ME 273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Long Nineteenth Century, Otto Pfleiderer, Abraham Kuenen
2 May 2018
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Ruig Head: Europea Cultural Superiority’s effect o Seitic races
This paper discusses the outcomes of the European cultural superiority in terms of mental
development and national character over Semitic languages and the people who spoke them,
such as Arabs and Jews. Tomoko Masuzawa’s text The Invention of World Religions has been
made a primary source of argumentation in this paper in order to understand the manner in which
modernity altered the understanding regarding World Religions. It has been discussed earlier in
the text Formations of Modernity by Stuart Hall that modernity shaped nearly every sphere of
human existence, such as economy and politics. In accordance with this understanding, by the
nineteenth century only one thing that was at odd with West’s superiority over the rest, was
Christianity (Masuzawa, 2005, p.148). The Europeans shifted their religious affiliation as being
an Abrahamic religion towards a more holistic view regarding spirituality such as Buddhism and
Brahmanism. In pursuit of achieving this goal, language was made a defining factor. Europeans
classified mankind into two distinct factions i.e. Aryans (the noble) and Semites (the savage).
The former was considered intellectually and ethically superior than the latter based on the
hypothesis of inflection over limited inflection 1or agglutination2 in language. This understanding
of language that classified people into noble or savage had an impact on the way (mainly)
European philologists (experts of language studies) of the long nineteenth century defined the
concept of World Religions and its universality. The aim of this paper is to analyze the reasons
behind the denial of European philologists like Abraham Kuenen and Otto Pfleiderer to consider
Islam as one among the World Religions by drawing connections between language, culture and
religion.
1 a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense,
mood, person, number, case, and gender.
2 An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination:
words may contain different morphemes to determine their meaning, but each of these morphemes
(including stems and affixes) remains in every aspect unchanged after their union
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Europea Cultural Superiority’s effect o Seitic races
The European civilization differentiated itself from the rest of the world on the basis of their
colour and intellect. By the nineteenth century it aimed for a superior place in the league of
World Religions. In order to achieve this goal, the route towards language superiority was taken
as it was believed by the West that language and religion are directly linked to one another. It
was considered by the Europeans that the language is the expression of people’s thoughts. The
mature and flexible the medium of articulation of thoughts is, the advance that civilization and its
culture is in comparison to other languages, which do not allow much flexibility in language
syntax. On the basis of this understanding of language, the world languages got divided into two
main categories, Aryans and Semitic. This classification categorized nearly everything that was
related to language such as culture, race and religion into one of these two branches. It is crucial
to understand what it meant to be an Aryan or a Semite for Europeans before delving into the
outcomes of this categorization of languages and people into these two streams.
This division initially defined language families and with time it started to articulate racial
connotations as well (Masuzawa, 2005, p.152). The word Aryan that means noble was taken by
the West from Persian and in the nineteenth century it referred to all the characteristics that came
along with ‘whiteness’ i.e. everything which was white considered to be noble, intellectual,
trustworthy and speculative (Masuzawa, 2005, p.152). While anything which was opposite of
being a European was most of the times termed as Semitic.
The major difference between Aryan languages for example, Sanskrit and the Semitic languages
such as Arabic is of inflection. According to the Europeans, the Indo-European languages
possess a great tendency of inflection that is due to the intellect of the people who formed them.
The greater a language has a capacity of inflection, the Europeans termed that language superior,
as it had the capacity to develop on its own, because it is governed by minimal syntax rules that
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Document Summary
Ru(cid:374)(cid:374)i(cid:374)g head: europea(cid:374) cultural superiority"s effect o(cid:374) se(cid:373)itic races. This paper discusses the outcomes of the european cultural superiority in terms of mental development and national character over semitic languages and the people who spoke them, such as arabs and jews. Tomoko masuzawa"s text the invention of world religions has been made a primary source of argumentation in this paper in order to understand the manner in which modernity altered the understanding regarding world religions. It has been discussed earlier in the text formations of modernity by stuart hall that modernity shaped nearly every sphere of human existence, such as economy and politics. In accordance with this understanding, by the nineteenth century only one thing that was at odd with west"s superiority over the rest, was. The europeans shifted their religious affiliation as being an abrahamic religion towards a more holistic view regarding spirituality such as buddhism and. In pursuit of achieving this goal, language was made a defining factor.
