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Islam Seen through European Eyes, 16th-18th Centuries

MCC-Rubicon Center for History

Medieval European Christians tended to cast Islam as a Christian Heresy and Muhammad as a false prophet and charlatan. In the sixteenth century, this began to change: more complex and more nuanced perceptions of Islam began to emerge, in the context of Ottoman conquests in Europe and of the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some freethinking intellectuals saw in Islam a true monotheism untainted with idolatry and blessed with the absence of clergy. Praising Muhammad and Islam became a means of criticizing the power of the Church.

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