The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment by Alexander Bevilacqua

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment by Alexander Bevilacqua Simon Mills The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. By Alexander Bevilacqua (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018. Pp. xviii, 340. $35.00. ISBN 9780674975927.) A decade before the revelation of his calling as he mused amidst the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, Edward Gibbon dreamed of studying Arabic. The “childish fancy” was banished by his unimaginative Oxford tutor. But it might easily have been otherwise. The books of Islamic history which captivated the teenaged Gibbon were the product of a “Republic of Arabic Letters.” For more than a century, scholars and patrons from Paris to Oxford, Leiden to Rome, had stocked libraries with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts. In Italy, Lodovico Marracci, a clerk regular in the Order of the Mother of God, had translated the Qur’an into Latin, while the English divine Edward Pococke uncovered the early history of the Arabs. With his Bibliothèque Orientale the Frenchman Barthélemy d’Herbelot bequeathed Europeans an early version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Such scholarly feats inspired the eighteenth-century authors who were Gibbon’s entrée to “Mahomet and his Saracens”: the impecunious Simon Ockley, who finished his history of the Muslim conquests in a debtors’ prison, and the solicitor George Sale, translator of the English Qur’an. Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment brings these and others of the Republic’s citizens to life with verve, insight, and erudition. Parts of the story have been told before, but typically in smaller-scale works on individual pioneers or national cultures; Bevilacqua’s narrative takes a bird’s eye view. The tale of scholars at their desks is skilfully interwoven with a subplot about the journeys of their books. Chapter 1 brilliantly evokes the world of Istanbul and its booksellers. Later, we learn how manuscripts brought serendipitously to Roman libraries were exploited by Marracci for his commentary on the Qur’an and how in Utrecht Adriaan Reland used Malay and Javanese Qur’an translations acquired thanks to the “global reach of the Dutch Republic” (p. 84). Readers of this journal will appreciate Bevilacqua’s efforts to include “both Catholic and Protestant contributions” (p. 15), doing justice to Catholic scholars’ such as Marracci’s and d’Herbelot’s indispensable achievements. [End Page 164] Moreover, Bevilacqua’s account of Islam and the Enlightenment is an important corrective to earlier versions. Enlightenment orientalists are typically cast as radicals who developed novel, more sympathetic depictions of the Prophet and his religion, or, at the least, adapted earlier scholarship to new polemical ends. Such narratives often embody an assumption that intellectually honest and cool-headed work on Islam simply could not have been produced by orthodox Christian writers. Bevilacqua argues convincingly that this is wrong. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon appear here, not as innovators, but as inheritors of a much older scholarly tradition. Nor was this simply a case of philosophical historians mining the data accumulated by erudite but uncritical antiquarians. The shift in the “normative evaluation of Islam” (p. 106), central to the Enlightenment’s more charitable interpretation of Muhammad and his followers, had occurred at least a century earlier. How and why had this change come about? One answer picks up a hint dropped by Machiavelli in the 1530s, then developed by Henry Stubbe in the seventeenth century, and George Sale in the “Preliminary Discourse” to his Qur’an. Muhammad came to be conceived no longer as a “false prophet,” but as a skilled political legislator. If his religion and its extraordinarily rapid diffusion could be explained purely in terms of secular power, bracketed off from real theology, then Muslim history was a safe topic for a Christian believer. Likewise, many of the early modern scholars who addressed Islam relied on some idea of comparison. Since antiquity, Christians had recognized the value of studying aspects of pagan history and culture. As “wise Muslims” (p. 106) were similarly imagined, an emerging idea of Islamic civilization became an acceptable field of theologically neutralized enquiry. Family resemblances between Islam and Christianity became increasingly apparent to...