Speculative Narratives

In 1894, Lou Salomé wrote an article with shattering new insights of European Orientalists on the religion of Islam. A woman had penned a stunning essay on a topic uncommon in her time. penned by a woman. A feuilleton appeared in the Vossische Zeitung under a title that sounded like a provocation: "Das Problem des Islams." Lou was not an orientalist but married – after overtures in the world of philosophers, psychoanalysts and poets – to a Göttingen Professor of Persian Literature: Lou Andreas-Salomé, the "wonder woman" and sometimes terrible child of German intellectual life at the turn of the century. She was a journalistic dabbler in matters of religion and psychoanalysis. No philologist of the guild would have looked for the beginning of anything like this in a newspaper. I suggest they should have.
That same year another text appeared under her name, this time on the life and works of Friedrich Nietzsche, her famous admirer in love along with Paul Re in long passed away days of Sorrento and Gay Science. However, in 1994 – Lou’s Leben und Werk of Nietzsche just published - it coincided that Max Weber began reading Nietzsche and delivered his famous Freiburg lecture. Weber turned from economy to culture.

One should be careful here: one must not stretch the web of connections too far. My aim is to indicate the significance of this coincidence since I think Weber had read Lous writings.

I think this coincidence of dates is too tidy to ignore, thus I propose to hold three things together in one context: Lou’s essay on Islam, focussing on Arab tribalism, her book on Nietzsche (revaluation of values), and Weber, then a young scholar, opening a volume on individualism and utility, he would carry with him for years.

What did Lou do? She took what the "new" Islamic scholarship had re-assembled at that time, from Dozy, Robertson Smith, Snouck Hurgronje and Wellhausen. She turned back to Arabs and Islam (desert people in freedom of wandering in sand dunes in pure star light turning to the ‘prison’ of monotheistic religion) and ran it through Nietzsche's opposition of master and slave morality. On one side stood the free desert life of the old Arabs as masters of their life in natural religion.  On the other stood the "religious culture" of Islam, in the shadow of slave morality. The turn to monotheism, she argued, was no great achievement of Arab culture and certainly not the summit of its religious life.

It would be wrong to insist that her intent was anti-racist, even counter-racist, but she was neither anti-Semitic nor pro-Arab, and she kept clear of the pro-Aryan bias of the philological humanities. Her target was the psychic effect of monotheism itself. Long before Weber and Freud, she asked what a single, law-giving God does to human beings, and unlike them she answered with a verdict of loss. The other-worldly pure individualism of "natural religion," as for the early Romantic Schlegel, was free and culture-creating. The moral laws and sublimations that monotheism produced, Islam's included, laced in the creative possibilities of culture. It became a dearly task for others, thinkers like Theodor Lessing, to enquire such spiritual potentials emanating in cultures further to the East.                                                                                               

Here, the story bends forward. Weber's Nietzsche reading does not lead him to her conclusion. For Weber, and later Jaspers, the passage from other-worldly individualism to inner-worldly orientation was the engine of the first modernist revolutions anchored in revelation. Men and global communication about truth:  the Axial Age. Where she saw a cage being built, they saw a foundation of modern shivering self-consciousness being laid. The affirmative culture of the West. Freud, in 1939, tied the monotheism of late Judaism to the sublimations that precede the modern civilizing process. What comes closer than to suggest that Freud, here, operates in a reaction to the theses of his former pupil Lou.  

Even Weber's Islam seems, I argue, to stand close with hers. In his sociology of religion, Islam becomes a very material "religion of masters," stripped of any romantic idealization of old Arabdom, (no path to Innerlichkeit, no self-reflection) and remains an anathema to Weber’s modernity. One can imagine Weber keeping the vocabulary of the new, the modern masters while dismantling the desert dream, turning her Nietzschean poetry into a sociological ledger. Whether this was conversation or coincidence, it can only to be left open. The narrative can only lean on the door.

Then my story darkens. I would like to ask, and this is only to be asked, whether such conceptions cast the master’s as worldly, original and close to nature ( i.e. a separate natural form of power construction) and monotheism as a constriction from above them? Did they later feed the cults of old Arabdom and Oriental "leader figures" that took hold in German mainstream orientalism in the 1930s and 40s and outlived National Socialism? A text written against racism, I wonder, may have had an afterlife it never intended?

Yet the essay's real significance lies elsewhere. In 1894, I argue, an intellectual from outside the discipline succeeded for the first time in wringing a sociological core out of Islamwissenschaft, slipping the bonds of philological loyalty. The sociology of Islam begins here, not with a theory of Islam but with a disclosure of the sociological epistemes hidden inside the scholarship about Islam. The discipline becomes its own object.

Consider what follows. In 1935 Joseph Schacht publishes what one could take as a contribution of German Islamwissenschaft to modernist fundamentalist essentialisation of Islamic Law and the apodictically guiding status of the ‘Jurist’.  Schacht, the philologist in the darkness of German times, was openly professing a sociological view, and he worked on this through Weber. The Nietzsche book of Lou, whose influence has reached all the way to Foucault, is rarely cited. The plot closes, as scholarly plots do, in a footnote: an essay in a newspaper, a book on a shelf, and a debt nobody quite paid.

Finally, let me draw attention to the fact that I cared for hedging the Salomé–Nietzsche-Weber link, and I kept that hedge. The reading of Weber's ‘Herrschaftslehre’, the „religion of masters" (Charisma and Power) is a reply to her. It should be understood, that in fact it reads as my own dramatization of Orientalism with respect to the genealogy of Sociology: the never-ending A of institutionalized being in modern society (Max Weber’s Amt - Office). 

Georg Stauth