Asadova chexrangiz salim qizi saydullayev nuriddin zayniddin o‘G‘li 35 – O‘zbek theme: idealism in tamburlane the great- the work of christopher marlowe contents

Now may Mahound that ruleth us, and Apollo our good lord And Termagant protect the King, and the Queen watch andward.
Said Bramimonde:
Great folly now do I hear thee say.
Our gods are knaves. At Roncevaux most evil deeds did they.
They let of our true Paynims be slaughtered many a knight.
And my own dear Lord Marsile, they failed him in the fight.
Marlowe draws the image of crusades in Tamburlaine but this time from the East. In the Song, the Muslim King of Marslie lost hope in Mahomet to save his authority from the Christian Emperor Charlemagne. He expresses his hopelessness saying:
And now the day was over, and on the night time came.
And clear the moon was shining, and the stars were flashing flame.
The King had ta’en Saragossa. A thousand men around
He bade march through town and temple and the mansions of Mahound.
With the axes that they carried, and with the iron maul.
They smote Mahound, and shattered his idols one and all.
That sorcery and falsehood, no longer might remain.
The King loved God. His service to accomplish was he fain. (CCLXVIII, 1–8)
In the Song of Roland the scene is one of Muhammad’s fellows, the Paynims, who cried:
Mahomet aid! Our gods on Charlemagne
Wreak vengeance for the villains he marshalled into Spain.
Rather than yield the battle-field unto us, will they die. (CXLIV, 21–23)
The deformed image of Islam is already established in the European mind. The public sources habitually prefer literary authority on the ideas of Islam, derived from superstitious Muslim proletariat, rather than men of education. Such ideas may have been interchanged orally on a very large scale. As a result, Islam was often misinterpreted by Christians. The masses always tend to be aggressive and xenophobia in their social attitudes. In spite of this, the basic tenets of Islam were well understood by a great number of writers. There is a common appreciation for some Islamic information, e.g. about fortune, written on the forehead of man. This information opposed other European writers’ view and was still not presented as absurd in Tamburlaine (Part I, II.i.3). Throughout the Middle Ages there was a wide awareness of the Islamic conception of Muhammad who was nothing more than a prophet. The Latin treatment of Islam contains a number of mistakes that had already been passed from one writer to another. Wolf states that Marlowe’s quotations from the Qur’ān are explicit quotations from one or another medieval version (1964:227). Marlowe’s reference to Termagant and Apollo as in the Songs Marsile worships them saying in the ‘holy laws we keep always – Apollo and Mahound’ (XXXIII.5).
The true religion for Marlowe is not Islam. For instance, the obeisance of Orcanes to Mahomet precisely reflects Marlowe’s ambivalent attitude to heavenly influences in the play. Although Wolf thinks of ‘Orcanes’ scorn of Christians’ in Part II as ‘an expression of Marlowe’s atheism,’ it depicts the faith of the Turks about Christians (1964:31). Carleen Ibrahim portrays Marlowe as a man on ‘a spiritual quest’ (1996:32). Marlowe is firm on religious themes, the oneness of deity in particular, although he usually expresses harmony with Christian faith.
Marlowe attempts to draw a theological parallel between Christianity and Islam when he equates the concept of Trinity with the concept of Prophethood, arguing in effect that the way Christ is his God, Mohammad is theirs. The statement of Orcanes to King Sigmund: ‘He by Christ and I by Mahomet,’ proposes a striking distinction over the divinity of both and the inspiration of ‘the chiefest God’ or one deity (Part II, V.i.181). Tamburlaine refers to the place of his God in heaven saying: “God sits in the heaven whom I only obey” (Part II, V.i.184). Muslims consider the divinity of Muhammad, Christ or any creation as polytheism. Orcanes echoes this idea with notable linguistic eloquence after his victory in a battle:
Christ or Mahomet hath been my friend
Yet in my thoughts shall Christ be honoured,
Not doing Mahomet an injury. (Part II, II.iii.33–34)
Marlowe underlines Muhammad’s effectiveness in the scene when the King of Amasia looks at the sky to see Muhammad, armed and prepared to support Callapine in his combat with Tamburlaine: “Mahomet is therefore able to come to earth and interact with humans, but is unable or unwilling to stop Tamburlaine’s affront” (Part II. V.ii.30–35). Marlowe’s statements display his lack of understanding Islam.