Asadova chexrangiz salim qizi saydullayev nuriddin zayniddin o‘G‘li 35 – O‘zbek theme: idealism in tamburlane the great- the work of christopher marlowe contents

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The representation of the Qur’ān before Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
The famous medieval Latin ink drawing of the Prophet Muhammad with a curved sword of tyranny in his right hand and the Qur’ān in the left hand is a factual representation of Islam in the European Dark Ages.¹ The same image of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’ān is depicted in the Modern American frieze of the stone sculptures of eighteen lawgivers, from Hammurabi to John Marshall, which is in the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the same Machiavellian image of the Prophet Muhammad is reproduced in the prominent medieval writers as spread by sword, though the sword of Islam abolished the oppression of tyrant rulers who were carrying on against the faithful Christians and Jews.
Islam was antagonistically reported by the fanatic Western medieval authors. For instance, Michael the Elder, a Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch in Syria, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, approved the attitude of his antecedents at the advent of the Islamic armies in the seventh century. He describes the change of history as the power of God in ‘His Arab conquests’, even after the Eastern Churches had had five centuries of experience with the Islamic laws which were inspired from the Qur’ān. After narrating the discriminations carried on by Heraclius against his ‘coreligionists’, Michael the Elder remarks:
This is why the God of vengeance – who alone is All-Powerful and changes the empires of mortals as He will, giving it to whomsoever He will, and uplifting the Humble-beholding the wickedness of the Romans, who, throughout their dominions, cruelly plundered our churches and our monasteries and condemned us without pity – brought from the region of the south the sons of Ishmael, to deliver us through them from the hands of the Romans… It was no slight advantage for us to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans, their wickedness, their wrath and cruel zeal against us, and to find ourselves at peace (Arnold 1986:54–6).
Thus, in the hands of the Western scholars, the Qur’ān became a text which could easily be subjected to semantic shifts to suit their own ideological purposes. The scholarly source of the Qur’ān which took its place in the Western churches was the translation of Qur’ān by Robert of Ketton (1110–1160) in the twelfth century. Robert of Ketton was an English medieval theologian, astronomer and Arabist. He received a church scholarship and support from the French Abbot Peter the Venerable, to translate several other Islamic texts as well as the Qur’ān into Latin in 1143, entitled Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, ‘Law of Muhammad, the False Prophet’ (Burman 1998:703). This first translation of the Qur’ān into a European language remained the standard well into the sixteenth century. The translation is not viewed by modern scholars as faithful, but rather includes some passages with distortions or exaggerations of the original Arabic. Additionally, Peter rejected Muhammad as a prophet and denied the Qur’ān’s divinity. Peter gives the impression to sort Islam as heresy or paganism:
I cannot clearly decide whether the Mohammedan error must be called a heresy and its followers heretics, or whether they are to be called pagans. For I see them, now in the manner of heretics, take certain things from the Christian faith and reject other things… For in company with certain heretics (Mohammad writes so in his wicked Koran), they preach that Christ was indeed born of a virgin, and they say that he is greater than every other man excluding Mohammad… They acknowledge that he was the Spirit of God, the Word-but not the Spirit or the Word as we either know or expound. They insanely hold that the passion and death of Christ were not mere fantasies, but did not actually happen… They hold these and similar things, indeed, in company with heretics (Kritzeck 1964:167)
The Qur’ān is counted among gods of Muslims. Saracen literary characters vow by Greek mythical gods, by Muhammad, by ‘Alcoran’ (the Qur’ān), or even by Jesus. According to Encyclopaedia Britannia (2007), the term ‘Saracens,’ is used by the ancient Romans to refer to people living in the desert, around the Roman province of Arabia. In the medieval Ages, Saracens in Europe included all Arabic-speakers and all Muslims. During the Crusades, Saracen is synonymous with ‘Muslim.’ Smith remarks that the medieval people believed that the Saracen idols, made of gold, silver and precious stones, were ‘being kept in temples or synagogue where Saracens come to adore them in rituals and seeking aid before battle’ (1977:2). Like other Saracen idols, the pictures of idols are usually made “off gold gaily gilte” (Aljubouri 1972:207). Therefore, Norman Daniel remarks that in general ‘the use of false evidence to attack Islam was all but universal’ (1960:267).
The medieval writers envisaged the Prophet Muhammad as an idol adored by Eastern people in their mosques. Many thought Muslims worshipped the Messenger Muhammad – but that is not true. Muhammad is not a deity. Instead, Muslims believe he is the last messenger of Allah. The Songs depict him as a god or a demigod. Furthermore, the Chansons de Geste has a crusading propaganda. There is an unconscious association of ideas by means of which Muslim’s beliefs and practices were often assimilated to Christian ways. Just as in Christianity, Jesus is both divinity and man, so medieval writers thought Muhammad was a being to the Muslims. But while Jesus was the incarnation of God, Muhammad, they reasoned, was the incarnation of the devil or Antichrist (Rudwin 1977:21). In Otuel and Roland romance, it is related that the souls of the dead Saracens were carried off to dance with the devils in hell (2463-4). Indeed, such vernacular romances represented devil images of Muhammad’s idol, which are repeated in the use of the term ‘mammet’ in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Ben Johnson.² In the Beues of Hamtoun romance, Beues reports on his visit to Damascus, a zealous hero meets a crowd of Saracens who have just offered their devotion to Muhammad:
What devil do ye?
Why make ye Mahound this present And so disspice god omnipotent?
I shall wytt, so haue I roo,
What Mahound can say or doo!" Beueslepe to Mahoun
And pullidhym right to the ground And caste hym in myddus the myre And he bad hem take her syre.
The Sarzins, that be Beuesstode
For Ire and tone waxid wood
And they swore all, he sholdabye
For’ disspysinge of their mawmentrye (Beues of Hamtoun, 1162–74).
Mandeville’s account about ‘Alkaron’ says:’on the day of doom, God shall come to doom all sorts of folk. And the good he shall draw on his side and put them into bliss, and the wicked he shall condemn to the pains of hell’ (1967: 101–2). On the other hand, the accounts reported by Mandeville about the Saracen paradise are wonderfully echoed in medieval literature. In Paradise, men shall find all sorts of fruits in all seasons, and rivers; and that Muslim Paradise, Arabic Qur’ānic Firdaws, the garden of delights with its gushing and running canals of milk and honey, and of wine and of sweet water, thornless shady trees, fair houses and noble, every man, after his desert made of precious stones and of gold and of silver and fair beautiful damsels (Arabic Houris), with wide lovely eyes like unto hidden pearls, as the Qur’ān describes them (56:12–40) find little or no expression in the romances of medieval England. Mandeville, however, provided his contemporaries with a brief description of Muslim’s relation with Qur’ān. From his popular Travels, the medieval reader learned something about the Muslim’s conception of the Qur’ān. He praises them, saying: ‘For Sarazines ben gode and feythfulle, for theike penentierly the commandment of the holy book Alkaron that God sente hem by his messager Machomet’ (1967:101–2).
This medieval conception was a wider literary practice in the early fourteenth century and was in transmission until the seventeenth century. Chaucer talks of ‘mammatte’ that had turned into a fable in The Man of Law’s Tale. Spenser’s Faerie Queene refers to a concealed idol in the holy temple of the Saracens (Aljubouri1972:84). As a literary tradition, Saracen characters after being overwhelmed, they curse, abuse, and haul their gods on the ground of the stage. They are even smashed to a waste and dealt as bogus gods (Smith1977:2). In Asia and the Far East, Marlowe talks about two idols of Samarkand as Asiatic deity. His Tamburlaine swears ‘by the love of Pyllades and Orestes/ whose statures we adore in Scythia’(Part I, I.ii.244). Wolf notes that this image might be related to ancient religions in Central Asia before Islam. On the other hand, the burning of the bodies of the Captain of Basra and his son by the Arab Muslim Olympia is a Hindu ritual of cremation, not Islamic (Part II, III.iv.71–72). Elizabethan plays, too, represented Muhammad on London stages in the shape of a stone head that speaks to infidels, Christians or Muslims.