= ee ee = = => 278 ORIENTALISM It is no accident, therefore, that Gibb’s master theme, in almost everything he wrote about Islam and the Arabs, was the tension between “Islam” as a transcendent, compelling Oriental fact and the realities of everyday human experience. His investment as a scholar and as a devout Christian was in “Islam,” not so much in the (to him) relatively trivial complications introduced into Islam by nationalism, class struggle, the individualizing experiences of love, anger, or human work. Nowhere is the impoverishing character of this investment more evident than in Whither Islam?, a volume edited and contributed to, in the title essay, by Gibb in 1932. (It also includes an impressive article on North African Islam by Massignon.) Gibb’s task as he saw it was to assess Islam, its present situation, its possible future course. In such a task the individual and manifestly different regions of the Islamic world were to be, not refutations of Islam’s unity, but examples of it. Gibb himself proposed an introductory definition of Islam; then, in the concluding essay, he sought to pronounce on its actuality and its real future. Like Macdonald, Gibb seems entirely comfortable with the idea of a monolithic East, whose existential circumstances cannot easily be reduced io race or racial theory; in resolutely denying the value of racial generalization Gibb rises above what had been most reprehensible in preceding generations of Orientalists. Gibb has a correspondingly generous and sympathetic view of Islam’s universalism and tolerance in letting diverse ethnic and religious communities coexist peacefully and democratically within its imperium. There is a note of grim prophecy in Gibb’s singling out the Zionists and the Maronite Christians, alone amongst ethnic communities in the Islamic world, for their inability to accept coexistence.” But the heart of Gibb’s argument is that Islam, perhaps because it finally represents the Oriental’s exclusive concern not with nature but with the Unseen, has an ultimate precedence and domination over ail life in the Istamic Orient. For Gibb Islam is Islamic orthedoxy, is also the community of believers, is life, unity, intelligibility, values. It is law and oder too, the unsavory disTuptions of jihadists and communist agitators notwithstanding. In page after page of Gibb’s prose in Whither Islam?, we learn that the new commercial banks in Egypt and Syria are facts of Islam or an Islamic initiative; schools and an increasing literacy rate are Islamic facts, too, as are journalism, Westernization, and intellectual societies. At no point does Gibb speak of European colonialism

Orientalism Now 279 when he discusses the rise of nationalism and its “toxins.” That the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its resistance, political and nonpolitical, to colonialism, never occurs to Gibb, just as it seems to him finally irrelevant to note whether the “Islamic” governments he discusses are republican, feudal, or monarchical. “Islam” for Gibb is a sort of superstructure imperiled both by politics (nationalism, communist agitation, Westernization) and by dangerous Muslim attempts to tamper with its intellectual sovereignty. In the passage that follows, note how the word religion and its cognates are made to color the tone of Gibb’s prose, so much so that we feel a decorous annoyance at the mundane pressures directed at “Islam”: Islam, as a religion, has lost little of its force, but Islam as the arbiter of social life [in the modern world] is being dethroned; alongside it. or above it, new forces exert an authority which is sometimes in contradiction to its traditions and its social prescriptions, but nevertheless forces its way in their teeth. To put the position in its simplest terms, what has happened is this. Until recently, the ordinary Muslim citizen and cultivator had no political interests or functions, and no literature of easy access except religious literature, had no festivals and no communal life except in connection with religion, saw tittle or nothing of the outside world except through religious glasses. Te hint, in censequence, religion meant everything. Now, however, more in all the advanced countries, his interests have expanded and his activities are no longer bounded by religion. He has political questions thrust on his notice; he reads, or has read to him, a mass of articles on subjects of atl kinds which have nothing to do with religion, and in which the religious point of view may not be discussed at all and the verdict held to lie with some quite different principles. . . . [Emphasis added]"" Admittedly, the picture is a little difficult to see. since unlike any other celigion /slam is or means everything. As a description of a human phenomenon the hyperbole is, I think, unique to Orientalism. Life itself—politics, literature, energy, activity, growth 1S an intrusion upon this (to a Westerner) unimaginable Oriental ‘otality. Yet as “a complement and counterbalance to European Civilisation” Islam in its modern form is nevertheless a useful object: this is the core of Gibb’s proposition about modem Islam. For “in the broadest aspect of history, what is now happening between