SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Islam in the Mind of Europe: Abraham Geiger, Ignaz Goldziher and Louis Massignon

It is remarkable that we owe to Jewish scholars - at a time when they were still unable to secure university appointments - some of the earliest and most daring comparative studies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In particular, the pioneering role of Abraham Geiger, before the mid-nineteenth century, must be highlighted here. In the twentieth century, two Islamicists, the Hungarian Jew Ignaz Goldziher and the French Catholic Louis Massignon (who saw himself as a disciple of Goldziher) transformed the study of Islam, and laid the ground for the late birth, in the last decades of the twentieth century, of the concept of the Abrahamic religions. The lecture will follow this trajectory.