The Shadow of Islam in the Enlightenment Discourse of Oriental Despotism

Research Directions from Nicolas Antoine Boulanger

Abstract

Within the history of Orientalizing texts of Western literature and scholarship, it repays to reconsider the first European monograph on “Oriental Despotism,” by Nicolas Antoine Boulanger (1722–59). This article attempts to establish that Boulanger’s text, which is basically about how the world’s religions become distorted by the worship or over-veneration of monarchical rulers, usefully points backwards and forwards to the way modern Western thinkers (Isaac Newton, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Hegel, etc.) have connected Islam to rules by decadent potentates, and to oppressive political control and tyranny.