For Lust of Knowing (20 page)

In order to clear space for his translation, he disparaged those of his predecessors, including Robert of Ketton's Latin translation and Du Ryer's French one. Marracci's translation was exact and literal and, though Sale did not like Marracci's lengthy refutations of Islamic doctrines, he still acknowledged the use he had made of the Latin translation. Although Sale made it perfectly clear that he considered Muhammad to be an impostor, ‘how criminal soever Muhammad may have been in imposing a false religion on mankind, the praises due to his real virtues ought not to be denied him'. Despite this damnably faint praise, many of his readers thought his portrait of the Prophet and the rise of Islam much too favourable and Gibbon called Sale ‘half a Musulman'.
²⁰

Those merchants who were not particularly interested in history or Christian polemics, but who wished to learn about the contemporary Middle East, were best served by Alexander Russell's
The Natural History of Aleppo, containing a Description of the City, and the Principal Natural Productions in its Neighbourhood, together with an Account of the Climate, Inhabitants and Diseases; Particularly of the Plague, with the Methods used by the Europeans for their Preservation
(1756, revised edition 1794, by his half-brother Patrick). Alexander Russell was from 1745 to 1753 resident physician to the merchant community of the English Levant Company at Aleppo. He was a particular expert on the plague. Indeed, the original intent
was to give an account of the plague and a means of countering it. However, the extremely lengthy second chapter covered such matters as population, language, dress, consumption of coffee and tobacco, eating habits, religious ceremonies, family life, entertainments and funerary rites.
²¹
Russell's book was in its time the classic and authoritative source on everyday life in a Muslim country and was the acknowledged inspiration in the following century of Lane's
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
. Lane in his preface was to praise the ‘excellent and learned work' of the Russell brothers.
²²
Like his half-brother, Patrick had strong scientific interests and was a particular expert on botany and on earthquakes. Patrick considerably added to
The Natural History of Aleppo
and gave it a more human dimension. In his account of Arabic culture he drew upon the researches of Sir William Jones into Arabic literature and it is to him that we now turn.

According to the twentieth-century Turcologist Harold Bowen, Sir William Jones (1746–94), also known as ‘Oriental Jones', mastered thirteen languages and dabbled in twenty-eight.
²³
As a schoolboy he started off with Hebrew but, finding that language too easy to be interesting, he then moved on to Arabic. He translated bits of the English version of
The Arabian Nights
back into Arabic for his amusement. (One took one's amusements where one could find them in those days.) While a student at Oxford, he retained Mirza, a Syrian from Aleppo, to teach him the language. (As in Cambridge fifty years earlier, there was no academic fellow capable of doing the job.) After Arabic, Jones moved on to Persian and Turkish. He translated a life of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah for Christian VII of Denmark and this was published in 1770. Jones's
Grammar of the Persian Language
, published only a year later, was really of more use to poets than to imperial administrators, as Jones's grasp of Persian was somewhat erratic and secondly he was more interested in introducing Persian poets to a European audience than he was in producing a cribfor merchants and administrators working in exotic parts. The
Grammar
is full of extracts from the famous medieval Persian poets. Jones's explorations of Persian poetry had persuaded him that European literature was stale and needed liberating from classical models: ‘Asiaticks excel the inhabitants of colder regions in the liveliness of their fancy, and the richness of their invention.'
²⁴

On the other hand, though Jones had discovered something fresh and different in Persian poetry, he also thought of it in another sense as perfectly familiar. His sense of the sheer Otherness of Persian poetry being imperfect, he described Firdawsi's eleventh-century epic, the
Shahnama
, as being written in ‘the spirit of our Dryden and the sweetness of Pope'. (The justice of this comparison is not obvious to a modern reader.) He also compared Firdawsi to Homer and Hafiz of Shiraz to Petrarch. Jones was keen that gentlemen of leisure should take up the study of Persian: ‘I may confidently affirm that few odes of the Greeks or Romans upon similar subjects are more finely polished than the songs of these Persian poets.' As with the study of Latin and Greek literature, study of Persian was character-building: ‘There is scarce a lesson of morality or a tender sentiment in any European language to which a parallel may not be brought from the poets of Asia.'
²⁵

Though he devoted less time to Arabic literature, he produced a number of important, though error-strewn, translations from Arabic poetry. In 1782 he published the
Moallakat
(more correctly
Mu‘allaqat
). This collection of seven pre-Islamic Arabian odes by diverse hands was treated by him as a series of essays in the pastoral. The Arabpoets then became so many Oriental versions of Theocritus on camel-back – herdsmen in lush landscapes singing of their love for some nymph or other. Part of the trouble was that the term ‘Arabia Felix' (‘Happy Arabia') had given Jones a quite fanciful notion that a verdant, rather English-looking countryside prevailed in South West Arabia. Though he knew as little about the people as he did about the countryside, he judged the noble and fierce Arabs to be superior to the softer Persians and Hindus. (Such generalizations were common in pre-modern times and not just in Western culture.)

It was impossible to make a living as an Orientalist and, in the introduction to the Persian
Grammar
, he had complained of the difficulty of finding patronage for Oriental studies. At an early stage in
his life Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad. However, in the end he had to knuckle down to legal studies and he was called to the Bar in 1774. There were various false turns in his career. For instance, he had hoped to become an MP, but his liberalism, his hostility to slavery and support of American independence counted against him. Nevertheless, in 1783 he was appointed Judge of the High Court in Calcutta and a knighthood came with the appointment. He was happy to sail out to India as, among other things, he hoped to find evidence in India for the Flood of Genesis.

When he set out for Calcutta, he had had no intention of studying Sanskrit. Having once succumbed to that erudite temptation, he was soon declaring that Sanskrit was ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either' and thereafter he switched to the study of Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1786 Jones was the first to make the link between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and declare that the three languages must have descended from a common ancestor. The establishment of an Indo-Aryan family of languages by European philologists is something that has been resented by Edward Said and he appears to doubt the validity of their findings, though he does not explain why.
²⁶
Though Jones's linkage of Sanskrit to a large group of European languages was sound enough, his ethnology was somewhat archaic and confused, as he held that Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Peruvians all descended from Noah's son, Ham. Ethnologists who came after him tended to make Ham the father of just the black peoples.

In 1784 Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal, the prototype and inspiration for the later learned associations of Orientalists, the Société Asiatique and the Royal Asiatic Society.
²⁷
Jones was also the first Orientalist to engage seriously, though briefly, with Turkish literature and, besides that and his other Oriental interests, he was an amateur astronomer, botanist, musician, historian of chess and an expert on pangolins. His explorations of Arabic and Persian poetry were as much or more an event in English literature as they were in Oriental studies. Byron, Southey and Moore all read him. Tennyson's
‘Locksley Hall' owes a great deal to Jones's
Mu‘allaqat
. Jones's researches were also important for German literature. Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) were both inspired by his translations to explore Oriental themes in their poetry – but all that is really the subject of another book.

Although Jones was the great pioneer of Indian studies, his chief heirs in this field were French and German, and Indological and Sanskrit studies were dominated by such scholars as Jean Pierre Abel Rémusat, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Eugène Burnouf and Max Müller. It was the French who set up the first university chair in Sanskrit.
²⁸
Many British East India Company officials and soldiers took up Persian or one or more of the Indian languages, but it was rare for such people to acquire more than a colloquial smattering. In
La Renaissance orientale
(1950) Raymond Schwabargued that the true beginnings of Orientalism are to be found in the late eighteenth century. Although he produced a great deal of evidence for this contention, he was chiefly interested in India and his conclusion is true, at best, only for Indian studies. As we have seen, Arabic studies began as early as the seventeenth century with Postel, Pococke, Erpenius, Golius and Marracci. There were no comparably grand figures in their field in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it does seem to be true that Indian studies took off in the late eighteenth century.

The great French Indologist, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, lived in Mughal India from 1755 to 1761. He published an edition of the Zoroastrian
Zend-Avesta
, as well as a narrative of his travels. He was hostile to the stereotypical portrait of Oriental despotism presented by
L'Esprit des lois
(1748), in which Montesquieu argued that despotism, conditioned by material and climatic factors, was pervasive throughout Asia and was savagely arbitrary, demanded blind obedience and was centred around the mysteries of the harem. As far as Anquetil-Duperron was concerned, such a portrait of Asian politics and society could only serve as an instrument of oppression over the peoples of Asia. In
Législation orientale
(1778), he used his close knowledge of Indian matters to refute Montesquieu's contentions that Oriental despots were not bound by the law and that there was no private property under the Moghuls.

Like so many Orientalists who came after him, Anquetil-Duperron
was fiercely anti-imperialist. In the introduction to another work,
Le Despotisme considéré dans les trois états où il passe pour être, la Turquie, la Perse et l'Hindoustan
, he expressed his fear that the concept of Oriental despotism had been summoned up by certain Western thinkers in order to justify the oppressive rule of Europeans over Asia.
²⁹
In many respects, Anquetil-Duperron antipated the main tenets of Said's
Orientalism
, though Said, who discusses him, chooses not to mention this. Samuel Johnson was, like Anquetil-Duperron, suspicious of Montesquieu's manner of argument and he remarked to Boswell that Montesquieu was always able to find some obscure Oriental example to back up anything that he wanted to say.
³⁰

Sale, Russell and Jones made important contributions to Islamic studies, but they did so outside the universities. Leiden was no less moribund than Oxford and Cambridge. After Golius, Oriental studies in Leiden went into a steep decline.
³¹
The most distinguished figure in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, Adrian Reeland (1676–1718), was to become Professor of Oriental Languages at Utrecht, not Leiden.
³²
By the age of fourteen this prodigy knew some Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic and Arabic. Arabic was exactly the sort of subject any young genius in this period should aspire to know, thanks to its reputation as a recondite and difficult language. Reeland was a polymath with interests in and knowledge of most things, as well as being a poet. Like Postel and Kircher before him, he speculated crazily about the nature of the
Ursprache
, or primal language, and the descent of all modern languages from it. In
De religione Mohammedica
(1705) and other works he combated misrepresentations of Islam. However, he was utterly typical in his approach to Arabic studies in that he considered that Arabic's chief importance was as a handmaiden to Hebrew and biblical studies and hence his heavy emphasis on a philological approach.

Later in the century, Albert Schultens (1686–1750), a professor first at Amsterdam and then at Leiden, took essentially the same approach.
³³
He was primarily a Hebraist and his
Dissertatio theologicophilologica de utilitate linguae arabicae in interpretanda sacra lingua
(‘Theologico-Philological Dissertation on the Utility of the Arabic Language for the Interpretation of Holy Scripture'), published in 1706, took it for granted that study of Arabic should be subordinated to that of Hebrew and actually took issue with those academics who argued that, since Hebrew was the divine language, study of any other was quite pointless. Nevertheless, though Schultens was eloquent in making the case for comparative Semitic philology (embracing Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Chaldaean), he was not actually very good at it.

The soundness of Schultens's philology was criticized by Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–74), the greatest Greek and Arabic scholar of the eighteenth century.
³⁴
Reiske had been Schultens's student but became his opponent. Reiske, the foremost German Orientalist of first rank, was primarily a classicist. He was born in poverty, brought up in an orphanage, and died in poverty. Having taught himself Greek, his first important published work was on the Attic orators. He produced editions of their speeches and then an edition of Theocritus. He was prone to intense depressions and his wife was driven to learn Latin and Greek to keep him happy. Perhaps because of his classical formation, Reiske took a more literary approach to Arabic and was hostile to Schultens's stress on Hebrew, a language that Reiske refused to learn. In 1738 he moved to Leiden. It was a mistake: ‘This served me an ill turn. Dearly, too dearly have I had to pay for my folly! I became a martyr for Arabic literature. Oh if my burning thirst of those days for this literature, which only made me unhappy coming as it did too early, at a time when nobody needed it and still less appreciated it enough to reward or encourage it, oh if it could find its way into a soul which could some day bring life to happier times! If that day ever comes (though there is hardly room for hope) then Arabic literature will be better appreciated and studied with greater application than it is now.'
³⁵
Reiske never succeeded in obtaining a chair in Leiden or anywhere else. He was suspected of being a free thinker as he did not attend church on Sundays, but the real reason for this was that he was too poor to afford a coat to go to church in. Coming from a humble background, he had no private income and, despite being the best
Arabist and one of the best classicists of the century, he was forced to do hack work in order to survive.