Abstract
Gibbon contemplated the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 with considerable disdain and some personal uneasiness. To his stepmother he wrote: “[a]s the old story of Religion has [caused] most formidable tumults in this town, and as they will of course seem much more formidable at the distance of an hundred [miles], you may not be sorry to hear that I am perfectly safe and well: my known attachment to the Protestant Religion has most probably saved me.” (Letters-G,II, 242, original italics) The rioters, perhaps along with Hume’s literary assistance, had conjured up in Gibbon’s imagination the ghost of Oliver Cromwell. “[F]orty thousand Puritans such as they might be in the time of Cromwell have started out of their graves.” (Letters-G, II, 243) Gibbon had a new, very practical reason to celebrate his recantation of Catholicism of many years past.
I must admit that I have not noticed among the Christians that lively faith in their religion which one finds in Mussulmen. With them there are great distances from profession to belief from belief to conviction, and from conviction to practice. Their religion is less a subject of sanctification than a subject for dispute, which is open to everyone. Courtiers, soldiers, even women rise up against ecclesiastic, demanding that they prove to them what they have resolved not to believe.
Montesquieu
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References
For a short, fascinating account of the Gordon riots, see, Dobson Austin, “The Gordon Riots,” in Twentieth Century Essays and Address, ed. William A. J. Archbold (1927; reprint, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970) 82–104.
R. W. Southern, Western Views of /.slam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3.
Bemard Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman, 70. “[A] point which Gibbon is at some pains to impress upon his readers is the stability and permanence of the Islamic faith in the form in which it was founded by the Prophet—that is to say, it is free from subsequent and local accretions such as have overlaid the message of Christ and retains its pristine content and character. In this, of course, he was greatly mistaken, as he could have ascertained by some attention to Islam as practiced in various parts of the Islamic world in his own day. Linked with this is his insistence that Islam is a faith with few dogmas and without priesthood or church and, therefore, by implication much freer and better than Christianity, which is heavily burdened by all these. This is slightly better than a half truth.”
See Jemielity, “Gibbon among the Aeolists, 168–69, ”The application to Christianity of the evaluative norms and principles of the General Observations and of chapter 2 is a familiar story. Less familiar, perhaps, is the consistency and degree to which Gibbon thinks comparably about religions other than Christianity and Judaism in the Decline and Fall. Any religion introduced into the history, first of all, appears always for the same reason: because its fortunes somehow influenced the fortunes of the Roman Empire. The religions that enter the history also permit Gibbon to provide a comparative study of the civil and ecclesiastical orders, which so often intersect in the course of his narrative.“
John Tolan, introduction to Medieval Christian of Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1996), xii.
Shaul Bakhash, review of Islam and the West, by Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books 40, no. 16 {October 7, 1993): 43.
R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 189–90.
Tolan, introduction to Medieval Christian of Perceptions of Islam,xi. ’Southern, Western Views of Islam, 5.
Bakhash, review of Islam and the West, 43.
Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 61.
Gibbon’s use of “Saracens” is consistent with an earlier European Christian practice that showed a preference for names that were ethnic rather than religious. As Bernard Lewis points out, “Saracen” is obscure in its origin but is certainly ethnic since it is pre-Christian and pre-Islamic. Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 61. Also, Tolan, introduction to Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, xi, notes that few Christian writers used the terms “Islam” or “Muslim.” They preferred ethnic or linguistic designations such as “Saracen,” “Hararene,” “Arab,” “Turk,” etc.
Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 62–66.
Bernard Lewis, “The State of Middle Eastern Studies,” American Scholar 48 (summer 1979):365.
Lewis writes: “[t]he Renaissance initiated an entirely new phase in the development of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in the Western world. Perhaps the most important new factor was a kind of intellectual curiosity that is still unique in human history. For until that time, no comparable desire had been felt and no effort made to study and understand alien, still less hostile, civilizations.”
Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 65.
See Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 63–4. Gellner makes note of Gibbon’s shortcoming of insight here. Gibbon’s contemporary, Adam Ferguson, was wiser than Gibbon: Gibbon thinks that civilization is advanced enough or strong enough to repel barbarianism from without. Ferguson realizes that the roots of barbarism are in civilization. This perhaps is a failure of Gibbon to apply consistently enough his view of mankind as a “degenerate race of beings.”
Southern, Western Views of Islam,13.
McCloy, Gibbon’s Antagonism to Christianity, 144–145.
Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 70.
Lewis writes: “[t]he honor and reputation of Islam and its founder were protected in Europe neither by social pressure nor by legal sanction, and they thus served as an admirable vehicle for antireligious and anti-Christian polemic. Gibbon occasionally accomplished this purpose by attacking Islam while meaning Christianity, more frequently by praising Islam as an oblique criticism of Christian usage, belief, and practice. Much of his praise would not be acceptable in a Muslim country.”
W. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 106.
Car1 Brocklemann, History of the Islamic Peoples, trans. Joel Carmichael and Moshe Perlmann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 36, says that: “Muhammad’s religion must not, of course be judged only by the Qur’anChwr(133). His intellectual world was his own only to the smallest degree; it stemmed mostly from Judaism and Christianity, and was skilfully adapted by him to the religious needs of his people. In doing this he raised them to a higher level of intuitive belief and moral sensitivity.”
With the use of this terminology Gibbon carries on the Christian tradition of falsely attributing to Muslims a worship of Muhammad analogous to the Christian worship of Christ. See Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 61. “Then, by false analogy, they [Christians] called them Muhammadans and their religion Muhammadanism, on the totally false assumption that Muslims worshiped Muhammad as Christians worshiped Christ.”
See Bernard Lewis, The Arabs In History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 20. In pre-Islam, “the religion of southern Arabia was polytheistic and bears a general, though not detailed, resemblance to those of the other ancient Semitic peoples.”
Daniel Norman, Islam and the West. The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960), 79.
Daniel, Islam and the West 107.
“ Thus, Catholic polemicists accused Calvin of Islamizing tendencies, and Calvinists in Geneva tried to bring the same charges against Servetus.” Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 72, n.3.
See John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 84. “Islam is scripturalist, egalitarian, and very strictly monotheist. It is also very simpleChwr(133). There are no mysteries needed to be interpreted by a formal ecclesiastical organization.”
Lewis, “Gibbon on Muhammad,” 72, notes a significant manifestation of ignorance on Gibbon’s part with this statement. ‘“Mahamot,’ of course, is here used metonymically for the empire of the Caliphs. Even so, the statement is remarkably inaccurate. Both Christianity and Rome survived the advent of Islam; the Qur’an did not become a book until some time after Muhammad’s death; only a left-handed swordsman could brandish both, since no Muslim would hold the sacred book in the hand reserved for unclean purposes—and most important of all, there was a third choice, the payment of tribute and acceptance of Muslim rule.”
Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, 50, makes an comparative observation about Christianity and Islam that is resonant with Gibbon’s presentation. Islam is at its center enthusiastic and thus puritan and scripturalist. At its edges is variant and ritualistic superstition. Christianity is the reverse; superstitious at its center and enthusiastic at the margins. It was this Christian mix, Gellner argues, that produced secularization.
Gellner, Anthropology and Politics, 109–110, refers both to Hume and Gibbon in a discussion of how models of explanation have developed from the magical to the religious to the scientific. Hume and Gibbon recognized, claims Gellner, that pagan religion was primarily sociological and functional. Christianity as an axiological religion moves away from function and toward theorizing, and bad theorizing at that.
Southern, Western Views of Islam, 7.
Daniel, Islam and the West, 148. “It must be said that it was usual for Christians to allow themselves a rather purple rendering of the gardens and precious metals of Paradise, though usually not of the virgins so beloved of later romanticism. There is a genuine latinisation here, that in one aspect recalls the lapidaries, and, in another, some of the background of romance, the legend of the Reine Sybille, a hint of the native pagan idyll.”
See, Daniel, Islam and the West, particularly Chapter III, “The Life of Muhammad: Polemic Biography” for the details of the interpretation that Christian polemicists put on the life of Muhammad including his “immoral” sexuality. “The picture of the licentious hypocrite took shape inevitably. What clerical writers, always aware of the problems of moral and pastoral theology, most feared was the doctrinal justification of sexual acts which are already attractive to men who believed them to be wrong. This explains the virulence of educated Christian feeling about Muhammad, which always excluded charity and usually excluded the complete truth.” (102)
Daniel, Islam and the West, 274.
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Foster, S.P. (1997). Attacking Christianity: By Way of Islam. In: Melancholy Duty. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales D’histoire des Idées, vol 154. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2235-3_10
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