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Thirty years after Edward Said’s groundbreaking "Orientalism," a British
scholar responds.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, November 12, 2006; BW15
DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE
Orientalism and Its Discontents
By Robert Irwin
Overlook. 409 pp. $35
Nearly 30 years ago, the late Edward Said brought out his most famous
book, Orientalism (1978). Till then, Orientalism had been regarded as
simply the branch of European scholarship focusing on the Middle East,
North Africa and South Asia. But Said argued that it was, in fact, a
highly politicized concept, the umbrella term for a kind of intellectual
— fostering racism, justifying Western interference in largely Muslim
nations, and generally controlling how the West perceived the Middle
East. It was, to use the now familiar academic catchphrase, a hegemonic
discourse, reducing rich and vital cultures, peoples and religions to a
set of patronizing stereotypes. As a scholarly discipline, Orientalism
was rotten with bad faith or its students were the naive tools of a
colonialist ideology.
The book proved wildly successful and made the young Said a star of the
academy and of what has come to be called cultural studies. Indeed,
Orientalism supported the central theoretical premise of many
intellectuals at the time — that the prejudices of dead white European
males had utterly distorted and warped their scholarship, art, politics
and human sympathies.
Robert Irwin, himself an Oxford-trained Arabist, doesn’t buy this. He
asserts in his introduction and argues in his penultimate chapter that
Said’s book, thinking and evidence are shoddy, unreliable and
mean-spirited. The Columbia literary critic’s attack on Orientalism,
Irwin argues, maligns the lifework of admirable and deeply learned
people, mocks a long, honorable tradition of scholarship, and plays fast
and loose with the facts. Dangerous Knowledge is in part, then, Robert
Irwin’s riposte to Edward Said.
I say in part, because the bulk of this exhaustive, and somewhat
exhausting, book consists of a solid history of Middle East scholarship
from antiquity to the present. In format, it recalls Sandys’s History of
Classical Scholarship , being made up of a series of short biographies
augmented by interpretive summaries of important research. Happily,
Irwin’s clean, clear prose — he is a novelist as well as the Middle
East editor for the Times Literary Supplement — keeps the pages
enjoyable as well as brisk. He explains the relevance of major textual
discoveries and translations, lingers affectionately over the
eccentrics, madmen and giants of the field, points out everyone’s
ideological or religious affiliations, and deploys with ease and grace a
vast amount of reading and research. Irwin has, to use his own highest
accolade, tried to get things right.
Dangerous Knowledge is appropriately full of knowledge, carefully
presented. In antiquity, for instance, the culture of the Middle East
wasn’t regarded by outsiders as a wholly alien "Other": Aeschylus’ "The
Persians" sympathetically portrays the empire that only seven years
previous had tried to conquer Greece; the Roman emperor Philip was an
Arab; Islam was often regarded as just a variant of the Arian heresy
(which denied the divinity of Christ). During the Middle Ages, Arabic
texts introduced Euclid’s mathematics to the West. Avicenna and Averroes
were major interpreters of Aristotle. Moorish Spain was a center of
unrivalled learning. As for the Crusades, well, the sultan of Egypt
sarcastically observed that he was surprised "that Christian Crusaders
should seek to imitate the violent ways of Muhammad, rather than the
peaceful preaching of Christ and his Apostles."
Irwin doesn’t fudge harsh truths. In Europe during the Middle Ages, an
interest in the Koran could get you branded as a crypto-Muslim and earn
you a prison sentence. European travel tales really did portray the East
as a land of marvels and romance and magic and sensuality. At first,
Europeans studied Arabic just to better understand the cultural
background of the Bible. Between the Renaissance and the 19th century,
European classical scholarship and Biblical studies usually provided the
structural model for Orientalist research. While westerners often
respected Arabs for their culture and science, they frequently thought
Turks to be "the barbarous descendants of the Scythians."
We learn that Guillaume Postel (1510-81) was the first true Orientalist,
as well a "complete lunatic." (For one thing, he believed a woman he met
in Venice was the mystical Shekhinah, or divine presence, of the
Kabbalah, as well as the New Eve.) Barth?l?my d’Herbelot (1625-95),
compiler of the Biblioth?que orientale , and Antoine Galland
(1646-1715), translator of The Thousand and One Nights , were "the first
Orientalists to take a serious interest in the secular literature of the
Middle East." Edward Gibbon wanted to study Arabic at Oxford, but no one
there could teach it to him. Ibn Khaldun’s 14th-century
historico-philosophical masterwork, The Muqaddimah , speculated about
the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations in ways that anticipate or
influenced Gibbon, Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler and Arnold
Toynbee.
Nearly every page of Dangerous Knowledge casually points out what seems
to most of us, with our feeble French or Spanish, truly awesome
linguistic erudition. In the 17th century, Thomas Hyde knew Turkish,
Malaysian, Armenian and Chinese; worked on the Persian, Arabic and
Syriac texts of a polyglot Bible; and at Oxford was the Librarian of the
Bodleian, Laudian Professor of Arabic, and Regius Professor of Hebrew.
William Jones, famous for his discovery of the Indo-Aryan roots of
Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, "mastered thirteen languages and dabbled in
twenty-eight." Silvestre de Sacy learned Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaean,
Ethiopian, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Mandaean "and the usual
number of European languages that any self-respecting nineteenth-century
academic would expect to be at home in." Sacy, says Irwin, was the first
European to really understand the meter of Arabic poetry.
Edward Said portrays Ernest Renan and the Count de Gobineau as
arch-villains, but Irwin takes pains to show that the former’s romantic
generalities — about, say, the desert as the land of monotheism — were
dismissed by true scholars, while the latter’s racism was far different
from what Said describes. (Irwin suggests that Said never actually read
Gobineau.) Moreover, the 19th century was legitimately exploring the
whole issue of race, with some people arguing, like Renan, that mixing
ethnicities avoided softness and decadence, while others, like Gobineau,
maintained that such mongrelization led to degeneracy (colonization,
was, therefore, an "appetizing dish, but one which poisons those who
consume it"). Even England’s greatest Orientalist, William Robertson
Smith, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , was a racist: He
thought the Arabs were superior to the Europeans.
Dangerous Knowledge is, in fact, really too packed a book for any easy
summary. It ranges from the Indiana Jones-like career of the doomed
Edward Palmer ("polyglot, spy and poet") to Arminius Vambery, who one
evening after dinner talked about Balkan superstitions with Bram Stoker
and thus provoked the nightmare that inspired Dracula. Irwin tells us of
the spiritually anguished French scholar Louis Massignon and A.J.
Arberry, whose translation of the Koran remains the truest and most
poetical. He speaks admiringly of the brilliant American Marshall
Hodgson who, before his early death at 47, shook up Middle East studies
with his three-volume The Venture of Islam , which emphasized the
importance of geography and the contributions of Persians, Turks and
Indians to the rise of Islam. He reminds us, time and again, that Jews
have consistently been the greatest Arabic scholars, from the Hungarian
Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), "the uncontested master of Islamic
studies," to our contemporary Bernard Lewis. Above all, Irwin emphasizes
what the late Albert Hourani (author of the bestselling A History of the
Arab Peoples ) learned from his teacher Richard Walzer: "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)."
Dangerous Knowledge is, obviously, a history of that apostolic
succession. It ends, though, with Muslim critiques of Western
Orientalism and a chapter about Edward Said titled "An Enquiry into the
Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic." This is an allusion to
John Carter and Graham Pollard’s quietly devastating 1934 Enquiry into
Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets , which exposed Thomas J. Wise,
England’s foremost book collector, as a forger, cheat and liar. Irwin
forthrightly maintains that "Said libelled generations of scholars who
were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared
to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good
faith."
Is Irwin right about Said? He certainly makes a cogent case. And yet.
Said too was admired, even revered, by many good and honorable men and
women, many of them first-rate thinkers and theorists. Haven’t we, after
all, persistently tended to view the Middle East through prejudices and
distorting lenses of one sort or another? There’s no doubt, then, that
Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of
literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like
Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and
tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose.
?
Michael Dirda’s e-mail address is [email protected]. He conducts a weekly
book discussion on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. at washingtonpost.com.
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