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302 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
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with the academic world. There are grants and other rewards, there
are organizations, there are hierarchies, there are institutes, centers,
faculties, departments, all devoted to legitimizing and maintaining
the authority of a handful of basic, basically unchanging ideas about
Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs. A recent critical analysis of the
Middle East studies operation in the United States shows, not that
the field is "monolithic," but that it is complex, that it contains ol~style
Orientalists, deliberately marginal specialists, counterinsurgency
specialists, policymakers, as well as "a small minority ... of
academic power brokers."123 In any event, the core of OrientaIist
dogma persists.
As an instance of what, in its highest and most intellectually
prestigious form, the field now produces, let us consider briefly the
two-volume Cambridge History of Islam, which was first published
in England in 1970 and is a regular summa of Orientalist orthodoxy.
To say of this work by numerous luminaries that it is an
intellectual failure by any standards other than those of Orientalism
is to say that it could have been a different and better history of
Islam. In fact, as several more thoughtful scholars have noted,124
this kind of history was already doomed when first planned and
could not have been different or better in execution: too many
ideas were uncritically accepted by its editors; there was too much
reliance on vague concepts; little emphasis was placed on methodological
issues (which were left as they have been standing in
Orientalist discourse for almost two centuries); and no effort was
put forth to make even the idea of Islam seem interesting. Moreover,
not only does The Cambridge History of Islam radically misconceive
and misrepresent Islam as a religion; it also has no
corporate idea of itself as a history. Of few such enormous enterprises
can it be true, as it is of this one, that ideas and methodological
intelligence are almost entirely absent from it.
Erfan Shahid's chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia, which opens the
history, intelligently sketches the fruitful consonance between
topography and human economy out of which Islam appeared in
the seventh century. But what can one fairly say of a history of
Islam, defined by P. M. Holt's introduction rather airily as a "cultural
synthesis,"125 that proceeds directly from pre-Islamic Arabia
to a chapter on Mohammed, then to a chapter on the Patriarchal
and Umayyad caliphates, and entirely bypasses any account of
Islam as a system of helief, faith, or doctrine? For hundreds of
pages in volume 1, Islam is understood to mean an unrelieved
chronology of battles, reigns, and deaths, rises and heydays, comings
and passings, written for the most part in a ghastly monotone.
Take the Abbasid period from the eighth to the eleventh century
as an instance. Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with
Arab or Islamic history will know that it was a high point of
Islamic civilization, as brilliant a period of cultural history as the
High Renaissance in Italy. Yet nowhere in the forty pages of description
does one get an inkling of any richness; what is found instead
is sentences like this: "Once master of the caliphate,
[al-Ma'mun] seemed henceforth to shrink from contact with
Baghdad society and remained settled at Merv, entrusting the
government of Iraq to one of his trusted men, aI-Hasan b. Sahl, the
brother of al-Fadl, who was faced almost at once with a serious
Shi'i revolt, that of Abu'l-Saraya, who in Jumada II 199/January
sent out a call to arms from Kufa in support of the Hasanid
Ibn Tabataba.»126 A non-Islamicist will not know at this point what
a Shi'i or a Hasanid is. He will have no idea what Jumada II is,
except that it clearly designates a date of some sort. And of course
he will believe that the Abbasids, including Harun aI-Rashid, were
an incorrigibly dull and murderous lot, as they sat sulking in Merv.
The Central Islamic lands are defined as excluding North Africa
and Andalusia, and their history is an orderly march from the past
till modem times. In volume 1, therefore, Islam is a geographical
designation applied chronologically and selectively as it suits the
experts. But nowhere in the chapters on classical Islam is there an
adequate preparation for the disappointments in store for us when
we come to "recent times,"as they are called. The chapter on the
modern Arab lands is written without the slightest understanding
of the revolutionary developments in the area. The author takes a
schoolmarm ish, openly reactionary attitude towards the Arabs ("it
must be said that during this period the educated and uneducated
youth of the Arab countries, with their enthusiasm and idealism,
became a fertile soil for political exploitation and, at times, perhaps
without realizing it, the tools of unscrupulous extremists and agitators"127),
tempered by occasional praise of Lebanese nationalism
(although we are never told that the appeal of fascism to a small
number of Arabs during the thirties also infected the Lebanese
Maronites, who in 1936 founded the Falanges libanaises as a copy
of Mussolini's Black Shirts). "Unrest and agitation" are ascribed to
1936 without a mention of Zionism, and the very notions of anticolonialism
and anti-imperialism are never allowed to violate the