Suchergebnisse

I will explore the emergence of Arabic studies in western Europe between the sixteenth-century Reformation and nineteenth-century Imperialism. There is scant research on the history of Arabic studies in early modern Europe aside from Johann Fück' s Arabische Studien (1955), because previous scientific efforts in the field seemed insignificant after the pioneering work of scholars such as Antoine Silvstre de Sacy (1758–1838) and Gustav Flügel (1802–1870). Moreover, research on European Orientalism has focused on the perception of Arabs and Islam within the context of French and British Near East politics, following the lead of Edward Said' s Orientalism (1979). My starting point is the observation that the theoretical discourse of Arabic studies still appears to be largely independent of that in French, English, or Germanic studies. The continued methodological autonomy seems to reflect that neither sixteenth-century Humanists nor nineteenth-century philologists were interested in the Arabic language. While Anthony Grafton has explored how the Humanist approach to editing developed from the goal to recover the Latin and Greek heritage of antiquity, Bernard Cerquiglini has analyzed how nineteenth-century philology became the scientific methodology for editing the first literary documents written in the European vernaculars. Latin, however, was continually taught, even throughout the Dark Ages. In contrast, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) published the first Arabic grammar (1617), and only in the seventeenth century did European libraries begin to collect systematically Arabic literature. But the marginal position of Arabic within European university curricula is salient. During the Middle Ages Muslims and Christians competed for territory in Spain, southern Italy, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and since the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics had relied on Islam as the prime example for spotting false prophets and Antichrists. I will use the chapter on Islam in the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde by Bernard Picart (1673–1733) to examine the role of Islam in the Enlightenment discourse on idolatry. My analysis will demonstrate that religious intolerance among Christians shaped their perceptions of diverse Muslim societies from the Balkans to the Indian peninsula. I will argue that nineteenth-century Arabic studies remained distant from the modern methodological developments in the field of philology because Europeans did not encounter an Arab nation state with Arabic as its national language. Knowledge of Arabic was relevant for theological research on the Scriptures, but not for the recovery of the literary heritage of the modern national languages.

The literary fame of Abu Nuwäs al-Hasan b. Hani' al-Hakami (died between 813 and 815) is founded on his reputation as poete maudit, whose diwan contains brilliant examples of both the traditional poetic genres and their parodies. The poet was a contemporary - and an alleged boon companion - of Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786-809). Both men became the subject of many legends, and popular stories about them are preserved through the Arabian. These stories, in which the poet appears as an equal of the 'Abbasid caliph, document the social and political importance of poetry in the emerging Arabo-Islamic culture of the 'Abbasid court in Baghdad.

The Egyptian politician Ali Mubarak (1823-1893) included three passages about French history in his "maqama" Alamuddin (1882). From our modern European point of view, the French Revolution is an outstanding event. But in Alamuddin French history is summarized by applying Islamic concepts like "jahiliyya," "sharia," and "fitna". Therefore, the sixteenth century Wars of Religion are regarded as events that are more interesting than the French Revolution.