by Robert Irwin
10
Enemies of Orientalism
If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.
Edward Gibbon’s account in The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire of how the Caliph Umar allegedly
had the library of Alexandria burnt in 641, but both
remark and fire are entirely apocryphal. The library
had been destroyed long before the coming of Islam.
KURD ‘ALI
The refusal of most Orientalists to take Islam at its own valuation as a revelation from the Divine has caused offence to many Muslims. The sheer degree of hatred with which Western culture in general and Orientalism in particular have been regarded in some Muslim circles is not widely understood. Mullahs and ‘ulamá’ (Muslim religious scholars) have become accustomed over the centuries to engaging in polemic with Christian and Jewish religious scholars, and it is perhaps because of this that they often find it difficult to accept that Orientalist reinterpretations of such matters as the career of the Prophet or the revelation of the Qur’an are not always motivated by Christian or Jewish confessional rivalry with Islam.
Kurd ‘Ali (1876–1953), a historian and journalist, twice became Minister of Education in Syria.1 He was also one of the first to challenge the intellectual hegemony of the Orientalists. In 1931 he had attended an international conference of Orientalists held at Leiden and was horrified by what he saw as an outrageous misrepresentation of Islam on the part of Western scholars. His al-Islam wa al-Hadara al-‘Arabiyya (‘Islam and Arabic Civilization’) (2 volumes, 1934–6) sought to explain and correct the misconceptions of the Orientalists. According to Kurd ‘Ali, the main reason that the Orientalists fell into error was their belief that Christianity was superior to Islam. Moreover, the West’s belittlement of Arab achievements was essentially a form of Shu‘ubiyya. That is to say that it was a modern European revival of the cultural and literary movement that had flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries in which Persians, Nabataeans and others disparaged the language and culture of the Arabs, while vaunting their own histories and achievements. Kurd ‘Ali denounced the triumphalism of the West and declared the European conquest of America to be a great crime. Like the nineteenth-century Islamic philosopher and political activist al-Afghani, he tried to rebut Ernest Renan’s thesis that the Arabs, because of their Semitic mindset, were innately anti-scientific. Kurd ‘Ali suggested that the only Arabs that Renan had ever met were Syrian fishermen and, on that basis, he had decided that Arabs were innately anti-science. Even so, Kurd ‘Ali decided that Renan was by no means all bad, as he had once expressed the wish to be a Muslim praying in a mosque.
Kurd ‘Ali polemicized against Christian missionaries and Jesuit scholars such as Père Lammens, whom he characterized as the ‘Peter the Hermit of Orientalism’. As we have seen, Kurd ‘Ali’s hostility was entirely understandable, as most of what Lammens wrote was indeed driven by a ferocious and religiously motivated hostility towards Islam. Though Kurd ‘Ali resented most of what the Orientalists had written about his culture, he tended to defend that culture and to refute hostile portrayals of the Qur’an, polygamy, Arabcultural achievements and so on by quoting more positive judgements by other Westerners. He was especially fond of quoting from Gustave Le Bon’s favourable portrait of Islam in the popularizing history, La Civilisation des Arabes (1884). In this book, the Arab mind was presented as having been shaped by its cultural achievements. Le Bon was an unscholarly hack writer who knew no Arabic, but Kurd ‘Ali thought that this was of less importance than Le Bon’s positive attitude towards Islam and Arabs.2 Though Le Bon was a racist, he seemed to be a pro-Arabracist, but what Kurd ‘Ali and other Muslim enthusiasts for Le Bon’s work failed to spot was that, though he had written enthusiastically about the achievements of Arab civilization, those achievements were all in the past, and Le Bon believed that Arab culture was incapable of any further development. (This line of reasoning was to have a great impact on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Arabhistorians of Islamic civilization, who tended to present that civilization as a glory that was past.) Unlike many who came after him, Kurd ‘Ali was also impressed by the Encyclopaedia of Islam, as well as by Western scholarly editions of the medieval biographical dictionaries of Ibn Hajar and al-Safadi.
A GENIUS CAUGHT BETWEEN TWOWORLDS
A more conspiratorial view of Orientalism was put forward by a leading Iranian intellectual, Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–69).3 Al-i Ahmad was a stylish, witty, vigorous novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He was also a friend of the great Iranian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, and a brilliant commentator on Hedayat’s extraordinary novel, The Blind Owl. Though Al-i Ahmad flirted with communism, he became disillusioned with it and with life in general. His most curious work, Gharbzadegi (later translated as Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, 1984), circulated as an underground publication from 1962. Gharbzadegi can be (awkwardly) translated as ‘Occidentosis’, ‘Euromania’, ‘West-toxification’ or ‘West-struckness’. ‘I speak of “Occidentosis” as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree.’4 Al-i Ahmad’s angry polemic could never have been published in the Shah’s Iran, for, though he attacked the West, his denunciation of the Shah’s regime was no less fervent, as he regarded both the modernization policies and the extravagant imports of the imperial Pahlavi family as major factors behind the pernicious Westernization of Iran. Gharbzadegi presented history as a millennial conflict between the West on the one hand and Iran and the rest of the world on the other. Everything of importance that happened in Iran and in the world at large was masterminded by the West: ‘One must see what would-be corporate colonists and what supportive governments are secretly plotting, under cover of every riot, coup d’état, or uprising in Zanzibar, Syria or Uruguay.’5 In Iran’s case it was oil that attracted the predatory interest of Britain and other powers.
Politics apart, Al-i Ahmad was disturbed by what he saw happening to Iranian culture. Occidentosis, an undiscriminating enthusiasm for all things Western, had reduced the Iranians to a people who had lost their tradition and historical continuity, ‘but having only what the machine brings them’. He denounced the Orientalists’ treatment of Asians as if they were raw material for a laboratory: ‘This explains why foremost among all the encyclopaedias written in the West is the Encyclopaedia of Islam. We remain asleep, but the Westerner has carried us off to the laboratory in this encyclopaedia.’6 Elsewhere in Gharbzadegi, he lamented that his fellow citizens had become ‘the playthings of orientalists’.7 The practice of citing books by Westerners as if they were absolutely authoritative seemed to him pretty stupid: ‘Even when he [the Oriental] wants to learn about the East, he resorts to Western sources. It is for this reason that orientalism (almost certainly a parasite growing on the root of imperialism) dominates thought and opinion in the occidentotic nations.’8 The West had become a repository of plundered relics and manuscripts from the East. The Orientalist conspiracy ran in tandem with the triumph of Western technology, for ‘the Orientalist hums a pretty Iranian tune, while his colleague sells machine parts’. Even Western intellectuals were disturbed by the mechanization of the spirit and Al-i Ahmad, cultured polyglot that he was, cited Camus’s The Plague, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal in support of this contention.
Gharbzadegi is an original and passionate piece of writing and as such an appealing read. Al-i Ahmad was incapable of being dull. He asked far more questions than he could answer and there were painful ambiguities in his anti-Western polemic, for even in Gharbzadegi he had used Western sources to support his arguments. While he gave Islam credit for being that element in Iranian culture that was least infected by Occidentosis, he still attacked the mullahs for their rigi
dity, hypocrisy and superstition. While he loathed machines and conferred an apocalyptic significance on mechanization, he still feared that the triumph of mechanization might be inevitable.
Al-i Ahmad was a bon viveur who was steeped in Western culture. He drank plenty and rarely said his prayers. When he went on the haj pilgrimage, he raged against his fellow pilgrims and against the Saudi authorities. At first sight he seems an unlikely figure to be a harbinger of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Yet it is so, for his treatise against West-toxification was read by and crucially influenced ‘Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as other key spiritual authorities in the holy city of Qum. Later Khomeini would denounce Orientalists in terms similar to Al-i Ahmad’s: ‘They sent missionaries into Muslim cities, and there found accomplices within the universities and various information or publication centres, mobilized their Orientalist scholars in the service of imperialism – all of that only so as to distort Islamic truths.’9 As far as Khomeini and his followers were concerned, the West was only gathering knowledge about Iran in order to control it.
MUSLIM CONVERTS CRITICIZE ORIENTALISM
The influence of Al-i Ahmad’s critique of Orientalism was felt only in Iran. A separate tradition of anti-Orientalism developed in the Arab-speaking world and non-Arab converts to Islam played a significant part in its development. Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) was chiefly famous in his lifetime for his books Islam at the Crossroads (1934) and The Road to Mecca (1954), as well as for his translation of the Qur’an into English.10 He was born Leopold Weiss, a Polish Jew. He travelled widely and had an adventurous life, about which he wrote unreliably. He converted to Islam in 1926. Islam at the Crossroads, in its Arabic version Al-Islam ‘ala muftariq al-turuq, had a great deal of influence on Sayyid Qutb(on whom see below). In this book, Asad championed Islam against the West. In his eyes, modern Europe, with its monstrous racism, imperialism and Orientalism, was born out of the spirit of the Crusades. ‘With very few exceptions, even the most eminent of European Orientalists are guilty of an unscientific partiality in their writings on Islam.’ Asad traced the Orientalists’ hostility back to the Crusades. (In general, Muslim historians and cultural commentators have tended to over-exaggerate the importance of the Crusades and they often attempt to make a rather dubious link between the Crusades and modern imperialism.)
Another convert to Islam, René Guénon (1886–1951), was raised a Catholic and dabbled with various occult and Masonic groups, but soon became disillusioned. He embarked on a quest for a primordial tradition that would be free of the contamination of the modern age.11 (Guénon hated democracy, science, feminism and anything else that was not part of an ancient elitist tradition.) Guénon believed that in the Hindu Vedanta he had found the primordial tradition but, somewhat curiously, he decided to convert to Islam and become a Sufi, as this was more ‘convenient’. There was enough of an authentic primordial tradition in Islam for it to be acceptable to him. He converted in 1912 and settled in Egypt where he produced a steady stream of treatises on the Vedanta, Sufism, occultism and the horrors of mass culture.
His elitist views meant that his books were sought out by fascists and neo-Nazis. Since Guénon despised both academic research and common sense, it was inevitable that he would denounce both the methods and findings of Orientalists. In Orient et Occident (1924) he condemned what he saw as the fantasies and errors of the Orientalists. English translators of Oriental texts took no real effort to understand the texts they were translating. Orientalists suffered from intellectual myopia. Their failure to take the advice of the authorized representatives of the civilizations they studied was disgraceful. German Orientalists were worse than the English, and German Orientalists had a near monopoly in the interpretation of Oriental doctrines. They invariably reduced those doctrines to something systematic that they could understand. Guénon thought the Germans grossly exaggerated the importance of Buddhism in the history of Indian culture and he thought that the notion of an Indo-Aryan group of languages was absurd. German Orientalism was ‘an instrument in the service of German national ambition’. According to Guénon, the West was interested in Oriental philosophies ‘not to learn from them… but to strive, by brutal or insidious means, to convert them to her own way of thinking and to preach to them’.12 The irony is that his ideas about the primordial nature of the Vedanta derived ultimately from the theories of German Orientalists.
OTHER MUSLIM CRITIQUES
There is some overlap between the thinking of René Guénon and that of the Iranian academic and Sufi, Hossein Nasr (b. 1933).13 Nasr, who studied at Harvard and MIT, nevertheless sneers at the trappings of modernity and abhors the secular premises of academic thinking. Thus, for example, he rejects orthodox scientific theories about the evolution of life on earth. He supports polygamy because four wives symbolize stability. Nasr writes as a member of a moral and intellectual elite who are certain that they know the great truth behind all exoteric religions. Nasr acknowledges that Orientalists have found certain aspects of the Qur’an problematic, but he maintains that the problems ‘arise not from scholarship but from a certain theological and philosophical position that is usually hidden under the guise of rationality and objective scholarship. For Muslims, there has never been the need to address these “problems” because Muslims accept the revealed nature of the Qur’an, in the light of which these problems simply cease to exist.’14 The use of source-critical techniques by Orientalists to date and test the authenticity of Hadiths has also been denounced by Nasr as ‘one of the most diabolical attacks made against the whole structure of Islam’.
Nasr’s version of Islam is a Gnostic one, in which the exoteric religion is a vehicle for an inner truth that is revealed only to initiates. Not all Muslims are happy with Nasr’s particular interpretation of Islam. One finds a more orthodox strain of Muslim religious criticism of Orientalism in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer and religious activist (1906–66).15 In the 1930s and 1940s Qutbworked for the Egyptian Ministry of Education and led a second life as a literary man about town. However, everything changed when in 1948 he was sent to the United States to study education there. He was disgusted by the loose morals and anti-Arab racism he encountered: ‘During my years in America, some of my fellow Muslims would have recourse to apologetics as though they were defendants on trial. Contrariwise, I took an offensive position, excoriating the Western jahiliyya [paganism], be it in its much-acclaimed religious beliefs or in its depraved and dissolute socio-economic and moral conditions: this Christian idolatry of the Trinity and its notion of sin and redemption which make no sense at all; this Capitalism, predicated as it is on monopoly and interest-taking, money-grubbing, and exploitation; this Individualism which lacks any sense of solidarity and social responsibility other than that laid down by the law; that crass and vacuous materialistic perception of life, that animal freedom which is called permissiveness, that slave-market dubbed “women’s liberation”.’16 Among other things, he denounced the churches as ‘entertainment centres and sexual playgrounds’.
On his return to Egypt, Qutbjoined the Muslim Brotherhood and became a religious activist. In 1954 he and other members of the Brotherhood were rounded up by Nasser’s regime and Qutb was to spend ten years in prison. He was released in 1964 and then rearrested in 1965 for his alleged part in a plot to assassinate Nasser. He was hanged in 1966. Qutbwas a prolific writer, particularly on the need for a new jihad against all forms of infidelity. His main work was a multi-volume commentary on the Qur’an, Fi Zilal al-Qur’an (‘In the Shade of the Qur’an’). In that commentary, he returned again and again to the argument that modern Muslims were living in an age of jahiliyya, that is to say that they were to all intents and purposes pagans and that their nominal profession of Islam did not absolve them of the charge of infidelity. As noted above, Qutb had read Muhammad Asad and he shared Asad’s hostile view of Orientalists: ‘Hundreds and thousands have infiltrated the Muslim world, and they still do in the guise of Orientalists.�
�� Qutbalso maintained that ‘it would be extremely short-sighted of us to fall into the illusion that when the Jews and Christians discuss Islamic beliefs or Islamic history, or when they make proposals concerning Muslim society or Muslim politics or economics, they will be doing it with good intentions’.17 In another clear echo of Asad, Qutbwrote: ‘Thus the orientalist prejudice against Islam is an inherited instinct and a natural characteristic based upon the effects created by the Crusades with all their sequels on the minds of the early Europeans.’ More generally, Qutb’s writings have had a vast influence on Muslim fundamentalist activism in recent decades.
The absolute authenticity of the divine revelation of the Qur’an and the categorical truth of the Prophet’s mission are so evident to some Muslims that they have found it impossible to accept that such matters can ever be criticized in good faith. Historically or philologically based criticisms made by Orientalists of the traditional Muslim account of the origins of Islam have been dismissed as being an expression of something sinister – perhaps a Zionist conspiracy, or a recrudescence of the spirit of the Crusades. The Pakistani Maryam Jameelah, in Islam Versus the West (1962), picked on Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who had taught in Lahore before moving to McGill University in Montreal, and denounced his Islam in Modern History for its alleged hostility to Palestine (though I can find no such hostility anywhere in the book). More reasonably, she attacked him for expressing the wish that Muslims would make their religion more compatible with Western ideas.18 That kind of thing was very common among Western pundits on Islam writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Cantwell Smith thought that the Arabs’ failure to produce a Paine or a Voltaire meant that there was no principled secular alternative to Islam in Arab society, whereas Jameelah did not believe that there should be a secular alternative to Islam. She also targeted the Egyptian intellectual Taha Husayn, who, she claimed, had forgotten that the Christians had lost the true gospel: ‘All that the Christians possess are four of the apocryphal biographies of Jesus which were not canonized until centuries after his death.’ In another book, Islam and Orientalism, Jameelah described Orientalism as ‘an organized conspiracy… based on social Darwinism to incite our youth to revolt against their faith and scorn the entire legacy of Islamic history and culture as obsolete’.19
