Islam was framed as a Mediterranean heir of Hellenism, not an Asiatic Other.
Evidence
Becker started out as a Semiticist and Assyriologist, before specializing in the history of Islam. However, unlike purist disciples of de Sacy and Fleischer, Becker thought as a historian rather than as a philologist. Like Von Kremer before him, he regarded Islam as a late version of Hellenism and in Der Islam im Rahme neine rallgemeinen Kulturgeschichte (1922) and Das Erbe der Antike im Orient und Okzident (1931), he presented Muslim civilization as one of the chief heirs of the cultural legacy of antiquity. ‘Without Alexander the Great there would be no Islamic civilization.’ The religion of Islam was not some Asiatic, alien ‘Other’, but was rather a Christian heresy and something that was very much a product of the Mediterranean world. As for Islamic philosophy, this was just late antique Greek philosophy under another name. Culture and society took precedence over religious revelation in Becker’s thought and Islam was shaped by society rather than the reverse. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 353
Categorization
- XREF: This directly counters Said’s framing of Orientalism as constructing Islam as an alien ‘Other’ — a core tension running through Irwin’s whole book.
- QUESTION: Becker’s ‘without Alexander there would be no Islamic civilization’ is a strong causal claim — how much of Islamic thought and law genuinely derives from Greek antecedents, and is that legacy overstated?
Related
- Western scholars framed Islam as a failed derivative of Greek thought (similarity 0.83)
- Islam has remained a dominant force in Middle Eastern life (similarity 0.79)