Book review: European modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Tom Grimwood, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean' by Karla Mallette (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Karla Mallette’s book seeks to analyse the methods and findings of those Orientalists who “traced a modern European national genius to a spark kindled by the Arabs . . . during the medieval past” (2), thus challenging the conventional history of European modernity that begins with “Greek and Roman antiquity, by way of the Italian Renaissance” (2). Whereas the seminal work Orientalism by Edward Said focused on sites of colonial expansion and exploration, Mallette focuses on the Mediterranean as a key site of cross-cultural encounters; and the subsequent picture that emerges is decidedly different. In this way, Mallette reminds us of the distinctions between the northern European Orientalisms (often the target of Said’s critique, though more recent work has challenged this homogenisation) and the Mediterranean accounts of those who lived next to or under Arab rule. It is these southern European scholars—particularly the Maltese, thus far underrepresented in the academic debate—who “ identify the Arab past as constitutive of a European modernity” (32).

In terms of scholarship, Mallette cannot be faulted for her application to the task. The idea that “Europe” and “the Orient” have existed as ontologically separate entities is consistently challenged by Mallette’s in-depth discussions of medieval source texts and their philological history. She argues that this “unity” arises more from the socio-cultural contexts of the Orientalists themselves (which, in turn, are reflected in their methodologies): “the object of the (distancing) Orientalist gaze is the history of the nation” (19). Keen to establish or promote a sense of coherent nationhood in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain, Italy, or Malta, the sources of this unity are read back philologically into the past. Such readings are often subsequently, as Mallette notes at one point, “twice removed from reality and twice lost to nostalgia” (96). In response to this, Mallette studies scholars such as Enrico Cerulli and Michele Amari, whose historical narratives “contradict some of the most cherished notions of European modernity” (202).

Situating Mallette’s argument in contemporary scholarship is perhaps slightly less obvious. She notes, for example, that her discussion in Chapter 3 of the view that Arab civilisation underlies European civilisation reflects a position “accepted in broad outlines by most medieval historians” but one that “has yet to win over a nonscholarly public (or even an academic public among those who do not specialise in the Middle Ages)” (98). It is less clear how this book is attempting (or, as the title suggests, moving towards an attempt) to bridge this gap. Often, Mallette closes chapters with gestures towards the future of Europe or the “next chapter” in European philology. But there sometimes seem to be gaps between these conclusions with the scholarly analyses of earlier Orientalist texts that form the body of the chapter. Certain chapters—in particular, the final chapter on the development of European conceptions of the Thousand and One Nights—do balance these two emphases very well indeed. In others, the shift from close-up analytic survey to wide-reaching methodological argument is often too subtle; all the more surprising for a work that is dominated throughout by the motif of “distance.”