Orientalism - autonomous learning

262 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
263
of the modern philological and archeological spirit, and the report
reads more like that of a congress of University tutors of the last
century met to discuss the reading of a passage in a Greek play,
or the accentuation of a vowel, before the dawn of Comparative
Philology had swept away the cobwebs of the Scholiasts. Was it
worth while to discuss whether Mahomet could hold a pen or
write?12
To some extent the polemical antiquarianism that Cust described
was a scholarly version of European anti-Semitism. Even the
designation "modern-Semitic," which was meant to include both
Muslims and Jews (and which had its origin in the so-called
ancient-Semitic field pioneered by Renan), carried its racist banner
with what was doubtless meant to be a decent ostentation. A little
later in his report Cust comments on how in the same meeting
" 'the Aryan' supplied much material for reflection." Clearly "the
Aryan" is a counterabstraction to "the Semite," but for some of the
reasons I listed earlier, such atavistic labels were felt to be especially
pertinent to Semites-with what expensive moral and human consequences
for the human community as a whole, the history of the
twentieth century amply demonstrates. Yet what has not been
sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been
the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and
more important for my purposes here, the way this academic and
intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern
age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient. For
whereas it is no longer possible to write learned (or even popular)
disquisitions on either "the Negro mind" or "the Jewish personality,"
it is perfectly possible to engage in such research as "the
Islamic mind," or "the Arab character"-but of this subject more
later.
Thus, in order properly to understand the intellectual genealogy
of interwar Islamic Orientalism-as it is most interestingly and
satisfyingly seen (no irony intended) in the careers of Massignon
and Gibb-we must be able to understand the differences between
the Orientalist's summational attitude towards his material and the
kind of attitude to which it bears a strong cultural resemblance,
that in the work of philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius. The
intellectual crisis in Islamic Orientalism was another aspect of the
spiritual crisis of "late bourgeois humanism"; in its form and style,
however, Islamic Orientalism viewed the problems of mankind as
separable into the categories called "Oriental" or "Occidental." It
was believed, then, that for the Oriental, liberation, self-expression,
and self-enlargement were not the issues that they were for the
Occidental. Instead, the Islamic Orientalist expressed his ideas
about Islam in such a way as to emphasize his, as well as putatively
the Muslim's, resistance to change, to mutual comprehension between
East and West, to the development of men and women out of
archaic, primitive classical institutions and into modernity. Indeed,
so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal
were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one
understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction
of Western civilization but rather the destruction of the barriers that
kept East and West from each other. When Gibb opposed nationalism
in the· modern Islamic states, he did so because he felt that
nationalism would corrode the inner structures keeping Islam
Oriental; the net result of secular nationalism would be to make the
Orient no different from the West. Yet it is a tribute to Gibb's
extraordinarily sympathetic powers of identification with an alien
religion that he put his disapproval in such a way as to seem to be
speaking for the Islamic orthodox community. How much such
pleading was a reversion to the old Orientalist habit of speaking
for the natives and how mUCh it was a sincere attempt at speaking
in Islam's best interests is a question whose answer lies somewhere
between the two alternatives.
No scholar or thinker, of course, is a perfect representative of
some ideal type or school in which, by virtue of national origin
or the accidents of history, he participates. Yet in so relatively
insulated and specialized a tradition as Orientalism, I think there is
in each scholar some awareness, partly conscious. and partly nonconscious,
9f national tradition, if not of national ideology. This
is particularly true in Orientalism, additionally so because of the
direct political involvement of European nations in the affairs of
one or another Oriental country: the case of Snouck Hurgronje, to
cite a non-British and non-French instance where the s,cholar's
sense of., national identity is simple and clear, comes to mind
immediately.73 Yet even after making all the proper qualifications
about the difference between an individual and a type (or between
an individual and a tradition), it is nevertheless striking to note
the extent to which Gibb and Massignon were representative types.
Perhaps it would be better to say that Gibb and Massignon fulfilled