Massignon aimed to study Arabic in order to demolish the Qur’an

Evidence

The speaking of Persian by many Muslims, especially Shi’is, was one of the things that had contributed to the degeneracy of Islam. Echoing Renan, Massignon suggested that the apparent sterility of Semitic languages arises from the fact that they are designed for interior contemplation. Although he was at first quite strongly influenced by Renan and Renan’s presentation of German-style philology, it was more or less inevitable that he should eventually turn against the lapsed Catholic atheist and denounce Renan for his lack of sympathy for the cultures he wrote about. However, Massignon’s own ‘sympathy’ for Islam was decidedly ambivalent and in a letter to the Catholic poet and dramatist Paul Claudel (another disciple of Huysmans’s doctrine of vicarious suffering), Massignon described his project as being to study the language of the Qur’an and thereby demolish it. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 402

Categorization

• XREF: The language-as-weapon framing echoes the book’s broader thesis about Orientalism as a tool of imperial domination; also resonates with Renan’s linguistic determinism discussed earlier in the book.