It seems to me that the most debilitating impairment the postcolonial world has suffered, an impairment that has mutilated its collective soul, is its severance from its own historical legacy.

This has given rise to a rupture, a yawning gulf in its historical memory, created with conscious effort quite systematically as a matter of colonial policy. One compelling manifestation of this rupture is the loss of languages — this loss has had disastrous cultural and intellectual consequences.

One must understand that, for us to reconstruct the past of Muslim societies — as we must, since we are rational beings — we need to have recourse not only to their source languages, particularly Arabic and Persian, but also have a working familiarity with Latin. Latin comes into the picture given the indelible links between the Islamicate world and Europe; in other words, between the former and what we call ‘modernity’.

But perhaps all of this is just too abstract. Coming down to the concrete, my aim here is to throw into sharp relief two intriguing and complex aspects of the Muslim-West relations — they happen to be convoluted, ironic and profoundly interesting.

While we find a colossus of contra-Muslim literature in the mediaeval Latin West on the one hand, there is also to be found pro-Muslim literature in mediaeval Europe on the other.

Many of us do not know that there exists a massive body of contra-Muslim polemical literature in Latin; yes, a massive body indeed. An 8th century Anglo-Saxon monk, for example, the Venerable Bede, reacting bitterly to the Arabo-Berber Muslim incursion into Spain, referred to the invading peoples as a “terrible plague of Saracens.”

Note that the appellation ‘Saracen’ is a pejorative racial epithet, originally applied in the Roman world to an Arab tribe living in the Sinai Peninsula. Then, its scope was indiscriminately inflated to cover any people who professed Islam.

The Venerable Bede was not alone in harbouring this attitude. Derogatory and abusive myths about Saracens, as the French historian Maxime Rodinson tells us, were pretty widespread among the Christian and Jewish masses of the time. Thus, in a text written about the year 1200, Baghdad was described as the capital of all pagandom, just as Rome was the capital of all Christendom.

In one of its crudest forms, this attitude is seen as late as the 14th century in Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy. Dante indulges in abject abuse of some of the most sacred personages of the Muslim religious tradition.

One recalls that there were a number of egregious factual misunderstandings about Islam in the Latin West. For example, the caliph (khalifa) becomes the ‘Pope of Muslims’ and also their sovereign prince. The famous early French epic poem, the celebrated ‘Chanson de geste’ [Song of Deeds], is replete with misunderstandings about Muslims. For instance, Saracens are lumped together with many pagan bands, including Armenians, Slavonians and Hungarians who “all worship the [Holy Prophet] Muhammad [PBUH], Termagant and Apollo.”

And yet, this whole story is not without its twists, its turns and its paradoxes. While we find a colossus of contra-Muslim literature in the mediaeval Latin West on the one hand, there is also to be found pro-Muslim literature in mediaeval Europe on the other, together with an attitude of fascination and even emulative tendencies in the field of literature and Arabic tales and fables. Ironically, there was a mystique of Islam, too, in the Latin West.

As soon as Toledo fell to the Reconquista in May 1085, Western scholars rushed to Spain to lay their hands on Arabic renderings of Greek works. But then, there was a large body of original Arabic works, too, that were of tremendous philosophical and scientific interest to European scholars.

For example, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was immensely valued and sought after. Likewise, the Spanish Arab philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was so celebrated in Europe that a philosophical fraternity emerged in France, styled ‘Paris Averroists’.

It was in the years 1704-1717 that the French Arabist Antoine Galland translated the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laila wa Laila) in as many as 12 volumes under the literally rendered title Les Mille et une nuits. Like the translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, it was an instant sensation. The frame story format, its imaginative content, the exotic ecology — all of this attracted throngs of European readership. The fictional narrator of the tales, Sheherzad, had practically become a household name in Paris!

In fact, the French Alf Laila generated such a huge demand that many pseudo translations and plagiarised versions were quickly fed into the market and emulations of the narrative structure of the Arabic became a popular preoccupation in the European literary landscape.

One can gauge the size of the market by the fact that two English translations, in hefty volumes, appeared in the century following Galland. The late 20th century also saw Western renderings, with my Harvard University teacher Muhsin Mahdi publishing his edition of the Arabic text in 1984, translated into English in 1990 by Husain Haddawy.

History is never linear or predictable. In our hazardous excursion into the jungle of the past, ironies and surprises suddenly jump out of the bushes and we are left utterly nonplussed. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a case in point. While, as respectable scholars tell us, he drew his material from Arabo-Islamic sources, he subjected to humiliation and insults the most hallowed figures carved respectfully in Muslim consciousness.

This humiliation was beneath contempt. But to recognise these ironies, we need a process of cultural salvaging.

The columnist is general editor of the book series Studies in Islamic Philosophy, published by the Oxford University Press

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 4th, 2023