TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 37into play. Finally, in the last forty pages of Stilfragen Riegl had put the Islamic
development of late antique artistic tropes and “Kunstwollen”—in other
words, of the whole late antique cast of mind—firmly on the agenda.
Strzygowski kicked against this, but could not deny the Islamic world’s
importance, or of course the fundamental role played by the study of art in
establishing it. Meanwhile the more inclusive approach to the Islamic sphere
found an eloquent advocate in Carl Becker (d. 1933), a combination of Se-
mitic philologist and social theorist who made his academic career at Ham-
burg and then Bonn before going into politics.^73 Becker wanted to embrace
Islam in a broader narrative of history, partly because he recognized the role
it played in his own day. Early Islam he treated as neither Iranian nor just a
self- generated, unique Qurʾanic religion, but as a culture and polity together,
standing on the shoulders of Greece and Rome—an Antiquity understood,
though, in its full diversity, in the light of the religious- historical school.
“Without Alexander the Great, no Islamic civilization!” was Becker’s motto,
even if that civilization was a reaction against Antiquity as well as its consum-
mation.^74 This acceptance of Islam’s relatedness to Antiquity broadly con-
ceived had consequences, too, for how Becker viewed the contemporary Is-
lamic world, which was of increasing concern to Europeans, especially
colonial authorities. Becker encouraged the Kaiser’s cultivation of an
Ottoman- German alliance, and once war broke out backed the proposal that
the Ottoman Empire declare jihād against the Entente powers. At least in
some minds, Islam and Christendom had never drawn closer; nor had the
prospects for integrated study of them been better.
Pirenne to the present
The destruction of the German and Ottoman Empires, not to mention the
Austro- Hungarian and Russian, along with deep disillusionment over the
peace settlement throughout the Muslim world, created a blasted intellectual
and political landscape without prospects for rapprochement between the
Islamic world and Europe, despite Becker’s continuing pleas. Historians of
the period in which Islam first emerged found nothing in their new milieu to
stimulate them to an inclusive or universalistic approach. As for students of
the fifth- century West, they could hardly fail to notice that then, too, Roman
civilization—in Gaul, for example—had faced Germanic barbarism or, in
more modern terms, Teutonist ideolog y and rejection of Romanocentricity,
in the manner of Strzygowski.^75 After 1918, French and other scholars
73 Marchand, German Orientalism [2:19] 361–67, and 438–46 on jihād.
74 C. H. Becker, Islamstudien (Leipzig 1924–32) 1.16.
75 On the background to this, see Marchand, Down from Olympus [2:43] 156–62.