Ottoman History Podcast - The Republic of Arabic Letters

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Episode 348 with Alexander Bevilacqua hosted by Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud When and how did European scholars first begin to seriously study Islam and the Arabic language? It has often been assumed that Medieval misconceptions and polemic towards Muslims were not cast off until the secularism of the European Enlightenment. In this episode, we learn that the foundations of the modern Western understanding were actually laid as early as the 17th century. Alexander Bevilacqua shares his research on the network of Catholic and Protestant scholars he calls the “Republic of Arabic Letters.” These scholars went to great lengths to learn Arabic and gather Arabic books and manuscripts, and eventually produced careful translations of the Qur’an and histories of Muslim societies based on Arabic sources. « Click for More »

Bağlamamın Düğümü Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Erin Patton. And I'm Shirin Hamza. And we're here with Professor Alexander Bevilacqua to discuss his new book, The Republic of Arabic Letters, Islam and the European Enlightenment, which just came out with Harvard University Press. Alex is an assistant professor of history at Williams College. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Alex, would you mind introducing your book for our listeners, sort of discussing its main topic

and where it fits in the historiography of Islamic studies and the Enlightenment. Of course, thank you so much. The Republic of Arabic Letters is about the European study of Islam in the 17th and the 18th centuries, which I argue was the formative period for the modern Western understanding of Islam. And the book begins with a collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts in the book markets of the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic cities. It continues through the process of trying to read and translate and edit these books. And then finally, it examines the impact of this new knowledge on the understanding of Islam, of the European Enlightenment, the famous 18th century movement

that, among other things, has been credited with a new view of Islam. Curious for listeners who may be less familiar with this, what else is characteristic of this Enlightenment period? Well, the Enlightenment, you know, it's a great question. It's an interesting time to be studying the Enlightenment. For one thing, it's a great question. It's an interesting time to be studying the Enlightenment. For one thing, it's an intellectual movement of the early modern period that is mentioned all the time in our contemporary world. It has this sort of incantatory power, I think. So it still seems normative and relevant to us.

And part of the reason is that it's seen as the first secular, completely secular intellectual movement in European history. And however else you define the Enlightenment, and people disagree sometimes vehemently about that, that is seen as a central feature. And what I try to show in the book is that, at least as regards the interpretation of Islam, a more charitable, comprehensive, informed, and also compassionate view of Islam did not have to wait for the secular movement. It was actually generated by Christian scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, who were working in 17th and 18th century Europe.

We think of the Republic of Letters and associate it very strongly with the Enlightenment, which comes a little bit later than the subjects of your book. How would you describe this Republic of Arabic Letters? Thanks so much. So I came up with this phrase to characterize this group of scholars, European men who lived all over the continent, lived sometimes removing time as well as space from one another, and who yet were working on the same set of questions. So they were collaborating in a sense, even across confessional lines.

And there are various ways that we can see that. For instance, they never duplicate each other's work. And they recognize what constitutes good research. So there are common norms and even common goals. They're often competing as to who can do something first. And they are really just a subset of the broader European Republic of Letters, which is an interconfessional community of scholars going back to the great period of Renaissance humanism, going back really to Erasmus of Rotterdam and his

continent-wide correspondence network and influence. So this is a sub-community within a broader community of Christian scholars working on sundry topics. So this is, I guess you could say, the underlying infrastructure that supported the study of Islam, which then influenced the ideas in Western scholarship that we have today. I'm very curious to hear how these 17th and 18th century European Christian scholars came to learn Arabic. You know, was there an institutional setting for them to do so? Did they have teachers already in universities? And was that continuous with earlier times in European history? Thank you so much for the question. So Arabic is institutionalized in a way in this,

at this moment in time. We're all familiar with the medieval translation movement from Arabic into Latin that happened in places like Toledo in the 12th century and elsewhere, and that had such an important impact on the course of Western intellectual history. But what is much less familiar is that there was a second translation movement that took place in the early modern period, so several centuries later, and that did not focus like that earlier translation

movement on the translation of scientific texts, but on this translation of religious and humanistic works in Arabic. For listeners who might not be familiar, what do you mean by humanistic? Well, I mean, for instance, poetry and history topics. We could call them bellatristic topics, topics that tell you more about the culture and society of Muslim people. So the way I like to phrase it is that in the Middle Ages, those Arabic translations took place in spite of the fact that the authors of the texts being translated were Muslims. In this later period, it was precisely because of that fact. So the fact that they were Islamic texts recommended them to their European readers. Now, Arabic had broad

appeal in early modern Europe. For one thing, people recognized that it was related to Hebrew, so it basked in that reflected glory, because Hebrew was not only the language of the Old Testament, it was also considered by many to have been the original language of mankind. And as you know, Old Testament Hebrew can be very difficult. There are words that only appear once in the Hebrew Bible and that they're therefore difficult to interpret. So some people thought that by studying Arabic, they could improve their Hebrew. They could become better readers of the Bible. So that was one motivation. But it was by no means the only one. Arabic had secular attractions as well. People somewhat overestimated the way it could take you from Morocco to Indonesia, so it was considered to be a useful language as well. And in addition, there were Christians

who spoke Arabic, and both after the Reformation, both Catholic and Protestant denominations were interested in connecting with those Christian communities of the Middle East. There was a variety of reasons for studying Arabic at this time, and it's no surprise in a way that this language attracted such a considerable number of students and of translators. And how did these European scholars go about learning Arabic? Did they tend to travel to the Middle East? Were there, you mentioned these Christian Arabs, and I think part of your book goes into the detail how they came to Rome and set up shop there and helped teach. Could you go a little bit more into the actual mechanics of learning Arabic?

Absolutely. This is a process that we start seeing in the late 16th century already, in specific cases. By the early 17th, people have composed dictionaries and grammars. This is always the first thing you do when you're trying to crack open a new linguistic tradition. Those are, in any age, the tools that you need, lexicography and grammar. So people are working on, initially, the first generation of scholars are working on dictionary projects and grammars. This is something that happens in

the Netherlands in particular. So Thomas Serpinius, a Dutch scholar, publishes a grammar of Arabic, and his colleague and successor, Jacobus Golius or Holius, publishes some decades later a grammar. And after that moment in time, it becomes possible to teach yourself Arabic if you have the zitsfleisch, right, if you have the patience and determination, which is a big ask then as it is now. But people can do that. So it becomes feasible. In that earlier moment, it's a much greater challenge. And we see that the very first generation of these European scholars spends considerable time in cities with Muslim populations of Arabophone people, and they take instruction there. So it's originally grounded in human relationships. Later, there is a more sort of

bookish way in. Since you mentioned the Christian Arabs, Christian Arabs, particularly Maronites, which is a denomination based in the Mount Lebanon, in modern-day Lebanon. These people are coming, starting in the late 16th century, to Rome because the Maronite church has reconnected with the Roman Catholic church, and there's a college for them. So they're being taught there, and then they're supposed to go back and bring good Catholic learning to the Mount Lebanon. What happens is that some of them go rogue. They travel around Europe, even Protestant Europe. And what can they market? Well, they can market their Arabic knowledge. So they become itinerant teachers of Arabic. Now, they are not versed in the Islamic

sciences. So for people who are looking, for instance, to translate the Quran and its commentaries, they're not so helpful. But they are certainly another way in which people find their way into the Arabic language. I see. So they could find teachers both in the Arabic-speaking world as well as in Europe itself. That's right. And in the 17th century, chairs of Arabic are created in Paris, in the Netherlands, in England, in Rome. And so there are people, sometimes they are Christian Arabs, other times they're European Christian scholars who are teaching Arabic. So it's a subject you can start to take at certain universities. So it's something that becomes institutionalized in a way that it wasn't before.

Is there any place in this picture of Arabic learning for Persian and Ottoman or Turkish? Absolutely. I'm so glad you asked that. The book focuses mainly on Arabic sources due to my own limitations, but my own limitations are by no means those of the people I'm writing about. And in one way of telling the story of oriental languages in early modern Europe is precisely a transition from associating Arabic with Hebrew and with the other Semitic languages to associating it with Turkish and Persian, which of course are not languages that have a genetic descent in common with Arabic. They belong together culturally.

And this is what we see by the end of the 17th century. We see attempts to compose grammars and dictionaries of those three languages together. And one of the projects that I've studied in the book, a French scholar, Barthelmy d'Herbelot, composes something of an encyclopedia of Islamic letters. And his three languages are Persian, Turkish, and Arabic. And that's what he draws on. He tries to recreate this whole cultural world. And that is really an intellectual achievement to have recognized that. And then, of course, it's also a linguistic achievement to be able to sort of make good on that realization and pull all of this material together for the French reader because the book is written in French.

This encyclopedia of Derbelot, how widely did this circulate? You know, who was reading it? What was its really coverage and significance? Well, the interesting thing about Derbelot's book, which appears just after his death, so it's a lifelong project. He's working on it for decades and he dies while it's in press. The interesting thing about it is that it was a perplexing book. There had never been anything quite like it. And its initial readers were confused by it. For one thing, it's organized alphabetically,

which I believe was a way for him not to have to make decisions about how to organize the material, but to sort of allow it its sort of free flow, in a sense. But it had a really, really long afterlife. So people got over their confusion about its genre. They didn't expect all of this historic and literary material to be organized alphabetically. It's, in a sense, a predecessor of the Encyclopédie

of d'Alembert and Diderot. And I think it was heavily inspired by the organization of the main Ottoman reference work on which Derbelo relied, Katip Çelebi's Kâşfız Zünun. But the book remains in use by both scholars and lay readers into the first half of the 19th century. So I found annotated copies from the 19th century, where people are inserting new, more up-to-date information in the margins, so they're expanding it. But at the same time, people like Flaubert and Victor Hugo

are using it to draw stories from inspiration for their literary compositions. So it has an influence on the sort of imagination of the Romantic period, which is, I don't think, something that Derbelot had in mind when he was writing the book. Derbelot's book is peculiar for another reason. The entries in the dictionary or encyclopedia are organized according to Islamic categories rather than European ones. The entry on religion appears under deen, not under religion. Fascinating.

So for a French reader who is not fluent in Arabic, that was really challenging. You had to work out where the material was that you wanted. But I believe, and there's good evidence to believe this, that Derbilo really thought that what was known in the Western tradition about Islamic culture was so misleading and so poor that it just had to all be thrown out, basically, and you had to start over. And using native terms was one way of doing justice to this material. As you mentioned, part of Derbilo and the other scholars in your book, part of their mission is And using native terms was one way of doing justice to this material. As you mentioned, part of Derboulot and the other scholars in your book, part of their mission is to sort of improve or correct these medieval myths and misconceptions about Islam,

which came about, you know, not through studied learning or reading Arabic sources for their own sake. Could you go into some of the myths or misconceptions that were cast off in this Republic of Arabic Letters? Absolutely. Thank you so much. So there was a tradition of writing about Islam in the West, and it goes back to the Middle Ages. It goes back in particular to 12th century Toledo, which is where the first Latin translation of the Quran was composed, which was actually one of the first translations of the Quran into any language. So a very interesting document and actually an impressive achievement considering the limitations that the translator faced, Robert of Caton. So without bashing that document, which was the main translation of hundreds of years later, still for Europeans.

So in the 16th century, when the Quran is for the first time printed with a printing press, that is the translation. Robert of Caton's 12th century translation is the one that is published 400 years exactly after it was first composed. However, the translation is something of a paraphrase. It's not precise. It doesn't always allow you to know word by word what the Arabic text says, and it conflates certain verses, it expands other ones. So it's a rather coarse instrument for detailed philological engagement with the Quran. And it also generated through its mistranslations and through the polemical uses to which it was put. This was a translation that was done in order to dissuade Christians from becoming Muslims. It gave rise to a polemical uses to which it was put, this was a translation that was done in order to dissuade

Christians from becoming Muslims. It gave rise to a polemical tradition of writing about Islam. It contained a lot of myths about Muhammad, which were repeated ad nauseum in this polemical tradition. Muhammad suffered from epileptic fits, or he had his coffin suspended by lodestones as a fake miracle that it was levitating. Or a more recent one, actually, that seems to arise in the Renaissance, is that he trained a dove to feed from his ear, and he pretended that he was receiving the Holy Ghost. So these are all of the myths that the members of the Republic of Arabic Letters are at pains to disprove and to

overthrow. Fascinating how some of these polemical things get repeated in the Muslim tradition about non-Muslim religions, say South Asian religions, the false levitation through lodestones. That's really interesting. Yes, I think you have to keep in mind that these are texts written for European audiences to make them feel good about their own religion. And one of the arguments in this moment of greater interaction between, for instance, the Ottoman Empire and European states is if Muslims were to hear these stories we tell, they would laugh at us. We would not convince them at all. They would think we were foolish.

And that is a reason to do better. So these scholars often do have polemical intent. They think that Islam still, perhaps even more than ever before, needs to be proved to be either heretical or false, whatever their position is on what the theological problem with Islam is. However, at this point, they believe that they can do a better job. And so for a good polemic, you need good philology. So even this religious motivation can actually bring people to a closer understanding of the Quranic text at this time. And that's actually what we see happening in the second half of the 17th century.

We're going to cut to a quick music break, and when we get back, we'll continue discussing translations of the Quran. Adonai Et nos tabus isra'el CHOIR SINGS So you mentioned how Robert of Ketten's medieval translation of the Quran persisted for four centuries, but now with this cast of characters and Enlightenment era thought, was there the perception that in order to accurately understand Islam itself, be it for polemical or scholarly purposes, that translating the Quran was a big desideratum to have a new translation of the Quran from scratch. And that is what a number of people attempted in the 17th century. And we see the first direct vernacular translation as well, so into French rather than into Latin, in the middle of the 17th century, done by the French diplomat André Durillet.

But this, again, this is not a scholarly translation, so it is not technical enough or precise enough to allow a precise study of particular words in the Quran. And although a number of people attempt that scholarly version, the person who manages to bring it to press is somebody whom we may not have expected to do so, namely a Roman Catholic cleric who was also confessor to a pope, Lodovico Maracci. And his translation comes out just at the century's close in 1698. It is more than a translation. It is also an edition of the Arabic text, only the second printed edition. He was scooped by a couple of years by a colleague, a counterpart in Hamburg, Abraham Hinkelmann.

His version has four parts. It has an Arabic text, Latin translation, notes, and this is perhaps the most interesting part to us because these notes are drawn from five different Quran commentaries, which Marachi read and excerpted and translated systematically. So there's something of an anthology here of Quran commentary. And the purpose is to use the Islamic tradition of commentary in order to explain the Quran. And finally, the fourth part is polemic. So this is where Marachi speaks in his polemical voice and tries to argue against all of the positions that he's just so painstakingly reconstructed. And indeed, the work appears under the title Refutatio al-Qurani, the refutation of

the Quran. That is fascinating, where four-fifths of the work is not a refutation. Absolutely, absolutely. It's a remarkable book, especially because since the different parts have been kept apart, it allows for very different uses. So in Protestant Europe, we find people saying, this book, you know, its polemic isn't so great, isn't so convincing, but you can just ignore it. The scholarly apparatus is really, really good. And it was indeed an amount of work that no one tried to duplicate. If anything, people read those notes and sometimes incorporated them into their own projects of Quran translation. Could you tell us an example of someone who relied on Marachi's translation of the Quran?

Of course. Of all these uses of Marachi, I think the most interesting one to me is George Sale's English translation of the Quran. George Sale was a London lawyer who translated the Quran. He published his English version in 1734, who translated the Quran. He published his English version in 1734 and it was the first time that the Quran was directly translated from Arabic into English. And this translation is, as a literary work, very beautiful and as a scholarly work very precise and accurate and it has excellent notes. And both of these features made it into the standard English translation

for 200 years, well into the 20th century. It's been replaced now, of course, by many, many other translations. But for a really long period, this was the way that an English language person would have accessed the Quran. And the interesting story is that George Sale had not studied at Oxford, which was the main place for Arabic studies in England at that time, and also the major collection in the Bodleian of Arabic manuscripts. So he did this without access to those riches. And he had one manuscript available to him in London, which is a Quran commentary by Baidawi, a one-volume Quran commentary which was very popular in the Ottoman Empire. But otherwise, there's a bit of a mystery as to how he was able to be so learned. The fascinating thing about George Sayle's translation

is that it was done in London, where he had relatively few resources other than his own manuscripts. And we know that among those there were no Quran commentaries, for example, the first kind of book that you would want when embarking on a project like this. So in fact, with the exception of a single Arabic manuscript that was available to him locally in London, he borrowed it from the Dutch church in London. Sale relied consistently on Maracci's scholarly work, on the scholarly work of this Catholic scholar, and he didn't really acknowledge his debt. So in this silent way, this work done for a polemical reason in Catholic Rome became the scholarly apparatus through which

Anglophone readers of the Quran in Britain, in the British Empire, in North America as well, of course, would access the Quran and would understand it in the 19th and into the 20th century. Why did the Dutch church have this one Arabic manuscript? That's a great question. Well, the manuscript we know was copied in Istanbul in the late 16th century, and it seems to have been picked up by a Dutch merchant in the early 17th century in Istanbul and then donated to the Dutch church. And this was a Quran commentary. It's Baidawi's commentary, but it's a running commentary. That is, the entire Quran is excerpted in it. So you get both a text of the Quran and an

explanation all in one handy volume. This is, of course, also why it was so popular among Ottoman students of the Quran. Now, the Quran was the souvenir par excellence for this kind of traveler or merchant in a place like the Ottoman Empire. If they were going to buy one Ottoman book, it was probably going to be a Koran. And so it's more as an object, I think, as a symbol than as a scholarly instrument that it makes its way from Istanbul to London. And then it sits on the shelves of the Dutch church in Austin Friars, which was the church of the Dutch merchant community in London for a century until somewhat randomly the lawyer George Sale, who's working at the inner temple, which is not that far from the Dutch church, manages to find out about this book and borrows it.

This manuscript still exists. It's now in the London Metropolitan Archive, where I went to uncover it when I was in London. And it was a funny experience because I was in an archive of urban history looking at late 16th century Arabic manuscripts. Not your average archive story for Arabic manuscripts. century Arabic manuscript. Not your average archive story for Arabic manuscript. And no, and people, you know, it wasn't really acknowledged as an important document in our history of the reception of the Quran in the West. But in fact, the Quranic text in Baidawi's manuscript has some variants that are not the standard one of the transmission that the Ottomans popularized.

And so what's interesting is that I noticed that in George Sale's published translation, he privileges those variants in the main text and puts the standard Ottoman ones in the footnotes, which is very odd unless you are translating directly from that Fadawi manuscript. And so by finding those variants, I was able to show that this is how George Sale translated the Quran. And there's a very important lesson here about mediation and about how important it was to European scholars at this moment in time to read the Quran through the Islamic tradition, through the way it would have been read in the Ottoman Empire. And that was the way to get at the true meaning of the Quran. That was the horizon of their interpretation of the Quran. And you see it summarized in this particular choice George Sale made, because he also had an uncommented Quran among his personal manuscripts, now in the Bodleian, and he did not use that. He chose the Baydawi.

From what I understand, this sounds very different from the kind of mode of, say, later, you know, late 18th and 19th century scholarship, even early 20th century scholarship on Islam, where the earlier, say, more classical texts from the earlier centuries of Islam are considered more authoritative than the later, say, late medieval or Ottoman texts, both with regards to Islamic sciences, but also with regards to natural sciences, literature, people's knowledge of the Arabic language. How does that shift happen in European scholarship? I'm so glad you remarked on that, because it is a difference. And at this particular

moment in time, European scholars who have become interested in the Islamic tradition have a real sense of their belatedness in coming to it. And so they're extremely willing to accept any help they can get, basically, and to, for instance, use the kinds of commentaries that are popular in the Ottoman Empire, which are often abridgments of longer ones. So Baydawi's commentary is an abridgment of Zamakhshari's commentary, for example. And that handiness is something that when you're starting out

is extremely attractive. But there is another wrinkle to this. It wasn't just expediency that drew them to Ottoman judgments about what mattered in the tradition. It was also that to them, the Ottomans in particular were sort of the Muslims par excellence in a sense. So the way you won an argument about what does a particular word in the Quran mean was by saying, well, this is how it's understood in the Ottoman Empire. And that doesn't always hold true in the

European tradition. Eventually, people start second guessing contemporary Muslim interpretations and coming to other ones of their own, or as you said, trying to go deeper and deeper and relying on earlier medieval or classical, however you want to call them, products of the Islamic tradition. At this moment in time, that is perhaps a little beyond reach. So in general, what we see is a use mainly of late medieval and early modern texts and abridgments, compendia, etc. So there's a very heavy mediation of the Ottomans and even their immediate predecessors. So the Islamic world, the post-classical Islamic world of the late medieval period.

Speaking of mediation, we've been talking a lot about how this new understanding of Islam, learning through Arabic, came about through texts and textual mediation and sustained reading, but that a lot of this was built on human relationships in the sort of late medieval period, especially when it came to learning Arabic and bringing these manuscripts. Could you speak a bit more about the continuance of these human relationships in this period when maybe there isn't so much of a need to go live in Istanbul or Aleppo anymore? Thank you so much. So definitely the earlier generation of Arabic scholars in Europe, as I mentioned, had to go abroad because they needed manuscripts. They needed, that's just the bread and butter of scholarly activity. So that was something,

a foregone conclusion, really, for the serious study of the Arabic tradition. And we see people like Jolios, like Edward Pocock, do exactly that. At a slightly later moment, we find people are continuing to go east or south if they're going to North Africa. Galland would be an example. Antoine Galland is famous as the translator of the Thousand and One Nights, but he did a lot of other work as well on Ottoman and on Middle Eastern topics. Even so, as you say, by this point, books were available in repositories in Europe. So some of the most important works, for instance, the work of Maracci or the work of Derbelo, were done without ever leaving Europe. And that was part of the story I tried to tell in this book

because I think the glamour of travel is so immediately intelligible to us that we sometimes neglect people who less glamorously stayed home and worked really hard in human relationships. So first of all, these texts were books, they were objects, right? And they circulated, they circulated through human networks of sometimes European merchants, sometimes Christian Arabs or other people whose main home was in the Levant or in the Ottoman Empire, or even further afield. And at most, these books were at one or two removes from their original location. So those booksellers who had sold them to someone like Edward Pocock, or those scholars of Aleppo, or those scholars of Istanbul who had advised Galand or who had advised Pocock in their acquisitions, their influence was still felt. And I can only presume that the memory, the orally transmitted memory of those relationships was very real to the people who were working on these books in Europe. So although they were armchair scholars, or actually this was the age before upholstered furniture, so they were actually working on hardback seating. Nevertheless, I think that this was very real to them. It wasn't an

abstract sort of textual world. It was something of people whom they could imagine very richly in their minds as they were doing this work. So what you're saying is that tastes and scholarly values as to what texts were important and what texts were representative were shaped by contemporary Muslims. Absolutely. Or at least those with whom the one generation earlier of scholars had met with. Absolutely. And in particular, you could almost make a stronger argument that as long as this work was done by Christians who understood Muslims as counterparts in some way, maybe as Christian heretics,

which is a way of thinking about Muslims as Unitarians, basically, which is a way of thinking about Muslims as Unitarians, basically, as long as they were grounded in that relationship, they had a live interest in Islam as it was practiced in their moment in time. And rather than trying to find a purer Islam in the past, their horizon was more contemporary in a way, precisely because they were Christian scholars in an inter-confessional world that extended to the other Abrahamic faiths. Thus far, we've really talked a lot about religious texts, about the Islamic sciences related to scripture or the prophet's life and words.

But you mentioned that in addition to these texts, this moment comes in and after a translation movement of humanistic texts, history, poetry, cultural texts. I'm not to draw too fine a line between culture and religion, but I do want to ask how that material was being interpreted at this time and the kinds of textual and non-textual mediation that may go into that as well. Thank you so much. Yes, I'm absolutely at pains to show that this translation movement was not solely obsessed with religion and with the Quran, but that it took quite a broad view of what was interesting in the Islamic tradition, and I mean Islamic in the broadest possible sense. So poetry began to be translated at this time. The reasons were various. One,

of course, was that it would improve one's understanding of the Arabic language because it was one of the high points of Arabic composition. And history instead was a very rich field for several reasons. I mean, for one thing, people wanted to know the history of the Muslim conquest, which they considered to be one of the great events in human history, and one about which they knew far too little. And they wanted to give a more accurate and more detailed account of that historical transformation. At the same time, the promise of Arabic, and particularly, I think, Persian historians, as well as Ottoman-Turkish ones, was that they could tell you about parts of Asia that lay beyond your linguistic abilities to read about in the original. So in the 17th century, one of the attractions of Islamic historiography is that it will tell you about

China as well. So it's the central Asian perspective that seems incredibly valuable at this moment in time. And this is actually a reason that people study Muslim geographers as well, because they will give you information about whole swaths of the world that are still not really frequented and still poorly understood by European scholars. One thing that is very interesting is the evaluation of Ottoman contributions and Ottoman cultural achievement. And this is something that is controversial even within the Republic of Arabic Letters. The Ottomans, as you know, had a bad reputation for the very fact of their conquest

of Constantinople, which was associated with the end of classical civilization, basically, and the decline and destruction, in particular, of the Greek heritage. So they had a real image problem to overcome. And what is interesting is that they overcame it in the eyes of people like Antoine Galland and Bertel Miderbello, who really tried to make an argument for Ottoman cultural, literary, intellectual achievement. So they were really serious about the fact that there was really no shame in being Ottoman, that there was just as much here as there had been in earlier Persian and Arabic language productions of the medieval period. But this is not a universally accepted position. And I would say that in the 18th century, the idea that the Ottomans are less lettered than their Arab

forefathers, you know, to simplify greatly, as people did, that idea prevails again. So this moment in which the Ottoman tradition get a fair shake, or even more than that, gets really a passionate defense, is a particular one, and it's a particular contribution of certain members of the Republic of Arabic Letters. How are these scholars able to overcome a millennium of polemic and abuse towards Muslims in order to appreciate these Ottoman histories and this perspective? I'm so glad you asked that question. This is really at the heart of making sense of these materials. We see a reclassification, I think, of Muslims. And there are various other

categories that people have for making sense of them. So in the polemical tradition, Muslims have been understood as either heretics, people who have known the truth but who deny it, that is, who are errant Christians, essentially, or they're understood as completely outside of the fold altogether, that is representing a false religion. What happens is we see them understood now by analogy to other available models. And the most powerful one is that of the good pagans of classical antiquity, because since the time of the church fathers, the Christian tradition has assimilated so much thought of people who are not Christian and who are excused because of their personal virtue and the value of their ideas. So people start to say, if we can read the works of these people who did not even recognize a single God, who are not even monotheists, why should we not be able to read the works of Muslims who agree with us in so many fundamentals about what is true and who say so many valuable and interesting things?

Wow, that's so counterintuitive to what comes later. where you should put, essentially, Islamic books in the library, and allows them to study this tradition in a humanistic way, rather than a polemical way, as a potential source of knowledge. And they feel like they're expanding the achievements of the Renaissance. They're moving from, as had happened, from Latin to Greek to Hebrew, and now to Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. So it's part of the revival of letters for them. So they're assimilating the study of the Islamic world into this earlier model of Renaissance humanistic learning. This is a really significantly different framework

than their contemporary scholars in, say, the Ottoman world or the Safavid or Mughal worlds for studying this history. So what you know, what's the impact on Islamic history of this framework? Well, it becomes available for study and for thinking about in a time period in which history is conceived of as a storehouse of examples for thinking about morality and virtue, for thinking about politics, suddenly Islamic history is offering a wealth of new examples. And people will work out what kind of lessons can be learned from studying the life of Saladin, for example. And in fact, medieval Muslims come to seem more civil and more similar to modern peoples than the very violent heroes of Greek classical history.

So maybe they're better moral exemplars. This is what some of these European scholars of Arabic will argue. So what they do is they make available this tradition for secular enjoyment, basically, you could say. And that has an impact, of course, on how this tradition is received in the 18th century, in the Enlightenment itself. So we've been discussing all this time this kind of Renaissance heritage of information gathering, especially philology and search for knowledge and improving awareness of Islam and Muslims.

And at the same time, we're heading in this direction towards this view of the Enlightenment as rational or secular thought. And yet here with your work, we see with such rich detail the work of Catholic and Protestant scholars using Islam, the religious history and study of religion itself in very interesting ways, which, you know, leaves me wondering where do we view the Enlightenment in light of its debt to this deeply religious scholarship? Absolutely. This material shows us a different pathway from the Renaissance and from Christian learning to the secular Enlightenment than the one that exists in conventional wisdom. And I'm by no means the only person who is trying to re-narrate that history in a new way. My colleagues Dimitri Levitin and William Bullman have shown a very similar transition in their recent books. I think this is something really significant for Enlightenment studies, something, a conversation that we need to have about how we want to interpret the Enlightenment. Insofar as people had noticed that there was a

new view of Islam in Western Europe in the 18th century, they had attributed it to the attainment of a secular viewpoint on religion. But we see now that that's just a really simplistic story and that actually even very committed Christian scholars, committed that is to their particular confession and even to the project of religious polemic, were able to think extremely thoughtfully and richly about Islam. So definitely that recasts the Enlightenment. I think we have two choices, really. One is to expand the tent of what counts as enlightened, and the other is to ask ourselves whether we want to give this movement of the 18th century as much importance and as much force as it has traditionally been given. Because in fact, early modern European Christian culture was able to yield very significant intellectual outcomes. There wasn't necessarily a conflict

between belonging to a particular faith and thinking very profoundly about a foreign faith. I think either way, we need to disaggregate. So we have conventionally thought of the Enlightenment as a package with metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and political elements. But in fact, when we disaggregate, we see that those different pieces of the puzzle traveled separately. So perhaps, as William Bulman has recently suggested, the Enlightenment was more of a political movement than an intellectual one, that it gave a political edge to ideas that had been elaborated previously in less politicized

contexts. And once we've realized that, maybe we need to ask ourselves, is it as important as we have long considered it to be? Especially in a contemporary world in which the Enlightenment is so often invoked as somehow the essence of what the West is or what Western democracy is, I think it's really important to revisit that relationship and particularly the relationship to religion as we, you know, hopefully attempt to create a society in which religions coexist and are part of the project of a modern, democratic, inclusive politics. Alex, I wanted to thank you so much for this discussion and this really important historical work. But I had one more little question, maybe for our grad students

and researchers who are just now sitting out. Can you offer any advice on the path of academic scholarship and from your own experiences, globetrotting and gathering the materials to craft this wonderful book? Well, I'm not sure I want to give advice. I don't want to give myself too much importance, but I can talk about my errors and maybe other people can learn from those. I traveled a lot for this book. What I discovered was that the printed material, the things I knew about before I started out, were just really the tip of the iceberg. There was a submerged continent of European engagement with Arabic materials. Many of those translations just had never made it into print, but they survive. And so what I learned from that was to be very ambitious when I visited

a new archive or collection and to ask as many questions as possible in order to collect as broadly as I could. And I think always to be hopeful that there would be interesting things. And sometimes on the very last day I was in a city, I would discover that I hadn't been asking the right question, that there was another collection that no one had told me about that had a letter by one of my protagonists in it. That happened. And so I think my advice, I suppose, would be to keep your spirits high. And, you know, the first step is believing that you will find things. And then, you know, you put in the work, of course, but lo and behold, there is so much out there,

so much that we haven't incorporated into a historical scholarship and memory. And it's our job as historians to find it and to bring it to the attention of readers. Thank you for that advice. Alex, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Shereen, Mariam, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. Shirin, Mariam, thank you so much for having me, for reading my work so carefully and for your generous question. It was a pleasure. And I'll remind our listeners that for more information, they can check out the website.

Keep in mind that Alex's book, The Republic of Arabic Letters, Islam and the European Enlightenment is out now for those who wish to read even more about Artists' Conversation today. Ben karışmam ister öldür ister as Çelkez kızı kınalar yakmış eline Ah sarılaydım o incecik beline © transcript Emily Beynon