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Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und der Islam. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2001.
Katharina Mommsen 's Goethe und der Islam is a revised edition of her earlier work, Goethe und die Arabische Welt, published in 1988. Like the original, Mommsen 's most recent text meticulously traces many of Goethe's Divan poems to specific verses of the Koran or to an array of Arabic and Persian poetry. Happily, in the new edition the footnotes have become endnotes. This structural change makes for a more hospitable text in that the footnotes no longer dominate the page, as they so often do in the original. In addition, Mommsen has made a considerable number of editorial changes, including the deletion and consolidation of certain chapters and the addition of new ones, as well as the reorganization of some sections of the text. Her book is now divided into numbered chapters and she has reworked some of the headings. Perhaps most importantly, Mommsen has changed the title from Goethe und die Arabische Welt to Goethe und der Islam, which calls attention to her more focused emphasis on Goethe's life-long interest in and preoccupation with the Koran and Islam. Mommsen locates traces of Koran verses in such early works as Götz von Berlichingen (1772), stresses Goethe's positive evaluation of Mohammed in the Mahomet-VragraerA and the poem Mahomets Gesang (1773), originally intended to be part of the drama, and finally focuses on Goethe's intensive study of the Koran, Hafis' Divan, biographies of Mohammed, and a variety of Persian and Arabic poetic texts during the composition of die West-Östlicher Divan (1814-1819). Mommsen emphasizes the potentially iconoclastic significance of Goethe's project. She provides an overview of the west's almost exclusively negative reception of both Mohammed and Islam, which began not long after the birth of Islam and lasted well into the nineteenth century. She cites Friedrich Megerlin's translation (1772), the first German edition of the Koran, as representative of the general pejorative attitude toward Islam prevalent at that time. Megerlin entitied his work, Die Türkische Bibel, referred to the Koran as a "Liigenbucb? and his title page features an etching of Mohammed with the caption Mohamet der falsche Prophet (31). In his positive reception of Islam, Goethe reflects the Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism and religious...