ISLAM AND THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "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 reconstruct this process, revealing the influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the secular Enlightenment understanding of Islam and its written traditions." [] "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 commitment of a select group of Christians. The authors cast aside inherited views and bequeathed a new understanding of Islam to the modern West.").