For Lust of Knowing (32 page)

As Becker saw it, although Islam, like Christendom, was the heir of antiquity, it had failed to assimilate all to which it was potentially an heir. From a European point of view, Islamic society was defective, as it failed to develop or acquire autonomous urban institutions, an ecclesiastical organization, feudalism, humanism, citizenship, individualism and capitalism. The European point of view was the only point of view Becker believed he could take, as he thought that it was impossible to cross cultural frontiers and understand a culture from the inside. In 1907 he was appointed to a post at Hamburg's Colonial Institute, a place for training administrators to serve in Germany's colonies. (Before the First World War, Germany had a substantial empire in Africa and the South Seas.) He was keen on using
Islamwissenschaft
(the scientific study of Islam) to further German colonial interests. Like Goldziher and the British Arabist Hamilton Gibb he took it for granted that Islamic society was dynamic and evolving and consequently took a keen interest in contemporary Middle Eastern issues. Despite the commitment to German imperialism in his early years, he was in most respects a progressive, liberal figure and in the 1920s he became Minister of Sciences, Arts and Public Instruction in the Weimar government. As a Weimarist, he viewed the rise of Hitler as a disaster. He died in the year the Nazis came to power.

Just as Nöldeke's Prussian nationalism made him stand out among his fellow Orientalists, so the practical involvement of Christian Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) with imperialist projects was unusual. The son of a Dutch Calvinist pastor, he studied biblical history and criticism at the University of Leiden. But in 1887 he abandoned his original ambition to become a Calvinist pastor and instead took up the study of Arabic with de Goeje. Hurgronje did early research on the pre-Islamic origins of the haj to Mecca. In this research and later work he was much influenced by Goldziher with whom he corresponded and it
was Goldziher who pushed him towards the study of
fiqh
(Muslim jurisprudence). Hurgronje also studied with Nöldeke in Strasburg. In 1885 he set off for the Middle East where he planned to improve his Arabic and do original research. Disguised as a Muslim, he spent several months in Mecca taking copious notes and numerous photographs. The result was a book that he published in German,
Mekka
(1888–9). This consisted of two volumes, as well as an atlas of photographs. From the first he was slightly unusual among his Orientalist peers in the interest he took in contemporary Islam.
Mekka
was a careful record of the manners and customs of the local inhabitants as well as the visiting pilgrims, detailing their beliefs, rituals and everyday life.

After his adventures in the Hejaz, Hurgronje became more interested in the Dutch East Indies. In 1889 he entered the service of the Ministry of the Colonies and left for Batavia, the Dutch centre of administration in Java. There he held a research post in the Dutch colonial administration and advised its officials on how to deal with Muslims and, more specifically, he gave guidance on points of Islamic law. He observed Islamic law as it was in contemporary practice, rather than just reading what was prescribed in the old law books. He was also interested in the survival of pagan beliefs and practices in the South East Asian version of Islam as well as the latitudinarianism of the local versions of Sufism. He produced a major report on customs and beliefs in the region of Atjeh in north-west Sumatra. He was a firm believer in the benefits of Dutch colonialism for the inhabitants of the Indies and he had no doubts about the virtues of Westernization for the Indonesians, nor about the benefits to Holland of assimilating Indonesians into Dutch society (and hence later he consistently encouraged Indonesians to come and study at Leiden University). In the meantime Indonesians needed defending from the full rigours of both colonialism and fundamentalist Islam. He feared the reactionary force of Pan-Islam. This kind of politico-religious paranoia was quite widespread at the time and in Britain it found expression in editorials in
The Times
as well as in novels by Talbot Mundy and John Buchan.

In 1906 Hurgronje returned to Holland and was appointed to the Chair of Arabic at Leiden University, but he continued to advise the
government and colonial officials. Although he was for a long time a supporter of what he saw as ethical imperialism and he had believed in educating the Indonesians to make them the partners of the Dutch, he eventually became disillusioned and turned against Dutch colonial policy. Though he had participated in shaping that policy, he was more or less unique among Dutch Orientalists in doing so. His career as an imperialist scholar-administrator has been worth dwelling on, if only for its rarity, but, though his intellectual collusion with imperialism was unusual, it was not unique.
¹⁸
The case of Becker has already been mentioned and, as we shall see, Massignon worked hard to further French colonial interests in North Africa and Syria.

Unlike most of his academic colleagues, Hurgronje had first-hand experience of Muslim societies, both in the heartlands and at the margins. Like Goldziher, he did not regard Islam as something fixed or as a body of ritual and belief with a past but no future. It was precisely Islam's power to expand, tolerate and assimilate that fascinated him. His industry and his expertise, particularly in the areas of Islamic law and Hadiths, as well as his post at Leiden, made it inevitable that he should be closely involved in the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
. In the early twentieth century Dutch and German scholars dominated Orientalism and de Goeje, Goldziher, Nöldeke and Snouck Hurgronje were the giants of their age. German Orientalists were famous for their productivity and the Syrian intellectual Kurd ‘Ali, who attended the 1928 Oxford Congress of Orientalists, noted how all the Germans who attended had stooped backs from overwork.
¹⁹

On the whole German Orientalists had been successful in emancipating themselves from the old tradition of confessional polemic. However, even in the twentieth century there were some scholars who attacked the history of Islam from a hostile Christian point of view, though the Belgian Jesuit Henri Lammens (1862–1937) was unusual in the depth of his hostility. Lammens, who taught at the Roman Catholic University of St Joseph in Beirut, wrote copiously about the origins of Islam.
²⁰
Although he took a critical view of the sources on
the subject, his criticisms owed more to confessional hostility than they did to methodological sophistication. His rule of thumbwas that any early source material that was critical of the Prophet was unlikely to have been invented and was therefore true. On the other hand, he scrutinized material favourable to the Prophet and his contemporaries in order to discredit it if possible. Reading the relevant Arabic sources was for him like ‘travelling in a region of mirages'. Lammens's hypercritical approach to the sources on early Islam led Goldziher to ask: ‘What would remain of the Gospels if he applied to them the same methods he applies to the Qur'an?' Nöldeke similarly expressed reservations about Lammens's methodology.

Lammens regarded the Prophet as a lascivious impostor, echoing here the theme of medieval Christian polemics. He attempted to give the rise of Islam a political and economic context that had been previously lacking and in
La République marchande de la Mecque vers l'an 600 de notre ère
(1910) he suggested that the aristocrats of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca had grown wealthy from spice caravans that travelled through the seventh-century Hejaz. Though there was no direct evidence for any of this, his presentation (or invention) of the socio-economic background was enormously influential and later biographers of Muhammad, such as Montgomery Watt and Maxime Rodinson, relied heavily on the model furnished by Lammens. Only in 1987 was this model systematically analysed and demolished by Patricia Crone in her
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
. Crone described Lammens as ‘a notoriously unreliable scholar whose name is rarely mentioned in the secondary literature without some expression of caution or disapproval'.
²¹
Lammens, who gloried in his ‘holy contempt for Islam', admired the Umayyad caliphs, who, he believed, had refused to allow themselves to be dominated by Islam. The seventh-century Umayyad Caliph Mu‘awiya was his particular hero, for Lammens claimed that he was the founder of the Syrian nation. On the other hand, he was not so keen on the priestcraft of the Abbasids. (In these particular prejudices he followed in the footsteps of Wellhausen.) Lammens, who loved Syria, regarded the ArabMuslim conquest as the greatest disaster that had ever befallen that region.

When one contemplates the career of Leone Caetani, Prince of Teano and Duke of Sermoneta (1869–1935), it is hard not to think of the fictional career of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, as conjured up in Tomasi di Lampedusa's marvellous novel,
Il Gattopardo
(1958, translated as
The Leopard
). Like Fabrizio, Caetani was a scholar aristocrat, but whereas Fabrizio devoted himself to astronomy, Caetani studied the early centuries of Islam. He taught himself Oriental languages and then set about compiling vast annals of the early history of Islam, constructed from lengthy translations selected from the earliest Arabic sources together with analytical commentaries. He was a positivistic disciple of Auguste Comte and had a fiercely critical approach towards those sources. Also in keeping with his positivism, he tended to minimize the role of the spiritual in history, preferring to stress economic and political factors as more important. Conflicts that were apparently religious were usually political or economic in origin. He believed that the increasing desiccation of the Arabian peninsula was a major underlying cause of the Islamic conquests, as the Arab tribes were obliged to leave their former territories and look for better pasturage elsewhere. According to Goldziher, ‘Caetani clearly demonstrates in various parts of his work on Islam, the Arabs' drive to conquest sprang chiefly from material want and cupidity…' They pushed out from the arid peninsula in a hunt for lusher territories to dominate. Although Caetani was not a Marxist, his writings gave them plenty to draw upon.

Whereas Becker had presented Islamic culture as one of the heirs of Hellenistic culture, Caetani took the opposite point of view, regarding the Islamic religion as the revolt of the East against European domination and the rejection of Greek civilization. His analytical chronicle, the
Annali dell'Islam
, was published in ten volumes in the years 1905–26. Although he had planned to take it up to 1517, the year of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, he never completed the full annals for the seventh century. He also worked on another vast enterprise, the
Onomasticon Arabicum
(an encyclopedia of Arabplace names), but this never got beyond the letter A.
²²

The anti-colonialist Caetani was nicknamed ‘the Turk' for his fierce opposition to his own country's occupation of Libya. There has been a marked tendency for Orientalists to be anti-imperialists, as their enthusiasm for Arabor Persian or Turkish culture often went hand in hand with a dislike of seeing those people defeated and dominated by the Italians, Russians, British or French. This was certainly the case with Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926).
²³
He first became emotionally involved in Near Eastern matters while still a schoolboy, because of his passionate support for the Turks in their war against the Russians (1877–8). Later in life, as an internationally renowned Cambridge professor, he campaigned for Persian freedom and democracy. The young Browne had wanted to enlist in the Turkish army, but the war with the Russians concluded while he was still struggling to teach himself the Turkish language. Instead, he went to read medicine at Cambridge. Then he took up Oriental languages as well and studied Arabic with the mesmerizingly brilliant Edward Palmer. Browne arranged tuition in Persian from a Hindu gentleman in 1880 and later studied with an eccentric Persian, who had invented his own religion and resided in Limehouse.

In 1884 Browne secured a first-class degree in the Indian Languages tripos (Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Hindustani). However, he was told by the Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, William Wright, that one really needed private means to pursue Oriental studies, as there were almost no jobs in the field: ‘And from the Government you must look for nothing, for it has long shown, and still continues to show, an increasing indisposition to offer the slightest encouragement to the study of Eastern languages.' Browne, who later in his memoir
A Year Amongst the Persians
recorded Wright's words, added, ‘Often I reflect in bitterness that England, though more directly interested in the East than any other country save Russia, offers less encouragement to her sons to engage in the study of Oriental languages than any other great European nation.'
²⁴
Having been so discouraged by Wright, Browne went to London in 1884 and, in accordance with his father's wishes, carried on with medicine at St Bartholomew's. Though work as a
medical student was arduous and distressing, he found comfort in reading the Sufis, ‘whose mystical idealism, which had long since cast its spell over my mind, now supplied me with a powerful antidote against the pessimistic tendencies evoked by the daily contemplation of misery and pain… Never before or since have I realized so clearly the immortality, greatness, and the virtue of the spirit of man, or the misery of its earthly environment: it seemed to me like a prince in rags…'
²⁵

In 1887 Browne's destiny changed. He was elected a fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, with some prospect that he might be asked to teach the Persian language. He thereupon resolved to go out to Persia in order to improve his mastery of the language. The shaping role of the
Wanderjahre
is a recurrent feature in the history of Orientalism. Many of Goldziher's and Wright's insights were first formulated as a result of their early travels in the East. Browne wrote a classic of travel literature that is also a chronicle of intellectual exploration.
A Year Amongst the Persians
details his travels through Persia in 1887–8 and his picaresque encounters with Persian noblemen, mystics, philosophers, Zoroastrian priests, magicians, ‘and social gatherings where wine and music, dance and song, beguiled away the soft spring days, or the moonlit nights'. Having read Gobineau, Browne had become particularly interested in the messianic Babi movement, but by the time he reached Persia, most of the Babis had deserted that movement and joined the breakaway Baha'i faith. The Baha'is were savagely persecuted by the Persian government and the Shi‘ite religious authorities. The courage of the Baha'is in withstanding persecution led Browne to compare them to the early Christians. While in Kerman, he received a telegram from Cambridge informing him that a lectureship in Persian had just been created and offering him the post. He thereupon returned to England.