Mahomet (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahomet, the play by Voltaire, arrived in the world not as a simple drama but as a philosophical provocation wrapped in theatrical costume. Written in 1736 and first performed in Lille on the 25th of April 1741, it carries a full title that announces its ambitions plainly: Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète. Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. The subject is Muhammad, but the target, many scholars have argued, was something closer to home. What drives a person of weak mind into the hands of an impostor? What makes religious devotion into a weapon? And how does a tyrant conceal his crimes behind the language of the divine? These are the questions Voltaire set into five acts of tragedy, and they have kept audiences and governments arguing ever since.

• 2. The Plot's Machinery

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  The action unfolds during Muhammad's post-exile siege of Mecca in 629 AD, at a fragile moment when opposing forces have called a short-term truce to discuss the terms of war. At the center of the drama stands Zopir, a fictional Meccan leader who champions free will and liberty, and who refuses to submit to Mahomet's authority. The audience meets him alongside two young captives, Seid and Palmira, who do not yet know they are Zopir's own children. Mahomet had abducted and enslaved them in their infancy, fifteen years before the play begins.

  Palmira's beauty has become the object of Mahomet's desire, but he sees in her growing affection for Seid a rival claim on her loyalty. His solution is methodical and cold. He indoctrinates Seid in religious fanaticism and sends him on what amounts to a suicide mission: assassinate Zopir inside Mecca. Success would rid Mahomet of his most defiant critic and his most dangerous romantic competitor at once. Seid hesitates, recognizing something noble in Zopir's bearing. But fanatical loyalty overtakes that hesitation, and he kills Zopir.

  The revelation that follows is devastating. A character named Phanor arrives to inform Seid and Palmira that the man Seid just murdered was their father. Omar, Mahomet's second in command and a historical figure who later became the second caliph, then has Seid arrested for the very killing that Mahomet himself ordered. Palmira, having understood the full scope of the deception, renounces Mahomet's God and takes her own life rather than become his possession. Mahomet moves to suppress the entire affair, determined not to be seen as the impostor and tyrant he is.

• 3. Voltaire's True Target

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  Voltaire described the play in stark terms as something "written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect." Yet what he told a correspondent in 1742 was considerably more ambiguous: "I tried to show in it into what horrible excesses fanaticism, led by an impostor, can plunge weak minds." The statement keeps the argument at the level of fanaticism generally, not of Islam specifically.

  The scholar Pierre Milza has suggested that what Voltaire truly had in his sights was "the intolerance of the Catholic Church and its crimes done on behalf of the Christ." This reading gains force from a detail Voltaire himself disclosed in another letter from the same year 1742. The assassination at the heart of the plot, he wrote, was an implicit reference to Jacques Clément, the monk who murdered Henri III in 1589. Clément was a French Catholic friar, not a Muslim zealot. The parallel makes the critique of fanaticism land much closer to Voltaire's own religious landscape.

• 4. A Pope, a Copy, and a Publicity Strategy

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  Voltaire sent a copy of the play directly to Pope Benedict XIV, accompanying it with a couplet written in Latin and a request for two holy medals. The gesture was either audacious or darkly comic, depending on how one reads Voltaire's intentions. The Pope complied. He had the medals dispatched and sent a reply in which he thanked Voltaire for his "very beautiful tragedy of Mahomet" and engaged with the grammar of the Latin couplet.

  Voltaire then made sure this correspondence did not stay private. He had the exchange published in every subsequent edition of the play. The result was a durable publicity coup: a work attacking religious imposture carried, as a kind of endorsement, the gracious letter of the head of the Catholic Church.

• 5. Napoleon's Objection

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  During his captivity on Saint Helena, Napoleon turned his attention to Voltaire's portrait of Muhammad and found it wanting on entirely different grounds than Voltaire's critics usually raised. His complaint was not that the play was too harsh but that it was too petty. In Napoleon's judgment, Voltaire had "degraded Mahomet, by making him descend to the lowest intrigues." A man who "changed the face of the world," Napoleon argued, had been reduced to acting "like a scoundrel, worthy of the gallows." He extended his criticism to the character of Omar as well, who he felt had been drawn as a crude melodrama villain rather than as the significant historical figure he actually was. Napoleon's reading inverts the usual objections to the play: rather than condemning Voltaire for attacking Islam, he condemned him for small-minded artistry.

• 6. Controversy Across Centuries

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  An 1881 revival of the play in Paris drew a formal diplomatic protest from the Ottoman Turkish ambassador. The objection traveled through official channels, a sign that the play retained its power to provoke long after Voltaire's death.

  The most vivid modern episode took place in 2005, in the town of Saint-Genis-Pouilly in the Ain department of France. A reading of the play there produced demands for cancellation and street disturbances outside the venue itself. The Mayor, identified in press accounts as Mayor Bertrand, refused to shut the event down. He was quoted afterward saying he was proud his town had refused to "cave in under pressure" and described free speech as modern Europe's "foundation stone." His fuller statement carried a note of frustration: "For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them." The reading went ahead.

• 7. The English Translations

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  Four known translations of the play exist in English, spanning more than two and a half centuries of interest. The earliest, by James Miller and completed by John Hoadly, was first performed in 1744 and published in 1759 by A. Donaldson; it is technically an adaptation rather than a direct translation, suggesting that even the earliest English-speaking producers felt the need to reshape the material for their audiences.

  E. P. Dupont publishers in New York issued a translation in 1901. Robert L. Myers produced a version published by Frederick Ungar in 1964. The most recent translation, by Hannah Burton, appeared through Litwin Books in 2013. The steady accumulation of English-language versions across different centuries reflects how persistently the play has attracted attention from translators who believed it had something still worth saying.