Orientalism - autonomous learning

76 ORIENTALISM
The Scope of Orientalism
77
wars with Byzantium and Persia."58 However, Ockley was careful
to dissociate himself from the infectious influence of Islam, and
unlike his colleague William Whiston (Newton's successor at Cambridge),
he always made it clear that Islam was an outrageous
heresy. For his Islamic enthusiasm, on the other hand, Whiston was
expelled from Cambridge in 1709.
Access to Indian (Oriental) riches had always to be made by
first crossing the Islamic provinces and by withstanding the
dangerous effect of Islam as a system of quasi-Arian belief. And at
least for the larger segment of the eighteenth century, Britain and
France were successful. The Ottoman Empire had long since settled
into a (for Europe) comfortable senescence, to be inscribed in the
nineteenth century as the "Eastern Question." Britain and France
fought each other in India between 1744 and 1748 and again
between 1756 and 1763, until, in 1769, the British emerged in
practical economic and political control of the subcontinent. What
was more inevitable than that Napoleon should choose to harass
Britain's Oriental empire by first intercepting its Islamic throughway,
Egypt?
Although it was almost immediately preceded by at least two
major Orientalist projects, Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798
and his foray into Syria have had by far the greater consequence
for the modem history of Orientalism. Before Napoleon only two
efforts (both by scholars) had been made to invade the Orient by
stripping it of its veils and also by going beyond the comparative
shelter of the Biblical Orient. The first was by Abraham-Hyacinthe
Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), an eccentric theoretician of
egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile J ansenism
with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism, and who traveled
to Asia in order to prove the actual primitive existence of a Chosen
People and of the Biblical genealogies. Instead he overshot his early
goal and traveled as far east as Surat, there to find a cache of A vestan
texts, there also to complete his translation of the A vesta. Raymond
Schwab has said of the mysterious A vestan fragment that set Anquetil
off on his voyages that whereas "the scholars looked at the famous
fragment of Oxford and then returned to their studies, Anquetil
lookect. and then went to India." Schwab also remarks that Anquetil
and Voltaire, though temperamentally and ideologically at hopeless
odds with each other, had a similar interest in the Orient apd the
Bible, "the one to make the Bible more indisputable, the other to
make it more unbelievable." Ironically, Anquetil's Avesta transla-
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tions served Voltaire's purposes, since Anquetil's discoveries "soon
ledto criticism of the very [Biblical] texts which had hitherto been
considered to be revealed texts." The net effect of Anquetil's expedition
is well described by Schwab:
In 1759, Anquetil finished his translation of the Avesta at Surat;
in 1786 that of the Upanishads in Paris-he had dug a channel
between the hemispheres of human genius, correcting and expanding
the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin. Less than fifty
years earlier, his compatriots were asked what it was like to be
Persian, when he taught them how to compare the monuments of
the Persians to those of the Greeks. Before him, one looked for
information on the remote past of our planet exclusively among
the great Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic writers. The Bible
was regarded as a lonely rock, an aerolite. A universe in writing
was available, but scarcely anyone seemed to suspect the immensity
of those unknown lands. The realization began with his
translation of the A vesta, and reached dizzying heights owing to
the exploration in Central Asia of the languages that multiplied
after Babel. Into our schools, up to that time limited to the narrow
Greco-Latin heritage of the Renaissance [of which much had been
transmitted to Europe by Islam), he interjected a vision of innumerable
civilizations from l!ges past, of an infinity of literatures;
moreover the few European provinces were not the only places
to have left their mark in history. 59
For the first time, the Orient was revealed to Europe in the
materiality of its texts, languages, and civilizations. Also for the
first time, Asia acquired a precise intellectual and historical dimension
with which to buttress the myths of its geographic distance and
vastness. By one of those inevitable contracting compensations for
a sudden cultural expansion, Anquetil's Oriental labors were succeeded
by William Jones's, the second of the pre-Napoleonic
projects I mentioned above. Whereas Anquetil opened large vistas,
J ones closed them down, codifying, tabulating, comparing. Before
he left England for India in 1783, Jones was already a master of
Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. These seemed perhaps the least of
his accomplishments: he was also a poet, a jurist, a polyhistor, a
classicist, and an indefatigable scholar whose powers would recommend
him to such as Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, William
Pitt, and Samuel Johnson. In due course he was appointed to "an
honorable and profitable place in the Indies," and immediately upon
his arrival there to take up a post with the East India Company