For Lust of Knowing (40 page)

Marshall Hodgson was one of the first major contributors to Islamic studies to have been born in the United States.
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He was also one of the first to try to break free from a vision of Islamic history that was conditioned by the philological and classicizing preoccupations of the German tradition. He queried the contention of Grunebaum and others that around the ninth or tenth century the Islamic world had experienced its classical moment and thereafter went into a steep decline. By contrast with Grunebaum, Hodgson, who also taught at Chicago and who died aged only forty-seven in 1968, has inspired quite a few historians with his vision of the central role of Islam in world history. This was set out in the three-volume
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
(posthumously published in 1974), a pioneering work of synthesis that aimed at rethinking the way Islamic history had been written about. In part, this was done by giving full weight to the shaping role of the physical environment of the torrid zone of the Eurasian landmass. In part, it was done by paying more attention to the political and cultural contributions of the Persians, Turks and Indians (with correspondingly less emphasis on the overweening role of the Arabs). This in turn led him to dismiss the notion that Islamic civilization had peaked in the eighth or ninth century. Rather he suggested that Islamic civilization was at its height in what he called the ‘Middle Period' extending from the late tenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. He also drew attention to the considerable cultural achievements of the ‘gunpowder empires' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In order to foster new ways of thinking about the subject, he created
a new (and rather unattractive) vocabulary: ‘Islamdom' designated the territories within which the Muslims and their religion were predominant; ‘Islamicate' referred to the culture of those territories; the ‘Oikumene' was the settled world of high culture that spread over Europe, Asia and Africa. Hodgson argued that Islam's wide territorial sway from the eighth century onwards served to break down previously existing cultural barriers in the three continents. His was a highly sympathetic portrait of Islamic culture and the
Venture
was emphatically not a history of the ‘Triumph of the West'. He also gave full weight to the Chinese contribution to the Oikumene and more specifically to what the neighbouring Islamicate civilization derived from it. He argued that the Oikumene should be considered as a single unit of study. His grand vision of history, like so many grand visions of history, was heavily influenced by Ibn Khaldun. But Hodgson was also a Christian who had embraced Massignon's notion of history as the ‘science of compassion'.

Hodgson took frequent issue with his predecessors in his entertainingly aggressive footnotes. In the main text, his presentation of his arguments, though occasionally eloquent, was often turgid and difficult. Even so, he has turned out to be one of the most influential writers on Islamic culture in modern times. Quite a few of today's professors would describe themselves as Hodgsonians. According to the novelist Saul Bellow, who knew him, ‘Marshall was a vegetarian, a pacifist, and a Quaker – most odd, most unhappy, a quirky charmer.' Bellow, a passionately blinkered Zionist, could not understand how any scholar could interest himself in the barbarous Arabs: ‘Why should a pacifist fall in love with militant Islam?'
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The question is rhetorical. If Bellow, an intellectual who seems extraordinarily ignorant about Islam, had wanted that question answered, he could have attended Hodgson's lectures or, later, read
The Venture of Islam
.

One of the longest and most thoughtful reviews of
The Venture of Islam
appeared in the
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
. This was by Albert Hourani (1915–93).
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Hourani was born in Manchester, the
son of a Protestant Lebanese businessman. He read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford – not classics. The farouche Margoliouth supervised his unfinished D. Phil. thesis. He then worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office before becoming a Fellow of Magdalen College and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford. Before turning to academic life, he had been an eloquent advocate of the Palestinian cause and, more generally, he had been optimistic about the future of Arab nationalism. He was then bitterly disappointed by the British betrayal of the Arabs of Palestine and thereafter he seems to have found a refuge from the setbacks of contemporary politics in the study of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Arabworld.

He was a master of intellectual biography and his best book,
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
(1962), is, like Edmund Wilson's classic study of the ideological origins of Soviet Communism,
To the Finland Station
, a mixture of character study and intellectual history. Hourani emphasized and perhaps overemphasized the role of British and French liberal ideas in shaping modern Arab thought. Before the achievement of independence by Arab nations and the bitter realities of post-colonialism, the days of hope were to be found in the ‘Liberal age'. An essay entitled ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables' has proved hardly less influential. In it he sought to show how local Arabnotables, especially in Syria, used to operate as mediators between the Ottoman central government and local interests. However, in the colonial era, the notable go-betweens were more or less forced to become leaders of their local communities with consequences that were often deleterious. His interest in urban elites and informal power structures closely reflected his own position and personality. He was an urbane, liberal patrician Oxford don, who invariably preferred courteous negotiation and debate to confrontation. His elegant cadenced prose added force to his arguments.

Late in life he produced a bestseller. This was
A History of the Arab Peoples
(1991), which came out at the time of the Gulf War and which was described by another Middle Eastern historian, Malcolm Yapp, as ‘a book which evoked like no other the sights, the smells and the rhythms of Arab life, and which integrated these insights into a flowing narrative of the course of Arab history'. Hourani's overview
of Arab history, which competed with earlier works by Philip Hitti and Bernard Lewis, was strongly influenced by Ibn Khaldun's model of the cyclical rise and decline of Muslim regimes. (It is noteworthy that the historical visions of Kremer, Gibb and Marshall Hodgson were similarly shaped by their reading of the fourteenth-century North African.) The other great influence was that of Goldziher. ‘Our view of Islam and Islamic culture is very largely that which Goldziher laid down.'
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In the 1950s Hourani had converted to Catholicism. Though a Christian, like many Christian Arabs in modern times he identified with the achievements of the Muslims. ‘Islam was what the Arabs had done in history.' His fascination with the life and thought of Massignon may have been one of the factors behind his conversion. For Hourani, as for Massignon, the practice of history was a series of exercises in empathy. A gentle and civilized man himself, he tended to play down the importance of confrontation, schism, warfare, persecution, poverty and plague in Arab History. He produced a sunlit, almost cloudless, version of that history.

Hourani also wrote a series of essays on the formation of Orientalism in which he argued that it was not an independent discourse, but took ideas from German philosophers of history such as Herder and Hegel, as well as from Darwin, Marx and others working in widely differing fields. His interest in German thought was fostered by his association in Oxford with distinguished Orientalists such as Richard Walzer and Samuel Stern, who had been trained in Germany. Richard Walzer (1900–1975), Schacht's close friend, was an expert on Arabphilosophy, and had fled Nazi Germany and ended up in Oxford. Walzer also taught Hourani about ‘the importance of scholarly traditions: the way in which scholarship was passed from one generation to another by a kind of apostolic succession, a chain of witnesses (a
silsila
to give it its Arabic name). He also told me much about the central tradition of Islamic scholarship in Europe, that expressed in German.'
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By contrast, Hourani was aware how weakly established British Orientalism was and how the small number of teaching posts in the field tended to force academic specialists to be generalists. (It is pretty easy to find a publisher for a general book on Islamic culture or Arab History. But if one is trying to publish on Fatimid coinage or on the ideology of the Almoravids, things are not
so easy and a publishing house may require a subsidy before it can consider publishing such recondite stuff.) Although he was a friend of Edward Said, Hourani lamented that Said's book had made Orientalism a dirty word. Hourani deplored the ammunition it gave to those Muslims who argued that Islam can only properly be studied by Muslims. He also wondered why those Orientalists who wrote in German, especially Goldziher, had been omitted from consideration.
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Attempts to present Orientalism as a monolithic discourse necessarily ignore or downplay the importance of the contributions made by Marxists to the field. Russian Marxist Orientalism has already been discussed. The contribution of French Marxists was no less important. Claude Cahen (1909–91) has been described by an American historian of the Arabworld, Ira Lapidus, as the greatest historian of the Middle East in the twentieth century.
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The break away from the focus on the anecdotal and heroic was largely pioneered by this historian. When Cahen was six years old, his mother made him cry by relating to him the misfortunes of Louis IX in Egypt. By the time he was ready to produce his first great work,
La Syrie du Nord à l'époque des Croisades
(1940), he was prepared to take a much sterner and more detached view of the respective fortunes of Christians and Muslims in the Near East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cahen was a Marxist, and in
La Syrie du Nord
he struggled to present the region as a territory in its own right, rather than as a temporary imperial extension of medieval Europe. He paid particularly careful attention to the topography and economy of northern Syria. He wanted to get away from history as the story of the doings of great men. At the 1954 Orientalist Congress at Cambridge, he denounced what he saw as the amateur historiography produced by imperialists, colonialists and missionaries, and their excessive preoccupation with the affairs of sultans, scholars and great artists. (He was very surprised when at the end of his speech, Gibb came up and shook him warmly by the hand. But as we have already seen, Gibb was similarly keen to break down the old boundaries of conventional Orientalism.)

Cahen was also hostile to assigning religion or philosophy a central role in the history of the medieval Near East. He disliked using Islam as the explanatory or structuring force in that history. He was not keen on using poetry and belles-lettres as historical sources either. He was an unrivalled expert on the historical sources as more narrowly defined, whether printed or in manuscript. No one did more to identify, edit and translate Arabic texts bearing on the history of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Egypt or Syria – or ever will, I guess. His Marxism was also evidenced in his interest in the role of those urban groups in medieval Cairo and Baghdad who might be seen as forerunners of a modern
Lumpenproletariat
. But, despite his Marxism, he was suspicious of many of the applications of ‘feudal' and ‘bourgeois' to the Near East. He was similarly suspicious of the idea of the ‘Asiatic mode of production', argued by some Marxists to be the precursor of the ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production.

He taught at the Sorbonne. His stress on economic and sociological factors was obviously a world away from Massignon's eccentric spiritualized version of Islam's past. However, Cahen was, like Massignon, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, and he campaigned for Palestinian rights. He belonged to the French Communist party and loyally accepted the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. (He did break ranks over the scientific basis to Lysenko's work on evolution and crop modification, however. It is clear he thought that the Soviet scientist was a fraud.) Cahen only let his party membership lapse sometime around 1960. He was by no means unique as a French Marxist anti-colonialist Orientalist.

Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) came, like Cahen, from a Jewish family.
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His parents were working-class communists in Paris. As a boy, he took part in demonstrations in favour of the Moroccan Rif uprising of the 1920s against the French colonial administration. He began working life as a messenger boy delivering croissants to typists, but in his spare time he set to work in libraries teaching himself the elements of scholarship. A reading of Renan got him interested in the comparative philology of the Semitic languages. Eventually he was taken on to study various Semitic languages, as well as Amharic, at the Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes. He spent the war mostly in Beirut where he had many contacts with Arab communists.
In 1955 he became Professor of Old Ethiopic at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He belonged to the Communist party from 1937 to 1958. As a loyal communist, he was obliged to argue against all the evidence that Russian Jews did not want to go to Israel. ‘Through Zionism, treason penetrated the socialist world,' according to Rodinson. While Jewish doctors and other Jews were falling victim to Stalin's purges, Rodinson was maintaining that there was no such thing as Soviet anti-Semitism. He hoped that Marxism would provide the necessary ideology for the modernization of the Arabworld.

Rodinson, who had studied with Massignon, did not share Said's enthusiasm for the man and, reacting against Massignon's flamboyant spirituality, he decided to concentrate on an aspect of material culture. So he published a series of articles on medieval Arab cookery. After all, he argued, not all Muslims were mystics, but, mystical or not, they did all have to eat. Since childhood, Rodinson had sensed an affinity between Islam and communism. In 1961, he produced a biography of Muhammad, of which he later wrote as follows: ‘Probably in an unconscious fashion I compared him to Stalin.'
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Rodinson produced an atheistic, positivist life of Muhammad, that placed him within the changing mercantile economy of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. Islam was presented as resembling a political party more than it did a spiritual movement. The later Shi‘ite Isma‘ili movement was presented as a kind of early precursor of the Communist International. In 1966 Rodinson published
Islam and Capitalism
(1966), in which he argued that Islam did not hinder the growth of capitalism, but on the other hand, neither did it help it. His
Israel and the Arabs
(1968) argued that in essence the struggle of the Arabs against Israel was an anti-colonialist war, rooted ‘in the struggle of an indigenous population against the occupation of part of its territory by foreigners'.