For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  For Lust of Knowing contains no discussion of Flaubert’s letters from Egypt, Disraeli’s novels, Delacroix’s painting of The Death of Sardanapalus, or Verdi’s Aida. I am hostile to the notion that Orientalism can be viewed primarily as a canon of literary and other artistic masterpieces, mostly composed by dead, white males. The products of mainstream Orientalism were less colourful and less fluent than that. Orientalism in its most important aspect was founded upon academic drudgery and close attention to philological detail. I do not believe that the novelist Flaubert and the Arabist and Islamicist Sir Hamilton Gibb were really contributing to essentially the same discourse or were the victims of it. However, the distinction between academic and artistic production is, of course, not hard-edged. For example, William Beckford’s novel Vathek has academic-looking footnotes and, on the other hand, Gibb’s understanding of Saladin’s career was greatly influenced by his enthusiasm for Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman. There is a significant overlap between Orientalist scholarship and artistic works of an Oriental inspiration, but it is, I believe, only an overlap and not evidence of a single cohesive discourse. Nevertheless the way Islam and the Arabs have been presented by Western writers and artists is clearly important, as well as interesting in its own right, and I shall be discussing it in a second volume, entitled The Arts of Orientalism.

  In the course of writing this book I have benefited from conversations with Helen Irwin, Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Charles Burnett, Roz Kaveney and Professor Hugh Kennedy. I am grateful to my editor, Stefan McGrath, for his enthusiasm. I have also benefited from the editing of Jane Robertson. They are not responsible for any errors in this book – I only wish they were. I have slated some critics of Orientalism for their factual errors, yet I am acutely conscious that in covering such a vast field as the history of Orientalism, I am bound to have made quite a few errors of my own. At least I tried to get things right.

  Since publication of the hardback, various friends and critics (and they overlap to a surprising extent) have pointed out a number of errors. Since I believe in getting facts right, I have corrected the errors. I am particularly grateful to Sir James Craig, Ted Gorton, Alastair Hamilton, Malcolm Jack, David Morgan, Basim Musallam and Amir Taheri.

  1

  The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

  But how did it all begin? If it is history we want, then it is a history of conflict. And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the ‘merchant wolves’, arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off the tauropárthenos from Argos. Tauropárthenos means ‘the virgin dedicated to the bull’. Her name was Io. Like a beacon signalling from mountain to mountain, this rape lit the bonfire of hatred between the two continents. From that moment on, Europe and Asia never stopped fighting each other, blow answering blow. Thus the Cretans, ‘the boars of Ida’, carried off Europa from Asia…

  Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

  (1993)

  TROY, AN ORIENTALIST BATTLEFIELD?

  Is Orientalism an eternal given? Or was it a discourse that was formed in, say, the early fourteenth century, when the establishment of chairs of Arabic was decreed by the Council of Vienne? Or, say, in the late eighteenth century, when Bonaparte invaded Egypt and his team of savants catalogued the antiquarian and ethnographic details of the land? Or was this perhaps a clash of cultures that went back to pre-Islamic and even pre-Christian times? In Crusade, Commerce and Culture, the Arab historian Aziz Atiya argued that the Crusades had to be seen in the context of a much older and enduring conflict between East and West: ‘These relations go far back into antiquity beyond the confines of the medieval world. The bone of contention was the undefined frontier of Europe, otherwise described as the spiritual frontiers of the West vis-à-vis Asia.’1 According to Atiya, the Greek mind created the frontier between Europe and Asia – the earliest version of the ‘Eastern Question’. For this Greek mind, the Hellenistic legacy ‘aimed at encompassing the whole world’. Edward Said developed a similar argument: ‘Consider the first demarcation between Orient and West. It already seems bold by the time of the Iliad.’2

  ‘Barbarian’ (or in Greek barbaros) was originally a linguistic concept and it applied to all non-Greek-speaking peoples. As such, it applied to both civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus the Greeks considered the Persians to be ‘barbarians’, but hardly uncouth or uncultured. Greeks were impressed by the Phoenician alphabet, Lydian coinage and Egyptian sculpture. (Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), has argued controversially that the Greek culture in its essentials was derived from that of the Egyptians.) In general, the Greeks admired Orientals, while despising the Thracians and Scythians on their northern frontiers. ‘Barbarians’ were just as likely to be Westerners as Orientals. Greeks envied the wealth of Gyges and Croesus, rulers of Lydia in Asia Minor.3 As Calasso notes: ‘Right from the beginning, Greek elegance is opposed to Asiatic sumptuousness with its prodigal mix of solemnity and abundance.’4 In fact the demarcation between Greek and Oriental is not so very clear in Homer. Nowhere in the Iliad (which was probably produced in the eighth century BC) are the Trojans called barbarians, nor are they treated as such. Only the Carians, from South West Asia Minor, are characterized as ‘barbarians’ by Homer. One thing that militated against a hypothetical contraposition of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ in this early period is that there was no word for ‘Greek’ in ancient Greece. ‘Graeci’ (meaning Greeks) is a later Roman coinage. However, the concept of the Hellene and Hellenic culture was in circulation by the time of Herodotus.

  The Orientalist Bernard Lewis, in a discussion of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in the world of antiquity, has suggested that the tendency to make such distinctions is common to all times and all places. However, the distinctions were not necessarily fixed and irrevocable. Though the Jews distinguished between Jew and Gentile, they were prepared to accept converts. Similarly, the Greeks distinguished between Greek and barbarian, but they allowed that it was possible to cease to be a barbarian by adopting Greek language and culture. Lewis continues: ‘There is another respect in which Greeks and Jews were unique in the ancient world – in their compassion for an enemy. There is nothing elsewhere to compare with the sympathetic portrayal by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus – himself a veteran of the Persian wars – of the sufferings of the vanquished Persians…’5 Edward Said has taken a rather different point of view of the same play, The Persians. According to him, Aeschylus dumps on to Asia ‘the feelings of emptiness, loss and disaster… also the lament that in some glorious past Asia fared better, was itself victorious over Europe’.6

  THE PERSIANS

  If the Persians needed to make play with the notion of an ‘Other’ or to construct an archive of racial stereotypes or to put on plays and write histories in order to justify their conquests, those activities have gone unrecorded. They just seem to have set about trying to conquer their neighbours. In the sixth century BC the Persian empire expanded westwards to include Lydia and the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Then Darius made careful preparations for the conquest of Athens (490 BC). After a prolonged standoff, the Persians were heavily defeated at Marathon and, after an abortive attempt to capture Athens, the First Persian War came to an ignominious end. Darius died in 485 BC and it was left to his son, Xerxes, to plan a renewed campaign of conquest. In 480 BC an enormous Persian army crossed over into Europe. This army (which, by the way, included large numbers of Greeks) was defeated at Thermopylae and at Plataea and their fleet was defeated at Salamis. That was the end of Persian attempts to conquer Greece. It is possible that these attempts to conquer Greece encouraged the Greeks to think more of themselves as a distinctive race. (The Persians certainly thought of themselves as a distinctive race and they referred to all foreigners as anarya, non-Aryan. The stone reliefs of the Persian citadel of Persepolis depicted the subject races in their various costumes br
inging tribute to their Persian overlords.)

  The Persians by Aeschylus was first staged in 472 BC, seven years after the withdrawal of the Persian army from mainland Greece. Both the author and his audience were veterans of that war. Aeschylus’s brother was killed in the aftermath of Marathon. His hand was cut off as he was hanging on to a Persian ship. Aeschylus’s play commemorates the triumph of Greek arms against vastly superior forces. However, as Lewis has indicated, it seeks to do this from the Persian point of view. The play, which is set in Persia, opens with a chorus of Persians anxiously speculating about the fate of Xerxes’s expedition. Atossa, the emperor’s mother, has had ominous dreams. Then a messenger arrives with a detailed report of the disaster of Salamis. (In Greek terms, this was a peripeteia, a surprising turn of events.) The chorus summons up the ghost of Xerxes’s father, Darius, and the ghost declares the disaster to have been brought about through the hubris of Xerxes and predicts the defeat at Plataea. Darius is presented as a capable and heroic figure. With the arrival of Xerxes himself, lamentations are redoubled at the court. It is important to bear in mind that the play really is a tragedy, even though the Greeks are not its victims.7

  THE FATHER OF HISTORY

  Voltaire thought that history began with Herodotus’s history of the Graeco-Persian war. Much of the History written by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 490–425 BC) was based on first-hand experience, for the author had travelled widely in Asia Minor, Scythia, Egypt, Babylon and elsewhere. Moreover, so far as his information on Persia was concerned, much of this is likely to have come from Greek mercenaries who had served in the Persian armies. Greek-speaking Persians may also have served as Herodotus’s informants. It has been suggested that the Persian wars served as the original stimulus for the writing of the book and that Herodotus’s account of those wars was written first, with the other parts on Egypt and elsewhere being written later. The History opens with a preface on the legendary origins of the hostility between the Europeans and the Asiatics. Thus Herodotus narrates the stories of the rapes of Io, Europa and Medea, before proceeding on to the Trojan War. Although he stresses the antiquity of the quarrel between the East and the West, there is absolutely no hint in his History that the Trojans are in any sense inferior to the Greeks. Real history in Herodotus’s book begins not with the legends that make up the story of the Trojan War but with the career of the last king of Lydia, Croesus, and his defeat by the Persians and their conquest of the Lydians. More generally, Herodotus was especially interested in the victims of Persian imperialism: Lydians, Egyptians, Scythians and Libyans.

  Herodotus seems to have been singularly free of racial prejudice and because of his open-minded interest in other cultures he was known as the ‘barbarophile’. He wrote an admiring account of the achievements of the Egyptian pharaohs and he harped on the grandeur of Egypt and Lydia before those lands fell to the Persians. As for the Persians, Herodotus tended to focus on the ways in which the Persians differed from the Greeks – in their tradition of despotic rule, their practice of polygamy, in their birthday celebrations and other matters. However, these were specific differences and there is no sense in Herodotus of some overarching Otherness. Incidentally, one thing that struck him about the Persians was their racism: ‘After their own nation they hold their nearest neighbours most in honour, then the nearest but one – and so on, their respect decreasing as the distance grows, and the most remote being the most despised. Themselves they consider in every way superior to everyone else in the world, and allow other nations a share of good qualities decreasing according to distance, the furthest off being in their view the worst.’8 He consistently stressed the importance of nomoi, or traditional behavioural norms, forming social customs. He thought that long-established custom could make anything seem normal and the strange ways of the Persians merely furnished proofs of Herodotus’s way of thinking. Moreover, though he enumerated the ways in which foreign cultures differed from Greek culture, this did not imply the superiority of Greek culture, and Herodotus repeatedly acknowledged Greece’s various debts to other cultures, particularly those of Egypt and Phoenicia. Indeed, he believed that Greece had been originally colonized from the East and that the Spartans were the descendants of the Egyptians. Certainly the Persians were far less alien in his eyes than the Scythians. According to Said, Herodotus conquered the Orient by visiting it and writing about it.9 Perhaps, but if so, his was an entirely metaphorical conquest.

  OCCIDENTAL FRENZY

  The dramatist Euripides (c. 484–406 BC) was the best known of the great Greek tragedians. His play, The Bacchae, was probably produced posthumously in Athens in 405 BC and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It deals with the coming of the god Dionysius to Thebes. The Theban women become his orgiastic devotees, or Bacchantes, but the city’s king Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Dionysius – this despite such clear manifestations of Dionysius’ power as the destruction of Pentheus’ palace. Then Dionysius, disguised as one of his cultists, persuades Pentheus to disguise himself as a woman in order to witness the Dionysian mysteries. However, Pentheus is unmasked and torn to pieces by the Bacchantes.10

  According to Said, in The Bacchae Euripides links Dionysius with threatening Oriental mysteries. The play, which was produced at a time when Oriental cults were spreading, presented the lure of the Orient as an insinuating danger: ‘Dionysius is explicitly connected with his Asiatic origin.’11 But what ‘Asiatic origin’? Dionysius was the son of Zeus and Semele, the Theban daughter of Cadmus, who in turn was grandfather of Pentheus. It follows that Dionysius is no more Asiatic than Pentheus. The only grounds for possibly thinking of him as an Asiatic was that he had conquered a large part of Asia (but, on those grounds, one would also have to regard Warren Hastings and General Allenby as Asiatics). It would be sad if a dyspeptic reading put people off reading the play as it is not a polemical tract attacking the introduction of new Oriental ideologies into Greece. The Bacchae is a work of imagination that has nothing to do with agitprop. In the play, Euripides presents the rational and the irrational as being found within the individual, rather than distributed between the two continents. As E. R. Dodds pointed out in The Greeks and the Irrational, the play was not intended as an attack on Dionysiac cults, for to ‘resist Dionysius is to repress the elemental in one’s own nature’.12 The legitimacy of Dionysius’ divine status is emphatically affirmed.

  Instead, the play commemorates the obstinacy and folly of Pentheus. His grandfather Cadmus, the seer Teiresias and the Chorus all warn him against opposing the Dionysiac rites. Their warnings are seen by Said as presaging Orientalism: ‘hereafter Oriental mysteries will be taken seriously, not least because they challenge the rational Western mind to new exercises of its enduring ambition and power’.13 But by the time Euripides wrote this play, the Dionysiac cult was an accepted part of the spiritual landscape of Athens and there is no evidence that Euripides or any of his contemporaries thought of Dionysius as an irrational Oriental. The play refers to his ‘white skin’ and, according to legend, he first entered Greece from Thrace (so from the north, not the east). The actual cult was probably Mycenaean in origin. In the twentieth century the theme of the Dionysiac strain within Greek culture and Western culture more generally was taken up and studied by the great German cultural historian and iconographer, Aby Warburg. Sir Ernst Gombrich (who later became director of London University’s Warburg Institute) summarized Warburg’s approach: ‘In its myth we find enshrined the extremes of emotion and self-abandon from which modern man must shrink in awe but which, as preserved in the symbols of art, contains those very moulds of emotion which alone make artistic expression possible. Without the primeval passion which was discharged in maenadic dances and Bacchantic frenzy, Greek art would never have been able to create those “superlatives” of gesture with which the greatest of Renaissance artists expressed the deepest human values.’14 Far from being Asian monopolies, the Dionysiac, the frenzied and the irrational lie at the roots of Western culture.r />
  LOVING AND HATING THE PERSIANS

  Xenophon (c. 430–354 BC) was a disciple of Socrates and a historian. An aristocrat, he was out of sympathy with the Athenian republic of his time and therefore he took service for a while in the army of the Persian prince Cyrus, son of King Darius II. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (‘Education of Cyrus’) presented an idealized portrait of the Persian king in order to serve as a vehicle for Xenophon’s meditations on statecraft and related matters. He rather idealized the achievements of the founder of the dynasty Cyrus the Great (539–529 BC), so that the Cyropaedia reads as a mixture of political treatise and historical novel.15 In Xenophon’s book, the Greeks would do well to emulate the achievements of Cyrus, the perfect ruler and general. Xenophon’s account of the admirable Persian constitution was really his own invention. However, by the time he wrote, it was clear that the Persian empire was in difficulties and the work ends up condemning Persian luxury and chronicling the disorder into which Persia had fallen after the death of Cyrus. It should also be noted that in his Anabasis, his account of the long march home of a band of 10, 000 Greek soldiers after Cyrus had been defeated in his attempt to take the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II, Xenophon presented the Persians as soft and treacherous. Even so the Anabasis is more concerned with Greek politics and the rhetoric of leadership than it is with the Persians and, as the Italian novelist and critic Italo Calvino remarked of Xenophon, in this book he consistently showed respect for the hostile lands they travelled through: ‘If he often displays an aloofness or aversion towards “barbarian” customs, it must also be said that “colonialist” hypocrisy is completely foreign to him. He is aware of being at the head of a horde of foreign parasites…’16