Ask HadiHenry Stubbe
Physician and historian of religion
Most seventeenth-century English writers treated Islam as a heresy and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as an impostor. Henry Stubbe read the sources they relied on, found them fraudulent, and set out to write something better.
Stubbe was a physician and classical scholar, educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned a reputation as one of the most formidable Latinists of his generation.
He served as deputy keeper of the Bodleian Library, translated portions of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan into Latin, and was appointed the king's physician for Jamaica in 1661. He was not a man drawn to devotional sentiment. He was drawn to evidence.
Around 1671, Stubbe composed The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism, a manuscript that did what no English writer had attempted: it drew on Arabic chronicles, medieval Christian Arab historians, and Latin translations of Islamic sources to construct a historical account of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an on their own terms.
He dismantled the popular European myths one by one: the trained pigeon, the magnetic coffin, the claim that Islam was spread by the sword.
In their place, he built a case for Qur'an miracles that no European polemicist had been willing to consider, presenting the Qur'an as a "lasting miracle" whose truth would "in all ages be satisfactory and convincing."
The manuscript was too dangerous to publish. It circulated privately among scholars and was only printed in 1911. Stubbe drowned near Bath in 1676 at the age of forty-four, leaving behind a text that, had it been published, might have altered the trajectory of Western engagement with Islam by centuries.