History of Islam in German Thought by Almond Ian;

Author:Almond, Ian; [IAN ALMOND]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

From Leonidas to Alexander—from Scipio to Trajan—from Charlemagne to Frederick the II; and then the history of the Caliphate; these are definitely the highlights in cosmopolitan attention.62

In the jigsaw-puzzle world of the early Schlegel’s many teleologies, Islam fits. Massive, millennia-stretching ideas such as the novel, cultural openness or the concept of mythology appear to connect the Muslim world to its nearest neighbours with little or no difficulty; Alexander the Great is found in the same epos as Mohammed; a history of the “Romance from Moses to Mohammed” is given brief consideration, whilst Islam, Judaism and Christianity are endowed with “a systematic unity”.63 History, in this sense, lends a chronicler’s homogeneity to Islam, gives it a certain compatibility with other cultures and civilizations, one which admittedly drains it of uniqueness and limits it to a specific function within a specific design, but at the same time frees it from traditional prejudices and allows it to be reconfigured in relation to fresh, different reference points—German monarchs, Greek heroes, figures in the Bible, Portuguese poets and even Scottish kings. When we find, on one page of Schlegel’s 1802 notebooks, Mohammed in the very middle of a host of names to include in a series of “epics” (featuring, amongst others, Christ, Macbeth, St. Sebastian and Richard III),64 it is difficult not to wonder what radically different approaches to Islam might have developed if the trajectory of Schlegel’s thought had not taken such a Catholic, conservative turn.

In a curious way, the historical importance of the Muslim world in Schlegel’s early notebooks persists in his later research, even if this centrality has now acquired a diabolical significance—Islam no longer as an important telos in the unfolding of human development, but rather as a species of apocalyptic signpost, warning of the end ahead. In terms of historiography, it is interesting to see how the form of Schlegel’s historical exegeses remains the same, but this time filled with a very different content. The Arabs are still seen as a transitional point “from the old world to the new”, a key moment in the mutation of human history, even if this epochal hinge is now a step not in the development but rather in the devolution of the human spirit.65 In this sense, Islam’s function as an epoch-demarcator still remains intact—even in 1812, Mohammed is still considered to have “begun a new age in Asia”66—but now operates within a history of error and gradually encroaching darkness, a melancholy chronicle of how the present-day catastrophe of reformation, revolution and disbelief came to be. Unsurprisingly, Schlegel’s later remarks tend to link together Mohammed, Luther, Robespierre and Napoleon as key sequential figures in this cumulative subversion of the one true order. His description of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt as a “relapse back into the Turkish”67—an essentially Oriental spirit of revolution finally returning to its ‘Mohammedan’ origins—shows, perhaps more than any other remark, how a vein of subversion running through Mecca, Wittenberg, Paris and Istanbul eventually came to dominate Schlegel’s later understanding of history as a series of temporary, diabolically inspired setbacks.

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