For Lust of Knowing (42 page)

Elie Kedourie (1926–92) was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad.
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(Until the 1950s at least there was a thriving Jewish community in Iraq that was then more or less wiped out by successive purges.) Though he was to write superbly in English, it was his third language after Arabic and French. He went to study at the London School of Economics and then to do historical research at St Antony's College, Oxford. Hamilton Gibb, who was one of Kedourie's thesis examiners, disliked Kedourie's fierce criticisms both of British policy in Iraq and of Arabnationalism. The two men clashed bitterly and Kedourie withdrew his thesis. Despite this setback, the famous conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott saved Kedourie's academic career by securing him a teaching post at the London School of Economics.

Kedourie went on to produce a series of important books and articles, most of them based on detailed research in archives and all of them argued with incisive eloquence. In an essay entitled ‘The Chatham House Version', he dissected the kind of well-meaning but misconceived Arabism represented by Gibb. Martin Kramer (on whom see below) has characterized the essay as follows: ‘It was an exacting refutation of an entire school of error, one rested on a nihilistic philosophy of Western guilt, articulated by a self-appointed priesthood of expertise.'
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Kedourie lamented the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the collapse after it of the British empire. He was cynical about the projects and boasts of contemporary Arab politicians. He described the Middle East as ‘a wilderness of tigers'. Like Massignon, he was influenced by that extraordinary political thinker, Joseph de Maistre, though his reading of de Maistre's grim teachings was quite different from that of Massignon.

Chatham House was a particular target of Kedourie's, as he was contemptuous of those who were attached to that institute of international studies and their penchant for apologizing for the evils of British colonialism and their readiness to fudge unpleasant realities about modern Arab history. In Chatham House he discovered ‘the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thirsting with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation'. Kedourie did not subscribe to
Hourani's vision of an Arabic liberal age and he wrote debunking studies of some of the key figures associated with that supposed phenomenon. He took a consistently hard-nosed approach to political and economic issues and he maintained that ‘the possession of political and military power determines who will enjoy the fruits of labour'. Kedourie's hostility to Arabnationalism made him favoured reading among supporters of Israel and, for example, the following passage from Kedourie's
Nationalism in Asia and Africa
on the accursed export of Western political theory, especially nationalism, to other continents was quoted in Saul Bellow's
To Jerusalem and Back:
‘A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from Western Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, India, the Far East, and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers for further horror and atrocity: such are the terms to describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not wilfully or knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by example of its prestige and prosperity.'
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Like Kedourie, Panayiotis J. Vatikiotis (1928–97) grew up in a multiracial, multi-confessional Levantine environment that has now all but vanished.
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He was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Haifa to a Palestinian Greek family and later taught in Egypt and the United States before moving to London. From 1965 onwards he taught Middle Eastern politics at SOAS where he was a friend and ally of Bernard Lewis. He fiercely criticized the despotisms of the Arabworld. He was sceptical about the aims and capacity of the Palestine Liberation Organization and cynical about Nasser.
The Egyptian Army in Politics
(1961) was one of Vatikiotis's most important books.

It was inevitable that he should be selected as a leading target by Said in
Orientalism
. Said chose to focus on an essay Vatikiotis had written as an introduction to a volume of collected studies on revolutions in the Middle East. In that introduction, he had argued that though there were frequent coups in the Middle East, the region lacked the political categories that are essential to a revolution in the full sense of the word. Said read the introduction as ‘saying nothing less than that revolution is a bad kind of sexuality'.
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It is most unlikely that this eroticized reading of Vatikiotis would have occurred to anyone other than Said. But it is fair to criticize Vatikiotis's writings
for their occasional tendency to slip into an opaque sociological jargon. Unlike Hourani, Lewis and Kedourie, he was not an elegant writer. Towards the end of his career at SOAS, he became increasingly depressed by the cuts in the college's funding imposed by the Conservative government: ‘Beginning with ad hoc rationalization policies, as new funding schemes for higher education were being brought in, we suddenly lost most of our star quality colleagues, either through early or premature retirement, resignation, or relocation across the Atlantic. Their departure impoverished the academic, scholarly standard of the institution as well as its intellectual quality…' He thought that SOAS's reputation thereafter rested on nothing more than past achievements.

From the 1960s onwards and for the first time ever, English-speaking Arabists had a decent dictionary of modern Arabic, though it was one based in the first instance on German scholarship. Milton Cowan's
A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
(1961) was an expanded English version of Hans Wehr's
Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart
(1952), which was actually the result of a collaborative effort by German Orientalists during the early 1940s. It was chiefly based on combing modern works of Arabic literature for lexical items, rather than culling them from medieval Arabdictionaries, which was what Lane had done in the nineteenth century.

The publication of the Hayter Report in 1961 gave only a brief fillip to Arabstudies and Orientalism more generally.
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As we have seen, the Scarborough Report had recommended that significant sums be allocated to the teaching of exotic subjects, but, after only a few years, the funding that had been promised was whittled away. The Hayter Commission was set up by the University Grants Commission as a follow-up to Scarborough and to remedy the failure to implement the previous report's recommendations in a sustained way. Sir William Hayter, the chairman of the new commission, recommended the extension of social studies and modern studies relating to Africa and Asia. The kind of expansion his report had recommended was funded for a while, but in the 1970s almost all departments in all British universities began to suffer from the sort of retrenchment that had so dismayed Vatikiotis. Exotic subjects were especially badly hit.
What, after all, was the point in lavishly funding Arabic studies? During the 1950s and 1960s Britain's position in the Middle East was eroded with surprising speed. Besides, in the post-war period, the Arabs with whom the British were dealing almost all spoke English or French anyway. Occasionally one might surprise and delight an Arab host by addressing him in his language, but this was a limited gain for such heavy expenditure on teaching facilities in London and elsewhere. As far as the study of Islam was concerned, Western academics and associated pundits had tended to regard the religion as a post-medieval survival, doomed to wither away in the face of Western-style secularism. It took the Iranian revolution of 1978–9 to change perceptions.

Outside London, the study and teaching of Arabic was less tied to contemporary agendas. Alfred Felix Landon Beeston (1911–95), long-haired, pot-bellied, chain-smoking and convivial, was one of Oxford's great eccentrics.
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When I was a student in Oxford in the 1960s I remember hearing how on a previous evening Beeston had cycled naked through Oxford pursued by the police, but successfully eluded his pursuers by abandoning his bicycle and swimming across the Cherwell. Beeston had originally done research under Margoliouth. His great passion was the study of ancient South Arabian inscriptions. When Gibb left for America, Beeston replaced him as the Laudian Professor. Besides publishing copiously on the old Arabian scripts and on medieval Arabic poetry, he also wrote an incisive handbook on the contemporary Arabic language and it was he who got modern Arabic on to the Oxford syllabus. Making heavy weather at conversation with him at a college dinner table, I asked him if he had read anything good in Arabic recently. Yes, he replied. He had found a copy of an Arabic translation of Ian Fleming's
Diamonds Are Forever
in his hotel room in Cairo and thought the novel terribly good.

In Cambridge, Malcolm Lyons, who held the Thomas Adams Chair from 1985 to 1996, was primarily interested in medieval literature and popular story-telling, though he co-wrote an important biography of Saladin.
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Like his Cambridge predecessors, Lyons was steeped in Latin and Greek literature and he had been awarded a first in the Cambridge Classical Tripos before he turned his attention to Arabic.
The young Lyons decided that classical studies was far too heavily covered and that the study of classical Arabic, which offered some of the same charms as the study of ancient Greek and Latin, would offer far greater opportunities for doing pioneering work and making independent discoveries.

William Mongomery Watt's life of the Prophet Muhammad had been studied by Maxime Rodinson, who then decided that it was not sufficiently Marxist and proceeded to write his own version. However, for several decades Watt's two-volume biography was effectively the authorized version for non-Muslims. William Montgomery Watt (b. 1909) had studied at Oxford and Jena.
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He taught moral philosophy at Edinburgh before being ordained an Anglican minister. He became interested in Islam while working for the Bishop of Jerusalem in the 1940s. From 1947 onwards he taught Arabic at Edinburgh University and in 1964 became Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies there, a post that he held until his retirement in 1979. Although he published copiously on Islamic matters, his most important books were his life of Muhammad, published as
Muhammad at Mecca
(1953) and
Muhammad at Medina
(1956). Watt placed a great deal of stress upon what he supposed was the economic background to the Prophet's preaching. He presented Mecca as the centre of a trading empire in which the Quraysh tribe (to which Muhammad belonged) grew wealthy on the profits of the transit trade in spices, as well as their custodianship of a pagan shrine crowded with idols. (Later this pseudo-historical construct was efficiently demolished by Patricia Crone.
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) According to Watt, the transition in the seventh century to a mercantile economy in Mecca produced social tensions. Islam was in a sense a product of those tensions and a solution to them.

In his introduction to the first volume, Watt wrote that ‘I have endeavoured, while remaining faithful to the standards of Western historical scholarship, to say nothing that would entail rejection of any of the fundamental doctrines of Islam.' Although his portrayal of the Prophet was extremely sympathetic, it still failed to satisfy many Muslims as it did not accept the Prophet as the ‘seal of prophecy'. A. L Tibawi (on whom see the final chapter) denounced Watt for writing that the Prophet ‘was aware of Jewish teaching' and that the Qur'an showed dependence on ‘biblical tradition'. For Tibawi and
many other Muslims, any account of the Qur'an that suggested that it was anything else than the revealed word of God was deeply offensive. Watt, on the other hand, though he was at pains not to present Muhammad as an impostor, believed that the Qur'an was ‘the product of creative inspiration', something that arose from the unconscious. It was inevitable that Watt should be attacked as a missionary Orientalist. But he was also criticized by other Western scholars in the field, particularly from the 1970s onwards, for accepting uncritically what the sources told him, except when they told him about something miraculous – for example the angels who fought for Muhammad at the Battle of Badr. Evidently this dot-and-pick approach to the source materials is not entirely satisfactory. John Wansbrough, who pioneered an approach to the history of the first centuries of Islam that was the polar opposite of Watt's, presented the Battle of Badr as a literary fiction – an account of something that never happened that had been constructed from familiar literary and religious clichés, ‘clientship and loyalty, plunder and pursuit, challenges and instances of single combat'.
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John Wansbrough (1928–2002) was born in Illinois, studied at Harvard, served in the US Marines in South East Asia and worked as a mining engineer in Sweden before arriving at SOAS in 1957.
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I have heard that in his youth he was a friend of William Faulkner and of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His doctorate on Mamluk–Venetian commercial relations, based on Italian archive materials, was supervised by Lewis, but Wansbrough seems to have been more strongly influenced by seminars conducted by the Ottomanist Paul Wittek, and by the latter's philological methodology. Study of language was the key to the underlying truths of history. In 1960 Wansbrough joined the history department and started to learn Arabic. In 1967 he switched to teaching Arabic in the Department of the Near and Middle East.

A decade later he published two devastatingly original and controversial books,
Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation
(1977) and
The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition
of Islamic Salvation History
(1978). Noting that none of the Arabic sources for the life of Muhammad are contemporary ones, Wansbrough argued that the final text of the Qur'an was put together some two hundred years after its supposed revelation. Moreover, much of that text was generated by two centuries of confessional polemic against Christians and Jews. Even so, there was a strong Jewish rabbinic influence on the Qur'an. As for the details of the life of the Prophet, these were not the product of documentary reporting, but were rather topoi (stock literary or rhetorical themes) that had been used to construct a salvation history, that is to say ‘the history of God's plan for mankind'. The deeds and sayings of the Prophet were modelled on Old Testament prototypes. Rather than being suddenly revealed in Arabia, Islam evolved elsewhere in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. The Qur'an, Qur'an commentaries and the earliest lives of the Prophet are not straightforward historical sources and were never intended to be.