If Bayle and Voltaire were somewhat equivocal in their interpretation of Muhammad and Islam, the French author Henri de Boulainvilliers offered one of the more flattering portrayals of the Prophet in the Enlightenment. In The Life of Muhammad (1730), Boulainvilliers devotes more energy than most of his contemporaries to describing the Prophet as a man who epitomizes the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and free thought. Muhammad’s religion is true in its essentials. Muhammad’s thought “conformed to the light of reason” and helped others seek truth and perform good works. Sharing the concern of many other Enlightenment philosophers that appeals to the miraculous in religion undermine reason, Boulainvilliers appreciates how Muhammad “constantly declared and protested that he had no power other than to persuade those who would calmly listen unto him.” Boulainvilliers’s Muhammad closely resembles an Enlightenment deist—that is, someone who rejects appeals to revelation and the miraculous in favor of belief in one creator God and the importance of morality. While this portrayal does not accurately reflect how Muslims historically have understood the Prophet, it does remind us of the Enlightenment’s most important legacy in light of our topic: the introduction of an alternative, more sympathetic narrative concerning Islam, one that challenged, even if modestly, medieval stereotypes.

Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Intro…, loc. 165