The Revolt of Islam is a work of history, because in it Shelley transposes the broad outlines of the course taken by the French Revolution to the vaguely Levantine setting of Argolis. Why did Shelley translate recent European history into the form of the oriental romance? He had read Ruines des Empires, a strange book by the late French philosophe Volney, in which the natural history of political despotism had been expressed as an oriental dream vision.  Shelley had evidently been impressed by the Frenchman's way of fusing the literary form of oriental fantasy and a philosophic interest with the natural history of political processes, and he attempted something similar in his own poem (the sonnet "Ozymandias", written at almost the same time as The Revolt of Islam, is another Shelleyan experiment in the mode of the "oriental-philosophic"). There is a calculated affront to an English reading public in this presentation to them of unrepentantly revolutionary sentiments in a form saturated with connotations of French philosophy.

Yet to affront was not, it seems, Shelley's purpose. In the long preface he composed for The Revolt of Islam he describes it as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live." That is to say, after the defeat of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy in France, the Congress of Vienna, and the violent suppression of radicalism in England, did the public still have any appetite for Shelley's brand of progressive idealism, with its inflammatory components of anarchic republicanism, inveterate hostility to monarchy and established religion, deism and free — if need be, incestuous — love? Shelley certainly strains every nerve in this poem to embellish the cause of political, sexual and religious radicalism with images of exceptional power, and often of memorable beauty.

Nevertheless, to the poem's implicit question its first readers seem to have returned a resounding "No". The public mind of the early-19th century was resolutely averse to experiments of this kind, and The Revolt of Islam quickly fell into obscurity. Later generations were reluctant to revive its fortunes. Its political, social and sexual commitments, and its narrative form, were incompatible with the ethereal, lyrical Shelley so prized by the Victorians. Only very recently have readers become once more interested in its strange blend of philosophy, radicalism, and oriental romance. Perhaps the poem's uncanny foreshadowings of current realities in Cairo, Bahrain and Tunis will now gain for it yet more readers.