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For the most part, the Mahometan of the oriental tale is confined to the Mahometan Orient, the vast space that seems to extend continuously from Cairo to Cashmire. Despite his extensive, often endless travels eastward, however, the Mahometan protagonist is barred from one space: the Indic Orient. By the early eighteenth century, long-circulating, conflicting arguments in Europe regarding India as either the site of ancient knowledge on Abrahamic religions and other historical mysteries or, alternatively, as the home to idolatrous sects whose philosophies were premised on transmigration had found their way into oriental tales as well.⁸⁶ Travel accounts offering details of the Mughal courts, penned by explorers such as Francois Bernier and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier were available in English by the end of the seventeenth century. India, though still not fully colonized, nevertheless had begun to take definite shape in the English imagination.

While travelers such as Sindbad and Aboulfouaris traveled to ports such as Golconda and Serendib, their journeys to these outlying parts of the Indic Orient were fraught, and the conditions they faced necessitated return to the Mahometan Orient. In the heyday of the orient tale, the Indic Orient is a lurking presence, described by Ballaster as a “duplicitous fiction,” the site of “master tricksters.”⁸⁷ For the Mahometan protagonist, however, the Indic Orient is a warning, a dark but sacred territory that threatens to destroy the masquerading despot should he attempt to traverse its bounds. For a good part of the eighteenth century, India was popularly seen in England as the reason for the rise of newly rich nabobs who threatened the domestic and political order of the metropolis upon their return from the colony. This well-known perception may well be one explanation for the early fictional construction of the Indic Orient—one that persisted in many stories and even some novels—but its animus toward the Mahometan in the oriental tale has more complex bearings.

While England’s dealings, from as far back as Thomas Roe’s embassy to the emperor Jehangir to the Company’s interactions with Aurangzeb, had been with Mughal rulers, a single narrative around this dynasty persisted in England and France within which we can see much of what I have attempted to describe take on material significance. To borrow from Francois Bernier’s travelogue from his days in the Mughal territories:

The Great Mogul is a foreigner in Hindoustan, a descendent of Tamerlane, chief of the Moguls from Tartary, who, about the year 1401, overran and conquered the Indies. Consequently, he finds himself in a hostile country, or nearly so, a country containing hundreds of Gentiles to one Mogul, or even to one Mohametan.⁸⁸

Bernier’s account was a popular one, translated into English around 1671, believed also to be a source for Dryden’s own Aureng-zebe. The Mughal ruler of India, by this account, follows the general prototype of the Mahometan despot: foreign and itinerant. But unlike fictional rulers such as Schahriar, Haroun, or Hasikin, who remained within the Mahometan Orient—incidentally no longer a threat to European interests—the “Mogul” rules in a “hostile” geography. Appropriating this general and oft-repeated conception of India, the oriental tale imaginatively codifies the perceived condition of the Mughal emperor in cautionary terms of ruined Mahometan empires.

The final element of the chronotope, then, posits that the Mahometan, in all his various forms—posturer, nomad, despot—cannot inhabit the Indic Orient. To put it another way, the Indic Orient of the oriental tale is starkly separated from the Mahometan Orient through the constitutions of its characters and its people. How can we read this destructive antagonism between orients: the one, signified by its empire-like formation and its itinerant, masquerading subjects, and the other, a place of possibility that, though mysterious, is home to vast stores of wealth and knowledge? As a construct, the Mahometan Orient, marked by its false time and space, simply could not cohere with the Indic. The latter, in contrast, was a territory whose “Gentiles” were rumored to be the “direct descendants of Abraham,” and that housed “ancient scriptures,” believed to be the key to the Mosaic narrative.⁸⁹ Captured by Raymond Schwab, the French letterist, the Mahometan Orient, “much of a piece with the empire of the caliphs” in the Arabian Nights, lacked exactly what India offered to Europe: “remoteness, nobility and a sense of the archaic.”⁹⁰ The vague incompatibility of two invented orients is formally theorized by later orientalists in India, ironically, using some of the terms that the oriental tale provides. In the stories of Fadlallah and Zemroude, and Beckford’s Vathek, the Indic Orient—personified as santons, or Hindu devotees—ventures to Mahometan territories, tempting sultans and caliphs with promises of immortality and wealth, but inevitably destroys them when they fail to resist their seductive guests.

The story of Fadlallah and Zemroude first appeared in the Persian Tales as a story about a man’s fidelity to his wife, while an excerpt from the story was reprinted in the Spectator with the lesson that “Consciousness alone and not Identity of Substance” makes a person. Indeed, a pliable plot with many lessons to offer, the story is also a warning to the Mahometan prince against giving in to his curiosity for India. Fadlallah, the prince of Moussel, asks his father to allow him to travel before he has to settle down and marry. En route to Baghdad, his retinue is attacked by Bedouins who, upon discovering his identity, decide to exact a special revenge on him. One of the Bedouin wives, taking pity on Fadlallah releases him from captivity a night before the desert pirates have to move camp. He continues his journey to Baghdad, but upon reaching it, he catches sight of Zemroude, the daughter of the aristocratic Mouaffac, engaged to marry the prince of Basra. Disguised in a “costly robe” and a “turban of Indian muslin,” Fadlallah impersonates the prince and ends up marrying Zemroude himself.⁹¹ Not at all unhappy when Fadlallah’s deception is discovered, Zemroude helps perpetuate the disguise, even indulging in some masquerade herself.

After living in Baghdad for some years, Fadlallah hears of his father’s death and decides to travel back to Mousel to take his rightful place on the throne, which was in the meanwhile occupied by his German cousin, Amadeddin Zengui. But Fadlallah’s reign is brief, for soon after returning to Mousel, he befriends a mysterious “dervis,” the Indic undoing of the happy couple.⁹² The young man, who fast becomes the “principal favorite” of Fadlallah, tells him of his travels to the Indies where he had seen a “great many curiosities and wonderful things” and during which had become close to an “aged Brachman,” a man acquainted with the “most hidden powers of nature.”⁹³ One of the many “secrets,” the devious dervish learns from the Brahmin is the power of transmigration, or transporting the soul from one body to another.⁹⁴ Overcome by curiosity, Fadlallah insists that the dervish also teach him the secret of transmigration, and after several refusals, the dervish gives in. By leaving out the words for returning to one’s own body, the dervish ends up occupying Fadlallah’s body, while the prince himself is in that of a wounded doe. Disguised as Fadlallah, the dervish returns to the palace and to Zemroude who knows nothing of what has transpired. After a series of bodily migrations, Fadallah finally manages to return to his body and kill his false friend, but when Zemroude discovers the deception she has suffered, and the adultery she has inadvertently committed, she dies, leaving Fadlallah alone. Fadlallah abdicates from the throne and spends the rest of his life as a wandering mendicant.

Allegorically, Fadlallah’s story “suggests parallels between the Persian seraglio and the court of Louis XIV in France, both spaces of intrigue, duplicity, sexual and political plotting.”⁹⁵ In the case of its abridged reprint in the Spectator, the story served as a philosophical and political reflection for the bourgeois Englishman. Derivative in form, the chronicle of Fadlallah and Zemroude has, at its center, a male protagonist who, like Sindbad, travels at will, and like Haroun, facilitates his physical and social mobility through disguise. In a sharp contrast to other characters in the oriental tale, however, Fadlallah, a Mahometan prince, pursues India, here signified by certain forms of knowledge with which the dervish tempts him. The pursuit of this mysterious entity costs Fadlallah both his person and his kingdom, leaving him forever a mendicant. Fadlallah and other Mahometans, including Aboulfouaris, seek proximity to India, a harsh end that stands in stark comparison to the happier situations that territorially compliant characters such as Schahriar and Sindbad find themselves in.

Though India and the dark arts also make an appearance in the story of Chec Chahubuddin from the Turkish Tales, a more precise example of the maturation of this contradiction between Mahometan and Indic appears in Vathek. The story of the Caliph Vathek details the events in the life of the protagonist and his final fall into the caverns of hell. Vathek is the ninth caliph of the Abassid caliphs, the ruling dynasty that claimed to be the direct descendants of “Mohamet” (as narrated in the Bibliothèque), taking control from the “Ommiades” by accusing them of “usurping” what was “heritage” to the former group.⁹⁶ The name Vathek is a corruption of al-Vasiq, the ruling Abassid caliph from 842 to 847 A.D.

The chronotope of the Mahometan culminates in the figure of Vathek, a caliph whose role the footnotes of the story tell us “implies the three characters of Prophet, Priest, and King,” and who, instead of living in a single palace, moves around within five different palaces, each dedicated to the pleasures of a different sense.⁹⁷ A man of excesses, Vathek “wished to know everything; even sciences that did not exist,” an end for which he decides to build a tower that literally seems to carry him beyond the earth and into the “mysteries of astrology.”⁹⁸ His desire to outdo his humanly limits and his “irreligious conduct” are “beheld with indignation” by the “great prophet Mahomet,” who decides that Vathek’s excess must become his undoing, going so far as to send his Genii to expedite the construction of the tower. When Vathek finally climbs atop the completed tower, he beholds “men not larger than pismires; mountains, than shells; and cities, than beehives.” In his own estimation, “he was almost ready to behold himself,” interrupted only by the presence of the stars that shone above him.⁹⁹ While Vathek is exterior to all that he beholds—pismires, shells, beehives, all suggestive of defined, bounded communities that exclude the caliph—Mahomet is an imposter of a prophet, who misleads his subject instead of counseling him.

Vathek’s forays into astrology lead him to believe that the “most marvelous adventures, which were to be accomplished by an extraordinary personage from a country all together unknown,” awaited him.¹⁰⁰ To that end, when a stranger arrives in Samarrah, “a man so abominably hideous” and of “so horrible a visage” that all who see him recoil, Vathek, despite his own disgust, decides to welcome him to the palace.¹⁰¹ The man identifies himself as a Giaour, “an Indian; but from a region of India, which is wholly unknown.”¹⁰² He shows Vathek “sabres … enriched with gems that were hitherto unknown” that “emitted a dazzling radiance,” covered with “uncouth characters engraven on their sides,” a script that arrests the caliph’s attention immediately.¹⁰³ Vathek’s obsession with the Giaour and the mysterious letters makes him ill to a point that he abandons all his pleasures, poring over the sabres daily until one day the Giaour finds him alone. He commands Vathek to “devote thyself to me … abjure Mahomet,” in return for which he would show Vathek “in immense depositories, the treasures which the stars have promised.”¹⁰⁴ Vathek agrees, and a series of events follow that signal the unraveling of his empire.

Vathek’s obsession with the Giaour leads him to abandon his own kingdom and travel across the Mahometan Orient, but the journey does not end with the treasures of India. Instead, the Giaour reveals himself to be “Eblis,” a satanic spirit, and Vathek meets his end in a monstrous cavern that seems to stand for hell itself. A number of other characters, including a benign Emir, his beautiful daughter and Vathek’s own sorceress mother, play a role in the story, but none as compelling as that of the Giaour from India. While the version of events presented in this discussion is an abridged one, my interest remains in the overwhelming role that the Indic Orient plays in the annihilation of the Mahometan protagonist and his territories. As a character, Vathek is certainly not likeable, but unlike other barbaric sultans, an enlightened domestication becomes closed to him when he pursues knowledge and territories that extend beyond the Mahometan Orient. Neither can Vathek be reformed or dissuaded by way of stories from his curiosity for the treasures and secrets of India, for the latter differently from the territories of the Mahometan Orient, resists any attempts on the part of the Mahometan to colonize it.

A somewhat later tale than others discussed here, Vathek deploys every aspect of the Mahometan chronotope to produce a narrative whose allegorical possibilities range from bad governance to sexual deviance, the performance of which is undertaken by the Mahometan protagonist. Taken as part of a progression of stories and characters that include Fadlallah, Aboulfouaris, Chech Chahabudin, Vathek ultimately points us to the impossibility of the posturing, itinerant, and despotic Mahometan—Ottoman or Mughal—to lay claim to the Indic Orient as the English imagination constructs it: the seat of ancient knowledge, perhaps even Abrahamic truths, populated by a Gentile people destined for Christianity. It seems redundant to recall that by this point, India was a flourishing site of lived Islam, the so-called “Gentiles” of Bernier’s narrative part of a fluid Indo-Persian religio-cultural complex. Scattered, even inconsistent, the interactions between the Mahometan and Indic Orients that take place in the oriental tale are gathered into a cohesive, scholarly narrative by William Jones within a year or so of Vathek’s publication.

By the latter decades of the eighteenth century, both the oriental tale and the chronotope of the Mahometan had become ubiquitous symbols in English culture. Independently composed volumes of oriental tales or single stories such as Thomas Moore’s political allegory Lalla-Rookh (1817) and Lord Byron’s romance The Giaour (1813) persisted, but to a large extent, the domestic novel had assumed the reigns of national narrative. Within the novel, what was once a definitive chronotope became a synecdoche for all that is oppositional to English virtue. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Pamela declares herself to be above those who may trade their honesty for “all the riches of the Indies,” while in Clarissa (1748), the evil Lovelace compares himself to a slave and his captive, Clarissa Harlow, to an “eastern monarch.” In Henry Fielding’s History of Tom Jones (1749), Tom Jones fantasizes about turning down “Circassian beauties” for the village squire’s daughter, Sophia. By the end of the eighteenth century, novels about Warren Hastings’s India, including Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), rewrite the chronotope as historical fact for the English reading public. Relegated to minor, low-brow popular forms such as the chapbook, the fantastic Mahometan endured as an image: Bluebeard, the infamous wife-killer, began to be dressed in Ottoman robes; brightly illustrated copies of Sindbad’s and Aladdin’s adventures circulated as penny fiction.

This is not to say that chronotope of the Mahometan, as it emerged in the once-dominant form of the eighteenth-century oriental tale, vanished entirely. Much of the point of this chapter, at the risk of seeming descriptive, has been to explicate the construction of the Mahometan as a figure in a space and time delineated by Enlightenment ideals. Similarly, for those weary of critics and scholars who continue to engage with the discipline and legacies of orientalism, this chapter may read as a simplistic rehearsal or elaboration of arguments contained in Said’s Orientalism. My extended argument, however, should not be misread as a recounting of various oriental tales and their biases against Muslims. What I hope to have done is to have elaborated the underlying narrative structure of the oriental tale as uniquely constituted by the elements of a time and space that are in contradiction with the moment in which they are invented. The Mahometan chronotope, as I call it, materializes in the English oriental tale as a non-national, shifting space whose inhabitants themselves are fluid, unattached beings. Over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chronotope travels past the limits of domestic fiction to other orientalist forms, including scholarly tracts and vernacular oriental tales.