Robert Irwin
FOR LUST OF KNOWING
The Orientalists and their enemies
410pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. £25.
0 713 99415 0
“All academic knowledge about India”, Edward Said wrote in the introduction to his Orientalism, is “tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact” of Western colonialism. Reading these words recently, I was reminded of R. S. McGregor, who taught me Hindi when I was a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1990s. McGregor was a tidy, inexpressive man whose desk was piled with pages in progress from the Hindi–English dictionary he went on to publish in 1993. He had not visited India in decades, and his interest in the here and now of South Asia was so slight that he greeted me on the morning after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by enquiring what I had understood of the Hindustani verses he had assigned me. If McGregor felt remorse that his long employment by the Faculty of Oriental Studies implicated him in a sinister enterprise that is aimed, in Said’s words, at “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, he never let on.
In that faculty, I became aware of two great Cambridge Orientalists of the past, Edward G. Browne and Reynold A. Nicholson. Browne took a First in Indian Languages (Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Hindustani) and went on to become Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, in 1902; but it is to Persian studies that he contributed most. His four-volume Literary History of Persia is unlikely to be bettered as an account of the development of classical poetry in Persian. Nicholson, Browne’s student, also excelled at Arabic, succeeding his teacher to the Adams Professorship in 1926 and writing A Literary History of the Arabs. But he, too, preferred Persian. He devoted fifteen years of his life to editing and translating all 25,000 couplets of Jalalul’ddin Rumi’s Sufi masterpiece, the Masnavi-e Manavi.
Browne and Nicholson were important figures in academic Orientalism at a time when the British Empire excelled in glitter and reach, but Said gave them no more than a single, shared reference in Orientalism – and that in a longer list of academics who built a “scholarly frame of reference” for such Imperial grunts as Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence. It seems that Browne and Nicholson got in the way of Orientalism’s central argument – namely, that Western (particularly British and French) scholars spent several centuries cooperating, more or less consciously, with novelists, poets and painters to construct an “Orient” in opposition to the “Occident” they inhabited, and to posit the latter’s superiority over the former; they put this pernicious discourse at the service of Imperialists such as Bonaparte. But Browne and Nicholson, like many other Orientalists, resist this characterization.
Browne’s affection for Eastern countries – Turkey and Persia in particular – sprang not from his desire to subjugate them, but from concern for their independence. In his introduction to A History of the Persian Revolution, his account of the country’s struggle for constitutional democracy at the start of the nineteenth century, Browne rebuts those contemporaries who believe that “Persia is a backward country, which, in the hands of its own people cannot be ‘developed’ . . . and that the best thing that can happen is that some European Power, whether England or Russia, should step in and ‘develop’ it”. (At other times, Browne also campaigned in favour of the Boers and for Irish Home Rule.) It is unclear how Nicholson’s enthusiasm for Islamic mysticism helped build a “frame of reference” for colonizers. (Nicholson was a contemplative man who never learned to speak the languages he mastered on the page, and did not set foot in the Middle East.) Strikingly, in today’s Iran, an Islamic Republic where anti-British feeling runs high, Browne is the only Briton who has a Tehran street named after him, and Nicholson’s Masnavi is not only in print but widely consulted by Iranian students of Rumi.
To judge from Said’s disdain for most criticisms of Orientalism, he would have summarily tossed such pebbles from his elegant shoe. In Said’s view, the shared feature of all Orientalists is the “intellectual authority” – the italics are Said’s; he is constantly wringing his hands as he writes – that they assume “over the Orient within western culture”. What Said seems to be saying is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t subscribe to the Imperialist mindset, or oppose it, or if you couldn’t care either way, because you are completely occupied by what you imagine is a narrow and uncontroversial academic pursuit. By virtue of the fact that you are Western and have some expertise in an aspect of the East – and, crucially, that you presume to pronounce on this expertise, before a mainly Western public – you are of necessity tainted.
The sweep of Said’s prejudice, and the passion that infuses his precarious, piled-up sentences, go some way to explaining why Orientalism is one of the world’s most popular academic books. Readers expecting similar things from For Lust of Knowing, Robert Irwin’s new history of academic Orientalism, and an avowed response to Said, will be disappointed, and this is no bad thing. As Irwin writes in his introduction, “there is nothing so very exciting about pedants busily engaged in making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, or cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt”; and this, he has us believe, is what most Orientalists get up to.
Irwin should know. Unlike Said, who somersaulted into Orientalism from a career in comparative literature, Irwin is an insider. He teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written books on Arabic literature and Islamic art, and is a member of prestigious bodies, such as the Royal Asiatic Society, that Said considered part of the whole invidious Orientalist superstructure. (He also happens to be the Middle East editor of the TLS.) In contrast to Said, who moves magisterially from philology to Flaubert on Oriental women, and thence to Lord Balfour, Irwin is restrained by his duty to his calling and his predecessors. He rejects Said’s belief that Western academics and artists looked at the East in an identical way. There may be an “overlap” – one that he plans to address in a forthcoming book on artistic depictions of the Orient – but he does not accept that, for instance, Flaubert and the Arabist and Islamicist Sir Hamilton Gibb were “contributing to essentially the same discourse”. Irwin can be prickly, as when he describes Orientalism as “a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations”, but he generally finds that the best way to demolish Said is not to join him on the high wire, where his adversary could land a lucky hit, but to lob well-aimed pies from ground level. By sketching portraits of dozens of Orientalists from the past and present, and by showing their widely varying preoccupations and abilities, Irwin makes human, and occasionally banal, an academic field that Said has demonized in its entirety. The result is an erudite and generally convincing riposte to Orientalism, a book that Irwin finds to be “richly imagined, but essentially fictional”; the characters drawn by Irwin are more rounded than Said’s cast of “villains”.
Where, then, do Orientalism’s origins lie? Not, Irwin convincingly argues, in ancient Athenian plays such as the Persae and the Bacchae, in which Said claims to detect early Orientalist twitches – claims that are based partly on his attribution of prophetic powers to Aeschylus and Euripides. Irwin traces Orientalism back to the half-millennium that followed the advent of Islam, when pious European churchmen acquainted themselves with Arabic in order to understand, and impugn more effectively, the rival faith, and scholars translated books by Arabs and Persians on medicine, philosophy and mathematics.
Through the Renaissance and beyond, Europeans’ scholarly interest in the East was oscillating and inconsistent, tending to rise whenever the Ottoman Turks, who three times threatened to take Vienna, seemed most threatening. Some Orientalists, such as Guillaume Postel, who wrote Europe’s first grammar of classical Arabic and procured Arabic manuscripts for the French Crown, admired many aspects of Islam and Islamic societies. Others were abusive, and still others indifferent.
Irwin writes of the Revd Edmund Castell (1606–85), a holder of the Adams Professorship that Browne and Nicholson would later occupy, that he was “not in the slightest interested in Islam. Rather, his chief enthusiasm was for trying to establish links with the Eastern Christian Churches”. Should we assume that these and other scholars had sympathy for what Said describes as “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures”? Irwin doesn’t clearly answer this question, perhaps because he feels that, in a world that was delineated along religious lines, it would have been odd if they had not. Certainly, feelings of cultural superiority were not confined to the Christian West. Irwin refers to Arab scholars who depicted Christian Europeans as smelly fornicators and polytheists. Well into the nineteenth century, aspiring Ottoman statesmen were drilled on the merits of their religion and society over those of Europe.
The dispute between Irwin and Said is at its most fascinating in their discussion of modern Orientalism. Both identify Silvestre de Sacy, who became professor at the Paris École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in 1795, as its father. De Sacy laid the foundations for a syllabus for students of Arabic, helped start the Société Asiatique and wrote copiously (and far from favourably) about heterodox Muslims such as the Druze. In Said’s view, de Sacy’s translations and anthologies established him as a judge of which aspects of the Orient are worth knowing about, and the holder of a “secret”. With de Sacy, the Orient becomes “overlaid with the Orientalist’s rationality; its principles become his. From being distant, it becomes available; from being unsustainable on its own, it becomes pedagogically useful; from being lost, it is found, even if its missing parts have been made to drop away from it in the process . . . Sacy’s work canonises the Orient”.
To most Orientalists, this must sound absurd. The Orientalist “canon”, and the question of what is important about the Orient, is under constant revision – increasingly, today, by scholars whose origins lie in the very countries and cultures that they scrutinize. Irwin detects no dark system behind de Sacy, and he takes particular issue with two assertions that Said makes about the Frenchman. De Sacy “doctored” texts, writes Said; Irwin demands evidence and a motive. Said, who is concerned to demonstrate the links between Orientalists and Imperialists, writes that de Sacy taught some of the “savants” who accompanied Bonaparte when he invaded Egypt in 1798. Irwin is sceptical; de Sacy only started teaching in 1796. All in all, he says, Said “libelled scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men”.
While he discusses the racialist Ernest Renan, a nineteenth-century philologist who was taught by students of de Sacy, Irwin notes that Renan loathed de Sacy and regarded him as incapable of scholarly insight. Said does not make this point, even though he devotes a single chapter to the two men. According to Said, Renan’s theories came out of the “same impulse” that inspired de Sacy to write his influential Chrestomathie Arabe; he leaves it to Irwin, who doubts that Renan even knew good Arabic, to note that many of Renan’s theories were rubbished by his fellow Orientalists. Of a second racialist, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, whom Said places in the “official genealogy of Orientalism”, Irwin writes that his linguistic skills were wanting and that “his venture into serious academic territory in the form of an attempted decipherment of the various cuneiform scripts was . . . a disastrous exercise in self-deception”.
One can understand the irritation that today’s Orientalists may feel at being included by Said, along with scholars who have been superseded or discredited, in a strain of intellectual inquiry that is depicted as improbably coherent and unified. Having goggled at the large number of omissions, distortions and factual inaccuracies that Irwin has found in Orientalism, readers may sympathize with his claim that Said popularized “the idea that it is more important to destroy Orientalism than to represent its history accurately”.
