Leibniz, Historicism, and the" Plague of Islam" more

Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 463 Leibniz, Historicism, and tHe “PLague of isLam” Ian Almond Provided that something of importance is achieved, I am indifferent to whether it is done in Germany or France, for I seek the good of mankind. I am neither a phil-Hellene nor a philo-Roman but a phil-anthropos. —letter to des Billettes, October 21st, 16971 It is difficult to make the world believe that black is white, that in order to affirm public peace one has to take up arms which destroy it, and that for the good of Christianity one has to break all the sacred bonds of Christianity, even up to attacking a catholic monarch while he is on the point of delivering Europe from the plague of Mohammedanism [la peste de mahométisme]. —“Réflexions sur la guerre” (1687)2 In the history of Western responses to Islam, what is fascinating about Leibniz is that he exemplifies a certain ideological overlap, a peculiar transition period between a theological repudiation of Islam (Muslims as enemies of Christ) and an early Enlightenment rejection of the ‘Mohammedan’ (Muslims as enemies of reason and civilization). Sometimes Leibniz’s Mohammedan is the Erbfeind or hereditary enemy/eternal foe, sometimes he is elevated to the status of mere barbarian, whilst on rare occasions he is even grudgingly acknowledged to be the possessor of a natural (though still errant) theology. Ian Almond is currently giving a course on Islam in American Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute, with the Freie Universität, Berlin. He is the author of Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn’Arabia (Routledge, 2004) and has a new book on postmodern representations of Islam, coming out with I. B. Tauris next year. Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (2006) Pp. 463–483. 464 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 Certainly, there is a standard essay on Leibniz and Islam that one could write; it would involve a Saidesque compendium of the thinker’s largely negative references to the faith and its followers, his dismissal of Turks as undeveloped, cruel, and backward, his constant emphasis on Christian unity in the face of the Ottoman threat; in such an essay, the author of Consilium Aegyptiacum (the Egyptian Plan) would be foregrounded as an early, classical model for the modern intellectual of Empire. Leibniz’s advice to Louis XIV, his attempt to persuade the monarch that an attack on Egypt would be “to the profit of Christendom” (pro profectu religionis Christianae3), appear almost to have been written with Gramsci and Said’s analysis of the intellectual’s complicity with imperialistic hegemony in mind. Even by the early nineties, when both the Ottoman threat and Leibniz’s own passion for an invasion of Egypt had faded, we can find enough remarks on infidels, Mahomedan fatalism and perverted fakirs to indicate at the very best a dismissive indifference, at the worst an abiding contempt on Leibniz’s part towards the Muslim Orient. The ultimate point of such an approach, predictably enough, would be to underline precisely how Christian the limits of Leibniz’s Christian humanism actually were—how Leibniz’s allegedly universal concern for “the welfare of mankind,”4 with regards to Islam at least, never really moved beyond Belgrade and Gibraltar. Paradoxically, such an essay would be both necessary and superfluous. ‘Superfluous’ because, as Joseph McCarney has already pointed out in another, quite different context, the collective damning of figures such as Leibniz or Kant for their Islamophobia and race-bias becomes quite meaningless in judging a vocabulary where terms such as ‘Islamophobia’ simply did not exist.5 At the same time, the association of Leibniz, and in particular Leibniz’s impassioned Sinophilia, with words such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’—he has been called a propagator of “disinterested, objective and unselfish love” (Heer), the promoter of “an ethics of harmony” (Perkins), the father of “an ecumenical accord of truly global dimensions” (Clarke) and a man who “clearly did not harbour thoughts of political conquest or religious conversion” (Umberto Eco)–does have to be modified in the light of Leibniz’s Islam.6 However remarkable Leibniz’s prescient interest in China may have been, the barbarous Mohammedans, lazy Turks, and lascivious Egyptians we find in his Opera omnia do offer a sobering corrective to the more ambitious claims made for his inter-culturalism—reminding us of the significance, more than anything else, of exactly when and how Europeans chose to praise the Orient, and which portions of that Orient were elevated above the others when they did so. Nevertheless, any such attempt to argue for an unambiguously negative representation of Islam in Leibniz’s work finds itself complicated by three problematic counter-points. The first of these is Leibniz’s epistemological subtlety—a sophisticated awareness of the extent to which human beings will modify information to suit their own political/doctrinal intentions. A single example will suffice: in 1697 the Englishman Thomas Burnet recommends to Leibniz one of the most notorious anti-Islamic tracts of the eighteenth century, Prideaux’s defamatory biography of Mohammed, The True Nature of Imposture. He recommends it to Leibniz as being “very well-written” and “highly praised” (Schriften, 1:14, 378). Leibniz’s reply, far from expressing any satisfaction that such a book has been written, is cold and discouraging: “In order to write a proper biography of Mahomet, Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 465 author of the religion of the Saracens, it would be necessary to consult the Arabic manuscripts, otherwise one runs the risk of getting things wrong [on court risque de se tromper].”7 There is a critical will to truth here, one which is reflected in Leibniz’s own frustrated search for a reliable translation of the Koran. Of course, this declared desire for objectivity should not be exaggerated—Luther too, genuinely felt he was able to discern between the untruths which had been told about the Turk and his own ‘real’ facts.8 A second, related complication leads on from this: a certain polyphony in Leibniz, the range of voices, of linguistic registers that we find—the slightly pompous political commentator, the polite, deferring subject to his queen, the impassioned advocate, the informal scholar to his fellow academician, the effusive patriot and lover of the German language one minute, the sectarian-hating universalist and lover of mankind the next . . . this plethora of different voices makes it harder to gauge the weight and tone of Leibniz’s remarks. At the very least, the discrepancy between the urge to holy war in the Egyptian Plan and the quieter, more respectful tone adopted towards Islam in the later correspondence does suggest a distinction between a Wartime Leibniz and a Peacetime Leibniz, between a public voice and a private one. The third complication involved in any straightforward exposé of Leibniz as a conservative, Eurocentric, hegemonic, Islamfeindlich thinker does not involve Leibniz so much as the multiplicity of optics through which his approach to Islam can be evaluated. There are at least four different frames of reference within which Leibniz’s rapprochement to—or perhaps reification of—Islam can be assessed. Three historical contexts intellectually color and calibrate our own understanding of Leibniz’s response to “Turcis et Tartaris.” As these three alternative frameworks suggest different evaluations of Leibniz’s own thoughts on Islam, it might be worthwhile to spend a moment briefly considering each one in turn. The first context would be that of Leibniz’s more illustrious contemporaries. Franklin Perkins, in his excellent Leibniz and China, sees Leibniz as “the only prominent modern philosopher to take a serious interest in Europe’s contact with other cultures” (42). Read against the background of Spinoza, Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes, whose references to non-European cultures invariably took the form of anecdotal ammunition to support their own views, Leibniz emerges as the only significant philosopher of his period (with the possible exception of Montaigne) to actively research the languages, religious texts, and ethnographies of other cultures. In this narrow sense at least, the attention Leibniz gives to Islam—his desire for a translation of the Koran using Muslim commentaries, his inquiries into the genealogy of Mohammed,9 his token attempts to understand the grammar and vocabulary of Persian, Arabic, and Uzbek10—distinguishes him from his more inward-looking contemporaries, for whom the non-European was never really more than a source of useful marginalia. Another possible context for evaluating Leibniz’s response to Islam—and in particular, his depiction of the Turk—would be the variety of French travel accounts available in the time leading up to his arrival in Paris (1672). The reports of travelers such as Nicolas de Nicolay, Thevet, Busbecq, Belon, and Postel had already established a mini-tradition of French writing about the Orient, a pool of texts Leibniz clearly made use of. In the Justa Dissertatio, for instance, we find 466 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 references to travelers such as Bartholomew Georgiewitz, the Hungarian pilgrim who spent thirteen years as a slave in Turkey, and achieved considerable fame with the publication of his experiences.11 Leibniz’s conviction that the Turk obtained his bellicose ferocity through consuming a wine called “Maslach,” for example, probably came from Georgiewitz’s account of this in his La Manière et cérémonies des Turcs.12 Read against this background, what emerges most strikingly is how Leibniz’s representation of the Turks as slovenly, inefficient, and bestial goes against a general seventeenth-century admiration of Ottoman order, sobriety, and military self-discipline. When one considers Postel’s praise of the integrity and efficiency of Turkish officials, Gassot’s description of the absence of pillaging in the Sultan’s campaigns, and the general way in which Turkish sobriety and moderation was used by writers such as Busbecq to attack Western excesses, the sheer paucity of Leibniz’s positive comments becomes more noticeable. 13 A third and final context which offers an interesting contrast to Leibniz’s own thoughts on Islam and the Turk is the seventeenth-century tradition of Protestant spirituality and millenarianism, one which gave a supernatural status to the Turk as a future ally of the true faith in the struggle against a Roman Antichrist. Böhme, Kuhlmann, and Comenius were all key figures in this tradition, the latter two being near contemporaries of Leibniz and writers with whom Leibniz was definitely familiar.14 Comenius’ Lux in tenebris (1657) had prophetically envisaged the Turks (alongside the Swedes) as fundamental in bringing down the House of Habsburg—for which the Muslims would be rewarded with “the light of the Gospel” (mercedisque loco reportaturos Evangelii lucem).15 In 1675, Kuhlmann even took a copy of Comenius’ tract to Istanbul to try and persuade Mehmet IV in person of the validity of his vision16—a visit Leibniz remained unimpressed with (in the Nouveaux Essais, he dismisses Kuhlmann’s trip “all the way to Constantinople” as the product of a “dangerous fantasy”17). This is no place to inquire into how close Leibniz’s contact with such spiritualistic/ Kabbalistic/Rosicrucian traditions was.18 On the surface, at least, it would appear that Leibniz was always skeptical towards such figures. In the Nouveaux Essais (1705) we see a general rejection of Comenius, Kuhlmann, Drabicius, et al as writers whose prophecies do more to “foment disturbances” than serve any useful purpose (New Essays, 508). Despite the ambiguities in Leibniz’s overall disdainful attitude towards the Rosicrucian/ alchemist/ Millenarian tradition—his abiding interest in plants and minerals,19 his praise for Comenius’ encyclopaedia project, his parallel Lullian interest (at the same time as Kircher and Kuhlmann) in an artificial language, his reading of Kabbalists such as Van Helmont, not to mention Leibniz’s faintly Rosicrucian belief that the wisdom inherent in the mystery of the numbers “came from the Orient to Greece”20—Leibniz’s writings distinguish themselves in this context with their near complete vilification of the Turk. As a Protestant thinker with Catholic sympathies, Leibniz rejects all three of the available anti-Catholic responses to Islam in the seventeenth century—for Leibniz, the Turk is neither a sign of the end of the Age, nor a divine punishment, nor a possible ally in the final apocalyptic struggle with Rome. Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” LeIbnIz the poLItIcAL thInker: ExultA, GErmAnIA! 467 One approach to Islam and Muslims, amongst the many found in Leibniz, remains predominantly political. Although it has theological underpinnings, and although it will both found itself on and provide a foundation for research into the ‘Orient,’ Islam is understood here as an essentially political entity. Its explicit synonymy with Ottoman power means that the Leibniz who used this version of Islam was the Leibniz of the court, the Hof, the diplomatic mission. A thinker who did not simply (as Russell said) “depend on the smiles of princes,”21 but who represented the social/ political institutions of his time as a genuine mouthpiece—the thinkers Gramsci called “experts in legitimation.”22 This means that the Leibniz who used this voice, the Leibniz who was able to produce this very European first person plural (“The Turks have already learnt our military arts and naval science . . . ” Schriften IV: 1, 398) felt he was representing a topos of Christian political power, sometimes generically European, sometimes Franco-German-Austrian, sometimes exclusively Teutonic. What emerges, subsequently, is the diminution of the philosopher who considered heaven to be his country,23 and an increase in emphasis upon the German thinker—the pen that could write a poem beginning “Exulta, Germania!” when Belgrade was finally taken back from the Turks.24 Leibniz’s own sense of Germanness is worth a few words, not just because Leibniz always emphasized how he was not “one of those impassioned patriots of one country alone,”25 but also because it appears to grow and recede in direct proportion to the Ottoman threat. Although Leibniz had always nurtured a sense of his native tongue’s intrinsic superiority—from his belief (1670) that it is the Sprache best suited to philosophy,26 to his candidacy of German in the Nouveaux Essais as the closest tongue to the Adamic language (New Essays, 281)—it is in 1683, the crucial year of the siege of Vienna, that we find the most explicit affirmation of his own patriotism in a tract entitled An Encouragement to the Germans to Make Better Use of their Language and Intellect.27 The style of the tract is simple and direct: Leibniz praises how untouched Germany is by hurricanes and earthquakes (unlike “Asia and Southern Europe” Heer, 79); Germany may not have any oranges, but it does not have any scorpions either—in any case, Leibniz adds, our own apples taste much sweeter than any India could send us. Mixed in with a slightly trivial nationalism, however, is a more serious affirmation on Leibniz’s part of what it means to belong to a nation. Beneath a shallow preference for homegrown vegetables and German linen, a much more earnest analysis of the naturalness and necessity of patriotism is offered: “The bond of language, of customs, even of common names unites human beings in such a powerful, albeit invisible way and forms at once a kind of kinship. A letter, a newspaper which talks of our nation can make us ill or happy” (78). First of all, a nation for Leibniz is a phenomenon based primarily not on race or faith but language. In speaking of a Christian Europe, Leibniz will have to abandon this appeal to German names and customs but, in this essay at least, the linguistic bond appears to be privileged over those of blood or creed. As Leibniz, following Luther’s recommendation of Gott as the best non-Hebrew term for God, attests in the same essay to the superior proximity of German to the original Hebrew (“I cannot conceive of the Holy Scriptures sounding better in any other language in the world than they do in German,” 211) then, by implication, the German people lie closer to the origins of Christianity than any other nation. It comes as no surprise, 468 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 therefore, to see Leibniz resurrecting the old Holy Roman description of the Kaiser as “the worldly head of Christianity” (das weltliche Haupt der Christenheit, 80). An attack on the German-speaking lands, in this sense, would be an attack on the origins and center of Christianity. Unconsciously, with no explicit aim in mind, Leibniz has moved Rome and Jerusalem to Hanover and Vienna. Leibniz’s prolific fluency in French—and Schleiermacher’s remark that Leibniz could never have been the same philosopher if he had only written in German (Loemker, Papers, 130)—supplies only a limited irony here. A frustration with Louis XIV’s un-Christian collaboration with the Ottomans—combined with his anger at “those French fools who say that God is now chastising the emperor for having helped the Dutch heretics”—had severely tested the limits of Leibniz’s already ambiguous Francophilia. 28 The main aim of Leibniz’s essay, however, is an urge to national awareness—the proposal for a German-orientated institution (deutsch gesinnten Gesellschaft) which would educate the “common man” (gemeine Mann) out of their desire for “animal drunkenness and card playing” (84) and give them a better understanding of their war and peacetime duties. Patriotism, for Leibniz, is an expression of intelligence, not a subjugation of it. In this national becoming-aware of responsibility (the unpatriotic for Leibniz are literally “asleep” die Schlafenden), a nation itself becomes more refined and zivilisiert. In an ironic anticipation of Nietzsche, Leibniz has little time for those “free spirits” who openly mock “the fear of God and the Fatherland” (79). In many ways, Ermahnung an die Deutschen offers a perfect example of how culture, religion, and language can be consolidated into a singular expression of nation. Leibniz’s un-Lutheran loyalty to topos over logos—to History over scripture—facilitates this extension of German awareness to civilization, happiness, and spiritual well-being. The “free spirits” who make fun of this, adds Leibniz on an unusually anti-Semitic note, those Freigeister who see religion as a cage for the masses, deserve the same contempt as those who poison wells (80). Where does the Turk come into all of this? I have dwelt on Leibniz’s treatment of patriotism not merely to show how a lively and highly developed national consciousness is at work in his writings, nor even to demonstrate how, predictably enough, the Ottoman threat augmented Leibniz’s own sense of his cultural origins. The Ermahnung an die Deutschen is also interesting because the way it describes the unawakened Pöbel or rabble sounds exactly like the way Leibniz talks elsewhere about the Turks. Most of Leibniz’s references to the Ottoman Turks, not surprisingly, are scattered throughout the 1680’s, in response to the events of the Ottoman Balkan campaign. Three essays in particular—Thoughts on the Unfortunate Retreat from Hungary (1683), Some Reflections on the Present War in Hungary (1683), and Thoughts On A Voluntary Turk-Tax (1688)—allow some limited glimpses into what Leibniz thought of the “Mohammedan” culture which was now encamped on the banks of the Danube. It is difficult not to be struck by the distinctly plebeian description of the Turk in these essays—he writes of the invading army as the “Turkish rabble [die Türckische Menge], made up of incompetent, press-ganged, and exhausted Asiatic peasants [abgemattete Asiatische landvolck]” (4:2 606). The lightning speed of the Ottomans’ arrival at the gates of Vienna shocks Leibniz—he says he can hardly believe the news; in writing of their presence, there is a tone of Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 469 outrage and offense not merely related to surprise and physical alarm, but also the indignation of an aristocrat who sees an army of serfs march into his guest salon. As with Luther, there seems to be in Leibniz an implicit association of Islam and the Turk with the proletariat, and a repressed (though occasionally expressed) fear of social upheaval connected to their approach. The fear of Islam and the fear of the masses, not infrequently, lie inextricably together in this common alarm for an extant Christian social structure. As Leibniz had already taken great pains a decade earlier to reassure Louis XIV that “despite their warrior pomp, there is no weaker army in the Orient” than the Ottomans (nihil Orientibus . . . licet in pompam armatis, imbellius, Schriften, 4:1, 388), we find the author of the Egyptian Plan, bereft of the Lutheran consolation of a Hidden Hand, trying to understand ten years later how such Turkish success was possible: I’ll leave it to others to better understand whether the belief in an imaginary predestination, Maslak (aromatic Turkish wine) or opium makes the Turks so heartened, or much more that they are used to working harder and for less salary and, like all barbarians, are stronger in body than civilized peoples. . . . (Schriften, 4:2, 609) The animal strength of the Turk, their uncouth sturdiness and peasant constitution, is what Leibniz chooses to emphasize here. The enemies of God, no longer simply the enemies of Europe, have become the enemies of culture. The obvious point to make here is that for Leibniz, an attack on one of these abstracts (God, Europe, Civilization) is an attack on all three. And yet what is interesting about the Turkish pieces Leibniz wrote in the Eighties is the relative paucity of religious references—only once in these essays, for example, does he refer to the Turk as the Erbfeind or eternal foe (“France should drive the Erbfeind into the water instead of tormenting Europe,” Schriften, 4:4, 81). The Turkish assault on Vienna, for Leibniz, is more of an assault of appetite on spirit, of ignorance on consciousness, and ultimately (one suspects) of the rabble on the elite. Not so much Erbfeind, then, as Kulturfeind. Like Luther, Leibniz tries to find negative reasons for the Ottomans’ success, reasons which will confirm his already extant conception of the Turk: their fanaticism, their animal savagery, their sensual imbecility, their servitude to Oriental despotism. The possibility of a divine factor is left significantly out of the equation. When Köprülü’s campaign begins to ebb after 1683, Leibniz’s confidence grows and he begins his characteristic association of the Turk with stupidity once more. The intellectual inferiority of Turks, of “Mohammedans” in general, appears to be a favorite motif of Leibniz—we encounter phrases such as imbecilitate imperii Turcici, “clumsy government” (4:4, 81) and “barbaric negligence”(4:4, 5–6). As late as 1697, we find Leibniz wondering why God supplies the Germans with miracles only against the Turks: How is it, I ask you, that He only does [a miracle] against the Turks, and not against the French? Perhaps it is because the Turks are idiots [sont des Sots], and Heaven loves clever nations like the French. (I:14, 609, Leibniz to de Monceaux, Oct. 1697) 470 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 The idiocy of the Turks: one has to wonder in what this idiocy consists. Do they reason slower? Are their brains less adapted to the rational? Do they find it harder to articulate abstract ideas? There are good reasons for thinking that if Leibniz deemed Turks—and “Mohammedans” in general—to be less intelligent than Europeans, it sprang from a perceived Turkish/ Muslim inability to fully grasp all the dimensions of temporality. Just as the unenlightened peasant Leibniz wished to educate “thinks no further than they see” and deems all “histories to be the same as fairytales” (84), Leibniz’s Muslims—he remarks on several occasions—find themselves equally historically challenged, trapped in an idiot stupor by an epistemological incapacity to reflect upon the past: The History of Antiquity is of absolute necessity for the proof of the truth of religion and, putting to one side the excellence of doctrine, it is by wholly divine origin that ours distinguishes itself from all others . . . and if the Mohammedans and the pagans . . . do not renounce [their beliefs], we can say it is principally the fault of their not knowing history. . . . (Nouvelles Ouvertures, 226) Of course, Leibniz’s denial of historical consciousness to Islam is only a small contribution to a long association of the Oriental with unreflectivity, one which will find its most spectacular expression in Hegel (the Oriental’s indifference to history culminating in History’s indifference to the Oriental). What is original in Leibniz—and most probably linked to his monadology—is how a “Mohammedan” inability to understand their origins is responsible for their present ignorance and error. Leibniz, author of the Protogaea, delver of both mines and etymologies, can forgive neither the Turk nor the peasant for their indifference towards the primordial. In a letter to Ludolf (1699) he mentions the eccentric Scandinavian philologist Rudbeck, who proposed his native Sweden to be the Lost Atlantis and the origin of Western civilization: “I do not doubt, however, that if Turkey and Tartary were given education [si Turcis et Tartaris eruditio daretur], from them would emerge a Hyperborea no less great than the one Rudbeck referred to” (Schriften I:16, 706). The Turks, Leibniz insinuates, have enough pride (fieri) to produce a Rudbeck, but lack the historical consciousness. Islam, in many ways, comes across as an incomplete Monad; unaware of its origins (and by implication unable to decide its future), it lacks the introspective/maieutic level of inquiry that would bring out (un-forget) the truths Platonically buried in its history. Leibniz’s fondness for the familiar motif of Mohammedan fatalism (Fatum Mahumetanum)—and the reports he gives of how Turkish travelers do not even bother trying to avoid places infested by the plague because of such fatalism—underlines this inadequacy of Islam to deal with time. 29 Bereft of arche and telos, isolated from a past it does not inquire into and a future it does not care about, it lies adrift in a sea of Oriental passivity (the Muslim, Leibniz tells us, will not even jump out of the way of carts, ibid, 173); the Turk, like the peasant, lives from day to day in the airlock of such unreflection. In contrast to earlier texts such as the Egyptian Plan, the “Mohammedan” faith of the Turks hardly emerges as a characteristic in any of these remarks during the eighties. Apart from the occasional reference to predestination, the Islam of the Ottoman armies is largely transparent. For a series of texts written during the most crucial period in the possible Muslim domination of Europe, the result is a Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 471 strangely secular analysis of the enemy—Leibniz’s Turks, one almost feels, could quite easily be replaced by Visigoths or barbarians with no great disturbance to the text, so little does the faith of Köprülü’s soldiers impinge upon the general narrative. Perhaps this is not the place to move onto the complex topic of the facelessness of Leibniz’s enemy; Gil Anidjar has already posited the question of the adversary as “a concrete, discursive, vanishing field,” and Leibniz’s Turks seem to share a similar ontological intangibility. 30 Certainly if the Islamic identity of the Turks is elided in these treatises, the Christian identity of the Europe they are attacking enjoys rather more emphasis, in equal measures of optimism and pessimism. In Thoughts on a Voluntary Turk-Tax Leibniz speaks glowingly of the “beautiful, unhoped-for unification” of the “greatest part of European Christianity,” whilst acknowledging some disappointment at “the cold-heartedness of current Christendom, since they have the enemy at the door . . . and yet show no signs of stirring” (Schriften 4:4, 6–7). In the 1683 satire Mars Christianissimus, we are told how important it is that “the people of Christendom have a leader against the infidels” (Riley, Political Writings, 123). And yet it is one of Leibniz’s earliest pieces, his Consilium Aegyptiacum or Egyptian Plan (written at the age of twenty-four) which best illustrates—and problematizes—the Christian underpinnings of Leibniz’s political thought. To some degree, the scholar D. J. Cook is correct in describing the Egyptian Plan as a “youthful outburst.”31 Despite the early date, however, this attempt to persuade France to attack Ottoman Egypt instead of her European neighbors is no piece of Leibnizian junvenilia, but a surprisingly well-prepared and meditated argument for an invasion of the Orient. Although Leibniz would never use again some of the more grotesque caricatures of Muslims (particularly Turks) in the Egyptian Plan, it remains an important text—not just because it establishes a trajectory for Leibniz’s approach to Islam which neither his political theory nor his apologetics would ever really leave, but also because it suggests a rather cynical use of Christianity as a slightly superficial decoration, tacked on to an essentially strategic and thoroughly un-transcendental project. The Consilium Aegyptiacum is a treatise which begins with a promise to Christianize the East, ends with the declaration that “never was God’s honor and our own more narrowly intertwined,” and spends large amounts of text in between describing naval facilities, army sizes, grain stores, and trade routes. The Egyptian Plan throws an interesting light on a number of points in Leibniz’s attitude towards the Muslim Orient—and the Christian Europe he juxtaposed against it. Most obviously (as Perkins has already pointed out), it shows how even at an early age, Leibniz was actively engaged in the research of non-European cultures. Some fairly detailed (albeit exaggerated) descriptions of Ottoman intrigues, Middle Eastern geography, and Arab resentment against their Turkish masters attest to an already extant familiarity on the young Leibniz’s part with travel accounts and ambassadorial reports.32 The conscious use of history in the Plan as a pragmatic tool of legitimation is also striking. “This project” Leibniz tells us, “has always been attractive to the greatest and wisest men as the sole means of re-establishing [restaurandum] the interests of Christianity in the Orient”(Schriften 4:1, 383). The word restaurandum is interesting—Leibniz is careful to historically contextualize his proposal partly to be able to supply precedents such as Caesar and Alexander the Great, but more importantly to sell the Plan not as an inva- 472 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 sion but a restoration. The Orient is originally Christian; Leibniz’s Morgenland is a place where Christianity is indigenous. Egypt will not be attacked so much as ‘taken back’—the existence of Muslims in the Middle East has no place within Leibniz’s exclusively Christian temporality except as unlawful and temporary occupiers. And yet if Time and History help Leibniz to transform Islam into the tout autre of Europe, they also serve to inscribe Islam into the destiny of Europe. In some sense anticipating Hegel’s own relegation of Islam to an intermediate stage between paganism and Christianity, the conquest of Ottoman Egypt (described somewhat entomologically as a “nest” for the Saracens [Schriften, 384; literally where the Saracens have “nested,” nidulati]) and the subsequent “disappearance” of Mohammedanism will enable Europe to fully become what it is and proceed to a higher stage within its own Christian identity: Egypt is the Holland of the Orient, as China is the France of the Orient . . . [if France undertook this project] it could lead the way to expansion without limit, towards expansion on the scale of Alexander the Great; thus the Gospel would be carried to the most distant regions, with happiness filling the whole earth. The conquest of Egypt is easier than the conquest of Holland, that of the whole Orient more easy than Germany alone. The houses of Austria and France will be able to share the world. To one the Orient, to the other the Occident. Italy and Germany will be delivered from the fear of the Turks, and the Moors will no longer trouble the peninsula (Schriften, 4:1 386) It is difficult to decide how much cynicism should be employed when witnessing these moments of overlap between Leibniz’s Christian and political vocabularies. In Leibniz’s desire to secure at the same time a spiritual and a ‘worldly’ good, one critic has discerned a mood of “Machiavellian Realpolitik.”33 Certainly the Leibniz who could tell Burnett how “the goal of the whole human race should be the knowledge and the development of the marvels of God” and, more importantly, that it was for precisely this reason that “God has given [the human race] the empire of this globe”34 . . . such a Leibniz would see nothing problematic in the synonymy of faith and Empire. In an ontology which privileges activity over passivity,35 actuality over possibility, development over stasis, an ontology whose universe sees happiness as “a perpetual progress to new pleasures and new perfections”(204), it is not difficult to imagine how Leibniz might see the expansion of culture to be the expansion of consciousness. Any part the Muslim Orient played in this process of “expansion” would be purely ancillary. Where China, for example, would be able to offer a “commerce of light” with the West, an exchange of knowledge which “could give to us at once their work of thousands of years and render ours to them,”36 neither the Turk nor the Arab have anything to teach us—their role is to be the recipient of European civilization, not an illuminating variant of it. Indeed, in some parts of the Plan, Leibniz seems to suggest the Orientals do not have any religion at all (Schriften 4:1, 393) 37—it will be necessary to wave a bag of booty to persuade the Arabs to join our side, for “it is foolish [stultum] to believe that these people are guided by religion” (395). Leibniz’s consistent de-humanizing of the Turk/Arab—turning them into a rabble of Asiatic peasants, a swarm of insects proceeding from a com- Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 473 mon nest—underlines the conscious refusal of the political Leibniz to consider any kinship or analogy whatsoever with the Muslim Other. When the much-vaunted status of Leibniz as a non-sectarian philosopher of peace and reconciliation is considered, then it becomes easier to see how Islam, in many ways, would pay the price for such Christian unity. The abiding otherness of Islam, in short, both sprang from and sustained Leibniz’s ecumenicalism. The annihilation of any possible relationship and future co-existence with the Muslim world—drawing on any example from a range of historical precedents, from Frederick II’s pact with the Saracens to Protestant hopes of an alliance with the Turks—was both the condition and consequence of Leibniz’s hope in “the great work of reunion” he envisaged for Christianity. 38 As far as the author of the Egyptian Plan and the “Turk-Tax” was concerned, the faith Leibniz once referred to as “the monster of Islam” possessed no redeeming features.39 LeIbnIz the chrIstIAn thInker: IsLAm As nAturAL theoLogy infidelis est qui Christi fidem respuit (quales judaei, Mahumetani, pagani). Defintionum Juris Specimen, (Schriften 6:3, 625) I heartily commend you, sir, for maintaining that faith is grounded in reason; otherwise, why would we prefer the Bible to the Koran or the ancient writings of the Brahmins? New Essays, 494 For all the interrelatedness of Leibniz’s political and religious vocabularies, there are approaches to Islam within Leibniz which see Muslims not as animals or savages or political enemies, but primarily as misguided human beings with similar moral/theological frameworks who, for some reason or another, have rejected the truth of Christianity. When Leibniz writes this way, his understanding of Islam as a corrupted, yet on many points still valid, version of Christianity comes to the fore, rather than any demonic picture of Islam as a plague, monster or Eternal Foe. For the political Leibniz—the author of the Egyptian Plan and advocate of the Turckensteuer—the “Mohammedan” is unconvertible in the most Lutheran sense of the word; he can never be convinced, only conquered. However, for Leibniz the Christian apologist—the Jesuit correspondent, the author of the Theodicy—the project of finding a way to evangelically disseminate the rational truthfulness of Christianity was of abiding significance. Muslims, as well as the Chinese and the Jews, were naturally included in this project. Leibniz’s lifelong desire to construct an artificial language is of crucial significance here. It is surprising how many scholars, in their appraisal of Leibniz’s dream of “a language or universal characteristic by which all concepts and things can be put into beautiful order,”40 fail to mention the medieval Christian author who inspired the project, the thirteenth-century “missionary to the Muslims” Raymond Lull. Certainly, Eco’s description of Leibniz as a thinker who “did not 474 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 harbor thoughts of political conquest or religious conversion” makes no mention of him (Serendipities, 70). This may be partly because Leibniz’s evaluation of Lull was as critical as it was laudatory, and partly because of the low opinion he had of the “Lullian” treatise he himself had written as a teenager—the 1666 Art of Combinations, a work he describes as “a little schoolboyish essay” written after the “Lullian Art.”41 Lull’s life was dedicated to the conversion of non-Christians—in particular, of the Jewish and Muslim populations on his native Majorca—and his Ars Magna (1305), a mathematical attempt to prove the validity of the Christian God through a succession of Kabbalistic, geometrical spheres, tables, and propositions, was a strong influence on the early Leibniz. A brief excerpt from the Prologue to his Book of the Gentile will give an idea of the spirit of his project: Since for a long time we have had dealings with unbelievers [Jews and Muslims] and have heard their false opinions and errors, and in order that they may give praise to Our Lord God . . . I . . . wish to exert myself to the utmost in finding a new method and new reasons by which those in error might be shown the path to glory without end and avoid infinite suffering. Every science requires words by which it can best be presented, and this demonstrative science needs obscure words unfamiliar to laymen, but since we are writing this book for laymen, we will have to discuss this science briefly and in plain words.42 Peter Fenves, in a remarkable essay on Leibniz and philosophical style, has already highlighted the relationship between Leibniz’s privileging of clarity over truth and the quest for an origin: “As a logica verbalis, philosophical style disambiguates discourse.”43 Almost four centuries earlier, we find Lull in the same quest for clarity—driven by the same concern for the transparency of Truth, exhibiting the same frustration at the inadequacy of the current tools available to him (the need for a “new method” and “new reasons” to convert the looming Saracens). Leibniz’s avoidance of special terminology (“Technical terms are to be shunned as worse than a dog or snake”44) finds its precedent in Lull’s desire for “plain words”—in both cases, given the evangelical projects of the two men, the price of ambiguity would be the eternal soul; the reward of clarity the promise of salvation. Both the Ars Magna and Leibniz’s own “General Characteristic” illustrate how the semiotic project to construct a language of perfect clarity has its origins not in a desire to seek truth, but to disseminate it—not to comprehend, but to convert. Leibniz, writing in 1679, is explicit on this point: . . . anyone who is certainly convinced of the truth of religion and its consequences, and so embraces others in love that he desires the conversion of mankind, will surely admit, if he understands these matters, that nothing will be more influential than this discovery for the propagation of the faith, unless it be miracles, the holiness of an apostle or the victories of a great monarch. Where this language can once be introduced by missionaries, the true religion, which is in complete agreement with reason, would be established. . . .45 Leibniz’s desire to construct a universal language, when seen as a direct descendant of Lull’s search for a new method or argument which would convert the Saracens, is ultimately motivated by Islam. To say ‘exclusively motivated’ would be in error— Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 475 Leibniz saw the defense of Christianity as a war on a number of Socinian/freethinking fronts, not least of all against “the shipwreck of atheism which now threatens us.”46 When one considers, however, Leibniz’s advocacy of his new language as an Ersatz for military campaigns (as good as “the victories of a great monarch”) in the propagation of the Christian faith—an evangelical device, moreover, indebted in no small part to medieval Christendom’s most renowned anti-Islamic apologist, it is difficult not to see Islam, in the form of the encroaching pressure of the Turks, as playing a significant part in Leibniz’s plan for a universal character. One consequence of this need for Christian clarity is that it pushes the Muslim/Turk/Arab into the realm of confusion, muddle and un-clarity. If the Christian is required to provide a transparent language so that the latent truthfulness of his faith may emerge, then Islam is an effect of the obfuscation of such a message. Not surprisingly, what Leibniz called the “childish errors of the Koran” rendered the Muslim faith a poor photocopy of the Christian original (Schriften IV: 1, 335).47 This natural tendency of Leibniz’s Muslim to confuse and pollute truth is not confined to religion; the “spring-water” of Greek medicine, we will recall, “was muddied in the Arab rivulets, and has had many impurities removed by recourse to the Greek originals” (New Essays, 336). Likewise the followers of Averroës are considered to have given sound neo-Platonic ideas “a bad turn of meaning.”48 Leibniz’s conviction of the natural clarity of German facilitates the ease with which a Christian Europe can command a superior access to truth—spiritually, intellectually, linguistically—over their muddled, origin-blind, Oriental counterparts. In his preface to Nizolius, Leibniz is happy to report how “even the Turks use German names for metals in the mines of . . . Asia Minor” in preference to their own (125). Nevertheless, this belief that Christians/Europeans have a clearer, uncorrupted view of truth than their Muslim/Arab opposites will be undermined by Leibniz’s own obsession with the arche. Leibniz’s conception of Islam as possessing a natural theology offers us a slightly milder aspect of his relationship to the faith. It would be wrong to exaggerate this; Leibniz’s understanding of the expansion of Islam could be quite cynical, and there are a number of stages in its development. The young author of the Egyptian Plan allows no credit at all to any semblance of natural religion in his description of “Mohammedan” conversion in North Africa, choosing rather to blame the indigenous Christianity there (“if the Nubians . . . have lost their faith, it is due more to the faults of their pastors than any love of Mahomet” [Schriften IV: 1, 395]). This reluctance to acknowledge anything remotely good about Islam—and the consequent decision to attribute its successes to the deficiencies of the Catholic/Orthodox church rather than any redeeming doctrine of Mohammed’s—continues well into the 1690’s. In a letter to Bossuet, we find Leibniz lamenting how the early church’s prohibition of images was overturned by the second Council of Nicaea—if the abuse of image-worship had been checked early on, remarks Leibniz, “Christianity would not have become reproachable [méprisable] in the Orient, and Mohammed would never have prevailed.”49 The main point to make here is that Leibniz’s approach to the possibility of a natural theology in Islam is still rather negative; two years later, in a letter to Madame de Brinon, Leibniz informs her how the “wholly sensuous” devotion of Roman Catholicism has resulted in abuses which, in turn, “have contributed a great deal to frightening away many 476 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 Mohammedans from Christianity.”50 For Leibniz the emphasis lies more on the unnaturalness of contemporary (invariably Catholic) Christianity, rather than the naturalness of the religion of Islam. Any praise there is for Islam’s natural theology is relative, implicit and tainted with a certain cynicism: . . . it is an ineradicable custom to relate all things to one single, intelligent and spiritual Principle—it is from this which Mahomet has profited, and Mohammedanism has been the graveyard of idolatry in many countries.51 Islam’s resemblance to Christianity, Leibniz suggests, is something Islam has ‘profited’ from. In all of these remarks, it is easy to detect a certain avoidance of the basic similarities Islam and Christianity share. Leibniz feels he has to mention these but, in order to render such resemblances less problematic, tries to place them in a framework (Mohammed the cynical imposter and manipulator of rabbles) which will actually turn them to his advantage. In this way the awkward problem of Mohammed’s similarities with Christian core-beliefs—the mistrust of images, the immortality of the soul, a single God—either end up reinforcing the image of Mohammed as one who ‘profits’ from truth or, even better, serve to strengthen Leibniz’s own attempts to reform Christianity from within (‘Even the Turk does not do X,’ ‘Even Mohammedans believe in Y,’ etc.). One could almost write a mini-history of this ‘even,’ this etiam, this meme . . . beginning, no doubt, with James’ assertion that “Even the devil believes in one God” (James 2:19), this reference to an enemy’s good practice or belief in order to provoke and correct the complacency of one’s own. Nevertheless, by the time we reach the Theodicy (1710), Leibniz’s approach is generally more positive, although the clause-inducing ‘even’ still persists: Even Mahomet in time did not stray from these important teachings of natural theology: rather, his followers have spread them even more to the farthest-flung peoples of Asia and Africa, where Christianity had neither penetrated, nor had a chance to spread; and in many lands they have done away with pagan superstitions, which was in contradiction with the true teaching of the unity of God and the immortality of the soul.52 The political enemy has become the spiritual ally; the Eternal Foe, the plague, the “monster” of Islam, actually does the work of Christianity. Islam’s similarities, no longer proof of Mohammed’s cunning, now attest rather to the universality of certain key-beliefs. A selective gaze, now bereft of any agonistic edge, has taken the extant resemblances to Christianity within Islam and converted them from a rival faith’s advantageous features into the basis for a sustained belief in universal moral truths. In a sense, this foreshadows what I am going to argue next—that as Leibniz becomes more and more interested in the question of origins, Islam’s resemblance to Christianity ceases to be resented, as it acquires a use-value in Leibniz’s bigger project. Again, this should not be exaggerated—although Leibniz concedes that “Mohammedans” practice a natural theology, there is never the sense (as with China) that such a natural theology is better at producing “public morality” than the European version (Leibniz and China, 151). Perkins has already shown in some detail how, for Leibniz, “both Europe and China have a natural theology—that of Europe is more developed and articulate, while that of China is more effective in producing good behavior” (152). This idea of an exchange—we teach the Chinese the Christian faith, they teach us how to lead better public lives—will Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 477 never be applied to the Islamic Orient. Although Leibniz’s generally low opinion of the Muslim never again reaches the levels of debauchery found in the Egyptian Plan—where the Ottoman Empire, we will recall, is submerged in crimes of Sodomy and rampant polygamy (Hinc infandum Sodomiae crimen, et in media polygamia contemtus sexus muliebris [Schriften 4:1, 390])—even as late as 1705, we still find tales (taken from Locke) of Egyptian fakirs who are considered holy because they sleep with mules, and not women or boys.53 If Leibniz felt that Europeans were to improve their morality by learning from the East (as Perkins argues), such lessons would come from a far higher Orient than any Islam could provide. LeIbnIz the seeker of cAuses: the enemy becomes the orIgIn. It is good to study the discoveries of others in such a way that allows us to detect the source of their inventions and to make them in some sense our own. And I wish authors would give us the history of their discoveries and the process by which they arrive at them.54 History, Leibniz once remarked, is the mother of observation.55 In three quests—Leibniz’s search for a reliable translation of the Koran, his linguistic investigations into the first ‘Adamic’ language, and the related ethnological inquiry into what he called “the origin of nations” (New Essays, 286)—historicism emerges as a determining vocabulary, one which overrides any religious or political considerations. Of course, Leibniz still remains a Christian thinker; the very fact that his request for samples of different languages from dozens of philologists took the form of a pater noster (so that “every tongue may praise His name”56) warns us against the naiveté of separating a “scientific” Leibniz from the theological thinker. Moreover, Leibniz’s occasional and inconsistent conviction that German was the most natural of Natursprachen also points to a nationalistic bias in his research.57 Nevertheless, the strangely respectful tone adopted towards Islam—not to mention Turks and Arabs—within Leibniz’s philological research, in contrast with the generally derogatory remarks he employs elsewhere in his political and religious writings, does suggest a fundamental change of identity. For this version of Leibniz, at least, the enemy becomes the origin, the adversary becomes the ancestor; Islam, along with its languages and cultures, moves from a place of political enmity and theological disdain to a new position of tacit philological acceptance. A number of factors facilitated this move. The most obvious of these would be the evaporation of the Ottoman threat after 1683—the gradual withdrawal of a “Mohammedan” empire not merely from the gates of Vienna, but even right back down to the boundaries of modern Bulgaria. By 1691, Leibniz is well aware that the “Turks are trying to save the rest of their Empire in Europe” and that a victory at Timisoara would frighten the Ottomans in Adrianopolis.58 One could argue, in a somewhat Foucauldian manner, that once the Turk had withdrawn physically, a lacuna was left which could only be filled philologically. Once the Turkish armies of the Ottomans were no longer there to represent the threatening contemporaneity of Islam, the retreating Muslim could be re-inscribed into an Oriental past, less real, more remote, the subject of scholarship, not strategists. 478 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 Whatever one might think of such historical methodology, the fact remains that Leibniz’s political and philological remarks concerning Turks do not overlap. The brief treatise Consultation sur les affaires générales (1691) is the last time Leibniz talks with any degree of seriousness about the Turkish military threat; a letter to Landgraf Ernst in July 1692 marks the first significant manifestation of Leibniz’s interest in the Turks as an ethnic/linguistic group, rather than a political power. After 1692, apart from the occasional reference to the Porte and their peace with the Tsar, Leibniz’s fervent inquiries into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—not to mention the Turk’s possible kinship with Kalmucks and Scythians—effectively sideline any interest in the Turk as a political contemporary. For Leibniz, the genealogy of Mohammed and the identity of Ibn Khallikan become more important than the Sultan’s intent in Transylvania or the size of his Balkan army. Leibniz’s concern for origins—reflected in an insistence on the authentic documentation of claims—was another factor in his late obsession with Oriental ethnic groups and etymologies. We have already seen how wary Leibniz was of anti-Islamic propaganda such as Prideaux’s The True Nature of Imposture. This extended to religious polemics in general. . . . it is the norm in authors to attribute monstrous opinions, and innumerable sects, to those they do not love. If we had the books of pagans against Christians we would see some interesting things [des belles choses], the Christians in their turn attributing to the ancient heretics many things I hold for false.59 This historically alert awareness of a possible outside perspective, as yet unreached and untold, on the subject at hand (‘How could the thing I am looking at be seen differently by someone else?’) is impressive in Leibniz, and yet it does have its limitations. Five years later, in a letter to the same Burnett he had told to rely on Arabic manuscripts for any sound biography of Mohammed, Leibniz relates how the Scholastics “had written several good books against Jews and Mohammedans, to which one could add Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles”—Leibniz’s fondness for the scholastics, here, clearly overriding his better critical judgment.60 Nevertheless, the fact that Leibniz, in this letter at least, is able to posit an imaginary pagan perspective on the Christian suggests two things: first of all, a tension between Leibniz’s historicism and his Christian faith, a prioritizing of letter and text over spirit and idea, producing a faint anxiety which could not simply be resolved by citing History’s usefulness in illuminating “the foundations of revelation” (New Essays, 470). Moreover, the passage also highlights an enigmatic motif in Leibniz’s discourse—the search for an imagined, as yet undisclosed book or source, one which would be free of any bias or tampering and which would perfectly illuminate a present state of knowledge. Leibniz’s hypothetical “pagan” book on Christianity, along with the perfect translation of the Koran (“not from Christianorum praejudiciciis but from Mahometanorum commentariis”61), the genealogy of Mohammed which he sought from scholars such as Ludolf (Schriften I: 9, 283), the elusive oeuvre of Ibn Khallikan, even the ideal bi-lingual Arabic interpreter Leibniz went to such lengths to try and find . . . all of these represent an imaginary viewpoint outside of Christianity which Leibniz, in his letters, was always trying to get hold of. By 1705, the author of the Nouveaux Essais is willing to acknowledge a truth-seeker “can Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 479 get satisfaction from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish historians on the one hand, and Greek, Roman, and Western ones on the other” (New Essays, 470). The Muslim, previously so inept at history, now becomes an important correlating factor in the verification of the past, a supplier of “powerful evidence of truth” (ibid). The desire to have a translation of the Koran made by a lay scholar, and not by a priest, is also significant in this respect. When Leibniz writes how a translation of the “Alcoran,” being prepared by a scholar called Acoluthus, “will be quite another thing from the version the good Father Maracci will give us,”62 we glimpse a Leibniz who is trying to go outside his tribe. The same historical drive which speculated on how Christianity might look to pagan eyes rejects an Islam constructed for Christian readers, by searching for a Muslim Koran, commented on only by Muslims. This point on the outside, this moment of willful alienation when a Christian thinker attempts to imagine Christianity and Christians through Muslim eyes, is a gesture of decentering we may also find in Kant’s speculations on the kinds of names Turkish travelers might give to European countries.63 It is possible to overestimate the significance of such maneuvers—the desire to obtain an outside, apodictic view on one’s own culture and belief-system makes momentary use of an alien, perhaps even hostile perspective, without necessarily resulting in any creation of empathy with the briefly visited vantage point of the Other. That Leibniz repeated this ex-static gesture on a number of occasions, even to the point of considering both Muslims and Christians together as inferior versions of Jews,64 underlines how far Leibniz saw his own Christianity as a detachable identity, one he could step out of from time to time and view with a pagan/non-European gaze. As we move into the 1690’s, we see that Islam and the world of cultures and languages it offered increasingly represented one of many such symbolic points of externality for Leibniz. Between 1692 and 1697, the letters of Leibniz reflect a profound interest in the languages/ethnologies of the Middle East and Central Asia. Eagerly awaiting a copy of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, we find Leibniz constantly corresponding with a variety of Orientalists, desperately trying to find out whether the Tartars are from Lithuania, whether Persians and Parthians are of Scythian origin, whether Armenian is related to Ancient Egyptian (Schriften, I:13, 543; I:14, 761). He keeps in close contact with the Swedish linguist Sparwenfeld, who in March 1697 writes Leibniz long letter, giving the exact list and bibliography of a whole set of Arab historians, including Ibn Khallikan, Ibn ‘Asakir, at-Tabari, Ibn ‘Abu-Zar’ and the famous Ibn Khaldun (Schriften, I:13, 637). The impression is of a thinker who is sifting through the world’s languages—as Leibniz himself recommended in the Nouveaux Essais, where he advocated the study of Turkish, Finnish, and Persian in an attempt “to make clear the origin of nations” (New Essays, 285–6). The fervor of his search, the intensity of Leibniz’s desire to locate the fons et origo of language, is best reflected in a letter to Landgraf (1692): To all appearances the Germans themselves, as well as the Slavs, Hungarians, Huns, and Turks, have come out of Scythia . . . the language of Persia also contains many words close to German . . . One could explain all these things concerning the origins of peoples, if one knew well the nations of Scythia from Poland up to China, and in order to do this, I propose, that we try to obtain the pater noster, in the languages of all the nations. 480 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 There would be dozens of them, which would serve as comparison, since the pater noster is already in many languages—it would even be a point of religion, “so that every tongue may praise His name.” (Schriften I:8, 139) It has been said that Leibniz’s desire to find the Ursprache runs in a fundamentally different direction from his quest for an artificial language. The view of Leibniz’s language-theory which has been termed the “Cassirer Thesis”—namely, Ernst Cassirer’s conviction that Leibniz’s conception of natural and artificial languages are ultimately in conflict and that it was Leibniz’s intention to replace the former with the latter65—seems less convincing when one takes into account the nonEuropean. What links Leibniz’s project for a characteristica universalis with his search for an ‘Adamic’ language, more than anything else, is the gaze towards the Orient; if the desire to construct a universal language was influenced to a significant extent by a desire to Christianize the East (“the conversion of mankind”), Leibniz’s investigations into the Natursprache are motivated by a desire to unite it. Ideologically, the second aim is much more ambiguous than the first; even though Leibniz’s request for a version of “Our Father” in every language is indicative of his ulterior evangelical motives, this relentless search for the wellspring of race and language (largely synonyms for Leibniz) did bring a new paradigm into his work, one which Leibniz was unconsciously affected by. In many ways, one could suggest that Leibniz’s work on languages gently foreshadows the explosive implications of the work of Jones and other British Sanskritists in the late eighteenth century, where the discovery of common English and Sanskrit Indo-Aryan roots completely “revolutionised European notions of universal history and ethnology.”66 Leibniz, writing a century earlier before such events, certainly experiences no such ‘revolution.’ When, however, in the Nouveaux Essais, we find Hebrew re-described as a sub-group of Arabic (New Essays, 281), one cannot help feeling Leibniz’s attitude to the Islamic Orient has undergone some form of significant change. The emerging possibility of kinship with Turks, Arabs, and Persians accounts for the gradual mellowing of Leibniz’s relationship to Islam from the 1690’s onwards. To share an origin, of course, does not mean to be suddenly filled with brotherly love for one’s ethnological/linguistic seventh cousin (although one hundred and fifty years later Max Müller, passionate reader of Leibniz, would advocate precisely this67). It does mean, however, having to change one’s strategies for ‘othering’ the enemy. In 1671, Leibniz’s talk was of the Turkish pestilence, the nest of Saracens, the plague of Islam; by 1710, we have a Leibniz who is willing to acknowledge the usefulness of Turkish/Arab historians, the positive, anti-idolatrous elements within Islam, and the ethno-linguistic proximity of Arabic and Turkish not merely to German, but also to the hypothetical primordial tongue. This movement from eternal foe to philological source is no sea-change, nor does it represent an unbroken, continuous movement. What it does suggest, however, is the gradual primacy of Leibniz’s philological identity over his political/theological vocabularies, at least with regards to his remarks on Islam. The critic Gensini has astutely noted how Leibniz found “in the historico-natural study of language the key to the historicity of human experience” (Leibniz and Adam, 133). Such historicism would ultimately overwhelm anything else Leibniz had to say about the Muslim. A near obsessive devotion to History, not scripture, would ultimately problematize Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 481 Leibniz’s simplistic picture of the ‘Mohammedan’ faith. A consecration of the origin, a fidelity to Ursprungen, would dilute, though never quite remove, Leibniz’s historically-inherited antipathy to Islam. NOTES Special thanks to Franklin Perkins and Sun Demirel for reading an earlier version of this essay, as well as to Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann for earlier conversations regarding the piece. 1. From a letter to des Billettes (December 1696), L. E. Loemke, ed. Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol.2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 2:475. 2. Leibniz, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaft, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923–) 4:3, 776. All translations from the French, German, and Latin of the Sämtliche Schriften are my own unless otherwise stated. 3. Consilium Aegyptiacum (1671), Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften 4:1, 399. 4. Leibniz in a letter to Peter the Great, cited in F. Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 200. 5. Joseph McCarney, “Hegel’s Racism: A Response to Bernasconi,” Radical Philosophy 119 (May/ June 2003), 1–3. 6. See F. Heer, ed. Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1958), 58; Perkins, Leibniz and China, 207; J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 47; U. Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (New York: Harvest, 1998), 70. 7. Leibniz in letter to Burnet, 1697, Schriften 1:14, 449. 8. A hundred and fifty years before Leibniz, Luther too had been searching for a trustworthy translation of the Koran—see his introduction to Montecroce’s Rifutatione Alcorani—Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi, Prediger Ordens, ed. H. Barge, Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 70 vols. to date (Weimar: Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 1883–1986), 53:260–385. 9. Leibniz in a letter to Hiob Ludof, January 1693, Schriften 1:9, 283. 10. Leibniz to Sparwenfeld, 1697, Schriften 1:14, 761. 11. Schriften 4:1, 336; Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature 1520–1660 (Paris: Boivin, 1938), 189. Georgiewitz published two books in 1544, Les misères et tribulations que les Christiens tributaires et esclaves tenuz par le Turcz seuffrent and La Manière et cérémonies des Turcs. Both were translated into Latin and German, and enjoyed several reprints well into the seventeenth century. From a reference in Leibniz’s 1683 satire Mars Christianissimus, we know that he had been familiar with the Latin edition of Georgiewitz’s work, De Turcarum moribus epitome. See P. J. Riley, ed. Leibniz: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 127. 12. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, 193. See Leibniz in “Bedencken,” Sämtliche Schriften, 4:2, 609. 13. Postel, for example, declares a sense of shame at the corruption of French courts in contrast with the perceived efficiency of the Turkish system. For more on this, see Rouillard, The Turk in French History, 298–306. 14. Kuhlmann and Leibniz had shared the same professor at Jena, Erhard Weigl. See Willhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Salvation Through Philology,” P. Schäfer and M. Cohen, eds. Toward the Millenium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 261. 15. W. Schmidt-Biggemann, “Comenius’ Politische Apokalyptik,” Studia Comenia et Historica 32 (2002), 78. 16. Schmidt-Biggemann, “Salvation Through Philology,” 267. 482 Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 / 4 17. P. Remnant and J. Bennett, eds. New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 507. 18. As is widely known, Leibniz had been a member of a Rosicrucian society during his brief stay in Nüremberg in 1667. Equally well-known is the story, repeated by Leibniz’s secretary Eckhart, that he had obtained membership of the alchemical society by crafting together a letter to the President using strange, mystical terms which Leibniz himself did not understand. E. J. Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1985), 25. Certainly, one study of the influence of the Kabbalist van Helmont on Leibniz has argued that Leibniz “took the Kabbalah extremely seriously,” rationalizing “its more mythical and mystical elements . . . to the tastes of a more modern world.” Alison P. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 157. 19. Richard Ariew makes this point in his “G. W. Leibniz, Life and Works,” Nicholas Jolley, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 41. 20. “On The General Characteristic” (1679), in Loemker, 221. One of the standard orthodox objections against the Rosicrucians was that Rosencreutz’s “learning came from Turkey and was therefore heathen.” Rosencreutz was said to have returned from the East with his newfound wisdom. See F. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2002), 141. 21. B. Russell, A Critical Expansion of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Routledge, 1988), 3. 22. Cited in Sheldon Pollack, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj,” Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 86. 23. Cited in Perkins, Leibniz and China, 200. 24. “Comparatio orientalis et occidentalis turcae,” Schriften 4:3 N42. 25. Cited in Perkins, Leibniz and China, 200. 26. “Preface to Nizolius,” Loemker, Philosophical Papers, 125. 27. Ermahnung an die Deutschen, ihren Verstand und ihre Sprache besser zu üben, samt beigefügten Vorschlag einer deutschgesinnten Gesellschaft, in Heer, Leibniz, 77–85. 28. “Quelques réflexions sur la guerre,” Schriften 4:2, 613. 29. From the Theodicy, cited in Heer, Leibniz, 173. 30. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), xi. 31. D. J. Cook, “Leibniz’s Use and Abuse of Judaism and Islam,” M. Dascal and E. Yakira, eds. Leibniz and Adam (Tel Aviv: Univ. Publishing Project Ltd., 1993), 290. 32. See L. Valensi’s “The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism,” A. Grafton and A. Blair, eds. The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990): 173-203, for a fascinating account of how the reports of Venetian ambassadors returning from their diplomatic missions in Istanbul became “a kind of literary genre.” More importantly, she examines how the Venetian representation of Ottoman rule mutated from a strong, legitimate, well-disciplined form of government, within the space of fifty years, into “the abhorred category of tyranny” (199). 33. M. Dascal, “One Adam and Many Cultures: The Role of Political Pluralism in the Best of all Possible Worlds,” Dascal and Yakhira, Leibniz and Adam, 390. 34. Riley, Political Writings, “Letters to Thomas Burnett,” 191. 35. No. 49 in the Monadology, in G. H. R. Parkinson, ed. Philosophical Writings (London: Dent, 1973), 186. 36. Leibniz in a letter to Vergus, December 1697, cited in Perkins, Leibniz and China, 42. 37. cum plerique nulla penitibus religione ducantur. 38. Leibniz to Bossuet, 1692, cited in Riley, Political Writings, 190. Almond / Leibniz, Historicism, and the “Plague of Islam” 483 39. Foucher de Careil, ed. Oeuvres de Leibniz (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1867) III:186, cited in Cook, “Leibniz’s Use and Abuse of Islam and Judaism,” 290. 40. “On the General Characteristic” (1679), Loemker, 222. 41. Leibniz in a letter to Remond, July 1714, Loemker, 657. 42. Antony Bonner, ed. Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 85. 43. Peter Fenves, “Of Philosophical Style—from Leibniz to Benjamin” in boundary 2, 30:1 (2003), 73. 44. Schriften 2:411, cited in Fenves, 73. 45. “On the General Characteristic,” Loemker, 225. 46. Leibniz to Thomasius, April 1669, Loemker, 102. 47. Cited in Cook, 290. 48. “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Loemker, 321. 49. Leibniz to Bossuet, March 1693, Schriften I:9, 85–6. 50. February 1695, Schriften I:11, 295. 51. Leibniz to Larroque, November 1692, Schriften I:8, 548. 52. Theodicee (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 66. 53. New Essays, 92. To be fair, Leibniz also has Theophilus remind us how “the Mohammedan authorities would customarily punish” such activities (ibid). 54. Cited in Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 159. 55. “A New Method for Learning and Teaching Jurisdprudence,”Loemker, 89. 56. Letter to van Hessen-Rheinfels, July 1692, Schriften 1:8, 139. 57. For more on these remarks, see Stefano Gensini’s “Leibniz Linguist and Philosopher of Language: Between ‘Primitive’ and ‘Natural’,” Leibniz and Adam, 117–9. 58. “Consultation sur les affaires générales,” Schriften 4:4, 479. 59. Letter to Landgraf Ernst, July 1692, Schriften I:8 141. 60. Letter to Burnett, 1697, Schriften I:13, 552. 61. May, 1693, Schriften I:9, 426. 62. Letter to Sparwenfeld, 1697, Schriften I:13, 546. 63. W. Weischadel, ed., Kant:Werkausgabe (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1968), XII:661. 64. Leibniz to Herzog 1677, Schriften II:1, 303. 65. Donald Rutherford, “Philosophy and Language in Leibniz,” Jolley, ed. Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, 248. 66. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2001), xxxiii. 67. For more on Müller and his descriptions of Indians, “our nearest intellectual relatives,” see his collection of lectures, India: What Can It Teach Us? (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2002), 11.