Jinggangshi

The Enlightenment marks a decisive shift in the history of European knowledge about the Orient. It expanded inquiry beyond Christian and Jewish reference points, encouraging the study of distant regions, earlier histories, and non-European cultures as parts of a broader human past. At the same time, the new secular vocabulary did not make knowledge neutral: it supplied modern Orientalism with methods of description and classification while leaving older religious patterns active in altered form.

Expansion Beyond the Biblical Framework

The geographical and temporal reach of European inquiry widened to include India, China, Japan, and Sumer, as well as Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism, and Manu. These reference points loosened the authority of the comparatively limited maps and calendars organized around Christianity and Judaism. The Orient could now be considered across greater distances and deeper historical periods, rather than examined chiefly through religious controversy.

This expansion also changed the terms on which history could be written. The study of non-European and non-Judeo-Christian societies became more historical and less reducible to ecclesiastical politics. Understanding Europe increasingly meant examining its relations with cultural and temporal frontiers that had once seemed unreachable. In this secular setting, Gibbon could treat Muhammad as a historical figure whose influence extended into Europe, rather than as a diabolical figure between magic and false prophecy.

Sympathy and the Recasting of Identity

The period also made room for selective identification with regions and cultures beyond Europe. The borders of Christian Europe no longer functioned as an absolute boundary between a community of believers and supposedly barbarian outsiders. Ideas of human association and possibility gained a wider, more general legitimacy, and the study of other societies could unsettle the presumed self-sufficiency of European identity.

That widening did not dissolve distinctions between peoples. Instead, systems for classifying humanity multiplied. Categories of race, color, origin, temperament, character, and type refined and extended older divisions between Christian and non-Christian peoples. In accounts of the Orient, such categories could turn historical and cultural differences into allegedly enduring traits, including claims about a people’s primitive condition or inherited spiritual character.

The Secular Foundations of Modern Orientalism

Expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, and classification formed the intellectual currents on which modern Orientalism depended. Together, they released the Orient, and Islam in particular, from narrowly religious scrutiny while creating new methods and vocabularies for studying them. From the end of the eighteenth century onward, Orientalism provided a conceptual repertoire and a set of techniques through which European writers could describe, organize, and interpret the region.

The shift was not a clean break with religion. Older patterns concerning human history and destiny were reconstituted and redeployed within secular frameworks. The result was what the book describes as a naturalized supernaturalism: a religious impulse that remained embedded in Orientalist discourse, including in the scholar’s understanding of himself, the Orient, and his discipline. The Enlightenment therefore helped make modern Orientalism possible without removing the inherited assumptions that continued to shape it.

Knowledge, Power, and the Limits of Representation

The book insists that the new intellectual frameworks cannot be separated from power. The Enlightenment’s development of historical study and human classification expanded knowledge, but those practices also made it possible to fix and order the Orient through European categories. Orientalist representation could present its classifications as settled facts even when they reduced complex societies to simplified types.

The same imbalance appears in later examples of European representation. Flaubert’s account of Kuchuk Hanem made a European traveler’s interpretation influential while leaving her own account of her emotions and history absent. The episode illustrates the material asymmetry behind representation: his position as a foreign, comparatively wealthy man enabled him both to speak for her and to present her as representative of the Orient. In this sense, the Enlightenment-era expansion of knowledge forms part of a history in which inquiry could enlarge understanding, but could also furnish the categories and authority through which Europe claimed to interpret others.