The staging of Islam andThe Alcoran of Mahometin Charles Saunders’sTamerlane the Greatand the Restoration politics

Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge

“…Matthew Dimmock explicates that the English translation of the Qur'an promotes the unfolding of the trope of the “English Mahomet” (Dimmock, 2013, 2) by early modern English writers. Hussein A. Alhawamdeh demonstrates that the Restoration and early eighteenth‐century playwrights reformulated Christopher Marlowe's Muslim character of Tamburlaine or Timūr in Tamburlaine the Great Parts One and Two (1587) from a burner into a reader of the Qur'an, as represented in Charles Saunders's Tamerlane the Great (1681) and Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane (1701) (Alhawamdeh, 2022b, 371–385; Alhawamdeh, 2023, 1–24). Young appropriates several verses of Jihad as “self‐defense” 6 from The Alcoran of Mahomet —as represented in Sūrat The Cow or Al‐Baqarah in Arabic, Sūrat Pilgrimage or Al‐Ḥajj in Arabic, and Sūrat The Tryal or Al‐Mumtaḥanah in Arabic (and verses of the non‐Trinitarian position of Islam) as appearing in Sūrat The Women or Al‐Nisā' in Arabic and Sūrat The Table or Al‐Mā'dah in Arabic—as an allegorical warning to the public of the Tories' and the Old Pretender's mimicking of the Islamic Jihad in restoring Catholicism/Islam into Hanoverian England, as will also be discussed.…”