For Lust of Knowing (19 page)

D'Herbelot died before his
Bibliothèque orientale
could be printed, but it was published in 1697 by his friend and associate, Antoine Galland. Galland also wrote an introduction to the work in which, among other things, he suggested that a study of the Arabic sources might shed additional light on the history of the Crusades. Galland, like d'Herbelot, had been thoroughly educated in the classics and early on in his career his chief area of expertise had been in numismatics. From 1670 to 1675 he was attached to the French embassy in Constantinople where, assisted by the embassy's Greek dragomans, he learnt Turkish. Having mastered Turkish, he studied Arabic and Persian with Turks in Constantinople. He had a second spell in the Orient from 1679 to 1688. One of his main missions was to hunt out rare coins, medals, curios and manuscripts for Louis XV. His other important task was to research the opinions of the various prelates of the Eastern Churches regarding the real presence of Christ in the eucharist and transubstantiation. It was hoped that their opinions might be used by Jansenist polemicists against Protestants. There is a Rochefoucauldian flavour to Galland's
Pensées morales des Arabes
,
which he published in 1682 and, in general, this was an age when Arabculture was given a courtly and sententious gloss by its European translators and popularizers. Later, Galland held the Chair of Arabic at the Collège Royale from 1709 onwards.

From 1704, Galland commenced the publication of his translation of the work that would make him famous,
The Thousand and One Nights
. The final volumes of
Les Mille et une nuits
came out in 1717. He intended his translation of the medieval story collection to be not merely a literary entertainment, but also a work of instruction that would inform its readership about the way of life of Oriental peoples, and to that end he inserted numerous explanatory glosses in his translation. In the introduction to the first volume, he wrote that part of the pleasure of reading these stories was in learning about ‘the customs and manners of Orientals, and the ceremonies, both pagan and Mohammedan, for these things are better described in these tales than in the accounts of writers and travellers'.

D'Herbelot and Galland were the first Orientalists to take a serious interest in the secular literature of the Middle East. Galland's translation of the
Nights
swiftly became a raging bestseller (as did the translations of his French into English, German and other languages).
¹¹
The
Bibliothèque orientale
, on the other hand, was an expensive book and it never sold well in France. With the death of Galland, serious research in France into Islam and Arabculture more or less ceased for a while.

Although future editions of the
Bibliothèque
would appear with corrections and additions, those corrections and additions were based on the researches of scholars who were not Frenchmen, such as Schul-tens and Reiske (on both of whom see below). Prominent French writers who wrote about Islam later in the eighteenth century usually knew no Arabic or any other Oriental language. For example, Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers's posthumously published
Vie de Mahomet
(1730) was really an exercise in church-and establishment-bashing.
¹²
Boulainvilliers relied heavily on the writings of Edward Pococke, though Pococke, a Royalist churchman, would have been horrified by the use made of his researches. The
Vie de Mahomet
set out to shock by denying that the Prophet Muhammad was an impostor and instead praising him as a great statesman and orator. Islam was presented as
a pastoral Arab anticipation of eighteenth-century Deism. Boulainvilliers, who knew no Arabic, was one of a number of writers who adopted the device of pretending to write about Arabian matters when their real targets were the Catholic Church and the French monarchy.

Libertine and Enlightenment authors were particularly fond of this sort of literary disguise. Voltaire wrote by turns in dispraise and praise of the Prophet, depending on what local political point he wished to make. His play,
Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète
, presented Muhammad as an impostor and tyrant. On the other hand, in the
Essai sur l'histoire générale
, Voltaire praised the Prophet as a great, cunning and bold leader. (Quite a few French Enlightenment thinkers took to praising Islam as a way of attacking Christianity, the Pope or the Bourbon monarchy.) Even so Voltaire still took it for granted that the Prophet was an impostor, and though he might have appeared to vacillate about the merits of Islam and the Prophet, he was, like most eighteenth-century thinkers, quite unambiguous in his attitude to the medieval Crusades. He maintained that the only thing that Europeans gained from the Crusades was leprosy.
¹³

The stagnation of French Orientalism throughout most of the eighteenth century was mirrored in England. In general, this was not a good time for English universities. Oxford and Cambridge were intellectually stagnant. Only theological controversies continued to rouse much passion. In a letter of 1734, the poet Thomas Gray wrote to Horace Walpole about Cambridge as follows: ‘The Masters of Colledges [
sic
] are twelve gray-hair'd Gentlefolks, who are all mad with Pride; the Fellows are sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things; the Fellows-Com: are imitators of the Fellows, or else Beaux, or else nothing.' Horace Walpole thought no better of Oxford and described it as ‘the nursery of nonsense and bigotry'.
¹⁴
Edward Gibbon, looking back on his time at Oxford, wrote as follows: ‘To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.
I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months most idle and unprofitable of my life.' Gibbon had vaguely thought of studying Arabic at Oxford, but was discouraged by his tutor from doing so.
¹⁵
Much later, in the 1790s, Chateaubriand, an émigré exile in England, gloomily celebrated the decay of that country's seats of learning: ‘Already the nurseries of knowledge, Oxford and Cambridge, are assuming a deserted aspect: their colleges and Gothic chapels, half-abandoned, distress the eye: in their cloisters, near the sepulchral stones of the middle ages, lie, forgotten, the marble annals of the ancient peoples of Greece: ruins guarding ruins.' Sluggards and dullards occupied the university chairs. When lectures on Oriental matters were given, which was rarely, they were poorly attended. In the course of his study of the nineteenth-century biographer of Scaliger and university reformer Mark Pattison, John Sparrow had occasion to record that it ‘is often said that Oxford did not emerge from the eighteenth century until half way through the nineteenth'.
¹⁶

On the whole academics were no longer so very interested in the precise text of the Bible and after the Restoration there was a decline in interest in the polyglot Bible project. Nevertheless, as a young man in France Jean Gagnier (1670?–1740) had become interested in Hebrew and Arabic after being shown a copy of a polyglot Bible. He later moved to England and, having converted to Anglicanism, became an English clergyman. In 1723 he published the Arabic text of the section of Abu al-Fida's fourteenth-century chronicle that dealt with the life of Muhammad, together with a Latin translation. He became Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in Cambridge in 1724. Gagnier was a real scholar and he swiftly detected how much of Boulainvilliers's biography of the Prophet was sheer fantasy, so he produced his own
Vie de Mahomet
(1732) to refute the errors of the earlier book and to denounce the alleged rationality of Islam (a theme that was sometimes taken up French Deists and rationalists). However, Gagnier's book had little impact, at least initially.
¹⁷

Although d'Herbelot and Galland had covered quite wide areas of history and literature, it was two Englishmen, Simon Ockley and George Sale, who pioneered the serious presentation of Islam in a vernacular tongue. Simon Ockley (1678–1720) studied Hebrew at Cambridge and around 1701 started to teach himself Arabic.
¹⁸
(There
was, of course, no one in Cambridge capable of teaching it.) He became a vicar in 1705 and in 1708 he published a translation of Ibn Tufayl's desert island fable,
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
, under the title
The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai ebn Yoqdhan
. Ockley's English translation had been preceded by Pococke's Latin one, the
Philosophus Autodidactus
(1671). It is more likely that Daniel Defoe read Ockley's English than Pocoke's Latin before going on to write
Robinson Crusoe
(1719).

In 1711 Ockley became the fifth person to occupy the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic at Cambridge. Ockley, an enthusiast for Oriental culture, did not think so very highly of his own: ‘So far as fear of God is concerned, the control of the appetites, prudence and sobriety in conduct of life, decency and moderation in all circumstances – in regard to all these things (and after all, they yield to none in importance) I declare that if the West has added one single
iota
to the accumulated wisdom of the East, my powers of perception have been strangely in abeyance.' His major work was
The History of the Saracens
(2 volumes, 1708–18). This covered the early history of the Arabs from the death of Muhammad in 632 (the life of Muhammad having already been covered by Prideaux until the death of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 705). Like several of his predecessors, Ockley was at first primarily interested in the history of the Eastern Church. Nevertheless, as he wrote and researched, he became interested in the history of the Arabs for their own sake and, while he routinely referred to Muhammad as an impostor, he nevertheless portrayed the Muslim Arabwarriors as heroes. Ockley presented the history of a people remarkable both for arms and for learning. Although he was based in Cambridge, he commuted regularly to Oxford because the Bodleian had a much better collection of Arabic manuscripts. In his history he relied heavily on d'Herbelot's
Bibliothèque
, but since he knew Arabic he also made use of a chronicler whom he believed to be al-Waqidi (d. 823), but whom modern Orientalists prefer to call pseudo-Waqidi, as the chronicle ascribed to Waqidi is a pseudonymous later work containing many legendary elements.

Ockley's attempts to learn Persian were ‘frustrated by malignant and envious stars'. He noted that his treatment was very different from the generous patronage that Pétis de la Croix received from
Colbert. It was still not possible to pursue Oriental studies without the sustained support of a wealthy patron and Ockley was not successful in securing one. His uncouthness and rumours that he was a heavy drinker may have had something to do with this, though it was also the case that the study of Arabic was no longer as fashionable as it had been in the age of Laud and Andrewes. Ockley's professorship brought him almost no money and his chief but inadequate income came from the vicarage of Swavesey. The second volume of the
History of the Saracens
was completed in prison in Cambridge Castle, as he was arrested for debt in 1717. At least his jail turned out to be a more peaceful place to do research in than his miserable vicarage. He died in prison, leaving a wife and six children in extreme poverty. He features prominently in Isaac Disraeli's
Calamities of Authors
(1813), where he was described as ‘perhaps the first who exhibited to us other heroes than those of Greece and Rome; sages more contemplative, and a people more magnificent than the iron masters of the world'. It was Ockley's
History of the Saracens
that got Gibbon interested in Islam and inspired him with the wish to study Arabic at Oxford. Gibbon called him ‘spirited and learned', adding that his work did ‘not deserve the petulant animadversions of Reiske'.
¹⁹

Gibbon's account of the rise of empire of the Arabs, when it eventually came to be incorporated in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, relied heavily not only on Ockley and d'Herbelot, but also on the work of George Sale (1697?–1736). Part of Sale's attraction for Gibbon may have been the stylish and stately cadences favoured by the writer. As
P. M
. Holt has pointed out, Sale ‘was the first notable English Arabist who was not in holy orders'. Moreover he was neither an academic nor a traveller. He was a London solicitor, outside the university system, and he learned Arabic from two Syrian Christians in London. Even so, there was a Christian background to Sale's Orientalism, as he first worked for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, checking its translation of the New Testament into Arabic before, in 1734, producing a translation of the Qur'an into English. (Sale also believed that God had reserved the future glory of the overthrow of Islam to the Protestants.) Sale's translation relied quite heavily on Marracci's Latin version and, like Marracci's version, it was more than just a translation, for it contained
a lot of prefatory explanatory matter on the history and culture of Muslims. This ‘Preliminary Discourse' was translated in France where it attracted Voltaire's enthusiasm. In the cautionary opening address to the reader, Sale suggested that he did not need to justify publishing his translation of the Qur'an, as Christian faith could not possibly be threatened by ‘so manifest a forgery'. He regarded the Arabs as the scourge of God visited on the Christians for their errors and schisms. He also took the opportunity to denounce ‘the writers of the Romish communion' for the inadequacies of their refutations of Islam. As he saw it, the Catholic missionaries to Muslim lands were crippled by their worship of images and doctrine of transubstantiation. No sensible Muslim was likely to be won over by such a superstition-ridden religion. ‘The Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success.'