by Robert Irwin
In 1861 he was promoted to the Chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, but he was suspended after his inaugural lecture in which he controversially referred to Jesus as ‘un homme incomparable’ (the implication being that he was indeed a man and not God). He went on to confirm his status as a dangerous atheistic thinker by publishing Vie de Jésus (1863), a scandalous bestseller that stripped away all that was supernatural in the traditional story of Jesus. Renan suggested that Jesus’s success in propagating his teaching was largely due to the fact that it was well adapted to the religious feelings of the Semites. Renan held that philology and specifically the philological study of the Indo-Aryan and Semitic languages had established the common origins of whites, but not that of Chinese or blacks. The Semites, like the Aryans, had played a role in the great project of civilization, though their time was now past. Renan’s racism merely put a pompous pseudo-scientific gloss on ideas that already circulated in the street. People did not need to have Orientalists invent racism for them.
He believed that, unlike the other great world religions, ‘Islam was born in the full light of history’. (As we shall see, this belief was to be seriously challenged in the second half of the twentieth century.) He took a fairly favourable view of the Prophet: ‘On the whole, Muhammad seems to us like a gentleman, sensitive, faithful, free from rancour and hatred. His affections were sincere: his character was inclined to kindness.’54 Renan believed that Islam had since become an intellectual and spiritual prison and he thought it would not survive the twentieth century, as it was doomed to wither away in the face of scientific progress. This was in accord with his Comtean belief that humanity was destined to advance from superstition to metaphysics and then ultimately to positive scientific knowledge. The Semites had played their part in world history by introducing monotheism, but with that their task was over and the rest of the story would consist of the triumph of science and rationalism, which was also the triumph of the West. At first he had taken a tolerably favourable view of Islam and it was only after a couple of visits to the Middle East in 1860 and 1865 that he adopted the position that Islam was acting as a brake on progress in the region: ‘The Muslims are the first victims of Islam.’ In L’Islamisme et la Science he put forward the view that Islam and science were intrinsically inimical (and, though he obviously did not spell it out, Catholicism and science were incompatible too). This thesis was attacked, though in moderate terms, by a leading Muslim thinker and political agitator, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Al-Afghani believed that the Middle East had to catch up but that it would. The Islamic world had yet to experience its Reformation.55
Renan’s other critics were Orientalists. Ignaz Goldziher, the commanding figure in Arabic and Islamic scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was particularly savage in his criticism of Renan.56 In his ‘Mahomet et les origines de l’Islam’ (Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 December 1851) Renan had generalized madly and ignorantly about the absolute lack of the supernatural in the teachings of the ‘philosopher’ Muhammad. The Semitic soul was, Renan thought, inherently monotheist and hostile to all kinds of mythology: ‘The desert itself is monotheist.’ Though Goldziher, who had done serious research on the mythology of the early Semites, demonstrated that this was nonsense, Renan refused to answer those criticisms or even to acknowledge his existence. However other Orientalists, including Heinrich Ewald, William Robertson Smith and Max Müller, criticized him on this issue. Henri Lammens attacked the quality of his Arabic and Michael Jan de Goeje ripped into Renan in an important speech at the 1883 Leiden Conference of Orientalists.
Renan’s original teacher, Le Hir, had been steeped in specifically German biblical textual techniques. Throughout Renan’s career, he would revere German scholarship: ‘I studied Germany and believed myself to have entered a temple.’ It was after all among the Germans that the major advances were being made in the study of Sanskrit and related languages. In 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, he told the Goncourt brothers that it was not surprising that the Germans had won the war: ‘Yes, gentlemen, the Germans are a superior race.’57 His enthusiasm for German scholarship and Germans in general, as well as his perceptions of the limitations of the Semitic mentality, were shared by his friend, Gobineau.
Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) developed Renan’s ideas about the distinction between Semites and Aryans and shared Renan’s view that the Germans were superior to the French. Some of the influence ran the other way, as Gobineau’s ideas had some influence on Renan, though many of Gobineau’s ideas were far too bizarre for Renan to swallow. Gobineau had pursued a military and then a diplomatic career, in tandem with that of a novelist. In 1849 he became the chef du cabinet of the Foreign Minister, Alexis de Tocqueville (also famous as a political theorist). From 1855 to 1858 and from 1861 to 1863 he was in Tehran successively as First Secretary, Chargé d’affaires and Minister. Drawing on the sojourns in Persia, he produced Mémoire sur l’état social de la Perse actuelle (1856), Trois Ans en Asie (1859), Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (1865) and the Histoire des Perses (1869).58
In so far as Gobineau is studied today, it is as a racial theorist and as an influence on the racial thinking of Houston Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler. Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (2 volumes, 1853–5) is much cited, especially by those who have not read it. However, though the Nazi theorists presented a triumphalist version of history in which the superior Aryan was predestined to dominate inferior races, Gobineau’s own view was different. He believed that the Aryans were doomed by centuries of miscegenation and that ‘Humanity’s best days are already behind us.’ Though Gobineau and Renan were both racists, they were at opposite poles of a racist spectrum, for, while Renan thought that racial admixture was not a bad thing, Gobineau thought it to be the source of all evil. Unlike the proto-Nazis and Nazis, Gobineau actually admired the Jews for, among other things, their racial exclusiveness. Furthermore, unlike most racists, including British and French racists, he was anticolonialist, as he regarded colonialism as just another symptom of racial and cultural decay. ‘Asia is a very appetizing dish, but one which poisons those who consume it.’ Strong races were doomed to be corrupted by the weaker races that they had conquered. He held that it was very difficult to transport civilization from one region to another and he was confident that India would become independent from the British one day.
In Orientalism, Edward Said implied that Gobineau was a key figure in ‘the official genealogy of Orientalism’, whatever that may be, but there is no sign that he had actually read Gobineau (and it does not look as though Schwab, on whom Said relies here, had read Gobineau either). Gobineau was not a trained Orientalist and though he had developed a passion for Oriental languages when a teenager in Switzerland, neither his Persian nor his Arabic ever amounted to much. His venture into serious academic territory in the form of an attempted decipherment of the various cuneiform scripts was, as we shall see, a disastrous exercise in self-deception. His observations on Persia were those of a diplomat and man of letters, albeit one with some extremely odd ideas. He loved Persia and was to look back on his time at the Tehran posting as his golden years, but that did not stop him from judging the Persians to be the decadent products of racial intermingling. (If any Persian readers are affronted by this, it may be some consolation for them to know that he had an even lower opinion of the United States in that respect.) He thought the Persian society and economy were crippled by a pervasive quietism and he judged Sufism in its higher manifestations to be a disguised form of atheism. He was probably also the only visitor to Persia under the Qajars in the mid-nineteenth century to find the place to be too democratic.59 He thought that, in general, the Asians were strong on intuition but short on logic. For this reason, he enlisted the help of a Persian Jewish rabbi and, with his help, he translated Descartes’ Discours de la méthode into Persian.
Gobineau’s views on the horrors of democracy
and revolution had been shaped by his experience of 1848, ‘the Year of Revolutions’ in France and elsewhere. His views on Asia’s cultures and languages had similarly already been formed before he arrived in Persia, where he saw what he was expecting to see. ‘Everything we think, and all the ways we think, have their origin in Asia’ is the opening sentence of Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale. In Gobineau’s vision of history, the Aryans started out on Central Asian plateaux and different branches of the super-race migrated from there to India, Persia and Europe. He found what he was expecting to see in Persia, which was that degenerate Aryans had become contaminated by their contacts with Semitic peoples. He constructed his early history of Persia from very few sources – mainly the Bible and Herodotus. Unlike ordinary, workaday Orientalists, Gobineau believed that the Sasanians (who ruled in Persia from aD 226 to 642) were Semites. As the centralizing conquerors of the older Aryan feudal Persia, they corrupted and destroyed its glorious Aryan vigour and therefore Gobineau thought it best to bring his history of Persia to an end with the coming of the Sasanians.
As for the Arabs who replaced the Sasanians as rulers of Persia from the seventh century onwards, he thought that they had become corrupted by intermarriage with black people. His reading of the pre-Islamic odes that comprise the Mu‘allaqat persuaded him that the early Arabs were barbarous. The coming of Muhammad and the propagation of the Qur’an had civilized them somewhat. Like Renan, he considered Islam to be an expression of the Semitic spirit. Semitic peoples were by their nature servile before God. However it was quietism rather than Islam as such that was the bane of Asia. He argued that Shi‘ism, as it developed from the eighth century onwards, was a kind of revolt of the Aryan Persians against Semitic Islam. (This racial approach to the development of Islamic doctrine was to be attacked by the great Orientalist, Julius Wellhausen.) Like de Sacy and Hammer-Purgstall, Gobineau was most interested in sectarian breakaways from mainstream Islam and he was particularly interested in the messianic movement of the Babis which arose in Persia in the 1840s and which was subjected to savage repression by the Qajars in the following decades. His interest in this persecuted minority (whom he bizarrely regarded as the spiritual heirs of Chaldaeanism and other cults of antiquity) inspired Edward Granville Browne to go out to Persia. (Browne was a grander figure and a serious Orientalist, on whom see next chapter.)
Gobineau’s later, superficially imposing, work on the decipherment of cuneiform was actually nonsense, merely the speculative work of a crank. He published two worthless works of linguistic scholarship, Lectures des textes cunéiformes (1858) and Traité des écritures cunéiformes (2 volumes, Paris, 1864). These volumes mingled obscure chimerical fantasies about the adventures of the Aryan race with speculation about his own genealogy (he thought he was descended from the Vikings). He took the Bible as his main source, but drew also on a range of cabalistic and other occult material. He took it for granted that the linguistic stability of the Middle East was such that cuneiform could not possibly represent a dead language, but had to be read as either Arabic or a mixture of Arabic and Persian which he called Huzarwesh. However, what he published demonstrated not only that he had fantastically daft ideas about cuneiform, but also that his ideas about how the Arabic language worked were hardly less erroneous. His comprehensive misreading of all sorts of cuneiform inscriptions was further fuelled by his rejection of what had by the mid-nineteenth century become the conventional scholarly view that the Indo-Aryan languages had originated in the Indian subcontinent. He produced repetitive, magical talismanic readings of all the inscriptions. By the time he published his proposed decryptions of cuneiform, a large part had already been successfully deciphered by other scholars, including Grotefeld, Henry Rawlinson and others. But Gobineau mocked their labours and sneered at ‘the glass world’ inhabited by the Orientalists. Some Orientalists responded by savagely demolishing Gobineau’s proposed decipherments; others, the majority, simply ignored what he had written.60 His work in the field of ancient languages had the sort of importance for Oriental studies that attempts to patent perpetual motion machines have had for the history of science. Far from being part of an Orientalist genealogy, he was both the first and the last to pursue his peculiar lines of enquiry. However, as a romancer he has some merit and his collection of short stories, Nouvelles Asiatiques (1876), is worth reading.
Renan and Gobineau were in their different ways racists. The banality of Renan’s racism has already been remarked upon. Robertson Smith (on whom see below) was another kind of racist; he thought that the Arabs were a superior race, though the Negroes were inferior. Racism was pervasive in nineteenth-century Europe. However, having said that, one has not said very much, as there were so many different types of racism and racist stereotyping had yet to assume the form it eventually took in the early Fascist decades of the twentieth century. The tendency to generalize about racial characteristics was not something invented by nineteenth-century Orientalists, nor was it confined to white Europeans. One only has to look at medieval Arabguides to the purchase of slaves of different races or to consider the traditional Chinese attitude to foreigners (whom they divided into ‘cooked barbarians’ and ‘uncooked barbarians’) to see that this was so. In part, racist attitudes in any period or region are the product of the natural tendency to think in generalities. In nineteenth-century Europe, in the absence of any seriousprior research, it seemed possible that there might be a scientific basis to racial differences. There was no reason to rule this out a priori. Some of nineteenth-century racism’s agendas would seem quite strange to later generations of racists. In part, those agendas were linked to an increasing preoccupation with the nation and nationalism. Victorian authors speculated at enormous length about the respective contributions made to the English by the Anglo-Saxon and then the Norman invaders, while Frenchmen, like Gobineau, made under-researched claims about the Germanic origins of their aristocracy. (But Gobineau’s claim to be a count was another of his fictions.)
Renan’s own view, however, was that what made the French nation, or any nation, was not race, but shared historical memories. Moreover, as we have seen, he thought that language rather than bloodlines defined a race. Unlike the Fascist racists of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century racists were not necessarily triumphalist. The pessimistic Gobineau was not alone here and, for example, Fabre d’Olivet, an eccentric scholar who wrote about Hebrew and linguistic matters more generally, believed that in the long run the blacks, who were stronger, were destined to enslave the whites.61
BACK TO SERIOUS ORIENTALISTS
As the numbers of Orientalists increased, so did their disagreements and feuds, and the Dutchman Reinhart P. Dozy (1820–83) contributed more than his fair share to these.62 In the early nineteenth century, Dutch Orientalism had experienced a modest revival under the slightly dull scholar, Théodore-Guillaume-Jean Juynboll (1802–61), who moved over from theology to Arabic and produced useful work on medieval Arabgeography. Dozy was not dull and he came to Arabic studies via romantic literature. He had been entranced by accounts of old Moorish Spain in such works as Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier des Abencerrages (1826) and Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832). He took up Arabic in the first instance ‘in order to bathe himself in waves of poetry’. His rather dry and pedantic teacher Hendrik Weijers pushed him towards history. Dozy thereupon read Quatremère’s Histoire des sultans mamlouks and was enraptured by the philological riches he discovered therein. His first major work was Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne pendant le moyen âge (1849), a study of Spanish Muslim history up to 1110 that was also a savagely polemical attack on his predecessors among the Spanish historians, José Antonio Conde and Pascual de Gayangos. Conde had died in 1820, but Dozy’s brutality cost him the friendship of Gayangos. Renan was terrified at the severity of the judgement on Conde’s inadequate Arabic (as well he might be) and Dozy’s student, de Goeje, described it as a ‘death sentenc
e’ on Conde. Spanish historians were enraged by Dozy’s debunking of Spain’s national hero, al-Cid, who, he argued, was merely a treacherous mercenary and ‘more Muslim than Catholic’. Dozy’s critics suggested that he placed too much reliance on Arabic sources on this topic.
Dozy went on to publish his Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne (1861). At the time he was criticized for having written such a work of scholarship in French rather than Latin. However, he had been strongly influenced by the contemporary vivid and romantic French style of writing history. As a consequence Dozy’s narrative has some of the feel of a novel of passion, as he invented dialogue and conjured up the look of things in order to give his readers the feeling that they were there in the medieval Moorish past. Dozy hated German pedantry and he clashed with Fleischer on editorial details. Dozy was a merciless controversialist and his history overflowed with strongly felt prejudices. He was liberal and anti-clerical and it was perhaps because of this that he took strongly against the Almoravids, the fiercely religious and puritanical Berber tribesmen who had occupied much of Muslim Spain in the twelfth century. He had strong views on racial matters and his vision of history was coloured by his belief that though the Arabs were capable of conquering an empire, they were incapable of holding it. The progress of the Arabs was held back by the prescriptions of the Qur’an and the backward-looking nature of Islamic law. Dozy disliked what he read about Muhammad and he shared the view (widespread among European scholars of the time) that the Prophet was epileptic. The romantic in Dozy much preferred pre-Islamic Arabia with its camel rustlers and warrior poets.