262 ORIENTALISM of the modern philological and archeological spirit, and the report reads more like that of a congress of University tutors of the last centuty met to discuss the reading of a passage in a Greek play, or the accentuation of a vowel, before the dawn of Comparative Philology had swept away the cobwebs of the Scholiasts. Was it worth while to discuss whether Mahomet could hold a pen or write?” To some extent the polemical antiquarianism that Cust described was a scholarly version of European anti-Semitism. Even the designation “modern-Semitic,” which was meant to include both Muslims and Jews (and which had its origin in the so-called ancient-Semitic field pioneered by Renan), carried its racist banner with what was doubtless meant to be a decent ostentation. A little later in his report Cust comments on how in the same meeting “ “the Aryan’ supplied much material for reflection.” Clearly “the Aryan” is a counterabstraction to “the Semite,“ but for some of the reasons J listed earlier, such atavistic labels were felt to be especially pertinent to Semites—with what expensive moral and human consequences for the human community as a whole, the history of the twentieth century amply demonstrates. Yet what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and more important for my purposes here, the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient. For whereas it is no longer possible to write leamed (or even popular) disquisitions on either “the Negro mind” or “the Jewish personality,” it is perfectly possible to engage in such research as “the Islamic mind,” or “the Arab character”—but of this subject more later. Thus, in order properly to understand the intellectual genealogy of interwar Islamic Orientalism—as it is most interestingly and satisfyingly seen (no irony intended) in the careers of Massignon and Gibb---we must be able to understand the differences between the Orientalist’s summational attitude towards his material and the kind of attitude to which it bears a strong cultural resemblance, that in the work of philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius. The intellectual crisis in Islamic Orientalism was another aspect of the spiritua) crisis of “late bourgeois humanism”; in its form and style, however, Islamic Orientalism viewed the problems of mankind as

Orientalism Now 263 separable into the categories called “Oriental” or “Occidental.” It was believed, then, that for the Oriental, liberation, self-expression, and self-enlargement were not the issues that they were for the Occidental. Instead, the Islamic Orientalist expressed his ideas about Islam in such a way as to emphasize his, as well as putatively the Muslim’s, resistance to change, to mutual comprehension between East and West, to the development of men and women out of archaic, primitive classical institutions and into modernity. Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilization but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other. When Gibb opposed nationalism in the modern Islamic states, he did so because he felt that nationalism would corrode the inner structures keeping Islam Oriental; the net result of secular nationalism would be to make the Orient no different from the West. Yet it is a tribute to Gibb’s extraordinarily sympathetic powers of identification with an alien religion that he put his disapproval in such a way as to seem to be speaking for the slamic orthodox community. How much such pleading was a reversion to the old Orientalist habit of speaking for the natives and how much it was a sincere attempt at speaking in Islam’s best interests is a question whose answer lies somewhere between the two alternatives. No scholar or thinker, of course, is a perfect representative of some ideal type or school in which, by virtue of national origin or the accidents of history, he participates. Yet in so relatively insulated and specialized a tradition as Orientalism, I think there is in each scholar some awareness, partly conscious and partly nonconscious, of national tradition, if not of national ideology. This is particularly true in Orientalism, additionally so because of the direct political involvement of European nations in the affairs of one or another Oriental country: the case of Snouck Hurgronje, to cite a non-British and non-French instance where the scholar’s sense of national identity is simple and clear, comes to mind immediately.”* Yet even after making all the proper qualifications about the difference between an individual and a type (or between an individual and a tradition), it is nevertheless striking to note the extent to which Gibb and Massignon were representative types. Perhaps it would be better to say that Gibb and Massignon fulfilled