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Robert Irwin, for Lust of Knowing. the Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 410 Pp

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Robert Irwin, for Lust of Knowing. the Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 410 Pp JEMH 11,1-2_2078_171-173 3/14/07 5:13 PM Page 171 Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing. The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 410 pp. £25.00, ISBN 0 713 99415 0. Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared in 1978. Its enduring success shows that it said something people wanted to hear. What it said is formu- lated by Robert Irwin with a clarity for which one looks in vain in Said’s book. “Orientalism, the hegemonic discourse of imperialism, is a discourse that constrains everything that can be written and thought in the West about the Orient and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs. It has legitimized Western penetration of the Arab lands and their appropriation and it underwrites the Zionist project... The West possesses a monopoly over how the Orient may be represented. Repre- sentations of the Orient invariably carry implications about Western superiority, or even, quite often, flat statements of that superiority”. Said’s is a slippery theory, a petitio principi which is in some ways reminiscent of Max Weber’s theory about Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. His work is frequently obscure, often contradictory, and his terminology is vague and confused. These, it has to be admitted, can be the ingredients of success. Different readers can pick the passages that please them most, and others can read their ideas into the obscurity. Countless orientalists (who cannot always be regarded as scholars) have proclaimed themselves Saidians, and Said’s work has been welcomed in kindred disciplines, such as postcolonial studies, by writers attracted by his generalisations and keen to keep abreast of the latest trends. “It is a scandal”, writes Irwin, “and damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said’s argument about Orientalism could ever have been taken seriously . .” Yet, he admits, the book has qualities, “those of a good novel. It is exciting, it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined, but essentially fictional”. Very few serious scholars have attrib- uted much importance to Said, and of those few even less are orien- talists. Most orientalists who are indeed serious scholars are likely to share Robert Irwin’s view that the book is “a work of malignant char- latanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations”. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 JEMH 11,1-2 Also available online – www.brill.nl/jemh JEMH 11,1-2_2078_171-173 3/14/07 5:13 PM Page 172 172 book reviews Rejoinders to Orientalism by such distinguished figures as Bernard Lewis and Ernest Gellner (whom Said picked out for attack), Albert Hourani, Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, have appeared over the years, but Robert Irwin’s is the first full-length book to present itself as a confutation. But is it really a confutation? In Orientalism Said attacked a vast range of writers—practitioners of eastern languages, novelists, poets and statesmen (Lord Curzon and Lord Cromer are among his favourite targets and have supplied him with memorable quotations). In For Lust of Knowing Robert Irwin concentrates almost entirely on academic orientalists, practitioners of the eastern languages, even if his first chapter on the Greeks puts paid to Said’s theory that western prejudice against the East can already be found in the works of Aeschylus and Homer. At the end of his book Irwin returns to Said, and to those who have attacked or supported him since the publication of Orientalism, but the greater part of For Lust of Knowing is in fact as much an English continuation of Johann Fück’s Arabische Studien in Europa as it is a critique of Said. In his survey of oriental studies in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as well as in his more detailed examination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Robert Irwin is concerned with the motives that drove scholars to study Arabic, Persian and Turkish. In the Middle Ages, Irwin observes, Islam featured far less promi- nently in the West than is often suggested, and the Arab world, when regarded at all, was certainly not regarded as in any way backward or barbarous. By the sixteenth century the growing emphasis on the use of philology in Biblical studies led to a more intensive interest in Arabic as a tool which could be handy in understanding the more obscure points of Hebrew, while a handful of scholars hoped to improve on the medieval translations of the Arab scientists. But even then the practi- tioners were few and the difficulties they faced considerable. They tended to be highly dependent on patrons, who were often persuaded to support the learning of Arabic by the ill-founded argument that it would allow missionaries to convert the Muslims to Christianity, and they were totally removed from utilitarian, not to mention imperialistic, considerations. And what scope could their imperialism have had at a time when Europeans were still living in terror of the Ottomans? At the end of the eighteenth century the foundation of language schools and societies did something to widen the interest in the field, but even later, when the western empires truly came into being, hardly any European ori- entalist put his learning in the service of the imperial cause. The French orientalist Massignon did so briefly, as did the Dutchman Snouck Hurgronje.
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