Alexander Bevilacqua. The Republic of Arabic Letters

The last decade has witnessed an upsurge in a kind of post-orientalist scholarship that has disaggregated early modern representations of Islam from later European empire building and resituated these representations in other sociopolitical and institutional formations. Alexander Bevilacqua furthers this trend in his deft intellectual history The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. This so-called “Republic of Arabic Letters” was an international community of European scholars who shared a humanistic investment in Muslim peoples, empires, and histories despite their Christian biases against this religion and its founder, Prophet Muhammad. Edward Pococke (the English Levant Company’s chaplain and an Oxford professor), Lodovico Marracci (confessor to Pope Innocent XI and Latin commentator and translator of the Qurʾān), George Sale (the orthodox Anglican who first translated the Arabic Qurʾān into English), and Barthélemy d’Herbelot (compiler of an ambitious reference work on Islamic history and literature, completed with King Louis XIV’s support), among other Arabic studies pioneers, provincialized Europe’s place in world history while reaffirming Christian revelation. Bevilacqua steers clear from trite postcolonial debates; Edward Said and his disciples are conspicuously absent in this book. Instead, the book offers a refreshing perspective on how Europeans between 1650 and 1750 studied an alien people and faith with precision, respect, and profound sympathy.

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Enlightenment · Faith · Humanism · Islam · Literature · Orientalism · Piety · Political science · Revelation · Scholarship · Theology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy · Religious studies