The Hermetic Tradition of Arabic Islam and the Colonial Politics of Landor's Gebir (2007)

From hence, under the idea of the instrumentality of the French Revolution, in the fulfillment of prophecies, religion itself became accessary to deism and atheism! Prophecies, relative to the destruction of almost every kingdom and empire in the world, teemed from the British press, some of them in weekly numbers, till government, perfectly aware of the tendency of these inflammatory means, prudently transferred the prince of prophets to a mad-house. (William Hamilton Reid, Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (1)) Infidelity is served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints; remote and oblique surmises.... in a word, in any form, rather than the fight one, that of a professed and regular disquisition. (William Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (2)) ONE OF THE MOST SUBVERSIVE MOMENTS IN WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR'S Gebir occurs in book six when Tamar, a poor shepherd and Gebir's brother, falls madly in love with an Egyptian nymph who takes him on a magical flight over Europe. In the middle of this episode, Landor inserts a provocative vision about the coming of an egalitarian social utopia: passing over the island of Corsica, the nymph prophetically announces the fall of all tyrannical monarchs--which includes the tragic lovers of this tale, Gebir, the King of Spain, and the Queen of Egypt--and the coming of A mortal man above all mortal men who will usher in a Golden Age of justice that spreads from Europe to the East (6: 193). Based on Landor's footnote to the 1803 edition of Gebir, it is safe to presume that this passage was largely intended as an allegory on Napoleon and the French Republic (Corsica being Napoleon's birthplace), in which case Napoleon acquires a messianic status as the redeemer of world history. (3) What is perplexing about this use of political allegory is the context in which it is articulated rather than its subversive content; the principles of the French Revolution are placed in the mouth of an Egyptian nymph, who in this poem (and in the mind of late eighteenth-century readers) is a symbolic figure of hermetic magic and enthusiastic prophecy. main plot of Landor's oriental tale derives from a medieval, Arabic-Islamic genre rooted in hermeticism. Published in 1672, the English translation of Murtada ibn al-Khafif's Egyptian History contains a section on the romance of Gebir and Charoba that Landor knew via Clara Reeve's work. In the 1803 preface to Gebir, Landor admits to having borrowed the plot of Gebir from Reeve's oriental tale, The History of Charoba, which contains a retelling of Murtada's romance located in the last section of Progress of Romance (1785) (Gebir 343). Not much is known about the life and works of Murtada ibn al-Khafif, except that he was an historian from Cairo who lived between 1154 or 55 and 1237. His only known book, Egyptian History, survives in the French and English translations. original Arabic manuscript cannot be located. (4) His stories and epics promote a syncretic account of Universal History: a medieval tradition of writing history that relies on the genre of the romance narrative in order to tie together the mythic pasts of the preadamites and the descendants of Noah with the rise of Mohammed in the early seventh century. Egyptian historians such as Murtada promoted this form of Islamic Humanism, and like Landor, looked toward ancient, pre-Islamic Egypt as the home of hermetic wisdom and esoteric science. (5) By borrowing from this Islamic-hermetic tradition, Landor's Gebir shares a close affinity to the anticlerical historiographies written by radical Protestants and hermetic philosophers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Paolo Rossi has documented in Dark Abyss of Time, any discussion of the biblical chronology was a politically vexed affair between orthodox Christians and heterodox freethinkers. …