For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In the late seventeenth century, the French traveller Jean de Thévenot, in Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant (3 volumes, 1665, 1674, 1678), was perhaps the first to diagnose a sickness in what was superficially still a great power in the East, for he judged that the Ottoman empire was in rapid decline: ‘All these peoples have nothing more to boast about than their ruins and their rags.’3 Thévenot’s analysis proved to be an accurate one and a few decades later, in 1699, by the Treaty of Carlowitz, the Turks had to accept humiliating defeat and cede Hungary, Transylvania and Podolia to an alliance of Christian powers. Western fears of the triumph of Islam and the Turk abated.

  Neither ancient fears nor a new predatory interest in the Near East had translated into any substantial interest in the language or culture of the Turks. Knolles, the author of a General History of the Turks, quoted at the start of this chapter, knew no Turkish. There was no chair in Turkish studies in any European university in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nor was there any interest in translating Turkish literature. There was nothing that could be called a tradition of Turkish studies in Britain or France until the twentieth century.4 Although eighteenth-century diplomats, merchants, soldiers and manuscript hunters travelled extensively in the Ottoman empire, they tended to rely on local Christians and Jews to act as interpreters of the alien language and culture. Phanariot Greeks, Maronites and Armenians served as agents of the various European powers.

  Those who acted as intermediaries and interpreters were known as tarjumans or dragomans (from the Arabic tarjama, ‘to translate’). There were schools for such translators in Paris, Venice and Pera (the suburb of Constantinople on the north side of the Golden Horn).5 We shall discuss the careers of two such dragomans, Jean-Joseph Marcel and Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, subsequently. The training such men received was in contemporary Arabic or Turkish and it was very different from the sort of thing taught at universities by the intellectual heirs of Pococke or Erpenius. The great Orientalist Sir William Jones (on whom see below) was to comment disparagingly on the scholarly attainments of the dragomans: ‘It has generally happened that persons who have resided among the TURKS, and who from their skill in EASTERN dialects, have best been qualified to present us with an exact account of that nation, were either confined to a low sphere of life, or were engaged in views of interest, and but little addicted to polite letters or philosophy; while they, who, from their exalted stations and refined taste for literature, have had both the opportunity and inclination of penetrating into the secrets of TURKISH policy, were totally ignorant of the language used at Constantinople, and consequently were destitute of the sole means by which they might learn, with any degree of certainty, the sentiments and prejudices of so singular a people… As to the generality of interpreters, we cannot expect from men of their condition any depth of reasoning, or acuteness of observation; if mere words are all they profess, mere words must be all they can pretend to know.’ Jones’s animadversions notwithstanding, the institution was to have a long history and Sir Andrew Ryan in his autobiography, The Last of the Dragomans, describes attending such a school for interpreters in Constantinople in 1899.

  Conditions of trade within the Ottoman sultanate were regulated by commercial treaties known as the Capitulations. The French were granted Capitulations in the Ottoman empire as early as 1535. In the second half of the seventeenth century Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister of Louis XIV, was particularly interested in promoting France’s commercial interests in the Levant. (He also sponsored hunts for Oriental manuscripts and antiquities.) A Levant Company was founded at Marseilles in 1671. The French were particularly involved in the purchase of cotton from Palestinian and Lebanese ports. There was also a strong French commercial presence in Alexandria and in the course of the eighteenth century the merchants of Marseilles and their political allies began to contemplate the desirability of a French occupation of Egypt. As the sultanate declined, the ambassadors of France, Britain and the other powers were successful in getting ever more extravagant concessions and privileges. Their merchants acquired a status not far short of diplomatic immunity. Moreover their servants and interpreters, many of them native Christians and Jews, were often covered by the same privileges.

  France’s Levant Company competed with the British Levant Company. Britain’s main commercial base in the Near East was the British Levant Company’s ‘factory’ in Aleppo, a city that was a major staging post for the silk trade.6 (In those days ‘factory’ referred to a trading settlement in another country.) By the early eighteenth century the British Levant Company was in steep decline, while the fortunes of the British East India Company, by contrast, prospered. Britain’s rivalry with France spanned the continents. This was to come to a head in the Seven Years War (1756–63) in which European and global territorial ambitions were thoroughly muddled. As Macaulay put it in a famous essay on Frederick the Great: ‘In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coramandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ If the British did define their own identity by distinguishing it from some notional ‘Other’ that was corrupt, despotic and licentious, then France was certainly that Other. William Hogarth’s painting, The Gate of Calais (1749), with its depiction of scrawny priest-ridden Frenchmen slavering enviously over beef destined for the British, graphically illustrated British contempt for the French.

  The ultimate triumph of the British over the French in India in the late eighteenth century was the crucial step towards establishing the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Though the British Levant Company still retained its ‘factories’ in Aleppo and elsewhere in the Middle East, Britain’s commercial ambitions were increasingly focused on India. From the 1740s onwards the British and French, represented by their respective India Companies, fought over the remains of the Mughal empire in India. In 1761, in the late stages of the Seven Years War, the French were decisively defeated and the British East India Company became the major power in the subcontinent. The Company had an interest in training its employees in the relevant languages and eventually it set up exams in Arabic and offered small financial bonuses for those who passed the exams. The Company also sponsored John Richardson’s A Grammar of the Arabick Language (1776).7 Nevertheless, Persian and Turkish were really far more important for the imperialist project. Persian was the language of the Indian courts, but somehow even this failed to lead to any corresponding growth in interest in Persian studies in England until William Jones took up the language as a schoolboy craze. As for Sanskrit studies, as we shall see, this was pioneered by a Frenchman, Anquetil-Duperron, and then, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the field was more or less monopolized by German academics and writers.

  While the French were increasingly dominating the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean and the British were establishing their Raj in India, the Dutch were setting about the colonization of Java and Sumatra and other islands and the Russians were expanding in Central Asia, as well as continuing to make territorial gains at the expense of Ottoman Turkey. Yet only perhaps in Russia was there a correlation between the numbers of Muslims conquered by the imperialist power and a growth in Orientalist studies. On the whole British and French diplomats, soldiers and merchants in the Levant and Muslim India worked with native interpreters and informants. It was a rare individual who took the trouble to acquaint himself with the Qur’an and Arabic and Persian literature. In the early eighteenth century there was as yet little crossover between the worlds of imperialism and Orientalism.

  THE FIRST ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ISLAM

  Although Latin continued to be the chief language of scholarship, the various vernaculars gained in academic respectability from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. France was the territory where there was the greatest chance of finding serious books published in the vernacular rather than in Latin. (German scholars tended obstinately to stick with Latin.) As far as Orientalism was concerned
, the publication in French of d’Herbelot’s encyclopedic Bibliothèque orientale was a landmark, as the broader reading public in France only really became aware of the literature and history of the Arabs, Persians and Turks when that work appeared. Galland’s subsequent publication of a translation of The Thousand and One Nights into French further increased general awareness of and interest in Oriental culture.

  Barthélémy d’Herbelot (1625–95) was a fervent Catholic who, after first studying the classics and philosophy, took up the study of Hebrew in order to understand the Old Testament better. He went on to become Professor of Syriac at the Collège de France. D’Herbelot was one of a number of antiquarians and Orientalists whose studies were sponsored by Colbert. Although the Bibliothèque can be seen as a forerunner of the twentieth-century Encyclopaedia of Islam and was indeed used as a work of reference, nevertheless d’Herbelot’s compilation had a rather belle-lettristic flavour, as anecdotes and occasional verses padded out the entries. Plutarch’s Lives furnished a literary model, as d’Herbelot was as interested in drawing out morals as chronicling events. He had never travelled in the Middle East and naturally he had no interest in its contemporary politics or commerce. Like the encyclopedias that succeeded it, the Bibliothèque’s entries were arranged in alphabetical order. He was vaguely apologetic about it, claiming that it ‘does not produce as much confusion as one might imagine’.8 Gibbon in the footnotes to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire patronized it as ‘an agreeable miscellany’ and claimed that he never could ‘digest the alphabetical order’. Gibbon also noted that d’Herbelot seemed to be stronger on Persian than on Arabic history, though he could hardly have written the later volumes of his history without frequent recourse to the Bibliothèque orientale.9

  The Bibliothèque concentrated on Arabic, Persian and Turkish culture, though an appendix devoted to Chinese culture was added in a later edition. In his researches, d’Herbelot relied on the Arabic manuscripts that had been assembled under the patronage of Colbert and others and placed in the royal library. D’Herbelot, who had no notion of source criticism, made exceptionally heavy use of late Persian compilations, but his task was made easier by one particular manuscript that had been acquired by Colbert’s agent, Antoine Gal-land, in Istanbul. This was the Kashf al-Zunun by Hajji Khalifa, also known as KatibCelebi. Hajji Khalifa was a seventeenth-century Turkish historian and bibliographer of manuscripts and his Kashf al-Zunun listed and briefly described 14,500 works in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This was the great discovery and reference resource of seventeenth-century Orientalism and it was translated into Latin much later by Gustav Flugel (in 1853–8). The Kashf al-Zunun decisively shaped Orientalists’ image of Islamic culture.10 Among other things, Hajji Khalifa’s alphabetical organization may have influenced d’Herbelot’s decision to organize his material in the same way. D’Herbelot also drew heavily on al-Zamakhshari (1075–1144), a Qur’anic commentator who also wrote on grammar and lexicography. When dealing with Arab History, it was natural that d’Herbelot, a devout Catholic, should rely where possible on Christian Arab chroniclers and, following his medieval and Renaissance precursors, he fiercely denounced Muhammad as an impostor. D’Herbelot argued that a great deal of the Islamic revelation derived from the Old Testament and Jewish lore. For d’Herbelot, who was steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, the Orient was an unexplored antiquity and, though he was not particularly interested in pre-Islamic Arabia, he was passionately interested in pre-Islamic Persia and Egypt.

  D’Herbelot died before his Bibliothèque orientale could be printed, but it was published in 1697 by his friend and associate, Antoine Galland. Galland also wrote an introduction to the work in which, among other things, he suggested that a study of the Arabic sources might shed additional light on the history of the Crusades. Galland, like d’Herbelot, had been thoroughly educated in the classics and early on in his career his chief area of expertise had been in numismatics. From 1670 to 1675 he was attached to the French embassy in Constantinople where, assisted by the embassy’s Greek dragomans, he learnt Turkish. Having mastered Turkish, he studied Arabic and Persian with Turks in Constantinople. He had a second spell in the Orient from 1679 to 1688. One of his main missions was to hunt out rare coins, medals, curios and manuscripts for Louis XV. His other important task was to research the opinions of the various prelates of the Eastern Churches regarding the real presence of Christ in the eucharist and transubstantiation. It was hoped that their opinions might be used by Jansenist polemicists against Protestants. There is a Rochefoucauldian flavour to Galland’s Pensées morales des Arabes, which he published in 1682 and, in general, this was an age when Arabculture was given a courtly and sententious gloss by its European translators and popularizers. Later, Galland held the Chair of Arabic at the Collège Royale from 1709 onwards.

  From 1704, Galland commenced the publication of his translation of the work that would make him famous, The Thousand and One Nights. The final volumes of Les Mille et une nuits came out in 1717. He intended his translation of the medieval story collection to be not merely a literary entertainment, but also a work of instruction that would inform its readership about the way of life of Oriental peoples, and to that end he inserted numerous explanatory glosses in his translation. In the introduction to the first volume, he wrote that part of the pleasure of reading these stories was in learning about ‘the customs and manners of Orientals, and the ceremonies, both pagan and Mohammedan, for these things are better described in these tales than in the accounts of writers and travellers’.

  D’Herbelot and Galland were the first Orientalists to take a serious interest in the secular literature of the Middle East. Galland’s translation of the Nights swiftly became a raging bestseller (as did the translations of his French into English, German and other languages).11 The Bibliothèque orientale, on the other hand, was an expensive book and it never sold well in France. With the death of Galland, serious research in France into Islam and Arabculture more or less ceased for a while.

  Although future editions of the Bibliothèque would appear with corrections and additions, those corrections and additions were based on the researches of scholars who were not Frenchmen, such as Schul-tens and Reiske (on both of whom see below). Prominent French writers who wrote about Islam later in the eighteenth century usually knew no Arabic or any other Oriental language. For example, Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers’s posthumously published Vie de Mahomet (1730) was really an exercise in church-and establishment-bashing.12 Boulainvilliers relied heavily on the writings of Edward Pococke, though Pococke, a Royalist churchman, would have been horrified by the use made of his researches. The Vie de Mahomet set out to shock by denying that the Prophet Muhammad was an impostor and instead praising him as a great statesman and orator. Islam was presented as a pastoral Arab anticipation of eighteenth-century Deism. Boulainvilliers, who knew no Arabic, was one of a number of writers who adopted the device of pretending to write about Arabian matters when their real targets were the Catholic Church and the French monarchy.

  Libertine and Enlightenment authors were particularly fond of this sort of literary disguise. Voltaire wrote by turns in dispraise and praise of the Prophet, depending on what local political point he wished to make. His play, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète, presented Muhammad as an impostor and tyrant. On the other hand, in the Essai sur l’histoire générale, Voltaire praised the Prophet as a great, cunning and bold leader. (Quite a few French Enlightenment thinkers took to praising Islam as a way of attacking Christianity, the Pope or the Bourbon monarchy.) Even so Voltaire still took it for granted that the Prophet was an impostor, and though he might have appeared to vacillate about the merits of Islam and the Prophet, he was, like most eighteenth-century thinkers, quite unambiguous in his attitude to the medieval Crusades. He maintained that the only thing that Europeans gained from the Crusades was leprosy.13

  SLEEPY DONS AND IMPOVERISHED ORIENTALISTS

  The stagnation of French Orientalism throughou
t most of the eighteenth century was mirrored in England. In general, this was not a good time for English universities. Oxford and Cambridge were intellectually stagnant. Only theological controversies continued to rouse much passion. In a letter of 1734, the poet Thomas Gray wrote to Horace Walpole about Cambridge as follows: ‘The Masters of Colledges [sic] are twelve gray-hair’d Gentlefolks, who are all mad with Pride; the Fellows are sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things; the Fellows-Com: are imitators of the Fellows, or else Beaux, or else nothing.’ Horace Walpole thought no better of Oxford and described it as ‘the nursery of nonsense and bigotry’.14 Edward Gibbon, looking back on his time at Oxford, wrote as follows: ‘To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months most idle and unprofitable of my life.’ Gibbon had vaguely thought of studying Arabic at Oxford, but was discouraged by his tutor from doing so.15 Much later, in the 1790s, Chateaubriand, an émigré exile in England, gloomily celebrated the decay of that country’s seats of learning: ‘Already the nurseries of knowledge, Oxford and Cambridge, are assuming a deserted aspect: their colleges and Gothic chapels, half-abandoned, distress the eye: in their cloisters, near the sepulchral stones of the middle ages, lie, forgotten, the marble annals of the ancient peoples of Greece: ruins guarding ruins.’ Sluggards and dullards occupied the university chairs. When lectures on Oriental matters were given, which was rarely, they were poorly attended. In the course of his study of the nineteenth-century biographer of Scaliger and university reformer Mark Pattison, John Sparrow had occasion to record that it ‘is often said that Oxford did not emerge from the eighteenth century until half way through the nineteenth’.16