Today the Protestant Oriental scholar Adriaan Reland may be known to specialists only. His academic career is linked with the University of Utrecht, where he stood in a tradition of Oriental and Arabic scholarship in the Netherlands, even though he never visited the Orient himself. The present volume is the first broad attempt to assess Reland's significance not only as an antiquarianist and scholar of religions but also as cartographer, linguist, and poet. The book contains an introduction, thirteen chapters written by international scholars of several academic disciplines (history, Arabic and Islamic studies, classics, Neo-Latin, anthropology), as well as a number of helpful appendixes, providing an invaluable basis for further research. It originates from an international symposium in Utrecht in 2018, on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of Reland's untimely death at age forty-one.
Born as a Reformed pastor's son, Reland was in touch with Reformed, Cartesian, and humanist influences since his school days (see the chapter by Henk J. van Rinsum). From 1701 onwards, he spent the rest of his short life as a professor of Oriental studies in Utrecht. His most famous accomplishment was the book De religione Mohammedica of 1705, with an expanded edition in 1717, in which, as the contributions of Lot Brouwer and Christian Lange show, he did not aim to refute Islam but took quite a sober and balanced stance on the topic. Reland relied on firsthand Islamic sources, presented a state-of-the-art summary of scholarly knowledge, and thus made possible a reception of his work beyond the realm of specialists. Reland's work contributed to the development of a view of Islam not as a Christian sect but as a religion in its own right. His message was that “Muslim culture has much to recommend itself” (6). At the same time, knowledge about the so-called Orient, including its cultures and languages, was also considered to have a very practical value in colonial contexts of an early global age (as the contribution by Richard van Leeuwen underlines with respect to the Hajj).
The volume presents Reland as a founder of a modern Religionswissenschaft with an enlightened Protestant and humanist background. He was a bible scholar interested in Jewish antiquities, but he also composed the Neo-Latin poem Galatea (as analyzed in Dirk Sacré's contribution and printed in the appendix of the volume). Moreover, he worked as a commentator of Arabic writings (as in Remke Kruk's and Arnoud Vrolijk's chapter) and studied the languages of the world in a comparative way and against the background of biblical Hebrew (as highlighted by Toon van Haal). Reland was also popular among Christian Hebraists for his involvement in sacred geography, as Ulrich Groetsch's article underlines, and he drafted maps of the Holy Land, Persia, and Japan, whose construction principles are investigated by Tobias Winnerling.
Compared to the Orientalist tradition in neighboring Leiden (represented by seventeenth-century orientalists Erpenius and Golius), Reland remained a solitary figure in Utrecht who was nevertheless well-connected within a wider scholarly world—through his philological and antiquarian interests and also as a scientist and collector, as Anna Pytlowany shows (a fitting translation of Reland's De gemmis arabicis is provided by Jan Just Witkam at the end of this volume). He acquired a rich private collection of Oriental books and manuscripts that were auctioned after his death. Since the library of his university was not interested in purchasing them, many went to Leiden and to the Vatican (as illustrated in Bart Jaski's and Arnoud Vrolijk's chapters, including the list in appendix 2). Reland's own publications as well as his maps appear in a separate bibliography in another appendix.
The contributions of this highly recommendable, well-written, and splendidly illustrated volume present Reland within a broad cultural network of learned collaborators and intermediaries. The collection offers a multifaceted picture of an important scholar of the early Enlightenment. It provides a tool for further research into the intellectual universe of Reland and his collaborators, as well as contributing to our knowledge of the place of Islamic culture in early modern Western Europe.
