Sistemul sau ntocmirea religiei muhammedane by Dimitrie Cantemir; Virgil Cndea

Review by: Keith Hitchins

Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1980), pp. 271-272
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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BOOK REVIEWS
Sistemul sau intocmirea religiei muhammedane. By Dimitrie Cantemir. Translation,
introduction, and notes by Virgil Candea.
Bucure?ti:
Editura Minerva, 1977. Pp.lxxiv
+ 687. Lei 38.
Dimitrie Cantemir, Prince of Moldavia (1710-11), was the founder of oriental
studies in Rumania and the initiator of the scholarly study of Islamic doctrine in
Russia. He composed his most important works on these subjects during his exile in
Russia from 1711 until his death in 1723. His European reputation as an orientalist
has largely rested upon his history of the Ottoman Empire, Incrementa atque
decrementa aulae othomanicae, completed in 1716 and translated into English
(1734), French (1743), and German (1745). But Cantemir was also the author of
other important works on Islamic society: a sophisticated study of Turkish music,
probably completed in 1704 in Constantinople, and an analysis of the Koran and the
Muslim religious tradition entitled Curanus. Cantemir apparently intended Curanus
to form part of a trilogy on the Ottoman Empire to be composed first of the history,
then of the study of the Muslim religion and finally, of a description of the
organization and institutions of the Muslim state (the Ottoman Empire, which he
tentatively entitled, De muhammedana religione, deque politico musulmanae gentis
regimine, but which was never written.
Curanus was the only part of the trilogy to be published during Cantemir's lifetime.
It appeared in Russian at St. Petersburg in 1722 under the title, Kniga sistima ili
sostoianie mukhammedanskiia religii. The number of copies seems to have been
limited, and perhaps for this reason the work remained practically unknown in the
West and even in Russia until after the Second World War. Although its basis was the
Latin manuscript, the Russian edition is not simply a translation. The significant
differences between the two texts suggest that Cantemir was continuously revising his
work as the translation (by others) proceeded.
The present Rumanian translation, Sistemul sau intocmirea religiei muhammedane,
is based upon the Russian edition. It is divided into six books and subdivided into
chapters. The first book describes in detail the life and work of Mohammed.
Although Cantemir rejects the divine mission of the 'pseudo-prophet', his tone is
scholarly and occasionally even sympathetic. The second book analyzes the Koran,
which Cantemir calls a 'false work'. He shows how its obscurities, contradictions, and
general lack of order are proof of its human rather than divine origin. In the next
book he discusses the prophecies of Mohammed and Muslim apocalyptical beliefs,
demonstrating at the same time his considerable knowledge of Arabic terminology.
Book four, entitled 'Mohammedan theology', treats at length a variety of subjects
such as fatalism in Islam, belief in angels and devils, the creation of the world, and
Adam and Eve, information based for the most part upon what Cantemir had heard
and seen in Constantinople. The same source is the basis for Book five, which
describes Muslim religious practices. The final book is devoted to Turkish customs of
marriage, divorce, and burial, the orders of dervishes, and the Turkish educational
system.
Cantemir was severely handicapped in writing his study in Russia, because of the
absence of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts and books. Consequently, he
had to rely largely upon his memory of what he had read and experienced in
Constantinople. His principal source was the Koran, which he had read in both the
original and Western translations and commentaries, notably Refutatio Alcorani by
Ludovico Marracci (Padua, 1698). Cantemir does not seem to have had a copy of the
Koran with him in Russia, to judge by the frequent inaccurate citations of chapter
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272 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
and verse. For information about the Islamic tradition he also had recourse to Risdle-i
Muhammediye, a collection of verses expounding Islamic doctrine composed in the
fifteenth century. He supplemented these sources with such Western accounts as
Rycaut's The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, his own history, and, for doctrinal
refutations and comparisons, the Bible and numerous classical and modern writers. A
source of extraordinary value was his direct contact with the Islamic world during the
nearly two decades he lived in Constantinople.
After two and a half centuries Sistemul retains its value for the student of Islam and
the Ottoman Empire. Cantemir's information about the Islamic world is rich, and his
interpretation of its nature, despite inaccuracies of detail, is fundamentally correct.
His discussion of such matters as Muslim apocalyptic beliefs and the orders of
dervishes and his judgments on the language and style of the Koran demonstrate a
sure command of his subject. Those parts of Sistemul which, in effect, constitute
Cantemir's memoirs of his life in Constantinople, are a unique source of information
about the customs and beliefs of the population at large. Of particular interest for the
scholar is Cantemir's attitude toward an 'alien' civilization. Although he took the
position of the believing Christian that there could be no other true faith, he could,
nonetheless, approach Islamic civilisation with a full appreciation of its achievements.
He was thus representative of the new generation of intellectuals in south eastern
Europe who were humanist and increasingly rationalist. His skepticism, therefore,
was often directed not at Islam specifically but at the myths and superstitions of
religion in general. Cantemir's attitude toward the Ottoman Empire was at variance
with that generally found in Western works of the time. In a sense, he viewed
Ottoman society from the inside, from the perspective of the inhabitant of south
eastern Europe who had had a long and intimate contact with it. Conscious of the
decline of the Empire, though he did not understand the causes and thought of the
process in terms of the loss of territory, he nonetheless rejected the idea of the
inherent inferiority of the East and the natural superiority of Western civilization.
The present edition is scholarly in every respect. The painstaking translation is the
work of Virgil Candea, the author of numerous pioneering studies on the intellectual
history of the Rumanian principalities and of south eastern Europe in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. He has provided a comprehensive introduction,
extensive notes on the text, indexes of names and places, of principal themes and
terms relating to the cultural history of the Islamic world, and of works used by
Cantemir, many of which he himself has identified, and a bibliography.
KEITH HITCHINS
People of Sale: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City, 1830-1930 by Kenneth L.
Brown. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976. Pp. xx, 265.
Nedroma: L'Evolution d'une Medina by Gilbert Grandguillaume. Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1976. Pp. xvi, 195.
Both these books are studies of the social and economic evolution of a North African
city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sale is a Moroccan port city with a long
and famous history as a center of Islamic learning, international trade, and Atlantic
piracy. Nedroma, located in the hilly interior of northwestern Algeria, is a smaller city
whose place in Maghribi history has been far more parochial. Yet both cities
experienced a similar set of transformations as a result of European economic
penetration and colonial rule. These transformations and the ways in which they
affected social relations and cultural values are the principal subjects of both books.
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