6 - Moving beyond the Binary? Christian-Islamic Encounters and Gender in the Thought and Literature of German Romanticism

Summary

MANY OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS VOLUME demonstrate a tension between those texts that present the encounter between Islam and Christianity as an insurmountable clash of cultural and religious binary opposites and those texts that resist that tendency. This chapter seeks to explore how that tension manifests itself in the thought and writing of the Romantic period, which we will we consider to have begun around 1796 and to have ended by the late 1820s. What forms did the Romantic encounter with Islam take? Although the German-speaking territories did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produce a range of itinerant Orientalist anthropologists and travel writers, some of whom ventured into Islamic territories and wrote about their experiences, the German Romantic encounter with Islam was not predicated upon the “real” encounters that were facilitated by travel—indeed, travel was far more common and more widely documented in the context of the colonial expansion of other European nations. Like previous generations of Germans, the Romantics approached Islam through bookish learning in libraries and lecture halls and artists' work in ateliers and galleries: the encounter was with a geographically remote Other religion and those nations and peoples it had ostensibly shaped.

The Romantic treatment of Islam has been traditionally identified with the wider European project of constructing a fantasy of the Orient, as defined in Said's Orientalism. While Said has much to say about Romanticism in general and about Islam (as understood within the Orientalist tradition) and does, on odd occasions, mention German cultural contributions to these fields, he rarely connects the three.