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VOLUME 21The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mumi

A keynote figure in Edward Said’s Orientalism, Renan’s work gave impetus to the differentiation between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ races and their contribution to civilisation that was formational for European race theory. He was helped in this by Gobineau, who had promoted the Aryan idea in his Inequality of the Human Races. Not only had this work influenced Renan, but Gobineau’s story of the Bab stimulated him to valorise the Bab’s martyrdom and that of his followers as evidence that religion was still alive in the nineteenth century. The chapter shows how this belief inflected Matthew Arnold’s ideas on modern religion too, and concludes by arguing that Renan’s endorsement of Babism was promoted by western Baha’is to support their claim that its offshoot, the Baha’i faith, was the modern religion for humanity.