For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In an article entitled ‘The Problems of Orientalists’, published in 1971, Hamid Algar, the Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at Berkeley, California, denounced the unfavourable picture of Islam that Grunebaum presented in Medieval Islam. He quite reasonably criticized Arberry for spreading himself too widely. He thought that it was extraordinary that some Muslims regarded the unbelieving Schacht as a great expert on Hadith with almost as much authority as the great medieval Muslim experts, al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. More generally Algar noted that Orientalists were curiously obsessed with issues to do with alien influences on Islam and forgeries. Most sweepingly of all, he questioned the special status of Western-style rationality.20

  A. L. TIBAWI

  A. L. Tibawi’s ferocious polemics, ‘English-Speaking Orientalists: a Critique of Their Approach to Islam and ArabNationalism’, ‘A Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs’, and ‘On the Orientalists Again’, published in 1964, 1979 and 1980 respectively, provide striking examples of an embittered Muslim’s response to Orientalism.21 Tibawi, a Muslim of Palestinian origin who taught at London University’s Institute of Education, resented the way Islamic topics were being taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies next door. He had also read and been influenced by Kurd ‘Ali and in the ‘Second Critique’ he cited Kurd ‘Ali’s view that most Orientalists had ‘political aims, inimical to our interests, that some of them are priests, missionaries or spies using Orientalism as a means towards an end’.

  He prefaced his onslaught in ‘English-Speaking Orientalists’ by declaring that his remarks were ‘not conceived in any spirit of controversy. It must not be mistaken for an apology for any creed, religious or national.’ But what followed was fierce (and the two articles that followed ‘English-Speaking Orientalists’ were even more vehement and the attacks increasingly ad hominem). Taken together, the three articles constitute a thesaurus of academic abuse: ‘speculation and guesswork’, ‘offensive’, ‘speculative’, ‘very little respect for the intelligence of the reader’, ‘audacious and extreme’, ‘chose to join the ranks of those who denigrate Islam and Arabnationalism’, ‘arrogant assurance’, ‘subjective prejudice’, ‘reckless writer and presumptuous pupil’, ‘an undercurrent of fanaticism’, ‘famous for nothing in particular, except in adapting or adopting well-known ideas’, ‘prolific in an area where little effort is required’, ‘blatant factual mistakes’, ‘fantastic theory’, ‘disjoint, digressive and rambling’, ‘insidious campaign to adulterate Islamic history’, ‘howling anachronisms’, ‘tendentious statements’, ‘untenable assertions’, ‘partisan and unscientific’, ‘political Zionist bias’, ‘jumpy and shallow patchwork’, ‘affected rhetoric and absurd hyperbole’, ‘pseudo-historians’, ‘blind bias’, ‘drivel’, ‘useless journalese’, ‘rash irony’, ‘streak of vanity’, ‘immoderate vehemence’, ‘biased citation of witnesses’, ‘discourteous writer’, ‘plagiarism’, ‘colossal failures’, ‘hackneyed dictum’, ‘arrogant assurance’, ‘excessive use of polysyllabic vocabulary’, ‘shackled by a legacy of medieval prejudices’, ‘the purveyors of “amity of hate”’, and so on and on in a torrent of bile. The proposition that the misconceptions of Orientalists are so absurd that they are not worth refuting in detail recurs as a favourite leitmotiv throughout Tibawi’s three articles.

  As a devout Muslim, Tibawi believed that only Muslims were competent to interpret their religion and at several points he suggested that non-Muslim scholars should steer clear of discussing what were matters of faith, for, as far as he was concerned, ‘scientific detachment’ could only be achieved by submitting to Islam. It is not surprising that few Orientalists in Britain agreed. Though Tibawi perceived that Christians were doomed to misunderstand Islam, he could not imagine that the converse might be possible. The Christian refusal to accept Muhammad as the last and most important of God’s prophets was offensive to him: it never seems to have occurred to him that any Christians might take offence at his refusal to accept the Gospels and their message that Jesus was the Son of God.

  Besides being a Muslim, Tibawi was also an Arab of Palestinian origin who believed fervently in Arab nationalism, as well as identifying strongly with the sufferings of the Palestinian Arabs. He believed that Orientalism had a political as well as a religious agenda and that much of what the Orientalists wrote was intended to damage the Arabcause or to conceal the past crimes of the colonialists. Furthermore he tended to identify Arabnationalism with Islam, so that whoever attacked the one attacked the other. Given his anti-Zionism, it was inevitable that he should particularly single out Jewish scholars as Orientalist villains: ‘There is an abundance of evidence that the old spirit of hatred still animates a great deal of the works that pass under the academic label.’ The ‘Jewish writer’ Bernard Lewis, in The Arabs in History (1950), refused to accept the Qur’an as the Word of God and suggested that the Prophet’s teachings had been influenced by Jewish and Christian doctrines. Lewis’s failure to accept the divine origin of Islam was offensive to Tibawi, who judged him to be ‘audacious and extreme’. Lewis was also attacked for an article he wrote in The Cambridge History of Islam, in which he cited some medieval Arab historians who had described Saladin as an ‘ambitious military adventurer’. It is easy to guess that Lewis’s frequently declared support for the state of Israel provoked Tibawi’s attacks on his scholarship.

  Tibawi tastelessly accused Elie Kedourie (another Jew) of having written an Orientalist equivalent to the Nazi textbook, Der Weg zum Reich. Tibawi does not actually name the book in question, but he seems to be referring to the volume of scholarly essays by Elie Kedourie entitled The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Essays (1970). Kedourie was also accused of not being ‘courteous to predecessors he did not agree with’. (It would be pleasant to think that Tibawi was making a joke at his own expense here.) One of Kedourie’s many sins was to have produced evidence that two of the leading intellectuals and social agitators in the nineteenth-century Middle East, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, were not believing Muslims. Tibawi did not dispute the evidence but claimed that they had subsequently been ‘rehabilitated and became recognized as leaders of modern Islamic thought’.

  Tibawi claimed that Jews and Christians had played too large a part in contributing to the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, as well as to the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Since this was the case, the Encyclopaedia should be submitted to censorship by Muslims. As for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Tibawi quoted a friend’s quip that it had been nicknamed the ‘Bulletin of the Hebrew University’. Two volumes of essays, The Legacy of Islam (1974) and The World of Islam (1976), were similarly denounced for having mostly Christian and Jewish contributors. Oxford Arabists were also attacked. R. B. Serjeant, treated favourably in the first piece, was subsequently denounced for writing to The Times about the torture of a Yemeni by Egyptian intelligence officers. Serjeant’s interest in colloquial Arabic was mysteriously deemed to be a disgrace. Patricia Crone was dismissed as ‘a female art specialist’. (Well, the ‘female’ bit is correct.) Hourani was guilty of getting Crone appointed to a job in Oxford. Tibawi considered Arabs and Muslims working within the Orientalist mode to be ‘alienated individuals, denationalized and deculturalized, who try to live in two worlds at the same time, but who are at peace in neither’. Apart from their sins of commission, the Orientalists were corporately guilty of not denouncing what had been happening to the Palestinian people. I know several Orientalists who treasure offprints of Tibawi’s articles as masterpieces of unintentional comedy. Even so, of course he did sometimes hit the mark, though more by luck than design. I never met the man, but I guess that it must have been difficult for him to harbour so much resentment and still feel that life was worth living.

  SECULAR ARAB CRITIQUES

  Tibawi, who criticized the Orientalists from a traditional Islamic stance, still reta
ined a certain respect for Hamilton Gibb. But for the Moroccan historian and novelist Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) and other secular-minded Marxist critics, Gibb was the enemy par excellence. Laroui, writing in L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine (1967), declared that Gibb’s Orientalism was the worst sort, as it had broken with the Germano-French school of erudition and presented itself as empiricism, which was a cover for generalized pontificating.22 Even so, Laroui does not really seem to have had any more respect for the older style of erudite Orientalism, as he attacked Ignaz Goldziher and those who came after him for dissecting and analysing events like the Battle of Badr (624) so intensively that they turned them into non-events. Goldziher’s kind of history was too negative, as was Joseph Schacht’s approach. Laroui was strongly influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, by Gramsci’s ideas about the manufacture by intellectuals of consent to the hegemony of the ruling class. As Laroui saw it, the Orientalist’s production and administration of a specialized kind of knowledge made him an accomplice of the colonialist.

  In The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual. Traditionalism or Historicism? (first published in French in 1974), Laroui returned to the attack on Gibb, accusing him of being too sympathetic to traditional Islam and, on the other hand, neglecting progressive and modernizing forces in the Middle East. (Cantwell Smith was similarly guilty.)23 According to Laroui, Gibb was downright hostile to contemporary Islamic reformism. There was a strange kind of collusion between Orientalists like Gibb and Islamic fundamentalists, as both parties could agree on propositions like ‘Islam and democracy are incompatible’. Tibawi, in his ‘On the Orientalists Again’, had observed that he ‘knew Von Grunebaum fairly well and was always amused by observing his arrogant assurance’. Laroui took the ideological threat posed by Grunebaum more seriously and in a chapter entitled ‘The Arabs and Cultural Anthropology: Notes on the Method of Gustave von Grunebaum’ he attacked the scholar, whom he described as a philologist and specialist in classical poetry who had turned himself into an anthropologist of Islam. Von Grunebaum had repeatedly laid stress on Arabatomism in poetry, natural philosophy and political science – that is to say that entities such as Islamic towns or Islamic poems tended to be composed of discrete elements and to lack an overarching unity. For Grunebaum, Islam’s culture was a mysteriously postulated timeless essence. He imposed his own pattern rather than accepting any self-description by the Muslims of their culture. He also tended to describe Islamic culture in terms of what it lacked, such as the genres of theatre and drama. He judged Islam to be inimical to humanism ‘in that it is not interested in the richest possible unfolding and evolving of man’s potentialities’. He also argued that its cultural development had been arrested in the eleventh century (something echoed by Bernard Lewis in his The Arabs in History). Islamic science was bound to peter out because it was founded upon an inadequate theory of knowledge. Von Grunebaum had infuriated Laroui by insisting that Islam will have to modernize in the Western way, for Islam ‘cannot undergo modernization unless it reinterprets itself from the Western point of view and accepts the Western idea of man and the Western definition of truth’.24

  A less impressive critique of Orientalism from a Marxist perspective had previously been published by an Egyptian of Coptic Christian origin, Anouar Abdel-Malek. In ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, published in 1963, he had accused Orientalists of positing ‘an essence which constitutes the inalienable and common basis of all Eastern beings considered’.25 Islam was viewed by them as a passive object. Abdel-Malek, who taught at the Paris Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, demanded that Orientalists adopt Oriental methodologies. His views about Western scholars positing an Oriental ‘Other’ were to be picked up later by Said, but Abdel-Malek’s knowledge of the history of Orientalism was shaky. For example, he believed that traditional Orientalism was established by a decision of the Council of Vienna (sic) in 1245 (sic). Like Said after him, Abdel-Malek argued that Orientalism was a child of the age of European hegemony, but his argument lacked supporting detail. He argued that traditional Orientalism was doomed by the rise of national liberation movements and the end of the age of colonialism. The Orientalists faced a crisis as their compatriots no longer controlled the territories that the scholars studied. Orientals were destined then to take over the interpretation of their own culture. One is not surprised to find no reference to the Soviet overlordship of Muslim territories in Central Asia and no reference either to Soviet Orientalism. Unlike Said, Abdel-Malek regarded Massignon as a misguided racist who had argued that the Arabs were inferior Semites compared to the Jews. Nevertheless, like Said, Abdel-Malek preferred French to British Orientalism.

  In ‘Apology for Orientalism’, published in Diogenes in 1965, a leading Italian Orientalist, Francesco Gabrieli, replied to Abdel-Malek. Gabrieli had supervised a complete translation of The Thousand and One Nights into Italian. He later published an anthology of Arabic primary sources on the history of the Crusades as well as various general introductions to aspects of Arabculture and politics. Gabrieli viewed Orientalism as essentially a benign Enlightenment phenomenon. He denied that Orientalists were invariably the accomplices of colonialism, citing the counter-examples of Browne, Massignon and ‘Caetani who was scoffed at in Italy as the “Turk” for having opposed the conquest of Libya’. Gabrieli’s response was quite aggressive. He regarded the East as a methodological desert: ‘Because so far as modern conceptions, master-ideas, interpretations of history or of life that have been developed in the East are concerned, we confess that we are still waiting to hear of them.’ Orientals had no choice but to work with the methods and materials of the Orientalist. In adopting a Marxist perspective, Abdel-Malek was in no sense emancipating himself from the Western style of thought.26

  Hitherto this chapter has considered Said’s Islamist and Marxist precursors. Said, in his book, seems to have drawn quite heavily on Abdel-Malek, Laroui and Tibawi without fully acknowledging his debt. The publication of Orientalism in 1978 also provided more fuel for further Islamist attacks on Orientalism – this despite Said’s hostility to Islamism and religion in general. Only a few of these will be mentioned here in order to suggest the flavour of the polemic.

  MUSLIMS WRITING AFTER SAID

  Writing in 1984 in a volume entitled Orientalism, Islam and Islamists, Professor Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi, an Indian writer and editor, indicted Hamilton Gibb for the crime of writing about Islam even though he was not a Muslim: ‘It seems to have been beyond his comprehension to see in Muhammad a divinely inspired Prophet ordained to give mankind a message of hope and happiness in all walks of life.’27 Gibb had given an economic and political slant to the early history of Islam, when that history could only really be understood in religious terms. Gibb was also guilty of doubting the reliability of Hadiths as source material. In the same volume, Suleyman Nyang and Samir Abed-Rabbo attempted to defend Islam against all the slurs that they had detected in the writings of Bernard Lewis. Not all the pleas for the defence were wholly convincing. Lewis had produced clear documentary evidence that Muslims traded in slaves in the Mediterranean (and on quite a considerable scale), but, according to Abed-Rabbo, the ignorant Lewis had failed to realize that ‘a person who acts contrary to the teachings of Islam by acting as a slave trader cannot be called a Muslim’.28

  This kind of devotional approach to the history of Islam taken by Faruqi and Abed-Rabbo is never likely to be adopted by Western Orientalists. It reminds me of a Muslim friend of mine who, in Oxford back in the 1960s, was set an essay by Professor Beeston in which he was asked to explain the victory of Muhammad and the Medinans over the polytheistic Quraysh tribe. He produced an essay in which he argued that Muhammad had won because, according to earliest sources, a thousand angels fought on his side. The eighth Sura of the Qur’an referred to this incident. My friend’s essay received no marks.

  Dr Ahmad Ghorab, a Saudi religious scholar, has expressed a remarkable hostility towards Orientalism. In a pamphlet published in
1995, he wrote as follows: ‘Whoever knows its long history will recognize in it the influence of the mentality of the Crusades and the rancour of the Jews against Islam. It soon becomes clear that the Orientalists are networks of Christians and Jews, who, behind the façade of academic institutions and the pretence of scholarly curiosity and objectivity, have been engaged in an unrelenting effort to distort Islam in all its aspects.’29 Collaboration with Orientalists was forbidden in the Qur’an. In the Old and New Testaments the Jews and Christians had received flawed and corrupted revelations. It is because of this that Orientalist textual critics are encouraging Muslims to experience the same kind of intellectual doubts that Christians and Jews are bound to experience about the Bible. The most striking thing about Ghorab’s polemical pamphlet is the sheer amount of hatred he evinces for Christians and Jews, as well as for scholarship.

  Ziauddin Sardar is also a believing Muslim, but he has attacked Orientalism from a more sophisticated point of view. He is a science journalist and columnist for the New Statesman who has published numerous books on modernism and Islam.30 His short book, Orientalism, was published in 1999.31 The influence of Said’s earlier book is pervasive, though Sardar has added some digressions on cultural studies, as well some factual errors that are entirely original to him. His treatment of what he chooses to regard as medieval Orientalism is peculiarly unsatisfactory. He claims that the ‘foundation of Orientalism was laid by John of Damascus’ and adds that his book became ‘the classical source of all Christian writings on Islam’. But John wrote in Greek and most of those Christians who wrote about Islam in the following centuries knew no Greek. Sardar has Pope Urban preach the First Crusade at Clermont in 1096. The correct date is 1095. Writing about the Crusades, he claims that ‘Jerusalem itself did not fall back into Muslim hands until 1244’. Actually Saladin occupied it in 1187. He cites Norman Daniels on the Crusaders’ hostility to Islam, but he must be thinking of Norman Daniel.