254 ORIENT ALISM the great European fear of Islam, and this was aggravated by the political challenges of the entre-deux-guerres. My point is that the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission—all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness. In fact, what took place was the very opposite of liberal: the hardening of doctrine and meaning, imparted by “science,” into “truth.” For if such truth reserved for itself the right to judge the Orient as immutab’y Oriental in the ways I have indicated, then liberality was ho more than a form of oppression. and mentalistic. Prejudice. The extent of such illiberality was not—and is not—often recognized from within the culture, for reasons that this book is mying to explore. It is heartening, nevertheless, that such illiberality has occasionally been challenged. Here is an instance from L A. Richards’s foreword to his Mencius on the Mind (1932); we can quite easily substitute “Oriental” for “Chinese” in what follows. As to the effects of an increased knowledge of Chinese thought upon the West, it is interesting to notice that a writer so unlikely to be thought either ignorant or careless as M. Etienne Gilson can yet, in the English Preface of his The Philesephy ef St. Thomas Aquinas, speak of Thomistic Philosophy as ‘‘accepting and gathering up the whole of human tradition.” This is how we all think, to_us. the Western world is still the Wo tld for the part of the World that counts); but _an impartial observer would perhaps say that ‘such _provincialism i: is dangerous. And we are not yet so happy im the West that we can be sure that we are not suffering from its effects.®? Richards’s argument advances claims for the exercise of what he calls Multiple Definition, a genuine type of pluralism, with the combativeness of systems of definition eliminated. Whether or not we accept his counter to Gilson’s provincialism, we can accept the proposition that liberal humanism, of which Orientalism has historically been one department, retards the process of enlarged and enlarging meaning through which true understanding can be attained. What took the place of enlarged meaning in twentiethcentury Orientalism—that is, within the technical field—is the subject most immediately at hand.

Orientalism Now 255 Ill Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient, or some aspect of its life, as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, unti] around World War IF, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist (with a great deal of specific knowledge, of course) who a ee pene uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the whole Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made perfectly good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things as the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or worid-spirit. Most of the first two chapters of this book have made similar arguments about earlier periods in the history of Orientalist thought. The differentiation in its later history that concerns us here, however, is the one between the periods immediately before and after World War J. In both instances, as with the earlier periods, the Orient is Oriental no matter the specific case, and no matter the style or technique used to describe it; the difference between the two periods in question is the reason given by the Orientalist for seeing the essential Orientality of the Orient. A good example of the prewar rationale can be found in the following passage by Snouck Hurgronje, taken from his 1899 review of Eduard Sachau’s Muhammedanisches Recht: aie the law, which in practice had to make ever greater concessiens to the use and customs of the people and the arbitrariness of Dia