"Almond discusses eight key German thinkers, beginning with Leibniz's plan to invade Egypt (1671) and ending with Nietzsche's praise of Islam in The Antichrist (1888). Each chapter title encapsulates the ambiguities resulting from the sexual, political, territorial, and philosophical constraints of the time. Almond compellingly argues for the need to recognize the multiple porous identities complicating the thought processes of each thinker. He asks: "[W]hat voices did Herder use when he wrote about the Muslim Orient?" (56), a question that captures the essence of his methodology. For example, depending on whether we see Leibniz the political thinker, or Leibniz the Christian thinker, or perhaps Leibniz the seeker of causes, we encounter differentiated accounts of Islam. Through meticulously close reading, Almond provides a wealth of textual evidence to show that although Leibniz ultimately uses Islam to further his own search for origins, he never ceases to traverse the entire spectrum between grudging respect for and hatred of Islam. "SOURCE
Mavi Boncuk |
History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Mavi Boncuk |
History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Ian Almond[1]
London, Routledge, 2009, ISBN: 978-0415995191; 216pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0415897792
ISBN-10: 0415897793
“That a thinker such as Herder could call Arabs a savage people one year, and then praise the sublimity of their poetic thought the very next, made me realize that I had to refashion my entire concept of what an author is. How
“The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.”
Ian Almond
On his book History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Cover Interview of December 21, 2009
In a nutshell
This book is about the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight major German thinkers, but differs from other histories of ideas on two points. First of all, it does not consider each of these thinkers as a clear and consistent Self, a single author who had a single response to Islam. On the contrary, I treat each author as a collection of multiple selves, each of whom had very different things to say about Islam at different times.
In the chapter on Gottfried Leibniz, for example, you will really read about three Leibnizes: Leibniz’s response to Islam as a Christian thinker, as a political theorist, and as a philologist. Leibniz, in all of these modes, had very different things to say about a faith he sometimes saw as a monster, a political rival, a corrupted version of a natural theology, and as a useful source of historical information.
The second central argument tries to show how much more German thinkers knew about the Muslim world than they let on, and how they were all-too-familiar with a sophisticated picture of their Ottoman neighbours, even if they never allowed this to impinge upon their writing. There is a truly remarkable disconnect between the kind of information mainstream intellectuals had about the Turks and the clichés and stereotypes they chose to perpetuate in their writing. It would be like living next door to a family of poets and teachers for years, and yet still holding to the conviction that they were farmers and manual labourers.
The wide angle
My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe. What emerges in my book is how central the idea of anicht-Europa was for German thinkers. This is as true for critical free spirits such as Herder, Marx and Nietzsche, who saw Muslim countries as offering different alternatives to Judaeo-Christian modernity, as it is for Kant or Hegel who wished to celebrate or consolidate Europe.
Secondly, the book takes issue with the received idea that thinkers in 18th and 19th century Europe held to stereotypes about Muslims because they had no access to “real” knowledge of the Muslim world, or that any knowledge they had was deformed and contaminated by the misrepresentations of Big Bad Orientalists.
I show that figures such as Hegel, Goethe, and Schlegel were fully aware of the complexity and relative tolerance of the Muslim Ottoman societies which were their neighbours. But they compartmentalized this awareness in order to be able to continue drawing from a vocabulary of bloodthirsty, savage Turks and fanatical Arabs. German thinkers read newspapers for news of the Turkish wars all the time, and were surprisingly familiar with the particularities of their Ottoman neighbours.
With all due respect to Edward Said—the postcolonial thinker whose work I try to qualify, not contradict—there were a number of German Orientalists such as Friedrich Christian Diez and Johann Jakob Reiske who were genuinely trying to communicate a sophisticated and nuanced view of Islam and the Ottomans. Mainstream philosophers read these experts and carefully sifted them for what they wanted, selecting the nuggets they found useful and filtering out anything which too flatly contradicted the idea of a civilized, Christian Europe surrounded by a Slavic/Muslim non-Europe, steeped in barbarism and ignorance.
Thirdly, the book explodes the idea of philosophers as autonomous, stable, coherent beings who thought X about A and Y about B. What emerged in my research was how truly wild, bizarre, and contradictory the attitudes towards Islam were in each thinker I studied. Often there was no strict sense of chronological development in what a particular thinker thought about Islam from the beginning of his life to the end of it; rather a bewildering flurry of positive and negative remarks interrupted and competed against one another. That a thinker such as Herder could call Arabs a savage people one year, and then praise the sublimity of their poetic thought the very next, made me realize that I had to refashion my entire concept of what an author is. How else to make any sense of such inconsistencies?
A close-up
The aspect of my research which took me most by surprise happened half-way through my writing of the book. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for all his stunning complexity, notoriously dismissed non-Europe as a place where History never happened. In the case of Islam, Hegel insists that it has “forever vanished from the stage of History.” Hegel is seen by many as the Eurocentric thinker par excellence.
Researching Hegel, I was surprised to come across a number of curious facts, the least important being that one of the first things Hegel ever wrote (at 18) was a high school graduation speech on education in Ottoman Turkey. More significantly, in the newspaper Hegel edited in Bamberg for over a year when he was 35 (theBamberger Zeitung), a large number of articles concerned developments in the Ottoman Empire. In some of the issues, events in Turkey took up over half of the newspaper.
And a surprising number of the articles were quite pro-Turkish, and went into some detail describing events happening in Istanbul, Wahhabi victories over the Ottomans, etc. Hegel, I estimate, would have had to have read well over eighty articles on Turkey and the Turks during his period as newspaper editor. Islam may well have disappeared from the stage of History, but it didn’t disappear from the pages of the Bamberger Zeitung.
For me, this moment epitomized the hidden Other history of Europe— not the official one which is written down, but the unrecorded presence of foreign ideas, non-European texts, and alien influences which is very hard to track down. An absence or omission means nothing in itself until one learns more about the background against which it is set. The disappearance of Hegel’s Islam from the stage of world history, von dem Boden der Weltgeschichte, the fact that Hegel hardly remarked at all upon the Ottomans, means relatively little until the greater store of knowledge Hegel could have drawn on is brought to mind.
Hegel’s non-philosophical interest in the Ottomans would continue long after he finished his newspaper editorship; as late as 1829, we find Hegel remarking in a letter how, reading a newspaper together with Schelling in a Karlsbad coffeehouse, they learnt of the taking of Adrianople and the end of the Russo-Turkish war. In the very last year of his life (1831), Hegel criticised the English treatment of Irish Catholics with the reproach that “even the Turks have mostly allowed their Christian/Armenian/Jewish subjects the use of their churches.” Hegel’s writings may well have been largely Turk-free, but the spectre of an established, sophisticated and distinctly unbarbaric Muslim culture next door to Europe would forever cause problems for the Christian and European bias of his teleology.
Lastly
The significance of this book lies in three directions. First of all, society’s responses to the foreign are irredeemably multiple, even in the individual. And when I say “multiple” I don’t simply mean in that obvious psychoanalytical, fetishism/phobia way we have two names for Persia/Iran, one connoting mystical poetry, exquisite miniatures, and nice carpets, the other a fanatical dictatorship which has to be destroyed. The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.
Secondly, the fact that the thinkers I deal with in this book were able to read sophisticated accounts both of and by Muslims and still reproduce the clichés of fanatics, terrible Turks, etc. not only reflects upon the compartmentalization human beings are capable of, but also makes us question what it actually means for knowledge of a foreign culture to reside in society.
In our “awareness-raising” epoch, which is trying to reverse negative representations of Islam and Muslims, we assume that simply providing people with correct information about the Muslim world will automatically remove stereotypes. What my research suggests is that this sort of education is simply not enough—it underestimates the psychic need for a notion of fanatical, barbaric Islam, and the need for a consequent “civilized” notion of Europe to persist. Asking people to acknowledge that these barbaric, backward “others” of the West are as civilized and multi-faceted as we are would be like asking them to talk about incest in their family. It would be asking them to embark upon the dissolution of themselves, and of the grand concepts with which they associate themselves.
Finally, last year I wrote a history of Muslim-Christian military alliances in Europe, to try and show the extraordinary extent to which Islam is involved in the history of Europe. In many ways, History of Islam in German Thought also shares the goal: to bring Islam into Europe, to highlight the futility of talking about Europe without ever referring outside it. Herder understood this simple truth over 200 years ago.
----------------------------
Reviewer:
“The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.”
Ian Almond
On his book History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Cover Interview of December 21, 2009
In a nutshell
This book is about the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight major German thinkers, but differs from other histories of ideas on two points. First of all, it does not consider each of these thinkers as a clear and consistent Self, a single author who had a single response to Islam. On the contrary, I treat each author as a collection of multiple selves, each of whom had very different things to say about Islam at different times.
In the chapter on Gottfried Leibniz, for example, you will really read about three Leibnizes: Leibniz’s response to Islam as a Christian thinker, as a political theorist, and as a philologist. Leibniz, in all of these modes, had very different things to say about a faith he sometimes saw as a monster, a political rival, a corrupted version of a natural theology, and as a useful source of historical information.
The second central argument tries to show how much more German thinkers knew about the Muslim world than they let on, and how they were all-too-familiar with a sophisticated picture of their Ottoman neighbours, even if they never allowed this to impinge upon their writing. There is a truly remarkable disconnect between the kind of information mainstream intellectuals had about the Turks and the clichés and stereotypes they chose to perpetuate in their writing. It would be like living next door to a family of poets and teachers for years, and yet still holding to the conviction that they were farmers and manual labourers.
The wide angle
My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe. What emerges in my book is how central the idea of anicht-Europa was for German thinkers. This is as true for critical free spirits such as Herder, Marx and Nietzsche, who saw Muslim countries as offering different alternatives to Judaeo-Christian modernity, as it is for Kant or Hegel who wished to celebrate or consolidate Europe.
Secondly, the book takes issue with the received idea that thinkers in 18th and 19th century Europe held to stereotypes about Muslims because they had no access to “real” knowledge of the Muslim world, or that any knowledge they had was deformed and contaminated by the misrepresentations of Big Bad Orientalists.
I show that figures such as Hegel, Goethe, and Schlegel were fully aware of the complexity and relative tolerance of the Muslim Ottoman societies which were their neighbours. But they compartmentalized this awareness in order to be able to continue drawing from a vocabulary of bloodthirsty, savage Turks and fanatical Arabs. German thinkers read newspapers for news of the Turkish wars all the time, and were surprisingly familiar with the particularities of their Ottoman neighbours.
With all due respect to Edward Said—the postcolonial thinker whose work I try to qualify, not contradict—there were a number of German Orientalists such as Friedrich Christian Diez and Johann Jakob Reiske who were genuinely trying to communicate a sophisticated and nuanced view of Islam and the Ottomans. Mainstream philosophers read these experts and carefully sifted them for what they wanted, selecting the nuggets they found useful and filtering out anything which too flatly contradicted the idea of a civilized, Christian Europe surrounded by a Slavic/Muslim non-Europe, steeped in barbarism and ignorance.
Thirdly, the book explodes the idea of philosophers as autonomous, stable, coherent beings who thought X about A and Y about B. What emerged in my research was how truly wild, bizarre, and contradictory the attitudes towards Islam were in each thinker I studied. Often there was no strict sense of chronological development in what a particular thinker thought about Islam from the beginning of his life to the end of it; rather a bewildering flurry of positive and negative remarks interrupted and competed against one another. That a thinker such as Herder could call Arabs a savage people one year, and then praise the sublimity of their poetic thought the very next, made me realize that I had to refashion my entire concept of what an author is. How else to make any sense of such inconsistencies?
A close-up
The aspect of my research which took me most by surprise happened half-way through my writing of the book. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for all his stunning complexity, notoriously dismissed non-Europe as a place where History never happened. In the case of Islam, Hegel insists that it has “forever vanished from the stage of History.” Hegel is seen by many as the Eurocentric thinker par excellence.
Researching Hegel, I was surprised to come across a number of curious facts, the least important being that one of the first things Hegel ever wrote (at 18) was a high school graduation speech on education in Ottoman Turkey. More significantly, in the newspaper Hegel edited in Bamberg for over a year when he was 35 (theBamberger Zeitung), a large number of articles concerned developments in the Ottoman Empire. In some of the issues, events in Turkey took up over half of the newspaper.
And a surprising number of the articles were quite pro-Turkish, and went into some detail describing events happening in Istanbul, Wahhabi victories over the Ottomans, etc. Hegel, I estimate, would have had to have read well over eighty articles on Turkey and the Turks during his period as newspaper editor. Islam may well have disappeared from the stage of History, but it didn’t disappear from the pages of the Bamberger Zeitung.
For me, this moment epitomized the hidden Other history of Europe— not the official one which is written down, but the unrecorded presence of foreign ideas, non-European texts, and alien influences which is very hard to track down. An absence or omission means nothing in itself until one learns more about the background against which it is set. The disappearance of Hegel’s Islam from the stage of world history, von dem Boden der Weltgeschichte, the fact that Hegel hardly remarked at all upon the Ottomans, means relatively little until the greater store of knowledge Hegel could have drawn on is brought to mind.
Hegel’s non-philosophical interest in the Ottomans would continue long after he finished his newspaper editorship; as late as 1829, we find Hegel remarking in a letter how, reading a newspaper together with Schelling in a Karlsbad coffeehouse, they learnt of the taking of Adrianople and the end of the Russo-Turkish war. In the very last year of his life (1831), Hegel criticised the English treatment of Irish Catholics with the reproach that “even the Turks have mostly allowed their Christian/Armenian/Jewish subjects the use of their churches.” Hegel’s writings may well have been largely Turk-free, but the spectre of an established, sophisticated and distinctly unbarbaric Muslim culture next door to Europe would forever cause problems for the Christian and European bias of his teleology.
Lastly
The significance of this book lies in three directions. First of all, society’s responses to the foreign are irredeemably multiple, even in the individual. And when I say “multiple” I don’t simply mean in that obvious psychoanalytical, fetishism/phobia way we have two names for Persia/Iran, one connoting mystical poetry, exquisite miniatures, and nice carpets, the other a fanatical dictatorship which has to be destroyed. The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.
Secondly, the fact that the thinkers I deal with in this book were able to read sophisticated accounts both of and by Muslims and still reproduce the clichés of fanatics, terrible Turks, etc. not only reflects upon the compartmentalization human beings are capable of, but also makes us question what it actually means for knowledge of a foreign culture to reside in society.
In our “awareness-raising” epoch, which is trying to reverse negative representations of Islam and Muslims, we assume that simply providing people with correct information about the Muslim world will automatically remove stereotypes. What my research suggests is that this sort of education is simply not enough—it underestimates the psychic need for a notion of fanatical, barbaric Islam, and the need for a consequent “civilized” notion of Europe to persist. Asking people to acknowledge that these barbaric, backward “others” of the West are as civilized and multi-faceted as we are would be like asking them to talk about incest in their family. It would be asking them to embark upon the dissolution of themselves, and of the grand concepts with which they associate themselves.
Finally, last year I wrote a history of Muslim-Christian military alliances in Europe, to try and show the extraordinary extent to which Islam is involved in the history of Europe. In many ways, History of Islam in German Thought also shares the goal: to bring Islam into Europe, to highlight the futility of talking about Europe without ever referring outside it. Herder understood this simple truth over 200 years ago.
----------------------------
Reviewer:
Professor Suzanne Marchand
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
This is the book about German Orientalism I felt I could not and did not want to write, and I am very grateful to Ian Almond for having produced it. In a series of eight chapters, Almond, a professor of English at Georgia State University and author of three other books on related topics, discusses sequentially the place of Islam in the works of leading German philosophers and poets from about 1680 to 1890. Very welcome are Almond’s in-depth treatments of German thinkers – famously excluded from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1) – and his reflections on their sources; he has wisely chosen to focus, too, on the German reception of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, the part of the Orient that was most difficult for all Europeans to romanticize. Almond also reminds his readers frequently of the changing nature of European-Ottoman relationships against which works like Leibniz’s Thoughts on the Unfortunate Retreat from Hungary (1683) were written. All of these things make Almond’s book an important contribution to ongoing debates about the continuing validity of Said’s model, while his deep knowledge of the writings of all of these well-studied figures (Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche) make the book an interesting and profitable read. It is the first step, though not an entirely unproblematic one, toward a new understanding of European-Asian cultural encounters in the era of European, rather than Ottoman or Chinese, empire-building.
Readers who are primarily interested in one or another of these figures can easily turn to the relevant chapter, and find therein a careful and concise discussion of the ways in which Goethe or Marx wrote about the Islamic world. But for the reader more interested in the general topic of Orientalism, certainly most important part of the book is Almond’s brief introduction. Here the author discusses the process by which he abandoned his original plan, provoked by Said’s critique of Europe’s ‘discourse on the Orient’, ‘to write a history of the demonization of Islam in mainstream German thought’ (p. 1; we will leave aside for the moment the question of what ‘mainstream’ might mean here). Almond had to give up the demonization narrative, first of all, in the face of ‘the truly bewildering variety of responses in one thinker to the faith and cultures of Islam, responses which were so zigzagging and contradictory in nature that I was forced to rethink not merely the book, but my entire concept of what an ‘author’ is’ (p. 1). Secondly, his original vision was complicated by the realization that the ‘big thinkers’ drew upon works by historians and philologists some of whom, rather than devoting themselves to defaming the Muslim world, ‘dedicated their energies to correcting European images of the Turk with volume after volume of translated Turkish writings’ (p. 2). Sometimes the philosophers took this Islamophilic scholarship into account; more often, as the author admits at the book’s close, they ‘tried hard not to think about Muslims at all’ (p. 166). Almond concludes that we can no longer claim, as did Said, that ‘“What Orientalists … made available, the literary crowd exploited”’ (p. 84). Rather, we have here to do with the development of compartmentalized subjectivities (to which I will return below) and what he calls ‘a filtered Orient’ (p. 3), a series of images produced as the German elite ‘sifted through a variety of Orientalia, taking the nuggets they needed but either overlooking or consciously rejecting anything which conflicted with their requirements’ (p. 3).
I like very much the idea of a ‘filtered Orient,’ a conception that takes into account German thinkers’ openness to non-European cultures, as well as their continuing and undigested prejudices, and their willful disregard of evidence, and thus makes it possible to escape the Saidian notion that before the 1970s, no one was able to think outside his or her continental box. As critiques of the Saidian paradigm now make it virtually impossible to uphold, this may well be the best over-arching concept now available for understanding the great variety of European engagements with the cultures, histories and languages of the vast region to Europe’s East. But we need to figure out how, for Almond, this filtering process works, and what it is that is actually being filtered. A clue here comes only in the final pages, where Almond says that his book has tried ‘to provide an idea of how a history of German thought might look to a Muslim observer – more specifically, to an observer who was only interested in how their [sic] own culture and faith influenced, featured in and interacted with the German philosophical tradition’ (pp. 165–6). This imaginary observer, moreover, is clearly presumed to be one who believes, as does Almond, that his Ottoman Empire is ‘every bit as complex and tolerant’ and we might add, industrialized and democratic, as the Europe of his day. And Almond seems to want to find this relativistic treatment of the Islamic world in sympathetic judgments of that world as a whole. The upshot of these assumptions is that negative statements –including comments about Ottoman ‘decadence’, ‘backwardness’, or ‘barbarism’ – even when they are addressed only to parts of the Islamic world, are treated as effects of the filtering devices, as mere prejudice. But what if we note that European philosophers regularly made critical indictments of the ‘backwardness’, ‘decadence’, or ‘barbarism’ of some aspects of their own or neighboring states? (Has anyone read recently what Marx said about the Czar, or Schopenhauer about the Catholic Church, or Max Nordau about Ibsen’s plays?) Then we could conclude that some, at least, thought some parts of the European world ‘every bit as degenerate and bigoted’ as the Ottoman Empire – or simply that intellectuals tend to be critical of the cultural worlds around them. What, moreover, if we acknowledge that some of their ‘prejudices’ about the Ottoman world might have some basis in reality?
This would be a tricky, and possibly politically uncomfortable (if not ‘incorrect’) thing to do; one could juxtapose, for example, 19th-century Istanbul and Naples, or Cairo and Marseilles, and produce a picture of equivalent Ottoman and European modernities. Certainly, one doesn’t want to overstate European toleration, or even generalize about it as a whole; Czar Nicholas I was more despotic than his contemporary Sultans, Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I, and even English liberals often held racist views about Jews, Africans, and Irish Catholics. Indeed, rather ironically, actual Turkish visitors to Europe were by no means insensible to the forms of ‘backwardness’, ‘decadence’, or ‘barbarity’ abroad in the Muslim world (though they would have identified different sources or causes of these things). Many of them – like Enver Pasha, or Osman Hamdi Bey, for example – were themselves extremely critical of Islam, and of modern Turkish culture, and eager to learn how to modernize their military, medical and cultural institutions by modeling them on European equivalents. But Almond has not studied these visitors, and it seems as if he would rather not mention that in the Ottoman lands, there were also periodic stabbings in the seraglio, sultans with multiple wives, massacres of Christians, financial chaos; nor does it seem that he really takes on board the fact that much of the Orientalist literature did have unpleasant things to say about Islam and the Ottomans, not all of them accurate or consistent with one another! One wishes Almond had introduced into his book a little of the real-world perspective available in Paula Fichtner’s study of early modern Austrian Orientalism, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850.(2) Taking such a perspective would make it possible to identify critical comments as more or less well-informed generalizations or critiques, rather than as pure prejudice, or as deviations from a supposedly consistently Islamophilic Orientalist literature. We might even find that critiques of the Ottoman world have their roots in Ottoman subjects’ own complaints, a finding that would, again, help us escape the Saidian house of mirrors.
Almond’s ‘imaginary Muslim observer’ model, then, ends up favoring those who tended to give Islam and/or the Ottomans a positive spin, and Europe a negative one. I found, accordingly, the chapters on Marx, Herder, Nietzsche, and to some extent, Leibniz most rich and interesting, as Almond, cutting across the Saidian grain, shows how willing these writers were to praise Arab poetry or Muslim manliness (though in some parts, or compartments, of their works, all of these figures also drew on negative stereotypes, as did Herder, for example, in his theological works, and Marx in rendering ‘the Turk’ a stumbling block to progress (p. 142)). Less satisfying are Almond’s chapters on Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe and Hegel, in part because for most of these figures, there are very few direct statements to analyze, and the author must push his texts very hard to get them to say anything at all relevant. Sometimes, as in his treatment of Kant’s ‘fear of Islam,’ one feels the claims are much overblown; I suspect that Kant treats Islam cursorily not because he is trying to contain his anxieties, but because he is much less anxious about Muslim Schwärmerei than about Christian fanaticism. In fact, it is hard to see how Kant, or Hegel, can fight free of their filters, or escape being blamed for the constraints and conventions of the genres in which they wrote. Almond criticizes Kant for attempting to contain and dismiss Islam when he treats Muhammed dispassionately (p. 50), and though Hegel ‘spares no criticism’ in describing the Crusaders’ murders of the inhabitants of Constantinople and Jerusalem, his critique is said to be ‘primarily metaphysical, not humanitarian’ (p. 119). Perhaps so; but after all, this is Hegel we’re dealing with, and, as Marx showed, a metaphysical critique can be deployed for practical purposes with relative ease. Though Almond is more sensitive than his predecessors in his appreciation of the ways in which the same author, writing in a different genre or for a different audience, might portray ‘the Turk’ differently, we still need to refine the idea of ‘a filtered Orient’ so that we don’t simply criticize authors for not saying what we think they should have said, in the way that we today might say it.
One of the nice things about Almond’s book is that he does, in the space of a very concise book, sketch the historical contexts in which his writers worked; but this historian, at least, wishes he had really taken changes in of ideas over time, and across the many different genres in which these authors wrote, more seriously. Almond recognizes, for example, why Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel developed more powerful prejudices against Islam after the Napoleonic wars; in the first instance, the Greek Wars of Independence and the Restoration convinced the poet that the Ottoman Turks were reactionary suppressors of what he believed to be modern, secular quests for freedom. In the case of Schlegel, as Almond nicely puts it, after his conversion and his political shift to the right, he discovered that his ‘substantial knowledge of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic’ had become excess baggage – and he had to jettison it, or at least the pieces of it that he had used to criticize European culture (p. 106). But rather than embracing the notion that individuals’ worldviews might really change over time, or that there might be some consistency in liking Arabic (secular) poetry and disapproving of the Sultanate’s religious policies, Almond favors the view that these figures ‘ultimately’ held contradictory ideas, in which negative conceptions consistently got the upper hand (cf. p. 2, p. 86, p. 102). In fact, rather than seeing the increasing number of contradictory statements in the 19th century as a function of the accelerating pace of changes in the Ottoman Empire (or as a function of the massively increased accessibility of news, images, and scholarly publications in Europe), Almond sees an increasing tendency on the part of European writers to ‘compartmentalize problematic and narrative-upsetting information.’ This leads him to posit ‘a correlation between the Romantik cultivation of a multi-chambered self … and the ability to construct an imaginary Europe of tolerance and sophistication, abiding in blissful denial of an Ottoman world on its borders every bit as complex and tolerant as its European neighbours’ (pp. 164–5). It is possible that this was happening: but it is also possible that the object (‘the’ Islamic world) under scrutiny was contradictory in nature. Once again, the context matters, and it would have been nice to have more of it.
There is one more area that Almond might have profitably explored, and that is the ‘Germanness’ (or perhaps, non-Germanness) of the figures he treats. His subjects all wrote primarily in German, and are perhaps the major thinkers of the era 1680–1890 – though a case could be made for the inclusion of others, such as Lessing, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Schleiermacher; personally, I would have liked to have deeper treatment of some of those who were both orientalists and cultural figures of note, like J. D. Michaelis, Friedrich Rückert, Julius Wellhausen, and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, referred to in the index simply as ‘von Hammer.’ Perhaps exploring what it is that these ‘Germans’ did and did not share might have also helped Almond understand the filtering process, and to explain why it was that in the end, the tradition didn’t have very much to say about Islam, or said contradictory things about it. It would also have been helpful to have some sense of what religious and historical subjects did figure large in the works of these thinkers. I think Almond’s conclusion would have been that much Central European ink was spilt in discussing Christianity and Judaism (often the subject of Islam arose in connection with studies of this other, crucially important, ‘Semitic’ people), or about the ancient Greeks. For some, like Herder and Friedrich Schlegel, the ancient Indians were important, at least for a time; for others, the medieval Germans took center stage. In general, German intellectuals thought more about Europeans than non-Europeans, more about Near Eastern than Far Eastern peoples, more about poetry, mythology, theology and philosophy than about science or economics, and more about ancient than modern peoples. Islam was sidelined – or treated chiefly by liberals, Jews, or diplomats – partly because this religion was relatively new and still alive and well, and partly because the Turks were so near, and had so recently conquered bits of Central and Southern Europe. As we perfect our studies of the ‘filtered Orient,’ we will need to add these elements into our understanding of the shape and functioning of the filter.
We have much work to do to tease out what ‘mainstream’, middle-class Germans read and thought about Islam in the modern period, and why they didn’t care more about an Ottoman world that was indeed rich in history, culture and languages, and was, moreover, virtually on their doorsteps. But, thanks to Ian Almond, we now have a concise and interesting account of the diverse directions the leading intellectuals pursued, and inspiration to investigate more fully how and why they did or did not think deeply and seriously about the Islamic world.
Notes
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).Back to (1)
Paula Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (New York, 2008).Back to (1)
[1] Ian Almond is a Professor of World Literature. He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000. He is the author of five books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2010), and over forty articles in a variety of journals including PMLA, Radical Philosophy, ELH and New Literary History. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. His books have been translated into eight languages, including Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Serbo-Croat, Persian and Indonesian. His fifth book, on Nirad C. Chaudhuri, is coming out with Cambridge University Press later this year. WEB SITE
[1] Ian Almond is a Professor of World Literature. He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000. He is the author of five books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2010), and over forty articles in a variety of journals including PMLA, Radical Philosophy, ELH and New Literary History. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. His books have been translated into eight languages, including Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Serbo-Croat, Persian and Indonesian. His fifth book, on Nirad C. Chaudhuri, is coming out with Cambridge University Press later this year. WEB SITE