பொய்மை எல்லாக் காலத்திலும் ஆள முடியாது.
இன்னொரு ஆசிரியர் எட்வர்ட் சயித்தின் வரலாற்றுத் திருப்புகளைப் பட்டியலிடுகிறார். இவர் சொல்வதனைத்தையும் நாம் ஏற்க வேண்டும் என்று நான் வாதிடவில்லை. எந்த நாகரிகத்தையும் பற்றி வெளியாட்கள் அணுகிப் படித்து ஆராய முடிய வேண்டும், அவற்றை விலக்க அல்லது எதிர்க்க தன்னிச்சையாக நாம் முயலக் கூடாது, படித்துப் பார்த்து சாரத்தை நன்மை கருதி எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்றுதான் வாதிடுகிறதாக எனக்குத் தெரிகிறது.
ஆராய்ச்சி செய்ய எவருக்கும் உரிமை இருக்கிறது. யார் ஆராயப் படுகிறாரோ அவருடைய நன்மையைக் கருதிச் செய்யப் படும் ஆய்வுக்கும், அவரை அழிக்கக் கருதிச் செய்யப்படும் ஆய்வுக்கும் பலத்த வேறுபாடு உண்டு. கண்டதை அப்படியே எழுதும் நடு வகை எழுத்து மிகக் கடினமான செயல்- அதையும் யாராவது செய்தால் எதிர்க்காமல் அறிவது நல்லது. இவ்வளவுதான் இவருடைய மையக் கருத்து. சயிது போன்ற சிந்தனையாளர்கள் எல்லாம் அரசியல் என்ற வாதத்தால் இயக்கப்பட்டு தாமுமே அரசியலாக மாறிப் போனார்கள்.
பட்சங்கள் இயல்புதான். ஆனால் மனிதரால் பட்சங்களைத் தாண்டி நியாயத்தைத் தரிசிக்க முடியும் என்ற நம்பிக்கை நம்மிடம் இல்லையென்றால் மனித நாகரிகம் என்ற முயற்சியே சாத்தியமாக இராது. பலபண்பாட்டியம் பேசும் இடதுகள் இதையே ஒத்துக் கொள்வதும் இல்லை, நம்புவதும் இல்லை, பிறகு என்ன பலபண்பாட்டியம் தேடுவது என்பது எனக்குப் புரிந்தது இல்லை.
சூ.கா
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ORIENTALISM/SAIDISM Said Falsifies the Past
‘In a nutshell, it is this: Orientalism, the hegemonic discourse of imperialism, is a discourse that constrains everything that can be thought and written about in the West about the Orient and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs. It has legitimized Western penetration of the Arab lands and their appropriation and it underwrites the Zionist project. Though Said is not consistent about the origins of Orientalism, on the whole he argued that it originated in the work of French and British scholars in the late eighteenth century. However, the discursive formation was not restricted to scholars, as imperialist administrators, explorers and novelists participated in, or were victims of this discourse. The West possesses a monopoly over how the Orient may be represented. Representations of the Orient invariably carry implications about Western superiority, or even, quite often, flat statements about that superiority. Note that it is only possible to talk of representations of the Orient, as the Orient has no objective reality, being merely a construct of Orientalism. Characteristically Orientalism is essentialist, racialist, patronizing and ideologically motivated.’ As Said, himself put it, ‘every European in what he could say about the Orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric’.
Why did Said write his book? He started out as a non-political academic, concentrating his researches on deconstructive approaches to English literature. But by the 1970s he felt that he could not ignore the sufferings of Palestinians. At the same time there were the most grotesque misrepresentations of the Arabs in the press, as well as all sorts of instances of US aggression in the Middle East.
Orientalism falsified the past in large and small matters. Said got the history of the Arab conquests badly wrong. He displayed an almost perfect ignorance of the chronology of British imperialism. He had an anachronistically secular and expansive vision of the nature of universities in pre-twentieth-century Europe. In my book I confined myself to Said’s mishandlings of academic Orientalists, but I shall be astonished if academic specialists in English literature will be prepared to stand up for his bizarrely tendentious readings of such novels as Sir Walter Scott’s Talisman or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
OF COURSE SOME Orientalists have agendas. Let us consider the intellectual ancestry of Bernard Lewis. Back in the 1960s, when he was a professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he was already famous as a historian of the Turks, the Arabs and Islam. He has become even more famous or notorious since. His books have sold widely and, since he writes accessibly, such works as The Arabs in History, Islam in History and The Crisis of Islam have influenced millions of students and general readers. He is also a well known Zionist, a defender of Israel’s actions and ambitions. He has been a leading advocate of intervening militarily in Iraq. He has been much in favour with the Neo-Cons in Washington and consulted by the White House. In an article in Atlantic Monthly he coined the phrase ‘Clash of Civilizations’, a phrase that was then recycled as the title of a book by Samuel Huntingdon which, echoing a fear expressed in Lewis’s article, predicted a coming struggle between Islam and Western society.
Lewis in turn had been the student of two famous Orientalists (the term did not have pejorative overtones then) Hamilton Gibb and Louis Massignon. Gibb, who taught at SOAS, got a particularly bad write-up in Said’s book, I am not sure why. Gibb was a great scholar who was keen on importing new methodologies into Oriental studies. He was also anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, passionately optimistic about the futures of both Arab nationalism and Arab scholarship and the man who was one of the first Orientalists to espouse the study of contemporary Arabic literature. He believed that Western Orientalism would soon become irrelevant as the Arabs would take over in analysing and interpreting their own culture.
As for Lewis’s other teacher, Louis Massignon, Said in Orientalism came very close to canonising this French Orientalist as a sainted genius. Massignon, who wrote mostly on Sufi mysticism and Arabic philology, had started out as an enthusiast for the French imperial project and he had worked for Marshal Lyautey in Morocco. Subsequently however, he became a fervent anti-colonialist and like most prominent French Orientalists of the time, including Jacques Berque, Vincent Monteil, Charles-André Julien, Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Maxime Rodinson, he campaigned for Algerian independence and protested at French torture of Arabs. He also founded Les Amis de Gandhi to campaign against British rule in India. Besides being anti-imperialist, he was also emphatically anti-Zionist and indeed sporadically anti-Semitic. And he was a terrific French chauvinist.
After a meeting with Ignaz Goldziher in 1905 Massignon regarded himself as Goldziher’s intellectual and spiritual heir and was so regarded by Goldziher. Goldziher (1850-1921) was by common consent of those in field the most important, the most innovative and the most influential Orientalist of the twentieth century. Goldziher’s name occurs just three times in Orientalism, but his work, ideas and influence were not discussed by Said. Why? Surely it is because Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew who wrote in German and who had studied at al-Azhar, was passionately pro-Arab and who repeatedly stressed the dynamism of the Islamic religion, just did not fit Said’s thesis about the collusion of, or the imbrication of imperialism and Orientalism. (Nor more generally did the leading role of German Orientalists fit that thesis either.) In 1920 Goldziher wrote to a Christian Arab friend in Mosul ‘I have lived for your nation and for my own. If you return to your homeland tell this to your brothers’. A year later Goldziher was dead.
GOLDZIHER WAS A meticulous scholar, but his teacher, the flamboyant Hungarian, Arminius Vámbéry was not that kind of scholar and indeed he was something of a charlatan. But Vámbéry was a vigorous campaigner against imperialism and for rights of the Muslim world to be free from Western domination. ‘Constitutional government is by no means a new thing in Islam, for anything more democratic than the doctrine of the Arabian Prophet it would be difficult to find in any other religion’, he wrote.
And so on. Or one could have followed an alternative silsila or chain of transmission from Gibb back to Dennison Ross, the first director of the School of Oriental Studies, and from Ross very swiftly back to the key German Orientalists. One can push the continuous chain of transmission of specialised knowledge and skills back to the immensely influential Heinrich Leberecht Fleisher and from him back to Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838). If one goes further back in time, one finds a fair number of Orientalists, but not continuous chains of them. The first real Orientalist was, I think, Guillaume Postel in the sixteenth century, but he was a lone figure in his time. The seventeenth century was a golden age for Orientalism, but thereafter there was a steep decline of that sort of learning in the eighteenth century.
It is a mistake by the way to think that Said was the first to point out that Orientalists have had agendas and therefore that he opened a debate. Jacques Waardenburg, Raymond Schwab, Anwar Abdalmalik, A.L. Tibawi and various others, including Bernard Lewis, were there before him. And it is natural for scholars to scrutinise their own methodologies and, for example, historians of modern Britain do it all the time, without the prodding of any polemic like Orientalism.
MOREOVER, FIGURES LIKE Vámbéry and Massignon were exceptional in having overt, even flamboyant agendas. The flat dull truth is that most Orientalists have been quiet, scholarly figures, often extremely pious folk who interested themselves in such matters as the position of the Eastern Christian Churches regarding the Eucharist and the date of Easter, or the relationship of Arabic to Biblical Hebrew, or the best way to translate Sufi mystical poetry. It takes a considerable feat of the fantastic imagination to see these dull dogs who cloistered themselves in libraries as the agents of imperialism, racism and Zionism.
As for the prejudiced Orientalists – the ones who published manifestos, wrote to the newspapers, remonstrated with politicians and so on, the prejudices they had far more likely to be in favour of Arabs and Islam, than against. That is and for centuries has been their professional deformation. Indeed, Elie Kedourie denounced most Arabists as being fatally compromised by their love of all things Arab. By and large, with certain glaring exceptions, the Orientalists have been the good guys.
And Said’s Orientalism has misdirected our attention. Who doubts that there is such a thing as Orientalism in the pejorative sense – a presentation of the Orient or more specifically Arab Muslims as corrupt, lazy, decadent and so forth? One would have to be insane to deny such thing. There was and is plenty of racism with respect to Arabs and Muslims in Western culture, but the best places to go looking for it are in government departments, army barracks, police stations, Hollywood film studios, and the editorial rooms of trash newspapers. Orientalism in a pejorative sense comes bubbling up from below – pulp novels, musical hall songs, cartoons, the violent rhetoric of street gangs, fights on the football pitch, and films about fanatical yet corrupt terrorists. It is a very foolish piece of academic snobbery to go hunting for faint hints of Orientalism in the pages of George Eliot or Joseph Conrad, while yet, neglecting the novels of Sax Rohmer and Dennis Wheatley. By misdirecting hostile attention to intellectuals, artists and, above all, academics, Said was indicting those who were mostly the good guys and he turned what should be a serious socio-cultural issue into a campus dog fight.
Moreover, whether Orientalism manifested itself in some recondite but prejudiced work of scholarship such as was indeed produced, for example, by Henri Lammens, or whether it manifested itself in the racial stereotyping in a trashy novel by Sapper about Bulldog Drummond, it seems to me that the importance of that cultural Orientalism for political and imperial history was still not that great. The imperialists – the Cromers, Curzons and T. E. Lawrences did not need Orientalists and they did not read them. Those soldiers in the Sudan, rubber plantation managers in Malaya and magistrates of the Raj who were without intellectual pretensions read Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive, books on pig-sticking and tiger hunting and later maybe they could just about manage the short stories of Somerset Maugham. The ones with pretensions to culture read Homer, Caesar, Cicero and Gibbon – and that is what Cromer, Curzon and Lawrence did. Those classics had a crucial role in framing their ideas about empire. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written as a kind of Homeric epic.
TURNING TO SAID’S cultural formation, he was born into a Christian family and raised in a largely secular environment. He did not read al-Bukhari, al-Ghazali, or Ibn al-Arabi. I think that this meant that he had a problem with Islam. It is true that he wrote a book entitled Covering Islam in which he denounced Western media misrepresentations, but they were mostly media misrepresentations of Arabs rather than of Islam. His hostility to Islam meant that he was blind to the growing importance of political Islam. He was reluctant to acknowledge the pivotal role of Islam in Middle Eastern history. This was a major reason for his hostility towards the Orientalists. He believed that they had grossly overemphasised the importance of Islam as a political, social and cultural force. But today, when one considers Khomeinism, Hizbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood or the numerous Muslim activist ginger groups or missions, it does not seem to me that those Orientalists like Gibb and Goldziher, who had emphasised Islam’s continuing dynamism and social role, were obviously wrong.
Said was no historian and his chronology does not work. His chief target was Britain and British imperialism and Orientalism, but he got the chronology of the British empire wrong. He failed to realise that for most of the nineteenth century Britain’s chief concern in the Middle East was to prop the Ottoman Empire up. Only in the 1880s did Britain begin to acquire quasi-imperial powers and responsibilities in one country, Egypt. Said (on page 169) writes of ‘an imperial domain which by the 1880s had become an unbroken patch of British held territory from the Mediterranean to India’. This is not factually correct. He has forgotten about the Ottoman Empire, Iran and Afghanistan, none of which were held by the British. Only at the end of the First World War did Britain acquire something that could be called an empire in the Middle East. As for the running together of Orientalism and imperialism, British Orientalism had two heydays. The first in the seventeenth century when Edward Pococke (1604-91) was one of the towering eminences of Arabic scholarship. That was a time when Britain had no overseas empire to speak of, but when the British feared the power of the Ottomans who still threatened Vienna and Christendom more generally and British also feared the depredations of the Barbary corsairs. Tens of thousands of Britons were taken captive and made slaves in North Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second heyday of British Orientalism ran from circa 1945 until the 1970s – a time when Britain’s moment in the Middle East was coming to an end and the British were withdrawing from India, Palestine, Egypt, Aden and the Trucial states.
Said provided no prescriptions for how the Middle East and Islam should be studied. Rather he seems to have wished to have wished Middle Eastern studies to become a no-go area. In Orientalism there is a slippage postulated, to the effect that to study the Orient is to represent it and to represent it is to dominate it. As Christopher Hitchens has written in a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly, ‘Most of all … one must be ready to oppose any analysis that even slightly licenses the idea that outsiders are not welcome to study other cultures. So far from defending those cultures from depredation, such a stance actually permits them to fall under the dominance of stultified and conservative forces to whom everything depends upon an affirmation of blind faith. This and not the enquiry into its origins might be described as the problem in the first place’.
TO CONCLUDE. ONE One wishes the argument of Said’s Orientalism to be right. That is natural, when one considers the wrongs perpetrated by Britain in the Middle East, from the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, to the carve- up of the Arab lands after the First World War, to the destabilisation of Mossadeq in 1953 to the Suez invasion of 1956. There is also of course the fairly steady support given by Britain to Israel. Then again critically alert outsiders must be suspicious of the Orientalists with their quasi-monopoly over difficult languages and claims to special expertise. The idea of an important link between imperialism and old-fashioned scholarship seems attractive. Furthermore the study of the Middle East studies from a Saidian point of view becomes so much more interesting, as one is then engaged in deconstruction and contestation. Scrutiny of the Orientalists then offers similar pleasures to the detective work involved in unmasking a conspiracy. Academics are mostly politically impotent, but here would be useful work to do, work that can be done in a library, which will help to reveal the ideological underpinnings of imperialism, racism and Zionism.
Nevertheless, however much one wishes Orientalism’s thesis might be true, the facts and theories advanced in its support are fatally flawed. Indeed many of the errors seem downright wilful, being generated by a rhetoric without reference to reality. As Joseph Butler, an eighteenth-century bishop, wrote ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?’
Robert Irwin is a historian and author of, for example, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006)
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