by Robert Irwin
In his introduction to the first volume, Watt wrote that ‘I have endeavoured, while remaining faithful to the standards of Western historical scholarship, to say nothing that would entail rejection of any of the fundamental doctrines of Islam.’ Although his portrayal of the Prophet was extremely sympathetic, it still failed to satisfy many Muslims as it did not accept the Prophet as the ‘seal of prophecy’. A. L Tibawi (on whom see the final chapter) denounced Watt for writing that the Prophet ‘was aware of Jewish teaching’ and that the Qur’an showed dependence on ‘biblical tradition’. For Tibawi and many other Muslims, any account of the Qur’an that suggested that it was anything else than the revealed word of God was deeply offensive. Watt, on the other hand, though he was at pains not to present Muhammad as an impostor, believed that the Qur’an was ‘the product of creative inspiration’, something that arose from the unconscious. It was inevitable that Watt should be attacked as a missionary Orientalist. But he was also criticized by other Western scholars in the field, particularly from the 1970s onwards, for accepting uncritically what the sources told him, except when they told him about something miraculous – for example the angels who fought for Muhammad at the Battle of Badr. Evidently this dot-and-pick approach to the source materials is not entirely satisfactory. John Wansbrough, who pioneered an approach to the history of the first centuries of Islam that was the polar opposite of Watt’s, presented the Battle of Badr as a literary fiction – an account of something that never happened that had been constructed from familiar literary and religious clichés, ‘clientship and loyalty, plunder and pursuit, challenges and instances of single combat’.43
DECONSTRUCTING THE BEGINNINGS
John Wansbrough (1928–2002) was born in Illinois, studied at Harvard, served in the US Marines in South East Asia and worked as a mining engineer in Sweden before arriving at SOAS in 1957.44 I have heard that in his youth he was a friend of William Faulkner and of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His doctorate on Mamluk–Venetian commercial relations, based on Italian archive materials, was supervised by Lewis, but Wansbrough seems to have been more strongly influenced by seminars conducted by the Ottomanist Paul Wittek, and by the latter’s philological methodology. Study of language was the key to the underlying truths of history. In 1960 Wansbrough joined the history department and started to learn Arabic. In 1967 he switched to teaching Arabic in the Department of the Near and Middle East.
A decade later he published two devastatingly original and controversial books, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978). Noting that none of the Arabic sources for the life of Muhammad are contemporary ones, Wansbrough argued that the final text of the Qur’an was put together some two hundred years after its supposed revelation. Moreover, much of that text was generated by two centuries of confessional polemic against Christians and Jews. Even so, there was a strong Jewish rabbinic influence on the Qur’an. As for the details of the life of the Prophet, these were not the product of documentary reporting, but were rather topoi (stock literary or rhetorical themes) that had been used to construct a salvation history, that is to say ‘the history of God’s plan for mankind’. The deeds and sayings of the Prophet were modelled on Old Testament prototypes. Rather than being suddenly revealed in Arabia, Islam evolved elsewhere in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. The Qur’an, Qur’an commentaries and the earliest lives of the Prophet are not straightforward historical sources and were never intended to be.
Wansbrough admired the scholarship and methodological boldness of Goldziher and Schacht, but he went much further than his masters in his sweeping scepticism. His arguments were based on close study of the key texts. Although he demolished the traditional narrative about the early history of Islam, he refrained from speculating about the real events behind the unreliable sources. In a later short publication, Res Ipsa Loquitur: History and Mimesis (1987), he stated that ‘bereft of archaeological witness and hardly attested in pre-Islamic Arabic or external sources, the seventh-century Hijaz owes its historiographical existence almost entirely to the creative endeavour of Muslim and Orientalist scholarship’. It is worth noting that he took a similarly hypercritical view of the Old and New Testament narrative traditions and that he regarded Islam as being, like Judaism and Christianity, a valid expression of the monotheistic tradition.
Although some Muslims attacked Wansbrough’s conclusions, the obscurity of his prose, which was densely and allusively argued, with frequent recourse to Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and German, presented a difficult target. Wansbrough was also criticized by many Western Orientalists who found such extreme scepticism hard to stomach and who could not seriously contemplate such a drastic revision of the historical narrative. A leading American historian of the medieval Near East, R. Stephen Humphreys, wrote as follows: ‘It is perhaps tempting to think of him as one of those scholars whose premises and conclusions are drastically wrongheaded, but whose argumentation is brilliant and filled with intriguing perspectives.’45
Wansbrough, despite his intimidating presence, was an inspiring teacher. He was easily bored and never one to suffer fools gladly. I remember his telling me back in the 1970s that he believed in changing subjects completely every seven years. Having delivered his two bombshells, he did not bother to defend and elaborate upon his controversial conclusions, but instead moved on to research in Hebrew and Ugaritic. He became Professor of Semitic Studies in 1984 and left SOAS in 1992. He retired to a chateau in south-western France where he took to writing (unpublished) novels. However, one Kafkaesque short story, ‘Let Not the Lord Speak’, had previously been published in Encounter in 1980.
Other scholars have taken a deconstructive approach to the history of Islam that is broadly similar to that espoused by Wansbrough, though almost none of them has followed him in his extreme agnosticism. In Hagarism (1977), Michael Cook and Patricia Crone used non-Arabic sources to present a history of the first century, in which the initial Arabconquest of the Middle East was a purely military one and in which the leading features of Islam were slowly elaborated outside the Arabian peninsula. They also stressed the influence of Samaritan Jewish doctrines and practices on early Islam. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), Patricia Crone raised great doubts about the reliability of the earliest Arabic sources on Islam. In Germany, Albrecht Noth (1938–99) who started off working on medieval European history, brought source-critical techniques to the study of early Arabic sources and published Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamischer Geschichtsüberlieferung (1973). In this book, he demolished Wellhausen’s theory regarding the regional and thematic compilation of history. Noth’s book was a guide on how to work with the difficult early sources. It took an extremely sceptical approach to those sources and showed how the same topoi cropped up again and again in various guises. However, the deconstructive approaches of Noth, Wansbrough, Cook, Crone and others remain extremely controversial and continue to be opposed by large numbers of Orientalists working in the same field. Because of the possible offence to Muslim susceptibilities, Western scholars who specialize in the early history of Islam have to be extremely careful what they say and some of them have developed subtle forms of double-speak when discussing contentious matters.
ISRAEL, A LEADING CENTRE OF ARABIC STUDIES
The deconstructive work done on early Arabic sources has been echoed by work done by archaeologists in Israel. There J. Koren and Y. D. Nevo have deduced that there was never one great Arabconquest of the Byzantine province of Syria.46 Rather the Arabs entered Syria as raiders and settlers over a long period of time and by the late sixth century the Byzantines had already withdrawn their defence forces from almost all of Syria south of Antioch. More generally, Israeli academics have made an enormous contribution to Orientalist scholarship in the twentieth century.47 In Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and elsewhere the standards of research and teaching of Arabic and Islamic studies a
re remarkable. For obvious reasons, Israel has a use for trained Arabists and some of them do important work for the army and Mossad while on national service. Many of Israel’s leading Orientalists came to Israel as refugees from the rise of Nazism and thus the old German tradition of Orientalist scholarship has been perpetuated in modern Israel. Israeli Arabists have combined the Germanic tradition of philological exactitude with the rabbinic tradition of discriminating exegesis and interpretation.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded in 1925 and Leo Ary Mayer (1895–1959), who arrived in Palestine in 1921 from Austrian Poland, went on to become Director of the School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem and a great specialist on Islamic art and artefacts. David Ayalon (who died in 1998) was born in Haifa in 1914 and, after compiling the standard Arabic–Hebrew dictionary, moved on to become one of the world’s greatest experts on the history of medieval Egypt and Syria.48 Eliyahu Ashtor, who left Austria in 1938, was similarly a great expert on medieval Egypt and Syria, though he chose to concentrate on economic and social issues.49 Gabriel Baer fled Germany in 1933 and in Israel became an authority on the economic history of the Ottomans.
Unlike Arab academics working in the same area, Israeli Orientalists were and are comparatively well funded and had access to good library resources. The Israelis also tended to publish in English. Israeli Arabists mostly worked on such neutral topics as pre-Islamic poetry, the novels of NaguibMahfouz and Sufi texts. But in some cases, one can detect a latent polemical intent. Emmanuel Sivan, Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who had started out by doing brilliant work on the Muslim response to the Crusades (published as L’Islam et la Croisade in 1968), later produced (wellresearched) articles on such topics as propagandistic and inaccurate histories of the Crusades produced by Arab historians, the medieval roots of Islamic terrorism and Arabcritics of Edward Said.50
Martin Kramer, a former student of Bernard Lewis, who is based at the Moshe Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv, published Ivory Towers on Sand in 2001.51 In this short polemic against the corruption of American Orientalism, he scored some palpable hits. Among other things, he denounced the fashion in recent decades for ‘Area Studies’, as opposed to more traditional ways of studying the Orient and Africa. He mounted a particularly damaging attack on John L. Esposito, an academic based at Georgetown University, who has produced a string of books presenting an apologetic, even Polyannaish version of Islam that belittles the prospect of any threat from Islamic fundamentalism or Arabterrorism. Yet Kramer’s depiction of a craven, politically correct, tacitly anti-Semitic, Orientalist academic establishment in the United States is overdrawn. More Americans read Lewis than Esposito.
A couple of quite exceptional Jewish scholars who worked outside Israel must be mentioned. Paul Kraus (1904–44) grew up in Prague and then studied at the University of Berlin, but fled Germany in 1933.52 He spent time in Paris, where he impressed many with his brilliance, though he was a melancholy eccentric and his genius was close to madness. The prominent Parisian intellectual and expert on Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, commented: ‘I see a lot of Kraus and thanks to him I know nothing of Islam. That’s progress.’ Then Massignon (whose anti-Semitism was not absolutely consistent and who had been asked by Becker to look after leading Jewish scholars on the run) found Kraus a jobin Cairo. His great work, Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, published in Cairo, is an esoteric work in respect of both content and presentation, but is a wonderful, amazing thing to read, as it ranges widely and eruditely over early Islamic occultism. Kraus argued (and surely rightly) that the suspiciously prolific Jabir was not an individual alchemist who lived in the eighth century, but rather the name concealed an esoteric movement in the ninth or tenth century. The Jabirian corpus related to Qarmatian and Isma‘ili propaganda. Unfortunately, he moved on from the study of alchemy to develop a daft theory of Semitic metrics. In October 1944 Albert Hourani and his brother found Kraus’s body hanging in the bathroom of his Cairo flat. Though there were rumours that this was a political murder, it was probably suicide.
Samuel Stern inherited his interest in Isma‘ilis from his friendship with Kraus. Stern was born in 1920 and grew up in Budapest.53 He went to Israel in 1939 and studied in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before going on to work in Oxford under Gibb. He became a research fellow at All Souls in 1958. His most important work was on the relationship of Arabic and Christian European poetry in Andalusia and he made major discoveries in this field, but he was also an expert on diplomatics. He died in 1969.
GERMANY AFTER THE DIASPORA
It must be obvious that American, Israeli and, to a lesser extent, British Orientalism owed an enormous amount to scholars who had trained in Germany or Austria. From the 1930s onwards German Orientalism went into a marked decline. Brockelmann and Schaeder were among the few major figures to continue to teach and research during the Nazi period. Schaeder’s star pupil, Annemarie Schimmel (1922–2003), was a fabulously prolific author and translator.54 She learnt Arabic at the age of fifteen and became comfortable not only in Arabic, but also in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Sindhi, as well as most of the useful European languages. (In an idle moment she also translated one of my novels into German.) Schaeder taught her to love Goethe and Goethe’s pastiches of the medieval Persian poet, Hafiz of Shiraz. Early on in her academic career, she also came under the influence of Massignon. She wrote widely on Islamic matters, but it was on Sufism that she concentrated. Though she was a devout Lutheran, there seems to have been a decidedly Sufic flavour to her Christianity. Apart from Sufism, she made herself an expert on the Persian and Urdu poetry of the Indian poet and thinker, Muhammad Iqbal (1873?–1938). Her work in these fields made her an intellectual heroine to many Turks, Pakistanis and Indian Muslims. She was a professor in Bonn and Harvard. She had an amazing memory and, since she needed no notes, she usually lectured with her eyes shut.
Schimmel was exceptional in Germany for the numerous popularizing accounts of Islamic matters that she published. Traditionally German scholars have been experts in editing texts. But philology is now out of fashion and the public is hungry for big ideas. German readers have usually gone to translations of books by more accessible Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis for more general accounts of Islam. Of course much important work has been done and continues to be done in Germany. Noth’s deconstructive work on the early history of Islam has already been mentioned. Hans Wehr’s dictionary of modern written Arabic, the Arabisches Wörterbuch (1952), has also been mentioned. Another great German lexicographer, Manfred Ullmann at Tübingen, was also an expert on the history of science and medicine. Josef van Ess, an expert on early Islamic theology, and Heinz Halm, a historian of Fatimid Egypt, are also at Tü bingen. Hans Robert Roemer (Fribourg) researched and wrote on medieval Egyptian history. His brilliant student Ulrich Haarmann (1942–99) became professor at Kiel and before his untimely death made himself one of the foremost historians of medieval Egypt, inspiring a whole generation of historians in this field.55 Stefan Wild has written important studies of medieval and modern Arabic literature. Ulrich Marzolph at Göttingen studies Arabfolk literature and humour. Fribourg and Bonn are leading centres for the study of the modern Middle East.56 The German contribution to recent Islamic studies has certainly been respectable, but the big battalions are now in the United States (where indeed several of the above-mentioned scholars spent part of their careers). These days in the United States thousands of Islamicists and Arabists attend the annual MESA conferences. Even so, recent events in the Middle East suggest that the United States does not possess nearly enough experts on Arabmatters.
ENDING UP
I have not attempted to cover in any sustained fashion developments in the last three decades or so. That would involve the risk of offending even more people than I already have. Besides, it is difficult to get recent developments into perspective. The amateur Orientalists who used to dominate such bodies as the Royal Asiatic
Society are disappearing. That Society’s meetings used to be attended by colonial administrators, Indian army officers and managers of rubber plantations, some of whom took up the study of, say, pre-Islamic poetry or Indonesian shadow theatre, but of course that generation is all but extinct now and the Society’s meetings are dominated by a dwindling band of academics. As for universities, the pressure to publish has been pushed to absurd lengths. This is especially true of British scholars who, at regular intervals, come up for judgement by the Research Assessment Exercise. In many ways the field, or rather fields, are better organized and better supplied with resources. MESA in the United States and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) in the United Kingdom bring Middle East experts together and act as lobbying organizations. But one reason Arabists come together is that their field is under threat, especially in Britain where posts are frequently left unfilled and one department after another is closed down. (Just recently Durham abandoned the teaching of Arabic to undergraduates and the Thomas Adams Chair in Arabic at Cambridge is currently in abeyance.) Area Studies, Development Studies and Anthropology departments flourish at the expense of more traditional fields of Orientalism.
In the 1950s and 1960s SOAS’s Middle Eastern History section was a world leader, but more recently foreign scholars have told me that in that field and related ones SOAS is living on its past reputation. As we have already noted, many of the best British brains in the discipline have been lured to the United States. Arabic and Middle Eastern history suffer from budgetary constraints and cuts in resources like almost all departments in all universities, but other factors count against the Arabists. One is the current government’s extremely narrow view of the economic value of university education. Another factor is the malign influence of Said’s Orientalism, which has been surprisingly effective in discrediting and demoralizing an entire tradition of scholarship. Another dismal consequence of polemics like Orientalism is that some university departments of Arabic or Middle Eastern history appear to have an unavowed policy of excluding Jews from serious consideration as candidates for jobs in those departments.
