For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In the introduction to a supplementary volume of his Geschichte der Arabische Literatur (‘A History of Arabic Literature’), Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956) described the Arabist and Weimar Minister, Carl Heinrich Becker, as ‘the minister against German culture’.79 Brockelmann, an extreme right-winger, had had a traditional German university education, in the course of which he had acquired the duelling scar that was de rigueur among right-wing student fraternities. However, he had also studied with the mighty Goldziher whom he revered as the master of Islamic studies. Brockelmann’s Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur (1898–1902 and supplementary volumes 1937–42) comes second only to the Encyclopaedia of Islam among the important Orientalist publications of the twentieth century. It is not, as its title might suggest, a narrative history of Arabic literature. It is rather a vast annotated catalogue of all the Arabic manuscripts and printed books that were known to Brockelmann. As such it is an indispensable work of reference. Yet he compiled the book only in order to persuade his publisher to take his real enthusiasm, his edition of Ibn Qutayba’s Uyun al-Akhbar (a ninth-century anthology of Arabic prose and poetry).80

  Brockelmann’s work on Arabic manuscripts was very much in the German philological tradition as pioneered by Fleischer. Hans Heinrich Schaeder (1896–1957), on the other hand, was the scholarly heir to a more romantic approach to Islam that can be traced back to von Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe and Rückert. At school he had studied Latin, Greek, English, French and Hebrew. During the First World War he pursued a self-taught course of European literature and Oriental grammar and he came to adopt a conservative, Junker position. When, in the aftermath of the war, Oswald Spengler published his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (‘Decline of the West’), Schaeder was influenced by that. He also read T. S. Eliot’s essays on culture and tradition and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s melancholy fin de siècle fantasies. As an Arabist, Schaeder studied with Carl Heinrich Becker and he shared the latter’s overwhelming enthusiasm for the Graeco-Latin heritage. Schaeder’s early work was on the eighth-century ArabSufi, Hasan of Basra, and the fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafiz of Shiraz (who may or may not also have been a Sufi). Having read Massignon’s book on the martyrdom of al-Hallaj, he fell under the mesmerizing spell of the book’s author and concentrated his researches on religious and, more specifically, Sufi terminology. Like Massignon, Schaeder was a convert to Catholicism and he relied more on inspiration than solidly referenced research. Apart from Massignon, Goethe was the other maître à penser who influenced his interpretation of Sufism. He wrote a study on Goethe’s Erlebnis des Ostens (‘Experience of the East’). Goethe’s poetry was a kind of private Bible and Schaeder regarded Goethe’s collection of Oriental pastiches, the West–östlicher Divan, as the foundation document of Orientalism. This enthusiasm for Goethe was something that he passed on to his student Annemarie Schimmel (later to become famous as a saintly and learned interpreter of Sufism).

  From 1931 until 1944 Schaeder was Professor of Oriental Philology and Religious History at Berlin and a leading spokesman of Nazi Orientalism. He wrote a history of Orientalism, which excluded all mention of the contribution of Jewish scholars. Schaeder’s racism pervaded his thinking on Middle Eastern culture too. One German Orientalist remembered Schaeder exclaiming to him, ‘Aha, you work on Islamic philosophy! But there were no Muslim philosophers. They were all infidels.’ Schaeder’s view was that the Semitic Arabs were incapable of that kind of abstract and speculative thought, so that Islamic philosophy was really the creation of Persian and other races. Although the Arabs had translated a lot of Greek materials, they chose only utilitarian subjects to translate and therefore they had failed to inherit the Graeco-Latin humanism that was the special heritage of Western Europe. In the long run, Islamic culture, like all other non-European forms of culture, was doomed to disappear. History was the story of the triumph of the West. After the Second World War Schaeder taught at Göttingen (1946–57), where his ideas were shaped by his literary romanticism and his racism.81 But at the risk of labouring the obvious, this does not mean that all he published on Sufism and Manichaeanism was worthless. On the contrary, his work on Sufism was fundamental and is of lasting value and, as Annemarie Schimmel has pointed out, two of the leading Jewish scholars who fled to the United States – Gustav von Grunebaum and Franz Rosenthal – revered Schaeder.82

  With the coming to power of the Nazis, Germany suffered a haemorrhage of scholarship as Jewish professors and others fled to France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The great tradition of German Orientalism that had begun with Fleischer and Hammer-Purgstall effectively came to an end. On the other hand, the diaspora of scholars in this field effectively re-established Orientalism on a new and more profound basis in Israel, Britain and the United States – and that will be one of the leading themes of the next chapter.

  8

  The All Too Brief Heyday of Orientalism

  Mostly he inclined to the ancient Chinese. He commanded them to step out of the volume and shelf to which they belonged, beckoned to them, offered them chairs, greeted them, threatened them, and according to his taste put his own words into their mouths and defended his own opinions against them until at length he had silenced them.

  Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé (1946)

  THE WAR AND ITS OUTCOME

  The Second World War was the making of academic Orientalism in Britain. Hitherto the study and teaching of Arabic and Islamic studies had depended on a handful of often grand, but rather eccentric figures. In the wake of the war, additional departments were established and enough scholars entered the field for proper scholarly discourse to take place. Historians replaced philologists as the authors of works on Islamic history. Anthropologists, sociologists and geographers also began to make a contribution. Moreover, there was growing emphasis on teaching the modern and spoken versions of Oriental languages. During the Second World War a number of Orientalists had worked in intelligence. Charles Beckingham, the future translator of the fourteenth-century North African globetrotter Ibn Battuta, was at Bletchley Park. Freddie Beeston (on whom see below) was in military intelligence. Bernard Lewis was posted to Istanbul, where he also seems to have worked for intelligence. Others found their linguistic expertise being employed in less glamorous spheres, such as broadcasting and postal censorship. Margoliouth, Hamilton Gibb, Lewis and R. B. Serjeant were among the academic Arabists who made broadcasts for the BBC Arabic Service during the war. Large numbers of troops were posted in Egypt and fought in North Africa and Syria. Never before had there been such a demand for people with a good knowledge of contemporary spoken Arabic. Towards the end of the war, Britain directly or indirectly controlled most of the Middle East from Iran to Morocco. One minor consequence of this was that in London the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was crowded with servicemen, diplomats and administrators taking language and culture courses before setting out for the Far East, India and Sudan. At the same time, MECAS (the Middle East Centre for ArabStudies), which at that time was based in Jerusalem, was also providing British personnel with crash courses in Arabic.1

  The wartime perception by ministers and civil servants of the usefulness of Arabic (something that had no real precedent) carried over into the immediate post-war period. In 1944, dismayed by Britain’s earlier reverses in the Far East, the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, set up a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Scarborough (a former governor of Bombay) ‘to examine the facilities offered by universities and other educational institutions in Great Britain for the study of Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African languages and cultures, to consider what advantage is being taken of these facilities and to formulate recommendations for their improvement’. (Eden, incidentally, was an Arabist and a former student of Margoliouth.) The committee brought out its report in 1946. It found that British Orientalism lagged behind that on the Continent to a disturbing degree and it recommended vastly expanded funding for African, Asian, East Europea
n and Slavonic studies and that this expansion should take place irrespective of student demand. (Those were the days.) The Cambridge Arabist Arberry called it ‘the Charter of Modern Orientalism’.2 In practice, London University’s SOAS and the School of East European and Slavonic Studies got most of what money was immediately available, though Durham and Manchester also benefited. Durham was unusual in paying as much attention as it did to modern Arabic. James Craig, who was a lecturer in Durham in the 1940s and 1950s before going on eventually to become Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, remarked that, ‘In those days Arabic in England was taught exactly like Latin and Greek and at the end of my studies, though I had read a great deal of pre-Islamic poetry and knew all about the jussive mood, I was quite unable to say “good morning” in Arabic.’ Prior to the publication of an English version of Hans Wehr’s Arabisches Wörterbuch in 1960, English students were still using Freytag’s Lexicon Arabico–Latinum. Professor Hamilton Gibb warned Craig against spending time in the Middle East, as ‘it will corrupt your classical’.3

  We also learn from Craig that by 1949 Gibb believed that the role of the Orientalist was coming to an end. After all, he argued, the Arabs had the language advantage when it came to the study of their own literature. All that the upcoming generation of Arabteachers and students needed to do was to master the methodology of their chosen fields. But on the whole, and with certain exceptions, Gibb’s expectations have not been fulfilled. Books published by academics in Arab universities still tend to be somewhat old-fashioned in their methodology and presentation. What is published in the Arab world is often out of date and, as it were, superseded in advance by research published in the West. Stephan Conermann, a professor at the German University of Kiel, after briefly surveying work published by Arabs on Mamluk history in the 1990s and the reception of that work by specialist reviewers in the West, wrote as follows:

  It seems to me that we find ourselves in an Orientalist predicament. On the one hand, considering the postmodern reappraisal of the colonial past, generally it is politically incorrect to make derogatory remarks about the scholarly works of Arabhistorians. As a product of Western socialization, one is not only suspected of judging the ‘natives’ as foolish and incompetent but also of reducing them to the rank of mere objects to be studied. On the other hand, in the age of ongoing globalization the Western scientific approach carries the day. If science stands for a special kind of communication that has been (at least temporarily) established by scholars who dominate this discourse, it can be taken for granted that everyone who wants to be part of the game has to follow its rules. This is of course – in spite of the overall calling for authenticity – the endeavour of the majority of Arabscholars.4 Conermann went on to identify the causes of the perceived problem as being, first, the old-fashioned hierarchical structure of Arab universities which obliged the students to defer to their professors with their dated scholastic agendas, and secondly, the restricted access Arab scholars had to recent Western publications, and consequently and thirdly, their failure to keep up with the methodological debates of recent decades. There is still no Arabic equivalent of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In this respect, among others, there is a contrast to be made with Turkish scholarship. Turkish academics used the European Encyclopaedia as the basis for their own Islam Ansiklopedisi (1940–), the latter offering of course increased coverage of the Turkish heritage. Von Grunebaum, who had a rather downbeat view of the degree to which Arab academics had adapted to modern methodologies, observed that ‘only the Turks among Muslims have successfully adapted to Western historiography’. Albert Hourani argued that part of the problem was that the Arab scholars who were any good went and got jobs in the West.5 Indeed, a striking number of Arabs occupy teaching posts in the United States.

  In order to improve British opportunities and problems in the postwar era, SOAS and other institutions were being given money to promote the teaching of exotic languages with the utilitarian aim of furthering Britain’s military, diplomatic and commercial presence in the world. However, the academic mindset being what it has always been, in practice the subventions from the Foreign Office were often used to fund the study of such recondite matters as the study of pre-Islamic poetry, the origins of Taoist philosophy, the philology of various dead languages of the Caucasus and so forth. Ralph Turner, who had succeeded Denison Ross as Director of SOAS in 1938, was determined that the place should remain ‘a repository of learning’. The reluctance of university Arabists to move away from traditional preoccupations deriving from classical studies, biblical studies and philology meant that the army and the colonial service had to fund its own Arabic institution in the Middle East. Driven out by the growing turbulence in Palestine, MECAS moved from Jerusalem to Shemlan in the Lebanon. There it gained a reputation, which may not have been entirely undeserved, for being a ‘nest of spies’. However, its main aim was certainly to teach language skills to administrators, businessmen and officers who worked publicly and uncontroversially in the Arabic-speaking world. After only a few years, both the universities and MECAS suffered from post-war retrenchment and financial austerity.6 There were simply not enough funds to supply anachronistic imperial dreams and soon what has been called Britain’s ‘moment in the Middle East’ would be coming to an end. In the event, full-blown academic Orientalism was, just like subaltern studies (studies of history from the point of view of inferior groups, in particular studies of colonial rule from the perspective of the colonized), a product of the post-colonial era. From 1954 onwards the massive labour of substantially revising and expanding the Encyclopaedia of Islam got under way. In the early stages Hamilton Gibb, Evariste Lévi-Provençal and Joseph Schacht were its editors. (Lévi-Provençal was a French expert on medieval Spain.) This time around, more Muslim scholars were invited to contribute to the Encyclopaedia, though arguably still not enough.

  GIBB AND ARBERRY

  Although Oxford and Cambridge no longer exercised the sort of monopoly over Arabic and Islamic studies they once had, it was still the case that, until his departure for the United States in 1955, the most influential Arabist in Britain was the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb (1895–1971).7 Gibb, who was born in Alexandria, studied Semitic languages at Edinburgh University. An early reading of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic novel, The Talisman, shaped his future portrait of Saladin, the leader of the Muslim counter-crusade. A committed Christian, Gibb identified strongly with Saladin’s well-advertised piety. In 1937, after previously teaching at SOAS, Gibb was appointed to the professorship at Oxford. Like most Orientalists who thought seriously about Islamic history, Gibb was strongly influenced by Goldziher. However, the influence of the fourteenth-century North African philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun was at least as strong. Ideas derived from both sources came together in Gibb’s brilliant and highly influential (though perhaps misleading) essay of grand synthesis, ‘An Interpretation of Islamic History’ (first published in 1953). Among other things, Ibn Khaldun had argued that regimes that failed to observe the Shar‘ia or holy law were doomed to follow a recurrent cycle of rise and decline. Gibb, like Ibn Khaldun, believed in historical laws. According to one obituary of Gibb, history was for him ‘the search for patterns on the webof human life’.8

  As we have seen, Goldziher had placed heavy emphasis on the ways in which Islamic societies were not static, but evolved over the centuries. However, Goldziher tended to see evolution as a more or less exclusively Sunni phenomenon. In the shadow of Goldziher, Gibb formulated an overarching vision of Islamic history as the long march extending over many generations of the Sunni Muslim community and its repeated successes in warding off threats from Shi‘ism, antinomian Sufism and philosophy as well as from external enemies like the Crusaders and Mongols. For Gibb Shi‘ism was an adversarial cult rather than a (or even the) legitimate Islamic tradition. Gibb, like most historians of his generation and the next, took it for granted that the golden age of Islamic civilization was under the Abbasid c
aliphs (c.750–945). Thereafter, the story of Islam was one of decline. Gibb’s Saladin was austere, frugal and pious as befitted an honorary Scotsman. He was an exceptional figure who rose above the conventional politicking of the age, and sought to reunite the Islamic community. Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. But, though Saladin was a hero, he was a hero manqué. In the late twelfth century he had struggled to recreate the golden moment of the Abbasids and he had failed. In Gibb’s line of thinking, one can detect half-echoes of Ibn Khaldun, who had argued that Saladin was an exceptional figure who had used the jihad to revive the ‘isaba, or social solidarity, of the Muslim community.

  When Gibb came to write a history of Arabic literature, he brought the story to an end in the mid-thirteenth century – despite the fact that he took an unusually serious interest in contemporary Arabic literature. As a Christian moralist, he was inclined to blame Islam’s decline on carnality, greed and mysticism. On the other hand, he did not regard that decline as irreversible. Indeed, he had great faith in the future of Arabic nationalism and democracy, and, as we have seen, he was waiting for Arabscholars to take over from the Orientalists.

  It may be that the interest that Gibb took in modern Arabic literature, thought and politics was something that had been forced upon him by the Second World War. Although he was in many ways an old-fashioned Christian gentleman with romantic ideas about the heroes of the medieval past, he was also keen on an interdisciplinary approach to Islamic studies, including, for example, making use of insights from anthropology. That sort of thing was not popular in the Oxford of the 1950s and it must have been one of the factors that led him to abandon Oxford and go to Harvard where he was given the mission of establishing a Middle East Centre. Because of his unyielding vision as well as his immense prestige, he was successful in the short term, but in the long term the Centre was not a success, as it depended entirely upon his personality and reputation. He was an autocratic figure, who did not suffer contradiction easily (as we shall see when we come to his confrontation with Kedourie). In 1964 he suffered a severe stroke and returned to England to live in retirement outside Oxford. His interests covered almost all aspects of Islamic history and culture, including pre-Islamic poetry, the Islamization of Central Asia, Saladin’s campaigns against the Crusaders, the administrative structure of the Ottoman empire, modern Arabreform movements and contemporary Arabic literature. This breadth of interests was occasioned by demand. There were still so very few Orientalists in Britain that they were called upon to pronounce on a very wide range of issues.