Orientalism (49 page)

The representations of Orientalism in European culture amount to what we can call a discursive consistency, one that has not only history but material (and institutional) presence to show for itself. As I said in connection with Renan, such a consistency was a form of cultural praxis, a system of opportunities for making statements about the Orient. My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which I do not for a moment believe—but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. Representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has said of all the operations of language, they are deformations. The Orient as a representation in Europe is formed—or deformed—out of a more and more specific sensitivity towards a geographical region called “the East.” Specialists in this region do their work on it, so to speak, because in time their profession as Orientalists requires that they present their society with images of the Orient, knowledge about it, insight into it. And to a very large extent the Orientalist provides his own society with representations of the Orient (
a
) that bear his distinctive imprint, (
b
) that illustrate his conception of what the Orient can or ought to be, (
c
) that consciously contest someone else’s view of the Orient, (
d
) that provide Orientalist discourse with what, at that moment, it seems most in need of, and (
e
) that respond to certain cultural, professional, national, political, and economic requirements of the epoch. It will be evident that even though it will never be absent, the role of positive knowledge is far from absolute. Rather, “knowledge”—never raw, unmediated, or simply objective—is what the
five attributes of Orientalist representation listed above
distribute
, and redistribute.

Seen in such a way, Massignon is less a mythologized “genius” than he is a kind of system for producing certain kinds of statements, disseminated into the large mass of discursive formations that together make up the archive, or cultural material, of his time. I do not think that we dehumanize Massignon if we recognize this, nor do we reduce him to being subject to vulgar determinism. On the contrary, we will see in a sense how a very human being had, and was able to acquire more of, a cultural and productive capacity that had an institutional, or extrahuman, dimension to it: and this surely is what the finite human being must aspire to if he is not to be content with his merely mortal presence in time and space. When Massignon said “nous sommes tous des Sémites” he was indicating the range of his ideas over his society, showing the extent to which his ideas about the Orient could transcend the local anecdotal circumstances of a Frenchman and of French society. The category of Semite drew its nourishment out of Massignon’s Orientalism, but its force derived from its tendency to extend out of the confines of the discipline, out into a broader history and anthropology, where it seemed to have a certain validity and power.
⁸⁹

On one level at least, Massignon’s formulations and his representations of the Orient did have a direct influence, if not an unquestioned validity: among the guild of professional Orientalists. As I said above, Gibb’s recognition of Massignon’s achievement constitutes an awareness that as an alternative to Gibb’s own work (by implication, that is), Massignon was to be dealt with. I am of course imputing things to Gibb’s obituary that are there only as traces, not as actual statements, but they are obviously important if we look now at Gibb’s own career as a foil for Massignon’s. Albert Hourani’s memorial essay on Gibb for the British Academy (to which I have referred several times) admirably summarizes the man’s career, his leading ideas, and the importance of his work: with Hourani’s assessment, in its broad lines, I have no disagreement. Yet something is missing from it, although this lack is partly made up for in a lesser piece on Gibb, William Polk’s “Sir Hamilton Gibb Between Orientalism and History.”
⁹⁰
Hourani tends to view Gibb as the product of personal encounters, personal influences, and the like; whereas Polk, who is far less subtle in his general understanding of Gibb than Hourani, sees Gibb as the culmination
of a specific academic tradition, what—to use an expression that does not occur in Polk’s prose—we can call an academic-research consensus or paradigm.

Borrowed in this rather gross fashion from Thomas Kuhn, the idea has a worthwhile relevance to Gibb, who as Hourani reminds us was in many ways a profoundly institutional figure. Everything that Gibb said or did, from his early career at London to the middle years at Oxford to his influential years as director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, bears the unmistakable stamp of a mind operating with great ease inside established institutions. Massignon was irremediably the outsider, Gibb the insider. Both men, in any case, achieved the very pinnacle of prestige and influence in French and Anglo-American Orientalism, respectively. The Orient for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference. Like Massignon, Gibb boasted of friendships with Muslims, but they seemed—like Lane’s—to have been useful friendships, not determining ones. Consequently Gibb is a dynastic figure within the academic framework of British (and later of American) Orientalism, a scholar whose work quite consciously demonstrated the national tendencies of an academic tradition, set inside universities, governments, and research foundations.

One index of this is that in his mature years Gibb was often to be met with speaking and writing for policy-determining organizations. In 1951, for instance, he contributed an essay to a book significantly entitled
The Near East and the Great Powers
, in which he tried to explain the need for an expansion in Anglo-American programs of Oriental studies:

The terms of this new relationship were spelled out later in “Area Studies Reconsidered.” Oriental studies were to be thought of not so much as scholarly activities but as instruments of national policy towards the newly independent, and possibly intractable,
nations of the postcolonial world. Armed with a refocused awareness of his importance to the Atlantic commonwealth, the Orientalist was to be the guide of policymakers, of businessmen, of a fresh generation of scholars.

What counted most in Gibb’s later vision was not the Orientalist’s positive work as a scholar (for example, the kind of scholar Gibb had been in his youth when he studied the Muslim invasions of Central Asia) but its adaptability for use in the public world. Hourani puts this well:

Yet no such later vision could have been possible without a fairly rigorous amount of preparation in Gibb’s earlier work, and it is there that we must first seek to understand his ideas. Among Gibb’s earliest influences was Duncan Macdonald, from whose work Gibb clearly derived the concept that Islam was a coherent system of life, a system made coherent not so much by the people who led that life as by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious practice, idea of order, in which all the Muslim people participated. Between the people and “Islam” there was obviously a dynamic encounter of sorts, yet what mattered to the Western student was the supervening power of Islam to make intelligible the experiences of the Islamic people, not the other way around.

For Macdonald and subsequently for Gibb, the epistemological and methodological difficulties of “Islam” as an object (about which large, extremely general statements could be made) are never tackled. Macdonald for his part believed that in Islam one could perceive aspects of a still more portentous abstraction, the Oriental mentality. The entire opening chapter of his most influential book (whose importance for Gibb cannot be minimized),
The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam
, is an anthology of unarguable declaratives about the Eastern or Oriental mind. He begins by saying that “it is plain, I think, and admitted that the conception of the Unseen is much more immediate and real to the Oriental than to the western peoples.” The “large modifying elements which seem, from
time to time, almost to upset the general law” do not upset it, nor do they upset the other equally sweeping and general laws governing the Oriental mind. “The essential difference in the Oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things.” Another aspect of this difficulty—which Gibb was later to blame for the absence of form in Arabic literature and for the Muslim’s essentially atomistic view of reality—is “that the difference in the Oriental is not essentially religiosity, but the lack of the sense of law. For him, there is no immovable order of nature.” If such a “fact” seems not to account for the extraordinary achievements of Islamic science, upon which a great deal in modern Western science is based, then Macdonald remains silent. He continues his catalogue: “It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental. The supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment.” That an
occasion
—namely, the historical and geographical birth of monotheism in the Orient—should in Macdonald’s argument become an entire theory of difference between East and West signifies the degree of intensity to which “Orientalism” has committed Macdonald. Here is his summary:

None of this, of course, is particularly new. From Schlegel to Renan, from Robertson Smith to T. E. Lawrence, these ideas get repeated and re-repeated. They represent a decision about the Orient, not by any means a fact of nature. Anyone who, like Macdonald and Gibb, consciously entered a profession called Orientalism did so on the basis of a decision made: that the Orient was the Orient, that it was different, and so forth. The elaborations, refinements, consequent articulations of the field therefore sustain and prolong the decision to confine the Orient. There is no perceivable irony in Macdonald’s (or Gibb’s) views about Oriental liability to be stampeded by a single idea; neither man seems able to recognize the extent of
Orientalism
’s liability to be stampeded by the single idea of Oriental difference. And neither man is concerned by such wholesale designations as “Islam” or “the Orient” being used as proper nouns, with adjectives attached and verbs streaming forth, as if they referred to persons and not to Platonic ideas.

It is no accident, therefore, that Gibb’s master theme, in almost everything he wrote about Islam and the Arabs, was the tension between “Islam” as a transcendent, compelling Oriental fact and the realities of everyday human experience. His investment as a scholar and as a devout Christian was in “Islam,” not so much in the (to him) relatively trivial complications introduced into Islam by nationalism, class struggle, the individualizing experiences of love, anger, or human work. Nowhere is the impoverishing character of this investment more evident than in
Whither Islam?
, a volume edited and contributed to, in the title essay, by Gibb in 1932. (It also includes an impressive article on North African Islam by Massignon.) Gibb’s task as he saw it was to assess Islam, its present situation, its possible future course. In such a task the individual and manifestly different regions of the Islamic world were to be, not refutations of Islam’s unity, but examples of it. Gibb himself proposed an introductory definition of Islam; then, in the concluding essay, he sought to pronounce on its actuality and its real future. Like Macdonald, Gibb seems entirely comfortable with the idea of a monolithic East, whose existential circumstances cannot easily be reduced to race or racial theory; in resolutely denying the value of racial generalization Gibb rises above what had been most reprehensible in preceding generations of Orientalists. Gibb has a correspondingly generous and sympathetic view of Islam’s universalism and tolerance in letting diverse ethnic and religious communities coexist peacefully and democratically within its imperium. There is a note of grim prophecy in Gibb’s singling out the Zionists and the Maronite Christians, alone amongst ethnic communities in the Islamic world, for their inability to accept coexistence.
⁹⁴

But the heart of Gibb’s argument is that Islam, perhaps because it finally represents the Oriental’s exclusive concern not with nature but with the Unseen, has an ultimate precedence and domination over all life in the Islamic Orient. For Gibb Islam
is
Islamic orthodoxy,
is
also the community of believers,
is
life, unity, intelligibility, values. It
is
law and order too, the unsavory disruptions of jihadists and communist agitators notwithstanding. In page after page of Gibb’s prose in
Whither Islam?
, we learn that the new commercial banks in Egypt and Syria are facts of Islam or an Islamic initiative; schools and an increasing literacy rate are Islamic facts, too, as are journalism, Westernization, and intellectual societies. At no point does Gibb speak of European colonialism
when he discusses the rise of nationalism and its “toxins.” That the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its resistance, political and nonpolitical, to colonialism, never occurs to Gibb, just as it seems to him finally irrelevant to note whether the “Islamic” governments he discusses are republican, feudal, or monarchical.