270 ORIENTALISM which is where one can see most immediately the jimitations of Massignon’s method, the East-West opposition turns up in a most peculiar way. At its best, Massignon’s vision of the East-West encounter assigned great responsibility to the West for its invasion of the East, its colonialism, its relentless attacks on Islam. Massignon was a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization and, as his numerOus essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against Zionism, against what, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, he scathingly called Israeli “bourgeois colonialism.”** Yet the framework in which Massignon’s vision was held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially ancient time and the West to modernity. Like Robertson Smith, Massignon considered the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this reductive category had a powerful grip on his thought. When, for example, in 1960 he and Jacques Berque, his colleague at the Collége de France, published their dialogue on “the Arabs” in Esprit, a good deal of the time was spent in arguing whether the best way to look at the problems of the contemporary Arabs was simply to say, in the main instance, that the Arab-Israeli conflict was really a Semitic problem. Berque tried to demur gently. and to nudge Massignon towards the possibility that like the rest of the world the Arabs had undergone what he called an “anthropological variation”: Massignon refused the notion out of hand.** His repeated efforts to understand and report on the Palestine conflict, for all their profound humanism, never really got past the quarrel between Isaac and Ishmael or, so far as his quarrel with Israel was concerned, the tension between Judaism and Christianity. When Arab cities and villages were captured by the Zionists, it was Massignon’s religious sensibilities that were offended. Europe, and France in particular, were seen as contemporary realities. Partly because of his initial political encounter with the British during the First World War, Massignon retained a pronounced dislike of England and English policy; Lawrence and his type sepresented a too-complex policy which he, Massignon, opposed in his dealings with Faisal. “Je cherchais avec Faysal . a pénétrer dans le sens méme de sa tradition 4 lui.” The British seemed to represent “expansion” in the Orient, amoral economic policy, and an outdated philosophy of political influence.*? The Frenchman was a more modern man, who was obliged to get from

Orientalism Now 271 the Orient what he had lost in spirituality, traditional values, and the like. Massignon’s investment in this view came, I think, by way of the entire nineteenth-century tradition of the Orient as therapeutic for the West, a tradition whose earliest adumbration is to be found in Quinet. In Massignon, it was joined to a sense of Christian compassion: So far as Orientats are concerned, we ought to have recourse to this science of compassion, to this “participation” even in the construction of their language and of their mentat structure, in which indeed we must participate: because ultimately this science bears witness either to verities that are ours too, or else to verities that we have lost and must regain. Finaily, because in a profound sense everything that exists is good in some way, and those poor colonized people do not exist only for our purposes but in and for themselves [en soi].5¢ Nevertheless the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. Partly because of what Europe had done to him, he had lost his religion and his philosophie; Muslims had “un vide immense” within them; they were close to anarchy and suicide. It became France’s obligation, then, to associate itself with the Muslims’ desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their dynastic tife, and the patrimony of believers,” No scholar, not even a Massignon, can resist the pressures on him of his nation or of the scholarly tradition in which he works. In a great deal of what he said of the Orient and its relationship with the Occident, Massignon seemed to refine and yet to repeat the ideas of other French Orientalists. We must allow, however, that the refinements, the personal style, the individual genius, may finally supersede the political restraints operating impersonally through tradition and through the national ambience. Even so, in Massignon’s case we must also recognize that in one direction his ideas about the Orient remained thoroughly traditional and Orientalist, their personality and remarkable eccentricity notwithstanding. According to him, the Islamic Orient was spiritual, Semitic, tribalistic, radically monotheistic, un-Aryan: the adjectives resemble a catalogue of late-nineteenth-century anthropological descriptions, The relatively earthbound experiences of war, colonialism, imperialism, economic oppression, love, death, and cultural exchange seem always in Massignon’s eyes to be filtered through metaphysical, ultimately dehumanized lenses: they are Semitic,