The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism

Reversing the Gaze

Susannah Heschel, Umar Ryad, Susannah Heschel, Umar Ryad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367663902
• eBook ISBN: 9781315313757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Edward Said's Orientalism, now more than fifty years old, has to be one of the most frequently cited books among academics in a wide range of disciplines, and the most frequently assigned book to undergraduates at colleges.

Among the common questions raised in response to Said's book: Did scholars in Western Europe provide crucial support to the imperialist, colonialist activities of European regimes? Are their writings on Islam laden with denigrating, eroticized, distorting biases that have left an indelible impact on Western society? What is the "Orientalism" invented by Europe and what is its impact today?

However, one question has been less raised (or less has been done about the question): How were the Orientalist writings of European scholars of Islam received among their Muslim contemporaries? An international team of contributors rectify this oversight in this volume.

1 On cooks and crooks

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and the orientalists in England and France (1840s–1850s)

Tarek El-Ariss

The Arab “discovery” of Orientalism in the nineteenth century generated both fascination with and contestation of European scholarship on Islam and Arabic language and literature. For instance, in Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz (An Imam in Paris) (1834), Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī (d. 1873) relates his encounter with Silvestre de Sacy (d. 1838),¹ heaping praise on this scholar at the École des Langues Orientales and founder of Journal Asiatique.² Working under the supervision of Edmé-François Jomard (d. 1862), the editor of Description de l’Egypte, al-Ṭahṭāwī expresses great admiration for de Sacy’s knowledge of Arabic language and literature, and quotes in Takhlīṣ parts of his translation and commentary on al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt.³ By way of comparison, al-Ṭahṭāwī states that this eminent scholar’s erudition and prestige are such that they lead the reader to imagine what al-Farābī (d. 950) was like in his day. al-Ṭahṭāwī illustrates this through an anecdote about al-Farābī’s first visit to Sayf al-Dawla al-Ḥamadānī’s (r. 944–967) court in Aleppo, during which he bewildered attendees with his knowledge, language mastery, and musical genius. By conjuring up al-Farābī in his discussion of de Sacy, al-Ṭahṭāwī reclaims a tradition of Arab-Islamic learning that produces wonder and fascination as well, and to which he, an al-Azhar scholar, is heir.

While Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī’s (d. 1897) response to Ernest Renan’s (d. 1892) claim about the incompatibility of Islam with Science in 1883 was a key site of the Arab-Islamic critique of Orientalism,⁴ this critical engagement could be traced to al-Ṭahṭāwī, Ḥasan al-Aṭṭār (d. 1835), and other scholars from the earlier part of the century whose contributions were fundamental to the development of Arab thought during and beyond the nahḍa.⁵ The Arab-Islamic critique of Orientalism starting in the nineteenth century draws on the classical Arabic tradition of polemics and satire but also on European genres and philosophical frameworks from Voltaire to Foucault, culminating, one might argue, with Edward Said. This critical genealogy, which is benefiting from increased scholarly attention, has the potential to refigure the history of Arab-Islamic critique in the modern age, and the history and development of Orientalism in Europe. Susannah Heschel’s groundbreaking exploration of the European Jewish Orientalist tradition offers alternative critical genealogies that decenter the prevalent paradigm. Examining the works of German and Austro-Hungarian Jewish scholars of Arabic and Islam such as Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), Gustav Weil (d. 1889), and Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921), Heschel argues that this tradition sought to move beyond the purely philological and Christian- (and British- and French-) centric tradition with which Orientalism became associated.

Writing against the Semitic philologist Ernest Renan, who viewed both Islam and Judaism as stagnant Semitic religions, incapable of development and lacking mythology, Goldziher argued that Islam, like Judaism, has a receptive nature, a capacity to assimilate foreign ideas and rituals and to adapt itself to changing circumstances.⁶

Goldziher’s response to Renan thus ought to be read alongside al-Afghānī’s, thereby complicating categories such as Europe, the East, Islam, and Arabic. In the same context, Karla Malette’s argument about Southern European Orientalist scholarship that claimed an “Arab origin for a modern European national identity”⁷ serves to expand the critical framework. Finally, Hosam Abol Elah’s work aptly situates Edward Said’s own critique of Orientalism in relation to Maghrebi thinkers such as Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) whose engagement with Orientalism repositions the critical genealogy within which contemporary scholarship has been operating.⁸

In this essay, I shed light on Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s encounters with Arabists in England and France in the 1840s and 1850s, and situate his contribution in the genealogy of the critique of Orientalism that comparatively draws on the polemical tradition fundamental to the development of Arab-Islamic philosophy and thought in the classical age, satire from al-Jāḥiẓ to Voltaire, and the critique of economic production and consumerism in nineteenth-century Europe and the Ottoman Empire. al-Shidyāq identifies Orientalist knowledge production as being intimately tied to marketing strategies, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classification models, and ideological and political prejudices. al-Shidyāq offers a systematic analysis of Orientalist knowledge production, acknowledging its achievements and exposing its internal mechanisms. Critiquing the self-referential economy of this epistemological production, he identifies what Said would later term “the restorative citation of antecedent authority,” through which the academic discipline of Orientalism is constituted, and the Orient itself is imagined and reproduced.⁹ al-Shidyāq not only exposes the errors of the Orientalists he encounters but also offers an alternative to this form of knowledge in order to establish his own authority as a native scholar. In doing so, he employs the models of circulation and promotion that he associates with the Orientalists’ scholarly production, thereby revealing a complex economy wherein the native scholar is not merely a passive observer but rather contests, critiques, praises, and appropriates.

In both al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāryāq (henceforth: al-Sāq) (Leg over Leg) (1855)¹⁰ and Kashf al-mukhabbaʾ ʿan funūn Ūrubbā (henceforth: Kashf) (Revealing the Hidden in European Arts) (1863),¹¹ al-Shidyāq relates his encounters with French and British scholars whom he admires and respects yet also critiques and parodies. Revealing or unveiling (kashf)¹² the economy of Orientalist scholarship in Parisian academies and at Cambridge and Oxford, al-Shidyāq offers a satirical and scathing account of the Orientalists’ deficient knowledge and dismissal of the expertise of native scholars of Arabic. He exposes the Orientalists’ countless intentional and unintentional mistranslations of Arabic texts, including lists of their “scandalous mistakes” (aghlāṭihim al-fāḍiḥa) in his various publications.¹³ He accuses them of patching (tarqīʿ) and concocting (talfīq) in order to consolidate their theses, recasting (sabk) Arabic language and ideas to make them conform to their own. He also considers both absurd and amusing the fact that they conceal their lack of knowledge by quoting one another and emblazoning the covers of their books with lists of their prior publications and the fields in which they have worked.¹⁴ He compares this practice to what he observes in the marketplaces of Europe with regard to food labels, mocking the superlatives used to describe items’ provenance and distinguished pedigree. “They do this,” al-Shidyāq writes in the case of England, “in order to show how civilized they are” (al-marād ʿindahum min al-tamaddun).¹⁵

al-Shidyāq opposes the Arabists’ “flawed” methodology by drawing on genealogies of knowledge and critique that could be traced to the Islamic classical period. In what follows, I investigate the registers of taqlīd (imitation, tradition), ʿāda (custom), tarqīʿ (patching), sabk (recasting), and tahāfut (precipitance, infatuation, competition, etc.) deployed in al-Shidyāq’s text against Orientalist practices. I read these elements together as the basis for an overall conceptual framework of critique, which I situate in a comparative genealogy of polemics and intellectual debates (jidāl). Specifically, I argue that the interplay between tahāfut and taqlīd in al-Shidyāq’s work allows him to analyze and expose (kashf) the Orientalists’ model of knowledge production and circulation in nineteenth-century Europe. al-Shidyāq’s activation and transformation of Arab-Islamic critical tools of scholarly engagement allow us to gauge the continuity between the classical period and the nahḍa, thereby contesting the notion of an epistemic break enacted in the nineteenth century.¹⁶ This also creates the possibility of reading Edward Said’s work as part of a long trajectory of intellectual debates that coalesce in this comparative nahḍa moment with al-Shidyāq.

A wandering polemicist

Born in 1804 to a family of Maronite notables and scribes from Mount Lebanon, al-Shidyāq experienced displacement at an early age.¹⁷ Persecuted along with his brother Asʿad for working with Protestant missionaries and converting to Protestantism, al-Shidyāq moved to Cairo in 1825.¹⁸ There, he collaborated with scholars at al-Azhar and succeeded al-Ṭahṭāwī as the editor of the journal al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya. When the Maronite patriarch imprisoned and put to death his brother Asʿad in 1830,¹⁹ Aḥmad Fāris’ exile from Mount Lebanon became permanent. After nine years in Cairo, he headed to Malta, spending fourteen years working for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the British administration on the island. In 1848, he left for England in order to collaborate with Cambridge Arabist Rev. Samuel Lee (d. 1852) on translating the Bible into Arabic.²⁰ Upon completing the translation in 1850, al-Shidyāq moved to Paris only to return to London in 1853. Unable to secure employment in England, al-Shidyāq moved to Tunis in 1857, where he would convert to Islam and court Sultan Abdülmecid I (r. 1839–1861) who eventually invited him to the Ottoman capital. In Istanbul, al-Shidyāq founded the journal al-Jawāʾib in 1861, which he edited until 1884.²¹ When al-Shidyāq passed away in 1887, his body was repatriated to Lebanon and buried in the Hazmiyeh cemetery alongside the high officials of the Ottoman administration.²²

al-Shidyāq devoted a great part of his career to editing and publishing Arabic lexicons and classical texts, and this work proved influential in shaping his own philological engagements and literary production. al-Sāq, for instance, draws on the genre of the maqāma and the Arabic lexicographical tradition to portray the vagaries of a character named al-Fāryāq and his wife, al-Fāryāqiyya, as they move back and forth between Europe and the lands of the Ottoman Empire. Conjuring a lewd position and attitude in its very title, al-Sāq is a satirical and highly experimental work that unsettles fixed categories of adab (manners, respectability, ethics, literature, etc.) and challenges religion, social propriety, and learning practices. al-Shidyāq deploys mockery to expose the incoherence of al-Fāryāq’s interlocutors over the course of his travels. In one instance, al-Fāryāq parodies the monk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 On cooks and crooks: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and the orientalists in England and France (1840s–1850s)
• 2 An eastern scholar’s engagement with the European study of the east: Amin al-Madani and the Sixth Oriental Congress, Leiden, 1883
• 3 The reception of the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam: An Egyptian debate on the credibility of orientalism (1930–1950)
• 4 Arabic literature for the colonizer and the colonized: Ignaz Goldziher and Hungary’s eastern politics (1878–1918)
• 5 Islamic modernism between colonialism and orientalism: Al-Manar’s intellectual circles and Aligarh’s Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, 1898–1914 103
• 6 The frustrating authority of Mr. Wells: Islam and the politics of orientalism in Republican China
• 7 Orientalist triangulations: Jewish scholarship on Islam as a response to Christian Europe
• 8 “Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”: The German-Jewish Orientalist Josef Horovitz in Germany, India, and Palestine
• 9 Scholarship on Islamic archaeology between Zionism and Arab nationalist movements
• 10 A Muslim convert to Christianity as an Orientalist in Europe – the case of the Moroccan Franciscan Jean-Mohammed Abdeljalil (1904–1979)
• Bibliography
• Index