For Lust of Knowing (34 page)

He went on in 1911 to write a book aimed at a broad audience, entitled
Mohammedanism
, in which potted history and other forms of elementary explication alternated with expressions of sheer prejudice. In this book he suggested that ‘literary and scientific ability has usually been the result of the entry into Islam of Indo-Germanic elements'. In 1925 he published an extremely important article in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
in which he denied the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry. Just a year later the distinguished Egyptian critic, novelist and historian Taha Husayn published a book
Fi al-Shi‘r
al-Jahili
(‘On Pre-Islamic Poetry') in which he made essentially the same case. The arguments advanced by Margoliouth and Taha Husayn were highly controversial, as the discrediting of pre-Islamic poetry led on inevitably to doubts about the dating and composition of the Qur'an. Margoliouth was the first academic Orientalist to become president of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1937. Hitherto peers and gentlemen scholars had dominated that institution. Gladstone thought him one of the two most impressive men in Oxford. Denison Ross (on whom see below) thought him the most learned man he had ever met.

Like Nöldeke, Margoliouth did not think much of Arabic literature. Writing in the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
on al-Hariri's
Maqamat
, he commented that the ‘reasons for this extraordinary success… are somewhat difficult to fathom and must be accounted for by the decline of literary taste'. And in his
Mohammedanism
, he observed that the failure of Arabic poetry to match that of Europe was ‘in the main due to the unsuitability of the Heat-Belt for continuous intellectual effort'.

Sir Charles James Lyall (1845–1920), who devoted most of his leisure hours to the study and translation of early Arabic poetry, seems to have had similar reservations: ‘To us much in these poems seems tedious and even repellent. The narrow range of the Kasida [ode], with its conventional framework, tends to produce monotony, and it is not easy to come into close touch with the life that is so realistically described.'
³⁹
Lyall had studied Hebrew and then Arabic at Oxford, before entering the Bengal Civil Service. While employed in the service of the Raj he took up the translation of Arabic and especially pre-Islamic poetry as a recreation. Consideration of Lyall's career as an administrator and first-rate scholar prompts the reflection that the commonest link between Orientalism and empire was that the former was often the hobby of the masters of the latter. While on leave in Europe, Lyall studied with Nöldeke, to whom he dedicated his two collections of Arabic poetry and whom he called ‘the acknowledged master of all European scholars in this field of study'. Lyall was a
brilliant translator and his translations are still worth reading today. Despite his expressed reservations about the
qasidas
, he rendered them into vivid, poetic English. The original inspiration for his metrical translations of Arabic poetry came from his reading of the lyrical translations of Oriental poetry by Friedrich Rückert. But Lyall was also a meticulous philological editor and he followed the example of the Germans (again), as well as the Dutch and William Wright in that field.
⁴⁰

In Britain, there had been a long tradition of disparaging the Crusaders as barbaric and bigoted warmongers and of praising the Saracens as paladins of chivalry. Indeed, it was widely believed that chivalry originated in the Muslim East. The most perfect exemplar of Muslim chivalry was, of course, the twelfth-century Ayyubid Sultan Saladin. He was praised by Gibbon and became the hero of novels by Sir Walter Scott, G. A. Henty and Rider Haggard among many others.
Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
(1898) by Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) gave academic legitimacy to Saladin's heroic status, as Lane-Poole's was the first biography to be based on Arabic sources. His book appeared in a series devoted to ‘Heroes of the Nations', though it was never clear exactly which nation the Kurdish Saladin belonged to. The story that Lane-Poole told was highly romanticized and absurdly biased against Saladin's Muslim and Christian enemies. Lane-Poole was a great-nephew of Edward William Lane and he republished several of his uncle's books and struggled (and failed) to complete Lane's great dictionary, as well as producing several popular narratives of Islamic history. He worked on cataloguing Muslim coins in the British Museum before becoming Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin.
⁴¹

There is little to say about American Orientalism in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Though there were, of course, distinguished individuals in the United States who interested themselves in Arabic and Islamic studies, they were few and there was no sustained academic tradition in these areas. Also it is perfectly clear that American Orientalists looked to Germany for inspiration and guidance. America's first Arabist of note, Edward Eldbridge Salisbury (1814–1901), after early studies in theology and Hebrew, travelled to Europe in 1837 and studied Arabic with de Sacy, before moving on to study
philology and Sanskrit with Bopp in Berlin. In 1841 Salisbury was appointed Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit at Yale. This was the first Orientalist teaching post in the United States. However Salisbury, who spread his academic interests quite widely, seems to have been more interested in Sanskrit matters than Arabic ones.
⁴²

Charles Cutler Torrey (1863–1956) was another American Orientalist with broad interests, though in his case only in the area of Semitic studies and languages. Torrey, who was initially schooled in New England biblical scholarship, later went to Strasburg to study with the intimidating Nöldecke (who was described by Torrey as ‘nobody's spring chicken').
⁴³
One reason for crossing the Atlantic was to learn German – a vital language for any aspiring Semiticist. Although Torrey went on to publish numerous editions and specialized studies, he was not a pathfinder like his German teacher.

Duncan Black MacDonald (1863–1943), born in Glasgow and trained in Berlin before moving to Hartford in Connecticut, is the first US-based Orientalist worth lingering on. He did important work on Arabmagic and superstition and on the manuscripts of
The Thousand and One Nights
. He also wrote copiously about Muslim–Christian relations and was involved in sending out Protestant missions to the Middle East.
⁴⁴
In general, however, Americans were to contribute little to Orientalist scholarship until the second half of the twentieth century. There were few academic posts in the field and, for a long time, there were very few texts and manuscripts available to the students. The American Oriental Society, founded in 1842, was at first an association for interested amateurs. In the longer run, as we shall see, American Orientalism was put on firmer foundations by recruiting intellectual stars from across the Atlantic.

It was more or less inevitable that during the First World War and the years that immediately followed tensions should arise between German Orientalists and the rest. The internationalist spirit of academic Orientalism was strained to breaking point. As late as 1918 Torrey was still worrying about American Orientalism's overdependence
on German studies. But after the war German scholarship became suspect in some quarters and the prejudice even extended to philology in general, as this was the German speciality par excellence. As J. R. R. Tolkien, an expert on medieval literature and language as well as a novelist, noted: ‘“Philology” is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things the late war was fought to end.'
⁴⁵
Although the fascicules of the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
had originally been published in English, French and German, after the war the German version was dropped.

The break-up of the Ottoman empire was another important result of the war and one that also had consequences for the development of Orientalism. Until the war Germans and Swiss had led the way in the exploration of the monuments and archaeological sites of the Middle East. They included Alois Musil, who discovered the frescoes at Qusayr Amra in Jordan, Max van Berchem, who compiled the
Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum
and Friedrich Sarre who, together with Ernst Herzfeld, made a detailed archaeological survey of Mesopotamia.
⁴⁶
After the war, Syria and Lebanon were placed under a French mandate, while Britain took over in Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. As a result, French and British scholars gained easier access to archaeological sites and monuments. The French led the way in urban and rural history. In particular, they mounted massive surveys of Islamic cities, both in the Levant and in North Africa. Roger le Tourneau produced several important books on Fez. Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thoumine worked on the architecture and topography of Damascus. Georges Marçais surveyed North African architecture. They and others in the field began to elaborate theories about the distinctive nature of the Islamic city.
⁴⁷

Jean Sauvaget (1901–50), a literary archaeologist who never excavated, made effective use of literary sources for urban history and architecture and published important studies of Aleppo and Damascus. In Egypt, Gaston Wiet (1887–1971), the director of the Museum of ArabArt in Cairo, was one of the foremost experts on the history of Cairo. For a long time Wiet's catalogues of the contents of that museum were among the very few substantial guides to Islamic art objects. The Egyptian King Fuad, resentful of the British occupation of Egypt, tended to favour French scholars over British ones. The
French in Egypt were the particular object of detestation of the intimidating Professor of Muslim Art and Architecture at the Fuad I University, Keppel Archibald Cameron Cresswell (1879–1974). He sternly advised the art historian Oleg Grabar to ‘Beware of Sauvaget!' But it is perhaps worth noting that he detested Jews and Arabs almost as much as he did the French. He used always to have a stick with him when he walked through the streets of Cairo, so that if he saw a man maltreating a horse or a donkey, he could give that man a beating.
⁴⁸
As for Sauvaget, the trouble with him was not just that he was French, but also that he had ideas (always a bad sign to Cresswell's way of thinking).

The classic theory of the ‘Islamic city' had first been developed by the French in Algeria, and then exported to Syria – where Sauvaget was its main exponent. He was obsessed with the
Nachleben
(or afterlife) of antiquity. He wanted to find Rome in Damascus, Latakia and elsewhere. Therefore, the main focus of his interest was naturally Umayyad Syria, but he was more generally interested in the notion of the Islamic city. In his work on ‘the silent webof Islamic history', he treated buildings as texts (and really only as texts for, like Cresswell, he had a healthy dislike for art historians). When dealing with manuscripts, Sauvaget (and Claude Cahen after him) placed great stress on understanding the sources of one's sources, or, to put it another way, it was not enough to parrot the information of late compilers like Ibn al-Athir or al-Maqrizi. Sauvaget also made effective use of local chroniclers. Cresswell, by contrast, did not trouble with theories about antiquity or the nature of pre-modern urban life. He concentrated narrowly on the chronology of the great Islamic monuments of Egypt and Syria and, despite his cantankerous prejudices, he did valuable work in this field, particularly as he worked at a time when people in the field were having difficulty in distinguishing Islamic monuments from Byzantine ones.
⁴⁹

During the First World War British troops had defended Egypt and invaded Palestine, Syria and Iraq. They had also attempted a disastrous landing at Gallipoli. In the Hejaz T. E. Lawrence, according to his own account in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, played a leading role in igniting the ArabRevolt. ‘Britain's Moment in the Middle East' had come. The country's direct wartime stake in the Middle East gave ammunition to those who had been campaigning for the establishment in London of a specialist institution for the teaching of Oriental languages and cultures. In the previous century Max Müller, Lyall and others had campaigned for such an institution and the Royal Asiatic Society had also lobbied for it. The peers Curzon and Cromer, who had strong political interests in the East, viewed the Orientalists' campaign with favour. In 1917 the School of Oriental Studies in Finsbury Circus was opened in the presence of Lord Curzon and the War Cabinet. Though it was established by the government, it was not well funded and successive directors struggled to make ends meet and keep the institute afloat.
⁵⁰

The first director of the School of Oriental Studies was the flamboyant and vainglorious Sir Edward Denison Ross (1871–1940). Ross, who was linguistically gifted, went to Paris to study Hebrew with Renan and Persian with Charles Schefer. Renan ‘made biblical criticism as entertaining as a detective story'. Schefer, the wealthy Persianist, lived in a chateau with his collection of Islamic art. Denison Ross also did research on Persian history in Strasburg with Nöldeke, whom he described as ‘one of the most brilliant Orientalists the world has ever seen'. In the same year he attended lectures by Baron Viktor Rosen in St Petersburg. Denison Ross was like a bee flitting from one flower to another, but never staying long. In 1895 he became Professor of Persian at University College London and in the years that followed he got to know Edward Granville Browne and fell under his spell. In 1896 he produced a thesis on Isma‘il, the first of the Persian Safavid Shahs. In 1897 he enjoyed a
Wanderjahr
that took him from London to St Petersburg and then on to Bukhara and Samarkand. Later he worked for the Indian Education Service in Calcutta.