| Summary/Abstract |
The mere mention of Henri Lammens, Society of Jesus (SJ), provokes unease, notorious as this militant “priest-scholar” has become in postcolonial circles. Yet his failings notwithstanding, Lammens has been a victim of the academic conceits and biases of postmodernist postcolonialists through whose prisms he often emerges as a cantankerous, inflammatory, Christian polemicist, hell-bent on defaming an otherwise blameless, innocent, beatific Islam. This article suggests that a more nuanced gaze be cast at Henri Lammens, the man and missionary, before judging his scholarship; a corrective of sorts, shedding light on the life and times of a Belgian boy, who traveled East at the tender age of fifteen, who fell into the snare of Near Eastern Christians, and who set out to write their history and restore their suppressed memories—doing so not without the passion and affection of the neophyte.
|