For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Like Silvestre de Sacy, Hammer-Purgstall interested himself in Oriental sects and, like de Sacy, he was extremely conservative and nervous also about secret revolutionary conspiracies. Doubtless the paranoia of his master Metternich about international conspiracies also influenced him. Hammer-Purgstall went further than de Sacy in suggesting that sinister Western groups like the Illuminists, the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians had Oriental origins. In The Mysteries of Baphomet Revealed (1818), Hammer-Purgstall brought his Orientalist expertise to bear on the history of the Knights Templar and the trial and condemnation of the order at the beginning of the fourteenth century. On the basis of the records of trial proceedings, which had been rigged to bring in the verdict desired by the Templars’ enemy, Philip IV of France, plus some rather dubious (i.e. fake) archaeological artefacts, Hammer-Purgstall concluded that the Knights Templar were indeed guilty as charged of heresy and blasphemy. They were apostates from Christianity who worshipped the demon Baphomet. If this was not enough, they also worshipped the Grail, which was a Gnostic object of adoration. A skewed reading of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval epic poem, Parzival, provided evidence of this.17

  In the same year that he sought to unmask the horrid heresy of the Templars, he also published Geschichte der Assassinen on the Assassins, or Hashishin sect, whom he presented as proto-Masons intent on conspiracy to subvert the world. His history of this sect was intended as a warning against ‘the pernicious influence of secret societies… and… the dreadful prostitution of religion to the horrors of unbridled ambition’. The Assassins of Syria and Iran were the ancestors of Europe’s subversives, the Illuminati: ‘To believe nothing and to dare all was, in two words, the sum of this system, which annihilated every principle of religion and morality, and had no other object than to execute ambitious designs with suitable ministers, who daring all and knowing nothing, since they consider everything a cheat and nothing forbidden, are the best tools of an infernal policy. A system which, with no other aim than the gratification of an insatiable lust for domination, instead of seeking the highest of human objects, precipitates itself into the abyss, and mangling itself, is buried amidst the ruins of thrones and altars, the wreck of national happiness, and the universal execration of mankind.’18

  Hammer-Purgstall’s enthusiasm for Persian mystical poetry and his fantasies about sinister Oriental sects were both alike part of a Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment values of the late eighteenth century. Reason and science were at a discount among those who sought wisdom in the East and who dreamt of finding a lost wholeness situated in an ideal Oriental past. Hammer-Purgstall’s researches greatly influenced Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), the Romantic poet and professor whose extremely free translations of Arabic poetry and of the wisdom of the Brahmins are really part of the history of German literature rather than of the serious study of the Orient.19

  Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–88) was not a Romantic. After studying theology in Leipzig, he went to Paris in 1824 to study with de Sacy. Fleischer was in Dresden and then Leipzig from 1835 to 1888 where he taught Arabic, Persian and Turkish. He edited two of the great medieval commentators on the Qur’an, al-Zamakhshari and al-Baydawi. (These sorts of scholarly undertakings may seem dull to the modern eye, but such critical editions of key works were the necessary basis for a more profound understanding of Islam.) He was also the leading figure behind the founding of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. De Sacy taught quite a number of other German Orientalists, including Freytag, Ahlwardt, Habicht, Gustav Weil, Kosegarten, Gustav Flügel, Franz Bopp, Eichhorn and Mohl, but Fleischer was his most important pupil, becoming, after de Sacy, the teacher of the next generation of Orientalists, including Caspari, Dietrici, Goldziher, Hartmann, Sachau, Rosen and others. Both the content and the style of Fleischer’s teaching were modelled on that of de Sacy, as Fleischer was a grammatical positivist with a narrow philological approach.20

  The dominance of Germans in Orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due in part to the large number of universities in Germany. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century every German prince seems to have felt the need to have a university and those who decided to have an Oriental chair usually sent their candidates to de Sacy to be trained. (Heinrich Ewald was the only important Arabist of his generation not trained by de Sacy and Ewald was primarily a Hebraist.) The Lutheran University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) enjoyed a particular prestige and it was there that members of the Protestant nobility tended to study. (Some of those Protestants were English, Dutch and Scandinavian.) Göttingen’s approach to the classics was particularly important in shaping the intellectual map of Europe in this century. Hitherto Latin and Greek authors had been studied in order to imitate their style alone. Rote-learning played an important part in this process. However, classicists at Göttingen now began to concentrate on the content and the underlying philosophy of the texts they studied.21

  Biblical studies and classical studies were the dominant intellectual discourses of the nineteenth century and there was a considerable overlap between the two. As has been noted, the great theologian and biblical expert, Michaelis, had presided at Göttingen in the late eighteenth century and it was his enquiries that had inspired the Danish expedition to the Middle East. He was also the teacher of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). From 1788 onwards Eichhorn held the Chair of Oriental Studies at Göttingen and did important work on, among other things, the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdoms of Ghassan and Hira. However, his main work was in biblical studies and his Einleitung im Alte Testament (‘Introduction to the Old Testament’) was one of the most important documents of the age. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who plagiarized so many German thinkers without acknowledgement, pillaged Eichhorn. Eichhorn had speculated about a primitive Oriental mentality and suggested that, though the Book of Genesis was not literally true, it mythologized events that had actually happened.22 The classicist Friedrich August Wolf, who taught at Halle and then Berlin, was in turn inspired by Eichhorn’s Einleitung, whose methodology he applied to Greek texts. In Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) Wolf demonstrated that the textual unity of both the Iliad and the Odyssey was illusory and he set out a methodology for detecting the various strata of their composition by various hands over the centuries. Wolf was perhaps the leading figure in a generation of classicists who sought to place the texts they studied in a wider historical and cultural context.23 Although Göttingen was the pre-eminent centre for state-of-the-art research in nineteenth-century Europe, Tübingen, with its vast theological faculty, was hardly less important and it was there that David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) did the research that led on to his scandalous Das Leben Jesu (1835), a biography that was based on a destructively critical analysis of the Gospels. Of course, such investigations by Eichhorn, Wolf and others had no direct relevance to the study of the Qur’an and the early history of Islam, but in the long run it was inevitable that scholars who had cut their teeth on source-critical techniques, as applied to the Bible or Greek and Latin texts, should think of applying those same techniques to early Arabic materials.

  A key feature of the century was the emancipation of the Jews in Germany, Britain and elsewhere and their consequent entry into the universities. Already by the 1840s a striking number of professors in Germany were Jewish, as Disraeli had noted in his novel, Coningsby. Jewish scholars played an important role in pioneering critical approaches to Islam and the Qur’an – approaches that surely owed something to the rabbinic and Talmudic education that so many of them had received. Abraham Geiger (1810–74) had had a Talmudic education before studying in Bonn with Wilhem Freytag (one of de Sacy’s disciples). In 1833, while still a young man, Geiger had published a prize-winning essay, Was hat Muhammed aus dem Judentum aufgenommen? (‘What did Muhammad adopt from Judaism?’), in which Geiger sought to identify those elements in the Qur’an that he thought the Prophet had deliberately borrowed from the Jews. Though
the essay was enormously influential for later critical approaches to Islam, Geiger was not so very interested in Arabic sources and after doing some work on Muslim Spain, he returned to his main interest, Jewish studies.24

  Gustav Weil (1808–89) started out in rabbinic studies, before studying Arabic in Heidelberg and then going on to Paris in 1830 to study with de Sacy. Weil also travelled in Egypt and Istanbul. This industrious, if somewhat dull, scholar wrote the standard life of the Prophet, as well as a history of the caliphate in five volumes (1846–62). Weil seems to have been innocent of the advanced critical techniques being used by scholars in parallel fields. His historiographical technique hardly amounted to more than translating or condensing extracts from medieval Arabchronicles and sticking them together in chronological order with little, if anything, in the way of interpretation or analysis. In particular, he relied heavily on manuscripts of al-Tabari, a tenth-century chronicler who is one of the standard sources on the early history of Islam and the caliphate. Inevitably, Weil found much to criticize in Hammer-Purgstall’s romantic fantasies.25

  If al-Tabari was his source, Leopold von Ranke’s Die römische Päpste im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1834–6) was the model for Weil’s fact-driven, dry-as-dust mode of proceeding. Ranke (1795–1886), who taught in Berlin, sought to present history ‘as it really happened’. (These days such an ambition seems remarkably naive.) His approach was anti-Romantic and based on research on primary sources, backed up by footnotes. He used philological expertise to expose forged documents. Although Ranke, a staggeringly prolific scholar whose collected works consist of fifty-four volumes, presented himself as an objective scholar just seeking to understand what it was that his sources had to tell him, nevertheless he had an overall vision of history that amounted to a shaping agenda. History had a mysterious divine purpose and it was the task of the historian to uncover that purpose. God made use of races and civilizations as his instruments and then discarded them. During the Middle Ages, Islamic civilization had served the divine will but, having been defeated by the Latin and Roman peoples, that civilization became a dead thing and was to be studied as such. Islam had served its purpose. It had preserved monotheism, it had transmitted the classical heritage to Europe, and finally it was the entity against which Europe had defined itself. (It would seem Ranke was the first to think of Islam as the ‘Other’ in this way.) However, having fulfilled these useful functions, Islamic culture was unable to break free from the bonds of the Middle Ages. World history was for Ranke and many who came after him the story of the triumph of the West.26

  Elsewhere in Germany other industrious Germans did the dull but necessary groundwork of editing and publishing the Arabic sources. For example, Gustav Leberecht Flugel edited Hajji Khalifa’s great catalogue of some 14,500 Arabic, Persian and Turkish writings, as well as Ibn al-Nadim’s tenth-century listing of works in Arabic, the Fihrist.27 As has been noted, it was also the Germans rather than the British who dominated Indian and Sanskrit studies and these Germans tended to argue for the superiority of Indo-Aryan cultures over those of the Semites. Friedrich von Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indien (1808) argued for the superiority of Sanskrit-based languages over Arabic. His brother August Wilhelm von Schlegel was similarly keen on Indian and Sanskrit: ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origin in India.’28 Accordingly, August Wilhelm argued that The Arabian Nights had their ultimate origin in India. (De Sacy had erroneously believed the origin of these stories was purely Arab.) The first Sanskrit grammars were compiled by German and Austrian missionaries and Germany’s first chair of Sanskrit was established in 1818 (for August Wilhelm von Schlegel at Bonn), whereas Britain acquired one only in 1833. The engagement of the Schlegel brothers with Indian culture was in large part romantic, but de Sacy’s student, Franz Bopp, put things on a more scientific basis with his comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages, the Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthausischen Gothischen und Deutschen (1833). In it he made a systematic comparison of the conjugational systems used in those languages. Prior to the nineteenth century, philology had been a branch of rhetoric, but Bopp established the principles for the historical study of languages.29 The idea that Sanskrit culture might be older than Hebrew culture was a shocking and exciting one.

  Continental scholars also led the way in Chinese studies and the great collection of Chinese texts was in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, but increasingly Germans competed with French scholars in this field. Though the British had many commercial interests in China – the sale of opium among them – this did not lead to any corresponding explosion of interest in Chinese studies in Britain. When Thomas Wade was appointed to a Chair of Chinese in Cambridge in 1888, he declared that ‘I assume that my pupils, should I have any, will be intending missionaries or interpreters… My advice to applicants in either category is that they should make their way to China with all speed.’30 When, in the following century, Arthur Waley, self-taught in Chinese and a great translator of its poetry, was offered the Cambridge Chair, his response was ‘I would rather be dead’.31

  RUSSIA, OR ASIA IN EUROPE

  Outside Germany, de Sacy’s chief intellectual legacy was in Russia. Here he regularly advised the Russian Tsar about whom to appoint to Orientalist teaching posts. The first Oriental Institute in Russia was set up by de Sacy’s students in St Petersburg. His students also found employment in the Ministry of External Affairs. Many of de Sacy’s intellectual missionaries were German and perhaps the most important of these was the Persianist Bernhard Dorn, who taught Afghan and Caucasian studies, Islamic numismatics and other subjects. Dorn also catalogued the manuscripts of Mount Sinai.32 In 1804 Tsar Alexander I issued a directive calling for the teaching of the languages of the Bible and the Orient. In 1807 a professorship of Asiatic studies was established in Kazan, which became the main centre for Oriental studies in the empire. In 1818 an Asiatic Museum opened in St Petersburg under the supervision of the German Orientalist, Christian Martin Frähn (1782–1851), the real founder of Middle East scholarship in Russia, who had started teaching in Kazan and then moved to St Petersburg. He was assisted at the Asiatic Museum by two French students of de Sacy. He pioneered the study of Arabic sources on the history of medieval Russia.33 Interest in Oriental and Islamic subject-matter increased as the Russians expanded in the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions at the expense of Turkey and Persia. In the late 1820s the Muslim tribesmen of Chechnya and Daghestan launched a holy war against the Russian empire – a war that found various echoes in the literature of the period.

  The dominance of German scholarship in Russian universities caused some resentment in Orthodox, anti-rational and Europhobe circles. However, it would be a mistake to think of nineteenth-century Orientalism as being monopolized by Western scholars. In Russia in particular this was not the case. Quite a number of Persians, Afghans, Turks and others taught at the University of Kazan and elsewhere in the Russian empire. For example, Mirza Kazem-Beg taught Arabic and Persian and Islamic history at the University of Kazan before becoming Professor of Persian in St Petersburg. Shaykh Muhammad ‘Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810–61) was headhunted from his teaching post at Cairo’s al-Azhar, where he had already taught Weil, Edward William Lane and other Westerners who wanted to learn Arabic. He arrived in Russia in 1840 and became Professor of Arabic at St Petersburg. He used traditional Azhari teaching techniques, which relied heavily on rote-learning and on the transmission of the opinions of earlier generations of scholars, something that many of his students found hard-going.34 In the next generation, Baron Viktor Romanovich Rosen (1849–1908), the son of a Baltic aristocrat from Tallinn and a student of the philologically meticulous Fleischer, dominated the study of Arabculture in Russia pioneering modern techniques of textual analysis. He was an enthusiast for and expert on the eleventh-century poet al-Ma‘arri. He studied early Arabic accounts of Russia. He denounced Eurocentric ways of looking at world history. Kratchkovsky
(on whom much more later) was his pupil and described him as ‘always lively’.35

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE: MANY MUSLIM SUBJECTS, BUT FEW ORIENTALISTS

  De Sacy had students who went on to distinguished careers elsewhere in Europe, among them the Spaniard Pascual de Gayangos and the Swede Johann Tornberg. The Irish Arabist de Slane apart (and de Slane settled in Paris), de Sacy had no British students of note. British university life, in so far as there was a university life at all, was dominated by biblical studies and the classics. Classical studies, in particular, thrived. From the late eighteenth century onwards there was a revival of interest in Greek and Roman culture, fostered in part by the Romantic enthusiasm for the Greek revolt against the Turks, by the Romantic cult of ruins and the mid-eighteenth-century discovery of the ruins of Pompeii, and, above all, by the growing importance of the public schools (in American terms, expensive private schools) and the stress that those schools placed upon study of the classics as character-building. As Richard Jenkyns has pointed out, authors such as Cardinal Newman (Apologia pro Vita Sua), Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown’s Schooldays) and Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure) could use Greek type in their texts in the confident expectation that their readers, mostly public-school-educated, would be able to read it.36 Greek and Latin trained the mind and made good citizens and a detailed knowledge of the history of the Roman empire shaped the thoughts of the rulers of the British Raj.