Pea 1772–1830. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
206 Book Reviews / Oriens 41 (2013) 185–212 Giovanni Bonacina, Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. I wahhâbiti in prospettiva euro- pea 1772–1830. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2011. xxv + 245 pp. ISBN 978 88 495 2171 9 Te habit of equating Christian ‘heretics’ with Muslims and Islam with Christian ‘heresies’ has a long history in the West. Te denial of the divinity of Christ led to the association of Muslims with Arians, and the implicit rejection of the Trin- ity incurred the identification of anti-Trinitarians and Socinians with Muslims. Afer the appearance in 1543 of Teodor Bibliander’s edition of the Qurʾan in Robert of Ketton’s Latin translation, the Catholic Church accused the Protes- tants of sympathies for Islam while the Protestants found numerous points of community between Islam and the Church of Rome. Tat a similar fate should have been reserved for the Wahhabis was perhaps inevitable, even if times had changed and religious dissent had lost its more negative shades. European reac- tions to the discovery of the new movement are an enthralling chapter in the his- tory of ideas. Tey have been charted comprehensively, with precision and intel- ligence, by Giovanni Bonacina in his Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. Bonacina’s account of shifing European attitudes to the Wahhabis starts with the publi- cation of Carsten Niebuhr’s Beschreibung von Arabien in 1772, the first occasion on which the movement was described in a European text. It ends with Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys issued posthumously in 1830, the first truly objective account of the Wahhabis by a man who had actually met them. Niebuhr, the sole survivor of the Danish expedition to Yemen which set out in 1761, managed to assemble an astonishing variety of informants in the course of a journey which took him as far east as India. Bonacina mentions merchants, schol- ars, renegade Christians and chance travelling companions, and to this one might add the members of the Jewish community who supplied him with information when he was in Muscat. It was from a motley selection of sources, probably on his return journey from India when he was travelling in Persia and Mesopotamia, that Niebuhr derived his information about the Wahhabis—a movement, he said, that rejected the invocation of saints and prophets and held that no sacred book could have been written under divine dictation. Te religion of the Wah- habis, his readers might deduce, was altogether independent of written revelation and, at odds with Islam, bore a strong resemblance to Deism. Such an idea aroused great sympathy in certain circles in the West. Volney, for example, drew, in his Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte of 1787, on Niebuhr’s descrip- tion as well as on other reports in order to interpret the Wahhabis as a force of purity, rationality, humanity, tolerance, and simplicity which could lead to the collapse of Islam. His version was confirmed by the French naturalist Guillaume Antoine Olivier, but slightly modified by the English traveller William George © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/18778372-13410109 Book Reviews / Oriens 41 (2013) 185–212 207 Browne who questioned the extent of Wahhabi tolerance and emphasised their observance of Islamic precepts. In the meantime speculations developed as to the true origins of the Wah- habis. Were they not, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in 1805, descended from the dreaded Qarmatians of the ninth century who, in turn, had generated the Assas- sins, the Druzes, and numerous other sinister sects? At the same time, however, two French consuls who had followed the triumphant advance of the Wahhabis devoted more than an incidental paragraph to the movement. Between 1804 and 1810 Jean-François Rousseau, consul in Basra, presented the Wahhabis as Islamic reformers, while Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez, a veteran of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign who had been appointed consul general in Baghdad and published his Histoire des Wahabis in 1810, acknowledged the revolutionary quality of the new movement which he believed was due to revive Islam and unite the Arabian peninsula. Afer the sack of Kerbala in 1802 and the invasion of Mecca in 1803 and 1805 it was clear that the Wahhabis were a force to be reckoned with. Te strategic importance of the Arabian peninsula on the route to India made them of growing interest to both the French and the English. Various Englishmen had produced reports on them over the years—Harford Jones Brydges, the resident in Baghdad, in 1798, Edward Scott Waring of the East India Company in 1802, John Lewis Reinaud, the envoy to Diriya in 1805, Lord Valentia on his return from India and Ethiopia in 1809—but hardly any of these or earlier authors had any direct knowledge of the Wahhabis. Tis was to change with three travellers who set out for the heart of the Arabian peninsula and adopted Muslim identities. Tere was the German Ulrich Jasper Seetzen who, in Mecca in 1809, could observe the Wahhabi attempts to reorganise society according to norms inspired by the Prophet. Another was the Catalan Domingo Badía y Leblich who performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1807 and saw the Wahhabis as heroic conquerors convinced that they alone were the true Muslims and who, he hoped, would bring Islam back to its original rationality. And the third was Burckhardt, Swiss by birth and English by adoption, who, in Upper Egypt in 1814, met the Sharif of Mecca Galib exiled afer the Wahhabi takeover. In contrast to Seetzen and Badía, Burckhardt observed that the Wahhabis were by no means unpopular in the Hijaz. He witnessed Muhammad ʿAli’s victory over them but himself retained a deep respect for their devotion to Islam and a regret that they should have been so maligned for reasons which were largely political. Wahhabism, he believed, could justly be termed the Protestantism, or indeed the Puritanism, of Islam. Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia is a fascinating book which thoroughly deserves to be translated into English in order to have a wider circulation. Giovanni Bonacina, a historian of philosophy, provides illuminating analyses both of the.