Ernest Renan’s Search for a Religion of Modernity

Abstract

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.

Persian orientalism: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the construction of ‘Iranianness’

“…Having connected race to religion, Renan presented Islam as the persistent expression of a narrow religiosity that hinders progress and modernity. Unlike de Gobineau, who marked Shi'ism as a Persian response to the invasion of Muslim Arabs, discerning within it and the Iranian forms of Sufism, Renan disparaged and rejected Islam entirely as a Semitic creation (Nash, 2014, p. 34), as the progeny of the ‘Semitic mind’ and therefore incapable of grasping complex ideas in comparison to the highly capable Aryan mind” (Anzali, 2021, p. 13). Renan writes ‘Islam is a thousand miles from anything one might call rationalism or science.…”