= SS SS ———— 276 ORIENTALISM nations of the postcolonial world. Armed with a refocused awareness of his importance to the Atlantic commonwealth, the Orientalist was to be the guide of policymakers, of businessmen, of a fresh generation of scholars. What counted most in Gibb’s later vision was not the Orientalist’s positive work as a scholar (for example, the kind of scholar Gibb had been in his youth when he studied the Muslim invasions of Central Asia) but its adaptability for use in the public world. Hourani puts this well: ... it became clear to him {Gibb] that modern governments and elites were acting in ignorance or rejection of their own traditions of social! life and morality, and that their fatlures sprang from this. Henceforth his main efforts were given to the elucidation, by careful study of the past, of the specific nature of Muslim society and the beliefs and culture which Say at the heart of it. Even this problem he tended to see at first mainly in political terms.°? Yet no such later vision could have been possible without a fairly rigorous amount of preparation in Gibb’s earlier work, and it is there that we must first seek to understand his ideas. Among Gibb’s earliest influences was Duncan Macdonald, from whose work Gibb clearly derived the concept that Islam was a coherent system of life, a system made coherent not so much by the people who led that life as by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious ptactice, idea of order, in which all the Muslim people participated. Between the people and “Islam” there was obviously a dynamic encounter of sorts, yet what mattered to the Western student was the supetvening power of Islam to make intelligible the experiences of the Islamic people, not the other way around. For Macdonald and subsequently for Gibb, the epistemological and methodological difficulties of “Islam” as an object (about which large, extremely general statements could be made) are never tackled. Macdonald for his part believed that in Islam one could perceive aspects of a still more portentous abstraction, the Oriental mentality. The entire opening chapter of his most influential book (whose importance for Gibb cannot be minimized), The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, is an anthology of unarguable declaratives about the Eastern or Oriental mind. He begins by saying that “it is plain, I think, and admitted that the conception of the Unseen is much more immediate and real to the Oriental than to the western peoples.” The “large modifying elements which seem, from

Orientalism Now 277 time to time, almost to upset the general law” do not upset it, nor do they upset the other equally sweeping and general laws governing the Oriental mind. “The essential difference in the Oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things.” Another aspect of this difficulty—which Gibb was later to blame for the absence of form in Arabic literature and for the Muslim's essentially atomistic view of reality—is “that the difference in the Oriental is not essentially religiosity, but the lack of the sense of law. For him, there is no immovable order of nature.” Tf such a “fact” seems not to account for the extraordinary achievements of Islamic science, upon which a great deal in modern Western science is based, then Macdonald remains silent. He continues his catalogue: “It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental. The supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment.” That an occasion—namely, the historical and geographical birth of monotheism in the Orient—should in Macdonald’s argument become an entire theory of difference between East and West signifies the degree of intensity to which “Orientalism” has committed Macdonald. Here is his summary: Inability, then, to see life steadily, and see it whole, to understand that a theory of life must cover all the facts, and lability to be stampeded by a single idea and blinded to everything else— therein. I believe, is the difference between the East and the West.” None of this, of course, is particularly new. From Schlegel to Renan, from Robertson Smith to T. E. Lawrence, these ideas get repeated and re-repeated. They represent a decision about the Orient, not by any means a fact of nature. Anyone who, like Macdonald and Gibb, consciously entered a profession called Orientalism did so on the basis of a decision made: that the Orient was the Orient, that it was different, and so forth. The elaborations, refinements, consequent articulations of the field therefore sustain and prolong the decision to confine the Orient. There is no perceivable irony in Macdonald’s (or Gibb’s) views about Oriental liability to be stampeded by a single idea; neither man seems able to recognize the extent of Orienralism’s liability to be stampeded by the single idea of Oriental difference. And neither man is concerned by such wholesale designations as “Islam” or “the Orient” being used as proper nouns, with adjectives attached and verbs streaming forth, as if they referred to persons and not to Platonic ideas.