Entangled Worlds

Unitarians and Muslims in the century of John Locke

Abstract

Throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, the correspondence between Socinianism and Mohammedanism became entrenched to the point of becoming hackneyed, a commonplace habitually used in religious disputes and political controversies. The aim of these pages is to look deeper into this topic in the English context, where its remarkable expansion calls for further investigation. In the famous and lesser-known writers who were engaged even occasionally in what we might call the “Socinian controversy” that persisted for at least two centuries, one is struck by the frequent polemical references to the ideas contained in the Qur’an, and to the most famous heretic who was its reader. The Spaniard Servetus addressed the question of the Trinity and intersected with the ideas of the Polish Brethren and the English Unitarians such as Biddle and Nye, right through to the milieu gravitating around Locke. The circulation of Islamic texts and curiosity about the Muslim world and its religion stimulated the interest of English and European readers on questions such as the oneness of God and the humanity of Christ, and also on social issues and the viability of tolerance.