Islam and the English Enlightenment: The Missing Link

Watch/Listen the Deep Dive conversation with Dr. Humberto Garcia, Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Merced.

I’m excited to share a new Deep Dive conversation with Dr. Humberto Garcia, Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Merced, whose work fundamentally reframes how we understand the English Enlightenment. In this interview, Prof. Garcia shows that Islam was not a marginal curiosity in early modern Europe, but a missing link in debates over toleration, republicanism, secular governance, and liberty.

Drawing on his landmark book Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670-1840, we descend into the underground world of manuscript culture—where radical Protestant dissenters secretly read the Qur’an, questioned the Trinity, and even imagined a provocative figure of a “Protestant Muhammad” as a political symbol, all while navigating the very real dangers of censorship and blasphemy laws.

The conversation situates these ideas within a longer Atlantic story that reaches all the way to America’s founding, engaging alongside works like Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an by Denise A. Spellberg. What emerges is a powerful corrective to the usual Enlightenment narrative: Islam appears not as an external “other,” but as an internal interlocutor shaping how early modern thinkers argued about reason, conscience, and freedom.

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