For Lust of Knowing (49 page)

In 1991 Said had been diagnosed as having leukaemia. In his final platform appearances he seemed tired and drawn. He died, aged sixty-seven, on 24 September 2003. He received many respectful and affectionate obituaries.
⁵⁹

But it is a scandal and damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said's argument about Orientalism could ever have been taken seriously. Obviously I find it impossible to believe that his book was written in good faith. If Said's book is as bad as I think it is, why has it attracted so much attention and praise in certain quarters? I am uncertain of what the correct answer might be. Perhaps part of it may be a resentment of the long-established ‘guild of Orientalists' on the part of some adherents of younger disciplines such as cultural studies and sociology. Some writers have joined the fray on Said's side, not because they care two hoots about the real history of Orientalism, but because they are anti-Zionist or anti-American. In such cases, sneering at Orientalists must serve as a soothing displacement activity. Said's fashionable brandishing of Gramsci and Foucault must have attracted some students. His obscurely voiced and facile doubts about the possibility of objectivity also fitted in with recent intellectual fashions. The book's general thesis fed upon the West's hand-wringing and guilt about its imperialist past. There are, of course, some grains of truth in the charges that Said raised and, for example, a few Orientalists, including Snouck Hurgronje, Massignon and Berque did work for colonial authorities. On the whole, though, the good qualities of
Orientalism
are those of a good novel. It is exciting, it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined, but essentially fictional.

If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.

Edward Gibbon's account in
The Decline and Fall of

the Roman Empire
of how the Caliph Umar allegedly

had the library of Alexandria burnt in 641, but both

remark and fire are entirely apocryphal. The library

had been destroyed long before the coming of Islam.

The refusal of most Orientalists to take Islam at its own valuation as a revelation from the Divine has caused offence to many Muslims. The sheer degree of hatred with which Western culture in general and Orientalism in particular have been regarded in some Muslim circles is not widely understood. Mullahs and ‘
ulamá
' (Muslim religious scholars) have become accustomed over the centuries to engaging in polemic with Christian and Jewish religious scholars, and it is perhaps because of this that they often find it difficult to accept that Orientalist reinterpretations of such matters as the career of the Prophet or the revelation of the Qur'an are not always motivated by Christian or Jewish confessional rivalry with Islam.

Kurd ‘Ali (1876–1953), a historian and journalist, twice became Minister of Education in Syria.
¹
He was also one of the first to challenge the intellectual hegemony of the Orientalists. In 1931 he had
attended an international conference of Orientalists held at Leiden and was horrified by what he saw as an outrageous misrepresentation of Islam on the part of Western scholars. His
al-Islam wa al-Hadara al-‘Arabiyya
(‘Islam and Arabic Civilization') (2 volumes, 1934–6) sought to explain and correct the misconceptions of the Orientalists. According to Kurd ‘Ali, the main reason that the Orientalists fell into error was their belief that Christianity was superior to Islam. Moreover, the West's belittlement of Arab achievements was essentially a form of
Shu‘ubiyya
. That is to say that it was a modern European revival of the cultural and literary movement that had flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries in which Persians, Nabataeans and others disparaged the language and culture of the Arabs, while vaunting their own histories and achievements. Kurd ‘Ali denounced the triumphalism of the West and declared the European conquest of America to be a great crime. Like the nineteenth-century Islamic philosopher and political activist al-Afghani, he tried to rebut Ernest Renan's thesis that the Arabs, because of their Semitic mindset, were innately anti-scientific. Kurd ‘Ali suggested that the only Arabs that Renan had ever met were Syrian fishermen and, on that basis, he had decided that Arabs were innately anti-science. Even so, Kurd ‘Ali decided that Renan was by no means all bad, as he had once expressed the wish to be a Muslim praying in a mosque.

Kurd ‘Ali polemicized against Christian missionaries and Jesuit scholars such as Père Lammens, whom he characterized as the ‘Peter the Hermit of Orientalism'. As we have seen, Kurd ‘Ali's hostility was entirely understandable, as most of what Lammens wrote was indeed driven by a ferocious and religiously motivated hostility towards Islam. Though Kurd ‘Ali resented most of what the Orientalists had written about his culture, he tended to defend that culture and to refute hostile portrayals of the Qur'an, polygamy, Arabcultural achievements and so on by quoting more positive judgements by other Westerners. He was especially fond of quoting from Gustave Le Bon's favourable portrait of Islam in the popularizing history,
La Civilisation des Arabes
(1884). In this book, the Arab mind was presented as having been shaped by its cultural achievements. Le Bon was an unscholarly hack writer who knew no Arabic, but Kurd ‘Ali thought that this was of less importance than Le Bon's positive attitude towards
Islam and Arabs.
²
Though Le Bon was a racist, he seemed to be a pro-Arabracist, but what Kurd ‘Ali and other Muslim enthusiasts for Le Bon's work failed to spot was that, though he had written enthusiastically about the achievements of Arab civilization, those achievements were all in the past, and Le Bon believed that Arab culture was incapable of any further development. (This line of reasoning was to have a great impact on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Arabhistorians of Islamic civilization, who tended to present that civilization as a glory that was past.) Unlike many who came after him, Kurd ‘Ali was also impressed by the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
, as well as by Western scholarly editions of the medieval biographical dictionaries of Ibn Hajar and al-Safadi.

A more conspiratorial view of Orientalism was put forward by a leading Iranian intellectual, Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–69).
³
Al-i Ahmad was a stylish, witty, vigorous novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He was also a friend of the great Iranian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, and a brilliant commentator on Hedayat's extraordinary novel,
The Blind Owl
. Though Al-i Ahmad flirted with communism, he became disillusioned with it and with life in general. His most curious work,
Gharbzadegi
(later translated as
Occidentosis: A Plague from the West
, 1984), circulated as an underground publication from 1962.
Gharbzadegi
can be (awkwardly) translated as ‘Occidentosis', ‘Euromania', ‘West-toxification' or ‘West-struckness'. ‘I speak of “Occidentosis” as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree.'
⁴
Al-i Ahmad's angry polemic could never have been published in the Shah's Iran, for, though he attacked the West, his denunciation of the Shah's regime was no less fervent, as he regarded both the modernization policies and the extravagant imports of the imperial Pahlavi family as major factors behind the pernicious Westernization of Iran.
Gharbzadegi
presented history as a millennial
conflict between the West on the one hand and Iran and the rest of the world on the other. Everything of importance that happened in Iran and in the world at large was masterminded by the West: ‘One must see what would-be corporate colonists and what supportive governments are secretly plotting, under cover of every riot, coup d'état, or uprising in Zanzibar, Syria or Uruguay.'
⁵
In Iran's case it was oil that attracted the predatory interest of Britain and other powers.

Politics apart, Al-i Ahmad was disturbed by what he saw happening to Iranian culture. Occidentosis, an undiscriminating enthusiasm for all things Western, had reduced the Iranians to a people who had lost their tradition and historical continuity, ‘but having only what the machine brings them'. He denounced the Orientalists' treatment of Asians as if they were raw material for a laboratory: ‘This explains why foremost among all the encyclopaedias written in the West is the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
. We remain asleep, but the Westerner has carried us off to the laboratory in this encyclopaedia.'
⁶
Elsewhere in
Gharbzadegi
, he lamented that his fellow citizens had become ‘the playthings of orientalists'.
⁷
The practice of citing books by Westerners as if they were absolutely authoritative seemed to him pretty stupid: ‘Even when he [the Oriental] wants to learn about the East, he resorts to Western sources. It is for this reason that orientalism (almost certainly a parasite growing on the root of imperialism) dominates thought and opinion in the occidentotic nations.'
⁸
The West had become a repository of plundered relics and manuscripts from the East. The Orientalist conspiracy ran in tandem with the triumph of Western technology, for ‘the Orientalist hums a pretty Iranian tune, while his colleague sells machine parts'. Even Western intellectuals were disturbed by the mechanization of the spirit and Al-i Ahmad, cultured polyglot that he was, cited Camus's
The Plague
, Ionesco's
Rhinoceros
, and Ingmar Bergman's
Seventh Seal
in support of this contention.

Gharbzadegi
is an original and passionate piece of writing and as such an appealing read. Al-i Ahmad was incapable of being dull. He asked far more questions than he could answer and there were painful ambiguities in his anti-Western polemic, for even in
Gharbzadegi
he had used Western sources to support his arguments. While he gave
Islam credit for being that element in Iranian culture that was least infected by Occidentosis, he still attacked the mullahs for their rigidity, hypocrisy and superstition. While he loathed machines and conferred an apocalyptic significance on mechanization, he still feared that the triumph of mechanization might be inevitable.

Al-i Ahmad was a bon viveur who was steeped in Western culture. He drank plenty and rarely said his prayers. When he went on the haj pilgrimage, he raged against his fellow pilgrims and against the Saudi authorities. At first sight he seems an unlikely figure to be a harbinger of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Yet it is so, for his treatise against West-toxification was read by and crucially influenced ‘Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as other key spiritual authorities in the holy city of Qum. Later Khomeini would denounce Orientalists in terms similar to Al-i Ahmad's: ‘They sent missionaries into Muslim cities, and there found accomplices within the universities and various information or publication centres, mobilized their Orientalist scholars in the service of imperialism – all of that only so as to distort Islamic truths.'
⁹
As far as Khomeini and his followers were concerned, the West was only gathering knowledge about Iran in order to control it.

The influence of Al-i Ahmad's critique of Orientalism was felt only in Iran. A separate tradition of anti-Orientalism developed in the Arab-speaking world and non-Arab converts to Islam played a significant part in its development. Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) was chiefly famous in his lifetime for his books
Islam at the Crossroads
(1934) and
The Road to Mecca
(1954), as well as for his translation of the Qur'an into English.
¹⁰
He was born Leopold Weiss, a Polish Jew. He travelled widely and had an adventurous life, about which he wrote unreliably. He converted to Islam in 1926.
Islam at the Crossroads
, in its Arabic version
Al-Islam ‘ala muftariq al-turuq
, had a great deal of influence on Sayyid Qutb(on whom see below). In this book, Asad championed Islam against the West. In his eyes, modern
Europe, with its monstrous racism, imperialism and Orientalism, was born out of the spirit of the Crusades. ‘With very few exceptions, even the most eminent of European Orientalists are guilty of an unscientific partiality in their writings on Islam.' Asad traced the Orientalists' hostility back to the Crusades. (In general, Muslim historians and cultural commentators have tended to over-exaggerate the importance of the Crusades and they often attempt to make a rather dubious link between the Crusades and modern imperialism.)

Another convert to Islam, René Guénon (1886–1951), was raised a Catholic and dabbled with various occult and Masonic groups, but soon became disillusioned. He embarked on a quest for a primordial tradition that would be free of the contamination of the modern age.
¹¹
(Guénon hated democracy, science, feminism and anything else that was not part of an ancient elitist tradition.) Guénon believed that in the Hindu Vedanta he had found the primordial tradition but, somewhat curiously, he decided to convert to Islam and become a Sufi, as this was more ‘convenient'. There was enough of an authentic primordial tradition in Islam for it to be acceptable to him. He converted in 1912 and settled in Egypt where he produced a steady stream of treatises on the Vedanta, Sufism, occultism and the horrors of mass culture.