Mohamed Amer Meziane, The Sacrifice of the Sky. Another Story of Reason, Seuil Editions, in the series “The Color of Ideas,” 18/06/2026, 288 pages, €23.
Everything begins in Damascus, at the home of an Arab Christian whose family ran the caliphate’s finances. Faced with a choice between his faith and his duties, John of Damascus withdraws to a monastery, where he places Islam among heresies and regards Muhammad as the archetype of the false prophet. Five years after his death, a council hostile to image worship, which John had defended, returns the favor by anathematizing him for his “Mahometan” sentiments, in a mechanism that the essay traces across a thousand years.
The double change of costume occurs when the seventeenth‑century English republicans make him a legislator, a move Rousseau praises in the Social Contract for having linked religion to the State. Opposed to this civil religion, Baron d’Holbach, in 1770, returns to the impostor of theologians. If “Muhammad” forged a religion to serve his power, Moses and Jesus may have done the same. The materialist borrows his premise from the devout and turns the weapon forged against Islam toward the Church. The author sees in this contaminating reasoning the first gear of the “sacrifice of the sky,” this humanization of the divine that makes prophetic words inventions of men.
That same year, in Göttingen, the philosopher Johann David Michaelis begins a treatise on Moses’ law. He nourishes it with the expedition he had designed and funded by the king of Denmark, who in 1761 set out for the land of the Happy Arabia with the singular instruction to observe the Arabs in order to better read the Old Testament. Michaelis portrays Abraham as a wandering Arab and reads the Law as the codification of a nomadic customary law. Reading the Bible as a human text, a gesture now so familiar, required this detour through Arabs kept outside history.
With Kant, practical reason takes the place of the Prophet, and Reason itself becomes legislator in turn. In Hegel, the sky goes on sacrificing itself, since God dies on the cross to become man and to be known. This humanization rests on a division promised to endure: Love attributed to Christ and the West, while the Law is sent back to an Orient where Moses and “Muhammad” blur together.
This division survived by migrating toward Islam, so much so that Western defenders now call the tradition “Judeo‑Christian,” despite centuries of anti‑Semitism. The myth of a violence inherent to monotheism also flows from it, as does the myth of a Reformation that gave birth to modernity, born during the Prussian jubilees of 1817 and 1830.
The French Revolution assigns the two roles in opposition. In 1794, after Robespierre’s death, Louis Lavicomterie sees in him “a kind of new Muhammad.” Hegel reverses the comparison and reads Islam as a “revolution of the East.” He is soon paid back in the same coin when the theologian August Tholuck likens his philosophy to Sufi mysticism, presenting him as a German Avicenna. Hegel replies that he is Lutheran, strengthened in his Lutheranism by philosophy.
Meziane has the archives at hand as he seeks the origin of so many modern certainties not merely in colonial offices but in the quarrels of theologians and philologists, for Orientalism predates colonization.
The Sword and the Pen
The final chapter opens the correspondence Europe’s scholars received from those they spoke about. On May 18, 1883, in the Journal des débats, Jamāl ad‑Dīn al‑Afghānī replies to the conference where Ernest Renan portrayed Islam as opposed to any science. He reminds him, with courteous irony, that Europeans “welcomed Aristotle, an exile who became Arab”. Renan praises the intelligence of his opponent to credit Persian genius, which he regards as Aryan and pits against the Arabs. In his view, the praise constitutes a form of listening.
Twenty‑eight years earlier, after fifteen years of resistance to colonial armies, Emir Abdelkader had sent to the Société Asiatique of Paris a treatise soon translated under the title Rappel à l’intelligent, avis à l’indifférent. Later, the Legion of Honor and Lincoln’s gifts would hail the hero. The book reintroduces the thinker into the history of philosophy by returning to the Arabic text. Humanity appears here as a knowing beast, with knowledge setting it apart from other living beings. The Emir laments that European science, which he admires, remains confined to the tangible and the technical. He regards the sword as the servant of the pen, a sharp admission from a wartime leader.
From the opening of Rappel, the Emir restates a maxim al‑Ghazālī is said to have attributed to Ali, the Prophet’s cousin. It states that “the intelligent know men through truth, not truth through men.” The author names this principle the wandering of truth and is right to treat it as a method. The rule touches both lay authorities and religious authorities, beginning with a famed Reason that becomes unreasonable by persistently referring only to the venerable authors of its Pantheon.
Educated with the fairness of a judge, the trial of Reason spares modern science and leaves the verdict to the reader. On the stand appear a Syriac patriarch, an Orientalist crowned by the Institute, the King of Prussia, and Kateb Yacine. The closing pages remind us that to be right is not the same as to be right against others. The author speaks of a spelæology of concepts. We descend from his galleries with a reason broadened by the book’s originality and by Mohamed Amer Meziane’s polyglot erudition.
The article The Sacrifice of the Sky: Rethinking Philosophy Beyond the West first appeared on Lythrum Press.
