Orientalism - autonomous learning

276 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalism Now
277
nations of the postcolonial world. Armed with a refocused awareness
of his importance to the Atlantic commonwealth, the Orientalist
was to be the guide of policymakers, of businessmen, of a fresh
generation of scholars.
What counted most in Gibb's later vision was not the Orientalist's
positive work as a scholar (for example, the kind of scholar
Gibb had been in his youth when he studied the Muslim invasions
of Central Asia) but its adaptability for use in the public world.
Hourani puts this well:
... it became clear to him [Gibb] that modern governments and
elites were acting in ignorance or rejection of their own traditions
of social life and morality, and that their failures sprang from this.
Henceforth his main efforts were given to the elucidation, by
careful study of the past, of the specific nature of Muslim society
and the beliefs and culture which lay at the heart of it. Even this
problem he tended to see at first mainly in political terms. 02
Yet no such later vision could have been possible without a fairly
rigorous amount of preparation in Gibb's earlier work, and it is
there that we must first seek to understand his ideas. Among Gibb's
earliest influences was Duncan Macdonald, from whose work Gibb
clearly derived the concept that Islam was a coherent system of
life, a system made coherent not so much by the people who led
that life as by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious
practice, idea of order, in which all the Muslim people participated.
Between the people and "Islam" there was obviously a dynamic encounter
of sorts, yet what mattered to the Western student was the
supervening power of Islam to make intelligible the experiences
of the Islamic people, not the other way around.
For Macdonald and subsequently for Gibb, the epistemological
and methodological difficulties of "Islam" as an object (about
which large, extremely general statements could be made) are never
tackled. Macdonald for his part believed that in Islam one could
perceive aspects of a still more portentous abstraction, the Oriental
mentality. The entire opening chapter of his most influential book
(whose importance for Gibb cannot be minimized), The Religious
Attitude and Life in Islam, is an anthology of unarguable declaratives
about the Eastern or Oriental mind. He begins by saying that
"it is plain, I think, and admitted that the conception of the Unseen
is much more immediate and real to the Oriental than to the
western peoples." The "large modifying elements. which seem, from
time to time, almost to upset the general law" do not upset it, nor do
they upset the other equally sweeping and general laws governing
the Oriental mind. "The essential difference in the Oriental mind is
not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system
as to seen things." Another aspect of this difficulty-which Gibb
was later to blame for the absence of form in Arabic literature and
for the Muslim's essentially atomistic view of reality-is "that the
difference in the Oriental is not essentially religiosity, but the lack
of the sense of law. For him, there is no immovable order of nature."
If such a "fact" seems not to account for the extraordinary achievements
of Islamic science, upon which a great deal in modern Western
science is based, then Macdonald remains silent. He continues
his catalogue: "It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental.
The supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment."
That an. occasion-namely, the historical and geographical birth
of monotheism in the Orient-should in Macdonald's argument
become an entire theory of difference between East and West
signifies the degree of intensity to which "Oriental ism" has committed
Macdonald. Here is his summary:
Inability, then, to see life steadily, and see it whole, to understand
that a theory of life must cover all the facts, and liability to
be stampeded by a single idea and blinded to everything elsetherein,
I believe, is the difference between the East and the
West.!)~
None of this, of course, is particularly new. From Schlegel to
Renan, from Robertson Smith to T. E. Lawrence, these ideas get
repeated and re-repeated. They represent a decision about the
Orient, not by any means a fact of nature. Anyone who, like Macdonald
and Gibb, consciously entered a profession called Orientalism
did so on the basis of a decision made: that the Orient was the
Orient, that it was different, and so forth. The elaborations, refinements,
consequent articulations of the field therefore sustain and
prolong the decision to confine the Orient. There is no perceivable
irony in Macdonald's (or Gibb's) views about Oriental liability
to be stampeded by a single idea; neither man seems able to recognize
the extent of Orientalism's liability to be stampeded by the
single idea of Oriental difference. And neither man is concerned
by such wholesale designations as "Islam" or "the Orient" being
used as proper nouns, with adjectives attached and verbs streaming
forth, as if they referred to persons and not to Platonic ideas.