When Islam Met the Enlightenment

When it appeared in Paris in 1697, Barthélemy d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale was the most ambitious and comprehensive European reference work on the Islamic world ever produced. For the first time, European readers had access to the writings of dozens of Arabic, Persian and Turkish authors, as well as more than 8,000 alphabetically arranged articles relating to the history and culture of Muslim peoples. As Alexander Bevilacqua, an academic based at Williams College in Massachusetts, argues in The Republic of Arabic Letters, the Bibliothèque orientale was “one of the crowning achievements of European Islamic scholarship at the end of the seventeenth century”.D'Herbelot's encyclopedia exhibited the kind of pioneering research that transformed European understanding of Islam and the Arab world. Scholars such as d'Herbelot represented what Bevilacqua calls the “Arabic-reading Enlightenment” — a cast of bibliophiles that also included George Sale, translator of the Koran; Simon Ockley, historian of the Arab conquests; and many others. Rather than their more famous 18th-century descendants such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, it was these men of letters who really started to alter Europeans' knowledge of Muslim lands as they tirelessly amassed, translated, interpreted and anthologised Islamic texts.