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

In the era this book describes, Europeans lacked standardized terminology for identifying Muslims and their religious, cultural, and linguistic communities. The ancient but unspecific Saracen, a name whose origin is as obscure as its use was widespread, was just one among many available designations. Oriental did not refer solely to Muslims: it could encompass all peoples of the Levant, including Jews and Christians, or even refer to all the peoples of Asia. Likewise, Arab could mean several things: sometimes it designated the nomadic desert Arabs, the Bedouin, sometimes the speakers of Arabic. (To call those who spoke or wrote in Arabic Arabs, as many Europeans did, was misleading, because Persians, Ottomans and many others used Arabic as well.) Turks, too, could refer to Ottoman dynasts and subjects or else to speakers and writers of Turkish, or even, by synecdoche, to all Muslims (as in the expression, first attested in the sixteenth century, to turn Turk). This terminological complexity led, perhaps inevitably, to some ambiguity and overlap between terms. Thus, the history of the Arabs often meant the history of the Muslimsthose medieval Muslims who had participated in Umayyad and Abbasid society. The non-Arab contribution was not properly acknowledged.

In this book I use Islamic rather than Oriental, because the latter term, while probably the most frequently employed by its protagonists, seems far too imprecise to be useful. Nevertheless, the pages that follow look beyond the study of the religion of Islam. As a consequence, I use the term Islamic broadly, not just for religion but also to indicate Muslim cultural and intellectual production. Not all of this was religious in character; poetry, philosophy, and history all fall under the term. Marshall Hodgson coined the useful term Islamicate to refer to the cultural production of Muslim lands, including that of minorities, as opposed to the properly religious aspects of life, which he called Islamic (Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization [Chicago, 1974], vol. 1). I have nonetheless avoided Islamicate because it has not taken hold outside the specialized circles of contemporary Islamic and Near Eastern studies (and perhaps not even there). As for the use of Europe and European: the goal is to be as inclusive as possible, and to bring together Italian, German, Dutch, French, and English sources. My aim is not to dismiss national differences; the connections and parallels merely seemed more significant. Western Christian would have served as well.

The term civilization was first used only in the 1760s, but in this book I employ it to describe a notion that certainly emerged much earlier: the assumption that the sum total of a societys achievements in the arts and sciences could be described and evaluated. The thinkers profiled here were interested in assessing the relationship of Islam to what we might term cultural output, though their notion of it seems more accurately captured by the phrase civilizational achievement. As for culture: in my own usage, I have attempted, where possible, to qualify the slippery term with more specific attributes such as intellectual or literary.

I use the vernacular names of humanist scholars (Reland, not Relandus), except when the Latin ones have gained currency in English (Golius, not van Gool). While Lodovico Marracci is mostly called Ludovico in the secondary literature, I have respected the way he spelled his name in autograph documents and vernacular publications. See, for instance, the letters at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence; and Lodovico Marracci, Lebreo preso per le buone (Rome, 1701).

Transliteration of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish follows the simplified system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have not included diacritics for words commonly used in English, such as Muhammad. Likewise, I have used the English equivalents of Arabic names where they exist, rather than transliterations (Medina, not Madna). The symbol stands for hamza, the glottal stop. The symbol stands for ayn, a throated consonant with no equivalent in English. In Arabic patronyms, b. stands for ibn (son), so that the name Al b. Ab lib translates as Al, the son of Ab lib.

Calendar dates are Common Era unless otherwise indicated. The Islamic calendar is a lunar twelve-month calendar and begins in 622 CE, the year of Muhammads flight to Medina, known as the hijra or hegira. Years in the Islamic calendar are referred to as AH for Anno Hegirae.

The Bible is quoted in the King James (Authorized) Version. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from the Quran use the version of A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (London, 1955). All other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated, though I have consulted published translations where available.