For Lust of Knowing (2 page)

At this early stage, only a few words are necessary concerning the meaning of ‘Orientalism', as it is used in Said's book and in my book. In the eighteenth century the French word ‘Orientaliste' described someone who was preoccupied with Levantine matters (not Chinese or Indian). In Britain, ‘Orientalist', as used in the late eighteenth century, referred at first to a style rather than to a scholarly discipline. ‘Dragons are a sure mark of orientalism' according to Thomas Warton's
History of English Poetry
(1774–81). Only in the early nineteenth century did it come to refer to the study of any and all Asian languages and cultures. There was a period in the 1830s when ‘Orientalist' acquired a quite specific meaning in the context of British India. The ‘Orientalists' there were administrators and scholars who advocated working with the traditional Muslim and Hindu institutions and customs as much as possible and of studying, teaching and researching the Indian cultural legacy. Such men were opposed and ultimately defeated by Anglicists like Macaulay and Bentinck, who, broadly speaking, preferred to impose British institutions and culture on the subcontinent.
Subsequently ‘Orientalist' has tended to be used of those who have made a special study of Asian (and North African) languages and cultures. Since the 1960s at least Orientalism has been under attack from Islamicists, Marxists and others, and the word ‘Orientalist' has acquired pejorative overtones. Nevertheless if anyone wants to call me an ‘Orientalist', I shall be flattered, rather than offended.

When A. J. Arberry published his little book
British Orientalists
in 1943, he wrote about scholars who travelled in or wrote about Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia and the Far East. In 1978 Said came to use the word ‘Orientalism' in a newly restrictive sense, as referring to those who travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world and even here he excluded consideration of North Africa west of Egypt. I cannot guess why he excluded North Africa, but, that omission apart, in this particular instance I am happy to accept his somewhat arbitrary delimitation of the subject matter, for it is the history of Western studies of Islam, Arabic and Arab history and culture that interests me the most. However, it is often necessary to cast a sideways glance at what was happening in contemporary Persian and Turkish studies – particularly Turkish, for it would be arbitrary to detach study of the pre-modern Arabworld totally from Ottoman studies. Developments in Sinology and Egyptology are also sometimes relevant and, of course, any study of Orientalism that fails to engage with the overwhelming importance of biblical and Hebrew studies and of religion in general for the way Islam and the Arabs were studied and written about would be preposterous and thoroughly anachronistic.

Some writers have thought that the origins of Orientalism are to be found in ancient Greece. Others have suggested a much later start with the decrees of the Council of Vienne in 1311–12. Others again believe that there was no Orientalism worthy of the name prior to Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. From the latter point of view, the rise of Orientalism begins at about the same time as the great age of European imperialism. My own view, which I shall be setting out in more detail in the course of this book, is that there was nobody one could consider to be a serious Orientalist prior to Guillaume Postel (
c
. 1510–81), and that Orientalism either begins in the sixteenth century with him or, if not quite so early as that, then no later than the mid-seventeenth century, when JacobGolius (1596–1667) and
Edward Pococke (1604–91), as well as other not quite so learned or industrious figures, published their ground-breaking researches. However, I shall briefly discuss what might be mistakenly interpreted as evidence of early Orientalism in antiquity and the Middle Ages, before rushing on to the seventeenth and later centuries.

Until the late nineteenth century, Orientalism had little in the way of institutional structures and the heyday of institutional Oriental-ism only arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. The research institutes, the banks of reference books, the specialist conferences and professional associations came then. Therefore,
For Lust of Knowing
is mostly a story of individual scholars, often lonely and eccentric men. Intellectual eminences such as Postel, Erpenius and Silvestre de Sacy scoured Europe for similarly learned correspondents who might have some inkling of the nature of the recondite problems that they worked upon. Since there was no overarching and constraining discourse of Orientalism, there were many competing agendas and styles of thought. Therefore this book contains many sketches of individual Orientalists – dabblers, obsessives, evangelists, freethinkers, madmen, charlatans, pedants, romantics. (Even so, perhaps still not enough of them.) There can be no single chronicle of Orientalism that can be set within clearly defined limits.

Edward Pococke was probably the best Arabist of his day and, much later, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was the most distinguished scholar of classical Arabic in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, I can produce better translations from Arabic than either of those impressive figures. This is not because I am cleverer or more industrious than they were, but I have been instructed by careful teachers, whereas Pococke and Silvestre de Sacy had effectively to teach themselves. Moreover, I have access to much better dictionaries and grammars and other reference tools, such as the excellent
Encyclopaedia of Islam
. A recurring theme of this book is the way in which each generation of Arabists found the previous generation's work unsatisfactory. It was more or less inevitable that this should be so. By today's standards, nobody's Arabic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that good. The early Orientalists were often ruthless in denouncing each other's translations and editing decisions. Rivalry and rancour have been powerful driving forces in the story of Orientalism.

For Lust of Knowing
contains no discussion of Flaubert's letters from Egypt, Disraeli's novels, Delacroix's painting of
The Death of Sardanapalus
, or Verdi's
Aida
. I am hostile to the notion that Orientalism can be viewed primarily as a canon of literary and other artistic masterpieces, mostly composed by dead, white males. The products of mainstream Orientalism were less colourful and less fluent than that. Orientalism in its most important aspect was founded upon academic drudgery and close attention to philological detail. I do not believe that the novelist Flaubert and the Arabist and Islamicist Sir Hamilton Gibb were really contributing to essentially the same discourse or were the victims of it. However, the distinction between academic and artistic production is, of course, not hard-edged. For example, William Beckford's novel
Vathek
has academic-looking footnotes and, on the other hand, Gibb's understanding of Saladin's career was greatly influenced by his enthusiasm for Walter Scott's novel
The Talisman
. There is a significant overlap between Orientalist scholarship and artistic works of an Oriental inspiration, but it is, I believe, only an overlap and not evidence of a single cohesive discourse. Nevertheless the way Islam and the Arabs have been presented by Western writers and artists is clearly important, as well as interesting in its own right, and I shall be discussing it in a second volume, entitled
The Arts of Orientalism
.

In the course of writing this book I have benefited from conversations with Helen Irwin, Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Charles Burnett, Roz Kaveney and Professor Hugh Kennedy. I am grateful to my editor, Stefan McGrath, for his enthusiasm. I have also benefited from the editing of Jane Robertson. They are not responsible for any errors in this book – I only wish they were. I have slated some critics of Orientalism for their factual errors, yet I am acutely conscious that in covering such a vast field as the history of Orientalism, I am bound to have made quite a few errors of my own. At least I tried to get things right.

Since publication of the hardback, various friends and critics (and they overlap to a surprising extent) have pointed out a number of errors. Since I believe in getting facts right, I have corrected the errors. I am particularly grateful to Sir James Craig, Ted Gorton, Alastair Hamilton, Malcolm Jack, David Morgan, Basim Musallam and Amir Taheri.

But how did it all begin? If it is history we want, then it is a history of conflict. And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the ‘merchant wolves', arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off the tauropárthenos from Argos. Tauropárthenos means ‘the virgin dedicated to the bull'. Her name was Io. Like a beacon signalling from mountain to mountain, this rape lit the bonfire of hatred between the two continents. From that moment on, Europe and Asia never stopped fighting each other, blow answering blow. Thus the Cretans, ‘the boars of Ida', carried off Europa from Asia…

Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

(1993)

Is Orientalism an eternal given? Or was it a discourse that was formed in, say, the early fourteenth century, when the establishment of chairs of Arabic was decreed by the Council of Vienne? Or, say, in the late eighteenth century, when Bonaparte invaded Egypt and his team of savants catalogued the antiquarian and ethnographic details of the land? Or was this perhaps a clash of cultures that went back to pre-Islamic and even pre-Christian times? In
Crusade, Commerce and
Culture
, the Arab historian Aziz Atiya argued that the Crusades had to be seen in the context of a much older and enduring conflict between East and West: ‘These relations go far back into antiquity beyond the confines of the medieval world. The bone of contention was the undefined frontier of Europe, otherwise described as the spiritual frontiers of the West vis-à-vis Asia.'
¹
According to Atiya, the Greek mind created the frontier between Europe and Asia – the earliest version of the ‘Eastern Question'. For this Greek mind, the Hellenistic legacy ‘aimed at encompassing the whole world'. Edward Said developed a similar argument: ‘Consider the first demarcation between Orient and West. It already seems bold by the time of the
Iliad
.'
²

‘Barbarian' (or in Greek
barbaros
) was originally a linguistic concept and it applied to all non-Greek-speaking peoples. As such, it applied to both civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus the Greeks considered the Persians to be ‘barbarians', but hardly uncouth or uncultured. Greeks were impressed by the Phoenician alphabet, Lydian coinage and Egyptian sculpture. (Martin Bernal in
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
(1987), has argued controversially that the Greek culture in its essentials was derived from that of the Egyptians.) In general, the Greeks admired Orientals, while despising the Thracians and Scythians on their northern frontiers. ‘Barbarians' were just as likely to be Westerners as Orientals. Greeks envied the wealth of Gyges and Croesus, rulers of Lydia in Asia Minor.
³
As Calasso notes: ‘Right from the beginning, Greek elegance is opposed to Asiatic sumptuousness with its prodigal mix of solemnity and abundance.'
⁴
In fact the demarcation between Greek and Oriental is not so very clear in Homer. Nowhere in the
Iliad
(which was probably produced in the eighth century BC) are the Trojans called barbarians, nor are they treated as such. Only the Carians, from South West Asia Minor, are characterized as ‘barbarians' by Homer. One thing that militated against a hypothetical contraposition of ‘Greek' and ‘barbarian' in this early period is that there was no word for ‘Greek' in ancient Greece. ‘Graeci' (meaning Greeks) is a later Roman coinage. However, the concept of the Hellene and Hellenic culture was in circulation by the time of Herodotus.

The Orientalist Bernard Lewis, in a discussion of ‘insider' and ‘outsider' in the world of antiquity, has suggested that the tendency
to make such distinctions is common to all times and all places. However, the distinctions were not necessarily fixed and irrevocable. Though the Jews distinguished between Jew and Gentile, they were prepared to accept converts. Similarly, the Greeks distinguished between Greek and barbarian, but they allowed that it was possible to cease to be a barbarian by adopting Greek language and culture. Lewis continues: ‘There is another respect in which Greeks and Jews were unique in the ancient world – in their compassion for an enemy. There is nothing elsewhere to compare with the sympathetic portrayal by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus – himself a veteran of the Persian wars – of the sufferings of the vanquished Persians…'
⁵
Edward Said has taken a rather different point of view of the same play,
The Persians
. According to him, Aeschylus dumps on to Asia ‘the feelings of emptiness, loss and disaster… also the lament that in some glorious past Asia fared better, was itself victorious over Europe'.
⁶

If the Persians needed to make play with the notion of an ‘Other' or to construct an archive of racial stereotypes or to put on plays and write histories in order to justify their conquests, those activities have gone unrecorded. They just seem to have set about trying to conquer their neighbours. In the sixth century BC the Persian empire expanded westwards to include Lydia and the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Then Darius made careful preparations for the conquest of Athens (490 BC). After a prolonged standoff, the Persians were heavily defeated at Marathon and, after an abortive attempt to capture Athens, the First Persian War came to an ignominious end. Darius died in 485 BC and it was left to his son, Xerxes, to plan a renewed campaign of conquest. In 480 BC an enormous Persian army crossed over into Europe. This army (which, by the way, included large numbers of Greeks) was defeated at Thermopylae and at Plataea and their fleet was defeated at Salamis. That was the end of Persian attempts to conquer Greece. It is possible that these attempts to conquer Greece encouraged the Greeks to think more of themselves as a distinctive race. (The Persians certainly thought of themselves as a distinctive race and they referred
to all foreigners as
anarya
, non-Aryan. The stone reliefs of the Persian citadel of Persepolis depicted the subject races in their various costumes bringing tribute to their Persian overlords.)