Orientalism - autonomous learning

270 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
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which is where one can see most immediately the limitations of
Massignon's method, the East-West opposition turns up in a most
peculiar way.
At its best, Massignon's vision of the East-West encounter
assigned great responsibility to the West for its invasion of the
East, its colonialism, its relentless attacks on Islam. Massignon was
a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization and, as his numerous
essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian
refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in
Palestine against Zionism, against what, with reference to something
said by Abba Eban, he scathingly called Israeli "bourgeois
colonialism."83 Yet the framework in which Massignon's vision was
held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially ancient time
and the West to modernity. Like Robertson Smith, Massignon considered
the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this
reductive category had a powerful grip on his thought. When, for
example, in 1960 he and Jacques Berque, his colleague at the
College de France, published their dialogue on "the Arabs" in
Esprit, a good deal of the time was spent in arguing whether the
best way to look at the problems of the contemporary Arabs was
simply to say, in the main instance, that the Arab-Israeli conflict
was really a Semitic problem. Berque tried to demur gently, and to
nudge Massignon towards the possibility that like the rest of the
world the Arabs had undergone what he called an "anthropological
variation": Massignon refused the notion out of hand. 84 His repeated
efforts to understand and report on the Palestine conflict,
for all their profound humanism, never really got past the quarrel
between Isaac and Ishmael or, so far as his quarrel with Israel was
concerned, the tension between Judaism and Christianity. When
Arab cities and villages were captured by the Zionists, it was
Massignon's religious sensibilities that were offended.
Europe, and France in particular, were seen as contemporary
realities. Partly because of his initial political encounter with the'
British during the First World War, Massignon retained a pronounced
dislike of England and English policy; Lawrence and his
type represented a too-complex policy which he, Massignon,
opposed in his dealings with Faisal. "Je cherchais avec Faysal ...
a penetrer dans Ie sens meme de sa tradition a lui." The British
seemed to represent "expansion" in the Orient, amoral economic
policy, and an outdated philosophy of political influence: 85 The
Frenchman was a more modem man, who was obliged to. get from
, the Orient what he had lost in spirituality, traditional values, and
the like. Massignon's investment in this view came, I think, by way
of the entire nineteenth-century tradition of the Orient as therapeutic
for the West, a tradition whose earliest adumbration is to be
found in Quinet. In Massignon, it was joined to a sense of Christian
compassion:
So far' as Orientals are concerned, we ought to have recourse to
this science of compassion, to this "participation" even in the
construction of their language and of their mental structure, in
which indeed we must participate: because ultimately this science
bears witness either to verities that are ours too, or else to verities
that we have lost and must regain. Finally, because in a profound
sense everything that exists is good in some way, and those poor
colonized people do not exist only for our purposes but in and
for themselves [en SOi].86
Nevertheless the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or
understanding himself. Partly because of what Europe had done to
him, he had lost his religion and his philosophie; Muslims had "un
vide immense" within them; they were close to anarchy and suicide.
It became France's obligation, then, to associate itself with the
Muslims' desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their
dynastic life, and the patrimony of believers. 8T
No scholar, not even a Massignon, can resist the pressures on
him of his nation or of the scholarly tradition in which he works.
In a great deal of what he said of the Orient and its relationship
with the Occident, Massignon seemed to refine and yet to repeat
the ideas of other French Orientalists. We must allow, however,
that the refinement~, the personal style, the individual genius, may
finally supersede the political restraints operating impersonally
through tradition and through the national ambience. Even so, in
Massignon's case we must also recognize that in one direction his
ideas about the Orient remained thoroughly traditional and
Orientalist, their personality and remarkable eccentricity notwithstanding.
According to him, the Islamic Orient was spiritual,
Semitic, tribalistic, radically monotheistic, un-Aryan: the adjectives
resemble a catalogue of late-nineteenth-century anthropological
descriptions. The relatively earthbound experiences of war, colonialism,
imperialism, economic oppression, love, death, and cultural
exchange seem always in Massignon's eyes to be filtered through
metaphysical, ultimately dehumanized lenses: they are Semitic,