Newton’s Secret Faith: Islam and the Lost History of Enlightenment

Episode 4 of the Stories Untold explores a side of Isaac Newton that rarely makes it into textbooks, unpacking the deeper religious world behind the rise of modern science.

Episode 4 is now available! It explores Newton’s private theology, his fascination with ancient wisdom, and the surprising ways Islamic intellectual traditions shaped his understanding of faith, nature, and reason.

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For readers who want to go deeper, I’ve included the full transcript with references below, so you can read along, quote, teach from it, or return to specific passages at your own pace.

As always, thank you for reading, listening, and supporting Islam and the Idea of America. More is coming—especially on how these hidden currents shaped early America.

Newton’s Secret Faith: Islam and the Lost History of Enlightenment

TRANSCRIPT WITH REFERENCES

Islam and The Idea of America, Episode 4 (The Stories Untold)

Mustafa Gurbuz

It’s late afternoon at Monticello. On Jefferson’s desk lie scissors and a razor. He bends over a large blank volume; before him the pages of Scripture he has cut from four New Testaments — English, French, Latin, and Greek. He pastes them in neat parallel columns. As he works, the silence thickens. He recalls another figure, a century earlier: Isaac Newton, alone at Cambridge, sifting through the Bible with the same surgeon’s precision, stripping away corruption to find the primitive faith. Newton dared not publish. Jefferson, too, keeps his work private.

When we think of Isaac Newton, most of us picture an apple falling to the ground and the law of gravity. Yet on London’s foggy mornings, when he sat at his desk, what lay before him was not only mathematical formulas but also notebooks he opened in deep silence. These manuscripts contained ideas he never dared publish—writings that rejected the Trinity and Christian dogmas. They surfaced only centuries later, nearly 300 years after his death.

In his unpublished theological manuscripts, Newton argued that the earliest patriarchs—Adam, Noah, Abraham—knew and worshiped the one true God in simplicity. Over time, however, human beings corrupted that original revelation with idolatry, priestcraft, and superstition. For Newton, the history of religion was cyclical: a period of purity, followed by corruption, followed by reform attempts. He believed that Christianity itself had been corrupted—most especially by the doctrine of the Trinity, which he rejected as a later pagan interpolation.^[i]

This picture resembles Islamic scholarly interpretations of religious history. The Qur’an describes prophets from Adam through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as bearers of the same essential message of God’s unity. Muslim scholars often teach that each human community received guidance through thousands of prophets but the messages were corrupted or distorted for worldly gains. And that fact necessitated renewal through later messengers—culminating in Muhammad as the “seal” of the prophets with a final universal message.

Only in recent years we learned that Newton’s secret notebooks were nourished by the waters of the Islamic legacy. Stephen Snobelen points to a remarkable report from Newton’s Cambridge years: that Newton believed Muhammad as God’s envoy to the Arabs, sent to restore the truth of the One God.^[ii] Newton simply echoed what scholars of the age called the historia monotheistica—a vision of history where prophets across time preached the same simple truth of divine unity.^[iii]

But, how that happened?

To see where this vision began, step back to Oxford, mid-seventeenth century. In cold stone lecture halls, students bent over parchment as Arabic syllables were pressed into Latin letters. The year was 1650, and Edward Pococke, Oxford’s first professor of Arabic, was opening a door to the East with many translations. His students were spellbound. Some historians later called this moment “the Age of Arabic.”^[iv]

Across the Channel, the French orientalist Barthélemy d’Herbelot was working on his Bibliothèque Orientale, a vast imaginary library of Eastern knowledge, published in 1697. Inside were gems from Muslim scholars like al-Masʿudi, Ibn Khaldun, and others. When Newton’s secret manuscripts resurfaced centuries later, they bore the fingerprints of these works: detailed lists of ancient kingdoms, lineages after the Noah’s Flood, reflections on how human corruptions of pure faith in One God.

Recent research indicates how Newton’s rational theology and his perspectives of natural law were shaped by the intellectual traditions of Muslim Spain, especially the philosophical corpus of Avicenna and the Judaeo-Islamic rationalism of Maimonides.^[v]

In recent years, we also learned that Newton’s theology was equally shaped by his obsession with alchemy.^[vi] He wrote over a million words on the subject—more than he did on optics or mechanics. His papers, crammed with coded diagrams and translations, survive today in archives from Cambridge to Jerusalem. For Newton, alchemy was no parlor trick. It was part of God’s hidden cipher. Just as the book of nature revealed laws of motion, so too alchemy carried shards of the ancient wisdom. Historians long ignored this side of him. But when famous economist John Maynard Keynes bought his alchemical manuscripts in 1936, he saw the truth. “Newton,” Keynes wrote, “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”^[vii]

“Ancient wisdom”! Who else were also interested in finding “Ancient Wisdom”? The “lost knowledge”! Surely, Newton was not the only person being interested in “the lost knowledge”. Could Newton be a member of a secret society? Could he be part of the “Invisible College” network, which later gave birth to the Royal Society of London?

Let’s follow the footsteps of Rosicrucians. This shadowy brotherhood revived Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, and the idea of a prisca theologia—a first theology hidden beneath all faiths. Their founding myth told of Christian Rosenkreutz, who traveled to Muslim cities like Fez, Cairo, and Damascus and learned from Sufis and other mystics, seeking the “lost knowledge.”^[viii] The Rosicrucian movement began in the German lands with the anonymous publications. Their pamphlets blended esoteric Christianity, alchemical imagery, and promises of hidden wisdom. Some scholars connect their roots with Knights Templars in Europe; and some explored the impact of Rosicrucians on the rise of freemasonry.^[ix]

Why did this mythical figure learn from Sufis? Maybe it was because Sufi strand of Islam had an emphasis of universal message of inner light, the notion that there is a path to the Creator from each soul. “Know thyself” is a central principle rooted in these teachings. It is a call for an inward journey to purify the heart.

By the 1620s, Latin and English translations of Rosicrucian texts were secretly circulating in England. Francis Bacon’s utopian novel, New Atlantis, described an ancient lost civilization and “Salomon’s House,” a secretive brotherhood dedicated to experimental science. Many readers saw this as resonant with Rosicrucian imagery of hidden societies and universal knowledge that needs to be discovered.^[x]

It is crucial to reflect on the connection between “lost knowledge” and “ancient wisdom.” To grasp their significance, we must situate them within the turbulent context in which these ideas emerged. This was the age Cervantes so subtly evoked in his Don Quixote, an age scarred by trauma, tragedy, and cultural catastrophe: books consigned to flames, forced conversions of Muslims and Jews, and the destruction of Spain’s most treasured libraries.^[xi] Against this violent backdrop, the notion of “lost books” and “ancient wisdom” came to symbolize not only an elegy for what was lost but also a yearning for recovering intellectual tradition.

Recent scholarship highlights how Morisco writings—produced by Muslims forcibly converted under the Spanish Inquisition—gave rise to a remarkably rich literature.^[xii] These texts included pious treatises and even deliberate forgeries, crafted to claim the existence of early Christian sources that portrayed a pristine, uncorrupted Christianity. In spirit, this so-called “original” Christianity was profoundly compatible with Islam’s unitarian message. But given that Moriscos had publicly appeared as Christians, it is not hard to see how some of their universalist ideas had joined the stream of Christian mysticism.

By the mid 17th century, Rosicrucian themes became woven into natural philosophy. Did you hear about the “Invisible College”? It refers to a loose fellowship of reform-minded experimenters who sought a synthesis of godliness, natural knowledge, and public reform. They read the Rosicrucian manifestos not as evidence of a literal brotherhood but as a powerful metaphor: a call to combine alchemical curiosity, medical reform, and millenarian expectation in pursuit of a universal renewal of learning.

When the Royal Society was formally chartered in 1660, it carried forward this Invisible College ethos. Let’s put it simply: it was a translation of Rosicrucian ideals of “universal reformation” into the language of experimental philosophy. Newton’s life shows how deeply those Rosicrucian undercurrents persisted. Privately, his manuscripts reveal an alchemist seeking the prisca sapientia; and publicly, we see him serving as President of the Royal Society.

Was Newton believing in a distant God in a mechanistic way? Was he a deist who imagined God as the initial creator but not an ongoing actor? If you judge only from Newton’s Principia and ignore his private theology, you might conclude his God was mechanistic. But his private manuscripts reveal that he explicitly rejected that interpretation. Newton’s conviction was not “physics without God” but “physics revealing God.” For him, every law of motion testified to divine wisdom and providence. The “mechanistic Newton” was more a creation of Enlightenment admirers than a reflection of Newton’s own faith. Enlightenment readers like Voltaire and Laplace chose to make Newton into a deist hero. They needed a symbol for their own project — and Newton’s physics fit the bill, even if Newton’s theology did not. In Newton’s world, science and religion were not rivals but twin faces of one truth. Stephen Snobelen notes an interesting anecdote from 1726: Voltaire asks Newton’s friend Samuel Clarke why he always pronounces God’s name with great reverence. Clarke says that he had learned that habit from Newton. The anecdote in fact compares well with Newton’s manuscripts, which decry naming God “idly & without reverence.”^[xiii]

Now imagine Newton in his deathbed. Also put an image of famous biography of Newton’s life, Never at Rest, in your vision.^[xiv] Newton refuses the sacrament of the Church. It was his last act of defiance, the only way he could remove the mask he had worn all his life. Was Newton a Rosicrucian? We simply don’t know. His secret way of communicating, like privately circulating his manuscript, Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, was in tandem with Rosicrucians.^[xv]

But...there was another possibility.

There was another movement that shared the same convictions Newton propagated privately: A belief that nature itself was God’s book, that reason and revelation spoke in harmony, and that true religion was nothing more than pure faith in one God. They were called Socinians. The anti-Trinitarian current swelled especially after the first Arabic philosophical tale was translated into English.

Newton owned Socinian books privately.^[xvi] And his close friend John Locke possessed one of the best Socinian libraries in England.^[xvii]

And the Socinian ideas would make a PROFOUND IMPACT on America’s founding fathers.

That’s in the next episode.

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^[i] Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. For recent discoveries of the Newton’s writings and his secret circulation of ideas, see the New Atlantis’ special issue that compiles original essays by top Newton scholars. Symposium: The Unknown Newton, The New Atlantis, Winter 2015.

^[ii] Stephen Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 32: 4, 1999, p. 388.

^[iii] On rising popularity of the Unitarian historia monotheistica in early modern period, see Justin Champion, The Pillars of the Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

^[iv] Karen Bird, “The Concession of Toleration, Muslims, and the British Enlightenment,” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 2017.

^[v] Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Islam and the English Enlightenment: The Untold Story, California: Claritas Books, 2022, 424-28.

^[vi] William Newman, Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s “Secret Fire”, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

^[vii] Quoted in Sam Kean, “Newton, The Last Magician,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 32:1, 2011.

^[viii] Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Second Edition, Routledge, 2002; Ronald Templeton, “Christian Rosenkreuz in the Orient,” Das Goetheanum, 2022, https://dasgoetheanum.com/en/christian-rosenkreuz-in-the-orient/

^[ix] Steven Sora, Rosicrucian America: How a Secret Society Influenced the Destiny of a Nation, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2019.

^[x] Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, pp. 167-69.

^[xi] Mustafa Gurbuz, “Don Quixote, Islam, and the Inquisition’s Cancel of a Morisco Comedian,” Islam and the Idea of America, https://islamandtheideaofamerica.substack.com/p/don-quixote-islam-and-the-inquisitions

^[xii] L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006; Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Fernando R. Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism, Brill, 2013.

^[xiii] Quoted in Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic,” p. 410.

^[xiv] Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

^[xv] Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic,” pp. 389-393.

^[xvi] Stephen Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Socinianism, and ‘The One Supreme God’” in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth Century Europe, Edited by Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, Brill, 2005.

^[xvii] Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic,” p. 385.