Introduction to the History of the Perception of Islam in the West – 3

Prof. Dr. İbrahim Kalın

Source: DÎVÂN Journal of  Scholarly Studies, Issue 15 (2003/2), pp. 1–51

 

Perceptions of Islam in the 19th Century: From Christian Pilgrimer to Orientalist

 

Outside the worlds of theology, philosophy, and literature, there were many Europeans whose curiosity about the East could not be satisfied by merely reading books. The fact that many of them set out on journeys to the Islamic world, producing numerous travelogues describing the Muslim countries they visited, their cities, people, and traditions, is a clear indication of this curiosity. Burton, Scott, Kinglake, Disraeli, Curzon, Warburton, Nerval, Chardin, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Lamartine, Pierre Loti, and Tavernier were among the leading European travelers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.[1] The incredible wealth of information flowing into Europe from these travelers, though not necessarily academic, led to the spread of much new knowledge about the Islamic world and Muslims among the public. Thanks to the vivid imagination in these accounts, Europeans felt as though they had penetrated the seemingly inaccessible world of Muslims and Orientals. Yet strangely enough, these travelogues produced effects similar to those left nearly seven centuries earlier by the Crusades: first-hand knowledge of the East was made available to the Western public, no longer perceived solely in terms of religious concerns or hostility to Christian theology. Thus, during the colonial era, the mission civilisatrice became established as the West’s (Occident’s) newly adopted mission to civilize the East (Orient).[2] The most skillful and radical expression of this view belongs to the French poet and writer André Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize. In his famous Journals, Gide reflected on his 1914 trip to Türkiye, which for him ended in utter disappointment:

“Istanbul, confirming all my prejudices, merges with Venice in my personal hell. Whenever I admire some architecture, for example the exterior of a mosque, I immediately learn (as I already suspected) that this architecture has Albanian or Persian influence. Their clothing is worse than one can imagine. I have long believed, and have long thought (out of a love of exoticism, a chauvinistic fear of self-esteem, and probably modesty), that there is more than one civilization, more than one culture, that deserves our attention and can deserve our love.  (…) Yet I now know well that our Western world (Occidental) is not only the most beautiful, but indeed the only one—yes, we are the sole heirs of the great Greek civilization.”[3]

Like their counterparts of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of these travelers were interested only in the “worldly” aspects of Islam. By doing so, their likely aim was to dispel the doubts surrounding a world long approached with prejudice but now attracting significant attention. From an inventory of obscure, prosaic names and places to vivid descriptions and fanciful musings, the travellers’ narratives fall short of a genuine interest in penetrating the Islamic world, reflecting and reconstructing it through the eyes of a top-class European writer. A crude example of this is that many of these travellers, with the notable exception of Richard Burton[4], did not know any of the Islamic languages, nor did they make any effort to obtain accurate information about the beliefs and practices of Muslims, other than the views prevalent in Europe.

Sir John Chardin’s famous travelogue Travels in Persia 1673–1677 contains many observations about the Iranian people, expressing complex emotions toward them. Chardin wrote of the Iranians’ “temperament, manners, and customs”:

“The Persians are courteous, civilized, and of noble descent; by nature they are inclined toward lust, luxury, extravagance, and abundance. They are far from being thrifty, and have little talent for trade. In short, they are born with as many natural qualities as other men, but few misuse them as much as they do. (…)(…) In addition to the moral vices they indulge in, Persians are extremely deceitful; they speak with oaths, borrow but seldom repay, and rarely miss opportunities for fraud. In other services they are equally unreliable, far from being honest in business or punctual in appointments, they deceive with such skill that their victims are left helpless; They are greedy for wealth and arrogant in display, using every opportunity to gain respect and fame.”[5]

The most important result of this literature is what Edward Said calls the “Orientalization of the East,”[6] which manifests itself as the romanticization and denigration of Muslim peoples. Moreover, in a more artistic and literary way, Orientalism strengthened the mystery of the East with defined identities and stereotypes such as the exotic harem, the soulful East, the Eastern man and his concubines, and city streets; these themes can be seen vividly in 19th century naturalistic European painting depicting the Eastern world. Such impressions of the East still retain vitality in the European mind and provide rich material for Hollywood films about Muslims and Islam in America. Films like True Lies (1994) and Executive Decision (1996), which depict Arabs as mindless criminals and savage psychopaths, remain part of our recent memory, their historical roots reaching back to the 19th-century European notion of the “mystery” of Islam.

It would not be wrong to say that the 19th century represents the longest period in the history of Islam and the West. Academic studies on Islam in Europe increased immeasurably during this century. This interest in Islam is closely related to the political, economic and, more importantly, colonial experience of the 19th century, when a handful of Europeans occupied a significant part of the Islamic world. As the long lists of Orientalist scholars suggest, the 19th century witnessed a sudden and dramatic rise in Islamic studies. The works produced in a short period of seventy years are greater in both quality and quantity than those produced in the previous millennium: Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), the father of French orientalism; E.W. Lane (1801-1876), author of the Arabic-English Lexicon, which remains a classic[7]; Karl Pfander, known for his missionary work in India and his debates with Indian Muslim scholars; J. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), known for his meticulous studies of Ottoman history and Arabic, Persian and Turkish poetry; the aforementioned William Muir; F.D. Maurice (1805-1872), a prominent theologian of the Church of England and author of The Religions of the World and Their Relations with Christianity, a key work for understanding the Islamic perspective of 19th-century Christianity; Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who drew the reaction of the Muslim intellectuals of the time, Cemaleddin Afghani and Namık Kemal, with his controversial lectures on Islam and science at the Sorbonne, are some of the important names that can be mentioned.[8]

Like the names mentioned above, many others wrote about Islam and the Islamic world in the 19th century, opening new fields in Islamic studies and contributing to the formation of new ways of understanding the Muslim world. Their contributions to the shaping of the modern Western image of Islam were multifaceted. First, these scholars helped satisfy European curiosity about Islam, a religion that was now under Western domination, both politically, militarily, and economically, but which had once been a threatening presence to the West and had achieved astonishing success. The concept of Islam they articulated was inevitably tied to Western Europe’s new colonial identity. Second, the flood of knowledge about Muslim history, beliefs, intellectual traditions, languages, and geography supported the development of scholarly studies as much as it served colonial power. It is difficult to escape our attention that in the 19th century, a significant number of scholars, travellers and translators were sent to the East as colonial officials, assigned to their fields of expertise and given a clear and detailed list of duties. Thirdly, the most important legacy of this period that concerns us closely is the completion of the necessary groundwork for the new categories, typologies, classifications, terminologies and methods necessary for understanding things belonging to the East and Islam, known as orientalism.

Orientalism reached its peak in the second half of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century,[9] and modern studies on Islam began to be taught as courses in Western universities with sincere efforts by many European scholars. With great passion, enthusiasm, academic zeal, and an obvious Western identity, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), Duncan Black Macdonald (1863-1943), Carl Becker (1876-1933), David Samuel Margoliouth (1858-1940), Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (1868-1945), Louis Massignon (1883-1962), and Sir Hamilton A.R. Gibb (1895-1971) became the leading figures in orientalist studies on Islam.[10]  These Orientalists published books, journals, articles, translations, critical editions, and reports, opened academic positions, and shaped the parameters of both the Muslim world and modern Islamic studies, leaving a lasting legacy that continues today. However, the Orientalist journey of representing Islam contributed little to changing the inherited pre-modern image of the East and Islam. Some Western scholars of Islam had no interest in such a project, focusing only on their own work. In other cases, the dark image of Islam as a discredited, dying, backward, mindless and lustful civilization has been reinforced and disseminated among the Western public through novels, TV programs, Hollywood productions and the media. In this context, Arberry’s idea of ​​mediating in his work Oriental Essays, in which he studied seven British orientalists including himself, to “build a bridge between the peoples of Asia and Europe by applying our expert skills, whether consciously or not,”[11] remained an unfinished project and an unfulfilled desire. Leaving aside personal inclinations of individual scholars, Orientalism has been plagued by numerous structural and methodological problems, many of which still influence portrayals of Islam today. It is of vital importance to define why Islam has been perceived at best as the “other” and at worst as the “enemy.” Without claiming to be exhaustive, we may briefly point out some of these issues.

In its early stages, Orientalism served specific functions within the 19th-century European mindset. Intellectual movements ranging from Romanticism and Rationalism to historical criticism and hermeneutics, which shaped Western humanities and the new colonial order, played a concrete role in reshaping the image of Islam. Yet Orientalists showed little interest in overcoming the limitations of studying another culture through Western categories. From this perspective, whether an Orientalist’s field of interest was popular Sufism, political history, science, or jurisprudence, the effort to seek correspondences, find homogenous structures, and construct “orthodoxy” was one of the hallmarks of the Orientalist tradition.[12] This inevitably led to strange generalizations, such as opposing “Islamic orthodoxy” to popular Islam, or setting high Islam or Sufism against the Sharia. The image of Islam articulated in the abstract language of academic expression was no less essentialist than medieval perceptions of Islam, and it continues to play a role in shaping today’s popular Western image of Islam. Secondly, the orientalist tendency, or at least Western researchers have studied the Islamic world both as a complex textual tradition, and decaying despite the diverse responses of Muslim intellectuals to the challenges of the modern world. For example, key figures of classical Orientalism agreed that when defining Islamic philosophy and science, these amounted to little more than a channel for transmitting Greek knowledge to Europe. Reading Salomon Munk’s Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (1859) or De Boer’s Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam (1903), one cannot help but gain the impression that Islamic philosophy, if the term is even appropriate, was nothing more than a lengthy Arabic commentary on Greek and Hellenistic thought, shaped by Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism.[13] As von Grunebaum put it, the highest compliment one could pay to the Islamic intellectual tradition was to call it “a creative quote.”[14] Thus, the obsessive quest to disprove the “originality” of Islamic thought was doomed to failure from the start.

Consequently, Islam came to be seen not as a living tradition coexisting with humanity but as an object of study to be historicized and relativized, stripped of its universal appeal and vitality. It should be noted here that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western scholars of Islam focused their attention on Islamic movements and figures that engaged with the modern West at intellectual and political levels. However, it is possible to say that the studies carried out during this period actually neglected or did not care about the majority of the Islamic world, the traditional scholars, the Sufis or their followers, who did not feel the need to respond to the West in a way that would attract the attention of Western scholars. Since the 1960s and 70s, when classical Orientalism began to be questioned, studies on the traditional Islamic world of the 18th and 19th centuries have gradually increased. But we are only now beginning to see research on figures such as Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, Ahmad ibn Idris, Haji Molla Sabzevari, Babanzade Ahmed Naim, and the last Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam Mustafa Sabri Efendi. In this respect, the Orientalist project, which aimed to reflect the Islamic world in detail, remained incomplete, for it presented Western readers with an incomplete picture of Islam and its diverse history.

 

[1]Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York 1979, pp. 166-197.

[2]This is not to say that internalized religious prejudice against Islam was absent among Europe’s “humanist” travelers. George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey, mentioned above, is an example. Sandys’s notes on Türkiye, Egypt, the Holy Land, and Italy clearly show that even Europe’s seventeenth-century humanists were influenced by Christian polemics against Islam; cf. Jonathan Haynes, The Humanist as Traveler: George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey, pp. 65-81.

[3]Andre Gide, Journals 1889-1949, trans. Justin O’Brien, Vintage Books, New York 1956, vol. Work. 177, 181.

[4]During his travels to Mecca and Medina, Burton presented himself as a Muslim physician of Indian origin. His book, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856), testifies to his knowledge of the Arabic language and Islamic culture.

[5] Sir John Chardin, Travels in Persia 1673-1677, Dover Publications, Inc., New York 1988, pp. 184 and 187.

[6]Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 49 ff.

[7]Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1st ed. 1836) is more important than his famous Arabic-English Kamus in demonstrating his approach to the Arab-Islamic world. On Lane, see also Leyla Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of His Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century, Longman, London-New York, 1978.

[8]Albert Hourani provides good analyses of these and some other lesser-known figures; see Islam in European Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991, pp. 18-34.

[9]According to an estimate quoted by Said, nearly 60,000 books were written about the “New East,” that is, the Islamic world, between 1800 and 1950; see Said, Orientalism, p. 204.

[10]I. Goldziher, C.S. Hurgronje, C.H. Becker, D.B. For Macdonald and L. Massignon, see. Jean Jacques Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident. Comment quelques orientalistes occidentaux se sont penches sur l’Islam et se sont forme une image de cette religion, Mouton, Paris 1963; A.J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars, Curzon Press, Surrey 1997 (1st ed. 1960) and Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, University of Washington Press, Seattle-London 1987, pp. 83-129.

[11]Arberry, Oriental Essays, p. 7.

[12] A classic example of the orientalist construction of Islamic orthodoxy is I. Goldziher’s work “Stellung der alten Islamichen Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften”, Abhandlungen der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrgang 1915 (Verlag der Akademie, Berlin 1916). In this work, Goldziher presents the criticisms of Hanbali scholars towards philosophy in terms of theology and jurisprudence as the main attitude of “orthodox Islam” towards the pre-Islamic heritage. This article was translated into English by M.L. Swartz in his Studies on Islam (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981, pp. 185-215).

[13]T.J. De Boer’s work was translated into English by E.R. Jones as The History of Philosophy in Islam (Dover Publications, Inc., New York 1967).

[14]Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, p. 294. This theme was further developed by the essays in a study by von Grunebaum entitled Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1955).