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Product Details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin UK; 1 edition (Feb. 27 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140289232
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140289237
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
  • Shipping Weight: 322 g
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #442,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review

Orientalism, the study of the Middle East and South Asia by Westerners, has recently been portrayed as the West’s appropriation of the image of the Muslim world. But it was not always so. The first true Orientalist was the 16th century French expert on the Ottomans, Guillaume Postel, who held the world’s first chair of Arabic in Paris. Postel saw Arabic as the best way to penetrate the Hebrew foundations of Christianity. He visited Constantinople with the French Ambassador, saw the Ottoman civilisation to be far superior to the European, and later concluded that Islam was a satanic co-conspirator with Protestantism against Catholicism.
Only one of a motley parade of Orientalists in Robert Irwin’s witty and absorbing For Lust of Knowing, Postel-contradictory, fickle, eccentric and difficult to categorise-is in many ways typical of those who followed him. Indeed, that is Irwin’s whole point: the pursuit of Orientalism has entailed congeries of beliefs, not a single, unifying set of assumptions, and he has written this book as a response to the late Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), which treats Orientalism as a fifth column of Western colonialism. Said’s controversial work is better known for its bold pioneering in anticolonial and multicultural politics than for its cogency or its accuracy. His angry sweep is so broad that he includes Aeschylus, Homer, and Dante as seminal proponents of Orientalist imperialism, and that’s just where Irwin takes up his pen.
Irwin, who knew Said, is careful to “attack the book, not the man,” but here and there he has trouble repressing what feels like a personal animus. Nevertheless, many points are well taken: for example, if Orientalism is part of the imperial project, how could people like Dante be guilty of it long before the age of imperialism? As for Herodotus, Irwin tells us he was not an Orientalist racist. On the contrary, he exalted the Persians and considered his Greek countrymen to be their descendants. Besides, there was no concept of ‘the other’ in the modern racial and geographical sense.
Irwin aims to show how scattered and different Orientalists have actually been throughout history. Their predecessors in Spain, like Avicenna, worked to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology, and in Europe they translated the Koran as a means to understanding Muslims in order to convert them. If, after the 14th century, the study of Arabic or of the Koran was at best a theological weapon, it tended also to attract suspicion of partisanship with the ‘enemy’ (a tradition reverently upheld by US Neonconservatives with regard to their own Arabists). Again, at that time, there was no sense of any geographical or racial ‘other’ because the concept of Europe or the West had not yet emerged.
The fall of Christian Constantinople to the Ottomans provoked fear of Islam among European humanists. This uneasy curiosity engendered a more serious academic approach to Orientalism, and the change in attitude influenced certain students, like Postel. However, the predominant tendency in academe of that time was to use Arabic to critique and discredit Islam or the Koran; or to discover the roots of Christianity in Eastern Orthodoxy and Hebrew; or to look for proof of it serving as a secret ally of Catholics or Protestants, since the competing Christian sects, and not Muslims, were the real, primal ‘other’ in European history.
By 1600, Orientalism was institutionalised and the chair of Arabic at Leiden would remain supreme until 1800. Thomas van Erpe (1584-1624), also known by his Latin name Erpenius, held the chair first. His Arabic grammar was published in 1613, and continues to be the progenitor of most Western Arabic grammars to the present day. Despite Erpenius’s renown, scholarship continued to be either personalised or motivated by obscurantism and of little use to the state. In fact, “. . . there was hardly an Orientalist type or a common Orientalist discourse.”
In the 18th century, the French, the British, the Russians, and the Dutch established imperial outposts on Muslim lands, but their brands of Orientalism were not what we-or Said-would have expected. For the British Raj in India, Orientalism entailed the study of local laws and culture to ensure equitable rule, and it was the hard, imperial hand of the missionaries that repressed Orientalism as something ‘unchristian’. Bonaparte’s adventure in Egypt quickly lost steam, leaving nothing in its wake but the new study of Egyptology. It was, rather, the French Arabist, Sylvestre De Sacy, who gave permanent institutional shape to a new Orientalism, and he is, generally speaking, the grandfather of modern Orientalists. Russia, with its Muslim neighbours, was the only one that combined Orientalism with its imperial policy.
In the 19th century, Orientalism was still an aristocratic hobby or a way of accessing the origins of the Bible. It had more to do with fascination on the part of linguists, administrators, and adventurers than with imperial policy. The explorer and Arabist, Richard Burton, lamented his country’s ignorance of the Muslim world. But if the British were academically frivolous, the Germans, by contrast, were extremely diligent. They perfected the discipline of philology, the painstaking study of linguistic sources, and soon dominated Orientalism.
German Orientalism began to wither with the First World War. The Ottoman Empire fell, and Britain became the greatest imperial power. Then, during the Second World War, the Nazis dispersed Germany’s brilliant philologists. Meanwhile, British agents and colonial administrators, like T. E. Lawrence, still viewed the Muslim world through the cultural and linguistic structures of classical Greek, Latin, and neglected Arabic. Only in Russia did Orientalism continue to support imperialism: now, it was the Soviet Communists who told Muslims that Moscow was their “new Mecca”.
The United States received all of the best Orientalists: German and Jewish refugees, and even some Arabs. These days, however, Orientalism is a dying discipline; it has given way to the social sciences and the more pragmatic pursuits of government administration. The intellectual fashion of deconstructionism, so closely related to multiculturalism, supplied the final, ironic stroke: the liberal idea that Islam had been “culturally constructed” could only be conveyed with extreme tact.
Irwin is conversational, articulate, combative, and laugh-out-loud funny, and he only begins to fail when, in making his point about the sheer variety of Orientalists, he classifies them one after the other, all the way through history, giving his narrative a dense and linear feel which isn’t always rescued by his lively prose.
But a few categories are important. Among the anti-Muslim Orientalists, those who only want to understand Muslims in order to convert them or refute their beliefs, there are the likes of Alvarus of 9th-century Spain, Raimundo Archbishop of Toledo, and the 17th-century Englishman, Pococke. Then there are those who think that Islam and the Arab world has passed its prime, and has no option but to adapt to the West: Von Ranke, Dozy, and the racists Renan and Gobineau. Today’s Bernard Lewis, a self-described Zionist and adviser to the Bush administration, though not a racist, falls within the “backward Muslims” school, and Irwin shows his own colours by comparing Lewis favourably to Said.
Among those Orientalists who sympathised with Islam, there were admirers of Muslim society, like medieval Arabists Da Monte Croce and Lull, and later Erpenius, who provided the West with the first Muslim history written by Muslims. The anti-imperialists seem to be legion: Duperron, who disproved Montesquieu’s cliché of “Muslim despotism”; Goldhizer, the most influential of all, who argued in the 19th century that Islam, with its fertile sectarianism could change from within and that Westerners should keep out; Hurgonje, a Dutch anticolonialist colonial administrator; Britain’s Edward Browne; France’s mystical Louis Massignon; the American Marshall Hodgson, who saw Islam as inseparable from European history; and Claude Cahen the French anticolonialist Marxist. There are others who are ambivalent, contradictory, or who, like William “Oriental” Jones, the West’s discoverer of Sanskrit, defy enlistment in any polemic.
Toward the end, Irwin takes a closer look at Said, and we glimpse the child of well-to-do Palestinian parents, raised and educated in an upper-class Anglophone society in Egypt and the West. A talented, brilliant, alienated, rootless, and unhappy man, he was an Arab born and raised “nowhere”, who only found his axe to grind with Israel’s annexation of Palestinian lands in 1967. His book, Orientalism, Irwin leads us to believe, is more an impassioned polemic against Orientalists than a work of scholarship. It is riddled with errors. In the end, Irwin is convincing when he tells us that Orientalists have, if anything, been suspected of partiality to the Muslim world. For balance, he might have added that even Said defended American Arabists when they came under suspicion at the onset of the invasion of Iraq.
Irwin concludes with a look at native, Middle Eastern Arabists, some of them forbears of contemporary Islamists, possessed of a chauvinistic hatred of the West’s Orientalist tradition and driven by a conviction that Westerners have ‘stolen’ and falsified the Muslim world simply by studying it.
This parting shot has the effect of steering us further away from a major oversight. Part of Said’s objection to Orientalism was the way in which it helped to create some of the romantic caricatures which continue to prejudice the West’s approach to the Muslim world. If the Orientalists didn’t conjure or help to conjure those powerful and enduring images, Irwin should have spent some time telling us who actually committed the libels for which Orientalists have been receiving blame.
Hugh Graham (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Robert Irwin is a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction. His works of non-fiction include The Arabian Nights, Islamic Art, Night & Horses & the Desert and The Alhambra.

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Amazon.com: 9 reviews
27 of 33 people found the following review helpful
The entertaining confusion June 1 2006
By Martyn A. Oliver - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Hardcover
Irwin's book, like Said's Orientalism, and like the other reviews of Irwin's book all suffer from the same problem--a confused sense of purpose. Are we to bash Arabs? Zionists? Orientalists? Imperialists? Muslims? The French? (yes, the french!)

Irwin's book--a fun read blessed with an English sense of wit, style, and flippancy--awkwardly combines (the awkwardness being Irwin's fault, as these topics do belong together) three topics: a history of the the study of the Orient, a critique of Said's critique of the study of the (so-called) Orient, and a plea for the reinvigoration of the study of the Orient. He succeeds admirably on the first, dully on the second, and, well, he does seem to plead . . .

Finer and more convincing critiques of Said's work have been done elsewhere--Irwin's consisting mainly of "gotcha" type errors (and Said is notoriously sloppy when it comes to facts). Begging for British institutions to beef up their Middle East studies programs is odd on two counts. First, the public's interest in the Mideast could hardly be higher. Second, British universities have, as Irwin himself shows, a rather lackadisical history when it comes to the study of the middle east--they do not have the same institutional dynamism that US universities do (although the Brits continue to produce very fine scholars).

What makes the book worthwhile is Irwin's account of the eccentric history of some of academia's most eccentric characters--many of whom did indeed study simply for the love of knowledge--while others were spies, some zionists, some anti-semites, some imperialists, some pacifists. Irwin's account does little to prove or disprove Said's (contentious) thesis, and would have been better off without trying to do both.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
For the History Part March 12 2008
By KC Tang - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Paperback
The book contains two things: a history of Islamic scholarship in the West, and a critique of Edward Said's book "Orientalism". I'm not really interested in the latter, hence the mere four stars. I only hoped the pages for second part (one long chapter) were devoted to the first! As Irwin says in the book, the rank of Oriental scholars in the West has more than their fair share of eccentrics; and it's sheer joy to read their biographies, though short. Sir Richard Burton is only briefly mentioned (for whom you've to refer to Rice's biography), but you'll meet the good Guillaume Postel and Edward Henry Palmer. This first part of the book is especially valuable as most of the source materials are difficult to get hold of for an ordinary reader.
15 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Absolutely brilliant ... April 2 2006
By Amazon Customer - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
... and hilarious! Mr. Irwin has authored several novels, and, no doubts, his non-fiction writing has only been improved by that.

So far, I found just a couple of rather strange ... aberrations? (I guess it is appropriate to use that word for a book populated by so many eccentrics). Mr. Irwin writes (pp. 19-20), "For reasons that remain mysterious, the new conquerors [i.e., Arabs] were referred to in the earliest Latin sources either as 'Hagarenes' or as 'Saracens'." I've always thought there's nothing mysterious about that: it's an old tradition of calling an ethnos by a name or place known to classical authors, or by a legendary ancestor. Hagar was mother of Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, hence Hagarians. Saraceni were nomads mentioned by the late Greek authors, so here you go ...

Another example (p. 181): "It always rankled with [Edward] Palmer that he did not succeed to [William] Wright's professorship when the latter died." Something isn't right here. Palmer was murdered in 1882, Wright was succeeded by their mutual friend William Robertson Smith after Wright's death in 1889. With all Orientalists' eccentricity, it seems rather unusual for Palmer to be irritated by a fact that his friend and colleague outlived him.

Despite these minor editorial omissions, I wish could give more than five stars to this book.

As for the sad case of Said's "Orientalism," Mr. Irwin yet again "tore that book to pieces," which, naturally, will have no effect on Said's admirers. As any critique never had and never will on supporters of the "Black Athena," or on believers in the less known here in the West so called "New Chronology."
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A balanced history of "orientalism" Jan. 4 2007
By W. H. Peck - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Hardcover
This is a rebutal to Edward Said's beselling diatribe against Western based scholarship on the Near East. It is also a balanced and careful history of Western (mainly European)study of Near Eastern languages, history and customs. Where Said grouped together almost every specialization in Middle Eastern studies under the same umbrella, Robert Irwin is careful to give each its proper attention.

He points out Said's typical use of over generalization and lack of attention to accuracy and is careful to say that it is not Said's stand on the Arab-Israelie conflict that he has fault with, just his somewhat distorted view of Western scholarship.
A Scholarly Attack Sept. 26 2012
By Yuri Sobol - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Hardcover
"For Lust of Knowing" reminds me of one of my favorite books, "The Sumerian Problem," which was one in a series of books examining scholarly controversies. The question in "The Sumerian Problem" was this: Were the first inhabitants of Mesopotamia Semites or Indo-Europeans? What followed was a chronicle of academic discourse that often degenerated into vicious personal attack.
That's why "For Lust of Knowing" reminds me of "The Sumerian Problem." "For Lust of Knowing" is a vehicle for Irwin to attack Edward Said and his book "Orientalism." Irwin sets up his prosecution very carefully with a thorough study of the West's attempts to investigate the East with a focus on Arabs and Islam. On the way, he never lets his readers completely forget that he is heading toward Said. Finally, he attacks.
For those who are not orientalists themselves, this book might not be very interesting. But having lived in the Middle East much of my life, I found this book a good read. I kept telling myself I would put the book down when I became tired of it, but Irwin manages to put something very interesting or terribly amusing in every chapter, if not on every page. So I read the whole book and quite enjoyed it.


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