pp. 873-74.
Lagrave, Henri. “Mahomet.” Inventaire Voltaire, edited by Jean M. Goulemot, André Magnan, and Didier Masseau. Paris: Gallimard, 1995, pp. 875-877.
Todd, Christopher. Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète. Critical edition by Christopher Todd, OCV vol. 20B, 2002.
[1] Charles-Étienne Jordan (1700-1745) was a Prussian-born Huguenot refugee, advisor to Frederick the Great, and French-language author on literature and history. http://data.bnf.fr/12435683/charles-etienne_jordan/
[2] “I saw that Voltaire whom I was so interested in meeting.... He recited Mohammed I, an admirable tragedy he had written. We were overcome, and all that I could do was to admire him and keep quiet.”
[3] “It must be admitted that the comedy of Tartuffe, that masterpiece which no nation has equaled, has done a lot of good for men by showing hypocrisy in all its ugliness. Cannot one try to attack in a tragedy this species of imposture which puts into practice the hypocrisy of some, and the fury of others? Can we not go back in time to these ancien criminals, illustrious founders of superstition and of fanaticism, who were the first to take the knife on the altar to victimize those who refused to be their disciples?”
[4] Sunnah (Arabic: “habitual practice”; also spelled Sunna), is the body of traditional social and legal custom and practice of the Islamic community. Along with the Qurʾān (the holy book of Islam) and Hadith (recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), it is a major source of Sharīʿah, or Islamic law.
See: Britanican.com https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sunnah
See: Britanican.com https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sunnah
