The Republic of Arabic Letters:
Islam and the European Enlightenment
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a pioneering community of Christian scholars laid the groundwork for the modern Western understanding of Islamic civilization. These men produced the first accurate translation of the Qur’an into a European language, mapped the branches of the Islamic arts and sciences, and wrote Muslim history using Arabic sources. The Republic of Arabic Letters reconstructs this process, revealing the influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the secular Enlightenment understanding of Islam and its written traditions.
Drawing on Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, and Latin sources, Alexander Bevilacqua’s rich intellectual history retraces the routes—both mental and physical—that Christian scholars traveled to acquire, study, and comprehend Arabic manuscripts. The knowledge they generated was deeply indebted to native Muslim traditions, especially Ottoman ones. Eventually the translations, compilations, and histories they produced reached such luminaries as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, who not only assimilated the factual content of these works but wove their interpretations into the fabric of Enlightenment thought.
The Republic of Arabic Letters shows that the Western effort to learn about Islam and its religious and intellectual traditions issued not from a secular agenda but from the scholarly commitments of a select group of Christians. These authors cast aside inherited views and bequeathed a new understanding of Islam to the modern West.
Praise for The Republic of Arabic Letters
“Deeply thoughtful… A delight.”—The Economist
“A closely researched and engrossing study of a subset of the Republic of Letters—those scholars who, having learned Arabic, used their mastery of that difficult language to interpret the Quran, study the career of Muhammad, write the history of medieval Islam and introduce Europeans to the masterpieces of Arabic literature… [Bevilacqua] has joined the ranks of a latter-day Republic of Arabic Letters that, in its scholarship and scholarly cooperation, is in no way inferior to its early-modern precursor.”—Robert Irwin, The Wall Street Journal
“Anyone interested in the Enlightenment, or Islam, or both, should read Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters.”—Ritchie Robertson, The Times Literary Supplement
“What makes his study so groundbreaking, and such a joy to read, is the connection he makes between intellectual history and the material history of books. The re-evaluation of Islam that took place in the 17th century was closely connected to the acquisition of a much wider range of empirical sources than had been available before: it was the stockpiling of Oriental collections in the great libraries of Europe that enabled this work to take place.”—Gavin Jacobson, Financial Times
“Erudite and eloquent… What [Bevilacqua’s] meticulous scholarship reveals is that between the mid-17th and mid-18th centuries, the engagement with Islam really did transform Europeans’ understanding not only of Islam but also of their own Christian faith.”—Dmitri Levitin, London Review of Books
“[A] tour de force study of the origins of modern Islamic scholarship in the West and its central role in the Enlightenment… Bevilacqua’s extraordinary book provides the first true glimpse into this story… It has taken until now for a book to tell the history of the origins of the Western study of Islam, as Bevilacqua’s does. Few have his linguistic and cultural expertise. He, like the tradition he describes, is a rarity.”—Jacob Soll, The New Republic
“Bevilacqua offers many surprising discoveries. One of them is that robust modern scholarship on Islam was shaped in an ostensibly improbable source, namely the Vatican… It is indicative of the West’s tortuous engagement with Islam that the foundation of European scholarship on Islam had to wait until now to be uncovered; it is all the more creditable that Bevilacqua has cleared the ground to build on it.”—Benedikt Koehler, Standpoint
“A closely researched and elegantly written book… The Republic of Arabic Letters brings back to life a fascinating moment in intellectual history.”—Francis Ghiles, Arab Weekly
“[A] fascinating book.”—Fitzroy Morrissey, History Today
“Bevilacqua explores a new humanism in early modern Europe that sought a more accurate representation of Muslims… The resulting wave of scholarship has impacted Europe’s relations with Muslims ever since.”—I. Blumi, Choice
“A succinct and erudite overview of 17th- and 18th-century European scholars and writers who focused on Islamic studies.”—Publishers Weekly
“The great names of the second phase [of reinterpretation of Islam] are known, among them secular men of letters like Montesquieu and Voltaire. The scholars of the first phase, however, are forgotten. The fascinating study of the American historian Alexander Bevilacqua studies these figures. Many of them were, unlike the Enlighteners after them, pious Christians or even clerics. They engaged on the basis of their faith with Islam, out of curiosity and as scholars. Thus Bevilacqua draws the portrait of a ‘Republic of Letters’ dedicated to the Islamic-Arabic world that was not known until now.”—Rainer Hermann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“In this passionate, lucid, and enjoyable book, Bevilacqua successfully pursues the connection between intellectual history and material history of books, showing how new texts and new information changed the traditional understanding of Islam. And in so doing he considers, rightly, the birth of the republic of Arabic letters to have been an episode in the history of the global Enlightenment or, at least, ‘a significant chapter in the long and painstaking global advance of philological learning and interreligious knowledge.’”—Franco Giudice, Il Sole 24 Ore
“Fascinating, eloquent, and learned, The Republic of Arabic Letters reveals a world later lost, in which European scholars studied Islam with a sense of affinity and respect. With deep research and insight, Alexander Bevilacqua delivers a powerful reminder of the ability of scholarship to transcend cultural divides, and the capacity of human minds to accept differences without denouncing them.”—Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
“Among the many things produced by the Enlightenment we must now include a vast expansion of European scholarly engagement with Arabic and Islam. That engagement shaped much of how future Christians and Muslims would think about each other and themselves. Alexander Bevilacqua’s learned and luminous The Republic of Arabic Letters is both a recovery of a fascinating moment in intellectual history, and an exploration of the conditions of thought in our own time.”—David Nirenberg, author of Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today
Harvard University Press: Hardcover | Paperback
Arabic Translation: Jarrous Press
Turkish Translation: Yeditepe Yayınevi
Italian Translation: Ulrico Hoepli Editore