Orientalism - autonomous learning

274 ORJENTALISM
Orientalism Now
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five attributes of Orientalist representation listed above distribute,
and redistribute.
Seen in such a way, Massignon is less a mythologized "genius"
than he is a kind of system for producing certain kinds of statements,
disseminated into the large mass of discursive formations
that together make up the archive, or cultural material, of his time.
I do not think that we dehumanize Massignon if we recognize this,
nor do we reduce him to being subject to vulgar determinism. On
the contrary, we will see in a sense how a very human being had,
and was able to acquire more of, a cultural and productive capacity
that had an institutional, or extrahuman, dimension to it: and this
surely is what the finite human being must aspire to if he is not to
be content with his merely mortal presence in time and space.
. When Massignon said "nous sommes tous des semites" he was
intlicating the range of his ideas over his society, showing the
extent to which his ideas about the Orient could transcend the
local anecdotal circumstances of a Frenchman and of French
society. The category of Semite drew its nourishment out of
Massignon's Orientalism, but its force derived from its tendency to
extend out of the confines of the discipline, out into a broader
history and anthropology, where it seemed to have a certain validity
and power.89
On one level at least, Massignon's formulations and his representations
of the Orient did have a direct influence, if not an unquestioned
validity: among the guild of professional Orientalists.
As I said above, Gibb's recognition of Massignon's achievement
constitutes an awareness that as an alternative to Gibb's own work
(by implication, that is), Massignon was to be dealt with. I am of
course imputing things to Gibb's obituary that are there only as
traces, not as actual statements, but they are obviously important
if we look now at Gibb's own career as a foil for Massignon's.
Albert Hourani's memorial essay on Gibb for the British Academy
(to which I have referred several times) admirably summarizes the
man's career, his leading ideas, and the importance of his work:
with Hourani's assessment, in its broad lines, I have no disagreement.
Yet something is missing from it, although this lack is partly
made up for in a lesser piece on Gibb, William Polk's "Sir Hamilton
Gibb Between Orientalism and History."oo Hourani tends to view
Gibb as the product of personal encounters, personal influences,
and the like; whereas Polk, who is far less subtle in his general
understanding of Gibb than Hourani, sees Gibb as the culmination
of a specific academic tradition, what-to use an expression that
does not occur in Polk's prose-we can call an academic-research
consensus or paradigm.
Borrowed in this rather gross fashion from Thomas Kuhn, the
idea has a worthwhile relevance to Gibb, who as Hourani reminds
us was in many ways a profoundly institutional figure. Everything
that Gibb said or did, from his early career at London to the middle
years at Oxford to his influential years as director of Harvard's
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, bears the unmistakable stamp
of a mind operating with great ease inside established institutions.
Massignon was irremediably the outsider, Gibb the insider. Both
men, in any case, achieved the very pinnacle of prestige and influence
in French and Anglo-American Orientalism, respectively .
Tlfe Orient .for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly;
it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the
confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference.
Like Massignon, Gibb boasted of friendships with Muslims,
but they seemed-like Lane's-to have been useful friendships, not
determining ones. Consequently Gibb is a dynastic figure within
the academic framework of British (and later of American)
Orientalism, a scholar whose work quite consciously demonstrated
the national tendencies of an academic tradition, set inside universities,
governments, and research foundations.
One index of this is that in his mature years Gibb was often
to be met with speaking and writing for policy-determining
organizations. In 1951, for instance, he contributed an essay to a
book significantly entitled The Near East and the Great Powers,
in which he tried to explain the need for an expansion in Anglo­
American programs of Oriental studies:
... the whole situation of the Western countries in regard to the
countries of Asia and Africa has changed. We can no longer rely
on that factor of prestige which seemed to play a large part in
prewar thinking, neither can we any longer expect the peoples of
Asia and Africa or of Eastern Europe to come to us .and learn
from us, while we sit back. We have to learn about them so that
we can learn to work with them in a relationship that is closer to
terms of mutuality.91
The terms of this new relationship were spelled out later in"Area
Studies Reconsidered." Oriental studies were to be thought of
not so much as scholarly activities but as instruments of national
policy towards the newly independent, and possibly intractable,