Orientalism - autonomous learning

256 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalism Now
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their rulers, nevertheless retained a considerable influence on the
intellectual life of the Muslims. Therefore it remains, and still is
for us too, an important subject of study, not only for abstract
reasons connected with the history of law, civilization and religion,
but also for practical purposes. The more intimate the relations of
Europe with the Muslim East become, the more Muslim countries
fall under European suzerainty, the more important it is for us
Europeans to become acquainted with the intellectual life, the
religious law, and the conceptual background of Islam.63
Although Hurgronje allows that something so abstract as "Islamic
law" did occasionally yield to the pressure of history and society,
he is more interested than not in retaining the abstraction for intellectual
use because in its broad outline "Islamic law" confirms
the disparity between East and West. For Hurgronje the distinction
between Orient and Occident was no mere academic or popular
cliche: quite the contrary. For him it signified the essential, historical
power relationship between the two. Knowledge of the Orient
either proves, enhances, or deepens the difference by which European
suzerainty (the phrase has a venerable nineteenth-celltury
pedigree) is extended effectively over Asia. To know the Orient
as a whole, then, is to know it because it is entrusted to one's
keeping, if one is a Westerner.
An almost symmetrical passage to Hurgronje's is to be found in
the concluding paragraph of Gibb's article "Literature" in The
Legacy of Islam, published in 1931. After having described the
three casual contacts between East and West up till the eighteenth
century, Gibb then proceeds to the nineteenth century:
Following on these three moments of casual contact, the
German romantics turned again to the East, and for the first time
made it their conscious aim to open a way for the real heritage of '
oriental poetry to enter into the poetry of Europe. The nineteenth
century, with its new sense of power and superiority, seemed
to clang the gate decisively in the face of their design. Today, on
the other hand, there are signs of a change. Oriental literature has
begun to be studied again for its own sake, and a new understanding
of the East is being gained. As this knowledge spreads
and the East recovers its rightful place in the life of humanity,
oriental literature may once again perform its historic function,
and assist us to liberate ourselves from the narrow and oppressive
conceptions which would limit all that is significant in literature,
thought, and history to our own segment of the globe. 64
Gibb's phrase "for its own sake" is in diametrical opposition to the
string of reasons subordinated to Hurgronje's declaration about
European suzerainty over the East. What remains,nevertheless, is
that seemingly inviolable over-all identity of something called "the
East" and something else called "the West." Such entities have a
use for each other, and it is plainly Gibb's laudable intention to
show that the influence on Western of Oriental literature need not
be (in its results) what Brunetiere had called "a national disgrace."
Rather, the East could be confronted as a sort of humanistic challenge
to the local confines of Western ethnocentricity.
His earlier solicitation of Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur notwithstanding,
Gibb's .call for humanistic interinanimation between East
and West reflects the changed political and cultural realities of the
postwar era. European suzerainty over the Orient had not passed;
but it had .evolved-in British Egypt-from a more or less placid
acceptance by the natives into a more and more contested political
issue compounded by fractious native demands for independence.
These were the years of constant British trouble with Zaghlul, the
Wafd party, and the like. us Moreover, since 1925 there had been
a worldwide economic recession, and this too increased the sense
of tension that Gibb's prose reflects. But the specifically cultural
message in what he says is the most compelling. Heed the Orient,
he seems to be telling his reader, for its use to the Western mind
in the struggle to overcome narrowness, oppressive specialization,
and limited perspectives.
The ground had shifted considerably from Hurgronje to Gibb,
as had the priorities. No longer did it go without much controversy
that Europe's domination over the Orient was almost a fact of
nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western
enlightenment.. What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural
self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic.
For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to
be studied because it releases the spirit from sterile specialization, it
eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic selfcenteredness,
it increases one's grasp of the really central issues in
the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this
new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because
the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and
second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of
cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western
suzerainty over the rest of the world.