Orientalism (42 page)

The peculiar hold on late-nineteenth-century liberal European culture of such relatively punitive ideas will seem mysterious unless it is remembered that the appeal of sciences like linguistics, anthropology, and biology was that they were empirical, and by no means speculative or idealistic. Renan’s Semitic, like Bopp’s Indo-European, was a constructed object, it is true, but it was considered logical and inevitable as a protoform, given the scientifically apprehendable and empirically analyzable data of specific Semitic languages. Thus, in trying to formulate a prototypical and primitive linguistic type (as well as a cultural, psychological, and historical one), there was also an “attempt to define a primary human potential,”
³³
out of which completely specific instances of behavior uniformly derived. Now this attempt would have been impossible had it not also been believed—in classical empiricist terms—that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasihistorical conditions.
³⁴
From this set, which was not available to the native for discovery or introspection, there was no subsequent escape. The antiquarian bias of Orientalists was supported by these empiricist ideas. In all their studies of “classical” Islam, Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism they felt themselves, as George Eliot’s Dr. Casaubon confesses, to be acting “like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.”
³⁵

Were these theses about linguistic, civilization al, and finally racial characteristics merely one side of an academic debate amongst European scientists and scholars, we might dismiss them as furnishing material for an unimportant closet drama. The point is, however, that both the terms of the debate and the debate itself had very wide circulation; in late-nineteenth-century culture, as Lionel Trilling has said, “racial theory, stimulated by a rising nationalism and a spreading imperialism, supported by an incomplete and mal-assimilated science, was almost undisputed.”
³⁶
Race theory, ideas about primitive origins and primitive classifications, modern decadence, the progress of civilization, the destiny of the white (or Aryan) races, the need for colonial territories—all these were elements in the peculiar amalgam of science, politics, and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was always to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind. There was general agreement too that, according to a strangely transformed variety of Darwinism sanctioned by Darwin
himself, the modern Orientals were degraded remnants of a former greatness; the ancient, or “classical,” civilizations of the Orient were perceivable through the disorders of present decadence, but only (
a
) because a white specialist with highly refined scientific techniques could do the sifting and reconstructing, and (
b
) because a vocabulary of sweeping generalities (the Semites, the Aryans, the Orientals) referred not to a set of fictions but rather to a whole array of seemingly objective and agreed-upon distinctions. Thus a remark about what Orientals were and were not capable of was supported by biological “truths” such as those spelled out in P. Charles Michel’s “A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy” (1896), in Thomas Henry Huxley’s
The Struggle for Existence in Human Society
(1888), Benjamin Kidd’s
Social Evolution
(1894), John B. Crozier’s
History of Intellectual Development on the Lines of Modern Evolution
(1897–1901), and Charles Harvey’s
The Biology of British Politics
(1904).
³⁷
It was assumed that if languages were as distinct from each other as the linguists said they were, then too the language users—their minds, cultures, potentials, and even their bodies—were different in similar ways. And these distinctions had the force of ontological, empirical truth behind them, together with the convincing demonstration of such truth in studies of origins, development, character, and destiny.

The point to be emphasized is that this truth about the distinctive differences between races, civilizations, and languages was (or pretended to be) radical and ineradicable. It went to the bottom of things, it asserted that there was no escape from origins and the types these origins enabled; it set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, and civilizations were constructed; it forced vision away from common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organization, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins. A scientist could no more escape such origins in his research than an Oriental could escape “the Semites” or “the Arabs” or “the Indians” from which his present reality—debased, colonized, backward—excluded him, except for the white researcher’s didactic presentation.

The profession of specialized research conferred unique privileges. We recall that Lane could appear to be an Oriental and yet retain his scholarly detachment. The Orientals he studied became in fact
his
Orientals, for he saw them not only as actual people but as monumentalized objects in his account of them. This double perspective
encouraged a sort of structured irony. On the one hand, there was a collection of people living in the present; on the other hand, these people—as the subject of study—became “the Egyptians,” “the Muslims,” or “the Orientals.” Only the scholar could see, and manipulate, the discrepancy between the two levels. The tendency of the former was always towards greater variety, yet this variety was always being restrained, compressed downwards and backwards to the
radical
terminal of the generality. Every modern, native instance of behavior became an effusion to be sent back to the original terminal, which was strengthened in the process. This kind of “dispatching” was precisely the
discipline
of Orientalism.

Lane’s ability to deal with the Egyptians as present beings and as validations of
sui generis
labels was a function both of Orientalist discipline and of generally held views about the Near Oriental Muslim or Semite. In no people more than in the Oriental Semites was it possible to see the present and the origin together. The Jews and the Muslims, as subjects of Orientalist study, were readily understandable in view of their primitive origins: this was (and to a certain extent still is) the cornerstone of modern Orientalism. Renan had called the Semites an instance of arrested development, and functionally speaking this came to mean that for the Orientalist no modern Semite, however much he may have believed himself to be modern, could ever outdistance the organizing claims on him of his origins. This functional rule worked on the temporal and spatial levels together. No Semite advanced in time beyond the development of a “classical” period; no Semite could ever shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe. Every manifestation of actual “Semitic” life could be, and ought to be, referred back to the primitive explanatory category of “the Semitic.”

The executive power of such a system of reference, by which each discrete instance of real behavior could be reduced down and back to a small number of explanatory “original” categories, was considerable by the end of the nineteenth century. In Orientalism it was the equivalent of bureaucracy in public administration. The department was more useful than the individual file, and certainly the human being was significant principally as the occasion for a file. We must imagine the Orientalist at work in the role of a clerk putting together a very wide assortment of files in a large cabinet marked “the Semites.” Aided by recent discoveries in comparative and primitive anthropology, a scholar like William Robertson Smith could group together the inhabitants of the Near Orient and write
on their kinship and marriage customs, on the form and content of their religious practice. The power of Smith’s work is its plainly radical demythologizing of the Semites. The nominal barriers presented to the world by Islam or Judaism are swept aside; Smith uses Semitic philology, mythology, and Orientalist scholarship “to construct … a hypothetical picture of the development of the social systems, consistent with all the Arabian facts.” If this picture succeeds in revealing the antecedent, and still influential, roots of monotheism in totemism or animal worship, then the scholar has been successful. And this, Smith says, despite the fact that “our Mohammedan sources draw a veil, as far as they can, over all details of the old heathenism.”
³⁸

Smith’s work on the Semites covered such areas as theology, literature, and history; it was done with a full awareness of work done by Orientalists (see, for instance, Smith’s savage attack in 1887 on Renan’s
Histoire du peuple d’Israël
), and more important, was intended as an aid to the understanding of the modern Semites. For Smith, I think, was a crucial link in the intellectual chain connecting the White-Man-as-expert to the modern Orient. None of the encapsulated wisdom delivered as Oriental expertise by Lawrence, Hogarth, Bell, and the others would have been possible without Smith. And even Smith the antiquarian scholar would not have had half the authority without his additional and direct experience of “the Arabian facts.” It was the combination in Smith of the “grasp” of primitive categories with the ability to see general truths behind the empirical vagaries of contemporary Oriental behavior that gave weight to his writing. Moreover, it was this special combination that adumbrated the style of expertise upon which Lawrence, Bell, and Philby built their reputation.

Like Burton and Charles Doughty before him, Smith voyaged in the Hejaz, between 1880 and 1881. Arabia has been an especially privileged place for the Orientalist, not only because Muslims treat Islam as Arabia’s
genius loci
, but also because the Hejaz appears historically as barren and retarded as it is geographically; the Arabian desert is thus considered to be a locale about which one can make statements regarding the past in exactly the same form (and with the same content) that one makes them regarding the present. In the Hejaz you can speak about Muslims, modern Islam, and primitive Islam without bothering to make distinctions. To this vocabulary devoid of historical grounding, Smith was able to bring the cachet of additional authority provided by his Semitic studies.
What we hear in his comments is the standpoint of a scholar commanding
all
the antecedents for Islam, the Arabs, and Arabia. Hence:

The “us” in the last sentence of this amazing piece of logic defines the White Man’s vantage point explicitly. This allows “us” to say in the first sentence that all political and social life are “clothed” in religious dress (Islam can thus be characterized as totalitarian), then to say in the second that religion is only a cover used by Muslims (in other words, all Muslims are hypocrites essentially). In the third sentence, the claim is made that Islam—even while laying hold upon the Arab’s faith—has not really reformed the Arab’s basic pre-Islamic conservatism. Nor is this all. For if Islam was successful as a religion it was because it fecklessly allowed these “authentic” Arab prejudices to creep in; for such a tactic (now we see that it was a tactic on Islam’s behalf) we must blame Mohammed, who was after all a ruthless crypto-Jesuit. But all this is more or less wiped out in the last sentence, when Smith assures “us” that everything he has said about Islam is invalid, since the quintessential aspects of Islam known to the West are not “Mohammedan” after all.

The principles of identity and noncontradiction clearly do not bind the Orientalist. What overrides them is Orientalist expertise, which is based on an irrefutable collective verity entirely within the Orientalist’s philosophical and rhetorical grasp. Smith is able without the slightest trepidation to speak about “the jejune, practical
and … constitutionally irreligious habit of the Arabic mind,” Islam as a system of “organized hypocrisy,” the impossibility of “feeling any respect for Moslem devotion, in which formalism and vain repetition are reduced to a system.” His attacks on Islam are not relativist, for it is clear to him that Europe’s and Christianity’s superiority is actual, not imagined. At bottom, Smith’s vision of the world is binary, as is evident in such passages as the following:

“We” are this, “they” are that. Which Arab, which Islam, when, how, according to what tests: these appear to be distinctions irrelevant to Smith’s scrutiny of and experience in the Hejaz. The crucial point is that everything one can know or learn about “Semites” and “Orientals” receives immediate corroboration, not merely in the archives, but directly on the ground.