Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers Nineteenth-Century Literary Approaches to Arab-Islamic History by Muhammed A. Al-Da'mi (New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 235 pages.)

Abstract

This is a superb book. With penetrating insight and an eloquent style, alDa'mi
explores the crucial role that Arabo-lslamic history played in the
arguments of such prominent British and American "men of letters" as
Thomas Carlyle and Washington Irving. The book opens with a preface,
in which he lays out his rationale and purpose, and contains seven chapters,
in which he develops his argument.
AI-Da'mi seeks to deepen our understanding of nineteenth-century
Oriental ism by exploring the works of leading intellectual writers of that
time: not the professional historians, but the "men ofletters" who used history
to expound their arguments, but with a kind of literary licence not
available to a proper historian. His main argument is that the writers used
Arabo-Islamic history not simply as an exotic or a romantic flourish, but
rather as an integral and important aspect of their discourses to comment
upon their own time. For example, Carlyle praises the Prophet as a heroic
leader, as a way to warn the British of the dangers of utilitarianism and
materialism; Ralph Waldo Emerson likewise does this to send a message
to the young American nation; Cardinal John H. Newman to alert Europe
to the Ottoman threat; and so on.
Al-Da'mi convincingly points out that we can neither understand
these writers nor the age itself adequately without properly comprehending
this aspect of their writings. This is an important rectification to traditional
western scholarship, which typically leaves out all mention of
anything non-European in its study of its own intellectual history. (Walter
E. Houghton's classic work on the Victorian age, The Victorian Frame of
Mind, 1830-1870, has in its index only one entry for Prophet Muhammad ...