by Robert Irwin
Sardar claims that the Chanson de Roland was written by Cretien de Troyes circa 1130. Actually the name of the author of this work is not known and Chrétien de Troyes, who flourished c. 1166–85, wrote nothing about Roland. Sardar claims that the Chanson shows the Muslims worshipping ‘Mohomme’, as well as a trinity of gods, Tergavent, Apolin and Jupiter. But the Chanson does not mention ‘Mohomme’ and it calls the trinity of idols Termagant, Mahound and Apollyon. The matter is not important, except perhaps that it indicates that Sardar has not troubled to read the work of literature that he wishes to attack.
A page later he tells his readers that Europeans borrowed the concept of the university from ‘the madrasas as they had developed from the eighth century in the Muslim world’. But there were no madrasas in the Muslim world in the eighth century. The institution spread slowly from the East in later centuries. The first Egyptian madrasas were founded in the late twelfth century and the first Moroccan ones were founded in the fourteenth century. Further down the same page he claims that St Thomas Aquinas decreed that Muslims and Jews were ‘invincibly ignorant’. This is not correct. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas specifically allows for the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Only he argued that they should not be compelled to convert. The chief aim of another of his books, the Summa contra Gentiles, was precisely to provide theological ammunition for debates with Muslims, Jews and heterodox Christians.32
Occasionally Sardar gets his facts right, particularly when he follows Richard Southern’s fine book, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962). At times he follows Southern rather closely. For example Southern, writing about John of Segovia’s fifteenth-century translation of the Qur’an, wrote this: ‘But the only really important question was this: Is the Koran the word of God or not? If, by a simple examination of the text, it can be shown to contain contradictions, confusions, errors, traces of composite authorship, these should – so he thought – convince anyone that it was not what it claimed to be.’ Sardar agrees: ‘The basic question was, is the Qur’an the word of God or not? If by examination of the text it could be shown to contain contradictions, confusions, errors, traces of composite authorship these should convince anyone that it was not what it claimed to be.’33 At times he follows Southern less closely. So that whereas, for instance, Southern refers to the Council of Vienne (1312), Sardar decides to move this great church council from the South of France to Vienna. He then states that this Council decided that, since it was impossible to convert Muslims who all rejected rational argument, academics trained in Arabic should launch assaults on Islam. But he must have known when he wrote this that it was a straightforward misrepresentation of the truth. In fact, the Council decided to set up chairs in Oriental languages in order to propagate the faith among unbelievers, including Muslims and Jews. On the next page Sardar claims that Ricoldo da Monte Croce, who went to Baghdad in 1291, ‘was totally blind to Muslim learning and intellectual achievements, which at that time represented the zenith of civilization’. This is a libel on the dead. Presumably Sardar read Ricoldo before writing about him. Why then suppress the fact that Ricoldo specifically praised the ‘Saracens’ for their ‘attention to study’? Ricoldo added that ‘They have in Baghdad many places devoted to study and contemplation alone, in the manner of our great monasteries…’34 And so the book blunders on from error to misspelling, to misquotation to misdating. Did Sardar think that no one would check up on him? His book was published by the Open University Press.
Said and his allies in cultural studies popularized the idea that it is more important to destroy Orientalism than to represent its history accurately. However, despite his debt to Said, Sardar is no fan of his predecessor in this field, since, as a pious Muslim, he rejects Said’s secular humanist perspective. Said’s ‘location in the metropolitan academy of the West and the fashionable genre of literary criticism’ meant that he was not properly equipped to defend Islam against the real or imagined slurs of the Orientalists.35 As we have seen in the previous chapter, as far as Sardar is concerned, Said’s humanism derives from the same culture that produced Orientalism and racism.
Naturally there have been better researched and more reasoned Muslim critiques of Orientalism. Fazlur Rahman (1911–88), a professor at the University of Chicago and author of numerous books on Islam, protested at Western reductionist approaches to his religion, such as ‘the attempt to “explain” Islam’s genesis and even its nature with reference to Jewish, Christian, or other “influences”’. This was an aspect of the West’s cultural arrogance.36 He also suggested that in order for a statement about a religion to be valid it had to be acceptable to at least some members of that religion, though he did not spell out his reasons for thinking this. He took particular offence at John Wansbrough’s strategy of treating the story of early Islam not as a piece of documentary history but as a narrative compiled from literary clichés. He also questioned the stress Wansbrough had placed on Jewish themes (such as covenant and exile) in the Qur’an. Rahman asked why, if those themes really were so important, had Muslims who studied the Qur’an not found them to be important?
Muhsin Mahdi’s article ‘Orientalism and the Study of Islamic Philosophy’ was also written from within the ‘academy of the West’ as he was at the time Professor of Arabic at Harvard.37 Mahdi has written numerous studies on Islamic philosophy, as well as producing a fine critical edition of The Thousand and One Nights. His strictures on Orientalism were harsh, but not unjust: ‘Oriental studies have for long suffered from a stodgy self-satisfaction and the belief that hard work and rhetorical flourish are sufficient to make one a celebrity in a field where it is not common for others to have access to one’s sources and to be in a position to judge one’s work apart from the impression it makes.’ He criticized Grunebaum for writing and teaching in such a way that made his thinking about Islam inaccessible to ordinary students and set out his reservations about Gibb’s approach to Ibn Khaldun and to Islam more generally. Mahdi notes the resentment widely felt by Muslims at the arrogance of the West in producing a vast reference work, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, that was neither by nor for Muslims and the notion that it should be written by Westerners or those who conformed to Western standards of scholarship. ‘It made no difference what Muslims thought of such an encyclopedia, whether they liked it or not, whether it agreed with their views of Islam or not, whether they saw themselves reflected in it or not.’ Mahdi also has interesting things to say about the role of German Romanticism in shaping German Orientalism and about those German Orientalists, like Schaeder, who argued that there was no such thing as Islamic philosophy, as philosophers in the Muslim world were all really unbelievers.
Mahdi at least was thoroughly familiar with what he was writing about – something that is not true of most of those discussed in this chapter. The shrillness and defensiveness of most of the attacks on Orientalists are both depressing and unnecessary. The past and present achievements of Arabculture are so considerable that they do not need to be exaggerated or to be defended from all and every single possible kind of criticism. As for Islam, a religion that embodies essential truths about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to God has nothing to fear from the most advanced techniques of Western textual criticism.
Notes
1 The Clash of Ancient Civilizations
1. Aziz S. Atiya, Crusade, Commerce and Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1962), pp. 19, 23.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), p. 56.
3. Robert Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 5–6.
4. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (London, 1993), p. 240.
5. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day (London, 1995), p. 32.
6. Said, Orientalism, pp. 56–7.
7. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians, translated by Philip Vellacott (London, 1961). My interpr
etation of The Persians is based on my reading of this translation in the Penguin Classics series. However, it should be noted that some classicists have provided a very different (and I think somewhat strained) reading of this play. See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), especially pp. 76–86; Thomas Harrison, The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’s Persians and the History of the Fifth Century (London, 2000); Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilization and Barbarism (London, 1996), pp. 61–2.
8. Herodotus, Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt (Harmondsworth, 1954), pp. 69–70. On this historian, see also John Gould, Herodotus (London, 1989). Again for a different reading of the text from mine, see Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, as well as François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998); Ascherson, Black Sea, pp. 51–5, 77–9.
9. Said, Orientalism, p. 58.
10. Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, translated by Philip Vellacott (London, 1954).
11. Said, Orientalism, pp. 56–7.
12. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), p. 273.
13. Said, Orientalism, p. 57.
14. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London, 1970), p. 243.
15. Drews, Greek Accounts, pp. 119–21.
16. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (London, 1999), p. 23.
17. Aristotle, The Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 225.
18. Ibid., p. 136.
19. Ibid., p. 269.
20. Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam (London, 1999), p. 2.
21. On Roman attitudes to the Arabs and Persians and on Arabs settled within the Roman empire, see Irfan Shahid, Roma and the Arabs: A Prolegomena to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs (Washington, 1984); Kevin Butcher, Roman Syria and the Near East (London, 2003). In ‘Il Petrarca e gli Arabi’, Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale, 7 (1965), pp. 331–6, Enrico Cerulli provides a revealing account of the stereotypical Arabas he appeared in Virgil, Catullus and other Roman authors.
2 An Ancient Heresy or a New Paganism
1. Patricia Crone, ‘The Rise of Islam in the World’, in Francis Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1996), p. 2.
2. Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), p. 40.
3. Armand Abel, ‘Bahira’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1960–2002); Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 4–5, 88–9, 93, 235–7, 241, 281, 286, 290, 344, 345, 347.
4. For examples of anti-Christian polemic, see The Sea of Precious Virtues (Bahr al-Fava’id): A Medieval Islamic Mirror for Princes, translated and edited by Julie Scott Meisami (Salt Lake City, 1991), pp. 232–4; Richard Gottheil, ‘An Answer to the Dhimmis’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 41 (1921), pp. 383–457; Aziz al-Azmeh, ‘Mortal Enemies, Invisible Neighbours: Northerners in Andalusi Eyes’, in Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, 1992), pp. 259–72.
5. For stimulating and scholarly surveys of medieval Christian attacks on Islam, see Dana Carlton Munro, ‘The Western Attitude towards Islam during the Period of the Crusades’, Speculum, vol. 6(1931), pp. 329–43; Richard Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Daniel, Islam and the West; Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (London, 1979); John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002).
6. Daniel 7: 7.
7. ‘The Travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, towards A.D. 700’ in Thomas Wright (ed. and tr.), Early Travels in Palestine (London, 1848), pp. 1–2.
8. The Koran Interpreted, translated by A. J. Arberry, 2 vols (London, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 125–6 (Sura 33, verses 36–9).
9. On John of Damascus, see Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam: The ‘Heresy of the Ishmaelites’ (Leiden, 1972); Sahas, ‘John of Damascus on Islam Revisited’, Abr Nahrain, vol. 23 (1984–5), pp. 104–18; Tolan, Saracens, pp. 50–55, 58–9; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003), pp. 307–8, 397–9.
10. On ‘Abd al-Masih al-Kindi, see Daniel, Islam and the West, pp. 239, 235; Tolan, Saracens, pp. 60–64.
11. Southern, Western Views of Islam, p. 21; Robert Hillenbrand, ‘“The Ornament of the World”: Medieval Córdoba as a Cultural Centre’, in Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, 1992), p. 115; Tolan, Saracens, pp. 86–97.
12. Jessica A. Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln, Nebr., 1995); Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches towards the Muslims (Princeton, 1984), pp. 15–18; Tolan, Saracens, pp. 85–98, 100–102.
13. On toleration in Muslim Spain and its limits, see Anwar G. Chejne, Muslim Spain: Its History and Culture (Minneapolis, 1974), pp. 115–20; Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London, 1992), especially chapter 7; Mikel de Epalza, ‘Mozarabs: An Emblematic Christian Minority in Islamic Andalus’, in Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 148–70; Bernard Lewis, ‘An Ode Against the Jews’, in Islam in History: Ideas, People and Events in the Middle East, 2nd edn (Chicago and La Salle, Ill., 1993), pp. 167–74.
14. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (London, 1984), pp. 45, 54, 197; Fletcher, Moorish Spain, pp. 96–7; Raymond P. Scheindlin, ‘The Jews in Muslim Spain’, in Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 195–6, 199.
15. E. Lévi-Provençal, Séville musulmane au début du XIIe siècle: Traité d’Ibn ‘Abdun sur la vie urbaine et les corps de métiers (Paris, 1947), p. 128.
16. Charles Burnett, ‘The Translating Activity in Mediaeval Spain’, in Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 1036–58.
17. James Kritzek, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, 1964), p. 30.
18. M. T. d’Alverny, ‘Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyen Age’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge, vols 22–23(1947–8), pp. 69–131; Kritzek, Peter the Venerable and Islam, passim; Thomas E. Burman, ‘Tafsir and Translation: Traditional Arabic Qur’an in Exegesis and the Latin Qur’ans of Robert of Ketton and Robert of Toledo’, Speculum, vol. 73(1998), pp. 703–32.
19. Kritzek, Peter the Venerable, pp. 45–6.
20. Ibid., pp. 155–99, 220–91.
21. D’Alverny, ‘Deux traductions’, pp. 113–19; D’Alverny and G. Vajda, ‘Marc de Tolède, traducteur d’Ibn Tumart’, Al-Andalus, vol. 16 (1951), pp. 99–140, 259–308; vol. 17, pp. 1–56.
22. On medieval translations from Arabic of scientific, mathematical and philosophical works in general, see Burnett, ‘The Translating Activity’; Burnett, Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, vol. 14 (London, 1987); Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London, 1996); W. Montgomery Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 58–71; Donald R. Hill, Islamic Science and Engineering (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 220–35.
23. On the impact of Arabic mathematics in Europe, see George Gheverghese Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (London, 1991), pp. 301–47; Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), pp. 167–75.
24. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, 1961), p. 417.
25. On the philosophy of Avicenna and its transmission to the West, see Salvador Gómez Nogales, ‘Ibn Sina’, in M. L. J. Young, J. D. Latham and R. B. Serjeant (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science during the ‘Abbasid Period (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 398–404; Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham (Harmondsworth, 1958), pp. 148–55.
26. Burnett, ‘Translating Activity’, pp. 1038–9.
27. Paul Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution à l’histoire de
s idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, 2 vols (Cairo, 1942–3).
28. [Pseudo-]al-Majriti, Ghayat al-Hakim, edited by H. Ritter (Leipzig and Berlin, 1933); David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim (London, 1986); David Pingree, ‘Some of the Sources of the Ghayat al-Hakim’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 43(1980), pp. 1–15; Vittore Perrone Compagni, ‘Picatrix Latinus: concezioni filosoficoreligiose e prassi magica’, Medioévo, Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale, 1(1975), pp. 237–337.
29. G. N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: The Philosopher of the Arabs (Rawalpindi, 1966); M. T. d’Alverny and F. Hudry, ‘De Radiis’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge, 41 (1975), pp. 139–60, reprinted in Sylvie Matton (ed.), La Magie arabe traditionelle (Paris, 1977), pp. 77–128; Fritz W. Zimmerman, ‘Al-Kindi’, in Young, Latham and Serjeant (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period, pp. 364–9.
