Revisiting Orientalism:

Pioneers of modern Orientalism

Continuing the series, in this week’s column we examine pioneers in modern Orientalism and how they shaped the discipline. According to Said, two greatest pioneers of modern Orientalism were Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan.

Said points out that one of the important contributions that Sacy made to modern Orientalism was the establishment of an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. Said observed, “It was not only because he was the first president of the Societe Asiatique (founded in 1822) that Sacy’s name is associated with the beginning of modern Orientalism; it is because his works virtually put before the profession an entire systemic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. In Sacy’s work, for the first time, since the Council of Vienne, there was a self-conscious methodological principle at work as a coeval with scholarly discipline.

“No less important Sacy always felt himself to be a man standing at the beginning of an important revisionist project. He was a self-aware inaugurator, and more to the point of our general thesis, he acted in his writing like a secularised ecclesiastic for whom his Orient and his students were doctrine and parishioners respectively.”

He was essentially a meticulous researcher who painstakingly revised the existing body of texts principally intended for his students. In fact, his first major work, Principes de grammaire generale was written in 1799 for his son.

Observing two salient characteristics of Sacy’s writing Said stated, “These two characteristics-the didactic presentation to students and the avowed intention of repeating by revision and extract are crucial. The keynote of his work contains in the opening lines of the dedication to his son of the Principes de grammaire generale ..I am writing (or speaking) to you because you need to know these things, and since don’t exist in any serviceable form. I have done the work myself for you. Direct address: utility:effort: immediate and beneficent rationality. For Sacy believed that everything could be made clear and reasonable, no matter how difficult the task and how obscure the object. ”

Living legacy

Sacy’s scholarship was awesome and as Said said, Sacy’s works virtually cannonised the Orient. Said observes, “Sacy’s work canonizes the Orient; it begets a canon of textual objects passed on from one generation of students to the next. And the living legacy of Sacy’s disciples was astounding. Every major Arabist in Europe during the nineteenth century traced his intellectual authority to him.

Universities and academies in France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and especially Germany were dotted with the students who formed themselves at his feet and through the anthological tableaux provided by his work. As with all intellectual patrimonies, however, enrichments and restrictions were passed on simultaneously. Sacy’s genealogical originality was to have treated the Orient as something to be restored not only because of but also despite the modern Orient’s disorderly and elusive presence.

Each Orientalist re-created his own Orient according to the fundamentals supplied and enacted by Sacy. Just as he was the father of Orientalism, he was also the discipline’s first sacrifice, for in translating new texts, fragments, and extracts subsequent Orientalist entirely displaced Sacy’s work by supplying their own restored Orient. Nevertheless the process he started would continue, a philology in particular developed systemic and institutional powers Sacy had never exploited. This was Renan’s accomplishment; to have associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent. ”

If Sacy was the father of Orientalism, it was Ernest Renan who undertook the task of solidifying the official discourse of Orientalism and establishing its intellectual and worldly institutions. Said observed, “Renan derives from Orientalism second generation; it was his task to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism and establish its intellectual and worldly institutions. For Sacy, it was his personalised effort that launched and vitalised the field and its structures; for Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave them greater visibility.”

Enthusiasm

Drawing a commonality among the Renon’s generation of Orientalists, Said observed, “What Renan’s generation –educated from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s-retained from their enthusiasm about the Orient was the intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occidental scholar of languages, cultures, and religions.

Here the key text was Edgar Quinet’s Le Genie des religions (1832), a work that announced the Oriental Renaissance and placed the Orient and the West in a functional relationship with each other. Quinet’s association with Michelet, their interest in Herder and Vico, imposed on them the need for a scholar –historian to confront, almost in a manner of an audience seeing a dramatic event unfold, or a believer witnessing a revelation, the different, the strange and distant. Quinet’s formulation was that the Orient proposes and the West disposes; Asia has its prophets, Europe its doctors (its learned men, its scientists: the pun is intended).

“Out of this encounter new dogma or god is born, but Quinet’s point is that both East and West fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in the encounter.

“As a scholarly attitude the picture of a learned Westerner surveying it from a peculiar suited vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver u its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derive from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages-this would persists in Renan. ”

Renan’s singular contribution to Orientalism is Renan’s notion of Orientalism as the philological laboratory that rendered Oriental subject a scholarly coherence. Renan was well-aware that he himself was his time and ‘his ethnocentric culture’. Said observed, “What is specially interested in Renan is how much he knew himself to be a creature of his time and his ethnocentric culture.

On the occasion of an academic response to a speech made by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1885, Renan averred as to how ‘it was so sad to be a wiser man than one’s nation…one cannot feel bitterness towards one’s homeland. Better to be mistaken along with the nation than to be too right with those who tell it hard truths. ’ ”