208 ORIENTALISM enough in pornographic novels (e.g., Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite) whose novelty draws on the Orient for their interest. Moreover the male conception of the world, in its effect upon the practicing Orientalist, tends to be static, frozen, fixed eternally. The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement— in the deepest sense of the word—is denied the Orient and the Oriental. As a known and ultimately an immobilized or unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality: hence, when the Orient is being approved, such phrases as “the wisdom of the East.” Transferred from an implicit social evaluation to a grandly cultural one, this static male Orientalism took on a variety of forms in the late nineteenth century, especially when Islam was being discussed. General cultural historians as respected as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt assailed Islam as if they were dealing not so much with an anthropomorphic abstraction as with a religiopolitical culture about which deep generalizations were possible and warranted: in his Weltgeschichte (1881~1888) Ranke spoke of Islam as defeated by the Germanic-Romanic peoples, and in his “Historische Fragmente”’ (unpublished notes, 1893) Burckhardt spoke of Islam as wretched, bare, and trivial. Such intellectual operations were carried out with considerably more flair and enthusiasm by Oswald Spengler, whose ideas about a Magian personality (typified by the Muslim Oriental) infuse Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918-1922) and the “morphology” of cultures it advocates. What these widely diffused notions of the Orient depended on was the almost total absence in contemporary Western culture of the Orient as a genuinely felt and experienced force. For a number of evident reasons the Orient was always in the position both of outsider and of incorporated weak partner for the West. To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by him, or as a kind of cultural and intellectual proletariat useful for the Orientalist’s grander interpretative activity, necessary for his performance as superior judge, learned man, powerful cultural will. I mean to say that in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence.

Orientalism Now 209 This fact of substitution and displacement, as we must call it, clearly places on the Orientalist himself a certain pressure to reduce the Orient in his work, even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating and exposing it. How else can one explain major scholarly production of the type we associate with Julius Wellhausen and Theodor Néldeke and, overriding it, those bare, sweeping statements that almost totally denigrate their chosen subject matter? Thus Néldeke could declare in 1887 that the sum total of his work as an Orientalist was to confirm his “low opinion” of the Eastern_peoples.* And like Carl Becker, Néldeke was a philhellenist, who showed his love of Greece curiously by displaying a positive dislike of the Orient, which after all was what he studied as a scholar. A very valuable and intelligent study of Orientalism—Jacques Waardenburg’s L'islam dans le miroir de l!'Occident—examines five important experts as makers of an image of Islam. Waardenburg’s mirror-image metaphor for late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Orientalism is apt. In the work of each of his eminent Orientalists there is a highly tendentious—in four cases out of the five, even hostile—vision of Islam, as if each man saw Islam as a reflection of his own chosen weakness. Each scholar was profoundly learned, and the style of his contribution was unique. The five Orientalists among them exemplify what was best and strongest in the tradition during the period roughly from the 188@s to the interwar years. Yet Ignaz Goldziher’s appreciation of Islam's tolerance t was un his dis dislike of Mohammed’s anthropomorphisms and I too- . theology and jurisprudence; Duncan Black Macdonald’s interest in Islamic