For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  The corresponding figure to Gibb at Cambridge, the holder of the Thomas Adams Chair in Arabic, was a very different character. Arthur John Arberry, who was born in 1905, won a classics scholarship to Cambridge and in an autobiographical essay he remarks of himself that before ‘going up to Pembroke College at Michaelmas 1924 I had read everything worth reading in Greek and Latin’.9 He studied classical textual criticism with the famous poet and don A. E. Housman and secured a first in both parts of the Cambridge examinations. In 1926 a meeting with Reynold Nicholson got him interested in Arabic and Persian. In effect, Arberry became Nicholson’s disciple. His switch from classics to Arabic was paradigmatic of Oxbridge Orientalism whose ranks were largely filled by brilliant young classicists who decided to move from the overcrowded field of Greek and Latin studies to the wider pastures of Arabic studies. It was more or less inevitable that such scholars should wish to treat Arabic as a dead classical language. In the 1930s Arberry became head of the classics department at Cairo University and taught Greek and Latin to the Egyptians. Back in England he worked in the India Office Library. His earliest research was conducted on the strange, almost Surrealist, tenth-century ArabSufi poet, al-Niffari. As a child, Arberry had lost his faith in Christianity, but he regained it through reading the Sufis. Thereafter, he became a leading translator of the Arabic and Persian literature of the Sufis and an interpreter of their doctrines.

  During the war he was employed as a postal censor. Then, from 1944 onwards, he taught at SOAS, before in 1947 becoming Thomas Adams Professor in Cambridge. Arberry seems not to have been a great teacher. One of his students recalled how his teaching technique consisted of taking them at a swift canter through an obscure medieval Arabic text and then vanishing with a cry of ‘Good luck in your exams!’ to be seen no more that year. Another who was taught by him in the 1960s recalls that Arberry was by then known as ‘the living fossil’. On the other hand, he was a fabulously prolific author, translator and editor. In the long run his industriousness sapped his health and he seems to have suffered some kind of breakdown. His translations vary wildly in quality and while, for example, his translation, The Koran Interpreted (1955), is an outstanding achievement, his translation of selections from The Thousand and One Nights can most charitably described as hackwork. He was not a modest man and he revelled publicly in his prolific output. Late in life, however, he became embittered at the lack of public recognition and he lived in expectation of a knighthood that never came his way. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and, after his death in 1969, in an obituary in the Proceedings of the British Academy, his career was subjected to one of the most brutal and sustained hatchet jobs in academic history. According to the obituarist G. M. Wickens (whom I guess to have been a disgruntled colleague), Arberry ‘wrote and spoke primarily to fulfil his own needs and aspirations rather than to communicate with a clearly envisioned audience’. He was vain, vague, reclusive, embittered, childish, administratively incompetent, facile, arch, out of date. He was also quite ignorant of modern scholarly techniques. In addition he had written as a ‘man of letters’ for ‘a mid-Victorian, middle-class public’. One gathers from Wickens’s account that one of Arberry’s few redeeming qualities was that he loved to spend hours watching television.10

  THE BELATED BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM

  Gibb’s passage across the Atlantic heralded the shape of things to come. From the 1930s onwards the United States was acquiring extensive interests in the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia and from the 1940s on, with ambitions to supplant Britain as the leading power in the Middle East, the US was expanding its provision of teaching of Islam, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. In order to set up the new institutes and departments, it relied heavily on recruiting established Orientalists from Britain and the rest of Europe.11Even before Gibb’s arrival at Harvard, a number of scholarly refugees from Nazi Europe had found academic posts in the United States, including Grunebaum, Ettinghausen, Franz Rosenthal at Yale and S. D. Goitein at Princeton. In 1958the National Defense Act provided funds for area and language studies in America. Gibb’s passage from Britain to the United States was to be followed by Bernard Lewis (to Princeton), Roger Owen (to Harvard) and Joseph Schacht (to Columbia). The brain drain from Britain has continued to the present day. Relatively recent migrants include Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Peter Sluglett and David Morgan.

  But not all the recruits have been from Europe. One of the striking features of modern American Orientalism has been the number of prominent Arabs in the field, among them the Syrian Philip Hitti (the author of a once standard general survey, A History of the Arabs (1946)), Aziz Suriyal Atiya (an Egyptian at Utah and author of an important book, The Crusades in the Late Middle Ages), Nabia Abbott (a leading papyrologist), Majid Khadduri, an expert on Islamic law, Muhsin Mahdi (an authority on Arabic philosophy as well as on The Thousand and One Nights), and also Fuad Ajami and Bassam Tibi (both experts on modern Arab society and politics).

  Even so, it remains the case that, for most of the twentieth century, American Orientalism was dominated by intellectual eminences imported from Europe. Gustave E. von Grunebaum (1909–72) is one of the most important examples of this phenomenon, as he was in his way as grand a figure as Gibb.12Born in Vienna, Grunebaum emigrated to the United States in 1938. He taught at Chicago and then, from 1957 onwards, he presided over the Near Eastern Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a student in Vienna, he had moved from biblical to classical and humanist studies and he brought European techniques and preoccupations with him. In going on to study Islam he was really studying the West: ‘And there may be no better guide to our own soul than the civilization which a great French scholar has called “The Occident of the East”, the world of Islam.’ Previously Nöldeke, who taught in Vienna, had lectured and written on the pre-Islamic poets, arguing for their importance as a source on the early history of the Arabs, but denying their literary merit. Grunebaum reacted against his teacher and in a series of specialized studies he upheld the aesthetic merits of pre-Islamic poetry.

  In Chicago Grunebaum moved on to much grander surveys of Islamic civilization. He took a Hegelian view of what he saw as Islamic decadence. Islamic civilization, having transmitted Greek wisdom from the West, had performed its historic task and had no future role in history. The comparison of Islamic civilization to the classical civilization that had preceded it, almost always to Islam’s disadvantage, was a constant theme in his writings. Islam was a mimetic civilization, compounded of borrowings from other cultures and incapable of independent innovation. Its copycat civilization reached its peak under the Abbasids in the ninth century, but thereafter it was doomed to stagnate, as Muslims were constrained by the intransigence of the Qur’anic revelation and doomed by their religion’s fatalism. ‘Classical Islam’ was conceived of by him as ‘a model whose reconstitution was both an obligation and an impossibility’. (The theme of the ‘unfulfilled promise’ of Islamic civilization was also taken up in Bernard Lewis’s The Arabs in History, first published in 1950.) Grunebaum considered that Muslims were incapable of grasping the value of knowledge that was not utilitarian and it was because of this, for example, that treatises on mathematics and mechanics were translated from Greek into Arabic, but the tragedies of Aeschylus were not. He maintained that Arabic poetry lacked the notion of an ‘I’ and of individuality. In general, he envisaged Islamic civilization as being defined by prohibitions, omissions and absences – ‘no pork, no figurative art, no drama, no objective studying of other cultures and so forth and so on’.

  Although Grunebaum’s view of Arab culture was overwhelmingly shaped by his early immersion in classical studies, he was open to more modern ideas and in particular he tried to make use of the insights of social anthropologists. He was particularly influenced by the ideas of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (who worked on Californian Indians) and Kroeber’s idea that the individual is subordinate to culture. Kroeber’s The Nature of Culture (1952) was also the s
ource of the idea of Islamic civilization as a system of exclusions. Von Grunebaum was a vastly well-read, charming and erudite polyglot, but he seems to have been incapable of guiding his students up to the intellectual heights that he inhabited. He seems neither to have had disciples nor wished for them. Muhsin Mahdi, a later professor of Arabic at Harvard, remembers Gibb listening to Grunebaum talking in a committee and then saying something along the lines of ‘You know, this is like a steel ball, what you said. There is no way to get inside at all. There is no way to open it and see its internal structure. And if you let it fall, it will hurt your feet. So you have to handle it with care.’ Grunebaum was a sociable academic who was active in setting up conferences and founding MESA (Middle East Studies Association), but he left no school of disciples.

  The study of Islamic art in the United States was spearheaded by Europeans trained in the German tradition. Richard Ettinghausen (1906–79) had studied with Carl Heinrich Becker and worked as a museum assistant in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis forced him to cross the Atlantic in 1934.13He taught in Washington and New York and supervised the Islamic collections of the Freer Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Although he wrote general books on Arab painting and Islamic art, he specialized in focusing closely on selected objects and making use of literary sources in Arabic, Persian and Turkish to interpret their imagery. He shared the preoccupation with iconography that was the raison d’être of London University’s Warburg Institute. He led the way in exploring the visual vocabulary of Islamic culture – the seasons, the signs of the zodiac, the princely cycle, the repertoire of mythological beasts and so forth.

  Born in Strasbourg in France in 1929, Oleg Grabar studied at Harvard and started teaching in the United States in the 1950s.14 In 1980 he became Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at Harvard and later was a professor at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. In his early years he took part in various archaeological digs in the Middle East. His most important publications were first on early Islamic architecture, the typology of palaces and on illustrated manuscripts. Later he moved on to the study of the meaning of Islamic ornament. Grabar’s approach has been more theoretical and less closely tied to the objects than that of Ettinghausen. But, important though his publications have been, Grabar’s influence has been at least as much through the Islamic art historians that he trained. Ernst Herzfeld, another leading expert on Islamic art and archaeology, similarly moved from America to the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies.

  Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–1985) published on religious aspects of Islamic life, but eventually became one of the most important historians of the Near Eastern medieval economy.15He was born in Bavaria into a family of Hungarian rabbis and studied at Frankfurt. He left Germany in the 1920s and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before moving to the United States in the 1950s. He ended up at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. In the five-volume A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–88), he used a massive archive of records of medieval Jewish life in the Middle East to produce a remarkably detailed survey of all aspects of everyday life, but especially of commercial practice.

  Franz Rosenthal (1914–2003) studied with Schaeder and Paul Kraus in Germany and acquired the traditional Orientalist grounding in philology, but he left Germany in 1938 after Kristallnacht and eventually became a professor in Yale. An excellent classicist who knew Homer and Hesiod by heart, he was a specialist in Graeco-Arabic studies and was the author of Der Fortleben der Antike im Islam (‘The Classical Heritage in Islam’, 1965). He was also a specialist in historiography and the translator into English of Ibn Khaldun’s historico-philosophical magnum opus, the Muqaddimah. He produced specialized studies of hashish and gambling in medieval Islam that make fascinating reading.16

  Walter Cook, a senior figure at Princeton, remarked, apropos of the influx of brilliant Jews into American academic life, that ‘Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples.’17One consequence of the migration of Jewish scholars to the United States was that English came to replace German as the leading language of Orientalism. Not all those who left Nazi Germany were Jews, however. Joseph Schacht (1902–69), born in Upper Silesia, came from a Catholic family.18Having studied Hebrew in a Gymnasium (a top-grade secondary school), he then studied Oriental languages and philological method more generally. He left Germany in 1936 in protest against the Nazi accession to power and taught at the University of Cairo for a while, before coming to America where he became a professor at the University of Columbia in New York. He followed up Goldziher’s work on Hadiths and investigated the isnads, or chains of transmission that were supposed to authenticate traditions concerning what the Prophet was supposed to have said and done.

  Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i (767–820) was the leading jurist of his age and founded a major school of Islamic law that still survives today. Understanding of the evolution of Shafi‘ite law is fundamental to the study of Sunni Muslim institutions and society. Goldziher had not been able to study al-Shafi‘i properly as a critical edition of the man’s legal writings was only beginning to be published towards the end of Goldziher’s life. But Schacht, working in the tradition of Goldziher, made a hypercritical study of Shafi‘ite law and the Hadiths it was supposed to be based on. In The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950), he demonstrated that the end of the eighth century was a watershed in the development of Islamic law. As Patricia Crone put it, in Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987), Schacht’s book ‘is a work of fundamental importance. It showed that the beginnings of Islamic law cannot be traced further back in the Islamic tradition than to about a century after the Prophet’s death, and this strengthened the a priori case in favour of the view that foreign elements entered the Shar‘ia.’19As it happens, Crone does not agree with all Schacht’s conclusions and, in her own book, she argued that he had grossly underestimated the importance of pre-existing provincial law. But that is how Orientalism advances – through disagreement and criticism rather than comfortable consensus. Schacht also did important work on Isma‘ili studies. The austerely brilliant Schacht was revered by those who came after him. Albert Hourani referred to him as ‘that great and much regretted master of his studies’. Wansbrough similarly thought of him as the master. But Schacht’s good friend, the scholarly Richard Walzer, observed of him that ‘he had only principles. He had no humanity and no common sense whatsoever’. As mentioned, Schacht taught at Columbia University, which is where Edward Said was also a professor. But Said never even mentions the great scholar in Orientalism.

  Marshall Hodgson was one of the first major contributors to Islamic studies to have been born in the United States.20He was also one of the first to try to break free from a vision of Islamic history that was conditioned by the philological and classicizing preoccupations of the German tradition. He queried the contention of Grunebaum and others that around the ninth or tenth century the Islamic world had experienced its classical moment and thereafter went into a steep decline. By contrast with Grunebaum, Hodgson, who also taught at Chicago and who died aged only forty-seven in 1968, has inspired quite a few historians with his vision of the central role of Islam in world history. This was set out in the three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (posthumously published in 1974), a pioneering work of synthesis that aimed at rethinking the way Islamic history had been written about. In part, this was done by giving full weight to the shaping role of the physical environment of the torrid zone of the Eurasian landmass. In part, it was done by paying more attention to the political and cultural contributions of the Persians, Turks and Indians (with correspondingly less emphasis on the overweening role of the Arabs). This in turn led him to dismiss the notion that Islamic civilization had peaked in the eighth or ninth century. Rather he suggested that Islamic civilization was at its height in what he called the ‘Middle Period’ extend
ing from the late tenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. He also drew attention to the considerable cultural achievements of the ‘gunpowder empires’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  In order to foster new ways of thinking about the subject, he created a new (and rather unattractive) vocabulary: ‘Islamdom’ designated the territories within which the Muslims and their religion were predominant; ‘Islamicate’ referred to the culture of those territories; the ‘Oikumene’ was the settled world of high culture that spread over Europe, Asia and Africa. Hodgson argued that Islam’s wide territorial sway from the eighth century onwards served to break down previously existing cultural barriers in the three continents. His was a highly sympathetic portrait of Islamic culture and the Venture was emphatically not a history of the ‘Triumph of the West’. He also gave full weight to the Chinese contribution to the Oikumene and more specifically to what the neighbouring Islamicate civilization derived from it. He argued that the Oikumene should be considered as a single unit of study. His grand vision of history, like so many grand visions of history, was heavily influenced by Ibn Khaldun. But Hodgson was also a Christian who had embraced Massignon’s notion of history as the ‘science of compassion’.