Leone Caetani

Life

Caetani was born in Rome into the prominent and wealthy Caetani family. His father Onorato, Prince of Teano and Duke of Sermoneta, was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Italy in 1896 in the second di Rudini cabinet; his English mother, Ada Bootle Wilbraham, was the daughter of the Earl of Lathom. His paternal grandfather, Michelangelo, had married the Polish countess Calixta Rzewuski, whose ancestor Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski had been a well-known Polish orientalist.

Caetani developed an interest in foreign languages at an early age. At 15 he began to study Sanskrit and Arabic on his own. Later he studied Oriental languages at the University of Rome, under Ignazio Guidi and Giacomo Lignana, with an intensive study of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Sanskrit and Syriac languages (and perhaps also Turkish). Caetani spent many years researching and travelling throughout the Muslim world gathering a great deal of material on a wide range of Islamic cultures from Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, the Levant, the Sahara, India, Central Asia and southern Russia. Later, one of his disciples was Giorgio Levi Della Vida. He had become a corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1911 and a full member in 1919. Later on, he left his rich library to the Lincei to create the Caetani foundation for Muslim studies.

Leone Caetani also served as a deputy of the Italian Parliament (1909–1913), keeping a radical socialist stance. He had married Vittoria Colonna, daughter of Marcantonio VI prince of Paliano, from which he later separated; since 1917 he had succeeded his father as Prince of Teano and Duke of Sermoneta.

Due to his family's situation, after the end of his marriage and to the rise of Fascism, in 1927 he decided to emigrate to Vernon, British Columbia, with his new partner Ofelia Fabiani and their daughter Sveva. He later become a Canadian citizen. In 1935 the Fascist regime stripped him of his Italian citizenship and expelled him from the Accademia dei Lincei; he died soon afterwards in the same year in Vancouver.

Research

Caetani made extensive analysis of sources related to the origins of the Qur'an and Islamic thought between 1904–1926 during which he collected and arranged chronologically and sequentially all known existing primary sources and materials related to the origins of Islam. Caetani presented his critical analysis and conclusions regarding what he believed to be inconsistencies, contradictions and variances in the Islamic sources in his monumental work in ten volumes "Annali dell'Islam". It is still regarded today as a milestone in Islamic studies.

Caetani claimed that most of the early traditions of Islam could be dismissed as fabrications by later generations of authors.. He also suggested that the Arab conquests during the formative era of Islam were driven not by religion but by material want and covetousness.

Caetani was not a Muslim and he did not believe in the literal truth of the Qur'an. Instead his views about its origins were as follows. As long as Muhammad was alive, he could answer any doctrinal questions that arose, so there was little attention paid to written documents. The reign of his successor Abu Bakr was characterized by increasing confusion as multiple written and oral versions of Muhammad's teachings coexisted. To his great credit, Uthman understood the danger of this situation; he had an official version of the Qur'an developed and ordered the destruction of all unapproved versions. To summarize, Caetani thought that the Qur'an as it exists today did not come word for word from the pen of the Prophet, but was the result of a standardization and cleanup effort ("Uthman's recension") undertaken many years after his death.

One of Leone Caetani's studies, Uthman and the Recension of the Koran, is included as a chapter in The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book edited by Ibn Warraq.

Works