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.          

 

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