Orientalism (53 page)

In most other contexts such writing would politely be called polemical. For Orientalism, of course, it is relatively orthodox, and it passed for canonical wisdom in American study of the Middle East after World War II, mainly because of the cultural prestige associated with European scholars. The point is, however, that von Grunebaum’s work is accepted uncritically by the field, even though the field itself today cannot reproduce people like him. Yet only one scholar has undertaken a serious critique of von Grunebaum’s views: Abdullah Laroui, a Moroccan historian and political theorist.

Using the motif of reductive repetition in von Grunebaum’s work as a practical tool of critical anti-Orientalist study, Laroui manages his case impressively on the whole. He asks himself what it is that
caused von Grunebaum’s work, despite the enormous mass of its detail and its apparent range, to remain reductive. As Laroui says, “the adjectives that von Grunebaum affixes to the word Islam (medieval, classical, modern) are neutral or even superfluous: there is no difference between classical Islam and medieval Islam or Islam plain and simple.… There is therefore [for von Grunebaum] only
one
Islam that changes within itself.”
¹¹⁶
Modern Islam, according to von Grunebaum, has turned away from the West because it remains faithful to its original sense of itself; and yet Islam can modernize itself only by a self-reinterpretation from a Western point of view—which, of course, von Grunebaum shows is impossible. In describing von Grunebaum’s conclusions, which add up to a portrait of Islam as a culture incapable of innovation, Laroui does not mention that the need for Islam to use Western methods to improve itself has, as an idea, perhaps because of von Grunebaum’s wide influence, become almost a truism in Middle Eastern studies. (For example, David Gordon, in
Self-Determination and History in the Third World
,
¹¹⁷
urges “maturity” on Arabs, Africans, and Asians; he argues that this can be gained only by learning from Western objectivity.)

Laroui’s analysis shows also how von Grunebaum employed A. L. Kroeber’s culturalist theory to understand Islam, and how this tool necessarily entailed a series of reductions and eliminations by which Islam could be represented as a closed system of exclusions. Thus, each of the many diverse aspects of Islamic culture could be seen by von Grunebaum as a direct reflection of an unvarying matrix, a particular theory of God, that compels them all into meaning and order: development, history, tradition, reality in Islam are therefore interchangeable. Laroui rightly maintains that history as a complex order of events, temporalities, and meanings cannot be reduced to such a notion of culture, in the same way that culture cannot be reduced to ideology, nor ideology to theology. Von Grunebaum has fallen prey both to the Orientalist dogmas he inherited and to a particular feature of Islam which he has chosen to interpret as a shortcoming: that there is to be found in Islam a highly articulated theory of religion and yet very few accounts of religious experience, highly articulate political theory and few precise political documents, a theory of social structure and very few individualized actions, a theory of history and very few dated events, an articulated theory of economics and very few quantified series, and so on.
¹¹⁸
The net result is a historical vision of Islam
entirely hobbled by the theory of a culture incapable of doing justice to, or even examining, its existential reality in the experience of its adherents. Von Grunebaum’s Islam, after all, is the Islam of the earlier European Orientalists—monolithic, scornful of ordinary human experience, gross, reductive, unchanging.

At bottom such a view of Islam is political, not even euphemistically impartial. The strength of its hold on the new Orientalist (younger, that is, than von Grunebaum) is due in part to its traditional authority, and in part to its use-value as a handle for grasping a vast region of the world and proclaiming it an entirely coherent phenomenon. Since Islam has never easily been encompassed by the West politically—and certainly since World War II Arab nationalism has been a movement openly declaring its hostility to Western imperialism—the desire to assert intellectually satisfying things about Islam in retaliation increases. One authority has said of Islam (without specifying
which
Islam or aspect of Islam he means) that it is “one prototype of closed traditional societies.” Note here the edifying use of the word
Islam
to signify all at once a society, a religion, a prototype, and an actuality. But all this will be subordinated by the same scholar to the notion that, unlike normal (“our”) societies, Islam and Middle Eastern societies are totally “political,” an adjective meant as a reproach to Islam for not being “liberal,” for not being able to separate (as “we” do) politics from culture. The result is an invidiously ideological portrait of “us” and “them”:

The triviality of most of the examples (marrying four wives, fasting or eating, etc.) is meant as evidence of Islam’s all-inclusiveness, and its tyranny. As to
where
this is supposed to be happening, we
are not told. But we are reminded of the doubtless nonpolitical fact that Orientalists “are largely responsible for having given Middle Easterners themselves an accurate appreciation of their past,”
¹²⁰
just in case we might forget that Orientalists know things by definition that Orientals cannot know on their own.

If this sums up the “hard” school of the new American Orientalism, the “soft” school emphasizes the fact that traditional Orientalists have given us the basic outlines of Islamic history, religion, and society but have been “all too often content to sum up the meaning of a civilization on the basis of a few manuscripts.”
¹²¹
Against the traditional Orientalist, therefore, the new area-studies specialist argues philosophically:

Good. But
how
does one know the “things that exist,” and to what extent are the “things that exist”
constituted
by the knower? This is left moot, as the new value-free apprehension of the Orient as something that exists is institutionalized in area-studies programs. Without tendentious theorizing, Islam is
rarely
studied,
rarely
researched,
rarely
known: the naiveté of this conception scarcely conceals what ideologically it means, the absurd theses that man plays no part in setting up both the material and the processes of knowledge, that the Oriental reality is static and “exists,” that only a messianic revolutionary (in Dr. Kissinger’s vocabulary) will not admit the difference between reality out there and in his head.

Between the hard and soft schools, however, more or less diluted versions of the old Orientalism flourish—in the new academic jargons in some cases, in the old ones in others. But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a “classical” Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is
that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically “objective.” A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).

The extraordinary thing is that these notions persist without significant challenge in the academic and governmental study of the modern Near Orient. Lamentably, there has been no demonstrable effect—if there has been a challenging gesture at all—made by Islamic or Arab scholars’ work disputing the dogmas of Orientalism; an isolated article here or there, while important for its time and place, cannot possibly affect the course of an imposing research consensus maintained by all sorts of agencies, institutions, and traditions. The point of this is that Islamic Orientalism has led a contemporary life quite different from that of the other Orientalist subdisciplines. The Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (who are primarily Americans) led a revolution during the 1960s in the ranks of East Asia specialists; the African studies specialists were similarly challenged by revisionists; so too were other Third World area specialists. Only the Arabists and Islamologists still function unrevised. For them there are still such things as
an
Islamic society,
an
Arab mind,
an
Oriental psyche. Even the ones whose specialty is the modern Islamic world anachronistically use texts like the Koran to read into every facet of contemporary Egyptian or Algerian society. Islam, or a seventh-century ideal of it constituted by the Orientalist, is assumed to possess the unity that eludes the more recent and important influences of colonialism, imperialism, and even ordinary politics. Clichés about how Muslims (or Mohammedans, as they are still sometimes called) behave are bandied about with a nonchalance no one would risk in talking about blacks or Jews. At best, the Muslim is a “native informant” for the Orientalist. Secretly, however, he remains a despised heretic who for his sins must additionally endure the entirely thankless position of being known—negatively, that is—as an anti-Zionist.

There is of course a Middle East studies establishment, a pool of interests, “old boy” or “expert” networks linking corporate business, the foundations, the oil companies, the missions, the military, the foreign service, the intelligence community together
with the academic world. There are grants and other rewards, there are organizations, there are hierarchies, there are institutes, centers, faculties, departments, all devoted to legitimizing and maintaining the authority of a handful of basic, basically unchanging ideas about Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs. A recent critical analysis of the Middle East studies operation in the United States shows, not that the field is “monolithic,” but that it is complex, that it contains old-style Orientalists, deliberately marginal specialists, counterinsurgency specialists, policymakers, as well as “a small minority … of academic power brokers.”
¹²³
In any event, the core of Orientalist dogma persists.

As an instance of what, in its highest and most intellectually prestigious form, the field now produces, let us consider briefly the two-volume
Cambridge History of Islam
, which was first published in England in 1970 and is a regular summa of Orientalist orthodoxy. To say of this work by numerous luminaries that it is an intellectual failure by any standards other than those of Orientalism is to say that it could have been a different and better history of Islam. In fact, as several more thoughtful scholars have noted,
¹²⁴
this kind of history was already doomed when first planned and could not have been different, or better in execution: too many ideas were uncritically accepted by its editors; there was too much reliance on vague concepts; little emphasis was placed on methodological issues (which were left as they have been standing in Orientalist discourse for almost two centuries); and no effort was put forth to make even the idea of Islam seem interesting. Moreover, not only does
The Cambridge History of Islam
radically misconceive and misrepresent Islam as a religion; it also has no corporate idea of itself as a history. Of few such enormous enterprises can it be true, as it is of this one, that ideas and methodological intelligence are almost entirely absent from it.