I hesitate to blog on this subject, since I am quite unqualified to comment on the underlying intellectual controversy. Yet it seems to me symptomatic of an intensifying polarization of certain areas of academic debate that in other circumstances would be of no interest at all to the wider intellectual community, much less to public opinion. But anything touching relations between "Islam" and "the West"--the "clash of civilizations" in its presently most acute form (though China and the West is a close second)--is likely to erupt in unexpected ways these days. So we have the
controversy surrounding the book of medievalist Sylvain Gouguenheim, who purports to undermine the claim that Greek philosophy came to the Christian West by way of Islamic intermediaries. Pascal Riché does a nice job of summarizing the controversy and some of its nastier excrescences. His conclusion is worth quoting:
This whole controversy--which might have gotten off on a good footing, with a muscular but enriching exchange on the origins of Europe--seems to have turned into a sterile exercise in name-calling (insults of "fascist" are flying in both directions), and people are asked to choose sides without necessarily having read the book in question. A pity.
It might be worth comparing this case to the tenure case involving Barnard professor Nadia El-Haj, about which Jane Kramer recently published a long article in
The New Yorker. The different constellation of cultural and intellectual forces involved in the two controversies might shed interesting light on similarities and differences between France and the United States in regard to the academic treatment of subjects touching on Islam.
1 comments:
It seems to me pretty common for academics to sit in libraries, and think up extreme thoughts relative to present-day issues, as Gouguenheim has done. After all, what was it that Marx did?
The difference between France and the US is that the French all have tenured posts funded by the state, tenure being almost automatic, and thus are free to say what they want. Personally I approve of that, academics should be free to say what they want. The question is, does anyone want want to hear it? Evidently, in the US, disputable tenure after five years, and private funding issues, lead to a different situation, as in the case of Nadia Abu al-Hajj.
The point where US and French situations come together is in access to the media. Much the same in both countries; the subject has to resonate, as Gouguenheim evidently did.
The truth is that he took an extreme position. That others took the extreme opposite is not surprising. As far as I understand it, there are some Greek philosophical and scientific texts which only survived in their Arabic versions, so Gouguenheim could not be completely right. On the other hand, it was not Islam as such which influenced medieval Europe, as philosophy and science of Greek derivation was only a minority occupation in the Islamic world. The battle was won by the logic of revealed religion some centuries before. If God says it, you should believe it.
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