At the hands of the European Republic of Arabic Letters (ca. 1650â1750),1 the Western perspective on Muhammad underwent a profound transformation.2 The Utrecht professor of Oriental languages Adriaan Reland (1676â1718), who occupied an exalted position in the network of European Arabists around 1700, contributed lastingly to a new and better understanding of the prophet of Islam, to the extent that the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729â1781), writing in 1754, could state that âwe did not possess genuine knowledge ⦠before the works of Reland and Sale, from which we have learned especially that Mahomet was no senseless impostor and that his religion is not merely a poorly woven fabric of inconsistencies and distortionsâ.3
George Sale (1697â1736), the first translator of the QurʾÄn from Arabic to English and author of the influential âPreliminary Discourseâ (1734), is regularly given credit for facilitating a balanced approach to Islam among the educated European public. Reland, by contrast, has flown somewhat under the radar of historians of Islamic scholarship in the West.4 How, then, did Reland contribute to the change in European attitudes toward Islam, and the prophet Muhammad in particular? In order to answer this question, first we survey the major strands of thinking about Muhammad among 17th- and 18th-century Europen intellectuals, as exemplified by Hugo Grotius (1583â1645), Humphrey Prideaux (1648â1724), Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658â1722), and Voltaire (1694â1778). These writers worked in proximity to, but were not themselves members of the Republic of Arabic Letters. However, they deserve our attention because we can legitimately assume that their works reflect broadly shared sentiments in Europe at the time. Moving on, in a second step, from the widely circulating ideas of these public intellectuals, we examine the learned literature on Muhammad produced by the representatives of the fledgling scholarly guild of professional Arabists and Islamicists around 1700. The article âMohammedâ in BartheÌlemy dâHerbelotâs (1625â1695) groundbreaking BibliotheÌque orientale (1697) provides a particularly fertile backdrop against which to evaluate Relandâs assessment of the prophet of Islam. On this basis, we can proceed to ask to what extent Lessingâs judgement is valid, that is, whether Relandâs work represents a truly new and different view of Muhammad in the Western encounter with Islam. Finally, we ask in what ways Relandâs Muhammad survives in the works of some later 18th- and 19th-century authors.
1 Muhammad in 17th- and Early 18th-Century European Thought
For large parts of the 17th century, the Ottomansâ expansion into eastern and southern Europe inspired Christian writers working not just in the southern Catholic but also in the central and northern European lands to formulate vitriolic attacks on Islam and its prophet Muhammad. In his magnum opus, De iure belli ac pacis (The Law of War and Peace), first published in 1625, Hugo Grotius shows himself to be suprisingly uninterested in the Ottoman question, presumably out of an anti-Habsburg sentiment. Grotius even voices a measure of appreciation for the Muslim law of war, urging his Christian audience to follow the example of the Muslims, by rejecting the permissibility of enslaving prisoners of war.5 However, in his Dutch parenetic poem, Bewys van den waren godsdienst (Proof of the True Religion), published in 1622, Grotius is thoroughly critical of Muhammad, and of Islam. Islam, according to Grotius, is a religion âfounded on violenceâ.6 While even the QurʾÄn, as Grotius notes with a degree of satisfaction, speaks of Jesus as the âspiritâ and the âwordâ of God, there can be no doubt that Muhammad was begotten naturally, the son of human parents.7 Not only that: he was a ârobber and an adultererâ.8 Likewise, those who followed him were âpeople used to making a living off robberyâ.9 In sum, Christianity is moderate, Islam extreme: it is grossly licentious in certain ways (Grotius points to the Prophetâs polygamy) and senselessly ascetic in other respects (Grotius refers to Islamâs prohibition of wine and pork).10
As if to cap his roundabout condemnation of Islam as being contrary to reason and to human nature, and to demonstrate the gullibility of its adherents, Grotius makes reference to several alleged miracles of Muhammad. Jesus, he reminds his audience, performed true miracles: he cured the sick and revived the dead. Muhammad, however, did not produce miracles; he only brought the sword. Grotius continues:
The âdove flying to a manâs earâ alludes to the legend, already told in the 13th-century Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine (1228â1298) and repeated by Boccaccio in the 14th century, William Shakespeare in the 16th century and Walter Raleigh in the early 17th century, of Muhammad tricking the Meccans into following him by means of a trained dove. According to this story, Muhammad put seeds in his ear and let a dove pick at them while preaching to the Meccans, so that they would believe that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost.12 Three of the alleged âsinsâ that were stereotypically foregrounded in medieval European representations of Muhammad13âhis imposture, sensualism and violenceâthus survive intact in the thought of Grotius.
The Ottoman threat to Europe waned after the Ottomansâ failure to capture Vienna in 1683. In the ensuing âperiod of relative calmâ, as Ahmad Gunny has observed, there came about âthe right atmosphere for a balanced reevaluation of the Prophet by the Westâ.14 However, not everybody rose above politics. Following Grotius, many, in fact, preferred to continue in the old polemical vein. One of the most elaborate denunciations of Muhammad, written around the turn of the century, is The True Nature of Imposture (1697), by Humphrey Prideaux, Dean of Norwich. In this work, Prideaux casts aside the old fables, such as the story of the dove, claiming to offer an objective account of Muhammad.15 Yet in the conclusion to his biographical sketch of Muhammad, Prideaux is relentlessly hostile. He castigates Muhammadâs âambitionâ and âlustâ, his greed for power and for women, which, as Prideaux maintains, Muhammad sought to satisfy by âinventingâ Islam and imposing it on his âdeludedâ followers.16 Prideaux writes as an orthodox Anglican keen to defend traditional belief against the Christian Deists, who rejected organized religion and were quick to criticize traditional Christianity as an imposture, instead promoting the rational observation of nature as the only valid way to God.17 The âtrueâ impostor, Prideaux aims to show, is Muhammad, not the Church.
Writing on the other side of the English Channel, a defense of the Church, whether Anglican or Catholic, was not at all in the interest of Voltaire, who was, after all, a famous Deist. However, as for Muhammadâs imposture and lustfulness, he agreed with Prideaux. Voltaire, who had read Prideauxâs work during his exile in England,18 popularized the notion of Muhammad as a power-hungry, cynical and hypersensual vilain in his anti-religious tragedy, the theatrical blockbuster Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le propheÌte (Amsterdam, 1736). Even if in later works, Voltaire showed himself to be more judicious in his assessment of Muhammad and of Islam (he was full of praise for Saleâs QurʾÄn translation and âPreliminary discourseâ, which he read shortly after writing his tragedy), Le fanatisme thrived on, and entrenched, the virulently anti-religious rhetoric of the radical French enlightenment. Already a generation earlier, the French-reading atheist public had been fed stories of Muhammadâs unscrupulous character in the shape of the notorious atheist manifesto, the TraiteÌ des trois imposteurs (compiled, in its French form, during the last quarter of the 17th century).19 For example, the TraiteÌ tells the tale of an accomplice of Muhammad, who speaks to the credulous Meccans from a pit, pretending to be the voice of God supporting Muhammadâs claim to prophecy.20
Against the likes of Grotius, Prideaux and the Voltaire of Le fanatisme, there were also authors of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Thomas Erpenius (1584â1624), professor of Oriental languages at Leiden, who were less biased. Erpeniusâ cautious openness toward Islam may have been motivated, among other things, by his acquaintance with the Morisco Aḥmad b. QÄsim al-ḤajarÄ«, a Moroccan emissary to France and the Netherlands (1611â13), by whom he was favourably impressed. Al-ḤajarÄ« visited Erpenius in Leiden in 1613 and discussed the promised âparaclete of the gospelâ with him (see John 14:16: âAnd I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate [Gr. paraÌklÄtos]â), which he told him was a reference to the coming of the prophet Muhammad. As al-ḤajarÄ« claimed, Erpenius âfelt attracted to our religionâ.21 âWe have frequent discussions about religionâ, Erpenius wrote in a letter, âbut believe me their discussions are not so easy to refute as many people imagine. They abhor especially the godhead of Christ [and] about many other things they do not think as stupidly as some of us try to prove by means of the Qurʾanâ.22
Protestant intellectuals were appreciative of Islamâs iconoclasm, not least because of the deep grudge they held against Catholicism and all forms of âpoperyâ. As al-ḤajarÄ« put it, the Protestants, led on by Luther and Calvin, rejected the Pope and the idol-worship of the Catholics, believed in the falsification (taḥrÄ«f), by later generations, of the original gospel taught by Jesus, and appreciated the Muslimsâ role in history as âthe sword of God in the world against the idol-worshippersâ.23
The 1657 Dutch QurʾÄn translation of Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker (ca. 1620â1682), which was based on the 1647 French translation of André Du Ryer, (ca. 1580â1660 or 1672), also foreshadows Relandâs later agenda to listen attentively to Muslim authors and provide an impartial account of Muhammad. Glazemaker appended two different versions of Muhammadâs lifestory to his translation, one based on an eastern source,24 another on various hostile biographies written by European authors, âso that the attentive reader will himself notice the differences and contradictions, and judge them, if he wills, as he sees fitâ.25 In the second half of the 17th century, there are even examples of Protestant authors lionizing Muhammad. The English Unitarianist Henry Stubbe (1632â1676), in his Originall & Progress of Mahometanism (ca. 1671), is full of praise for Muhammad, calling him an âextraordinary personâ with âready witâ, âpenetrating judgementâ and âundaunted courageâ, âa person cut out for great achievements and equally qualified for actions of war, or the arts of peace and civil governmentâ.26 As Matthew Dimmock has remarked, Stubbeâs concern was to portray Muhammad âas the true inheritor of an original Christianity, unpolluted by priestcraft or poperyâ.27 âSympathetic identification with Islamâ allowed English radical Protestantism to achieve âhistorical, philosophical, and ideological coherenceâ.28 Also Henri de Boulainvilliers, in his much-read Vie de Mahomed (1730), used Muhammad towards anti-clerical ends, declaring him to be a wise lawgiver and a true prophet, sent to wash out the moribund decadence of late-antique Oriental Christianity.29 Not unlike Voltaireâs Le fanatisme, but based on a diametrically opposed view of Muhammad, de Boulainvilliersâ book is a covert attack on the Church.
Voltaire and de Boulainvilliers are late representatives of two dominant trends in the early modern European view of Islam and its prophet. Voltaire sketched a carricature of Muhammad as the embodiment of the moral corruption and cynical authoritarianism of religious leadership in general. De Boulainvilliers, who did not exactly write in an even-handed manner either, pitched Muhammad as a just ruler and wise lawgiver, a great leader who became the postmortem victim of an intrigant clergy assuming the reins of power after his death. In sum, both Voltaire and de Boulainvilliers unmistakably used Muhammad towards their own ulterior ends.
2 Muhammad in dâHerbelotâs BibliotheÌque orientale (1697)
None of the authors discussed so far, to the exception of Erpenius, were scholars trained in the languages or the history of the Islamic world. As we would say today, they wrote from the perspective of âworld historyâ, and always with the history and current situation of Europe as their main concern. What, then, of the intervention of specialised scholars of Arabic and Islamic history in the early modern debate about Muhammad? Were these scholars able to transcend the Eurocentric perspective of their more famous contemporaries among the philosophers and Christian theologians, and provide an account of Muhammad that was more historically accurate and true to the Islamic tradition?
In the second half of the 17th century, a generation after Erpenius, the Italian Ludovico Maracci (1612â1700), the Englishman Edward Pococke (1604â1691) and the Frenchman BartheÌlemy dâHerbelot (1625â1695) form a stellar triad among the scholars of the Republic of Arabic Letters. Of these three men, dâHerbelot was the most closely connected to Reland: Antoine Galland (1646â1715), the French Orientalist who brought dâHerbelotâs stupendous BibliotheÌque orientale to publication two years after the latterâs death, counted among Relandâs acquaintances. The fascinating gestation of dâHerbelotâs BiblotheÌque has recently been studied, with admirable perspicacity, by Alexander Bevilacqua.30 Here, we limit ourselves to taking a closer look at the BibliotheÌqueâs entry on Muhammad.31
This entry counts ten columnsâa fairly lengthy treatment, but still noticeably shorter than, for example, the articles dâHerbelot dedicates to Genghis Khan and Timur. DâHerbelot invokes an impressive range of Arabic and Persian sources. It is striking that all works of history on which dâHerbelot relies to tell Muhammadâs biography are the works of Christian authors: the Naáºm al-jawhar (The String of Jewels) of Eutychius Ibn Baá¹rÄ«k of Alexandria (d. 940), known in the West under the title Eutychii annales, in the partial edition and translation of Edward Pococke (1658â59); the world chronicle of AbÅ« al-Faraj (âAboulfarageâ) Gregorius Bar Hebraeus from Antioch (d. 685/1286), edited by Pococke under the title Specimen Historiae Arabae (1650 [1663]); and the world chronicle of Georgius al-MakÄ«n (âElmacinusâ) Ibn al-Ê¿AmÄ«d from Cairo (d. 1273), partially edited by Erpenius and published by his student Jacobus Golius (1596â1667) under the title Historia saracenica (1625). DâHerbelotâs reliance on Christian historians is not happenstance: he knew the works of Muslim historians, butâassuming he had access to themâchose not to use them. The most elaborate biographies of Muhammad, he notes toward the end of the entry, were written by âNouairi in the fourth part of his history written in Arabic and by Mirkhond in his Persian historyâ. These works are the fifth chapter, dealing with the biography of Muhammad and the early caliphs, of the fourth book, on history, of al-NuwayrÄ«âs (d. 733/1333) massive literary anthology, the NihÄyat al-arab (The Ultimate Ambition), and the Rawá¸at al-á¹£afÄʾ (Garden of Purity) of the Persian chronicler MÄ«rkhÄnd (d. 903/1498). DâHerbelot mentions these two works immediately after discussing a number of pious and mystical works about Muhammad. This suggests that he did not think of al-NuwayrÄ« and MÄ«rkhÄnd as trustworthy sources. At least he did not consider them more reliable than Eutychius, Bar Hebraeus and al-MakÄ«n.32
Next to providing the skeleton of biographical events of Muhammadâs life, dâHerbelot draws particular attention to the Muslim mystical literature about Muhammad, as well as to the Muslim belief in Muhammadâs existence as a âluminous substanceâ prior to the creation of the world, a notion that strikes him as an âextravaganceâ.33 For these aspects, dâHerbelot draws from the âBahar alhacaiqâ, that is, the Baḥr al-ḥaqÄʾiq (The Sea of [Mystical] Truths) of Najm al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ« (d. 654/1256), a QurʾÄn commentary in the KubrÄwiyya Sufi tradition; the âMethneuiâ, that is, the MathnavÄ« of RÅ«mÄ« (d. 672/1273); and the âNacdalnossousâ, that is, the Naqd al-nuṣūṣ (Critique of Texts) of JÄmÄ« (d. 898/1492), a commentary on the Naqsh al-fuṣūṣ (Imprint of the Bezels [of Wisdom]) of Ibn al-Ê¿ArabÄ« (d. 638/1240). Later on, he further refers to al-FutuḥÄt al-makkiyya (The Meccan Openings) of Ibn al-Ê¿ArabÄ« and the NafaḥÄt al-uns (Breezes of Intimacy), again of JÄmÄ«, both wellknown works. But this is not all: dâHerbelot also demonstrates familiarity with the famous mysticial poem dedicated to Muhammad, the Qaṣīdat al-burda (Poem of the Mantle) of al-BūṣīrÄ« (d. ca. 695/1295), works of the genre of âThe names of the Prophetâ (asmÄʾ al-nabÄ«), as well as a string of other texts. Whether he actually had read all these works, of course, one may doubt. As others have noted, dâHerbelot relied extensively on the Ottoman polymath KÄtip Ãelebiâs (d. 1068/1657) monumental annotated bibliography, the Kashf al-áºunÅ«n (Unveiling of Thoughts). All in all, however, it cannot be denied that dâHerbelotâs entry on Muhammad is astonishingly learned.
This erudition, however, does not prevent dâHerbelot from indulging in derogatory language and from invecting against several aspects of Muhammadâs life and afterlife, in particular as regards his alleged imposture, his warmongering, and the exaggerated, superstitious devotion of his followers.34 Muhammad, he declares, is âthe famous impostorâ,35 an âignorantâ36 person who âplayed comedy until the end of his lifeâ.37 He also notes that Muhammadâs pagan enemies called him abtar, âsans queueâ, because âhe did not leave any male progeny, despite having 21 wivesâ.38 To respond to this mockery, Muhammad would have declaimed the 108th chapter of the Qurʾan, sÅ«rat al-Kawthar. Whether or not there is a sexual innuendo here on the part of dâHerbelot (the translation of abtar as âsans queueâ was apt to amuse some of his readers), his mentioning of sÅ«rat al-Kawthar again evinces his familiarity with the Arabic sources. The QurʾÄn exegetes did indeed relate that on the death of Muhammadâs infant son, al-QÄsim, some of Muhammadâs contemporaries observed that he had become curtailed (abtar) of his son. In response, to make up for the loss suffered by Muhammad, God revealed âWe have given you abundance, so pray unto your Lord and sacrifice, for those who hate you, they are the ones cut off (abtar)â (QurʾÄn 108:1â3).39
As for Muhammadâs warfare, dâHerbelot maintains that Muhammad was hellbound on bloodshed. Having fled to Medina, Muhammad would have insisted, against his followersâ unanimous advice, that a Meccan caravan be attacked, an event that sparked the first battle, at Badr, in the war against pagan Mecca.40 Finally, in several places of his entry, dâHerbelot draws attention to the âoutreÌâ superstitious beliefs of Muslims in Muhammadâs theurgical powers, including his ability to intercede on behalf of the believers on the Day of Judgement, and in the magical properties of Muhammadâs name. He refers, specifically, to a work by one ḤanbalÄ« author, Ê¿UthmÄn al-Futūḥī, titled BushrÄ al-karÄ«m al-amjad bi-Ê¿adam taÊ¿dhÄ«b man yusammÄ Aḥmad wa-Muḥammad (The Good Tidings Given by the Exalted Generous [God] about the Fact that Those Who Are Called Aḥmad and Muhammad Will Not Be Punished [in the Hereafter]).41
The tendency to elevate Muhammad to the status of a supernatural, salvific figure is not as uncharacteristic of Muslim devotional attitudes as some have claimed.42 The notion of Muhammadâs pre-existing light (the nÅ«r Muḥammad), for example, enjoyed great popularity throughout Islamic history.43 However, it is difficult to avoid the impression that dâHerbelot takes a certain delight in foregrounding the more extreme mystical and cosmological speculations attaching to Muhammad. Even though, unlike earlier European polemicists, he does not seem interested in Muhammadâs alleged sexual licentiousness, overall he takes a one-sidedly harsh view of him. The imbalance of dâHerbelotâs portrait of Muhammad appears to jar with his overall intention to âprovide an accurate description of Islam, not to attack itâ.44 Did dâHerbelot feel obliged, in the case of Muhammad, to pay lip service to the Catholic environment in which he operated? The BibliotheÌque orientale, after all, is dedicated to the âRex Christianissimusâ, the French king Louis XIV, who was dâHerbelotâs patron, paying him a handsome annual pension.45 Be that as it may, European scholars writing around the year 1700, despite the progress booked by erudite Arabists and Islamicists like Maracci, Pococke and dâHerbelot, were still miles away from an impartial assessment of Muhammad.
3 Muhammad in Relandâs De religione Mohammedica(1705) and His De jure militari Mohammedanorum (1708)
As we saw above, Erpenius in Leiden had paved the way for the study of the Islamic world based on first-hand knowledge of Arabic sources and undertaken in conversation with Muslim interlocutors. At Utrecht, Erpeniusâ one-time student Voetius (1589â1676) took a different approach. Voetius, one of the founding fathers of the University of Utrecht, was a systematic theologian of the Reformed Church, a scholar of Oriental languages, and an outspoken critic of Copernicus, Descartes and Spinoza. In his Disputatio de Mohammedanismo (Disputation regarding Mohammedanism, 1648), he relies, as his most important source, on the Confusio sectae Mahometanae (Confusion of the Sect of Muhammad) of the Spanish convert Juan AndreÌs (fl. ca. 1487â1515), a polemic, inter alia, against the Muslim failure to understand the Christian trinity and against the sensuality of the Muslim afterlife.46 Voetius points out that Muhammad âcontradicted himselfâ in several places in the QurʾÄn, which, the reader is made to gather, makes it easy to come up with arguments against him.47 Further, Voetius maintains that Muhammad, a âpossessed maniacâ (Lt. âmaniaco-energumenicumâ) and âimpostorâ, suffered from epilepsy.48
The polemical Grotius and Voetius, the vituperative Prideaux, the learned but dismissive Maracci, Pococke and dâHerbelot, but also the cautiously curious Erpenius: these were the scholars of whose ideas we may assume Reland was aware, and with whom and against whom he developed his own view of Muhammad. This happened only gradually. In one of his early works, written as a twenty-year-old student in Utrecht, the Exercitatio philologico-theologica de symbolo Mohammedico (Non est Deus nisi Unus) adversus quod S.S. Trinitas defenditur (A Philological-Theological Investigation of the Muslim Creed [There is no God but God], against Which the Holy Trinity is Defended, 1696), he squarely dismissed Islam as a dangerous heresy, and Muhammad as a âpseudo-prophetâ and âimpostorâ.49 In De religione Mohammedica, however, the tone is markedly different, even if it is never as celebratory as, for example, in the works of Stubbe or de Boulainvilliers. Granted, De religione Mohammedica is not primarily a book about Muhammad. The distinction of having written the first balanced biography of Muhammad based exclusively on Muslim sources belongs to Jean Gagnier (ca. 1670â1740), professor at Oxford, who published his De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis in 1723.50 Relandâs De religione Mohammedica, by contrast, paints a much wider canvas. But it is worthwhile to focus for a moment on those passages in De religione Mohammedica that deal explicitly with the prophet of Islam.
First, let us highlight that Reland makes short work of some of the more fanciful and factually incorrect claims about Muhammad circulating in 17th- and early 18th-century European literature, such as the legend of the dove. Reland calls it an absurd idea that the Arab authors should have failed to mention this legend, if indeed there was any truth to it, considering that âthey bring to the attention other miracles about Muhammad that seem far less realistic, for example, that the moon descended towards him, that the trees greeted him, etc.â51 Grotius, as will be remembered, had given credence to the story, and it may well be that Reland here reacts to what he perceived as the shortcoming of his illustrious Dutch predecessor. In fact, it is tempting to think that Relandâs twin publications, De religione Mohammedica and De jure militari Mohammedanorum (Treatise of the Mahometansâ Law of Warfare, first published 1708, also appended, as âVerhandelinge van het Krygs-recht der Mahometaanenâ, to the 1718 Dutch version of De religione Mohammedica), were conceived as a response to Grotiusâ Bewys van den waren godsdienst and De iure bellic ac pacis, as if aiming to supersede and replace the work of a scholar with no first-hand knowledge of the Islamic tradition with the careful scrutiny of a scholar of Oriental languages and Islam.
Reland also takes aim at the pernicious Western idea that Muhammadâs grave is in Mecca,52 where his coffin was supposedly suspended, by means of a magical trick, between the floor and the roof of his mausoleum. This legend was disseminated all over medieval Europe thanks to Petrus Alphonsiâs (d. 1140) Dialogi contra Iudaeos (Dialogues against the Jews). As has been suggested, the legend served to illustrate that Islam was âan inversion of Christian worshipâ.53 Reland notes that Muhammadâs grave is in Medina, not in Mecca, and that the belief that his coffin is suspended in the air is incorrect. In the manner of a modern historian of religion, he speculates about the origins of the story: âSimilarly, it is recounted about a certain statue in the Temple of Serapis that it was suspended between the floor and the roof by means of a magnet placed in the roof of the templeâ.54
It may not have been particularly difficult for Reland to debunk the hackneyed factual misconceptions about Muhammad, and he was hardly the first to do so. Erpenius had already exploded the myth of the suspended coffin,55 and Pococke had upbraided Grotius for relating the legend of the dove.56 It is on another level that Relandâs innovative views of Muhammad come to the fore, namely when he engages with two accusations made by dâHerbelot, that is, first, that Muhammad was a warmongerer and second, that the veneration granted to Muhammad in Islam is nothing but superstitious extravagance. Regarding the first of these accusations, in his Treatise of the Mahometansâ Law of Warfare, Reland writes that
it deserves to be known that Mahomet, when he first claimed that he was sent as a prophet of God [â¦], did not encourage his people to go to war, but counseled against it, admonishing them that one should patiently bear oneâs enemiesâ injustices. Then, when he had increased in wealth and power, he stated that it was allowed for him and his people to defend themselves against the unbelievers. Finally, grown more and more in status, he openly declared that it was permissible to wage war against oneâs enemies at all times â¦57
This is a rather even-handed summary of Muhammadâs attitude towards warfare, far more nuanced than what dâHerbelot had written. Reland is aware of the meek, early phase of Muhammadâs career, in which he discouraged violence, but which gave way, after the emigration from Mecca to Medina, first, to a legimitization of defensive warfare and second, to allowing warfare âagainst enemies at all timesâ. In the end, Muhammad praised warfare against the unbelievers as a holy duty. However, Reland warns his readers, for this we should not condemn him too quicklyâafter all, several popes had behaved in the same way.58 In his attempt to normalize Islam, Reland then offers a paraphrase of a text dealing with the Islamic law of warfare, of which he possessed a manuscript and which he introduces by saying that ârecently, I managed to obtain a book, written in a sure hand, that contains in a convenient order the most important things that serve to illuminate this topicâ.59 This text, the ShiÊ¿i legal compendium JÄmiÊ¿-i Ê¿AbbÄsÄ« (The Ê¿AbbÄsÄ« Collection, in Persian) of BahÄʾ al-DÄ«n al-Ê¿ÄmilÄ« (d. 1030/1621),60 provides a standard summary of the most important rules regulating warfare in Islamic law: that war is to be waged in defense of Islam; that war may only be declared by the head of state (the imÄm); that certain restrictions and regulations must be respected concerning the treatment of prisoners of war and of booty; and other such things.
Regarding the second of dâHerbelotâs accusations, namely that Muhammad claimed quasi-divine status and as such is the object of superstitious devotion among his followers, Reland seeks to set the record straight, too. Muhammad, he avers, had a rather healthy awareness of human fallibility, including his own. Reland cites QurʾÄn 10:98 (âIf your Lord had willed, whoever is in the earth would have believed, all of them, all togetherâ). This helps him to score a crucial point: Muhammad taught that âall should be free to follow their own light, and to believe that to be true which thus seems to themââa maxim with which Reland manifestly concurs.61 Muslims, Reland continues, know full well that Muhammad was a fallible human being. They even admit âthat Mahomet, with his own lips, spoke words which he did not believe to be trueâ.62 Here, Reland refers to the wellknown incident of the âSatanic versesâ. As the exegetes of the QurʾÄn related, the devil misled Muhammad into reciting these verses, which praise a number of polytheistic deities. However, realizing his mistake, Muhammad later retracted and expunged them from the QurʾÄn.63
Another Western misconception Reland seeks to debunk is that Muslims believe that âGod prays for Muhammadâ.64 Reland devotes chapter eight of his De religione Mohammedica to this question, in the second part of his work, which is entitled âBook 2 over the Mahometan religion, treating some of the things that people accuse the Mahometans of without causeâ. This misperception, Reland argues, is based on a mistranslation that ultimately goes back to Robert of Kettonâs Latin rendering of the QurʾÄn (see QurʾÄn 33:56).65 This mistranslation concerns the formula á¹£allÄ AllÄhu Ê¿alayhi, which Muslims are encouraged to recite after every mention of the name Muhammad. The verb á¹£allÄ, Reland explains, does not only mean âto prayâ, but also, âto have a favourable opinionâ, and this is how the formula ought to be understood: âMay God have a favourable opinion of Muhammadâ. Reland had ample resources at his disposal to reach such a conclusion. The 1761 auction catalogue of his manuscripts, the Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum, mentions no fewer than three works dealing with praise formulas for Muhammad, next to a manuscript of the story of his ascension, the miÊ¿rÄj.66 And indeed, Relandâs view finds support in the works of Muslim scholars, who generally understand á¹£allÄ to mean âto blessâ.67 In sum, Reland maintains that Muhammad is not unduly venerated in Islam, let alone deified. The point of the pilgrimage to Mecca is not to worship Muhammad in his allegedly flying coffin, but to participate in an ancient ritual, a religious ceremony anchored in the remote past of humankind, predating Islam.68
4 Relandâs Muhammad: A New Departure?
In what ways, if any, does Relandâs treatment introduce new aspects into the European view of Muhammad? The gulf that separates him from the likes of Prideaux, Voltaire and de Boulainvilliers should by now be obvious on the basis of the above. But how does Relandâs Muhammad compare to the Muhammad of his learned colleagues Pococke, Maracci and dâHerbelot? It is true, Reland continues to espouse the view shared by all these men that Islam should be studied first and foremost in order to refute it, and in this and other respects, âhis approach ⦠can only be regarded as highly traditionalâ.69 However, as I woud like to suggest here, the little shifts in perspective that Reland proposes add up to something more than just a cleverly âpartisanâ70 extension of the works of earlier scholars of the Republic of Arabic Letters.
First of all, let us note, as others have done,71 the remarkable fact that Reland completely disavows the insulting epithets that his contemporaries so commonly use to denigrate Muhammad. Nor does he indulge in lavish praise of Muhammad as particularly wise, just, or courageous. Instead of dismissing him as an impostor or reducing his significance to that of a mere statesman, throughout De religione Mohammedica, Reland refers to Muhammad simply as âprophetâ.72 Already in his notes to the 1701 edition of the Dutch translation of Ḥayy Ibn YaqáºÄn (Rotterdam, Pieter Van der Veer), Reland had emphasised that the shahÄda, the Muslim profession of faith, should not be rendered as âI profess that God has not companionâ (Dt. âmeede-genootâ), but ought also to include the formula âand that Muhammad is his Messengerâ.73 In this context, it is also worth highlighting the straightforward manner in which Reland denounces the old fables about Muhammad, such as the belief that his coffin is suspended mid-air in the KaÊ¿ba, or the story of the dove. As we saw above, others had preceded him in this, notably Erpenius and Pococke (though Maracci did, too), but dâHerbelot, in his BibliotheÌque orientale, while steering clear of fables, makes no effort at all to reflect on earlier Western misconceptions. As for Maracciâs and Pocockeâs attitudes toward Muhammad, the differences with Reland are palpable. As Snouck Hurgronje observed, while Maracci was unable to âmention the name Muhammad without shiveringâ, Relandâs âexcellent little book ⦠has a very different characterâ.74 Like Maracci, Pococke was thoroughly unsympathetic to Muhammad. He âcontinued to look on Muḥammad as the great impostor and Islam as the religion of the false prophetâ.75 Things may have been different with George Sale, but he wrote a generation later, and under the influence of Relandâs work.76
Secondly, there is something rather special about the way in which Reland goes about selecting his sources. âAll I can know about Muhammadâs feelingsâ, he declares in the preface to De religione Mohammedica, âI must learn from his writingsâ.77 Similarly, he begins his Treatise on the Mahometansâ Law of Warfare by noting that âwe have a desire (Dt. âhet lust onsâ) to relate the Mahometansâ law of warfare on the basis of authentic (Dt. âechteâ) texts, and such as they themselves have determined itâ.78 This âdesireâ to go back to âauthenticâ sources is present in the work of other early modern scholars of Islam, but again there are differences. Maracci is famous for relying on a broad range of Arabic-Muslim sources, but he often cites them only in order to ridicule them.79 Pococke and following him dâHerbelot rely on Arab Christian historians for their reconstruction of Muhammadâs biography, which strikes one as problematic, even if it signals an important advance upon earlier uncritical reliance upon the Greek-writing Byzantine historians, which were more prone to distortion.80 It seems significant that in De religione Mohammedica, when telling the story of Muhammadâs life, Reland refers the reader, not to the standard texts of Eutychius, Bar Hebraeus and al-MakÄ«n, but instead, to a short âTurkish chronicleâ, the manuscript of which he had bought from Goliusâ Nachlass.81 Although Relandâs apparent unwillingness to leave Utrecht restricted his ability to access manuscripts, we can still discern a distinct strategy to use specifically Muslim sources as much as possible. A splendid example of this is how Reland, in De religione Mohammedica, makes use of al-GhazÄlÄ«âs (d. 505/1111) K. al-ArbaÊ¿Ä«n fÄ« uṣūl al-dÄ«n (The Book of Forty [Articles] on the Principles of Religion), a work that repeats, in a succinct form, many themes of al-GhazÄlÄ«âs magnum opus, the IḥyÄʾ Ê¿ulÅ«m al-dÄ«n (The Revivification of the Religious Sciences), a pivotal work in the history of Islamic religious thought.82
Thirdly and finally, to what extent is it possible to credit Reland with the ambition to emancipate the European study of Islam and of Arabic from its roots in expansionist politics, Christian interreligious polemics and inner-Christian confessional conflict? The decisive push for the autonomy of Western Arabic Studies is commonly attributed to the German Johann Jakob Reiske (1716â74) and the Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy (1758â1838),83 and one cannot really disagree with this view. As opposed to de Sacy and Reiske, Reland openly declared that the study of Arabic was first and foremost a help to Hebrew philology.84 Besides, his versatility as a polymath scholar of languages, history, and religions, among other things, arguably undercut his ability to promote a single discipline, such as Arabic or Islamic Studies.85 Reland also held that Islam should be studied in order better to understand the enemy of Christianity. Occasionally, he was candid about this: âWe are forcedâ, he wrote in his Treatise on the Mahometansâ Law of Warfare, âto fight the Indian and Persian Muslimsâ; this is why, according to Reland, it is âusefulâ to study the Muslimsâ ideas about warfare.86 As noted, in many respects he was a man of traditionalist convictions.
However, Reland also points to the future.87 Crucially, he insisted on studying the beliefs and practices of Muslims on their own terms. Most of his predecessors, learned or not, plainly reduced knowledge of Arabic and Islam towards other ends. By contrast, from Relandâs writings, Muhammad emerges as a man who âspoke in his own languageâ and âfollowed his own lightâ, a prophet deserving of study, not in order to undermine the civilization that he spawned, but to come to an honest assessment of his character and achievement. Reland thus may not have revolutionised the European view of Muhammad but he can be said to have acted as a switchman, almost imperceptibly changing the course of thought of later interpreters and of the educated public at large.
We should note, however, that in certain quarters, his success was quite limited. For example, from 1777 to 1779, there appeared in The Hague a revised and updated edition of the BibliotheÌque orientale. The revisions were the work of Reiske and his Dutch mentor, the professor of Oriental languages at Leiden, Albert Schultens (1686â1750). Schultens, who was a mere ten years younger than Reland, met Reland in Utrecht in 1708 and throughout the 1710s, and must have been well acquainted with De religione Muhammadica. And yet, the entry on Muhammad in the revised edition of the BibliotheÌque remained unchanged from the earlier version of dâHerbelot. In Diderotâs and dâAlembertâs EncyclopeÌdie (1751â72), there is no separate entry on Muhammad, but he is mentioned in the two entries written by Louis de Jaucourt, âAlcoranâ and âMahomeÌtismeâ, to an overall uneven effect. While in the entry âAlcoranâ, we are back in the arena of Byzantine polemicsâMuhammad is the âfalse prophetâ who composed the QurʾÄn with the help of âBatyras, a Jacobite heretic, Sergius, a Nestorian monk, and some Jewsââ, the entry âMahomeÌtismeâ seems inspired by de Boulainvilliersâ enthusiasm: Muhammad had the âaudicity of Alexander the Great, but also the generosity and sobriety that Alexander lackedâ, while parts of the QurʾÄn, a text deemed generally âincoherentâ and full of âcontradictions, absurdities and anachronismsâ, are âsublimeâ.88 Relandâs name does not appear in the EncyclopeÌdie, to the single exception of a brief mention in the entry on the Greek city of Thebes.
Reland was more successful at home, in the Netherlands, and in the northern Protestant countries. When Jean Gagnier, a French refugee who taught Oriental languages at Oxford, published his biography of Muhammad (1732), in a spirit congenial to Reland he made sure to let only âthe best Arab authorsâ speak to the topic, having previously, in 1723, edited and translated (into Latin) the life (sÄ«ra) of Muhammad of the Syrian Muslim historian, AbÅ« al-FidÄʾ (d. 732/1331).89 Reland also paved the way for Bernard Picartâs and Jean-Frédéric Bernardâs Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam 1723â43), dubbed in recent scholarship, because of its massive commercial success and its decentering of European views of other peoples, âthe book that changed Europeâ.90 The fifth volume, published in 1737, is devoted to Islam. Picart, the engraver, used the engraving of the KaÊ¿ba featuring in the second edition of De religione Mohammedica, the same image that was also included in the front matter of George Saleâs Koran of 1734.91 Bernard, the author, compiled his text from the writings of de Boulainvilliers, dâHerbelot and Sale, but also and importantly, from Reland. In fact, he reproduces the entire preface of Relandâs De religione Mohammedica.92 While also Johannes Nomszâ (1738â1803) Dutch biography of Muhammad (1780) owes much to Reland,93 the cultural relativism that Relandâs work foreshadowsâthat is, the idea that different peoples should be âfree to follow their own light, and believe that to be true which thus seems to themââis fully articulated in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humankind, 1784â91) of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744â1803). Muhammad, according to Herder, was âa wondrous combination of everything that nation, tribe, period and environment had to offer: merchant, prophet, preacher, poet, hero and lawgiver, everything according to the Arab styleâ.94 From Herder, the view that Muhammad should be understood from within his own milieu (âclimateâ, as Herder would have said) touched Goethe, from whom Thomas Carlyle took it in the later 19th century. It is a view that continues to inspire Arabists and Islamicists to this day.
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Wiegers, G.A., A Learned Muslim Acquaintance of Erpenius and Golius: Ahmad b. Kasim al-Andalusi and Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, Leiden, Dokumentatiebureau Islam-Christendom, 1988.
I borrow this term from Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters.
The research for, and writing of, this essay was supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant âThe senses of Islamâ (project no. 724951). I wish to thank Bart Jaski, Henk van Rinsum and Arnoud Vrolijk for providing valuable feedback on a draft of this essay.
Lessing, âRettung des Hieronymus Cardanusâ, p. 153. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.
In his landmark study, Johann Fück mentions Reland only in passing. See Fück, Die arabischen Studien, pp. 102â103. Norman Daniel, in another standard account, is highly positive about Reland, but extremely brief (he devotes no more than half a paragraph to him). See Daniel, Islam and the West, p. 318. John Tolan, in his recent history of Western perceptions of Muhammad, makes brief mention of Reland, but largely reduces him to the status of a source for the work of Sale. See Tolan, Faces of Mohammed, p. 163. See, however, the various publications of Alistair Hamilton mentioned below; in addition, see Pfannmüller, Handbuch, pp. 63â64, who credits Reland with âthe first scientific account of the Mohammedan religionâ; Waardenburg, âMustashriḳūnâ, p. 741b, who calls Relandâs De religione Mohammedica âthe first enlightened study of Islam as a religionâ; and Schimmel, âAbendländische Islamstudienâ, pp. 27â28, who puts Reland on par with Sale. In his brilliant study of the Republic of Arabic Letters, Alexander Bevilacqua gives Reland ample space but also accuses him of a certain partisanship, that is, an âassimilative biasâa tendency to overstate the resemblance of Islamic beliefs to Christian onesâ. See Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, p. 97. By contrast, Sale âarbitrated between similarity and difference [between Islam and Christianity] more fair-mindedly than any of his ⦠predecessorsâ. See ibid., pp. 88â89.
See Kelsay, âIslam and Christianityâ, p. 212.
Grotius, Bewys van den waren godsdienst, p. 126: âgegrondet op geweldâ.
Ibid., p. 128: âeen bloot menschâ.
Ibid., p. 128: âMahumet heeft rooff en overspel bedrevenâ.
Ibid., p. 129: âSyn luy geweest gewent te leven op den rooffâ.
Ibid., pp. 130â131.
Ibid., p. 129 : âDoch eenigen, soo ât schynt, om syne leer te styven, / hem tegen sijnen dank ook wonderen toeschryven: / Waar van een deel door kunst soo wel geschieden kan, / Als dat een duyff aen ât oor komt vliegen van een manâ.
See Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, pp. 89â92.
Daniel, Islam and the West, pp. 92â93, 118â121, 158 and passim; Tolan, Saracens, pp. 135â169 and passim; Lange, Mohammed, pp. 111â112.
Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, p. 21.
Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, p. 90.
Prideaux, True Nature of Imposture, pp. 132â133.
Dimmock, Mythologies, pp. 180â181.
Reeves, Muhammad in Europe, p. 159.
The dating of the TraiteÌ, which is based on earlier polemical works (some of them medieval), is the subject of scholarly controversy. Here I follow the assessment of Schröder, âEinleitungâ, p. xix.
TraiteÌ, pp. 106â9 (§ 22).
Translated by Wiegers, A Learned Muslim Acquaintance, p. 58. Much against al-ḤajarÄ«, Johann Fück noted that Erpenius held Muhammad to be an impostor, the QurʾÄn a travesty of the Bible, and that he had âno sympathies for the religion of Islamâ. See Fück, Die arabischen Studien, pp. 69, 71.
Translated by Wiegers, A Learned Muslim Acquaintance, p. 50.
ḤajarÄ«, K. NÄá¹£ir al-dÄ«n, p. 33.
This was the chronicle of Georgius al-MakÄ«n (âElmacinusâ) Ibn al-Ê¿AmÄ«d from Cairo (d. 1273), in Erpeniusâ Latin translation. On al-MakÄ«n, see below.
Glazemaker, Mahomets Alkoran, p. iv.: â⦠op dat dâopmerkende lezer zelf ât verschil, en de strijdigheid daar in zou bemerken, en, zo ât hem lust, naar zijn eige believen daar af oordelenâ. I owe this reference to Lucas van der Deijl.
Stubbe, Account, pp. 141â142. For a long time, Stubbeâs text circulated in manuscript form, only to be published in the 20th century.
Dimmock, Mythologies, p. 186.
Garcia, âA Hungarian Revolutionâ, p. 1.
See Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, pp. 113â123.
Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, pp. 108â135.
DâHerbelot, BibliotheÌque, pp. 598aâ603b. See also Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, pp. 32â35.
None of these three authors commands the attention of historians of early Islam today, their works having long been supplanted by the likes of the SÄ«ra of Ibn HishÄm (d. ca. 215/830) or the TaʾrÄ«kh (History) of al-ṬabarÄ« (d. 310/923), both edited in the second half of the 19th century, by a German and a Dutch scholar, respectively. However, as Alistair Hamilton rightly remarks, both al-MakÄ«n and Bar Hebraeus were not interested in anti-Islamic polemics: both wrote for a Christian as well as a Muslim audience. See Hamilton, âStudy of Islamâ, pp. 175, 177.
DâHerbelot, BibliotheÌque, p. 603a.
As noted by Ahmad Gunny, dâHerbelotâs articles on âDinâ and âEslamâ are more âbalancedâ. See Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, p. 31.
DâHerbelot, BibliotheÌque, pp. 598b, 599a.
Ibid., p. 599a.
Ibid., p. 602b.
Ibid., p. 603a.
SuyÅ«á¹Ä«, Durr, vol. 8, p. 652.
DâHerbelot, BibliotheÌque, 600a.
Ibid., p. 603a. A manuscript of this work is mentioned by KÄtip Ãelebi. See KÄtip Ãelebi, Kashf, vol. 2., p. 54.
Gunny, The Prophet Mohammed, pp. 32â33.
See Rubin, âPre-Existence and Lightâ.
Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, p. 129.
Fück, Die arabischen Studien, p. 99.
Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies, p. 64; Van Amersfoort and Van Asselt, Liever Turks dan Paaps?, p. 22.
Voetius, Disputatio, p. 662 (tr. pp. 63â64).
Ibid., p. 671 (tr. pp. 75â76).
See Hamilton, âReland and Islamâ, p. 245. In a congratulatory poem written in Arabic on the occasion of the Exercitatio philologico-theologica de consensu Mohammedanismi et Judaismi, Relandâs friend and tutor, Heinrich Sike (1669â1712), slandered Muhammad as a pseudo-prophet who falsely claimed divine revelation, and who is accordingly punished in hell by being fed the fruits of the infernal tree of ZaqqÅ«m (QurʾÄn 56:52 and passim) and made to drink the âboiling waterâ with which sinners are threatened in the QurʾÄn (QurʾÄn 55:44 and passim). The poem is appended, on the last page (no page number), to Reland, Exercitatio philologico-theologica. In his Exercitatio, Reland is rather stereotypically derogatory of Muhammad, even though in his De libertate philosophandi, written two years earlier, he had fully embraced, at least in principle, the imperative for intellectual freedom and rejection of the authority of earlier scholars. See Henk van Rinsumâs chapter in this volume. For a translation of Sikeâs poem, see the appendix of the present volume.
Gagnier followed up on his Vita with an enlarged and more widely read French version, La vie de Mahomet, published in Amsterdam in 1732. See Gagnier, Vie de Mahomet. Pfannmüller, Handbuch, p. 171, sees in Gagnierâs work the first scholarly study of Muhammad by a Western scholar, but Ehlert, âMuḥammadâ, p. 382a, states that Gagnierâs work is no more than âa polemic against Boulainvilliers and a denigration of Islamâ. See the useful summary of this controversy by Bennett, âJean Gagnierâ.
Reland, Verhandeling, p. 188. Here and in the following, I quote Relandâs De religione Mohammedica and De jure militari Mohammedanorum from their 1718 Dutch translation. For a noteworthy difference between the 1705 and 1717/1718 editions of De religione Mohammedica, see below, at n61.
A view also held by Voetius, see Voetius, Disputatio, p. 666 (tr. p. 68).
Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, p. 159 (I owe this reference to Jo Spaans). See also Pellat, âNote sur la leÌgendeâ. It is interesting to note that early Muslim geographers told similar stories about the Greek pagans (a magnetic statue constructed by Apollonius of Tyana), as well as the Hindus of Gujarat. See Dietrich, âMaghnÄá¹Ä«sâ, p. 1168a. Similarly, the Mamluk chronicler Ibn KathÄ«r (d. 774/1373) related that Genghis Khan was buried in an iron coffin, which was suspended between two mountains. See Ibn KathÄ«r, BidÄya, vol. 13, p. 118.
Reland, Verhandeling, p. 149. Cf. Tolan, Faces of Mohammed, p. 163: âReland uses comparisons with classical antiquity to valorize Islam both by associating it with the revered cultures of Greco-Roman antiquity and by removing it from a simple comparison with Christianityâ.
See Hamilton, âStudy of Islamâ, p. 175.
Pococke, Specimen, pp. 186â187. Grotius, at the insistence of Pococke, agreed that the legend would be excised from Pocockeâs Arabic translation of Grotiusâs poem. See Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, p. 89; Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, p. 41; Fück, Die arabischen Studien, p. 87.
Reland, âKrygs-rechtâ, p. 201.
Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., pp. 200, 257 (Dt. âhandschriftâ). There is no work specifically dedicated to the law of warfare (jihÄd) or law of nations (siyar) among the handful of legal works mentioned in the âIndex codicum Orientalium Manuscriptorumâ appended to the 1705 edition of De religione Mohammedica (nos. 2, 3, 5, 18, 19, 22) or in the 1761 auction catalogue of Relandâs manuscripts, the Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum (pp. 3 [no. 28], 10fds [nos. 1 and 2], 12 [no. 25]). On several occasions in his text, Reland cites the opinions of ShÄfiÊ¿Ä« jurists, contrasting them with âthe jurists of the Persiansâ. See Reland, âKrygs-rechtâ, pp. 249, 251â252. Reland possessed at least one ShÄfiÊ¿Ä« legal manuscript, the GhÄyat al-ikhtiá¹£Är (Ultimate Summary) of AbÅ« ShujÄÊ¿ al-Iá¹£fahÄnÄ« (fl. second half of 5th/11th c.), a well-known legal digest (matn). See âIndexâ, no. 18. We may assume that also the âSystema Juris Sacri & Civilis Muhammedanorum Arabice cum versione Malaica interlineariâ (âSystem of sacred and civil law of the Muhammedans, Arabic with interlinear Malayâ) in the 1761 catalogue (Catalogus, p. 3 [no. 28]) is a ShÄfiÊ¿Ä« work. One of Relandâs other manuscripts, kept in the Leiden collection (Or. 1347,) is AbÅ« ShujÄÊ¿âs matn with interlinear Malay (see Arnoud Vrolijkâs contribution to this volume). AbÅ« ShujÄÊ¿âs work, however, is rather too short to have served as the basis of Relandâs relatively detailed discussion. The other Sunni legal works in Relandâs possession cannot have served as his main source, either. The RisÄla of Ibn AbÄ« Zayd al-QayrawÄnÄ« (MÄlikÄ«, 4th/10th century) (âIndexâ, no. 5), like AbÅ« ShujÄÊ¿âs work, is too short. The two ḤanafÄ« works Kanz al-daqÄʾiq (The Treasure of Subtleties) of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-NasafÄ« (d. 710/1310) (âIndexâ, no. 22) and MultaqÄ al-abḥur (The Meeting of the Seas) of IbrÄhÄ«m b. Muḥammad b. IbrÄhÄ«m al-ḤalabÄ« (d. 956/1549) (Catalogus, p. 12 [no. 25]) do not bear much similarity to Relandâs treatment. See NasafÄ«, Kanz, pp. 369â391; ḤalabÄ«, MultaqÄ, pp. 333â356. As is explained in the following footnote, Reland instead relied on a ShiÊ¿i text, written in Persian.
The Catalogus (p. 10 [no. 1] = âIndexâ, no. 3) describes this work as âGiameng Abasi, h.e. Pandectae Abbasici sive Systema Juris Sacri & Civilis Muhammedici Persici conscriptum Jussu Regis Schach Abas, divisum in 20. capita liber accuratissimus ⦠(JÄmiÊ¿-i Ê¿AbbÄsÄ«, or The Ê¿AbbÄsÄ« Collection, or: System of sacred and civil law of the Persian Muhammedans, composed on the order of the king ShÄh Ê¿AbbÄs, divided in 20 chapters, a very accurate book â¦)â. The sections on jihÄd in al-Ê¿ÄmilÄ«âs work (see Ê¿ÄmilÄ«, JÄmiÊ¿-i Ê¿AbbÄsÄ«, pp. 150â161 [§§ 143â149]) are titled as follows: § 143: Praise of jihÄd; § 144: Conditions for engaging in jihÄd; § 145: JihÄd against hostile unbelievers; § 146: Modalities of jihÄd; § 147: Protections guaranteed to defeated unbelievers; § 148: Rules about armistice; § 149: Rules about booty. As against what one finds in the works mentioned in the previous footnote, this coincides neatly with the sequence of topics in Relandâs work. Also content-wise, there is ample overlap. For example, Reland reproduces the five-fold classification (aḥkÄm) of acts of warfare that one finds in § 146 of al-Ê¿ÄmilÄ«âs work (Reland, âKrygs-rechtâ, §§ 10â15). Relandâs reliance on this text perfectly illustrates the âusefulnessâ of studying Persian, a point he defended in his 1701 Utrecht inaugural address Pro lingua Persica et cognatis litteris Orientalibus (In Favour of the Persian Language and Cognate Oriental Idioms). He did not suffer from the Arabocentrism that has marred so much of Western scholarship on Islam in the 20th and 21st centuries. Relandâs manuscript of the JÄmiÊ¿-i Ê¿AbbÄsÄ«, now kept in Vatican library (MS Vatican, BAV, in 1763), was written in 1045/1636 in Hyderabad, and possibly reached Reland through Cornelis Mutter (1659â1701 or 1704), who had been stationed there before returning to the Dutch Republic in 1698. On Mutterâs connection with Reland, see Bart Jaskiâs contribution to this volume. On Relandâs contribution to the study of Persian, see De Bruijn, âThe Persian Studies of Adriaan Relandâ.
Reland, Verhandeling, p. 115: â⦠zy het eenen iegelyken vry zyn licht te volgen, en te gelooven, dat dat geene waar is, ât geen hem alzo schyntâ = idem, De religione Mohammedica (1717), p. 161: â⦠liberum sit unicuique lumen suum sequi, & illud credere verum essere quod ipsi videturâ. It is noteworthy that this remarkable passage only occurs in the second, 1717 edition, not in the first, 1705 edition, of De religione Mohammedica, in the substantially enlarged fifth chapter of part two.
Ibid., p. 116.
See Ahmed, âSatanic versesâ.
Reland, Verhandeling, pp. 120â123: âOf zy gelooven, dat God voor Mohamet bidâ.
As Henk van Rinsum points out to me, already in his 1996 Exercitatio de symbolo Mohammedico is Reland skeptical with regard to Kettonâs translation.
Catalogus, p. 6: âno. 19: Collected blessings on Muhammad, by âAbdalla Muhammed Sokeiker Anhaswaliensiâ, in African script â¦â This corresponds to De religione Mohammedica, âIndex codicum Orientalium Manuscriptorumâ, no. 14, where the authorâs name is given in Arabic as âAnhazÅ«lÄ«â, a garbled form of AbÅ« Ê¿AbdallÄh Muḥammad b. SulaymÄn al-JazÅ«lÄ«, d. 869/1465, the Moroccan author of a celebrated collection of devotional prayers on the Prophet, the DalÄʾil al-khayrÄt. Further, Catalogus, p. 8: âno. 41: Story of Muhammadâs rapture â¦â, i.e. the ḥadÄ«th al-miÊ¿rÄj (= âIndex codicum Orientalium Manuscriptorumâ, no. 12); ibid., p. 9: âno. 60: Several sermons and confessionary formulas in praise of Mahometâ¦, in Arabicâ; ibid., p. 11: âno. 14: A Persian book containing much in praise of Mohamet â¦â
Meier, Segenssprechung, p. 1.
Reland, Verhandeling, p. 150.
Hamilton, âReland and Islamâ, p. 250.
Bevilacqua, Rebublic of Arabic Letters, p. 97.
Hamilton, âReland and Islamâ, p. 245.
See Snouck Hurgronje, âUne nouvelle biographieâ, p. 323.
Ibn Ṭufayl, De Natuurlyke Wysgeer, p. 2. On Relandâs contribution to the publication of this work, see the chapter by Remke Kruk and Arnout Vrolijk in the present volume.
Snouck Hurgronje, âUne nouvelle biographieâ, p. 322.
Gunny, The Prophet Muhammad, p. 41.
Dimmock, Mythologies, p. 206.
Reland, Verhandeling, p. xlii.
Idem, âKrygs-rechtâ, p. 199.
Hamilton, âReland and Islamâ, p. 245.
Idem, âStudy of Islamâ, p. 175.
See Reland, Verhandeling, pp. 31â32, note (a).
Idem, De religione Mohammedica, âIndex codicum Orientalium Manuscriptorumâ, no. 1. It seems rather likely to me that this is the âshortâ and âwell-respectedâ work that Reland used as the source text for the first part of De religione Mohammedica, the âCompendium theologiae Mohammedicaeâ. See Reland, Verhandeling, xliâxlii. The K. al-ArbaÊ¿Ä«n is divided in four parts: (1) matters of creed (al-Ê¿aqÄʾid); (2) ritual and âouter behaviourâ (al-aÊ¿mÄl al-áºÄhira); (3) vices (al-akhlÄq al-madhmÅ«ma); (4) virtues (al-akhlÄq al-maḥmÅ«da). See further Bouyges, Essay, pp. 50â51.
Fück, Die arabischen Studien, pp. 108â24 (Reiske), 140â157 (de Sacy); Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies, p. 82; Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, pp. 141â43. Alistair Hamilton credits Reland with achieving a certain âprogressâ but thinks of 18th-century scholars, including Reland and Reiske, as less innovative than 17th-century scholars. See Hamilton, âStudy of Islamâ, p. 182.
Fück, Die arabischen Studien, 105; Hamilton, âOutstanding Orientalistâ, p. 28.
See the pertinent remarks by Fück, Die arabischen Studien, p. 105.
Reland, âKrygs-rechtâ, p. 200.
Hamilton, âOutstanding Orientalistâ, p. 28.
EncyclopeÌdie, s.v. Alcoran, vol. 1 (1751), pp. 250aâ251b; s.v. MahomeÌtisme, vol. 9 (1765), pp. 864aâ68b. See Pfannmüller, Handbuch, 172: â[Regarding Muhammad,] the encyclopedists and their friends repeat, with typical hyperbole, the formulas of Voltaireâ.
AbÅ« al-FidÄʾ, De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis.
Hunt et al., The Book that Changed Europe.
Reland had based his engraving on a âTurkishâ oil painting shown to him by the Swedish scholar Michael Eneman, who had visited him in Utrecht. See Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies, p. 66.
Picart and Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses, vol. 5, pp. 81â101. See Brafman, âPicart, Bernard, Hermes and Muhammadâ, 150; Hunt et al., The Book that Changed Europe, 261â63.
As noted by Richard van Leeuwen in his contribution to this volume.
Herder, Ideen, p. 832 (§ IV, 19, IV).