Orientalism Revisited

Art, Land and Voyage

Ian Netton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136159848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 marks the inception of orientalism as a discourse. Since then, Orientalism has remained highly polemical and has become a widely employed epistemological tool. Three decades on, this volume sets out to survey, analyse and revisit the state of the Orientalist debate, both past and present.

The leitmotiv of this book is its emphasis on an intimate connection between art, land and voyage. Orientalist art of all kinds frequently derives from a consideration of the land which is encountered on a voyage or pilgrimage, a relationship which, until now, has received little attention.

Through adopting a thematic and prosopographical approach, and attempting to locate the fundamentals of the debate in the historical and cultural contexts in which they arose, this book brings together a diversity of opinions, analyses and arguments.

Part I
Imagining the Orient

1
The Muslim world in British historical imaginations

‘Re-thinking Orientalism’?

K. Humayun Ansari

Ever since the publication of Orientalism in 1978 there has been a great deal of debate about Edward Said’s thesis and propositions. His study has provoked much controversy but it has also generated an immense amount of positive intellectual development across many humanities and social sciences disciplines. Said’s objective was to explore the relationship between power and knowledge; between imperialism and scholarship. He thus viewed ‘Orientalism’ as a Western discourse that essentialises the Muslim world in pejorative ways, one intimately entwined with imposition of imperial power and offering ideological justifications for it.¹

While a wide range of academics have subsequently developed or refined Said’s framework, others have challenged and, indeed, denounced it, as Robert Irwin puts it, as a perverted muddle of ‘malignant charlatanry’.² In terms of the production of historical knowledge about the peoples, politics and cultures of the Orient, the disagreements have been to do with approaches, sources, and interpretive paradigms. An increasing number of scholars more generally have come to accept that knowledge is socially constructed and that complex developments contribute towards shaping our understandings of the world.³ Hence, social and political interests play a significant role in the adoption of one way of construing reality rather than another. Others claim that they tell it like it is; they allow facts to speak for themselves, and have no interest in the social utility of the historical knowledge that they produce. Intellectual curiosity, the lust for knowing, is their only drive.⁴ Bernard Lewis, thus, defended Orientalism as ‘pure scholarship’, a discipline that strove towards objectivity.⁵ On the other hand, A.J. Arberry (1905–1969) in his compilation, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (1960), while denying that he himself had any political agendas, accepted that politics, nonetheless, intruded upon academic scholarship.⁶ Indeed, it could be argued that politics is always present, but not necessarily where people claim to locate it, since politics has less to do with interactions than actions and results, which are always unpredictable. It is thus difficult to put intentions on trial.⁷

Absolute claims such as these, however, demand closer inspection, and so what I want to explore in this essay is how far there were scholars who were genuinely ‘purely’ interested in Islam and Muslim societies and so studied them for their own sake. I will do this by looking at the places that Islam and Muslims have occupied in British historical imaginations from the outset of the early modern period to the present.

One of the key reasons for examining the past is to uncover the shape of human experience: can we discern any patterns in it, and how can we make sense of it through time? For many centuries, in the context of Britain, ‘the march of history’ was understood in sacred terms. For Christian writers historical knowledge bore witness to the grand theme of Creation and the Last Judgement. But as Islam spread through the Mediterranean, posing a potentially lethal theological and political threat as it conquered the bastions of Eastern Christendom, the mysterious rise of this ‘falsehood’, against the truth of Christianity, compelled an explanation. How to stem its rising tide and protect Christians and Christendom [and convert Muslims] from this scourge?

The response of medieval and early modern Christian scholars was to create ‘a body of literature concerning the faith, its Prophet, and his book, polemic in purpose and scurrilous in tone, designed to protect and discourage rather than to inform’.⁸ Attacks on Islam were in part a way of propping up ideological conformity among various Christian denominations, in Britain as elsewhere.⁹ With military power unable to withstand Islamic expansion, refutation through argument and missionary work was considered the best option for overcoming the challenge, for which knowledge of the Muslim adversaries, their beliefs and practices, was considered crucial. The lengthy title of William Bedwell’s (1562– 1632) best-known work – Mahomet Unmasked. Or a Discoverie of the manifold Forgeries, Falsehoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducer Mahomet. With a demonstration of the Insufficienie of his Law, contained in the cursed Alcoran. Written long since in Arabicke and now done in English – underlined its similar polemical rationale.¹⁰ In much of this scholarship, therefore, a repertoire of Christian legends nourished by imaginative fantasies, rather than hard historical evidence about Islam and Muslims, served the purpose. While the explanations provided were never fully satisfying, writers such as Bedwell succeeded in creating a portrait of an exotic, and deluded, ‘other’ – and helped to embed a negative perception in the ‘British’ social imaginary, something that possesses considerable emotional resonance even to this day.

That said, when we look at the early modern period, we find that, in the British Isles at large, there was little popular awareness of, let alone curiosity about, Muslims – and even less so in serious literature. Most of those who had sufficient resources and interest to sponsor Arabic studies were either churchmen (as was the case with most forms of learning, not just this field) or closely aligned with their causes who, while acknowledging that acquisition and study of Arabic manuscripts was useful insofar as they contained much valuable scientific information,¹¹ primarily aimed at producing materials to achieve salvation of oneself and of wayward Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims.¹² Thomas Adams (1586– 1668), a wealthy draper, created the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge in 1632 in the hope that he might, through his patronage, contribute to converting Muslims.¹³ Four years later, William Laud (1573–1645), Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, established its Professorship in Arabic, primarily as part of the struggle against Catholicism.

In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, those in Europe who studied Islam tended to do so not out of interest in that faith per se, but primarily to pursue intra-confessional polemic.¹⁴ During the Reformation, Islam was frequently used by one group of Christians to criticise another. Protestants were likened to Muslims for deviating from and perverting the true faith. Such developments, of course, need to be located in the context of Ottoman expansion in competition with other European states. It is noticeable that, while there was considerable conflict between the states, it did not take the form of ‘Islamdom’ versus ‘Christendom’.

The 1600s are credited with having marked the beginning of ‘modern’ British historical writing.¹⁵ The confident authority of the Christian world-view began to crumble as secularised interpretations of history, centred on human rather than divine activity, gained ground. Reason combined with empirical evidence was coming to be accepted as the final authority for deciding what was historically credible. Scholars now increasingly possessed the resources and linguistic potential to investigate more rigorously than before the nature of Muslim beliefs, history, traditions and practices. Hence, writings on Islam became contradictory, reflecting the fragmented views held by Europeans on the subject, influenced by political thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza.¹⁶ The old stereotypes were repeated by most writers, but now alongside newer observations that found favourable things in Islam. For example, there was The General Historie of the Turkes (1603) by Richard Knolle (c. 1540–1610). A fear-inducing chronicle, it was filled with accounts of Ottoman atrocities, cruelties and torture. Knolle, like earlier English writers, called the Ottoman Empire the ‘great terror of the world’, Islam the work of Satan and Muhammad a false prophet. But – here is the difference – Knolle also acknowledged Turkish determination, courage and frugality, and the massive twelve hundred-page account contained much positive information about Muslims, until then considered mortal enemies.

Edward Pococke’s Specimen Historae Arabum (1649), while casting Islam as the religion of the false prophet, likewise managed, by deploying Arabic sources and historians, to avoid the distortions of medieval polemic and presented what was, for its time, an arguably more balanced view of Muslim society.¹⁷ A little later Paul Rycaut, in The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), drew a picture of Ottoman despotism, unequivocally corrupt and backward, straight out of the old stock of ignorance and fear. But it also recounted accurate, knowledgeable and insightful details of Turkish life and history, of Ottoman political, military and religious organisation, of the diversity of Islamic beliefs and traditions. In it there was also acknowledgement of mutuality of commercial interests and benefits and admiration of many aspects of Islamic culture.¹⁸ Most importantly, having been written by British men, these histories inevitably lacked the breadth of understanding of Muslim societies that women travellers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) would contribute, thanks to their experiences of spheres of life to which they, as females, had exclusive access.

By the end of the seventeenth century, while the intellectual climate had changed significantly in favour of ‘freethinking’, both orthodox Christians and so-called ‘deviants’ continued to critique each other. Humphrey Prideaux’s (1648–1724) Life of Mahomet (1697) aimed to uncover ‘The true nature of imposture fully displa’d in the life of Mahomet, with a discourse annex’d for the vindication of Christianity from this charge’,¹⁹ while Henry Stubbe’s (1632–1676) anti-Trinitarian tract, Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism (written in 1671 but not eventually published until nearly 250 years later),²⁰ trenchantly challenged ‘the fabulous inventions of the Christians’²¹ in the light of reason, contrasting this with his positive assessment of the life of Muhammad and Islam’s rationality.²² What is particularly interesting is that both these authors used Pococke’s work and sources extensively but interpreted them in radically different ways to arrive at the opposite poles in their conclusions – one hostile (it should be added, largely in response to the challenge of Deism rather than Islam), the other sympathetic, to Islam and Muslims.²³

What we see emerging out of these controversies by the eighteenth century are more sophisticated understandings of Islam, though, given the broader religious context in which they were operating, their authors could hardly be expected to write wholly positively of a re...