In 1698, the noted Arabic scholar and Catholic evangelical crusader, Ludovico Marracci published the first historically-accurate Latin translation of the Qur’an, as well as a refutation of the Muslim holy book—both of which he hoped could be used to help “fight Islam.” Since the Reformations of the sixteenth century, religious conflicts had been settled not only by the sword, but with the potent weapon of philology, the linguistic science that produced accurate versions and translations of holy and ancient texts. Philology had such force that new translations and interpretations of the Bible had helped split the Church. Marracci hoped that his accurate work would have the same effect in training crusading priests to dispute the word of Muhammad.



THE REPUBLIC OF ARABIC LETTERS: ISLAM AND THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT by Alexander Bevilacqua Harvard University Press, 345 pp., $35.00

As it happened, Marracci’s translation did not have the effect he intended, as Alexander Bevilacqua shows in his tour-de-force study of the origins of modern Islamic scholarship in the West and its central role in the Enlightenment, The Republic of Arabic Letters Islam and the European Enlightenment. Bible critics and burgeoning Islamic scholars from Paris and Leiden to Oxford used his accurate translation of the Qur’an not to fight Islam, but to study and appreciate it. His work became the basis of even more translations and historical works, ultimately leading to the founding of great schools and centers of Islamic languages and culture in Europe the eighteenth century.

Bevilacqua’s extraordinary book provides the first true glimpse into this story. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon studied and critiqued Islam along with Christianity, giving the study of Islam a new importance in Europe. The idea that one could equally compare religions was the beginning of a movement of religious tolerance that began with seventeenth-century religious scholars and made its way to the thinking of Voltaire, William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, who believed that Muslim theologians should have the freedom to preach their religion to the citizens of Philadelphia.

What this book shows is that the great philosophes may have been innovative thinkers, and they took Islam seriously as a religion, but they ultimately lacked the scholarly skill to excavate Islam in Europe. It was, instead, done by an often motley group of scholars who fought against remarkable odds to establish the field of Islamic studies. As we know today, this did not necessarily lead to a great understanding between religions. The forces of repression were never far from their scholarship and, contrary to Bevilacqua’s claims, the world of learning was not always a rosy affair.



Central to Bevilacqua’s story are two friends who began the feat of explaining Islam to Europe in the seventeenth century: Antoine Galland, the Orientalist scholar, book hunter, archeologist and translator of One Thousand and One Nights, and Barthélemy d’Herbelot, the court scholar. Born in 1646 to a modest background, Galland became fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish and, at the orders of Louis XIV’s minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in the 1670s he was attached to the French embassy in Istanbul with the mission of finding rare Oriental manuscripts to send back to the royal collection. Colbert’s goal was not only to create a prestigious library filled with Oriental works, but also to find ammunition in the French crown’s brutal conflict with Protestants and its constant conflicts with the papacy over taxes and jurisdiction.