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278 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
279
It is no accident, therefore, that Gibb's master theme, in almost
everything he wrote about Islam and the Arabs, was the tension
between "Islam" as a transcendent, compelling Oriental fact and
the realities of everyday human experience. His investment as a
scholar and as a devout Christian was in "Islam," not so much in
the (to him) relatively trivial complications introduced .into Islam
by nationalism, class struggle, the individualizing experiences of
love, anger, or human work. Nowhere is the impoverishing character
of this investment more evident than in Whither Islam?, a
volume edited and contributed to, in the title essay, by Gibb in
1932. (It also includes an impressive article on North African
Islam bv Massirmon.) Gibb's task as he saw it was to assess Islam,
its possible future course. In such a task the
different regions of the Islamic world
were to be, not refutations of Islam's unity, but examoles of it
Gibb himself proposed an introductor
in the concluding essay, he sought to pronounce on its acmamy
and its real future. Like Macdonald, Gibb seems entirely comfortable
with the idea of a monolithic East, whose existential circumstances
cannot easily be reduced to race or racial theory; in
resolutely denying the value of racial generalization Gibb rises
above what had been most reprehensible in preceding generations
of Orientalists. Gibb has a correspondingly generous and sympathetic
view of Islam's universalism and tolerance in letting diverse
ethnic and religious communities coexist peacefully and democratically
within its imperium. There is a note of grim prophecy in
Gibb's singling out the Zionists and the Maronite Christians, alone
amongst ethnic communities in the Islamic world, for their inability
to accept coexistence. 94
But the heart of Gibb's argument is that Islam, perhaps because
it finally represents the Oriental's exclusive concern not with nature
but with the Unseen, has an ultimate precedence and domination
over all life in the Islamic Orient For Gibb Islam is Islamic
orthodoxy, is also the community of believers, is life, unity,
intelligibility, values. It is law and order too, the unsavory disruptions
of jihadists and communist agitators notwithstanding.
In page after page of Gibb's prose in Whither Islam?, we learn that
the new commercial banks in Egypt and Syria are facts of Islam
or an Islamic initiative; schools and an increasing literacy rate are
Islamic facts, too, as are journalism, Westernization, and intellectual
societies. At no ooint does Gibb speak of European colonialism
when he discusses the rise of nationalism and its "toxins." That
the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its
resistance, political and nonpolitical, to colonialism, never occurs
to Gibb, just as it seems to him finally irrelevant to note whether
the "Islamic" governments he discusses are republican, feudal, or
monarchical.
"Islam" for Gibb is a sort. of superstructure imperiled both by
politics (nationalism, communist agitation, Westernization) and by
dangerous Muslim attempts to tamper with its intellectual soVereignty.
In the passage that follows, note how the word religion and
its cognates are made to color the tone of Gibb's prose, so much so
that we feel a decorous annoyance at the mundane pressures
directed at "Islam":
Islam, as' a religion, has lost little of its force, but Islam as the
arbiter of social life [in the modern world} is being dethroned;
alongside it, or above it, new forces exert an authority.which is
sometimes in contradiction to its traditions and its social prescripbut
nevertheless forces its way in their teeth. To put the
pU!>I[!Un in its simplest terms, what has happened is this. Until
the ordinary Muslim citizen and cultivator had rio
and no literature of easy access
except religious literature, no festivals and no communal life
except in connection with religion, saw little or nothing of the
outside world except through glasses. To him, in consequence,
religion meant everything. Now, however, more in all the
advanced countries, his interests have expanded and his activities
are no longer bounded by religion. He has
thrust on his notice; he or has read to him, a mass of
on subjects of all kinds which have nothing to do with
and in which the religious point of view may not be discussea
all and the verdict held to lie with some quite different nr;o,,;...jp<
... [Emphasis added}9U
Admittedly, the picture is a little difficult to see, since unlike
any other religion Islam is or means everything. As a description
of a human phenomenon the hyperbole is, I think, unique to
Orientali~m. Life itself-politics, literature, energy, activity, growth
-is an intrusion upon this (to a Westerner) unimaginable Oriental
totality. Yet as '~a complement and counterbalance to European
civilisation" Islam in its modem form is nevertheless a useful object:
this is the core of Gibb's proposition about modem Islam. For "in
the broadest aspect of history, what is now happening between