For Lust of Knowing (18 page)

Pococke, Erpenius, Golius and Marracci would have few intellectual heirs. Kircher's fascination with Chinese culture and Egyptian hieroglyphs more accurately presaged future developments in the eighteenth century when, on the whole, the intelligentsia were more interested in Chinese sages than they were in Arabian prophets and warriors.

Dons admirable! Dons of might!

Uprising on my inward sight

Compact of ancient tales, and port,

And sleep – and learning of a sort.

        Hilaire Belloc, ‘Lines to a Don'

Clergymen in Oxbridge colleges and rural rectories who interested themselves in Arabic texts for scholarly and theological reasons were not at all interested in real live Arabs, but only wanted to know more about the manner of life of Abraham and Moses, to identify the flora and fauna of the Bible and map out the topography of ancient Palestine. Princes, diplomats, soldiers and merchants, however, had a more immediate interest in the Turks and the Ottoman Turkish empire. Until the late seventeenth century the West's interest in the Turks was mostly driven by fear. The Ottomans in the seventeenth century ruled over almost the whole of the Balkans. Only the tiny mountain principality of Montenegro preserved a nominal independence. The Turks had twice besieged Vienna, in 1529 and 1683. The Ottoman navy dominated the eastern Mediterranean. Richard Knolles in his
General History of the Turks
(1603) had described the Turks as ‘the present terror of the world'.
¹
Christian thinkers in the West anxiously asked themselves why it was that God seemed to favour that great Muslim empire and there were some who feared that the Muslims were destined to conquer the whole of Christendom. In the sixteenth century Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the imperial ambassador
in Constantinople, had argued that this was the most likely outcome: ‘On [the Turks' side] are the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, discipline, frugality and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers are avaricious; there is contempt for discipline; license, recklessness, drunkenness and debauch are rife; and worst of all, the enemy is accustomed to victory, and we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result will be?' Busbecq thought that the Christians were squandering their resources in exploring and colonizing the Americas.
²

In the late seventeenth century, the French traveller Jean de Thévenot, in
Relation d'un Voyage fait au Levant
(3 volumes, 1665, 1674, 1678), was perhaps the first to diagnose a sickness in what was superficially still a great power in the East, for he judged that the Ottoman empire was in rapid decline: ‘All these peoples have nothing more to boast about than their ruins and their rags.'
³
Thévenot's analysis proved to be an accurate one and a few decades later, in 1699, by the Treaty of Carlowitz, the Turks had to accept humiliating defeat and cede Hungary, Transylvania and Podolia to an alliance of Christian powers. Western fears of the triumph of Islam and the Turk abated.

Neither ancient fears nor a new predatory interest in the Near East had translated into any substantial interest in the language or culture of the Turks. Knolles, the author of a
General History of the Turks
, quoted at the start of this chapter, knew no Turkish. There was no chair in Turkish studies in any European university in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nor was there any interest in translating Turkish literature. There was nothing that could be called a tradition of Turkish studies in Britain or France until the twentieth century.
⁴
Although eighteenth-century diplomats, merchants, soldiers and manuscript hunters travelled extensively in the Ottoman empire, they tended to rely on local Christians and Jews to act as interpreters of the alien language and culture. Phanariot Greeks, Maronites and Armenians served as agents of the various European powers.

Those who acted as intermediaries and interpreters were known as
tarjumans
or dragomans (from the Arabic
tarjama
, ‘to translate'). There were schools for such translators in Paris, Venice and Pera (the
suburb of Constantinople on the north side of the Golden Horn).
⁵
We shall discuss the careers of two such dragomans, Jean-Joseph Marcel and Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, subsequently. The training such men received was in contemporary Arabic or Turkish and it was very different from the sort of thing taught at universities by the intellectual heirs of Pococke or Erpenius. The great Orientalist Sir William Jones (on whom see below) was to comment disparagingly on the scholarly attainments of the dragomans: ‘It has generally happened that persons who have resided among the TURKS, and who from their skill in EASTERN dialects, have best been qualified to present us with an exact account of that nation, were either confined to a low sphere of life, or were engaged in views of interest, and but little addicted to polite letters or philosophy; while they, who, from their exalted stations and refined taste for literature, have had both the opportunity and inclination of penetrating into the secrets of TURKISH policy, were totally ignorant of the language used at Constantinople, and consequently were destitute of the sole means by which they might learn, with any degree of certainty, the sentiments and prejudices of so singular a people… As to the generality of interpreters, we cannot expect from men of their condition any depth of reasoning, or acuteness of observation; if mere words are all they profess, mere words must be all they can pretend to know.' Jones's animadversions notwithstanding, the institution was to have a long history and Sir Andrew Ryan in his autobiography,
The Last of the Dragomans
, describes attending such a school for interpreters in Constantinople in 1899.

Conditions of trade within the Ottoman sultanate were regulated by commercial treaties known as the Capitulations. The French were granted Capitulations in the Ottoman empire as early as 1535. In the second half of the seventeenth century Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister of Louis XIV, was particularly interested in promoting France's commercial interests in the Levant. (He also sponsored hunts for Oriental manuscripts and antiquities.) A Levant Company was founded at Marseilles in 1671. The French were particularly involved in the purchase of cotton from Palestinian and Lebanese ports. There was also a strong French commercial presence in Alexandria and in the course of the eighteenth century the merchants of Marseilles and
their political allies began to contemplate the desirability of a French occupation of Egypt. As the sultanate declined, the ambassadors of France, Britain and the other powers were successful in getting ever more extravagant concessions and privileges. Their merchants acquired a status not far short of diplomatic immunity. Moreover their servants and interpreters, many of them native Christians and Jews, were often covered by the same privileges.

France's Levant Company competed with the British Levant Company. Britain's main commercial base in the Near East was the British Levant Company's ‘factory' in Aleppo, a city that was a major staging post for the silk trade.
⁶
(In those days ‘factory' referred to a trading settlement in another country.) By the early eighteenth century the British Levant Company was in steep decline, while the fortunes of the British East India Company, by contrast, prospered. Britain's rivalry with France spanned the continents. This was to come to a head in the Seven Years War (1756–63) in which European and global territorial ambitions were thoroughly muddled. As Macaulay put it in a famous essay on Frederick the Great: ‘In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coramandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.' If the British did define their own identity by distinguishing it from some notional ‘Other' that was corrupt, despotic and licentious, then France was certainly that Other. William Hogarth's painting,
The Gate of Calais
(1749), with its depiction of scrawny priest-ridden Frenchmen slavering enviously over beef destined for the British, graphically illustrated British contempt for the French.

The ultimate triumph of the British over the French in India in the late eighteenth century was the crucial step towards establishing the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Though the British Levant Company still retained its ‘factories' in Aleppo and elsewhere in the Middle East, Britain's commercial ambitions were increasingly focused on India. From the 1740s onwards the British and French, represented by their respective India Companies, fought over the remains of the Mughal empire in India. In 1761, in the late stages of the Seven Years War, the French were decisively defeated and the British East India Company became the major power in the subcontinent.
The Company had an interest in training its employees in the relevant languages and eventually it set up exams in Arabic and offered small financial bonuses for those who passed the exams. The Company also sponsored John Richardson's
A Grammar of the Arabick Language
(1776).
⁷
Nevertheless, Persian and Turkish were really far more important for the imperialist project. Persian was the language of the Indian courts, but somehow even this failed to lead to any corresponding growth in interest in Persian studies in England until William Jones took up the language as a schoolboy craze. As for Sanskrit studies, as we shall see, this was pioneered by a Frenchman, Anquetil-Duperron, and then, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the field was more or less monopolized by German academics and writers.

While the French were increasingly dominating the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean and the British were establishing their Raj in India, the Dutch were setting about the colonization of Java and Sumatra and other islands and the Russians were expanding in Central Asia, as well as continuing to make territorial gains at the expense of Ottoman Turkey. Yet only perhaps in Russia was there a correlation between the numbers of Muslims conquered by the imperialist power and a growth in Orientalist studies. On the whole British and French diplomats, soldiers and merchants in the Levant and Muslim India worked with native interpreters and informants. It was a rare individual who took the trouble to acquaint himself with the Qur'an and Arabic and Persian literature. In the early eighteenth century there was as yet little crossover between the worlds of imperialism and Orientalism.

Although Latin continued to be the chief language of scholarship, the various vernaculars gained in academic respectability from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. France was the territory where there was the greatest chance of finding serious books published in the vernacular rather than in Latin. (German scholars tended obstinately to stick with Latin.) As far as Orientalism was concerned, the publication in French of d'Herbelot's encyclopedic
Bibliothèque orientale
was a landmark, as the broader reading public in France only really became aware of the literature and history of the Arabs, Persians and Turks when that work appeared. Galland's subsequent publication of a translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
into French further increased general awareness of and interest in Oriental culture.

Barthélémy d'Herbelot (1625–95) was a fervent Catholic who, after first studying the classics and philosophy, took up the study of Hebrew in order to understand the Old Testament better. He went on to become Professor of Syriac at the Collège de France. D'Herbelot was one of a number of antiquarians and Orientalists whose studies were sponsored by Colbert. Although the
Bibliothèque
can be seen as a forerunner of the twentieth-century
Encyclopaedia of Islam
and was indeed used as a work of reference, nevertheless d'Herbelot's compilation had a rather belle-lettristic flavour, as anecdotes and occasional verses padded out the entries. Plutarch's
Lives
furnished a literary model, as d'Herbelot was as interested in drawing out morals as chronicling events. He had never travelled in the Middle East and naturally he had no interest in its contemporary politics or commerce. Like the encyclopedias that succeeded it, the
Bibliothèque
's entries were arranged in alphabetical order. He was vaguely apologetic about it, claiming that it ‘does not produce as much confusion as one might imagine'.
⁸
Gibbon in the footnotes to
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
patronized it as ‘an agreeable miscellany' and claimed that he never could ‘digest the alphabetical order'. Gibbon also noted that d'Herbelot seemed to be stronger on Persian than on Arabic history, though he could hardly have written the later volumes of his history without frequent recourse to the
Bibliothèque orientale
.
⁹

The
Bibliothèque
concentrated on Arabic, Persian and Turkish culture, though an appendix devoted to Chinese culture was added in a later edition. In his researches, d'Herbelot relied on the Arabic manuscripts that had been assembled under the patronage of Colbert and others and placed in the royal library. D'Herbelot, who had no notion of source criticism, made exceptionally heavy use of late Persian compilations, but his task was made easier by one particular manuscript that had been acquired by Colbert's agent, Antoine Gal-land, in Istanbul. This was the
Kashf al-Zunun
by Hajji Khalifa, also known as KatibCelebi. Hajji Khalifa was a seventeenth-century
Turkish historian and bibliographer of manuscripts and his
Kashf al-Zunun
listed and briefly described 14,500 works in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This was the great discovery and reference resource of seventeenth-century Orientalism and it was translated into Latin much later by Gustav Flugel (in 1853–8). The
Kashf al-Zunun
decisively shaped Orientalists' image of Islamic culture.
¹⁰
Among other things, Hajji Khalifa's alphabetical organization may have influenced d'Herbelot's decision to organize his material in the same way. D'Herbelot also drew heavily on al-Zamakhshari (1075–1144), a Qur'anic commentator who also wrote on grammar and lexicography. When dealing with Arab History, it was natural that d'Herbelot, a devout Catholic, should rely where possible on Christian Arab chroniclers and, following his medieval and Renaissance precursors, he fiercely denounced Muhammad as an impostor. D'Herbelot argued that a great deal of the Islamic revelation derived from the Old Testament and Jewish lore. For d'Herbelot, who was steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, the Orient was an unexplored antiquity and, though he was not particularly interested in pre-Islamic Arabia, he was passionately interested in pre-Islamic Persia and Egypt.