[Series] The Crescent and the Cross (introduction)

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar.

In the 18th and early 19th-centuries, European travellers, artists, and scholars turned renewed attention to the East and the Holy Land, facilitating an extraordinary osmosis of Islamic philosophy and culture. Some of the movement's biggest champions were the Romantics of Germany (Herder, Schlegel, Novalis), England (Southey, Shelley, Byron), and the United States (Irving, Emerson, Poe). Although today Western representations of Islam are often negatively associated with "Orientalism," they may also express a desire to transcend parochial boundaries and a sincere urge toward universalism.

When Goethe discovered the poetry of Hafez (collectively known as a "divan" in Persian), he responded with admiration and emulation, producing his own collection of quasi-Persian poetry, the "West-Eastern Divan." Predicated on a fictitious journey to the East, it followed metaphorically in Hafez's literary footsteps to the West. In 2001, the work was memorialized by the "Hafez-Goethe Monument": a sculpture depicting two chairs ("divans"?). According to Dr. Hodkinson: "Reflecting Goethe's vision, the chairs imply a meeting of two distinct faiths, though, as the chairs are cut from the very same stone, the monument also implies an underlying commonality connecting the two cultures."

In Mardi, "Orienda" is Melville's stand-in for the Orient, a cradle of civilization "where first dawned song and science...!" "Reverence we render thee, Old Orienda!" say the travelers. But distressed by the violence there, they mourn that "On the world’s ancestral hearth, we spill our brothers' blood!"; a sentiment expressed also in Kipling's famous line: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

For this series, we explore ideality and reality in the Holy Land.

Series schedule:

• The Crescent and the Cross (schedule)

For further exploration:

• Goethe's West-Eastern Divan audio excerpt
• Islam and Romanticism by Jeffrey Einboden
• Melville's Orienda by Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein
• Borrowed Imagination by Samar Attar
• The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism by Tim Marr

Extracts:

• "But surely, few so dull to-day / As not to make allowance meet / For Orientalism’s display / In Scripture, where the chapters treat / Of mystic themes." (Clarel, 2.29)