The body of Mahomet : Pierre Bayle on war, sex, and Islam
Abstract
This paper discusses Pierre Bayle’s article on Muhammad in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696), especially with regard to its two main themes: the role of force in the establishment of Islam, and sexual morality within Islam. Both themes had been a traditional part of Christian apologetics for centuries, but Bayle takes them up in an unconventional way, proposing to write the history of Islam objectively rather than fitting it into a Christian story. This article will discuss these and other themes in Bayle’s "Mahomet" and place it within the wider historiographical context of the early modern debate on Islam.
Citation
van der Lugt , M 2017 , ' The body of Mahomet : Pierre Bayle on war, sex, and Islam ' , Journal of the History of Ideas , vol. 78 , no. 1 , pp. 27-50 . https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2017.0001
Publication
Journal of the History of Ideas
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0022-5037Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, 2017. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2017.0001
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