28@ ORIENTALISM Europe and {slam is the reintegration of western civilization, artificially sundered at the Renaissance and now reasserting its unity with overwhelming force.’ Unlike Massignon, who made no effort to conceal his metaphysical speculations, Gibb delivered such observations as this as if they were objective knowledge (a category he found wanting in Massignon). Yet by almost any standards most of Gibb’s general works on Islam are metaphysical, not only because he uses abstractions like “Islam” as if they have a clear and distinct meaning but also because it is simply never clear where in concrete time and space Gibb's “Islam” is taking place. If on the one hand, foltowing Macdonald, he puts [slam definitively outside the West. on the other hand, in much of his work, he is to be found “reintegrating” it with the West. In 1955 he made this inside-outside question a bit clearer: the West took from Islam only those nonscientific elements that it had originally derived from the West, whereas in borrowing much from Islamic science, the West was merely following the law making “natural science and technology . . . indefinitely transmissible.”"*" The net result is to make Islam in “art, aesthetics, philosophy and religious thought” a second-order phenomenon (since those came from the West), and so far as science and technology are concerned, a mere conduit for elements that are not sui generis Islamic. Any clarity about what Islam is in Gibb’s thought ought to be found within these metaphysical constraints, and indeed his two important works of the forties, Modern Trends in Islam and Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey, flesh out matters considerably. In both books Gibb is at great pains to discuss the present crisis in Islam, opposing its inherent, essential being to modern attempts at modifying it. I have already mentioned Gibb’s hostility to modernizing currents in [slam and his stabbora commitment to Islamic orthodoxy. Now it is time to mention Gibb’s preference for the word Mohammedanism over Islam (since he says that }slam is really based upon an idea of apostolic succession culminating in Mohammed) and his assertion that the Islamic master science is law, which early on replaced theology. The curious thing about these statements ts that they are assertions made about Islam, not on the basis of evidence internal to {slam, but rather on the basis of a logic deliberately outside Islam. No Muslim would cail himself a Mohammedan, nor so far as is known would he necessarily feel the importance of law over theology. But what Gibb does is to

Orientalism Now 281 situate himself as a scholar within contradictions he himself discerns, at that point in “Islam” where “there is a certain unexpressed dislocation between the formal outward process and the inner realities.”** The Orientalist, then, sees his task as expressing the dislocation and consequently speaking the truth about {slam, which by definition-—Since its contradictions inhibit its powers of self-discernment —it cannot express. Most of Gibb’s general statements about Islam supply concepts to Islam that the religion or culture, again by his definition, is incapable of grasping: “Oriental philosophy had never appreciated the fundamental idea of justice in Greek philosophy.” As for Oriental societies, “in contrast to most western societies, [they] have generally devoted [themselves] to building stable social organizations {more than] to constructing ideal systems of philosophical thought.” The principal interna] weakness of Islam is the “breaking of association between the religious orders and the Muslim upper and middle classes.”°* But Gibb is also aware that Islam has never remained isolated from the rest of the world and therefore must stand in a series of external dislocations, insufficiencies, and disjunctions between itself and the world. Thus he says that modern Islam is the result of a classical religion coming into disynchronous contact with Romantic Western ideas. In reaction to this assault, Islam developed a school of modernists whose ideas everywhere reveal hopelessness, ideas unsuited to the modern world: Mahdism, nationalism, a revived caliphate. Yet the conservative reaction to modernism is no less unsuited to modernity, for it has produced a kind of stubborn Luddism. Well then, we ask, what is Islam finally, if it cannot conquer its internal dislocations nor deal satisfactorily with its external surroundings? The answer can be sought in the following central passage from Modern Trends: Islam is a living and vita) religion, appealing to the hearts, minds, and consciences of tens and hundreds of millions, setting them a standard by which to live honest, sober, and god-fearing lives. It is not Islam that is petrified, but its orthodox formulations, its systematic theology, its social apolegetic. It is here that the dislocation lies, that the dissatisfaction is felt among a large proportion of its most educated and intelligent adherents, and that the danger for the future is most evident. No religion can ultimately resist disintegration if there is a perpetual gulf betweea its demands upon the will and its appeal to the intellect of its fotlowers.