Page 240 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes weighted heavily with all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives, and moods of Orientalism that I
have been describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized.
An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the
Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage containing the Orient. By the end of World War
I both Africa and the Orient formed not so much an intellectual spectacle for the West as a
privileged terrain for it. The scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire, and it was
this absolute unanimity between the two that provoked the only crisis in the history of Western
thought about and dealings with the Orient. And this crisis continues now. Beginning in the
twenties, and from one end of the Third World to the other, the response to empire and imperialism
has been dialectical. By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955 j the entire Orient had gained
its political independence from the Western empires and confronted a new configuration of imperial
powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unable to recognize 'its' Orient in the new Third
World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. Two alternatives opened
before Orientalism. One was to carry on as if nothing had happened. The second was to adapt the
old ways to the new. But to the Orientalist, who believes the Orient never changes, the new is
simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-Orientals (we can permit ourselves the
neologism). A third, revisionist alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, was considered
by only a tiny minority.
One index of the crisis, according to Abdel Malek, was not simply that 'national liberation
movements in the ex-colonial' Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic
'subject races'; there was in addition the fact that 'specialists and the public at large became aware
of the time-lag, not only between orientalist science and the material under study, but also -- and
this was to be determining -- between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work
in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism. The Orientalists -- from Renan to
Goldziher to Macdonald to von Grunebaum, Gibb, and Bernard Lewis -- saw Islam, for example,
as a 'cultural synthesis' (the phrase is P. M. Holt's) that could be studied apart from the economics,
sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples. For Orientalism, Islam had a meaning which, if one
were to look for its most succinct formulation, could be found in Renan's first treatise: in order best
to be understood Islam had to be reduced to 'tent and tribe'. The impact of colonialism, of worldly
circumstances, of historical development: all these were to Orientalists as flies to wanton boys,
killed -- or disregarded -- for their sport, never taken seriously enough to complicate the essential
Islam. The career of H. A. R. Gibb illustrates within itself the two alternative approaches by which
Orientalism has responded to the modern Orient. In 1945 Gibb delivered the Haskell Lectures at
the University of Chicago. The world he surveyed was not the same one Balfour and Cromer knew
before World War I. Several revolutions, two world wars, and innumerable economic, political,
and social changes made the realities of 1945 an unmistakably, even cataclysmically, new object.
Yet we find Gibb opening the lectures he called Modern Trends in Islam as follows:
The student of Arabic civilization is constantly brought up against the striking contrast between
the imaginative power displayed, for example, in certain branches of Arabic literature and the
literalism, the pedantry, displayed in reasoning and exposition, even when it is devoted to these
same productions. It is true that there have been great philosophers among the Muslim peoples
and that some of them were Arabs, but they were rare exceptions. The Arab mind, whether in
relation to the outer world or in relation to the processes of thought, cannot throw off its intense
feeling for the separateness and the individuality of the concrete events. This is, I believe, one of
the main factors lying behind that 'lack of a sense of law' which Professor Macdonald regarded as
the characteristic difference in the Oriental.
It is this, too, which explains -- what is so difficult for the Western student to grasp [until it is
explained to him by the Orientalist] -- the aversion of the Muslims from the thought-processes of
rationalism. . . . The rejection of rationalist modes of thought and of the utilitarian ethic which is
inseparable from them has its roots, therefore, not in the so-called 'obscurantism' of the Muslim

234 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY