Orientalism (50 page)
Authors: Edward W. Said
“Islam” for Gibb is a sort of superstructure imperiled both by politics (nationalism, communist agitation, Westernization) and by dangerous Muslim attempts to tamper with its intellectual sovereignty. In the passage that follows, note how the word
religion
and its cognates are made to color the tone of Gibb’s prose, so much so that we feel a decorous annoyance at the mundane pressures directed at “Islam”:
Islam, as a religion, has lost little of its force, but Islam as the arbiter of social life [in the modern world] is being dethroned; alongside it, or above it, new forces exert an authority which is sometimes in contradiction to its traditions and its social prescriptions, but nevertheless forces its way in their teeth. To put the position in its simplest terms, what has happened is this. Until recently, the ordinary Muslim citizen and cultivator had no political interests or functions, and no literature of easy access except religious literature, had no festivals and no communal life except in connection with religion, saw little or nothing of the outside world except through religious glasses.
To him, in consequence, religion meant everything
. Now, however, more in all the advanced countries, his interests have expanded and his activities are no longer bounded by religion. He has political questions thrust on his notice; he reads, or has read to him, a mass of articles on subjects of all kinds which have nothing to do with religion, and in which the religious point of view may not be discussed at all and the verdict held to lie with some quite different principles.… [Emphasis added]
95
Admittedly, the picture is a little difficult to see, since unlike any other religion
Islam is or means everything
. As a description of a human phenomenon the hyperbole is, I think, unique to Orientalism. Life itself—politics, literature, energy, activity, growth—is an intrusion upon this (to a Westerner) unimaginable Oriental totality. Yet as “a complement and counterbalance to European civilisation” Islam in its modern form is nevertheless a useful object: this is the core of Gibb’s proposition about modern Islam. For “in the broadest aspect of history, what is now happening between
Europe and Islam is the reintegration of western civilization, artificially sundered at the Renaissance and now reasserting its unity with overwhelming force.”
96
Unlike Massignon, who made no effort to conceal his metaphysical speculations, Gibb delivered such observations as this as if they were objective knowledge (a category he found wanting in Massignon). Yet by almost any standards most of Gibb’s general works on Islam
are
metaphysical, not only because he uses abstractions like “Islam” as if they have a clear and distinct meaning but also because it is simply never clear where in concrete time and space Gibb’s “Islam” is taking place. If on the one hand, following Macdonald, he puts Islam definitively outside the West, on the other hand, in much of his work, he is to be found “reintegrating” it with the West. In 1955 he made this inside-outside question a bit clearer: the West took from Islam only those nonscientific elements that it had originally derived from the West, whereas in borrowing much from Islamic science, the West was merely following the law making “natural science and technology … indefinitely transmissible.”
97
The net result is to make Islam in “art, aesthetics, philosophy and religious thought” a second-order phenomenon (since those came from the West), and so far as science and technology are concerned, a mere conduit for elements that are not
sui generis
Islamic.
Any clarity about what Islam is in Gibb’s thought ought to be found
within
these metaphysical constraints, and indeed his two important works of the forties,
Modern Trends in Islam
and
Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey
, flesh out matters considerably. In both books Gibb is at great pains to discuss the present crisis in Islam, opposing its inherent, essential being to modern attempts at modifying it. I have already mentioned Gibb’s hostility to modernizing currents in Islam and his stubborn commitment to Islamic orthodoxy. Now it is time to mention Gibb’s preference for the word
Mohammedanism
over
Islam
(since he says that Islam is really based upon an idea of apostolic succession culminating in Mohammed) and his assertion that the Islamic master science is law, which early on replaced theology. The curious thing about these statements is that they are assertions made about Islam, not on the basis of evidence internal to Islam, but rather on the basis of a logic deliberately outside Islam. No Muslim would call himself a Mohammedan, nor so far as is known would he necessarily feel the importance of law over theology. But what Gibb does is to
situate himself as a scholar within contradictions he himself discerns, at that point in “Islam” where “there is a certain unexpressed dislocation between the formal outward process and the inner realities.”
98
The Orientalist, then, sees his task as expressing the dislocation and consequently speaking the truth about Islam, which by definition—since its contradictions inhibit its powers of self-discernment—it cannot express. Most of Gibb’s general statements about Islam supply concepts to Islam that the religion or culture, again by
his
definition, is incapable of grasping: “Oriental philosophy had never appreciated the fundamental idea of justice in Greek philosophy.” As for Oriental societies, “in contrast to most western societies, [they] have generally devoted [themselves] to building stable social organizations [more than] to constructing ideal systems of philosophical thought.” The principal internal weakness of Islam is the “breaking of association between the religious orders and the Muslim upper and middle classes.”
99
But Gibb is also aware that Islam has never remained isolated from the rest of the world and therefore must stand in a series of external dislocations, insufficiencies, and disjunctions between itself and the world. Thus he says that modern Islam is the result of a classical religion coming into disynchronous contact with Romantic Western ideas. In reaction to this assault, Islam developed a school of modernists whose ideas everywhere reveal hopelessness, ideas unsuited to the modern world: Mahdism, nationalism, a revived caliphate. Yet the conservative reaction to modernism is no less unsuited to modernity, for it has produced a kind of stubborn Luddism. Well then, we ask, what is Islam finally, if it cannot conquer its internal dislocations nor deal satisfactorily with its external surroundings? The answer can be sought in the following central passage from
Modern Trends
:
Islam is a living and vital religion, appealing to the hearts, minds, and consciences of tens and hundreds of millions, setting them a standard by which to live honest, sober, and god-fearing lives. It is not Islam that is petrified, but its orthodox formulations, its systematic theology, its social apologetic. It is here that the dislocation lies, that the dissatisfaction is felt among a large proportion of its most educated and intelligent adherents, and that the danger for the future is most evident. No religion can ultimately resist disintegration if there is a perpetual gulf between its demands upon the will and its appeal to the intellect of its followers.
That for the vast majority of Muslims the problem of dislocation has not yet arisen justifies the ulema in refusing to be rushed into the hasty measures which the modernists prescribe; but the spread of modernism is a warning that re-formulation cannot be indefinitely shelved.
In trying to determine the origins and causes of this petrifaction of the formulas of Islam, we may possibly also find a clue to the answer to the question which the modernists are asking, but have so far failed to resolve—the question, that is, of the way in which the fundamental principles of Islam may be re-formulated without affecting their essential elements.
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The last part of this passage is familiar enough: it suggests the now traditional Orientalist ability to reconstruct and reformulate the Orient, given the Orient’s inability to do so for itself. In part, then, Gibb’s Islam exists
ahead
of Islam as it is practiced, studied, or preached in the Orient. Yet this prospective Islam is no mere Orientalist fiction, spun out of his ideas: it is based on an “Islam” that—since it cannot truly exist
—appeals
to a whole community of believers. The reason that “Islam” can exist in some more or less future Orientalist formulation of it is that in the Orient Islam is usurped and traduced by the language of its clergy, whose claim is upon the community’s mind. So long as it is silent in its appeal, Islam is safe; the moment the reforming clergy takes on its (legitimate) role of reformulating Islam in order for it to be able to enter modernity, the trouble starts. And that trouble, of course, is dislocation.
Dislocation in Gibb’s work identifies something far more significant than a putative intellectual difficulty within Islam. It identifies, I think, the very privilege, the very ground on which the Orientalist places himself so as to write about, legislate for, and reformulate Islam. Far from being a chance discernment of Gibb’s, dislocation is the epistemological passageway into his subject, and subsequently, the observation platform from which in all his writing, and in every one of the influential positions he filled, he could survey Islam. Between the silent appeal of Islam to a monolithic community of orthodox believers and a whole merely verbal articulation of Islam by misled corps of political activists, desperate clerks, and opportunistic reformers: there Gibb stood, wrote, reformulated. His writing said either what Islam could not say or what its clerics would not say. What Gibb wrote was in one sense temporally ahead of Islam, in that he allowed that at some point in the future
Islam would be able to say what it could not say now. In another important sense, however, Gibb’s writings on Islam predated the religion as a coherent body of “living” beliefs, since his writing was able to get hold of “Islam” as a silent appeal made to Muslims
before
their faith became a matter for worldly argument, practice, or debate.
The contradiction in Gibb’s work—for it is a contradiction to speak of “Islam” as neither what its clerical adherents in fact say it is nor what, if they could, its lay followers would say about it—is muted somewhat by the metaphysical attitude governing his work, and indeed governing the whole history of modern Orientalism which he inherited, through mentors like Macdonald. The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work. Gibb’s
oeuvre
purports to be Islam (or Mohammedanism) both
as it is
and
as it might be
. Metaphysically—and only metaphysically—essence and potential are made one. Only a metaphysical attitude could produce such famous Gibb essays as “The Structure of Religious Thought in Islam” or “An Interpretation of Islamic History” without being troubled by the distinction made between objective and subjective knowledge in Gibb’s criticism of Massignon.
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The statements about “Islam” are made with a confidence and a serenity that are truly Olympian. There is no dislocation, no felt discontinuity between Gibb’s page and the phenomenon it describes, for each, according to Gibb himself, is ultimately reducible to the other. As such, “Islam” and Gibb’s description of it have a calm, discursive plainness whose common element is the English scholar’s orderly page.
I attach a great deal of significance to the appearance of and to the intended model for the Orientalist’s page as a printed object. I have spoken in this book about d’Herbelot’s alphabetic encyclopedia, the gigantic leaves of the
Description de l’Égypte
, Renan’s laboratory-museum notebook, the ellipses and short episodes of Lane’s
Modern Egyptians
, Sacy’s anthological excerpts, and so forth. These pages are signs of some Orient, and of some Orientalist,
presented
to the reader. There is an order to these pages by which the reader apprehends not only the “Orient” but also the
Orientalist, as interpreter, exhibitor, personality, mediator, representative (and representing) expert. In a remarkable way Gibb and Massignon produced pages that recapitulate the history of Orientalist writing in the West as that history has been embodied in a varied generic and topographical style, reduced finally to a scholarly, monographic uniformity. The Oriental specimen; the Oriental excess; the Oriental lexicographic unit; the Oriental series; the Oriental exemplum: all these have been subordinated in Gibb and Massignon to the linear prose authority of discursive analysis, presented in essay, short article, scholarly book. In their time, from the end of World War I till the early sixties, three principal forms of Orientalist writing were radically transformed: the encyclopedia, the anthology, the personal record. Their authority was redistributed or dispersed or dissipated: to a committee of experts (
The Encyclopedia of Islam
,
The Cambridge History of Islam
), to a lower order of service (elementary instruction in language, which would prepare one not for diplomacy, as was the case with Sacy’s
Chrestomathie
, but for the study of sociology, economics, or history), to the realm of sensational revelation (having more to do with personalities or governments—Lawrence is the obvious example—than with knowledge). Gibb, with his quietly heedless but profoundly sequential prose; Massignon, with the flair of an artist for whom no reference is too extravagant so long as it is governed by an eccentric interpretative gift: the two scholars took the essentially
ecumenical
authority of European Orientalism as far as it could go. After them, the new reality—the new specialized style—was, broadly speaking, Anglo–American, and more narrowly speaking, it was American Social Scientese. In it, the old Orientalism was broken into many parts; yet all of them still served the traditional Orientalist dogmas.
