THIS APPENDIX IS ARRANGED according to chapters; the poems in order of their appearance in the chapter. In the text of the translation, above, the first number in square brackets preceding a poem indicates the chapter (with “I” denoting the introduction, since it is unnumbered), the second the poem’s place within it. Thus [7-11], for example, indicates the eleventh poem in the seventh chapter, marking, too, its place in the appendix.

ARISING FROM A SUBJECTIVE AFFINITY with its people, Johann Wolfgang Goethe had a special predilection for the literature, religion, and culture of ancient Arabia. His gratitude toward Arabia is evident throughout his life and works. Yet very few scholars have been aware of this. The West-Eastern Divan (West-ostlicher Divan) appeared to indicate that his interest in the “Orient” was limited to Hafez and Persia. Relatively little notice was paid those aspects of the work stemming from Arabic and Islamic traditions. Goethe and World Literature (Goethe und die Weltliteratur), Fritz Strich’s fundamental study of the subject, does not touch on Goethe’s relationship to Arabic literature at all. Although Strich did not promise a “comprehensive” treatment, he stressed his intention to “consider every [literary phenomenon] of which Goethe became aware and which played a role in the development and essence of his conception of “world literature,” making his total omission of the question inexplicable, especially as Arabic literature engaged Goethe throughout his life, clearly stimulating his poetic creativity.

During many years of research for a documentary study on the genesis of the West-Eastern Divan, I came to realize that clarifying Goethe’s relationship to Arabian culture was an urgent task. My book Goethe and the Thousand and One Nights (Goethe und 1001 Nacht) already dealt with a work of Arabian literature. Earlier articles on Goethe’s interest in pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry and his attitude toward Muhammad have long been out of print, though I was pleased to hear that some had been translated into Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu. This is especially fitting in light of Goethe’s idea of “world literature” (Weltliteratur), an exchange of ideas between peoples as the means to bring about more accurate perceptions and improve mutual understanding.

In the present volume, I hope to represent as comprehensively as possible Goethe’s relationship to Arabian culture, a task not yet fulfilled, and to address these questions: What did Goethe think and say about the Arabs? Where are the influences of Arabian literature to be found in his works? How can Goethe’s affinity for Islam and Muhammad be explained? “The West’s” increasing interest for the world of Islam suggests that this topic deserves to be studied and discussed more widely than I could accomplish on numerous lecture tours in the Near and Middle East.

Belief in Predestination and Personal Submission to Fate

TWO CENTRAL PRECEPTS OF ISLAM do not yet appear in Goethe’s excerpts from the Qur’an of 1771–72: belief in Providence and total submission to the faith. Later, however, these doctrines took on special significance for him. One could even say that Islamic ideas influenced the second half of his life, as Goethe believed as firmly as any Muslim that fate is predestined by God and regarded it as a commandment of piety not to rebel against God’s will. While at work on the West-Eastern Divan, he had read these remarks of Joseph von Hammer, his chief source, on Islam’s major tenets:

Goethe had long since arrived at a similar attitude of amor fati through his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, whose teachings he had embraced at the time he had conceived Mahomet. According to Spinoza, human beings do not possess an absolute or free will, but are capable only of individual acts of the will, to accept one thing or refuse another. All things result necessarily from the eternal decision of God. In the degree to which our actions are perfect, we participate in the nature of the divine and become capable of recognizing God. In Spinoza’s sense, this realization should cause us to expect with equanimity whatever fate brings about through our own actions or events beyond our control.

Such belief in a providential fate and a corresponding serene resignation to its will occur extraordinarily often in Goethe’s works, increasing as he grew older, manifested to greater or lesser degree in Egmont, The Natural Daughter (Die naturliche Tochter), Poetry and Truth, the West-Eastern Divan, “Orphic Sayings” (“Urworte Orphisch”), The Feast-Day of Saint Roch in Bingen (Sankt-Rochus-Fest zu Bingen), Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, and others.

INTENSE AND FRUITFUL THOUGH IT WAS, scholars long neglected Goethe’s involvement with the culture of Arabia, which appeared modest in comparison with his more obvious attraction to other Eastern traditions. While his interactions with the arts of Persia, India, and China received close attention, hardly any was paid to his relations with Arabian culture. Hans Pyritz’s Goethe bibliography lists only one relevant publication, a four-page essay, and even this contains insupportable and, on the whole, misleading claims. Whereas this piece ventures that “Goethe felt at home in the Arabic language” and understood “classical Arabic as spoken in Muhammad’s own time,” another, in a reference work appearing in 1962, goes to the other extreme, denying that Goethe had any interest at all in Arabian culture and culminating in the absurd assertion that he “paid no attention whatever to the Arabian Orient.” I hope to demonstrate that, on the contrary, his interest in that region and its culture was highly developed and of long duration.

To begin with, Goethe admired the Thousand and One Nights, a classic of world literature that influenced him enormously. Babinger, however, refuses to acknowledge even this fact: “It seems odd that [Goethe] never consulted Ant. Galland’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights, which was soon translated into German, often republished, and is esteemed to the present day.” This is an error, as even a cursory examination of the Weimar edition’s index reveals, which does not even list all references to Galland’s version. Throughout his life, Goethe loved the stories of Sheherazade. Thanks to his mother and grandmother, he had become familiar with some in early childhood and had never forgotten them. His affection for this work, entirely Arabic in language and style, many of whose stories originated in Arabia, did not diminish as he grew older. Motifs, figures, and narrative strategies in many of his works were rooted in Sheherazade’s tales. Even as an old man, he found relief in these stories during long, depressing winter nights or spells of illness. The intensity and endurance with which he perused the many volumes of the Thousand and One Nights time and again amazed his family and friends. He mentioned the work, if only in passing, dozens of times in letters, diaries, and conversations, but even fleeting allusions are, by virtue of sheer numbers, highly indicative.

Now he needed to connect those worlds [of the East] to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this … would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his career: the great question of how the world joins up—not only how the East flows into the West and the West into the East but how the past shapes the present even as the present changes our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the frontier separating it from the “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believe they live.

IDEAS SIMILAR TO THESE occupied Goethe throughout his life, most intensively, however, early in the nineteenth century, during the involved creative process that brought forth the West-Eastern Divan. His youthful interest in the Middle East had arisen from his imaginative immersion in the world of the biblical patriarchs and a fascination with Muhammad as the founder of a new monotheistic faith. His encounter with Herder and his conception of a progressive history of humanity provided Goethe with a wider context for these concerns. The appearance in 1812 of Hammer-Purgstall’s translation of the Diwan by the Persian Hafez (Khāwaja Shamsu Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī) rekindled Goethe’s interest in the East, presenting him with a poet, a “twin,” whose artistry and attitudes struck vital chords deep within his being. Goethe sought to reflect on his life and world from the complex of perspectives offered by Hafez and the cultures that had nurtured him, emulating and incorporating, too, their manifold artistic traditions. His intensive study of the history, literature, and life of the people of the Middle East deepened his ambivalent relationship with the teachings of the Qur’an, acquainting him, too, with the culture and poetry of Arabia, especially the Moallakat and poets of the Islamic epochs, such as Mutanabbi and Tograi, with whom he felt a strong temperamental affinity. Goethe und die arabische Welt, Katharina Mommsen’s magisterial study, documents precisely how Goethe, through his poetic and intellectual powers, could integrate, in his personality and works, a fruitful dialectic of West and East, each no longer an “other” to the other, establishing the basis for his conception of Weltliteratur.

Disputing Islamic Views on Women

ISLAM’s CONCEPTION OF WOMANHOOD differs substantially from images of Arabian women in “heathen,” pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry. Those women seemed to lead amazingly free lives and were often quite independent in their relations with men. Following the introduction of Islam, however, they appear solely as beings of a second order, destined only to serve. Goethe took a critical stance toward this conception, and when he says, in the “Arabs” chapter of the Notes and Essays, that Muhammad had cast a “gloomy religious veil” over his tribe, this metaphor implied, too, the covering women are subjected to in Islamic lands. In contrast to orthodox Jewish, Christian, and Muslim opinion, Goethe did not consider women to be, essentially, creatures of a lower order.

The moral basis for the abasement of women and the low regard in which they are held within Judaic and Christian traditions lies in the Old Testament’s story of the Fall (Genesis 3), in which “woman” is identified with evil. In the Islamic tradition, on the other hand, “Eve has never been held responsible for Adam’s exile,” as Annemarie Schimmel correctly asserts. She adds that Muslims “only rarely reached the pitch of hatred that medieval Christian authors achieved in their damning tirades against women.” Furthermore, medieval monasticism’s contempt for women is impossible in Islam because of “the Prophet’s love for women, his numerous marriages, and his four daughters.” Ever since the introduction of Islam, however, women have been under the control of men and subject to their commands. Their subordinated roles are traditionally rationalized by the idea that women are creatures of lesser intellectual capacity than men and that animal qualities predominate in their characters. Otherwise than pre-Islamic Arabs, Muslims do not respect females as much as males, aside from a few saints such as Fatema or the Virgin Mary.

In light of Goethe’s essentially equitable opinion of women, it is not surprising that he does not share Islamic attitudes toward them, treating such ideas ironically and asking that the verdict of Genesis 3:16 be qualified: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

Historical and Cultural Perspectives

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE phenomena of Goethe’s life was his relationship with Islam and its founder, Muhammad (569–632). Quite evidently, he developed an exceptional empathy for the Muslim religion. Except for the Bible, Goethe was more familiar with the Qur’an than with any other religious book. He expressed interest in Islam at various times of his life. At twenty-three, Goethe composed a marvelous ode in praise of Muhammad, and at seventy he confessed frankly that he was contemplating “celebrating in awe that holy night, when the Qur’an, in its entirety, was presented to the Prophet from on high.” During his long life, the poet paid tribute to Islam in the most varied ways, above all in the work that we regard today, together with Faust, as one of his most significant legacies, the West-Eastern Divan. Goethe’s prospectus for the work states, amazingly, that the book’s author does not “reject the suspicion that he himself is a Muslim.”

The causes for this extraordinarily positive attitude toward Islam lie in Goethe’s fascination with religious phenomena of every kind. His life’s work is founded, ultimately, on religious impulses and convictions. In regard to Islam, Goethe was influenced, too, by the aspirations of his age. A major purpose of the Enlightenment, inspired by the ideal of tolerance, lay in acknowledging the positive values of other, non-Christian religions. Islam, the most familiar of these to Europeans, presently received greater attention. The religions of India and the Far East were barely known or understood.

From early in life, Goethe shared the open-mindedness and liberal convictions of leading spirits of the Enlightenment. This alone, however, does not suffice to explain his attitude toward Islam, much less the warmth of his poetic tributes to it. To assess how exceptional, personal, and daring they are, we must understand in broad terms what Goethe’s contemporaries knew and believed about Islam, attempting to determine, too, how historical antecedents and his own temperament shaped Goethe’s convictions.

For one thousand years, from the end of the seventh century onward, the West was, in general, hostile toward Islam.

Talismans throughout this book I’ll scatter.

ALL HIS LIFE, but especially after turning fifty, Goethe prized terse, pithy statements of opinion or widely held truths: proverbs, aphorisms, country sayings, parables, maxims, apophthegms, and epigrams, that is, in brief, all trenchant, didactic forms. Psychologically, the existential attitude of such sayings might well have appealed to the aging mind’s inclination to reflect on life rather than take an active role, as in youth, and to state what it concludes from experience briefly and with apodictic self-assurance. The books Goethe borrowed from the library reflect this preference. To better understand other cultures, he studied carefully the proverbs still current in their colloquial languages. Experience had taught him [7-1]:

Goethe was more than a merely receptive reader of these forms; often, he was moved to respond “productively,” in that spirit of constructive criticism encountered earlier. Occasionally, he sought creative impulses in anthologies, as in the case of Arabic proverbs while writing the Divan. Aside from available collections, he found such genres everywhere during his oriental studies, mainly as quotations from the Qur’an, the Sunna, or in poetic texts. Poems by Goethe inspired by the Qur’an or Sunna were discussed earlier, as were the Tame Xenias on motifs from the Moallakat.

Sayings play an enormous role in Arabian culture. Arabs customarily quote proverbs and the like in their ordinary speech and in writing. That is why they occur so frequently in travel journals, histories, biographies of the Prophet, and similar works. With its many aphorisms, the Divan reflects the culturally significant role such sayings play in the Near and Middle East. Goethe intentionally “scattered” such forms throughout the work. He inclined strongly to such witty, apodictic reflections, finding it liberating to encapsulate ideas and experiences in this way and anchor them in language. His encounter with the spirit and poetry of Arabia and Persia was necessary, however, for Goethe to bring forth the wealth of brief, reflective poems in the Divan and Tame Xenias. He acknowledged this commenting on the “Book of Observations,” declaring that “he who dwells in the Orient” is inclined toward reflection:

Ibn Arabshah: “The Winter and Timur”

GOETHE WAS MOVED to include a “Book of Timur” in the West-Eastern Divan after encountering the work of Ibn Arabshah (Muhammad Ibn Arabshah, 1389–1450), an Arabian author during the period of the Mamlukes. He composed a satirical history of Timur, that is, Tamerlane (1336–1405). Goethe came upon a famous episode of this work in rhyming Arabic prose, accompanied by a translation into Latin, in William Jones’s Poeseos Asiaticae, of which Goethe owned a copy. This text inspired him to write “The Winter and Timur” (“Der Winter und Timur”), the balladesque poem constituting most of the “Book of Timur.” He wrote the poem while in Jena on 11 December 1814. His reading notes relating to Ibn Arabshah are based on Jones’s work and Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale and were likely written down shortly before the poem’s composition: “† 1450. / Ben Arabshah / An Arab / The Story of Timur / Two Parts / [the first] Concerning Timur / [the second] Concerning his nephew / Khalil Soltan. / Agiaib al macdur fi / akhbar Timur (in French). The wondrous workings / of God’s will / in the chronicle / of Timur.” The note’s first ten lines, the date of the poet’s death, the spelling of his name, and his nationality are based on Jones’s Poeseos Asiaticae, as Goethe indicated in a marginal note (omitted here) in which the brief description of the work and its title in Arabic appeared; Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale provided the translation of the title.

We do not know whether or how intensively Goethe studied the two volumes of Tamerlane’s biography, one of the earliest works of Arabic literature to become known in the West. For generations, until well into the nineteenth century, Ibn Arabshah’s biography of Tamerlane was required reading for Arabian students. Jones included the section that was to interest Goethe so greatly in his Poeseos Asiaticae in 1774, which Eichhorn translated and published in 1777.

Ibn Arabshah was not a historian in the ordinary sense, as he did not write his poetically inspired history of Tamerlane sine ira et studio but rather in quest of vengeance.

EARLY IN THE SIXTH CENTURY, in the north of Arabia, a poetic tradition of unprecedented artistic perfection blossomed into a “fully developed literary art,” seemingly of its own accord and without antecedents. Poets suddenly appeared whose “qasidas,” as they called their odes, treated “a variety of themes with superb energy, lively wit, and precise images,” combining “a rich and highly developed language with the most sophisticated rhymes in complex metrical schemes.” There is widespread surprise that “a Bedouin people otherwise only moderately cultivated had created poetry of astonishing formal richness and of the greatest subtlety.” During the eighth century, anthologies of this pre-Islamic poetry were assembled. The so-called Moallakat is considered the oldest of these collections to have come down to us, and the one containing the best poetry. The word means “those that were hung up,” a title not yet satisfactorily explained. Experts no longer accept the idea that the poems had been judged the best in poetic contests, written down in golden letters and hung up at the Kaaba in Mecca. We can leave questions such as which qasidas actually are to be included in the Moallakat to specialists in Arabic literature. We wish primarily to determine with which poets Goethe was familiar and how they influenced him.

William Jones (1746–94), Goethe’s contemporary, played a leading role in making the Moallakat known in the West. In his famed Poeseos Asiaticae Commentarii libri sex of 1774, Jones presented the seven “golden odes” as the unexcelled initiation and culmination of Arabic literary art. Three years later, J. G. Eichhorn, the Jena theologian and Arabist, published a reprint and presented a copy to Goethe. In 1783, Jones’s transcription of the anthology appeared together with an English translation. This immediately moved Goethe to translate the Moallakat into German, as his letter to Carl von Knebel on 14 November 1783 confirms:

SHORTLY AFTER EXPERIENCING the portents of 1813–14, Goethe wrote the first poems of the West-Eastern Divan, a work situated entirely within the spirit and atmosphere of Islam, and which could not have come into existence without Goethe’s lifelong positive attitude toward the Muslim faith.

The poet’s congenial familiarity with Arabian religiosity, the ease with which his mind moved within its world, arose from his profound sympathy for Islam and knowledge of its principles. Only this bond of trust and congeniality lent Goethe the confidence, when treating religious themes, to be grave or ironic by turns. It permitted him to blend into his poetry the aspect of “skeptical agility,” which he regarded as a chief characteristic of his Persian model, Hafez. However, Goethe’s high esteem for both Islam and Hafez assured that he never struck a discordant note.

Goethe’s Model: Hafez, an Adept of the Qur’an

For Goethe, it was important that Hafez was spiritually grounded in the Qur’an. Indeed, he stressed the fact that Hafez’s original byname, “retained as a characterizing first name,” conveyed that he knew the Qur’an by heart, “so that he could, on any occasion, cite appropriate passages, edify his audience, or resolve disputes.” In paying tribute to his Persian “twin, Goethe compared such total saturation with the Qur’an with the thorough knowledge (Bibelfestigkeit) of the Bible then still widespread in Germany, which he himself possessed. He believed that “a substantial education” could result from such knowledge, “because memory, occupied constantly with worthy matters, harbored pure contents for [a person’s] feelings and powers of judgment to enjoy and act on,” endowing a person with “exceptional dignity and unquestionable standing.” Of Hafez he says: