Orientalism

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Orientalism

HH

Orientalism

A.L. MACFIE

Pearson Education Limited Head Ofﬁce: Edinburgh Gate Harlow CM20 2JE Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623 Fax: +44 (0)1279 431059 London Ofﬁce: 128 Long Acre London WC2E 9AN Tel: +44 (0)20 7447 2000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7240 5771 Website: www.history-minds.com

First published in Great Britain in 2002 © Pearson Education, 2002 The right of A.L. Macﬁe to be identiﬁed as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN 0 582 42386 4 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the Publishers. 10

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Set in 10/14pt Goudy Old Style Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Malaysia, LSP. The Publishers’ policy is to use paper manufactured from sustainable forests.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS MAP

vii viii

PART ONE: BACKGROUND 1

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

3

A geographical note Questions of definition

14 19

PART TWO: ANALYSIS THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

25

The rise of Arabic studies in England The rise of Indic studies in England The rise of oriental studies in France The rise of oriental studies in Germany Elsewhere in Europe The origins of European prejudice against lslam Orientalism and Colonialism

25 29 31 36 39 42 44

3

THE ORIENTALIST – ANGLICIST CONTROVERSY

50

4

ORIENTALISM IN THE ARTS

59

MacKenzie versus Nochlin

66

THE ASSAULT ON ORIENTALISM

73

‘Orientalism in Crisis’ English-speaking Orientalists Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient Marx and the End of Orientalism Analysis

75 79 85 93 96

2

5

v

CONTENTS

6

7

8

RESPONSES TO THE ASSAULT ON ORIENTALISM

102

‘Orientalism in Crisis’ ‘English-speaking Orientalists’ Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient ‘The Question of Orientalism’ A Marxist (Indian) response ‘Edward Said and his Arab Reviewers’ A black perspective ‘Edward Said and the Historians’ Marx and the End of Orientalism

103 105 108 110 123 127 132 134 145

CASE STUDIES

148

History, Theory and the Arts Oriental Enlightenment ‘Deep Orientalism’ Imperial Fictions Kipling and Orientalism Imagining India Scottish orientalism Orientalism and Religion Orientalism and Algeria

150 153 156 159 167 171 175 179 183

EXIT FROM ORIENTALISM – ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED

186

Exit from Orientalism

197

PART THREE: ASSESSMENT 9

QUESTIONS OF FACT, DEFINITION AND SIGNIFICANCE

207

CHRONOLOGY WHO’S WHO GUIDE TO FURTHER READING BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

218 225 230 231 239

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the editorial staff at Pearson Education for their help in preparing the manuscript of Orientalism for publication. I would also like to thank Sarah Bury for her help in editing the text, and the library staff of the University of London and School of Oriental and African Studies libraries for their help in collecting the material required. A.L. Macﬁe

vii

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HH

PART ONE

BACKGROUND

ORIENTALISM

HH

2

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

ONE

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), the word orientalism was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally used to refer to the work of the orientalist, a scholar versed in the languages and literatures of the East; and in the world of the arts to identify a character, style or quality commonly associated with the Eastern nations. At the same time, according to John MacKenzie, the author of Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth, the word came, in the context of British Rule in India, to acquire a third meaning. There it was used to refer to or identify a ‘conservative and romantic’ approach to the problems of government, faced by the ofﬁcials of the East India Company. According to this approach the languages and laws of Muslim and Hindu India should not be ignored or supplanted, but utilized and preserved, as foundations of the traditional social order. For a time this approach was adopted, but at the turn of the eighteenth century it was challenged by the combined forces of evangelicalism and utilitarianism; and in the 1830s it was supplanted by the new, so-called ‘Anglicist’ approach. Henceforth, as a minute on education – presented by Thomas Macaulay, President of the 3

ORIENTALISM

Committee of Public Instruction, to the Supreme Council, in Calcutta, on 2 February 1835 – made clear, indigenous learning in India would be completely supplanted by British scholarship, imparted through the English language. The meaning of the word orientalism, as given in the Oxford English Dictionary, remained more or less unchanged until the period of decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War (1939–45). Then, in a little more than twenty years, it came to mean not only the work of the orientalist, and a character, style or quality associated with the Eastern nations, but also a corporate institution, designed for dealing with the Orient, a partial view of Islam, an instrument of Western imperialism, a style of thought, based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between Orient and Occident, and even an ideology, justifying and accounting for the subjugation of blacks, Palestinian Arabs, women and many other supposedly deprived groups and peoples. This transformation, which as MacKenzie has remarked turned orientalism into one of the most highly charged words in modern scholarship, was accomplished by a series of scholars and intellectuals, many of whom lived in or came from the Orient. Principal among these were Anouar Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian (Coptic) sociologist, attached to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque (CNRS) (Sociology), Paris; A.L. Tibawi, a Syrian student of Arabic history, employed at the Institute of Education, London University; Edward Said, a Palestinian (Christian Arab) student of English and Comparative Literature, employed at Columbia University, New York; and Bryan S. Turner, a leading English sociologist and student of Marxism. The result was that orientalists, members of what had, in recent years, become an abstruse, dry-as-dust profession, were now 4

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

accused of practising, not orientalism, but ‘orientalism’, that is to say a type of imperialism, racism, and even, according to some, anti-Semitism. The conditions necessary for the launching of an effective assault on orientalism, as traditionally practised, were, as Maxime Rodinson, the eminent French orientalist, has pointed out, in an article entitled ‘The Western Image and Western Studies of Islam’, in S. Schacht and C. Bosworth, The Legacy of Islam (1979), already created well before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Iranian revolution of 1906, the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the defeat and destruction of the German, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman Empires in the period of the First World War, the rise of the Kemalist movement in Turkey (1919– 22), the rise of the national movement in Egypt (1919), the spread of Bolshevism – all these events and developments showed that the military and political hegemony imposed by the European powers, throughout large parts of Asia and Africa, could now be successfully challenged, and even on occasion undermined. There followed a period of rapid decolonization, culminating in the independence of India (1947), the Algerian uprising (1952), the British withdrawal from Egypt (1954) and the collapse of the Britishbacked Hashemite regime in Iraq (1958). As a result of these and other developments, there arose, in Asia and Africa, in the 1950s and 1960s, a climate of opinion that made possible an effective challenge to European hegemony, not only in the military and political, but also in the intellectual sphere. The assault on orientalism, when it ﬁnally came, was launched on four fronts: on orientalism as an instrument of imperialism designed to secure the colonization and 5

ORIENTALISM

enslavement of parts of the so-called Third World (AbdelMalek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes, 1963); on orientalism as a mode of understanding and interpreting Islam and Arab nationalism (Tibawi, ‘Critique of Englishspeaking Orientalists’ and ‘Second Critique of the Englishspeaking Orientalists’, Islamic Quarterly, 1964 and 1979); on orientalism as a ‘cumulative and corporate identity’ and a ‘saturating hegemonic system’ (Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 1978); and on orientalism as the justiﬁcation for a syndrome of beliefs, attitudes and theories, affecting the geography, economics and sociology of the Orient (Turner, Marxism and the End of Orientalism, 1978). The intellectual origins of the four principal assaults on orientalism, launched in the post-Second World War period, were somewhat narrower in scope than might have been expected. Abdel-Malek based his critique of orientalism on the work of Karl Marx, the nineteenthcentury German philosopher and economist. Tibawi based his analysis on the traditional principles of mutual respect, scientiﬁc detachment and fair-mindedness, much promoted in Europe in the nineteenth century. Said based his approach on the work of a number of European scholars and intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida (deconstruction), Antonio Gramsci (cultural hegemony), and Michel Foucault (discourse, power/knowledge and epistemic ﬁeld). Turner based his criticism on a critical reading of Marx and the literature of anti-colonialism associated with his name. All four critiques, that is to say, were either based on, or assumed the existence of, a European philosophy or thought system, derived for the most part from the work of two of the greatest German philosophers of the nineteenth century, G.W.F. Hegel, the transcendental 6

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

idealist and precursor of Marx, and F. Nietzsche, the critic of idealism in all its manifestations. The motivation of the four principal assaults on orientalism, on the other hand, may be sought elsewhere: in a hatred of colonialism and imperialism (Abdel-Malek); a dislike of what was perceived by some to be the lack of respect shown by many English-speaking orientalists for Islam (Tibawi); a personal sense of loss and national disintegration (Said); and an aversion to the workings of the capitalist system (Turner). In the face of such resentment, exacerbated, it is said, in Tibawi’s case by a sense of personal and professional marginalization, it is not surprising that apologies for orientalism and defences of it made by a series of European and American scholars should have failed to persuade the four principal critics of the subject to reconsider their position. What the principal critics of orientalism hoped to achieve, according to their own account, was a critical re-evaluation of the methods employed by the orientalists (Abdel-Malek); a ‘better understanding of an old problem’ (Tibawi); an exposure of the ‘subtle degradation of knowledge’, accomplished by the orientalist (Said); and a reconsideration of the dispute between the orientalists, the sociologists and the Marxists, regarding the characterization of the history and social structure of North Africa and the Middle East (Turner). What they actually succeeded, to a considerable extent, in achieving, in conjunction with other antiEuropean, anti-imperialist and anti-elitist groups (liberals, socialists, blacks, feminists and others) active at the time, is what Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was wont to refer to as a ‘transvaluation of all values’. What had previously been seen as being good (orientalism, 7

ORIENTALISM

text-based scholarship, knowledge of classical languages, concepts of absolute truth, ethnocentricity, racial pride, service to the state, and national pride) was now seen as being bad, or at least suspect. And what had previously been seen as being bad (anti-colonialism, racial equality, uncertainty regarding the nature of truth, resistance to imperialism, mixed race and internationalism) was now seen as being good, worthy of promotion. Not that the victory achieved by the critics of orientalism was uncontested, as the debate which ensued, following the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978, shows. Of the four principal assaults launched on orientalism, as traditionally practised, that launched by Edward Said, in Orientalism, proved to be by far the most effective. According to Said, the orientalist, the heir to a ‘narcissistic’ tradition of European writing, founded by, among others, Homer and Aeschylus, through his writing ‘creates’ the Orient. In the process, he assists in the creation of a series of stereotypical images, according to which Europe (the West, the ‘self’) is seen as being essentially rational, developed, humane, superior, authentic, active, creative, and masculine, while the Orient (the East, the ‘other’) (a sort of surrogate, underground version of the West or the ‘self’) is seen as being irrational, aberrant, backward, crude, despotic, inferior, inauthentic, passive, feminine and sexually corrupt. Other ‘orientalist’ fantasies invented, in Said’s opinion, by the orientalists include the concept of an ‘Arab mind’, an ‘oriental psyche’, and an ‘Islamic Society’. Together they contribute to the construction of a ‘saturating hegemonic system’, designed, consciously or unconsciously, to dominate, restructure and have authority over the Orient – designed, that is to say, to promote European imperialism and colonialism. 8

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

In Orientalism, Said cites scores of examples of orientalism, as it appears in the works of European scholars, poets, philosophers, imperial administrators, political theorists, historians, politicians, travel writers and others. These include the Italian poet, Dante, the French orientalists, Barthélemy d’ Herbelot and Abraham-Hyacinthe AnquetilDuperron, the East India Company ofﬁcial and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Sir William Jones, the German political economist, Karl Marx, the French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, the English adventurer, Sir Richard Burton, the British Arabist, Sir Hamilton Gibb, and the British (later American) Islamist, Bernard Lewis. Not that Said believes that the orientalism he discovers in Western thought and text is merely an imaginative phenomenon, a ‘structure of lies and of myth’, which might, if the truth were ever told, be quickly blown away. On the contrary, he believes that it is part of an integrated discourse, an accepted grid for ﬁltering the Orient into the Western consciousness, and an ‘integral part of European material civilisation and culture’ – an instrument, that is to say, of British, French and later American imperialism. The critiques of orientalism mounted by Abdel-Malek, Tibawi, Said and Turner provoked a variety of responses. Abdel-Malek’s critique in ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ provoked two polite but ﬁrm responses from Claude Cahen, Professor of Muslim history at the Sorbonne, and Francesco Gabrielli, Professor of Arabic languages and literatures at the University of Rome. Tibawi’s critique, in ‘Englishspeaking Orientalists’, provoked an uncertain response from Donald P. Little, a student of Middle Eastern history, employed at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Montreal, Canada. Said’s critique, in Orientalism, provoked a wideranging response, from scholars as diverse as James 9

ORIENTALISM

Clifford, Albert Hourani, Peter Gran, Jalal al-’Azm, David Kopf, Fred Halliday, Bernard Lewis, Aijaz Ahmad, Emmanuel Sivan, Ernest J. Wilson III and John MacKenzie. And Turner’s critique, in Marx and the End of Orientalism, provoked a vigorous response from Ernest Gellner. Said’s critique of orientalism, in particular, provoked a lively debate in the academic community. A list of critics generally convinced of the validity of his thesis might include Stuart Schaar, ‘Orientalism in the Service of Imperialism’ (1979), Ernest J. Wilson III, ‘Orientalism: A Black Perspective’ (1981), and Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’ (1986). A list of critics generally opposed might include Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’ (1982), C.F. Beckingham, Review of Orientalism (1979), David Kopf, ‘Hermeneutics versus History’ (1980), M. Richardson, ‘Enough Said’ (1990), John MacKenzie, ‘Edward Said and the Historians’ (1994), and Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History (1996). A list of critics generally sympathetic, but critical of some (and in one or two cases many) aspects of his approach, might include Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’ (1981), Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’ (1991), James Clifford, ‘On Orientalism’ (in The Predicament of Culture, 1988), and Fred Halliday, ‘Orientalism and Its Critics’ (1993). Donald P. Little, ‘Three Arab Critiques of Orientalism’ (1979), while in general critical of Said, effectively accepts his conclusions, as does Albert Hourani, ‘The Road to Morocco’ (1979). What divides Said from many of his critics is the fact that while Said, in Orientalism, tends to view his subject through the prism of modern and post-modern philosophy (the 10

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

philosophies of Foucault, Derrida and, surprisingly, the Marxist, Gramci), his critics remain for the most part ﬁrmly wedded to a traditional (realist) approach to the writing of history. Thus Bernard Lewis, in his article, ‘The Question of Orientalism’ (1982), accuses Said of an ‘arbitrary rearrangement of the historical background’, a ‘capricious choice of countries, persons and writings’ and an ‘unpolemical ignorance’ of historical fact. Into the category of orientalist, he, Said, introduces a series of writers and littérateurs, such as Chateaubriand and Nerval, whose work may have been relevant to the formation of Western cultural attitudes, but who had nothing to do with the academic tradition of orientalism. David Kopf, in ‘Hermeneutics versus History’ (1980), notes Said’s failure to take account of the bitter Orientalist–Anglicist controversy, concerning cultural attitudes and policies, that took place in India in the 1830s. Said’s notion of orientalism, Kopf remarks, lacks historical precision, comprehensiveness and subtlety. John MacKenzie, in ‘Edward Said and the Historians’ (1994) points out that, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain’s principal ‘other’ was France; and in the century and a half that followed, France, Russia, Germany and the Soviet Union. Said’s account of orientalism fails to take account of the instability, the heterogeneity and the ‘sheer porousness’ of imperial culture. His work is ‘supremely a-historical’. Critics of Said’s Orientalism are, from their own point of view, no doubt, fully justiﬁed in drawing attention to Said’s occasional lack of respect for historical fact. But in so emphasizing the issue of historical fact, it can be argued that Lewis, Kopf and MacKenzie, in particular, fail to make due allowance for the nature of the task undertaken by Said: the identiﬁcation of orientalism as a Foucauldian 11

ORIENTALISM

discourse, a ‘systemic discipline’, without which it would be difﬁcult, if not impossible, for European culture to ‘manage – and even produce – the Orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientiﬁcally, and imaginatively’ (Said, 1978, p. 3). Said, in other words, was not attempting to write a history of orientalism, similar to Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française (1906) and Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (1950). Nor, as he makes clear in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ (Barker et al., Literature, Politics and Theory, 1986) and the Afterword of the 1995 edition of Orientalism, was he attempting to write an anti-Western tract, a defence of Islam and the Arabs, a history of East–West relations, a history of British and French colonialism, or a history of European and Asian cultural relations and exchange. His concern was merely to identify the nature of the ‘orientalist’ discourse as a ‘created body of theory and practice’, designed, consciously or unconsciously, to serve the interests of the European imperial powers. Not that, in exploiting the concepts of discourse and epistemic ﬁeld, Said was necessarily following a model which Foucault would have recognized. According to Aijaz Ahmad, one of Said’s most perceptive critics, Foucault would not have accepted Said’s view that a discourse – that is to say an epistemic construction – could span both the pre-capitalist and the capitalist periods of history. Moreover, Said’s view, that an ‘ideology of modern imperialist Eurocentrism’ (Macﬁe, 2000, p. 291) might be found, already inscribed, in the ritual theatre of ancient Greece, was radically anti-Foucauldian. For Foucault, it may be noted, a discourse was a complexly dispersed historical phenomenon, a recalcitrant means of expression, burdened with historical sedimentation, while 12

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

an epistemic ﬁeld was a ﬁeld of knowledge, created by a culture, which exercised control over what might, and might not, be said and written. The debate about orientalism in the academic journals was not conﬁned to merely intellectual issues. In Lewis’s view, Said’s critique of orientalism was intended not as a contribution to understanding, but as an attack on Zionism, Jewish scholarship and the West, particularly America. It was a polemic inspired by hostile motives (Lewis, 1982). In Said’s view, on the other hand, Lewis, seen as a spokesman for the guild of orientalists, was a politically motivated zealot, masquerading as an imperial scholar. His defence of orientalism was an ‘act of bad faith’, covered with a ‘veneer of urbanity’. In reality it was pro-Zionist, anti-Islamic and anti-Arab (Barker et al., 1986, p. 218). Criticism of Said’s Orientalism was not conﬁned to reviews and review articles. In the twenty years or so following its publication, a number of scholars, including, in particular, John MacKenzie, J.J. Clarke, Sheldon Pollock, Rana Kabbani, B.J. Moore-Gilbert, Ronald Inden, Jane Rendall, Richard King and Sharif Gamie, sought to test out Said’s conclusions in what became, in effect, a series of case studies, the outcome of which proved once again quite inconsistent. The criticisms of Said’s Orientalism, in the years following its publication, did not go unanswered. In the mid-1980s, at a conference held at the University of Essex, Said, in a talk later published as ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, responded vigorously to the charges made against him, stubbornly defending his thesis, that orientalists, deeply 13

ORIENTALISM

implicated in the imperialist project, had assisted in the creation of negative images of the Orient. And in the Afterword of the 1995 edition of Orientalism, also published, in a slightly shorter version, under the title ‘East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism’, in the Times Literary Supplement of the same year, he again defended his position, recently under renewed attack from a variety of groups and individuals, including Arab nationalists, Muslim fundamentalists, orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (in 1993 Lewis published a revised version of his ‘The Question of Orientalism’ in Islam and the West) and Marxists such as Aijaz Ahmad. But by then it was evident that the debate about orientalism was on the wane, as the title selected by Said for his article in the Times Literary Supplement indicates. Not that the subject was by then in any sense exhausted, as the publication of J.F. Codwell and D.S. Macleod’s Orientalism Transposed in 1998 and Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion in 1999 shows. Several attempts to discover an ‘exit’ from orientalism have been made – not least that of Said himself in the closing pages of Orientalism. These include proposals regarding the use of an improved methodology, a greater self-awareness on the part of the orientalists, the application of a Marxist, class-based analysis, the search for a global order and the adoption of a methodological stance which would ‘provincialize’ Europe. It remains to be seen if any of these offers a viable solution to the problem of orientalism, the intractability of which is only equalled by its complexity.

A GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE According to Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (1957), the tripartite division of the known world in three 14

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

parts, Europe, Asia and Libya (later Africa), occurred in the ninth to ﬁfth centuries BC. It then became customary among the Greeks to use the word Europe to identify not only the mainland of Greece, as hitherto, but also territories lying to the west and north of Greece, along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The word Asia was used to distinguish the territories lying to the east of the river Nile or the isthmus of Suez in Egypt, and the river Phasis, and later the river Tanais (Don) at the eastern end of the Black Sea. The word Libya (later Africa) was used to identify the territories lying to the south of the Mediterranean. Not that the meaning of the three words used was at that time precise. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, made a distinction between Europe, which in his view was inhabited by people full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill, and Asia, which was inhabited by people of great intelligence and inventiveness, but wanting in spirit. Between the two lived the Hellenic race, which enjoyed the advantage of being both high-spirited and intelligent. Paradoxically, Europa, the eponymous princess after whom the continent of Europe was named, came not from Greece but from Phoenicia (Lebanon), whence she was carried off by Zeus, disguised as a bull, to Crete. There she gave birth to several sons and married the king. By the ﬁfth century BC the tripartite division of the known world into three continents, Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa), had become widely accepted; but for the Greeks the essential dichotomy lay between East and West, Persia and Greece, Asia and Europe. Asia, in this context, denoted a continent famed for its lavish splendour, 15

ORIENTALISM

vulgarity and arbitrary authority, all that was antithetical to Greek values. This polarization between Europe and Asia, the Romans, who established the northern frontiers of their empire on the Rhine and the Danube, continued to assert; but as masters of the inland sea – the Mediterranean – they had, of necessity, to pay more attention to events in Africa. Solinus, a contemporary of Ptolemy, in the second century AD identiﬁed three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, surrounding an inland sea, the whole surrounded by a circumambient ocean, whose parts were named (not always very accurately) after the regions they touched, Arabic, Persian, Indian, Oriental, Chinese, Hypercanian, Caspian, Scythian, German, Gallic, Atlantic, Libyan and Egyptian. In the ﬁfth to the ninth centuries AD, following the partial collapse of the Roman Empire – the Byzantine Empire survived more or less intact in the East – and the adoption in Europe of a Christian-Jewish topography, such elaborate distinctions in the geography of the known world received less attention, at least in the West. Europe became for many Christian commentators the land inhabited by the descendants of Japhet (one of the sons of Noah), the land of the Gentiles, the Greeks and the Christians. Asia became the land inhabited by the descendants of Sham (also one of the sons of Noah), glorious in that they had produced the patriarchs and the prophets, the chosen people and Christ himself. Africa became the land inhabited by the descendants of Ham (a third son of Noah). Following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD, the traditional dichotomy established by the Greeks, and later the 16

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

Romans, between East and West, Persia and Greece, Asia and Europe, was partially transposed into a new dichotomy, based now mainly on religion, between Christianity and Islam. Europe became for a time, in practice if not in theory, the equivalent of Christendom (Christianitas), while North Africa and the East became the world of Islam, threatening to engulf the Byzantine Empire, the Iberian peninsula, and even the whole of Europe. In the eighth century, in a description of the battle of Tours (732), in which Charles Martel, a Frankish chief, defeated a Muslim force advancing northwards into France, the word European (Europeenses) was for one of the ﬁrst times used. And in the ninth century, in the pontiﬁcate of John VIII (872–82), Christian soldiers were called on to march against the Saracens (Muslims) in the defence of Christendom. Finally, in an account of a speech given by Pope Urban II at the Council of Claremont (1095), recorded by William of Malmesbury, an English Chronicler, Urban II is reported to have informed the audience that the latest Christian defeats (in Anatolia) were a consequence of human wickedness, which had provoked God’s anger. The Christian people might recover grace by ﬁghting for the cross: Therefore go forward in happiness and in conﬁdence to attack the enemies of God. For these enemies (it should shame Christians to remember) have already occupied Syria, Armenia and latterly the whole of Asia Minor (whose provinces

are

Bythinia,

Phrygia,

Galatia,

Lydia,

Caria,

Pamphylia, Isauria, Lycia, Cilicia). Now they traverse Illyria and all the land beyond as far as the Bosphorus. They have seized control of our Lord’s sepulchre (unique pledge as it is of our faith) and make our pilgrims pay for permission to enter Jerusalem which, had they a grain of their earlier humanity about them, should be open to Christians alone. 17

ORIENTALISM

By itself this is enough to oppress our minds. But can any one with any initiative, anyone who cares for the glory of Christ, tolerate that we do not even share equally with them the inhabited earth? They have made Asia, which is a third of the world, their homeland – an area justly reckoned by our fathers as equal to the two other parts both for size and importance. There of old our religion ﬁrst blossomed forth, and there all the apostles but two were martyred. Now the Christians there – if any survive – eke out a miserable living, pay taxes to their wicked masters and silently long to partake of our liberty having lost their own. They have also forcibly held Africa, the second portion of the world, for over two hundred years and I call this the ruin of Christian honour for this continent formerly nourished men of the greatest genius, whose inspired writings will ensure them immortality so long as there is anyone to cherish Latin literature: scholars will bear me out in this. There remains Europe, the third continent. How small is the part of it inhabited by us Christians! for none would term Christian those barbarous people who live in distant islands on the frozen ocean, for they live in the manner of brutes. And even this fragment of our world is attacked by the Turks and Saracens. Three hundred years ago they conquered Spain and the Balearic Islands: now they covet the rest. But they are a singularly inactive lot, having little zest for warfare and preferring as they do a war when the enemy retreats. (Hay, 1957: 31–2)

Thereafter, for some centuries a loose and ill-deﬁned correlation was identiﬁed between Christendom and Europe. Pascal, the noted philosopher, used the two concepts indiscriminately, as did Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas More and Erasmus; and a French writer, writing about the same time, remarked that in the period of the crusades, the West rose against the East, Europe against 18

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

Asia. But such a clear distinction, created by historical accident, could not be forever sustained, for as one Christian authority remarked, the Christian world was one, centred in Jerusalem. It included the schismatic Greek Church, which bridged the divide between Europe and Asia, and also other small Christian communities, located in Africa and Asia. Christianity, that is to say, like Islam, could not be conﬁned by merely geographical boundaries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as European explorers and merchants discovered more about Asia, knowledge about the Orient became more complex. Hegel, the German philosopher, for instance, divided Asia into two separate parts – a hither Asia and a farther Asia. According to Hegel, hither Asia was inhabited by nations belonging to the Caucasian race, i.e. European stock, and farther Asia by the Mongolian race. Thereafter, this distinction between a Near East (proche Orient), mainly Islamic, and a Far East, dominated by China and Japan, became generally accepted; though at the turn of the nineteenth century the Europeans created a new category, the Middle East, used originally to indicate the territories stretching from Iran to Tibet, but later extended to include the greater part of the Ottoman Empire.

QUESTIONS OF DEFINITION Early examples of the use of the word orientalism in England illustrate the variety of meanings attached to the word. In 1755, Dr Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language, deﬁned orientalism (from oriental) as an ‘idiom of the eastern languages: an eastern mode of speech’. In 1769, Holdsworth, in On Virgil, drew attention 19

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to the frequent instances of orientalism to be found in Homer. In 1775, Warton, in A History of English Poetry, remarked that references to dragons in English verse were a sure sign of orientalism. In 1775, F. Wrangham, in a collection of sermons, drew attention to the ‘sublime orientalisms’ of Job; and in 1811, Byron, in Childe Harold, noted Mr Thornton’s frequent hints of ‘profound orientalism’. The words orient, oriental and orientalist, on the other hand, had a much longer history. In 1386, Chaucer, in The Knight’s Tale, referred to ‘ﬁery Phebus’, rising up so bright, that ‘all the Orient laugheth of the light’. In 1529, Thorne, in a letter to Henry VIII, referred to ‘All the Indies which we call Orientall’. In 1535, Stewart, a chronicler of the history of Scotland, mentioned two Saxon kings belonging to the ‘Orient of England’. In 1612, Brerewood, in Languages and Religion, referred to a diocese of the Orient, which then contained Syria, Palestine, Cilicia and parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia. Finally, in c. 1779, Johnson identiﬁed Dr Pocock as a ‘great orientalist’. In his dictionary, Johnson deﬁnes the word Orient as: adj. (oriens, Latin). 1. Rising of the sun. 2. Eastern, oriental. 3. Bright, shining, glittering, gaudy, sparkling. Oriental, adj. (oriental, Fr), he deﬁnes as: Eastern, placed in the east; proceeding from the east. Oriental, n.s., he deﬁnes as: an inhabitant of the eastern parts of the world. In English literature the words orient and oriental were used variously to identify orient pearl, orient ﬂames, ‘true orients’, orient kings, orient science, the ‘orient moon of Islam’, oriental carpets, oriental stitch, oriental Jews, oriental poppy, oriental leprosy and oriental porcelain. 20

INTRODUCTION – ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

In France, as in England, the words orient, oriental and orientalist had a long history. In c. 1100, the word orient was used in the Chanson de Roland. In 1353, the word orientalité was used to signify a position in the East. In 1651, Hottinger wrote a Historia orientalis, and in 1695, Galland published his Paroles remarquables des Orientaux. In 1799, in an edition of the Magazin Encyclopédique, a writer referred to the ‘Le savant orientaliste le père Paulinus’. But it was only in the nineteenth century that the word orientalisme appeared in common usage. In 1838, according to the French dictionary Lexis, the word was used to refer to knowledge of the languages, history and civilizations of the peoples of the East, and a taste for things oriental; and in the same year the word was used by Ozanam, in a book about Dante. In 1854, the brothers Goncourt used the word in one of their journals to refer to a style or genre associated with the East; and in 1921, Proust used it in Guermantes.

21

HH

PART TWO

ANALYSIS

ORIENTALISM

H

24

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

TWO

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

According to Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française (1906) and Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (1950), the rise of orientalism as a profession may be dated from the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, when a number of British and French scholars, including such noted ﬁgures as Abraham-Hyacinthe AnquetilDuperron, William Jones, Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, began the translation of a series of Hindu texts, many from the original Sanskrit. Such a conclusion may reasonably be drawn in the ﬁeld of Indic studies, but with regard to Arab and Islamic studies, it appears misleading, for in those areas, as a number of scholars have pointed out, orientalism had a somewhat earlier beginning, particularly in England and France.

THE RISE OF ARABIC STUDIES IN ENGLAND The formal foundation of Arabic studies in England, in the modern period, may be dated from the creation of a chair of Arabic, at Oxford, in 1640. Archbishop Laud, himself a keen collector of oriental manuscripts, created the chair. Later a second chair was created, the Lord Almoner’s, supported ﬁrst by an endowment, set up by 25

ORIENTALISM

William III in 1699, and then by a second endowment, set up by Queen Anne in 1702. In 1714 George I, on his accession to the throne, contributed £50 for the support of ‘professors’ or ‘students’ of Arabic at Oxford, and also £50 for the support of ‘professors’ and ‘students’ of Arabic at Cambridge, where a chair had also been created in 1660. The purpose of these grants and endowments was, according to the statute laid down by Laud, the teaching of Arabic to students, in order to illuminate their understanding of Syriac and Hebrew, considered at that time essential to a full understanding of the Bible; and, according to the conditions laid down by William III, the instruction of ‘some young students’ in the university, in the modern Arabic and Turkish languages, in order that at some time in the future they might be employed in the ‘service of the Publique’. The formal responsibilities undertaken by the professors were by no means onerous. Professors were expected to lecture one hour a week, on Wednesdays, during the vacation. The ﬁrst holder of the Oxford chair of Arabic was Edward Pococke (1604–91), a scholar who had learned Arabic at an early age and lived for some years in Aleppo. Pococke later became widely known in Europe as a teacher of Arabic. He published numerous works, including a critical edition of Specimens of the History of the Arabs (1649), and an edition of the classical Arabic poem of TughrA’C. During his life he collected 420 Arabic manuscripts, later acquired by the Bodleian Library. Other holders of a chair of Arabic at Oxford include Thomas Hyde, John Garnier, Thomas Hunt and Joseph White. Hyde, a noted eccentric, appointed professor of Arabic in 1691, studied Arabic astronomy and published the tables of Ulugh Bey, with a commentary, in 1665. He 26

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

also wrote a major study of Zoroastrianism (1700), assisted in the publication of a Malay dictionary, and collected vocabularies of ‘two of the languages of Tartary . . . that of the Ouzbek Tartars about the great city of Samarcand and that of the Tartars above the China Wall who now govern China’. Jean Garnier, a French catholic who converted to Protestantism, appointed in 1714, edited works by Abu’l Fida, a fourteenth-century Syriac prince, and published a two-volume life of Muhammad. Hunt, a deeply learned but largely unproductive scholar, appointed in 1738, who is said to have regarded Arabic and Hebrew as ‘sister’ languages, published a number of short works on Arabic dialects. White, the son of a journeyman weaver, appointed in 1774, published an edition of the works of Abd al-Latif, and co-operated with an ofﬁcer serving in the East India Company army in the preparation of an edition of The Institutes Political and Military . . . by the Great Timur (1783), taken from a Persian text. Hyde, Hunt and White, who combined their chairs of Arabic with tenure of the regius professorship of Hebrew, were ﬁrst and foremost biblical scholars. Nevertheless, in their inaugural lectures, following a precedent set by Pococke, all three laid great stress on the beneﬁts to be gained from the study of Arabic (Lewis, 1941; Marshall, 1986). Meanwhile, in Cambridge in 1631, Mr Thomas Adams, a London draper, later Lord Mayor of London, encouraged by the Vice Chancellor and Heads of Colleges of the University, who wished to do ‘good service’ to king and state, promote English commerce and enlarge the borders of the Church, agreed to defray the charge of an Arabic lecture, at £40 a year, for three years. Then, in 1660, a chair was established, supported by an endowment. The 27

ORIENTALISM

ﬁrst holder of the Sir Thomas Adams lectureship or chair, as it became known, was Abraham Wheelock (1593–1653). Other holders of the chair include Edmund Castell, Simon Ockley and Samuel Lee. Holders of the Lord Almoner’s Readership or Professorship of Arabic, set up in Cambridge, like its twin in Oxford, by Royal Warrant, in 1715, include David Wilkins, appointed in 1724, and Joseph Dacre Carlyle, appointed in 1795. Wheelock, a university librarian, fellow of Claire College and student of Arabic and Anglo-Saxon, attempted a refutation of the Koran and translated the Gospels into Persian. Castell published a dictionary of the Semitic languages (1669), an immense work which took him eighteen years to complete. He also published a volume of original poems in Arabic, dedicated to Charles II. Ockley, a poor Church of England priest born in Exeter, who studied Arabic at both Oxford and Cambridge, was appointed in 1711. He published a History of the Saracens (1708), which was derived mainly from Arabic manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian. This is said to be the ﬁrst popular and readable account of Arabic history written in English. He also published an Introduction to Oriental Languages (1706). Lee, the son of a poor family living in a Shropshire village, originally apprenticed to a carpenter, was appointed in 1819 and is said to have taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian and Hindustani. Carlyle, who travelled widely in the Near East, published several works, including Specimens of Arabic Poetry (Arberry, 1943 and 1948). The foundation of chairs of Arabic at Oxford and Cambridge, and later, in the nineteenth century, at the University of London, undoubtedly did much to promote the study of Arabic in England. Yet in the nineteenth 28

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

century, when an extraordinary explosion of interest in oriental studies occurred, not only in England but also in a number of other European countries, many of the most noted students of Arabic, including Lane, Burton, Blunt and Doughty, carried out their work for the most part independently of the world of academe. It should not be supposed that knowledge of the Orient and oriental languages in the period preceding the foundation of chairs of Arabic at Oxford and Cambridge was non-existent. In the twelfth century a number of English scholars attended Muslim universities in Spain to study Arabic, mathematics, medicine and philosophy; and in 1158–59 Abraham b. Ezra of Toledo, a Spanish-Jewish scholar, visited London and taught Arabic there. About the same time Adelard of Bath, a pioneer of Arabic learning in Europe, travelled extensively in Spain and Syria; and Thomas Brown, an Englishman, served as a judge in Sicily, then under Muslim rule. In the early seventeenth century William Bedwell (1561–1632), who taught Pococke Arabic in his youth, wrote an Arabic lexicon, in seven volumes, and a study of the Koran; Richard Knolles, vicar of Sandwich, and sometime fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, published a General History of the Turks (1603), part of which was based on translations of Turkish chronicles; and John Greaves, a mathematician and astronomer, travelled extensively in the Near East, where he studied Arabic and Persian, and collected Arabic and Persian manuscripts (Lewis, 1941; Bowen, 1945).

THE RISE OF INDIC STUDIES IN ENGLAND The origin of the rapid expansion in oriental, mainly Indic, studies that occurred in England and many of the other 29

ORIENTALISM

European countries in the last quarter of the eighteenth and the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century lay in the work of a series of remarkable scholars and linguists, employed in one way or another by the East India Company, which had recently taken over responsibility for the government of Bengal. In 1776 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, with the support of Warren Hastings, the governor, himself a noted scholar, ‘skilled in Persian and Arabic literature’, published a Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pandits, based on a Persian compilation, and in the same year a Bengali grammar. In 1785 Charles Wilkins, who for the ﬁrst time created a printing press in India that was capable of printing the Bengali script, published a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, described by Raymond Schwab as the ‘summit of metaphysical poetry’; and in 1787 he translated the Hitópadéshá, which was published posthumously in 1807. In 1789 William Jones, a judge in the Supreme Court in Calcutta, who as a young man at Oxford had already learned numerous oriental languages and prepared a Persian grammar, published a translation of Kalidasa’s Shakúntala, a classical Hindu drama; and in 1792 an edition of the same author’s Ritusamhara, in Sanskrit characters, and a translation of Gita Govinda, a remarkable Hindu love poem. In 1819, Horace Hayman Wilson, originally employed in the Company’s medical service and later at the Mint, published the ﬁrst practical Sanskrit–English dictionary; and in 1846 a Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus. Finally, in 1837, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who had for some years held the post of professor of Sanskrit at the College of Fort William, and later served as president of the Calcutta Court, published his Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus, an inﬂuential work (Schwab, 1950; Kopf, 1969).

30

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

Interest in Indic studies found an immediate expression in the foundation of academic institutions of various kinds. In 1783 an oriental college was opened at Fort William in India; and in 1792 a Sanskrit College in Benares. In 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the most inﬂuential of the learned institutions established, was set up in Calcutta; and in 1833 a chair of Sanskrit was created at Oxford. About the same time an Oriental Translation Fund was opened in London, that between 1829 and 1834 was to publish more than ﬁfty translations of oriental, mainly Hindu, works. It was at a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal that William Jones, in an anniversary address given in 1786, ﬁrst suggested that a relationship existed between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, a discovery that was later to give rise to the myth of Aryanism and play a signiﬁcant part in shaping racialist ideology in Europe (Kopf, 1969).

THE RISE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES IN FRANCE The rise of oriental studies in France might reasonably be dated from the posthumous publication, in 1697, of Berthelémy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s Bibliothèque orientale. This was a universal dictionary of the peoples of the East, of extraordinary comprehensiveness, which though based largely on earlier histories and encyclopaedias, published in the preceding century or so, yet attempted a realistic survey of the principal religions, cultures and peoples of Asia, from the ‘extreme orient’ to the ‘pillars of Hercules’ (the Straits of Gibraltar), together with histories of the Mogul, Tartar and Turkish Empires. There followed a series of publications which, while exploiting the new-found interest

31

ORIENTALISM

in all things oriental, generated by travellers’ tales, accounts of the voyages of merchant-adventurers and the letters and reports of Jesuit missionaries despatched to China and Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – many of which were published in an extraordinary series of journals, thirty-four in number, entitled Lettres ediﬁantes et curieuses (1703–76) – yet managed to lay the foundations of a tradition of oriental studies that was to incorporate the work of a series of remarkable writers and scholars. These include Antoine Galland, Father du Halde, Father Charlevoix, Joseph de Guines, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the Abbé Grossier, the Abbé Parraud and Constantine Volney. Thus in 1704–8, Antoine Galland published a translation of the Thousand and One Nights, a work which, more than any other, promoted an exotic image of the Orient in Europe. In 1735 Father du Halde published a Description de l’Empire de Chine et de la Tartarie Chinois; and in 1736 Father Charlevoix an Histoire et Description Générale de Japon. In the 1740s and 1750s scores of books on oriental subjects, aimed at the general reader, were published, including Anecdotes Turques (1744), Anecdotes orientales (1751) and Anecdotes Chinoises (1754). In 1756–58 de Guignes published a monumental Histoire général des Huns, which included accounts of the cyclical rise and fall of a number of Arab empires; and in 1771 Anquetil-Duperron who, following a journey to India, where he learnt Persian, Malayalan and Hindustani and collected a Sanskrit alphabet, published a translation of the Zend-Avesta, in three volumes, thereby laying the foundations of Indic studies in France. Anquetil-Duperron also completed a series of retranslations of the Upanishads, from the Persian, published in 1801–2. In 1777–84, the Abbé Grossier published a Histoire Générale de la Chine; and in 1787 the Abbé Parraud a retranslation of Charles Wilkins’s 32

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

version of the Bhagavad Gita. Finally, in 1787–8 Constantine Volney published his Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, and about the same time his Considérations sur la Guerre des Turcs, both inﬂuential works. In these circumstances it is not surprising that, in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte was looking for new ﬁelds to conquer, he should have launched the Egyptian expedition, described by some French historians as a sort of ‘orientalisme appliqué’ (Reig, 1988). In France, as in England, the growing interest in all things oriental, created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, found an institutional expression. Already, in the reign of Louis XIII (1610–43), it had been possible to print Arabic texts on the royal printing presses, and to study Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac at the Collège de France; and in 1718 the Abbé Bignon, librarian to the King of France, had invited French missionaries, then active in the East, to collect manuscripts for an oriental library he hoped to set up. In the reign of Louis XIV (1661–1715), Colbert, the ﬁnance minister, created chairs of oriental studies at the Collège de France and despatched archaeological expeditions to investigate sites in Turkey and Egypt. About the same time, what in effect became a school of oriental languages was set up in the royal household, to train translators in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Many of the translators trained in the school spent long periods living in the Levant, perfecting their skills. Students of the school included such noted orientalists as Antoine Galland and François Petis de la Croix. But it was only in the period of the French Revolutionary Wars (1793–1815) and the decades immediately following that a rapid expansion in the institutional organization of French orientalism occurred. In 1795 the Convention established 33

ORIENTALISM

an Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris, with Silvestre de Sacy, the effective founder of French orientalism as a fully-ﬂedged profession, as its ﬁrst professor of Arabic. About the same time, a chair of Persian was created at the Collège de France, to which Sacy was also appointed; and in 1814 a chair of Sanskrit, with Léonard de Chézy, one of Sacy’s students, as its ﬁrst incumbent. In 1822 a Société Asiatique was set up in Paris, by, among others, the Duke of Orleans, the ﬁrst meeting of which was chaired by Sacy. Shortly thereafter the society commenced publication of its journal, the Journal Asiatique; and in 1826 Sacy, at a meeting of the society, outlined his ‘guidelines for the encouragement of oriental studies’ in France, a signiﬁcant event in the development of French orientalism. Members of the society included Champollion Jeune, Abel Rémusat, Jean Louis Burnouf, Eugène Burnouf, Daniel Kieffer, Claude Fauriel, Alexandre du Humboldt, the Duke of Richelieu, François Littré and François René de Chateaubriand. The progressive expansion of French orientalism in the period of the French Revolutionary Wars and the decades immediately following may be traced in the list of oriental languages taught at the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes: Arabic (1795), Turkish (1795), Persian (1795), Armenian (1812), Hindustani (1830), Chinese (1843), Malay (1844), Javanese (1844) and Japanese (1868). Other languages added later include Russian, Siamese, Berber, Mongol, Ukrainian, Hausa, Urdu and Cambodian. In France, again as in England, in the period preceding the publication of d’Herbelot’s monumental work, knowledge of the Orient and oriental languages was by no means absent. Throughout the Middle Ages, as elsewhere in Europe, a great deal was known about the Holy Land, 34

THE RISE OF ORIENTALISM

the birthplace of Jesus and Christianity, to which pilgrims and crusaders travelled in large numbers. In the period of the Renaissance, and even earlier, a period in which the term ‘Muslim’ became for a time synonymous with Turk, knowledge of the Near East, particularly the Ottoman Empire, ‘the greatest terror of the World’, inhabited by ‘barbari’, ruled by a ‘tyrannus’, was extensive, as was to a lesser degree knowledge of Persia (see article by Parry in Lewis and Holt, 1962). In the age of exploration, when more than a hundred accounts of travel and adventure were published in France, including Thévenot, Récit d’un voyage fait au Levant (1665), Tavernier, Voyages en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes (1676) and Bernier, Voyages (Inde) (1699), huge interest was created. It was from the accounts of exploration written by Tavernier, Chardin and Bernier that Voltaire acquired his extensive knowledge of the Orient. Meanwhile, in the 1620s Michel Baudier wrote a history of Turkey and a treatise on Islam. In 1651 de Hottinger published his Historia orientalis; and in 1679 de Chassepol his Histoire des grand viziers. More than thirty novels were written describing events in the Orient in this period, including De Logeas, L’Histoire des trois frères, princes de Constantinople (1632), Mme de Villedieu, Asterie et Tamerlan (1675), and Le Noble, Zulima ou l’amour pur (1695); while on the French stage numerous plays were presented, again loosely based on events in the Orient, including Mayret, Soliman ou la mort de Mustapha (1630), Magnon, Tamerlan ou la mort de Bajazet (1647), and Racine, Bajazet (1672). But, according to Pierre Martino, Orientalism dans la littérature française (1906), with the exception of one or two of the tales of exploration, which were based on personal experience, these works remained for the most part remote from reality, betraying an inclination to stereotype the orientals concerned, either as ﬁne men, full of spirit and 35

ORIENTALISM

imagination, ‘galant, gentil, poli, bien élévé’, or as wastrels, lazy, dishonest, pompous, quarrelsome, superstitious, sexually corrupt and fatalistic. Scholars, in particular in this period, were inclined to display all the worst faults, later identiﬁed by the critics of orientalism. These include a pedantic obsession with academic method: ‘la rapprochement, le commentaire, la glose, la compilation’, and a tendency to speak of Turkey, ‘sans même connaître Constantinople’ (Martino, 1906; Reig, 1988).

THE RISE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES IN GERMANY The rise of oriental studies in Germany may be dated from the turn of the eighteenth century, when a number of German scholars trained in Paris, many by Sacy, returned home to pursue their new-found vocation. In the ﬁeld of Arabic and Islamic studies, these included Georg Wilhelm Freytag (1788–1861), a student of Sacy’s who drew up a Lexicon Arabico–Latinum, and Gustav Flügel (1802–70), also a student of Sacy’s, who published an edition of the Koran, a Koran concordance and The Catalogue of the Books of Ibn an-Nadcm. Then in 1833 Abraham Geiger, a Jewish scholar, published an account of the rise of Islam entitled What did Muhammad Retain from Judaism; and in 1843–44 Gustav Weil, also a Jewish scholar, published Muhammad the Prophet, His Life and Teaching and a Historical–Critical Introduction to the Koran. In 1845 Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, who had played a leading part in the foundation of a school of Arabic studies in Leipzig, published several signiﬁcant works, including Notes on the Study of Arabic and an edition of Baidawc’s Koran. Fleischer’s successors at Leipzig included Albert Socin, August Fischer and Heinrich Thorbecke. 36

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Other scholars contributing to the rise of Arabic and Islamic studies in Germany include Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, who published a translation of an as yet unprinted biography of Muhammad, written by Ibn Hiˇsam (1858–60); Aloys Sprenger, who published Das Leben und die Lehre des Muhammed (1861–65); Theodor Nöldecke, who wrote a History of the Koran (1868), Aufsätze zur Persischen Geschichte (1887) and an important essay on the language of the Koran, published in Neue Beiträge zur Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (1910); Julius Wellhausen, who published Relics of Arabic Paganism (1887), a Prolegomena to the Earliest History of Islam (1899), and The Arab Empire and Its Fall (1902); Eduard Sachau, the ﬁrst director of the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages, who in 1897 published Muhammadan Law According to the Shaﬁi School; and Carl Brockelmann, who in 1892 and 1902 published the ﬁrst two volumes of his monumental History of Arabic Literature. Orientalist institutions set up in Germany at about that time include the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), established in 1845 by Fleischer and a group of leading orientalists; a Seminar for Oriental Languages, set up in Berlin in 1887, which published an inﬂuential series of ‘Communications’ and textbooks, mainly concerned with Islam and the Arab world; a Chair of the History and Culture of the Orient, established in Hamburg, in 1908; Der Islam, a journal for the history and culture of the Islamic Orient, set up in 1910; and The German Society for the Study of Islam, founded in 1912, whose journal, The World of Islam, was later to publish many signiﬁcant articles (Paret, 1968). The honour of introducing Indic studies to Germany is usually attributed to Friedrich Schlegel, a professor of 37

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history and philosophy at the Ecole Superior in Cologne, who in 1808 published Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier in Heidelberg. Schlegel, like a number of other German scholars resident for a time in Paris at the turn of the eighteenth century, had learnt Sanskrit from Alexander Hamilton, a British ofﬁcer who was held prisoner in the French capital as a result of the breakdown of the Treaty of Amiens (1803), and who passed his time, while awaiting release, cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale and teaching the language. Schlegel’s work sparked off a craze for Sanskrit studies in Germany that was to spread to most parts of the continent and result in its author being credited with the title of ‘inventer of the Oriental Renaissance’, a concept which was to play a signiﬁcant part in the formation of the German Romantic Movement. In his essay, Schlegel, like Jones, concluded that a clear relationship existed between Sanskrit and the principal European languages and that the origins of the peoples of Northern Europe could be traced back to India, the ‘real source of all tongues’ and the ‘primary source of all ideas’. Signiﬁcant works, published following the introduction of Indic studies in Germany, include Joseph von Görres, Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt (1810), Friedrich Cruezer, Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810–12), and Friedrich Rückert, Die Weisheit der Brahmen (1836). It was in this period that Franz Bopp, who had studied Sanskrit in Paris, created the new science of comparative grammar. The groundwork of the rapid expansion in Indic studies that followed the publication of Schlegel’s essay in 1808 had been laid some years earlier, in the work of a number of German scholars and translators. These include Georg 38

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Forster, who translated Jones’s version of the Shakúntala into German in 1791; Johan Friedrich Klueker, who translated a number of Jones’s articles, published in the Asiatic Review, in 1795; and Friedrich Maier, a lecturer at Jena University, who translated the Bhagavad Gita and the Gita Govinda. About the same time, numerous articles on recent British discoveries made in India were published in the Asiatische Magazin, a magazine set up in Weimar in 1802, which unfortunately did not survive its second edition (Schwab, 1950).

ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE The rise of oriental studies elsewhere in Europe in the nineteenth century was equally impressive. In Holland, where schools of Hebrew and Arabic, early established, had long survived, and where Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) had produced a Grammatica Arabica, used as a textbook for the teaching of Arabic for almost two hundred years, Christian Snouck Hurgronje, who had travelled widely in the Near and Middle East, published Het Mekkaansche Feest, in 1880, and Mekka, in 1888–89. In Hungary, which had already given birth to a number of remarkable orientalists – these included Janos Uri, who published Epistolae Turcicae in 1771 and Bibliothecae Bodleianae in 1787 (Uri was employed for a time cataloguing oriental manuscripts in the Bodleian), and Sandor Korosi Csoma, who as a young man had studied Hebrew, Turkish, Persian and Arabic, learned Tibetan and published an Essay towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English and a Grammar of the Tibetan Language in 1834 – Armin Vambery, who had travelled widely in Turkey, Persia and Central Asia, learning the languages of the inhabitants, published a series of remarkable works. These included Sketches of Central Asia 39

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(1868), Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Frontier Problem (1874), and Das Türkenvolk (1883). Vambery made a point in his work of emphasizing the great inﬂuence exercised by the Turks on Hungarian culture. Meanwhile Ignaz Goldziher, who had studied Islam in Cairo, under Muhammad Abdu, the noted Arab scholar, published a series of important works on the subject, including Die Zâhiriten (1884), Mohammedanische Studien (1888–90) and Lectures on Islam (1910). Other Hungarians working in the ﬁeld of oriental studies in this period, include Mihaly Kmosko, Sahdor Kegl, Jozsef Thury and Aurel Stein. In Austria, A. von Kremer, a diplomat by profession, published Geschichte der Herrschenden Ideen des Islams, Gottesbegriff, Prophetie und Staatsidee (1868) and Kulturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen (1875–77). About the same time, in Italy, Michele Ameri, a keen student of Arabic, wrote a series of important works on the history of Muslim Sicily. These included Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (1854–72) and Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula (1880–89). Then, in 1912, Leone Caetani published La Fonction de l’Islam dans la Evolution de la Civilisation. In Russia, a country deeply involved from earliest times with the Orient, where oriental languages had been taught to interpreters in the period of Catherine the Great, a chair of oriental languages was established at Moscow University in 1804, and a department of oriental languages at the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to statutes published in 1835, all Russian universities were instructed to set up departments teaching the principal Islamic languages, together with Kalmak and Mongol, but it was only in the University of Kazan, under M.N. MoussinePouchkine, it would seem, that any serious attempt was made to implement the proposed programme. In 1845 the 40

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Society of Russian Imperial Geography was set up; and about the same time a faculty of oriental languages in St Petersburg. Manuscripts collected during Russian campaigns in Central Asia, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, were deposited in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial Library, where they formed the foundations of important collections. Russian scholars, responsible for the creation of effective departments of oriental studies, in particular Arabic, Persian and Turkish, at Russian universities, included Boldyrev, at Moscow (1811–37), Senskovskii, at St Petersburg (1822–47) and Kazem-Bek, at Kazan (1826–45) and later at St Petersburg (1845–70). Boldyrev wrote Arabic and Persian manuals, used in Russian universities until the end of the nineteenth century. Senskovskii published a French translation of the Tarîkh-i Mukîm-Khrân (c. 1825), a manuscript presented by the Emir of Bukhara to the Russian ambassador in Negri. He was also responsible for acquiring the d’Ardebil collection of Persian manuscripts, now deposited in the Bibliothèque Publique in St Petersburg. Other Russian scholars making useful contributions include Baron Desmaisons, the professor of Tartar at Orenburg University, and later a director of the Institute of Oriental Languages, who in 1883 travelled from Orenburg to Bokhara dressed as a Tartar molla, and Khanykhov, who in 1843 published an account of a journey to Bokhara made in the company of a group of Russian engineers, invited by the Emir, entitled Description du Khanate de Boukhara (Barthold, 1947). It should not be supposed that European orientalists worked in isolation. On the contrary, until the period of the First World War, and even beyond, co-operation between orientalists was commonplace, as the publication 41

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of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a major international enterprise, shows. The ﬁrst volume of the encyclopaedia, which was edited by two leading German orientalists, Arthur Schaade and Richard Hartmann, appeared in 1913, and the second volume in 1927.

THE ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN PREJUDICE AGAINST ISLAM As Norman Daniel, Islam and the West (1960) and Richard Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962) have shown, by the end of the twelfth century many European scholars had acquired a sufﬁcient knowledge of Islam to understand its principal features. But their understanding was vitiated by a polemical desire to distort the religion, denigrate its followers, and where possible secure their conversion to Christianity, which was seen as the one and only true faith. The result was that, until the end of the sixteenth century at least, understanding of Islam and Islamic society in Europe remained confused, distorted by an unwillingness or inability to appreciate the signiﬁcance of a number of central Muslim conceptions, such as that of the unity of God, the nature of creation, the role of Muhammad and the nature of the Koran. Muslim doctrine, it was assumed, was simply a reworking of material contained in the Old and New Testaments. Muhammad, an ambitious adventurer, who had sought merely to justify his own pursuit of power, wealth and sexual satisfaction, had misused that material. Nor, according to Daniel, was any correction of the misunderstanding likely, for in time the prejudice and distortion displayed by Christian scholars and polemicists created an accepted canon, a constituted body of belief about Islam, which identiﬁed a ‘real truth’, substantially 42

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different from what Muslims themselves actually believed. Constantly conﬁrmed by repetition, this ‘doctrine about doctrine’ became ﬁrmly embedded in the consciousness of the Europeans concerned, until it became virtually impervious to change. An essential ingredient of the canon thus created was the belief that Islam was inherently irrational, an assumption supposedly conﬁrmed by Islam’s denial of Christianity, the one and only true faith, and by its acceptance of the false prophecy of Muhammad. Other convictions widely held include the belief that Islam, unlike Christianity, was inherently violent; that its founder preached the doctrine of Jihad or Holy War; that Islam was idolatrous, an assumption conﬁrmed by the fact that Muhammad, its founder, had been born an idolater; and that Islam was licentious, an assumption conﬁrmed by the prophet’s own behaviour, Muslim marriage and divorce law, and the promise, contained in the Koran, that its adherents would enjoy complete sexual satisfaction in paradise. Christian misunderstanding and distortion of Islam was, from earliest times, supported by a series of myths and legends that were widely believed in Mediaeval times. Thus it was believed that Muslims promoted homosexuality, prostitution and adultery; that Muhammad had been taught religion by a renegade Christian; that he suffered from epileptic ﬁts; and that parts of the Koran had been written by Christians and Jews. Muhammad, it was frequently asserted, had trained a pigeon to eat grains of corn from his ear, in order that he might simulate a visit from the Holy Ghost; secreted milk and honey, so that at the appropriate moment he might release them and thus impress his followers; and died a monstrous and humiliating death. As in the case of the Christian polemic, 43

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such myths and legends, widely believed, remained for the most part impervious to criticism, unaffected by the experiences and observations of the many hundreds of merchants, crusaders, missionaries, Christian prisoners and slaves, who from time to time visited, or resided in, the Muslim world in that period (Daniel, 1960).

ORIENTALISM AND COLONIALISM It is evident that, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a close correlation existed between orientalism, as a profession, and the expansion of European commerce, mainly English and French, and the colonialism and imperialism to which it eventually gave rise. Thus Archbishop Laud’s interest in the collection of Arabic manuscripts and his foundation of a chair of Arabic studies in Oxford in 1640 almost certainly originated in the activities of the Levant Company, whose interests in the eastern Mediterranean were at that time expanding rapidly. Pococke, appointed to the ﬁrst chair of Arabic at Oxford, spent more than ﬁve years studying Arabic in Aleppo, a centre of Company activity. The foundation of the Almoner’s chair of Arabic by William III, at Oxford in c. 1699, was inspired mainly by the need to train students for the ‘service of the Publique’, which now required a ready supply of linguists capable of translating Arabic and Turkish into English. Hyde, an early incumbent of the Oxford chair, served for a time as Charles II’s translator of Arabic. In Cambridge, the foundation of the Thomas Adams lectureship or chair of Arabic in 1636 was inspired by a desire to see the university’s work tend to the ‘good service of the King and State in our commerce with those Eastern nations, and in Gods [sic] good time to the 44

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enlarging of the borders of the Church, and the propagation of Christian religion to them who now sitt in darkenesse’ (Arberry, 1948, p. 8). Later, when commercial attention shifted from the Levant Company, operating in the Near East, to the East India Company, operating in south Asia, interest in Persian, the diplomatic and administrative language of Mogul India, expanded rapidly, as did interest in the indigenous languages of the subcontinent. Early students of Indian languages, including Sanskrit, such as Jones, Wilson, Wilkins and Halhed, were almost all loyal servants of the East India Company, keen to advance its interests. Meanwhile, in France, interest in oriental studies, as in England, marched in step with colonialism from at least the period of Henry IV, when, in 1604, a ﬁrst, unsuccessful attempt was made to set up a French East India Company. Colbert’s decision to create a chair of oriental studies at the Collège de France was largely inspired by the need for language specialists, generated by the foundation of the Compagnie de la Chine in 1600, the Compagnie des Indes orientales in 1665, and the Compagnie du Levant in 1670. D’Herbelot, the author of the Bibliothèque orientale, enjoyed the patronage of both Fouquet and Colbert. In the eighteenth century, when Law, the French ﬁnance minister, took steps to reorganize the Compagnie des Indes (1719), and when Dupleix, the French governor-general in India, dreamed, vainly as it turned out, of establishing a great French colonial empire there, interest in all things oriental in France expanded rapidly. According to Pierre Martino, L’Orientalism dans la littérature française (1906), the relationship between colonialism and orientalism, in literature at least, already well established, was in the mid-eighteenth century ‘un 45

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simple rapport de cause à effet’. In the period of the Congress of Belgrade (1740), at which the French acted as mediators, and the Turco-Russian Wars of 1768–74, publications of books about Turkey are said to have quadrupled in France. Anquetil-Duperron, the effective founder of Indic studies in France, was supported on his journey to India by an allowance, granted by the French king, and provided with a free passage. But it is in the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) that the closest correlation between orientalism and colonialism can be detected. It was in this period that the Ecoles des Langues Orientales, ‘destineé à l’enseignement des langues orientales vivantes ayant une utilité reconnue pour la politique et le commerce’ was founded (Reig, 1988, p. 20). More than two dozen French orientalists, including Venture de Paradis, Jean-Joseph Marcel and Dom Gabriel Tabril, were attached to Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Following the conquest, an institute was at once set up, staffed partly by orientalists, for the study of the geography, language and culture of Egypt; and orientalists were throughout employed in the administration, not only as translators and interpreters, but also as administrators. Following the failure of the expedition, much of the material collected by the orientalists accompanying Bonaparte was published in the Déscription de l’Egypte. In 1805, Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, took steps to further encourage the teaching of oriental languages at the Collège de France, as interpreters and translators were needed to assist in the promotion of French foreign policy objectives in Asia. Finally, in the period of the French occupation of Algeria (1830), a number of orientalists helped to prepare the expedition, translate proclamations and organize the new administration. 46

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The close correlation that existed between orientalism, as a profession, and colonialism can be seen most clearly in the career of Silvestre de Sacy, the effective founder of French orientalism. Recruited by the Comité de l’Instruction Publique de la Convention Nationale in 1794, because of his expertise in oriental languages, Sacy, in addition to teaching Arabic and Persian at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and the Collège de France, assisting with the work of several government departments, including the Imprimerie Royale and the Bibliothèque Royale, and helping with the administration of several academic societies, including the Société Asiatique and the Journal des Savants, yet found time to translate numerous ofﬁcial documents into Arabic. These included bulletins issued by the Grande Armée, a manifesto issued by Napoleon in 1807, which was designed to raise the Muslim subjects of the Russian Empire against their Tsar, and a proclamation issued by General de Bourmont to the Algerians on the occasion of the French occupation of Algiers. Other orientalists employed from time to time by the French state include Eusèbe de Salle, a student of Arabic, Turkish and Persian, educated at the Ecole Des Langues Orientales and the Collège de France, who in the 1830s was employed as principal interpreter in Algeria, and later reported to the French intelligence services on events in Egypt and Syria; Abraham Daninos who, as an interpreter attached to the staff of General de Bourmont, was charged with the task of informing the ruler of Algeria of the conditions of his capitulation; and Léon-Charles Zaccar, an interpreter, who along with Sacy and Bianchi, a professor of Arabic at the Ecole des Jeunes de langues, translated the proclamation issued by Bourmont on the occasion of the conquest. 47

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Colonialism was of course not the only force driving the expansion of orientalism in this period. Throughout, other motives for the study of the subject existed. These included the pursuit of a better understanding of Hebrew and Arabic, the languages of the Bible; a better understanding of the Greek classics, many of which had been preserved by the Arabs in the Dark Ages; realization of the Enlightenment project of a universal study of humankind, unpolluted by religious and political prejudices; and the acquisition by missionaries of the linguistic and other skills necessary for the successful conversion of the inﬁdel, always a principal Christian objective. While it is true that many orientalists lacked direct knowledge of the Orient, numerous exceptions to the general rule may be found. Pococke, as we have seen, lived for more than ﬁve years in Aleppo. Carlyle travelled widely in the Levant. Many of the orientalists employed by the East India Company spent a substantial part of their lives in India, and many died there. Lane, the nineteenthcentury Arabist, author of The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, lived in Cairo for long periods, nine or ten years in all. Palmer, who travelled widely in the Levant, and was eventually murdered by marauding Arabs while riding on horseback through the Sinai Peninsula, made many visits to the area. Burton, whose exploits are legendary, served in the India army, lived in Damascus for some years, rode on a camel from Cairo to Suez, joined a pilgrim ship bound for Yanbe, visited Mecca and Medina, and travelled to East Africa and Abyssinia, disguised as an Arab merchant. Blunt, who, together with his wife, travelled widely throughout the Near East and Middle East, in particular in Arabia, eventually bought a house in Cairo, where it is said he lived the life of an Egyptian effendi. 48

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Students in the school of translators, set up in France in the reign of Louis XIV, were, as we have seen, required to spend long periods in the Levant, perfecting their knowledge. Anquetil-Duperron’s extraordinary adventures in India, which included visits to Pondicherry, Chandernagore – a French settlement, to the north of Calcutta – Benares, Surat, Cossimbazar, Mahé – a French possession on the south-west coast – Cochin, Malabar and Goa, and the killing of an irate husband, to whose wife the ardent orientalist was giving French lessons, would provide ample material for a novel, in three volumes. Several later French orientalists, including Léon-Charles Zaccar and Joanny Pharaon, were born in the Near East. Burkhardt, the Swiss historian, who spent most of his life travelling in the Near East, visiting Mecca under the protection of Muhammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, died there in 1817. Sandor Korosi Csoma, the Hungarian orientalist, who travelled widely in the Near East, researching the origins of the Hungarian people, lived for seven years in a Tibetan monastery, studying Buddism. Vambery lived for many years in Turkey, Persia and Central Asia, before travelling, dressed as a dervish, from Persia to Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand. Russian scholars, deeply involved with the Islamic world in Central Asia and the Crimea, frequently lived for long periods in the area. Such experiences may not have entirely expunged stereotypical images of the Orient and the oriental from the minds of the orientalists and travellers concerned, but it may be supposed that they did something to reduce their intensity.

49

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THREE

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One of the most striking cases of orientalist involvement in the world of politics was that which occurred in India in the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century, when an elite group of orientalists, enlisted in the service of the East India Company, played a decisive part in shaping the educational and cultural policy of the Company. Initially, following their victory at Plassey in 1757, the British had concentrated their attention on trade, conquest and extortion, but following the Company’s decision to ‘stand forth as Diwan’ (take over direct responsibility for management of the revenue, in effect the government) in Bengal, the Orientalists – as an elite group of Company ofﬁcials controlling educational and cultural policy became known – adopted a more responsible approach to the problems of government they now faced, based on the conservative principle that where possible local institutions, laws and culture should be preserved and the use of local languages encouraged. But in the end, despite its evident success in winning popular and elite support, mainly in Bengal, the policy adopted by the Orientalists did not prevail. In the 1830s, under the inﬂuence of the so-called Anglicists – a loose alliance of evangelical, utilitarian and liberal groups, made up mainly of the Clapham Sect (Wilberforce, Grant, 50

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Macaulay, Parry, Shore, Zachary, Thornton and Venn), the Baptist Mission Society and the Foreign Bible Society – the Company was persuaded to abandon the conservative educational and cultural policy previously pursued, and opt instead for one based on the principle that progress and modernization in India would be best attained by a radical expansion in the use of English, both in the administration and in the educational institutions concerned. The progenitor of the Orientalist approach to the problems of government faced by the East India Company in India was, according to David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), Warren Hastings, who was appointed governor-general in 1772. Believing that British power in India could only be preserved in the long run with the support of the Indian people, Hastings took a series of steps to obtain their support. In 1773, he drafted a proposal for the establishment of a professorship of Persian at Oxford (never implemented); in 1784, in conjunction with William Jones and others, he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, later to become famous throughout Europe; and in 1790 he made provision for the employment of tutors to teach company ofﬁcials Persian (the language of the Mogul court). At the same time competence in Indian languages was made a prerequisite for promotion, and Hindu pandits were encouraged to settle in Calcutta to teach Company ofﬁcials Sanskrit and translate ancient texts. As a result of these and other measures, Hastings quickly succeeded in creating an elite group of Company ofﬁcials, ﬂuent in local languages and sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim religion and culture. Other governors-general continued to implement the educational and cultural policy laid down by Hastings. In 1800, 51

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Marquess Wellesley, appointed governor-general in 1797, created the College of Fort William, a ‘university of the East’, designed to train the servants of the Company and implement the principles of educational policy laid down by Hastings. At the College Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and six Indian vernacular languages were taught, together with Hindu, Muslim and Indian law, world geography, mathematics, and the principal sciences. In 1803, in order to promote high standards in the learning of oriental languages, Wellesley, together with the College Council, introduced a system of public examination and disputation, held in the recently erected Government House in Calcutta. For many years the ceremony at which the disputations were conducted was seen as the principal social event of the year. Meanwhile, at the College of Fort William printing presses were set up, to publish textbooks and copies of the Indian classics, and a library was opened, later to become a major depository of rare manuscripts. Working together with the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Serampore Mission, earlier established by Baptist missionaries in Serampore, then a Danish settlement, in the following years the College, which employed H.T. Colebrooke and William Carey, two of the most outstanding orientalists of the period, published a series of foundational works, including Bengali and Sanskrit grammars, translations of Hindu and Muslim classics and studies of Indian history, culture and law. In 1811 Lord Minto, who succeeded to the governorgeneralship in 1807, introduced a programme to promote Hindu culture and, about the same time, a series of measures designed to improve the Calcutta school system. In 1816, Lord Moira (later Marquess Hastings), Minto’s successor, supported the foundation of Hindu College, a 52

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college set up by a group of wealthy Hindus, based mainly in Calcutta, designed to educate the sons of respectable Hindus in the English and Hindu languages and the literatures and sciences of Europe and Asia; and in 1817– 18 he supported the foundation of the Calcutta School Book Society and the Calcutta School Society. Meanwhile, as president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he supported H.H. Wilson, its secretary, later professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, in the introduction of a series of measures designed to improve the working of the Society. But signs of a probable change of direction in Company policy were already present. In 1805, Castlereagh, the British foreign minister, agreed to a plan, put forward by the Company court, to establish a college in England, to which the European section of the curriculum taught at the College of Fort William might be transferred; and in 1807, with the creation of Haileybury College in Hertfordshire, this plan was implemented. Then, in 1807–13, following a massacre of British subjects at Vellore, a town in south-eastern India, an intense debate took place in England about the future course of Company policy – a debate which turned on the crucial question of whether British missionaries should be allowed to operate freely in India. In the great debate regarding the work of the missionaries, which took place in England in this period, mainly in Parliament, the Court of Directors and the press, the Anglicists, supported by leading members of the Clapham Sect, the Baptist Mission and the Foreign Bible Society, argued that British power in India would in the future be effectively sustained only by a mass conversion of the Hindu people. Hinduism was, in the view of its Christian critics, incapable of reform. English education and Christian 53

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conversion alone would make the Hindu people prosperous and industrious; and, incidentally, open the Indian market to British manufacturers. The supporters of the Orientalist policy, pursued by Hastings, Wellesley and Minto, on the other hand, argued that the evangelical policies advocated by the Clapham Sect and their supporters would inevitably lead to the destruction of British power in India. As Thomas Twining, an enemy of Grant’s, put it: ‘If ever the fatal day shall arrive when religious innovation shall set her foot in that country, indignation will spread from one end of Hindoostan to the other; and the arms of ﬁfty millions of people will drive us from that portion of the globe with as much ease as the sand of the desert is scattered by the wind’ (Kopf, 1969, pp. 136–7). One of the strongest defences of the Orientalist position put forward in the Orientalist–Anglicist debate was that mounted by Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stewart, an ofﬁcer in the East India Company army, in a pamphlet entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Ofﬁcer (1808). In this pamphlet Stewart argued that any attempt to convert the Hindus to Christianity was bound to fail, as the Hindu religion was in many respects superior to the Christian. The numerous Hindu gods represented merely ‘types of virtue’, while the theory of transmigration of souls was preferable to the Christian notion of heaven and hell. As for Hindu mythology, much ridiculed by the evangelicals, that too was in many respects superior: ‘Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory; and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample System of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced’ (Kopf, 1969, p. 140). 54

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The ﬁnal stage of the debate between the Orientalists and the Anglicists regarding the work of the missionaries took place in Parliament in 1813, when the East India Company’s charter came up for renewal. The outcome was victory for the Anglicists, who proved more successful in arousing public opinion in favour of their point of view. In May 1813, shortly after the passing of the Charter Renewal Act, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, himself a member of the Board of Control of the East India Company, informed Wilberforce that the British government was willing to see the establishment in Calcutta of a bishopric, and the grant of licences to missionaries wishing to evangelize in the area. The ﬁnal defeat of the Orientalists in India was accomplished by the Anglicists in the period of the governor-generalship of William Bentinck (1827–35). In 1834 Charles Trevelyan, an ardent Westernizer, wrote a tract aimed at justifying the abolition of the College of Fort William. According to Trevelyan, the policy pursued by the British of educating Europeans in the languages and cultures of the East was mistaken. Henceforth the British should seek to educate the Asiatics in the sciences of the West. Attempts made to revive Hinduism by means of a college-directed programme of literary and cultural revival were bound to fail. All they resulted in was a ‘revival of antiquated errors’. In February 1835, Thomas Macaulay, recently appointed President of the General Committee of Public Instruction in India, composed a powerful minute recommending that the government withhold further grants of public money to institutions ‘conferring instruction in native languages’; and in March Bentinck, an enthusiastic utilitarian and disciple of James Mill, whose immensely inﬂuential indictment of Hindu civilization, The History of 55

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British India, had been published in 1817, issued an ofﬁcial resolution, incorporating the main principle of Macaulay’s minute. This resolution stated: His Lordship in Council is of opinion that the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science amongst the natives of India and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education would be best employed on English education alone. (Trevelyan, 1932, pp. 370–3)

The effects of Bentinck’s resolution were, from the Orientalist point of view, disastrous. In a few short years the College of Fort William was effectively dismantled, and its precious collection of books and manuscripts dispersed, while the Asiatic Society of Bengal and other associated institutions were allowed to fall into decay. In October 1853, when Governor-General Dalhousie investigated the College of Fort William, he found ‘no College, no buildings, no rooms, no professors, no lectures, but only a few Moonshis [language teachers] whom the Government pays but who have no employment’ (Kopf, 1969, p. 235). Three months later, on 24 January 1854, the by then nonexistent College of Fort William was ofﬁcially dissolved. It is generally agreed that the orientalist policies pursued by the British in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contributed directly to a major extension of Western knowledge of the Orient, a renaissance of Bengali culture and an ‘oriental enlightenment’ that was closely related to the romantic movement in Europe. The Anglicist approach later adopted led directly to an increasing polarization of Indian society, between colonizer and colonized, an acute crisis of Hindu, and to a lesser extent Muslim, identity, and the eventual rise of an Indian

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national movement independence.

that

was

determined

to

secure

That British orientalism in India was intimately bound up with the imperial project is not in doubt. It should not be forgotten that the object of Orientalist policy, as much as that of the Anglicist, was the preservation of British power in India. However, the accusation that the British orientalists concerned were ‘orientalist’, in the critical sense in which the word was later used by the critics of orientalism, in the period following the end of the Second World War, cannot for the most part be sustained. True, the Orientalists, like their opponents, the Anglicists, were inclined to exaggerate the passivity of the Hindu people, particularly those living in Bengal; and they displayed an exaggerated respect for classical text, imagining the existence of a ‘golden age’, from which Hindu civilization must have declined into its present state of ‘barbarism and ignorance’ (Kopf, 1969, p. 103). But as David Kopf makes clear, in Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), as children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, rationalist, classicist and cosmopolitan, they were inclined to believe that man, though culturally different, was basically the same everywhere. Difference, where it existed, should be tolerated, not condemned. Moreover, unlike later Englishmen of the age of imperialism, they did not ensconce themselves in clubs or build a ‘Chinese wall of racial privilege’, to keep the ‘inferior races’ at a distance (Kopf, 1969, p. 5). Rather, many Orientalists formed enduring relations with Indians, in particular members of the Bengali intelligentsia. Thus Warren Hastings, a man ‘deeply skilled in Persian and Arabic literature’, invited Hindu pandits to come to Calcutta to teach Sanskrit. Charles Wilkins, who lived in

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India for more than a decade and wrote a history of Indian land grants, set up, with the help of a number of very able Bengalis, the ﬁrst vernacular printing press in India, and translated the Bhagavat Gita, a foundational Hindu text. Nathaniel Halhed, who lived in India for more than two decades, published a Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) and a Grammar of the Bengal Language (1788). William Jones, the ‘harmonious’ Jones, a linguist of extraordinary ability, who lived in India for more than a decade and died there in 1794, translated Shakúntala, a noted Indian drama (1790), helped found the Asiatic Society of Bengal and ﬁrst identiﬁed Sanskrit as a source of the IndoEuropean language group. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who lived in India for some thirty-eight years or so, and studied Hindu languages and culture at Benares, published a foundational work on the Vedas (1805) and Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus (1837), again a foundational work. Finally, William Carey, the Baptist missionary, who lived in India for the greater part of his life, became a professor of Bengali at the College of Fort William and published a Grammar of the Bengalee Language (1801). According to his own account, Carey lived in India for so long that he became, in effect, an acculturated Hindu, as did Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stewart and many others in that period. Were such men, one wonders, afﬂicted by the narrow racialism, nationalism and parochialism attributed to them by the critics of orientalism? It would seem improbable.

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At ﬁrst sight it might be expected that orientalism, as a style or category of European art commonly associated in the nineteenth century with the Islamic Near East, particularly Egypt and North Africa, would have little or nothing to do with the orientalism that was so widely attacked by its critics in the period following the end of the Second World War. After all, the artists, mainly painters, associated with the orientalist genre, who travelled so widely in the Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not for the most part agents of empire, and far from denigrating the peoples and cultures of the Near East, almost all attempted in one way or another to glorify them. But such a conclusion would be misleading, for a closer examination of the facts would suggest that orientalism in the arts, in the nineteenth century at least, was all too often intimately bound up with the imperial project – a camp follower, marching in the train of imperialism at least, if not an actual belligerent. Moreover, even a cursory examination of the paintings reproduced in such publications as Lynne Thornton, The Orientalists: Painters-Travellers, 1828–1908 (1983), Mary Anne Stevens, The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse (1984) and Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art (1998), would suggest 59

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that many of the painters of the orientalist genre were also frequently inclined to display the ‘latent or manifest’ prejudice detected by Said and others in their critiques of European orientalism – inclined, that is to say, to create stereotypical images of the ‘other’ as backward, corrupt, irrational and uncontrolled. However, in arriving at such a conclusion the reader might do well to bear in mind John MacKenzie’s conclusion, in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), that in portraying such stereotypical images of the East the artists of the orientalist genre were, for the most part, not so much attempting to diminish the ‘other’, as to liberate the ‘self’ from the narrow constraints increasingly imposed in Europe by middle-class convention and the exigencies of an industrial society. The close connection which existed between European, mainly French and British, imperialism in the Near East, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and orientalism in the arts is all too evident. The orientalist genre, in its modern guise – earlier forms of orientalism in the arts, such as chinoiserie and turquerie, had proved extremely inﬂuential, but they had not succeeded in creating a style or fashion comparable to orientalism – ﬁrst appeared in the period of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt (1798). It became increasingly popular in the period of the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), when the European public, fascinated by the exploits of Lord Byron – who died at Missolonghi in 1824 – and to a lesser extent their governments, supported the Greek people in their struggle for independence; and it reached maturity in the years immediately following the French occupation of Algiers in 1830, when scores of European artists and writers, mainly French and British, travelled to

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the Levant and North Africa to experience the delights of the Orient, now for the ﬁrst time made generally accessible to the ordinary traveller. Later, challenged by impressionism and modernism, orientalism suffered something of a decline, but it survived the defeat and partition of the Ottoman Empire in the period of the First World War (1914–18), and only went into ﬁnal decline in the 1920s and 1930s, when anti-imperialist forces in the Near and Middle East and elsewhere became, for the ﬁrst time, capable of posing a serious challenge to the military, political and cultural hegemony imposed throughout many parts of the world by the imperial powers. Orientalism in the arts, in other words, coincides almost exactly with that phase of great power involvement in the Near and Middle East known as the Eastern Question; and it was facilitated throughout by the structure of inﬂuence and control exercised by the great powers in the area – a structure of inﬂuence and control that found expression variously in the creation of an independent Greek state (1830); the French occupation of Algiers (1830), great power involvement in the two Mohammad Ali crises (1832–33 and 1839–41); the defence of Ottoman independence and integrity mounted by Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853–56); French involvement in the Lebanon (1861); the opening of the Suez Canal (1869); the Eastern Crisis (1875–78); the French occupation of Tunis (1881); and the British occupation of Egypt (1882). Not that European involvement in the Near East was a purely political affair. In the 1830s the Peninsula and Orient Steam Navigation Company opened a Mediterranean route to India, by way of Egypt, and in 1870 Thomas Cook established the ﬁrst of his tours of Egypt and the Holy Land, thereby opening the area to popular tourism (Macﬁe, 1996).

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Napoleon Bonaparte’s occupation of Egypt in 1798 led directly to the creation of an Institute de l’Egypte, which was committed to the study of the geography, history and culture of Egypt (1798); the commissioning by Bonaparte and other French generals attached to the expedition of a series of paintings, designed to glorify France’s achievements in the Near East; and the publication of two major seminal works, Dominique-Vivant, Baron Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les Campagnes du Général Bonaparte (1802), and the Déscription de l’Egypte – an encyclopaedic collection of material relating to Egypt, collected by the French Commission on the Sciences and Arts, which accompanied Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt – published in twenty-four volumes in 1809–29. Paintings commissioned by Bonaparte and other French generals included three paintings by Antoine-Jean Gros, The Battle of Nazareth (1801), later copied by Auguste and Gérôme, The Pesthouse of Jaffa (1804), and The Cavalry Charge under General Murat at the Battle of AbA QCr (ﬁrst sketched in 1806). These paintings, which were painted by Gros, not in the Near East, but in Europe, where he had been appointed a member of a commission set up by Bonaparte to transfer looted Italian works of art to the Museé Napoléon established in the Louvre, proved immensely inﬂuential in creating the orientalist genre – a genre which contributed some seventy or so works of art to the Paris Salon in the following decade. Interest in Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt remained strong in France throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in the period of the Second Empire, created by Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, in 1852. It was in this period that many of the most striking paintings of the orientalist genre were painted. These include three 62

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paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Le Général Bonaparte au Caire, Le Général Bonaparte en Egypte and Oedipe: Bonaparte et le Sphinx (all painted in the 1860s). The numbers of European artists visiting the Levant and North Africa in the nineteenth century, particularly in the middle years, is remarkable. In 1830, Adrien Dauzats, a member of the atelier of Julian Michel Gué, who had started out as a scene painter in the French theatre, toured Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. In 1833, David Roberts, a Scottish painter, who had also started out as a scene painter in the theatre, and John Frederick Lewis, who was later to spend ten years living in Cairo, visited Tangier. In 1837, Horace Vernet, a Professor at the Ecole des BeauxArts, descended from a line of distinguished French painters, toured Algeria, the ﬁrst of four visits. In 1840, David Wilkie, a Scottish painter, trained at the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh, and the Royal Academy, London, who later painted a notable portrait of Mohammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, visited Constantinople, Jerusalem and Alexandria. In 1842, Richard Dadd toured the Levant, as did Holman Hunt, a founder member of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, in 1854. In 1846–53, Eugène Fromentin, a French painter, trained by the classical landscapist, Rémond, made three journeys to the interior of Algeria, and in 1862, Gustave Guillaumet, an established French painter, trained in the Ecole des BeauxArts, went to live there for some years. In 1856–75, JeanLéon Gérôme, an inﬂuential teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, made as many as seven visits to Egypt; and in 1869, numerous French artists, including Charles de Tournemine, Gérôme and Fromentin, attended the inauguration of the Suez Canal. In 1873–74, Leopold Carl Müller, a German painter trained at the Vienna Academy, 63

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visited Constantinople, Smyrna and Cairo; and in 1880, John Singer Sargent, a noted English painter, visited Morocco. Finally, in 1904, Kandinsky visited Algeria and Tunisia; and in 1906, Matisse went to Algeria. Most of the British and French artists who explored the Near East and North Africa in the nineteenth century travelled independently, but by no means all. Several French artists are said to have accompanied the French army that occupied Algiers in 1830; and in 1832, Eugène Delacroix joined the Comte de Mornay on a diplomatic mission to Meknes in Morocco. In 1837–39, Eugène Flandin accompanied a French army operating in the interior of Algeria; and in 1839, Adrien Dauzats accompanied a military expedition led by the Duke of Orleans, despatched to pacify the region between Algiers and Constantine. Nor were French artists on the whole averse to accepting public commissions to record and commemorate French military exploits. In 1828 Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, who had lived in Smyrna for a year or so, accepted a commission from the French government to paint a picture commemorating the Battle of Navarino. In or about 1839, Adrien Dauzats accepted a commission from the Royal Museums to paint ﬁve water colours of scenes relating to military campaigns in Algeria, later exhibited in the Salon; and in the same year Horace Vernet, the so-called ‘Raphael des cautines’, accepted a commission from the citizens of Autun to commemorate the part played by General Changarnier, a native son, in the Battle of Somah. A copy of this painting was later hung, along with ﬁfteen other paintings by Vernet, including The Taking of the Smalah [household] of Abd el Kader (1845), in the Musée de Versailles.

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The orientalist assumptions, identiﬁed by Said and others in European scholarship and literature, are not difﬁcult to discover in the paintings of the orientalist genre: irrational excess in Delacroix, The Fanatics of Tangier (1838) and Gérôme, The Whirling Dervishes (1895); uncontrolled cruelty and violence in Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827– 28) (partly inspired by a dramatic poem of Lord Byron) and The Lion Hunt (1855); oriental despotism in Chassérian, Ali Ben Hamed, Caliph of Constantine, followed by his Escort (1845) and Delacroix, The Collection of Arab Taxes (1863); prurient sensuality in Gérôme, Dance of the Almeh (1863) and Renoir, The Woman of Algiers (1870); languorous eroticism in Ingres, Odalisque and Slave (1842) and Gérôme, The Moorish Bath (c. 1870); and simple exoticism in Gérôme, Harem in the Kiosk (c. 1875–80) and Le Comte du-Nouÿ, The Guard of the Seraglio (1876). But it is possible also to identify other factors at work in the paintings of the orientalist genre, not easily incorporated into the orientalist thesis: a pronounced respect for the Islamic faith, as practised by its adherents, in Gérôme, Prayer in the House of an Arnaut Chief (1857) and Prayer in the Mosque of ‘Amr (c. 1872); admiration for Muslim art and design in Lewis, The Reception (1873) and Leighton, Interior of the Grand Mosque, Damascus (1873–75); a sympathetic portrayal of everyday life in Lewis, In the Bezestein, El Khan Khalil, Cairo (1860) and Gérôme, The Carpet Merchant (1887); a gloriﬁcation of chivalric virtue in Schreyer, Arab Horsemen (c. 1850) and Fromentin, Arab Falconer (1857); and a pitiless realism in Gérôme, Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert (1857) and Guillaumet, The Desert (1867). It can equally well be argued, in other words, that the artists of the orientalist genre, far from producing stereotypical images intended, consciously or unconsciously, to denigrate

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the Orient, were actually concerned, for the most part, to create images which, taken over all, celebrate, indeed glorify, the cultural, historical and ethnographical identity of the area. Not that, in portraying the Orient, the artists of the orientalist genre were concerned merely with things oriental. As John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession (1988), has shown, in exploiting their new found freedom, they were more often than not seeking also to escape from the rigidities of European classicism, establish a science of colour which might facilitate the decoration of buildings in the West, and discover, or rediscover, the supposed roots of Christianity, still believed to be observable in the ‘unchanged habits of the East’ (quoted in Stevens, 1984, p. 32).

MACKENZIE VERSUS NOCHLIN The dispute regarding the precise signiﬁcance of orientalism in the arts in the nineteenth century has found two worthy contestants in Linda Nochlin, a leading feminist critic of the genre, and John MacKenzie, a principal exponent of the view that, in their dealings with the Orient, European artists, far from being impervious to its inﬂuence, were actually highly responsive and constantly engaged in what was in effect a mutually modifying relationship. In her article, ‘The Imaginary Orient’ (Art in America, May 1983), Linda Nochlin argues that the paintings of the orientalist genre, as typiﬁed by Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, The Slave Market and Street in Algiers (all painted in the 1860s), repeatedly reproduced stereotypical images of an East seemingly unaffected by European political, military and economic intervention in the area. The orientalist topos, 66

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in other words, was haunted by a number of apparent absences. These include the absence of history – no mention is made of the series of reforms introduced, at the instigation of the great powers, in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century; the absence of Western man, always implicitly present as the originator and potential viewer of the work; the absence of the act of creation, as if the work had simply sprung into being of its own accord, a mere reﬂection of some kind of pre-existing oriental reality; and the absence of scenes of work and industrial production – an absence which, in the context of the physical decay of the Muslim city, implied oriental idleness and neglect, and even a childlike indifference to the need to preserve culture and tradition. Moreover, Nochlin argues, though some artists of the orientalist genre did portray the Near East as an actual place, albeit timeless and unchanging, others, such as Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28), used it merely as a ‘project of the imagination’, a ‘fantasy space’ or ‘screen’, on to which ‘strong desires’, erotic, sadistic or both, could be ‘projected’ with impunity. On to such ‘screens’, in other words, Western man was able to project not only images of male power over women, usually naked and enslaved, but also images of the white man’s superiority to, and hence justiﬁable control over, inferior, darker races, precisely those who are supposedly inclined to indulge in that sort of ‘regrettably lascivious commerce’ (Nochlin, 1983, p. 125). Where women in the paintings of the orientalist genre were frequently depicted as victims of male exploitation, Muslim religious practices were depicted as being picturesque, that is to say pious, traditional and unthreatening. In this way conﬂict in the Islamic world would be contained, hidden behind a mask of stability, while the people thus 67

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portrayed would be identiﬁed as being ‘irredeemably different from, more backward than and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product’, namely the Europeans. In the process, no reference could be permitted to such events as the Holy War of 1871, in Algeria, in which 100,000 Muslim tribesmen fought for their independence under the banner of ‘Islamic idealism’ (Nochlin, 1983, pp. 126–7). John MacKenzie, in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), on the other hand, argues that the historical development of the orientalist genre was in fact far more complex than Nochlin allows, as was the motivation of many of the painters concerned. The history of orientalism in the arts, he suggests, can be divided into ﬁve principal phases: a late eighteenth-century phase, characterized by the creation of images of an imagined East, not based on direct experience of any kind (see, for example, Hogarth, A Procession through the Hyppodrome and Gavin Hamilton, illustrations of Beckford’s Vathek); an early nineteenthcentury phase, in which artists such as Denon, Roberts, Decamps and Delacroix endeavoured to create either a sort of topographical and archaeological realism or an energetic and vibrant romanticism; a mid-nineteenth-century phase, in which artists such as Vernet, Fromentin and Gérôme attempted to take realism even further than their predecessors; a late nineteenth-century phase, in which artists such as Melville, much inﬂuenced in one way or another by impressionism, sought to extend the range of their subject matter even further; and a turn-of-the-century phase, in which artists such as Kandinsky, Matisse and Klee found inspiration in the abstract, geometrical intricacy of Islamic art and design. Not that a single school or tradition of orientalist painting ever existed. Where French 68

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painters, such as Delacroix, for example, were inclined, in the early part of the nineteenth century, to indulge in grandiose gestures, British painters of that period generally adopted a less ﬂamboyant approach, remaining low key and pragmatic. In MacKenzie’s view, no clear correlation can be established between the evolution of orientalism in the arts in the nineteenth century and the rise of European, mainly British and French, imperialism in the Near East. True, French orientalism was largely inspired by Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 and the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, but thereafter the paths trodden by orientalism in the arts and British and French imperialism diverged. Throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century, particularly in the period of the Crimean War (1853–56), the British – who had early on established effective control of the Mediterranean route to India, by way of Gibraltar, Malta and Egypt – and the French worked for the preservation of the Ottoman Empire, which was seen as a useful bulwark against the advance of Russia in the area. Only in 1878, in the period of the Eastern Crisis, did the British acquire Cyprus and, in 1882, Egypt; and only in 1881 did the French acquire Tunis. Meanwhile, the Egyptians, themselves, like the great powers bent on imperial expansion, had built up a substantial imperial presence in the Sudan, the area of the Red Sea and East Africa, while the Ottoman Empire, supposedly the ‘sick man’ of Europe, had shown a remarkable capacity for recovery, retaking control of Syria, Palestine and parts of Arabia earlier lost to the Empire. Only in the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and in the period of the war itself, which led to the collapse and partition of the Ottoman Empire, did the 69

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European great powers make further substantial advances in the area. The French then occupied Morocco (1911), the Italians occupied Libya (1911), and the British formally annexed Egypt (1914). Finally, in the peace settlement imposed on the Near and Middle East (a recently invented geographical designation) by the victorious Entente powers – Britain, France and Italy – in the period immediately following the end of the First World War, the French were granted a League of Nations mandate for Syria, and the British mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine. Orientalism in the arts, MacKenzie concludes, simply did not march in step with imperialism. Nor did it merely celebrate ‘otherness’. What it reﬂected, if anything, was cultural proximity, historical parallelism and religious familiarity. As for orientalist interest in violence and cruelty, the explanation for that should be sought not in imperial ambition, but in a Romantic urge to portray the sublime. Many other British imperial possessions were, according to MacKenzie, the subject of artistic representation in the nineteenth century, in particular India (Lear, Horsley, Swoboda, Tornai, Menpes), Burma (Talbot-Kelly), Australia and South Africa, but none produced a comparable body of painting, enjoying the patronage and fame of the orientalists, whose work appeared so frequently in exhibitions staged in the Royal Academy and the Salon (MacKenzie, 1995, chapter 3). At ﬁrst sight the interpretations of orientalism put forward by Nochlin and MacKenzie appear diametrically opposed, but a closer reading would suggest that they are less opposed than might at ﬁrst sight appear. MacKenzie effectively accepts Nochlin’s contention, based on Said, that 70

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the painters of the orientalist genre frequently portrayed the East as backward, irrational, unchanging, sexually corrupt and decadent. But he ﬁnds that the explanation for this characterization lies not in a desire to stereotype the Orient, to make it ‘more amenable to the economic, cultural and political transformations of imperialism’, but in an atavistic desire to escape from the constraints and imperfections of European life and recreate the ‘ancient verities’ (quasi-feudal personal relations, loyalty, hospitality, female protectiveness and the settling of scores by a swift, clean vendetta) associated with a now lost civilization. Thus the emphasis on oriental craftsmanship and design may be seen as an escape from the drab uniformity of mass production; prurient sensuality as an escape from Christian Puritanism; respect for Islam as an escape from the emptiness of European agnosticism; the feminizing of the oriental male as an attempt on the part of the European male to explore and deal with his own divided identity; and the depiction of oriental languor as an escape from the frenetic character of life in a Western, industrialized society. Orientalism in the arts, in other words, was not so much a comment on the ‘other’ as an analysis of the ‘self’, as seen reﬂected in the convex mirror of the Orient. Thus it can be argued that orientalism in the arts, however deﬁned, did to some extent create in the nineteenth century a series of stereotypical images of the Islamic Near East, capable of shaping European perception of the area and facilitating the onward march of imperialism; though whether European statesmen and imperialists, intent on maintaining peace in the Balkans, preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, resisting the advance of Russia, securing control of the route to India, acquiring control of markets and economic resources, protecting their citizens 71

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from attack and preparing for war with each other, would have been seriously inﬂuenced by such stereotypical images and pre-conceptions must remain in doubt, particularly, as MacKenzie has pointed out on a number of occasions, since Britain’s principal ‘other’ in the nineteenth century was ﬁrst France, then France and Russia, and ﬁnally, at the turn of the century, Germany, while France’s ‘other’ was similarly ﬁrst Britain and Russia, and then Germany.

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As Aijaz Ahmad, the noted Indian scholar, has pointed out in his essay ‘Orientalism and After’ (in Ahmad, 1992), attacks on colonial cultural domination are almost as old as colonialism itself. Such attacks might include K.M. Pannikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (George, Allen and Unwin, 1959), Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto, 1967), Jonah Ruskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (Random House, 1971), and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: M.R., 1972). But it was only in the period of decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War that attacks on orientalism, seen as a pillar of the intellectual hegemony exercised by the European imperial powers, became widespread. Among these, four in particular stand out: Anouar Abdel-Malek’s article, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, published in Diogenes in 1963; A.L. Tibawi’s two articles, ‘English-speaking Orientalists’ and ‘Second Critique of the English-speaking Orientalists’, published in the Islamic Quarterly in 1964 and 1979; Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, published in 1978; and Bryan S. Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism, also published in 1978. 73

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Anouar Abdel-Malek was an Egyptian student of sociology and philosophy, born in Cairo in 1923. After studying at the French Jesuit College in Cairo, and the Sorbonne, Paris, and teaching philosophy for some years at the Lycée al Hourriyya, Cairo, Abdel-Malek, by then an established writer and journalist, out of favour with the Egyptian government because of the left-wing stance he adopted, moved to Paris, where he was appointed to a post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque. A.L. Tibawi was a Palestinian born in Tayba, Palestine, in 1910. Educated at Tel-Karm School and a Training College, later known as the Arab College, in Jerusalem, Tibawi attended the American University of Beirut, where he was awarded a BA degree in 1939. In 1947, after working for a time in Palestine as a teacher of history and a Department of Education inspector, he moved to London where, sponsored by a British Council scholarship, he studied the administration of education. He then settled in London, taking a PhD degree in education in 1952, lecturing, again on education, at the Institute of Education, and occasionally writing for the BBC, Arabic Service. Later in life, he moved to Harvard where, as a noted authority on Muslim law, he was appointed a research fellow. He died in London in 1981, as a result of a road accident. In the course of his life he published several works on Arab history, including British Interests in Palestine (Oxford University Press, 1961), A Modern History of Syria (Macmillan, 1969), and Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine 1914–21 (Luzac, 1977). Edward Said is a Palestinian (Christian Protestant) Arab, born in 1935 and brought up in Palestine, Egypt and America, where he attended both Princeton and Harvard 74

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Universities. After graduating from Harvard with a PhD in 1964, he moved to New York, where he was appointed to a post at Columbia University, teaching English and Comparative Literature. In the late 1960s he became involved in anti-Vietnam campus activities, and in the 1970s in the Palestine liberation movement. In 1977 he became a member of the Palestinian National Council. Before the publication of Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient in 1978, he published a number of books, including Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Harvard University Press, 1966) and Beginnings: Intention and Method (Basic Books, 1975). Bryan S. Turner is an English sociologist, born in Birmingham in 1945 and educated at the University of Leeds. After taking a PhD at Leeds in 1970, he lectured for a time at the Universities of Aberdeen and Lancaster, before being appointed Professor of Sociology at Flinders University of South Australia in 1982. His books include Weber and Islam: A Critical Study (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978), Capitalism and Class in the Middle East (Heinemann, 1984) and Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (1994).

‘ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS’ In ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Abdel-Malek, a keen student of Marxism, argues that the victories achieved by the various national liberation movements in the post-Second World War period produced a crisis at the heart of orientalism, a subject deeply infected by europeocentricism. The subject was, therefore, in need of radical revision, as many of the erstwhile objects of study, the colonial peoples, had now become ‘sovereign’ subjects. Orientalism had, of course, 75

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produced much valuable work. In the ﬁeld of Arabic and Islamic studies, in particular, it had contributed to an understanding of ancient civilization; collected and catalogued many Arabic manuscripts, deposited mainly in European libraries; published numerous important works; established an accepted method of study; organized orientalist congresses; and contributed to a revival of national consciousness in many Asian and African countries. But the fact remained that orientalism was profoundly affected by prejudice – a prejudice also displayed by an amalgam of university dons, businessmen, military men, colonial ofﬁcials, missionaries, publicists and adventurers, whose only objective was to gather intelligence about an area to be colonized and penetrate the consciousness of the people concerned, in order the better to ensure their enslavement. Both orientalists and the other groups concerned tended to view the oriental peoples as ‘objects of study’, imbued with a ‘constituted otherness’, of an essentialist character, historical, inalienable and intangible. Such ‘objects of study’, with regard to whom the studying subject, the European ‘normal man’ was transcendent, were expected to remain passive, non-participating, non-autonomous and nonsovereign. Essentialist conceptions of the peoples concerned found expression in various ethnic typologies, such as homo Sinicus, homo Arabicus and homo Africanus, and sometimes even in naked racism. The essentialist approach adopted by the orientalists largely determined their methods of study. As it was taken for granted that the study of oriental cultures and civilizations, like those of ancient Greece and Rome, should be concerned primarily with their essential ingredients – language and religion – and with their periods of greatest achievement, little or no attention was paid to their contemporary 76

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condition, which it was assumed must, by deﬁnition, be one of decadence and decline; and no allowance was made for social evolution. As for the work of scholars belonging to the Orient, that should for the most part be ignored, passed over in silence, or even denigrated, as the product of an assumed ‘oriental’ mentality. In order to facilitate their studies of such ‘classical’ or ‘dead’ cultures and civilizations, Western orientalists, supported by colonial administrators, Catholic and Protestant missionaries and other agents of empire, assembled in European libraries and museums, such as the British Museum, London, and the Guimet Museum, Paris, great collections of oriental manuscripts and other material relating to the Orient. Many of these collections remained closed to scholars, particularly those coming from the East. According to Abdel-Malek, in recent years a number of European scholars had come to acknowledge the crisis lying at the heart of orientalism, but their response had been divided, between those belonging to the colonial powers, including ‘European’ America, and those belonging to the socialist states and movements of Eastern Europe and the three ‘forgotten continents’ (Asia, Africa and South America). Recent works by J. Berque, a French orientalist, and a report drawn up by the Hayter Commission (1961) in Britain, might be taken as representative of the former; and conclusions drawn at various Soviet congresses in the 1950s and 1960s as representative of the latter. Berque, speaking on behalf of French culture, the so-called ‘Hellenism of the Arab peoples’, advocated the creation of a new orientalism, disinterested and committed, which would show a greater respect for the ‘Arab side of things’, while the Hayter Commission, in its report, recommended the adoption by the British government of a policy based 77

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on the American model, designed to provide more and better information about the contemporary Orient, stimulate an interest in living oriental languages and shift the emphasis from classical to modern studies. In the socialist sector, on the other hand, following the collapse of the principal European empires, a series of Communist Party congresses and conferences, starting with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, recommended that a new approach to orientalism be adopted, involving an elimination of europeocentricism and a recognition of the right of the peoples of Asia and Africa to be treated not as mere objects of history, but as its creators. In their work Soviet orientalists, fully recognizing the implications of the political resurgence of the Orient, should where possible reﬂect objectively on the history of the Asian and African countries and assist their peoples in their struggles for national and social liberation. In the discussions which ensued, however, some socialist orientalists, mainly European, continued to argue that, although traditional orientalism was antiquated and outmoded, it was not yet appropriate to reduce the scientiﬁc study of the countries of Asia and Africa into the generality of historical and linguistic science, as this would, in the present state of world evolution, be tantamount to a relapse into europeocentricism. Differences between Europe and Asia, which had for centuries suffered from underdevelopment, imperialist intervention and a Mediaeval social structure, justiﬁed a special approach. Orientalists might, in particular, consider the importance of the ‘Oriental mode of production’, within the general framework of the periodization of human history; the balance sheet of colonial imperialism, taking into account its ‘internal contradictions’; the appearance of the national liberation movements in the colonies, objectively more 78

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advanced than many working-class movements in Europe; the importance of the factor known as ‘national psyche’; the appearance of a third type of nation (in addition to the two types distinguished by J.V. Stalin) within the Afro-Asian group; the ‘universalization of Marxist thought’; and the different role of the working class, which tends to become ‘the central element of the popular forces, of the people’, and not of a ‘unique dominating class’ (Abdel-Malek, 1963, pp. 123–4). According to Abdel-Malek, the closer relations established in the period of decolonization, between the USSR and the Afro-Asian states and popular movements, led to a massive expansion in Soviet orientalism. The Institute of the Peoples of Asia, which is attached to the Academy of Sciences, became the biggest oriental institute in the world; all Soviet universities were obliged to engage in the study of Asia and Africa; personnel employed in oriental studies, or related subjects, numbered 18–20,000; and a publishing house specializing in oriental studies published a new title every two or three days. No longer was it possible to study oriental studies without a knowledge of Russian.

ENGLISH-SPEAKING ORIENTALISTS In the ﬁrst of his two critiques of English-speaking orientalists, published in the Islamic Quarterly in 1964, A.L. Tibawi traces the prejudice against Islam and Arab nationalism which he detects in much European, mainly Englishspeaking, orientalism back to the Middle Ages, when Byzantine and Roman Catholic theologians and polemicists painted a misleading picture of the religion. At the heart of their misunderstanding lay a refusal to acknowledge Muhammad’s role as the bearer of a divine message. As a 79

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result, Islam was portrayed as the ‘work of the devil’, the Koran as a ‘tissue of absurdities’, and Muhammad as a ‘false prophet’, an ‘impostor’ and an ‘anti-Christ’ (Tibawi, 1964, p. 58). Closer contact with the Muslim world, in the period of the crusades and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, did nothing to dispel this misunderstanding. Nor was it diminished in the period of imperial expansion which followed the creation of the European nation states, when generations of Christian missionaries and empire builders came to exercise a powerful inﬂuence on education in the Muslim world. It was from the ranks of these ‘ambassadors of Christ’ and ‘Christian gentlemen’ that there appeared a new species of Arabic, Turkish and Persian specialist, the forerunner of the professional orientalist. From the beginning, therefore, Western orientalism has been less than objective, lacking in scientiﬁc detachment and ﬁlled with prejudice. Moreover, in recent years this prejudice has been transferred to Arab nationalism. Among the academic failings of English-speaking orientalists identiﬁed by Tibawi, the greatest is, in his view, an unwillingness to recognize the fact that, for the community of Islam, Muhammad is the last of God’s messengers to humankind, sent to complete and conﬁrm earlier messages revealed by former prophets. To the community of Islam, therefore, the Koran is the Speech of God, eternal and uncreated, transmitted to Muhammad, at intervals, through the agency of the angel, Jibrcl. Not only is the message itself of divine origin, but also the call to preach it. This truth many Islamists and orientalists, lacking in objectivity, fail to acknowledge, asserting falsely that the Koran is Muhammad’s composition. From this fundamental misunderstanding many other academic errors arise. These include a search for the Judaeo-Christian origins of Islam; 80

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the promotion of an essentially secular ‘comparative religion’ approach to the study of the religion; a misunderstanding of the Muslim view of Christ and Christianity; and a misunderstanding of the nature of the SharC‘ah (Islamic law), part of which is derived from revelation and not, therefore, subject to mutation, through human agency, and part from prophetic tradition, open to interpretation and change. It is from a failure to understand this difference that many Western misunderstandings regarding a possible reform of Islam and its institutions arise. Those parts of Islam that are based on prophetic tradition are open to reform but those parts that are based on revelation are not. In this context Europeans frequently misunderstand the position, deﬁning Muslims who respond favourably to European proposals regarding reform as ‘liberals’, and those who reject such proposals as ‘reactionaries’. In this too they show their ignorance. European misunderstanding regarding the nature of Islam has been exacerbated by the failure of many Englishspeaking orientalists to speak Arabic, Turkish or Persian sufﬁciently well to enter into a conversation with a learned Muslim on the subject, and also by the dislike many orientalists feel for Muslim culture and the Muslim peoples. In Tibawi’s opinion, the prejudice generated in Europe by ignorance of Islam has in recent years been extended to embrace also Arab nationalism. Inspired by fear of communism, irritation at a rejection in the Muslim world of the Western European liberal constitutional model (largely discredited by Western illiberal misconduct in the Arab world), sympathy and support for the Israeli cause, concern regarding the supply of Middle Eastern oil, and ultimately by disappointment at the decline of Western power in the 81

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Middle East, Western academics, particularly those who appear in their new incarnation as Middle East specialists, have created a ‘pile of learning’ which, like Western knowledge of Islam, is replete with distortion and evasion. In such work little or no attempt is made to discover basic principles, patterns and tendencies inherent in the native tradition. Rather it is expected that, as the idea of nationalism originated in the West, the Islamic or Arabic variety would necessarily follow the Western model. All too often the orientalists concerned meddled in politics, acting as advisers to governments and supporting particular causes, such as Zionism. In his ‘Second Critique of English-speaking Orientalists’, published in 1979, Tibawi re-examines the problems raised in his ﬁrst critique, reviews the progress made in English orientalism and examines a number of instances of orientalist bias in recent publications. For the most part he ﬁnds little cause for comfort, though he does acknowledge the greater degree of tolerance displayed by some Christian clerics. English-speaking orientalists and pseudo-orientalists, he concludes, continue to ﬁght, with varying degrees of subtlety and crudeness, against Islam and Arab nationalism, both on the academic and on the missionary front. While it is true that, on the missionary front, the ﬁght is now carried on with greatly reduced forces, on the academic front it is waged with an increased fury, reminiscent of earlier attacks mounted on Islam and Muhammad in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the motives and methods employed remain the same: animosity and prejudice using distortion and misrepresentation. In particular, numerous orientalists, including W. Montgomery Watt, Kenneth Cragg, Bernard Lewis, P.M. Holt, C.E. Bosworth and John Wansborough, continue to pronounce on the Judaeo82

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Christian origins of Islam and the related question of Muhammad’s sincerity, and few take the trouble adequately to explain the Muslim point of view. Unlike earlier generations of orientalists, the present generation takes little interest in the possibility of a ‘reform’ of Islam, though those who do continue in the arrogant assumption that Islam must respond to modern European thought. The possibility that modern European thought might be required to respond to Islam is not considered. Few contemporary orientalists engage in the difﬁcult task of editing Arabic manuscripts. Instead, they prefer to edit collections of articles, by different hands, purporting to be studies of one general subject. Many such collections are prefaced by introductions which ‘introduce very little, sum up even less . . . synthesise next to nothing, and even neglect to correct factual mistakes’. Many orientalists, in writing the history of Islam and the Arabs, display ignorance and prejudice, and many continue to engage in political controversy (Tibawi, 1979, p. 15). Examples of orientalist ignorance and prejudice might be found in many works, such as The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Arthur Schaade and Richard Hartmann, 1913, second edition, 1960), The Legacy of Islam (Arnold and Guillaume, 1931 and 1979), and the Cambridge History of Islam (Holt et al., 1970). Both editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam are, in Tibawi’s opinion, ‘on’ Islam, but not ‘of ’ it; and both, being largely based on books, are but little concerned with Muslim society and its people. The ﬁrst edition is practically without Muslim contributors, and the second, in which the editors have managed to ‘sprinkle’ a few token Muslim and Arab contributors, remains dominated by Christian and Jewish writers. Much of the work disﬁgures and misrepresents Islam, undermining its tradition, as the 83

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Muslims know it. To publish offensive opinions about Islam in this way, without balancing them with an opposite view, is both arrogant and offensive. In The Legacy of Islam, which is also written almost entirely by Christian and Jewish writers, tendentious statements abound, as do untenable assertions. Many signiﬁcant facts are suppressed, and throughout there is disturbing evidence of an ‘insidious campaign’ to adulterate Islamic history, at least in one of the key articles. From his analysis of English-speaking orientalism, Tibawi concludes that there are two versions of Islam, both as a religion and as a civilization. The ﬁrst version is derived from love, faith and tradition, the second from hatred, scepticism and speculation. On almost all essentials there is a complete divorce between the two. The scheme of things created by Western orientalists, many of whom act as agents of British imperialism and Zionism, places formidable barriers between themselves and enlightened Muslims. At the same time it fosters prejudice against Islam and a misunderstanding of Muslims in the Western mind. Ideally, learning ought to have no national or racial boundaries, but such cannot be the case as long as British orientalism is controlled by an ‘unavowed fraternity of mutual congratulation whose members restrict publications to their own product and that of their colleagues and protégés’, many of them Zionist Jews (Tibawi, 1979, p. 26). Such orientalists and pseudo-orientalists are behind the times. Like their predecessors, they remain Eurocentric in their view of Islam and the Arabs; and they obstinately refuse to respond to the post-war movement for a revision of conventional history, with a view to ‘purging it of national, racial and other bias and thereby promoting international and human understanding’ (Tibawi, 1979, p. 29). Rather 84

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than continuing to denigrate Islam and the Arabs, Englishspeaking orientalists might do well to express sympathy for Muslims and Arabs in distress, in particular the Palestinian Arabs, driven from their homes by the Israelis.

ORIENTALISM: WESTERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE ORIENT In Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), Edward Said, building on the work of Abdel-Malek and other critics of orientalism (but hardly at all it would seem on the work of A.L. Tibawi, whose Islamic fundamentalism he no doubt ﬁnds unattractive), expands the critique of orientalism mounted in the post-Second World War period to an extraordinary extent, until it appears to be allembracing, incorporating almost every aspect of European life and thought, social, intellectual, religious, psychological, economic and political. For Said, orientalism, particularly as practised by the British and the French in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Americans in the later part of the twentieth century, becomes a way of coming to terms with the Orient, based on the Orient’s special place in European experience, as one of its deepest and most recurring images of the ‘other’; an academic discipline, practised not just by orientalists, but also by anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philologists; a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident; a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient; and an accepted grid for ﬁltering the Orient into Western consciousness. Orientalism, according to Said, thus identiﬁed as a sort of Foucauldian discourse, was able, during the postEnlightenment period, to manage – and even produce – 85

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the Orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientiﬁcally and imaginatively. For practical reasons, concerned with the predominance of British and French imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and American imperialism in the later part of the twentieth century, and for personal reasons, concerned with the fact that he was brought up and educated in Palestine and Egypt, both then ruled by the British, and later in America – a fact which led him to want to ‘inventory’ the traces left on himself, the oriental subject, by Anglo-French cultural predominance – Said, in his study of orientalism, is concerned mainly with AngloFrench-American relations with the Arab world and Islam, though he recognizes that in many cases a wider frame of reference, involving German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese imperialism and orientalism, would be appropriate. Said’s analysis of Anglo-French-American orientalism is divided into three parts: a survey of the early history of orientalism, entitled ‘The Scope of Orientalism’; an account of the way in which orientalism later developed, entitled ‘Orientalist Structures and Restructures’; and an account of contemporary orientalism entitled ‘Orientalism Now’. It is in the ﬁrst of these three sections, ‘The Scope of Orientalism’, that Said makes his essential case, elaborated at considerable length in the later sections, that orientalism, besides being merely an academic discipline, is something more, namely a ﬁeld of studies, embracing almost the whole of European culture, a self-sustaining myth and an internally structured archive, shaping European thought and opinion. It is also in this section that he identiﬁes the origins of the principal features of the orientalist myth – that orientals, unlike occidentals, are by 86

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nature mysterious, menacing, irrational, demonic and sexually corrupt. Said’s account of the rise of orientalism, as an academic discipline, woven into the text of Orientalism, is for the most part conventional enough, although he does tend to pay rather more attention to the rise of Indic, than to the rise of Arabic studies. Drawing on Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (1950), Jules Mohl, Vingt-sept Ans d’Histoire des études orientales (1879–80) and Gustave Dugat, Histoire des orientalistes de l’Europe du XIIe au XIXe siècle (1868–70), Said explains how, following the despatch of Jesuit missions to China and the establishment of British East India Company power in India, European orientalists, originally students of biblical studies, semitic languages and Islam, turned orientalism into a vast ‘treasure house’ of learning about the East. In particular, he explains how d’Herbelot’s encyclopaedic Bibliothèque orientale (1697), a foundational text, helped shape oriental studies in the eighteenth century; how the remarkable discoveries made in India by Anquetil-Duperron, Jones and others gave rise to Indic studies; and how Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, combined with the publication in 1809–28 of the Déscription de l’Egypte, led to a rapid expansion not only in French, but also in European orientalism. In Said’s opinion, Bonaparte’s expedition created a tradition of orientalist research and investigation that led directly to the publication of a series of signiﬁcant texts, including Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1837), Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1848), and even to the construction of Ferdinand de Lessep’s Suez Canal in 1869, and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. 87

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Where Said’s account of orientalism differs substantially from earlier, more traditional accounts of the subject is in its deﬁnition of orientalism as a Foucauldian discourse and ﬁeld of study, the product of ‘imaginative’ geography, an obsession with classical text, a huge eclecticism and a deepseated binary distinction between Occident and Orient, West and East and ‘self’ and ‘other’. According to Said, orientalism, as thus deﬁned, originated not in the eighteenth century or thereabouts, but in the period of Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’s The Persians, and Euripedes’s The Bacchae. In The Persians, Asia was identiﬁed as Europe’s ‘other’, and in The Bacchae it was associated with the Dionysian cult, mysterious and demonic. In the following centuries this essential, binary division was repeatedly reinforced by Roman geographers, historians and public ﬁgures (Herodotus, Alexander, Caesar), Mediaeval merchants, writers and crusaders (Marco Polo, Mandeville, Lodovico di Varthema) and Mediaeval Christian writers and polemicists (Dante, John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa). In this way a ‘stage’ was constructed, in the European imagination, on which the East, symbolized by such colourful places as Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Sphinx, Nineveh and Babylon, and such archetypal ﬁgures as Cleopatra, Astarte, Isis, the Magi, Prester John and Muhammad, was represented. It was from this great storehouse of ‘theatrical’ imagery that the principal features of orientalism, as a self-sustaining myth, deﬁning the Orient and the oriental, were drawn. Thus in Aeschylus’s The Persians, Asia is identiﬁed as a region associated with emptiness, loss and disaster. In Euripedes’s The Bacchae, it is associated with excess, danger, the demonic and the irrational. In the works of Mediaeval polemicists and theologians, it is associated, through Islam, its latest embodiment, with terror, devastation and an apparently 88

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irrational unwillingness to acknowedge the evident truths of Christianity – images later reinforced by the writings of such major Renaissance ﬁgures as Ariosto, Shakespeare, Marlow, Milton, Tasso and Cervantes. Philosophically speaking, Said concludes, the orientalism thus created should be seen as a form of radical realism, which attempts to identify the East as ﬁxed and unchangeable. Rhetorically speaking, it should be seen as an attempt to anatomize and enumerate the East; and psychologically speaking, as a form of paranoia. From this orientalist discourse arose the nineteenth-century discipline of orientalism, which in due course facilitated Western imperialism. Instrumental in creating the orientalist foundations of imperialism were students of Sanskrit and Indic studies, such as Jones, Bopp and Schlegel, students of linguistic and racial studies, such as Gobineau, Renan and Humboldt, and travellers and writers, such as Goethe, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubrand, Kinglake, Nerval, Flaubert, Lane, Burton, Scott, Byron, Vigny, Disraeli, George Eliot and Gautier. Also instrumental in the twentieth century were such writers and travellers as Doughty, Barrès, Loti, T.E. Lawrence and Forster. In ‘Orientalist Structures and Reconstructions’, Said identiﬁes four elements which helped lay the foundations of modern orientalism: an expansion in overseas exploration; the development of comparative studies, particularly in history, philology and religion; the development of historicist ideas, which identiﬁed cultures as organic, inspired by a particular spirit or genius (Vico, Herder, Hamann); and an obsession with clariﬁcation (Linnaeus, Montesquieu, Johnson). These elements loosened the dependence of European thought on Christianity and 89

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Judaism, opened the way to a more genuine understanding of European history, and wore down the ‘obduracy’ of the European conception of ‘self ’ and ‘identity’; but they did not eliminate the old ‘existential paradigms’ of European history. Those were simply reconstituted, redeployed or redistributed in the secular framework of orientalism, which became a vehicle for the exercise of European power over the Orient. Leading ﬁgures in the new orientalism include Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan. Sacy, according to Said, played a decisive part in shaping nineteenth-century oriental studies, systematizing its texts and laying down a code of pedagogic practice. Renan, seen as an archetypal nineteenth-century student of philology and oriental languages, adopted what he believed to be a strictly scientiﬁc approach to his work. Yet he remained willing, in his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855), to identify Semitic languages, and by implication the Semitic peoples and cultures, as ‘inorganic, arrested, totally ossiﬁed, incapable of self regeneration’, while the Indo-German languages he identiﬁed as ‘alive and organic’. This orientalist construction, Said believes, should be seen as an act of ‘imperial power’ exercised over ‘recalcitrant phenomena’ (Said, 1978, p. 145). The orientalist structure of stereotypical images of the Orient, created by such orientalists as Sacy and Renan, and their colleagues and successors, William Muir, Reinhart Dozy and Caussin de Perceval, was, according to Said, repeatedly reinforced throughout the nineteenth century by the writings of a variety of European scholars, travellers, explorers and pilgrims. Many of these, including such noted ﬁgures as Flaubert, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, 90

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Kinglake, Lane, Disraeli and Burton, visited the Orient. But a number, including Carlyle, Cardinal Newman, Hugo and Karl Marx, did not. One way or the other, consciously or unconsciously, all contributed to the European, mainly British and French, project of regulating, codifying, classifying and reproducing the Orient – that is to say creating a ‘reduced model’ of the Orient, suitable for the prevailing dominant culture and its theoretical and practical contingencies. In ‘Orientalism Now’, Said once again outlines his interpretation of orientalism as a positive doctrine about the East, an inﬂuential academic tradition and an area of concern, deﬁned by travellers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions and many other groups and institutions, all inherently racist, imperialist and ethnocentric. Orientalism, he concludes, is fundamentally a political doctrine, willed over the Orient by the West, which elides the Orient’s difference with its weakness. Latent orientalism, in effect a category of European thinking, is conservative, unanimous and unchanging. Manifest orientalism, as represented in the works of imaginative writers (Flaubert, Nerval), scholars (Sacy, Lane), students of racial theory (Cuvier, Gobineau), cultural historians (Ranke, Burkhardt), and colonial administrators (Cromer, Curzon), is various and unstable. Absent for the most part from all such works is any feeling for the Orient as a ‘genuinely felt and experienced force’. According to Said, in the period of the First and Second World Wars, the West, threatened by a rising tide of barbarism, strident nationalism and moral failure, and affected also by a reduction of Western dominance over the rest of the world, experienced a phase of cultural crisis. 91

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This experience led many Western scholars to adopt a more sympathetic approach to the study of alien cultures. But students of Islamic orientalism remained for the most part impervious to change, continuing to preserve the mythological and ideological backwardness of their subject. Even H.A.R. Gibb and Louis Massignon, two of the greatest and most sympathetic European orientalists of the period, were not immune to such failure. In the post-Second World War period, in which America emerged as the dominant world power, Said ﬁnds that orientalism, as deﬁned by its principal dogmas – a belief in the existence of an absolute and systematic difference between East and West, an obsession with classical text, and a conviction that the Orient is eternal and unchanging, incapable of deﬁning itself, something to be feared – survived intact. It could be found variously in American newspaper reports, cartoons, caricatures, ofﬁcial reports and the work of various scholars, students for the most part of Near and Middle Eastern history, culture and politics. A list of the scholars referred to might include Morroe Berger, David Gordon, H.A.R. Gibb, mainly in his American incarnation (Gibb moved to Harvard in the 1950s), Gil Carl Alroy, Leonard Binder, P.J. Vatikiotis and Bernard Lewis, again mainly in his American incarnation. Where in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries orientalism had been enlisted in the service of European, mainly British and French, imperialism, it was now enlisted in the service of American imperialism, with particular reference to the Near and Middle East (Israel, oil, trade, the Cold War). Lewis, Said suggests, might be taken as a typical orientalist of the period, seeking, despite a pretence of liberal, objective scholarship, to ‘debunk’, ‘whittle down’ and ‘discredit’ 92

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the Arabs and Islam (Said, 1978, p. 316). This he is supposed to have done by suggesting that Islam is not merely a religion but also an anti-Semitic ideology, irrational, passionate and unreﬂecting; and by refusing to acknowledge the right of the Palestinian Arab people to protest against the Zionist invasion and colonization of their country. Lewis’s work, in Said’s eyes, is the culmination of orientalism, as a dogma that ‘not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners’ (Said, 1978, p. 319).

MARX AND THE END OF ORIENTALISM In Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978), published coincidentally in the same year as Said’s Orientalism, but seemingly uninﬂuenced by it, Bryan S. Turner, a leading Marxist sociologist, is concerned not so much with the failures of orientalism, which he more or less takes for granted, as with the effect those failures had on Marxism and the characterization of the history and social structure of North Africa and the Middle East, mainly in the nineteenth century. By orientalism, which he describes as an ‘overdeveloped’ luxurious system, Turner means a syndrome of beliefs, attitudes and theories which infects not only the classical works of Islamic studies, but also extensive areas of geography, economics and sociology. This syndrome, in his view, consists of a number of basic arguments: social development is caused by characteristics which are internal to a society; the historical development of a society is either an evolutionary progress or a gradual decline; society is an ‘expressive totality’, in the sense that all the institutions of a society are the expression of a primary essence. These arguments, in Turner’s opinion, allow orientalists, such as H.A.R. Gibb and H. Bowen, 93

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Islamic Society and the West (Oxford University Press, 1950, 1957), G.E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam (Allen and Unwin, 1970), and Ira M. Lapidus, Middle East Cities (University of California Press, 1969), to establish a dichotomous ideal type of Western society, whose inner essence unfolds in a dynamic progress towards democratic industrialism, on the one hand, and Islamic society, timelessly stagnant or in decline, on the other. In this context North African and Middle Eastern societies are deﬁned not by their own characteristics, but by a cluster of absences – the missing middle class, the missing city, the absence of political rights, and the absence of revolutions. These missing features are then used to explain why Islamic civilization failed to produce capitalism, to generate modern personalities and to convert itself into a secular, radical culture. In Turner’s view, not only is the orientalist model of Islamic society empirically false, it also fails to explain the true reason for the economic and political underdevelopment of North Africa and the Middle East. This arises from the fact that Islamic society, in the Middle East and North Africa, remains trapped in a peripheral relationship with the global centres of capitalism. Once the global centres of capitalism have been established, the conditions for development on the periphery are fundamentally changed. Advocates of the internalist theory of development, based on the orientalist model, fail to grasp this fact. They persist in posing futile questions about spontaneous capitalist development. What actually happens is that capitalism, once established, intensiﬁes and conserves pre-capitalist modes of production on the periphery, so that a unilinear, evolutionary path from ‘traditional society’ to ‘modern society’ is no longer open. Assumptions about 94

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the universal relevance and signiﬁcance of European models of development – the bourgeois revolution, secularization and modernization for instance – become in this context irrelevant (Turner, 1978, chapter 6). A thoroughgoing Marxist analysis of the economic and political development of North Africa and the Middle East would then, according to Turner, make orientalist contributions to the subject almost entirely superﬂuous. Unfortunately, however, as some Hegelian versions of Marxism overlap with orientalism – both see history as the unfolding of an essence – Marxism itself has become infected by the orientalist afﬂiction. Before, therefore, Marxism can undertake the task of purging orientalism of its many faults and misconceptions – belief in the unique nature of oriental despotism, mosaic stratiﬁcation, circulating elites, historical stagnation, the Muslim city, and so on – it must ﬁrst deal with its own theoretical problems, purging itself not only of orientalism but also of certain aspects of Hegelianism. Turner, according to his own account, derived his characterization of orientalism as an academic study, involving certain fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of Islamic society – namely that Islamic society is essentially authoritarian, despotic, reactionary, stagnant or in decline – mainly from Abdullah Laroui, ‘For a Methodology of Islamic Studies’, Diogenes (81, 4, 1973), Marshal Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), and Ralph Coury, ‘Why Can’t They Be Like Us?’, Review of Middle Eastern Studies (1, 1975). Surprisingly, in Marx and the End of Orientalism, he does not cite Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes (1963), though he does refer to Abdel-Malek’s ‘Nasserism and Socialism’, Socialist Register, 1 (1964). 95

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ANALYSIS What is surprising about the four critiques of orientalism mounted by Abdel-Malek, Tibawi, Said and Turner, in the period following the end of the Second World War, is the fact that, though each of their authors approaches the subject from a different point of view – Abdel-Malek Egyptian-Marxist, Tibawi Palestinian-Islamic, Said PalestinianFoucauldian and Turner English-Marxist – all four arrive at the same conclusion, that orientalism, as an academic discipline, is deeply ﬂawed, in crisis and in need of radical reform. It is tempting to conclude that this unanimity was the product of some kind of Foucauldian discourse, created in a post-colonial ﬁeld or episteme, but it would appear more likely that it was the product of a common sense of resentment felt by the four critics of orientalism regarding the extraordinary power exercised in the period of their youth by the combined forces of imperialism and capitalism. Tibawi and Said, after all, were both Palestinians, born and brought up in the period of the British mandate, Abdel-Malek was an Egyptian, born and brought up in a country controlled at the time by the British, and Turner was, according to his own account, the son of working-class parents. The similarities between the four critiques are striking. All four agree that orientalism, acting for the most part in the service of imperialism, created stereotypical images of Islam/the Orient/the East; and all four agree that the origins of this bias lay in the remote past, in the case of Abdel-Malek and Said in the world of ancient Greece, and in the case of Tibawi and Turner in the Mediaeval Christian confrontation with Islam. Similarities between the work of Abdel-Malek and Turner may be accounted for by 96

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the fact that both are Marxists; and similarities between the work of Abdel-Malek and Said by the fact that Said to some extent built on the foundations laid by Abdel-Malek, employing in particular his concept of a European, ‘sovereign’ subject and an oriental object. The essential differences between the four – the most important of which is Said’s radical redeﬁnition of orientalism as a sort of Foucauldian discourse and an instrument of imperialism – arise out of their different approaches to the question of knowledge. For Abdel-Malek and Turner, both good Marxists, scientiﬁc knowledge of the world, deﬁned as matter, is possible. In the form of an ideology, knowledge may be used by the ruling class to exploit and suppress the working class. For Tibawi, a good Muslim, knowledge may be divided into two parts: eternal knowledge, known by God, and knowledge of the world, known by man, God’s creature. Knowledge of the world may be acquired by means of intuition, the senses and reason; but in the Koran, revealed to Muhammad, man has direct access to the word of God. For Said, following Foucault, knowledge, in the context of the debate about orientalism, at least, consists of a series of representations, shaped by the knowing subject’s point of view or perspective. Such representations are essentially unstable, but after long usage they become accepted as ﬁxed and unchanging. Yet, paradoxically, Said, in Orientalism, continues to assert that there is a material Orient, about which true knowledge may be obtained. Foucault’s view of knowledge, as set out in Power/Knowledge (1980), assumes that knowledge is closely related to power. Knowledge, that is to say, is not a matter of objective fact, but the outcome of a struggle for power, in which ‘events’ and ‘discourses’, vehicles of ‘economies of power’, create 97

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new ‘networks’ and ‘regimes’ of knowledge. Truth is, therefore, not outside power, nor lacking in it, but a thing of this world, produced by it. Each society has a ‘general politics’ of truth, that either accepts a discourse and makes it function as truth, or rejects it and deﬁnes it as error. In (European) societies like ours such ‘political economies’ of truth are generally centred on a scientiﬁc discourse and on the institutions which produce and support it. Such discourses are subject to constant economic and political incitement, and they become the object, in various forms, of immense diffusion. At the same time, controlled by a few great political and economic apparatuses, they are deeply involved in ideological struggle. In this context, power should be conceived not in terms of what it denies, represses and rejects, but in terms of what it creates. Numbered among the things that power creates are both subjective identity and the objects of knowledge, which in the constant ﬂow of things achieve a ﬁxed shape or identity. Foucault’s account of the relationship between power and knowledge is, as he explains in his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (1971), based almost entirely on Nietzsche’s critique of the Socratic (Platonic) ideal – the idea that objects in the world are copies of basic ideas, universal prototypes or forms, existing somewhere in the universe, presumably in the mind of God. This critique, as Nietzsche made clear on a number of occasions, implies among other things the abolition of all essence, ﬁxed identity and the metaphysical. That is to say, it implies the abolition of being. All that is left after the abolition of being, in Nietzsche’s view, is becoming, forever changeable and unstable. In this context knowledge

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and truth are deﬁned merely as illusions that veil reality, deﬁned by Nietzsche as will to power. Beyond Nietzsche, of course, stands Schopenhauer, whose distinction, in The World As Will and Representation (1819), between will (numena) and appearance (phenomena) provided Nietzsche with many of the essential ingredients of his critique of idealism. Beyond Schopenhauer stands Kant, whose so-called ‘Copernican turn’ laid the foundation of virtually all modern philosophy, including the philosophy of knowledge. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant showed that all knowledge is limited by the conditions of its own experience, and that there can, therefore, be no direct knowledge of the ‘thing-initself’. The perspective of the viewer and the categories of his perception must, in the nature of things, determine knowledge. In Orientalism, Said acknowledges his debt to Nietzsche, quoting his deﬁnition of truth as a ‘mobile army’ of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished, politically and rhetorically, and which after long usage seem ﬁrm, canonical and obligatory. Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that that is what they are (Said, 1978, p. 203). Said’s evident unwillingness to incorporate Tibawi’s critique of orientalism into his study of the subject arises, perhaps, from the fact that he feels uncomfortable with Tibawi’s deep sense of personal commitment to the Islamic faith, evident in his attack on orientalist interpretations of the Koran, and also from the fact that Tibawi, a Palestinian Arab, succeeds in breaking the orientalist rule, identiﬁed by

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Said, that since the Orient is incapable of representing itself, it must be represented. Far from being intimidated by the West, in his two critiques of English-speaking Orientalists Tibawi, writing from an Islamic point of view, succeeds in mounting a devastating critique of Englishspeaking orientalism, identifying in considerable detail what he believes to be its major faults. As several writers, including Aijaz Ahmad, the noted Indian scholar, and John MacKenzie, the Scottish imperial historian, have pointed out, what is surprising about Said’s account of orientalism is the extent to which he, a critic of European essentialization of the Orient, has himself, in Orientalism, essentialized Europe, providing it with a ﬁxed and unchanging identity. If essentialization of the Orient is not, from an intellectual point of view, acceptable, Ahmad enquires, how can it be permissible for Said to essentialize Europe? Foucault, for one, would not have accepted such an essentialization. He would have rejected out of hand the proposition that an integral relationship existed between ancient Greece and modern Western Europe, except in so far as post-Renaissance Europe began to trace its lineage from that Antiquity, while reversing most of its prevailing assumptions. In this context it may be remembered that, in the so-called Dark Ages, Europe was overrun by a variety of nonEuropean tribes and peoples, including the Huns, the Avars, the Goths, the Visigoths, the Tartars and the Magyars; that for long periods parts of southern Spain and Sicily were Muslim; and that for almost six hundred years the Balkans were ruled by the Ottomans, Muslim Turks, originating in Asia Minor and beyond. To the present day substantial Muslim populations survive in Bosnia, Albania 100

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and Bulgaria. It might also be remembered that from the beginning Europe was riven by division, between Greek and barbarian, Roman and Greek, Latin and German, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Hapsburg and Ottoman, German and French, German and Slavonic, East and West, and Soviet and capitalist, not to speak of the scores of lesser divisions that have also from time to time fragmented the continent. Said’s essentialization of Europe, as a geographical, cultural and political identity, existing from the times of Homer, at least, is of course not an accident. Without it he would be unable to sustain the essential distinction between Occident and Orient, West and East, and ‘self’ and ‘other’, on which he builds his thesis. Nor would he be able to sustain his indictment of European orientalism, deﬁned by him as a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident. It is evident that Turner’s approach to the problem of orientalism – Marxist, globalist and class-based – differs substantially from those of Tibawi and Said, though not so much from that of Abdel-Malek, a fellow Marxist. Turner’s solution to the problem of orientalism is a Marxist analysis of oriental society, carried out by a Marxism purged of the essentialist and teleological elements of Hegelianism. But it may be wondered whether a Marxism, purged of Hegelianism – purged that is to say of the teleological concept of progress, as seen in the development of European society from slavery to capitalism – would survive such a puriﬁcation, though of course the way would still be open to a class-based analysis of the politics and history of the Middle East. 101

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Responses to the assault on orientalism mounted by AbdelMalek, Tibawi, Said and Turner in the 1960s and 1970s varied. Abdel-Malek’s ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ provoked considerable interest in orientalist circles, but with the exceptions of Claude Cahen, Professor of Muslim history at the Sorbonne, Paris, and Francesco Gabrieli, Professor of Arabic languages and literatures at the University of Rome, few orientalists took the trouble to respond. Tibawi’s ‘English-speaking Orientalists’ disturbed and offended many orientalists, including such noted ﬁgures as H.A.R. Gibb and A.J. Arberry, but again the public response was muted. Said’s Orientalism, together with other associated writings, including ‘Shattered Myths’, an article published in Naseer H. Aruri, Middle East Crucible (1975), and ‘Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West’, a review article published in the New York Times Book Review (1976), provoked an extraordinary response, reﬂected in the sixty or so reviews of Orientalism published at the time and the many books and articles on the subject which followed. In the process, almost every aspect of orientalism, as traditionally practised, was subjected to minute analysis, as were the arguments put forward by Said and his opponents. Turner’s Marx and 102

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the End of Orientalism (1978), a book more concerned with the impact of capitalism in the Third World than with orientalism as such, also proved contentious, though its impact could not be compared with that of Orientalism.

‘ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS’ The interesting thing about the responses offered by Claude Cahen and Francesco Gabrieli to Abdel-Malek’s indictment of orientalism in ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, is that, while challenging his conclusions, neither challenged the validity of his four principal propositions: that orientalism had in the past generally observed the East from a Western perspective; that it had frequently functioned as an instrument of imperialism and colonialism; that the ‘old generic term’, orientalism, was now outdated and in need of reform; and that orientalists had in the past paid insufﬁcient attention to the recent history of the peoples and cultures of the Orient. But where Cahen remained content to adopt a moderate approach, arguing merely that orientalism had in the past contributed greatly to the rediscovery of ancient civilizations and that it should be permitted to survive, as a language-based subject, concerned mainly with the ‘richest examples’ of oriental culture, Gabrieli – who like Cahen looked on orientalism as a ‘brilliant chapter of contemporary European culture and civilisation’ (Gabrieli, 1965, p. 128) – chose to challenge central aspects of Abdel-Malek’s analysis. While it was true, Gabrieli argued, that orientalism had in the past become to some extent implicated in the subjection and exploitation of the East, that did not mean that the main motivation of European interest in the East – historical, linguistic, literary and religious – was political and economic. On the contrary, many orientalists, such as Edward Browne, Louis 103

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Massignon and Leone Caetani, who would have insisted that their interest in Eastern culture and society was entirely distinct from the practices of the colonial powers, had been engaged merely in a ‘disinterested and impassioned search for the truth’ (Gabrieli, 1965, p. 132). The peoples of the East might justiﬁably assert their right to be considered as the ‘subjects’ of history, and not as its ‘objects’, but it should not be expected that the West would renounce the result of its secular study of the evolution of humanity and look at the Orient with oriental eyes and mentality. Nor should it be expected that the East would in the near future succeed in developing a new approach to the study of oriental civilization and culture, based on modern Eastern interpretations of historiography, philosophy, aesthetics and economics, for the foundations of such an approach did not as yet exist. Almost all modern conceptions, master ideas and interpretations of history were now European. To these the East had little to offer. Marxism, for instance, along with Hegelianism and Leninism, the basis of Abdel-Malek’s analysis of orientalism, was itself a fruit of Western thought. When the AfroAsiatic peoples preach hatred and contempt for the West in dogmatic formulas, they do so by adopting weapons forged by the West, for its own purposes. The road to scientiﬁc progress and intellectual maturation in the study of oriental civilization still passes through Western orientalism – that is to say through European historical, philological and sociological thought. European orientalism had become merely a scapegoat for the East’s own problems, anxieties and pains. So long as the East failed to overcome the complex of suspicion and ill-feeling that prejudiced the prospect of friendly co-operation with the West, it should not speak with so much presumption of an

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‘Orientalism in Crisis’, blaming orientalism for its own ‘agonising crisis’ (Cahen, 1965; Gabrieli, 1965). It is evident that Gabrieli’s response to ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ was written before the publication of Said’s Orientalism and his other attacks on the subject. Had it not been so, it is probable that Gabrieli would have avoided some at least of the instances of ‘orientalism’, as deﬁned by Said, that occasionally mar his response. These include easy assumptions of European friendliness and honesty, contrasted with Asiatic ‘suspicion and ill-feeling’, and a reference to European ‘reason’ contrasted with Asiatic ‘passion’ (‘passionate words’ which we believe should be answered with ‘calm reason’). In Gabrieli’s account, in other words, the West is generally assumed to be reasonable, dispassionate, friendly, open to ‘friendly co-operation’, while the East is assumed to be suspicious, unfriendly and dogmatic – all this despite the fact Abdel-Malek, as a good Marxist, had gone out of his way to couch his arguments in the most dispassionate language he could manage.

‘ENGLISH-SPEAKING ORIENTALISTS’ Tibawi’s critique of orientalism, in ‘English-speaking Orientalists’ (1964) (later followed up by a ‘Second Critique’ in 1979) provoked surprisingly little response, though it did make a considerable impact on the orientalists concerned. Gibb and Arberry, two leading English orientalists, were, according to Tibawi’s own account, deeply disturbed by the critique, but they both wisely refrained from entering into a prolonged dispute on the subject. Gibb tacitly accepted many of the criticisms made, while Arberry, less constrained, admitted that the story Tibawi

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told was ‘sad but unfortunately true’ (Tibawi, 1980). Later, Arberry invited Tibawi to lecture on the subject at the Middle East Centre in Cambridge. It was left to Donald P. Little, of the Institute of Islamic Studies, Montreal, Canada, to respond more fully to Tibawi’s attack. In his response, contained in ‘Three Arab Critiques of Orientalism’ (Little, 1979) – the article also contains comments on Abdel-Malek’s ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ and Said’s ‘Shattered Myths’ – Little, after ﬁrst summarizing the contents of Tibawi’s article, concludes that his analysis, based as it is on three central assertions regarding the nature of religious experience – that religious experience is essentially intuitive; that it cannot be understood by employing the analytical and critical methods used by scholars; and that those viewing a religious system from the outside can never fully appreciate the signiﬁcance of the experience of those engaged in it – gives the impression that he would have preferred it if non-Muslims had not studied Islam at all. Nor, it seemed, from Tibawi’s account, was much to be gained from discussing the subject directly with Muslims, for most orientalists, according to Tibawi, cannot speak any Islamic languages properly, and few Muslims have mastered a Western tongue. In this way, Little concludes, Tibawi has effectively closed all the doors by which orientalists have traditionally approached Islam. In the process, while pleading for a more sympathetic and tolerant approach to Islam, he has gone out of his way to denounce the very orientalists (Cantwell Smith and Montgomery Watt) who have leaned over backwards to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities. As for Tibawi’s analysis of Western hostility to Arab nationalism, that too was suspect, for Tibawi appeared to believe that Arab nationalism was inseparable from Islam, and that ‘what is hostile to Arab nationalism 106

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is automatically hostile to Islam and vice-versa’; though Little does respond sympathetically to Tibawi’s plea that Arab politics should not be judged, or even analysed, within the context of rigid Western norms and standards (Little, 1979, p. 115). Following the publication of Little’s ‘Three Arab Critiques of Orientalism’, Tibawi, in a somewhat ill-tempered article, entitled ‘On the Orientalists Again’ (Tibawi, 1980) took the opportunity offered by the editor to respond to what he described as Little’s ‘belated’ response to his article. This he found to be inadequate in almost every respect. Little’s method of treatment was, in his view, ‘simplistic’, bordering on the journalese. His summaries of the arguments presented were ‘brief and inadequate’, interspersed with his own opinions and embroidered with rhetorical questions and exclamation marks. His response amounted to a ‘blatant and unreasoned tirade’. Producing no concrete evidence to back up his opinions he, Little, had voiced strong objections to well-documented criticism of certain orientalists (Guillaume, von Grunebaum, Montgomery Watt and others), whom he appeared to idolize. So-called moderate orientalists, identiﬁed by Little in his article (Cantwell Smith, Montgomery Watt), remained shackled by the legacy of Mediaeval prejudice. True, in a reversal of his previous position, Little had suggested that some orientalists had attempted a misguided reformulation of Islam, and expressed the hope that in the future a ‘more measured tone’ might be adopted. But as the ‘Second Critique of English-speaking Orientalists’, recently published, showed, no such change had in fact taken place. Professional orientalists continued to distort and misrepresent Islam. As for Little’s imputation that he, Tibawi, regarded the treatment of Arabs and Islam by 107

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Western scholars with a ‘deep bitterness and resentment’, this he rejected out of hand. What he really felt was disappointment and disenchantment with those who, despite failing to live up to its standards, yet claimed to be the heirs of a humane and liberal tradition. What he had in mind was the callous indifference with which the so-called Arabists and Islamists among the orientalists viewed the colossal injustice and human misery inﬂicted on the Palestinian Arab nation. Tibawi’s contemptuous response to Little’s remarks betrays a strength of feeling out of place perhaps in an academic debate. This may have been inspired by what Tibawi saw as Little’s failure to appreciate the epistemological consequences of the Muslim belief that the Koran, as transmitted by Muhammad, embodies the word of God, or by Little’s failure to engage in the ‘rigorous analysis’ he believed a ‘detailed and documented discussion’ of the subject warranted. One way or the other, the argument illustrates all too clearly the difﬁculties inherent in any attempt made to bridge the gap between a Muslim and a Christian/ secular view of knowledge, religion and the world.

ORIENTALISM: WESTERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE ORIENT Opinion regarding the critique of orientalism, contained in Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), was from the beginning deeply divided between those who, though occasionally critical, were generally convinced of its validity (Clifford, Inden, Hourani, Gran, Talal Asad, Ernest J. Wilson III), those who for a variety of reasons considered it to be for the most part invalid (Lewis, Geertz, Butterworth, Beckingham, Richardson, MacKenzie) 108

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and those who, though generally sympathetic, called in question certain aspects of Said’s approach ( Jalal al-’Azm, Kopf, Aijaz Ahmad, al-Bctar, Halliday). Professional orientalists might have been expected to reject Said’s thesis, and Third World scholars and intellectuals, particularly those who had suffered from the depredations of British and French colonialism, to accept it. But such was not always the case. Bernard Lewis, a leading orientalist and professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, rejected Said’s thesis out of hand, while Ronald Inden, a leading Indologist, accepted it more or less in full. Ernest J. Wilson III, a leading black American scholar, saw a parallel between the role played by the oriental, as the white man’s ‘other’, in Asia and the role played by the American black, the white man’s ‘other’, in America; while Jalal al-’Azm, an Arab writer and philosopher, condemned Said’s ‘anti-scientiﬁc’ approach. Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist, attacked Said’s failure to appreciate the part played by economic forces in the shaping of British and French imperial history; while John MacKenzie, a historian of British imperialism, though sympathetic to Said’s anti-imperialist stance, yet opposed his thesis root and branch. Opinion regarding the validity of Said’s Orientalism was then mixed. But a pattern of sorts can be detected, based not so much on the nationality and religion of the scholars and intellectuals concerned as on their attitude to history and the modern and post-modern philosophical ideas (deconstruction, truth as illusion, intellectual hegemony, and so on) which frequently inﬂuence it. Critics committed to a traditional (realist) approach to the writing of history – these might include the Marxists – such as Lewis (1993) and MacKenzie (1995), generally condemned Said’s approach, while critics committed to a modern or 109

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post-modern approach, such as Behdad (1994) and Hildreth (see MacKenzie, 1994) generally approved of it, though it has to be admitted that in most cases no clear dividing line can be established. A brief survey of some of the reactions provoked by Orientalism might serve to illustrate this point. At the same time it will illustrate the nature of the arguments advanced, both by the defenders of Orientalism and by its critics, in this lively and at times heated debate.

‘THE QUESTION OF ORIENTALISM’ Bernard Lewis’s rebuttal of Said’s critique of orientalism, ﬁrst published as an article entitled ‘The Question of Orientalism’ in the New York Review of Books (1982), and later in a revised form as a chapter in Islam and the West (1993), might be taken as a classical expression of the tradional orientalist point of view. In his article Lewis challenges Said’s right to indict, not just one or two orientalists accused of racial prejudice and bias, but a whole profession. It is, he suggests, as if a group of patriots and radicals from modern Greece had decided to accuse classicists, and the classical profession to which they belonged, of insulting the great heritage of Hellas. Classicists, according to this scenario, would be seen as ‘manifestations of a deep and evil conspiracy, incubated for centuries, hatched in Western Europe, ﬂedged in America’ (Lewis, 1982, p. 49). Only Greeks would be allowed to teach Greek history, write on the subject and conduct programmes of academic studies in that ﬁeld. Stated in such terms, Lewis concludes, the picture is absurd, but with regard to orientalism this is effectively what Said has done. As a result, the term ‘orientalist’, once the title of a scholar engaged in the study of the languages and cultures 110

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of the Near East, already under attack in Asia and Africa, and even in Europe (the International Congress of Orientalists had already agreed to abandon the use of the word in 1973), had become poisoned, polluted beyond salvation. According to Lewis, earlier attacks on orientalism, mounted mainly in the Arab world, include a tract by a Muslim professor at Al Azhar, in Egypt, accusing orientalists of colluding with Christian missionaries to secure the destruction of Islam, published in 1962; Abdel-Malek’s ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, published in 1963; and an attack on Zionist academic hegemony, published in a Beirut magazine in 1974. But the principal contemporary exponent of antiorientalism was, according to Lewis, Edward Said, whose Orientalism had been published in 1978. In this work Said had made a number of ‘very arbitrary decisions’. These include a reduction of the Orient to the Middle East, and a reduction of the Middle East to a small part of the area; a concentration on British and French imperialism and orientalism; and an arbitrary selection of orientalists. This meant that Turkish, Persian and Semitic studies were ignored; German, Austrian, Russian and Soviet orientalism was excluded; and a number of leading orientalists, such as Claude Cahen, E. Levi-Provençal and Henri Corbin, were disregarded. No mention was made in Orientalism of Edward Lane’s multi-volume Arab–English lexicon, but a series of writers and politicians, such as Chateaubriand, Nerval and Cromer, who had nothing to do with orientalism, were accorded the status of ‘orientalist’. Unaware of the contributions made by such orientalists as Adam Mez and J.H. Kramers to the study of Muslim economics, Said had credited Maxime Rodinson with the ﬁrst account of the subject (Islam and Capitalism, 1974, ﬁrst published in 111

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1966). Ignorant of Near Eastern history, he had asserted that England and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘from the end of the seventeenth century’. As for Said’s charge, made in Orientalism, that he, Lewis, had given the derivation of an Arabic word for revolution (thawra) in such a way as to suggest that the Arab people, as a whole, were incapable of serious action, inclined only to indulge in ‘bad sexuality’, foreplay, masturbation and coitus interruptus, the derivation of the word he had given was a standard one, recognizable to anyone familiar with Arabic lexicography. The use of carnal imagery in politics was as natural to the ancient Arabs as horse imagery was to the Turks and ship imagery to the maritime peoples of the West. Said’s work, in short, showed a ‘capricious choice of countries, persons and writings’, an ‘arbitrary rearrangement of the historical background’, a ‘contempt for fact, evidence, and even probability’, an ‘obsessive search for hostile motives’ and a ‘lexical HumptyDumptyism’ of the most astounding kind. No doubt there were orientalists who, objectively or subjectively, served or proﬁted from imperial domination. But as an explanation of the orientalist enterprise as a whole, Said’s analysis was ‘absurdly inadequate’ (Lewis, 1982). Later, in the revised version of his article, published in Islam and the West, Lewis admitted that, in reading Orientalism, he had been puzzled by Said’s eccentric account of the subject, in particular his post-dating of the rise of Arabic studies in England and France and the relegation of German scholarship to a secondary role. Was this, he wondered, an attempt on Said’s part to devise one of those alternative universes, so beloved of science ﬁction writers? The explanation, he eventually discovered, lay in the fact that, in his account of the rise of orientalism, Said had 112

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drawn not on the standard works on the subject, but on Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale (1950), a work mainly concerned with the Anglo-French discovery of India, and the impact of that discovery on European learning and culture. Once this fact was understood, Said’s ‘mystifying schema’ of Arabic studies in the West became intelligible. But it did not make it more acceptable. For a world of difference existed between the development of Indic and Islamic studies in Europe. Western interest in India had developed in a period of Western dominance, when Europe was powerful and expanding. Western interest in the Islamic World, on the other hand, had begun in the High Middle Ages, when Europe was threatened with conquest, ﬁrst by the Saracens, and then by the Turks (Lewis, 1993). Lewis’s hard-hitting critique of Said’s Orientalism, published in the New York Review of Books, provoked an immediate response from Said. In a letter to the editor, published on 12 August 1982, he accused Lewis of ‘suppressing or distorting the truth’, an ‘extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong’ and a passing off of ‘wilful political assertion’ in the form of scholarly argument, a practice ‘thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism’. Orientalism, as a discipline concerned with Islam and the Arabs, simply cannot be compared with classical philology, as Lewis had suggested. European interest in Islam derived from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor of Christianity. This fear, together with the hostility it provoked, which found expression in the work of Mediaeval polemicists, the ‘earliest scholars of Islam’, survived to the present day, in both scholarly and nonscholarly circles, where Islam is viewed as ‘belonging to a 113

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part of the world, the Orient, counterpoised imaginatively, geographically, and historically against Europe and the West’. Strong afﬁliations continue to exist between orientalism and imperialism. Many Islamic specialists, including Lewis himself, work for governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination or downright aggression. Many Sinologists and Indologists had attempted to deal with the issues he, Said, had raised in Orientalism, but not the Islamicists and Arabists. They had responded merely with aggrieved outrage, a substitute for self-reﬂection. Lewis’s defence of orientalism was an act of ‘breathtakingly bad faith’ (Said and Lewis, 1982). In his reply Said vigorously rebutted the charges, of inaccuracy, ignorance and tendentiousness, laid against him by Lewis. Lewis’s defence of his deﬁnition of the Arabic word thawra (revolution), he found to be misplaced, yet another example of Lewis’s ‘bogus learning’, mere point scoring. His contention that he, Said, only discussed minor works of minor orientalists was also misplaced. There were good reasons, for instance, why he had considered Lane’s Modern Egyptians more important, for his purposes, than his Lexicon. Lewis’s criticism, also voiced elsewhere, that he had omitted German orientalists from his account of the subject, hardly merited a response. As he had explained in Orientalism, he had left out German orientalism because he was concerned mainly with the close relationship that existed between orientalism and British and French imperialism. In this context German orientalism, important as it was, appeared merely as an elaboration and extension of the essential Weltanschauung adumbrated by the British and the French. As for Lewis’s remark that he had not attacked Soviet orientalists, for their attacks on Muhammad, this was because Soviet orientalists attacked 114

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also Christianity, Judaism and other religions. They had not singled out Islam for attack, as had Western orientalists. Lewis’s attack on Orientalism, in short, should be seen, not as a defence of ‘scholarly validity’ and ‘intellectual precision’, but as the work of a lobbyist and propagandist. In his work, politics always overrides everything, except the façade of scholarship. In the Arab world today, Arabs and Muslims would look on him as their political enemy. Given the opportunity, in turn, to respond to Said’s letter, which he interpreted as a ‘scream of rage’, Lewis went out of his way to insist that at no time had he advised the various congressional committees he attended to send arms to Israel – a charge laid by Said. Neither had he carried out any mission for the US State Department, nor briefed ‘area embassies’ on US security interests – again both charges laid by Said. All Said seemed able to offer, in addition to direct personal abuse, was an ‘unsavoury mixture of sneer and smear, bluster and innuendo and guilt by association’. But all such political polemic was irrelevant to the matter under discussion, namely the attack on orientalism. This must stand or fall on its scholarly merits. But in his response, Said had attempted to shift the discussion from the ground of scholarship to that of politics, where he evidently felt more at ease. As for the speciﬁc issues he, Lewis, had raised in his article, these Said had responded to merely with evasion, fudge and quibble. The most important points he had simply ignored. In this he had followed very closely on the standards of analysis and exposition established in his book, Orientalism. Said’s defence of his dating of the beginning of orientalism, for instance, which he attributed to the Church Council of Vienne in 1312, was ﬂawed. The 115

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decision taken by the Church Council, to set up chairs of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac at various European universities, marked not the beginning of modern orientalism, but the end of Mediaeval orientalism. It was not until the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation that a new kind of orientalism began to develop in Europe. As for Said’s assertion that German orientalism was merely an elaboration of British and French orientalism, that too was mistaken. Arabic studies in Germany, and for that matter in Holland, had begun about the same time as in France, and earlier than in Britain. On those grounds alone Said’s thesis, that orientalism was a product of imperialism, was mistaken (Said and Lewis, 1982). Lewis’s argument – one can hardly call it a debate – with Said over the nature of orientalism did not end there. In a chapter entitled ‘Other People’s History’, published in Islam and the West (1993), Lewis once again returned to the subject. Why, he enquired, does the orientalist, now under attack as an agent of empire, a predator, interested only in stealing other people’s possessions, study the Orient? Two explanations have been given: that higher civilizations frequently engage in the study of lower civilizations and that knowledge is power. Neither explanation is entirely satisfactory. European study of the Orient (Islam) began at a time when European civilization was manifestly inferior to that of the Muslim world (Muslim Spain, North Africa and the Near East). Arab and Turkish conquerors, advancing on Europe in the southeast and southwest, showed little interest in the Christian civilization they wished to conquer. Scholarship and imperialism may at times have been related, particularly in the modern period, but that relationship was narrow, and more tenuous than is supposed. Nineteenth-century English writing on the history of 116

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India, designed in part to conﬁrm English readers of the rightness of English rule in India, was far removed from orientalist scholarship, as practised in English universities. French writers, seeking to promote la mission civilisatrice de la France, in Asia and Africa, again had little to do with French orientalism. If a place were to be sought where academic orientalism and government/imperialism were directly related, in the manner described by Said, it should be sought in the Soviet Union, under Stalin and some of his successors. Studies of the history and culture of TransCaucasia, Central Asia and the countries beyond were there instituted with the speciﬁc purpose of supporting Soviet rule. In France, on the other hand, the ﬁrst chair of Arabic was founded in the Collège de France by King Francis I in 1538. The ﬁrst French incursion into an Arab country occurred in 1798. In England, the ﬁrst chair of Arabic was founded in Cambridge in 1633, the second in Oxford in 1636. The ﬁrst British incursion into the Arab world came only in the early nineteenth century, in the Persian Gulf and Aden. To link the beginnings of English and French orientalism with imperial expansion is to reverse the course of history. In his chapter, Lewis admits that he is unable to offer a clear explanation as to why Europeans studied oriental cultures in the past; but he does put forward a number of ‘tentative suggestions’. Firstly, Christian Europe needed, from the beginning, to look outward, both to discover the mainsprings of its civilization, and to learn Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages associated with its faith. Secondly, inspired by a deep sense of loss – many of the countries conquered by Islam had been Christian – and fear, Europeans needed to understand the culture and religion of their enemy. Islam, on the other hand, for 117

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many centuries triumphant, felt no such need. Thirdly, in the Middle Ages, Europeans who wished to study science and philosophy were obliged to study Arabic. Fourthly, intellectual development in Europe, in the age of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, promoted curiosity, while religious conﬂict between Catholic and Protestant in the period of the Reformation drove both Catholics and Protestants to seek the support of Arab Christians, many of whom travelled to Europe. Fifthly, European merchants, trading in the Near and Middle East, were permitted to establish trading posts, a privilege seldom granted to Muslim merchants trading in Europe. In his critique of Orientalism Lewis is no doubt right to question Said’s over-dependence on Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale (1950); his misuse of the word orientalist; his indictment not only of individual orientalists and writers, but of a whole profession; his failure to include accounts of German and Soviet orientalism; and his occasional historical errors and evasions. But Said, it can be argued, is equally right in concluding, in his reply to Lewis’s ‘The Question of Orientalism’, that Lewis fails to respond adequately to the central message of Orientalism, that strong afﬁliations exist between orientalism and the European literary imagination, and that a clear relationship can be established between the rise of modern oriental scholarship in Europe and the acquisition of Eastern empires by Britain and France. Said’s argument is not, as Lewis at times seems to suppose, that imperialism promoted orientalism but that orientalism, in one way or another, promoted imperialism. That is to say, the orientalist, the heir to a ‘narcissistic’ tradition, founded by, among others, Homer and Aeschylus, Dante and Marlow, through his writing ‘creates’ the Orient – an Orient which 118

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once created, in the European imagination, might then be subjected to European conquest and colonization. A more sympathetic reading of Orientalism might have persuaded Lewis that Said’s work, however ﬂawed, yet constitutes a remarkable reading of Europe’s intellectual and political history, worthy of further consideration. A more tolerant reading, by Said, of Lewis’s critical analysis of his work, might have enabled him more effectively to defend the intellectual integrity of his project. But in a world in which Lewis accuses Said of ‘politicising the whole question and assigning a political signiﬁcance not only to his own statements but also to those of any who have the temerity to question his facts and methods’, and in which Said accuses Lewis of verbosity, and of scarcely concealing the ‘ideological underpinning of his position’, such expectations are hardly likely to be fulﬁlled (Said and Lewis, 1982). Other orientalists, anthropologists and historians with an interest in oriental history proved more sympathetic, but many expressed reservations about Said’s approach. Albert Hourani, a leading orientalist, in a review of Orientalism published in the New York Review of Books (1979), found Said’s work to be ‘powerful and disturbing’, his writing ‘forceful and brilliant’. But he wondered whether, in his analysis of orientalism, Said had not fallen into the trap into which he accused the orientalists of falling. Had he not constructed an abstract concept, an ideal type, free from extraneous and accidental elements? Such a concept might serve to describe politicians and colonial servants, like Cromer, and even nineteenth-century writers, like Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Flaubert, but can it be used to describe the work of great Islamic scholars, like Massignon and Ritter? The answer must be no. A hundred years of orientalist study of Islam has produced a body of 119

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work which ‘cannot be regarded as badly done’. There is in that work a cautious and careful use of original sources, an avoidance of unfounded generalization, a sense of the interrelation between intellectual movements and social and political events, and a feeling for the quality of individual thinkers, in so far as their works reveal them. It is true that a general concept has shaped such work, namely that of ‘Islam’ as a system of thought, seen in relation to earlier systems, Greek, Christian, Jewish. But that concept is not another idea of the Orient, as Said has described it. It is Islam, not seen as the reverse side of something else, but in its speciﬁc nature. Within the limits of such work, orientalists were not guilty of what Said calls orientalism. J.H. Plumb, a professor of history at Cambridge, in a review published in the New York Times Book Review (1979), found that Said’s Orientalism, the product of an acute analytical mind, dealt with a ‘profoundly interesting concept’, but unfortunately his book was almost impossible to read. The names of Lévi-Strauss, Gramsci and Michel Foucault drop ‘with a dull thud’ to authenticate statements or suggest methods. Sensible statements are sometimes clothed in the ‘unbearable jargon of philosophic sociology’. Said’s need to be all-embracing leads him to make some very odd historical statements. Said should have read more Marx and less Lévi-Strauss. He does not see that the orientalist thesis he describes, which ‘one can accept’, breeds its own antithesis. Eventually, as Marx predicted, the West’s impact on the East will prove beneﬁcial, destroying the feudalism that holds the peoples of the East in thrall, giving them a promise of a richer and longer life, and generating a greater self-awareness. Eventually the intellectual interchange, between East and West, that nineteenth-

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century orientalism generated, will result in the destruction of the very orientalism that supported it. David Kopf, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, in a review article entitled ‘Hermeneutics versus History’, published in the Journal of Asian Studies (1980), sees Orientalism as a work of considerable merit, comparable to Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1946), Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Macmillan, 1951) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Cape, 1953). Said’s essential conclusions, he believes, cannot be challenged. Anyone trying to teach Asian history to American students in a reasonably objective way – as part of human history – knows that. But Said’s orientalism, deﬁned by Kopf as a ‘sewer category’ of Western intellectual thought, should not be confused with orientalism as history. That exists and has existed outside Said’s conception of it. It has a concrete reality, is complex, internally diverse, changes over time and is never monolithic. In particular, Said fails to pay proper attention to the part played by orientalism in India, where it contributed to the modernization of Indian vernacular languages and literature, the emergence of historical consciousness, the search for a new identity in the modern world and a reconstruction of Hindu tradition. Said’s study of orientalism, in short, lacks precision, comprehensiveness and subtlety. It is simply not a work of historical scholarship. James Clifford, a leading anthropologist, in ‘Orientalism’, a chapter published in his The Predicament of Culture (1988), sees Orientalism as a personal protest, a narrow polemic dominated by immediate political goals, a serious

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exercise in textual criticism and, most fundamentally, a series of important if tentative epistemological reﬂections on general styles and procedures of cultural discourse. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes forced, it is in the end numbingly repetitive. In his work Said remains uncertain whether orientalism is concerned with a real Orient, or merely with the Orient as mental construct. Said may, following Foucault, Gramsci, Fanon and others, adopt an oppositional stance, but the humanist values he adopts escape oppositional analysis, as do the discursive alliances of knowledge and power produced by anti-colonial and nationalist movements. As for the limitations imposed by Said on his account (genealogy) of orientalism, in particular its relationship to India, the Far East, the Paciﬁc, and North Africa, the omission of North Africa is crucial, for it ensures that he does not have to discuss modern French orientalist currents. In a French context, the kind of critical questions posed by Said have been familiar since the Algerian war. It would simply not be possible to castigate recent French orientalism in the way that he does the discourse of the modern American Middle East experts. Said is perfectly correct to identify a discourse that dichotomizes and essentializes in its portrayal of the other, but the discourse should not be identiﬁed with orientalism alone. Anthropological orthodoxy, based on a mythology of ﬁeldwork encounter and a hermeneutically minded cultural theory, should also be questioned. Finally, Michael Richardson, in ‘Enough Said’, Anthropology Today (1990) pointed out that Said’s analysis of orientalism raises the fundamental question of the relationship between subject and object. If the relationship of occidental subject and oriental object is not reciprocal, as Said at times seems to suggest, then no possibility exists of the object chal122

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lenging the subject, and developing alternative models of reality. The only way out of the impasse would be for the subject to correct its own misrepresentation, an unlikely development. As for Said’s repeated references to a remark made by Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – that ‘they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ – these displayed a complete misunderstanding of Marx’s intention in making the remark, which was to identify a reciprocal relationship between the French peasantry and the Bonapartist party in the period of the 1848 revolution, and not, as Said seemed to assume, a condition of imposed silence. In so interpreting Marx’s remark, Said, in Richardson’s opinion, shows a curious naivety as to how people actually perceive images. Only an academic literary critic, obsessed with the problem of representation, would make the mistake of believing that people in general equate images of the Orient with the reality of the things they represent.

A MARXIST (INDIAN) RESPONSE Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Orientalism, contained in ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’ – a shorter version of a talk originally given at a Fellows’ Seminar held at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi – published in Studies in History (1991), and later expanded in ‘Orientalism and After’, in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), might be taken as a representative sample of the Marxist response to Said’s work, though in his critique Ahmad ranges far beyond the usual conﬁnes of a strictly Marxist approach. Central to Said’s approach to orientalism, Ahmad concludes, is his foregrounding of literature. This facilitates a reading of history not from the basis of material production and 123

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appropriation, but from its systems of representation. As a result, Said tries to occupy theoretical positions that are mutually contradictory; deﬁnes his object of knowledge, orientalism, in ways which are mutually incompatible; and disables himself from acquiring a coherent anti-imperialist position by adopting an attitude towards Marxism so antagonistic as to be virtually hysterical. According to Ahmad, many of Said’s theoretical, methodological and political problems arise from his determination simultaneously to uphold the absolutely contrary traditions of what Ahmad refers to as Auerbachian High Humanism – Auerbach was a German-Jewish scholar who in the period of the Second World War sought sanctuary in Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis (1946), a noted study of some aspects of the European humanist literary tradition – and Nietzschean (Foucauldian) anti-humanism. In locating the origins of orientalism in the period of Antiquity (Homer, Aeschylus), Said implicitly accepts the humanist tradition, exempliﬁed by the work of Auerbach, but such an origination would be completely incompatible with the approach to history adopted by Foucault. Said, in other words, while employing Foucault’s concept of discourse, refuses to accept the consequences of his mapping of history. If ‘Foucauldian pressures’ force him to trace the beginnings of ‘Orientalist discourse’ from the eighteenth century or so, the equally irresistible pressures of Auerbachian High Humanism force him to trace the origins of discourse, in the conventional form of a continuous European literary textuality, all the way back to ancient Greece – an impossible position. Said’s three-fold deﬁnition of orientalism – as a profession, a style of thought based on an ontological and epistem124

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ological distinction made between Orient and Occident, and a corporate institution – also causes problems. In particular, his deﬁnition of orientalism as a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction effectively essentializes Europe, in much the same way that he accuses Europe and the West of essentializing Asia and the East. Not that, in Ahmad’s view, the case Said describes, of Europe’s identiﬁcation of a hostile ‘other’, used as a means of identifying the ‘self’, is in any sense unusual. Muslims frequently make similar distinctions, between East and West, Islamicate and Christendom, while Hindus routinely contrast Hindu spirituality with Western materialism and Muslim barbarity. For Ahmad this is not merely a matter of polemics. As he makes clear, what he is suggesting is that there have historically been all sort of processes – connected with class and gender, ethnicity and religion, xenophobia and bigotry – which have been at work in all societies, both European and non-European. What gave European forms of prejudice their special force in history, with devastating consequences for the lives of countless millions, was ‘not some transhistorical process of ontological obsession and falsity – some gathering of unique force in domains of discourse – but, quite speciﬁcally, the power of colonial capitalism which then gave rise to other sorts of powers’ (Ahmad, 1992, p. 184). Throughout Orientalism, according to Ahmad, Said fails to decide whether he considers the orientalism he identiﬁes to be merely the product of a system of representations, in the post-modernist sense (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’) attached to it by Derrida and Foucault, or a system of misrepresentation, wilfully produced by the West. 125

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The latter case would suggest that an objective reality exists, against which misrepresentation can be measured. The former case would allow no such positive outcome. According to Ahmad, it is a peculiarity of the postmodernist mind that it elides objective experience into a purely textual notion of ‘representation’. In this respect, Said’s ideal reader is a Western reader. Asian and African readers would inevitably be tempted to enquire how the system of representations described actually compared with their own ‘real’ experience. At the same time, in allocating blame for the depredations of imperialism and colonialism, they might be compelled to look more closely at their own contribution to the outcome. An emphasis merely on representation saves them from this embarrassment. In other respects too Said’s analysis of orientalism may be found wanting. It fails to take account of the criticisms of colonial cultural domination, made in India and Latin America, in the nineteenth century. It fails to pay proper attention to the ‘enabling conditions’ of the orientalist discourse, economic, political and military. It fails to make due allowance for the contribution made by the intelligentsia of the colonized countries concerned to the formation of Western textuality. Finally, in its psychologizing of orientalism as a form of European ‘paranoia’, it risks dismissing an entire civilization, as a diseased formation, in a manner unfortunately ‘all too familiar to us, who live on the other side of the colonial divide’ (Ahmad, 1992, p. 182). In a follow-up article to ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’ and ‘Orientalism and After’, entitled ‘Marx on India’, also published in In Theory (1992), Ahmad mounted a detailed defence of Marx, dismissed by Said in 126

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Orientalism as an ‘unsavoury child of historicism’, who had allowed himself to be ‘censored by the lexicographical police action’ of orientalism. In his article, Ahmad makes it clear that Said’s reading of Marx, in particular Marx’s two most famous articles on India, ‘The British Rule in India’, and ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, published in the New York Tribune in 1853, is wrong in almost every respect. Said fails to set Marx’s comments on India in the context of his other writings, completely ignores what Indian historians have had to say on the subject, and places Marx in a category of English and French travel-writers, to which he does not belong. In his writings about India, Marx had not said anything which he had not also said about Europe, in even more vitriolic terms. If his comments on India were authorized by some kind of Foucauldian discourse, then it was not the discourse of orientalism, but the nineteenth-century discourse of political economy, as applied mainly to Europe and America. His views were generated not by racist values, but by a belief in the Enlightenment values of unity, universality and human potential; and they were the necessary and logical outcome of the positions he held on ‘issues of class and mode of production, on the comparative structuration of the different pre-capitalist modes, and on the kind and degree of violence which would inevitably issue from a project that sets out to dissolve such a mode on so wide a scale’ (Ahmad, 1992, p. 230).

‘EDWARD SAID AND HIS ARAB REVIEWERS’ In his article, entitled ‘Edward Said and his Arab Reviewers’, published in Interpretations of Islam: Past and Present (1985), Emmanuel Sivan, a student of modern Middle Eastern history at Princeton, attempted a survey of 127

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Muslim and Arab responses to Said’s Orientalism. Most of these he found to be merely descriptive and cursory, but four works merited further consideration: Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’ (1981), part of which appeared as an article published in Khamsin (1981); Muhammad Husayn ’Alc al-Saghcr, Orientalists and Koranic Studies (1983); Nadcm al-Bctar, ‘From Western Orientalism to Arab Orientalism’, in HudEd al Huwiyya al-Qawmiyya (The Boundaries of National Identity) (1982); and Hasan Hanafc, ‘Arab National Thought in the Balance’, in QadAyA ’Arabiyya (1978). According to Sivan, three of the four authors mentioned are leading Arab intellectuals. Al-’Azm, educated at Yale, is the author of one of the best Arab critiques of the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. He is also the author of a controversial agnostic analysis of Islamic thought, a work that cost him his job at the American University of Beirut. Al-Bctar, also US trained, is one of the most important Arab thinkers of his day, a courageous critic of religious traditionalism. Hanafc, a graduate of the Sorbonne, is a specialist in hermeneutics. Less well known is al-Saghcr, an authority on Koranic studies. In his article, Sivan ﬁnds that al-’Azm and al-Bctar – the most prominent of the four – agree with Said that knowledge is intertwined with power, and that orientalism as an intellectual enterprise had close ties with the colonial domination of the Middle East. Yet both felt ill at ease with Said’s book. Al-Bctar wondered how Said, in a few short years, could have read the 60,000 or so books about the Arab East, published in the period 1800–1950. Al-’Azm wondered why Said did not restrict his account of orientalism to the modern period. Both agree that Said’s study of orientalism is ahistorical and unscientiﬁc. It is not based on a close examination of the evidence; and in 128

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attributing erroneous, and even racist, views to Europe, starting with ancient Greece, Said effectively essentializes the West, in much the same way that he accuses the West of essentializing the East. Whatever the position may have been in the nineteenth century, no respectable European scholar would today adopt the views associated by Said with orientalism.

Arab reviewers in general, Sivan goes on, ﬁnd that Said fails to place the eighteenth-century critique of Islam in its proper context – the Enlightenment critique of Christianity and religion; that he fails to pay proper respect to the great achievements of orientalism; that he engages at times in extreme subjectivism, almost denying that it is possible for a Westerner to describe the East objectively – an assumption which, if accepted, would by implication exonerate orientalism of all the charges laid against it; and that he fails to include German orientalism in his study. German orientalism, more than any other, was inspired not by imperialism and colonialism, but by classicism. As such it was enabled to treat Islam as a dead civilization, a facility not available to British and French orientalists who, driven by the imperatives of empire, were compelled to consider the present (living) condition of the Islamic world.

Arab reviewers were, according to Sivan, concerned lest Said’s attack on orientalism, seen as an essential ingredient of the European mind, encourage backward-looking Arabs – supporters of ‘Pan-Arabism’, ‘Arabo-Islamism’ and ‘political Islam’ – to promote what Al-’Azm refers to as ‘Orientalism in Reverse’. By this Al-’Azm meant the essentializing of an authentic Islamic or Arab character, 129

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harking back to the seventh century, unchanging over time, intrinsically spiritual and idealist, and opposed to the materialist West. Such mystiﬁcation, Arab liberal and forward-looking intellectuals believe, threatens to cut the Arab world off from modernity, and prevent progress. As long as it prevails the Arabs will, as Hanafc puts it, remain devoid of will power and deﬁcient in perception and reasoning, the plaything of others: ‘God, fate and the dictator become one in our eyes. He who questions this is accused of atheism. It is as though the era of science and reason has barely touched us’ (Sivan, 1985, p. 142). In Orientalism, Said at one point accuses Arab intellectuals of engaging in ‘orientalisms’, by which he means ‘secondorder analyses’ of the ‘Arab mind’, ‘Islam’ and ‘other myths’. Arab reviewers found this accusation particularly offensive, as they assumed, no doubt rightly, that it referred to their own writings. In these, as al-Bctar explains, they had merely tried to liberate the Arab people from the ‘dregs and residues of the past’. If Said found their work second rate, he should have taken the trouble to explain to them why that was so (Sivan, 1985, p. 143). To the Arab reviewers concerned, Said’s denigration of their work was clearly an important issue. But, according to Sivan, the ‘primordial divergence’ between Said and his Arab reviewers lay elsewhere, in Said’s refusal to recognize the continued relevance of the Arab-Islamic past to the present state of things in the Middle East. Far from the Arab-Islamic past being irrelevant, as Said asserts, recent work carried out by Arab intellectuals shows that, as many Western orientalists have long suspected, it remains central. Arab society remains permeated throughout by traditional Islamic values – regarding male–female relations, authority, 130

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subservience, family descent and attitudes to death – supposedly drawn from an ideal past. Of course Arab society changes over time, but on the whole the old norms remain in force. Arabs are, as a matter of observable fact, frequently obscurantist, escapist, fatalistic and passive. As Al-Bctar remarks: ‘Arab political backwardness’ is a product of attitudes shaped in the sixth century. The Weltanschauung of Arab society is religious and transcendental. It is a ‘holistic philosophy of life through which society deﬁnes its place in history and its internal rules of the game. This mystic philosophy creates a man who does not recognize history as an independent truth; a man who is unaware of the fact that there are objective factors and tendencies which exist beyond human aspirations and intentions, and that in order to inﬂuence them one should comprehend their logic and dynamics. . . . This is a society which deﬁnes all its activities and the events occurring around it through ritual and relationship with God’ (Sivan, 1985, p. 149). Arab reviewers, Sivan concludes, are saddened that Said, who seemed to be one of them, a secularist and a modernist, appears to blame orientalism for all the ills of the Arab world, to practise verbal legerdemain, and to provide ammunition for ‘defrocked secularists’ who wish to embrace ‘Orientalism in Reverse’. Unlike Said, Arab intellectuals have to face up to the realities of the Arab world. They know what a hold the Islamic past has on Arab society. They cannot afford to be caught up in the clichés and fantasies of the outsider and the tourist. Their angst is not the faked one of the radical chic, but the real one of people who have a clear perception of their ultimate goal but also of the formidable obstacles blocking the road. 131

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What is interesting about the Arab reviewers of Orientalism is that where they might, as natives of the Middle East, have been expected to give full backing to Said’s attack on orientalism, they have in fact adopted a critical approach, questioning the validity of his method and challenging many of his principal conclusions. These include the suggestion that the oriental project is from start to ﬁnish riddled with prejudice; that orientalism is incapable of objective observation; that orientalists invariably write about Eastern culture and civilization as if it were dead; and, most signiﬁcantly, that there is no such thing as an Islamic society and an Arab mind. This is because as secularists and modernists seeking to tackle the problems inherent in Arab society, they have been forced to make radical choices, unconnected with many of the more sophisticated but less relevant (from their point of view) issues raised by Said. In that respect their views deserve the most serious consideration.

A BLACK PERSPECTIVE Where the Arab reviewers of Orientalism described by Sivan look at Said’s work from an Arab point of view, Ernest J. Wilson III, a member of the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan, in ‘Orientalism: A Black Perspective’, an article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies (1981), looks at it from the perspective of a black American. For Wilson, a keen student of the workings of the capitalist system and ﬁghter for black rights in America, the orientalism Said describes – seen by Wilson as a dominant ideology, erected on a sure base of economic and political domination, capable of capturing, de-naturing and assimilating other cultures – is fundamentally a political doctrine. As such it should be of particular 132

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interest to Afro-Americans, who in America subjected to a kind of internal orientalism. Like other orientals, Afro-Americans too have been an ‘other’, the ‘mirror image of civilized and white people’, to be feared and controlled.

have been Arabs and deﬁned as respectable

As a consequence of his tight focus on the role of the oppressor, rather than on the role of the oppressed, Said, in Orientalism, does not deal with oriental resistance to Western cultural domination, but Wilson suspects that, just as in America, where Afro-American scholars have attempted to challenge the prevailing biases of white scholarship, such resistance must exist, particularly in the Middle East. Faced with such challenges, dominant cultures, Wilson concludes, not only try to maintain the integrity of their world-view, by crafting and recrafting modes of knowing other cultures, they also respond by seeking to prevent suppressed groups, such as the AfroAmericans and the Palestinians, from uniting against them.

Intellectuals and political leaders of such oppressed groups can challenge orientalist categorization in three ways: by challenging the sub-categories of the orientalist paradigm; by challenging the very notion of an entire paradigm and replacing it with a world-view reﬂecting the structural position and cultural heritage of the oppressed group; and by seeking to unite oppressed groups in alliances and working for the creation of new world-views, operating within a Third World perspective. This latter challenge to Western dominance occurred when American blacks and the Palestine Liberation Organization recently began discussions – a development that caused consternation among the American political and economic elite. 133

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In order to build a more humane and democratic world order, the dominated of the world, whether in the Middle East, North America or Africa, must fashion a consistent set of goals and a set of strategies and tactics to get there. The foundations have been laid down, for example, in work undertaken, mainly in the Third World, to create a New International Economic Order. American blacks should explore the implications of this work for their own efforts to achieve liberation within the USA. At the same time they should examine more seriously and consistently the role that international alliances might play in future black liberation movements – movements that may be the best hopes for a more humane and democratic America.

‘EDWARD SAID AND THE HISTORIANS’ As we have seen, what divides Said from many of his critics is the fact that while Said, in Orientalism, tends to view his subject through the prism of modern and postmodern philosophy (in particular the philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and the Marxist Gramsci) his critics remain, for the most part, ﬁrmly wedded to a traditional (realist) approach to the writing of history. As Lewis puts it in ‘The Question of Orientalism’, in the debate regarding orientalism the academic world appears to be divided between those who, adopting a currently fashionable epistemological view, believe that absolute truth is either non-existent or unattainable, and those who, believing that truth, or at least an approximation to it, is attainable, seek to understand history, and by implication the world, by way of a study of the facts (evidence, phenomenon). Orientalists, in particular, seek to obtain an understanding of oriental history by means of a ‘minute

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examination of difﬁcult texts’. For the former, according to Lewis, truth doesn’t matter, facts don’t matter. All discourse is a manifestation of a power relationship, and all knowledge is slanted. All that matters is attitude, motive and purpose. For the latter, history is a matter of material fact, subject to the rules of evidence and the laws of rational analysis. This distinction appears particularly clearly in a debate which occurred in Nineteenth-Century Contexts in the mid-1990s, centred round a talk, entitled ‘Edward Said and the Historians’, given by John MacKenzie, a British student of imperial history, at an Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, held at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, later published as an article in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (1994). In his article, ‘Edward Said and the Historians’, MacKenzie attempts to explain why Said’s analysis of East–West relations in Orientalism (and also in Culture and Imperialism, 1993), made so little impression on historians of Western imperialism and the arts. In accusing the orientalists of being tools of Western imperialism, guilty of producing and reproducing a prefabricated East, a stereotypical ‘other’, ideologically continuous, Said, MacKenzie argues, has effectively essentialized the West, in much the same way that he accuses the West of essentializing the East. In the process he has produced a stereotypical picture of Western culture, hermetic and unchanging. This picture historians of Western imperialism and the arts have generally rejected, for neither the retreat into an essentialized, basically unchanging self, nor the freezing of the ‘other’ in a kind of basic objecthood, bears any relationship to the record of constant change, the instability, heterogeneity and sheer porousness of imperial culture.

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MacKenzie ﬁnds Said’s philosophical stance with regard to the history of orientalism perplexing. While apparently writing within the humanistic tradition, Said seeks to expose its deﬁciencies. Toying with the language of base and superstructure, he rejects the Marxist tradition. Much inﬂuenced by Gramsci and Foucault, he stands, or claims to stand, outside any scholarly collective. Essentializing the West, as a hermetically sealed and stereotypical culture, he makes the promotion of cross-cultural awareness, which he claims to seek, theoretically impossible. Identifying orientalism as an ‘imperial totalizing project’, he distrusts all other ‘meta-narratives’. Discounting the possibility of a ‘theorization of the whole’, he rejects the ‘cultural guerrillas’ – nativism, nationalism and fundamentalism – that beset the fringes of the master-narratives. Thus, according to MacKenzie, an extraordinary, disabling paradox appears, in that an author attempting to identify a master-narrative discourse of the Orient, operating over at least two centuries, himself distrusts all global theorization. It is as if Said’s critical, totalizing head was at war with his nomadic polymorphous heart. Historians such as John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession (1988), and David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), unlike Said, whose version of orientalism is broadly and even independently instrumental, have, according to MacKenzie, generally sought to analyze the speciﬁc and contrasting, even oppositional, character of different periods. Thus it can be shown that the orientalists of the Enlightenment had little in common with the orientalism of the period of the Anglicist–Orientalist controversy. Other historians, such as Linda Colley, Britons, Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale University Press, 1992), have pointed out that Britain’s ‘other’, in the eighteenth 136

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and early nineteenth centuries, was not, as Said suggests, Asia and the Orient, but France. In these and later periods, when Imperial Russia, Germany and Soviet Russia became Britain’s principal ‘other’, new national histories, idealized pasts, myths, sagas and heroic ﬁgures were created in many European states and nations which had more to do with the leitmotifs of class and European ethnicity than they had to do with empire and race. Nor when European culture was apparently concerned with the East, was this necessarily always the case. Verdi’s Aida, for instance, was not, as Said suggests, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), an imperial spectacle, designed to illustrate Europe’s conquest of Egypt, but a reworking of a number of common European themes, concerned with national identity and freedom, placed in an exotic context – just about as antiimperialist an opera, in other words, as you could get. Historians, concerned with explaining change over time, the interrelationship of ideas and events, and the social, economic and intellectual milieu in which sources are produced, feel uncomfortable with Said’s ‘discourse’, which, however complex, is yet supposed to display unchanging intention and effect over a century and a half. Rather, they seek to tie analysis to a ﬁrm empirical base, and link it to speciﬁc episodes, particular individuals, territories, and deﬁnable socio-economic contexts in the historical record. They seek out unities of period, place and person, even when dealing with broader time spans. Unlike Said, who appears to have little understanding of the role of irony and accident in history, historians have never felt conﬁdent about the predictive and practical purposes of their discipline. Nor are they inclined, as Said is, to moralize. Said, in short, falls into all the pitfalls historians constantly warn their students against: reading present values into past ages, 137

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passing judgements on previous generations, failing to discriminate intention from effect, and missing the multiple readings emanating from the conﬂict between authorial intention and audience expectation. MacKenzie’s analysis of Said’s work on orientalism, culture and imperialism provoked a lively response. In ‘Lamentations on Reality: A Response to John M. MacKenzie’s “Edward Said and the Historians” ’, published in NineteenthCentury Contexts (1995), Martha Hildreth, a social historian of medicine, suggested that MacKenzie’s article contains a subtext, a feeling of nostalgia for a fast-disappearing consensus regarding the practice of history. Any historian who has taken a few breaths outside the archives in recent years knows that the ‘historical procedures’ and ‘tenets’ he refers to are no longer taken for granted. Even the existence of a ‘ﬁrm empirical base’ has been called in question. Historians today, inﬂuenced by critical theory and cultural studies, are no longer certain where the foundations of history lie, in objective reality or cultural production. One way or the other, most would argue that a clear distinction can no longer be maintained between empirical truth, founded on text, archive and source, and interpretation. The concept of absolute objectivity, as conceived by the nineteenth-century German historian, Ranke, is no longer acceptable. Nor is the choice any longer simply between the Marxist socio-economic paradigm – which Hildreth supposes to be MacKenzie’s ‘terrain of analysis’ – and discourse theory. In recent years scholars such as Althusser, Gramsci and Foucault have opened up large areas of common ground between the two. It is in this context that Said’s analysis of orientalism and cultural imperialism should be viewed.

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In his analysis of Said’s work, MacKenzie referred to Said’s failure to appreciate the value of irony. In Hildreth’s view, following Hayden White and Hans Kellner, irony represents merely a theoretical device used to escape the full implications of the abandonment of absolute objectivism. Irony, in other words, allows historians to claim the status of relative truth for their accounts, while refusing to acknowledge the epistemological basis of their facts and contexts. It enables them to arbitrate the historical record and distinguish agency, intention, cause and effect, while preserving their own position of free subjectivity and avoiding questions relating to their own perspective and identity. Said, in his work, pretends to no such disengagement. His supposed ‘inability’ to appreciate the ironic and the unintended stems from his denial of the decontextualized subject, intention, action and insight. For MacKenzie, Verdi’s Aida is about the interweaving of conﬂicts between ‘imperial power and subordinate nationalism’, between ‘private anguish and public duty’. For Said, it is a textual witness to the construction of a discourse. Precisely because Said refuses to enter into the pre-existing historical discourse of nationalism and imperialism, he can show connections that are inconvenient for that discourse. That is to say he can show how the discourse creates its own product and participatory tropes (see MacKenzie, 1994). In ‘The Seduction of the Unexpected: On Imperialism and History’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts (1995), Bruce Robbins, a student of English at Rutgers University, New Jersey, similarly ﬁnds that in his article, ‘Edward Said and the Historians’, MacKenzie has failed to read Said with the sort

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of generous regard for hidden complicity, ironic complication and unintended consequence he recommends to others. Texts such as Aida he reads at times with a ‘righteously single-minded dogmatism’. He appears to believe that if a text is about one thing, it cannot be about another as well. Literary critics, on the other hand, tend to assume that since there are many histories happening at the same time, a text can be about many things, such as, for instance, imperialism and gender. MacKenzie’s conclusion, that Said has had ‘less effect upon historians than might have been expected’, Robbins also calls in question. Though MacKenzie does recognize Said’s inﬂuence on the Subaltern Studies group of mainly Indian historians, he fails to take account of his inﬂuence on historians concerned with the history of the disciplines, such as the intellectual historian James Clifford, who has done path-breaking work on the history of anthropology. Many historians, including Clifford, have learned, from Said’s Orientalism and also from Foucault, to reject Whiggish narratives of disciplinary development and to incorporate their self-conscious explorations into the uses and abuses of knowledge in other sorts of narrative. As for MacKenzie’s accusation that Said’s work on orientalism and imperial culture is ahistorical, what is ‘strikingly ahistorical’ is MacKenzie’s blithe assumption that the past can and must be seen for what it really was, and that historians can and must be objective, disinterested and non-ideological. The abuses of simple-mindedly presentist history are no excuse for ignoring a century and a half of voices that have argued the necessary, if also problematic, involvement of ‘contemporary criteria’ in any account of the past. 140

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In his comments on Said’s work, as in the General Introduction to his ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series (published by the Manchester University Press), MacKenzie, in Robbins’ opinion, reveals an ‘unavowed political agenda’, and a ‘revisionist desire to tilt the moral scales back in favour of the colonists’ (see Mackenzie, 1994). In ‘The Connection between Things’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts (1995), on the other hand, Tim Youngs, of Nottingham Trent University, springs heroically to MacKenzie’s defence, pointing out that most of the responses provoked by MacKenzie’s article, ‘Edward Said and the Historians’, are misdirected. Far from being a typically conventional (conservative) historian, defending his discipline from contamination, MacKenzie is in fact, as his record shows, a keen proponent of the new socio-cultural approach to the writing of history, in particular the history of art, popular culture, and the media. His conclusion that Said, in Orientalism, constructs a ‘hermetic and stereotypical Western culture’ and his setting himself up, as the spokesperson of his own discipline, may be ill advised. But the fact remains that some colonial discourse analysts are worryingly ahistorical. All too many of them pluck passages from texts, and proceed to paint their ideology by numbers, with no regard to the historical and social circumstances of their composition. MacKenzie responded to the comments made by Hildreth, Robbins and others, at the College of William and Mary conference and thereafter, in articles published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, in an article entitled ‘A Reply to My Critics’, also published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (1995). In his reply, MacKenzie vigorously rebutted virtually all the charges made against him. Far from being 141

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reactionary, conservative and straight-laced as a person, and ‘objectivist’, pro-imperial and prejudiced as a historian, he had throughout his professional career always located himself in the radical, anti-imperialist camp; and he had always remained open to the use of a multi-disciplinary approach to the writing of history. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had published a number of works on African history which adopted an Afro-centric approach. His work on imperial propaganda and the relationship between imperialism and popular culture was intended to demonstrate the extraordinarily pervasive character of the mindset of empire. Later in the 1980s and 1990s he had published works on imperial environmental history. Throughout he had remained personally committed to the history of the oppressed and the hitherto voiceless. But such sympathies, which he shared with Said, were not a reason for him to neuter his critical faculties. However sacred a text Orientalism (and its subsequent apocrypha, Culture and Imperialism) might be, it should, like Said’s own orientalist targets, remain open to criticism. What he was actually trying to do in his talk/article was to explain why the mainstream of British imperial historiography remained so largely uninﬂuenced by Said’s insights. One of MacKenzie’s critics, Clare A. Simmons, in an article entitled ‘Thoughts on “Said and the Historians” ’, published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (1995), had pointed out that Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), had attempted to reverse the usual position, according to which ‘history provides the authority for literature’, by replacing it with one in which literature becomes the authority for assessing ‘if not history, then at least the cultural mood of the past’. Such a reversal, in MacKenzie’s opinion, raises

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the question of the relationship between fact and interpretation and the related question of the relative weight of different sorts of source material. All historians now accept that many ‘facts’ are socially, economically or culturally constructed, and that this has not always been the case. But if the historian is not to drown in a sea of relativism, there must be a category of observable phenomena upon which interpretations can be built. In his article MacKenzie had been concerned to point out that in some key cases such a ﬁrm foundation does not exist. Some at least of the challenges posed by literary criticism to historical scholarship come from contemporary theorizing that simply does not ﬁt aspects of historical reality as it would be acknowledged by historians of imperialism. Hildreth’s article, MacKenzie ﬁnds to be a powerfully argued piece; but he does not recognize himself in it. He simply does not make the distinction between relativist analysis and documentary fact that she assumes. He accepts that all documents are socially and ideologically constructed, that many lie and that the most careful acumen must be brought to bear upon them. He also accepts that historians should, whenever possible, get out of the archives and study other sources, such as cultural artefacts, ephemera, visual images and packaging. But that does not mean that they should abandon the document altogether and engage in ‘free-ﬂoating theoretical inquiry’. Hildreth’s notion, for instance, that ‘nineteenth-century bourgeois individualism involved a ﬁxed male subjectivity which reiﬁed certain modes of thought and being in the world’, does not bear examination. The evidence suggests that the nineteenth century was polyglot, multivalent and constantly shifting.

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MacKenzie again rejects out of hand Robbins’ numerous accusations that he, MacKenzie, accepts routine periodizations of history that achieve a line of demarcation only at the cost of ‘myopic triviality’, believes that historians can and must be objective, disinterested and non-ideological, desires to ‘tilt the moral scales back in favour of the colonists’, and is anti-pathetic to gender and women’s studies. Throughout his work he has sought to promote a subtle approach to the writing of history, encouraged transdisciplinary and radical studies, and collaborated with women scholars. Said’s remark, that ‘facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them’, he accepts, but he would insist that at the heart of that circulation must lie identiﬁable phenomena. In his defence of his article, MacKenzie makes an admirable attempt to bridge the gap that apparently divides the objectivist/realist historian from the discourse theorist. That he has not quite succeeded in so doing is scarcely surprising, as philosophers (Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, Hume and many others) have for centuries struggled with the same problem, expressed in terms of the relation between subject and object, mind and matter, and appearance and reality. Is perception merely a reﬂection of an external world of real causes and powers, or is it the product of a series of neural events, taking place in the brain. Does matter impinge on the mind, or does the mind create matter, in all its various manifestations? Or is there a two-fold relation between perception and the world, that is to say a physical causal relation between physical objects and brain events, and another, perhaps cognitive or semantic relation between brain events and the mind? In so far as human experience is the product of a series of 144

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mental processes which ﬁnd expression in consciousness, image, feeling, language and ultimately discourse and text, it can be argued that the discourse theorists have the better of the argument, for after all there is in fact no real world which may be observed, measured, identiﬁed and employed as a standard of truth, independent of image and appearance. But historians, and for that matter discourse theorists writing about history, do not inhabit a world of mere appearance (mind, phenomena). The world they inhabit is the ‘real’ world of daily experience, in which, whatever the philosopher may say, Dr Johnson’s notorious stone can still be kicked. In the ‘real’ world in which we live, facts, evidence, data, historical or other, are true or false, valid or invalid, in accordance with reality or opposed to it. Our world may not be as ‘real’ as was at one time supposed, but it remains nonetheless a remarkably concrete place. MacKenzie’s assumption that Said’s analysis of orientalism, in Orientalism, made little or no impression on the historians of imperialism, proved premature. In N. Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 1998), numerous historians, including Jefferey Auerbach, C.A. Bayly and Robert E. Frykenberg, made a number of references to Said’s work, and D.A. Washbrook contributed an article entitled ‘Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire’.

MARX AND THE END OF ORIENTALISM Bryan S. Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978) provoked a number of vigorous responses, not least that of Ernest Gellner, in a review article entitled ‘In Defence 145

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of Orientalism’, Sociology (1980). In this article Gellner recognizes the extent of Turner’s ambition not only to purge orientalism of its numerous errors, but also Marxism of its orientalist and Hegelian inﬂuences. But he questions many of Turner’s conclusions. Where, for instance, would Elie Kedourie, an orientalist who admired the stability of the Ottoman Empire and deplored its disruption, ﬁt into Turner’s categorization of the orientalist as a scholar who contrasts the undesirable stagnation of the East with the admirable dynamism of the West? Can it be seriously contended that the economic underdevelopment of the Middle East is a consequence of its dependence on the global centres of capitalism, when that underdevelopment preceded the impact of capitalism by many hundreds of years, including a period in which it was Western Europe, not the world of Islam, that lay on the periphery? Is not Turner himself guilty of the very same European ethnocentrism with which he charges the orientalists, for in so far as he believes that the stagnation of the Orient is due to the external intervention of the ‘global centres of capitalism’, does he not also believe that, in the absence of that inﬂuence, oriental society would have developed independently – a thesis which would seem to imply a unilinear theory of social development? Alternatively, if it were assumed that, in such circumstances, no such development would have occurred, would not that assumption make the dependency theory of underdevelopment superﬂuous? Turner’s implication that orientalist support for the stability/stagnation thesis somehow implies a moral failure, Gellner ﬁnds worrying. Such questions are, in his view, merely historical and sociological, best decided on the basis of the evidence available. Turner’s search for self146

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puriﬁcation on the other hand – in Marx and the End of Orientalism, Turner claimed to be engaged in a ‘personal work of decolonisation’ – Gellner ﬁnds generous and admirable. But he suspects that it might not be all that it seems. Might not this obligatory de-orientalization turn out in the end to be the ‘subtlest and most insidious form of conceptual colonialism’?

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SEVEN

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Said’s Orientalism, and to a lesser extent the other critiques of orientalism published in the 1960s and 1970s, sparked off an explosion of interest in the intercultural relations of East and West, Orient and Occident, Europe and Asia. Few, if any, of the works published in the following decades – most of them in effect case studies in the history of orientalism and imperialism – seriously questioned Said’s central thesis, that the West all too often created stereotypical images of the East, largely unrelated to reality. But almost all showed that European responses to the Orient were far more complex, varied, heterogeneous and unstable than Said supposed. John MacKenzie, in History, Theory and the Arts (1995), for instance, while grudgingly accepting Said’s thesis that the West occasionally stereotypes the East, showed that, with regard to the arts at least, the intercultural relations of Europe and Asia were in almost every respect reciprocal, and that the West was as much inﬂuenced by the East as the East was by the West. J.J. Clarke, in Oriental Enlightenment (1997), similarly showed the extent to which European culture was inﬂuenced by oriental thought and religion, though Clarke is more prepared than MacKenzie to accept Said’s central message. Sheldon Pollock, in ‘Deep Orientalism: Notes on 148

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Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj’ (1993), showed how, in Germany in the 1930s, orientalism, as practised by German orientalists, was capable of creating, or at least helping to create, an internal ‘other’, with devastating consequences for both the host community and the ‘other’. Rana Kabbani, in Imperial Fictions (1988), fully conﬁrmed Said’s thesis, if anything going even further in her condemnation of orientalist attitudes than Said himself; but Billie Melman, in Women’s Orients (1992), while accepting Said’s thesis that European men were frequently guilty of orientalism, questioned the extent to which Western women travel writers were also infected by the virus, arguing that more often than not Western women travelling in the Middle East were capable of establishing excellent personal relations with their oriental counterparts. B.J. Moore-Gilbert, in Kipling and Orientalism (1986), showed how the orientalism practised by the Anglo-Indian community in India in the nineteenth century differed from that of the British metropolis. Ronald Inden, in Imagining India (1990), fully accepting Said’s thesis, showed how orientalist attitudes shaped the writing of James Mill’s The History of British India (1817/1820), a view challenged by Javed Majeed, in Ungoverned Imaginings (1992). Jane Rendall, in ‘Scottish Orientalism’ (1982), endeavoured to correct what she saw as Said’s misunderstanding of the nature of Scottish orientalism; while Richard King, in Orientalism and Religion (1999), fully accepting the validity of Said’s thesis, showed how European orientalism effectively created the ‘religions’ of Hinduism and Buddhism. Finally, Sharif Gemie, in ‘France, Orientalism and Algeria’, an article published in The Journal of Algerian Studies (1998), showed how Said failed to appreciate the part played by Algeria in the formation of French orientalism. 149

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HISTORY, THEORY AND THE ARTS According to his own account, John MacKenzie, the author of Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995) originally found Said’s Orientalism so provocative and stimulating that he felt that its range could be widened to include the popular arts, and that its analytic techniques could be extended to apply to theatre, cinema, and exhibition. But a further consideration of some of Said’s sources, the theoretical critique developed by many of his critics and a re-examination of a variety of other art forms eventually led him radically to revise his opinion. In the end, following a thorough study of the relations between East and West, mainly in the ﬁeld of the arts, architecture, design, music and theatre, he concluded that Said’s thesis that the West inhabited a hermetic and stereotypical world, closed to the inﬂuence of the ‘other’, was completely wrong. Far from inhabiting a closed world, Western culture, mainly nineteenth-century imperial culture, had in fact been one of constant change, instability, heterogeneity and sheer porousness. It is impossible to recognize there either the ‘essentialized basically unchanging Self ’ or the freezing of the ‘other’ in a kind of ‘basic objecthood’. Both ‘self ’ and ‘other’ were locked into a process of mutual modiﬁcation, sometimes slow but inexorable, sometimes running as fast as a recently unfrozen river. In MacKenzie’s view, European concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’ were far more complex than Said supposed. The European states, for instance, some formed only in the nineteenth century, besides responding to other continents and their cultural and artistic complexes, reacted both positively and negatively to each other, sought the reinvocation of mythic pasts (Norse, Celtic, Germanic), invented 150

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internal others, such as the ‘folk’, and searched for tural renaissance in Mediaevalism and chivalry. Only orientalism is placed in this wider context does it sense as one of several ‘courts of appeal’ (MacKenzie, p. 209).

a culwhen make 1995,

In art, orientalism was used to create a feudal, chivalric, pre-industrial world of supposedly uncomplicated social relations, clear legal obligations, heroic connections with the environment, a supposedly appropriate separation of the gender spheres and enthusiasm for craft production. In architecture, it offered fresh conjunctions, new syncretic approaches, the marriage of form to function and a whole fresh language of design. In design, it produced new sensations over a whole range of artefacts, revolutionary approaches to ornament, different ways of handling space, colour, composition and texture, and even a reversal of the ‘scientiﬁc’ developments of Western art and design. In music, composers, such as Mozart, Cherubini, Weber and Mayerbeer, discovered in the East an extension of instrumental language, different sonorities, new melodic possibilities and complex rhythmic patterns. In the theatre, orientalism created a fresh visual and dramatic language, together with opportunities for display and satire, often involving a parodying of the self through a portrayal of the other. This process was for the most part synthetic, shaped by market forces: it seldom involved a realistic facsimile. One way or the other, had it not existed, the development of the Western arts would have been radically different. Far from facilitating Western rule of the Orient, orientalism in the arts was more often than not oppositional, challenging preconceived ideas. The arts of the Eastern tradition were frequently used as weapons to attack the production processes of industrialization, its resultant social 151

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relations and its shoddy products. Fixed images of the oriental may from time to time have appeared in popular culture, but such stereotyping was not invariably offensive. Often what was presented in this way was made to seem endlessly attractive, ‘another side of the self waiting to be released from repression or ﬁnancial and social constraint’ (MacKenzie, 1995, p. 213). The modern critics of orientalism, MacKenzie concludes, have been too procrustean. By creating a monolithic and binary vision of the past, they have too often damaged the very intercultural reactions they seek to promote. In reality, orientalism was endlessly protean, as often consumed by admiration and reverence as by denigration and depreciation. MacKenzie’s account of the impact of the Orient on the European arts, like Raymond Schwab’s account of its impact on European literature (La Renaissance orientale, 1950) and J.J. Clarke’s account of its impact on European philosophy (Oriental Enlightenment, 1997), offers an alternative and highly convincing reading of the intercultural relations of Europe and Asia, showing that Europe owed as much, and possibly more, to the Orient than the Orient did to Europe. At the same time, using many of the arguments already advanced in ‘Edward Said and the Historians’ (1994), regarding the need for a clearer periodization, a respect for the facts, a consciousness of intellectual context, an avoidance of oversimpliﬁcation and an awareness of the possibility of a multiple reading of text, it exposes many of Said’s methodological and other inadequacies. Yet, as MacKenzie himself admits in his conclusion to Orientalism: History, Theory and Arts, stereotype and caricature, racially conscious attitudes, and notions of moral, technical and political superiority remained for a 152

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period highly prevalent in European popular culture. Extensive oriental inﬂuence on the arts then presumably does not rule out the existence of a structured European orientalist discourse, though the relative signiﬁcance of that discourse might well be called in question.

ORIENTAL ENLIGHTENMENT In Oriental Enlightenment (1997) J.J. Clarke effectively accepts Said’s thesis that, with some notable exceptions, European attitudes to the East often embodied a mixture of patronizing chauvinism and racist contempt. The colonial rulers of British India, for example, saw themselves as a caste above the rest, all too often treating the sensibilities, beliefs and religious practices of their subject peoples with indifference and scorn. China, though never colonized in the full sense of the word, yet became in the period of Western imperial expansion a standard object of ethnocentric bias, frequently ridiculed both by scholars and the common people for its backwardness and moral vileness. Missionaries and others, concerned with religious rather than commercial and political conquest, usually looked on the beliefs and practices of the Asian peoples with horror and disdain. Western reaction to the complex set of phenomena associated with orientalism was generally one of ‘partial amnesia’, while the inﬂuence of the West on the East was readily acknowledged. All too often Western interest in the Orient – for Clarke mainly east and south Asia rather than the Middle East – was guided by a desire to escape into some remote and fantastic ‘other’, where it was hoped a lofty means of uplift might be found, material for dreams of lost wisdom and a golden age, as symbolized by Shangri-La, the ﬁctional Buddhist paradise, described by James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933). 153

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But such a representation of East–West relations, though not entirely misconceived, is, in Clarke’s opinion, an oversimpliﬁcation. Where Said sees orientalism merely in terms of colonial exploitation, economic dominance and racial prejudice, Clarke sees it as an attempt on the part of the West primarily to integrate Eastern thought into its own intellectual concerns. This attempt cannot on the face of it be understood merely in terms of ‘power’ and ‘domination’. Orientalism, in other words, is not so much a master narrative of Western imperialism, as Said, drawing on Foucault, suggests, as an attempt on the part of the West to confront the structures of its own forms of knowledge and power, and to engage with Eastern ideas in ways which are creative, open-textured, and reciprocal. European hegemony over Asia may represent a necessary condition for orientalism. It does not represent a sufﬁcient one. Clarke, in Oriental Enlightenment, deﬁnes orientalism not as an isolated phenomenon, a closed monolith, but as a ‘luxuriating fascination for the East’ (Clarke, 1997, p. 17). Evidence of this fascination may be found in the period of the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment (Montaigne, Bayle, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists), the Romantic era (Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Schopenhauer), and the modern period (Wagner, Nietzsche, Emerson, Pound, Eliot, the New Age Movement and the beat generation). Far from being fundamentally escapist, a retreat into the irrational or an expression of ‘Faustian’ curiosity, orientalism represented a means of confronting some of the West’s most pressing and immediate problems. Central to these was the loss of certainty, conﬁdence and security that resulted from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientiﬁc revolution, the rise of capitalism and the dissolution of the Mediaeval Christian theological, 154

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philosophical and political synthesis that these developments entailed. It was as a result of these changes, Clarke argues, combined with the global expansion of European political and commercial interest, that orientalism, in its modern incarnation, arose. The breakdown of European conﬁdence had, in Clarke’s opinion, a long history. The Renaissance led to an inﬂux of ideas from classical Greece and Rome and from esoteric Jewish and Hermetic traditions. The Protestant Reformation effectively put an end to the universalist projects of Mediaeval Christianity and the Renaissance, and opened up the exciting but alarming prospect of pluralism. The rediscovery of the sceptical and atomistic philosophies of ancient Greece undermined orthodoxy and opened the way to new, more open and complicated styles of thinking, typiﬁed by Descartes’ Meditations. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, combined with the rise of modern science and other developments in Western philosophy, led inexorably to nihilism, a condition profoundly analyzed by Nietzsche. These developments, that is to say, helped ﬁrstly, to create a painful void in the spiritual and intellectual heart of Europe, and secondly, to beget geopolitical conditions which facilitated the passage to Europe of alternative world-views from the East. Clarke’s analysis of the history of East–West relations, from ancient times to the modern period, persuades him that, despite the numerous problems involved – these include the nature of the language barrier, the difﬁculty of translation, the absence of a common standpoint and the important part played by context – a signiﬁcant dialogue between two radically different cultures is possible. A hermeneutic engagement between peoples might even be 155

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envisaged as a universal phenomenon, stretching as far as the limits of human experience and language allow. Nor should this conclusion come as a surprise. After all, people cross conceptual, cultural and linguistic barriers every day, not only when they translate a foreign text, but also when they listen to a lecture, read a book or engage in the most trivial conversation, for every act of communication involves a measure of decipherment and interpretation.

‘DEEP ORIENTALISM’ In ‘Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj’, in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (1993), Sheldon Pollock, a student of classics and Sanskrit at Harvard, suggests that the relationship identiﬁed by Said, in Orientalism, between Western knowledge of Asia and colonialism, was merely a speciﬁc instance of a larger, transhistorical, albeit locally inﬂected, relationship between knowledge and power in the world. Such knowledge and power, he suggests, is not invariably directed at the colonial ‘other’. As in the case of Germany in the period of the Third Reich (1933– 45), it might also be directed inwards, towards the orientalization (colonization and domination) of an internal ‘other’. In Pollock’s view, German Indology, the dominant form of Indianist orientalism in Germany in the modern period, was driven by the German romantic quest for identity and the emerging vision of Wissenschaft. The discovery of Sanskrit, an ancient language connected to Greek, German and English, offered the Germans the prospect of an IndoGermanic, Aryan identity, independent of Latin and Semitic sources of identity, now considered degenerate – an 156

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identity, moreover, which could be considered scientiﬁcally validated by its ‘Aryan origins’. As a result it became possible to justify intellectually an internal colonization of Europe, as instanced in a series of German National Socialist measures, including the ‘Law on the Reconstitution of the Civil Service’ and the ‘Law on the Overcrowding of German Schools’, recently instituted in Germany. Contributions to this form of internal orientalism – archaeological, philological, anthropological, Indological – made by such noted scholars as Walther Wüst, Ludwig Alsdorf, Jacob Wilhelm Hauer, Hermann Lommel, Paule Thieme, Helmuth Arntz, Wilhelm Koppers and Erich Frauwallner, varied, but they all displayed the same characteristics: a belief in the existence of a past Aryan culture; a belief in the importance of its survival and meaning for the German present; a belief in Indo-Germanic, Aryan superiority; and a conviction that knowledge of Aryanism was built on secure scholarly foundations. A single instance of the type of material cited by Pollock – an article entitled ‘German Antiquity and the History of Aryan Thought’, published by Walter Wüst, a Vedic specialist at the University of Munich, in Süddeutsche Monatshefte (1934) – might serve to illustrate Pollock’s case. In his article Wüst assembled material drawn from etymology, literary history, comparative religion, folklore and archaeology, to show that the ancient Aryas of India were people who felt themselves to be ‘privileged, the legitimate’. The ‘deep signiﬁcance’ and ‘indestructible grandeur’ attaching to the term Arier, arisch, had been preserved in the present thanks to the existence of a traditional racial memory (Erberinnerung). The kg Veda as an Aryan text ‘free of any taint of Semitic contact’; the ‘almost Nordic Zeal’ that lies in the Buddhist conception 157

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of the mArga; the ‘Indo-Germanic religion-force’ of yoga; the sense of race and the ‘conscious desire for racial protection’; the ‘volksnahe kingship’ – such was the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without a knowledge of the past. Wüst, in a speech given in the Hacker Keller, in Munich, in 1937, before the ofﬁcers of the SS ofﬁcer corps South and the SS subordinate commanders and regulars of the Munich garrison, declared that he saw Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a ‘Mirror of the Aryan World View’. This world-view had, according to Wüst, survived from the second millennium BC right up to the present (Breckenridge and van der Veer, 1993, pp. 89–90). What is signiﬁcant about Wüst and his other like-minded colleagues, Pollock concludes, is the need they felt to legitimate the National Socialist Weltanschauung, by anchoring it ﬁrmly in orientalist scholarship – a scholarship that all too often displayed the characteristic signs of orientalism: an ontological and epistemological division between ‘them and us’, and a scholarly justiﬁcation of domination. The ﬁnal outcome of the Indology they produced – a mixture of non-scholarly mystical nativism, deriving from romanticism and the supposed objectivism of Wissenschaft – was the ultimate ‘orientalist’ project, the legitimization of genocide. A defender of the orientalist profession might be tempted to argue that German Indology, in the National Socialist period, represented merely an aberration, generated by the peculiar circumstances of the time; and that in any case, orientalism, deﬁned as the study of the Orient, can hardly be held responsible for events occurring in Europe. Yet the fact remains that the developments in German Indology in 158

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the National Socialist period, described by Pollock, show beyond peradventure that it is possible for a branch of European orientalism to display an extreme form of prejudice, totally undermining whatever claim it may have had to impartiality and disinterestedness.

IMPERIAL FICTIONS In Imperial Fictions (1988), an account of Western travel writing in the Near and Middle East – mainly Galland, Lane, Burton, Doughty and Lawrence – Rana Kabbani, a Muslim feminist, journalist and student of English and Arabic literature, educated in America and England, ﬁnds wholly in favour of Said’s thesis: that there exists a predetermined discourse regarding the Orient; that Western travel writers, inescapably subservient to that discourse, were deeply implicated in the imperialist project; and that Western culture was itself to some extent shaped by warped representations of the East (the Orient, the other, the opposite, the enemy, the foil). The literary fabrication of the East was, in Kabbani’s view, the product of changed relations between the Islamic East and the Christian West. In the Middle Ages, the Christian West, threatened by Islam, generated a powerful polemic, aimed at the defeat and destruction of its great rival. But as the Islamic (Ottoman) threat diminished, fear changed to fascination. Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights, for instance, appeared at a moment of Ottoman defeat; and Western composers copied Turkish music in the period of Ottoman decline. After Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, the wearing of turbans became all the rage in Europe; and in the following decades European travel writers, such as Chateaubriand (Itinéraire de Paris à 159

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Jérusalem, 1811), Lane (Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1836), Burton (Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, 1855–56), Doughty (Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1888) and Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1935), created a series of self-conﬁrming stereotypical images of the East – as alien, timeless, jealous, irrational, cruel, lethargic and lascivious – designed to codify, comprehend and ultimately rule over the Orient. Other writers involved in the creation of stereotypical images of the East include Shakespeare (Othello, Antony and Cleopatra), Beckford (Vathek), Shelley (‘The Revolt of Islam’), Coleridge (‘Kubla Khan’) and Moore (Lalla Rookh). Not that, in Kabbani’s view, the creation of such stereotypical images of the ‘other’ was in any sense original. Muslim travellers, emissaries and explorers, such as Ibn Khurdadbih, Al-Maqdisi and Idrisi, travelling in the Far East and Southeast Asia, in the seventh to fourteenth centuries, had themselves created similar images of the ‘other’, as had Pliny, in his Natural History, Pigafetta, in his description of Magellan’s ﬁrst voyage, and Columbus and Cortes, in their accounts of their travels. Kabbani does not deny that the travel writers she describes had frequently acquired an extraordinary knowledge of the East. But few, she believes, succeeded in escaping the orientalist trap. Lane, supposedly a scholar committed to the pursuit of absolute objectivity, could not help falling a victim to the common distortion of selectivity, choosing to stress those tales – of perverted sexuality, promiscuity, licentiousness and indecency – which would most interest his readers. Burton, a man of extraordinary energy, who had culled a vast store of knowledge from his Eastern travels, chose to present the sum of his experience in ‘one 160

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speciﬁc mode’. His East was the conventional sensual realm of the Western imagination, a realm that at that time could only be depicted by an unconventional man. Doughty, a man who liked to perceive himself as a Christian patriarch, chose to exile the Arabs he observed to a ‘spurious ancientness’, where they would no longer be recognizable as contemporary beings with similar wants and aspirations to his own. Lawrence, who like Burton sought in the East sexual liberation, portrayed the Arabs as primitive and irrational. The Arab mind, he wrote, is ‘strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule’ (Kabbani, 1988, p. 110). Only Blunt, who looked on the Bedouin Arabs as representatives of a pastoral and chivalric tradition, long eroded in Europe by industrialism and new money, escaped the orientalist net. Throughout his career in the East he championed Islam and the colonized (the Algerians, the Indian people, the Arabs and the Egyptian nationalists), calling for an end to Ottoman rule in Arab lands and the removal of the Caliphate to Mecca. Yet even he, according to Kabbani, felt unable to call for an end to British rule in India. In Kabbani’s view, the representations of women, constructed by writers like Burton, reﬂected a standard Victorian prejudice, namely that all women were inferior to men; and that oriental women were doubly inferior, being both women and orientals. Women, that is to say, were chattels, part of the goods of empire, the living rewards available to men. They were there to be used sexually, and if it could be suggested that they were inherently licentious, then they could be exploited without misgiving. Rana Kabbini’s thesis, that Western men inferiorized the oriental, found much support among other women writers. 161

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Rosalind O’Hanlon, in ‘Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance: Gender, Discourse and Tradition in Recent South Asian Historiographies’, Social Analysis (1989), sees the orientalist characterization of the oriental – as effeminate, irrational, submissive and cunning – as an implied attack on women. Jane Miller, in Seductions (1990), sees Said’s analysis of orientalism – deﬁned as a form of political and cultural domination, in which the dominated are persuaded to internalize the rationale for, and even the justice of, their own domination – as an implicit analysis of male–female relations. In other words, a ‘prevailing imagery of penetration, of stamina and of the eventual discovery of the strange and the hidden at the end of a journey, requiring courage and cunning’, served to merge the colonizing adventure deﬁnitively with the sexual adventure (Miller, 1990, p. 117). Veena Das, in ‘Gender Studies, Cross-cultural Comparison and the Colonial Organisation of Knowledge’, Berkshire Review (1986), argues that, in Western relations with the Third World, categories of nature and culture, emotion and reason, excess and balance, are used to inferiorize not only women but also whole cultures. Finally, Susan Hekman, in Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (1990) concludes that the exclusion of women from the realm of the subject has been synonymous with their exclusion from the realm of rationality. Kabbani’s thesis, expressed in Imperial Fictions, that Western men inferiorized women, just as they inferiorized the oriental, was then widely supported. But her supposition that women’s travel writing, particularly in the Victorian period, constituted an intrinsic part of the patriarchal discourse, constructed by the West, was widely contested. Billie Melman, in Women’s Orients (1992), a study of 162

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women’s travel writing, mainly concerned with the Middle East, argues that women travel writers – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Craven, Julia Pardoe, Amelia Hornby, Lady Anne Blunt, Mary Garnett and many others – concerned with the Middle East, far from being mere ‘token travellers’, ‘emergency men’, operating within and subsumed by the hegemonic cultural apparatus of Western male tradition, remained for the most part independent, fully capable of establishing a personal rapport with the people among whom they lived, tolerating difference and making comparisons between the morals and customs of the host community and the one from which they came. True, a number of women travel writers, such as Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Flora Shaw, Lady Luggard, Amelia Edwards and Gertrude Bell, frequently those concerned with evangelical and scientiﬁc pursuits, did on occasion display signs of Western prejudice, ethnocentrism and lack of empathy, but for the most part women travel writers in the Middle East entirely escaped the orientalist trap, creating in their writings a plurality of voices and idioms, reﬂecting a variety of inﬂuences, individual, group, gender and class. There was not, Melman concludes, one authority ordering experience, reconstructing information, and shaping discourse, but a number of equally signiﬁcant models of perception and action (central to these were the Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), which moulded actual encounter with alien peoples and places and, in turn, were modulated by that encounter. There was no single literary canon, no ‘monoglot’ authorial voice, but a variety of diverse texts and a ‘heteroglot’ language, richly manifesting shifts and changes in sensibility. There was no single focus of power and knowledge about ‘things oriental’, but diverse foci, which characteristically were located outside the places identiﬁed with political 163

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domination and economic expansion overseas. These foci included voluntary philanthropic organizations, smaller missionary enterprises and new scientiﬁc societies (Melman, 1992, p. 315). A number of conclusions, Melman continues, may be drawn from the foregoing. Seen from the point of view of women’s travel writing, Europe and the West are not uniﬁed categories, to be applied indiscriminately in studies of orientalism, exoticism and cultural exchange in the colonial era. In addition to national and regional differences, already noted by a number of students of the subject, varieties of class and gender must also be taken into account. Such differences cannot be comprehended as solely political. Western ‘Man’ may have constructed the Orient and the oriental as his ‘other’, irrational and inferior, but Western women travellers, missionaries and explorers did not perceive the oriental woman as the absolutely alien, the ultimate ‘other’. On the contrary, oriental women became the feminine West’s recognizable mirror image. The haremlik was for Western women not the non plus ultra of an exotic décor, but a place comparable to the bourgeois home. Of course, the reconstruction of the Orient should not be separated from the construction of the notion of empire and modern imperialism, but the work of women travel writers, described in Women’s Orients, should be related ﬁrst and foremost to the Bildung of individuals, the evolution of class culture and concepts of gender and feminine sexuality. Representations of the different, that is to say, do not easily yield themselves to binary models. Reina Lewis, in Gendering Orientalism: Race-FeminityRepresentation (1996), an examination of the contribution 164

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made by Henrietta Brown (paintings of harem scenes) and George Eliot (Daniel Deronda) to the construction of the imperial project, does not go as far as Melman in challenging Said’s view (somewhat qualiﬁed in Culture and Imperialism, 1993) that European orientalism created (in Lewis’s words) a homogenous discourse enunciated by a colonial subject that was uniﬁed, intentional and irredeemably male. Substantial numbers of women artists, Lewis concludes, inevitably inﬂuenced by imperial ideology, were engaged in orientalist representation. Nevertheless, their contribution was far more ﬂuid and contested than the standard orientalist model would lead one to expect. The nineteenth-century orientalist discourse, that is to say, produced spaces from and in which women could represent, while at the same time developing strategies to contain, appropriate and minimize the threat created by their alternative voices. The hegemonic knowledge about the East that Said identiﬁes as fundamental to imperialism can still be recognized, but it is necessary to recognize also the extent to which a degree of ﬂuidity was necessary to the maintenance of that hegemony. Orientalism was never static. It was perpetually fending off or responding to challenges from within and without, challenges that were not simply an unavoidable burden, but were themselves productive of dominant and alternative deﬁnitions, not only of race and orientalism but also of gender, class and nation. Women’s relationship to orientalism was, in short, neither simply supportive nor oppositional. It was partial, fragmented and contradictory (Lewis, 1996, p. 237). In Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991) a study of orientalism in French and English literature – Flaubert, Montagu, Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Forster – Lisa Lowe, like Lewis, does not challenge Said’s essential 165

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contention that British and French culture exercised colonial domination over the Orient by constituting certain sites and objects as oriental. But in her study, like Melman, she refrains from totalizing orientalism as a monolithic development discourse that uniformly constructs the Orient as the ‘other’ of the Occident. Rather, she argues for a conception of orientalism that allows for the heterogeneous and the contradictory. Orientalism, in her view, consists not of an unchanging topos, identically constructed through time, but of an uneven matrix of orientalist situations stretching across different cultural and historical sites, each one of which is internally complex and unstable. In this context the binary opposition of Occident and Orient should be seen as a misleading perception, which serves merely to suppress speciﬁc heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages. Kabbani’s account of Western travel writing, in Imperial Fictions, is a powerful endorsement of Said’s thesis regarding orientalism. Melman’s contribution to the debate, in Women’s Orients (and to a lesser extent Lewis’s and Lowe’s), on the other hand, is a powerful challenge, effectively undermining the concept advanced by Said of orientalism’s homogeneity. Yet paradoxically, Kabbani, in emphasizing so mercilessly the extraordinary contributions made by the travel writers she deals with, in particular Burton, Doughty and Lawrence, to the construction of the orientalist topos, calls into question the typicality of her chosen subjects; while Melman, Lewis and Lowe, in emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of the contributions made by women travel writers, strengthen the image projected (intentionally or otherwise) by Said, in Orientalism, of orientalism as an essentially Western European male construction. 166

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KIPLING AND ORIENTALISM In Kipling and Orientalism (1986), B.J. Moore-Gilbert declares that it is his intention to use the fruits of an investigation into Kipling’s relationship with Anglo-Indian culture to provide a critique of Said’s analysis of orientalism. This to some extent he does; but the greater part of his book is concerned not so much with Said, as with the substantial differences that, in Moore-Gilbert’s view, existed between British metropolitan orientalism and Anglo-Indian orientalism. According to Moore-Gilbert, metropolitan orientalism, as revealed in the works of writers such as Beckford, Moore, Southey, Scott, Dickens and Collins, displayed all the worst features of orientalism, as deﬁned by Said – the portrayal of India and the East as gorgeous, fabulous, effeminate (the ‘effete Gentoo’), mysterious, unchanging and fanatical (the ‘barbarous Muslim’) – while Anglo-Indian orientalism, fully conscious of the realities of life in India, and aware of the constant changes occurring in the political situation there, sought stubbornly, and for the most part unavailingly, to correct metropolitan prejudice and ignorance. It can be argued, therefore, that Moore-Gilbert’s analysis of British metropolitan attitudes supports Said’s thesis that British orientalism with regard to India was monolithic and unchanging, while his analysis of Anglo-Indian orientalism, by showing that Anglo-Indian orientalism was throughout the period of British ascendancy ﬂuid, changeable and frequently driven by contradiction, challenges it. Said’s thesis, advanced in Orientalism, that British orientalism, with regard to India, as reﬂected in several of Kipling’s poems and Kim, was essentially monolithic and 167

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unchanging, is at ﬁrst sight compelling. But the evidence cited by Moore-Gilbert, in support of his view that the Anglo-Indians – the term Anglo-Indian was, according to Moore-Gilbert ﬁrst used in the early 1800s – saw themselves as an autonomous community, clearly differentiated from the metropolis, capable of generating its own values and well informed about developments in the subcontinent, appears overwhelming. Certainly, many British people, arriving in India for the ﬁrst time, were inﬂuenced by the metropolitan orientalist topos, but experience soon applied an often painful corrective, as new arrivals were confronted by the realities of life in the subcontinent. These included the ugliness of many of the major cities, outbreaks of cholera and typhoid – in the 1840s on a four-day army excursion to Karachi sixty-one men, out of a complement of two hundred and ﬁfty, died of cholera – malaria, the losses suffered in an unending series of border wars, the purgatory of an Indian summer on the plains, home-sickness – the average length of uninterrupted military service in India in the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century was twenty years – the imbalance of the sexes, social isolation, loneliness, disillusion and insecurity. For the Anglo-Indians insecurity was, according to MooreGilbert, an ever-present reality. In 1806 a mutiny occurred at Vellore, which caused some observers to entertain apprehensions of a ‘universal revolt, without the possibility of resistance’ (Moore-Gilbert, 1986, p. 73); and in the 1820s further mutinies and insurrections occurred at Barrackpore, Bareilly, Cuttack and Rohilcund. In the 1830s, it is said, the Indian army, on which Anglo-Indian security depended, consisted of a mere 67,000 men, with only ninety pieces of artillery, quite insufﬁcient to control

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a population of one hundred million, dispersed over a million square miles. On the eve of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, a mere twenty-ﬁve white artillery men, assisted by a small number of invalided foot soldiers, policed the population of Benares, some ten million or so in number. In May 1857, according to one account, only 20,000 white troops remained in the subcontinent. The rest had been withdrawn to ﬁght in the Crimean War or serve elsewhere. Insecurity remained, therefore, a permanent feature of Anglo-Indian life; though on the eve of the uprising of 1857–58, most Anglo-Indians, it is said, remained remarkably unconcerned. The events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 proved for the Anglo-Indians traumatic. Never again would they feel wholly at ease in the subcontinent. Never again would they put their trust in the dependability of native forces. Following the suppression of the mutiny, immediate steps were taken to discover its true causes; and measures were introduced to neutralize Muslim discontent, seen as a serious threat to the survival of British power. To some extent these measures proved effective, but as Muslim discontent diminished, Hindu discontent increased. In 1876 Hindu nationalists formed the India Association, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress. As a result, British stereotypes of the Muslim as a bloodthirsty fanatic, formed in the eighteenth century, were toned down, while stereotypes of the Hindu as an ‘effete Gentoo’ were further honed. Anglo-Indian orientalism, in other words, responded rapidly to political change in the subcontinent; while metropolitan orientalism, following a period of intense concern, slumped back into its characteristic inattention and indifference.

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The insecurity felt by Anglo-Indians in India was not caused merely by the possibility of a further uprising. As occasional references in Kipling’s novels and short stories, such as Kim, ‘The Mutiny of the Mavericks’ and ‘The Man Who Was’, show, throughout the nineteenth century, particularly the second half, the Indian government and its metropolitan counterpart feared a Russian advance in Persia or Afghanistan – an advance which it was feared might provoke rebellion in India, and a collapse of British power there – and even a direct invasion. In 1882, for instance, the Pioneer, an Anglo-Indian newspaper, warned that Russian encroachments ‘have become too pronounced to be regarded any longer with equanimity’ (Moore-Gilbert, 1986 p. 89). In 1885, on the occasion of the so-called Penjdeh crisis – a crisis provoked by a possible Russian seizure of the Penjdeh valley in Afghanistan – all army leave was cancelled and steps were taken to prepare for war. Nor were the Anglo-Indians convinced that in an emergency the British government would prove capable of defending them. As an article in the Pioneer put it, in 1881, the Anglo-Indian community felt ‘no general conﬁdence in the watchfulness of the government to detect coming danger to the Empire, or its resolution to meet and beat down such danger at its outset’ (Moore-Gilbert, 1986, p. 97). So signiﬁcant did Moore-Gilbert consider Anglo-Indian fear of the consequences of what the Pioneer on one occasion called ‘false security and unpreparedness’ (1887), that in Kipling and Orientalism, he placed it foremost among the factors shaping the discourses of Anglo-Indian orientalism. Moore-Gilbert is convinced, then, that Anglo-Indian orientalism differed substantially from metropolitan orientalism, challenging many of its principal tenets and strategies. But in the end, he concludes, Anglo-Indian 170

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orientalism and metropolitan orientalism remained united, committed to the pursuit of British hegemony in India. Neither was, in his view, capable of imagining a new relationship with ‘indigenous’ India. As for Kipling, for all the doubt and unease expressed in his writing, he remained trapped in the political realities out of which orientalism had emerged. In the end, that is to say, as Said had declared in Orientalism, Kipling remained a spokesman for the ‘White Man’, the inﬂexible agent of colonial government, shaped willy nilly by an overarching orientalism which experience, even of the most profound and traumatic kind, could not undermine.

IMAGINING INDIA In Imagining India (1990), Ronald Inden, an anthropologist who is interested mainly in the history of India, identiﬁes James Mill’s The History of British India (1817/1820) as the oldest hegemonic account of the history of India within the Anglo-French imperial formation, a prime example of imperial knowledge and a model explanatory text of utilitarian reductionism. By hegemonic account Inden meant a text used by scholars to build and maintain the hegemony of their discourses over other knowledge. By imperial knowledge he meant discourses, cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies, produced at their upper reaches by people who claim to speak with authority. By utilitarian reductionism he meant the practical, empiricist philosophy of advancement, associated in the period of the Anglicist–Orientalist controversy with the Anglicist point of view. Mill’s history, in other words, was for Inden an archetypal orientalist text, which painted Indian, mainly Hindu, society – as characterized by its caste system, its supposedly self-sufﬁcient and unchanging villages, its belief 171

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in divine kingship and its collective ‘Hindu’ mind – as essentially backward, static, immutable, barbarous, despotic and irrational. This interpretation did not go unchallenged. In Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992), Javed Majeed vigorously contested Inden’s view that Mill’s history was a hegemonic text, arguing rather that it should be seen as a concealed criticism of the English class system, landed wealth and the conservative philosophy that supported them. James Mill – the father of John Stuart Mill, the noted philosopher – was born in 1773 in Northwater Bridge, Logie-Pert, Forfarshire, Scotland, the son of a shoemaker and an ambitious servant girl, whose parents had, owing to the suppression of the Jacobites, come down in the world. After attending Edinburgh University he moved to London, where he became a successful writer and editor of numerous journals and reviews, including the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Literary Journal, and St. James’s Chronicle. He began writing The History of British India in 1806 or thereabouts, and completed it in 1817, the year of ﬁrst publication. In 1819, on the strength of the knowledge he had acquired and the contacts he had made, he was appointed Assistant to the Examiner of Indian correspondence at the London headquarters of the East India Company, and in 1830 Chief Examiner, though he never visited India. In The History of British India, Mill, according to Inden, characterizes Indian civilization as essentially unchanging. Muslim rule may to some extent have introduced new forms of administration into some of the principal departments of state, but it had not greatly altered the texture of native society. The basis of Indian civilization,

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the key to understanding the ‘whole frame of Hindu society’, was caste. The system of government employed was theocratic despotism, divine kingship, in which the king controlled the army and the public revenue, but not religion and its ministers. The king claimed ownership of all land and the surplus value the land produced. Inherently irrational, the Hindus never contemplated the universe as a connected and perfect system (as the utilitarians did), governed by general laws and directed to benevolent ends. Rather, they saw it as displaying no coherence, wisdom or beauty. All was disorder, caprice, passion, contest, portents, prodigies, violence and deformity. Hindu gods, who preside over this disorder, acting only to maximize private gratiﬁcation, were worshipped in an endless succession of observances, while the beneﬁcial duties of life were ignored. Excesses associated with the Hindu religion included human sacriﬁce, various forms of self-destruction and suttee (the burning of wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands). Javed Majeed sees Mill’s The History of British India in quite a different light. For Majeed, the History, far from being a hegemony text, inspired by orientalist attitudes, is actually an implied critique of English society, seen by his colleague, Jeremy Bentham, as ‘priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden and soldier-ridden’ (Majeed, 1992, p. 127). In this context, Mill’s characterization of Hindulaw as recently compiled by the pandits – as vague, stupid, arbitrary and unintelligible – should be seen as an implied critique of English common law, described by Mill in The History of British India as ‘unintelligible, tedious and expensive’ (Majeed, 1992, p. 132). Doubt regarding the supposed antiquity of Hindu culture and civilization should

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be seen as an aspect of Mill’s general contempt for what Bentham referred to as ‘superstitious respect for antiquity’ (Majeed, 1992, p. 146). Scepticism regarding the supposed beneﬁts of monopolistic trading practices in India should be equated with doubt regarding their beneﬁts elsewhere. And calls for rational legislation, based on sound utilitarian principles, in India, should be equated with similar calls for rational legislation at home. For Mill, in short, India provided a testing ground for the application of utilitarian theories, based on sound rational principles – principles which might equally well be applied at home and for that matter in any other human society bedevilled by ignorance and superstition. Mill’s The History of British India became a standard work for East India Company ofﬁcials and, eventually, a textbook for candidates for the Indian civil service. It was also for a time the ofﬁcial textbook of the Company’s college at Haileybury. But, as Majeed makes clear, that does not mean that the philosophical radicalism advocated by Mill in The History of British India shaped East India Company policy in India. On the contrary, British rule in India, in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, remained conservative, cautious and experimental, sensitive to the complexities of local politics. Far from seeking to impose radical change, the British aimed mainly to appropriate and legitimize British rule through accommodation with what Majeed refers to as ‘indigenous idiom’, the basis of which had been laid down in the Mogul period. Indian groups and societies, far from being passive bystanders and victims of their creation as colonial subjects, in this process remained active agents, deeply implicated. Said’s conception that British rule in India was monolithic and irresistible simply does not ﬁt the facts. 174

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SCOTTISH ORIENTALISM Said, in Orientalism, saw the work of British orientalists, employed by the East India Company in the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth century, as a typical instance of the European inclination to classify, codify and tabulate the Orient, the better to control and colonize it. Such a desire may well have driven many English orientalists in their pursuit of knowledge of the Orient in that period, but Jane Rendall, in ‘Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill’, The Historical Journal (1982), offers an alternative explanation for the approach adopted by a number of Scottish orientalists employed by the Company. Scottish orientalists, such as Alexander Hamilton, James Mackintosh, John Crawfurd, William Erskine, John Leyden, Alexander Murray, Vans Kennedy and Mountstuart Elphinstone, all connected in one way or another with Edinburgh University and the Edinburgh Review, Rendall suggests, were inﬂuenced mainly by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, as expounded by William Robertson, Dugald Stewart and Adam Smith. These scholars believed that methods of enquiry, similar to those of the natural sciences, should be applied to the study of man and society. On the basis of observation, laws might then be formulated which would apply not just to this or that community or people, but to the whole of human society. According to Rendall, certain guidelines were laid down by the scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment for the proper study of man and society. Firstly, it was assumed that a close relationship existed between the various aspects of man’s life in society, economic, political, cultural and social. Secondly, a civilization, the product of those aspects, 175

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could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations, running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘reﬁnement’. Thirdly, the mode of subsistence of a particular society – hunting, pastoral, agricultural and commercial – tended to play a critical part in determining the location of a civilization on that scale. Fourthly, progress from one stage to another was expected to be slow, undirected, sometimes accidental, and rarely the result of deliberate human intervention. The inﬂuence of the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment may be detected in the work of several of the Scottish orientalists. Hamilton, a member of the Asiatic Society, criticized the Society for what he saw as its narrow concentration on Hindu antiquities; and he suggested that even the essays of H.T. Colebrooke, the leading orientalist in Calcutta, were too much concerned with the ‘tedious ritual of superstition’, interesting only in so far as they furnished deductions of a more general nature. Murray suggested that what was needed was a historian of India with a much wider perspective, a historian with a genuinely ‘philosophic purpose’. Mackintosh and Erskine, who founded the Bombay Literary Society in 1804, sought to promote enquiry into the physical and moral sciences, in particular mineralogy, natural history and botany; and Mackintosh, who wanted to write a book (which never appeared) on the ‘History and present state of the British dominions in India’, declared that he intended to exclude ‘antiquarian research as well as uncertain or merely curious disquisitions’ (Rendall, 1982, pp. 48–9). According to Rendall, two major themes illustrate the methods and assumptions of the Scottish orientalists of that period. One is the study of comparative philology, 176

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the other the ‘philosophical’ approach to Indian society. Alexander Murray, for instance, much inﬂuenced by Horne Tooke, a leading philologist, and Charles Wilkins, whose Grammar of the Sanskrita Language was published in 1808, wrote a History of the European Languages; or, Researches into the Afﬁnities of the Teutonic, Greek, Celtic, Slavonic and Indian Nations (1823), in which he aimed to trace the original European language, to which Teutonic was the nearest known. But he insisted that in philology, as in moral and natural philosophy, the enquirer should ‘collect as many facts of all descriptions, relating to his subject, as possible, and he should never assume a principle without ample proof of its existence, nor draw a conclusion unsupported by all the facts’. Alexander Hamilton, in a review of the accounts of two envoys recently returned from Ava and Tibet, emphasized that such observations were mainly of use to the philosopher engaged in ‘contemplating the nature of man, as displayed in his actions and opinions under every diversity of climate, government and religious system’. Elphinstone noted the need to justify the study of Asian history, by stressing its relevance to the ‘general history of the species’. Kennedy contrasted the traditional narrative subjects of both Persian and European historians with subjects more worthy of the attention of the philosophical historian. Following James Mill, that is to say, the Scottish orientalists aimed to illuminate ‘the history of society . . . in almost all its stages and all its shapes’ (Rendall, 1982, pp. 52, 59–60). For the Scottish orientalists inﬂuenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, the categorization of societies, peoples and cultures was, as we have seen, not based on a polarization of West and East, Europe and Asia, occidental and oriental, but on the placing of a society on a scale of 177

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development. Thus, Erskine, in a translation of the Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber Emperor of Hindustan (1826), divided Asia into two parts: that lying to the north of the range of mountains, including the Himalayas, running from China in the East to the Black Sea in the West, which he characterized as being inhabited by ‘uncivilized tribes’, and that lying to the south of this line, which he characterized as being inhabited by nations of ‘comparative civilization’. In this context civilization denoted a state or society that had developed major cities, a ﬂourishing commerce and a government able to protect its people. These conditions, Erskine suggested, had been achieved in the past, in the powerful empires of Asia, to the south of the Himalayas. John Crawfurd, in History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), divided the Indian archipelago into ﬁve divisions, according both to their geographical position and to their degree of civilization. But for Crawfurd the condition of savage peoples was more or less uniform, since the ‘inﬂuence of physical and local circumstances on the character of our species does not become obvious and striking until society has made considerable advances’ (Rendall, 1982, p. 63). It should not, of course, be supposed that the Scottish orientalists entirely escaped the orientalist trap. Their inclination to categorize every aspect of oriental society, as displayed in Leyden’s great project to investigate the languages, literature, antiquities and history of the Deccan, would be considered by Said as typically orientalist. And as Rendall has remarked, the approach they adopted offered an easy rationale for assumptions of intrinsic Western European superiority, since Western Europe was automatically assumed to be at the top of the ladder of civilization. But the fact remains that the Scottish orientalists were not for the most part seeking to divide the world up into 178

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particular sectors, based on the suspect principles of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, Occident and Orient, East and West. What they were aiming to produce was knowledge of human nature in all its aspects. As MacKenzie remarks in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), in failing to take account of the intellectual background of the Scottish orientalists and other factions seeking to promote a philosophic approach to the problem of Indian government, Said and his fellow critics of orientalism were oversimplifying the position.

ORIENTALISM AND RELIGION Many remarkable claims have been made regarding the impact of orientalism on the East, but few can equal that made by Richard King, a scholar of ancient Indian philosophy and religion, in Orientalism and Religion (1999), that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries orientalism effectively created the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. That is not to suggest that the peoples of Asia had somehow failed to develop complex systems of religious belief and practice comparable to those of Europe, but they had not, as the Europeans had done, developed the notion of ‘religion’ as a monolithic entity, involving a uniﬁed set of beliefs, doctrines and religious practices. The categorization of Indian beliefs and practices, under the general headings of Hinduism and Buddhism, was therefore left to the Europeans, mainly the British, to accomplish. The notion of a religion as a composite belief system, based on speciﬁc texts and supported by some kind of priesthood, conceived by the Europeans in the Middle Ages and the period of the Enlightenment, originated, according to King, in the third century when Christians living in the 179

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Roman Empire redeﬁned the Latin word religio. Originally signifying a ‘re-tracing’ or ‘re-reading’ of the lore and ritual of the forefathers, in the third century the Christians redeﬁned the word to mean a banding together, in which a ‘bond of piety’ would unite all true believers. Later, a Christian model of religion that strongly emphasized theistic belief, exclusivity and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendental world of the divine, to which one bonds (religare) oneself, became dominant. And in the period of the Enlightenment it was taken for granted that all cultures are, in one way or another, supported by religions, easily identiﬁable and classiﬁable, in terms of speciﬁc names such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The term Hindoo was, according to King, originally a Persian variant of the Sanskrit sindhu, the Indus River, and as such it was used by the Persians to identify the people inhabiting the region. Later the term was used by the peoples of the area to distinguish themselves from foreigners, but it was not, it seems, used as a religious designation. That development occurred as a result of the arrival of the British and French, who, as children of the Enlightenment, would have found it difﬁcult to envisage the existence of a set of religious beliefs and practices not categorized as a ‘religion’. On ﬁrst arriving in India the British referred to the peoples of the Indian subcontinent variously as heathens, the children of the devil, Gentoos (Portuguese: gentio – gentile) and Banians (the merchant populations of north India), and to their religion as the ‘religion of the Gentoos’. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the expression ‘religion of the Hindoos’ became common, and 180

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in 1816, according to King, Rammahon Roy, a leading Indian intellectual, used the word Hinduism. In 1829 the word was used in the Bengalee (Vol. 45), and in 1858 it was used by Max Müller, a leading orientalist. Not that the notion of Hinduism was necessarily imposed by the British on the Hindus. On the contrary, many Hindus, in particular the Brahmanical elite, were more than willing to adopt the new categorization, as this supplied them not only with a ready-made cultural tradition, supposedly inherited from a once great classical civilization, but also with the politically useful concept of a ‘national’ identity. For the Europeans the Buddhist religion posed fewer problems than its rival. It had been founded by an identiﬁable ﬁgure, the Buddha; could be discovered in a body of teaching associated with its founder and his followers; and was administered by a community of ordained religious specialists. But according to King, it was by no means certain that the Tibetans, the Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As in the case of other Indian religions, European scholars, in identifying Buddhist religious belief and practice as a religion, sought to impose on them an essential identity, supposedly discoverable in a series of speciﬁc classical texts. Fundamental to the classiﬁcation of Buddhism as a composite religion founded on a series of speciﬁc classical texts was the work of Eugene Burnouf, Introduction à l’histoire de Buddhisme indien (1844), which was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal by Brian Hodgson in 1824. As in the case of Hinduism, contemporary Buddhism, as practised in Asia, was seen as a degenerate version of a classical original, much in need of reform. In this context, 181

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Tibet, a country with a lively and sometimes violent history, was identiﬁed as a sacred place, within which time and history had been suspended. According to King, the elaborate mystiﬁcation thus created served a triple purpose. Firstly, in identifying the Indians and other Orientals as degenerate and backward, much in need of reform, it facilitated the imperial project. Secondly, in characterizing the East as essentially ancient, lost in time, shrouded in mystery, it served to deﬁne the West as quintessentially modern and rational. Thirdly, it satisﬁed a European nostalgia for origins, in which Asia in general, and India in particular, could be seen as the West’s gateway to its own past – to the lost innocence and childhood of humanity. As Friedrich Schlegel, the German Sanskritist, remarked: ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origin in India’ (quoted by King, 1999, p. 147). It is evident that King for the most part accepts Said’s thesis that in the past Western studies of Asian culture generally involved a degree of essentialization that had the effect of distinguishing Asian culture from that of the West; and that Western scholars believed that their work presented an accurate and unproblematic picture of the reality they were endeavouring to explain. In King’s opinion, however, the orientalist discourses thus created were not univocal. In India, for instance, such discourses were appropriated by the ‘new’ Indian intelligentsia, educated to European standards, and used to promote the idea that a spiritually advanced and ancient religious tradition existed in India called ‘Hinduism’, which might be identiﬁed as the religion of the Indian ‘nation’. Not that, in King’s opinion, the appropriation by Indian nationalists 182

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of such politically useful ideas and concepts was an unmixed blessing, for in the post-independence period it left Indian self-awareness deeply imbued with the orientalist presuppositions on which it had been constructed.

ORIENTALISM AND ALGERIA In his study of ‘France, Orientalism and Algeria: 54 Articles from the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1846–52’, published in The Journal of Algerian Studies (1998), Sharif Gemie, a student of the humanities, ﬁnds that Said, Kabbani and Nochlin, in their various books and articles, exaggerate the unitary nature of orientalism, overprivilege literary text and underestimate the importance of Algeria in the construction of French images of the East. Nevertheless, the material uncovered by Gemie in the 54 articles he investigates fully conﬁrms the thesis, advanced by the critics of orientalism, that Europeans in their writings almost invariably essentialize the Orient (Algeria, Africa, the Arab World, the Near East) as exotic, mysterious, irrational, primitive, violent, savage and unchanging. According to Gemie, French orientalism, as discovered in the Revue des Deux Mondes – a middle-brow, middle-class, household journal, published twice monthly in France in the period of the July Monarchy (1830–48), the Second Republic (1848–51) and the Second Empire (1852–70) – far from emphasizing the exotic and erotic elements of life in the Near and Middle East, as readers of Said, Kabbani and Nochlin might have expected, actually covers a wide range of subjects, including history, archaeology, war, travel, public administration and literature, concerned primarily with Algeria, the focal point, in Gemie’s opinion, of French orientalism. For the writers and readers of the 183

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Revue des Deux Mondes, that is to say, the Orient consisted primarily of Algeria, conquered by France in the 1830s, colonized in the following decades, and made part of France in 1848. But in almost all other respects the orientalism discovered by Gemie, in his investigation, conﬁrms the standard interpretation advanced by the critics of orientalism. For the writers published in the Revue des Deux Mondes – these included Théophile Gautier, J.-J. Ampère, Léonce de Lavergne, Pierre de Castellane, Gérard de Nerval and A. de la Tour du Pin – the Orient was a strange, exotic place, violent and savage (Castellane), fanatical (de la Tour du Pin), prodigal (de Lavergne), unchanging (Ampère), irrational (Gautier) and backward (Nerval). In two respects only does the orientalism revealed in the Revue des Deux Mondes differ from the standard version. It acknowledges the patriarchal character of Algerian (Arab) society – a characteristic much admired by French conservatives – and it makes little or no attempt to feminize the East. Any reference to the feminization (seduction, capture, management) of the East was, in Gemie’s opinion, ruled out by the nature of the readership of the Revue, which could not be exposed to such salacious material. In France, Gemie suggests, the orientalization of Algeria was used to promote ideas of French cultural superiority, justify conquest and foster national unity, threatened by the forces of socialism, revolution and class war. Inherent in all ideas of Algeria as primitive, irrational, uncivilized and anarchic were ideas of France as advanced, rational, civilized and disciplined. Savagery and disorder in Algeria justiﬁed the imposition of order and an extension of French civilization. The need to impose order required national unity and a respect for authority. Colonization of 184

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Algeria, in other words, would help unite France, then threatened by the rival claims to power advanced by the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the Bonapartists and the Republicans.

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In the mid-1980s, at a conference held at the University of Essex, Edward Said was offered an opportunity to look again at the issues raised by his study of orientalism. This he did with both frankness and determination. He admitted that he had not yet fully digested or understood some of the criticisms made of Orientalism, but he continued stubbornly to defend his thesis that orientalists frequently played a decisive part in the formation of negative images of the Orient. Critics of Orientalism were no doubt to some extent justiﬁed in seeing his work as part of the current debate regarding conﬂict in the ArabIslamic world, particularly in the area where that world interacted with Europe and the United States of America. His own consciousness of being an oriental, indeed, went back to the days of his youth in colonial Palestine and Egypt; and his impulse to resist the ‘impingements’ of colonialism and imperialism had been nurtured in the heady atmosphere of the post-Second World War period of independence, when Arab nationalism, Nasserism, the 1967 and 1973 Arab–Israeli Wars, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution and its horriﬁc aftermath produced an extraordinary series of highs and lows, the revolutionary 186

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impact of which had yet to be worked out. In such a situation of perpetual ﬂux it was evident that no one could by an act of pure will or sovereign understanding comprehend what was happening. Yet still many mainstream academics treated the Orient, the Arabs and Islam as if they were ﬁxed objects, frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of Western percipients (Barker et al., 1986). According to Said, many of the critics of Orientalism had taken his work to be a defence of Islam and the Arabs. This was not the case. Neither Islam nor the Arabs actually existed. Both were merely ‘communities of interpretation’. Like the Orient itself, each designation represented merely interests, claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only frequently in violent disagreement with each other, but also often at war. So saturated with meaning, so over-determined by history, religion and politics were such labels that no one today can use them without paying some attention to the ‘formidable polemical mediations’ that screen the actual objects – if they exist at all – that the labels designate. Scholars may argue that science and learning are designed to transcend such vagaries of interpretation, but as the history of orientalism shows, such assertions are all too often themselves politically motivated (Barker et al., 1986, p. 214). Said’s own critique of orientalism, he goes on, was very much a continuation of the work of A.L. Tibawi, Abdullah Laroui, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Talal Asad, S.H. Alatas, Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, each of whom had suffered from the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and each of whom wished to rediscover a lost sense of identity, suppressed by orientalism. Not that the line adopted by 187

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these writers was the only one available. Other critics of orientalism included the nativists, who wanted to promote the virtues of a native culture, the nationalists, who sought salvation in the creation of a nation state, and the fundamentalists, who sought salvation in the application of traditional Islamic values. He would not attempt to adjudicate the claims of these groups, except to say that he, personally, had always tried to avoid making claims regarding the reality, truth and authenticity of such entities as the Islamic world and the Arab World, except in so far as they were concerned with conﬂict situations, involving partisanship, solidarity and sympathy. Critics of the critics of orientalism had, in Said’s opinion, either reinforced the afﬁrmations of positive power lodged within orientalism’s discourse or much less frequently engaged the critics of orientalism in a genuine intellectual exchange. The reasons for this split were self-evident: some had to do with power and age, as well as institutional power and guild defensiveness; others had to do with religious or ideological conviction. All were political. For sheer heedless anti-intellectualism, unrestrained and unencumbered by the slightest trace of critical selfconsciousness, no one, in Said’s opinion, achieved the sublime conﬁdence of Bernard Lewis. As for the view of Islam propounded by Daniel Pipes, in In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), this represented neither science, nor knowledge, nor even understanding. It was a statement of power and a claim to absolute authority. It was constituted out of racism, and designed to appeal to an audience already prepared in advance to listen to its muscular truths. Similarly, much of the animus against Orientalism was inspired by Zionists, opposed to the Palestinian cause, and by orientalists, members of the guild 188

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of orientalism, defending their professional terrain from outside scrutiny. It should not be forgotten that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the destruction of Palestinian society and the sustained Zionist assault on Palestinian nationalism were all staffed by orientalists. One of the legacies of orientalism was, in Said’s opinion, historicism – the view pronounced by such leading intellectuals as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Ranke and Dilthy, that if human kind has a history, it is produced by men and women, and can, at any given moment, be understood historically, as possessing a complex but coherent unity. Bryan S. Turner, in Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978), has gone a long way towards fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating and decentring the experiential terrain covered by historicism; and he has identiﬁed the need to subvert the polarities and binary oppositions of Marxist-historicist thought (voluntarism versus determinism, Asiatic versus Western society, change versus stasis), in order to create a new way of analyzing plural, as opposed to single, subjects. In order to complete this task it will be necessary to think in both political and theoretical terms, locating the main problems in the area of domination and the division of labour. The material of historicism that is to say, must be dispersed into radically different objects and pursuits of knowledge. In Said’s opinion, the reconsideration of orientalism and other, related issues, such as male gender dominance and patriarchy in metropolitan societies, has already led to a new interest in the conﬁgurations of sexual, racial and political asymmetry, underlying mainstream, modern, Western culture, adumbrated and illustrated respectively by feminists, black studies critics and anti-imperialist activists. 189

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Examples of this include Sandra Gilbert’s recent study of Rider Haggard’s She, in Partisan Review (50, 3, 1983), Abdul Jan Mohamed’s Manichean Aesthetics (University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), and Peter Gran’s The Islamic Roots of Capitalism (University of Texas Press, 1979). Other works driven by impulses similar to those fuelling the antiorientalist critique include Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (Hogarth, 1973), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Partha Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters (Clarendon Press, 1977). What these works have in common is the fact that they are all interventionary in nature. That is to say, they ‘selfconsciously situate themselves at vulnerable conjunctural nodes of on going disciplinary discourses’, where each of them posits ‘nothing less than new objects of knowledge, new praxes of humanist (in the broad sense of the word) activity, new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the paradigmatic norms’ (Barker et al., 1986 p. 226). They appeal to a plurality of audiences, operate on a number of terrains and work for a variety of constituencies, each with its admitted (as opposed to denied) interest, political desiderata and disciplinary goals. All work out of what might be called a decentred consciousness, not less reﬂective and critical for being decentred, for the most part non- and in some cases antitotalizing and anti-systematic. The result is that instead of seeking common unity by appeals to a centre of sovereign authority, methodological consistency, canonicity and science, they offer the possibility of common grounds of assembly between them. They represent, therefore, planes of activity and praxis, rather than one topography, commanded by a geographical and historical vision locatable in a known centre of metropolitan power. They are also consciously secular, marginal and oppositional with 190

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regard to the mainstream, generally authoritarian systems from which they emanate and against which they now agitate; and they are political and practical in as much as they intend – without necessarily succeeding in implementing – the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge (Barker et al., 1986, p. 228). Said’s condemnation of orientalism, as a dominating, coercive system of knowledge, commanded by a geographical and historical vision, locatable in a known centre of metropolitan power, is fully in line with his previous analysis of the subject. What is, perhaps, surprising is his apparent belief that earlier orientalist works, such as those of Anquetil-Duperron, Sacy, Jones, Colebrooke and Hamilton, did not posit new objects of knowledge, seek to alter paradigmatic norms and appeal to a variety of audiences and constituencies; that authors such as Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm worked out of a decentred consciousness; and that their works have not already become part of a dominating, coercive system of knowledge, metropolitan, mainstream and canonic. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ (1986) was by no means Said’s last word on the issues raised by his critique of orientalism. In an Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism – also published, in a somewhat shortened version, under the signiﬁcant title ‘East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism’, in an edition of the Times Literary Supplement (1995) – Said made it clear that his critique was not intended as an attack on the West, a defence of Islam and the Arabs, or a defence of the downtrodden and the abused. It was none of these things. It was an attempt to show that concepts such as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ correspond to no stable reality. Far 191

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from being natural facts, they are constructs, designed to create a sense of identity – a sense of identity that may be further strengthened by the construction of an ‘other’, against which the self can be contrasted. A number of Westerners, who mistakenly concluded that orientalism stood as a synecdoche for the West, saw Orientalism as an attack on the West, the ‘self’ and nationalism. Muslims and Arabs, particularly fundamentalists, saw it as a defence of Islam, which was under attack from orientalists who called the authenticity of their religion into question. The downtrodden and the abused, hitherto deprived by the West of an opportunity to express themselves, saw it as a book which for the ﬁrst time enabled the ‘subaltern’ classes (the ‘wretched of the earth’) to answer back. According to Said, people in general ﬁnd it difﬁcult to accept the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and unmade. Such ideas provoke insecurity, and insecurity in turn generates patriotism, xenophobic nationalism and chauvinism. Muslim fundamentalists, in particular, ﬁnd it difﬁcult to accept the thesis that the ‘fundamentals’ of their religion are not ahistorical (hardly surprising in view of the fact that acceptance of that thesis would destroy the foundation of their religion). Said’s own position on this issue, he explains, is that images of an essential Islam are just that, merely images, as are images of an essential Orient. His objection to orientalism is not that it is the antiquarian study of oriental languages, societies and peoples, but that as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality from an essentialist standpoint. This approach suggests the existence not only of an enduring oriental reality, 192

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but also of an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar, and, so to speak, from above. The false position thus created hides historical change; and even more important, it hides the interests of the orientalists concerned. In writing Orientalism Said had, he declares, wanted to liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems such as orientalism. New works might then be written which would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a more generous, enabling mode. This had already to some extent happened in Europe, the United States, Australia, India, the Caribbean, Ireland, Latin America and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses, the analyses of subaltern history, the reconﬁguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism and musicology, and the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourse – to all of these Orientalism had made a difference. Only the Arab world remained largely untouched. There a sense of confrontation between an often emotionally deﬁned Arab world and an even more emotionally experienced Western world had drowned out the fact that Orientalism was meant to be merely a study in critique, and not an afﬁrmation of warring and hopelessly antithetical identities; and there he had been upbraided for not paying sufﬁcient attention to Marx and for failing to appreciate the great achievements of orientalism and the West. But, in his view, recourse to Marxism and the West, as a coherent, total system, represents merely an attempt to use one orthodoxy to shoot down another. Many British and American academics, of a decidedly rigorous and unyielding stripe, had criticized Orientalism for 193

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its residual humanism, its theoretical inconsistency and its insufﬁcient treatment of agency. These failings, if such they be, he, Said, did not in any way regret, as Orientalism had always been intended as a partisan book, not a theoretical machine. No one had convincingly shown that individual effort is not at some profoundly unteachable level both eccentric and original; this despite the existence of systems of thought, discourses and hegemonies, none of which were seamless, perfect or inevitable. The interest he took in orientalism, for instance, derived from its variability and unpredictability, qualities that gave writers like Massignon and Burton their surprising force. The most vociferous critics of orientalism were, according to Said, the orientalists, academic scholars specializing in the languages and histories of the East. Albert Hourani, in a review of Orientalism published in the New York Review of Books (1979), had pointed out that while he, Said, had singled out the exaggeration, racism and hostility, present in much orientalism, for comment, he had not mentioned the scholarly and humanistic achievements of orientalists such as Marshall Hodgson, Claude Cahen and André Raymond, all of whom should be acknowledged as real contributors to human knowledge. But it had never been his intention to suggest that orientalism was invariably evil, sloppy and uniform, merely that the guild of orientalists had a speciﬁc history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant. In this context Bernard Lewis’s defence of orientalism, published in Islam and the West (1993), should be mentioned. In his defence, Lewis, the self-appointed spokesman for the guild of orientalists, whose ‘verbosity scarcely conceals the ideological underpinnings of his position’ and who displays an ‘extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything 194

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wrong’, delivers ahistorical and wilful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist orientalism. What Lewis refuses to recognize is the extent to which modern orientalist scholarship has paralleled the acquisition by Britain and France of vast Eastern empires. Instead of accusing other people of espousing fashionable causes, Lewis should address the question of why so many Islamic specialists were and still are routinely consulted by, and actively work for, governments whose objectives in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination and outright aggression (Said, 1995, pp. 343–5). For Said, it is worth noting, the consequences of his critique of orientalism and involvement with the Palestine question were not merely academic. In 1989 Edward Alexander, a professor of English at Tel-Aviv University and the University of Washington, author of The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies (c. 1988), published an article in Commentary, entitled ‘Professor of Terror’, in which he accused Said of being an ‘ideologue of terrorism’, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization and an enemy of Israel. Shortly thereafter Said was threatened with assassination, and forced to take all the precautions normally taken by a person placed in that situation. And in 1999, Justus Reid Weiner, a student of international law at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs and a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in an article entitled ‘ “My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’, accused Said of distorting the history of his supposedly idyllic childhood in Palestine. According to Weiner, Said, in various accounts of his life, claimed that he had been born and brought up in Palestine, the son of 195

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Wadie Said, a Palestinian businessman, who lived there before ﬂeeing to Egypt in 1947. In fact, according to Weiner, whose researches are obviously ideologically driven, Said had been born in 1935, not at the family home in Jerusalem, as he had suggested, but at the Jerusalem home of his father’s brother, Boulos Yusef, during a family visit there. Wadie Said, Said’s father, though born and brought up in Palestine, had migrated to America, where he had obtained American citizenship. Then, following a period of service with the American forces in Europe in the First World War, he had, in the early 1920s, moved to Cairo, where he had built up a successful stationery company. It was there that Said spent his childhood years, living in a series of luxurious apartments, visiting Jerusalem only occasionally, on holiday. Meanwhile, according to Weiner, the supposed family home in Jerusalem, actually owned until 1941 by Yusef Said, Said’s grandfather, and then by Mrs Boulos Yusef Said, Said’s aunt, and her ﬁve children, was divided into apartments and let variously, to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as a consulate general, to Iran, again as a consulate, and to the German-Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, and his family, refugees from Nazi Germany. Said, that is to say, in telling the story of his early life, had ‘served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda – and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel’ (Weiner, 1999, p. 24). An alternative account of Said’s life, no doubt more authentic, can be found in Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). 196

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EXIT FROM ORIENTALISM If the problem of orientalism, as deﬁned by Said, is as deep-seated as its numerous critics suppose, then it may be doubted whether it can be easily eliminated. Nevertheless several academics have offered possible solutions to the problem, none wholly convincing. Said, himself, in Orientalism, opted for critical self-scrutiny, involving a direct sensitivity to the material studied, combined with a continual re-examination of methodology and practice, and a constant attempt to respond, not to doctrinal preconception, but to the subject matter concerned. Orientalists who have adopted this approach might include Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson, Anouar Abdel-Malek and Roger Owen. Progressive scholarship, openly polemical and right-minded, might still degenerate into dogmatic prejudice, but with sufﬁcient effort, a study might be made to ﬁt experience, at the same time as being shaped by it. At all costs the danger of orientalizing the Orient, over and over again, is to be avoided. A generation of scholars, critics and intellectuals might then grow up for whom racial, ethnic and national distinctions are less important than the common enterprise of promoting humanity. Gyan Prakash, in an article entitled ‘Writing PostOrientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1990), more consistently, perhaps, suggests that Third World historians studying oriental history, who in their work risk reinforcing the existing East–West, Orient– Occident divide, might solve the problem of orientalism by viewing all previous studies of their subject as discursive attempts to constitute objects of knowledge, involving a variety of shifting positions. Modes of thinking which 197

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conﬁgure the Third World in such irreducible essences as religiosity, underdevelopment, poverty, nationhood and non-Westernness are at all costs to be avoided. The ‘calm presences’ of orientalist categories, such as East–West, First World–Third World, which inhabit thought, might then be disrupted. In Prakash’s opinion, earlier challenges to orientalist historiography – nationalist, anthropological and Marxist – had for the most part proved unsuccessful, though they had succeeded in challenging the hegemony exercised by European Indology. Nationalist historians, such as H.C. Raychaudhuri, K.P. Jayaswal and Beni Prasad, for instance, had tended in the pre-Second World War period merely to reinforce the orientalist concept of India as an autonomous, national essence, now treated as being active rather than passive. They had generally accepted the orientalist periodization of Indian history, as Hindu (ancient), Muslim (mediaeval) and British (modern); and they had failed to question the existence of a long and unchanging Sanskritic Indian civilization. Anthropologists and area studies specialists, such as Louis Dumont in the post-Second World War period, still convinced that knowledge might be discovered, unshaped by the identity of the knowing subject, had similarly continued to orientalize India, discovering its essence anew in the cultural ﬁeld, particularly in caste. Convinced that they had freed themselves from the colonialist imperative, they had yet continued to reﬂect a battery of interests – academic, ideological and institutional – and they had continued to oppose tradition to modernization. Marxist historians, it is true, convinced that class, based on modes of production, was the dominant factor in both societies, had challenged the essentialization of India, as an undivided subject, 198

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separate from Europe; and they had argued that Indian history, far from being static, was constantly changing, heterogeneous and contestatory, shaped by domination and rebellion. But Marxist history, like certain other kinds of social history, which aim to place Indian history in a world context, remained foundational, allowing insufﬁcient room for further decomposition. By foundational Prakash, according to his own account, means a work of history which is ultimately founded in, and representable through, some identity – individual, class, structure – which resists further decomposition into heterogeneity. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, in ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1992), wholly unconvinced by Prakash’s rejection of foundational (Marxist) history, argue that the problems created by orientalism and similar forms of intellectual hegemony can only be overcome by adopting a rigorously objectivist (foundational, in effect Marxist) approach. Only a structural approach to knowledge would enable subordinate groups and peoples to understand the impact of the global capitalist system on their lives, and only a structural approach would enable them to engage effectively in the politics of emancipation. Marxist categories, supposedly ﬁxed and essential, may be arbitrary and subjective, but they cannot be dispensed with if orders of certainty are to be evaluated and effective historical analysis undertaken. Post-modernist approaches to knowledge, which fail to undertake a materialist critique of capitalism, deny the true underclassses of the world the opportunity to present themselves as classes; and they deny them the opportunity 199

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to portray themselves as victims of the universalistic, systematic and material deprivations of capitalism. At the same time they reinforce the well-known hostility of American political culture to any kind of materialist or class analysis. Bryan S. Turner, who would no doubt, as a fellow Marxist, have sympathized with O’Hanlon and Washbrook, in ‘From Orientalism to Global Sociology’, in his Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (1994), suggests four possible ways of overcoming the problems created by orientalism. Firstly, it should be recognized that the debate about orientalism has been theoretically productive and beneﬁcial. In contemporary writing about Islam, for instance, it is now possible to detect a far more self-reﬂexive and selfcritical attitude to Western constructions of the religion, the diversity and complexity of which is now generally admitted. Secondly, it should be noted that whereas, in the orientalist discourse, the emphasis was in the past placed on difference (we versus them, East versus West, rationality versus irrationality), in the future emphasis might be placed on sameness. In the future, that is to say, scholars might seek to create a discourse in which continuity between cultures would be preferred to antagonism. In such a discourse Islam would be regarded as part of a wider cultural complex, embracing both Judaism and Christianity. Thirdly, it should be recognized that recent developments in the study of historical sociology have increasingly focused on the idea of a world system, a global order, the political, economic and cultural importance of which is widely admitted. As we now live in a world which is increasingly uniﬁed, the character of social science will be transformed. The sharp contradiction, which in the past existed between Occident and Orient, can now be seen as 200

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an anachronism, a remnant of the nineteenth-century legacy. Fourthly, it should be recognized that there is considerable merit in the strategy of treating one’s own culture as strange, characterized by a profound otherness. The anthropological gaze might then be turned on to one’s own religious and cultural practices. Fred Dallmayr, in ‘Exit from Orientalism’, a chapter in his Beyond Orientalism: Essays in Cross-Cultural Encounter (1996), sceptical of the possibility of global forms of knowledge, argues in favour of a continued attempt to achieve cross-cultural understanding, based on a sustained effort of reciprocal interrogation. Many of the traditional academic tools – philological, historical and anthropological – might be employed in this task. Exiting from orientalism, in Dallmayr’s opinion, requires something more than an exchange of charges and counter-chargers of Eurocentrism. What it requires is a serious rethinking of such basic philosophical categories as equality (or sameness) and difference, and a willingness to engage in a genuine process of dialogical learning of the type undertaken by Wilhelm Halbfass, the noted Indologist. Finally, Richard King, in Orientalism and Religion (1999), determined to repudiate the involvement of the West in what he sees as the continued orientalization of the Third World, suggests the adoption of a methodological stance which would effectively ‘provincialize’ Europe – the Europe that modern imperialism and Third World nationalism have, according to King, by their collaborative effort and violence, made universal. In order for this provincialization to be achieved, not only must the construction of a hyperreal ‘Europe’, at the centre of ‘History’, be problematized, but also those of analogous constructs such as ‘India’, 201

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‘Hinduism’ and the ‘Indian mentality’. In the process, any tendency to construct a newly established set of relations between a ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’, as the locus of a uniﬁed, homogenized and uncontested history, should be avoided. Solutions to the problems created by orientalism include then greater self-scrutiny and the use of an improved methodology (Said); the adoption of a post-structuralist approach to knowledge (Prakash); the application of a Marxist, class-based analysis (O’Hanlon and Washbrook); an emphasis on sameness, as distinct from difference, and the search for a global order (Turner); a renewed attempt to achieve cross-cultural understanding (Dallmayr); and the adoption of a methodological stance which would ‘provincialize’ Europe (King). Yet it may be doubted how far a number of the solutions offered would prove effective. Said has, himself, shown all too effectively how fallible academics often are, even when supposedly committed to the highest academic values. Post-structuralist historians, according to O’Hanlon and Washbrook, despite all their best endeavours, frequently continue to essentialize history, recreating timeless and undifferentiated conceptions of the past. Marxist historians may succeed in analyzing world history in class terms, but as, according to Turner, Marxism is itself deeply infected by orientalism, it is unlikely that they will succeed in banishing the dragon. An emphasis on sameness, as distinct from difference, and the search for a global order may simply result in a denial of complexity. And the adoption of a methodological stance which would ‘provincialize’ Europe might, as King has himself recognized, result merely in the creation of an alternative hegemonic centre, exercising power over a European periphery. Of the six solutions to the problem of 202

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orientalism offered, therefore, only one appears viable: the stubborn search for cross-cultural understanding, advocated by Dallmayr (and also presumably by Said), in the course of which academics would have little choice but to revert to the use of the traditional tools of scholarly enquiry – philological, historical and anthropological – so widely criticized by the critics of orientalism.

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PART THREE

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NINE

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The debate regarding orientalism, launched by its critics in the period of decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War, proved both stimulating and enlightening, giving rise on occasion to strong opinion and ﬁrm conclusion. Bernard Lewis, for instance, a doughty defender of the orientalist profession, who believed that orientalism could with reasonable justiﬁcation be compared in the quality and thoroughness of its scholarship to classical studies, continued throughout the remaining decades of the twentieth century and even beyond to defend the discipline, threatened in his opinion by those who believed that all scholarly discourse is inherently ideological, politically motivated. Aziz al-Azmeh, an Arab student of Arabic and Islamic studies employed in the West, on the other hand, concluded, in a speech given on the occasion of his appointment as professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Exeter University, later published in Islams and Modernities (1993), that orientalism, particularly that part of the subject concerned with the study of Islam, was so 207

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corrupted by European prejudice and myth as to warrant only radical reconstruction, undertaken on the basis of modern historical scholarship (Aziz al-Azmeh, 1993, p. 123). It is unlikely, therefore, that the issues raised in the debate regarding orientalism will be easily resolved. Nevertheless an attempt will be made to draw a number of tentative conclusions. Crudely put, the principal critics of orientalism (AbdelMalek, Tibawi, Said and Turner) believe that Europe exists not only as a geographical, but also as an ethnic, political and cultural identity; that it harboured from earliest times a mythical image of the Orient (Asia, the East); that that mythical image to a greater or lesser extent infected all forms of European life, political, cultural and intellectual; that orientalism, deﬁned as an academic subject, became infected by prejudice, against Muslims, Arabs, Semites, Hindus, orientals, and other groups and peoples – prejudice that also found expression in popular stereotypical images of the Ay-rab, the Semite, the babu, the wog and so on – to the extent that it became corrupted, degenerate, no longer worthy of respect; that orientalism, deﬁned not only as an academic discipline but also as popular interest in the East, directly and indirectly inspired and supported European, and later American, colonialism and imperialism; and that, as a result, orientalism, deﬁned as an academic discipline, arrived, in the period of decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War, at a point of crisis, making reform imperative. Again crudely put, the critics of the critics of orientalism (Lewis, MacKenzie, Aijaz Ahmad and others, not all of whom are necessarily keen defenders of the subject) question whether Europe can be so easily identiﬁed throughout 208

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its long history as enjoying an ethnic, political and cultural identity; whether it is possible with any degree of certainty to identify the existence of a European mythical image of the Orient, from earliest times to the present day – though virtually all admit the existence of such an image at certain times and in certain places; whether orientalism, deﬁned both as an academic subject and as popular interest in the East, was in fact as polluted by prejudice as its critics suppose; whether orientalism actually inspired and supported imperialism in the manner described by its critics; and whether orientalism is in fact in need of reform, at least to the extent ascribed to it by its critics. Moreover, some of the critics of the critics of orientalism assert that a number of the critics of orientalism, masquerading as reputable scholars engaged in an academic pursuit, are actually engaged in launching a political attack on Zionism, Jewish scholarship and the West, particularly America. To this charge the critics of orientalism generally respond that it is the critics of the critics of orientalism who are involved in launching political attacks, ﬁrst and foremost on Islam, and then on the Arabs and the Palestinian people. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that it is possible to identify a longstanding European tradition, of sorts, from ancient times to the present day, Greek, Roman and Christian; but that that tradition became at times, particularly in the so-called Dark Ages, tenuous in the extreme, much in need of resuscitation by the re-translation of Arabic translations of the Greek classics and the labours of Renaissance scholarship. In so far as Europe did actually enjoy a ﬁxed identity, that identity was ﬁrst Roman (an identity which excluded most of northern Europe) and then Christian – a development which for some years persuaded 209

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numerous commentators to confuse Christendom with the continent. Given the existence of a longstanding European identity, however tenuous, there is no doubt that many Europeans did harbour ﬁxed images of the Orient (Asia, the East) as exotic, mysterious, magniﬁcent, irrational, cruel and barbarous. Witness the fascination displayed by various Europeans with Indian religion and philosophy – the gymnosophists – Egyptian and Persian culture and civilization, the traveller’s tales of Marco Polo, the exploits of Yenghiz Khan and Tamburlaine, images of the ‘Terrible Turk’, The Thousand and One Nights stories, the discoveries of the Upanishads and the I Ching, concepts of a ‘yellow peril’, and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, not to speak of Madam Blavatsky’s theosophy movement, English pantomimes such as Aladdin, Kung Fu and the other oriental martial arts, the Third Age Movement and the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela. The problem is not to identify the ingredients of a longstanding European myth of the Orient, but to estimate its signiﬁcance, political, cultural and historical. Mythical images of the Orient appear then to have remained a ﬁxed ingredient of European thinking – in so far as such a ﬁxed entity or tradition can be identiﬁed – from earliest times to the present day. But what gave those images their peculiar force and signiﬁcance, in the context of European relations with the East, was the powerful polemic against Islam, forged by Christian scholars and others in the Middle Ages, and so effectively described by Norman Daniel, in Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960), and Richard Southern, in Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962). It was almost certainly the Christian polemic against Islam that persuaded Europeans, already half convinced, that Islam and the East were by 210

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deﬁnition mysterious, despotic, irrational and corrupt. From the point of view of the convinced Christian polemicist writing in the Middle Ages, they could be no other. There appears to be no doubt that institutional orientalism, as distinct from individual orientalists, such as Lane, Burton, Doughty and Fitzgerald, was from the beginning occasionally implicated in the political process, subsidized and supported either by the state or by commercial interests closely connected with the state. In England and France, in the early period, chairs of Arabic and oriental studies were set up by state ofﬁcials and commercial companies with interests in the East, designed to encourage the training of interpreters; and in the periods of the British conquest of Bengal and the French conquest of Egypt further institutions were set up, designed to train orientalists for colonial service overseas. In Germany, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a rapid expansion in institutional forms of orientalism occurred at a time when the German state was for the ﬁrst time seriously contemplating the creation of a great overseas empire; and in Russia a similar development occurred in the period of Russian expansion in (Muslim) Central Asia. Of course, it can be argued that in the case of England and France, an interval of some hundreds of years is to be found between the foundation of the ﬁrst orientalist institutions and direct acts of colonization and imperial conquest, but such a thesis can only be sustained if it can be shown that there was no connection between commercial expansion and imperial conquest, an unlikely conclusion. Further evidence of the close connection that existed between British orientalism and imperialism may be found in documents connected with the foundation of the School 211

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of Oriental Studies, opened in London in 1917. In these, it was made clear that the principal purpose of the School was the teaching of Oriental and African languages, useful to British imperial and commercial interest in Asia and Africa. As the Reay Committee report of 1908 put it: ‘As England is the country which above all others has important relations with the East, the fact that no oriental school exists in its capital city is not creditable to the nation’ (Adelson, 1995, p. 67). Prior to the founding of the School of Oriental Studies, the British Foreign Ofﬁce paid £100 a year for each student studying oriental languages at Cambridge (with an upper limit of £1,000); the India Ofﬁce provided grants of up to £2,000 a year to Oxford and Cambridge, Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, London, while the Colonial Ofﬁce gave £100 a year for the teaching of an African language at King’s College, London. Not that this expenditure was by any standard excessive. In the same period the German government spent £10,000 a year on an Oriental School in Berlin, which employed forty-two teachers, while France spent £7,000 a year on a similar institution in Paris, which employed twenty-six teachers (Adelson, 1995, p. 63). Evidence may also be found in the publication, in the period of the Second World War, of three pamphlets by leading British orientalists (Lewis, Arberry and Bowen) on British contributions to Arabic, Persian and Turkish studies. Superﬁcially, the three pamphlets appear to illustrate the fact that British orientalism remained throughout the greater part of its history independent, objective and unfettered, but further investigation reveals that the pamphlets were commissioned by the British Council, with a view to improving the image of Britain in the Middle East (Lewis, 1941; Arberry, 1942; Bowen, 1945).

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There is then abundant evidence that institutional forms of orientalism in Europe were occasionally implicated in the political process, particularly in the imperial period. What is surprising is not that this should have been so, but that the principal critics of orientalism, in particular Said, should have been surprised that it was so. Who else, after all, would subsidize orientalism, except groups and institutions with an interest in its achievements? Not that European government subsidy of orientalism necessarily implies that the governments concerned were successful in seeking to promote commercial and imperial interest by the promotion of academic research. Even the briefest of surveys of the numerous academic journals published in Europe would conﬁrm the fact that orientalists, like most academics, display an almost inﬁnite capacity to subvert the principal purposes of their subvention. As for the suggestion made by the critics of orientalism that orientalism, as a profession, was, in the period following the end of the Second World War, in urgent need of reform, this orientalists had for the most part no problem in accepting; though of course a majority never accepted the suggestion that, as a result of its cumulative failures, it was in crisis. As Abdel-Malek, Said, Lewis and others have shown, already in the 1940s and 1950s numerous English and American orientalists, with the encouragement of their governments, were advocating reform, recommending an increase in the amount of attention given to modern studies; and in the 1960s many, ﬁnding that the title ‘orientalist’ no longer described accurately the work in which they were engaged, began to describe themselves not as orientalists, but as Indologists, Sinologists, Iranists, Arabists, and so on. Indeed, as we

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have seen, in 1973, at the Twenty-Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, held in Paris, the members attending actually voted to remove the term orientalist from the title of their institution (Abdel-Malek 1963; Said 1978; Lewis, 1993). Much of the confusion that prevails in the recent debate about orientalism arises from the fact that Said, exploiting perhaps the fact that the meaning of the word ‘orientalism’ was already variously deﬁned – as the work of an orientalist, a style or quality commonly associated with the East, an approach to the problems of government inherited by the British conquerors of Bengal, and a school of mainly nineteenth-century painting – redeﬁned the term to refer also to a corporate institution designed for dealing with the Orient, an instrument of Western imperialism, a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between Orient and Occident, and even an ideology justifying the oppression and exploitation of inferior groups. There appears to be no reasonable justiﬁcation for this redeﬁnition, which enables Said to accuse the whole of European culture, from Homer to the present day, of ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ orientalism; the orientalist profession of what today would be referred to as ‘institutional racism’; and hundreds of European statesmen, writers, travellers and others, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the orientalist profession, of the supposed crime of orientalism. No doubt, as Said, Pollock and others have convincingly shown, many European orientalists were biased, capable of ethnocentric prejudice, but the profession of orientalism, as practised in England and France at least, was never, except in a metaphorical sense, a corporate institution designed for dealing with the Orient, an instrument of Western imperialism, a style of thought 214

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based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between Orient and Occident – though it has to be admitted that Hegel and a number of his followers attempted to make it so – and an ideology justifying the oppression and enslavement of inferior groups and peoples. What for the most part it was, throughout the greater part of its history, was an attempt, made by numerous European scholars, of every description, to correct ignorance and prejudice, enlighten the ‘self ’ and understand, in however inadequate a manner, the ‘other’. Of course, from time to time individual orientalists, and even groups of orientalists (witness Pollock) did promote Western imperialism, create ﬁxed images of the Orient, and shape ideologies justifying the oppression of inferior groups. But to indiscriminately indict whole groups, professions, classes, nations and cultures, regardless of the actual contribution made by the individuals concerned, is to engage in a type of blanket judgement more commonly associated with the world of political propaganda than academe. In other respects too Said’s analysis of European culture, viewed through the prism of orientalism, can be called into question. As MacKenzie, Melman, Moore-Gilbert, Lowe, R. Lewis, Majeed, Rendall and Gemie have shown, European images of the Orient were far more complex, irregular, discontinuous and heterogeneous than Said appears at times to suppose. As Ali Behdad puts it, in Belated Travelers (1994): In formalising orientalism’s discursive regularities and the dominant system of its ideological constellation, Said’s text cannot account for the complexities of its micropractices; that is, the speciﬁc but crucial points of its dispersed network of representations that include strategic irregularities, historical discontinuities, and discursive heterogeneity. (Behdad, 1994, p. 12) 215

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Nor is it possible to maintain, as Said does in Orientalism and elsewhere (see MacKenzie, 1995, p. 208), that the Orient failed to exercise an inﬂuence on the Occident, comparable to that exercised by the Occident on the Orient. As Schwab (1950), MacKenzie (1995) and Clarke (1997) have shown, the impact of Asia on Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a revolution in European thought and experience, comparable to that experienced by the Europeans in the period of the Renaissance; though as Clarke makes clear, the conditions necessary for the realization of that revolution had already been laid down in Europe in the period of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. What is striking about the debate regarding orientalism inspired by the critique of the subject, mounted by AbdelMalek, Tibawi, Said and Turner in the decades following the end of the Second World War, is the extent to which it fails to divide its participants on the basis of ethnic, racial, national, cultural, philosophical and religious afﬁliation. Abdel-Malek (Egyptian, Coptic) and Turner (English), both leading critics of orientalism, adopt a rigorously Marxist (materialist) approach to the subject, whereas Tibawi (Palestinian), a convinced Muslim, adopts a Muslimhumanist approach, and Said (Palestinian, Christian) adopts a post-modernist approach, based on the Foucauldian concepts of epistemic ﬁeld, power–knowledge and discourse, and the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony. Bernard Lewis (British-American), MacKenzie (Scottish) and Kopf (American), all leading critics of Said’s Orientalism, adopt a traditional (realist) approach to the subject – though MacKenzie claims an awareness of post-modernist theory – while Ahmad (Indian), also a leading critic of Said’s Orientalism, adopts a Marxist (materialist) approach, similar 216

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to the approaches adopted by Abdel-Malek and Turner. Pollock (American), a supporter of Said, sees German orientalism as an example of the power–knowledge relationship identiﬁed by Foucault, while Richardson (English) adopts a philosophical–analytical approach, and al’Azm (Arab) criticizes Said for being non-scientiﬁc. Moore-Gilbert (English), Rendall (British) and Gemie (Arab) adopt a severely empiricist approach, while Hildreth (American) defends Said against the attack mounted on him by MacKenzie, calling up in Said’s defence the philosophical approach advocated by Husserl, the German philosopher. Inden (American) and King (British) seek to analyze British views of Indian history from a Saidian, representational point of view, while Majeed (Indian) sees them as the product of English utilitarianism. Finally, MacKenzie and Kabbani (Arab) both employ post-modernist methods of analysis to deconstruct nineteenth-century orientalist art, arriving in the process at radically different conclusions. If a consistent division of sorts can be identiﬁed between the participants in the debate regarding orientalism, it is the division between Said’s representational view of knowledge and the traditional (realist-Marxist) view taken by many of his principal critics. But that division, though important, is not sufﬁcient to establish an overall pattern. In the context of the debate about orientalism, therefore, the standard polarization of Orient–Occident, East–West, Christian– Muslim, white–black and capitalist–socialist, simply does not apply. Does this mean that, in academic circles at least, the forces of globalism, or perhaps better still individualism, have overcome orientalism? It would seem that it does.

217

ORIENTALISM

ORIENTALISM: A CHRONOLOGY 1757–1914

Date Historical Events

Literature and the Arts

1757 Battle of Plassey 1759

Anquetil-Duperron translates the Avesta

1772 East India Company assumes responsibility for the administration of Bengal 1776

Halhed publishes a Code of Gentoo Laws

1783 College of Fort William is opened 1784 Foundation of Asiatic Society of Bengal 1785

Wilkins publishes a translation of the Bhagavad Gita

1786

W. Beckford, Vathek, an Oriental Fantasy

1789

Jones publishes a translation of Shakuntala

1795 Opening of the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte occupies Egypt Battle of the Nile

French Commission on the Sciences and the Arts commences work on all aspects of Egyptian life and culture Creation of the Institute d’Egypte

1799 Bonaparte invades Syria

Publication of L.-F. Cassas, Voyage pittoresque, a collection of engravings 218

CHRONOLOGY

of drawings by artists attached to Conte de Choiseul-Goufﬁer, French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire 1800

J.M.W. Turner’s Fifth Plague of Egypt is exhibited at the Royal Academy, London

1801 French surrender Alexandria to the British and evacuate Egypt

R. Southey, Thalaba, the Destroyer, an Arabian Tale

1804 Mohammad Ali, Commander of an Albanian contingent, expels Mamluks from Cairo 1805 Mohammad Ali declares himself Pasha of Egypt 1806

Chateaubriand tours Greece, Constantinople, Syria, Egypt and Tunis

1808

Publication of Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier

1809

Byron tours Greece, Albania, Asia Minor and Constantinople Publication of ﬁrst volume of Description de l’Egypte, a collection of plates and text illustrating the history, geography, science and culture of Egypt

1811 Massacre of Mamluks in Cairo 1812

Première of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri in Venice Byron, Childe Harold 219

ORIENTALISM

1813

Byron, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos J.C. Hobhouse, A Journey Through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey

1815

Jules-Robert Auguste tours Syria

1817

Shelley, Ozymandias T. Moore, Lalla Rookh

1821 Outbreak of the Greek War of Independence Foundation of Société Asiatique in Paris 1822 Mohammad Ali completes the conquest of Sudan

J.L. Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land

1824 Demise of the Levant Company

Byron’s death at Missolonghi J.J. Morier, Hajji Baba of Isphahan

1826 Massacre of Janisseries in Constantinople 1827 Battle of Navarino

Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus is exhibited in Paris

1828

Decamps tours Greece and Asia Minor. He is commissioned by the French government to paint a picture of the Battle of Navarino

1829 Russo-Turkish War

J.L. Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia V. Hugo, Orientales

1830 Declaration of Greek independence French invasion of Algeria

Adrian Dauzats tours Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor

1831

Marilhat accompanies a scientiﬁc expedition led by Baron Charles von 220

CHRONOLOGY

Húgel to Greece, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon 1832

Delacroix accompanies a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco Lamartine tours Syria and Egypt

1833 War between Mohammad Ali and the Ottoman Sultan Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi

Roberts visits Tangier and Tetuan Lamartine, Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un Voyage en Orient

1834

Alexander Kinglake tours Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor

1836

E.W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians

1837 Overland route to India is established

Eugène Flandin accompanies the French army to Algeria Vernet in Algeria

1838 British occupy Aden

M.C.F. Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt

1839 War between Mohammad Ali and the Sultan

Dauzats accompanies the expedition of the Duke of Orleans to Algeria

1840 Convention of London for the paciﬁcation of the Levant

R. Hay, Illustrations of Cairo Flandin, with Pascal Coste, embarks on a French diplomatic mission to Persia

1842

Richard Dadd tours the Near East David Roberts, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, 6 volumes of lithographs

1843

Gerard de Nerval in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor D. Wilkie, Sketches in Turkey, Syria and Egypt 221

ORIENTALISM

1844 French war with Morocco

A. Kinglake, Eothan

1845 Foundation of Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft

Theophile Gautier in Algeria

1849

Flaubert tours Levant

1853

Fromentin in Algeria Richard Burton in Arabia Theophile Gautier, Voyages pittoresques en Algérie

1854 Outbreak of the Crimean War

Holman Hunt in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Constantinople

1856 Treaty of Paris End of the Crimean War

Gerome in Egypt

1858

F. Frith, Egypt and Palestine photographed and described

1859

Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

1860 Massacre of Christians in Damascus and Lebanon 1861 International Regime is established in Lebanon 1862

Guillaumet in Algeria and Morocco Palgrave in Arabia Flaubert, Salammbo

1865

Foundation of the Palestine Exploration Society

1869 Opening of the Suez Canal

First Cook’s Tour of Egypt and Holy Land 222

CHRONOLOGY

1871

First performance of Verdi’s Aida in Cairo

1872

Clairin accompanies Tissot’s envoy in Morocco W.S. Blunt tours the Near East and North Africa

1873

L.C. Müller in Egypt and Asia Minor First International Congress of Orientalists is held in Paris

1874

Charles Doughty in Syria, Palestine, Sinai and Egypt

1875 Disraeli purchases the Khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal Company 1876

K. Baedecker, ed., Palestine and Syria: Handbook for Travellers

1877 Russo-Turkish War

C. Warren, ed., Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, 4 volumes illustrated by various travellers

1878 Congress of Berlin 1880

John Singer Sargent in Morocco Rimbaud in Aden and Abyssinia Flinders Petrie begins the survey of the Great Pyramid at Gaza

1881 French invade Tunisia 1882 British occupation of Egypt

W.S. Blunt, The Future of Islam Egypt Exploration Fund is founded in London

1885 Death of General Gordon at Khartoum 1888

G. Guillaumet, Tableaux algériens C.M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta 223

ORIENTALISM

1893

Foundation of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes, Paris

1895

P. Loti, Jerusalem et la Galilée

1897 First Zionist Congress 1898 Battle of Omdurman The Fashoda Incident Kaiser Wilhelm II tours Holy Land 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium is established in Sudan

Gertrude Bell tours Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia

1904

Kandinsky in Algeria and Tunis

1905 Kaiser Wilhelm visits Tangier 1906

Matisse in Algeria

1907

G. Bell, The Desert and the Sown

1908 Young Turk Revolution

C.M. Doughty, Wanderings in Arabia

1910 Franco-German Convention on Morocco Foundation of Der Islam

Exhibition of Islamic Art in Munich

1912 French protectorate is established in Morocco 1913 Italian occupation of Tripoli

Publication of the ﬁrst volume of Encyclopaedia of Islam

1914 Outbreak of the First World War. Egypt is declared a British protectorate

224

WHO’S WHO

WHO’S WHO

Abdel-Malek, Anouar (born 1924) Marxist student of Arabic literature and philosophy and author of ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes (1963). Born and brought up in Cairo, Egypt, and educated at the French Jesuit College there, Abdel-Malek later studied at the ’Ain Shams University and the Sorbonne. After teaching for some years at the Lycée al-Hourriyya, Cairo, he moved to Paris, where he was appointed to a post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque (Sociology). Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe (1731–1805) Traveller and orientalist, and precursor of the rise of Iranian studies in France. Student of Zoroastrianism. Published the Zend-Avesta, in three volumes, in 1771. Also translated ﬁfty-one Upanishads. Born in Paris, the son of a grocer, and educated at the Sorbonne and at an old Catholic seminary near Utrecht, Anquetil-Duperron travelled widely in India (1754–61), where he learnt Persian, the lingua franca of the area, Bengali, some Malayalan and some Hindustani. Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (1765–1837) Early Sanskrit scholar and professor of Hindi, law and Sanskrit at the College of Fort William. Author of A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (1798), Introductory Remarks to the Hitópodésá (1804), A Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (1805) and scores of other works on Indian law, languages and culture. Born in London, the son of a wealthy banker and director of the East India Company, and privately educated, Colebrooke lived for thirtytwo years in India (1782–1814), starting as a writer with the East India Company and ending with a seat on the council. Gabrieli, Francesco (born 1904) Orientalist. Professor of Arabic languages and literatures at the University of Rome. Author of Il Califfato die Hisham (1935), Storia e civiltè musulmana (1947), Storia della letteratura araba (1952), and many other works. Galland, Antoine (1646–1715) Orientalist and numismatist. Translator of the Arabian Nights and scores of other Arabic, Turkish and Persian works. Publisher of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. Born in Rollot, Picardy, the son of poor parents, Galland, thanks to the patronage of a series of generous benefactors, attended the Collège de Noyon and the Collège de Plessis, where he learnt not only Latin and Greek but also a number of 225

ORIENTALISM

oriental languages. In 1670 he accompanied the French ambassador on a trip to the Levant, the ﬁrst of a number of trips, on one of which he was charged by the Compagnie des Indes with the task of collecting medals and other rarities for Colbert. On his return, he was granted the title of antiquaire du roi, and in 1709 he was appointed Professor of Arabic at the Collège de France. Hastings, Warren (1732–1818) British Indian administrator governor-general of Bengal. He reformed the whole system of tion and established regular law courts, for which he had old books translated. He was impeached in 1788 for oppression, stration and corruption.

and ﬁrst administraHindu law maladmini-

Hamilton, Alexander (1762–1824) Orientalist, employed in the service of the East India Company in Bengal. Member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Studied and taught Sanskrit in London, and in Paris, where he was held prisoner following the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens. Catalogued Sanskrit manuscripts at the Paris Library. Professor of Sanskrit and Hindoo literature at Haileybury, the East India Company college in Hertfordshire. He published an edition of the Hitópadésá in Sanskrit (1811), Terms of Sanscrit Grammar (18l5), and A Key to the Chronology of the Hindus (1820). Herbelot, Berthélemy d’ (1625–95) Orientalist, student of Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Author of a Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l’Orient (published posthumously by Galland in 1697). Born in Paris and educated at the university and the Collège de France, in 1692 Herbelot was appointed Professor of Syriac at the Collège de France. Jones, Sir William (1746–94) Orientalist, student of Sanskrit and other oriental languages. Founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Born in Westminster, the son of a mathematician, and educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford, where he learnt Arabic and Persian. Jones published many works concerning the Orient, including a translation of a Life of Nadir Shah (1770), a Traité sur la Poésie Orientale (1770), and a Dissertation sur la Littérature Orientale (1774), before being called to the bar in 1774. In 1783 he was appointed a judge of the High Court at Calcutta. There, following the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he published numerous important articles on Indian history, languages and culture, including ‘On the Orthography of Asiatick Words’ (1784), ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ (1785), and ‘On the Hindus’ 226

WHO’S WHO

(1786); and he translated numerous Indian works, including the Hitópadésá of Pilpay, the Sakúntala of Kalidása (1799) and extracts from the ‘Vedas’. Jones was probably the ﬁrst European scholar to recognize the common identity of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Kabbani, Rana (born 1958) Journalist and leading Muslim feminist. Author of several works including Letter to Christendom (1989) and Imperial Fictions (1986). Born in Damascus, and brought up in New York City and Djakarta, Kabbani studied literature at Georgetown University and Jesus College, Cambridge (PhD). She taught for some years at the American University of Beirut, before moving to London. Lane, Edward William (1801–76) Arabic scholar. Author of an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and an Arabic– English Lexicon (1863–92). Translator of A Thousand and One Nights (1838– 40). Born in Hereford, where his father was prebendary of Withington Parva, and educated at the grammar schools of Bath and Hereford, Lane lived in Egypt in 1825–28, 1833–35 and 1842–49. Lewis, Bernard (born 1916) Orientalist. Author of numerous works on oriental history, mainly Middle Eastern, including The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), The Middle East and the West (1964), The Assassins (1967), Race and Colour in Islam (1971), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Jews in Islam (1985), and Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990). Born in London, the son of a businessman, and educated at the University of London (BA, 1936, PhD, 1939) and the University of Paris (diplome des études sémitiques, 1937), Lewis taught Near and Middle Eastern History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where he was appointed Professor of History of the Near and Middle East in 1949, and at Princeton, where he was appointed Professor of Near Eastern Studies in 1974. Lewis was also appointed Visiting Professor at the University of California, 1955–56, Gottesman lecturer at Yeshiva University, 1974, and Douglas Robb Foundation lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, 1982. He served with the British Army, in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps, 1940–41, and was attached to the Foreign Ofﬁce, 1941–45. He has testiﬁed before the US Senate committees on several occasions. Ockley, Simon (1678–1720) Orientalist. Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Author of a History of the Saracens (1708), which is said to be the ﬁrst popular account of Arab history and civilization written in English. Born in Exeter, the son of a ‘gentleman’, living in Great Ellingham, Norfolk, 227

ORIENTALISM

Ockley was brought up in Norfolk. At the age of ﬁfteen he entered Queens College, Cambridge, where, two years later, being naturally inclined to the study of oriental languages, he was appointed Hebrew Lecturer. Pococke, Edward (1604–91) Orientalist. First professor of Arabic at Oxford. Author of Specimen historiae Arabum (1649), which is seen as a foundational work of Arabic studies in England. Translator of numerous Christian works into Arabic, which were designed to secure the conversion of Muslims. Born in Oxford, the son of a fellow of Magdalen College, and educated at the Free School, Thame, Oxfordshire, Magdalen Hall, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Pococke spent long periods living in the Near East, including a period spent serving as chaplain to the ‘Turkey Merchants’ of Aleppo, 1830–36, and a period living in Constantinople, 1837–40. Sacy, Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de (1758–1838) Orientalist. First professor of Arabic at the Ecole Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes (1795), and professor of Persian at the Collège de France (1806). Born in Paris, the son of a notary, and educated privately, Sacy wrote many inﬂuential works, including a Grammaire Arabe and a Chrestomathie Arabe. It was largely due to Sacy that Paris became a centre of Arabic studies in the early part of the nineteenth century. Said, Edward (born 1935) Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Member of the Palestine National Council, 1977–91. Author of Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and many other books and articles, mainly on European literature and the Palestine question. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and educated in Egypt, Said moved to the United States in 1950, where he attended Princeton and Harvard (PhD, 1964). Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829) Considered to be one of the ﬁrst German students of Sanskrit, a knowledge of which he acquired from Alexander Hamilton, the British orientalist, in Paris. Author of Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808). Brother of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the German critic. Tibawi, Abdul-Latif (1910–81) Orientalist. Author of a number of books on Arab history, including British Interests in Palestine, 1800–1901 (1961), A Modern History of Syria (1969), and Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–21 (1977). Also author of an inﬂuential series of articles 228

WHO’S WHO

on English-speaking orientalists. Later in life Tibawi became known for his extensive knowledge of Islamic Law and his defence of the Palestine-Arab cause. Born in Palestine, and educated at a local school and the American University of Beirut, Tibawi, after a period working in educational administration in Palestine, moved to London, where he took a PhD in education (1952), and was appointed to a post at the Institute of Education. Following his retirement from the Institute, he held a research fellowship at Harvard. He was killed in a car crash in London in 1981. Turner, Bryan S. (born 1945) Leading English sociologist. Author of numerous books including Weber and Islam (1974), Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978), Religion and Social Theory: A Materialist Perspective (1983), and Capitalism and Class in the Middle East (1984). Born in Birmingham, the son of a waiter and waitress, and educated at Leeds University, in 1981, following a period teaching at the Universities of Aberdeen and Lancaster, Turner moved to Flinders University, South Australia, where he was appointed Professor of Sociology. Wilkins, Sir Charles (c. 1749–1836) Orientalist, student of Sanskrit. In 1778 he established a printing press for the printing of oriental languages in India. Co-founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Examiner and visitor of Haileybury, the East India Company college in Hertfordshire. Born in Frome, Somerset, the son of Walter Wilkins and Martha Wray, niece of Robert Bateman Wray, the engraver, Wilkins joined the East India Company as a writer in 1770, serving in Bengal until 1786. His numerous works include translations of the Bhagavad Gita (1785), the Hitópadésá (1787), the Story of Sakúntala, from the Mahabharata (1793), a Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (1806) and an edition of Richardson’s Persian, Arabic and English Dictionary (1806).

229

ORIENTALISM

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Readers interested in looking more deeply into the question of orientalism might start by reading Anour Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ (1963), A.L. Tibawi, ‘English-speaking Orientalists’ (1964 and 1979), Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) and Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978). Extracts from these, together with numerous other extracts from signiﬁcant works on orientalism, reviews and review articles, are published in A.L. Macﬁe, Orientalism: A Reader (2000). Two of the best accounts of the issues raised by orientalism are John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995) and J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (1997). Also well worth consulting are Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions (1988), A. Behdad, Belated Travelers (1994), Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (1999) and Billie Melman, Women’s Orients (1992). L. Mani and R. Frankenberg, ‘The Challenge of Orientalism’, Economy and Society, 14, 2 (1985), includes a survey of more than sixty reviews of Said’s Orientalism. A number of interesting articles, mainly concerning south Asia, can be found in C.A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (1993). David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), is an excellent study of British orientalism in India in the early period, and Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art (1998), of orientalism in nineteenth-century European painting. Readers wishing to ﬁnd out more about Said might consult Michael Sprinker, Edward Said: A Critical Reader (1992).

230

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(The place of publication is London except where otherwise stated.)

BOOKS Adelson, Roger (1995) London and the Invention of the Middle East. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ahmad, Aijaz (1992) In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures. Verso. Arberry, Arthur John (1943) British Orientalists. Collins. Arberry, Arthur John (1948) The Cambridge School of Arabic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, T. and Guillaume, A. (eds) (1931) The Legacy of Islam. Oxford: Clarendon Press. New edition, 1979. Aziz al-Azmeh (1993) Islams and Modernities. Verso. Barker, Francis, Hulme, P., Iverson, M. and Loxley, D. (eds) (1986) Literature, Politics and Theory. Methuen. Barthold, Vasilli Vladimirovitch (1947) La découverte de l’Asie: Histoire de l’orientalisme en Europe et en Russe, French translation by Basile Nikitone. Paris: Editions Payot. Behdad, A. (1994) Belated Travelers. Cork: Cork University Press. Breckenridge, C.A. and van der Veer, P. (eds) (1993) Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Canny, N. (ed.) (1998) The Oxford History of the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clarke, J.J. (1997) Oriental Enlightenment. Routledge. 231

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Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Codwell, J.F. and Macleod, D.S. (1998) Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dallmayr, Fred (1996) Beyond Orientalism: Essays in Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Daniel, N. (1960) Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Hay, Denys (1957) Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hekman, S. (1990) Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism. Oxford: Polity Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, P.M., Lambton, A.K.S. and Lewis, B. (eds) (1970) The Cambridge History of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inden, Ronald (1990) Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell. Kabbani, Rana (1988) Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient. Pandora. King, Richard (1999) Orientalism and Religion. Routledge. Kopf, David (1969) British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lewis, B. (1993) Islam and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, B. and Holt, P.M. (1962) Historians of the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, R. (1996) Gendering Orientalism: Race-Feminity-Representation. Routledge. 232

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Lowe, Lisa (1991) Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Macﬁe, A.L. (1996) The Eastern Question. Longman. Macﬁe, A.L. (2000) University Press.

Orientalism:

A

Reader.

Edinburgh:

Edinburgh

MacKenzie, John M. (1995) Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Majeed, Javed (1992) Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martino, Pierre (1906) L’Orient dans la littérature francaise aux XVII e et au XVIII e siècle. Paris: Hachette. Melman, Billie (1992) Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle-East, 1718–1918. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mill, James (1817/1820) The History of British India. Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. Miller, Jane (1990) Seductions. Virago. Moore-Gilbert, B.J. (1986) Kipling and Orientalism. Croom-Helm. Paret, Rudi (1968) The Study of Arabic and Islam at German Universities. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Peltre, Christine (1998) Orientalism in Art. Abbeville Press. Pipes, D. (1983) In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power. New York: Basic Books. Reig, Daniel (1988) Homo orientaliste. Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose. Rodinson, M. (1974) Islam and Capitalism. Allen Lane. First published in 1966. Sacy, Silvestre de (1861) Mélanges de littérature orientale. Paris: E. Docrocq. al-Saghcr, M.H.’A. (1983) Orientalists and Koranic Studies. Beirut: publisher not known. 233

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Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Pantheon Books. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism. Chatto and Windus. Said, Edward (1999) Out of Place: A Memoir. Granta. Schaade, A. and Hartmann, R. (1913) The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill. New edition, 1979. Schacht, S. and Bosworth, C. (eds) (1979) The Legacy of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schlegel, Friedrich (1808) Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer. Schwab, R. (1950) La Renaissance orientale. Paris: Editions Payot. Southern, Richard (1962) Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stevens, Mary Anne (1984) The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, European Painters in North Africa and the Near East. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Sweetman, John (1988) The Oriental Obsession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thornton, Lynne (1983) The Orientalists: Painters-Travellers, 1828–1908. Paris: ACR Edition International. Trevelyan, G.O. (1932) The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, B.S. (1978) Marx and the End of Orientalism. George Allen and Unwin. Turner, B.S. (1994) Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. Routledge. Windshuttle, K. (1996) The Killing of History. New York: Free Press.

ARTICLES AND PAMPHLETS Abdel-Malek, Anouar (1963) ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes, 44, Winter, pp. 103–40. 234

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Ahmad, Aijaz (1991) ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, Studies in History, 7, 1, new series, pp. 135–63. Alexander, Edward (1989) ‘Professor of Terror’, Commentary, August, pp. 49–50. Arberry, Arthur G. (1942) ‘British Contributions to Persian Studies’. Longmans, Green & Co. Beckingham, C.F. (1979) Review of Orientalism, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 42. al-Bctar, N. (1982) ‘From Western Orientalism to Arab Orientalism’, in The Boundaries of Nationalist Identity. Beirut: publisher not known. Bowen, Harold (1945) ‘British Longmans, Green & Co.

Contributions

to

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Studies’.

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Hanaﬁ, H. (1978) ‘Arab National Thought in the Balance’, QadAyA ’Arabiyya, Beirut, 2, pp. 17–42. Hildreth, M. (1995) ‘Lamentations on Reality: A response to John M. MacKenzie’s “Edward Said and the Historians” ’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 19, pp. 65–73. Hourani, A. (1979) ‘The Road to Morocco’, New York Review of Books, 8 March, pp. 27–30. Inden, R. (1986) ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20, 3, pp. 401–48. Kopf, David (1980) ‘Hermeneutics versus History’, Journal of Asian Studies, 39, 3, pp. 495–506. Lewis, Bernard (1941) ‘British Longmans, Green & Co.

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O’Hanlon, R. and Washbrook, D. (1992) ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 1, pp. 141–67. Plumb, J.H. (1979) ‘Review of Orientalism’, New York Times Book Review, 18 February. Pollock, Sheldon (1993) ‘Deep Orientalism: Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj’, in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Prakash, Gyan (1990) ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32, 2, pp. 383–408. Rendall, Jane (1982) ‘Scottish Orientalism from Robertson to James Mill’, The Historical Journal, 25, 1, pp. 43–69. Richardson, M. (1990) ‘Enough Said’, Anthropology Today, 6, 4, pp. 16–19. Robbins, B. (1995) ‘The Seduction of the Unexpected: On Imperialism and History’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 19, pp. 75–9. Sadik Jalal al-’Azm (1981) ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin, 8, pp. 5–26. Said, Edward (1975) ‘Shattered Myths’, in Naseer H. Aruri (ed.), Middle East Crucible. Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press, pp. 410–27. Said, Edward (1976) ‘Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West’, The New York Times Book Review, 31 October. Said, Edward (1986) ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in F. Barker, et al. (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory. Methuen. Said, Edward (1995) ‘East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 February. Said, Edward and Lewis, Bernard (1982) ‘Orientalism: An Exchange’, The New York Review of Books, 12 August. 237

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238

INDEX

INDEX

Brown, Henrietta, 165 Brown, Thomas, 29 Buckinghamshire, Earl of, 55 Buddhism, 179–83 Burton, Sir Richard, 9, 48, 160–1 Byron, Lord, 60

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 4, 6–7, 74–9, 96–101 Abraham b. Ezra of Toledo, 29 Adams, Thomas, 27 Adelard of Bath, 29 Aeschylus, 88 Africa, 14–19 Ahmad, Aijaz, 12, 100, 109, 123–7 Al-’Asm, Sadik Jalal, 109, 128–30 Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 207–8 Al-Bctar, Nadcm, 128–31 Alexander, Edward, 195 Algeria, 46, 68, 183–5 Al-Saghcr, M.H.’A., 128 Ameri, M., 40 Ampère, J.J., 184 Anne, Queen, 26 Anquetil-Duperron, AbrahamHyacinthe, 9, 32, 46, 49, 87 Arab nationalism, 79, 81, 106–7 Arberry, A.J., 105–6 Asia, 14–19 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 31, 51, 56 Asiatische Magazin, 39 Auerbach, E., 124

Cahen, Claude, 9, 103–5 Calcutta School Book Society, 53 Carey, William, 52, 58 Castell, Edmund, 28 Castellane, Pierre de, 184 Castlereagh, 53 Chardin, 35 Charlevoix, Father, 32 Clapham Sect, 50, 53–4 Clarke, J.J., 153–6 Clifford, James, 121–2 Colbert, 33, 45 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, 30, 58 Collège de France, 33–4, 46 Compagnie de la Chine, 45 Compagnie des Indes orientales, 45 Compagnie du Levant, 45 Cook, Thomas, 61 Crawfurd, J., 178 Crimean War, 61, 69 Csoma, Sandor Korosi, 39, 49

Baptist Mission Society, 51, 53 Bedwell, William, 29 Bengal, 50–7 Bentinck, William, 55–6 Bernier, 35 Berque, J., 77 Bhagavad Gita, 30, 58 Blunt, W.S., 161 Bombay Literary Society, 176

D’Herbelot, Barthélemy, 31, 45, 87 Dadd, Richard, 63 Dalhousie, Governor-General, 56 Dallmayr, Fred, 201 239

ORIENTALISM

Gemie, Sharif, 183–5 German Society for the Study of Islam, 37 Géróme, Jean-Léon, 63–5 Gibb, Sir H., 9, 105 Goldziher, I., 40 Gramsci, A., 6 Greaves, John, 29 Gros, Antoine-Jean, 62 Grossier, Abbé, 32 Guillaumet, G., 63–5

Daniel, Norman, 42 Danios, Abraham, 47 Das, Veena, 162 Dauzats, A., 63–4 Decamps, Alexander Gabriel, 64 Delacroix, Eugène, 64–5 Denon, Baron, 62 Der Islam, 37 Derrida, Jacques, 6 Déscription de l’Egypte, 46, 62 Desmaisons, Baron, 41 Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 37 Doughty, Charles, 161 Du Halde, Father, 32 Du-Nouÿ, Le Comte, 65

Haileybury College, 53 Halhed, N.B., 30, 58 Hamilton, Alexander, 38, 176–7 Hanafc, Hasan, 128–30 Hastings, Warren, 30, 51, 57 Hayter Commission, 77–8 Hegel, G.W.F., 6, 19 Hekman, Susan, 162 Hildreth, Martha, 138–9, 143 Hindu College, 52–3 Hinduism, 54, 179–83 Hitópadéshá, 30 Homer, 88 Hourani, Albert, 119, 194 Hunt, Holman, 63 Hunt, Thomas, 27 Hurgronje, Christian Snouck, 39 Hyde, Thomas, 26–7

East India Company, 50 Eastern Crisis, 61, 69 Eastern Question, 61 Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, 34, 46 Elphinestone, Mountstuart, 177 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 42, 83 Erpenius, Thomas, 39 Erskine, William, 176–8 Euripedes, 88 Europe, 14–19 Flandin, Eugène, 64 Flaubert, Gustave, 9 Fleischer, H.L., 36–7 Foreign Bible Society, 53 Fort William, College of, 31, 52–3, 56 Foucault, Michel, 6, 12, 97–8 Fromentin, E., 63–5 Gabrieli, Galland, Garnier, Gautier, Gellner,

Inden, Ronald, 109, 171–3 India, 5, 50–8, 179–83 Indian Mutiny, 169 Institute de l’Egypte, 62 Iranian Revolution, 5 Islam, 42–4, 79–85, 119–20, 192

Francesco, 9, 103–5 Antoine, 32 John, 27 Théophile, 184 Ernest, 145–7

John VIII, Pope, 17 Johnson, Samuel, 22 Jones, Sir William, 9, 30–1, 58 Journal Asiatique, 34

240

INDEX

Martel, Charles, 17 Martino, Pierre, 35–6 Marx, Karl, 123–7 Matisse, 64 Melman, Billie, 162–4 Mill, James, 171–4 Miller, Jane, 162 Minto, Lord, 52 Moira, Lord, 52 Moore-Gilbert, B.J., 167–71 Moussine-Pouchkine, M.N., 40 Müller, Leopold Carl, 63 Murray, Alexander, 176–7

Kabbani, Rana, 159–66 Kandinsky, 64 Kant, Emmanuel, 99 Kedourie, Elie, 146 Kennedy, Vans, 177 King, Richard, 179–83, 201–2 Kipling, Rudyard, 167–71 Knolles, Richard, 29 Kopf, David, 11, 121 Lane, Edward W., 48, 160 Laud, Archbishop, 25–6, 44 Lavergne, L. de, 184 Lawrence, T.E., 161 Lebanon, 61 Lee, Samuel, 28 Legacy of Islam, 83 Levant Company, 44–5 Lewis, Bernard, 9, 11, 13, 188, 194–5, 207 and the question of orientalism, 109–19 Lewis, John Frederick, 63, 65 Lewis, Reina, 164–5 Leyden, John, 178 Libya, 15 Little, Donald, 9, 106–8 Louis XIII, King of France, 33 Louis XIV, King of France, 33 Lowe, Lisa, 165–6

Napoleon Bonaparte, 33, 62 Nerval, Gérard de, 184 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 98–9 Nochlin, Linda, 66–7 Ockley, Simon, 28 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 162, 199–200 Orient, orientalist, deﬁnitions of, 19–21 Oriental Translation Fund, 31 Orientalism, assault on, 73–101 assessment of, 207–17 and colonialism, 44–9 in crisis, 3–14 debate concerning, 102–47 exit from, 186–206 and India, 50–8 rise of, 25–44 Scottish orientalism, 175–9 Orientalist–Anglicist controversy, 50–8 Ottoman Empire, 35, 69

Macaulay, Thomas, 3, 55–6 MacKenzie, John, 11, 60, 100, 109, 179 and the arts, 66–72 and the historians, 134–45 history, theory and the arts, 150–3 Mackintosh, J., 176 Majeed, Javid, 173–4 Malmesbury, William of, 17–18

Palestine Liberation Organization, 133 Parraud, Abbé, 32 Pipes, Daniel, 188

241

ORIENTALISM

Tibawi, A.L., 4, 6–7 analysis of, 96–101 and English-speaking orientalists, 74–85 and responses to critique, 105–8 Tour du Pin, A. de la, 184 Trevelyan, Charles, 55 Tunis, 61, 69 Turner, Bryan S., 4, 6–7, 75, 189, 200–1 analysis of, 96–101 and end of orientalism, 93–5 response to critique, 145–7 Twining, Thomas, 54

Plassey, Battle of, 50 Plumb, J.H., 120–1 Pococke, Edward, 26, 44, 48 Pollock, Sheldon, 156–9 Prakash, Gyan, 197 Renan, Ernest, 90 Rendall, Jane, 175–9 Richardson, Michael, 122–3 Robbins, Bruce, 139–41, 144 Roberts Roberts, David, 63 Roman Empire, 16–17 Sacy, Silvestre de, 34, 47, 90 Said, Edward, 4, 74, 214–16 analysis of, 96–101 case studies concerning, 148–85 and Orientalism, 6–14, 85–93 Orientalism reconsidered, 186–96 Salle, Eusèbe de, 47 Sanskrit, 31, 38, 89 Sargent, John Singer, 64 Schlegel, Friedrich, 37–8 School of Oriental Studies, London, 211–12 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 99 Seminar for Oriental Languages, Berlin, 37 Serampore Mission, 52 Shakúntala, 58 Simmons, Clare A., 142–3 Sivan, Emmanuel, 127–32 Société Asiatique, 34 Solinus, 16 Southern, Richard, 42 Soviet Union, 78–9 Stewart, Colonel, ‘Hindoo’, 54 Suez Canal, 61

Urban II, Pope, 17 Uri, Janos, 39 Vambery, Armin, 39–40, 49 Verdi, 137–9 Vernet, Horace, 63–4 Vienne, Counil of, 115–16 Volney, Constantine, 32–3 Voltaire, 35 Washbrook, David, 199–200 Weiner, J.R., 195–6 Wellesley, Marquess, 52 Wheelock, Abraham, 28 White Joseph, 27 Wilkie, David, 63 Wilkins, Charles, 30, 57–8 William III, 26, 54 Wilson, Ernest J., 109, 132–4 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 30 World of Islam, 37 Wüst, W., 157–8 Zaccar, Leon-Charles, 47 Zend Avesta, 32 Zionism, 82, 188–9

Talleyrand, 46 Tavernier, 35

242