For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In 1885 he also published Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, which drew upon both pre-Islamic poetry and contemporary accounts of Bedouin practice in order to argue that early Arabsociety was matriarchal and matrilocal (that is to say that the husband joined the wife’s clan upon marriage). Mutterrecht or the power of women in primitive Arabsociety was presented by Smith as a product of Arab sensuality. Over the centuries, however, matriarchy was replaced by patriarchy, and female infanticide and polygamy consolidated male dominance. What was true for the Arabs went for the ancient Hebrews too, for he seems to have regarded the early Jews as camel-rearing Bedouin. For both early Arabs and Hebrews, ‘religious life involved clans living in close fellowship with their clan god’. On the other hand, the perceived natural conservatism of the Bedouin that Muhammad had found so hard to combat, meant that their present manner of life was an excellent guide to the way things were done in biblical times. The scorching hot desert of Arabia was a kind of refrigerator in which ancient Semitic practices were preserved.

  In 1889 Smith published his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, which dealt with the rituals of sacrifice, communion and atonement as practised by early Hebrew and Arab tribesmen. He argued that rituals arise before the mythologies or creeds that are constructed around them and that all primitive religions pass through a totemistic stage. True religion originates in magic and superstition but outgrows them. Prophets tailored their messages to the societies and circumstances they spoke to and, if this applied to Samuel and Ezekiel, it also applied to Muhammad. Smith’s study of the Hadiths, the body of traditions associated with the Prophet, persuaded him that these had been invented and compiled over a long period in much the same way as Pentateuchal law had been. Smith might have done more but for poor health, and the book does not quite have a finished feel. Although twentieth-century anthropologists like James Frazer and Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to explore the themes that Smith raised, his ideas on totemism and primitive matriarchy are no longer accepted. On the other hand, his argument that tribal genealogies are social constructs, rather than literal records, commands widespread assent among anthropologists today. He was a fiery, energetic character who regarded slack scholarship as a form of immorality. Every Christmas, but only at Christmas, he read a novel, out of some sort of reluctant sense of cultural duty. As he lay on his deathbed in 1894 he was planning the Encyclopaedia Biblica. This great reference work, together with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, must be regarded as the key model for the later, fundamental document of modern Orientalism, the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

  GERMANS STILL LEAD THE FIELD

  Smith’s views on the slow evolution of both early Jewish law and the Hadith corpus were similar to those of his German friend, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918).72 Albert Hourani, a leading twentieth-century historian of the Arabs and Islam, argued that Wellhausen and Goldziher were the first people to study Islam seriously.73 (The slightly younger and more long-lived Goldziher will be discussed at length in the next chapter.) Wellhausen came from a Lutheran background. He had become interested in biblical history after hearing Heinrich Ewald’s lectures in Göttingen. Although Ewald was a considerable Arabist and had produced a two-volume Grammatica critica linguae Arabicae (1831–3), he was only interested in using Arabic in the furtherance of the study of ancient Israel. This was Wellhausen’s prejudice too and his fame today, such as it is, rests chiefly upon his Old Testament researches. In 1878 he produced Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, in which he sought to discover through close source-criticism the real history of the early Hebrew folk, before it was written up and distorted by the post-exilic priesthood. In 1892 Wellhausen became Professor in Göttingen, where he worked closely with Nöldeke, another former student of Ewald’s.

  Although Wellhausen was to become a friend and intellectual ally of Robertson Smith, he was very different in temperament, being large, convivial and keen on his beer. He was also a stylish and witty writer. Though the application of source-critical techniques to biblical texts would strike many as a dry and dusty activity, there was nothing dry about Wellhausen and he felt passionately about the history of the early Israelites. He loved the early Hebrews with their ancient and wild pagan rituals. He hated the later priests of Israel with their joy-destroying codes of ritual and law. The end of ancient Hebrew polytheism was a kind of Götterdämmerung, or twilight of the gods. At least that was how he viewed the process. He preferred his ancient Hebrews to be wild and hard-drinking. He took the view that ancient Semitic religion was ancestor worship. In this he was probably influenced by the French historian Fustel du Coulanges, who had put forward a similar argument regarding the ancient Greeks and Romans. But obviously Wellhausen’s ideas were also rather similar to those of Robertson Smith.

  Because of the problems he discovered in his Hebrew material, he believed that the lore of the pre-Islamic Arabs provided the best evidence for the way of life of the early Hebrews. Eventually he moved on from close scrutiny of the Old Testament and became interested in the romantic and colourful world of the Arabs: ‘I have made the transition from the Old Testament to the Arabs with the intention of getting to know the wild vine upon which priests and prophets grafted the Torah of Yahweh. For I have no doubt that some idea of the original characteristics with which the Hebrews entered history may most easily be won by means of a comparison with Arab antiquity.’74 In this field too he was a great lover and hater. He loved the Umayyad caliphs, who presided over the Arabheartlands from 661 till 750. He hated the Abbasid caliphs who came after them. ‘To hell with the Abbasids! They might as well already be there.’ A fervent patriot, he thought that the Abbasids were not fit to hold a candle to the German Kaisers. Wellhausen much preferred what he saw as the earlier Umayyads’ penchant for politicking and high living. He was also a keen if decidedly belated supporter of the seventh-century Kharijites who rebelled against the caliphate and whom he admired for their passion and activism. More generally, he applauded historical signs of schism within Islam as indicators of social dynamism.

  From 1879 onwards, edited volumes of the tenth-century historian al-Tabari started to appear. This enabled Wellhausen and others to adopt a more analytic approach to the early history of the Arab caliphate. Instead of translating and then pasting together snippets from Arabic chronicles, which was pretty much what William Muir had done in his history of the caliphate, Wellhausen tried to sift the surviving texts and to deduce what lost original sources those texts were based on and how the historical narrative was distorted over the centuries. This, of course, was exactly what contemporary biblical scholars were doing. Wellhausen himself had already demonstrated, to his own satisfaction at least, that the Pentateuch was composed by four different writers (and not by Moses, as previous generations used to believe). Wellhausen now attempted to carry out the same kind of operation on the earliest Arabic sources concerning the early history of Islam. In doing so, he conjured up what have since been shown to be imaginary Medinese and Iraqi schools of transmission of historical information. His conclusions were demolished by Albrecht Noth in the twentieth century. Thus Wellhausen’s sophisticated techniques of textual analysis do not in the end seem to have brought him any closer to the historical truth than did Muir’s methodological naivety. Even so, his Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) was for a long time the major work of Islamic history. Having dealt with Umayyad history, he seems to have become bored with the subject and switched his attention to New Testament studies.

  Wellhausen had introduced historical method to Islamic history. Methodical Germans and Austrians dominated the writing of Islamic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Apart from Wellhausen, Aloys Sprenger (1813–93) and Alfred von Kremer (1828 – 89) were the key figures. Both were inspired by their reading of the fourteenth-century philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun to take a broader and less tediously fact-driven approach to Islamic history. Sprenger in Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed (‘The Life and Teachings of Muhammad’, 1861–5)
treated the rise of Islam as a product of its times. He also stressed the impact of Islamic culture on Western civilization.75 Von Kremer was an Austrian diplomat who took up the study of Islamic cultural history.76 He was not interested in political detail, preferring to write about the broad sweep of things. In the Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams, Gottesbegriff, Prophetie und Staatsidee (1868) he put forward an idealist vision of the whole of Islamic history and argued that civilization progressed when there was a clash of ideas and decayed when there was no such clash. His Kulturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen (1875–7), which concentrated on the heyday of the Abbasid caliphs, was the first major study of Islamic cultural life. The Orient was pillaged by German historians and religious thinkers for material that they could use in more general debates about the future of civilization, the nature of culture and the primacy of ideas in historical evolution. Leopold von Ranke’s grandiose vision of world history cast a long shadow and the Cinderella subject of Islamic history was mostly conducted under that shadow. In the twentieth century, German historicism would give way to theories and methodologies pioneered by British and American historians and sociologists, and Orientalists would take their lead from them. Finally, it is noteworthy that the Americans had yet to make a significant contribution to the field.

  7

  A House Divided Against Itself

  His preoccupation was with the words themselves and what they meant; the slightest hitch in the text and he was absorbed, with all his imagination and powers in play. He was intent on knowing precisely what the words of that liturgy meant, to the priests who translated it, to the scribe who copied it somewhere in a Central Asian town in the sixth century… Outside the text his imagination, so active upon the words themselves, so lively in his everyday life, seemed not to be engaged. He gave only a passing thought to the societies where this religion grew or to the people in the congregations which used this liturgy. There was something in such speculations which offended his taste – ‘romantic’ he called them as a term of abuse.

  A portrait of Roy Calvert, compiler of a dictionary of

  Soghdian in C. P. Snow’s novel, The Light and the Dark (1947)

  The Encyclopaedia of Islam is the most important document in the history of twentieth-century Orientalism. William Robertson Smith, the editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a key figure in the team of the Encyclopaedia Biblica, had proposed that a major reference work should be devoted to Islam, roughly along the lines of the two great enterprises he had worked upon. (The Encyclopaedia Biblica, devoted to biblical and Hebrew matters, had been planned by Smith but was published posthumously in the years 1899–1903.) At various conferences held in the last decades of the nineteenth century, two leading Orientalists of the next generation, the Dutchman Michael Jan de Goeje (1836–1909) and the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), continued to agitate on behalf of Smith’s scheme. Although, as we shall see, Goldziher was easily the grandest Orientalist of his generation, he was inconveniently distant from Leiden, which was the Dutch base where the articles for the Encyclopaedia were to be edited and printed. (Leiden was the preeminent centre for Islamic studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Therefore his place as editor was taken over by two Dutchmen, Martin Theodor Houtsma, a scholar who specialized in Seljuk Turkish history, and Arent Jan Wensinck, a specialist in the early history of Islam. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the English language had not yet become the language of international scholarship. So the Encyclopaedia of Islam was printed in three languages – English, French and German. For this and other reasons, the project was complex and expensive. Scholars started to research their articles around 1908 and the first complete volume appeared in 1913. The Encyclopaedia, four fat volumes of approximately 1,200 double-columned pages plus a supplementary volume of afterthoughts, was completed in 1938.

  Although the production of the Encyclopaedia took place in Holland and Dutch scholars provided a remarkably large number of contributions, the Germans (Becker, Brockelmann, Plessner and Schacht among them) also made a considerable contribution and indeed scholars from all over Europe collaborated on the vast enterprise.1 Such an international project was made possible by the increasingly frequent international gatherings of Orientalists, the first of which, the International Congress of Orientalists, had taken place in 1873.

  Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966) a distinguished Turkish historian, was a leading contributor, but otherwise relatively few Turks, Arabs or Persians were invited to contribute (and it seems that many who were invited to contribute failed to do so on time). The historian of medieval Islam, R. Stephen Humphreys, has observed that the first edition of the Encyclopaedia represents ‘a specifically European interpretation of Islamic civilization. The point is not that this interpretation is “wrong”, but that the questions addressed in these volumes often differ sharply from those which Muslims have traditionally asked about themselves.’2 (As we shall see in the chapter on ‘Enemies of Orientalism’, the Encyclopaedia has had plenty of enemies in the Middle East.) On the other hand, the Encyclopaedia can be criticized for overstressing the importance of the Islamic religion in the history of what is commonly known as Islamic culture. It was also overwhelmingly an encyclopedia of medieval Islam.

  De Goeje, one of the founding figures of the Encyclopaedia, had been a student of Reinhart Dozy and he became perhaps the greatest Arabist in his lifetime. His strengths lay in his skills as a philologist and editor. He was industrious and prolific. His edition of al-Tabari, the chronicler of the Abbasid caliphs, was of particular importance for the study of the early history of Islam. His care for accuracy and serious scholarship meant that he hated everything that Ernest Renan had stood for.3 De Goeje’s contempt for Renan was something that he shared with the other key figure in the launch of the Encyclopaedia, Ignaz Goldziher.

  THE GREATEST OF THE ORIENTALISTS

  Ignaz Goldziher was a Hungarian Jew and his early studies were in the Talmud. He went on to study in Budapest at its Gymnasium (a superior secondary school specializing in classical studies). He also sat in on the lectures of the university’s ‘Professor’ of Oriental Languages, Arminius Vámbéry. Although Vámbéry (1832–1913) made no significant contribution to Arabic studies, he is such a curious figure that he is worth pausing on briefly here. Like Goldziher, he was a Hungarian Jew and had studied Hebrew and the Talmud as a child. In 1857 he set out for Istanbul where he earned a living as a teacher and mastered Turkish. In the years 1863–4, he travelled through Armenia, Persia and Turkestan disguised as a dervish. His chief aim was to seek evidence of the original Magyar homeland in Central Asia. On his return to Europe he went to London where he was lionized, before proceeding on to Vienna. After an interview with the Emperor Franz Josef, he was given a jobteaching Turkish, Arabic and Persian at the University of Pest. Although he was not a professor, he pretended that he was. He supplemented his earnings by writing about his adventures and producing pieces of polemical journalism.

  In particular, he campaigned tirelessly against the spread of the Russian empire in Muslim Central Asia. He believed in the future of a free, democratic and modernizing Muslim world: ‘We alone, we think, have the right to be mighty and free, and the rest of humanity to be subject to us and never taste the golden fruits of liberty.’ According to Vámbéry, Europeans ‘tend to forget that constitutional government is by no means a new thing in Islam, for anything more democratic than the doctrine of the Arabian Prophet it would be difficult to find in any other religion’.4 Though Vámbéry lacked professional skills, he was successful in demonstrating that Turkish and Magyar belonged to the same linguistic family. He was very pro-British and spent a lot of his time in London. (It was after a dinner at which Vámbéry had talked about Balkan superstitions that Bram Stoker went home and had the nightmare that inspired his novel Dracula.)5

  ‘My wanderings have left powerful impressions on my mind. Is it surprising if I stand sometimes
bewildered, like a child in Regent Street, or in the salons of British nobles, thinking of the deserts of Central Asia, and of the tents of the Kirghiz and Turkomans?’ Vámbéry, known to his contemporaries as ‘the dervish’, was an adventurous and resourceful figure, but he was no true scholar. Indeed, he was something of a charlatan and Goldziher despised him for this. Vámbéry was not a great teacher and, according to some of the few students he pretended to teach, his teaching method consisted of sending them away to teach themselves. But Goldziher also disapproved of his teacher’s abandonment of the Jewish faith in order to advance his career, as well as his ideas about forcing Muslims to accommodate themselves to modernity.

  In 1868 Goldziher left Hungary for the more scholarly environment of Germany, where he studied with various Orientalists and philologists, including the Hebraist, Abraham Geiger. Above all, he studied at Leipzig with the philologically sound and meticulous Fleischer. (No one would have dreamed of calling Fleischer ‘dervish’.) Goldziher’s work with Fleischer put him just one link down the scholarly chain of transmission from Silvestre de Sacy. In 1871 Goldziher visited Holland and conferred with Dozy and de Goeje. The years 1873 to 1874 were his formative Wanderjahre, as it was then that he travelled in the Middle East and studied with the Muslim scholars of the al-Azhar in Cairo. He recorded the encounters and revelations of his year in the lands of Islam in a diary. It was while he was in Damascus that he decided that Islam was better than Judaism or Christianity. He also came to identify with progressive forces in the region. In particular, he formed a friendship with the writer and activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who at that time was in Egypt campaigning for the country’s independence.