They may be disappointed, however, that Irwin does not confront Said on perhaps the most influential of his big ideas: that Orientalist scholarship helped define the character of the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that it was itself influenced by Imperialism. There are, Irwin concedes, “grains of truth” in Said’s suggestion of symbiosis, but Irwin doesn’t examine this much beyond deploring Said’s tendency to “jumble up” academic Orientalists “with proconsuls and explorers, as if they had very much in common”. He weakens Said’s argument by citing instances of exaggeration or distortion – Said’s misrepresentation of E. G. Browne is one – but does not answer it.

Irwin’s omission seems all the odder when one considers that For Lust of Knowing contains evidence for strong and complex ties between Orientalism and Imperialism. Russian Orientalism, Irwin notes, developed as Peter the Great added Muslim lands to his possessions. SOAS itself was set up at the urging of distinguished Orientalists on one hand, and two grand Imperialists, “the peers Curzon and Cromer”, on the other. But Irwin does not discuss what effect this patronage and support had on the discipline. Other, more specific, gaps have the effect of diminishing our perception of Orientalists’ association with Imperialism. Nowhere in Irwin’s otherwise full account of de Sacy does he mention that the Frenchman was an adviser to the Foreign Minister, or that he translated the bulletins of the Grande Armée in Egypt and the Imperial proclamation that was issued after France’s occupation of Algiers in 1830. (As you might expect, Said goes into all this.) Irwin praises the erudition of Sir William Jones, who made the genealogical link between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, in 1786, and who presided over the Asiatick Society of Bengal. However, he does not explain the influence that Jones and other pro-Indian scholars had on Britain’s Imperial approach to its Indian subjects – which was, until the 1830s, relatively inclusive and tolerant – or record the role of Warren Hastings, the Governor of Bengal, in starting the Society. Clearly, the work of Jones and his colleagues bore on the development of British Imperialism.

There is even a word to be said in defence of jumbling up scholars and proconsuls, for the border between Orientalism and Imperialism is not always neat. In the nineteenth century, two diplomats who were prominent in promoting Britain’s influence over Iran, Sir John Malcolm and Sir Gore Ouseley, the latter a founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, made serious scholarly contributions to the study, respectively, of Iranian history and poetry. More recently, Ann Lambton won renown as a Persian grammarian and a student of Iranian land tenure. In 1951, while she was a lecturer at SOAS, she advised the British Government on ways to oust the Iranian Prime Minister, Muhammad Mussadeq, who had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. On Lambton’s recommendation, an Oxford Persianist, R. C. Zaehner, was dispatched to Tehran to make preparations. (In the event, it took the CIA to topple Mussadeq, in 1953.) Irwin’s admission that “a few Orientalists – he [Said] gives the names of three of them – did work for colonial authorities” is paltry. As Bernard Lewis, a hugely experienced Orientalist whom Irwin admires, has pointed out, “there is a connection between scholarship and empire . . . which deserves but has not yet received serious study”.

Irwin’s reluctance to expose his discipline to Said’s charges of collusion in Empire, post-colonial domination and, more specifically, brutalities committed in the name of Zionism, is the main flaw in an otherwise meticulous and impressive book. It mars Irwin’s appraisal of Lewis, a brilliant scholar whose “knack of looking at awkward subjects” – one thinks of his exploration of Muslim responses to modernity as it is defined in the West – has been overshadowed by his role, “quasi-official”, in Clifford Geertz’s apt words, “as the go-to authority on all things Middle Eastern”. There is a disparity between the best of Lewis’s scholarly writing – Irwin singles out his Emergence of Modern Turkey for deserved praise – and his neo-conservative advocacy, which gained urgency after the attacks on America of September 11, 2001. Lewis’s urging the United States to invade Iraq, in 2002, is said to have had an effect on policy makers; he also speculated (wrongly, in my view) that the people of Iran “look to us for help and liberation”. In his luridly titled Crisis of Islam: Holy war and unholy terror, which he wrote after the attacks of 2001, Lewis observed that, “if the [Muslim fundamentalists] can persuade the world of Islam to accept their views and their leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead . . . . Al-Qa’ida and related groups will clash and the other groups will clash with the other enemies of Islam – Russia, China, India . . . . if the fundamentalists are correct in their calculations and succeed in their war, then a dark future awaits the world . . .”.

The predictions and generalizations in this passage are so vast as to make it almost worthless; there is much that is mischievous and misleading in Lewis’s positing the inevitability of conflict. In 1982, in the course of his response to criticisms that Said had levelled at him in Orientalism, Lewis observed that “the term Orientalist is now polluted beyond salvation”. If it wasn’t then, it is now, and Bernard Lewis is partly to blame. But Robert Irwin – loyal, respectful – does not show us this.
This, perhaps, illustrates why For Lust of Knowing will not supplant Orientalism, and why the two should be read alongside each other. For all its errors and excesses, and its venerable age – it was first published in 1978 – Edward Said’s book reminds us why this academic discipline, more than most, connects with profound emotions and memories, and why distrust of Orientalists is not altogether deluded, all of the time.