by Robert Irwin
In 1783 he arrived in Alexandria and then spent two years and four months travelling in the Middle East. He was struck by the poverty, backwardness, depopulation, corruption and slavery that prevailed throughout the region. Like many Western observers of the time, he thought that Turkish despotism, together with the fatalistic attitudes fostered by Islam, were the causes of the miserable condition of the Arabs. He believed that there was something in Islam that actually colluded with political tyranny. Volney was opposed to Islam – but then he was opposed to all religions, especially Christianity. In stressing the determining and negative roles of religion and politics, he was setting himself against Montesquieu, who had argued that climate had a determining role in shaping societies and that Asiatics were naturally indolent. Volney believed that the Ottoman empire was doomed to fall apart: ‘I swear by the ruin of so many empires destroyed: the empire of the Crescent shall suffer the fate of the states whose scheme of government it copied.’
Though he was sure that the Arabs, Kurds and other subject races were longing to be liberated from the Turk, nevertheless he was opposed to European intervention in the region. Indeed, it seems plausible that Volney’s journey and subsequent book were sponsored by influential French figures who were similarly opposed. Volney’s chief aim seems to have been to dispute this and he argued that, in the end, ‘we would only have conquered Egypt to devastate it’. He was then the leading spokesman for those who opposed de Tott’s project for the invasion of Egypt. Volney published his observations in Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie in 1787. It was widely read and one of its readers was Bonaparte.
Volney’s even more famous work, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), opened with a meditation on the ruins of Palmyra in eastern Syria: ‘Je vous salue, ruines solitaires, tombeaux saints, murs silencieux! C’est vous que j’invoque; c’est à vous que j’adresse ma prière.’ (I salute you, solitary ruins, holy tombs, silent walls. It is you that I invoke. It is to you that I address my prayer.) Everybody read this book. It was a bestseller and the talk of the salons, spas and gaming rooms. Even Frankenstein’s monster read it. (Arguably, recent Frankenstein films have seriously traduced the monster by undervaluing its engagement with cultural studies – but that is to digress.) Be that as it may, no one reads Les Ruines nowadays. It is quite hard going. After the sonorous opening invocation, Volney presented himself as sitting amidst the ruins of Palmyra, musing on the grandeur of the place as it once was and on the causes of the passing of its greatness. All of a sudden, there appears beside him a spectral genius, or genie, who takes the author aloft and gives him an airborne lecture on the causes of the rise and fall of empires and lots of other things besides. The key question was why the East was so impoverished and backward compared with the West. The prevalence of despotism in the East was a large part of the answer. Volney, steeped in the classics, found it natural to compare the Mamluks and Pashas to the tyrants of Syracuse and other oppressive despots of classical antiquity. So there was nothing inherently exotic, or Other, about despotism. Soon, though, the Sultans and Pashas would go the way of the French king, for Volney was confident in the ultimate triumph of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity throughout the world – and more specifically he believed in the future revolt of the Arab nation. Volney was an Arab nationalist before most Arabs were.46
From 1802 onwards Volney campaigned to get a chair in colloquial Arabic established in France, so that this useful language could be taught to diplomats and merchants. However, this came to pass only in 1830, as he was fiercely opposed by the grand French Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy. The latter seemed to take pride in the fact that he had not learned Arabic from any Shaykh, but only from books. He could not speak Arabic, still less teach spoken Arabic to others. Since there was no great literature in modern Arabic, he interested himself only in the medieval classics.47 (His approach to Arabic still had its heirs and supporters in British universities as late as the 1960s.) There were others in the field who thought as Silvestre de Sacy did and, according to Volney, there was not a single professor in Paris who could speak Arabic properly.
In 1798 a French fleet carrying a French army under the command of General Bonaparte arrived on the coast of Egypt. The French went on swiftly to occupy the Delta ports and then Cairo, before invading Palestine.48 It is tempting to read Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie as a blueprint for that disastrous imperialist adventure and that is a temptation to which Said succumbed. As if what Volney had been saying in that book was ‘Allez la France! Now here is a golden opportunity for some ambitious young Frenchman, or perhaps a Corsican, to carve out a French empire in this backward part of the world.’ But that is to get Volney exactly wrong. The subtext of Voyage and of a later tract, Considérations sur la guerre actuelle des Turcs (1788) (which Said has muddled with Voyage) is that one should forget about Egypt as a territory that is ripe to be colonized. Volney was not saying that in order to conquer Egypt the French ought first to fight the Turks, then the English and finally deal with the Muslims. Rather he was arguing that first the French would have to fight the Turks, then they would have a battle on their hands with the English and then, finally, they would still have to fight the Muslims. Volney thought that, faced with such opposition, the occupation of Egypt was not feasible and that Muslim resistance to French rule would be particularly intractable.49 How right he was. The 1798 French expedition to Egypt was a military disaster to be compared with the Gallipoli landings, the Arnhem parachute drop and Dien Bien Phu. The most astonishing thing about the debacle is that its commander, Bonaparte, went on to have quite a successful military career.
A powerful lobby of Marseilles merchants had been pressing for a French invasion of Egypt in order to secure a market for French products. The French were conscious of having lost out in America and India. The occupation of Egypt would threaten British possessions in India. Bonaparte, who had studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great, seems to have dreamed of using Egypt as a base for the conquest both of Constantinople and of India. Moreover, while one may well be sceptical about motives for the French expedition, it will not do to be totally cynical. It is likely that some of those who sponsored or accompanied the expedition were genuinely committed to a mission of liberation and civilization and they thought of themselves as going to wage war on the chateaux of the Mamluk beys in order to liberate the oppressed fellahin. Theirs was a mission civilisatrice enforced at the point of a gun. The expedition took with it a printing press that had an Arabic typeface. After his forces had landed in Egypt, Bonaparte issued a proclamation in Arabic that sought to win the support of the Egyptian people against their Mamluk Caucasian Turkish masters and declared among other things: ‘For too many years that gang of slaves, purchased in Georgia and the Caucasus, has tyrannized over the most beautiful region of the world. But almighty God, who rules the universe, has decreed that their reign shall come to an end.’50 The French sought to present themselves as liberators rather than crusaders in the tradition of Louis IX, but though some of Bonaparte’s officers denounced Christianity and declared themselves to be atheists, the puzzled or sceptical Muslims took atheism to be merely another version of Christianity.
Said says many of Bonaparte’s Arabic interpreters had been students of the great Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, but this does not seem very likely. De Sacy began teaching only in 1796and, as has been indicated, he was perfectly incapable of teaching the Egyptian colloquial. Certainly Said provides no evidence at all for the involvement of France’s leading Orientalist in the Egyptian project. The Orientalist Louis Mathieu Langlès (1763–1824), a student of Arabic and Persian, was asked to go, but he timidly refused, as he felt more comfortable in a library than he would have done in Egypt. However Langlès (whom Maxime Rodinson has described as ‘an Orientalist of questionable merit’) had played a leading part in the foundation of the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, an institution that was unusual in teaching spoken languages – in theory at lea
st – and, as we shall see, two of Bonaparte’s interpreters had previously studied there.
Bonaparte took an impressive team of scientists, scholars and artists with him on the expedition to Egypt. A large number of Bonaparte’s team of savants were experts in civil engineering. The Institute of Egypt, as it was eventually set up in Cairo, was divided into four sections: Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy and, finally, Literature and Art. In this last section there was just one Arabist, Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis. This man, who was Bonaparte’s chief interpreter, was aged sixty in 1798 and therefore the doyen of the expedition. Venture de Paradis had not studied Arabic in academic circles. Rather, he was the son of a dragoman and he had worked as a dragoman himself in Istanbul, Sidon, Cairo and Tunis before becoming Professor of Turkish at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. In the 1780s he had supported de Tott’s interventionist policies regarding the Middle East. At around the same time he worked on a translation of a late medieval Egyptian administration manual by Khalil al-Zahiri, the Zubda Kashf al-Asrar, which he never got round to publishing. (He translated this text not because he had an antiquarian interest in what life was like in fifteenth-century Egypt, but rather because he thought that Khalil al-Zahiri’s data might still be largely valid for contemporary Egypt.) In 1790 he published a memoir on the need to study Oriental languages in order to promote commercial and political relations. He stated that in France professors gave lectures that no one attended and manuscripts languished in the libraries unread. France was lagging behind Germany and Britain in this respect. In Egypt he played a crucial role because of his previous knowledge of the land and his personal contacts and he was in effect Bonaparte’s first minister for all Oriental matters. The Egyptian scholar and historian al-Jabarti met him and praised him as an eloquent and likeable man. Venture de Paradis died of dysentery in 1799 at Nazareth and was buried under the walls of Acre.51 After Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, the death of Venture de Paradis was one of the greatest of the many disasters that befell the French expeditionary force.
The death of Venture de Paradis left Bonaparte without any real expert guidance on Arabpolitics, religion and society. He seems to have brought only a couple of other Arabic interpreters from France out with him and they were less grand and less experienced. The first of these, Jean-Joseph Marcel (1776–1854), took up Hebrew and Arabic at fifteen and as a student at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, he had studied under Langlès, but he had then pursued an early career in mining and the manufacture of saltpetre. He went into hiding during the Terror. In Egypt with the French expedition he supervised the operations of the printing press in Alexandria that produced documents in French, Arabic and Greek. He was industrious and, besides acting as interpreter, he put together an Arabic grammar and studied Arabic poetry.52 Less seems to be known about Amadée Jaubert, who also studied at the Ecole and who became Bonaparte’s personal interpreter after the death of Venture de Paradis. He later taught Turkish at the Ecole and wrote four memoirs for the Description de l’Egypte.53
As has been noted, Bonaparte had brought with him a team of savants. Some of the Egyptian Institute’s tasks were purely practical, such as improving army baking ovens, trying to brew beer without hops, introducing new crops and investigating the practicability of digging a canal across the Suez peninsula. But there was a more scholarly component to the Institute. Al-Jabarti, who visited it, was impressed by the dedication of the scholars: ‘Some of the French were studying Arabic and learning verses from the Qur’an by heart; in a word they were great scholars and they loved the sciences, especially mathematics and philology. Day and night they applied themselves to learning Arabic…’54 The French research brief was modelled on a famous address given by Sir William Jones at the inaugural meeting of the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784, ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for Inquiry into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. In that Discourse, Jones had set out a programme for his fellow scholars that would take an interdisciplinary approach to the history and culture of India. It was a thoroughly idealistic project, inspired by a vision of Asia that Jones had had as the ship he was on sailed between Persia and India: ‘Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and of useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs and languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men.’55 Jones had wanted his fellow Orientalists to learn from Asian institutions, crafts and sciences.
Jones considered the mastery of Oriental languages to be not so much a part of scholarship in its own right, but rather a means towards more practical goals, and the French followed him in this. The results of the French researches, the Description de l’Egypte, was commissioned in 1802 and started to appear in 1809, though its twenty-third volume only appeared in 1828. The high price of the extravagantly printed volumes militated against widespread sales. Bonaparte had hoped that its publication would retrospectively turn a military and political disaster into a cultural and scientific triumph. The Description seems in part to have been modelled on the work of the Russells on Aleppo. Though the French savants covered the manners and customs of the Egyptian people, their trades, industries, costumes, musical instruments and so forth, it is evident from the briefest acquaintance with the Description that what they were chiefly interested in was Egypt’s Pharaonic legacy. Egypt’s Islamic heritage was much less significant.56 Therefore, though the scholarly invasion of Egypt was a milestone in the history of Egyptology, effectively its founding document, it had little or no influence on the way Arabic and Islamic studies developed in the following century.
6
Oriental Studies in the Age of Steam and Cant
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period
would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
Max Beerbohm, 1880
THE FOUNDER OF MODERN ORIENTALISM
The Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes was founded in 1795 and was headed first by Louis Mathieu Langlès and then by Silvestre de Sacy. However, not too much weight should be placed on the term ‘vivantes’, for, as we have seen, the second of these professors had no interest at all in the living spoken languages of the Orient. Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was the son of a notary and came from a Jansenist background. (The Jansenists were Catholic rigorists who held that good works are only possible with God’s grace and that only a minority of individuals are predestined to God’s salvation. There was a strong intellectual tradition centred around the Abbey of Port Royal and Jansenist thinkers had done important work on French grammar and logic and would extend their approach to Oriental languages.) A man of stern piety, de Sacy first studied Hebrew for religious reasons. Subsequently, he was encouraged by conversations with Dom Berthereau to take up the study of Arabic. Berthereau, an unsystematically scholarly monk in the Benedictine Maurist order, had been asked by his superiors to learn Arabic so as to research more thoroughly the history of the Crusades and France’s part in them. He had taught himself Arabic but, though he made a large number of fragmentary translations of Arabic materials that bore on the Crusades, there were no direct results of his researches in his lifetime. On the other hand, the engagement of de Sacy in Arabic and other Eastern languages was a watershed in the history of Orientalism.
Like Berthereau, de Sacy had some difficulty in learning Arabic. There was no one in the universities who was capable of teaching him. He got some help from a dragoman called Etienne le Grand and he may also have had lessons from a learned Jew in Paris, though this is obscure. There were almost no texts to study and only one worthwhile grammar, that of Golius, but de Sacy toiled away, teaching himself by memorizing key texts from classical Arabic literature. Eventually de Sacy was to master
Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Persian and Turkish, as well as Hebrew, Aramaic and Mandaean and the usual number of European languages that any self-respecting nineteenth-century academic would expect to be at home in. His first employment was at the Royal Court of Moneys (the mint) where he worked from 1781 onwards. A fervent royalist, he viewed the French Revolution with dismay and in 1792 retired from public service for a while, before re-emerging after the overthrow of Robespierre.
In 1795 de Sacy became a professor in the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. Not only had he no time for living languages, but also, unlike many of his learned contemporaries, he had no interest in the comparative study of languages. He also had no interest in visiting exotic parts (unless one counts Genoa, which he visited to do research in its archives). He was a sombre, severe and polemical figure. Judged by modern standards, his teaching was quite dreadful. His students were expected to learn by rote and memorize sections of the grammars and selected texts, but, as will soon become apparent, he must even so have been an inspiring figure. Together with Champollion, the decipherer of the Rosetta Stone, he was one of the co-founders of the Société Asiatique in 1821 and its first president. Bonaparte made him a baron in 1814 and in 1832 under the monarchy he became a peer of France.1
A chrestomathy is an anthology of literary passages, usually for the use of students learning a foreign language, and this was exactly what de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe was. He published this collection of extracts compiled from manuscripts in 1806, intending it to be used by students of the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. In his introduction, he listed the few Arabic printed texts that it was possible to come by in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the proverbs of the pre-Islamic sage Luqman, the Qur’an, Ibn alMuqaffa’s Kalila wa-Dimna (a mirror for princes cast in the form of a collection of beast fables) and Ibn Arabshah’s floridly overwritten life of Tamerlane. In the previous century, Reiske had argued that Arabpoetry should be studied for its literary merits. De Sacy’s emphasis was different, for he upheld the study of ancient Arabic poetry as useful source material on the early history of the Arabs and Arabic philology. (Like Reiske, de Sacy had to defend Arabic poetry from those who declared that there was no point at all in studying it.) Despite his unromantic approach to Arabpoetry, de Sacy seems to have been the first European scholar to understand how Arab metre actually worked. He had strong views on Arabic prose. He disapproved of the disordered imagination and sloppy colloquialisms of The Thousand and One Nights. He also had a poor opinion of alHariri’s Maqamat, as fiction. The Maqamat, composed in the twelfth century, is a picaresquely episodic celebration of the erudite eloquence of a wily rogue and scrounger called Abu Zayd. Even educated Arabs resort to a commentary in order to understand what Abu Zayd is saying. However, the sheer difficulty of the grammar and vocabulary of al-Hariri’s picaresque display of linguistic fireworks made it an eminently suitable text to inflict upon students and so de Sacy published the Arabic text together with a commentary in 1822.
