264 ORIENTALISM all the expectations created for them by their national traditions, by the politics of their nations, by the internal history of their national “schools” of Orientalism. Sylvain Lévi put the distinction between the two schools trenchantly: The political interest that ties England to India holds British work to a sustained contact with concrete realities, and maintains the cohesion between representations of the past and the spectacle of the present. Nourished by classical traditions, France seeks out the human mind as it manifests itself in India in the same way that it is interested in China.” It would be too easy to say that this polarity results, on the one hand, in work that is sober, efficient, concrete, and on the other, in work that is universalistic, speculative, brilliant. Yet the polarity serves to illuminate two long and extremely distinguished careers that between them dominated French and Anglo-American Islamic Orientalism until the 1960s; if the domination makes any sense at all, it is because each scholar derived from and worked in a self-conscious tradition whose constraints (or limits, intellectually and politically speaking) can be described as Lévi describes them above. Gibb was born in Egypt, Massignon in France. Both were to become deeply religious men, students not so much of society as of the religious life in society. Both were also profoundly worldly; one of their greatest achievements was putting traditional scholarship to use in the modern political world. Yet the range of their work— the texture of it, almost—is vastly different, even allowing for the obvious disparities in their schooling and religious education. In his lifelong devotion to the work of al-Hallaj—“whose traces,” Gibb said in his obituary notice for Massignon in 1962, he “never ceased to seek out in later Islamic literature and devotion"—Massignon’s almost unrestricted range of research would lead him virtually everywhere, finding evidence for “l’esprit humaine a travers l’'espace et Ie temps.” In an oeuvre that took “in every aspect and region of contemporary Muslim life and thought,” Massignon’s presence in Orientalism was a constant challenge to his colleagues. Certainly Gibb for one admired—but finally drew back from—the way Massignon pursued

Orientalism Now 265 themes that in some way linked the spiritual life of Muslims and Catholics {and enabled him to find] a congenial element in the veneration of Fatima, and consequently a special field of interest in the study of Shi'ite thought in many of its manifestations, or again in the community of Abrahamanic origins and such themes as the Seven Sleepers. His writings on these subjects have acquired from the quatities that he brought to them a permanent significance in Islamic studies, But just because of these qualities they are composed, as it were, in two registers. One was at the ordinary Sevel of objective scholarship, seeking to elucidate the nature of the given phenomenon by a masterly use of established tools of academic research. The other was at a level on which objective data and understanding were absorbed and transformed by an individual intuition of spiritua! dimensions. It was not always easy to draw a dividing line between the former and the transfiguration that resulted from the outpouring of the riches of his own personality. There is a hint here that Catholics are more likely to be drawn to a study of “the veneration of Fatima” than Protestants, but there is no mistaking Gibb’s suspicion of anyone who blurred the distinction between “objective” scholarship and one based on (even an elaborate) “individual intuition of spiritual dimensions.” Gibb was right, however, in the next paragraph of the obituary to acknowledge Massignon’s “fertility” of mind in such diverse fields as “the symbolism of Muslim art, the structure of Muslim fogic, the inwicacies of medieval finance, and the organization of artisan corporations”; and he was right also, immediately after, to characterize Massignon’s early interest in the Semitic languages as giving rise to “elliptic studies that to the uninitiate almost rivalled the mysteries of the ancient Hermetica.” Nevertheless, Gibb ends on a generous note, remarking that for us, the lesson which by his example he impressed upon the Orientalists of his generation was that even classical Orientalism is no longer adequate without some degree of committedness to the vital forces that have given meaning and value to the diverse aspects of Eastern cultures.”® That, of course, was Massignon’s greatest contribution, and it is true that in contemporary French Islamology (as it is sometimes called) there has grown up a tradition of identifying with “the vital forces” informing “Eastern culture”; one need only mention