Orientalism - autonomous learning

282 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
283
That for the vast majority of Muslims the problem of dislocation
has not yet arisen justifies the ulema in refusing to be rushed into
the hasty measures which the modernists prescribe; but the spread
of modernism is a warning that re-formulation cannot be indefinitely
shelved.
In trying to determine the origins and causes of this petrifaction
of the formulas of Islam, we may possibly also find a Clue to
the answer to the question which the modernists are asking, but
have so far failed to resolve-the question, that is, of the way in
which the fundamental principles of Islam may be re-formulated
without afiecting their essential elements.1oo
The last part of this passage is familiar enough: it suggests the
now traditional Orientalist ability to reconstruct and reformulate
the Orient, given the Orient's inability to do so for itself. In part,
then, Gibb's Islam exists ahead of Islam as it is practiced, studied,
or preached in the Orient. Yet this prospective Islam is no mere
Orientalist fiction, spun out of his ideas: it is based on an "Islam"
that-since it cannot truly exist-appeals to a whole community
of believers. The reason that "Islam" can exist in some more or
less future Orientalist formulation of it is that in the Orient Islam
is usurped and traduced by the language of its clergy, whose claim
is upon the community's mind. So long as it is silent in its appeal,
Islam is safe; the moment the reforming clergy takes on its (legitimate)
role of reformulating Islam in order for it to be able to
enter modernity, the trouble starts. And that trouble, of course, is
dislocation.
Dislocation in Gibb's work identifies something far more significant
than a putative intellectual difficulty within Islam. It identifies,
I think, the very privilege, the very ground on which the Orientalist
places himself so as to write about, legislate for, and reformulate
Islam. Far·from being a chance discernment of Gibb's, dislocation
is the epistemological passageway into his subject, and subsequently,
the observation platform from which in all his writing, and
in everyone of the influential positions he filled, he could survey
Islam. Between the silent appeal of Islam to a monolithic community
of orthodox believers and a whole merely verbal articulation
of Islam by misled corps of political activists, desperate clerks,
and opportunistic reformers: there Gibb stood, wrote, reformulated.
His writing said either what Islam could not say or what its clerics
would not say. What Gibb wrote was in one sense temporally
ahead of Islam, in that he allowed that at some point in the future
Islam would be able to say what it could not say now. In another
important sense, however, Gibb's writings on Islam predated the
religion as a coherent body of "living" beliefs, since his writing
was able to get hold of "Islam" as a silent appeal made to Muslims
before their faith became a matter for worldly argument, practice,
or debate.
The contradiction in Gibb's work-for it is a contradiction to
speak of "Islam" as neither what its clerical adherents in fact say
it is nor what, if they could, its lay followers would about itis
muted somewhat by the metaphysical attitude governing his
work, and indeed governing the whole history of modem Orientalism
which he inherited, through mentors like Macdonald. The
Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically
reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the
Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about
the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent
itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed
through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist's
work. Gibb's oeuvre purports to be Islam (or Mohammedanism)
both a~ it is and as it might be. Metaphysically-and only metaphysically--essence
and potential are made one. Only a metaphysical
attitude could produce such famous Gibb essays as "The
Structure of Religious Thought in Islam" or "An Interpretation of
Islamic History" without being troubled by the distinction made
between objective and subjective knowledge in Gibb's criticism
of Massignon. 101 The statements about "Islam" are made with a
confidence and a serenity that are truly Olympian. There is no dislocation,
no felt discontinuity between Gibb's page and the
phenomenon it describes, for each, according to Gibb himself, is
ultimately reducible to the other. As such, "Islam" and Gibb's
description of it have a calm, discursive plainness whose common
element is the English scholar's orderly page.
I attach a great deal of significance to the appearance of and to
the intended model for the Orientalist's page as a printed object. I
have spoken in this book about d'Herbelot's alphabetic encyclo"
pedia, the gigantic leaves of the Description de I'Egypte, Renan's
laboratory-museum notebook, the ellipses and short episodes of
Lane's Modern Egyptians, Sacy's anthological excerpts, and so
forth. These pages are signs of some Orient, and of some Orientalist,
presented to the reader. There is an order to these pages by
which the reader apprehends not only the "Orient" but also the