Modern Universalism and the Myth Of Westernness

THE COMPAKATIST MODERN UNIVERSALISM AND THE MYTH OF WESTERNNESS Abdulla Al-Dabbagh I have read, reverend Fathers, in the works of the Arabs, that when Abdala the Saracen was asked what he regarded as most to be wondered at on the world's stage, so to speak, he answered that there is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man (nihil spectari Homine admirabilius). (Pico della Mirandola, qtd. in Makdisi 307) In a recent address as president of the MLA, Edward Said declared that he did not "believe that humanism as a subject for us can be evaded," and asked: "Does humanism now help in our enterprise, or has it served its purpose? If it hasn't, we need to concentrate on it and reclaim it for our purposes as citizen-members ofour profession" (3). It is this paper's implicit, underlying purpose to answer Said's question in a most positive way. For a renewed, modern form ofhumanism, a new humanist universalism , is precisely what we need at the moment, as a response both to the current anti-human onslaught ofimperialist globalism, that marches inevitably, as Said rightly points out, behind the banner of "humanism" and "human rights," and to the anti-humanism that pervaded much of Western philosophic thought in the last hundred or so years (the Age of High Imperialism) and has openly re-surfaced once again in the last two decades. Such true humanism and true universalism would be the only apt reply to the philosophic anti-humanism of the past and to the anti-human, unjust, and oppressive politics of the present. It would be a timely philosophy and belief for the twenty-first century. One indication ofthe importance ofhumanism as a subject that cannot be evaded (which at the same time is also symptomatic of the inadequacy of many such discussions) is its recent appearance as a title in the New Critical Idiom series (Davies). This study, while clearly establishing early modern (i.e. Renaissance) humanism and contemporary and late modern (i.e. the last hundred years of high imperialist) anti-humanism as the two distinct poles of debate on this issue, completely neglects the origins of early modern humanist universalism. Such total neglect, surprisingly but just as symptomatically, also marks the Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism that appeared in 1996 and has been reprinted twice since, and Davies's "Forum on the Renaissance," recently published in The American Historical Review. It is the contention ofthis paper,1 which is based not so much on new research as on a broad synthesis of a persistent trend in scholarship that in true comparative spirit seeks to counter the flattering assumption that the West developed in "splendid isolation" from other cultures, most notably its Islamic neighbor to the east and south, that an important Vol. 27 (2003): 5 UNIVEKSALISM ANV the myth ofwesteknness part of these origins go back to Islamic civilization. For, in spite of fashionable talk about the "clash of civilizations," recent scholarship has demonstrated at length the existence of a wide, humanist movement at the heart of classical Islamic civilization that preceded early European modernism by three to four centuries. This movement, aptly termed the Renaissance of Islam, was a clear harbinger, and a major force behind the rise, ofthe European Renaissance. Among the main features of this new humanism, e.g. individualism, secularism, belle-lettrism, and humanist idealism, it is universalism that stands out as path-breaking and reverberating in its influence on subsequent developments in world literature and culture through the period of the European Renaissance and beyond. In other words, early modern humanism has clear roots in high Islamic culture and civilization (eighth to tenth centuries particularly) that laid the foundation for the twelfth-century European Renaissance (Haskins) and its subsequent stages, culminating in the wide European Renaissance (with a capital "R") ofthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The classic study in this field defines the principal expression of this Islamic Renaissance as "a philosophical humanism that embraced the scientific and philosophical heritage of antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal" and elaborates that "along with this philosophical humanism , a literary humanism epitomized in the word adab, equivalent in many of...