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280 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
281
Europe and Islam is the reintegration of western civilization, artificially
sundered at the Renaissance and now reasserting its unity
with overwhelming force."96
Unlike Massignon, who made no effort to conceal his metaphysical
speculations, Gibb delivered such observations as this
as if they were objective knowledge (a category he found wanting
in Massignon). Yet by almost any standards most of Gibb's general
works on Islam are metaphysical, not only because he uses abstractions
like "Islam" as if they have a clear and distinct meaning but
also because it is simply never clear where in concrete time and
space Gibb's "Islam" is taking place. If on the one hand, following
Macdonald, he puts Islam definitively outside the West, on the
other hand, in much of his work, he is to be found "reintegrating"
it with the West. In 1955 he made this inside-outside question a
bit clearer: the West took from Islam only those nonscientific
elements that it had originally derived from the West, whereas in
borrowing much from Islamic science, the West was merely following
the law making "natural science and technology ... indefinitely
transmissible."!l7 The net result is to make Islam in "art, aesthetics,
philosophy and religious thought" a second-order phenomenon
(since those came from the West), and so far as science and technology
are concerned, a mere conduit for elements that are not sui
generis Islamic.
Any clarity about what Islam is in Gibb's thought ought to be
found within these metaphysical constraints, and indeed his two
important works of the forties, Modern Trends in Islam and
Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey, flesh out matters considerably.
In both books Gibb is at great pains to discuss the present
crisis in Islam, opposing its inherent, essential being to modern
attempts at modifying it. I have already mentioned Gibb's hostility
to modernizing currents in Islam and his stubborn commitment to
Islamic orthodoxy. Now it is time to mention Gibb's preference
for the word Mohammedanism over Islam (since he says that Islam
is really based upon an idea of apostolic succession culminating
in Mohammed) and his assertion that the Islamic master science
is law, which early on replaced theology. The curious thing about
these statements is that they are assertions made about Islam, not
on the basis of evidence internal to Islam, but rather on the basis
of a logic deliberately outside Islam. No Muslim would call himself
a Mohammedan, nor so far as is known would he necessarily feel
the importance of law over theology. But what Gibb does is to
situate himself as a scholar within contradictions he himself discerns,
at that point in "Islam" where "there is a certain unexpressed
dislocation between the formal outward process and the inner
realities."ij3
The Orientalist, then, sees his task as expressing the dislocation
and consequently speaking the truth about Islam, which by definition-since
its contradictions inhibit its powers of self-discernment
-it cannot express. Most of Gibb's general statements about Islam
supply concepts to Islam that the religion or culture, again by his
definition, is incapable of grasping: "Oriental philosophy had never
appreciated the fundamental idea of justice in Greek philosophy."
As for Oriental societies, "in contrast to most western societies,
[they] have generally devoted {themselves] to building stable social
organizations [more than] to constructing ideal systems of philosophical.
thought." The principal internal weakness of Islam is the
"breaking of association between the religious orders and the
Muslim upper and middle classes."99 But Gibb is also aw.are that
Islam has never remained isolated from the rest of the world and
therefore must stand in a series of external dislocations, insufficiencies,
and disjunctions between itself and the world. Thus he
says that modern Islam is the result of a classical religion coming
into disynchronous contact with Romantic Western ideas. In reaction
to this assault, Islam developed a school of modernists whose
ideas everywhere reveal hopelessness, ideas unsuited to the modern
world: Mahdism, nationalism, a revived caliphate. Yet the conservative
reaction to modernism is no less unsuited to modernity,
for it has produced a kind of stubborn Luddism. Well then, we
ask, what is Islam finally, if it cannot conquer its internal dislocations
nor deal satisfactorily with its external surroundings? The
ariswer can be sought in the following central passage from Modern
Trends:
Islam is a living and vital religion, appealing to the hearts, minds,
and consciences of tens and hundreds of millions, setting them a
standard by which to live honest, sober, and god-fearing lives.
It is not Islam that is petrified, but its orthodox formulations, its
systematic theology, its social apologetic. It is here that the dis­
·location lies, that the dissatisfaction is felt among a large proportion
of its most educated and intelligent adherents, and that the
danger for the future is most evident. No religion can ultimately
resist disintegration if there is a perpetual gulf between its demands
upon the will and its appeal to the intellect of its followers.