For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Like so many Orientalists who came after him, Anquetil-Duperron was fiercely anti-imperialist. In the introduction to another work, Le Despotisme considéré dans les trois états où il passe pour être, la Turquie, la Perse et l’Hindoustan, he expressed his fear that the concept of Oriental despotism had been summoned up by certain Western thinkers in order to justify the oppressive rule of Europeans over Asia.29 In many respects, Anquetil-Duperron antipated the main tenets of Said’s Orientalism, though Said, who discusses him, chooses not to mention this. Samuel Johnson was, like Anquetil-Duperron, suspicious of Montesquieu’s manner of argument and he remarked to Boswell that Montesquieu was always able to find some obscure Oriental example to back up anything that he wanted to say.30

  ALL’S QUIET IN HOLLAND

  Sale, Russell and Jones made important contributions to Islamic studies, but they did so outside the universities. Leiden was no less moribund than Oxford and Cambridge. After Golius, Oriental studies in Leiden went into a steep decline.31 The most distinguished figure in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, Adrian Reeland (1676–1718), was to become Professor of Oriental Languages at Utrecht, not Leiden.32 By the age of fourteen this prodigy knew some Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic and Arabic. Arabic was exactly the sort of subject any young genius in this period should aspire to know, thanks to its reputation as a recondite and difficult language. Reeland was a polymath with interests in and knowledge of most things, as well as being a poet. Like Postel and Kircher before him, he speculated crazily about the nature of the Ursprache, or primal language, and the descent of all modern languages from it. In De religione Mohammedica (1705) and other works he combated misrepresentations of Islam. However, he was utterly typical in his approach to Arabic studies in that he considered that Arabic’s chief importance was as a handmaiden to Hebrew and biblical studies and hence his heavy emphasis on a philological approach.

  Later in the century, Albert Schultens (1686–1750), a professor first at Amsterdam and then at Leiden, took essentially the same approach.33 He was primarily a Hebraist and his Dissertatio theologicophilologica de utilitate linguae arabicae in interpretanda sacra lingua (‘Theologico-Philological Dissertation on the Utility of the Arabic Language for the Interpretation of Holy Scripture’), published in 1706, took it for granted that study of Arabic should be subordinated to that of Hebrew and actually took issue with those academics who argued that, since Hebrew was the divine language, study of any other was quite pointless. Nevertheless, though Schultens was eloquent in making the case for comparative Semitic philology (embracing Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Chaldaean), he was not actually very good at it.

  The soundness of Schultens’s philology was criticized by Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–74), the greatest Greek and Arabic scholar of the eighteenth century.34 Reiske had been Schultens’s student but became his opponent. Reiske, the foremost German Orientalist of first rank, was primarily a classicist. He was born in poverty, brought up in an orphanage, and died in poverty. Having taught himself Greek, his first important published work was on the Attic orators. He produced editions of their speeches and then an edition of Theocritus. He was prone to intense depressions and his wife was driven to learn Latin and Greek to keep him happy. Perhaps because of his classical formation, Reiske took a more literary approach to Arabic and was hostile to Schultens’s stress on Hebrew, a language that Reiske refused to learn. In 1738 he moved to Leiden. It was a mistake: ‘This served me an ill turn. Dearly, too dearly have I had to pay for my folly! I became a martyr for Arabic literature. Oh if my burning thirst of those days for this literature, which only made me unhappy coming as it did too early, at a time when nobody needed it and still less appreciated it enough to reward or encourage it, oh if it could find its way into a soul which could some day bring life to happier times! If that day ever comes (though there is hardly room for hope) then Arabic literature will be better appreciated and studied with greater application than it is now.’35 Reiske never succeeded in obtaining a chair in Leiden or anywhere else. He was suspected of being a free thinker as he did not attend church on Sundays, but the real reason for this was that he was too poor to afford a coat to go to church in. Coming from a humble background, he had no private income and, despite being the best Arabist and one of the best classicists of the century, he was forced to do hack work in order to survive.

  Nevertheless, he did important work in Arabic literature and he campaigned vigorously for it to be studied as a subject in its own right. He translated histories by Abu al-Fida and Ibn ‘Arabshah into Latin. It is noteworthy how in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the same authors got translated again and again. Pococke, Greaves and Gagnier had already worked on Abu al-Fida and, after Reiske, many were to work on Ibn ‘Arabshah, most notably Silvestre de Sacy. Other works or authors that were recurrently chosen for editions or translations included the Proverbs of ‘Ali, the Proverbs of Luqman, the chronicle of al-Makin, the Ramlah Maqamat of al-Hariri and the al-Tughrai poem known as the Lamiyyat. In part, this phenomenon may indicate how few worthwhile Arabic manuscripts had been acquired by European libraries. Even complete manuscripts of the Qur’an were hard to get hold of. One may also suspect that scholars in this period were not so keen to venture into virgin territory and some of them at least preferred to cribcovertly from their predecessors. Reiske also translated the tenth-century poet Mutanabbi into German. (In this period it was still most unusual to translate Arabic into a vernacular language.)

  Despite France’s predatory ambitions in the Middle East and Egypt, there were no major Arabists in France until the appearance of Silvestre de Sacy (on whom, see the next chapter). The decline of Orientalism in the eighteenth century was fairly pervasive throughout Europe. Not only did few patrons take an interest in this recondite branch of learning, but the public at large was somewhat suspicious of the study of Arabic and Islam, suspecting those who undertook such studies to be crypto-Muslims. Moreover hopes had faded since the seventeenth century of finding much of any scientific value in Arabic books (though exceptionally there was interest in Ulugh Beg’s astronomical tables in Persian). Although Avicenna’s Galenic medical treatise, the Canon, was still being taught in some places, elsewhere it was coming to be realized that most of this body of ‘knowledge’ would have to be discarded if medicine was to make any progress. By 1700 the great age of hunting for Arabic manuscripts had come to an end. Though some enthusiastic scholars had tried to present the knowledge of Arabic as vital for international commerce, this was not really true and European traders got along fine without recourse to Oriental scholarship. At the same time missionaries had achieved very little indeed in the idle East and those few converts they did succeed in making tended to be from some form of Eastern Christianity rather than from Islam. The short-lived craze for Arabic was succeeded by an equally transient fashion for Chinese studies and Chinoiserie. The eccentric Jesuit Athanasius Kircher had done much to awaken interest in China by producing his China Monumentis (1667) with its surreally fantastic illustrations. In general, Europe was dependent on Jesuit missionaries for much of its information on China. A literary cult of the Chinese sage developed, English landowners had their gardens landscaped in the Chinese manner, French philosophes brooded on the supposed merits of Chinese imperial despotism, and the German philosopher Leibniz studied the I Ching.36

  RUSSIA IN ASIA

  If Oriental studies stagnated in most of Europe, in Russia they were barely beginning and, if one wishes to make close connections between Orientalism and imperialism, then it is surely to Russia that one should first turn. The origins of Russian Orientalism are most curious–indeed they begin with the cabinet of curiosities assembled by Peter the Great (1672–1725). As is well known, Peter was determined to modernize his empire and put an end to the medieval attitudes and customs that were an obstacle to commercial and military progress. (It is interesting to note that Peter’s sponsorship of teaching and publishing in Latin was part of the great modernizing projec
t.) In the years 1697–8 Peter undertook his ‘Great Embassy’ to Western Europe, where he studied shipbuilding, mining techniques and much else. Among other things he was struck by the role in the West of cabinets of curiosity in organizing knowledge and stimulating research. Having visited several Dutch collections of curiosities and works of art, he began collecting himself when he returned to Russia. His agents scoured Europe, buying up not just individual curiosities but whole collections of such things. Peter the Great’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Kabinet Redkostei) was open to the public, or at least to those members of the public who could pass as gentlemen or ladies. The gentlefolk could inspect a live dwarf, a live hermaphrodite, teeth from Alexander’s elephants, manuscripts in exotic languages, stuffed monsters and a magnificent hoard of Scythian gold. In this manner Peter hoped to instruct his barbarous Russian subjects. From 1724 onwards the collection was administered by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and in the long run the Cabinet of Curiosities would become a fully fledged Museum of the Academy of Science.37 Much of its contents were transferred to the Asiatic Museum which opened in 1818 and the Asiatic Museum would in turn become the kernel of the Institute of Oriental Studies.

  At the same time as Peter was educating his subjects, he was seeking to add to their number. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, Russia was acquiring an empire inhabited mostly by Muslims and it was obviously desirable to understand Islam better in order to govern those Muslims more effectively. In 1702 a special school for the study of Oriental languages was established. In 1716 Peter had the Qur’an translated from the French version of Du Ryer. Peter also commissioned Dmitri Kantemir’s The System or Condition of the Muhamedan Religion (1722). He sent five scholars to Persia to study Oriental languages. As Russia expanded into the Islamic lands it acquired more materials to fuel Oriental studies and, for example, the capture of Derbent in the Caucasus (1722) led to an influx of Oriental manuscripts into Petersburg.38

  DENMARK IN THE ORIENT

  Reiske apart, Germany produced no Arabists of real note for most of the eighteenth century. However, the Hebrew scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the Hanoverian University of Göttingen, Johann-David Michaelis (1717–91), was one of the age’s great intellectual patrons of Islamic and Arabic studies.39 Michaelis’s own knowledge of Arabic seems to have been slight, though he translated Erpenius’s grammar from Latin into German. Michaelis was best known for his Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes (1750), in which he sought to distinguish on textual and philological grounds those books that had actually been written by the Apostles from those which had not. He was sceptical about the idea that Hebrew was the primal language and similarly sceptical about the received account of the descent of the world’s great racial groups from the sons of Noah. But he had no doubt that the study of Arabic and the contemporary Middle East should be subordinated to the study of Hebrew and the Bible and it was he who was the mastermind behind the Danish expedition to Egypt and the Arabian peninsula in the years 1761 to 1767, a scholarly venture that can be considered as the paradigmatic Orientalist penetration of the Islamic lands.

  The commissioning from William Jones by Christian VII of Denmark of a translation from the Persian of a life of Nadir Shah has already been noted. There was a significant tradition of Oriental studies in Denmark in this period. In the early seventeenth century Adam Olearius had travelled to Persia in order to investigate the prospects for Danish trade in the lands of the Safavid Shah and subsequently Olearius wrote up his travels.40 In 1737 Christian VI had sent an expedition including Frederick Ludvig Norden on a mission to establish trade links with Ethiopia. Though the exhibition never did get that far, Norden subsequently published maps and sketches of the journey up the Nile.41

  The Danish King Frederick V (1746–66) was an enlightened patron of the arts and sciences. It was therefore to him that Michaelis turned for sponsorship of an expedition that was intended to be an exercise in biblical research. Though the Danish king agreed to fund the project, it was effectively organized by Michaelis and the University of Göttingen. Michaelis was a believer in Arabic in the service of Hebrew studies and he proposed an expedition to Arabia Felix (effectively the modern Yemen), as the South Arabian dialect was distinct from the Arabic spoken elsewhere in the peninsula and ‘knowing that it is this form of Arabic, which we learned, that has been the most important tool to date in understanding the Hebrew language, what illumination can we not expect to be cast over the Bible, the most important book of ancient times, by learning the Eastern Arabian dialects, as well as we know the Western?’ In addition to the study of this particular branch of the Arabic language, the expedition was to seek out manuscripts (especially of the Bible), survey the topography, enquire into the effects of polygamy on population growth, and record the vegetation and wildlife. Michaelis was particularly keen to receive data that would help in identifying the flora and fauna of the Bible. He also thought that the contemporary Arabs had a way of life similar to that of the ancient Hebrews. To these ends Michaelis produced a detailed questionnaire that the members of the expedition were supposed to fill in as they proceeded.

  Acting on Frederick V’s behalf, the University of Copenhagen also produced a lengthy and detailed set of articles for the guidance of the expedition. According to Article X: ‘All members of the company shall show the greatest courtesy to the inhabitants of Arabia. They are not to raise any objections to their religion, more than that, they shall give no indication – not even indirectly – that they despise it; they shall refrain from that which is the abomination of the inhabitants of Arabia. And also, as necessary in the course of their tasks, they should proceed in such a manner as to draw the least attention as possible, shrouding anything which might arouse the suspicion among the ignorant Muhamedans that they were searching for treasure, practising sorcery, or spying with the intention of harming the country…’

  The ill-fated expedition that was sent out in 1761 included a naturalist, a philologist, a physician, an artist, a cartographer and an orderly. Of these six, only the cartographer Carsten Niebuhr was to survive the rigours of the expedition and return to Denmark alive. But he was a remarkable and determined man and, even before reaching Arabia, he had made a systematic survey of the manners and customs of Cairo and the details of its material life, including costumes, implements, craft techniques and so forth. Having travelled out from Constantinople and Cairo to Yemen and from there to Bombay, he returned via Oman, Persia, Iraq and Syria. He returned to Denmark with important transcriptions of hieroglyphics and of cuneiform, as well as excellent maps of the Nile Delta and parts of Arabia and the Red Sea. Niebuhr was very fond of the Arabs and had little but good to report of them (though he was not so fond of the Turks). He wrote up his discoveries and adventures in German in three volumes published in 1772–8.42

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE SAVANTS IN EGYPT

  Though Michaelis’s enquiries and Niebuhr’s discoveries epitomized Orientalist interest in the Middle East in this period, at the same time French politicians, merchants and soldiers had developed a more predatory interest in that region. There were plenty of French theorists ready to argue that Ottoman Turkey, a typical Oriental despotism, was in full decay, because, as the statesman and economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot argued, despotism conduced inevitably to slavery, polygamy and softness.43 Others held that it was Turkey’s espousal of a satanic religion that had doomed it. Others again attributed it to the Ottoman lands’ failure to keep up with Western commercial and industrial developments. In the 1770s François, Baron de Tott, had been sent by the French Foreign Office on a mission, ostensibly to inspect French consular posts in the eastern Mediterranean, but actually to spy out Ottoman strengths and weaknesses. In 1779 he produced a memorandum which put the case for a French invasion of Egypt. He thought the decayed state of the government there meant that there would be little resistance and he suggested that the French invaders should present themselves as on a mission from the Ottoman sultan to libera
te the Egyptian people from the corrupt Mamluk beys.44

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Shelley’s poem, in which the above lines appear, was allegedly inspired by the arrival in the British Museum of the head of Rameses II which had been brought out of a ruined temple in Thebes.45 As mentioned earlier, the celebrated seventeenth-century traveller in the Middle East, Jean Thévenot, considered that the Middle East was rich only in ruins. Ancient ruins set in an arid wilderness was the topos, or stock theme, that fuelled the French project to conquer Egypt. Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, made Oriental ruins his peculiar speciality. His interest in the Middle East had initially been inspired by a reading of Herodotus. He studied Erpenius’s grammar and the questionnaire compiled by Michaelis and had then tried to learn Arabic at the Collège de France, but he found the teaching there totally unsatisfactory, for the teachers worked from classical texts and had no interest in the contemporary spoken language. As Abbé Barthélémy put it, ‘One does not learn these languages to speak them…’ So Volney decided to make a fresh start at learning Arabic as it was spoken in Egypt.