The Al-Afghani-Renan Debate, Reconsidered

Abstract

The (in) famous lecture given at the Sorbonne by French religious studies scholar Ernest Renan on March 29, 1883 entitled “Islam and Science” caused enormous consternation in Muslim intellectual circles and prompted the penning of a number of refutations, the most famous of them that of Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani.” In many ways, the debates surrounding Renan’s assertions resembled the “Clash of Civilizations” controversy engendered by Samuel Huntington’s similarly infamous article published exactly 110 years later. Renan argued that Islam was a metaphoric ‘iron band’ crowning the heads of Muslims that prevented rational and scientific thought and which therefore accounted for Islamic societies’ backwardness vis-à-vis Europe.