A Book Review… A Treasury Of European Studies On Islam
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Bevilacqua, Alexander. The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018; 360 pp.
“The Republic of Letters” is a reference to European scholars who in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries took an interest in Islam. Sometimes called “Orientalist,” they were a community of scholars, working in different languages, with different political affiliations and traditions of Christian belief. The result: a transformation of European knowledge of Islam and Islamic traditions.
The imprecise and often incorrect notions available during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance generally gave way to a vast and diverse set of translations, insights, and interpretations
Generally speaking, those Europeans who studied Arabic and wrote on Islamic topics tended to hold a high opinion of Islamic letters and culture. Increased interest in Islam was aided by and in part due to increased commercial contact in cities such as Istanbul, Izmir, and Aleppo.
Scholars, in their attempt to make sense of Islamic history, its religion, and letters, and in their comparison of Islam to Christianity and Judaism, relied heavily on a 1143 translation of the Qur’an into Latin produced under the auspices of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. Peter is sometimes credited as the man who did the most to advance the study of Islam in the Middle Ages.
A European looking at a world map in the seventeenth century would have been struck by the transcontinental scope of the lands governed by or inhabited by Muslims. Bevilacqua identifies three Islamic dynasties that flourished between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. From east to west, they were the Ottomans in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, and North Africa; the Safavids in Persia; and the Mughals in northern India.
These empires were distinct, not allied. The Ottomans and the Mughals adhered to the Hanafi branch of Sunni Islam; the Persians to Twelver Shiism. (Twelver Shiism takes its name from the belief that twelve imams are the spiritual and political successors to the Prophet.)
As his narrative progresses, Bevilacqua provides a snapshot of Islamic beliefs through the eyes of his protagonist. Its central dogma, the unity of the divine, is a direct contradiction of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Although it respects Christ as a prophet, Islam claims to possess the final revelation of the Abrahamic God, and to be a replacement for Christianity.
In the Renaissance, humanist scholars broadened their studies beyond Greek and Latin to include Hebrew. Trilingual colleges were founded at Louvain (1517) and Paris (1530). For European scholars Hebrew facilitated the mastery of Aramaic and Syriac. It also put Christian scholars into a complex but sometimes collaborative relationship with their Jewish contemporaries.
Pope Gregory XIII also authorized the printing of Arabic texts in Christian Europe.
Scholars in the seventeenth century witnessed the founding of great libraries across the Continent, for example, the French Royal Library in Blois, the Escorial near Madrid, the Hapsburg Imperial Library in Vienna, the Leiden University Library, and the Bodleian in Oxford. The Vatican library was established in 1475, although its collection dates to the Middle Ages. All these libraries became depositories for major Islamic manuscript collections. Printing aided the dissemination of Islamic texts.
In 1698 the entire text of the Qur’an was published by Cardinal Barbarigo at the printing press he founded in Padua. Ludovico Maracci, a professor of Arabic at Sapienza University in Rome, provided the translation and a commentary. The first English translation was produced by George Sale in 1734. His study convinced him that the Qur’an derived much of its content from the apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, with the Jews providing Mohammed’s chief sources.
That said, it must be kept in mind that the present book is not so much about Islam as it is about Arabic scholarship produced in Europe. Bevilacqua in his discussion of the Enlightenment vis-à-vis Islam takes Voltaire and Edward Gibbon as representatives of that movement. He finds that neither had studied Arabic or any other Semitic language. Both relied on the Republic of Letters for their knowledge of Islam.
Gibbon writes that, before he was sixteen, “I had absorbed all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and the Persians, the Tartars and the Turks.” Voltaire held that Muslim achievements did not spring from Islam itself. Gibbon believed that Islam was handicapped by what he called “religious captivity.” Bevilacqua is convinced that each veered from learned scholarship on the subject of Muslim achievements. Voltaire erred on the side of enthusiasm, Gibbon on the side of condemnation.
Bevilacqua makes no secret of his contempt for those eighteenth-century philosophes whom he regards as spokesmen for a political movement rather than an intellectual one.
A brief review can only hint at the richness of this volume. The book may not be for everyone, but for anyone interested in European scholarship in the period covered, it is a treasure.
