For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  From 1872 onwards Goldziher taught Hebrew in Budapest and published in that field. Then in 1876 he secured a not particularly remunerative jobas the secretary of the Israelite Community (the liberal Jewish community) in Budapest. He occupied this rather humble job for thirty years, even though he was offered the Cambridge professorship after the death of William Robertson Smith, as well as various professorships in Germany. For most of his life, Goldziher’s status in the world of Orientalism depended not on a formal academic rank, but on his sheer brilliance and industry. Anti-Semitism in Hungary made it almost impossible for Jews to get university posts. Only in 1905 did he move on from his secretaryship to become Professor of Semitic Philology at Budapest. He died in 1921.

  Goldziher’s mind was formed by the overlapping worlds of the German and Jewish Enlightenment. He spent much of his life battling with an obscurantist rabbinate and opposing the narrow ritualism of Orthodox Judaism. In 1876 he published Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwicklung (‘Hebrew Myths and their Historical Evolution’). This study was written under the influence of Friedrich Max Müller, the Sanskrit expert and comparative philologist, who had put forward ideas about the nature of primitive mythology and argued that early myths derived ultimately from people’s perception of such basic natural phenomena as day and night, earth, sky, stars and sea – and, above all, the sun. The theories that Max Müller had developed in relation to Indo-Aryan mythology were reapplied by Goldziher to the early beliefs of the Hebrews and their advance from polytheism to monotheism. Obviously this put him in conflict with Renan, who had previously generalized grandly on the intrinsic monotheism of the Semitic spirit and the incapacity of the Jews and Arabs to generate any kind of mythology. Goldziher considered all that to be racist nonsense: ‘There is no such thing as a psychology particular to a given race.’6 His first interest was in Hebrew mythology, but when he turned to the early beliefs of the Arabs, he pointed out that they only reluctantly abandoned polytheism under pressure from Muhammad and his supporters. Eventually, in a famous speech delivered in Budapest in 1893, entitled ‘Renan as Orientalist’, he attacked both the notion of an intuitive monotheism of the Semites and the supposed scholarship of Renan.

  Only in 1881 did Goldziher start to publish in Islamic and Arabic studies. He wrote on a wide range of topics: he outlined the evidence for foreign influences on the Qur’an; he stressed the magical and ritual aspects of poetry; he explored the Shu‘ubiyya (the anti-Arabic movement of the eighth and ninth centuries); he demonstrated that the culture of Muslim Andalusia generally lagged behind that of the Middle East and took its lead from the latter. However, his most far-reaching (and, in the eyes of many Muslims, most destructive) contribution was in the area of Hadith studies, especially his essay, ‘On the Development of Hadith’. Here his thinking, like that of Wellhausen, was strongly influenced by the work of Abraham Geiger on the evolution of Old Testament stories. This interest in the evolution specifically of early narratives was transferred by Goldziher to Islamic studies, where he studied how stories about the Prophet and his contemporaries evolved over the centuries. Here he was successful in demonstrating that, notwithstanding their long chain of authorities that seemed to authenticate the oral transmission of Hadiths (I was told by Abu Hamza, who had it from Ismail ibn Abi Bakr that he heard Faisal al-Isfahani say, etc….), most Hadiths could not be traced back to the Prophet, but were fabricated in later centuries.

  This was not the purely destructive exercise that it seems at first sight. Having discounted them as evidence for what went on in the early seventh century, it then became possible to use Hadiths as a different kind of source – to shed light on the evolving preoccupations and debates within the Islamic community, as they were formulated in order to answer particular problems regarding law, ritual and everyday living in particular communities at particular times during the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The context of this sort of material was, if anything, even more interesting than its content. Hadiths were now seen to be interesting and important for they illustrated evolving trends in law, theology and so forth. A lot of traditions concerning the Prophet and his companions could be seen to have been invented in order to support or oppose the Umayyad caliphs. A lot of early Muslim law that ostensibly referred back to the practices of the Prophet and his companions could be seen to derive from Roman law or pre-existing provincial law. Goldziher’s crucial essay, ‘On the Development of the Hadith’, was reprinted in Muhammedanische Studien (2 volumes, 1889–90), a collection that includes most of his important essays. The other key book, Vorlesungen über den Islam (1910) was translated in 1982 as Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, though this general survey ranged more widely than that.

  The German Arabist and cultural historian Alfred von Kremer (1828–89) had pioneered the study of the spiritual evolution of Islam.7 Wellhausen and Goldziher followed him in this and they in turn would be followed by Louis Massignon and Bernard Lewis who similarly focused on the way Islam was not something fixed by the decree of the Prophet in the seventh century, but evolved and adapted over the centuries. Goldziher was particularly interested in the part played by schismatic religious and political groupings in Islamic history (among them the Kharijites, Carmathians and Isma‘ilis), as he saw schism and dissension as indicators of the vitality and continuing evolution of the Islamic faith. Prior to Goldziher, historians of early Islam had mostly focused on the life of the Prophet, whereas Goldziher was more concerned with the revivalist movements that arose in later centuries. This concern carried over into his perception of the Muslim world in the twentieth century. He believed in the future of Islam and its ability to revive itself from within. As has been noted, he was hostile to colonialism and the Westernization of the Near East. He had supported the Egyptian nationalist revolt of Arabi Pasha (in 1881–2). In 1920 he wrote a letter to a Christian Arabfriend in Mosul: ‘I have lived for your nation and for my own. If you return to your homeland, tell this to your brothers.’ A year later Goldziher was dead.8

  Despite the relatively humble posts that Goldziher occupied for most of his career, he was perfectly well aware how clever and important he was. He was an arrogant and passionate scholar. According to Lawrence Conrad, a leading historian of early Islam and an expert on the life and works of Goldziher, ‘The formulations of Goldziher remain to this day the basic underpinnings of the field.’9 According to Albert Hourani, the author of A History of the Arab Peoples, ‘Goldziher shaped our view of what Islam is more than anyone else.’10 The famous Orientalist Louis Massignon declared that Goldziher was ‘the uncontested master of Islamic studies in the eyes of Western Orientalists’ and that he had exercised a ‘vast and complex personal influence on our studies’.11 Massignon’s student, Bernard Lewis, the author of The Origins of Modern Turkey and The Arabs in History among much else, echoed this verdict: ‘Probably the greatest of all was Ignaz Goldziher… a pious Hungarian Jew whose magnificent series of studies on Muslim theology, law and culture rank him, by common consent, as one of the founders and masters of modern Islamic studies.’12 Kratchkovsky, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century Russian Orientalists, declared that ‘Islamic studies took definite shape as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the work of the Dutchman Snouck Hurgronje and the Hungarian I. Goldziher.’13 According to Jacques Waardenburg (who, like Conrad, has made a special study of Goldziher’s work), ‘It is no exaggeration, in our opinion, to say that Goldziher had created Islamology in the full sense of the term; if one thinks moreover that he inspired the production of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the foundation of the review Der Islam and the numerous researches of colleagues…’14 In other words, a book on Middle Eastern and Islamic studies that gave no account of Goldziher’s work in the field would not be worth the paper it was printed on.

  Apart from publishing copiously, Goldziher was keen on correspondence. Much of his impact on Islamic studies was due to the contacts he made and the ideas he exchanged with
other Orientalists. Apart from his writings, Goldziher was a fervent attendee of Orientalist conferences and he believed that giving lectures at such events was just as important as publishing articles. As the example of the Encyclopaedia of Islam suggests, Orientalism in the early twentieth century was to a considerable extent a collaborative European enterprise. However, though the Orientalists corresponded and co-operated, it will become apparent that otherwise they had little in common: there was hardly an Orientalist type or a common Orientalist discourse. In this chapter I shall be discussing a range of approaches, among them Nöldeke’s Prussian jingoism, Hurgronje’s colonialist approach to Islam, Lammens’s polemical Christian agenda and Margoliouth’s crossword-solving approach to Arabtexts.

  THE CENTRALITY OF GERMAN ORIENTALISM

  Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930) was a rationalist positiviast. His doctorate was entitled De origine et compositione Surarum qoranicarum ipsiusque Qorani (‘Concerning the origin of the Qur’an and the composition of its suras’) and this was later expanded into a more mature study, published in 1860 as Geschichte des Korans. He was the first to use historical method in an attempt to work out the chronological ordering of the revelation of various suras, or chapters of the Qur’an. Broadly speaking he dated the more mystical suras to the early years of the Prophet’s preaching in Mecca, while assigning the longer suras with their detail on legal and social matters to the Prophet’s later sojourn in Medina. Although Nöldeke’s conclusions are now widely queried by specialists in Qur’anic studies, they were for a long time highly influential and without them, for example, the biographies of Muhammad by William Montgomery Watt in 1953 and 1956and by Maxime Rodinson in 1961 could not have been written. In the long run, however, Nöldeke became disillusioned with Qur’anic studies: ‘It is my ultimate wish not to be harassed by Muhammad and the Koran. When I was young I was preoccupied with these subjects for some reason or other. I must confess that they seem to be more mysterious now than ever before… I am too modern a European to see clearly into that world of dreams.’15

  This disillusion carried over into his study of Arabic literature. ‘Whether the aesthetic pleasure to be drawn from Arabic poetry is worth the effort in order to reach an approximate understanding is questionable. But the study is necessary as an important means to penetrate deeply the essence of the Arabpeople.’16 Goldziher was an enthusiast for Arabic literature and wrote a short history of it, but Nöldeke thought that Arabic literature was of negligible aesthetic value. It seems that Nöldeke, the positivist, was reacting against the wild and woolly enthusiasms of Germans of an earlier generation, including the Schlegels, Herder and Rückert, for all things Oriental. Goldziher was a fervent admirer of Islam, even though he remained attached to his own Jewish faith. Nöldeke, on the other hand, condemned Islam, just as he condemned all religions. He was also at odds with William Robertson Smith, as he disapproved of his way of bolstering his arguments by calling on all sorts of comparative material mostly from primitive cultures. Smith treated the Arabs of the desert as fascinating barbarians, but Nöldeke did not think that they were as barbarous as all that. He was a fierce Prussian nationalist and racial bigot. In these respects he was an outsider in the community of Orientalists. In at least one respect, however, he belonged to the grand tradition of de Sacy and Fleischer: he had never been to the Middle East and he could not actually speak Arabic.

  As we shall see, the political opinions of Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) were at the opposite pole from those of Nöldeke. The continuity of German Orientalism is well illustrated by the fact that Becker had studied with various students of Fleischer, who had been the student of de Sacy. Becker started out as a Semiticist and Assyriologist, before specializing in the history of Islam. However, unlike purist disciples of de Sacy and Fleischer, Becker thought as a historian rather than as a philologist. Like Von Kremer before him, he regarded Islam as a late version of Hellenism and in Der Islam im Rahme neine rallgemeinen Kulturgeschichte (1922) and Das Erbe der Antike im Orient und Okzident (1931), he presented Muslim civilization as one of the chief heirs of the cultural legacy of antiquity. ‘Without Alexander the Great there would be no Islamic civilization.’17 The religion of Islam was not some Asiatic, alien ‘Other’, but was rather a Christian heresy and something that was very much a product of the Mediterranean world. As for Islamic philosophy, this was just late antique Greek philosophy under another name. Culture and society took precedence over religious revelation in Becker’s thought and Islam was shaped by society rather than the reverse. As a young man, Becker had known Max Weber and he tended to think in Weberian sociological terms. He was perhaps also the first to study the economic history of the Islamic world.

  As Becker saw it, although Islam, like Christendom, was the heir of antiquity, it had failed to assimilate all to which it was potentially an heir. From a European point of view, Islamic society was defective, as it failed to develop or acquire autonomous urban institutions, an ecclesiastical organization, feudalism, humanism, citizenship, individualism and capitalism. The European point of view was the only point of view Becker believed he could take, as he thought that it was impossible to cross cultural frontiers and understand a culture from the inside. In 1907 he was appointed to a post at Hamburg’s Colonial Institute, a place for training administrators to serve in Germany’s colonies. (Before the First World War, Germany had a substantial empire in Africa and the South Seas.) He was keen on using Islamwissenschaft (the scientific study of Islam) to further German colonial interests. Like Goldziher and the British Arabist Hamilton Gibb he took it for granted that Islamic society was dynamic and evolving and consequently took a keen interest in contemporary Middle Eastern issues. Despite the commitment to German imperialism in his early years, he was in most respects a progressive, liberal figure and in the 1920s he became Minister of Sciences, Arts and Public Instruction in the Weimar government. As a Weimarist, he viewed the rise of Hitler as a disaster. He died in the year the Nazis came to power.

  AN IMPERIALIST ORIENTALIST

  Just as Nöldeke’s Prussian nationalism made him stand out among his fellow Orientalists, so the practical involvement of Christian Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) with imperialist projects was unusual. The son of a Dutch Calvinist pastor, he studied biblical history and criticism at the University of Leiden. But in 1887 he abandoned his original ambition to become a Calvinist pastor and instead took up the study of Arabic with de Goeje. Hurgronje did early research on the pre-Islamic origins of the haj to Mecca. In this research and later work he was much influenced by Goldziher with whom he corresponded and it was Goldziher who pushed him towards the study of fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence). Hurgronje also studied with Nöldeke in Strasburg. In 1885 he set off for the Middle East where he planned to improve his Arabic and do original research. Disguised as a Muslim, he spent several months in Mecca taking copious notes and numerous photographs. The result was a book that he published in German, Mekka (1888–9). This consisted of two volumes, as well as an atlas of photographs. From the first he was slightly unusual among his Orientalist peers in the interest he took in contemporary Islam. Mekka was a careful record of the manners and customs of the local inhabitants as well as the visiting pilgrims, detailing their beliefs, rituals and everyday life.

  After his adventures in the Hejaz, Hurgronje became more interested in the Dutch East Indies. In 1889 he entered the service of the Ministry of the Colonies and left for Batavia, the Dutch centre of administration in Java. There he held a research post in the Dutch colonial administration and advised its officials on how to deal with Muslims and, more specifically, he gave guidance on points of Islamic law. He observed Islamic law as it was in contemporary practice, rather than just reading what was prescribed in the old law books. He was also interested in the survival of pagan beliefs and practices in the South East Asian version of Islam as well as the latitudinarianism of the local versions of Sufism. He produced a major report on customs and beliefs in the region of Atjeh in north-west Sum
atra. He was a firm believer in the benefits of Dutch colonialism for the inhabitants of the Indies and he had no doubts about the virtues of Westernization for the Indonesians, nor about the benefits to Holland of assimilating Indonesians into Dutch society (and hence later he consistently encouraged Indonesians to come and study at Leiden University). In the meantime Indonesians needed defending from the full rigours of both colonialism and fundamentalist Islam. He feared the reactionary force of Pan-Islam. This kind of politico-religious paranoia was quite widespread at the time and in Britain it found expression in editorials in The Times as well as in novels by Talbot Mundy and John Buchan.

  In 1906 Hurgronje returned to Holland and was appointed to the Chair of Arabic at Leiden University, but he continued to advise the government and colonial officials. Although he was for a long time a supporter of what he saw as ethical imperialism and he had believed in educating the Indonesians to make them the partners of the Dutch, he eventually became disillusioned and turned against Dutch colonial policy. Though he had participated in shaping that policy, he was more or less unique among Dutch Orientalists in doing so. His career as an imperialist scholar-administrator has been worth dwelling on, if only for its rarity, but, though his intellectual collusion with imperialism was unusual, it was not unique.18 The case of Becker has already been mentioned and, as we shall see, Massignon worked hard to further French colonial interests in North Africa and Syria.

  Unlike most of his academic colleagues, Hurgronje had first-hand experience of Muslim societies, both in the heartlands and at the margins. Like Goldziher, he did not regard Islam as something fixed or as a body of ritual and belief with a past but no future. It was precisely Islam’s power to expand, tolerate and assimilate that fascinated him. His industry and his expertise, particularly in the areas of Islamic law and Hadiths, as well as his post at Leiden, made it inevitable that he should be closely involved in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In the early twentieth century Dutch and German scholars dominated Orientalism and de Goeje, Goldziher, Nöldeke and Snouck Hurgronje were the giants of their age. German Orientalists were famous for their productivity and the Syrian intellectual Kurd ‘Ali, who attended the 1928 Oxford Congress of Orientalists, noted how all the Germans who attended had stooped backs from overwork.19