Nearly a year ago, I wrote an answer to a question on Taiping views on Judaism and Islam, which I had a good amount of fun with and so will repost here.

"There is no god but God, and Tai-ping-wang is the brother of Jesus."

This quotation adorns the title page of John Milton Mackie's Life of Tai-Ping-Wang, Chief of the Chinese Insurrection (1857), and for anyone familiar with English renditions of the Shahada (Muslim declaration of faith), it bears a striking resemblance, perhaps even intentionally on Mackie's part:

I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

The origin of the quote, however, is hard to pin down as Mackie does not cite any particular text, and I don't know anywhere near enough about Anglophone writing on Islam at this time to say whether there was any conscious attempt at allusion. But, there is little need to speculate on the motives of an American commentator who never went to China, and whose interest in the Taiping seems to have been a temporary affectation in a career otherwise focussed on German literature. If nothing else it's a neat detail, and does get those mental gears turning as to how the Taiping related to the other major Abrahamic faiths.

Now, the question as phrased is Judaism and then Islam, but given my lead-in I suppose I'll have to do it the other way around. The Taiping relationship with Islam is generally poorly attested. In the surviving corpus of texts by Taiping authors, Islam or Muslims appear a grand total of three times, and there is a single throwaway reference in a British report from 1859. However, few as these references are, we can mine quite a bit of information out of them.

Reverend Alexander Wylie, a British Protestant missionary and translator, visited Taiping territory as part of an informal British delegation in 1858, and reported on scenes of desolation and devastation owing to the ongoing war between the Taiping and Qing. Wylie was apparently interested to see what had become of the Catholic churches in the Yangtze valley, which French missionaries had reported the effective dissolution of back in 1853. He reported as follows in a letter published in July 1859 and probably written around January:

There was no appearance of the existence of Roman Catholicism, but I found Mohammedan mosques still standing among the ruins at Chin-keang [Zhenjiang] and Nanking [Nanjing], and one demolished at Teih-keang [?Dijiang?].

With no further elaboration, all we have to go on is that the Taiping generally, but evidently not consistently, left Muslim places of worship as is, and generally, but not consistently, avoided persecuting Muslims in their territory. But this raises some interesting questions, the most important of which is, of course: Why were the Taiping not as concerned about Islam (at least up to 1858), when they were opposed to just about every other religious tradition, and did, even if by mistake, persecute Catholics?

A likely explanation, though a necessarily speculative one thanks to the paucity of primary evidence, is that Islam was not practiced by Han Chinese. Islam was the only major religion in the Qing Empire with a very specifically ethnic tie, with the Islam-practicing Hui being considered a distinct ethnicity from the majority Han. The definition of 'Hui' certainly changed over time, shifting from being mainly used for Muslims in Qing Turkestan, to any Muslims in the empire, to specific groups of Muslims (some Turcophone, some Sinophone) outside of Qing Turkestan, but it was nevertheless a marker of ethnic identity emerging largely out of religious background. Conversion to and from Islam was neither common nor expected, and so the two groups would remain distinct. As such, Islam may not have been considered a 'corruptive' force towards Han Chinese in the same way as Buddhism or Confucianism, or indeed for a brief while Catholicism (before the Taiping came to recognise their common origin).

Later in 1859, Hong Rengan, a cousin of the Taiping monarch Hong Xiuquan, arrived in Nanjing after a stint in Hong Kong as an apprentice translator for Protestant missionaries, and wrote a reform manifesto titled the New Treatise on Aids in Administration (資政新篇 zizheng xinpian). One of its sections, 'On the Rule of Law', advocates at one point for a move towards regularising foreign relations on equitable lines, as part of which Hong Rengan seems to have begun writing about the customs of foreign countries in order to explain the proper etiquette for each of them, but after the first entry he largely opts to describe their admirable and/or condemnable features to serve as either positive or negative exemplars for the Taiping kingdom. As part of this, he comes to describe three majority-Muslim regions, those being the Ottoman Empire, Iran (then ruled by the Qajars), and the Eyalet of Egypt:

Turkey, in the southwestern part of which lies the ancient state of Israel, borders Russia on its northwest. As the people of this country do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Saviour, they still cling to the Mosaic Law, without change or modification. Hence, the country is not strong. [In the year 1856], it was invaded by the Russians and was rescued from catastrophe through the assistance rendered by England and France. This country, being the sacred place where the Heavenly Elder Brother was born, must eventually be converted to Christianity, for it is said in the New Testament that when the ten thousand nations of the world have been converted to the faith, Israel will be ashamed.

[two other sections]

Persia lies to the southeast of Israel. The Persians worship one of God’s creations, namely, the sun. They do not eat dogs or pigs and they believe in the demon Buddha. At present, though they are called Persians, their land is in reality under foreign domination, of which they are not ashamed. They seek only after wealth and power, never fighting for honour; hence they wander about, moving around with outers, without the slightest sense of loyalty or discipline. They resemble the Chinese of today who have no sense of shame under the domination of the Manchus. This is so because each is concerned only with his own welfare and has no means of achieving unity.

Egypt, also known as Masri, is situated to the southwest of Israel, with the Red Sea as its boundary. In this place there is no cold in the entire year, and it is extremely hot in the summers. There is a mountain called Ya-la-pe, which is the highest in the world. It was on this mountain that Noah’s Ark was anchored. It is covered with clouds during all four seasons, and its summit is rarely seen. The Egyptians have never seen rain or snow, nor have they ever heard the sound of thunder. In this land there are few springs, but there is much desert. During the time between spring and summer, clouds gather atop the mountain, and waterfalls race down in all directions. Just before the water recedes, the farmers sow their seeds in the fields; by the time the water subsides, the sprouts are growing luxuriantly. This is so because the mountain is high and reaches the clouds, and the ascending hot air freezes on the mountain peak without ever evaporating. Consequently, rain does not fall upon the wilderness, thunder does not clap on the earth, ice forms constantly on the high summit, and snow never flutters over the warm ground. At present, the people there worship Joseph and Moses as their sages, and their religion is called Islam [Huihui jiao], for our Heavenly Father, God, once displayed his power to these two men, and their virtues have remained known to this day.

As can be seen, Hong Rengan only explicitly identifies the Egyptians as Muslims, although it's possible to backtrack a bit and say that he implies the Turks were, too, if the criterion was the importance of Joseph and Moses. Muhammad is of course absent from his description of Islam. It is interesting that the assessment of Islam is not wholly negative. On the one hand, he is critical of the Turks for following the Mosaic Law but not also the New Testament, and clearly advocates for Christian proselytisation in the region. On the other hand, at least in terms of tone, his view of the Egyptians' reverence of Joseph and Moses seems reasonably favourable. The section on Persia seems completely off religion-wise, but could well be based on first- or second-hand encounters with Zoroastrian Parsis in Hong Kong – see this discussion which I had with /u/Xuande88.

Obviously we cannot extrapolate Hong Rengan's writings too far: he was, after all, just one person, and moreover he was one person who had rejoined the fold relatively recently and had not been present for developments in Taiping ideology in his absence. However, Hong's more global view of Christianity does seem to have filtered into the wider Taiping leadership, so we could surmise that there was some heightened awareness of Islam as a global religion, but without much actual understanding of the religion itself.

Islam has a surprising history in the creation of puppet shows! As Islam swept across the islands that make up Indonesia (in the late 13th century, though it had been present before), traditional shows used to celebrate special occasions and entertain children were banned because it was considered an affront to the religion to see accurate representations of the human form on stage. One of the easiest ways around this was to take the beautiful leather figures, pictured here, and put them behind a sheer, white screen. You could then shine a light through the screen and see the puppets. This allowed Indonesians to continue telling traditional stories, some of which had been brought over from India centuries before, without offending the Muslim clerics. This puppet show was especially popular on the island of Java and remains closely tied to the culture of the island today.

Islam never made it all the way through Bali, so they still used their non-puppet theatre to entertain people. To this day, the Balinese traditional performances show us the roots of the performances that now take place behind screens in other parts of the country.

Indonesians and visitors of all ages enjoy wayang puppet shows. Dalangs, (the puppeteers who work behind the scenes) manipulate the jointed puppets, put up very simple scenery, and use their voices to tell stories. A small band of musicians provide atmospheric music for puppets to dance to. The dalang weren’t breaking the rules set up by clerics because they could see the sticks of the puppets this they weren’t looking at a “true” representation of the human body.

Anyone interested in seeing wayang might enjoy this link.

I’ve written a few previous answers about how Christians and Muslims understood each other during the crusades in the Middle Ages, so I thought I’d combine them all together here.

What did Christians and Muslims understand about each others’ religions at the time? Barely anything! Even though they had lived together for hundreds of years all over the world, from Spain to Africa to Persia, the average person didn’t need, and didn’t want, to know anything about the other side.

As for what Christians understood about Islam, I like to start off with this quote from John Tolan:

“Before the rise of Islam, Christians had established categories for the religious other: Jew, pagan, and heretic. When Christians encountered Muslims, they tried to fit them into one of those categories.” (Tolan, Saracens, pg. 3)

Medieval Christians believed that Christianity was the culmination of world history. Christianity had fulfilled the prophecies in the Old Testament, and Christians had inherited the status of the chosen people from the Jews. There were still Jews, but it was believed that they would one day be converted to Christianity (willingly or otherwise); there were also still pagans, who had never been Jews or Christians, but they would also one day be won over; and there were Christians who had become heretics, but they were just a deviant form of Christian. So, medieval Christians couldn’t conceive of Islam as something new. Muslims were either unusually well-organized and powerful pagans, or some kind of heretical Christian sect, or maybe they represented Biblical prophecy about the Antichrist and the end of the world.

By the time of the First Crusade in 1095, an average Christian might have known the name Muhammad, but they wouldn’t have known the words “Islam” or “Muslim”. Those words were never used in European languages until much later in the 15th and 16th centuries. They understood Muslims in terms of ethnicities inherited from Ancient Greek and Latin literature and history, like Arabs or Persians. Arabs were usually called “Saracens” instead. They also knew there were new arrivals in the Middle East, the Turks, who were Muslims but not Arabs. Crusaders didn’t always correctly distinguish the two groups though, so “Saracen” and/or “Turk” could simply mean “Muslim” regardless of their actual ethnicity.

The important thing was that they weren’t Christians or Jews, so they were probably pagans, and if they were pagans, they probably worshipped several gods and/or idols.

“Chroniclers of the First Crusade portrayed Saracens as idolaters who had polluted the holy city of Jerusalem with their profane rites, in particular through the adoration of a silver idol of Muhammad in the Temple of Solomon, an idol the crusaders supposedly demolished.” (Tolan, Saracens, pg. 69)

Medieval Muslims certainly weren’t idolaters so there’s no way the crusaders actually saw an idol of Muhammad, but that’s what they expected to find there, and that’s what their audience back in Europe was expecting to read about.

Other crusaders noted that Saracens and Turks spoke a “devilish” language, and their mosques were sometimes called “the devil’s house”. Mosques were also known as “Mahomerias” in Latin, a place where they worshipped Muhammad (or Mahomes, or Mahomet or various other spellings). Muhammad was either sent by the devil, or a human raised to the status of a pagan god. What he could obviously not be, in the medieval Christian worldview, was a new prophet - there couldn’t be any new ones after Jesus.

Once Christians in Europe started to learn more about Islam (thanks, apparently, to the increased contact with Muslims during the crusades), they began to concede that Muhammad might be a prophet, but a false one. For example, William of Tyre, the court historian of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th century, always refers to Muhammad as “the seducer” or “the deceiver”. When the Qur’an was first translated into Latin in the mid-12th century (in Spain), it was attributed to Muhammad “the Pseudo-Prophet”.

Assuming that Muhammad was the same sort of figure for Muslims that Christ was for Christians, Muslims were therefore often called “Muhammadans” or “Mohammadans” or similar spellings. This term ended up being extremely persistent - you can still see it even in the 20th century.

The crusaders knew there were political divisions within Islam and that the caliph in Cairo was different from the caliph in Baghdad. They knew the Turks were political rivals of the Fatimids in Egypt, and they did take advantage of these divisions and rivalries during the First Crusade, but for the most part they didn’t know about Sunnis and Shiites.

But I can’t just say “they didn’t know anything about Islam and they didn’t care” because at least some crusaders were interested and did want to learn more. Although William of Tyre, as mentioned above, dismissed Muhammad as a false prophet, he was the first to try to understand the split between Sunni and Shia Islam:

“…the fifth in the succession from Muhammad, namely Ali, was more warlike than his predecessors and had far greater experience in military matters than his contemporaries. He was, moreover, a cousin of Muhammad himself. He considered it unfitting that he should be called the successor of his cousin and not rather a great prophet himself, much greater, in fact, than Muhammad. The fact that in his own estimation and that of many others he was greater did not satisfy him; he desired that this be generally acknowledged. Accordingly, he reviled Muhammad and spread among the people a story to the effect that the Angel Gabriel, the profounder of the law, had actually been sent to him from on high but by mistake had conferred the supreme honor on Muhammad. For this fault, he said, the angel had been severely blamed by the Lord. Although these claims seemed false to many from whose traditions they differed greatly, yet others believed them, and so a schism developed among that people which has lasted even to the present. Some maintain that Muhammad is the greater and, in fact, the greatest of all prophets, and these are called in their own tongue, Sunnites; others declare that Ali alone is the prophet of God, and they are called Shiites. (William of Tyre, vol. 2, pg. 323)

He seems to have been using a Sunni source, or maybe Christian sources (Greek? Syriac? Coptic?) that were anti-Shia or at least not exactly neutral. But his history was very popular and was translated into French and other languages, and used as a source for later historians, like Jacques de Vitry, the bishop of Acre in the crusader kingdom in the early 13th century. Through William and Jacques Christians all over Europe learned about Sunni and Shia Islam for the first time.

Despite slowly learning more about Islam over the centuries, Christians typically still called all Muslims “Mohammedans” well into the early modern period, even up to the 20th century. The latest case I know of is Hamilton A.R. Gib’s “Mohammedanism”, a history of Islam published in 1971!

I unfortunately don't have the time to write something new, but I thought I would share a brief older answer on the burqa:

The burqa/chadri is most strongly associated in the West today with Taliban rule, since most Westerners did not hear about it until Afghani women were required by law to wear them, but the garment has a much longer and more complicated history.

It's very common to view veiling as inherently oppressive, but the purpose of it was to allow women to seclude themselves in public in cultures where they were supposed to remain at home. To quote from my earlier answer on veiling in ancient Greece, which is relevant here:

In all of these cultures, the more important theoretical stricture was that respectable women were secluded. The title of Llewellyn-Jones's book, "Aphrodite's Tortoise," refers to a statue by Phidias, Aphrodite Ourania, which depicts the goddess standing with one foot on a tortoise. Plutarch described it, saying that that point of the tortoise - thought by the Greeks to be mute and female - was "to typify for womankind staying at home and keeping silent." While Aphrodite Pandemos ("Vulgar Aphrodite", literally "of the people") was worshipped as a deity of sex, as she's commonly conceived today, Aphrodite Ourania ("Heavenly Aphrodite") was a purer version who displayed "married love and wifely devotion". The tortoise, which pulls itself into its shell, was a good symbol for women staying privately inside their own homes.

But - the tortoise doesn't just stay at home, the tortoise wears its home. Likewise, the layers of fabric a woman wrapped around her body and/or draped over her face were symbolically bringing her home with her into the world on the occasions that she was forced to go out into it, because it simply wasn't realistic for even elite women to absolutely never leave their homes, or more specifically the women's side of the home. (Women were secluded in that their lives were separate from men, but they would visit each other and (if unwealthy) work outside and sell things in the marketplace.) When in their own rooms, they did not sit around veiled; it was an intrusion for men to come in unannounced, symbolically tearing away women's coverings, and accounts describe women embarrassed that way as throwing on a veil to shield themselves.

... Which is why there are a number of garments related to the burqa, such as the paranja of central Asia, a large mantle with vestigial sleeves and a horsehair face veil, or the Iranian chador, which covers the body but has no face veil.

The burqa itself - the full-body veil with face screen - may have been invented by Muslims in India for the above reasons; it had traveled to the Near East by the seventeenth century, when the Iranian cleric Mohammad Baqer Majlesi listed it as an example of women's clothing than men should not wear. It was, in fact, seen as something of a reform garment - allowing a woman to move about outside freely. Irene Barnes, in her 1897 memoir, Behind the Pardah, describes the contemporary burqa thus:

The Muhammadan pardah lady's out-door costume - the white linen 'burqa' - is a voluminous, surplice-like garment without sleeves, enveloping her from head to foot, the only aperture for light and air being a small piece of silk netting insertion over the eyes, which are the only features rendered partially visible.

So yes, it is generally accurate for the setting, although without seeing it I can't say whether the characters are wearing burqas correctly.

I previously wrote an answer in /r/AskHistorians about al-Ma'arri, the first known vegan from 11th century Iraq: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qyonde/almaarri_was_an_arab_philosopher_from_the_golden/

It's debatable whether he can be called "Muslim." He and Thomas Jefferson were somewhat similar in theological views. Yet, each is clearly heavily indebted to the Islamic and Christian cultures they came from. Neither are Muslim, but Jefferson is arguably "less" Muslim than al-Ma'arri.

All that said, there is a history of vegetarianism among Muslims in the Islamic world, despite its infrequency. Vegetarianism is arguably less represented in Islam than in the other world religions, like Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Indeed, vegetarian recipes are present in medieval Islamic Arabic texts. However, people associate vegetarianism with Christians and the ill, and it would seem queer to be eating/requesting a vegetarian meal if one were neither. Christians were a noticeable population in the medieval Islamic world, and had considerable impacts on it, despite being a minority. For example, Christians typically operated taverns which were associated with the "paradoxical" Islamic drinking culture discussed in Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? Christian asceticism was an influence on Sufi mysticism, both in its ascetic practices, and in its theme of mystical transcendence of religious boundaries present in poetry by figures such as Fariddudin Attar's Conference of the Birds, and Rumi's Masnavi.

For an example of vegetarian thinking in Islamic mysticism, this is a story recorded by Attar about two of the earliest Sufis, Hasan Basri (a student of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali) and Rabia Basri (one of Hasan's students). It is from a hagiography about Sufi saints, and is likely not historically true, but nonetheless represents attitudes from the late medieval Islamic context in which it was written:

Rabia had gone one day into the mountains. She was soon surrounded by a flock of deer and mountain goats, ibexes and wild donkeys which stared at her and made to approach her. Suddenly Hasan of Basra came on the scene and, seeing Rabia, moved in her direction. As soon as the animals sighted Hasan, they made off all together, so that Rabia remained alone. This dismayed Hasan.

“Why did they run away from me, and associated so tamely with you?” he asked Rabia.

“What have you eaten today?” Rabia countered.

“A little onion pulp.”

“You eat their fat,” Rabia remarked. “Why then should they not flee from you?”

There are also two additional famous examples of vegetarian themes in Islamic history. One is in the writings of the "Brethren of Purity," a 10th century Iraqi secret society. The Brethren (Ikhwan al-Safa in Arabic) are very fascinating for many reasons. Their writings demonstrate an immense eclecticism where they saw people from Socrates to the Buddha as prophets of their secretive sect. They were highly influenced by Greek esotericism, magic, and philosophy, yet were undeniably Islamic. In spite of this, it's completely unknown what kind of Muslims they were. Scholars have variously argued for Sunni, Sufi, Shia, Ismaili, and Rationalist presences in their writings. Relevant to vegetarianism is their dialogue wherein the animals present a court case to the King of the Jinn that humanity shouldn't eat them. It is a very interesting read, where anthropomorphic animals give philosophical arguments for vegetarians against the human side.

The other famous example is the Sufi ibn Tufail's famous book Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Especially famous for its impact in the European Enlightenment, the novel is about a boy who grows up alone on a desert island and independently realizes the truth of Islam, philosophy, and science. The story ends with him encountering the outside world, and remarking that they came to the same truths as he did (with society using the revelation of Prophets, and Hayy using pure reason). However, he is dismayed at the blind dogmatism he sees in society. Relevant to the topic, while on the desert island, Hayy concludes that he should care for animal and plant life in order to nurture creation as God/Heavens do. He thus develops what has been called an "ecological ethics" by Peter Adamson: Hayy becomes a strict vegetarian to avoid causing harm, and even prevents plants from having too much shade so they can prosper. Hayy even develops the practice of whirling (akin to the "whirling dervishes") in order to imitate the divine motions of the Heavens (in classical Greek-influenced Islamic philosophy, the Heavens were divine agents of their own, rather than pure matter as we think).

People like al-Ma'arri, Hayy, and the Brethren of Purity were somewhat unique in pre-modern vegetarian thinking. In contexts such as ancient Greece and India, vegetarianism was defended. However, it was commonly defended under the premise of philosophical/spiritual asceticism (e.g. Porphyry, who argued meat-eating was immoral because it was too pleasurable, thus making Impossible meat equally problematic), or with the assumption of reincarnation. As we've seen, the ascetic argument was present in some Sufis, but it was generally associated with Christians, and Muslims often tried to set their religion apart from Christianity's preference for asceticism (examples can be seen in the 'humanist' Miskawayh's distaste for asceticism, and the Quran's critique of Christian monasticism).

However, the latter vegetarian argument based in reincarnation was majorly absent in Islamic history, as reincarnation itself hardly has any appearance in Islamic history. That said, reincarnation has been believed by some Islamic groups, particularly among Shia. The Druze religion (which developed out of an Ismaili Shia context) still teaches reincarnation. However, humans can only be reborn as other humans. However, there were medieval Shia groups who did believe that humans could be reborn as animals (and vice versa). They were part of "Ghulat" ("extremist") Shia groups who believed "extreme" things such as the divinity of Imams and other Islamic historical figures (Muhammad, Ali, etc.), reincarnation, and the non-relevance of literal Sharia law. While they were heavily influenced by the pre-Islamic Greek philosophy which also featured arguments for reincarnation, we have no evidence of vegetarianism among these Muslims.

I have an older answer about lesbians in medieval Islamic sources based on the work of Sahar Amer, which you can read here! Perfect for the end of Women's History Month. :)