In this time of Islamophobic rhetoric and policy, it is salutary to come across an academic study showing how much some early modern scholars of Arabic and Oriental languages came to appreciate Muslims, “not just for their religious piety and military prowess, but also for their music and architecture, their social customs, the heroism of their histories, and even for their poetry and for the beauty of the Qur'an”(1). In The Republic of Arabic Letters, Alexander Bevilacqua surveys select works of the members of “a working community of scholars of different languages, political affiliations, and traditions of belief” (3). This community included English, Italian, French, and other Arabists, from Oxford to Rome to Paris, and produced “a new history of Islam and the European Enlightenment.”

The second half of the seventeenth century and the early Enlightenment witnessed some change in the European attitude toward Islam. But the change was not as embracing of Islam as Bevilacqua makes it out to be. Take, for instance, Edward Pococke, who was the first Englishman to fill the chair of Arabic at Oxford, in 1636. Bevilacqua shows the importance of Pococke's Historia and uses it as evidence of English-Protestant neutrality toward Islam. Historia was, correctly, a major work of scholarship, but to evaluate Pococke's view of Islam based on this Latin tome without the Oxonian's Arabic translation of Grotius's ugly text on Islam and the Prophet (even after Pococke deleted many of Grotius's hostile passages) is inaccurate. If Pococke was part of a “republic of Arabic letters,” it was a missionary republic, as the endowment of the chair stated: “enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sitt in darkenesse”—and, more specifically, to Anglicanism and to the Stuart Crown. Pococke's Arabic translation of parts of the Book of Common Prayer in 1674, copies of which were sent to hoped-for converts in Istanbul and Aleppo, included invocations for God to protect “Sultan Qarlos” and his consort and his brother. Arabic was a means to a Christian-English end.

Or take Johann Hottinger, Pococke's contemporary and superior Orientalist, who published his study of Islam in 1651 and 1660 but referred to Muhammad as “pseudo-propheta” on every page of the section on the Prophet. Bevilacqua does not discuss him but mentions Humphrey Prideaux without discussing how often Prideaux's English account about the “Imposter” Muhammad in 1697 was reprinted and translated in eighteenth-century Europe and America. True, both Pococke and Prideaux refuted the fable about the pigeon inspiring the Prophet: but to study Arabic in order to convert Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews to Anglicanism, and to refute a Christian trope of bigotry at the same time as turning the Prophet into an “imposter” needs serious scrutiny in the light of the purported new image of Islam that this book presents. Strangely, Henry Stubbe, the first European writer who truly tried to present a new view of Islam, and praised the Qur'an fulsomely, barely receives attention in the book. True, he was not an Arabist, but neither was Prideaux.

Throughout, Bevilacqua cherry-picks texts and themes, sacrificing scholarly comprehensiveness to ideological appeal. While it is valuable to praise writers who sought to challenge misconceptions about Islam, it is important not to isolate them from the larger geopolitical context. Bevilacqua mentions his intention of discussing the political context of Islamic studies, but there is no reference to the ongoing Euro-Christian designs on the Islamic-Ottoman Empire. For instance, when d'Herbelot wrote his wonderful treatise, there were French plans—accompanied by maps—to conquer and dismantle the Ottoman Empire (for the seventeenth century, see T. G. Djuvara, Cent projets de partage de la Turquie (1281–1913) [1914], 190–239). The military and conversionary ideology that promoted—and still promotes—the study of Islam cannot be ignored: the study of Islam was not neutral, then or now.

It is unclear why Bevilacqua left out the Arab and Arabic-speaking members of the republic of letters. For him, the republic was an exclusionary European project. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Moroccans and Egyptians contributed to the Arabic scholarship of Thomas Erpenius, Jacob Golius, and others; Erpenius hosted Ahmad ibn Qasim in his house in 1613. At the same time, and far more influential, were the Maronite scholars from Lebanon: Jibrā’īl al-Ṣuhyūnī, Ibrāhīm al-Ḥāqilānī, Yūḥanna al-Ḥaṣrūnī and a score of others until the end of the eighteenth century. These men were native Arabic speakers in “the oriental center of all Europe” (Nasser Gemayel, Les échanges culturels entre les Maronites et l'Europe [1984], 71), and they engaged with some of the scholars whom Bevilacqua examines: al-Ṣuhyūnī knew Pococke and was praised by Brian Walton, and al-Ḥāqilānī controverted with John Selden—the bibliography of his writings fills ten pages in Gemayel's magisterial study. They wrote theological treatises in Latin, translated from and to Arabic, Syriac, and Latin, and participated in the making of the Paris Polyglot Bible. They moved between Paris, Rome, Madrid, North Africa, and Mount Lebanon, showing how much the republic of Arabic letters went far beyond the book's Eurocentric scope. Arabic, after all, was also the language of Eastern Christian scholars—a point completely ignored in the book.

Finally, do modern Arab scholars agree with Bevilacqua that the European members of his republic of Arabic letters did indeed introduce a new view of Islam? The controversy about them, first discussed in the three-volume study by the Arab scholar Najīb ‘Aqīqī of al-Mustashriqūn / The Orientalists (3rd ed., 1965), would have been valuable to include. It is unfortunate that Bevilacqua excluded Arabs from the Arabic republic of letters.