Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes

Mehmet Karabela’s Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes is a welcome contribution to the fields of religious studies and Islamic studies. Karabela brings to light a topic that has long been neglected by historians and scholars of religion, one that is of great importance to Christian-Muslim relations and to our understanding of 17^th-  and 18^th-century European views on Islam. In particular, the author explores a vast array of post-Reformation writings on topics ranging from Islamic theology and philosophy to Islamic liberal arts and Islamic sects.

Karabela focuses primarily on German Lutheran theologians who engaged in studying various aspects of Islamic thought to discredit Islam as a true religion, on the one hand, and to demonstrate the fallacies of Catholics and other Christian sects, on the other. The author begins by discussing the post-Reformation uses of Islam followed by three sections on “Religion and Theology,” “Philosophy and Liberal Arts,” and “Muslim Sects: Sunni and Shi‘a.” The book ends with a list of selected post-Reformation works on Islamic thought.

The first section, “Religion and Theology,” introduces the reader to Lutheran theologians who claimed that Muhammad used the Old and New Testaments to fashion the Qur’an. Moreover, these theologians argued that a Nestorian monk named Sergius helped Muhammad craft the Qur’an because Muhammad, in their view, lacked the skill and the knowledge to fully grasp Jewish and Christian doctrine. While these Lutheran theologians acknowledged that Islam has a system of theology and morality, they attributed the development of Islamic religious thought to Judaism and Christianity (with the help of Christian heretics). Also, in the same section, we learn that the same Lutheran theologians focused on Islam’s acceptance of both faith and good works as paths to salvation, thereby allowing them to covertly criticize Catholics, who hold a similar view. Thus, this group of Lutheran theologians used Islam and its theologies to support the claim that Protestantism was the only true religion.

The section “Philosophy and Liberal Arts” introduces Lutheran views on the origins and development of Islamic philosophy. Here, Lutheran writers tried to demonstrate that philosophy in the context of Aristotelianism and Scholasticism had flourished in pre-Islamic Arabia, albeit in a corrupted form. With the rise of Islam, the Lutheran theologians argued, Muhammad feared the study of philosophy and argumentation because they challenged his religious authority. Therefore, for these Lutheran theologians, Islam “is a barrier to philosophical thinking because it is antithetical to reason,” and they also held “that the highest truth is revealed in true ancient Greek philosophy, not in the corrupted Scholastic form as advanced by Catholics and Muslims” (17).

The last section, on Muslim sects, examines the writings of Lutherans who focused on the Sunni-Shi‘a divide. Their discussion of that divide was not driven by their interest in understanding Islam and the theological differences between the two sects; rather, they were keen on comparing the Sunni-Shi‘a divide to the division between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in doing so establishing that Protestantism is the only true religion.

This book shows that the evolution of the European Reformation cannot be understood in isolation from Islamic thought. This is the main contribution of Karabela’s work, which successfully details the various ways Islam influenced Protestantism. In the author’s own words: “Islam, as a theological utility, became a part of Protestant development as Lutherans used Islam for self-criticism against their Catholic origins” (7).

Karabela nicely situates his work within the broader scholarship on Islam in Western thought. For instance, he provides the reader with a review of past works, such as Ian Almond’s History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2009), which analyzes the understanding of Islam by nineteenth-century German philosophical thinkers; John V. Tolan’s Faces of Muhammad (Princeton University Press, 2019), which traces the evolution of Western perceptions of Muhammad from the Middle Ages to the present (but without the focus on Lutheran writers); and Noel Malcolm’s Useful Enemies (Oxford University Press, 2019), which examines Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western political thought from 1450 to 1750. According to Karabela, none of the above works paid sufficiently close attention to the writings of German Lutherans on Islamic thought. The lack of works on Islam from a Lutheran perspective makes this book an original and unique work.

Within the scholarly genealogy sketched above, the book contributes in three ways to the study of Islam in European thought. First, it examines the works of unstudied post-Reformation theologians on Islamic thought. Second, it shows how Lutheran scholars used Islam to define, redefine, and solidify their new Protestant identity against Catholics and the Reformed, Pietist, and Syncretic movements. Third, it challenges the “subsequent evaluation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers as the seeds of a later Orientalism” (8). Karabela contends that 17^th- and 18^th-century Lutheran theologians were not involved with colonialism and empire-building. What they were instead interested in was defending Christianity and Europe against the threat of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion westward, into the heart of Europe. Their works about Islam were not written form a colonial perspective; rather, they wrote with two things in mind: preventing Christian conversions to Islam and solidifying their own Protestant identity.

Karabela writes that his book “serves as a starting point for sparking a conversation between modern religious studies scholars and Islamic studies scholars about the interconnected nature of post-Reformation Protestantism and Islamic thought as part of global intellectual history” (10). I would add that this book is an excellent illustration of post-Reformation Protestant scholarly engagement with Islamic literature. Although the theologians Karabela discusses painted Islam in a skewed way, they nevertheless introduced the religion to broader European society and initiated a conversation among academicians on Islamic thought. While some theologians saw Islam as a false religion, others acknowledged it “as a religion containing legitimate moral and theological principles of its own” (9). The reasons for these conflicting views among 17^th- and 18^th-century Lutheran theologians are worth exploring in future research.

Karabela’s book has a lot to offer. It compels us to turn our attention to, and dig deeper into, the vast scholarship on Islam in European Christian thought. It helps us understand the roots of conflicts not only between Muslims and Christians, but also between Catholics and Protestants. It is a great read and is recommended for students of religion and Christian-Muslim relations.

Hussam S. Timani is a professor of philosophy and religion and co-director of Middle East and North Africa studies at Christopher Newport University. 

Hussam S. Timani

Date Of Review:

March 21, 2023