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Another Look at Orientalism: Western Literature in the Face of Islam

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Another Look at Orientalism: Western Literature in the Face of Islam ANOTHER LOOK AT ORIENTALISM: WESTERN LITERATURE IN THE FACE OF ISLAM by EMEL TASTEKIN B.A., Middle East Technical University, Turkey, 1995 M.A., University of Hanover, Germany, 2000 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2011 © Emel Tastekin, 2011 ABSTRACT Another Look at Orientalism seeks to establish a genealogical link between the fields of literary criticism and Islamic studies through a case study of the Qur’anic scholarship of Abraham Geiger (1810-1874). Responding to Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism (1978), which polemically subordinates all Orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century to some form of imperialist motive, this dissertation argues that Geiger, as a member of the Jewish diaspora in a German-speaking land, reacted against the Christian bias in the philological scholarship of his time by highlighting the heading “Abrahamic” in his work Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1833). I see Geiger’s work as one of the first attempts to critique the internal imperialism of Western/European culture and, as such, a precursor of comparative and postcolonial literary studies of the twentieth century. From a theoretical angle, I combine Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, particularly on “Abrahamic hospitality” and “exemplarity,” with perspectives drawn from diaspora and postcolonial studies, such as those of Aamir Mufti, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Sander Gilman, Susannah Heschel and Amos Funkenstein. The aim is to show that Geiger’s pioneering influence on the “objective” study of Islam—however motivated by his defence of Judaism in face of Christianity—should be seen as a gesture of hospitality towards Islam. I ultimately argue that Islam was not always exterior but also implicated in the construction of modern European identity. In the first chapter, I show how the corroboration of a Judaeo-Christian essence in Western literary criticism, particularly in the works of canonical critics like Matthew Arnold and Erich Auerbach, was informed by the nineteenth-century background of the “Jewish question.” In the second chapter, I trace how postmodern Jewish theory, as influenced by Derrida’s ii philosophy, has contended with the supersessionist and hegemonic implications of the Judaeo- Christian “hyphen.” Next, I turn to my case study of Abraham Geiger and contextualize his work with respect to the methods of German Orientalism and in relation to the German-Jewish emancipation struggle. I then analyze Geiger’s Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? in the light of Derrida’s philosophy of exemplarity and hospitality, as explained in Chapter Two. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................................ v DEDICATION ........................................................................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................................... 1 CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS ..................................................................................................................... 4 THEORETICAL FRAMING .......................................................................................................................................... 13 SIGNIFICANCE .......................................................................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER ONE: Edward Said on Culture and the Western Canon, or How the Judaeo-Christian View Came to Dominate Modern Literary Criticism .......................................................................................................................... 20 MATTHEW ARNOLD THE ORIENTALIST .................................................................................................................... 26 Said on Arnold’s Orientalism ............................................................................................................................ 26 The Hospitality in Arnold’s Dialectic of Hebraism and Hellenism ................................................................... 33 Lionel Trilling’s Admiration for Matthew Arnold ............................................................................................. 42 ERICH AUERBACH: FROM WESTERN CANON TO WORLD LITERATURE .................................................................... 50 Auerbach the Exemplary Critic at the Limits..................................................................................................... 52 The Hegemony of Erich Auerbach’s Western Canon in Mimesis ...................................................................... 61 The “Oriental” Location of Auerbach’s Exile .................................................................................................... 65 The Harmonious Tension between Hebrew and Hellene in “Odysseus’ Scar” .................................................. 69 CHAPTER TWO: Unsettling the Judaeo-Christian Hyphen ..................................................................................... 83 FORMS OF JEWISH DIFFERENCE ............................................................................................................................... 91 Textuality ........................................................................................................................................................... 91 Historicity ........................................................................................................................................................ 101 Materiality ........................................................................................................................................................ 113 DECONSTRUCTION AS AN OPENING TOWARDS ISLAM ............................................................................................ 122 Derrida and Islam ............................................................................................................................................. 123 Deconstructive Exemplarity and Hospitality ................................................................................................... 138 CHAPTER THREE: German-Jewish Scholarship on Islam: Abraham Geiger in his Contexts .............................. 161 THE DEVELOPMENT AND PREDICAMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN ORIENTALISM ............................... 164 The Emergence of the Historical-Philological Method: Vico and Herder ....................................................... 164 The Rise of Historical Philology in German Universities ................................................................................ 180 The Predicament of German Orientalism ........................................................................................................ 189 THE “GERMAN-JEWISH INTELLECTUAL PSYCHE” AND THE ORIENTALIZATION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY ................... 195 Judaism during the Aufklärung: The Dialogue between Kant and Mendlessohn ............................................ 198 Romantic Nationalism and the Radical Difference of the Jew ......................................................................... 211 Liberal-Protestant Old Testament Criticism versus Wissenschaft des Judentums ........................................... 218 HOSPITALITY TOWARDS ISLAM IN ABRAHAM GEIGER’S WAS HAT MOHAMMED AUS DEM JUDENTHUME AUFGENOMMEN? .................................................................................................................................................... 232 Abraham Geiger and the German-Jewish Interest in Islam ............................................................................. 235 Geiger’s Representation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in WMJ .............................................................. 252 EPILOGUE .............................................................................................................................................................. 272 WORKS CITED ...................................................................................................................................................... 282 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a pleasure to thank those who made this thesis possible: my friends and colleagues in the UBC Department of English for their intellectual insights and encouragement, and my family for the moral support throughout the years I have worked on this project. I am particularly grateful for the exceptional guidance of my supervisory committee. Special thanks is reserved for my supervisor Professor Mark Vessey, who enthusiastically supported a project that might have appeared too ambitious to others. His exceptionally generous support, incisive and expedient response to my writing accounts for all that is good about my project. I would like to thank Professor Lorraine Weir for helping
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