For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Hodgson took frequent issue with his predecessors in his entertainingly aggressive footnotes. In the main text, his presentation of his arguments, though occasionally eloquent, was often turgid and difficult. Even so, he has turned out to be one of the most influential writers on Islamic culture in modern times. Quite a few of today’s professors would describe themselves as Hodgsonians. According to the novelist Saul Bellow, who knew him, ‘Marshall was a vegetarian, a pacifist, and a Quaker – most odd, most unhappy, a quirky charmer.’ Bellow, a passionately blinkered Zionist, could not understand how any scholar could interest himself in the barbarous Arabs: ‘Why should a pacifist fall in love with militant Islam?’21The question is rhetorical. If Bellow, an intellectual who seems extraordinarily ignorant about Islam, had wanted that question answered, he could have attended Hodgson’s lectures or, later, read The Venture of Islam.

  ALBERT HOURANI

  One of the longest and most thoughtful reviews of The Venture of Islam appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. This was by Albert Hourani (1915–93).22 Hourani was born in Manchester, the son of a Protestant Lebanese businessman. He read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford – not classics. The farouche Margoliouth supervised his unfinished D. Phil. thesis. He then worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office before becoming a Fellow of Magdalen College and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Before turning to academic life, he had been an eloquent advocate of the Palestinian cause and, more generally, he had been optimistic about the future of Arab nationalism. He was then bitterly disappointed by the British betrayal of the Arabs of Palestine and thereafter he seems to have found a refuge from the setbacks of contemporary politics in the study of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Arabworld.

  He was a master of intellectual biography and his best book, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962), is, like Edmund Wilson’s classic study of the ideological origins of Soviet Communism, To the Finland Station, a mixture of character study and intellectual history. Hourani emphasized and perhaps overemphasized the role of British and French liberal ideas in shaping modern Arab thought. Before the achievement of independence by Arab nations and the bitter realities of post-colonialism, the days of hope were to be found in the ‘Liberal age’. An essay entitled ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables’ has proved hardly less influential. In it he sought to show how local Arabnotables, especially in Syria, used to operate as mediators between the Ottoman central government and local interests. However, in the colonial era, the notable go-betweens were more or less forced to become leaders of their local communities with consequences that were often deleterious. His interest in urban elites and informal power structures closely reflected his own position and personality. He was an urbane, liberal patrician Oxford don, who invariably preferred courteous negotiation and debate to confrontation. His elegant cadenced prose added force to his arguments.

  Late in life he produced a bestseller. This was A History of the Arab Peoples (1991), which came out at the time of the Gulf War and which was described by another Middle Eastern historian, Malcolm Yapp, as ‘a book which evoked like no other the sights, the smells and the rhythms of Arab life, and which integrated these insights into a flowing narrative of the course of Arab history’. Hourani’s overview of Arab history, which competed with earlier works by Philip Hitti and Bernard Lewis, was strongly influenced by Ibn Khaldun’s model of the cyclical rise and decline of Muslim regimes. (It is noteworthy that the historical visions of Kremer, Gibb and Marshall Hodgson were similarly shaped by their reading of the fourteenth-century North African.) The other great influence was that of Goldziher. ‘Our view of Islam and Islamic culture is very largely that which Goldziher laid down.’23 In the 1950s Hourani had converted to Catholicism. Though a Christian, like many Christian Arabs in modern times he identified with the achievements of the Muslims. ‘Islam was what the Arabs had done in history.’ His fascination with the life and thought of Massignon may have been one of the factors behind his conversion. For Hourani, as for Massignon, the practice of history was a series of exercises in empathy. A gentle and civilized man himself, he tended to play down the importance of confrontation, schism, warfare, persecution, poverty and plague in Arab History. He produced a sunlit, almost cloudless, version of that history.

  Hourani also wrote a series of essays on the formation of Orientalism in which he argued that it was not an independent discourse, but took ideas from German philosophers of history such as Herder and Hegel, as well as from Darwin, Marx and others working in widely differing fields. His interest in German thought was fostered by his association in Oxford with distinguished Orientalists such as Richard Walzer and Samuel Stern, who had been trained in Germany. Richard Walzer (1900–1975), Schacht’s close friend, was an expert on Arabphilosophy, and had fled Nazi Germany and ended up in Oxford. Walzer also taught Hourani about ‘the importance of scholarly traditions: the way in which scholarship was passed from one generation to another by a kind of apostolic succession, a chain of witnesses (a silsila to give it its Arabic name). He also told me much about the central tradition of Islamic scholarship in Europe, that expressed in German.’24 By contrast, Hourani was aware how weakly established British Orientalism was and how the small number of teaching posts in the field tended to force academic specialists to be generalists. (It is pretty easy to find a publisher for a general book on Islamic culture or Arab History. But if one is trying to publish on Fatimid coinage or on the ideology of the Almoravids, things are not so easy and a publishing house may require a subsidy before it can consider publishing such recondite stuff.) Although he was a friend of Edward Said, Hourani lamented that Said’s book had made Orientalism a dirty word. Hourani deplored the ammunition it gave to those Muslims who argued that Islam can only properly be studied by Muslims. He also wondered why those Orientalists who wrote in German, especially Goldziher, had been omitted from consideration.25

  MARXISTS AND OTHERS IN FRANCE

  Attempts to present Orientalism as a monolithic discourse necessarily ignore or downplay the importance of the contributions made by Marxists to the field. Russian Marxist Orientalism has already been discussed. The contribution of French Marxists was no less important. Claude Cahen (1909–91) has been described by an American historian of the Arabworld, Ira Lapidus, as the greatest historian of the Middle East in the twentieth century.26 The break away from the focus on the anecdotal and heroic was largely pioneered by this historian. When Cahen was six years old, his mother made him cry by relating to him the misfortunes of Louis IX in Egypt. By the time he was ready to produce his first great work, La Syrie du Nord à l’époque des Croisades (1940), he was prepared to take a much sterner and more detached view of the respective fortunes of Christians and Muslims in the Near East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cahen was a Marxist, and in La Syrie du Nord he struggled to present the region as a territory in its own right, rather than as a temporary imperial extension of medieval Europe. He paid particularly careful attention to the topography and economy of northern Syria. He wanted to get away from history as the story of the doings of great men. At the 1954 Orientalist Congress at Cambridge, he denounced what he saw as the amateur historiography produced by imperialists, colonialists and missionaries, and their excessive preoccupation with the affairs of sultans, scholars and great artists. (He was very surprised when at the end of his speech, Gibb came up and shook him warmly by the hand. But as we have already seen, Gibb was similarly keen to break down the old boundaries of conventional Orientalism.)

  Cahen was also hostile to assigning religion or philosophy a central role in the history of the medieval Near East. He disliked using Islam as the explanatory or structuring force in that history. He was not keen on using poetry and belles-lettres as historical sources either. He was an unrivalled expert on the historical sources as more narrowly defined, whether printed or in manuscript. No one did more to identify, edit and translate A
rabic texts bearing on the history of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Egypt or Syria – or ever will, I guess. His Marxism was also evidenced in his interest in the role of those urban groups in medieval Cairo and Baghdad who might be seen as forerunners of a modern Lumpenproletariat. But, despite his Marxism, he was suspicious of many of the applications of ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois’ to the Near East. He was similarly suspicious of the idea of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, argued by some Marxists to be the precursor of the ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production.

  He taught at the Sorbonne. His stress on economic and sociological factors was obviously a world away from Massignon’s eccentric spiritualized version of Islam’s past. However, Cahen was, like Massignon, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, and he campaigned for Palestinian rights. He belonged to the French Communist party and loyally accepted the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. (He did break ranks over the scientific basis to Lysenko’s work on evolution and crop modification, however. It is clear he thought that the Soviet scientist was a fraud.) Cahen only let his party membership lapse sometime around 1960. He was by no means unique as a French Marxist anti-colonialist Orientalist.

  Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) came, like Cahen, from a Jewish family.27 His parents were working-class communists in Paris. As a boy, he took part in demonstrations in favour of the Moroccan Rif uprising of the 1920s against the French colonial administration. He began working life as a messenger boy delivering croissants to typists, but in his spare time he set to work in libraries teaching himself the elements of scholarship. A reading of Renan got him interested in the comparative philology of the Semitic languages. Eventually he was taken on to study various Semitic languages, as well as Amharic, at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. He spent the war mostly in Beirut where he had many contacts with Arab communists. In 1955 he became Professor of Old Ethiopic at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He belonged to the Communist party from 1937 to 1958. As a loyal communist, he was obliged to argue against all the evidence that Russian Jews did not want to go to Israel. ‘Through Zionism, treason penetrated the socialist world,’ according to Rodinson. While Jewish doctors and other Jews were falling victim to Stalin’s purges, Rodinson was maintaining that there was no such thing as Soviet anti-Semitism. He hoped that Marxism would provide the necessary ideology for the modernization of the Arabworld.

  Rodinson, who had studied with Massignon, did not share Said’s enthusiasm for the man and, reacting against Massignon’s flamboyant spirituality, he decided to concentrate on an aspect of material culture. So he published a series of articles on medieval Arab cookery. After all, he argued, not all Muslims were mystics, but, mystical or not, they did all have to eat. Since childhood, Rodinson had sensed an affinity between Islam and communism. In 1961, he produced a biography of Muhammad, of which he later wrote as follows: ‘Probably in an unconscious fashion I compared him to Stalin.’28 Rodinson produced an atheistic, positivist life of Muhammad, that placed him within the changing mercantile economy of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. Islam was presented as resembling a political party more than it did a spiritual movement. The later Shi‘ite Isma‘ili movement was presented as a kind of early precursor of the Communist International. In 1966 Rodinson published Islam and Capitalism (1966), in which he argued that Islam did not hinder the growth of capitalism, but on the other hand, neither did it help it. His Israel and the Arabs (1968) argued that in essence the struggle of the Arabs against Israel was an anti-colonialist war, rooted ‘in the struggle of an indigenous population against the occupation of part of its territory by foreigners’.

  Rodinson’s La Fascination de l’Islam (1980, translated as Europe and the Mystique of Islam) is a short and astringent account of the development of Arabic and Islamic studies. He was especially critical of religious polemic and philological bias. His book tends to overemphasize the importance of French Orientalists at the expense of those of other nations. Although Rodinson welcomed the challenge to what he judged to be the smug self-satisfaction of so many Orientalists, he thought that Said’s earlier critique was overstated, based on limited reading, and unreasonably limited to French and British Orientalists. He considered the linkage made by Said between colonialism and Orientalism was too naive. Said’s book was too exclusively focused on Arabs, whereas Rodinson pointed out that four out of five Muslims are not Arabs. Moreover, unlike Said, he did not believe that the bad faith or polemical intent of a scholar necessarily and intrinsically vitiated everything that that scholar wrote. He made a speech at the Leiden Conference of Orientalists where, among other things, he pointed out that the fact that Champollion had racist ideas about the degeneracy of modern Egyptians did not affect the correctness of his decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Although French Orientalism was not monopolized by Marxists, it does seem to have been dominated by the left wing. Jacques Berque (1910–95) was born in Algeria and served in colonial administration in Morocco.29 But slowly he came to detach himself from the colonial viewpoint, to adopt socialist positions and to identify with the oppressed. He held the chair of social history of contemporary Islam at the Collège de France and produced books on the modern history of the Arabworld. His most ambitious work was a fanatically francophone-biased history of modern Egypt. As a pied-noir, he was understandably slow to accept that the colonial experiment in Algeria was doomed. He never entirely emancipated himself from chauvinism and he maintained that the Arabcountries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) ‘are still for us the place of our pride and our tears’ and that the French language ‘still remains – I dare to proclaim it today – the Hellenism of the Arabpeoples’. Having early on maintained that the future of the Arabworld would be democratic, socialist and secular, he was disconcerted by the Islamic revival in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere. His was a highly literary sociology of the Arabworld, embellished with sensuous evocations of the colours and smells of everyday life in that world. At a more theoretical level he struggled to trace the passage from ‘the sacral to the historic’ and discussed the problems of alienation and identity in rather ponderous, allusive, even flatulently vacuous essays about the characteristics of Mediterranean societies and of Islamic culture.

  By contrast with these committed left-wing Orientalists, the Arabist André Miquel (b. 1929) chose Arabic on aesthetic grounds.30 As a schoolboy, he decided that he wanted to work in a field that was obscure and marginal, in which he could peacefully do research and publish. So he taught himself Arabic. Since there were few university teaching posts in his chosen field, he initially worked as a representative of French culture in Ethiopia and Egypt (and during the latter stint, he spent five months in prison as a suspected spy). On release he secured a university post in Aix-en-Provence and it was in part at least under the influence of his friend, the famous Annales historian Fernand Braudel, that he produced important work on medieval Arab geography. He is chiefly important as a translator and popularizer of medieval Arabliterature. From 1968 he taught in Paris and it was there that he assembled a team of scholars which produced a series of specialized studies on The Thousand and One Nights. He is also the author of a charming autobiography, L’Orient d’une vie (1990).

  THE BRITISH PATRICIANS

  British Orientalism was less radicalized than the French. Middle Eastern studies, particularly in London, were dominated by a rather grand patriciate of scholars who espoused what can loosely be described as right-wing positions. These scholars (among them Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie, P. J. Vatikiotis (Taki) and Ann Lambton) tended to be sceptical about the declared aims of Arab socialism and nationalism, defensive about Britain’s role in the Middle East and sympathetic towards Israel. However, they were (or in some cases still are) scholars and, even if one has detected a right-wing strain in their writings, that in itself does not absolve one from carefully considering their researches and the conclusions to be drawn from them (and, of course, the same sort of consideration applies t
o the writings of the French Marxists discussed above). Professors at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1960s had more power than they do today. Malcolm Yapp, then a junior lecturer at the School, described it as follows: ‘At that time the School constituted a loose framework intended to facilitate the personal academic initiatives of its academic staff rather than a scheme of neat and purposive pigeonholes in which individual scholars laboured to achieve a greater good.’31 Moreover, the influence of the senior figures in Middle Eastern studies was not restricted to academic circles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Orientalists wrote for one another, but in the twentieth century and particularly after the Second World War this changed as experts on the Arabs and Islam were invited to write general books for a lay public as well as to contribute to newspapers, literary journals and programmes on radio and television.

  Bernard Lewis is a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Emeritus Professor of Princeton University and the possessor of various honorary degrees and a member of the Athenaeum, yet he also features as one of the darkest of the demons that stalk the pages of Said’s phantasmagorical Orientalism.32 Lewis, born in 1916, learned Hebrew as a schoolboy (he is Jewish). He read history at London University and studied with Gibb, before doing a diploma in Semitic studies in Paris in 1937, where he studied with Massignon. After receiving a London University doctorate in 1939, he taught briefly at the School of Oriental Studies, but, having been called up, he served in the Royal Armoured Corps and the Intelligence Corps before being seconded to a department of the Foreign Office. During the war, the book of his thesis, The Origin of Isma‘ilism (1940), was published. This short book presented the medieval Shi‘a movement as one of class-based social protest. (Though Lewis considered the possibility that the Isma‘ili movement might have been some kind of precursor of communism, he came to the conclusion that it was not.) His war work in the Foreign Office led on to his next book, A Handbook of Diplomatic and Political Arabic (1947). Throughout his career he has maintained a constant, philological preoccupation with terminology, particularly the Arabic vocabulary of politics, diplomacy and warfare.