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Western
Perceptions of Islam
The
19th Century Perceptions of Islam: From the
Pilgrim to the Orientalist
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Ibrahim
Kalin
George Washington University
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14/04/2003
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Outside
the world of theology, philosophy and literature, there were many
Europeans whose thirst and curiosity for the Orient could not be
quenched by reading books. So they went to the Islamic world and
produced a sizeable literature of travel accounts about Muslim
countries, their customs, cities, and so on. These were the European
travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries whose
ranks included such celebrities as Burton, Scott, Kinglake, Disraeli,
Curzon, Warburton, Nerval, Chardin, Chateaubriand, Flaubert,
Lamartine, Pierre Loti, and Tavernier.
The
wealth of information these travelers brought back to Europe
contributed to the popular, if not academic, perceptions of Islam
and Muslims whereby the impenetrable world of the Saracens and the
Orientals was now opened for many Europeans through the first-hand
accounts of their fellow men and women. In some curious ways, the
travel accounts of European pilgrims to the Islamic world and to the
‘Orient’ had an impact similar to that of the Crusades almost a
millennium ago: a first hands-on experience of the Orient was made
available for public consumption in Europe and it was entrenched not
in the religious concerns and hostilities of Christian theologians
but in the new mission of the Occident to ‘civilize’ the Orient
– the celebrated mission civilisatrice of the colonial
period.
Like
their intellectual peers in the 17th and 18th
centuries, those travelers were interested in the worldly qualities
of Islamdom, perhaps with a good intention of dispelling some
long-standing misgivings about a world in which Europe had now a
vital interest or simply because Islam did not offer anything of
value in view of the theological, if not historical, superiority of
the Christian faith to which they belonged. Their narrations,
ranging from recondite and arid inventory of names and places to
spirited depictions and imaginary ruminations, display not so much
interest in penetrating into the Islamic world as reflecting and
constructing it through the eyes of an upper class Westerner.
A
somewhat crude indication of this is the fact that many of those
travelers, notwithstanding such notable exceptions as Sir Richard
Burton, did not learn any of the Islamic languages or made any
serious study of the beliefs and practices of Muslims other than
what was available to them in Europe as common knowledge. An
important outcome of this literature was what Said called
‘Orientalizing the Orient’, viz., the further romanticizing of
Muslim peoples, reinforcing the mystique of the Orient, the exotic
harem, the sensuous East, the Oriental man and his concubines,
streets immersed in mystery, and so on, all of which are to be seen
vividly in the naturalistic European paintings of the Orient in the
19th century. Needless to say, these images of the Orient
are still alive in the Western mind and continue to be an
inexhaustible resource for Hollywood constructions of Islam and
Muslims.
It
would not be a stretch to say that the 19th century is
the longest period in the history Islam and the West. It was in this
century that the academic study of Islam exploded more than any one
in Europe could have imagined a generation ago. The new interest in
Islam was certainly tied to the political, economic and most
importantly colonial circumstances of the 19th century
during which time a handful of European countries had occupied a
good part of the Islamic world.
As
we can see from the long list of Orientalist scholars, the 19th
century witnessed a sudden and dramatic rise in the study of Islam,
surpassing both qualitatively and quantitatively the work of the
last millennium over a period of sixty to seventy years: Silvestre
de Sacy (1758-1838), the father of French Orientalism, E. W. Lane
(1801-1876) whose Arabic-English Lexicon is still a classic,
Karl Pfander, a German missionary working in India and famous for
his controversy with Indian Muslim scholars, J. von Hammer-Purgstall
(1774-1856), known for his meticulous studies on Ottoman history and
Arabic, Persian and Turkish poetry, William Muir whose name was
already mentioned, F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), a prominent theologian
of the Church of England and the author of The Religions of the
World and Their Relations with Christianity, a key text for the
understanding of Christian perspectives on Islam in the 19th
century, Ernest Renan (1823-1892) who incited a long controversy
with his famous lecture at Sorbonne on Islam and science to which a
number of leading Muslim intellectuals of the time including Jamal
al-Din Afghani and Namik Kemal wrote responses.
These
and many other figures writing on Islam and the Islamic world in the
19th century unearthed a new terrain for the study of
Islam and ushered in new modes of perception vis-à-vis the Islamic
world. In so far as shaping the modern Western images of Islam is
concerned, the contribution of these scholars was manifold. First,
they were the direct conduits of satisfying the curiosity of
European populace about the Islamic world that was now, after
centuries of menacing presence and bewildering success, under the
unquestionable dominance of the West. In this limited sense, the
picture of Islam that arises out of the works of such scholars as
mentioned above was intractably tied to the new colonial identity of
Western Europe.
Secondly,
the torrent of information about the Muslim world, its history,
languages, geography, ethnic texture, and so on was as much
knowledge serving scholarship as it was knowledge serving power. It
can hardly escape our attention that a good number of scholars,
travelers, and translators of the 19th century, credited
duly with relative expertise, were colonial officers sent to the
Orient with clear and detailed job descriptions. The third and, for
our purposes, the most important legacy of this period was the
completion of the groundwork for the full-fledged establishment of
what came to be known as Orientalism – a new set of categories,
typologies, classifications, terminologies, and methods of coming to
terms with things Oriental and Islamic.
Orientalism
reached a climax in the second half of the 19th century,
and a truly impressive and ambitious venture was set in motion by a
dozen or so European academics who were to mould the modern study of
Islam in Western universities. Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), Snouck
Hurgronje (1857-1936), Duncan Black Macdonald (1863-1943), Carl
Becker (1876-1933), David Samuel Margoliouth (1858-1940), Edward
Granville Browne (1862-1926), Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (1868-1945),
Louis Massignon (1883-1962), and Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb (1895-1971)
were, inter alia, the towering figures of the Orientalist
study of Islam with all of their ambitions, fervor, differences,
diligence of scholarship, and distinctly Western identities. By
producing a massive body of books, journals, articles, translations,
critical editions, reports, and academic posts for the study of
Islam, Orientalists generated an enduring legacy that has shaped the
parameters of the modern study of Islam and the Muslim world up to
our own day.
Insofar
as the relation between Islam and the West is concerned, the
Orientalist journey in the path of representing Islam contributed
very little to the amelioration of the mystique of Islam and the
Orient inherited from the pre-modern era. Some of the Western
students of Islam were simply not interested in such an enterprise
and focused their energies on their solitary work. In some other
cases, the dark image of Islam as a decadent and dying civilization,
as a backward, irrational and sensual world was reinforced and made
its ways into popular culture through fictions, TV images, Hollywood
productions, and media reporting. In this regard, Arberry’s
conciliatory remark that the seven British scholars of Islam,
including Arberry himself, whom he chose to analyze in his Oriental
Essays, “have striven, consciously or unconsciously, by the
exercise of somewhat specialized skills to help build a bridge
between the peoples and cultures of Asia and Europe” appears to be
no more than an unfinished project and unfulfilled will if it was
ever willed at all. Notwithstanding individual exceptions,
Orientalism was marred by a number of structural and methodological
problems some of which are still operative at the current
representations of Islam. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can
highlight some of these issues, albeit briefly, as follows.
First
of all, Orientalism in its early stages functioned, consciously or
unconsciously, within the matrix of the 19th century
European mindset. The currents of thought from Romanticism and
rationalism to historical criticism and hermeneutics which had
shaped Western humanities on the one hand, and the new colonial
order, on the other, were at work in the remaking of the picture of
Islam, and the Orientalists showed little interest and/or effort in
dispensing with the limitations of studying another culture with
categories that were patently Western.
It
was within this framework that the perennial search for
‘correspondences’, homogenous structures, and orthodoxies in the
Islamic tradition became a hallmark of the Orientalist tradition
whether one was dealing with popular Sufism, political history,
science, or jurisprudence. Inevitably, this has led to grotesque
generalizations, often couched in the abstract language of academic
parlance, that were no less inhibiting and essentializing than the
medireview conceptions of Islam – conceptions that continue to
play out in popular images of Islam in the West today.
Secondly,
the Orientalist tendency was to analyze the Islamic world as a case
of decaying civilization whose only import, at least for the Western
student of Islam, was either its obscure textual tradition or the
variegated responses of Muslim intellectuals to the challenges of
the modern world. For instance, all of the leading figures of
classical Orientalism were unanimous in depicting Islamic philosophy
and sciences as no more than a port for the transmission of Greek
lore to Europe.
In
reading some of the classics of Orientalism on the subject, one
hardly fails to get the impression that Islamic philosophy, if this
name was allowed at all, was essentially a long commentary in Arabic
on Greek and Hellenistic thought. The best compliment one could
accord the Islamic intellectual tradition was, in the words of von
Grunebaum, “creative borrowing”, and within this framework the
obsessive search for ‘originality’ in Islamic thought was
destined to fail. Thus Islam, having lost its universal appeal and
vitality, was seen not as a living tradition with a human face but
as an object of study to be historicized, contextualized, and
relativized.
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