Michael Kreutz - The Renaissance of the Levant: Arabic and Greek Discourses of Reform in the Age of Nationalism

Michael Kreutz
The Renaissance of the Levant

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Tension, Transmission, Transformation

Edited by Patrice Brodeur, Alexandra Cuffel, Assaad Elias Kattan, and Georges Tamer

Volume 13

ISBN 978-3-11-063122-7
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063400-6
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063134-0
ISSN 2196-405X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931215

Bibliografic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliografic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

I would like to express my warmest thanks to Assaad Kattan (Mnster) for his wonderful intellectual support for my project under the original title Beyond the centers: Religion and Enlightenment by the example of Greek and Arab Christianity in Southeast Europe and the Middle East ( Jenseits der Zentren: Religion und Aufklrung am Beispiel von Islam, griechischem und arabischem Christentum in Sdosteuropa und im Vorderen Orient ); to the DFG for funding this book; to the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Mnster, i.e. the working platform Transcultural Entanglements , for providing a conducive environment; to the members of my project group Transfer between world religions for their feedback; to Katharina Linnemann (Mnster) for reviewing and improving the manuscript; and to David West (Mnster) for careful scrutiny of my English. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents and friends most heartily for their invaluable and strong backing while I was writing this book.

Since the Mediterranean connects cultures, Mediterranean studies have by definition an intercultural focus. This is a vast field and requres a command of different languages not necessarily related to each other. Throughout the modern era, the Ottoman Empire has had a lasting impact on the cultures and societies of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. It is for this reason that it makes sense to investigate both Greek and Arabic sources two essential languages in that area that are connected by the fact that Orthodox Christians have written in both of them. This book will shed some light on the significance of ideas in the political transitions of their time, and on how the proponents of these transitions often became so overwhelmed by the events that they helped trigger adjustments to their own ideas.

The book is therefore both a survey of intellectual history from the perspective of mainly Greek and Arabic speakers. Greek and Arabic challenge attempts to modernizing culture in their own special way since they are languages being associated with the Bible and the Quran. founding texts of two great civilizations. Being languages of erudition Greek and Arabic used to connect different peoples over a vast stretch of territory which is another challenge to political reforms oriented towards an order of nation states where languages no matter what historical baggage they carry have to be forged into national languages. On a final note, the discourses in Greek and Arabic reflect the provinces of the Ottoman Empire and it will be interesting to see their differences and commonalities. The discourse which is I examine here is pivoting around religion but with a secular outlook.

Intellectual history has become a neglected field of research and a nineteenth century remnant

As the political scientist Hannah Arendt argued, however, intellectual history is key to understanding the present, since political ideas function as reference parameters for political actors to decide and judge in times of uncertainty. closely intertwined; and, while they sometimes complete each other, they might also fall into opposing camps.

The very name of liberty is in any case forgotten sometimes, and falls into oblivion when other values and ideals become more important. The Eastern Mediterranean of the modern era provides numerous examples of how progressive ideas based on the idea of liberty gave way to more authoritarian traits in society, and even paved the way for them when the very modern state that they had helped to create fell prey to an ethnic nationalism that was focused on expansion and hegemony in the region. This is a kind of dialectic of enlightenment, and it is one of the goals of this book to make clear how the intertwining of progressive, universalist values on the one side, and ethnic nationalist currents on the other, can help understand the current politics of identity in the Eastern Mediterranean.

This fact has been obfuscated by the Orientalism debate. According to Edward Said (2003), to be a European in the Orient, one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe. Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient.

Yet, Said and the postcolonial school perpetuate this binary view, which does not reflect the realities on the ground: Greece and all of Southeast Europe do not easily fit into this binary pattern, if they fit at all. Said does not recognize that the predominantly Christian-Orthodox part of the European continent has historically never been part of the Occident, and is usually not viewed nowadays as being part of the Orient, either. Besides, it was not the West that dominated the Middle East, but almost exclusively Great Britain and France, which Said well knew. And both Britain and France often saw themselves as being superior not only to the Middle East, but also even to many cultures in mainland Europe. Moreover, when they were secular, the same forces that aimed to overcome French and British imperialism also aimed to overcome Ottoman imperialism. In so doing, they also harnessed the British and the French powers to achieve their own ends.

Although the ancient Mediterranean has long since disappeared (no matter whether we follow Henri Pirennes thesis or not), the modern Eastern Mediterranean shares the common burden of an Ottoman legacy that resists any binary thinking in terms of West and non-West. Toner (2013) is very much to the point when he argues that [t]he relationship between East and West was always a complex dialectical phenomenon.

The dichotomy between East and West became a permanent feature of Western perception, with Europe and Asia being placed in opposite positions. Nevertheless, the notion that the Orient was somehow connected to Europe and constituted the cradle of European civilization was not yet over.

There has been criticism of Saids claims even within postcolonial studies. Although well aware that for a British nineteenth-century traveller the Orient was identical to India,

None of this seems to be of relevance to Said. And, although he provides some strong arguments to show the racist character, especially of scholarship in the nineteenth century, he goes too far when he argues that the modern Orientalist

Said opposes capitalism, too, describing it in a neo-Marxist manner as a system of subjugation that is commanded at the top by the handful of leading industrial countries.