For Lust of Knowing (24 page)

At first relatively little space was devoted to Arabmatters in the heavyweight Orientalist periodicals. The
Journal Asiatique
's coverage was somewhat weighted towards the Far East. There were a lot of articles in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
about ancient cultures and such controversial matters as the decipherment of cuneiform. Also, since many of the contributors had served in India as administrators or soldiers, there were many articles about Sanskrit studies, Pali texts, early Indian Buddhism and so forth. If there was a connection between nineteenth-century imperialism and Orientalism, it was chiefly this – that imperial servants, lonely and bored in remote outposts, took up the study of exotic languages and histories as their hobby. William Muir, who wrote about the history of the caliphs, and Charles Lyall, who published marvellous editions and translations of pre-Islamic poetry, are only two of the most prominent examples of amateur scholars who first took up the study of early Arabculture while serving in India.
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The coverage of the
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
was also heavily weighted towards Indian matters. Although the Germans had no empire in India, they were fascinated by their Aryan origins, which they traced back to ancient India. Moreover, the heavy stress on philological studies in German universities fostered the study of Sanskrit and its links with other Indo-Aryan languages. The Indian Brahmans distinguished between Aryan and non-Aryan, equating this with civilized and non-civilized, and this theme was taken up in the first place by German Orientalists.
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It is one of the threads that feeds into modern European racism. On the other hand, the study of India's ancient cultures by German and other Orientalists is part of the background to the ‘Bengal renaissance' and, beyond that, to the rise of Indian nationalism, as ancient India's past was explored and lost classics of Sanskrit literature were rediscovered.
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It was inevitable that French Orientalism in the first half of the nineteenth century should be dominated by de Sacy's students. The most prominent of these was Etienne-Marc Quatremère (1782–1857). Like de Sacy, Quatremère was a Jansenist and like de Sacy he loathed the French Revolution. He had had an exciting, that is to say horrible, childhood, as after his father was executed by a revolutionary tribunal he and his mother had to go into hiding with peasants in the countryside. Like de Sacy, he was educated in the classics and largely self-taught in Hebrew. He fell under the master's spell at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes and learned Arabic with him. He worked for a while in the Bibliothèque Impériale, before becoming Professor of Hebrew, Chaldaic and Syriac at the Collège de France in 1819. He was a hard worker with wide interests and, among other things, he worked on Phoenician, Pharaonic inscriptions, and Persian and Mamluk Egyptian history. As far as Mamluk history is concerned, he edited and translated part of al-Maqrizi's chronicle, the
Kitab al-Suluk
, under the title
Histoire des sultans mamlouks
, de l'Égypte, not because he had all that much interest in the history of Mamluk Egypt, but rather because he was fascinated by the vocabulary of fifteenth-century Arabic and particularly in those lexicographic nuggets that had not been defined in the standard Arabic dictionaries. As a consequence, his lexical footnotes ran on for page after page, often
reducing the text they were supposed to be commenting on to two or three lines at the top of the page.

Like his teacher, Quatremère was a passionate philologist in an age when philology was thought of as one of the cutting-edge sciences. Nietzsche described philology as ‘slow reading'. Nineteenth-century philologists believed that by correct application of their techniques they could not only discover lost languages but also reconstitute the ancient societies that had used those languages. Quatremère believed in close attention to philological detail and he did not allow himself to speculate or generalize about the materials that he studied. However, he sometimes found himself at odds with German philologists, when he perceived that their researches on the language of the Old Testament were leading to conclusions that threatened his fervently held Christian belief. The German Arabist Freytag accused him of wanting to reserve the whole field of Arabic studies to himself.
¹⁰

One other publication of his is worth pausing on. That is his edition of the
Muqaddimah, Prolégomènes d'Ebn Khaldun: texte arabe
(1859). De Sacy had first discovered Ibn Khaldun and included extracts in his
Chrestomathie.
Subsequently, another of de Sacy's students, the Irish expatriate William MacGuckin, Baron de Slane (1801–78), translated the
Muqaddimah
into French. Among other things, de Slane used his translation to mount an onslaught on the scholarship of Quatremère. The Dutch Orientalist Reinhart Dozy suggested that the edition was the product of senility.
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Franz Rosenthal, a twentieth-century Orientalist, who translated the
Muqaddimah
into (rather awkward) English, described Quatremère as ‘a scholar of great merits but also, it seems, one who was at odds with his colleagues and with the world in general'.
¹²
He was erudite, austere, reclusive and, in general, the epitome of what most people then thought an Orientalist should be. As for the
Muqaddimah
itself, in this great work, the North African philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) set forth a philosophy of history based upon the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties. A new dynasty was brought to power by tribal armies held together by ‘
asabiyya
(roughly ‘social solidarity'), but within a few generations that same dynasty, enfeebled by sedentarization and luxury, would be brought down by an invasion by fresh bands of vigorous nomads. Arnold Toynbee, in his
A Study of History
,
described the
Muqaddimah
as ‘undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place' and there is more to Ibn Khaldun's encyclopedic philosophy of history than can even be hinted at here. What is important for our purposes is that, in the long run, Ibn Khaldun's ideas were to be immensely influential on the way Western Orientalists thought about North African history and about Islamic history more generally.
¹³
Aloys Sprenger, Alfred von Kremer, Carl Heinrich Becker, David Ayalon, Albert Hourani and Marshall Hodgson were strongly affected by him and Ibn Khaldun was not just read by historians. The philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner was also strongly influenced by Ibn Khaldun (too strongly, I would say).
¹⁴
Whether Ibn Khaldun's impact on Western thought was entirely benign is debatable.

In addition to the students mentioned above, de Sacy taught quite a number of other distinguished French scholars, including Champollion, Rémusat, Burnouf, Reinaud and Garcin de Tassy (another Jansenist). Even so, though de Sacy exercised an enormous influence on French Orientalism, his influence on parallel developments in Germany and Russia is even more striking, but before considering the achievements and publications of his German disciples, it is necessary first to turn to a contemporary Orientalist whose approach to Eastern texts was quite different. The Austrian Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) started out as a dragoman and interpreter in the Levant. He mastered, with varying degrees of competence, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. On his return to Europe he was employed by the Austrian Chancery and ennobled as a baron. From 1807 onwards, he settled in Vienna and produced a series of books, articles and translations on Oriental topics.
¹⁵
Though Hammer-Purgstall and de Sacy corresponded and co-operated on, among other things, the periodical known as both
Mines de l'Orient
and
Fundgruben des Orients
(Vienna, 1809–18), Hammer-Purgstall, unlike his French colleague, was a prolific and careless writer. He had no academic training and he was full of ideas and insights, many of which were not only wrong
but also slightly mad. His main work was the ten-volume history of the Ottoman empire,
Geschichte des Osmanisches Reiches
(1827–35), which is not much more than an uncritical compilation of Turkish and Greek source material gutted and ordered approximately according to chronology, but such is the slow progress of Oriental studies that it still features in bibliographies today. He also wrote a history of Persian literature,
Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens
(1818). His translations in that history as well as in numerous articles on Persian poets such as Hafiz of Shiraz and Jalal al-Din Rumi inspired both Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson – which is surprising, as Hammer-Purgstall's translations are clumsy and ugly. His Arabic seems to have been worse than his Persian and the twentieth-century Arabist, R. A. Nicholson, remarked of Hammer-Purgstall's rendering of a mystical poem by Ibn al-Farid that ‘“translation” of a literary work usually implies that some attempt has been made to understand it, I prefer to say that Hammer rendered the poem into German rhymed verse by a method peculiar to himself, which appears to have consisted in picking out two or three words in each couplet and filling the void with any ideas which might strike his fancy'.
¹⁶
Hammer Purgstall's enthusiasm for Oriental poetry and romance was limitless, but rather woolly.

Like Silvestre de Sacy, Hammer-Purgstall interested himself in Oriental sects and, like de Sacy, he was extremely conservative and nervous also about secret revolutionary conspiracies. Doubtless the paranoia of his master Metternich about international conspiracies also influenced him. Hammer-Purgstall went further than de Sacy in suggesting that sinister Western groups like the Illuminists, the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians had Oriental origins. In
The Mysteries of Baphomet Revealed
(1818), Hammer-Purgstall brought his Orientalist expertise to bear on the history of the Knights Templar and the trial and condemnation of the order at the beginning of the fourteenth century. On the basis of the records of trial proceedings, which had been rigged to bring in the verdict desired by the Templars' enemy, Philip IV of France, plus some rather dubious (i.e. fake) archaeological artefacts, Hammer-Purgstall concluded that the Knights Templar were indeed guilty as charged of heresy and blasphemy. They were apostates from Christianity who worshipped the demon
Baphomet. If this was not enough, they also worshipped the Grail, which was a Gnostic object of adoration. A skewed reading of Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic poem,
Parzival
, provided evidence of this.
¹⁷

In the same year that he sought to unmask the horrid heresy of the Templars, he also published
Geschichte der Assassinen
on the Assassins, or Hashishin sect, whom he presented as proto-Masons intent on conspiracy to subvert the world. His history of this sect was intended as a warning against ‘the pernicious influence of secret societies… and… the dreadful prostitution of religion to the horrors of unbridled ambition'. The Assassins of Syria and Iran were the ancestors of Europe's subversives, the Illuminati: ‘To believe nothing and to dare all was, in two words, the sum of this system, which annihilated every principle of religion and morality, and had no other object than to execute ambitious designs with suitable ministers, who daring all and knowing nothing, since they consider everything a cheat and nothing forbidden, are the best tools of an infernal policy. A system which, with no other aim than the gratification of an insatiable lust for domination, instead of seeking the highest of human objects, precipitates itself into the abyss, and mangling itself, is buried amidst the ruins of thrones and altars, the wreck of national happiness, and the universal execration of mankind.'
¹⁸

Hammer-Purgstall's enthusiasm for Persian mystical poetry and his fantasies about sinister Oriental sects were both alike part of a Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment values of the late eighteenth century. Reason and science were at a discount among those who sought wisdom in the East and who dreamt of finding a lost wholeness situated in an ideal Oriental past. Hammer-Purgstall's researches greatly influenced Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), the Romantic poet and professor whose extremely free translations of Arabic poetry and of the wisdom of the Brahmins are really part of the history of German literature rather than of the serious study of the Orient.
¹⁹

Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–88) was not a Romantic. After studying theology in Leipzig, he went to Paris in 1824 to study with de Sacy. Fleischer was in Dresden and then Leipzig from 1835 to 1888 where he taught Arabic, Persian and Turkish. He edited two of the
great medieval commentators on the Qur'an, al-Zamakhshari and al-Baydawi. (These sorts of scholarly undertakings may seem dull to the modern eye, but such critical editions of key works were the necessary basis for a more profound understanding of Islam.) He was also the leading figure behind the founding of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. De Sacy taught quite a number of other German Orientalists, including Freytag, Ahlwardt, Habicht, Gustav Weil, Kosegarten, Gustav Flügel, Franz Bopp, Eichhorn and Mohl, but Fleischer was his most important pupil, becoming, after de Sacy, the teacher of the next generation of Orientalists, including Caspari, Dietrici, Goldziher, Hartmann, Sachau, Rosen and others. Both the content and the style of Fleischer's teaching were modelled on that of de Sacy, as Fleischer was a grammatical positivist with a narrow philological approach.
²⁰

The dominance of Germans in Orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due in part to the large number of universities in Germany. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century every German prince seems to have felt the need to have a university and those who decided to have an Oriental chair usually sent their candidates to de Sacy to be trained. (Heinrich Ewald was the only important Arabist of his generation not trained by de Sacy and Ewald was primarily a Hebraist.) The Lutheran University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) enjoyed a particular prestige and it was there that members of the Protestant nobility tended to study. (Some of those Protestants were English, Dutch and Scandinavian.) Göttingen's approach to the classics was particularly important in shaping the intellectual map of Europe in this century. Hitherto Latin and Greek authors had been studied in order to imitate their style alone. Rote-learning played an important part in this process. However, classicists at Göttingen now began to concentrate on the content and the underlying philosophy of the texts they studied.
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