For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  FURTHER PROBLEMS WITH ORIENTALISM

  Sir William Jones and then the German Sanskritists established the undoubted relationship between Sanskrit and various Indo-European languages. Today no serious linguist doubts that Sanskrit, Latin, German and Greek all derive ultimately from a common ancestor. But, as we have seen, Said refused to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an Indo-Aryan family of languages and the German Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel was denounced by him for persisting in his belief ‘that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American or African languages’.27 Said seemed to regard the establishment of the Indo-Aryan family of languages as a kind of clubthat had set up arbitrary rules in order to exclude the ‘wog’ tongue, Arabic. More generally, Said appeared to hate any kind of taxonomy, regarding attempts to classify languages, cultures or anything else as tools for the conquest and enslavement of the Third World. Taxonomy is one of the besetting sins of the West. On the other hand, one of his own favourite devices was to list strings of vastly disparate figures and, in so doing, briskly and cursorily tar the listed line-up with the same brush.

  Said was proud to be a secular humanist. Although he took it upon himself to defend Islam in Orientalism, Covering Islam (1981) and other writings, he does not seem to have liked the religion very much. In After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) Said wrote as follows: ‘Lift off the veneer of religious cant – which speaks of the “best and noblest in the Judaic, Christian, or Muslim tradition,” in perfectly interchangeable phrases – and a seething cauldron of outrageous fables is revealed, seething with several bestiaries, streams of blood and innumerable corpses.’28 Since he hated religion in all its forms, he was unable to accept that Islam has really been important in determining the shape of Arabculture, in the same way that Christianity has been important in the shaping of Europe and America. Said seemed to believe that when people were talking about religion, they were really talking about something else. Of course, as we have seen, certain Orientalists did go too far in talking about the Islamic city, the Islamic mind and so forth. In the nineteenth century, religion played such a large part in shaping Western culture (think of Matthew Arnold, Ernest Renan, Fyodor Dostoevsky and so many others) that some Orientalists may have overstressed the importance of religion in Middle Eastern culture and society. But Islam has been and remains a dominant feature in Middle Eastern life, affecting or at times even determining law, the educational curriculum, the rhythm of the working week, women’s dress and other matters in the region. Again, because of his anti-religious prejudice, Said failed properly to engage with the Christian motivations of the majority of pre-twentiethcentury Orientalists, among them Ricoldo da Monte Croce, Postel, Pococke and Muir.

  Though he detested all Orientalism, some of it was less detestable than the rest. Said claimed that the English tradition was more scientific and impersonal while the French was more aesthetic. He could be seen as guilty of racial stereotyping here, but, in any case, it does not strike me as particularly true. It was after all the French who produced the Bibliothèque orientale and the Description de l’Egypte. According to Said, the ‘official genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt’.29 But why then did he not actually discuss the works of Gobineau and Humboldt? Said noted that Renan and Gobineau shared a common Orientalist and philological perspective and that Renan took ideas from Gobineau for his Histoire générale, but he does not say what these ideas were. The conviction grows that he had never actually read Gobineau or Humboldt. And his acquaintance with Renan was of the slightest. The names of Renan and Gobineau come up many times in the book, but their ideas are not analysed or criticized in any detail. Their importance is something that is taken as a given, rather than as something that badly needs to be proved. As we have seen, the status of both Renan and Gobineau as Orientalists is somewhat marginal.

  Said libelled generations of scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good faith. He accused de Sacy of doctoring texts.30 But he provided no evidence for this nor did he suggest why he should have done so. Lane was denounced for all sorts of things, including denying himself the sensual enjoyments of domestic life in order to preserve his superiority as a Western observer, but in fact, in his third period of residence in Egypt, he did marry a freed slave of Greek origin.31

  Karl Marx was not an academic Orientalist, nor a desert adventurer, nor an imperialist proconsul. Although there was no compelling reason to include him in a book on Orientalism, Marx did feature and his writings were travestied. A passage from Marx was quoted (selectively) in which he argued that the Indian villagers would suffer as a result of the transformation of their society by British colonialism, but that, though their sufferings might arouse compassion in Western breasts, these sufferings were necessary if economic and social progress was to be achieved in India. Typically, Said first conceded that Marx did feel some compassion for the Oriental peasant and then denied that he did. The numbing of Marx’s capacity to feel compassion was then attributed to the grip Goethe’s West–östlicher Divan held over his imagination, and to a racialist essentialism similar to that found in Renan’s writings. Thus, in the end, ‘the Romantic Orientalist vision’ won out over Marx’s humanity.32 Surely only the most literary-minded academic will find this sort of interpretation satisfactory? Why do we not find here some discussion of the Asiatic mode of production, Oriental despotism and Marx’s belief that there was no private property in land in the East? For it was these elements – they could be termed idées reçues – that came to form Marx’s vision of the Orient. It is of course true that Marx was the victim of Western generalizations about the Orient, but these were generalizations about types of government and land tenure, not born out of a romantic sentiment that the dark-skinned do not feel as much pain as the white-skinned. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm has summarized Marx’s approach to the Raj as follows: ‘Like the European capitalist class, British rule in India was its own grave-digger. There is nothing particularly “Orientalistic” about this explanation.’33

  Writing about individualist adventurers and Middle Eastern experts, Said observed: ‘they substituted a sort of elaboration of latent Orientalism, which was easily available to them in the imperial culture of their epoch. Their scholarly frame of reference, such as it was, was fashioned by people like William Muir, Anthony Bevan, D. S. Margoliouth, Charles Lyall, E. G. Browne, R. A. Nicholson, Guy le Strange, E. D. Ross and Thomas Arnold, who also followed directly in the line of descent from Lane.’34 This is the only reference to Edward Granville Browne in the whole book. As we have seen, Browne campaigned tirelessly for Persian independence and democracy. He was a bane of the British Parliament and Foreign Office. What on earth is he doing in this sneery list? And in what sense is he in the direct line of descent from Lane? Browne’s A Year Among the Persians is, like Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, set in the Middle East, but in other respects it is hard to imagine two more different books.

  ‘None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an Oriental as a reader,’ wrote Said in a later article.35 So why on earth did Hamilton Gibb write articles in Arabic? Why does Said not discuss Gibb’s ‘Khawatir fi-Adab al-Arabi’ (‘Reflections on Arabic Literature’)? What about all the Western contributors to Muslim World and Islamic Culture, both periodicals with a largely Muslim Indian readership? And what about Lewis’s evident pride in his being translated into Arabic, Persian and Turkish? Said’s treatment of Gibb was particularly harsh. He was presented by Said as a typical British Orientalist. In contrast to Massignon, who was ‘irremediably the outsider’, Gibb was presented as an institutional figure. Lucky old Massignon, not only ‘irremediably an outsider figure’, but also counsellor of Marshal Lyautey, head of the Near East section of the Ministry of Information during the Second W
orld War, Director of the elite Ecole pratique des hautes études, member of the Académie arabe du Caire, President of the Institut d’études iraniennes, founder of the Comité Chrétien d’entente France Islam, founder of the Comité France Maghreband member of the Commission des Musées Nationaux.

  Of course Said, the professor at Columbia and one-time president of the MLA (Modern Language Association), was also an outsider figure. Gibb, by contrast, was racially stereotyped by him as a typical British Orientalist and the product of ‘an academic-research consensus or paradigm’.36 But when Gibb was a young man there were so few Arabists in Britain that it is hard to imagine how they could have generated any sort of academic consensus or paradigm. Come to that, what would the consensus have been about? Muslim invasions of Central Asia? Saladin? Sunni Islam? Modern Arabic literature? Ibn Battuta (the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller)? One would not guess from Said’s presentation of Gibb as an establishment hack that Gibb repeatedly denounced Zionism and the British betrayal of undertakings made to the Arabs and that he was also an enthusiastic supporter of Arabnationalism and of Sunni Islam. (Most of these things had made Gibb a target of Kedourie’s writings.)

  It may be that in Said’s fantasy world Gibb stood in for the headmaster of Victoria College, Cairo. Said much preferred the charismatic, cranky, mystical, chauvinist Frenchman Louis Massignon. Massignon was more spiritual than Gibb and also more aesthetic. Not only did Said fail to note Massignon’s anti-Semitism, he also failed to remark on his decidedly patronizing attitude towards Arabs as well as his debt to Renan in that respect. Said argued that Massignon’s empathy for the Arabs was the result of his genius. (So one gets the impression that one had to be very clever indeed to like Arabs.) The Syrian critic Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm remarked on Said’s near deification of Massignon: ‘Now the question to which I have no ready answer is, how can the most acute and versatile critic of Orientalism praise so highly an Orientalist who obviously subscribed to the entire apparatus of Orientalism’s discredited dogmas?’37 Just as Gibb was presented as representative of British Orientalism (but surely not a representative of his fiercest critic, Kedourie), so Massignon was presented as representative of French Orientalism. But it is hard to understand how Massignon represented the kind of Orientalism practised by the atheist Marxists, Rodinson and Cahen – or, for that matter, by André Raymond (a leading historian of pre-modern Cairo) and Jacques Berque.

  Even so, it must be conceded that Said has perhaps as much as half a point, for it is evident from the foregoing chapters that not all Orientalists did write in good faith. However, once one has identified an intellectual agenda on the part of a scholar, this does not absolve one from the task of evaluating that scholar’s evidence and conclusions. To take one example among many, Lammens certainly had a militantly Catholic agenda and the intensity with which he scrutinized the sources for the early history of Islam was in large degree motivated by his hostility towards that religion, but that does not in itself invalidate all his findings about those sources.

  I have confined my discussion of Orientalism mostly to its (mis)treatment of academic Orientalists, as I think it is muddling and misleading to jumble them up together with poets, proconsuls and explorers as if they had very much in common.

  In Orientalism Clifford Geertz had been highly praised as an excellent example of an anthropologist who had dispensed with the idées reçues of Orientalism and ‘whose interest in Islam is discrete and concrete enough to be animated by the specific societies and problems he studies and not by the rituals, preconceptions, and doctrines of Orientalism’.38 But five years later, in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Said wrote of the ‘standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory clichés about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz’.39 Had Geertz’s methodology changed in those five years? Not really. What had changed was that Geertz had written critically of Said’s Covering Islam in the New York Review of Books in 1982, where he had referred to Said’s ‘easy way with the evidence’ and his ‘tone of high moral panic’ and concluded that the book left ‘a bad taste in the mind’.40

  THE RECEPTION OF ORIENTALISM

  Early reviews of Orientalism were mostly hostile. Even those praised by Said, such as Hourani, Watt, Berque and Rodinson, were highly critical.41 But slowly the book acquired a cult status, particularly among people who were not Orientalists and who had no special knowledge of the field. Though specialists in the field listed its errors and misrepresentations, subsequent editions of the book were published with no corrections or retractions whatsoever. Criticisms of the book by Western Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis or Donald Little may be dismissed as the defensive posturing of the Orientalists’ ‘guild’. But some of the book’s hardest critics were Arabs. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm’s bafflement regarding Said’s adulation of Massignon, as well as his doubts about the chronology of Orientalism offered by Said, have already been mentioned. More generally, al-‘Azm in his brilliant article ‘Orientalism in Reverse’ agreed with Said on the self-righteousness of Orientalists and their tendency to create ‘an ontological rift’ between East and West, but he attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and for grotesquely misrepresenting Islam. Said was wrong to trace Orientalism’s origins back to Homer and Dante, as that disguised the fact that it was essentially a modern phenomenon. Al-‘Azm suggested that for Said representation seemed more real than reality and that his hostility to the schematization and codification of knowledge was irrational. Nadim al-Bitar, a Lebanese Muslim, denounced Said for wildly over-generalizing about the nature of Orientalism, as well as grotesquely exaggerating the prevalence of racism in Western intellectual circles.42 Arabcritics were particularly offended by Said’s dismissal of Arab cultural critiques as ‘secondorder’ analyses and contemporary Arabthought as a shallow reflection of Western thinking.

  In ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist teacher of English, was scathing about Said’s old-fashioned, Western-style humanism, as well as his muddled use of Derrida’s ideas about identity and difference. He accused Said of trying ‘to exploit three quite different definitions of Orientalism’, but it was Said’s allegiance to Foucault that got him into the worst muddles, as Said accused Orientalists of wilfully misrepresenting objective reality, whereas Foucault denied the possibility of an objective reality.43 The British Muslim Ziauddin Sardar criticized Said for his location in a Western academy and for narrowness of scope. As Sardar pointed out, Islam is not confined to the Middle East and indeed most Muslims are found outside that region. He also criticized Said for not acknowledging his predecessors’ work in the field. Sardar shared the Marxists’ hostility towards Said’s ‘humanism’, which, he claimed, came from the same culture that produced Orientalism, imperialism and racism. Sardar had also noticed that a later book by Said, The Question of Palestine, revealed a strong dislike of Islam.44

  Others, however, took a much more favourable view of Orientalism and in the long run the book set a trend for books that proposed to ‘negotiate the other’, ‘reinvent alterity’ and suchlike enterprises. Said was canonized by the Western intelligentsia and acclaimed as a leading proponent of post-colonial studies; there was a tendency to associate him with such figures as Homi Bhaba, the post-colonial theorist, and Gayatri Spivak, the Bengali cultural-literary critic. This school of writing has developed its own distinctive prose style. Consider, for example, this gem from Spivak: ‘The rememoration of the “present” as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular)place, the metropolitan project that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossible cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator.’45

  Orientalism fostered a plethora of narratives of oppression, and its arguments fed into subaltern studies. (In subaltern studies the voices of the colonized are given preference over those of the colonialists.) In Orientalism and the later Culture and Imperialism Said presented himself as engaged in a contestatory enterprise: this p
articular literary critic was on the front line in the struggle against post-colonial Western hegemony. But what had he achieved? Have Orientalists changed their working practices? They have not, as Said made no positive suggestions as to how they should change those practices and, indeed, at several points he seemed to be suggesting that it was impossible to change. Were imperialists disturbed by Said’s book? It seems not. Sheldon Pollock put his finger on the problem here: ‘Why, in other words, should central apparatuses of empire so hospitably embrace those who seek to contest it, and why is it that the empire should all the while be so thoroughly unconcerned? It may be a tired and tiresome issue (a reprise of the 1960s hit “Repressive Desublimation”), but late capitalism’s blithe insouciance towards its unmaskers, its apparently successful domestication of anti-imperialist scholarship and its commodification of oppositional theory are hard to ignore and certainly give pause to those who seriously envision some role for critique in the project of progressive change.’46

  LEWIS AND GELLNER VERSUS SAID

  Unsurprisingly the most magisterial of the responses to Orientalism came from Bernard Lewis. ‘The Question of Orientalism’ was belatedly published in the New York Review of Books (24 June 1982). Lewis eloquently defended old-fashioned scholarship and concluded his defence as follows:

  The most important question – least mentioned by the current wave of critics – is that of the scholarly merits, indeed scholarly validity, of Orientalist findings. Prudently, the anti-Orientalists hardly touch on this question and indeed give very little attention to the scholarly writings of the scholars whose putative attitudes, motives, and purposes form the theme of their campaign. Scholarly criticism of Orientalist scholarship is a legitimate and indeed a necessary, inherent part of the process. Fortunately, it is going on all the time – not a criticism of Orientalism, which would be meaningless, but a criticism of the research and results of individual scholars or schools of scholars. The most rigorous and penetrating critique of Orientalist, as of any other scholarship has always been and will remain that of their fellow-scholars, especially, though not exclusively, those working in the same field.