A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Muslims

Our edition follows the fourth edition, printed at London in 1810 as an appendix to Henry Maundrell's Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem — the setting that carries Pitts's own revisions and the cleanest of the four surviving printings; doubtful readings were checked against the third edition of 1731. The free scan linked here is that whole volume, with Pitts's book as its appendix. Spelling and dated terminology are modernized, his transliterations are given in the forms a reader can look up, and six editorial notes answer the places where he says what something means rather than what he saw — in the words of Muslim converts whose own accounts this series carries. Every change is set out below.

Joseph Pitts published this account at Exeter in 1704, after fifteen years' slavery in Algiers and a forced conversion to Islam. He was the first Englishman known to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he wrote the book to tell his countrymen what he had actually seen.

The text here follows the fourth edition, printed at London in 1810 as an appendix to Henry Maundrell's Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, which carries Pitts's own revisions and is the cleanest surviving setting of the book. Doubtful readings were checked against the third edition of 1731.

What we changed, and why.

The spelling and punctuation are modernized, and so are words that have simply gone out of English: thence, thither, ere, hath. Where Pitts wrote a word that has since turned into a false friend — his "Boors" for country people — it is given in its plain modern sense.

Dated terms for Muslims and for Islam are updated to the words those communities use for themselves. Mahometan and Mussulman become Muslim; Mahometanism becomes Islam; Alcoran becomes Quran.

Pitts also transliterated by ear, having no dictionary and no standard to follow, and those words are given in the forms a reader can now look up: abdes is wudu, nomas is namaz, erkaets are rak'ahs, towoaf is tawaf, hagge is hajji, emaum is imam, beat Allah is Bayt Allah. His ear was often good and always honest, but an edition exists to communicate, and his spellings now stand between the reader and what he is describing. The four schools of Sunni law, which he calls hanifee, schafee, hanbelee and malekee, are given as Hanafi, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Maliki; the caliphs he lists as Abu-beker, Omar and Othman are Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman.

Two words are deliberately left as he wrote them. Pitts says Turk to mean both Ottoman and Muslim, and "turned Turk" is his own phrase for what was done to him; replacing it would erase the fact rather than clarify it. He says Papist, Popery and Romish about Roman Catholics, and means the insult. Changing that would be editing his opinion rather than his spelling.

The key to the engraved plan of the Temple at Mecca has been left out. We do not reproduce the plate, and its lettered legend survives only as unreadable scanning; the four schools it named are described in Pitts's own prose in Chapter VII.

Six editorial notes have been added, marked in the text and set apart from anything Pitts wrote. Each one attaches to a place where he says what something means rather than what he saw, and answers it in the words of a man who held the belief before he left it — Imad-ud-din Lahiz, a Quran scholar of Punjab, and Kamil Abdul Messiah of Beirut, whose own accounts are published in this series. Where none of them speaks to the point, we have said nothing.

The scan this text was made from carries at least one damaged word in every sixty-seven. Every repair is recorded.

The 1704 text is in the public domain. This edition is copyright T.S. Baker Books, 2026.