282 ORIENTALISM That for the vast majority of Muslims the problem of dislocation has not yet arisen justifies the ulema in refusing to be rushed into the hasty measures which the modernists prescribe; but the spread of modernism is a warning that re-formulation cannot be indefinitely shelved. In trying to determine the origins and causes of this petrifaction of the formulas of Islam, we may possibly also find a che to the answer to the question which the modernists are asking, but have so far failed to resolve—the question, that is, of the way in which the fundamental! principles of Islam may be re-formulated without affecting their essential elements.’ The last part of this passage is familiar enough: it suggests the now traditional Orientalist ability to reconstruct and reformulate the Orient, given the Orient’s inability to do so for itself. i part, then, Gibb’s Islam exists ahead of Islam as it is practiced, studied, or preached in the Orient. Yet this prospective Islam is no mere Orientalist fiction, spun out of his ideas: it is based on an “Islam” that—since it cannot truly exist—appeals to a whole community of believers. The reason that “Islam” can exist in some more or less future Orientalist formulation of it is that in the Orient Islam is usurped and traduced by the language of its clergy, whose claim is upon the community’s mind. So long as it is silent in its appeal. Islam is safe; the moment the reforming clergy takes on its Clegitimate) role of reformulating Islam in order for it to be able to enter modernity, the trouble starts. And that trouble, of course, is dislocation. Dislocation in Gibb’s work identifies something far more significant than a putative intellectual difficulty within Islam. It identiftes, I think, the very privilege, the very ground on which the Orientalist places himself so as to write about, legislate for, and reformulate Islam. Far from being a chance discernment of Gibb’s, dislocation is the epistemological passageway into his subject, and subsequently, the observation platform from which in all his writing, and in every one of the influential positions he filled, he could survey Islam. Between the silent appeal of Islam to a monolithic community of orthodox believers and a whole merely verbal articulation of Islam by misled corps of political activists, desperate clerks, and opportunistic reformers: there Gibb stood, wrote, reformulated. His writing said either what Islam could not say or what its clerics would not say. What Gibb wrote was in one sense temporally ahead of Islam, in that he allowed that at some point in the future

Orientalism Now 283 Islam would be able to say what it could not say now. In another important sense, however, Gibb’s writings on Islam predated the religion as a coherent body of “living” beliefs, since his writing was able to get hold of “Islam” as a silent appeal made to Muslims before their faith became a matter for worldly argument, practice, or debate. The contradiction in Gibb’s work—for it is a contradiction to speak of “Islam” as neither what its clerical adherents in fact say it is nor what, if they could, its lay followers would say about it— is muted somewhat by the metaphysical attitude governing his work, and indeed governing the whole history of modern Orientalism which he inherited, through mentors like Macdonald. The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work. Gibb’s oeuvre purports to be Islam (or Mohammedanism) both as it is and as it might be, Metaphysically—and only metaphysically—essence and potential are made one. Only a metaphysical attitude could produce such famous Gibb essays as “The Structure of Religious Thought in Islam” or “An Interpretation of Islamic History” without being troubled by the distinction made between objective and subjective knowledge in Gibb’s criticism of Massignon.’*! The statements about “Islam” are made with a confidence and a serenity that ate truly Olympian. There is no dislocation, no felt discontinuity between Gibb’s page and the phenomenon it describes, for each, according to Gibb himself, is ultimately reducible to the other. As such, “Islam” and Gibb’s description of it have a calm, discursive plainness whose common element is the English scholar’s orderly page. ] attach a great deal of significance to the appearance of and to the intended model for the Orientalist’s page as a printed object. I have spoken in this book about d’Herbelot’s alphabetic encyclopedia, the gigantic leaves of the Description de (Egypte, Renan’s laboratory-museum notebook, the ellipses and short episodes of Lane’s Modern Egyptians, Sacy’s anthological excerpts, and so forth. These pages are signs of some Orient, and of some Orientalist, presented to the reader. There is an order to these pages by which the reader apprehends not only the “Orient” but also the