For Lust of Knowing (23 page)

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period
would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

                                 Max Beerbohm,
1880

The Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes was founded in 1795 and was headed first by Louis Mathieu Langlès and then by Silvestre de Sacy. However, not too much weight should be placed on the term ‘vivantes', for, as we have seen, the second of these professors had no interest at all in the living spoken languages of the Orient. Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was the son of a notary and came from a Jansenist background. (The Jansenists were Catholic rigorists who held that good works are only possible with God's grace and that only a minority of individuals are predestined to God's salvation. There was a strong intellectual tradition centred around the Abbey of Port Royal and Jansenist thinkers had done important work on French grammar and logic and would extend their approach to Oriental languages.) A man of stern piety, de Sacy first studied Hebrew for religious reasons. Subsequently, he was encouraged by conversations with Dom Berthereau to take up the study of Arabic. Berthereau, an unsystematically scholarly monk in the Benedictine Maurist order, had been asked by his superiors to learn Arabic so as to research more thoroughly the history of the Crusades
and France's part in them. He had taught himself Arabic but, though he made a large number of fragmentary translations of Arabic materials that bore on the Crusades, there were no direct results of his researches in his lifetime. On the other hand, the engagement of de Sacy in Arabic and other Eastern languages was a watershed in the history of Orientalism.

Like Berthereau, de Sacy had some difficulty in learning Arabic. There was no one in the universities who was capable of teaching him. He got some help from a dragoman called Etienne le Grand and he may also have had lessons from a learned Jew in Paris, though this is obscure. There were almost no texts to study and only one worthwhile grammar, that of Golius, but de Sacy toiled away, teaching himself by memorizing key texts from classical Arabic literature. Eventually de Sacy was to master Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Persian and Turkish, as well as 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. His first employment was at the Royal Court of Moneys (the mint) where he worked from 1781 onwards. A fervent royalist, he viewed the French Revolution with dismay and in 1792 retired from public service for a while, before re-emerging after the overthrow of Robespierre.

In 1795 de Sacy became a professor in the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. Not only had he no time for living languages, but also, unlike many of his learned contemporaries, he had no interest in the comparative study of languages. He also had no interest in visiting exotic parts (unless one counts Genoa, which he visited to do research in its archives). He was a sombre, severe and polemical figure. Judged by modern standards, his teaching was quite dreadful. His students were expected to learn by rote and memorize sections of the grammars and selected texts, but, as will soon become apparent, he must even so have been an inspiring figure. Together with Champollion, the decipherer of the Rosetta Stone, he was one of the co-founders of the Société Asiatique in 1821 and its first president. Bonaparte made him a baron in 1814 and in 1832 under the monarchy he became a peer of France.
¹

A chrestomathy is an anthology of literary passages, usually for the use of students learning a foreign language, and this was exactly what
de Sacy's
Chrestomathie arabe
was. He published this collection of extracts compiled from manuscripts in 1806, intending it to be used by students of the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. In his introduction, he listed the few Arabic printed texts that it was possible to come by in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the proverbs of the pre-Islamic sage Luqman, the Qur'an, Ibn alMuqaffa's
Kalila wa-Dimna
(a mirror for princes cast in the form of a collection of beast fables) and Ibn Arabshah's floridly overwritten life of Tamerlane. In the previous century, Reiske had argued that Arabpoetry should be studied for its literary merits. De Sacy's emphasis was different, for he upheld the study of ancient Arabic poetry as useful source material on the early history of the Arabs and Arabic philology. (Like Reiske, de Sacy had to defend Arabic poetry from those who declared that there was no point at all in studying it.) Despite his unromantic approach to Arabpoetry, de Sacy seems to have been the first European scholar to understand how Arab metre actually worked. He had strong views on Arabic prose. He disapproved of the disordered imagination and sloppy colloquialisms of
The Thousand and One Nights
. He also had a poor opinion of alHariri's
Maqamat
, as fiction. The
Maqamat
, composed in the twelfth century, is a picaresquely episodic celebration of the erudite eloquence of a wily rogue and scrounger called Abu Zayd. Even educated Arabs resort to a commentary in order to understand what Abu Zayd is saying. However, the sheer difficulty of the grammar and vocabulary of al-Hariri's picaresque display of linguistic fireworks made it an eminently suitable text to inflict upon students and so de Sacy published the Arabic text together with a commentary in 1822.

In many ways his driest and most difficult work is also the most interesting. In his
Grammaire arabe
(1810, second edition 1831), he aimed, first, to set out the grammar of the Arabic language in what he judged to be the logical way and then in the way that the Arab grammarians used it. The two were, of course, quite different. The logic of his grammar was strongly influenced by the logic and grammar of Port Royal. The monastery of Port Royal, near Paris, produced two massively influential works, the
Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port Royal
(1660) and
La Logique; ou, L'Art de penser
(1662). The Jansenist grammarians of Port Royal upheld the Cartesian view
that the general features of grammatical structures are common to all languages – also a view that in modern times has been taken up by Noam Chomsky, in particular, in his
Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought
(1966). The Port Royal grammarians believed in the isomorphism of language, thought and reality – that is to say that language mirrored thought and thought in turn mirrored reality. (I am reminded of a certain French general who is alleged to have remarked that ‘It seems to me that French is the most perfect of all languages because its grammar exactly reflects the way I think.')

Logic apart, de Sacy was also obsessed with irregularities and rarities. In this he had much in common with the medieval Arab grammarians and lexicographers whom he studied with so much enthusiasm. In particular, the grammarians of ninth-century Kufa in Iraq interested themselves in irregularities and anomalies, in contradistinction to the grammarians of nearby Basra who preferred to stress the normative and regular features of the language. Medieval Arabic grammars were backward-looking texts, as their compilers did not seek to register the way Arabic was actually spoken or written in their own lifetimes, but rather they sought to deduce from linguistic lore how Arabic had been spoken at the time of the revelation of the Qur'an to the Prophet.
²
There was thus a striking parallel between the
nahw,
or ‘way', of Arabic grammar and the
Sunna
or custom of the Prophet, that is to say the orally transmitted corpus of reports about his sayings and doings and those of his immediate companions. De Sacy intended that his grammar should replace Erpenius's
Grammatica Arabica
and in particular that the new grammar should break free from the Latinate structure that Erpenius had imposed upon Arabic grammar. To some extent de Sacy was successful and he was a pioneer in introducing Arabic technical terms into his grammar. Though the Göttingen Orientalist Heinrich Ewald later criticized the grammar for following Arabmodels too closely, a modern student of that grammar (if it is possible to envisage such a person) would probably be more struck by its Latinate approach. Besides his researches based on Arabic texts, de Sacy also published on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Persia, Persian grammar, the writings attributed to the Persian poet al-Attar, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics,
a history of the kings of Mauritania and Samaritan texts. This was an age when the Orientalist was expected to spread himself rather widely.

Since de Sacy was a fervent Christian, it was more or less inevitable that he should regard Muhammad as a skilled impostor. However, de Sacy was less interested in mainstream Islam than he was in its various schismatic, secretive and sometimes subversive movements. Having lived through the horrors of the Jacobin terror, he projected his horror of revolutionary conspiracy backwards into the early history of Islam and presented the Druzes, the Isma‘ilis and Nusayris as forerunners of such sinister modern movements as the Freemasons, Carbonari and Jacobins. In the introduction to his
Exposé de la religion des Druzes
(1838), he declared that he had been impelled to write this book by ‘the desire that this portrait of one of the most notorious follies of the human spirit may serve to teach men who take pride in the superiority of their enlightenment what aberrations human reason is capable of when it is left to itself'. De Sacy's Druzes were atheistic revolutionaries who drew upon Shi‘ite political fanaticism and a mixture of Greek and Persian philosophy. He found plenty in polemical Sunni Muslim sources to support his prejudices. He spent his whole career working on and off on the Druzes. (His views on Oriental secretive quasimasonic fanatics were pretty similar to those of von Hammer-Purgstall (on whom see below).

De Sacy had strong views on other matters too. In the previous century Montesquieu had argued, on the basis of a fairly superficial knowledge of Oriental history and society, that in Oriental despotisms all the land belonged to the prince and there were no civil laws regarding property, or succession, or commerce, or rights of women. (As we have already seen, Dr Johnson had grumbled that Montesquieu was always able to dredge up the practices of some obscure and exotic culture in order to support whatever argument he wished to make.) Drawing upon the
Description de l'Egypte
, as well as the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi's topographical Khitat, Silvestre de Sacy produced a lengthy treatise on Egyptian land tenure specifically in order to refute Montesquieu. To take another issue, de Sacy's brief career in the Royal Court of Moneys had given him strong views on sound money. Here again he found support for
his views in al-Maqrizi who, in his view, was a much sounder man than most financial theorists in contemporary Europe. De Sacy was pleased to discover that the Fatimid Egyptian caliphs, unlike some foolish modern governments, realized that the ratio of gold to silver must be variable. ‘Doubtless one will note with pleasure that Maqrizi had ideas about true monetary principles which are more correct than many writers in our own century.'
³

After the deaths of Schultens and Reiske, there were no Orientalists of first rank until the appearance of de Sacy, and by the time he died most of the remaining Orientalists of first rank had been trained by him. As Daniel Reig has remarked, with Silvestre de Sacy ‘Orientalism… entered the libraries and at times even shut itself up in them'. But Reig also notes that Orientalism did not totally abandon the salons.
⁴
Indeed, despite de Sacy's ferocious scholarship and personal austerity, he did in fact frequent the salons, where he met Prosper Mérimée, Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve among others. De Sacy was a thoroughly political animal and hence his success in establishing chairs in Oriental studies and setting up learned panels, societies and journals. A large part of his achievement was in establishing Orientalist institutions that would survive him. Although he was hardly the first Orientalist (think of Postel, Pococke and Erpenius), it was de Sacy more than any other who created Orientalism as a sustained discipline with a regular flow of teachers, students, rituals of intellectual initiation and academic standards.

As has been noted, de Sacy was one of the founders of the Société Asiatique in 1821 and this was followed in 1823 by the first issue of the Société's
Journal Asiatique
. Substantially earlier, in 1784 William Jones had set up the Asiatick Society of Bengal and its attendant learned journal,
Asiatick Researches
. Britain's Royal Asiatic Society (1823) and its
Journal
drew its inspiration from Jones's institution. The American Oriental Society was founded in 1842 and the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft was established in 1845 (with
its
Zeitschrift
starting to appear four years later). In the long run, these societies and periodicals would provide important support for institutional Orientalism.
⁵

However, this was in the long run and the present chapter deals chiefly with individuals and the motives, passions and rivalries of those individuals. For a long time there was no cohesion in the world of the Orientalist. Their first Congress took place in Paris only in 1873. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the learned societies of Orientalists were not yet what they have since become, the adjuncts of academic Orientalism. They were largely the province of enthusiastic amateurs, often leisured aristocrats or clergymen. Throughout the nineteenth century the presidency of the Royal Asiatic Society was monopolized by earls, knights and right honourables. A fair number of maharajas and other Indian princes were also members.
⁶
The articles that appeared in the Orientalist journals were not systematically refereed (as is the rule nowadays). The bulk of the articles consisted of Oriental texts and sometimes their attempted decipherment or translation. There was little in the way of analysis or synthesis. The Orientalist societies, like most nineteenth-century societies, were male institutions; female Orientalists did not make their mark until the twentieth century.