Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East by Arie L. Molendijk (review)

The early years of this century have seen a number of scholars chronicle the emergence of religion as a concept in social and political theory. Just as literary scholars and anthropologists in the 1990s reconstructed the formation of literature and culture as disciplinary objects, so have Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, Brent Nongbri, and others tracked the transformation of religion into a term for a universal aspect of all societies that could be studied comparatively. Unsurprisingly, at least to a literary scholar, most of these new historians of religion have approached their task along Saidian or Foucauldian lines. The modern concept of religion as a set of propositions in which one could believe, they argue, was built to reflect certain normative values of Western liberalism—conviction, privacy, interiority—and then exported abroad. In both metropolitan and colonial contexts, these historians show, the concept has worked to police the space of private individuality and the idea of a secular state to which all individuals, whatever their inward convictions, could submit.

Arie L. Molendijk's new volume, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East, approaches the modern construction of religion from a usefully different angle: not as an ideological enterprise, but rather as a publishing one. It goes beyond the axiom that religion was an abstract ideology formulated by the West and then imposed upon the rest by tracing the ways in which that ideology depended upon the careful selection and translation of heterogeneous cultural materials. Specifically, Molendijk takes up the Oxford philologist Friedrich Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series (SBOTE), which was published between 1879 and 1910 in fifty volumes and contains the work of twenty different editors and translators. Financed simultaneously by Oxford University Press and the India Office, the series represented a groundbreaking attempt to construe different religions as similar textual objects that could be analyzed and appreciated as equals. Although now largely forgotten, the SBOTE was considered by the American philosopher Moncure Conway to represent "the chief religious achievement of the nineteenth century" and continues to wield considerable cultural power in India, where reprints may still be purchased thanks in part to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) World Heritage Fund (Conway qtd. in Molendijk 2).

Molendijk calls his book an "intellectual history" of the SBOTE, but it remains a bit odd as a work of historical scholarship. To some extent, the volume resembles recent studies such as Lise Jaillant's Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (2017) in that it seeks to historicize the series as a modern publishing form. In other ways, however, it reads more like an extended introduction to the SBOTE, one that would feel at home in Princeton University Press's Lives of Great Religious Books series, with its companionable overviews of the Koran, the Analects of Confucius, and the Song of Songs. The book's claim that Müller's SBOTE represented "a marker and not a definer" of modern comparative religion is one that few would dispute (185). More locally, Molendijk's summaries of Müller's theses about the origins of language, mythology, and religion are not contextualized by any larger intellectual-historical narrative. Indeed, the book's deep dive into Müller's career can sometimes produce a strange lack of perspective. If you do not already command a basic grasp of Müller's place within the monogenesis-polygenesis debates, or of the differences between Müller's account of religion's development and that proffered by Edward Burnett Tylor and the emerging field of evolutionary anthropology, then you may have some difficulty assessing the precise significance of Müller's intellectual moves.

Provided that one approaches Molendijk's volume with some prior sense of context, however, there are real rewards to be found in it. Müller's theoretical work has been explored...