256 ORIENTALISM their rulers, nevertheless retained a comsiderable influence on the intellectual life of the Muslims. Therefore it remains, and still is for us too, an important subject of study, not only for abstract reasons connected with the history of law, civilization and religion, but also for practical purposes. The more intimate the relations of Europe with the Muslim East become, the more Muslim countries fall under European suzerainty, the more important it is for us Europeans to become acquainted with the intellectual life, the religious law, and the conceptual background of Islam.® Although Hurgronje allows that something so abstract as “Islamic law” did occasionally yield to the pressure of history and society, he is more interested than net in retaining the abstraction for intellectual use because in its broad outline "Islamic law” confirms the disparity between East and West. For Hurgronje the distinction between Orient and Occident was no mere academic or popular cliché: quite the contrary. For him it signified the essential, historical power relationship between the two. Knowledge of the Orient either proves, enhances, or deepens the difference by which European suzerainty (the phrase has a venerable nineteenth-century pedigree) is extended effectively over Asia. To know the Orient as a whole, then, is to Know it because it is entrusted to one’s keeping, if one is a Westerner. An almost symmetrical passage to Hurgronje’s is to be found in the concluding paragraph of Gibb’s article “Literature” in The Legacy of Islam, published in 1931. After having described the three casual contacts between East and West up till the eighteenth century, Gibb then proceeds to the nineteenth century: Following on these three moments of casual contact, the German romantics turned again to the East, and for the first time made it their conscious aim to open a way for the real heritage of oriental poetry to enter into the poetry of Europe. The nineteenth century, with its new sense of power and superiority, seemed to clang the gate decisively in the face of their design. Today, on the other hand, there are signs of a change. Oriental literature has begun to be studied again for its own sake, and a new understanding of the East is being gained, As this knowledge spreads and the East recovers its rightful place in the life of humanity, oriental literature may once again perform its historic function, and assist us to liberate ourselves from the narrow and oppressive conceptions which would limit all that is significant in literature, thought, and history to our own segment of the globe.

Orientalism Now 257 Gibb’s phrase “for its own sake” is in diametrical opposition to the string of reasons subordinated to Hurgronje’s declaration about European suzerainty over the East. What remains, nevertheless, is that seemingly inviolable over-all identity of something called “the East” and something else called “the West.” Such entities have a use for each other, and it is plainly Gibb’s laudable intention to show that the influence on Western of Oriental literature need not be (in its results) what Brunetiére had called “a national disgrace.” Rather, the East could be confronted as a sort of humanistic challenge to the local confines of Western ethnocentricity. His earlier solicitation of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur notwithstanding, Gibb’s call for humanistic interinanimation between East and West reflects the changed political and cultural realities of the postwar era. European suzerainty over the Orient had not passed; but it had evolved—in British Egypt—from a more or less placid acceptance by the natives into a more and more contested political issue compounded by fractious native demands for independence. These were the years of constant British trouble with Zaghlul, the Wafd party, and the like.** Moreover, since 1925 there had been a worldwide economic recession, and this too increased the sense of tension that Gibb’s prose reflects. But the specifically cultural message in what he says is the most compelling. Heed the Orient, he seems to be telling his reader, for its use to the Western mind in the struggle to overcome narrowness, oppressive specialization, and limited perspectives. The ground had shifted considerably from Hurgronje to Gibb, as had the priorities. No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe’s domination over the Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western enlightenment. What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic. For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because itt releases the spirit from sterile specialization, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic selfcenteredness, it increases one’s grasp of the really central issues in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western suzerainty over the rest of the world.