Bibliothèque orientale

The Bibliothèque orientale was a posthumously published, alphabetically arranged compendium by Barthélemy d’Herbelot that made the Orient appear comprehensive and knowable to European readers. Its achievement was inseparable from its power: by gathering histories, languages, religions, geography, and custom into a disciplined reference work, it also arranged its subject within European Christian judgments. In Edward Said’s account, the book exemplifies how Orientalist scholarship could enlarge access to knowledge while making its own classifications the reader’s authoritative passage to the Orient.

Compilation and Scope

Published in 1697 with a preface by Antoine Galland, the Bibliothèque orientale became, apart from Johann H. Hottinger’s Historia Orientalis of 1651, Europe’s standard reference work on the Orient until the early nineteenth century. Galland, the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights and an Arabist, emphasized the scale of d’Herbelot’s undertaking. D’Herbelot had read works in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and began by composing a dictionary of those three languages. He then studied Oriental history, theology, geography, science, and art, attending both to fabulous accounts and to what could be treated as truthful knowledge.

The plan was broader than a dictionary alone. D’Herbelot intended two works: a bibliotheque, or library, in the form of an alphabetically arranged dictionary, and a florilege, or anthology. Only the first was completed. Galland described its intended geographic emphasis as the Levant, but its historical reach crossed conventional limits: it extended beyond the Creation and the present day into the fabulous pre-Adamite history of the Solimans. It treated the Creation, the Deluge, and the destruction of Babel as parts of a compendium of world history assembled from Oriental sources.

The book organized history along two axes. It distinguished sacred history, associated with Jews and Christians, from profane history, associated with Muslims, and divided both into pre-diluvian and post-diluvian periods. Its coverage ranged across Mogul, Tartar, Turkish, and Slavonic histories, and across the provinces of the Muslim Empire, from the Extreme Orient to the Pillars of Hercules. Customs, rituals, traditions, commentaries, dynasties, palaces, rivers, and plants all entered the same reference system. This scope made the book more capacious than earlier works that concentrated narrowly on grammar, lexicography, geography, or another specialized field.

Authority and Readerly Appeal

Galland presented the Bibliothèque orientale as both useful and agreeable, and as an unusually effective introduction to the study of Oriental culture. Other scholars—including Postel, Scaliger, Golius, Pococke, and Erpenius—had produced important but specialized studies; d’Herbelot, in Galland’s account, sought to give readers a sufficiently ample conception of what it meant to know the Orient. The book promised to satisfy expectations that had already formed around its subject, making Orientalist learning seem not thankless or fruitless but intellectually encompassing.

That promise also marks a limit. Said argues that the Bibliothèque did not set out to unsettle received ideas about the Orient. Rather, its enlarged presentation confirmed them. Materials that might otherwise have remained a scattered collection of facts about Levantine history, biblical imagery, Islamic culture, and place names became a rational panorama ordered from A to Z. The alphabet thus operated not simply as a convenient arrangement but as a means of turning heterogeneous material into a legible whole, under the authority of the compiler’s judgments.

The Entry on Muhammad

The entry on Muhammad makes the book’s classificatory force especially clear. D’Herbelot first supplied the Prophet’s given names, then described him through a polemical Christian framework: as the founder of a heresy that had taken the name of religion. The entry sent the reader from the name for Islam to another heading, while reserving its preferred designation for the alleged heresy. In Said’s analysis, this choice made a significant distinction: the correct Muslim name was displaced, and the European label became the reference work’s organizing term.

The entry further cast Muslim interpreters and scholars as having applied to Muhammad praises that Christian heresies had attributed to Jesus while denying Jesus’s divinity. D’Herbelot could then proceed to a more or less straightforward account of Muhammad’s life, but the prior placement governed how that narrative would be read. Instead of leaving Muhammad to appear beyond the book’s interpretive control—as a threatening and immoral figure in the European imagination—the alphabetical entry gave him a genealogy, an explanation, and a bounded development. A figure who might otherwise seem to roam the Eastern world was made to sit within a discrete portion of the Orientalist stage, where doctrinal judgment contained the possibility of interpretive disorder.

Knowledge as a Disciplinary System

For Said, the Bibliothèque orientale’s form helped produce its authority. The theatrical metaphor he uses casts the Orient as a stage affixed to Europe: figures on it stand for a much larger and more diffuse world, while the work presents that world as a bounded field. D’Herbelot’s compendium brought dispersed histories and cultural materials into this representational space. Its entries did not merely record facts; they arranged them so that European readers could grasp the Orient through recognizable characters, types, and categories.

The book’s didactic effect followed from the combination of systematic research and disciplinary presentation. Readers encountered not only information about the Orient, but also the assurance that the printed page delivered an ordered judgment of it. The work consequently directed them toward learned Orientalist grids and codes as the means of access. Instead of returning first to Oriental sources to test or correct the account, an uninitiated reader was encouraged to consult other Orientalist works and accept their classifications as knowledge.

This process worked in several directions at once. The Orient was measured against the moral demands of Western Christianity and represented as corrected—or penalized—for lying outside the boundaries of European society. Orientalism also established the specialist’s authority over the material, while training Western consumers to recognize the specialist’s codifications as the true Orient. The Bibliothèque orientale therefore stands, in Said’s account, as more than a storehouse of information: its alphabetic comprehensiveness helped make Orientalist judgment a condition of knowing its subject. The resulting truth was treated less as something derived from the material itself than as the product of learned authority—a process through which the Orient could seem to owe its very existence to the knowledge that represented it.