246 ORIENTALISM British agent-Orientalist—Lawrence, Bell, Philby, Storrs, Hogarth -—during and after World War I took over both the role of expertadventurer-eccentric (created in the nineteenth century by Lane, Burton, Hester Stanhope) and the role of colonial authority, whose position is in a centra} p}ace next to the indigenous ruler: Lawrence with the Hashimites, Philby with the house of Saud, are the two best-known instances. British Oriental expertise fashioned itself around consensus and orthodoxy and sovereign authority; French Oriental expertise between the wars concerned itself with heterodoxy, spiritual ties, eccentrics. It is no accident, then, that the two major scholarly careers of this period, one British, one French, were H. A. R. Gibb’s and Louis Massignon’s, one whose interest was defined by the notion of Sunna (or orthodoxy) in Islam, the other whose focus was on the quasi-Christlike, theosophical Sufi figure, Mansur al-Hallaj. I shall return to these two major Orientalists a little later. If I have concentrated so much on imperial agents and policymakers instead of scholars in this section, it was to accentuate the major shift in Orientalism, knowledge about the Orient, intercourse with it, from an academic to an instrumental attitude. What accompanies the shift is a change in the attitude as well of the individual Orientalist, who need no longer see himself—as Lane, Sacy, Renan, Caussin, Miiller, and others did-—as belonging to a sort of guild community with its own internal traditions and rituals. Now the Orientalist has become the representative man_of his Western culture, a man who _compresses within his own work a major duality of which that work (regardless of its ‘specific form) is the symbolic expression: Occidental consciousness, knowledge, science taking hold of the furthest Oriental reaches 2 as well as the self as accomplishing the union of Orient and Occident, but mainly by reasserting the technological, ‘political, and cultural supremacy ef the West, History, in such a union, is radically attentuated if not banished. Viewed as a current of development, as a narrative strand, or as a dynamic force unfolding systematically and materially in time and space, human history-—of the East or the West —is subordinated to an essentialist, idealist conception of Occident and Orient. Because he feels himself to be standing at the very rim of the East-West divide, the Orientalist not only speaks in vast generalities; he also seeks to convert each aspect of Oriental or

Orientalism Now 247 Occidental life into an unmediated sign of one or the other geographical half. The interchange in the Orientalist’s writing between his expert self and his testimonial, beholding self as Western representative is pre-eminéntly worked out in visual terms. Here is a typical passage (quoted by Gibb) from Duncan Macdonald’s classic work The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam (1909): The Arabs show themselves not as especially easy of belief, but as hard-headed, materialistic, questioning, doubting, scofting at their own superstitions and usages, fond of tests of the supernatural——and afl this in a curiously light-minded, almost childish fashion.°? The governing verb is show, which here gives us to understand that the Arabs display themselves (willingly or unwillingly) to and for expert scrutiny. The number of attributes ascribed to them, by its crowded set of sheer appositions, causes “the Arabs” to acquire a sort of existential weightlessness, thereby, “the Arabs” are made to rejoin the very broad designation, common to modern anthropological thought, of “the childish primitive.” What Macdonald also implies is that for such descriptions there is a peculiarly privileged position occupied by the Western Orientalist, whose representative function is precisely fo show what needs to be seen. All specific history is capable of being seen thus at the apex, or the sensitive frontier, of Orient and Occident together. The complex dynamics of human life—what I have been calling history as narrative— becomes either irrelevant or trivial in comparison with the circular vision by which the details of Oriental life serve merely to reassert the Orientalness of the subject and the Westernness of the observer. If such a vision in some ways recalls Dante's, we should by no means fail to notice what an enormous difference there is between this Orient and Dante’s. Evidence here is meant to be (and probably is considered) scientific, its pedigree, genealogically speaking, is European intellectual and human science during the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Orient is no simple marvel, or an enemy, or a branch of exotica; it is a political actuality of great and significant moment. Like Lawrence, Macdonald cannot really detach his Tepresentative characteristics as a Westerner from his role as a scholar. Thus his vision of Islam, as much as Lawrence's of the Arabs, implicates definition of the object with the identity of the