History of Islam in German Thought

From Leibniz to Nietzsche

Ian Almond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135268886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This concise overview of the perception of Islam in eight of the most important German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows a new and fascinating investigation of how these thinkers, within their own bodies of work, often espoused contradicting ideas about Islam and their nearest Muslim neighbors. Exploring a variety of 'neat compartmentalizations' at work in the representations of Islam, as well as distinct vocabularies employed by these key intellectuals (theological, political, philological, poetic), Ian Almond parses these vocabularies to examine the importance of Islam in the very history of German thought. Almond further demonstrates the ways in which German philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx repeatedly ignored information about the Muslim world that did not harmonize with the particular landscapes they were trying to paint – a fact which in turn makes us reflect on what it means when a society possesses 'knowledge' of a foreign culture.

1 Leibniz, Historicism and the Plague of Islam

Provided that something of importance is achieved, I am indifferent to whether it is done in Germany or France, for I seek the good of mankind. I am neither a phil-Hellene nor a philo-Roman but a phil-anthropos.

—letter to des Billettes, October 21, 1697¹

It is difficult to make the world believe that black is white, that in order to affirm public peace one has to take up arms which destroy it, and that for the good of Christianity one has to break all the sacred bonds of Christianity, even up to attacking a catholic monarch while he is on the point of delivering Europe from the plague of Mohammedanism [la peste de mahometisme].

—from “Reflexions sur la guerre” (1687—own trans.)²

In the history of Western responses to Islam, what is fascinating about Leibniz is that he exemplifies a certain ideological overlap, a peculiar transition period between a theological repudiation of Islam (Muslims as enemies of Christ) and an early Enlightenment rejection of the Mohammedan (Muslims as enemies of reason and civilization). Sometimes Leibniz’s Mohammedan is the Erbfeind or hereditary enemy/eternal foe, sometimes he is elevated to the status of mere barbarian, whilst on rare occasions he is even grudgingly acknowledged to be the possessor of a natural (though still errant) theology. This oscillation between these three responses to Islam constitutes a second, more limited point of continuity with Luther: that is to say, his schizophrenia. Although Leibniz’s responses to the Muslim take a different direction from that of Luther’s—a movement from theology to politics, from the chapel to the court, from Christendom to a place called ‘Europa’—Islam creates the same problems of coherence for Leibniz as it did for Luther. This similarity is one of structure, not of content. Luther’s schizophrenic attitude to Islam stemmed from a problematic indebtedness to the Turk as a divine sign of chastisement and correction. Leibniz’s multiple approaches to Islam, however, do not spring from the awkward implications of an apocalyptic/esoteric eschatology, but rather from a much more basic inability to reconcile the three separate (albeit porous) identities his work presents us with: Leibniz the political thinker, Leibniz the Christian apologist and Leibniz the early Enlightenment seeker of origins.³ The rest of this chapter will try to show how the agreements, tensions and conflicts between these three identities are reflected in (at times, even initiated by) Leibniz’s various remarks on Islam and Islamic cultures.

Certainly, there is a standard essay on Leibniz and Islam that one could write; it would involve a Saidesque compendium of the thinker’s largely negative references to the faith and its followers, his dismissal of Turks as undeveloped, cruel and backward, his constant emphasis on Christian unity in the face of the Ottoman threat; in such an essay, the author of Consilium Aegyptiacum (the Egyptian Plan) would be foregrounded as an early, classical model for the modern intellectual of Empire. Leibniz’s prescriptions for Louis XIV, his attempt to persuade the monarch that an attack on Egypt would be “to the profit of Christendom” (pro profectu religionis Christianae⁴), appear almost to have been written with Gramsci and Said’s analysis of the intellectual’s complicity with imperialistic hegemony in mind. Even by the early nineties, when both the Ottoman threat and Leibniz’s own passion for an invasion of Egypt had faded, we can find enough remarks on infidels, “Mohammedan” fatalism and perverted fakirs to indicate at the very best a dismissive indifference, at the worst an abiding contempt on Leibniz’s part towards the Muslim Orient. The ultimate point of such an approach, predictably enough, would be to underline precisely how Christian the limits of Leibniz’s Christian humanism actually were— how Leibniz’s allegedly universal concern for “the welfare of mankind”⁵, with regards to Islam at least, never really moved beyond Belgrade and Gibraltar.

Paradoxically, such an essay would be both necessary and superfluous. ‘Superfluous’ because, as Joseph McCarney has already pointed out in another, quite different context, the collective damning of figures such as Leibniz or Kant for their Islamophobia and race bias becomes quite meaningless in judging a vocabulary where terms such as ‘Islamophobia’ simply did not take place.⁶ At the same time, the association of Leibniz, and in particular Leibniz’s impassioned Sinophilia, with words such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’—he has been called a propagator of “disinterested, objective and unselfish love” (Heer), the promoter of “an ethics of harmony” (Perkins), the father of “an ecumenical accord of truly global dimensions” (Clarke) and a man who “clearly did not harbour thoughts of political conquest or religious conversion” (Umberto Eco)⁷—does have to be modified in the light of Leibniz’s Islam. However remarkable Leibniz’s prescient interest in China may have been, the barbarous Mohammedans, lazy Turks and lascivious Egyptians we find in his Opera omnia do offer a sobering corrective to the more ambitious claims made for his inter-culturalism—reminding us of the significance, more than anything else, of exactly when and how Europeans chose to praise the Orient, and which portions of that Orient were elevated above the others when they did so.

Nevertheless, any such attempt to argue for an unambiguously negative representation of Islam in Leibniz’s work finds itself complicated by three problematic counterpoints. The first of these is Leibniz’s epistemological subtlety—a sophisticated awareness of the extent to which human beings will modify information to suit their own political/doctrinal intentions. A single example will suffice: in 1697 the Englishman Thomas Burnet recommends to Leibniz one of the most notorious anti-Islamic tracts of the eighteenth century, Prideaux’s defamatory biography of Mohammed, The True Nature of Imposture. He recommends it to Leibniz as being “very well-written” and “highly praised”.⁸ Leibniz’s reply, far from expressing any satisfaction that such a book has been written, is cold and discouraging: “In order to write a proper biography of Mahomet, author of the religion of the Saracens, it would be necessary to consult the Arabic manuscripts, otherwise one runs the risk of getting things wrong [on court risque de se tromper]”.⁹ There is a critical will to truth here, one which is reflected in Leibniz’s own frustrated search for a reliable translation of the Koran. Of course, this declared desire for objectivity should not be exaggerated—Luther too, we should remember, genuinely felt he was able to discern between the untruths which had been told about the Turk and his own ‘real’ facts. One of the arguments in this chapter, however, will be that a certain hunger for origins in Leibniz—whether it is for factual documents, racial Ursprungen or sound etymologies—will inadvertently undermine some of the religious/political hierarchies Leibniz makes use of elsewhere.

A second, related complication leads on from this: a certain polyphony in Leibniz, the range of voices, of linguistic registers that we find—the slightly pompous political commentator, the polite, deferring subject to his queen, the impassioned advocate, the informal scholar to his fellow academician, the effusive patriot and lover of the German language one minute, the sectarian-hating universalist and lover of mankind the next . . . this plethora of different voices makes it harder to gauge the weight and tone of Leibniz’s remarks. At the very least, the discrepancy between the urge to holy war in the Egyptian Plan and the quieter, more respectful tone adopted towards Islam in the later correspondence does suggest a distinction between a Wartime Leibniz and a Peacetime Leibniz, between a public voice and a private one. Our attempt to understand Leibniz as three, interrelated identities instead of one will only partially address this deeper problem of how to examine an aggregate of philosophical texts as a meaningful whole.

The third complication involved in any straightforward expose of Leibniz as a conservative, Eurocentric, hegemonic, Islamfeindlich thinker does not involve Leibniz so much as the multiplicity of optics through which his approach to Islam can be evaluated. There are at least four different frames of reference within which Leibniz’s rapprochement to—or perhaps reification of—Islam can be assessed. Four historical contexts which, intellectually, colour and calibrate our own understanding of Leibniz’s response to “Turcis et Tartaris”. As these four alternative frameworks suggest different evaluations of Leibniz’s own thoughts on Islam, it might be worthwhile to spend a moment briefly considering each one in turn.

The first context would be that of Leibniz’s more illustrious contemporaries. Franklin Perkins, in his excellent Leibniz and China, sees Leibniz as “the only prominent modern philosopher to take a serious interest in Europe’s contact with other cultures”.¹⁰ Read against the background of Spinoza, Locke, Descartes and Hobbes, whose references to non-European cultures invariably took the form of anecdotal ammunition to support their own views, Leibniz emerges as the only significant philosopher of his period (with the possible exception of Montaigne) to actively research the languages, religious texts and ethnographies of other cultures. In this narrow sense at least, the attention Leibniz gives to Islam—his desire for a translation of the Koran using Muslim commentaries, his inquiries into the genealogy of Mohammed¹¹, his token attempts to understand the grammar and vocabulary of Persian, Arabic and Uzbek¹²—distinguishes him from his more inward-looking contemporaries, for whom the non-European was never really more than a source of useful marginalia.

Another possible context for evaluating Leibniz’s response to Islam— and in particular, his depiction of the Turk—would be the variety of French travel accounts available in the time leading up to his arrival in Paris (1672). The reports of travellers such as Nicolas de Nicolay, Thevet, Busbecq, Belon and Postel had already established a mini-tradition of French writing about the Orient, a pool of texts Leibniz clearly made use of. In the Justa Dissertatio, for instance, we find references to travellers such as Bartholomew Georgiewitz, the Hungarian pilgrim who spent thirteen years as a slave in Turkey, and achieved considerable fame with the publication of his experiences.¹³ Leibniz’s conviction that the Turk obtained his bellicose ferocity through consuming an opiate herb called “Maslach”, for example, probably came from Georgiewitz’s account of this in his La Maniere et ceremonies des Turcs.¹⁴ Read against this background, what emerges most strikingly is how Leibniz’s representation of the Turks as slovenly, inefficient and bestial goes against a general seventeenth-century admiration of Ottoman order, sobriety and military self-discipline. When one considers Postel’s praise of the integrity and efficiency of Turkish officials, Gassot’s description of the absence of pillaging in the Sultan’s campaigns, and the general way in which Turkish sobriety and moderation was used by writers such as Busbecq to attack Western excesses,¹⁵ the sheer paucity of Leibniz’s positive comments becomes more noticeable.

The expansion of Arab studies in Europe in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century, particularly in England and the Netherlands (Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden) also provides another frame of reference for understanding Leibniz’s own investigations into Islam. Although the Palatine library at Heidelberg had been a large source of Arabic manuscripts for Europe (and had produced one of Oxford’s most prominent Arabists, Matthias Pasor), its ransacking during the Thirty Years’ War only served to emphasize the German “dearth of texts and teachers of Arabic” up to 1650 (Toomer).¹⁶ Amongst the Oxford/Cambridge renaissance of Arabic studies in the seventeenth century, the figure of Edward Pococke (1604–1691) emerges as an interesting precursor to Leibniz’s own historicism. Not simply because Pococke, like Leibniz, had cultivated what was a fairly common evangelical interest in Arabic as a means of converting Muslims—in 1660, Pococke had translated Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae into Arabic, and by 1674 had also provided translations of the Anglican catechism and liturgy.¹⁷ Pococke, like Leibniz, was particularly interested in Islamic history, in figures such as Ibn Khallikan (whose oeuvre Leibniz himself would seek out) and Ibn Tufayl. It is this respect for historical accuracy which led Pococke to correct the common misconceptions of Islam—the belief that Muhajirun is derived from the name of Hagar, for example, or the well-circulated Christian fiction of Mohammed’s iron coffin, suspended magically above the ground (a fable which Leibniz uncritically reiterates in the New Essays). The priest Ludovico Maracci, whose translation/refutation of the Koran Leibniz received in 1697, had quoted a large number of Arab authors second-hand from Pococke’s work.¹⁸ The philological fervour which Pococke showed in tracking down false etymologies and anecdotes of both Arab and non-Arab origin offers an interesting comment on Leibniz’s own excursion into the Orient.

A fourth and final context which offers a significant contrast to Leibniz’s own thoughts on Islam and the Turk is the seventeenth-century tradition of Protestant spirituality and millenarianism, one which gave a supernatural status to the Turk as a future ally of the true faith in the struggle against a Roman Antichrist. Böhme, Kuhlmann and Comenius were all key figures in this tradition, the latter two being near contemporaries of Leibniz and writers with whom Leibniz was definitely familiar.¹⁹ Comenius’s Lux in tenebris (1657) had prophetically envisaged the Turks (alongside the Swedes) as fundamental in bringing down the House of Habsburg—for which the Muslims would be rewarded with “the light of the Gospel” (mercedisque loco reportaturos Evangelii lucem).²⁰ In 1675, Kuhlmann even took a copy of Comenius’s tract to Istanbul to try and persuade Mehmet IV in person of the validity of his vision²¹—a visit Leibniz remained unimpressed with (in the Nouveux Essais, he dismisses Kuhlmann’s trip “all the way to Constantinople” as the product of a “dangerous fantasy”²²). This is no place to inquire into how close Leibniz’s contact with such spiritualistic/Kabbalistic/Rosicrucian traditions was²³—on the surface, at least, it would...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: LEIBNIZ, HISTORICISM AND THE PLAGUE OF ISLAM
• 2: KANT, ISLAM AND THE PRESERVATION OF BOUNDARIES
• 3: Herder’s Arab Fantasies
• 4: KEEPING THE TURKS OUT OF ISLAM GOETHE’S OTTOMAN PLAN
• 5: FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL AND THE EMPTYING OF ISLAM
• 6: HEGEL AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ISLAM
• 7: MARX THE MOOR
• 8: NIETZSCHE’S PEACE WITH ISLAM
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR