Revisiting Orientalism:

Modern phase of Orientalism

In this week’s column we would look at the reshaping of modern Orientalism and its specialisation in modern context into different branches such as ‘area studies’.

Considering the early phase of Orientalism, Said says that until World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a ‘generalist who had developed skills for making summational skills. In other words, Orientalist had developed skills to present a comprehensive picture of the Orient as a whole.

Said observed, “ By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say , about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the whole Orient hung together in some profound organic way, it made perfectly good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading for a better understanding of such things as the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.”

Said pointed out that one of the best examples for pre-war rationale is the writing of Snouk Hurgronje. He observed, “A good example of pre-war rationale can be found in the following passage by Snouck Hurgronje, taken from his 1899 review of Eduard Sachau’s Muhammedanische Recht ; …the law, which in practice had to make ever greater concessions to the use and customs of the people and the arbitrariness of their rules nevertheless retained a considerable influence on the intellectual life of the Muslims. Therefore, it remains, and still is for us too, an important subject of study, not only for abstract reasons connected with the history of law, civilisation and religion, but also for practical purpose. The more intimate the relation of Europe with the Muslim East becomes, the more Muslim countries fell under the European suzerainty, the more important it is for us Europeans to become acquainted with the intellectual life, the religious law, and the conceptual background of Islam.”

Disparity

According to Said, Hurgronje’s focus was on broader outline of “Islamic Law” to confirm the disparity between East and the West. For his, it is pointed out, that the difference between the East and the West is not mere ‘academic or popular cliché’ but it signified the ‘essential power relationship between the two’. Said observes, “Knowledge of the Orient either proves, enhances, or deepens the difference by which European suzerainty (the phrase has been a venerable nineteenth-century pedigree) is extended effectively over Asia. To know the Orient as a whole, then, is to know it because it is entrusted to one’s keeping, if one is a Westerner. ”

Citing Orientalist Gibb, Said observed that ‘Gibb’s call for humanistic interinanimation between the East and the West reflect the changed political and cultural realities of the postwar era’. It is interesting to note that the core message of Gibb’s writing is that he urges to ‘heed the Orient’ and to overcome ‘narrowness, oppressive specialisation, and limited perspectives’.

Said observed, “The ground had shifted considerably from Hurgronje to Gibb, as had the priorities. No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe’s dominance over the Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western enlightenment. What matters during the interwar years was a cultural self-definition that transcended the provincial and xenophobic. For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because it releases the spirit from sterile specialisation, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic self-centeredness, it increases one’s grasp of the really central issues in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is first, because the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western suzerainty over the rest of the world. ”

Although almost all the Orientalist experienced a sense of estrangement as ‘they dealt with or lived in a culture so profoundly different from their own’, Islamic Orientalists’ estrangement from Islamic culture further intensified their ‘feeling of superiority over European culture’.

Culture

Said observed, “Islamic Orientalist never saw their estrangement from Islam either as salutary or as an attitude with implications for better understanding of their own culture. Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified their feeling of superiority about European culture, even as their antipathy spread to include the entire Orient, of which Islam was considered a degraded ( and usually, a virulent dangerous) representative. Such tendencies- it has been my argument-become built into the very tradition of Orientalist study throughout the nineteenth century, and in time became a standard component of most Orientalist training, handed on from generation to generation. In addition, I think, the likelihood was very great that European scholars would continue to see the Near Orient through the perspective of its Biblical ‘Origins’ that is, as a place of unshakable influential religious primacy. Given its special relationship to both Christianity and Judaism, Islam remained forever the Orientalist’s idea (type) original cultural effrontery, aggravated naturally by the fear that Islamic civilisation originally ( as well as contemporaneously) continued to stand somehow opposed to the Christian West.”

It is interesting to observe that the knowledge and the attitude of Islamic Orientalism has, a very little, been changed over the years. What seems to have changed, are the terminology that have been used to reaffirm old fears about the Islamic Orientalism which inevitably resulted in the ‘clash of civilizations’.

At this juncture, it is interesting to observe some of the ideas about Islamic Orientalism. Said observed, “Well then, we ask, what is Islam finally, if it cannot conquer its internal dislocations nor deal satisfactory with its external surroundings? The answer can be sought in the following central passage from Modern Trends;

Islam is a living and vital religion, appealing to hearts, minds, and consciences of tens and hundreds of millions, setting them a standard by which to live honest, sober, and god-fearing lives. It is not Islam that is petrified, but its orthodox formulations, its systemic theology, its social apologetic. It is here that the dislocation lies, that the dissatisfaction is felt among a large proportion of its most educated and intelligent adherents, and that the danger for future is most evident.

No religion can ultimately resist disintegration if there is a perpetual gulf between its demands upon the will and its appeal to the intellect of its followers.

That for the vast majority of Muslims the problem of dislocation has not yet arisen justifies the ulema in refusing to be rushed into the hasty measures which the modernist prescribed; but the spread of modernism is a warning that re-formulation cannot be indefinitely shelved.

In trying to determine the origins and causes of this petrifaction of the formulas of Islam, we may possibly also find a clue to the answer to the question which the modernists are asking, but have so far failed to resolve-the question, that is, of the way in which the fundamental principles of Islam may be re-formulated without affecting their essential elements. ”