For Lust of Knowing (17 page)

Erpenius was an industrious scholar and produced editions of many classic works of Arabic literature, to serve as a basis for teaching. Among his discoveries was the
Geography
of Abu al-Fida that was later to be worked on by Greaves. Erpenius was able to make use of the Arabic manuscripts assembled by Postel (some of which were
in Leiden and others in Heidelberg) in order to produce the
Historia Saracenica
of 1625. This history relied heavily on a chronicle by a thirteenth-century Coptic Christian, al-Makin. Although al-Makin was a Christian, his chronicle was mostly compiled from earlier Muslim sources, so Erpenius made what was in effect a Muslim version of Muslim history available in Europe for the first time. However, Erpenius's
magnum opus
was his
Grammatica Arabica
, published in Leiden in 1613. In this, the first proper grammar of Arabic in a European language, he struggled to impose an unsuitable Latinate grammatical structure on the usages of classical Arabic. Erpenius's grammar was reworked by Silvestre de Sacy in the early nineteenth century, then revised by the Norwegian Karl Caspari in 1848, and Caspari was revised in 1859 by William Wright as
A Grammar of the Arabic Language
, which remains a standard work to this day. Orientalism in the seventeenth century was a rancorous and competitive field, rife with backbiting and plagiarism, in which Erpenius was entirely at home. He was outspokenly dismissive of the work of others.
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After Erpenius's untimely death of the plague, his star pupil Golius (JacobGool) (1596–1667) succeeded him as Professor. Golius had a background in philosophy and theology and he had studied mathematics and astronomy before switching to Orientalism. He held the Chair of Mathematics and, like Greaves, he believed that Western mathematicians still had much to learn from the Arabs. He travelled widely in North Africa and the Middle East where he hunted for manuscripts. In Morocco he had served the Dutch embassy as an engineer. He spent time in Morocco and it was there that he located a copy of Ibn Khallikan's thirteenth-century biographical dictionary and other works identified by Leo Africanus as key sources for understanding Arabthought and literature. In 1636 Golius published the Arabic text of Ibn ‘Arabshah's life of Tamerlane, the
‘Aja'ib al-Maqdur
. (This was to become a standard text for teaching Arabic throughout Europe and many students must have cursed Golius, for Ibn ‘Arabshah wrote in a monstrously florid and opaque style.) Whereas Raphelengius's dictionary was not much more than a glorified word list, Golius's Arabic–Latin dictionary, the
Lexicon Arabico–Latinum
(1653), became obsolete only in the nineteenth century.
Golius followed Erpenius in basing his dictionary upon the great medieval Arab dictionaries, supplemented by Turkish–Arabic dictionaries. (Even so, as Pococke noted, there were still serious gaps in Golius's dictionary.)

Golius disliked the subordination of the study of Arabic to that of Hebrew and Syriac and preferred to study Turkish and Persian. He also studied other languages, including Chinese. Golius was a genius and he revelled in it. He quarrelled with his rivals, disparaged their scholarship and obstructed their access to key manuscripts. He acknowledged only Pococke as an intellectual equal. Like the great Scaliger before him, Golius considered teaching to be beneath his dignity. It was perhaps partly because of this that when he died in 1677 the sequence of great Leiden Orientalists came to a temporary halt.
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The fortunes of Orientalism in Leiden would revive briefly with the appointment of Albert Schultens to a professorship in 1729.

Catholic Orientalism, such as it was, owed little to the advances being made by Orientalists in the Protestant north. In Rome and other Catholic centres there seems to have been less interest in making use of Arabic manuscripts for scientific purposes. However, Catholics were just as interested in making contact with Eastern Christians – especially the Maronites, Lebanese Christians in communion with Rome, for whom a college had been founded by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome in 1584. Maronite scholars, native speakers in Arabic and Syriac, assisted in the publication of a handful of books printed in Arabic by the Medici Press.
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However, new translations of the Qur'an were produced by Catholics with the aim of assisting missionaries to the Muslim lands, or alternatively fuelling anti-Muslim polemic. The translation of the Qur'an into French in 1647 by André du Ryer, the former French vice-consul in Alexandria, had an introduction that declared that the translation had been produced for the use of missionaries, so that they might have material for their missions of conversion. This was a traditional excuse used by those who wished to avoid censorship and ecclesiastical disapproval of any translation of the
Qur'an. The risks involved in publishing any such translation were considerable, but so were the profits, as the Qur'an was widely regarded as a kind of black book, or Satanic text, and there were always readers eager for such novelties.

In Du Ryer's case, it seems that his real aim was to produce a readable translation that would make the French public aware of one of the glories of Arabic literature. Like Galland who translated
The Thousand and One Nights
half a century later, Du Ryer set upon improving the barbarousness of the Arabic by turning it into a stately and courtly French. ‘I have made the Prophet speak French,' he declared. Du Ryer's was the first complete translation of the Qur'an since the Middle Ages and the first translation ever into a vernacular. He made extensive use of Muslim
tafsir
literature to elucidate the difficulties in the text of the Qur'an. However, he had to work without a decent Arabic dictionary or grammar. His translation was inevitably rather inaccurate and those who produced later translations were careful to rubbish the work of their predecessor. Marracci claimed that Du Ryer had depended on unreliable advisers. There were ‘mistakes in every page' according to George Sale. As Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard put it in their study of the life and works of Du Ryer: ‘European Arabists, like most scholars, have seldom distinguished themselves by their charitable treatment of their colleagues, and Du Ryer was the victim of their malice.'
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Despite Du Ryer's declaration of pious Christian intentions, the publication gave rise to a great deal of protest as people accused him of furthering the interests of Islam by publicizing its false doctrines. Even so his scandalous translation sold very well and was itself translated into English, Dutch, German and Russian.

Similar accusations were made of the next translation, this time into Latin, though this was in every respect a superior work of scholarship. Ludovico Marracci (1612–1700) was a member of the Regular Clergy of the Mother of God and Pope Innocent XI's confessor. Marracci taught himself Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaean and Arabic. He was one of those who had worked on the
Biblia Sacra Arabica
(1671), a translation of the Bible into Arabic, before going on to produce a four-volume attack on the Qur'an, the
Prodromus ad refutationem Alcorani
(1691), as a prelude to the publication in 1698 of
Alcorani textus universus
, a volume which included the Arabic text and
Marracci's translation into Latin. The Latin text, a literal translation, was accompanied by lengthy and hostile annotations. Islam ‘totally excludes those mysteries of our faith'. Islam was destined to flourish because the world was full of fools and people naturally inclined to evil. In that respect it did not differ greatly from Protestantism, which Marracci viewed as essentially a variant form of Islam.

Although he was savage in his denunciation of Muslim doctrines, the hostility was not founded upon ignorance. He had spent forty years studying what he regarded as a damned text and his annotations drew heavily upon the works of Muslim commentators. Despite his ferociously hostile commentary, the Pope at first forbade him to publish the text. In the seventeenth century it was thought dangerous to study Islam. Yet no such prejudice applied to studying the pagan doctrines and rituals of ancient Greece and Rome. Marracci's translation was to be much drawn upon by George Sale in the next century, and it is notable that Sale's citation of Muslim commentators seems to be restricted to those already cited by Marracci. Apart from Islamic matters, Marracci's other speciality was biographies of saintly nuns.
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It must be stressed that only a tiny handful of scholars had any interest in Arabic at all. In this period the learned world at large was much more interested in Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, in the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Prior to the sixteenth century, it had been widely believed that civilization and language was Egyptian in origin. Thereafter the focus shifted to ancient Greece as the source of European civilization, while most scholars accepted that Hebrew was the primal language, from which all other languages, including ancient Egyptian, were descended.

In the seventeenth century the torch of mad linguistics passed from Guillaume Postel to Athanasius Kircher (1601–80), the omnivorously studious and bizarre Jesuit thinker, who was described by one of his critics as ‘the most learned of all madmen'.
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Kircher taught Oriental languages in Würzburg before settling at the Jesuit College in Rome in 1635. There he was bullied by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peresc, an aristocratic antiquarian who collected mummies and who had acquired some Egyptian papyri, into doing researches into Pharaonic Egyptian and Coptic (the language of the descendants of the ancient Egyptians). Seventeenth-century Rome had more than a dozen
obelisks that provided material for him to work on. His
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
(1652–5) was an attempt, backed up by a knowledge of Coptic, to interpret Pharaonic hieroglyphs as a Hermetic language that embodied mystical and philosophical truths. By ‘Hermetic' Kircher meant that the language had literally been devised by Hermes Trismegistus and was organized in such a way that its ideograms represented the fundamental metaphysical forces operative in the real world. (Kircher obstinately regarded Hermes as a historical figure of great antiquity, despite Isaac Casaubon's earlier demonstration that the Hermetic literature had been forged in late antiquity.) Kircher's ‘decipherment' of the hieroglyphs allowed him to present an exciting picture of ancient Egyptian culture that was both quite mystical and utterly false. However, at least he had guessed the hieroglyphs to be a form of writing; some of his predecessors had regarded them as merely decorative.
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He presented the ancient Egyptian Hermetic revelation as a prefiguration of the Christian revelation.

Another of his wonderfully strange books, the
Turris Babel
(1679), was a study of the history of the world, the architecture of the ill-fated Tower of Babel and the curse of the confusion of tongues. When Adam named each beast with its real Hebrew name, this was not an arbitrary act, but a cabalistic operation that disclosed the names of the beasts by permuting the Hebrew letters so as to define their real natures. All the world's surviving languages were degenerate renditions of the original Hermetic mysteries as revealed in Hebrew. Kircher held that Chinese ideograms, with their precise and fairly easily discoverable meanings, were inferior to the Egyptian hieroglyphs from which they derived. As for the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he mistakenly believed that they were pictographs illustrating higher theological mysteries. Kircher, like Postel, believed in linguistic unification as a prerequisite for world peace. He wrote also on a diverse range of subjects, including codes and code-breaking, music, Atlantis, bird-song, Noah's Ark, magic lanterns, volcanoes, China, mathematics and pyramidology. Forty-four of his books and some two thousand letters survive. He devised a vomiting machine and eavesdropping statues, as well as a kind of piano powered by screeching cats. He also helped Bernini erect the obelisk in the Piazza Navona and he taught the principles of perspective to Poussin. Kircher's famous cabinet of curiosities,
the Museo Kircheriano in the Roman College of the Vatican, reflected his diverse interests: Egyptological curios, stuffed animals, odd stones, sunspots, automata, microscopes, rhinoceros horns and medical anomalies. (The remains of this collection can be found today in Rome's Museo Preistorico ed Etnografico L. Pigorini.) Kircher was one of the last scholars to aspire to know everything. The philosopher Leibniz (1646–1716) was probably the last.

Kircher's overweening fascination with the esoteric, bizarre and monstrous meant that his publications, though they touched on almost all fields of research, were usually marginal to mainstream scholarship on those areas and that was certainly true of his contribution to the study of Arabic and Islam. Pietro della Vale, the Roman traveller in the Arablands, Iran and India, provided Kircher with the manuscript of a Coptic–Arabic dictionary, and since knowledge of Arabic was a necessary precondition for the study of Coptic, Kircher acquired some rudiments of that language. His daft views on the history of the pyramids and how they were built by Hermes Trismegistus were probably based on Arabic sources. Kircher seems to have produced a (now lost) translation from Arabic and Hebrew of a work by Avicenna on medicinal herbs. Even so Kircher did not find Arabic to be particularly interesting. Also, though he was tolerant, even appreciative, of most religions, he detested Islam and what he believed to be its promises of sensual bliss in the afterlife. More generally, much of Kircher's Oriental expertise and research materials had been provided by Jesuit missions in distant parts, especially in China, but the Jesuits had failed to establish themselves in the Arab lands. Kircher was primarily a Sinologist and Egyptologist. In the twentieth century one particular aspect of his arcane thinking has been revived by Martin Bernal in
Black Athena
(1987), in which Kircher's belief in the Egyptian sources of Greek wisdom has been resurrected and updated by Bernal in a highly controversial form.
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