For Lust of Knowing Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FOR LUST OF KNOWING

  Robert Irwin is a publisher and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His works of non-fiction include The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Literature (1999) and The Alhambra (2004). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the London Institute of Pataphysics, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and is a Senior Research Associate of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  ROBERT IRWIN

  For Lust of Knowing

  The Orientalists and their Enemies

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Allen Lane 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Robert Irwin, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90180–0

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

  2 An Ancient Heresy or a New Paganism

  3 Renaissance Orientalism

  4 The Holiness of Oriental Studies

  5 Enlightenment of a Sort

  6 Oriental Studies in the Age of Steam and Cant

  7 A House Divided Against Itself

  8 The All Too Brief Heyday of Orientalism

  9 An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic

  10 Enemies of Orientalism

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  ‘Are you an Orientalist?’ asked the underling.

  I winced inwardly. It was a word with undertones, dark ones; an Orientalist went around in native dress, carried a pocket theodolite and worked for the ultimate and total dominance of the West.

  Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine:

  A Journey in the Footsteps of Ibn Battutah (2002)

  A man lives not only his own personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

  Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)

  I sometimes think of myself as a living fossil, for I was taught in a school where daily chapel services and the study of Latin were compulsory for everyone (though Greek was only for the clever boys). The teaching of Latin relied heavily on the rote learning of declensions and the elements of parsing and scansion. Our textbooks dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century or even earlier. The classics masters lingered lovingly on such weighty matters as whether the Roman ‘V’ should be pronounced as a ‘W’ or not. I used to play the alphabet game during the sermons and there were lengthy sermons at least once a week. Classical and biblical figures were presented to us as models for behaviour – King David, Simon Maccabeus, Gaius Mucius Scaevola, or Scipio Africanus. The system of education I endured was certainly much closer to that practised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than to the system which prevails in the twenty-first century. Today, education no longer places such a heavy stress on the achievements of individual heroes and, in most schools, Christian indoctrination has been replaced by something vaguer, kinder and more multicultural. Rote learning of anything has fallen out of favour. Even so, I now find that my early immersion in both the Bible and in Latin texts proves to be useful in understanding the origins and formation of Orientalism, for, as we shall see, Orientalism developed in the shade of the much grander discourses of the Bible and of the classics.

  I have done my best to make this book interesting, so that it can be read for pleasure, as well as for information. However, this has created problems for me, in that a leading theme of my book is that its subject is neither very important nor very glamorous – still less actually sinister. The older way of acquiring learning was a bit boring. Serious scholarship often is. Most of what Orientalists do will seem quite dull to non-Orientalists. There is nothing so very exciting about pedants busily engaged in making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, or cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt, or establishing the basic chronology of Harun al-Rashid’s military campaigns against Byzantium. Scholarship used to place little emphasis on accessibility or on contemporary socio-political relevance. The key early Orientalist texts were written in learned Latin and therefore could only be read by an educated elite. Also there were then fewer pressures to publish and many translations and academic essays remained in manuscript. Pious bishops, worthy patrons, timid antiquarians, museum curators with time on their hands, bewigged and gowned dons pursued their recondite enquiries in dusty tomes. They managed to find excitement in long-forgotten controversies regarding the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon or the correct manner of pronouncing Attic Greek. In their minds, they walked and talked with dead men. Many of the Orientalists I shall be discussing regarded their scholarly research as a form of prayer, and, Catholic or Protestant, they went to their graves convinced that, once their last breath was drawn, they would face eternal salvation or damnation. It is difficult for most of us now imaginatively to enter this past.

  Orientalism was and is a subset of Western scholarship in general; the history of academic Orientalism is therefore a special case study of the role of academics in cultural life. Who taught whom and how does academic transmission work? How does one achieve recognition as a scholar? In any century what resources were necessary and available in order to pursue a proper study of another culture? Was the study of Arabic and Islam really important within the broader framework of Western intellectual life? These are simple questions that have not yet been answered. Then there are murkier issues raised by Orientalism’s critics, such as to what extent have academics working in this area been witting or unwitting collaborators with imperialism and Zionism? Are certain dictionaries and encyclopedias indictable as agents of cultural expropriation? Come to that, are all of Orientalism’s critics writing in good faith, or does some of the polemic have an agenda which is related to internal academic politics, anti-Semitism or fundamentalist Islam?

  This book would not have been written but for Edward Said’s earlier book Orientalism, which was first published in 19
78. Said added an afterword to a reissue in 1995, but none of the errors of fact and interpretation in the first edition were corrected in the expanded version. What does his book say? In a nutshell, it is this: Orientalism, the hegemonic discourse of imperialism, is a discourse that constrains everything that can be written and thought in the West about the Orient and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs. It has legitimized Western penetration of the Arablands and their appropriation and it underwrites the Zionist project. Though Said is not consistent about the beginnings of Orientalism, on the whole he argued that it originated in the work of French and British scholars in the late eighteenth century. However, the discursive formation was not restricted to scholars, as imperialist administrators, explorers and novelists also participated in, or were victims of, this discourse. The West possesses a monopoly over how the Orient may be represented. Representations of the Orient invariably carry implications about Western superiority, or even, quite often, flat statements of that superiority. Note that it is only possible to talk of representations of the Orient, as the Orient has no objective reality, being merely a construct of Orientalism. Characteristically Orientalism is essentialist, racialist, patronizing and ideologically motivated.

  Although some admirers of Said’s book have conceded that it contains many errors and often misrepresents the achievements of the Orientalists it discusses, they sometimes go on to argue that it deserves praise and attention because of the subsequent debate and research it has provoked. I am not so sure about this. Most of the subsequent debate has taken place within the parameters set out by Edward Said. Much that is certainly central to the history of Orientalism has been quietly excluded by him, while all sorts of extraneous material have been called upon to support an indictment of the integrity and worth of certain scholars. One finds oneself having to discuss not what actually happened in the past, but what Said and his partisans think ought to have happened. Once one has entered the labyrinth of false turns, trompe-l’œil perspectives and cul-de-sacs, it is quite difficult to think one’s way out again and reflect rationally and dispassionately about the subject. The distortion of the subject matter of Orientalism is so fundamental that to accept its broad framework as something to work with and then correct would be merely to waste one’s time. I have therefore corralled most of my disagreements with Said within a single chapter. This has left me more space to discuss the principal works produced by major Orientalists that were so oddly ignored or disparaged in Orientalism. To set my cards out on the table at this early stage, that book seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations. This may seem to my readers to depart from the normal restraint and courtesies of academic debate, but I am afraid that Orientalism led the way in these respects. Said, who died in 2003, was a well-respected figure. In attacking his most important book, I fear that I shall alienate some of my friends: on the other hand I shall certainly also infuriate old enemies and I shall take great pleasure in that. I really am attacking the book rather than the man. I have no significant disagreements with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel, Kipling’s Kim, or Glenn Gould’s piano playing.

  Orientalism has been a bestseller – whether it deserved to have been is another matter. For Lust of Knowing will cover much of the same ground in what I hope is a more coherent and accessible fashion. The ‘ground’ in question is vast, for though the Orientalists were always few in number and rarely famous figures, the work they did was heavily influenced by work done in biblical exegesis, literary criticism, historiography and other grander disciplines, and sometimes, on the other hand, the research done by Orientalists had implications for the way the Bible or Homer was read, or it shed some light on how languages in general evolved. Therefore issues presented in this book have implications for those working in literary, historical, theological and cultural studies – as well, of course, for those working in Oriental studies. Critical books on Orientalism by Anouar Abdel-Malek, Edward Said, Alain Grosrichard and others have also raised profound and difficult questions about the nature of discourse, ‘the Other’, ‘the Gaze’ and a wide range of related epistemological issues. To engage with these and other critical accounts, it is necessary to consider the potential relevance for the study of Orientalism of concepts formulated by Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and others. The conclusions reached after a study of the true history of Orientalism (or at least a truer one) may have relevance for controversies in loosely related fields. (I am thinking, for example, of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) and of Edith Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (1989).)

  At this early stage, only a few words are necessary concerning the meaning of ‘Orientalism’, as it is used in Said’s book and in my book. In the eighteenth century the French word ‘Orientaliste’ described someone who was preoccupied with Levantine matters (not Chinese or Indian). In Britain, ‘Orientalist’, as used in the late eighteenth century, referred at first to a style rather than to a scholarly discipline. ‘Dragons are a sure mark of orientalism’ according to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). Only in the early nineteenth century did it come to refer to the study of any and all Asian languages and cultures. There was a period in the 1830s when ‘Orientalist’ acquired a quite specific meaning in the context of British India. The ‘Orientalists’ there were administrators and scholars who advocated working with the traditional Muslim and Hindu institutions and customs as much as possible and of studying, teaching and researching the Indian cultural legacy. Such men were opposed and ultimately defeated by Anglicists like Macaulay and Bentinck, who, broadly speaking, preferred to impose British institutions and culture on the subcontinent. Subsequently ‘Orientalist’ has tended to be used of those who have made a special study of Asian (and North African) languages and cultures. Since the 1960s at least Orientalism has been under attack from Islamicists, Marxists and others, and the word ‘Orientalist’ has acquired pejorative overtones. Nevertheless if anyone wants to call me an ‘Orientalist’, I shall be flattered, rather than offended.

  When A. J. Arberry published his little book British Orientalists in 1943, he wrote about scholars who travelled in or wrote about Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia and the Far East. In 1978 Said came to use the word ‘Orientalism’ in a newly restrictive sense, as referring to those who travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world and even here he excluded consideration of North Africa west of Egypt. I cannot guess why he excluded North Africa, but, that omission apart, in this particular instance I am happy to accept his somewhat arbitrary delimitation of the subject matter, for it is the history of Western studies of Islam, Arabic and Arab history and culture that interests me the most. However, it is often necessary to cast a sideways glance at what was happening in contemporary Persian and Turkish studies – particularly Turkish, for it would be arbitrary to detach study of the pre-modern Arabworld totally from Ottoman studies. Developments in Sinology and Egyptology are also sometimes relevant and, of course, any study of Orientalism that fails to engage with the overwhelming importance of biblical and Hebrew studies and of religion in general for the way Islam and the Arabs were studied and written about would be preposterous and thoroughly anachronistic.

  Some writers have thought that the origins of Orientalism are to be found in ancient Greece. Others have suggested a much later start with the decrees of the Council of Vienne in 1311–12. Others again believe that there was no Orientalism worthy of the name prior to Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. From the latter point of view, the rise of Orientalism begins at about the same time as the great age of European imperialism. My own view, which I shall be setting out in more detail in the course of this book, is that there was nobody one could consider to be a serious Orientalist prior to Guillaume Postel (c. 1510–81), and that Orientalism either begins in the sixteenth century with him or, if not quite so early as that
, then no later than the mid-seventeenth century, when JacobGolius (1596–1667) and Edward Pococke (1604–91), as well as other not quite so learned or industrious figures, published their ground-breaking researches. However, I shall briefly discuss what might be mistakenly interpreted as evidence of early Orientalism in antiquity and the Middle Ages, before rushing on to the seventeenth and later centuries.

  Until the late nineteenth century, Orientalism had little in the way of institutional structures and the heyday of institutional Oriental-ism only arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. The research institutes, the banks of reference books, the specialist conferences and professional associations came then. Therefore, For Lust of Knowing is mostly a story of individual scholars, often lonely and eccentric men. Intellectual eminences such as Postel, Erpenius and Silvestre de Sacy scoured Europe for similarly learned correspondents who might have some inkling of the nature of the recondite problems that they worked upon. Since there was no overarching and constraining discourse of Orientalism, there were many competing agendas and styles of thought. Therefore this book contains many sketches of individual Orientalists – dabblers, obsessives, evangelists, freethinkers, madmen, charlatans, pedants, romantics. (Even so, perhaps still not enough of them.) There can be no single chronicle of Orientalism that can be set within clearly defined limits.

  Edward Pococke was probably the best Arabist of his day and, much later, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was the most distinguished scholar of classical Arabic in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, I can produce better translations from Arabic than either of those impressive figures. This is not because I am cleverer or more industrious than they were, but I have been instructed by careful teachers, whereas Pococke and Silvestre de Sacy had effectively to teach themselves. Moreover, I have access to much better dictionaries and grammars and other reference tools, such as the excellent Encyclopaedia of Islam. A recurring theme of this book is the way in which each generation of Arabists found the previous generation’s work unsatisfactory. It was more or less inevitable that this should be so. By today’s standards, nobody’s Arabic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that good. The early Orientalists were often ruthless in denouncing each other’s translations and editing decisions. Rivalry and rancour have been powerful driving forces in the story of Orientalism.