For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the prevailing ethos of government in British India was quite different from what it later became. In White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, William Dalrymple has noted that the British then ‘inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect… It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events.’37 The word ‘Orientalist’, in the sense of one versed in Oriental languages and literatures, entered the English language as early as 1779. (The French equivalent appeared twenty years later.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘the Orient’ tended to refer to the Near East and Ottoman North Africa, rather than Asia more generally. In India, however, ‘Orientalist’ had, for a while, quite a specialized sense, as it referred to a Briton who not only studied Indian culture, but also advocated governing in India in accordance with local laws and customs.38 Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India and the patron of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, was the grandest proponent of such an approach. Hastings hired Brahmin pundits to codify Hindu law and he encouraged his subordinates to study Islamic law. From 1772 until approximately 1830, ‘Orientalists’ dominated the government of India. The founding in 1800 of the College of Fort William in Calcutta was one fruit of their policies. The College not only taught Greek and Latin, but also Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. Most of the teaching was done by munshis (native language teachers).39 Fort William also published some texts in Arabic, including in 1814–18 an important edition of The Thousand and One Nights (known to specialists in the field as Calcutta I). Later, after Fort William had closed, Sir William Hay Macnaghten, the greatest linguist ever produced by the College, published a second edition. Both editions, with their colourful stories of magic, adultery and treasure hunting, had been produced as texts to be studied by administrators seeking to improve their Arabic.40 However, the College was more interested in Persian and the Indian languages (and Persian was Macnaghten’s real speciality). Persian was the language of the princely courts and administration, but Arabic was necessary for the study of Persian. Many of the key texts in Islamic law were also in Arabic, but even so not many people studied it.

  More generally, the enthusiasm of British officers and administrators was part of the background to the Bengal renaissance and to the increased interest of Hindus in finding out about their own past. Fort William ceased teaching in 1830. Its closure was part of a fairly widespread reaction against British Indian ‘Orientalism’. This reaction was spearheaded by an alliance of Evangelicals and Utilitarians in the home country. ‘Orientalists’ had opposed and resisted missionary activity in India and this was resented by the Evangelicals. In 1817 the Utilitarian thinker James Mill published a three-volume History of British India, in which he comprehensively disparaged Oriental culture. That culture was, he believed, the product of despotism, superstition and poverty and there was no point in pretending that Europe could learn anything from it.41 The same sort of point was made with misconceived eloquence by the statesman and man of letters, Lord Macaulay. In a minute on education in India, written in 1835, he claimed to have talked to Orientalists, but ‘I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Or, as he also put it, ‘all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’.42 Mill had never been out to India and neither he nor Macaulay had actually troubled to learn Sanskrit. Both were convinced that the Indians’ only hope was to learn modern, Western ways. In this new environment, Fort William’s teaching programme was obviously an unnecessary expense. Macaulay powerfully urged that Greek and Latin should be at the heart of the East India Company exams. The content of the classics as such was less important than the well mapped-out techniques of intellectual training that were part of the classical formation: ‘If, instead of learning Greek, we learned the Cherokee, the man who understood the Cherokee best… would generally be a superior man to him who was destitute of these accomplishments.’43

  Macaulay and his allies had their way and, later in the century, Sir Richard Burton was to complain, in the introduction to his translation of The Arabian Nights, that ‘England has forgotten, apparently, that she is at present the greatest Mohammedan empire in the world, and in her Civil Service examinations she insists on a smattering of Greek and Latin, rather than a knowledge of Arabic.’ In 1850, the distinguished scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903), made a similar point: ‘England, in spite of her vast opportunities, has done least for Oriental literature of the learned nations of Europe; France and Germany have in every department (except Lexicography, where Wilson stands unrivalled) left her far behind; and this reflection is truly humiliating when one visits the Library of East India House and sees the stores of Oriental lore, which lie on their shelves, unread and almost unknown. German scholars come over to London and study the MSS., to correct their own editions; but hardly a solitary English scholar can be found to avail himself of the treasures which his countrymen have brought from the East almost to his very door.’ (The Wilson in question, Horace Hayman Wilson, compiled a Sanskrit–English dictionary.)44 Cowell, who as a fifteen-year-old had discovered Sir William Jones’s Poesae Asiaticae Commentarii, a commentary on Persian and Arabic poetry, then sought tuition in Persian from a retired Indian Army officer and later taught himself and his wife Sanskrit. (He wanted to have something to talk to her about over the breakfast table.) In 1867 he became the first to occupy Cambridge’s newly established Chair of Sanskrit. Despite his status as a Sanskritologist, he kept a watching brief over Persian studies and he was the friend of the eminent Persianists, including Palmer and Browne and Edward Fitz-Gerald.45 It was a manuscript of Cowell’s that furnished the source for FitzGerald’s fine, if very free, version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

  Sir William Muir (1819–1905) was one of the few prominent Arabists or Islamicists that British India produced. (Sir Charles Lyall, the other great example, will be discussed in the next chapter.) Muir had had a distinguished career in the Indian administration where he played a leading role in the struggle against female infanticide and rose to become Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Frontier Province, before turning to academic matters and becoming Principal of Edinburgh University. Although he spent much of his life studying Islam, he hated the subject. In part, his horror of Islam may have been influenced by his experience of the Indian Mutiny. Despite his fervent Christianity, The Caliphate, its rise, decline and fall (1891) may also have been influenced by Gibbon’s account of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The caliphate was in the end brought low by barbarism and superstition, though in Muir’s book both the barbarism and the superstition were Muslim. Muir denounced the Prophet as both a servant of the Devil and an epileptic. Any Hadiths that showed the Prophet in a bad light were bound to be true: those that portrayed him more favourably were dubious. Although Muir listed some of the key Arabic sources for the medieval period, it is not clear how many of these he cited directly from the Arabic. He was comfortable in German, and he relied heavily on Weil’s earlier history of the caliphate. This meant that, when Muir was not engaged in anti-Islamic polemical rant, his history was pretty dull. He also translated the medieval Christian al-Kindi’s anti-Islamic polemic, the Apology, and in 1887 the Religious Tract Society published his fervently Christian The Rise and Decline of Islam.46 Missionaries in India were still having recourse to these works in the twentieth century.

  LANE’S ETHNOGRAPHY OF EGYPT

  Muir acquired his expertise in Arabic and knowledge of Islam outside the universities. The same was true of Edward William Lane (
1801–76), who trained as a metal-engraver. Early on in life, however, he developed a passion for ancient Egypt, possibly inspired by seeing a presentation by Giovanni Battista Belzoni, the fairground strong man turned Egyptologist. He was twenty-four when he first caught sight of the Alexandrian monument known as Pompey’s Pillar: ‘It seemed as if it rose from the sea; for neither the city nor the hills in its neighbourhood could yet be discerned. Soon afterwards we saw the tops of two lofty hills of rubbish, each crowned with a fort; and next we distinguished the vessels in the Old Harbour, intercepting almost entirely the view of the town, which lies upon a low flat site.’47

  Lane had of course seen the great French Description de l’Egypte and admired it, though with increasing reservations, as he travelled throughout Egypt and began to reckon up the vast number of errors and misrepresentations. As far as the essay on contemporary Egyptian customs was concerned, he thought it was based on too much philosophy and not enough observation. His first ambition was to publish a survey of Egypt that concentrated on the antiquities and which would establish his reputation as an Egyptologist.

  He believed that he had an undertaking from a famous London publisher, John Murray, to publish this mighty project. However Murray, who had also taken on a survey of Egyptian antiquities by John Gardner Wilkinson, delayed and prevaricated and as part of the strategy of delay suggested that Lane turn one of his chapters that was devoted to contemporary Egypt into a whole book. As a consequence Wilkinson, the author of Topography of Thebes, and General View of Egypt (1835) and Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), faced no challenge from Lane, who went on to produce further studies of the Arabs and Arabic.

  Thus Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) was a by-blow of his original ambition to make a visual and literary record of what remained of ancient Egypt. Manners and Customs dealt with strictly contemporary matters and Lane took as his model Alexander Russell’s The Natural History of Aleppo and, in particular, the second chapter where Russell had discussed such matters as population, language, dress, consumption of coffee and tobacco, eating habits, religious ceremonies, family life, story-telling, entertainments and funerary rites. Lane thought that Russell had devoted too much space to the manners and customs of the ruling Turkish elite and not enough to those of the Arabs. (Lane levelled a similar criticism against the French survey.) He became well acquainted with the Arabs and their manner of life in Cairo. He lived near the Babal-Hadid in old Cairo and dressed as a Turk – that is, as a member of Egypt’s ruling caste. Outside Cairo and Alexandria foreigners who travelled about in Western clothes were liable to attract ridicule and even stoning. He studied Arabic with, among others, al-Tantawi, the shaykh who eventually went off to teach in Russia. Lane’s book, which was written for a general readership, was published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, an organization which aimed its publications ‘to all classes of the community, particularly to such as are unable to avail themselves of experienced teachers, or may prefer learning by themselves’. Lane’s book sold well and was often reprinted. British academics (and as we shall see there were hardly any of these in Arabic studies) were not interested in modern Egypt. Only in the twentieth century did academics turn to Lane’s book as an important source on ‘modern Egyptians’.

  Since Manners and Customs had sold well, Lane was encouraged to go on to produce his translation of The Thousand and One Nights, commonly called the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1838–41). He thought of this as an educational project. In his preface to Manners and Customs, he had already remarked of The Arabian Nights that it ‘presents most admirable pictures of the manners and customs of the Arabs and particularly those of the Egyptians’ and that ‘if the English reader had possessed a close translation of it with sufficient illustrative notes, I might almost have spared myself the present undertaking’. This then was what Lane now set out to do. While his Victorian readers read eagerly of enchanted caliphs, princesses, jinns, sorcerers and mysteriously abandoned cities, he was busy in efforts to distract them with barrages of annotations on Muslim ablutions, circumcision rituals, the use of henna, the etymology of obscure Arabic words and so forth.48 The Bulaq Press, established in 1822, was the Arabworld’s first printing press and in 1835 it had published one of the earliest printed versions of the Nights.49 It was more or less inevitable that this should be the version that Lane translated, as he regularly frequented the Press and had become a friend of Ibrahim al-Dasuqi, who taught in that part of Cairo. Additionally, he relied heavily on advice from ‘the first philologist of the first Arabcollege of the present day [al-Azhar]’, al-Tantawi. In the nineteenth century, it was common for Orientalists to work in close collaboration with Arab, Turkish and Persian scholars. Similarly, when Burton produced his later translation of the Nights, he relied heavily on the advice of his friend, Yacoub Artin Pasha.

  From 1842 onwards, Lane was engaged on his grandest project yet, as he started to compile his Arabic–English Lexicon.50 His chief, but by no means only, source was the vast eighteenth-century dictionary of classical Arabic, the Taj al-‘Arus (‘Crown of the Bride’), but he supplemented its information with that from other equally vast medieval dictionaries and read widely in the literature, in order to furnish the lexical entries with illustrations of usage. Al-Dasuqi was employed to find the necessary manuscripts on which the dictionary was to be based. Lane became so engrossed in this monumental task that the only recreation he took was to spend half an hour walking on his roof at sunset. In 1848 ill-health obliged him to return to England, but he continued to work on the dictionary and he used to complain that he had become so used to the cursive calligraphy of his Arabic manuscripts that he found Western print a great strain on his eyes. By 1876, the year of his death, Lane had reached fa, the twentieth letter of the twenty-eight-letter alphabet. Although Lane had received an honorary degree from Leiden in the previous year, he had spent his life researching and publishing outside the university system. To this day his great dictionary remains incomplete. There were no other British Arabists or Islamists of note in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Things started to change only later in the century with the appointment of William Wright and David Samuel Margoliouth to professorships in Cambridge and Oxford respectively.

  TWO OF SAID’S ORIENTALIST ARCHVILLAINS

  Ernest Renan (1823–92) is the central figure, the paradigmatic Orientalist and racist in Edward Said’s book, and as such he has more pages devoted to him than de Sacy, Louis Massignon or Bernard Lewis.51 Renan studied for the priesthood at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, but in 1845 he experienced a philologically based crisis of faith and renounced Catholicism. In 1843 he had started to study Hebrew and he later widened his range to include Syriac and Arabic. Renan’s teacher of Arabic at Saint-Sulpice was the biblical scholar, M. Le Hir, and Renan was later to explain that his own grasp of Arabic was so bad because his teacher’s had been similarly bad. Later Renan studied various subjects with students of Silvestre de Sacy and (perhaps because of this?) he came to loathe all that de Sacy stood for. Renan judged him to be ‘the typical orthodox scholar… but if one looks further, one sees the strange spectacle of a man, who, though he possesses one of the vastest eruditions of modern times, has never had an important critical insight’. More generally he had a disparaging opinion of earlier French Orientalists, especially by comparison with the learned Germans: ‘quelles misères et songez à ce qui se passait alors en Allemagne’. Moreover Renan’s temperament was more romantic, speculative and slapdash than that of de Sacy.

  If Renan is going to be considered as a serious Arabist, then we must turn to his second published thesis. Having first in 1852 written a thesis in Latin, De Philosophia Peripatetico apud Syros (‘On the Peripatetic Philosophy Among the Syrians’), he went on in that same year to defend a thesis on Averroès et l’averroïsme and to publish it in edited form in 1861. This was a study of the famous twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd or Averroes and the impact of his
ideas about the immortality of the soul and the double truth on medieval Western scholastics. The most striking feature of the published version is that, almost without exception, Renan preferred inaccurate translations of Ibn Rushd into Latin to using original Arabic texts. The suspicion must be that Renan’s Arabic was not up to it. His book is less a serious study of Islamic philosophy and more a fable about the rise of rationalism in the West. Arabists who later worked on Averroes found Renan’s view that the Muslim philosopher was a secret atheist to be unfounded. Goldziher was swift to point out that Renan had failed to use two absolutely essential sources: al-Ghazali’s pietistic attack on the philosophy of Avicenna and Averroes’s response to al-Ghazali.52

  By contrast, Renan’s Hebrew was quite good. Renan had been impressed by work being done on Sanskrit and on the Indo-Aryan family of languages and, in particular, the German Sanskritologist Franz Bopp’s comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan languages, the Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthausischen Gothischen und Deutschen (1833). Renan considered the possible influence of language on the Semitic character in Nouvelles Considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques (1859). The Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1863) was Renan’s attempt to do for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-Aryan ones. However, Renan had wide interests and in the years to come he wrote about the future of research, the decadence of democracy, the Apostles, Breton folklore, Marcus Aurelius, contemporary morality, the origins of Christianity, Greece, Berbers, the history of Israel, the morale of the French nation after the Franco-Prussian War and childhood memories. He was above all a recycler of idées reçues. He also wrote low-grade novels. He was much in demand as a stylish journalist and general pundit. He became a familiar of the salons, though not necessarily a particularly stylish familiar. The Goncourt brothers described him as ‘short and podgy, badly built with a calf’s head covered with the callosities of a monkey’s rump’.53