For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Raimondi and his patrons had hoped that the press might do good business in the Near East, since there were no Muslim printing presses employing Arabic typefaces. Though Greeks, Jews and Armenians in the Ottoman empire were eventually allowed to print books in their own languages, Muslim theologians argued that to set up the holy language of the Qur’an in print would be a kind of desecration. (Apart from the religious objection to printing, the vested interests of the professional scribes and copyists also had some weight.) Only in the late eighteenth century was Ibrahim Muteferrika allowed to set up a printing press using an Arabic typeface in Istanbul.40 Several Western writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggested that the invention and use of printing in the West demonstrated Christendom’s superiority to Islam, though the theme of the West’s technological superiority to the rest of the world was not yet fully articulated.

  THE LATINITY OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTALISM

  Enough has been said here about the subordination of Arabic to Hebrew studies. The study of Arabic was also dominated by the preoccupations of classicists, though the boundaries between the scholarly disciplines were not sharp, for the greatest classicists of the age had usually also mastered Hebrew as a matter of course. Classical scholars only occasionally troubled to pick up a smattering of Arabic. Nevertheless, they often took a friendly interest in the language and the embryonic Orientalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only managed to limp along because of the interest of such famous classical scholars as Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Lancelot Andrewes and Henry Saville. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) was a polymath and by common consent the greatest scholar of his age, ‘the prince of scholars’. His family was of Italian origin and came from Geneva. He was the son of the no less famous controversialist, grammarian and philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558). His father, a harsh taskmaster, demanded that the child Joseph Justus make a short speech in Latin every day. However, the father forbade his son the study of Greek, which Joseph Justus took up only after his father’s death, having decided that ‘those who do not know Greek know nothing at all’. At sixteen, he wrote a tragedy in Latin. Later he would write poetry in the same language. Forced to be a genius by his father’s educational programme, Joseph Justus Scaliger seems to have been a tormented figure. All his life he suffered from strange dreams and chronic constipation. He slept little and often forgot to eat. He also related that once, when riding by a marsh, he encountered the Devil in the guise of a black man who sought to lure him into the quagmire.41

  Having grown up in France as a Catholic, Scaliger converted to Calvinism in 1562. In the same year Postel, shortly before he was arrested for heresy, got Scaliger interested in Oriental languages – in the first instance, in Hebrew. Thereafter, Scaliger revered Postel, though with reservations: ‘Postellus excellens philosophus, cosmographus, mathematicus, historicus stultus, linguarum non ignarus, sed nullius ad unguem peritus. Invideo illi Arabicam linguam.’ (Postel an excellent philosopher, cosmographer and mathematician, a foolish historian, he knows many languages, but is not expert in any single one. I envy him his Arabic.) Scaliger was chiefly famous as a classicist and philologist and he edited a series of important Latin and Greek texts. His edition of the notoriously corrupt and difficult Astronomica by Manilius, a first-century AD didactic treatise on astrology, was particularly esteemed. (Later classicists of the first rank, including Richard Bentley and A. E. Housman, would also crack their skulls on the same text.) Scaliger was quite messianic about the importance of language: ‘Our theological disputes arise from ignorance of grammar.’ He also studied Syriac, Coptic, Arabic and Persian and he published Proverbia Arabica, a short collection of Arabproverbs.

  Nevertheless, his knowledge of Arabic and the other Oriental languages was slight and he was mainly interested in Arabic sources for the light they could shed on the chronology of the world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the chronology of the world was an exciting and controversial subject, or, as Anthony Grafton has put it, ‘a legendarily rebarbative subject’. James Ussher’s Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1650–54) fixed the Creation of the world as taking place on 23 October 4004 BC and the Flood was confidently dated by him at 1, 656 years after the Creation. But Ussher only relied on the Bible, supplemented by Greek and Latin sources. Scaliger, in his great work on chronology, Opus de emendatione temporum (1583), cast his net more widely and used a range of exotic sources, including Arabic ones. Scaliger and others attempted to collate data from the Bible and classical historians with what scholars thought they knew about the chronology of Egyptian history, as well as Chinese chronology and the Aztec calendar, in order to produce a unified timeline of world history that would confirm the chronology of the Bible. The growing problems of the chronologists were one of the minor consequences of the expansion of European power throughout the world and the resultant influx of exotic and inconsistent data, almost none of which seemed to support what could be deduced from the Scriptures. Some of Europe’s best minds, including Leibniz and Newton, as well as Scaliger, struggled with chronological issues. (Postel, by the way, had argued that Romulus had invented a faulty calendar in order to extirpate the memory of Noah.) Scaliger did his best, even if he was obliged to conclude that anyone who thought that they had fully worked out the chronology of the Kings of Israel would have to be mad.

  Scaliger had studied with Postel and admired him, but he did not share the latter’s faith in missionary work and future world harmony and believed that Arabic-speaking missionaries would have little chance of success. He suggested that Postel’s Arabic was not actually that good and he also thought that Postel’s emphasis on learning Arabic through the study of translations of the Gospels into that language was mistaken. It was much better to study Arabic by working on the Qur’an and indigenous works of Arabic literature. ‘You can no more master Arabic without the Qur’an than Hebrew without the Bible,’ as he remarked to Casaubon.42 (One great advantage of learning Arabic from the Qur’an was and is the fact that it is the only text that is normally vowelled. Arabic manuscripts of other works not only omitted the vowels, but were often slapdash about adding the diacritical marks that distinguished some consonants from others.) Scaliger identified the paucity of Arabic manuscripts in European libraries as being the major problem of the time. He was also hostile to the notions that knowing Hebrew was a big help in learning Arabic and that the main purpose of studying Arabic was to further Hebrew studies. He suggested that the study of Turkish and the use of Turkish guides, grammars and dictionaries of Arabic, might be of more use to European Arabists.

  Perhaps because the struggle for intellectual ascendancy and the quest for patronage were so acute in this period, scholarly rivalry and rancour were common. Scaliger was dismissive of all his fellow scholars, except for Raphelengius, to whom he condescended to lend manuscripts and whom he helped on his primitive Latin dictionary, Thesaurus linguae arabicae. (As we shall see, Erpenius and other Arabists who came later habitually disparaged the work of their predecessors and contemporaries.) In 1592 Scaliger was invited to the University of Leiden, where he stayed until he died in 1609. He hated lecturing. However, he was an influential figure behind the scenes and it was almost certainly at his urging that a Chair of Arabic was established at Leiden in 1599. His ideas regarding the need to assemble more Arabic manuscripts, to detach Arabic from Hebrew studies and to have recourse to Turkish aids certainly exercised a massive influence on the first significant incumbent of that chair, Thomas Erpenius.

  Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), a friend and rival of Scaliger’s, also encouraged Erpenius’s work on Arabic grammar and literature. Like Scaliger, Casaubon was a Protestant refugee from France and as such another example of the intellectual diaspora that occurred as a result of religious persecution there. Subsequently spiritual head-hunters in Paris tried very hard to win him over to the Catholic faith, though without success. Like Scaliger, Casaubon was a classicist and philologist and, with Scaliger, h
e was probably the most famous intellectual in sixteenth-century Europe. Indeed Scaliger called him ‘the most learned man in Europe’. Greek and Hebrew were not regarded by sixteenth-century Protestants as marginal subjects, primarily fit for drilling the unformed minds of public schoolboys. Rather, close study of the languages of the Bible was one of the keys to eternal salvation. Casaubon produced critical editions and commentaries on a range of Greek texts. (George Eliot borrowed Casaubon’s name for the pedantic and over-ambitious scholar to whom Dorothea is unhappily married in the novel Middlemarch.) His translations of some of the Greek texts into Latin were also welcomed by scholars of fewer attainments. His main claim to fame was his demonstration, in De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI ad Baronii annales, that the Hermetic writings had not been written in Egyptian by an ancient sage called Hermes Trismegistus, that those writings were not nearly as old as had been supposed and that, since they did not predate the life of Christ, they could not be read as prophesying His coming or, more generally, as confirming the truths of Christianity (as Pico della Mirandola had supposed). Instead, the Hermetic writings could be shown to have borrowed from both the Bible and Plato. Although Casaubon eventually settled in England in 1610, he was shocked by the limited range of intellectual interests in England: ‘The only reading which flourishes here is theology; no books but theological books, and those of English authors are published here. The educated men in this part of the world condemn everything which does not bear upon theology.’ Although he was not really an Arabist himself, he collected Arabic books and manuscripts and a copy survives of the Medici Press’s edition of an Arabgrammar, the Ajurrumiyya, annotated in Casaubon’s hand. He was more generally a key figure in advancing Arabic studies in Europe and, like Scaliger, a sponsor of Erpenius, the first great seventeenth-century Orientalist. Casaubon was fervently pious and he dreamed of the formation of an ecumenical alliance between Protestantism and the Eastern Churches. It is clear from the work diary that he kept, and which was posthumously published, that he regarded scholarly research as a form of prayer.43

  Postel apart, most of those who interested themselves in Arabic in the sixteenth century were, like Casaubon, amateurs. These amateurs did useful work in the way of collecting manuscripts and sponsoring and funding the next generation of more dedicated academic Orientalists. In the seventeenth century Casaubon’s benign interest in Arabic would be sustained by English churchmen, classicists and scholars with philological or scientific interests. In the next century, with the notable exception of Marracci, Protestants dominated the study of Islam and Arabs. The proto-Orientalism of the sixteenth century was mostly a Catholic affair. Postel was a Catholic, though an eccentric one. The Papacy welcomed Maronite Arabs to Rome and made a start in acquiring manuscripts for the Vatican library. As we have seen, the Medici Press in Rome was established under papal patronage. Plantin’s press in Antwerp published a huge amount of literature for the furtherance of Catholic worship and study and the pious Catholic, Philip II of Spain, had been the ultimate patron of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. In the century that followed, Antwerp’s status as a commercial and intellectual centre declined steeply. The next great polyglot Bible would be produced in London, while Antwerp’s intellectual role would be usurped by Leiden in the Dutch Republic. Although the Medici Press’s hope of substantial sales in the Near East had not been realized, enlightened printers like Raimondi and Plantin had had a spearheading role in the sixteenth-century in fostering Oriental studies. In the seventeenth century, that role would be taken over by a handful of university professors, above all by Erpenius and Golius at Leiden and Pococke at Oxford.

  4

  The Holiness of Oriental Studies

  Thus it is not without wonder, how those learned Arabicks so tamely delivered up their belief unto the absurdities of the Alcoran. How the noble Geber, Avicenna and Almanzor, should rest satisfied in the causes of Earthquakes, delivered from the doctrine of their Prophet; that is, from the motion of a great Bull, upon whose horns all the earth is poised. How their faiths could decline so low, as to concede their generations in Heaven, to be made by the smell of a Citron, or that the felicity of their Paradise should consist of a Jubile of copulation, that is, a coition of one act prolonged unto fifty years. Thus it is almost beyond wonder, how the belief of reasonable creatures, should ever submit unto Idolatry…

  Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica

  The First book, Chap V

  THE LANGUAGE OF SCHOLARSHIP

  This chapter, like its predecessors, is devoted to those who interested themselves in Islam, Arabic and the Arabs. Yet one still needs to remind oneself that not many people were so interested. Those who were tended to be somewhat detached from worldly affairs and their approach to Islam and the Arabs was usually scholarly and antiquarian rather than utilitarian. In this respect, the studies of the Orientalists reflected seventeenth-and eighteenth-century scholarship more broadly. The Orientalists tended to model their study of Oriental languages on the way Latin and Greek were studied by their contemporaries. The paradox here is that, though living languages such as Arabic, Persian and Chinese were studied as if they were dead languages, this was not really the case with Latin and Greek. Latin was a living language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only was it the normal language of scholarly discourse, but poets and playwrights composed in it and children might use it in their playground games. Philosophy and science required the precision of Latin and, as Bill Bryson has pointed out, such epoch-making, forward-looking works by Englishmen as Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), William Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628), Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) were composed in that language. English was not considered to be a suitable vehicle for the discussion of serious scholarly matters. Even grammars and dictionaries of English were routinely produced in Latin and their authors struggled to make English grammar fit the straitjacket of Latin grammar, as for example in Thomas Smith’s De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus (1568), Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica (1619) and John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653). It was inevitable that those major works that were written in the vernacular, such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Cervantes’s Don Quixote, should then be translated into Latin, so that they could achieve a wider, international readership.1

  Latin was a prerequisite for the study of Arabic, for the dictionaries and grammars of Arabic were in Latin, as was almost all the supporting scholarly literature. The men (yes, all men) who took to the study of Arabic had first studied Latin and Greek (and almost always Hebrew too and quite often Syriac as well). As scholars became acquainted with the treasures of Arabic literature, they tended to compare that literature to Greek and Latin classics. When, in the late eighteenth century, William Jones (see the next chapter) translated Arabic and Persian works in order to introduce them to an English public, it was inevitable that he should attempt to fit the Oriental verses into classical genres and so he enthused about Persian ‘pastorals’, ‘eclogues’ and so forth. Even in the twentieth century, R. A. Nicholson, who had been trained as a classicist, found it most natural to compare the pre-Islamic poetry he presented in his A Literary History of the Arabs to Greek and Roman exemplars. On the other hand, those who were bored by the great works of antiquity, and who thought the arts and learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans had been overrated (and they were a vociferous minority), seized on Oriental literature as providing a treasury of new images, modes of expression and heroes which might provide some escape from the constraints of classical precedents. The heroes included the pre-Islamic warrior-poet ‘Antar, the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the chivalrous Sultan Saladin. Aesop now faced competition from newly discovered ancient Arabian sages, including Luqman and ‘Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and the alleged source of a collection of improving Sentences, on which see below). D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, an early version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, pu
blished at the end of the seventeenth century, would have a Plutarchan cast, as anecdotes and snatches of poetry were used to cast light on the lives and moral character of the Oriental great. Not only did the dictionaries of Arabic compiled by Europeans give their meanings in Latin, but the earliest grammars of Arabic were closely – too closely – modelled on grammars of the Latin language. The great Dutch Orientalists of the seventeenth century who worked on those dictionaries and grammars – Raphelengius, Erpenius and Golius – adopted Latinate names, rather than write under their barbarous-sounding original Dutch names. This was, of course, also a period in which Dutch – and Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Danish – scholars found it relatively easy to have direct access to an international readership as they could publish in Latin.