For Lust of Knowing (50 page)

His elitist views meant that his books were sought out by fascists and neo-Nazis. Since Guénon despised both academic research and common sense, it was inevitable that he would denounce both the methods and findings of Orientalists. In
Orient et Occident
(1924) he condemned what he saw as the fantasies and errors of the Orientalists. English translators of Oriental texts took no real effort to understand the texts they were translating. Orientalists suffered from intellectual myopia. Their failure to take the advice of the authorized representatives of the civilizations they studied was disgraceful. German Orientalists were worse than the English, and German Orientalists had a near monopoly in the interpretation of Oriental doctrines. They invariably reduced those doctrines to something systematic that they could understand. Guénon thought the Germans grossly exaggerated the importance of Buddhism in the history of Indian culture and he thought that the notion of an Indo-Aryan group of languages was absurd. German Orientalism was ‘an instrument in the service of
German national ambition'. According to Guénon, the West was interested in Oriental philosophies ‘not to learn from them… but to strive, by brutal or insidious means, to convert them to her own way of thinking and to preach to them'.
¹²
The irony is that his ideas about the primordial nature of the Vedanta derived ultimately from the theories of German Orientalists.

There is some overlap between the thinking of René Guénon and that of the Iranian academic and Sufi, Hossein Nasr (b. 1933).
¹³
Nasr, who studied at Harvard and MIT, nevertheless sneers at the trappings of modernity and abhors the secular premises of academic thinking. Thus, for example, he rejects orthodox scientific theories about the evolution of life on earth. He supports polygamy because four wives symbolize stability. Nasr writes as a member of a moral and intellectual elite who are certain that they know the great truth behind all exoteric religions. Nasr acknowledges that Orientalists have found certain aspects of the Qur'an problematic, but he maintains that the problems ‘arise not from scholarship but from a certain theological and philosophical position that is usually hidden under the guise of rationality and objective scholarship. For Muslims, there has never been the need to address these “problems” because Muslims accept the revealed nature of the Qur'an, in the light of which these problems simply cease to exist.'
¹⁴
The use of source-critical techniques by Orientalists to date and test the authenticity of Hadiths has also been denounced by Nasr as ‘one of the most diabolical attacks made against the whole structure of Islam'.

Nasr's version of Islam is a Gnostic one, in which the exoteric religion is a vehicle for an inner truth that is revealed only to initiates. Not all Muslims are happy with Nasr's particular interpretation of Islam. One finds a more orthodox strain of Muslim religious criticism of Orientalism in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer and religious activist (1906–66).
¹⁵
In the 1930s and 1940s Qutbworked for the Egyptian Ministry of Education and led a second life as a literary man about town. However, everything changed when in 1948
he was sent to the United States to study education there. He was disgusted by the loose morals and anti-Arab racism he encountered: ‘During my years in America, some of my fellow Muslims would have recourse to apologetics as though they were defendants on trial. Contrariwise, I took an offensive position, excoriating the Western
jahiliyya
[paganism], be it in its much-acclaimed religious beliefs or in its depraved and dissolute socio-economic and moral conditions: this Christian idolatry of the Trinity and its notion of sin and redemption which make no sense at all; this Capitalism, predicated as it is on monopoly and interest-taking, money-grubbing, and exploitation; this Individualism which lacks any sense of solidarity and social responsibility other than that laid down by the law; that crass and vacuous materialistic perception of life, that animal freedom which is called permissiveness, that slave-market dubbed “women's liberation”.'
¹⁶
Among other things, he denounced the churches as ‘entertainment centres and sexual playgrounds'.

On his return to Egypt, Qutbjoined the Muslim Brotherhood and became a religious activist. In 1954 he and other members of the Brotherhood were rounded up by Nasser's regime and Qutb was to spend ten years in prison. He was released in 1964 and then rearrested in 1965 for his alleged part in a plot to assassinate Nasser. He was hanged in 1966. Qutbwas a prolific writer, particularly on the need for a new jihad against all forms of infidelity. His main work was a multi-volume commentary on the Qur'an,
Fi Zilal al-Qur'an
(‘In the Shade of the Qur'an'). In that commentary, he returned again and again to the argument that modern Muslims were living in an age of
jahiliyya,
that is to say that they were to all intents and purposes pagans and that their nominal profession of Islam did not absolve them of the charge of infidelity. As noted above, Qutb had read Muhammad Asad and he shared Asad's hostile view of Orientalists: ‘Hundreds and thousands have infiltrated the Muslim world, and they still do in the guise of Orientalists.' Qutbalso maintained that ‘it would be extremely short-sighted of us to fall into the illusion that when the Jews and Christians discuss Islamic beliefs or Islamic history, or when they make proposals concerning Muslim society or Muslim politics or economics, they will be doing it with good intentions'.
¹⁷
In another clear echo of Asad, Qutbwrote: ‘Thus the orientalist prejudice
against Islam is an inherited instinct and a natural characteristic based upon the effects created by the Crusades with all their sequels on the minds of the early Europeans.' More generally, Qutb's writings have had a vast influence on Muslim fundamentalist activism in recent decades.

The absolute authenticity of the divine revelation of the Qur'an and the categorical truth of the Prophet's mission are so evident to some Muslims that they have found it impossible to accept that such matters can ever be criticized in good faith. Historically or philologically based criticisms made by Orientalists of the traditional Muslim account of the origins of Islam have been dismissed as being an expression of something sinister – perhaps a Zionist conspiracy, or a recrudescence of the spirit of the Crusades. The Pakistani Maryam Jameelah, in
Islam Versus the West
(1962), picked on Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who had taught in Lahore before moving to McGill University in Montreal, and denounced his
Islam in Modern History
for its alleged hostility to Palestine (though I can find no such hostility anywhere in the book). More reasonably, she attacked him for expressing the wish that Muslims would make their religion more compatible with Western ideas.
¹⁸
That kind of thing was very common among Western pundits on Islam writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Cantwell Smith thought that the Arabs' failure to produce a Paine or a Voltaire meant that there was no principled secular alternative to Islam in Arab society, whereas Jameelah did not believe that there should be a secular alternative to Islam. She also targeted the Egyptian intellectual Taha Husayn, who, she claimed, had forgotten that the Christians had lost the true gospel: ‘All that the Christians possess are four of the apocryphal biographies of Jesus which were not canonized until centuries after his death.' In another book,
Islam and Orientalism
, Jameelah described Orientalism as ‘an organized conspiracy… based on social Darwinism to incite our youth to revolt against their faith and scorn the entire legacy of Islamic history and culture as obsolete'.
¹⁹

In an article entitled ‘The Problems of Orientalists', published in 1971, Hamid Algar, the Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at Berkeley, California, denounced the unfavourable picture of Islam that Grunebaum presented in
Medieval Islam
. He quite reasonably criticized Arberry for spreading himself too widely. He thought that
it was extraordinary that some Muslims regarded the unbelieving Schacht as a great expert on Hadith with almost as much authority as the great medieval Muslim experts, al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. More generally Algar noted that Orientalists were curiously obsessed with issues to do with alien influences on Islam and forgeries. Most sweepingly of all, he questioned the special status of Western-style rationality.
²⁰

A. L. Tibawi's ferocious polemics, ‘English-Speaking Orientalists: a Critique of Their Approach to Islam and ArabNationalism', ‘A Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs', and ‘On the Orientalists Again', published in 1964, 1979 and 1980 respectively, provide striking examples of an embittered Muslim's response to Orientalism.
²¹
Tibawi, a Muslim of Palestinian origin who taught at London University's Institute of Education, resented the way Islamic topics were being taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies next door. He had also read and been influenced by Kurd ‘Ali and in the ‘Second Critique' he cited Kurd ‘Ali's view that most Orientalists had ‘political aims, inimical to our interests, that some of them are priests, missionaries or spies using Orientalism as a means towards an end'.

He prefaced his onslaught in ‘English-Speaking Orientalists' by declaring that his remarks were ‘not conceived in any spirit of controversy. It must not be mistaken for an apology for any creed, religious or national.' But what followed was fierce (and the two articles that followed ‘English-Speaking Orientalists' were even more vehement and the attacks increasingly
ad hominem
). Taken together, the three articles constitute a thesaurus of academic abuse: ‘speculation and guesswork', ‘offensive', ‘speculative', ‘very little respect for the intelligence of the reader', ‘audacious and extreme', ‘chose to join the ranks of those who denigrate Islam and Arabnationalism', ‘arrogant assurance', ‘subjective prejudice', ‘reckless writer and presumptuous pupil', ‘an undercurrent of fanaticism', ‘famous for nothing in particular, except in adapting or adopting well-known ideas', ‘prolific in an
area where little effort is required', ‘blatant factual mistakes', ‘fantastic theory', ‘disjoint, digressive and rambling', ‘insidious campaign to adulterate Islamic history', ‘howling anachronisms', ‘tendentious statements', ‘untenable assertions', ‘partisan and unscientific', ‘political Zionist bias', ‘jumpy and shallow patchwork', ‘affected rhetoric and absurd hyperbole', ‘pseudo-historians', ‘blind bias', ‘drivel', ‘useless journalese', ‘rash irony', ‘streak of vanity', ‘immoderate vehemence', ‘biased citation of witnesses', ‘discourteous writer', ‘plagiarism', ‘colossal failures', ‘hackneyed dictum', ‘arrogant assurance', ‘excessive use of polysyllabic vocabulary', ‘shackled by a legacy of medieval prejudices', ‘the purveyors of “amity of hate”', and so on and on in a torrent of bile. The proposition that the misconceptions of Orientalists are so absurd that they are not worth refuting in detail recurs as a favourite leitmotiv throughout Tibawi's three articles.

As a devout Muslim, Tibawi believed that only Muslims were competent to interpret their religion and at several points he suggested that non-Muslim scholars should steer clear of discussing what were matters of faith, for, as far as he was concerned, ‘scientific detachment' could only be achieved by submitting to Islam. It is not surprising that few Orientalists in Britain agreed. Though Tibawi perceived that Christians were doomed to misunderstand Islam, he could not imagine that the converse might be possible. The Christian refusal to accept Muhammad as the last and most important of God's prophets was offensive to him: it never seems to have occurred to him that any Christians might take offence at his refusal to accept the Gospels and their message that Jesus was the Son of God.

Besides being a Muslim, Tibawi was also an Arab of Palestinian origin who believed fervently in Arab nationalism, as well as identifying strongly with the sufferings of the Palestinian Arabs. He believed that Orientalism had a political as well as a religious agenda and that much of what the Orientalists wrote was intended to damage the Arabcause or to conceal the past crimes of the colonialists. Furthermore he tended to identify Arabnationalism with Islam, so that whoever attacked the one attacked the other. Given his anti-Zionism, it was inevitable that he should particularly single out Jewish scholars as Orientalist villains: ‘There is an abundance of evidence that the old spirit of hatred still animates a great deal of the works
that pass under the academic label.' The ‘Jewish writer' Bernard Lewis, in
The Arabs in History
(1950), refused to accept the Qur'an as the Word of God and suggested that the Prophet's teachings had been influenced by Jewish and Christian doctrines. Lewis's failure to accept the divine origin of Islam was offensive to Tibawi, who judged him to be ‘audacious and extreme'. Lewis was also attacked for an article he wrote in
The Cambridge History of Islam
, in which he cited some medieval Arab historians who had described Saladin as an ‘ambitious military adventurer'. It is easy to guess that Lewis's frequently declared support for the state of Israel provoked Tibawi's attacks on his scholarship.

Tibawi tastelessly accused Elie Kedourie (another Jew) of having written an Orientalist equivalent to the Nazi textbook,
Der Weg zum Reich
. Tibawi does not actually name the book in question, but he seems to be referring to the volume of scholarly essays by Elie Kedourie entitled
The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Essays
(1970). Kedourie was also accused of not being ‘courteous to predecessors he did not agree with'. (It would be pleasant to think that Tibawi was making a joke at his own expense here.) One of Kedourie's many sins was to have produced evidence that two of the leading intellectuals and social agitators in the nineteenth-century Middle East, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, were not believing Muslims. Tibawi did not dispute the evidence but claimed that they had subsequently been ‘rehabilitated and became recognized as leaders of modern Islamic thought'.