Orientalism - autonomous learning

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ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
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Oriental, Islamic, Arab, or whatever-endures and is nourished
by similar kinds of abstractions or paradigms or types as they
emerge out of the modern social sciences.
I have often spoken in this book of the sense of estrangement
experienced by Orientalists as they dealt with or lived in a culture so
profoundly different from their own. Now one of the striking differences
between Orientalism in its Islamic version and all the other
humanistic disciplines where Auerbach's notions on the necessity
of estrangement have some validity is that Islamic Orientalists never
saw their estrangement from Islam either as salutary or as an attitude
with implications for the better understanding of their own
culture. Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified
their feelings of superiority about European culture, even as their
antipathy spread to include the entire Orient, of which Islam was
considered a degraded (and usually, a virulently dangerous) representative.
Such tendencies-it has also been my argument-became
built into the very traditions of Orientalist study throughout the
nineteenth century, and in time became a standard component of
most Orientalist training, handed on from generation to generation.
In addition, I think, the likelihood was very great that European
scholars would continue to see the Near Orient through the perspective
of its Biblical "origins," that is, as a place of unshakably influential
religious primacy. Given its special relationship to both
Christianity and Judaism, Islam remained forever the Orientalist's
idea (or type) of original cultural effrontery, aggravated naturally
by the fear that Islamic civilization originally (as well as contemporaneously)
continued to stand somehow opposed to the Christian
West.
For these reasons, Islamic Orientalism between the wars shared
in the general sense of cultural crisis adumbrated by Auerbach
and the others I have spoken of briefly, without at the same time
developing in the same way as the other human sciences. Because
Islamic Orientalism also preserved within it the peculiarly polemical
religious attitude it had had from the beginning, it remained fixed in
certain methodological tracks, so to speak. Its cultural alienation,
for one, needed to be preserved from modern history and sociopolitical
circumstance, as well as from the necessary revisions imposed
on any theoretical or historical "type" by new data. For
another, the abstractions offered by Orientalism (or rather, the
opportunity for making abstractions) in the case of Islamic Givilization
were considered to have acquired a new validity; since it was
assumed that Islam worked the way Orientalists said it did (without
reference to actuality, but only to a set of "classical" principles). it
was also assumed that modern Islam would be nothing more than
a reasserted version of the old, especially since it was also supposed
that modernity for Islam was less of a challenge than an insult.
(The very large number of assumptions and suppositions in this
description, incidentally, are intended to portray the rather eccentric
twists and turns necessary for Orientalism to have maintained its
peculiar way of seeing human reality.) Finally. if the synthesizing
ambition in philology (as conceived by Auerbach or Curtius) was
to lead to an enlargement of the scholar's awareness, of his sense
of the brotherhood of man, of the universality of certain principles
of human behavior, in Islamic Orientalism synthesis led to a sharpened
sense of difference between Orient and Occident as reflected
in Islam.
What I am describing, then, is something that will characterize
Islamic Orientalism until the present day: its retrogressive position
when compared with the other human sciences (and even with the
other branches of Orientalism), its general methodological and
ideological backwardness, and its comparative insularity from developments
both in the other humanities and in the real world of
historical, economic, social; and political circumstances. 7l Some
awareness of this lag in Islamic (or Semitic) Orientalism was already
present towards the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps
because it was beginning to be' apparent to some observers how
very little either Semitic or Islamic Orientalism had shaken itself
loose from the religious background from which it originally
derived. The first Orientalist congress was organized and held in
Paris in 1873, and almost from the outset it was evident to other
scholars that the Semiticists and Islamicists were in intellectual
arrears, generally speaking. Writing a survey of all the congresses
that had been held between 1873 and 1897, the English scholar
R. N. Cust had this to say about the Semitic-Islamic subfield:
Such meetings [as those held in the ancient-Semitic field], indeed,
advance Oriental learning.
The same cannot be said with regard to the modem-Semitic
section; it was crowded, but the subjects discussed were of the
smallest literary interest, such as would occupy the minds of the
dilettanti scholars of the old school, not the great class of "indicatores"
of the nineteenth century. I am forced to go back to
Pliny to find a word. There was an absence from this section both