William Tyler
The Christian and Muslim Enlightenment

William Tyler | The Christian and Muslim Enlightenment | 05.20.24

- And welcome everyone. I’ve missed you over the last two weeks. By the way, it’s very warm here at five o'clock in southern England. I’ve got the window slightly open. If you hear a bird singing, it’s a black bird, which we have in the hedge just to my right, so I hope you won’t mind a black bird in the distance. I’ve always loved black birds because my grandfather, and we lived with my father’s parents when I was a child, as well as my mom and dad, and my grandfather used to imitate a black bird in a whistle. People don’t whistle today, but we always could find him because we listened and he whistled like a black bird, anyhow. I’m going to talk today about Christian and Arab or Islamic, well, I’ve called it enlightenment. You’ll see what I mean as we go through the story. For a long time, the view in the west has been that the Islamic world, in particular, that in the Middle East, under Ottoman rule, right up until the end of the First World War remained backward culturally, economically and politically well compared to Europe and in particular compared to Western Europe.

The argument runs along the lines that as Europe emerged from the Middle Ages with the advent of the Renaissance and later entered the Age of Enlightenment, the Ottoman Empire with its largely Arab population in the Middle East remained anchored in a mediaeval world. Today such views are being challenged by historians who begun examining what is called the Golden at the Arab Golden Age, as well as looking at the relationship between the European Renaissance and the European Enlightenment and the Ottoman Empire. Now, in practical terms, we shall come back to see in the 19th century next week in the 1890, so next week, and what in fact the Ottoman Empire did positively in terms of enlightenment issues. But today I’m looking with a broader brush than that, but I thought I better begin with some definitions of the three terms we’re using, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Arab Golden Age. Firstly, the Renaissance. Now the renaissance was a word coined long after it was over by historians and art historians in the 19th century.

The movement of the Renaissance is dated from the 14th to the 17th century in rough terms, beginning, starting in Italy and spreading across the continent of Europe. The Enlightenment is really the child of the Renaissance. A phrase that historians today use beginning in the late 17th century and extending into the early 18th century. Although some historians, and I think an increasing number date its end to the French Revolution of 1789. The phrase Enlightenment, unlike that of the Renaissance, was used contemporarily. People refer to it in whatever language they had in English. We refer to it as the Enlightenment. We associate the Renaissance, primarily if I asked you to write down what you associate it with, you would say art and architecture and you would be right. And if I said what you associate the Enlightenment with, you’ll probably say philosophy and politics. And in the first, you would think of Italians and in the second of French folk.

But that of course, as many of you know, is only half the story. There’s a much deeper renaissance and a much deeper enlightenment. And if you are Scottish, you’ll be very cross that I didn’t mention the Scottish Enlightenment. And if you are English, you’ll be very cross that I didn’t mention the Shakespearean Renaissance. And if you are American, you’ll be very cross. I didn’t mention the American Enlightenment, but those in broad terms, the Renaissance is art and architecture beginning in Italy and the Enlightenment is philosophy and politics, which hones in on France, not least because of the French Revolution of 1789. Now the Arab Golden Age predates both the European Renaissance and the later enlightenment. It’s usually dated. And like all these dates, historians or what shall we say, postgraduate historians take their doctorates in challenging the previous dates agreed. But it’s normally said to be from the early seventh century, AD, CE to the mid 13th century, therefore covering the crusading period of the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land against Islam.

This is term the Arab Golden Age was coined like the Renaissance in the 19th century. If I asked you what the key factors of the golden age of Arabism is, you might not be able to answer. Some of you might suggest Persian poetry. Well, that’s not Arab of course, but you might be right and Persian art. But actually the important part of it is mathematics and other sciences in general. But having said that, it only scratches the surface. You can think of architecture, horticulture and so on. So we have these three movements historically, chronologically, the Arab Golden Age focusing on maths and other sciences, not these medicine at a time when in Europe we were far behind that. Then we have the Renaissance in Europe, which led on to challenging all sorts of things, not least the Catholic Church in the Reformation.

And then we come to the age of the Enlightenment or as it was also known and well, I always think it makes more sense to think of it as the age of reason, the age of reason, the philosophical base of that, and its emphasis upon the individual that the Enlightenment has given us. Now, the old fashioned superior view of the West thinking of itself as superior to the East has increasingly been challenged by historians who study world history. World history is the story and study of how different societies have evolved, how they’ve interacted and influenced one another. And it goes much to the discipline of social anthropology. Why is this approach of particular interest in 2024? Well, because it allows us to be less judgmental of others or encourages us to be less judgmental of others and to see ourselves as others see us, and perhaps to seek on an international scale productive ways forward. If you are American or Canadian, you can think about the indigenous Canadians and Americans from whom American Canadian historians say, how much we can learn particularly in relationship to the environment.

I have to say, as an educator, I would like to live in a world where all the representatives of all the different nations attending the United Nations General Assembly, for example, were forced to undergo a course on world history. It might make them less judgmental of other people and aware of how others see them. Now I know that’s not going to happen, but by saying that I hope I can emphasise the importance of world history. Interestingly, in a little pamphlet, and it’s a little pamphlet by Dirucchi Shavan, she writes this very brief, she writes at the end of this book, which is simply called “What If the Renaissance Never Occurred? She says, "The Renaissance legacy is global, touching every corner of our interconnected world.” Interconnected world is what we have today. She says, “The lessons, ideas, and innovations of the Renaissance didn’t stop at Europe’s borders. They spread across continents influencing cultures and civilizations far and wide.”

And so the idea is what she’s arguing is not constrained to Europe, but the ideas spread across the globe. It’s an interesting thought and is not without merit. And the same argument can be made, in fact can be made more strongly for the Enlightenment. The ideas of the Enlightenment. Well, the ideas of the Enlightenment created the League of Nations and the United Nations. It created the declaration of human rights. The Enlightenment has had an enormous effect, but also of course it’s had a reaction against it for every positive, well, positive is the wrong word, but every movement forward, there is always a counter effect of saying, no, we are not going to go that way. But what I’m going to concentrate on for this talk is the interconnections between Europe and the Arab Ottoman Empire. We’re going to look at the interrelationship of ideas between Europe, largely Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, which in the Middle East is overwhelmingly Arab.

So let me begin with something that many of you may be less familiar with. I’m sorry if you are familiar with it, I apologise. But I think most people will be less familiar with the Arab Golden Age than they are with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And the Arab Golden Age came first in the early Middle Ages, as I’ve suggested. And this a study of the Arab Golden Age challenges the negative stereotype of Arabs held in the West. There is an excellent book published by Penguin by Al-Khalili called “Pathfinders: The Golden Age Of Arabic Science.” And I said just now the golden age of Arabism is largely in the fields of mathematics and science. Robert has written in his book, “The Making of Humanity” the following. And he says this, “The Greeks systematised, generalised, and theorised, but the Persian ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were all together alien to the Greeks temperum. What we today call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry of the methods of experiment, observation and measurement.”

In particular in the Enlightenment. “Of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks, that spirit and those methods were introduced into European world by the Arabs.” By the Arabs. Our basis today of modern science owes enormous debt to Arab science and mathematics of the Golden Age. If I was to ask you to give me an example of that, many of you will say, well, it was the invention of zero in mathematics. And it’s true that the Arabs used the concept of zero in ways that it had not been used before, but they didn’t invent zero. In fact, zero came from further east from the Hindus of India. But there is one thing that our Al-Khalili points out that the Arabs did develop in maths. And so I will read what he says. It circumvents talking for ages. Al-Uqlidisi is the very first mathematician we know of to use decimal fractions and to suggest a symbol for the decimal points. He used an oblique dash over the number. In the preface to his book Al-Uqlidisi explains that he has taken great pains to describe the best arithmetical methods of manipulating computing fractions of all previous writers.

This makes it very hard to determine whether the notion of decimal fraction says Al-Khalili, or even the notation used is his discovery or that of an earlier mathematician. But since this was not something the Islamic world inherited from the Indians, it can be said that unlike decimal numbers or the zero, decimal fractions were almost certainly an invention of a mathematicians.“ That’s a big leap forward. Outside of maths, it’s medicine that the Arabs made great advances, not only in the Middle East, but during the crusades, the last thing you ever wanted to be if you were a soldier with a wound was be dealt with by a European surgeon who simply hacked limbs off from which of course most people died of shock, whereas the Arab medical team would use all sorts things. Comfy, for example, was used by them as wounds later introduced as something to help wounds back in Europe.

But it also developed science, Arab science in Spain. And that’s important because developing it in Spain, Arab medicine spread to the Jewish community in Spain so that by the time, for example, the Queen Elizabeth I, she had a Jewish doctor, even though technically Jews were banned in England because English surgeons and English doctors in the 16th century in the reign of Elizabeth were still hacking about. They liked nothing when hacking an old limb off. Whereas a Jewish doctor trained in Islamic medicine would approach the problem quite differently. We have an account from the year 1202, in other words, in the middle of the crusading era of an Egyptian Jew visiting Damascus. And this is what he said or wrote. He wrote, "The physician must pay attention to the patient’s strength to the matter of the disease and its duration. But if the strength is weak but the disease matter plentiful and the duration long, then the patient should be offered from the very beginning, something which sustains the strength while not increasing the disease matter. And there is nothing more appropriate than that, the right amount of chicken broth.”

Now you can tell he wasn’t an Egyptian, but a Jew if the answer to medicine is chicken broth. But what he was really saying was, you want to think through carefully and you want to attend to those things that are important, like the general health of the patient. Something that I think British hospitals could learn today. It would be marvellous if we got anything as good as chicken broth in a British hospital to eat when we are forced to be in hospital. That’s another story for another day. But medicine is important. One of the greatest medics of the Arab Golden Age was a man called Razi. Now Razi is particularly interesting. He was involved in all sorts of advances in medicine. But I wanted to read you this introduction because there’s something else about Razi. It said that Razi took up the study of medicine after his first visit to Baghdad when he was around 30.

While there he studied under the well-known physician Ali Ibin Shaal, a Jewish convert to Islam. Razi soon surpassed all his teachers and his reputation grew as the most respected medic in the world. So we’ve got two references here to Jewish medicine, or at least Arab medicine involving Jews important. This is just one factor about Razi. Time is too short for me to go into any depth. If you are interested, you can read Al-Khalili’s book, which is called “Pathfinders: The Golden Age Of Arabic Science.” And it’s on my blog. You can look it up and you can get hold of a copy it. It’s not a new book now, but it is very detailed and I find the examples very interesting. He says this, Razi introduced many practical and progressive medical and psychological ideas. He ran a psychiatric ward in the Baghdad Hospital at a time when in the Christian world, the mentally ill were regarded as being possessed by the devil.

You see, like hacking limbs off, mental illness was something that the west could not deal with. The west was full of superstition about illness and mental illness in particular, and mental illness is caused by the devil. So what did you do to annoy the devil that he should have have given you this mental illness? Whereas here in Baghdad, he is looking at psychiatric treatment of patients with mental illness and were back then in the 13th century. He also was the first person to seriously conduct experiments. For example, he would take a group of people, half of whom he would treat, and half of whom he would not treat to see if the half he treated were any better than the half he didn’t treat. Unfortunately, he dealt with bloodletting on one occasion. Well, we knew that bloodletting had little effect. That doesn’t matter. He was developing what today we would describe as a scientific method and a method widely adopted in Europe during the Enlightenment. So what all of this says to us is that the Arab Golden Age in the early Middle Ages up until the 13th century is far in advance in many fields.

And I’ve just chosen maths and science because they’re the most important perhaps, that we can identify is far in advance of anything that the West was doing. And we don’t really catch up with that and take it further until the enlightenment of the 18th century, you really wouldn’t want to be treated by a European doctor from the 13th century to as late as the 18th century. It was more like butchering than doctoring. So let’s put that aside. And then the Renaissance comes to Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, historians say that the Renaissance marked the end of the Middle Ages, and it also was influenced by Arab thought. In the book that I quoted last week, simply called the “Ottomans” by David Baer. B-A-E-R. Baer writes this, “If we think of the Ottomans and the Renaissance at all, it is with a negative association, but a negative based onto myths. The first myth is that the Renaissance was sparked in Italy by the arrival of Greek humanists fleeing Constantinople in 1453 after it fell to the Ottomans.

But there are new views about the Muslim and Jewish role in the European Renaissance. We now know that until the 15th century, cultural exchange between the Muslim majority regions and Western Europe was extremely one-sided, Muslims found little to learn from Western Europe while Western Europe absorbed knowledge from Muslims, which led to the growth of their own cultures. Ancient Greek culture and learning, including history, philosophy, medicine, chemistry, and mathematics and astronomy were actually preserved by being translated into Arabic or Syriac by the Ottoman Empire after 1453 in particular, but actually before 1453 as well.” So I read on. “What’s improved upon with new commentaries by Christian, Jewish and Muslim thinkers originating in Middle Eastern Islamic empires.” In other words, some of the knowledge, which we say came out to the fall of Constantinople to the West, did not come in ancient Greek or Latin. It came in Arabic with Arabic comments to those ancient documents.

And so what came into Europe was a refined, advanced form of Greek knowledge influence what largely by Jewish and Arab and Turkish intellectuals, but also some Greeks who live in the Middle East under the Ottoman Empire. And Baer goes on to write this, “In the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, this formalistic worldview and knowledge was then transmitted to Christian Europe through Islamic, Spain and Sicily when it was translated from Arabic into Hebrew and into Latin.” So we have this western form of Islam in Spain in particular until, as we all know that the Muslims were thrown out of Spain. But in the Middle Ages, a lot of knowledge came to Spain from the Middle East or developed in Spain itself, firstly amongst the Arab community, but for which it spread to the Jewish community. So there is a long history of the influence of Western thought, Western European thought from both Middle Eastern Arabs, Spanish Arabs, and Spanish Jews. Let me read on.

The divine comedies section entitled Inferno Dante’s great work demonstrates that Dante was familiar with Islamic narratives of Mohammed’s ascent to paradise and used it as a framing device for his work.“ It’s always interesting to trace where the ideas come from. People make a living after tracing where Shakespeare’s ideas came from. But this is Dante at the beginning of the Renaissance taking ideas, we think from the Arabic story of Mohammed’s ascent to Paradise. Baer goes on to say, "Thus the European renaissance has its roots in Islamic Spain in the Arab world. The Renaissance raised Western Europe to the cultural level of Muslim majority societies by incorporating the achievements of Euro Asian, especially Islamic societies. Importantly the Islamic world in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular had never been cut off from ancient knowledge as had Western Europeans. They had never needed to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients and catch up as the Europeans did.”

So what Baer is saying, that’s why the Middle Ages Western Europeans lagged behind in many areas the knowledge and culture of the Islamic Middle East. But by and 1453 is as good a date as any, however you might want to criticise that date. 1453, the fall of Constantinople, mid 15th century Western Europe begins to catch up with, it begins to catch up with Islam having fallen behind Islam with the fall of Rome right back at the beginning of the fifth century, end of the fourth century, AD, CE. So now there’s a more equal balance when we come to the 16th century, but that isn’t going to last long because the Renaissance and in particular the Enlightenment, which I’d already described as the child of the Renaissance, takes Europe ahead. If you want to think of it as a race, then at the fall of Rome, Europe fell behind and Islam in the Middle East raced ahead. By the Renaissance, were sort of neck and neck. By the time of the Enlightenment, particularly the 18th century, we in the West are running far ahead of Islam. That is pretty straightforward to understand. It’s the history of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, which is the more difficult period to understand.

But I’ll come to that later. I just want to emphasise the Arab Golden Age, the European Renaissance and the European Enlightenment. Western views of Islam remained as they had always been negative, largely of course in the Middle Ages, inspired by the Church of Rome, which is looking down on Islam clearly as heresy. But Baer gives some interesting view from, if you want to look at prejudice, popular prejudice, you need look no further than Britain or England in particular. And Baer gives some fantastic example. He looks at William Shakespeare and he looks at the play “Othello.” And this is what he writes about “Othello.” First of all, he reminds us that the first Arab ambassador from the Ottoman Empire to be sent to the English court was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the second half of the 16th century. And he was a man called Mohammed Al-Anuri. And it’s thought by many that he might have been the model for “Othello” Shakespeare’s Moor, M-O-O-R, from Spain. Ottomans, Venetians, and Moroccans all have a part in this play “Othello” dominated by the tragic hero Othello who begins the play as a baptised North African Muslim mercenary general in the service of Venice.

Othello is charged with commanding the defence of the Venetian island of Cyprus from Ottoman attack. When Othello is introduced by Shakespeare by name, he is addressed as quote, “Valiant Othello, we must straight implore you against the general enemy ottoman. But by the end of the play, after the ottoman Navy has been scattered by a storm and Cyprus saved.” In reality, Cyprus was actually conquered by the Ottomans in 1571. That doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s play. Maybe you simply didn’t know. So towards the end of the play, Othello quote, “From Shakespeare turns Turk.” In other words, becomes a Muslim again. “Othello turns Turk reverting to the stereotypical, cruel, blood thirsty Ottoman.” Even though he was from North Africa and Indian Spain, that’s all murdered by Shakespeare. “He’s a blood thirsty Ottoman murdering his Christian lover, Desdemona, and then killing himself.”

Well, we’re all familiar with that story, but it’s interesting to put it into this context. And Baer goes on to identify adjectives, descriptions of a Muslim. That is to say a fellow in this case that Shakespeare uses Shakespeare’s words to describe a Muslim are cruel, jealous, lustful, violent, aggressive, merciless, faithless, lawless, damned, circumcised, murderous, adulterous, whoring, wrathful, seductive, polygamous, libertine, black devil, destructive energy, desperate tyrant, ally of Satan, enemy, sodomy, castration, and unnaturalness. Well, that’s about the full gamut, isn’t it? So although we become closer in terms of development in the Renaissance with the Ottoman Empire and with the collapse of Constantinople, we are now trading, that is to say France and Britain in particular, as well as the Italian cities are trading now with the Ottoman in Constantinople, we still have a negative view. And Shakespeare is writing, remember, not for the court, but for ordinary Londoners who attend the globe and hear and see the play “Othello” and come away with this stereotype of the unholy Turk, the unholy ottoman, the unholy Muslim.

These words that Shakespeare uses are very, very dark words indeed. And so coming together in terms of progress does not mean we drop the stereotypes. One of the things which bedevils human societies as a whole and does so in the 21st century as it did way back then, is this whole question of stereotyping. You only have to read the popular press in Britain. I dread to think what will happen in the football, the World Cup in Germany, we’ve had terrible headlines in the past about Germany. We’ve had terrible chants by football fans when we play German teams, let alone French. So these stereotypes persist and they influence, it’s no good saying they’re not important. They influence people’s views, but they also influence political leadership’s views. And we see that with the whole question both on the other side of the Atlantic to us and in Europe and down across the Mediterranean from North Africa in the way that we regard immigrants. I don’t want to start a row with anybody who’s British, but the truth is our government referring to illegal immigrants is not telling the truth.

No immigrant is illegal. If they’re claiming asylum, if they are genuine asylum seekers, then they are only illegal when a British court says you are illegal. And not for the government to cast all of them as illegal. Stereotyping, it is not a good thing to do. If we turn from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, there was also much input from the eastern world. You all remember the story of Lady Montague Wesley, the wife of the English ambassador to the Ottoman Court in the 18th century who discovered that she was your archetypal nosy neighbour, which were very familiar in England. And she went and talked to women in Constantinople, and she discovered that they inoculated against smallpox. Now, smallpox was a dreadful disease throughout western Europe. It killed many and disfigured far more. And she discovered they inoculated.

Now, remember, inoculation, you give a little bit of smallpox from someone who’s had smallpox to someone who hasn’t, they develop a mild form of smallpox, which means they won’t develop the real thing. That’s quite different vaccinations, that’s a different story. This is inoculations. And she brought her knowledge back to England. She had her own children done, the queen had her children done. And this knowledge from the East spread across Europe and spread to the Czars court in Moscow itself. So this is an one example of something moving east to west. The Enlightenment itself began to question old stale western stereotyping of Arabs and Islam and the Ottoman Empire. And this began, how many times have I said this to many of you? It all began with Napoleon. My goodness, he’s got a lot to answer for. Napoleon, you remember invaded Egypt and his army invaded the Middle East. He said he wanted to enter India on the back of an elephant in triumph like Alexander.

Well, it didn’t happen as we know, because the British defeated him at the Battle of the Nile and subsequently defeated him in the Middle East, and he fled back to France. But he brought with him when he reached Egypt archaeologists, and they discover ancient Egypt. And there becomes a fad, if you like, across Western Europe, in England as well for Orientalism as it’s called. Now in England, Orientalism incorporated, of course, India. But it is specifically Egyptian. And if you wish to see an example of that you live in Britain, go and see from the early 19th century, any non-conformist church like a Baptist church in particular, where they built them in the early 19th century. And you’ll see many of them are built with Egyptian style pillars. It was a fad. And like the giraffe that was taken back to France and paraded all around France, it was a great dad was Orientalism, but it gave rise, but not only to English men, but English women to see Arabs in a way that they’ve never looked at them before in 19th century, Victorian England, with those who set off in search of adventure, men and women alike.

And this is something I will be talking about at a later talk, but they went to the Middle East and they went into the desert and they thought it was the most romantic place they’d ever seen. And the notion grew of the noble Arab living in the desert. And perhaps we’ve had modern examples of that like Wilfred Sesoger. But we also had, of course in English history, Lawrence of Arabia, TE Lawrence in the First World War. And again, that will into our story later because of TE Lawrence’s promises made to Hussein, the Arab leader seeking at the end of the First World War, a unified Arab state, a new Arab empire right across the Middle East. So the west became entranced in the enlightenment with the idea across the globe of the noble savage. But in Middle East, with the concept of the noble Arab. And it doesn’t go well, it perhaps does go without saying that both women and men fell in love sexually with Arabs, Lawrence and his little Arab boys, et cetera, et cetera.

We won’t go down that line today. I may go down it on a later meeting and I brought along Roy Porter’s book on enlightenment, which is one of the best standard works on the enlightenment. And I wanted to share two things. First of all, Roy Porter writes this, “Stereotypes of the East had been deeply entrenched since mediaeval times. The great Asiatic emperors were fiend of despots. Islam was a cheat, fabricated by an impostor. The Asiatic imagination of producing exotic central, tawdry art. Enlightened thinking in Europe, somewhat challenged such negative cliches. Mohammed was portrayed in Gibbons decline and fall of the Roman Empire as a heroic figure. And Islam is relatively tolerant of other faiths. A favourite device was the noble sage, a parallel to the noble savage.” So what Porter is saying is that there was a view in the 18th century amongst the educated of the enlightenment that Islam was not quite as it had previously been portrayed. He goes on to say, “But” says Porter, “if some aspects of the orient received sympathy, underlying assumptions were hardly shaken.”

In other words, the general view as written in the 16th century in the play “Othello” by Shakespeare trumped for most people any enlightenment educated idea of the 18th century. The Enlightenment as such is a terribly complex area to study. I have suggested to Trudy that we might look at the Enlightenment over a 10 or 12 week period because it’s so interesting and has so many different aspects, not least religious. Now, those of you who are still awake, I hope some of you’re and have listened carefully, will I’m sure have picked up on the fact that at various moments I’d made side references to Jews, and it is to Jews and their contribution in the West that I wish now to term. Many European Jews featured in and contributed in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. You all know that, I’m sure. That’s no surprise to anyone. And many of you, no, sorry, all of you who are Jewish listening will know that there was a separate Jewish enlightenment, the Haskalah originating in 18th century Germany. And as Rabbi Louis Jacobs has written “With the aim of broadening the intellectual and social horizons and the Jews to enable them to take their place in western society.”

That is an enlightenment idea, an idea that you can be of a different faith, but at the same nation. Something Christian Europeans were grappling with, but which this was grappled with by the great leader of Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn. And Mendelssohn is looking at how you can be both a Jew, a good Jew, and a good German. To Christians, this is simply what Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things of the Caesars, render unto God, the things that are Gods.” But it is a major step forward. Why is that important? Well, it’s important for two reasons. It’s important at the time because it allowed Jews to appear, not to appear. To encompass, to encompass the society in which they live so that a Jew could be British and a Jew could be German and a Jew. It’s important today because in many places in Western Europe, there is a proportion, we have no idea what proportion of Muslim citizens who reject that, who reject the idea being, we use the phrase British Muslims, but I think we use it misguidedly because we know many of them do not wish to be British, but wish to actually not just not be British, but to destroy us.

So you can look at the situation of Jews in the 18th century in Europe and the situation of Muslims today and see that they are worlds apart. The Jews recognised that they could be members of a nation as well as Jews. Many Muslims today do not accept that they are Muslim and they wish to make us in the West Muslim and our country’s Islamic, or if you like, they wish to make Israel Muslim. But what this does in Europe at the Enlightenment is of great importance because although these are ideas circulating within the Jewish communities coming from Germany, they spread into the wider European community. And toleration, greater toleration of Jews during the Enlightenment begins to be argued for, and it’s the French philosopher Voltaire and his arguments for tolerance during the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the individual within society that is important. One of the characteristics of Western society has largely been since the enlightenment, toleration. Tolerance of people who are not like us. And that tolerance, well, that tolerance has paid off well until this present century and Islamists, and that’s a problem I’ll come back to.

But Voltaire argued for this tolerance. And in the book, in the Oxford short series “Enlightenment” by John Robertson, Robertson writes this, “Voltaire’s realisation that theology must be set aside and nothing must be considered” and quote, “The physical or moral wellbeing of society, coupled with the confidence that a well-mannered society not fanaticism resulted in an exclusively this worldly argument for toleration.” So toleration becomes an issue in the Enlightenment, and part of the issue of toleration is to reach out to the Jewish community living in the Christian European communities or of the West. And the French Revolution, which is the end of the enlightenment if you like, it is both the climax and the decline all in one go of the enlightenment. And Robertson writes, “In this way, the declaration of the rights of man and citizens issued in August, 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. At the same implication, the National Assembly almost immediately recognises his entailed a general freedom to worship and followed up with political rights for Protestants by the end of the year and for Jews within two years.”

So things are changing. In 1753, the first act of parliament at Westminster was passed called “The Jews Act”, which was to give Jews, British Jews equal citizenship rights to everyone else. Sad to say one year later in 1754, it was revoked because of public outcry against Jews. But the truth was that this was a move, this tolerance move was a move that was only ever going one way, and that was towards greater citizenship rights for Jews. There’s an irony in this. If we take Europe, Jews rights were recognised 1808 in Hessen, 1808 in Westafaria, 1811 in the city of Frankfurt, 1812 in Mecklenberg swearing, 1812 Prussia, 1813 Bavaria, 1828 Vertenberg. How come within a hundred years we get the Holocaust. What that teaches us is unlike Victorian education, and some of us old enough to have suffered from Victorian education, is we believe that mankind was on a graph going up and up and up. But the view in Germany about Jews starting in 1808 is going up. And by 1933 has gone through the floor. There is another irony in this. Britain has full citizenship for Jews only in 1858.

Question, when did the Ottoman Empire give Jews full citizenship? Well, obviously after Britain, no, two decades before in 1839. So the Enlightenment gives the opportunity for Jews to look at their own place in the European society, but also gives the techniques for European societies to welcome Jews. Now, this is not a graph that simply goes like that. It’s a graph that goes like that. That’s how progress happens. There’s advance and there’s retreat. Now the retreat in Germany in 1933 is horrendous, but there’s retreats in England from the 1750s. It takes another hundred years. You can’t expect major changes to happen overnight. They don’t, you can’t expect intellectual arguments to win in the political field when politicians depend upon, certainly by 1850s in Britain, the non-educated elite. It’s difficult is all of this.

But what I’m saying is that one outcome of the enlightenment within Europe is a gradual acceptance of the Jewish community. Okay, you don’t have to take the Holocaust, which is a gross example, but you can take examples from France as well in the 19th century. It’s not a simple way forward, but the Enlightenment tells us how we should behave. Even if we go against what the enlightenment says. The Enlightenment is about tolerance. The Enlightenment is about reason. Why on earth can someone like Israeli have to turn Christian because his father wants him to get on in life as it were, why? We would think that nonsensical today nonsensical, would we? Because we’re concerned in Britain with Islamists being elected in local government offices as counsellors in our local government elections held last month or earlier this month, we’ve been very concerned of what they have said, which is not just anti-Semitic, but anti British. They want to get rid of some of them said. They want to term the whole country’s Islam. Now, that’s not the same situation of the 19th century and Jews. It’s a world away from that and its tolerance.

Some would argue it’s falling backwards over ourselves to be tolerant to Muslims. It’s landed us in this state. I remember working as an advisor in Warwick, where we had a large Muslim community in Leamington in the education office back in the 1970s where the views to the Muslim community were presented by a very small number of men, always men. And the education officials would cow tow to their demands. And now today that would be challenged, but then we thought it was the right thing to do. We were being tolerant, we were being British. Yes, come in, join this committee, join that committee, and we’ve landed where we are. Make your own minds up. That’s a political issue for today. Your choice, not mine. But even if we’ve moved forward, these are the Jewish communities within Western Europe. We are more than aware now that anti-Semitism is just below the surface. And throughout Europe and the States, Canada, elsewhere Australia, we’ve seen anti-Semitic protests by the young and the so-called educated young.

The so-called children of the Enlightenment in the universities behaving in ways which are to many of us alien, not understandable. How do women, young girls, undergraduates campaign on behalf of Islam and how on earth do gays campaign on behalf of Palestine, do they not know? Are they not aware of what would happen to them in an Islamic society? It’s all quite strange to many of us. The Enlightenment of the Asian region made people and reason challenged both old superstitions and stereotypes. Today, we hope that governments make choices based upon solid evidence. Well, we know that doesn’t always happen, but we hope that they do. Because we live in a post-enlightenment age. We should only be making decisions based upon reason and logic, not upon superstition or stereotyping or what we might like to see, but simply on reason. You can call reason by other names. You can call it evidence if you like, factual evidence, and whatever words or phrases you choose to use.

But it is the very basis of the enlightenment. This is a book called “The Enlightenment for Beginners” by Spencer and Kraugzer. And in it, they just write this very short paragraph. “The intellectuals of the Enlightenment felt themselves to be part of a great movement representing the highest aspirations and possibilities of mankind. They were reformers who believed their cause was best served by the new passion for arguing, criticism, and debate.” Which is the very basis of modern western liberal democracy, the very basis of our democracy, argue it out and made the best man or woman win. Very familiar in the Jewish world to the way that Jewish intellectuals have operated for a very long time. But from the enlightenment onwards, this idea of reason is very important. So much of the social and cultural arguments of today from the rights of women to the nature of government itself owe their origins to the enlightenment, the rights of women.

Mary Warcraft’s book, the nature of Government itself, liberal democracy, their origins lie in the Enlightenment. But the question now has to be, has the Enlightenment and the ideas it produced from the centrality of the individual to toleration of others, especially in politics and religion. Has it won? And the short answer is no, it hasn’t won. Even in Western society the answer to the question, has it won? Is not a resounding yes. We know today that liberal democracy is under attack. Just look at the United States as one example of Trump outside of Western Europe and America in the wider world, China, in Putin’s Russia, and of course in the Arabic Middle East and in Iran. The answer is the Enlightenment has not won. As regards to Middle East by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, whilst the Ottoman Empire still staggered on, there was real hopes of reform along the lines of the Enlightenment. And we’ve seen with the example of giving full citizenship to Jews in 1839.

Although the Ottoman Empire itself came to a crashing end at the end of the First World War, the subsequent state of Turkey, which was declared a secular state by Ataturk, it looked as though Enlightenment reform would come to Turkey. And indeed Turkey is a member of NATO and in many ways is seen as very European. You just have to look in Britain, at least at the adverts for holidays in Turkey, it looks like Turkey with the sun. But that early progress in the Ottoman Empire, the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, has somewhat stalled even in Turkey itself with the rule of Erdogan. And as for the rest of the Arab world, well we know what has happened. So it’s as though we live in a society where the enlightenment rules, if questionably in Western Europe and North America where reasoning or progressive minds are in charge against closed static minds in the Middle East, if we stick with the Middle East. So we are still in a war of ideas between the West and in this case the Middle East.

But you can add in China and Russia if you wish, but I’m talking about the Middle East and the Arab world. We’ve seen in negotiations over the current crisis and war in the Middle East that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, Israel has found to negotiate with Hamas. You can’t negotiate with people with closed static minds who are determined to destroy, not just to disagree with you, but to destroy you. And this sort of difference between closed static minds and reasoning progressive minds is said by Christopher de Bellaigue in his book “The Islamic Enlightenment.” He gives a story from a long time back from Britain and from Turkey, I mean, sorry. “There was to be no Turkish Gutenberg. In fact, the printing press had been banned as soon as it appeared on Ottoman shores in the 1490s.

On the grounds that making the Koran accessible would only enable the ignorant to misinterpret it. What an argument. You can’t read the Bible, you can’t read the Torah because you might get ideas and you are not meant to have ideas. You’re meant to do what we tell you to do. That’s what they said in 1490. Later on printing was made a capital crime in the Ottoman Empire. So it isn’t until much later that printing comes. There is a division between closed static minds and reasoning progressive minds. And it’s frightening. We thought that at the end of World War I, with Turkey being declared secular, with the Arab nations under European League of Nations mandates with Persia under potentially, and it came about reforming Czars, that the Arab world was moving steadily towards joining us as we joined them at the Renaissance. They would belatedly join us in the Enlightenment. But it didn’t happen like that. The Arab antagonism to Israel from 1948 onwards has poisoned that particular hope. And even though the phenomenon of the Arab Spring gave some people the mistaken hope that a new relationship with the Arab world could now be forged, that was a mere kind era.

It certainly wasn’t. In a book by Anthony Padden called "The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters” Quite early in his book, he writes this, “Today, many in the Arab world have grown suspicious, are precisely those values and aspirations which are now closely identified with the West of which the Enlightenment is seen as the most heinous representative. The past century and a half of Euro-American history has come to be regarded and not that reason as little more than a litany of war and oppression, colonisation, exploitation. In the light of such a history, the airy, optimistic ecumenical claims of the Enlightenment have come to look thread bear were not hypocritical and presumptuous. It’s the Enlightenment which is now accused of being responsible for a Eurocentrism which led inexorably to an impeccable intolerance of everyone and everything which arose to challenge its rationalistic reductive objectives that’s making it the midwife to modern imperialism and modern racism.” “Give us the grace to see ourselves as others see us” says Robbie Burns.

And that’s very cleverly put in the paragraph I’ve just written of how the Arab Middle East sees us, not just Israel but the West in general that sees us as hypocritical, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do we resolve in the 21st century the failure of Islam to connect with the Enlightenment? Many people thought that Islam in the West would change itself, would have a reformation, would enter the modern world, but the opposite appears to be happening. But I’ve written here, not particularly cleverly, but what I’ve written is to finish tonight, but in hope, I’m sorry I’ve gone over time, I’ve got too excited. “But in hope, we place our trust that in the end, coup backed by Enlightened reason will win. But it’s no guarantee that the Enlightenment of the West will win.” It’s no guarantee it will win in the West, let alone in the Middle East.

Next week, I’m not here on Monday, I’m here on Wednesday next week. So please drop me next Wednesday. I’m sure I’ve got lots of people wanting to argue and question and I will find you all.

Q&A and Comments

Q: What’s a Jewish enlightenment as well? A: It’s usually referred to in the Haskalah. Thank you, Rita. That’s why they call it the Jewish Enlightenment. And in fact, you can translate the word haskalah as enlightenment if you wish. I think the origin of the word is, oh gosh, intelligence, isn’t it?

Q: Wasn’t the Enlightenment a movement of tolerance and liberalism? A: Yes, I think I said that Jonathan, if you missed that, I think you probably asked your question before I said it. Wasn’t the enlightenment of movement about reason and humanity, has it not passed sell by date? Well, that is a big question that lots of people are asking. Is the enlightenment finished? If it is, what do we put in its place? I don’t think tolerance is something that we should abandon. I don’t think reason is something we should abandon. And I don’t think the importance of the individual in society is something we should abandon. But there are people who want us to redefine the enlightenment in terms of 21st century.

Q: David, “Why so much of the Muslim world still mired in pre-medieval thinking?” A: I think the answer is that they are highly critical of the West in the way that they are critical of the modern west imperialism, colonialism, et cetera. Remember that Hamas describes Israel as a colonising power and they have turned in their opposition back to the Koran. Now the Koran is I’ve said before I’ve read it and expect some of you had, it’s a very strange document indeed and Mohammed advocates war.

Tim, “Yes, I’m sure the Jewish and Christian Bible is a very old attitudes in some ways too. For example, on patriarchal ideas, attitudes on gay people on abortion in the United States. And we can think about the very author, the Orthodox on the West Bank.” Yes, religion does contain that. The enlightenment challenge religion and the mainstream religions, Christian, Jew, the mainstream Christianity, mainstream Judaism follow the arguments of the Enlightenment and embrace the enlightenment. But there are aspects of Christianity and there are aspects of Judaism which have not embraced the Enlightenment. But in Islam, there doesn’t seem to have been that embracement of the Enlightenment.

Yes, you’re absolutely right about the Alhambra Palace. Architecture is one of the great things of the Golden Age of the Arabs. That’s absolutely true. Problem with world leaders says Jean taking a course on world history is whose version of world history? Absolutely. AOU has taught me that I learned world history is seen through British eyes. Yes, of course, that’s true. There are ways you can overcome that in terms of who is involved in teaching it. I mean, I would love to be doing this if we were face to face in a room, in a lecture theatre, I could perhaps get a Jewish colleague and an Arab colleague either side of me. I’m neither Jewish nor Arab, so I’ll keep the peace in the middle. But seriously, if you were to do that, then you spread the ideas and you can do it in a perfectly rational enlightenment way simply to say the Arab could say, but William, you are wrong because this is what the situation is. And I could say, well, I hear what you say, but I still don’t agree, but I can’t do that. You have to read around what I say, read other people and get to a position where you think, yeah, he isn’t right.

Q: If as you say, the Arab Golden Age was in the fields of math and science, would it be true to say that liberalism of enlightenment was not adapt? A: Yes, yes, it would be true. Liberalism of the Enlightenment was not adopted by the Arab world except in Turkey by Ataturk after the end of the First World War. Turkey remains the only democratic state in Islamic secular state. I was thinking about talking about British India. India itself is the largest democracy in the world. You cannot really say anything about democracy in terms of Pakistan or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. So the British failed there to get the ideas and enlightenment across. There may be many things wrong with India, but the enlightenment, as taken by Britain there has taken root, not least in the legal structure.

Q: Margaret, can we not take into account the possibility the Arab, Middle Eastern people’s development in astrology too?“ A: Yes, absolutely, absolutely, you can. And Copernicus learned from the Arabs. Yes, absolutely.

Arlene says, "I’ve read that decimals became known to Arabs when they conquered central Asia largely developed in India.” No, I don’t think that is actually true. The first psychiatric hospital says Lawrence, were in the Arab world. This is usually denied in Western accounts, the history of psychiatry. It absolutely spot on. In fact, the whole concept of hospitals in a modern sense was adopted by the Knights Hospital from what they’d seen in the Middle East in Islam. So if you go to Valletta in Malta, you can visit what was the Knights Hospital there, which gives you a good idea of what Arab hospitals were like at the time.

Rita, “Psychiatric hospitals earlier evidence for institutional psychiatric care is reported documents of psychiatric patients in Al-Fustat Hospital founded in Cairo. That’s absolutely right. It was in Cairo from the 10th century onwards. The doctor may well have been, Maimonide says Rose’s iPhone. I’m not sure which bit that refers to. Alfred says, "An interesting confluence, perhaps a climax of European renaissance took place in Italy in 1585 in Vicenza, the inauguration of Paladio’s theatrical Olympico theatre with a performance of Oedipas Rex, a classical Greek play saved from oblivion in the Arab world libraries punctuated from choral music written by Andrea Gabrieli, an immediate predecessor of the opera. That’s a very intellectual response. Alfred, I’m very impressed.

Margaret, "In the early 18th century, Lady Mary worked in Montague learn at the Ottoman Court.” Yes, yes, yeah, that’s I mentioned that Margaret in what I said. Oh, and you said, yeah, no, it was inoculation. Vaccination was done near where I was born. It was done in Gloucester in Berkeley. And it was looking, taking, it was to deal with cowpox and smallpox. They took cowpox from cows and it vaccinated that into people and that was vaccination vacs because of cow. Annoying problem. Sir when does it start? We seem to be forever patients. It’s always something. You can say that again.

Rita, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what the Zoom user meant, and I don’t understand your reply. I’m being thick today. Ed says, “In the early 1800s the Kliph Ahman, so was the patron commanded scholars to prepare Arabic translations.” Absolutely, absolutely spot on of Greek Syria and Persian work. Still more important was the patron is given by the Kliph Amamun, who at 832 founded a school, sorry, I’ve lost it now. Founded a school or house of wisdom and he placed under the guidance of Ibin Mashaba AD 857, who was an author both in Syria and Arabic. Learned also the use of Greek. His medical treatments on fevers was long and was afterwards translated into Arabic. Yeah, all of that underlines the points I was making with good examples.

Ralph, “I think the two most important contributors foundation of science and ethics and medicine hippocrates, was credited with creating corn.” Oh dear, dear. Come up, here we are. Sorry, I lost it. I pressed too hard. Let me get to, I think the two most important contributors says Ralph, to the foundation, science and ethics and medicine who is credited with creating concept preventative medicine and Maimonides, the Spanish Jewish physician of philosopher who later became the physician to Saladin. Regarding biomedicine, there are similarities in both the Talmudic and Muslim techs in dealing with common medical problems suggesting some common origins.“ Excellent, people are making really good comments today.

Q: Marian, "Did you say Islam is relatively tolerant about the faith?” A: If so, I beg to differ. I didn’t say it was, it was said it was, and it’s true that Islam under the Ottoman Empire was tolerant for a large period of time of other faiths. Marian, you are referring today, when it is intolerant, largely intolerant, these things are not set in stone. The Ottoman Empire was tolerant. It gave full citizenship to Jews in 1839. But there’s also massacres of Jews and nothing is ever straightforward in history.

Q: Monty said, “Should Othello now be banned?” A: Well, a funny question. In the sense that some people think it should be banned and I think some universities don’t teach it here in Britain. I don’t know.

Q: Aisha says, “What about the Chinese contribution?” A: What indeed, but I’m sorry, I wasn’t talking about China. I’m talking about the Arab Jewish and Christian world. If we want to look at China, we can do that on another occasion, but it’s another story and a separate story. But in terms of world history and the study of world history, you are spot on. But again, with China, we’ve got periods of advancement. We’ve got periods of refusing the enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries, and we’ve got the outcome of Marxism and now the extraordinary picture of a sort of diluted capitalist Marxism, but nevertheless a threat to all of us.

Q: Jonathan, “Would it be true that the current populism reinforced by disinformation is an anti enlightenment phenomenon?” A: Yes, I would say so. Current populism reinforced by disinformation, yes, it is, and that’s the problem of the internet with a huge amount of disinformation on it. And it’s difficult even for us to be able to identify the true from the false.

Tim, “In relation to what you said about being Jewish and German, I was born in Ireland, raised Jewish, I would find myself as Irish Jew as in both.” Yes, absolutely. And that’s exactly what Moses Mendelssohn was talking about. Shelly says, “I’m not sure Mendelssohn’s family proves the point. You can be Jewish and German and most of his children or his grandchildren were converted to Christianity.” Well, yeah, that’s another issue. It’s like the Israeli issue. Yeah, that’s before the opportunities given to Jews right across Germany. I was talking to Trudy earlier today, and I was talking about the Al Razi being taught by a man who was Jewish, doctor who was Jewish, but it converted to Islam and Trudy said, “Well, that’s what Jews do.” They find an opportunity, and maybe it’s a Christian thing, maybe it’s a British. Before I started really working with the Jewish community, which has now been well over 20 years, I would’ve thought that most Jews were religious. Well, that is no longer the case in the same way that not all Christians are religious, but it means therefore that you remain a Jew, but you could compromise with Christianity to get on when there weren’t other options open.

Monty says two bankers walking down, I hope this is clean. One says, I used to be Jewish. The other says, I have a brother. He used to be a hunchback. No Monty, there was a joke I read recently and it was a longer one than that, and I simply felt I couldn’t tell it. Oh, you can be anti-Jewish, Susan, but the ideas you put out, academics don’t always practise what they preach. He is preaching toleration, but doesn’t himself apply it to Jews. But his ideas of toleration underlined the beginnings of the French Revolution, so his ideas are taken on board even though he appears hypocritical. One of the problems about mankind, humankind, women as well as men, is that we can be hypocritical and we can deny that we’re hypocritical. We can even convince ourselves we’re not being hypocritical. Thank you, whoever that is, Judy, thank you.

• [Judy] William, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re going to have to stop there just because there’s another lecture at seven.

• They’ve all heard my black birds in the garden, so I’m really pleased about that. I have an app which tell, or my wife does, which tells us which birds are singing at any particular time. If I sounded terribly knowledgeable, was only because we were checking it earlier today. Thanks very much. See you all, bye-bye.