Islam, Herodotus, and the Eastern Question. Overview of the books of the week.
The Islam of the Enlightenment: History of Muslim Humanism (VIIth-XXIst Century)
Olivier Hanne, Tallandier, 368 pages, 23.90 euros
In a context where public debate on Islam often oscillates between orientalist fascination and categorical rejection, Olivier Hanne, a recognized Islamologist and researcher-associate at Aix-Marseille University, offers with The Islam of the Enlightenment a perspective as necessary as it is audacious.
Far from the clichés that freeze Islam in a conflict-ridden present or in a fantasized Middle Ages, the author unfolds a fresco of fourteen centuries to highlight the humanistic currents that have traversed Muslim civilization. The title itself constitutes a historiographical challenge: to speak of an “Islam of the Enlightenment” is to defy dominant narratives that mechanically oppose Western reason and Islamic obscurantism. Hanne, however, does not fall into apology. With the rigor of the historian known to him from his work on The Alcoran or Europe Facing Islam, he meticulously documents the moments when Muslim thought embraced humanistic values: the rational Mutazilism of the 9th-10th centuries, the philosophy of Averroes and Avicenna, the mystical Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or Rûmî, to the reform movements of the Nahda in the 19th century and contemporary intellectuals like Mohammed Arkoun or Abdennour Bidar.
The book reveals how, at different times, Muslim thinkers have favored contextual exegesis over literalism, the primacy of reason over fixed dogma, and universal openness over identity retreat. Olivier Hanne shows that these currents, far from being marginal, have deeply marked the intellectual history of Islam, even if they have often been eclipsed by political powers or by more rigorous readings. The book deconstructs the idea of an essential incompatibility between Islam and humanism, between the Muslim faith and the tradition of the Enlightenment. Particularly stimulating is the way in which the author draws parallels between theological debates in the Islamic world and those that have influenced medieval and modern Christianity. The question of the relationship between faith and reason, the tension between individual liberty and religious authority, the place of interpretation in the face of sacred texts: these are all questions that have worked on both civilizations, often at the same times. This cross-history approach, dear to Olivier Hanne, allows us to escape the trap of exceptionalism as well as that of cultural relativism.
The pages devoted to contemporary thinkers would have deserved more development, given the current challenges around the reform of Islam. However, The Islam of the Enlightenment emerges as a major contribution to the debate on Islam in France and Europe. As a rigorous historian, Olivier Hanne offers the intellectual tools to think of an Islam compatible with democratic and humanistic values, not through concession or syncretism, but through fidelity to its own intellectual traditions too often forgotten.
Tigrane Yégavian
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Herodotus, 50 years of geopolitics: A tribute to the heritage of Yves Lacoste
Herodotus, Fifty Years of Geopolitics: Tribute to Yves Lacoste, Number: 200-201 (double issue), 304 pages, 24 euros.
Herodotus magazine celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with issue 200, which constitutes more than just an editorial milestone.
It is an intellectual monument paying tribute to Yves Lacoste and the ecosystem he created. Under the direction of Béatrice Giblin since 2006, Herodotus remains the flagship among French-speaking geopolitical journals. What strikes in the history of Herodotus is Yves Lacoste’s ability to build a real ecosystem. The French Institute of Geopolitics, created in 2002 at Paris 8, trains analysts in this particular approach: committed, critical geography, rooted in territories and their contradictory representations. There is no doubt that this great geographer, so atypical in the geographers’ guild, played a decisive role in the now uncontested return of geopolitics, both among academics -geographers, political scientists specializing in international relations or historians specializing in contemporary history- and among journalists who were the first to take it up.
This issue begins with a retrospective look at the history of Herodotus, the method implemented over the numbers, and the major themes that characterize the journal’s geopolitical approach. The second part is more prospective, as it addresses current geopolitical issues from unusual angles.
Béatrice Giblin, founding member in 1976, embodies this intellectual continuity. She has preserved the DNA of the journal while adapting it to contemporary challenges: from the Arab world to Ukraine, from migrations to the Arctic. The history of Herodotus is marked by painful losses. Barbara Loyer, deceased on April 13, 2024, at the age of 62, was a central figure at the IFG. Director of the Institute from 2010 to 2018, a specialist in Spain, she refined geopolitical methodology. Her articles on the Bonnets Rouges or the Balkans testify to remarkable intellectual rigor. Delphine Papin, a doctor at IFG and responsible for infographics at Le Monde, demonstrated in her articles how mapping is an essential tool for geopolitical reasoning. Her work in 2012 on cartography perfectly illustrates how to represent the complexity of conflicts. Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, a political scientist at IRD, exemplifies Herodotus‘s intellectual position. His contributions on the Sahel, particularly in issue 172 of 2019, deconstruct simplistic grids on Boko Haram and French intervention. Also noteworthy is Marie Jego’s article on Russia.
From Conflits, we fraternally salute the Herodotus journal. In half a century, it has established a French school of geopolitics rooted in geography, attentive to power rivalries over territories. Issue 200 is an accomplishment and a promise: that of demanding, democratic, and citizen geopolitics, faithful to the path initiated by Yves Lacoste.
Tigrane Yégavian
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Stéphanie Prévost, The Battle of Opinion, The Eastern Questions in the United Kingdom, Late 19th-Early 20th Century, Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2025, 397 pages, 26 euros.
In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, the coronation site of the kings of England and the United Kingdom since William the Conqueror in 1066 and royal and national necropolis where Lord Palmerston rests near, lies the most famous British advocate of the Armenian cause, William Gladstone (1908-1898). The liberal politician, nicknamed the “Grand Old Man” by his supporters, is immortalized by a Victorian-style marble sculpture, which one must try to bring back to life by imagining him in all the force of his eloquence declaring in a rich, vibrant singer’s voice captivating the audience, playing on the most expressive and nuanced modulations with a touch of Liverpool accent: “To serve Armenia is to serve Civilization!” Reviving Gladstone’s statue through the panegyric made by the historian and liberal politician James Bryce (1838-1922) is an excellent exercise to approach the reading of the Battle of Opinion, a book drawn from Stéphanie Prévost’s 2010 thesis, a young academic teaching British history and specializing in relations between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Since 2021, the author has been a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and is interested in the emergence of liberal internationalism and its practical dimensions before the creation in the early 1920s of international refugee law.
The book approaches the Eastern Question, or rather the Eastern Questions, from an unusual angle. It is not about foreign policy or diplomacy here: one book would not be enough to address the role of Great Britain and its Empire in the still pending “settlement” of the different aspects, from the Balkans to Afghanistan, from Armenia to Jerusalem, from the Suez Canal to the Strait of Hormuz, of the Eastern Question!
The author intends to approach the Eastern Question as a “prototypical” phenomenon that occupied a central place in late 19th-century British political culture. The book’s first merit is to allow the reader to grasp the magnitude of this issue, not in terms of Britain’s relations with the rest of the world – one must bear in mind that the preservation of the British Empire most of the time justified a realist policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire – but rather from the perspective of domestic policy. Thus, the book proposes to consider several aspects of the Eastern Question as an ideological matrix of the bipartisan system, a stumbling block between liberals and conservatives within the Parliament, but also within a nebula of associations that attracted “public opinion” in late 19th-century Britain. For example, the Eastern Question Association, which, thanks to Gladstone’s collaboration, managed to garner some support in the working class and among the Radicals, not without provoking new dividing lines with the former Whigs and especially the Lords. Stéphanie Prévost shows that the Eastern Questions are at the heart of a democracy characterized by lively debates and played a decisive role, for example, in the Liberal victory in the 1880 elections. Of course, the book does not fail to address the most resounding aspect of Gladstone’s commitment against “Turkish atrocities in Armenia.” A fourteen-year-old Armenian girl, Gulizar, was abducted by Moussa Bey, a Kurdish leader known for his many exactions against Armenians in the vilayet of Bitlis. The abduction, rape, conversion, and forced marriage of Gulizar stirred emotion and publicity, thanks to a widely distributed postcard-sized photograph of the young girl, featuring an excerpt from a famous letter by Gladstone (August 27, 1889). Thus, Gulizar’s voice was heard all the way to London, and Moussa Bey was brought to trial in Constantinople. This story within a story is that of my great-grandmother recounted in Arménouhie Kévonian’s story, The Black Weddings of Gulizar (Parenthèses, 2005). Stéphanie Prévost demonstrates with clarity and precision how, starting from “the Moussa Bey affair,” the Armenian question managed to assert itself in public debate.
Taline Ter Minassian
