Orientalism - autonomous learning

74
ORIENTALISM
unresolved challenge on the political, intellectual, and for a time,
economic levels. For much of its history, then, Orientalism carries
within it the stamp of a problematic European attitude towards
Islam, and it is this acutely sensitive aspect of Orientalism around
which my interest in this study turns.
Doubtless Islam was a real provocation in many ways. It lay
uneasily close to Christianity,. geographically and culturally. It
drew on the Judeo-Hellenic traditions, it borrowed creatively from
Christianity, it could boast of unrivaled military and political successes.
Nor was this all. The Islamic lands sit adjacent to and even
on top of the Biblical lands; moreover, the heart of the Islamic
domain has always been the region closest to Europe, what has
been called the Near Orient or Near East. Arabic and Hebrew
are Semitic languages, and together they dispose and redispose of
material that is urgently important to Christianity. From the end
of the seventh century until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam
in either its Arab, Ottoman, or North African and Spanish form
dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. That
Islam outstripped and outshone Rome cannot have been absent
from the mind of any European past or present. Even Gibbon was
no exception, as is evident in the following passage from the Decline
and Fall:
In the victorious days of the Roman republic it had been the
aim of the senate to confine their councils and legions to a single
war, and completely to suppress a first enemy before they provoked
the hostilities of a second. These timid maxims of policy
were disdained by the magnanimity or enthusiasm of the Arabian
caliphs. With the same vigour and success they invaded the successors
of Augustus and Artaxerxes; and the rival monarchies at
the same instant became the prey of an enemy whom they had so
long been accustomed to despise. In the ten years of the administration
of Omar, the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six
thousand cities or castles, destroyed four thousand churches or
temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen hundred moschs
for the exercise of the religion of Mohammed. One hundred years
after his flight from Mecca the arms and reign of his suc:cessors
extended from India to the Atlantic Ocean, over the various and
distant provinces. . . .54
When the term Orient was not simply a synonym for the Asiatic
East as a whole, or taken as· generally denoting the distant and
exotic, it was most rigorously understood as applying to the Islamic
The Scope of OrientaIism
Orient. This "militant" Orient came to stand for what Hend Baudet
has called "the Asiatic tidal wave."55 Certainly this was the case in
Europe through the middle of the eighteenth century, the point at
which repositories of "Oriental" knowledge like d'Herbelot's
Bibliotheque orientale stop meaning primarily Islam, the Arabs, or
the Ottomans. Until that time cultural memory gave understandable
prominence to such relatively distant events as the fall of
Constantinople, the Crusades, and the conquest of Sicily and Spain,
but if these signified the menacing Orient they did not at the same
time efface what remained of Asia.
For there was always India, where, after Portugal pioneered
the first bases of European presence in the early sixteenth century,
Europe, and primarily England after a long period (from 1600 to
1758) of essentially commercial activity, dominated politically as
an occupying force. Yet India itself never provided an indigenous
threat to Europe. Rather it was because native authority crumbled
there and opened the land to inter-European rivalry and to outright
European political control that the Indian Orient could be treated
by Europe with such proprietary hauteur-never with the sense of
danger reserved for Islam. 56 Nevertheless, between this hauteur and
anything like accurate positive knowledge there existed a vast
disparity. D'Herbelot's entries' for Indo-Persian subjects in the
Bibliotheque were all based on Islamic sources, and it is true to
say that until the early nineteenth century "Oriental languages" was
considered a synonym for "Semitic languages." The Oriental
renaissance of which Quinet spoke served the function of expanding
some fairly narrow limits, in which Islam was the catchall Oriental
example. ~7 Sanskrit, Indhm religion, and Indian history did not
acquire the status of scientific knowledge until after Sir William
Jones's efforts in the late eighteenth century, and even Jones's interest
in India came to him by way of his prior interest in and
knowledge of Islam.
It is not surprising, then, that the first major work of Oriental
scholarship ~fter d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque was Simon Ockley's
History of the Saracens, whose first volume appeared in 1708. A
recent historian of Orientalism has opined that Ockley's attitude
towards. the Muslims-that to them is owed what was first known
of philosophy by European Christians-"shocked painfully" his
European audience. For not only did Ockley make this Islamic
pre-eminence clear in his work; he also "gave Europe its first
authentic and substantial taste of the Arab viewpoint touching the
75