Orientalism - autonomous learning

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ORIENTALISM
the extraordinary achievements of scholars like Jacques Berque,
Maxime Rodinson, Yves Lacoste, Roger Arnaldez-all of them
differing widely among themselves in approach and intention-to
be struck with the seminal example of Massignon, whose intellectual
impress upon them all is unmistakable.
Yet in choosing to focus his comments almost anecdotally upon
Massignon's various strengths and weaknesses, . Gibb misses the
obvious things about Massignon, things that make him so different
from Gibb and yet, when taken as a whole, make him the mature
symbol of so crucial a development within French Orientalism. One
is Massignon's personal background, which quite beautifully illustrates
the simple truth of Levi's description of French Orientalism.
The very idea of "un esprit humain" was something more or less
foreign to the intellectual and religious background out of which
Gibb, like so many modem British Orientalists, developed: in
Massignon's case the notion of "esprit," as an aesthetic as well as
religious, moral, and historical reality, was something he seemed to
have been nourished upon from childhood. His family was friendly
with such people as Huysmans, and in nearly everything he wrote
Massignon's early education in the intellectual ambience as well as
the ideas of late Symbolisme is evident, even to the particular brand
of Catholicism (and Sufi mysticism) in which he was interested.
There is no austerity in Massignon's work, which is formulated in
one of the great French styles of the century. His ideas about human
experience draw plentifully upon thinkers and artists contemporary
with him, and it is the very wide cultural range of his style itself
that puts him in a different category altogether from Gibb's. His
early ideas come out of the period of so-called aesthetic decadence,
but they are also indebted to people like Bergson, Durkheim, and
Mauss. His first contact with Orientalism came through Renan,
whose lectures he heard as a young man; he was also a student of
Sylvain Levi, and came to include among his friends such figures
as Paul Claudel, Gabriel Bounoure, Jacques and Ralssa Maritain,
and Charles de Foucauld. Later he was able to absorb work done in
such relatively recent fields as urban sociology, structural linguistics,
psychoanalysis, contemporary anthropology, and the New History.
His essays, to say nothing of the monumental study of al-Hallaj,
draw effortlessly on the entire corpus of Islamic literature; his
mystifying erudition and almost familiar personality sometimes
make him appear to be a scholar invented by Jorge Luis Borges.
He was very sensitive to "Oriental" themes in European literature;
Orientalism Now
this was one of Gibb's interests, too, but unlike Gibb, Massignon
was attracted primarily neither to European writers who "understood"
the Orient nor to European texts that were independent
artistic corroborations of what later Orientalist scholars would
reveal (e.g., Gibb's interest in Scott as a source for the study of
Saladin). Massignon's "Orient" was completely consonant with the
world of the Seven Sleepers or of the Abrahamanic prayers (which
are the two themes singled out by Gibb as distinctive marks of
Massignon's unorthodox view of Islam): offbeat, slightly peculiar,
wholly responsive to the dazzling interpretative gifts which Massignon
brought to it (and which in a sense made it up as a subject).
If Gibb liked Scott's Saladin, then Massignon's symm.etrical predilection
was for Nerval, as suicide, po~te maudit, psychological
oddity. This is not to say that Massignon was essentially a student
of the past; on the contrary, he was a major presence in Islamic­
French relations, in politics as well as culture. He was obviously
a passionate man who believed that the world of Islam could be
penetrated, not by scholarship exclusively, but by devotion to all of
its activities, not the least of which was· the world of Eastern
Christianity subsumed within Islam, one of whose subgroups, the
Badaliya Sodality, was warmly encouraged by Massignon.
Massignon's considerable literary gifts sometimes give his
scholarly work an appearance of capricious, overly cosmopolitan,
and often private speculation. This appearance is misleading, and
in fact is rarely adequate as a description of his writing. What he
wished deliberately to avoid was what he called "l'analyse analytique
et statique de l'orientalisme,"76 a sort of inert piling up, on a
supposed Islamic text or problem, of sources, origins, proofs,
demonstrations, and the like. Everywhere his attempt is to include
as much of the context of a text or problem as possible, to animate
it, to surprise his reader, almost, with the glancing insights available
to anyone who, like Massignon, is willing to cross disciplinary and
traditional boundaries in order to penetrate to the human heart of
any text. No modern Orientalist-and certainly not Gibb, his closest
peer in achievement and influence-