304 ORIENT ALISM serenity of the narrative. As for the chapters on “the political impact of the West” and “economic and social change”——ideas left no more specific than that—they are tacked on as reluctant concessions to Islam as having something to do with “our” worid in general. Change is unilaterally equated with modernization, even ' though it is nowhere made clear why other kinds of change need be so imperiously dismissed. Since it is assumed that Islam’s only worthwhile relations have been with the West, the importance of Bandung or of Africa or of the Third World generally is ignored; this blithe indifference to a good three-quarters of reality somewhat explains the amazingly cheerful statement that “the historical ground has been cleared [by whom, for what, in what way?) for a new relationship between the West and Islam . . . based on equality and cooperation.”"*8 If by the end of volume 1 we are mired in a number of contradictions and difficulties about what Islam really is, there is no help to be had in volume 2. Half the book is devoted to covering the tenth to the twentieth,centuries in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Spain, North Africa, and Sicily; there is more distinction in the chapters on North Africa, although the same combination of professional Orientalist jargon with unguided historical detail prevails pretty much everywhere. So far, after approximately twelve hundred pages of dense prose, “Islam“ appears to be no more a cultural synthesis than any other roll call of kings, battles, and dynasties. But in the last half of volume 2, the great synthesis completes itself with articles on “The Geographical Setting,” “Sources of Islamic Civilization,” “Religion and Culture,” and “Warfare.“ Now one’s legitimate questions and objections seem more justified. Why is a chapter commissioned on Islamic warfare when what is really discussed (interestingly, by the way) is the sociology of some Islamic arinies? Is one to assume that there is an Islamic mode of war different, say, from Christian warfare? Communist war versus capitalist war proposes itself as a suitably analogous topic. Of what use for the understanding of Islam----except as a display of Gustave von Grunebaum’s indiscriminate erudition— are the opaque quotations from Leopold von Ranke which, along with other equally ponderous and irrelevant material, dot his pages on Islamic civilization? Is it not mendacious thus to disguise the real Grunebaumian thesis, that Islamic civilization rests on an un~ principled borrowing by Muslims from the Judeo-Christian, Hellenistic, and Austro-Germanic civilizations? Compare with this idea—

Orientalism Now 305 that Islam is by definition a plagiaristic culture—the one put forward in volume I that “so-called Arabic literature” was written by Persians (no proof offered, no names cited). When Louis Gardet treats “Religion and Culture,” we are told summarily that only the first five centuries of Islam are to be discussed; does this mean that religion and culture in “modern times” cannot be “synthesized,” or does it mean that Islam achieved its final form in the twelfth century? Is there really such a thing as “Islamic geography,” which seems to include the “planned anarchy” of Muslim cities, or is, it mainly an invented subject to demonstrate a rigid theory of geographical-racial deterininism? As a hint we are reminded of “the Ramadan fast with its active nights,” from which we are expected to conclude that Islam is a religion “designed for town dwellers.” This is explanation in need of explanation. The sections on economic and social institutions, on law and justice, mysticism, art and architecture, science, and the various Islamic literatures are on an altogether higher level than most of the History. Yet nowhere is there evidence that their authors have much in common with modern humanists or social scientists in other disciplines: the techniques of the conventional history of ideas, of Marxist analysis, of the New History, are noticeably absent. Islam, in short, seems to its historians to be best suited to a rather Platonic and antiquari ias. To some writers of the History Islam is a politics and a religion; to others it is a style of being; to others it is “distinguishable from Muslim society”, to still others it is a mysteriously known essence; to all the authors Islam is a remote, tensionless thing, without much to teach us about the complexities of today’s Muslims. Hanging over the whole disjointed enterprise which is The Cambridge History of Islam is the old Orientalist truism that Islam is about texts, not about people. The fundamental question raised by such contemporary Orientalist texts as The Cambridge History is whether ethnic origins and religion are the best, or at least the most useful, basic, and clear, definitions of human experience. Does it matter more in understanding contemporary politics to know that X and Y are disadvantaged in certain very concrete ways, or that they are Muslims or Jews? This is of course a debatable question, and we are very likely in rational terms to insist on both the religious-ethnic and the socio-economic descriptions; Orientalism, however, clearly posits the Islamic category as the dominant one, and this is the main consideration about its retrograde intellectual tactics.