For Lust of Knowing (51 page)

Tibawi claimed that Jews and Christians had played too large a part in contributing to the
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
, as well as to the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
. Since this was the case, the
Encyclopaedia
should be submitted to censorship by Muslims. As for the
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
, Tibawi quoted a friend's quip that it had been nicknamed the ‘
Bulletin of the Hebrew University
'. Two volumes of essays,
The Legacy of Islam
(1974) and
The World of Islam
(1976), were similarly denounced for having mostly Christian and Jewish contributors. Oxford Arabists were also attacked. R. B. Serjeant, treated favourably in the first piece, was subsequently denounced for writing to
The Times
about the torture of a Yemeni by Egyptian intelligence officers.
Serjeant's interest in colloquial Arabic was mysteriously deemed to be a disgrace. Patricia Crone was dismissed as ‘a female art specialist'. (Well, the ‘female' bit is correct.) Hourani was guilty of getting Crone appointed to a job in Oxford. Tibawi considered Arabs and Muslims working within the Orientalist mode to be ‘alienated individuals, denationalized and deculturalized, who try to live in two worlds at the same time, but who are at peace in neither'. Apart from their sins of commission, the Orientalists were corporately guilty of not denouncing what had been happening to the Palestinian people. I know several Orientalists who treasure offprints of Tibawi's articles as masterpieces of unintentional comedy. Even so, of course he did sometimes hit the mark, though more by luck than design. I never met the man, but I guess that it must have been difficult for him to harbour so much resentment and still feel that life was worth living.

Tibawi, who criticized the Orientalists from a traditional Islamic stance, still retained a certain respect for Hamilton Gibb. But for the Moroccan historian and novelist Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) and other secular-minded Marxist critics, Gibb was the enemy par excellence. Laroui, writing in
L'Idéologie arabe contemporaine
(1967), declared that Gibb's Orientalism was the worst sort, as it had broken with the Germano-French school of erudition and presented itself as empiricism, which was a cover for generalized pontificating.
²²
Even so, Laroui does not really seem to have had any more respect for the older style of erudite Orientalism, as he attacked Ignaz Goldziher and those who came after him for dissecting and analysing events like the Battle of Badr (624) so intensively that they turned them into non-events. Goldziher's kind of history was too negative, as was Joseph Schacht's approach. Laroui was strongly influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, by Gramsci's ideas about the manufacture by intellectuals of consent to the hegemony of the ruling class. As Laroui saw it, the Orientalist's production and administration of a specialized kind of knowledge made him an accomplice of the colonialist.

In
The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual. Traditionalism or Historicism?
(first published in French in 1974), Laroui returned to the attack on Gibb, accusing him of being too sympathetic to traditional Islam and, on the other hand, neglecting progressive and modernizing forces in the Middle East. (Cantwell Smith was similarly guilty.)
²³
According to Laroui, Gibb was downright hostile to contemporary Islamic reformism. There was a strange kind of collusion between Orientalists like Gibb and Islamic fundamentalists, as both parties could agree on propositions like ‘Islam and democracy are incompatible'. Tibawi, in his ‘On the Orientalists Again', had observed that he ‘knew Von Grunebaum fairly well and was always amused by observing his arrogant assurance'. Laroui took the ideological threat posed by Grunebaum more seriously and in a chapter entitled ‘The Arabs and Cultural Anthropology: Notes on the Method of Gustave von Grunebaum' he attacked the scholar, whom he described as a philologist and specialist in classical poetry who had turned himself into an anthropologist of Islam. Von Grunebaum had repeatedly laid stress on Arabatomism in poetry, natural philosophy and political science – that is to say that entities such as Islamic towns or Islamic poems tended to be composed of discrete elements and to lack an overarching unity. For Grunebaum, Islam's culture was a mysteriously postulated timeless essence. He imposed his own pattern rather than accepting any self-description by the Muslims of their culture. He also tended to describe Islamic culture in terms of what it lacked, such as the genres of theatre and drama. He judged Islam to be inimical to humanism ‘in that it is not interested in the richest possible unfolding and evolving of man's potentialities'. He also argued that its cultural development had been arrested in the eleventh century (something echoed by Bernard Lewis in his
The Arabs in History
). Islamic science was bound to peter out because it was founded upon an inadequate theory of knowledge. Von Grunebaum had infuriated Laroui by insisting that Islam will have to modernize in the Western way, for Islam ‘cannot undergo modernization unless it reinterprets itself from the Western point of view and accepts the Western idea of man and the Western definition of truth'.
²⁴

A less impressive critique of Orientalism from a Marxist perspective had previously been published by an Egyptian of Coptic Christian
origin, Anouar Abdel-Malek. In ‘Orientalism in Crisis', published in 1963, he had accused Orientalists of positing ‘an essence which constitutes the inalienable and common basis of all Eastern beings considered'.
²⁵
Islam was viewed by them as a passive object. Abdel-Malek, who taught at the Paris Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, demanded that Orientalists adopt Oriental methodologies. His views about Western scholars positing an Oriental ‘Other' were to be picked up later by Said, but Abdel-Malek's knowledge of the history of Orientalism was shaky. For example, he believed that traditional Orientalism was established by a decision of the Council of Vienna (
sic
) in 1245 (
sic
). Like Said after him, Abdel-Malek argued that Orientalism was a child of the age of European hegemony, but his argument lacked supporting detail. He argued that traditional Orientalism was doomed by the rise of national liberation movements and the end of the age of colonialism. The Orientalists faced a crisis as their compatriots no longer controlled the territories that the scholars studied. Orientals were destined then to take over the interpretation of their own culture. One is not surprised to find no reference to the Soviet overlordship of Muslim territories in Central Asia and no reference either to Soviet Orientalism. Unlike Said, Abdel-Malek regarded Massignon as a misguided racist who had argued that the Arabs were inferior Semites compared to the Jews. Nevertheless, like Said, Abdel-Malek preferred French to British Orientalism.

In ‘Apology for Orientalism', published in
Diogenes
in 1965, a leading Italian Orientalist, Francesco Gabrieli, replied to Abdel-Malek. Gabrieli had supervised a complete translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
into Italian. He later published an anthology of Arabic primary sources on the history of the Crusades as well as various general introductions to aspects of Arabculture and politics. Gabrieli viewed Orientalism as essentially a benign Enlightenment phenomenon. He denied that Orientalists were invariably the accomplices of colonialism, citing the counter-examples of Browne, Massignon and ‘Caetani who was scoffed at in Italy as the “Turk” for having opposed the conquest of Libya'. Gabrieli's response was quite aggressive. He regarded the East as a methodological desert: ‘Because so far as
modern
conceptions, master-ideas, interpretations of history or of life that have been developed in the East are concerned,
we confess that we are still waiting to hear of them.' Orientals had no choice but to work with the methods and materials of the Orientalist. In adopting a Marxist perspective, Abdel-Malek was in no sense emancipating himself from the Western style of thought.
²⁶

Hitherto this chapter has considered Said's Islamist and Marxist precursors. Said, in his book, seems to have drawn quite heavily on Abdel-Malek, Laroui and Tibawi without fully acknowledging his debt. The publication of
Orientalism
in 1978 also provided more fuel for further Islamist attacks on Orientalism – this despite Said's hostility to Islamism and religion in general. Only a few of these will be mentioned here in order to suggest the flavour of the polemic.

Writing in 1984 in a volume entitled
Orientalism, Islam and Islamists
, Professor Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi, an Indian writer and editor, indicted Hamilton Gibb for the crime of writing about Islam even though he was not a Muslim: ‘It seems to have been beyond his comprehension to see in Muhammad a divinely inspired Prophet ordained to give mankind a message of hope and happiness in all walks of life.'
²⁷
Gibb had given an economic and political slant to the early history of Islam, when that history could only really be understood in religious terms. Gibb was also guilty of doubting the reliability of Hadiths as source material. In the same volume, Suleyman Nyang and Samir Abed-Rabbo attempted to defend Islam against all the slurs that they had detected in the writings of Bernard Lewis. Not all the pleas for the defence were wholly convincing. Lewis had produced clear documentary evidence that Muslims traded in slaves in the Mediterranean (and on quite a considerable scale), but, according to Abed-Rabbo, the ignorant Lewis had failed to realize that ‘a person who acts contrary to the teachings of Islam by acting as a slave trader cannot be called a Muslim'.
²⁸

This kind of devotional approach to the history of Islam taken by Faruqi and Abed-Rabbo is never likely to be adopted by Western Orientalists. It reminds me of a Muslim friend of mine who, in Oxford back in the 1960s, was set an essay by Professor Beeston in which he
was asked to explain the victory of Muhammad and the Medinans over the polytheistic Quraysh tribe. He produced an essay in which he argued that Muhammad had won because, according to earliest sources, a thousand angels fought on his side. The eighth Sura of the Qur'an referred to this incident. My friend's essay received no marks.

Dr Ahmad Ghorab, a Saudi religious scholar, has expressed a remarkable hostility towards Orientalism. In a pamphlet published in 1995, he wrote as follows: ‘Whoever knows its long history will recognize in it the influence of the mentality of the Crusades and the rancour of the Jews against Islam. It soon becomes clear that the Orientalists are networks of Christians and Jews, who, behind the façade of academic institutions and the pretence of scholarly curiosity and objectivity, have been engaged in an unrelenting effort to distort Islam in all its aspects.'
²⁹
Collaboration with Orientalists was forbidden in the Qur'an. In the Old and New Testaments the Jews and Christians had received flawed and corrupted revelations. It is because of this that Orientalist textual critics are encouraging Muslims to experience the same kind of intellectual doubts that Christians and Jews are bound to experience about the Bible. The most striking thing about Ghorab's polemical pamphlet is the sheer amount of hatred he evinces for Christians and Jews, as well as for scholarship.

Ziauddin Sardar is also a believing Muslim, but he has attacked Orientalism from a more sophisticated point of view. He is a science journalist and columnist for the
New Statesman
who has published numerous books on modernism and Islam.
³⁰
His short book,
Orientalism,
was published in 1999.
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The influence of Said's earlier book is pervasive, though Sardar has added some digressions on cultural studies, as well some factual errors that are entirely original to him. His treatment of what he chooses to regard as medieval Orientalism is peculiarly unsatisfactory. He claims that the ‘foundation of Orientalism was laid by John of Damascus' and adds that his book became ‘the classical source of all Christian writings on Islam'. But John wrote in Greek and most of those Christians who wrote about Islam in the following centuries knew no Greek. Sardar has Pope Urban preach the First Crusade at Clermont in 1096. The correct date is 1095. Writing about the Crusades, he claims that ‘Jerusalem itself did not fall back into Muslim hands until 1244'. Actually Saladin occupied it
in 1187. He cites Norman Daniels on the Crusaders' hostility to Islam, but he must be thinking of Norman Daniel.

Sardar claims that the
Chanson de Roland
was written by Cretien de Troyes
circa
1130. Actually the name of the author of this work is not known and Chrétien de Troyes, who flourished
c.
1166–85, wrote nothing about Roland. Sardar claims that the
Chanson
shows the Muslims worshipping ‘Mohomme', as well as a trinity of gods, Tergavent, Apolin and Jupiter. But the
Chanson
does not mention ‘Mohomme' and it calls the trinity of idols Termagant, Mahound and Apollyon. The matter is not important, except perhaps that it indicates that Sardar has not troubled to read the work of literature that he wishes to attack.

A page later he tells his readers that Europeans borrowed the concept of the university from ‘the
madrasas
as they had developed from the eighth century in the Muslim world'. But there were no madrasas in the Muslim world in the eighth century. The institution spread slowly from the East in later centuries. The first Egyptian madrasas were founded in the late twelfth century and the first Moroccan ones were founded in the fourteenth century. Further down the same page he claims that St Thomas Aquinas decreed that Muslims and Jews were ‘invincibly ignorant'. This is not correct. In the
Summa Theologica
, Aquinas specifically allows for the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Only he argued that they should not be compelled to convert. The chief aim of another of his books, the
Summa contra Gentiles
, was precisely to provide theological ammunition for debates with Muslims, Jews and heterodox Christians.
³²