GOETHE ON THE ARABS,
MUHAMMAD, ISLAM
How the German poet and thinker J.W. Goethe came in
1819 to write on the Arabs, Muhammad and Islam is perhaps a subject for a
literary magazine rather than a political Internet site like our Middle East
Desk. To give his observations the context they need and to show their
relevance to an understanding of the Arabs in our time a brief account is
called for of the background of Goethe’s entirely unpolitical and dispassionate
interest in the subject.
In Goethe's lifetime (1749 - 1832)
the Orient was a popular location for literary and artistic works of various
kinds. This intellectual fashion originated, like others before and after it,
in France and was referred to in literary circles in Europe at the time as "turquerie".
Turkey was the nearest Eastern
country; its rulers, the sultans, were best known to the West and regarded as
typical for “the East” altogether.
Montesqieu dressed up in such Oriental disguise his “Lettres Persannes",
political and social comments on conditions in contemporary France (partly also
to disarm the royal censor in Paris). Mozart wrote enchanting opera music to a
lame libretto under the title "Abduction from the Seraglio" that he
was sure would appeal to the audiences because of its exotic flavour. Rossini,
Carl Maria von Weber and other composers made similar choices.
Goethe, then
70, sought a suitable scenery for a string of brief poems into which he could
cast the wisdom of his old age laced with the lyrical ardour of his youthful
heart, stirred by an encounter with a pretty and brilliant young woman he had
met in Frankfurt. His choice fell on the Orient, partly because it was the
current literary fashion, but more because he felt that the contemplative and
lyrical frame of mind which Western readers then associated with “the
mysterious East” suited him well as the most suitable platform for his poetry.
Where Goethe
differed however from most poets, writers and composers of his time was that he
took pains even with his stage props. Living in a small town in Germany where
his chances of meeting Orientals were scant, he spent some time studying the
East by reading old and new texts of and on the Orient, among them the Koran
and Arab poetry, then available in translations into European languages, and
once again the Bible. He recorded his impressions and reflections on this
exotic literature and called them “Annotations and Essays on the West-Eastern
Divan", the title he had given to the string of Orient-flavored lyrical
poems he was writing.
Comparing Arab poems of
the pre-Islamic period with those written during and after Muhammad’s lifetime, he was struck by the sudden and
drastic change of their spirit in the powerful wake of the new faith. What
follows is an impromptu translation of some relevant quotations from these
"Annotations and Essays". (We tried to render as best we could the
precise and firm, but rather dry and stiff prose of the German original).
Commenting on the little
that has survived of pre-Islamic poetry (most of the texts were expunged as
“godless” by Muslim fanatics and lost) Goethe compared what he rated the
“outstanding poems” of the pre-Islamic period with those written after
Muhammad. The former he saw as “pointing to a nomadic nation, rich in herds,
bellicose, troubled by conflicts between its various tribes. Presented are: strong feelings of fellowship for
members of the tribe, a craving for honour, courage, unquenchable thirst for
revenge, tempered by grief, love, alms-giving, self-sacrifice, all without
bounds. These poems give us an adequate idea of the high level of attainments
of the tribe of Koreish to which Muhammad himself belonged”.
On
post-Islamic poetry Goethe observed that “one could describe its character as
gloomy, even bleak, raging, revengeful, saturated with vindictiveness.” The new poetry, he thought, reflected
the spirit of Muhammad’s teachings “which cast over the Arab mind a gloomy cover
of religion and managed to block every prospect of a tidier
advancement...."
Goethe commented
also on other outstanding literary creations of the Arab nation in its country
of origin, especially on the Koran. The foregoing extracts were quoted here for
the poet's intuitive evaluation on what he called a “blocking of the
"prospect of advancement" by "the gloomy cover of
religion". About a hundred
years later the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920), discovered, on the
basis of statistical evidence, that religion had a decisive and formative
influence on the education, mentality and economic performance of a group, a
class, a nation. No common factor other than religion can explain why all
countries in which Islam is the dominant religion, from Indonesia to West
Africa without exception are patently lagging in industrial and economic growth
far behind Christian Western and non-Muslim East Asian countries, despite
many years of very high incomes of
the oil-rich Arab nations in the Middle East. Weber’s research results
established a new branch of sociology which he called “Religionssoziologie”.
Its scientific findings back what Goethe had arrived at by intuition and
literary criticism. In over fifty countries, nearly thirty of them non-Arab,
Islam is the dominant religion, and all share as this common feature of
economic and technological retardation.