“For Lust of Knowing” by Robert Irwin
Published in The Independent, 2007
There is a schism that has divided the world of Oriental scholarship into two adversarial camps for a whole generation. Robert Irwin’s new book, For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their Enemies, has not been designed to add oil to these troubled waters it is more like a petrol bomb which has been casually lobbed into the flames of dissent. It is a self-confessedly partisan document which at times glows bright-red with polemic, so much so that in the last chapter it seems in danger of consuming itself in a spontaneous combustion of zeal. But whether you agree or disagree, there is no mistaking the passion that underpins the scholarship, nor the myriad ideas that sparkle within it.
Robert Irwin is the only man alive who could have carried it off. He has taken on the Herculean task of reviewing three thousand years of Western scholarship about the East not as a drier-than-dust biographical dictionary or an annotated bibliography but as a narrative which breathes life and vivacity into these decidedly odd and quirky figures. For as well as his day job as an Islamic scholar, Irwin is also a publisher and a novelist. In this work, he time and again investigates the frail dividing line between creativity and madness, between genius and self-consuming obsession. In this chronicle of chroniclers, the Orientalists are paraded for our inspection, their motives and prejudices examined by Irwin the novelist and their achievements rated by Irwin the scholar.
He is no council for the defence of all Oriental scholars. I grieved for many of my heroes as William Muir’s histories were shown to have been infected by the horrors that he witnessed in the Indian Mutiny, Massignon’s obsession with the martyrdom of al-Hajaj is traced back to the suicide of his Spanish boyfriend, while the great Arabist grammarian De Sacy (the embodiment of French Jansenist scholarship), honoured by both Napoleon and the Bourbons, never once put a foot in the Middle East. I was relieved to find that William "Oriental" Jones, Persian Browne, Lane of Cairo, poor old Ockley (bankrupted by his zeal) and Ignaz Goldziher (one of the many Hungarian Jews of linguistic genius) survived the examination and can keep their place in the pantheon of Orientalist scholar-heroes. Amongst all this formidable erudition there is also room for much discursive entertainment: where Shelley first saw Ozymandias, which tome Frankenstein would have read and how dinner with Arminius Vambary gave Bram Stocker his first nightmare vision of Dracula. We also get a nodding acquaintanceship with the passing fads of the scholars, like squaring the circle, polyglot Bibles, world chronologies and the cabalist-like search for the pre-Babel primal tongue. In its richness and fullness of life, Lust for Knowing stands beside Aubreys Brief Lives.
That however is only a small part of Irwin’s project, for its central objective is to destroy the influence and reputation of Eward Said’s Orientalism which Irwin considers "to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations" though he does confess that it would have made a good novel, for "it is exciting, packed with sinister villains and a richly imagined world.
Orientalism is an extraordinary book. It is one of the few literary criticisms to have become a best-seller, translated into 35 languages, yet at times it is virtually unreadable, with its elongated sentence structure and dangerous pile-ups of multiple clauses. Said put forward the idea that Western academics, explorers, artists and writers had over the centuries created a self-defining delusion, an innately prejudiced method of thinking about the Arabs and Islam. They had collectively (and indeed almost unconsciously) built up an image of the East that was designed to belittle, pacify and feminize it, which would legitimize its cultural, economic, social and political domination by the West. In short he argued that Western historians have only been gathering knowledge in order to conquer. This concept has launched thousands of critical reviews of hitherto accepted texts and long-held assumptions. It has offered a tectonic shift in historical perspective and a worldwide challenge to indigenous historians to rise up and become the chroniclers, editors and translators of their own past. The downside has been to ‘nationalise’ history, a sad ingratitude towards the brilliant labours of generations of selfless historians (whilst privately using them) and an erosion in scholarship.
Robert Irwin, on behalf of the living and the dead, has decided it is time to reply. As one gallops through the gallery of scholars in his company, the idea of any sort of European-wide consensus let alone an interlocking conspiracy of deception amongst these quarrelsome individualists does not seem possible. Irwin does not forgo the opportunity to hammer, and hammer again, at the many invalid assumptions, omissions, errors, mistranslations and evidence of unread books within Edward Said’s Orientalism. He points out the inevitable distortions of Said’s work because he concentrated on the French and the British, and excluded the much better-travelled Italian and Spanish, let alone the much more innovative Germans or state-directed Russians. He also points out the dangers of making assumptions from Said’s chosen area of central Arabia, without balancing it with Persia, Turkey, India, Central Asia or North Africa. He reminds the reader that before 1699 Europe’s primary relationship with Islam was not of predatory superiority but of ingrained fear, reinforced intellectually by the ecclesiastical concern that the Koran must not be translated lest it eclipse the Gospels.
After all this accomplished and highly skilful Said bashing, the reader is left in no doubt that the original premise of Orientalism is highly flawed - though in my case there is an itching desire to read it again for myself. Irwin has won this battle but what about the war?
Irwin’s book deliberately concentrates on the scholarly high ground of linguistics, philology and history. It is going to be much more difficult to disprove the orientalizing tendencies amongst the swamp ground of public opinion-makers; all the half-educated journalists, diplomats, administrators, artists, postcard photographers, poster designers, film-makers and popular historians who have also entered the field. And as for the really creative Orientalists, Flaubert, T.E.Lawrence, Disraeli and Delacroix & Co Volume Two of the Lust for Knowing is going to be uphill work.
Something of the emotional intensity behind Orientalism needs to be acknowledged as well. Said was writing not just as a literary critic but as a Palestinian in defence of his homeland, at a time when Israel had just won a fourth war in succession and had emerged as the decisive military power in the Middle East. He also shared in the Arab world’s sense of betrayal. For instead of leading the opposition to the destruction of Palestine, the Oriental scholars of the day (many of them working at London’s SOAS) were seen to be simultaneously stabbing the Islamic world in the back. The �sweeping scepticsm� of Wansbrough and Crone is no more than a thesis but it had the potential to undermine the whole foundation of Islamic identity. While professors Lewis and Grunebaum argued that the Muslim world had been in decay since the 11th century and must submit to Westernization if it was ever to revive.
There is also a highly personal element embedded into Orientalism. It has long been thought that Bernard Lewis: professor of SOAS, wartime intelligence officer, a brilliant linguist and a wonderfully fluent historian, is the real target of Orientalism. Bernard Lewis’s acknowledged role as a strategic advisor to both US and Israeli Presidents and as the eminence grise behind the Neo-Con movement makes you doubt that Edward Said’s Orientalism can ever be considered totally wrong.
“... the idea of any sort of European-wide consensus, let alone an interlocking conspiracy of deception amongst these quarrelsome individualists does not seem possible.”