For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  History, as Massignon conceived it, was the work of God. History was ultimately the history of holiness and was based on archetypes that manifested themselves in dreams. (Massignon was always particularly interested in dreams and his interest in them and in archetypes eventually brought him into close contact with Jung.) His methodology, if that is the word for it, was based on compassion, introspection, the quest for originality and globality. As Said put it in his essay, ‘Islam, Philology and French Culture’, for Massignon ‘History… is made up of chains of individual witnesses scattered throughout Europe and the Orient, interceding with and substituting for one another.’66 Jesus, al-Hallaj, Joan of Arc and de Foucauld were among those witnesses and Massignon strove throughout his life to join that holy chain. Philology was one of the means to that end, for it was ‘the science of compassion’. Evidently his notion of philology was somewhat different from that of, say, Fleischer or Quatremère.

  Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael were among the archetypal figures that featured prominently in Massignon’s personal mythology. He took the figure of Abraham as it features in Islamic tradition and presented him as an archetype of the holy figure who offers hospitality and compassion and who offers himself as a substitute for the sins of others. Ishmael, the son of Abraham, and ancestor of the Arab race, had transmitted this cult of Abrahamic hospitality to his descendants. His brother Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, had been chosen by Abraham as his successor over Ishmael the wanderer, who, as the disinherited son, prefigured the disinherited Muslims of modern times. The whole history of the Middle East could be read as the struggle between the two brothers. The great mission of the twentieth century, as Massignon saw it, was to bring Ishmael back within the fold of the true faith.

  Massignon was a fervent patriot. His cult of Joan of Arc has already been mentioned and he was similarly devoted to the crusading king and saint, Louis IX. His belief in France’s sacred destiny went hand in hand with an aversion to the British and their empire. He accused Britain of fostering hatred between Hindu and Muslim and he founded a group known as Les Amis du Gandhi. At first, Massignon felt rather differently about France’s empire and mission civilisatrice in the Middle East and North Africa. He deluded himself into believing that the Arabs had accepted French colonialism in the spirit of sacred hospitality.

  Ever since his first visit to Morocco in 1904 Massignon had been a friend and protégé of Marshal Lyautey. In the early 1920 she worked for Lyautey’s colonial administration, researching craft guilds in Morocco. In general, French Orientalists tended to do research in Arabcities under French control, such as Fez, Casablanca, Tunis, Damascus and Beirut, and this encouraged them to present Islam as, above all, a religion of the cities. Moreover, Massignon and his colleagues took the view that there was such a thing as the distinctive Islamic city, centred around the mosque and the souq. Massignon came to believe that craft guilds played a central role in the life of the Islamic city and that Isma‘ili Shi‘ism was the dominant ideology in those guilds. Subsequently scholars have challenged Massignon’s ideas of Isma‘ilism, demonstrating that there were no such things as guilds in medieval Islam and querying the essentialist notion of the ‘Islamic city’. His belief in esoterically motivated medieval craft guilds was of a piece with the twentieth-century French obsession with secret societies and sinister heterodoxies (Cathars, Templars, Illuminists, Freemasons and so on). As for the ‘Islamic city’, this had been conjured up by French historians and archaeologists on the basis of their knowledge of cities in French-controlled North Africa, but with little reference to cities further east in the Persian-and Turkish-speaking lands.

  Though Massignon was for a long time a believer in the French imperial project, he thought that the French colonial authorities should work with the ArabMuslims rather than play off the religious and racial minorities (Christian, Jewish, Berber, Kabyle, Druze and so on) against them. In the longer term he came to think of imperialism in the region as an abuse of the hospitality that he imagined had been on offer and he became a prominent opponent of French colonialist policies in North Africa. From 1953 onwards he campaigned for the return of the Sultan of Morocco from his enforced exile in Madagascar. Later on, he protested against French policies in Algeria and, together with François Mauriac and Jean-Paul Sartre, he agitated for Algerian independence. (In general it is striking how many twentieth-century French Orientalists were anti-imperialist – among them Jacques Berque, Vincent Monteil, Charles André Julien, Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Maxime Rodinson.) Massignon became increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church in his own time as well as to ‘the rich, developed, arrogant West’ and he argued that a revived Islam should take the lead against the oppression of superior technology, science and banking produced by a godless Europe.

  He was a consistent anti-Zionist and a partisan for Palestinian rights. In part this was because of his identification with Arab and Muslim culture, but in part it seems to have been because he did not like Jews very much. There were a lot of Jews teaching at the Collège de France – until, that is, the Second World War and the purges instituted by the Vichy regime. During the 1920s Massignon, like many Catholic thinkers, had been close to the extreme right-wing organization, Action Française. He viewed with dismay the influx into France of Jews fleeing Nazism. In 1938 he had argued that French Jews were leading France to destruction. He believed that the war, when it came, was largely the result of the scheming of British (and Jewish) financiers. On the other hand, he did remain friendly with individual Jewish scholars and he despised the Vichy regime. After the war, he came to fear that Israel, once established, would be in effect an Anglo-American colony and he prayed that Palestinians and Jews would combine against Anglo-American hegemony. He hated the technocracy and atheism of the leading Zionists. In 1945 he intervened to prevent Hajj Amin al-Hussaini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, from being extradited from France. During the war al-Hussaini, in the hope of seeing a Palestine cleansed of Jews, had put himself in the service of the Nazis.

  When Massignon died in 1962 many of those who knew him regarded him as a saint. He believed that Christians had a great deal to learn from Muslims about true monotheism, the nature of prayer and much else. He prayed for the salvation of Muslims and for their coming over to the true faith. His own deep religious convictions led him to empathize with Muslims and at the same time to patronize them. His history of Islam was permeated by esoteric and Christological themes that only he and his disciples found in that history.

  ORIENTALISM IN THE SERVICE OF THE BOLSHEVIK EMPIRE

  Massignon had been involved in the French colonial enterprise in North Africa. Snouck Hurgronje spent much of his life in the service of Dutch colonialism. However, if one wants to give full and proper consideration to the relationship between Orientalism and imperialism, then one should turn to Russia with its vast empire of Muslim subjects in the Caucasus and Central Asia. No history of Orientalism can be regarded as serious if it has totally neglected the contribution of the Russians. The opening year of the twentieth century saw the establishment of the Imperial Oriental Institute in St Petersburg. Viktor Rosen was at that time the dominating figure and the teacher of Barthold and Kratchkovsky, the two greatest Russian Orientalists of the early twentieth century and the guardians of a pre-communist tradition of scholarship.

  According to The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Vasili Vladimirovich Bartold (1869–1930) had a bourgeois upbringing and consequently embraced an idealist conception of historical processes.67 Although he paid a lot of attention to the class struggle, he was no communist. He remained an idealist who tended to place emphasis on ideological factors rather than material ones. He was primarily a Turcologist, who tended to present a positive picture of pre-modern Turco-Mongol culture, and consequently he was attacked by the orthodox communist Orientalist Petrushevsky for his ‘racialist-nationalist idealization of the Turco-Tatar nomads’. Moreover, his views on the economic consequences of the Mongol invasions ‘cannot be accepted by Sovie
t historiography’. (Bartold had argued that accounts of Mongol destruction and savagery in the thirteenth century were exaggerated and that in some respects the Mongol occupation of medieval Russia had had beneficial results.68) The Great Soviet Encyclopedia echoed Petrushevsky and decreed that not enough ‘consideration is given to the fact that the Mongol conquest led to the destruction of productive forces and the protracted enslavement of subjugated peoples’. The communist Orientalist Belyaev pronounced Bartold’s The World of Islam to be a valuable work of vulgarization, ‘despite being written from the standpoint of European bourgeois Orientalism’. Smirnov, another communist academic hack, denounced Bartold for not regarding Islam as an ideology and for failing to detect the class-based nature of Islam and ‘the fact that it always and everywhere serves as an instrument of exploitation and coercion of the toiling masses’. Bartold’s books were banned by the Soviet authorities for a while, but then reprinted in the 1960s with corrective annotations. Though Bartold’s main work was on Turkish materials, he was also an Arabist and, for example, in an article on ‘The Koran and the Sea’, he argued that the maritime references in the Qur’an could not have come from Jewish sources.

  Bartold’s old-fashioned scholarly respect for facts and his bourgeois idealism attracted an enormous amount of criticism from more craven or ideologically deluded colleagues. Nevertheless, his international reputation saved him from losing his teaching post or worse. The same was true of his contemporary Ignatius Kratchkovsky (1883–1951).69 As a schoolboy, the book-mad Kratchkovsky had tried to learn Arabic from de Sacy’s grammar, before learning the language properly with Viktor Rosen. In the relatively free and easy last days of the old Russian empire Kratchkovsky travelled out to Lebanon and Egypt where he made many friends among the Arabintelligentsia. Things became much harder once the Bolshevik Revolution got under way and he recorded that the director of the library that he was working in had died of malnutrition. Although Kratchkovsky was frequently attacked by his younger colleagues because of the old-fashioned nature of his scholarship and his highly suspicious contacts with Orientalists abroad, he survived – but only just. He suffered from the ‘bourgeois’ defect of paying too much attention to foreign scholarship and therefore minimizing the glorious achievements of Russians in the field. He held that an Arabist must be familiar with English, French and German, ‘but also with Italian because since the second half of this century works in this language on Arabic subjects have taken their place in the forefront of learned literature’. Spanish was also desirable, if one was going to study the Arabs in Spain.70 In 1930 he invited Massignon to Russia on a visit of academic goodwill and, as a consequence, was jailed for nine months, as the Soviet authorities decided that Massignon was really a spy. Kratchkovsky, who was frequently prone to depression, tended to take refuge in obscure Oriental books and manuscripts. He was in charge of the Leningrad Academy during the bitter siege of that city in 1941 and 1942, during which he immersed himself in a manuscript of alMaqqari’s Nafh al-Tib (a sixteenth-century account of the past glories of Muslim Spain).

  ‘My heart is saddened. The shades of the teachers do not hide from us the shades of our pupils who passed away before us. Many of these do I see: a life full of hardships and two devastating wars cut down the young shoots before their prime and it was not given to all to attain full blossom. But they all had entered the realm of learning and had felt its fascination. To them, as to me, the manuscripts had spoken in the tongue of the living, and they had come to me with the treasures which they had unearthed.’71 These melancholy reflections came at the end of his memoir of a life in Orientalism. Few Orientalists have produced autobiographies (but notable exceptions are Denison Ross, André Miquel and Maxime Rodinson). As Kratchkovsky observed, ‘scholars seldom speak about themselves, their development, the emotions which accompanied their work and the circumstances in which they made their discoveries’. Kratchkovsky’s Among Arabic Manuscripts (1945, English translation 1953), despite its frequent reference to hardship and depression, is easily the most delightful example of the genre.

  Kratchkovsky was fabulously prolific and moved from topic to topic. Like Hamilton Gibb, he was extremely interested in modernist and reformist movements in the Middle East and in the modern Arabic novel. However, his major work was a comprehensive work on the medieval Arab geographers, published in Russian but subsequently translated into Arabic, and still of use today.72 He also produced a Russian translation of the Qur’an from the Arabic. (All but one of the previous Russian ‘translations’ had actually been made from European languages.) As noted, he enjoyed an international reputation. However, it is time to turn to some of his less estimable and sometimes rather bizarre colleagues and successors.

  Soviet Orientalists were at the service of an empire with a vast population of Muslims. In 1917 the Bolshevik regime issued a decree guaranteeing freedom of conscience for Muslims. According to a proclamation of the Scientific Association of Russian Orientalists in 1921, ‘Moscow is the new Mecca; it is the Medina of all repressed peoples.’ Yet, despite the fair-seeming promises, Islam was pilloried in the Soviet museums of atheism and Soviet Orientalists were enlisted to combat Islamic superstition. There was also a fierce campaign against the use of the Arabic script. It was described as the script of the reactionary mullahs and Sufis and as not being particularly well adapted to rendering the Turkic languages. Possession of books in the Arabic script could lead to the death sentence: Islamic culture and social structures were things that the Muslim peoples had to be weaned away from. Broadly speaking, the Soviet orthodoxy was that Islamic society had to pass through five stages: primitive society, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist and Marxist socialist.73

  The life of the Prophet and the first century of Islam were subjected to particularly fierce scrutiny by Soviet Orientalists. Some scholars were content to do not much more than present the rise of Islam within a determining economic context. E. A. Belyaev, for example, accepted that the Prophet was a historical figure. His Arabs, Islam and the Arab Caliphate in the Early Middle Ages placed heavy emphasis on the role of the physical environment in the rise of Islam. More specifically, Islam was a religion that arose to serve the interests of the slave-owning mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina. The Qur’an was not revealed by the Prophet, but concocted after the latter’s death. Early Islamic society made the transition from a slave-owning patriarchal society to a more advanced feudalism. Belyaev stressed the importance of heterodox and revolutionary movements in the early Islamic period, such as the Mazdakites and the Kharijites, and he was a keen, if belated, supporter of the aspirations of the working masses of the early medieval Middle East, which he thought these movements represented. He also emphasized the destructive nature of the early Arabconquests.74 (The denunciation of the nomad invasions, whether Arab, Turkish or Mongol, was a routine duty for Soviet scholars.) Although Belyaev tried to make a point of ignoring both European and Arab scholarship in his field as such scholarship was inevitably ideologically tainted, he was still denounced by some of his colleagues for paying too much attention to such material.

  Some Soviet Orientalists took a much more destructive approach to Islamic history. Klimovich wrote an article entitled ‘Did Muhammad exist?’ in which the answer to the question so posed was no. All the sources on the Prophet’s life were late and dubious. In The Contents of the Koran (1928), Klimovich sought to lay bare its internal contradictions. It was, he maintained, a document drafted on behalf of the exploiters – the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina – that promised the exploited masses a paradise in the never-never that was the main force behind Islam.75 The Prophet was a back-formation – a figure retrospectively invented in order to give the religion a founder. N. A. Morozov went further yet and argued in Christ (1930) that, until the shock of the Crusades, Islam and Judaism were indistinguishable from one another. There were indications in the Qur’an that it was composed as late as the eleventh century. Islam could not possibly have originated i
n the Arabian peninsula, as it was too far from the main centres of civilization to give birth to a new religion. Muhammad and the early caliphs were merely mythical figures. Inconsistently, Morozov, having suggested that early Islam did not differ from Judaism, also suggested that early Islam was merely a version of the Christian Arian heresy.76 (Arians denied that Christ was fully divine or consubstantial with God the Father.) Needless to say, no Soviet scholars took the traditional Muslim view of the origins of Islam. The only substantial debate was over the question whether the rise of that religion represented a triumph of the bourgeoisie or if it reflected an earlier phase in historical evolution, the transition from a slave-owning society to a feudal one.

  NAZI ORIENTALISM

  The German and Nazi agenda in Middle Eastern studies was less obvious and less pervasive than the Soviet Russian one. In so far as they took any interest in Oriental matters at all, Nazi ideologues were more interested in Indian and Tibetan matters, and a motley band of scholars and eccentrics under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg quested for the origins of the Teutonic master race somewhere in Asia.77 Walther Wüst, a keen Nazi, a specialist in the Veda (the ancient holy books of the Hindus) and an Orientalist in the broad sense, was the key figure in this quasi-scientific research into the Asian origins of the Aryans. The Veda, as presented by him, were blessedly free of any Semitic taint and fully in accord with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. By contrast, the Nazis took little interest in Arabor Islamic studies, despite widespread hopes in the Arabworld that the Nazis would liberate them from British and French colonialism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had expressed his contempt for Arabnationalists.78 He considered that Arabs deserved to be colonized. Several institutes of Oriental studies were closed during the Nazi period.