For Lust of Knowing (41 page)

Rodinson's
La Fascination de l'Islam
(1980, translated as
Europe and the Mystique of Islam
) is a short and astringent account of the development of Arabic and Islamic studies. He was especially critical of religious polemic and philological bias. His book tends to overemphasize the importance of French Orientalists at the expense of those of other nations. Although Rodinson welcomed the challenge to what he judged to be the smug self-satisfaction of so many Orientalists, he thought that Said's earlier critique was overstated, based
on limited reading, and unreasonably limited to French and British Orientalists. He considered the linkage made by Said between colonialism and Orientalism was too naive. Said's book was too exclusively focused on Arabs, whereas Rodinson pointed out that four out of five Muslims are not Arabs. Moreover, unlike Said, he did not believe that the bad faith or polemical intent of a scholar necessarily and intrinsically vitiated everything that that scholar wrote. He made a speech at the Leiden Conference of Orientalists where, among other things, he pointed out that the fact that Champollion had racist ideas about the degeneracy of modern Egyptians did not affect the correctness of his decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Although French Orientalism was not monopolized by Marxists, it does seem to have been dominated by the left wing. Jacques Berque (1910–95) was born in Algeria and served in colonial administration in Morocco.
²⁹
But slowly he came to detach himself from the colonial viewpoint, to adopt socialist positions and to identify with the oppressed. He held the chair of social history of contemporary Islam at the Collège de France and produced books on the modern history of the Arabworld. His most ambitious work was a fanatically francophone-biased history of modern Egypt. As a
pied-noir
, he was understandably slow to accept that the colonial experiment in Algeria was doomed. He never entirely emancipated himself from chauvinism and he maintained that the Arabcountries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) ‘are still for us the place of our pride and our tears' and that the French language ‘still remains – I dare to proclaim it today – the Hellenism of the Arabpeoples'. Having early on maintained that the future of the Arabworld would be democratic, socialist and secular, he was disconcerted by the Islamic revival in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere. His was a highly literary sociology of the Arabworld, embellished with sensuous evocations of the colours and smells of everyday life in that world. At a more theoretical level he struggled to trace the passage from ‘the sacral to the historic' and discussed the problems of alienation and identity in rather ponderous, allusive, even flatulently vacuous essays about the characteristics of Mediterranean societies and of Islamic culture.

By contrast with these committed left-wing Orientalists, the Arabist André Miquel (b. 1929) chose Arabic on aesthetic grounds.
³⁰
As a
schoolboy, he decided that he wanted to work in a field that was obscure and marginal, in which he could peacefully do research and publish. So he taught himself Arabic. Since there were few university teaching posts in his chosen field, he initially worked as a representative of French culture in Ethiopia and Egypt (and during the latter stint, he spent five months in prison as a suspected spy). On release he secured a university post in Aix-en-Provence and it was in part at least under the influence of his friend, the famous Annales historian Fernand Braudel, that he produced important work on medieval Arab geography. He is chiefly important as a translator and popularizer of medieval Arabliterature. From 1968 he taught in Paris and it was there that he assembled a team of scholars which produced a series of specialized studies on
The Thousand and One Nights
. He is also the author of a charming autobiography,
L'Orient d'une vie
(1990).

British Orientalism was less radicalized than the French. Middle Eastern studies, particularly in London, were dominated by a rather grand patriciate of scholars who espoused what can loosely be described as right-wing positions. These scholars (among them Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie, P. J. Vatikiotis (Taki) and Ann Lambton) tended to be sceptical about the declared aims of Arab socialism and nationalism, defensive about Britain's role in the Middle East and sympathetic towards Israel. However, they were (or in some cases still are) scholars and, even if one has detected a right-wing strain in their writings, that in itself does not absolve one from carefully considering their researches and the conclusions to be drawn from them (and, of course, the same sort of consideration applies to the writings of the French Marxists discussed above). Professors at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1960s had more power than they do today. Malcolm Yapp, then a junior lecturer at the School, described it as follows: ‘At that time the School constituted a loose framework intended to facilitate the personal academic initiatives of its academic staff rather than a scheme of neat and purposive pigeonholes in which individual scholars laboured to achieve a greater good.'
³¹
Moreover,
the influence of the senior figures in Middle Eastern studies was not restricted to academic circles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Orientalists wrote for one another, but in the twentieth century and particularly after the Second World War this changed as experts on the Arabs and Islam were invited to write general books for a lay public as well as to contribute to newspapers, literary journals and programmes on radio and television.

Bernard Lewis is a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Emeritus Professor of Princeton University and the possessor of various honorary degrees and a member of the Athenaeum, yet he also features as one of the darkest of the demons that stalk the pages of Said's phantasmagorical
Orientalism
.
³²
Lewis, born in 1916, learned Hebrew as a schoolboy (he is Jewish). He read history at London University and studied with Gibb, before doing a diploma in Semitic studies in Paris in 1937, where he studied with Massignon. After receiving a London University doctorate in 1939, he taught briefly at the School of Oriental Studies, but, having been called up, he served in the Royal Armoured Corps and the Intelligence Corps before being seconded to a department of the Foreign Office. During the war, the book of his thesis,
The Origin of Isma‘ilism
(1940), was published. This short book presented the medieval Shi‘a movement as one of class-based social protest. (Though Lewis considered the possibility that the Isma‘ili movement might have been some kind of precursor of communism, he came to the conclusion that it was not.) His war work in the Foreign Office led on to his next book,
A Handbook of Diplomatic and Political Arabic
(1947). Throughout his career he has maintained a constant, philological preoccupation with terminology, particularly the Arabic vocabulary of politics, diplomacy and warfare.

In 1950 he published
The Arabs in History
, a classic work of compressed synthesis, in which he put the golden age of the Arabs firmly back in the Abbasid era. In early editions of this book (for it has gone through many editions), he presented the semi-covert Isma‘ili Shi‘a movement of the ninth and tenth centuries as a kind of revolution
manqué
, which, had it succeeded, might have heralded a humanist Renaissance and freed Muslims from too literal an interpretation of
the Qur'an. As for the future of the Arabworld, he maintained that the Arabs had the choice of coming to terms with the West and participating as equal partners in the political, social and scientific benefits or of retreating into some kind of medievalist, theocratic shell. He surely exaggerated the freedom of choice available to the Arabs, since he wrote as if America, Europe and Israel exercised no kind of military, diplomatic and economic sway in the Middle East. Still, it is an interesting book in that its first draft was written before the full impact of the existence of vast oil reserves in the Middle East had been felt and, of course, before the rise of fundamentalism and the revival of Shi‘ism. Although the future political importance of Shi‘ism was far from clear in the 1940s, nevertheless Lewis, presumably fired up by his original research topic, did in fact devote quite a lot of attention to various Shi‘a and other oppositional movements. In the decades to come, he was increasingly inclined to find parallels between such movements and both communism and Arab terrorist organizations.

In 1949, aged only thirty-three, he became Professor of the History of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was a fluent and popular lecturer. In 1961 he published what is almost certainly his most substantial book,
The Emergence of Modern Turkey
. Anybody who wishes to determine Lewis's merits as an Orientalist has to engage with this book and other works of the 1960s. It is not sufficient to pillory him only on the basis of later essays and
pièces d'occasion
. In
The Emergence of Modern Turkey
, Lewis praised the Turks for having shed their decayed imperial past and moved towards nationhood and democracy, thanks in large part to the quality shown by the Turks – ‘a quality of calm self-reliance, of responsibility, above all of civic courage'. What was unusual at the time it was published was that Lewis had made more use of Turkish sources than of those produced by Western observers.

His next book,
The Assassins
(1967), presented this medieval offshoot of the Isma‘ilis, with their penchant for political murder, as a precursor of modern terrorist organizations. (The PLO had been founded in 1964. In 1966 Israelis in the vicinity of Hebron were killed by a landmine planted by Palestinians, a harbinger of things to come.)
Race and Color in Islam
(1970) attacked the pious myth that there
has been no such thing as racial prejudice in Islamic culture.
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry
(1990) similarly explored the notion that the slave trade and the enslavement of black Africans was peculiarly the historical crime of the Christian West. One of the questions tackled in
The Muslim Discovery of Europe
(1982) was why, until the nineteenth century at least, were Muslims so uninterested in Europe? On the other hand, thanks to his erudition and wide reading, he was able to produce more evidence for a limited interest in Europe on the part of Muslims than anyone had hitherto guessed. In
The Jews of Islam
(1984) Lewis repeatedly stressed that the Jews had been fairly well treated and tolerated in the pre-modern Muslim world. But he also drew attention to the limits of that tolerance and to the occasional anti-Jewish pogroms.

In general, it must be clear that he has a knack of looking at awkward subjects – subjects that Muslim apologists and starry-eyed believers in an unalloyed golden age of the Arabs would rather not see discussed. Although his selection of topics might suggest an agenda, the identification of Bernard Lewis as both a friend of Israel and a supporter of American policies in the Middle East and the consequent polemics directed against his past scholarly achievements have obscured just how positive his portrayal of Arab and Islamic culture has been and how profound his knowledge of that culture is.

In 1974, Lewis left SOAS for the United States. One factor behind his move was rumoured to be his growing disillusionment with the radicalization of the student body at SOAS. He became Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. Although he retired in 1986, he has continued to lecture and publish. Among other things, he has published some fine translations of poetry from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. As for his prose, it is always elegant and cadenced. One never has any doubt about exactly what it is that he is trying to say (and that is something that is not always the case with most of his opponents). Among the later works,
The Middle East:
2000
Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day
(1995) summarized his views at some length. In its conclusion, he observed that ‘the larger problem that had been exercising Muslim minds for centuries [was] the problem of
Western wealth and power contrasted with the relative poverty and powerlessness of the Muslim states and peoples.' This echoes in a blunter form the conclusion of
The Arabs in History
, written so many decades earlier. The Arabs had their day in the Middle Ages. For Lewis, history in the longer term has been the story of the Triumph of the West. Islam just has to come to terms with a modernity shaped by the West. It is not the kind of message that most Muslims want to hear. On the other hand, it is hard to say that it is obviously wrong.

Since his retirement, Lewis has tended to recycle ideas and evidence from other works in a series of general books and survey articles and it is these that his critics have tended to engage with. Inevitably, his broad surveys have relied to some extent on generalizations. One particularly controversial article, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage', was published in
Atlantic Monthly
(September 1990) and it was in this article that the phrase ‘the clash of civilizations' was first used – a phrase that was later picked up by Samuel Huntington and used as the title of a controversial book. Although most right-thinking liberals and believers in multiculturalism would reject the notion of a clash, it is clear that some Muslims believe in exactly that and it is a clash that they hope to win. On the other hand, Arabs with secular backgrounds have accused Lewis of having exaggerated both the centrality of Islam in Middle Eastern history and its role as a brake on the acceptance of science, democracy and women's rights.

Lewis was one of the main targets of
Orientalism
and later publications by Said, though Said tended to concentrate on Lewis's later essays of popularization and failed to engage with the early major works. In some ways Said's criticisms are surprisingly obtuse. He failed to notice how much Lewis in his early works owed to Massignon (whom Said admired) and how he sympathized with the revolutionary and the underdog. On the other hand, Said and Lewis share quite a lot of common ground and Said may have taken more from Lewis than he realized. Lewis has placed great stress on the French expedition to Egypt as a pivotal moment in the history of the Arabworld and as the harbinger of the Triumph of the West. Lewis, like Said, stresses the lamentable lack of a civil society in the Islamic world. Lewis, like Said, regards Orientalism as important. Lewis was not really attacked
by Said for being a bad scholar (which he is not), but for being a supporter of Zionism (which he is).