THE MORALITY OF THE EAST; extracted from the Koran of Mohammed: digested under alphabetical heads

Koran

Published by London: Printed for W. Nicoll, 1766, 1766

About this Item

First Edition. An eighteenth century pot-boiler taking excerpts from Sale s edition of the Koran in order to bash Papists. In the introduction the unknown compiler suggests that Islam took hold in the Middle-East because Christianity had left a moral vacuum. Mohammed arose at a most convenient time for a man of talents to give birth to anew reform of religion. Born in the midst of pagan darkness, and monkish barbarism, religion was debased to such a degree, as rendered the dictates of that subtle Arab really sublime, when compared with the grossness of pagan idolatry on the one hand , and with the then mixture of Christian idolatry and jargon on the other. [p. 10] Justification for this view is built from wide ranging excerpts from Soame Jenyns Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil; William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester The Divine Legation of Moses, Tournefort s Voyages, Ockleys s Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Egypt by the Saracens, the Bible and of course Sale s translation of the Koran. To excite sales the compiler has chosen topics likely to be attractive to buyer of the work, not surprisingly the largest extracts are on Divorce, Marriage and Women. Probably the buyer could justify the purchase of such a work containing such titillating material so long as it strengthened and justified their own Protestant bias. The Monthly Review of 1766 gave the work a good puff but was slightly uneasy about introducing such topics of divorce into polite reading, it maybe this reticence on the subjects that accounts for the scarcity of the work. Ships from U.A.E.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1531847481105

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE MORALITY OF THE EAST; extracted from the Koran of Mohammed: digested under alphabetical heads
• Publisher: London: Printed for W. Nicoll, 1766
• Publication Date: 1766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good