For Lust of Knowing (28 page)

Renan and Gobineau were in their different ways racists. The banality of Renan's racism has already been remarked upon. Robertson Smith (on whom see below) was another kind of racist; he thought that the Arabs were a superior race, though the Negroes were inferior. Racism was pervasive in nineteenth-century Europe. However, having said that, one has not said very much, as there were so many different types of racism and racist stereotyping had yet to assume the form it eventually took in the early Fascist decades of the twentieth century. The tendency to generalize about racial characteristics was not something invented by nineteenth-century Orientalists, nor was it confined to white Europeans. One only has to look at medieval Arabguides to the purchase of slaves of different races or to consider the traditional Chinese attitude to foreigners (whom they divided into ‘cooked barbarians' and ‘uncooked barbarians') to see that this was so. In part, racist attitudes in any period or region are the product of the natural tendency to think in generalities. In nineteenth-century Europe, in the absence of any seriousprior research, it seemed possible that there might
be a scientific basis to racial differences. There was no reason to rule this out a priori. Some of nineteenth-century racism's agendas would seem quite strange to later generations of racists. In part, those agendas were linked to an increasing preoccupation with the nation and nationalism. Victorian authors speculated at enormous length about the respective contributions made to the English by the Anglo-Saxon and then the Norman invaders, while Frenchmen, like Gobineau, made under-researched claims about the Germanic origins of their aristocracy. (But Gobineau's claim to be a count was another of his fictions.)

Renan's own view, however, was that what made the French nation, or any nation, was not race, but shared historical memories. Moreover, as we have seen, he thought that language rather than bloodlines defined a race. Unlike the Fascist racists of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century racists were not necessarily triumphalist. The pessimistic Gobineau was not alone here and, for example, Fabre d'Olivet, an eccentric scholar who wrote about Hebrew and linguistic matters more generally, believed that in the long run the blacks, who were stronger, were destined to enslave the whites.
⁶¹

As the numbers of Orientalists increased, so did their disagreements and feuds, and the Dutchman Reinhart P. Dozy (1820–83) contributed more than his fair share to these.
⁶²
In the early nineteenth century, Dutch Orientalism had experienced a modest revival under the slightly dull scholar, Théodore-Guillaume-Jean Juynboll (1802–61), who moved over from theology to Arabic and produced useful work on medieval Arabgeography. Dozy was not dull and he came to Arabic studies via romantic literature. He had been entranced by accounts of old Moorish Spain in such works as Chateaubriand's
Aventures du dernier des Abencerrages
(1826) and Washington Irving's
Tales of the Alhambra
(1832). He took up Arabic in the first instance ‘in order to bathe himself in waves of poetry'. His rather dry and pedantic teacher Hendrik Weijers pushed him towards history. Dozy thereupon read Quatremère's
Histoire des sultans mamlouks
and was enraptured by the philological riches he discovered therein. His first major work was
Recherches sur l'histoire politique et littéraire de l'Espagne pendant le moyen âge
(1849), a study of Spanish Muslim history up to 1110 that was also a savagely polemical attack on his predecessors among the Spanish historians, José Antonio Conde and Pascual de Gayangos. Conde had died in 1820, but Dozy's brutality cost him the friendship of Gayangos. Renan was terrified at the severity of the judgement on Conde's inadequate Arabic (as well he might be) and Dozy's student, de Goeje, described it as a ‘death sentence' on Conde. Spanish historians were enraged by Dozy's debunking of Spain's national hero, al-Cid, who, he argued, was merely a treacherous mercenary and ‘more Muslim than Catholic'. Dozy's critics suggested that he placed too much reliance on Arabic sources on this topic.

Dozy went on to publish his
Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne
(1861). At the time he was criticized for having written such a work of scholarship in French rather than Latin. However, he had been strongly influenced by the contemporary vivid and romantic French style of writing history. As a consequence Dozy's narrative has some of the feel of a novel of passion, as he invented dialogue and conjured up the look of things in order to give his readers the feeling that they were there in the medieval Moorish past. Dozy hated German pedantry and he clashed with Fleischer on editorial details. Dozy was a merciless controversialist and his history overflowed with strongly felt prejudices. He was liberal and anti-clerical and it was perhaps because of this that he took strongly against the Almoravids, the fiercely religious and puritanical Berber tribesmen who had occupied much of Muslim Spain in the twelfth century. He had strong views on racial matters and his vision of history was coloured by his belief that though the Arabs were capable of conquering an empire, they were incapable of holding it. The progress of the Arabs was held back by the prescriptions of the Qur'an and the backward-looking nature of Islamic law. Dozy disliked what he read about Muhammad and he shared the view (widespread among European scholars of the time) that the Prophet was epileptic. The romantic in Dozy much preferred pre-Islamic Arabia with its camel rustlers and warrior poets.

Finally, Dozy's early work as a research student on the medieval Arabic terminology of costume bore fruit in a wider-ranging work, the
Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes
(2 volumes, 1881). His study
of the vocabulary of costume as well as his reading of Quatremère and then of the Spanish Arabic sources had made him aware of the vast number of words that had been circulating in the Arabic-speaking world without being admitted into the famous dictionaries of classical Arabic. As we have seen, Lane had relied on those dictionaries. The other standard dictionary that circulated in the nineteenth century was Georg Wilhelm Freytag's
Lexicon Arabico–Latinum
(1830–37), but this was not much more than a revamping of Golius's seventeenth-century compilation that had in turn been based on the great classical Arabic dictionaries. Dozy's dictionary was based on words found in texts rather than in other dictionaries, and in many cases he had to guess their meaning from context. His dictionary was the product of wide and discriminating reading and it is regularly consulted by scholars to this day.

For much of the century Oriental studies were even more stagnant in Britain than they had been in Holland. Dozy was not impressed by Oxford and Cambridge and he judged that these places were held back by ecclesiastical shackles. It is not possible to understand what was happening in British universities in this period without coming to terms with the intense religiosity of the age. G. M. Young, the superbly eloquent historian of Victorian Britain, characterized that period as ‘an age of flashing eyes and curling lips, more easily touched, more easily shocked, more ready to spurn, to flaunt, to admire and, above all, to preach'.
⁶³
Intellectual life in Britain throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by theological controversies. Most of the new critical techniques that were now being applied to the study of the Bible had been pioneered by German scholars. Young, having remarked on the challenge posed by the researches of Sir Charles Lyell and other geologists to the traditional chronology laid down by the Bible, went on to observe that a ‘far more serious onslaught was preparing… English divinity was not equipped to meet – for its comfort, it was hardly capable of understanding – the new critical
methods of the Germans: it is a singular fact that England could not, before Lightfoot, show one scholar in the field of Biblical learning able and willing to match the scholars of Germany… The flock was left undefended against the ravages of David Strauss.'
⁶⁴
David Strauss's
Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet
(2 volumes, 1835–6) daringly suggested that the miraculous and supernatural events associated with Jesus had been foisted on to his life prior to the composition of the Gospels. The Gospels were then, at least in part, the records of myths. In 1846 Marian Evans (better known as the novelist George Eliot) published a widely read English translation of Strauss's work. If the life of the Christian Son of God was to be treated in this manner, it was hardly likely that in the long run Muhammad's biography would escape similar treatment.

In the short term, however, there was little interest in Britain in doing serious research into Islam and the Arabic language. Richard Burton, in his famous (or notorious) translation of
The Arabian Nights
(1885–8), had pointed out that Britain now ruled over the greatest empire of Muslims ever seen and he thought that this ought to have led to a much greater interest in Muslim languages and cultures.
⁶⁵
This indeed was what might have been expected. Yet Major C. M. Watson, a member of the Imperial Institute, put the paradox plainly in a letter to Sir Frederick Abel in 1887: ‘Although England has greater interests in the East than any other European country, yet for some unexplained reason, she is the most behindhand in encouraging the study of modern oriental languages.' Like Gibbon, Burton had wanted to study Arabic at Oxford but had been unable to find anyone who was prepared to teach him. When he went up in 1840, it was to study Greek and Latin, but, since this was boring, he set to teaching himself from Erpenius's
Grammatica Arabica
(1613). The then Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford refused to teach individual students, claiming that he was only paid to teach classes and, since he discouraged those individual students who might have formed such classes, he never had to do any teaching. Burton's efforts to teach himself were seriously impeded by his failure to realize that Arabic was written from right to left and it was only when he encountered de Sacy's distinguished Spanish student Pascual de Gayangos in Oxford that this fundamental misapprehension was corrected.
⁶⁶
Later in life, Burton
acquired a reputation as a brilliant linguist that seems to have been somewhat inflated.

Like many of his lively-minded contemporaries, Burton hated and despised Oxford. In part, the decay of Oriental studies in Oxford reflected the broader stagnation of British universities in the early nineteenth century. It is a big mistake to project the intellectual power and industriousness of a modern university like, say, Columbia in New York back to nineteenth-century Oxbridge (though Edward Said seems to be assuming this). Besides allowing the sons of peers and similar folk to grow a little older in pleasant and idle surroundings, the wealthy Oxbridge colleges were, as much as anything else, training places for Anglican clergymen. But this was to change.

Mark Pattison, a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and an expert on the lives of Casaubon and Scaliger, put forward proposals for university reform in the 1850s and 1860s that were based on his travels around German universities.
⁶⁷
Oxford in Pattison's day had only twenty professors to Leipzig's more than a hundred. There were also far more university students in Germany. A tiny proportion of the population went to university in England. Pattison was particularly impressed by the German scholars in classical studies and their use of philological techniques, as well as their emphasis on institutions and social factors in the history of antiquity. Part of the trouble was that Oxbridge faced little competition within Britain. In the course of the 1820s and 1830s the University of London (consisting at first of University College and King's College) came into being. The University of Durham was founded in 1832, but it remained tiny until the second half of the twentieth century. The Scottish universities, including Edinburgh and St Andrews, had longer histories, but they did not teach Arabic or Islamic studies.

Serious university reform got under way in the 1870s with a series of parliamentary acts and royal commissions. Fortuitously 1870 was the date at which William Wright was appointed to the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic in Cambridge.
⁶⁸
With this appointment Cambridge acquired an Orientalist of the first rank, something it had not possessed since the seventeenth century: the prestige of Cambridge Orientalism was established. (Oxford, meanwhile, had to wait until 1889 and the appointment of David Samuel Margoliouth to the
Laudian professorship. On Margoliouth, see the next chapter.) Wright was born on the frontier of Nepal, the son of a captain in the service of the East India Company. He did a first degree at the University of St Andrews, and went on to the German university of Halle where he studied first Syriac and then Arabic. He also picked up Persian, Turkish and Sanskrit at about the same time. His schooling in German philological techniques was at least as important as the languages he had mastered. He then went on to Leiden, where the redoubtable Dozy was his doctoral supervisor. His research consisted of editing the unique Leiden manuscript of Ibn Jubayr's
Travels
. (The Spanish Muslim, Ibn Jubayr, went on haj to Mecca in the late twelfth century and produced a remarkably lively account not just of the Muslim lands he travelled through, but also of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Norman Sicily.)

Wright was appointed to a chair of Arabic at University College, London, and then to one at Trinity College, Dublin, where he also taught Hindustani. While in Dublin, he produced
A Grammar of the Arabic Language
(1859–62). This was effectively a translation and expansion of an Arabic grammar published in Latin in 1848 by a Norwegian student of Fleischer's, Karl Paul Caspari. Wright received help from Fleischer, who had made many corrections to de Sacy's earlier grammar and, in the preface to the second edition of his
Grammar
(1874), Wright wrote: ‘Professor Fleischer will, I trust, look upon the dedication as a mark of respect for the Oriental scholarship of Germany, whereof he is one of the worthiest representatives.'
⁶⁹
Wright's
Grammar
is still in use today, which is a little surprising, as it is rather difficult to use and those wishing to get full value from it should first acquaint themselves with the elements of Latin, Hebrew, Ethiopic and Syriac.