Commentary
p. 95-102
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : orientalisme
Texte intégral
1On this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism’s publication, Marc Gaborieau and Baber Johansen are the appropriate scholars to comment on Edward Said’s book, and on orientalism in general. Marc Gaborieau knows French orientalism very well, as he does know area studies and the work of those who specialise in the dialogue and competition of Asian religions. Ironically, a week ago at a conference in the United Arab Emirates, I gave a lecture on “Islam and Buddhism” and I arrived at conclusions that contradict those of Professor Gaborieau’s well-known study on Islam and Tibetan Buddhism. In addition to his significant original studies on Islamic jurisprudence, Professor Johansen has published studies on orientalism and its critics, state and religion, and Islamic civilization. I was impressed to find professor Johansen’s lecture to be much more insightful and even-handed than other critiques of German orientalism.
2I will not so underestimate Edward Said’s thesis as to say that it is simplistic, nor that it belongs to the previous phase of colonial criticism. In any case, such a view does not address the validity or invalidity of the thesis itself, which, as I will explain below, is highly problematic. Notwithstanding this, it is important to be concerned with Said’s work since its discussion of the nature of Muslim-Western relations over the long-term has had a great impact on Arabs and Muslims. The radical nature of Said’s criticism made his analysis of the crisis between Islam and the West not unlike a surgical operation. Given the comprehensive nature of that crisis, such an approach might have been necessary in order to remove any misperception and dispel any unjust miscalculation of the two hundred years dialectic of disruption and continuity experienced by the West and Islam.
3This is the positive aspect of the thesis, if I may call it that. The problematic aspect of the thesis relates to orientalism’s effects on Arabs and Muslims. It is known that nationalists and Islamists were criticizing orientalism long before Abdallah Laroui, Anwar Abd al-Malek or Edward Said. When Said’s Orientalism was translated into Arabic, it was considered to be the analysis of a Westerner – a view confirmed by the ironic critique of the Syrian Marxist Sadiq Jalal al-Azm. Nationalists and Islamists treated the book as the work of a great western intellectual, one knowledgeable of the intricacies of the western culture, who has uncovered its inner workings and conspiracies against the Arabs and Muslims. Orientalism became the vehicle that the West employed to understand our main issues: to dominate us, on the one hand, and to mis-represent us, on the other. So in addition to feeling threatened we, including our leftist and Islamic students, were made to feel trivial.
4Edward Said is not definitely responsible for this feeling. He tried to rectify some of the misunderstandings related to his opinions in his treatise “Footnotes on Orientalism” – but to no avail. The books of Bryan Turner – Marx and the End of Orientalism and Max Weber and Islam – had effects similar to that of Orientalism, although these two books were less known because Said’s writings in the eighties on the Palestine problem made him immune to criticism. When Edward Said criticized the Palestinian Hamas because of its suicide operations leading to killing of civilians, the audience was dumbfounded. They could not believe that Edward Said could say that.
5Orientalism did not only affect the Arab and Muslim audiences. In different ways it also affected the orientalists themselves. Understandably, most of them took positions against it. But young orientalist scholars, especially in France during the eighties, refused to be called orientalists and claimed that they were specialists in the sociology of Islam or the social history of Islam. Others, mostly British and Germans, claimed that their speciality was Islamic studies or Islamwissenschaft. Yet, a third group of orientalists insisted that they were primarily historians with different focus: the history of the Middle East, medieval Arab and Islamic history, Islamic legal history of the Arabs or Arab philology. Only a small minority acknowledged the orientalist label.
6The nature of the discipline, in fact whether it was an independent discipline at all, is a significant issue. Said focused, erroneously, on this point. Professor Johansen mentioned a story of Fleischer with his father when he went to Paris to study Arabic philology with de Sacy. Briefly, the story shows that oriental studies were not an independent science or discipline but fell between theology and history. Later it did become a discipline in its own right, but when the German state wanted to determine which policies it should follow vis-à-vis the Ottoman state, it appointed Ranke as official Ottoman historian. No orientalist was appointed because the general impression was that such a task should go to historians; the orientalists were not considered since most of them originally came from the ranks of theology.
7Thus I am compelled to disagree with professor Johansen on another issue. Liberal theology has not claimed for itself the task of liberation or, at least, renaissance outside of Germany. This means that German orientalists who came from theology were very conservative, not liberal. With the exception of Ewald, in fact, there are no liberals among them. This is why Wellhausen decried the political activities of his teacher Ewald, on account that such activities were unbecoming a theologian and a scholar. This is why I see that the influence of eighteenth-century romanticism, which endured in the nineteenth century to make itself manifest in an interest in the Arabic language and Arab and Islamic history, as is known from the historicist school.
8Professor Gaborieau has been pleased with the development of French oriental studies in the last few decades. Professor Johansen, on the other hand, is pessimistic about German oriental studies after the Second World War. Gaborieau is happy because he thinks that he has finally found the scientific affiliation for oriental studies or islamic studies in the sociology of Islam, while the classical Islamic era falls within the field of comparative religion. We are part of the social sciences and when we speak about medieval Islam, we belong to the comparative sciences. It seems that professor Johansen wishes German oriental studies could be as advanced as French oriental studies, so that in Germany, too, philologies and histories could be done away with in favour of the methods of the humanities and social sciences, which should include oriental studies. This is why in his exposition he is so appreciative of the orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker for his wanting to be included among the social scientists. However, I see that Becker has been a historian close to cultural anthropology rather than to Max Weber, regardless of their friendship.
9Edward Said ignored the nuances of his subject matter, regarding oriental studies as an independent discipline and judging orientalists accordingly. Consequently, orientalists were made responsible for the animosities between the East and the West because of their working for so-called colonialist governments. Orientalists were made responsible for perceptions and ideas as well as practices and politics. I remember I was studying at Tübingen when many reviews of Said’s book appeared. One of the zealous leftist students wanted to challenge our professor Heinz Halm on the issue of orientalists working for colonialism. The only figure he could recall, though, was the then-retired orientalist Rudi Paret. He said Paret had worked as a translator in Feldmarschall Rommel’s army when he was conducting operations in the Libyan desert during the Second World War!
10In summation, and without downplaying a century and a half of orientalist achievement, orientalists in Germany, France and England were not the primary actors in determining their countries’ perceptions of and policies toward the Islamic East. Neither were they central in influencing the ideas and practices of European societies. Edward Said did well to write Imperialism and Culture ten years after Orientalism. There he dealt with the perceptions and ideas that have been advanced or influenced by philosophers, poets, novelists and historians toward the East. The knowledge they disseminated, whether while working for governments or not, is indeed of substance. Now and for the last three decades, the Islamists have been added to their number as experts.
11Nevertheless, I asked Bernard Lewis what his opinion was of these neo-conservatives who were citing him all the time. I asked him: “Did you, as an orientalist or as an expert, have any influence on American politics in the Middle East or on the Americans’ notion of the place?” He answered that no one had asked him officially, only in private, and that many of their citations, their mis-conceptions and misunderstandings could not be blamed on him. “But”, he said, “my books benefited from it, because I sold about one million copies of What Went Wrong and in six months the second one sold about 250 thousands copies. So some of these neo-conservatives are my students, like Kramer and Pipes, but I don’t think I have influenced them or influenced the policies of the government. And last but not least I am against the invasion of Iraq.”
12The year Orientalism appeared, John Wansborough’s book on the Qur’an was published, as were other critical and radical studies by Crone, Cook, Calder, Hawting, Rippin, and Zimmermann. These studies give the impression of a return to the philology of Wellhausen and Nöldeke, while the truth is totally otherwise. During the eighties, two anthropological theories to explain the origin of Islam and its contemporary developments spread among young orientalists – those of Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz. Young orientalists competed amongst themselves to prove that there was nothing in the first century of Islam, a tabula rasa, and that all ideas, including the originality, historicity and codification of the Qur’an, were a mode of anthropology. The vast scope of traditional orientalist knowledge that was based on languages, history, and textual analysis has stopped attracting new recruits in western universities. The neo-revisionists moved to either deconstruct what the previous orientalists had built or to deny, negate and uncover the so-called unthinkable. They go all back to the first century success of Islam – without a good grounding in history or languages – only to discover the unthinkable, not to study the texts or to see what was happening at the time or to study the system. Consequently, Edward Said’s campaign against classical orientalism was its funeral dirge. What came after orientalism, after these orientalist critiques, was the so-called anthropology of Islam.
13On this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Said’s Orientalism, this great discipline of oriental studies seems torn and obsolescent and everybody seems to be fleeing it. What is fashionable now is the anthropology of Islam, which is a new science that lacks identity and therefore is accessible to all. What is left of Edward Said’s book is its great effort at collection and reference as well as its thesis that Islam’s relations with the West have been bad for the last two hundred years. But is orientalism the reason for this situation or these relations? I don’t think so. If the East and the West are to meet they can do so only out of time, and out of place!
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