In the middle of the last century Kipling's line — "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" — was repeated with the confidence usually reserved for the laws of nature. Haïdar Bammate, a native of Temir-Khan-Shura in Dagestan, devoted an entire book to refuting it, and in its closing pages he observed that the line is almost always quoted half-finished: the ballad goes on to say that there is neither East nor West when two people stand face to face.
The book is Visages de l'Islam. It appeared in French in 1946, went through three editions and was translated into Turkish and Arabic (only excerpts have appeared in Russian), yet for eight decades it remained closed to readers of English. That gap has now been filled: the til.im team has translated the book and released its first English edition online, on its own website (read Visages of Islam).
A life on the border of worlds
Haïdar Bammate was born on 1 November 1889 in Temir-Khan-Shura, today's Buynaksk, and his life spanned the collapse of more than one era. In 1917 he addressed the First All-Russian Muslim Congress; from 1918 to 1920 he directed the foreign policy of the Mountain Republic of the North Caucasus and represented it at the Paris Peace Conference. When the republic fell, Bammate remained in Europe — first in Switzerland, then in France — where he edited the journal Caucasus in Paris and wrote in French, signing some of his articles with the pen name Georges Rivoire.
Each of his sons found a calling of his own: the elder, Najmuddin, became a scholar and devoted his life to UNESCO; the younger, Temir-Bulat, became an aircraft designer and worked on the Concorde. Both helped their father prepare the second edition of Visages de l'Islam, published in 1959.
A book written in wartime
Bammate wrote the book during the Second World War, when almost the entire Muslim world lay under colonial rule. He foresaw the independence of these countries, but a deeper question mattered more to him, and it has lost none of its urgency: how to enter the modern age without renouncing one's own past.
The French press received the book with attention. Émile Henriot of the Académie française wrote in Le Monde that, in a world that had lost its footing, it sounded as "a reminder of the community of minds". The Algerian review As-Salam called it the finest overview of Muslim civilisation then in existence and hoped it would become a bedside book in the West and the East alike.
A book passed from hand to hand
The book found its true destiny on the far shore of the Mediterranean. It appeared just as the countries of the Maghreb were fighting for independence, and the young people of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria reached for it. Many of them, schooled under the colonial system, could not read Arabic with ease, and this French book by a Kumyk author opened a road back to their own sources — to a heritage their textbooks had passed over in silence. Visages de l'Islam circulated in secret and, as Najmuddin Bammate recalled, made its way even to the resistance fighters in the hills. His father, he wrote, counted this among the greatest and truest joys of his life.
Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi, who belonged to that generation and later became an Algerian statesman, remembered how the book restored to his contemporaries the memory of their ancestors and strengthened their faith in a dialogue between equals with the West — a dialogue in which Bammate himself deeply believed. Its significance, he stressed, reached far beyond Algeria: in the post-war years, as the Muslim world was freeing itself step by step, Visages de l'Islam bore witness to what Islamic civilisation had contributed to the European Renaissance and to the common heritage of humankind. It is no accident that the book was translated and published in Istanbul and Cairo. In the awakening of the Muslim peoples Bammate saw the beginning of a new renaissance of Muslim civilisation, and he hoped the Mediterranean would once again become a cradle of encounters and exchanges whose fruits would be shared by all humanity.
The third edition appeared in an independent Algeria, with a preface by Taleb-Ibrahimi, and it included the last lines Bammate ever wrote — a text about a free Algeria. And on the tenth anniversary of the author's death, when Najmuddin Bammate entered a lecture hall at the University of Algiers, the students rose to their feet and recited the Fatiha for his father.
What Muslim civilisation gave the world
For Bammate, the history of Islam is not a chronicle of conquest but a history of the transmission of knowledge. For centuries the Muslim world was both custodian and co-author: it inherited and reinterpreted the thought of antiquity, brought together the experience of Arabs, Persians, Turks and the peoples of Africa and Asia, and passed on to Europe a science that, in the author's words, prepared the rise of modern science.
Bammate follows this path chapter by chapter — from the Baghdad school of astronomers, mathematicians and physicians to al-Andalus, from the Mu'tazilites to Ibn Rushd. Muslim philosophy, he writes, played a decisive role both in handing down the legacy of antiquity and in shaping medieval scholasticism.
He takes issue with the familiar idea that Europe discovered the East through the Crusades. The Crusades brought new goods and crafts to the West, but in the realm of ideas they dug a trench between the two shores of the Mediterranean that long remained unbridged. Knowledge travelled by other roads — through Sicily, Spain and the south of France. In Toledo a school of translators arose in 1130, and Bammate cites Renan: the history of medieval science divides into the time before the Arabic translations and the time after them. In Palermo, Emperor Frederick II gathered Arabic manuscripts for the University of Naples he had founded, commissioned translations of Aristotle and Averroes and sent them on to Paris and Bologna. At his court, poets who had learned their art from Muslim troubadours founded the Sicilian school from which Italian poetry grew, while Arabic lyric verse echoed in the European ideals of courtly love and chivalry.
A special place in the book belongs to the parallels with which it closes. Ibn Khaldun anticipates Vico and Montesquieu; in the systems of Avicenna and Averroes one senses the coming synthesis of Thomas Aquinas; in the inner struggles of al-Ghazali one hears Pascal, and in the hymns of Jalal ad-Din Rumi the voice of Saint John of the Cross.
Nor does the author avoid the difficult pages: separate chapters examine the causes of the decline of Muslim civilisation, the movements for its renewal and the fate of Muslim countries after the Second World War. Alongside them stand chapters on Persian poetry from Ferdowsi to Hafez, on the Turkic literature of Navoi and Fuzuli, on art and music.
Bammate's conclusion is that there is no irreparable break between civilisations.
Despite historical divergences, despite political antagonisms, in the higher order of thought and morality the world of Islam and the Western world remain closely bound together. — Haïdar Bammate, Visages de l'Islam
Now in English
English is today the common language of world scholarship, and the translation opens Visages de l'Islam to researchers and students for whom the French original remained out of reach. For the Kumyks the publication carries a meaning of its own: the editors of til.im describe the book as a monument of the intellectual life of the Kumyk emigration.
Alongside the English translation, til.im has also published the French original — the full text of the second edition of Visages de l'Islam (Payot, Lausanne, 1959), with the prefaces to the third edition.
On til.im the French original and the English translation run side by side and switch with a single button, so any paragraph can be checked against the original. The edition includes the prefaces by Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi and Najmuddin Bammate, reviews of the first edition, notes and an index of names. Readers unsure where to begin might open Chapter IX, on the roads by which Muslim learning reached Europe, or turn straight to the conclusion.
The book now stands on the til.im shelf beside a volume on the poet Yırçı Qazaq, the historical novel Soltanmut, a Kumyk translation of The Little Prince and Muhammad Dibirov's History of Dagestan; the site also hosts a Kumyk dictionary of 74,000 words.
Read on til.im: Visages of Islam — the English translation · Visages de l'Islam — the French original