Abstract
This article examines the place of Islam in the intellectual history of the European Enlightenment. In 1649, the English civil war resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell and the execution of King Charles I; in the same year, the first English translation of the Quran was published in London. For some royalists, the two events were linked: they both signalled the moral demise of the kingdom, and indeed some polemicists depicted Cromwell as a ‘new Mahomet’ seeking to gain power by attacking the moral and religious foundations of the nation. Authors writing in English, such as Henry Stubbe, John Toland and George Sale, embraced the comparison, presenting the Muslim prophet as a reformer who preache