2024 Volume 48 Pages 86-103
In this article, I explore how and why orientalist scholars in early modern Europe studied pre-Islamic Arab culture. To do so, this article focuses, at first, on Adriaan Reland’s De religione Mohammedica. While celebrated for his rejection of Christian prejudices against Islam, Reland’s interest in pre-Islamic Arab culture and its continuity to Islam has escaped scholarly attention. Yet, a closer examination of how Reland tried to trace the pre-Islamic Arab background of Islam opens a window onto the interplay between orientalist and antiquarian scholarship and early modern European understandings of Islam and Muḥammad.
Drawing extensively on Arab-Islamic authors, seventeenth-century scholars such as Edward Pococke and Levinus Warner had pointed out the continuity between pre-Islamic Arab customs and Islamic rites. Specifically, Warner’s manuscript treatise on pre-Islamic Arab customs, a Latin compilation of various Arab-Islamic sources, inspired Friedrich Spanheim, from whom Reland pieced Warner’s study of pre-Islamic Arab customs.
By looking into the pre-Islamic Arabs, scholars like Warner, Spanheim, and Reland revealed which customs were introduced to Islam, and in this sense, they traced historical origins of Islamic rites. Yet, such an attempt could have anti-Islamic implications. De Mohammedanismo ante Mohammed of David Mill, Reland’s successor at Utrecht, suggests that orientalist scholarship could also drive anti-Islamic polemics.
