Is There a Middle East?
Page 16
All pilgrims are not the same, and one should not assume that a specific genre of Holy Land travel accounts can be reduced to a shared template apart from the imaginable ways in which the land can be construed as sacred. Some texts are little more than trip logs, others serve as guides for future travelers, and a few are elaborated narrations that tell stories and inspire devotion. My point is that narratives that fix on the Middle East as the physical sign of God’s directing of history, all history past and future, do not invariably view the East as inherently inferior to the West. Following the passage quoted above from Orientalism, Said insists, “To be a European in the Orient always involves being a consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings.”30 His selective choice of travelers, avoiding the vast repertoire of avowedly religious texts, serves his point well.31 The problem is that none of the examples that come immediately to mind of the literary critic treat the Holy Land as sacred. Flaubert and Disraeli visited the region, but it is their novels rather than their published travel accounts that were influential.32 Alexander Kinglake, in his pre-tabloid Eothen, self-consciously refers to himself as “a headstrong and not very amiable traveller, whose prejudices in favour of other people’s notions were then exceedingly slight.”33 In The Innocents Abroad, as one of the first steamboat tourists, Mark Twain quite consciously satirized the genre, offering “no apologies for any departure from the usual style of travel writing.”34 These are entertaining accounts to read, but they constitute the exception rather than the rule.
My criticism of Said’s conceptual model of Orientalist discourse does not dismiss the obvious ethnocentrism, especially of religiously motivated authors, in all travel texts. “Every interpretation, every structure created for the Orient, then, is a reinterpretation, a rebuilding of it,” argues Said.35 But this is true for travel texts written at any time or about anywhere. Unlike a novel, the author of a travel account cannot escape his necessary presence in the text, which becomes as much a vehicle for memoir as a collection of information, whether geographic facts or romantic farces. There is often a concern, whether fulfilled or not, in these texts to be accurate. Most travelogues, especially those over the past three centuries, are justified as corrections of the mistakes in earlier accounts. This is especially the case for the nineteenth century, which is the focus of Said’s interest in Oriental travel writing as a narrative tradition. Thus, Reverend Edward Daniel Clarke in his early nineteenth-century account insists he will not use “monk’s eyes” and will correct the misrepresentations of earlier travelers.36 Nevertheless, the concern for an absolute historical truth, validated in secular, scientific terms rather than rote confirmation of biblical historicity, is a relatively recent phenomenon.37
Because the land was holy, there was an extraordinary incentive to experience it firsthand rather than rely on the ambiguity of the sacred scriptures themselves or the inadequacies of earlier accounts. The rationale of Sir Henry Blount, in his A Voyage in the Levant (1636), lays bare the common rhetoric: “Wherefore I, desiring somewhat to inform myself of the Turkish nation, would not sit down with a book knowledge thereof, but rather (through all the hazard and endurance of travel), receive it from my own eye, not dazzled with any affection, prejudacy or mist of education, which preoccupate the mind, and delude it with partial ideas, as with a false glass, representing the object in colours, and proportions untrue.”38 Blount was certainly right, in his time, to question book knowledge about the Holy Land. He figured the only rational way to resolve his curiosity was to go there and see the place with his own eyes. Given the travel conditions of the times, Ottoman control of the region, thieves, and the lucrative tourist-gouging guild of the locals, such a trip was indeed a hazard. The hubris, of course, is that seeing the region firsthand with his own eyes dispels error and delusion. Yet, it must be admitted that such travel created the opportunity for more accurate understanding, just as the archaeological exploration of the region has eventually yielded a critical historical lens on the sacred history.
SACRED GROUND: THE LAND AND THE BOOK
Our first walk in the Land of Promise. To me a land of promises more numerous and not less interesting than those given to the Father of the Faithful, when the Lord said, “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.” It is given to me also, and I mean to make it mine from Dan to Beersheba before I leave it.
—William M. Thomson, The Land and the Book
To the pilgrim and settler, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the Holy Land is in the eyes of the beholder. My interest here is not in the overall genre of travel narratives and devotional spinoffs but rather how a given text that appears quintessentially “Orientalist” by default may be probed to reveal an imaginary that is sacred and at the same time must fit into cultural, political, and individual contexts. A key element to Said’s Orientalism is that Western narratives invariably treat the Orient as “all absence” so that “we must not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence.”39 But what about those texts in which the key objective is presence in the land in order to write the book and in which there is a sacred dimension of that land that transcends the author and those he or she describes? An example is provided by Thomson, the American Protestant missionary who arrived in Syria in 1834 at age twenty-eight. Only fifteen years after the first American missionary activity there in 1819, the Ohio-born Thomson came with a twofold goal far removed from antebellum American foreign policy at the time. He certainly was commissioned to bring the Gospel as he knew it back to the land of its origin, but he also came to live for the experience itself. He settled in for several decades, a choice made bittersweet by the death of his wife soon after arrival. His goal, as stated at the very start of his book (quoted above) was to walk through the Land of Promise, not just as a pilgrim but in order to make the Holy Land his.
This would seem to be a prime example of the Orientalism Said rightly ascribes to another reverend, William Muir, whose mid-nineteenth-century biography of Muhammad is the epitome of Christian prejudicial dismissal.40 The obvious rationale for missionary presence was the Great Commission, which prompted Christians over the centuries to spread the message of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. But missionaries to the Holy Land, especially Palestine, faced an ironic fate. They were not bringing news of Jesus to the heathen who had never heard the message, but they were returning to the very land where Jesus had lived. Jerusalem had long contained resident populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, each with their holy sites. Reverend Thomson finds a lesson for his own role while musing on an ethnographic datum, a type of wallet that he suggests David would have used to carry the stones for his slingshot and that farmers would carry as a “universal vade-mecum.”41 “Do you suppose that this wallet, in which they carry their provisions, is the ‘scrip’ which the disciples were directed not to take in their first missionary tours?” he asks.42 The pragmatic Protestant observer interprets the advice of the disciples’ master as a general principle for preaching among one’s own brethren. “The best way to get to their hearts and their confidence is to throw yourselves upon their hospitality,” he concludes; even the modern Muslim devout is cited as doing this in the same region where Jesus sent his disciples. “Of course,” continues Thomson, “such ‘instructions’ can only have a general application to those who go forth, not to neighbours of the same faith and nation, but to distant climes, and to heathen tribes, and under conditions wholly diverse from those of the fishermen of Galilee.”43
Thomson is well aware that his mission field is unique, one in which it is important to pay close attention to Jesus’ own directives for spreading the word because the Oriental customs are assumed to have remained essentially unchanged. The disciples were admonished to “salute no man by the way.” Why? Because, given the Oriental penchant for consuming time with tedious salutations, this would “waste time, distract attention, and in many ways hinder the prompt
and faithful discharge of their important mission.” Similarly, the disciples were not supposed to go house to house. “They were, therefore, first to seek a becoming habitation to lodge in, and there abide until their work in that city was accomplished,” suggests Thomson.44 Cultural Yankee that he was, Thomson no doubt thought himself following in spirit the directive to travel without a purse simply because he was not gainfully employed (like a fisherman) apart from the Lord’s call. As a missionary called to spread the Gospel he should ignore the distractions and otherwise necessary social obligations along the way and secure lodging until his work was done. Yet as a resident in a land where every step conjured sacred history, there was clearly more to his work than this missionary call. This was not a self-imposed exile at the end of the earth among heathens who had no idea of Christianity; as a Christian, Thomson was free to rejoice at returning to the very source of his faith. As sacred turf, the land itself is not inferior, nor are the individuals who need the Gospel easily dismissed or ignored, since in many respects they remain a living testimony to scriptural history.
But who was he called to convert? Local Christians, with whom he finds little common spiritual cause, are set in their ways. Condemning the “buffoonery and the profane orgies of Greek and Latin Christian monks in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Thomson concludes, “I doubt whether there is anything more disgraceful to be witnessed in any heathen temple.”45 This was hardly a modern notion in his mind, because Jesus himself upbraided the cities that did not repent and his fellow religionists who were mere whited sepulchers.46 Thomson observed “how densely the poor Jews can and do pack themselves away in the most wretched hovels” in Jerusalem, but his guided tour of the Holy Land is more concerned with uncovering the spots made famous by biblical Jews. Thomson does not appear to subscribe to the messianic eschatological fervor of some other Protestant missionaries, who thought the remaining Jews must be converted before Christ would return.47 Converting Muslims in the domain of the Sublime Porte was a suspect act from the start. The fact is that few Muslims ever chose to convert to a distinctly Western mode of Christianity, notwithstanding the theoretical death sentence on the head of an apostate. But acknowledged “heretics” were a different story. On passing by the mysterious Nusayriya sect, Thomson opined that “they were fragments of Syria’s most ancient inhabitants—descendants of those sons of Canaan” and that “perhaps many of their brethren, when driven from the south by Joshua, took refuge with them.”48 Here were remnants of the lost from the time of the conquest. Yet Thomson’s concern is not so much to bring them to salvation, which they resisted, as it is to be “better acquainted with the origin, history, manners, customs, and religion of this remarkable people.”
As a devotional travel guide for the English-speaking Christian, The Land and the Book does not leave out the people along the way. The narrative is more than an itinerary of a pilgrim passing through; it is very much the reflections of a stranger who settled and made this Holy Land his own. In the first two pages of his narrative it is the biblical past that comes to life first. Abraham, Moses, the old Phoenicians, Hebrew poets, and Paul enter as the readers’ companions before setting off on a ramble “ala bab Allâh (towards God’s gate), as our Arabs say when they neither know nor care where they are going.”49 Not surprisingly, Thomson is anything but a neutral observer. His ethnocentrically American Protestant views of the local populations drive the narrative. “Have you any curiosity to see a real Arab village?” he asks, after arriving at the Jordan River and halfway through his lengthy narrative. “Will these coarse mat walls and roofs shed rain and defend from cold?” he continues. The response is candid, but ambiguous. “Better than you imagine; still, they are a miserable abode for rational beings. They are the most sinister, ill-conditioned race I have ever seen, and do not begin to fill my beau ideal of the free, proud denizen of the desert.”50 The major reason for Thomson’s seeming tirade here is the “squalid poverty and inexpressible filth” in a village where there were converts.51 He experienced this firsthand while stranded there for three days during a major storm. “The good people did what they could to make me comfortable, and were not to blame if my eyes could not bear to be smoked like bacon, nor my nerves endure ceaseless titillation of fleas,” Thomson confides.52
A modern reader can easily dismiss such rhetoric as racist and dismiss the author as motivated by a latent desire to validate his own superiority. But his text as a whole provides more nuance. The holiness of the “land” in The Land and the Book is very much an idyll in which the open country is superior to towns and cities. “The Bible is not a city book; its scenes are mostly laid in the country—its themes suggested by, and its illustrations drawn from the same source; there most of it was thought, felt, spoken, acted, and even written.”53 The very premise of his narrative, as an in situ traveling biblical commentary, is unusual in the genre. This is not a book about the land and the book as much as it is a personalized travel guide extolling the rustic virtues as well as the visible relics. In devotional mode, Thomson concludes, “To reproduce and vitalize all this, we need the country, and best of all, this country.”
The irony in this idyll is that the land is populated by people worthy of being saved, unlike the Canaanites of old who were wiped out. The current customs of the people encountered along the author’s excursions provide illustrations of Bible characters; this is a major theme for The Land and the Book and no doubt the most important aspect of its success as a text. Even the author’s confrontation with “a troop of the most savage Bedawîn” provides a devotional lesson for the thousands of illusions to robbers in the Bible.”54 Yet Thomson lives to tell the story because he was under the protection of a guide from the tribe of an important sheikh noted for his “dignified manner and intelligence.” All Bedouins are not the same. The Bedouins encountered, not surprisingly, fail to fit the author’s beau ideal as living testimonies of the biblical patriarchs. “Pshaw!” he humphs, “the Bedawîn are mere barbarians—rough when rational, and in all else coarse and vulgar.”55 Yet Thomson as narrator accepts a contextual rationale that does not view the Bedouin as inferior by nature: “the ancient, generous customs of the Bedawîn were being corrupted by Turkish oppression.”56 Noting the fear of peasants over the insecurity in the region, Thomson turns sympathetic political scientist: “Here is the true explanation of the wide-spread desolations of this beautiful country; and unless some stronger government than the Turkish shall come in to repress these intolerable robbers, the farmers will be driven toward the sea-board, until the whole interior is abandoned and changed to frightful deserts.”57
Being barbaric does not make the local inhabitants dispensable or less than human as God’s creatures that he was sent to minister to, no matter what the results. At several points during his rhetorical journey, Thomson suggests that some of the surviving Arabs before him are the literal descendants of Bible peoples.58 It is tempting to read The Land and the Book and conclude that the local people would be absent in the mind of the author because they are absent in the title. I suggest, however, that the various groups described by Thomson serve as more than foils for biblical history. There is a sincere compassion for the hardships faced by the people as people. This can be seen, without having to read contrapuntally, in Thomson’s description of the 1837 earthquake that destroyed Safed. In discussing the Jewish immigrants who repopulated Safed after this earthquake, Thomson reduces them in one passage to “an incredible and grotesque melange of filth and finery, Pharisaic self-righteousness and Sadducean licentiousness.”59 This is a fine example of rhetoric for an isolated quote. But the account of his visit to the scene of the earthquake tells a different story. Arriving with a party to bring medical assistance and supplies, he admits to being “utterly confounded when the reality burst upon our sight.” That reality was an entire town in ruin, with hundreds killed by the disaster or buried alive. “Parents heard their little ones crying, Papa! Mamma! fainter and fainter, until hushed in death, while they
were struggling to free themselves, or labouring with desperate energy to throw off the fallen rocks and timber from their dying children,” he laments. “O God of mercy! my heart even now sickens at the thought of that long black winter’s night. Most hideous spectacle, may I never see its like.”60 In such moments the Oriental other strewn throughout the text is humanized.
There is no question that Thomson sees his own values as superior; he is, after all, a missionary who has dedicated his life to spreading these values. But he is neither an imperialist nor an advocate of colonial rule. After describing the difficulties of the local eye-for-an-eye customary law and the difficulties faced by women, he suggests that following his Gospel would alleviate such problems here as he believed it has done in America; yet he warns: “But such large changes in social habits and domestic institutions, to be brought about safely, must begin from within, and develop gradually, and not be rudely forced into society by foreign influence acting from without; and the Christian reformer should be contented to wait for this gradual development.”61 Thomson cites corruption and the weakness of government in providing security as the chief problems: “No wonder people oppressed and robbed as these peasants are, become dishonest and cruel, and even vent their pent-up rage on everything under their control,” he concludes, even before Marx had laid out his ideas on exploitation of the masses.62 My point is that reducing rhetoric to a discourse of bias sacrifices the nuance that salvages the humanity that exists alongside, and at times comes to dominate, the omnipresent bias of ethnocentrism.
EPILOGUE: WHEN DID THE HOLY LAND STOP BEING HOLY?
Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the Curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is dreamland.