Islam and the Arabs in the work of a Maronite scholar in the service of the Catholic church (Abraham Ecchellensis)

Abstract

As an expert in Arabic documents in the “Republic of Letters”, Abraham Ecchellensis devoted himself in his work to an attempt at synthesis that was characteristic of his time: he tried to reconcile contemporary scholars’ expectations of specialised knowledge both with his Catholic and controversialist commitments and with his status, in his role as a Maronite, as a spokesman for Arabic and even Muslim culture. Ecchellensis provided the public with translations of Arabic Muslim philosophical and scientific texts which he deemed to have drawn on universal “wisdom”. However, a disinterested curiosity concerning Islam could not be publicly advertised and had to be cloaked in the form of anti-Protestant controversy or Catholic apology. In the work of Ecchellensis this stance was accompanied by an expurgation of all Islamic terminology from the Arabic language and by a recourse to the Christian Arabic literature writen during the first centuries of the Hijra.