For Lust of Knowing (37 page)

Bartold's old-fashioned scholarly respect for facts and his bourgeois idealism attracted an enormous amount of criticism from more craven or ideologically deluded colleagues. Nevertheless, his international reputation saved him from losing his teaching post or worse. The same was true of his contemporary Ignatius Kratchkovsky (1883–1951).
⁶⁹
As a schoolboy, the book-mad Kratchkovsky had tried to learn Arabic from de Sacy's grammar, before learning the language properly with Viktor Rosen. In the relatively free and easy last days of the old Russian empire Kratchkovsky travelled out to Lebanon and Egypt where he made many friends among the Arabintelligentsia. Things became much harder once the Bolshevik Revolution got under way and he recorded that the director of the library that he was working in had died of malnutrition. Although Kratchkovsky was frequently attacked by his younger colleagues because of the old-fashioned nature of his scholarship and his highly suspicious contacts with Orientalists abroad, he survived – but only just. He suffered from the ‘bourgeois' defect of paying too much attention to foreign scholarship and therefore minimizing the glorious achievements of Russians in the field. He held that an Arabist must be familiar with English, French and German, ‘but also with Italian because since the
second half of this century works in this language on Arabic subjects have taken their place in the forefront of learned literature'. Spanish was also desirable, if one was going to study the Arabs in Spain.
⁷⁰
In 1930 he invited Massignon to Russia on a visit of academic goodwill and, as a consequence, was jailed for nine months, as the Soviet authorities decided that Massignon was really a spy. Kratchkovsky, who was frequently prone to depression, tended to take refuge in obscure Oriental books and manuscripts. He was in charge of the Leningrad Academy during the bitter siege of that city in 1941 and 1942, during which he immersed himself in a manuscript of alMaqqari's
Nafh al-Tib
(a sixteenth-century account of the past glories of Muslim Spain).

‘My heart is saddened. The shades of the teachers do not hide from us the shades of our pupils who passed away before us. Many of these do I see: a life full of hardships and two devastating wars cut down the young shoots before their prime and it was not given to all to attain full blossom. But they all had entered the realm of learning and had felt its fascination. To them, as to me, the manuscripts had spoken in the tongue of the living, and they had come to me with the treasures which they had unearthed.'
⁷¹
These melancholy reflections came at the end of his memoir of a life in Orientalism. Few Orientalists have produced autobiographies (but notable exceptions are Denison Ross, André Miquel and Maxime Rodinson). As Kratchkovsky observed, ‘scholars seldom speak about themselves, their development, the emotions which accompanied their work and the circumstances in which they made their discoveries'. Kratchkovsky's
Among Arabic Manuscripts
(1945, English translation 1953), despite its frequent reference to hardship and depression, is easily the most delightful example of the genre.

Kratchkovsky was fabulously prolific and moved from topic to topic. Like Hamilton Gibb, he was extremely interested in modernist and reformist movements in the Middle East and in the modern Arabic novel. However, his major work was a comprehensive work on the medieval Arab geographers, published in Russian but subsequently translated into Arabic, and still of use today.
⁷²
He also produced a Russian translation of the Qur'an from the Arabic. (All but one of the previous Russian ‘translations' had actually been made from
European languages.) As noted, he enjoyed an international reputation. However, it is time to turn to some of his less estimable and sometimes rather bizarre colleagues and successors.

Soviet Orientalists were at the service of an empire with a vast population of Muslims. In 1917 the Bolshevik regime issued a decree guaranteeing freedom of conscience for Muslims. According to a proclamation of the Scientific Association of Russian Orientalists in 1921, ‘Moscow is the new Mecca; it is the Medina of all repressed peoples.' Yet, despite the fair-seeming promises, Islam was pilloried in the Soviet museums of atheism and Soviet Orientalists were enlisted to combat Islamic superstition. There was also a fierce campaign against the use of the Arabic script. It was described as the script of the reactionary mullahs and Sufis and as not being particularly well adapted to rendering the Turkic languages. Possession of books in the Arabic script could lead to the death sentence: Islamic culture and social structures were things that the Muslim peoples had to be weaned away from. Broadly speaking, the Soviet orthodoxy was that Islamic society had to pass through five stages: primitive society, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist and Marxist socialist.
⁷³

The life of the Prophet and the first century of Islam were subjected to particularly fierce scrutiny by Soviet Orientalists. Some scholars were content to do not much more than present the rise of Islam within a determining economic context. E. A. Belyaev, for example, accepted that the Prophet was a historical figure. His
Arabs, Islam and the Arab Caliphate in the Early Middle Ages
placed heavy emphasis on the role of the physical environment in the rise of Islam. More specifically, Islam was a religion that arose to serve the interests of the slave-owning mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina. The Qur'an was not revealed by the Prophet, but concocted after the latter's death. Early Islamic society made the transition from a slave-owning patriarchal society to a more advanced feudalism. Belyaev stressed the importance of heterodox and revolutionary movements in the early Islamic period, such as the Mazdakites and the Kharijites, and he was a keen, if belated, supporter of the aspirations of the working masses of the early medieval Middle East, which he thought these movements represented. He also emphasized the destructive nature of the early Arabconquests.
⁷⁴
(The denunciation of the nomad
invasions, whether Arab, Turkish or Mongol, was a routine duty for Soviet scholars.) Although Belyaev tried to make a point of ignoring both European and Arab scholarship in his field as such scholarship was inevitably ideologically tainted, he was still denounced by some of his colleagues for paying too much attention to such material.

Some Soviet Orientalists took a much more destructive approach to Islamic history. Klimovich wrote an article entitled ‘Did Muhammad exist?' in which the answer to the question so posed was no. All the sources on the Prophet's life were late and dubious. In
The Contents of the Koran
(1928), Klimovich sought to lay bare its internal contradictions. It was, he maintained, a document drafted on behalf of the exploiters – the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina – that promised the exploited masses a paradise in the never-never that was the main force behind Islam.
⁷⁵
The Prophet was a back-formation – a figure retrospectively invented in order to give the religion a founder. N. A. Morozov went further yet and argued in
Christ
(1930) that, until the shock of the Crusades, Islam and Judaism were indistinguishable from one another. There were indications in the Qur'an that it was composed as late as the eleventh century. Islam could not possibly have originated in the Arabian peninsula, as it was too far from the main centres of civilization to give birth to a new religion. Muhammad and the early caliphs were merely mythical figures. Inconsistently, Morozov, having suggested that early Islam did not differ from Judaism, also suggested that early Islam was merely a version of the Christian Arian heresy.
⁷⁶
(Arians denied that Christ was fully divine or consubstantial with God the Father.) Needless to say, no Soviet scholars took the traditional Muslim view of the origins of Islam. The only substantial debate was over the question whether the rise of that religion represented a triumph of the bourgeoisie or if it reflected an earlier phase in historical evolution, the transition from a slave-owning society to a feudal one.

The German and Nazi agenda in Middle Eastern studies was less obvious and less pervasive than the Soviet Russian one. In so far as they took any interest in Oriental matters at all, Nazi ideologues were more interested in Indian and Tibetan matters, and a motley band of scholars and eccentrics under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg quested for the origins of the Teutonic master race somewhere in Asia.
⁷⁷
Walther Wüst, a keen Nazi, a specialist in the Veda (the ancient holy books of the Hindus) and an Orientalist in the broad sense, was the key figure in this quasi-scientific research into the Asian origins of the Aryans. The Veda, as presented by him, were blessedly free of any Semitic taint and fully in accord with Hitler's
Mein Kampf
. By contrast, the Nazis took little interest in Arabor Islamic studies, despite widespread hopes in the Arabworld that the Nazis would liberate them from British and French colonialism. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler had expressed his contempt for Arabnationalists.
⁷⁸
He considered that Arabs deserved to be colonized. Several institutes of Oriental studies were closed during the Nazi period.

In the introduction to a supplementary volume of his
Geschichte der Arabische Literatur
(‘A History of Arabic Literature'), Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956) described the Arabist and Weimar Minister, Carl Heinrich Becker, as ‘the minister against German culture'.
⁷⁹
Brockelmann, an extreme right-winger, had had a traditional German university education, in the course of which he had acquired the duelling scar that was de rigueur among right-wing student fraternities. However, he had also studied with the mighty Goldziher whom he revered as the master of Islamic studies. Brockelmann's
Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur
(1898–1902 and supplementary volumes 1937–42) comes second only to the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
among the important Orientalist publications of the twentieth century. It is not, as its title might suggest, a narrative history of Arabic literature. It is rather a vast annotated catalogue of all the Arabic manuscripts and printed books that were known to Brockelmann. As such it is an indispensable work of reference. Yet he compiled the book only in order to persuade his publisher to take his real enthusiasm, his edition
of Ibn Qutayba's
Uyun al-Akhbar
(a ninth-century anthology of Arabic prose and poetry).
⁸⁰

Brockelmann's work on Arabic manuscripts was very much in the German philological tradition as pioneered by Fleischer. Hans Heinrich Schaeder (1896–1957), on the other hand, was the scholarly heir to a more romantic approach to Islam that can be traced back to von Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe and Rückert. At school he had studied Latin, Greek, English, French and Hebrew. During the First World War he pursued a self-taught course of European literature and Oriental grammar and he came to adopt a conservative, Junker position. When, in the aftermath of the war, Oswald Spengler published his
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(‘Decline of the West'), Schaeder was influenced by that. He also read T. S. Eliot's essays on culture and tradition and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's melancholy
fin de siècle
fantasies. As an Arabist, Schaeder studied with Carl Heinrich Becker and he shared the latter's overwhelming enthusiasm for the Graeco-Latin heritage. Schaeder's early work was on the eighth-century ArabSufi, Hasan of Basra, and the fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafiz of Shiraz (who may or may not also have been a Sufi). Having read Massignon's book on the martyrdom of al-Hallaj, he fell under the mesmerizing spell of the book's author and concentrated his researches on religious and, more specifically, Sufi terminology. Like Massignon, Schaeder was a convert to Catholicism and he relied more on inspiration than solidly referenced research. Apart from Massignon, Goethe was the other
maître à penser
who influenced his interpretation of Sufism. He wrote a study on Goethe's
Erlebnis des Ostens
(‘Experience of the East'). Goethe's poetry was a kind of private Bible and Schaeder regarded Goethe's collection of Oriental pastiches, the
West–östlicher Divan
, as the foundation document of Orientalism. This enthusiasm for Goethe was something that he passed on to his student Annemarie Schimmel (later to become famous as a saintly and learned interpreter of Sufism).

From 1931 until 1944 Schaeder was Professor of Oriental Philology and Religious History at Berlin and a leading spokesman of Nazi Orientalism. He wrote a history of Orientalism, which excluded all mention of the contribution of Jewish scholars. Schaeder's racism pervaded his thinking on Middle Eastern culture too. One German
Orientalist remembered Schaeder exclaiming to him, ‘Aha, you work on Islamic philosophy! But there were no Muslim philosophers. They were all infidels.' Schaeder's view was that the Semitic Arabs were incapable of that kind of abstract and speculative thought, so that Islamic philosophy was really the creation of Persian and other races. Although the Arabs had translated a lot of Greek materials, they chose only utilitarian subjects to translate and therefore they had failed to inherit the Graeco-Latin humanism that was the special heritage of Western Europe. In the long run, Islamic culture, like all other non-European forms of culture, was doomed to disappear. History was the story of the triumph of the West. After the Second World War Schaeder taught at Göttingen (1946–57), where his ideas were shaped by his literary romanticism and his racism.
⁸¹
But at the risk of labouring the obvious, this does not mean that all he published on Sufism and Manichaeanism was worthless. On the contrary, his work on Sufism was fundamental and is of lasting value and, as Annemarie Schimmel has pointed out, two of the leading Jewish scholars who fled to the United States – Gustav von Grunebaum and Franz Rosenthal – revered Schaeder.
⁸²