Hussein A. Alhawamdeh contextualizes Charles Saunders’s Tamerlane the Great (1681) within the Exclusion Crisis and the circulation of the frst English translation of the Qur’an, the The Alcoran of Mahomet (1649). Alhawamdeh argues that Saunders strategically adopts the Muslim Tartar court of Tamerlane and appropriates Qur’anic verses to allegorize the Tory anxiety that the Duke of Monmouth might succeed Charles II over the Duke of York. Alhawamdeh contends that Saunders borrows the Qur’anic principle of “Islamic royalism,” the absolute sovereignty of God and the divine authority granted to kings, to represent these partisan tensions through Tamerlane’s two sons: Arsanes and Mandricard. In his obedience to his father, Arsanes represents the Tory expectation that Monmouth accept the Duke of York as the rightful successor. Beguiled by the scheming Shaftesbury stand-in Odmar, Mandricard personifes the Tory fear of corruption of the throne. Te conclusion of reconciliation between Tamerlane and Arsanes, the reveal of Mandricard as Odmar’s bastard son, and Odmar’s death afrms “the triumph of Islamic royalism” and by extension, the Tories’ belief in the Duke of York’s divine right to the throne; thus, Saunders “reinvents the legacy of Tamerlane to connect Restoration England’s anxiety” of the royal succession (345).

The link to this featured publication on Project Muse is:

 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/954106

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2024.a954106​