For Lust of Knowing (31 page)

In 1868 Goldziher left Hungary for the more scholarly environment of Germany, where he studied with various Orientalists and philologists, including the Hebraist, Abraham Geiger. Above all, he studied at Leipzig with the philologically sound and meticulous Fleischer. (No one would have dreamed of calling Fleischer ‘dervish'.) Goldziher's work with Fleischer put him just one link down the scholarly chain of transmission from Silvestre de Sacy. In 1871 Goldziher visited
Holland and conferred with Dozy and de Goeje. The years 1873 to 1874 were his formative
Wanderjahre
, as it was then that he travelled in the Middle East and studied with the Muslim scholars of the al-Azhar in Cairo. He recorded the encounters and revelations of his year in the lands of Islam in a diary. It was while he was in Damascus that he decided that Islam was better than Judaism or Christianity. He also came to identify with progressive forces in the region. In particular, he formed a friendship with the writer and activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who at that time was in Egypt campaigning for the country's independence.

From 1872 onwards Goldziher taught Hebrew in Budapest and published in that field. Then in 1876 he secured a not particularly remunerative jobas the secretary of the Israelite Community (the liberal Jewish community) in Budapest. He occupied this rather humble job for thirty years, even though he was offered the Cambridge professorship after the death of William Robertson Smith, as well as various professorships in Germany. For most of his life, Goldziher's status in the world of Orientalism depended not on a formal academic rank, but on his sheer brilliance and industry. Anti-Semitism in Hungary made it almost impossible for Jews to get university posts. Only in 1905 did he move on from his secretaryship to become Professor of Semitic Philology at Budapest. He died in 1921.

Goldziher's mind was formed by the overlapping worlds of the German and Jewish Enlightenment. He spent much of his life battling with an obscurantist rabbinate and opposing the narrow ritualism of Orthodox Judaism. In 1876 he published
Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwicklung
(‘Hebrew Myths and their Historical Evolution'). This study was written under the influence of Friedrich Max Müller, the Sanskrit expert and comparative philologist, who had put forward ideas about the nature of primitive mythology and argued that early myths derived ultimately from people's perception of such basic natural phenomena as day and night, earth, sky, stars and sea – and, above all, the sun. The theories that Max Müller had developed in relation to Indo-Aryan mythology were reapplied by Goldziher to the early beliefs of the Hebrews and their advance from polytheism to monotheism. Obviously this put him in conflict with Renan, who had previously generalized grandly on the
intrinsic monotheism of the Semitic spirit and the incapacity of the Jews and Arabs to generate any kind of mythology. Goldziher considered all that to be racist nonsense: ‘There is no such thing as a psychology particular to a given race.'
⁶
His first interest was in Hebrew mythology, but when he turned to the early beliefs of the Arabs, he pointed out that they only reluctantly abandoned polytheism under pressure from Muhammad and his supporters. Eventually, in a famous speech delivered in Budapest in 1893, entitled ‘Renan as Orientalist', he attacked both the notion of an intuitive monotheism of the Semites and the supposed scholarship of Renan.

Only in 1881 did Goldziher start to publish in Islamic and Arabic studies. He wrote on a wide range of topics: he outlined the evidence for foreign influences on the Qur'an; he stressed the magical and ritual aspects of poetry; he explored the Shu‘ubiyya (the anti-Arabic movement of the eighth and ninth centuries); he demonstrated that the culture of Muslim Andalusia generally lagged behind that of the Middle East and took its lead from the latter. However, his most far-reaching (and, in the eyes of many Muslims, most destructive) contribution was in the area of Hadith studies, especially his essay, ‘On the Development of Hadith'. Here his thinking, like that of Wellhausen, was strongly influenced by the work of Abraham Geiger on the evolution of Old Testament stories. This interest in the evolution specifically of early narratives was transferred by Goldziher to Islamic studies, where he studied how stories about the Prophet and his contemporaries evolved over the centuries. Here he was successful in demonstrating that, notwithstanding their long chain of authorities that seemed to authenticate the oral transmission of Hadiths (I was told by Abu Hamza, who had it from Ismail ibn Abi Bakr that he heard Faisal al-Isfahani say, etc….), most Hadiths could not be traced back to the Prophet, but were fabricated in later centuries.

This was not the purely destructive exercise that it seems at first sight. Having discounted them as evidence for what went on in the early seventh century, it then became possible to use Hadiths as a different kind of source – to shed light on the evolving preoccupations and debates within the Islamic community, as they were formulated in order to answer particular problems regarding law, ritual and everyday living in particular communities at particular times during
the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The context of this sort of material was, if anything, even more interesting than its content. Hadiths were now seen to be interesting and important for they illustrated evolving trends in law, theology and so forth. A lot of traditions concerning the Prophet and his companions could be seen to have been invented in order to support or oppose the Umayyad caliphs. A lot of early Muslim law that ostensibly referred back to the practices of the Prophet and his companions could be seen to derive from Roman law or pre-existing provincial law. Goldziher's crucial essay, ‘On the Development of the Hadith', was reprinted in
Muhammedanische Studien
(2 volumes, 1889–90), a collection that includes most of his important essays. The other key book,
Vorlesungen über den Islam
(1910) was translated in 1982 as
Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law
, though this general survey ranged more widely than that.

The German Arabist and cultural historian Alfred von Kremer (1828–89) had pioneered the study of the spiritual evolution of Islam.
⁷
Wellhausen and Goldziher followed him in this and they in turn would be followed by Louis Massignon and Bernard Lewis who similarly focused on the way Islam was not something fixed by the decree of the Prophet in the seventh century, but evolved and adapted over the centuries. Goldziher was particularly interested in the part played by schismatic religious and political groupings in Islamic history (among them the Kharijites, Carmathians and Isma‘ilis), as he saw schism and dissension as indicators of the vitality and continuing evolution of the Islamic faith. Prior to Goldziher, historians of early Islam had mostly focused on the life of the Prophet, whereas Goldziher was more concerned with the revivalist movements that arose in later centuries. This concern carried over into his perception of the Muslim world in the twentieth century. He believed in the future of Islam and its ability to revive itself from within. As has been noted, he was hostile to colonialism and the Westernization of the Near East. He had supported the Egyptian nationalist revolt of Arabi Pasha (in 1881–2). In 1920 he wrote a letter to a Christian Arabfriend in Mosul: ‘I have lived for your nation and for my own. If you return to your homeland, tell this to your brothers.' A year later Goldziher was dead.
⁸

Despite the relatively humble posts that Goldziher occupied for
most of his career, he was perfectly well aware how clever and important he was. He was an arrogant and passionate scholar. According to Lawrence Conrad, a leading historian of early Islam and an expert on the life and works of Goldziher, ‘The formulations of Goldziher remain to this day the basic underpinnings of the field.'
⁹
According to Albert Hourani, the author of
A History of the Arab Peoples
, ‘Goldziher shaped our view of what Islam is more than anyone else.'
¹⁰
The famous Orientalist Louis Massignon declared that Goldziher was ‘the uncontested master of Islamic studies in the eyes of Western Orientalists' and that he had exercised a ‘vast and complex personal influence on our studies'.
¹¹
Massignon's student, Bernard Lewis, the author of
The Origins of Modern Turkey
and
The Arabs in History
among much else, echoed this verdict: ‘Probably the greatest of all was Ignaz Goldziher… a pious Hungarian Jew whose magnificent series of studies on Muslim theology, law and culture rank him, by common consent, as one of the founders and masters of modern Islamic studies.'
¹²
Kratchkovsky, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century Russian Orientalists, declared that ‘Islamic studies took definite shape as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the work of the Dutchman Snouck Hurgronje and the Hungarian I. Goldziher.'
¹³
According to Jacques Waardenburg (who, like Conrad, has made a special study of Goldziher's work), ‘It is no exaggeration, in our opinion, to say that Goldziher had created Islamology in the full sense of the term; if one thinks moreover that he inspired the production of the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
, the foundation of the review
Der Islam
and the numerous researches of colleagues…'
¹⁴
In other words, a book on Middle Eastern and Islamic studies that gave no account of Goldziher's work in the field would not be worth the paper it was printed on.

Apart from publishing copiously, Goldziher was keen on correspondence. Much of his impact on Islamic studies was due to the contacts he made and the ideas he exchanged with other Orientalists. Apart from his writings, Goldziher was a fervent attendee of Orientalist conferences and he believed that giving lectures at such events was just as important as publishing articles. As the example of the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
suggests, Orientalism in the early twentieth century was to a considerable extent a collaborative European enterprise.
However, though the Orientalists corresponded and co-operated, it will become apparent that otherwise they had little in common: there was hardly an Orientalist type or a common Orientalist discourse. In this chapter I shall be discussing a range of approaches, among them Nöldeke's Prussian jingoism, Hurgronje's colonialist approach to Islam, Lammens's polemical Christian agenda and Margoliouth's crossword-solving approach to Arabtexts.

Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930) was a rationalist positiviast. His doctorate was entitled
De origine et compositione Surarum qoranicarum ipsiusque Qorani
(‘Concerning the origin of the Qur'an and the composition of its suras') and this was later expanded into a more mature study, published in 1860 as
Geschichte des Korans
. He was the first to use historical method in an attempt to work out the chronological ordering of the revelation of various suras, or chapters of the Qur'an. Broadly speaking he dated the more mystical suras to the early years of the Prophet's preaching in Mecca, while assigning the longer suras with their detail on legal and social matters to the Prophet's later sojourn in Medina. Although Nöldeke's conclusions are now widely queried by specialists in Qur'anic studies, they were for a long time highly influential and without them, for example, the biographies of Muhammad by William Montgomery Watt in 1953 and 1956and by Maxime Rodinson in 1961 could not have been written. In the long run, however, Nöldeke became disillusioned with Qur'anic studies: ‘It is my ultimate wish not to be harassed by Muhammad and the Koran. When I was young I was preoccupied with these subjects for some reason or other. I must confess that they seem to be more mysterious now than ever before… I am too modern a European to see clearly into that world of dreams.'
¹⁵

This disillusion carried over into his study of Arabic literature. ‘Whether the aesthetic pleasure to be drawn from Arabic poetry is worth the effort in order to reach an approximate understanding is questionable. But the study is necessary as an important means to
penetrate deeply the essence of the Arabpeople.'
¹⁶
Goldziher was an enthusiast for Arabic literature and wrote a short history of it, but Nöldeke thought that Arabic literature was of negligible aesthetic value. It seems that Nöldeke, the positivist, was reacting against the wild and woolly enthusiasms of Germans of an earlier generation, including the Schlegels, Herder and Rückert, for all things Oriental. Goldziher was a fervent admirer of Islam, even though he remained attached to his own Jewish faith. Nöldeke, on the other hand, condemned Islam, just as he condemned all religions. He was also at odds with William Robertson Smith, as he disapproved of his way of bolstering his arguments by calling on all sorts of comparative material mostly from primitive cultures. Smith treated the Arabs of the desert as fascinating barbarians, but Nöldeke did not think that they were as barbarous as all that. He was a fierce Prussian nationalist and racial bigot. In these respects he was an outsider in the community of Orientalists. In at least one respect, however, he belonged to the grand tradition of de Sacy and Fleischer: he had never been to the Middle East and he could not actually speak Arabic.

As we shall see, the political opinions of Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) were at the opposite pole from those of Nöldeke. The continuity of German Orientalism is well illustrated by the fact that Becker had studied with various students of Fleischer, who had been the student of de Sacy. Becker started out as a Semiticist and Assyriologist, before specializing in the history of Islam. However, unlike purist disciples of de Sacy and Fleischer, Becker thought as a historian rather than as a philologist. Like Von Kremer before him, he regarded Islam as a late version of Hellenism and in
Der Islam im Rahme neine rallgemeinen Kulturgeschichte
(1922) and
Das Erbe der Antike im Orient und Okzident
(1931), he presented Muslim civilization as one of the chief heirs of the cultural legacy of antiquity. ‘Without Alexander the Great there would be no Islamic civilization.'
¹⁷
The religion of Islam was not some Asiatic, alien ‘Other', but was rather a Christian heresy and something that was very much a product of the Mediterranean world. As for Islamic philosophy, this was just late antique Greek philosophy under another name. Culture and society took precedence over religious revelation in Becker's thought and Islam was shaped by society rather than the reverse. As
a young man, Becker had known Max Weber and he tended to think in Weberian sociological terms. He was perhaps also the first to study the economic history of the Islamic world.