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Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840

Humberto Garcia

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A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century.

Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French...

A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century.

Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty.

This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.

Reviews

Reviews

Garcia's book gives valuable new insight and opens up a fascinating new direction into an already heavily mined field.

In this important and fascinating new book, Humberto Garcia makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the ways that English author conceptualized Islam in the long eighteenth century.

Based on an analysis of both primary and secondary sources, this is an informative, well- researched and highly readable book. Consisting of around 100 pages of notes and references alone, it is a highly recommended reading especially for students of English literature, history and comparative religion.

A tour de force in substance and argument, Humberto Garcia's signal study uncovers a surprisingly coeval narrative with Enlightenment ideals and demonstrates in painstaking detail the multifarious receptions and assimilations of Islam into English constitutional and nationalist discourse. This book will make an impressive difference to the field of post-colonial inquiry.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
368
ISBN
9781421403533
Illustration Description
5 b&w illus.
Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Islam in the Eighteenth Century
1. A True Protestant Mahometan: Henry Stubbe, Ottoman Hungary, and the Siege of Vienna
2. Letters from a

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Islam in the Eighteenth Century
1. A True Protestant Mahometan: Henry Stubbe, Ottoman Hungary, and the Siege of Vienna
2. Letters from a Female Deist: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Muslim Women, and Freethinking Feminism
3. In Defense of the Ancient Mughal Constitution: Edmund Burke, India, and the Warren Hastings Trial
4. Ali Bonaparte in Hermetic Egypt: The Colonial Politics of Walter Savage Landor's Gebir
5. The Flight and Return of Mohammed: Plotting Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and Robert Southey's Unitarian Epic
6. A Last Woman's Eschatology: The Avenging Turks in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
Epilogue: Postcolonial Reflections
Appendix A: Outline of "MOHAMMED"
Appendix B: Southey's Sketch of "Mohammed"
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Author Bio
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Humberto Garcia

Humberto Garcia is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
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