Abstract
Enlightenment thinkers dealt with Islam in two ways. Contemporaries living in Muslim countries recounted, according to their religious orientations (Anglican, Calvinist, Lutheran, liberal Catholic, Jansenist or Salesian), what they believed to have seen or understood. Their information was often superficial, especially in the area of theology, but globally they developed the corpus of texts which subsequently served the growth of orientalism. Theoreticians remaining in Europe essentially hoped to deconstruct the devout testimony of the preceding century. Islam was for them a simple pretext within a wider polemical context. This said, attitudes remained ambiguous due to the coexistence of forms of de-demonization and demonization of Islam; neutral attitudes were the exception rather than the rule.