The Scope of Orientalism 99 the Muslims, however, espoused a “dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith.”* Much of the racism in Schlegel’s strictures upon the Semites and other “low” Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. But nowhere else, unless it be later in the nineteenth century among Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the dasis of a scientific subject matter as it was in comparative linguistics or philology. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the “good” Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the “bad” Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of Nerth Africa, and Islam everywhere. “Aryans” were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient; as Léon Poliakov has shown (without once remarking, however, that “Semites” were not only the Jews but the Muslims as well**), the Aryan myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the “lesser” peoples. The official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt, Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir, to mention a few famous names almost at random from the nineteenth century. It would also include the diffusive capacity of learned societies: the Société asiatique, founded in 1822; the Royal Asiatic Society, founded in 1823; the American Oriental Society, founded in 1842; and so on. But it might perforce neglect the great contribution of imaginative and travel literature, which strengthened the divisions established by Orientalists between the various geographical, temporal, and racial departments of the Orient. Such neglect would be incorrect, since for the Islamic Orient this literature is especially rich and makes a significant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse. It includes work by Goethe, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Kinglake, Nerval, Flaubert, Lane, Burton, Scott, Byron, Vigny, Disraeli, George Eliot, Gautier. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we could add Doughty, Barres, Loti, T. E. Lawrence, Forster. All these writers give a bolder outline to Disraeli’s “great Asiatic mystery.” In this enterprise there is considerable support not only from the unearthing of dead Oriental civilizations (by European excavators) in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, but also from major geographical surveys done all through the Orient. By the end of the nineteenth century these achievements were materially abetted by the European occupation of the entire Near

100 ORIENTALISM Orient (with the exception of parts of the Ottoman Empire, which was swallowed up after 1918). The principal colonial powers once again were Britain and France, although Russia and Germany played some role as well.*! To colonize meant at first the identification—indeed, the creation—f interests; these could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural. With regard to Islam and the Islamic territories, for example, Britain felt that it had legitimate interests, as a Christian power, to safeguard, A complex apparatus for tending these interests developed. Such early organizations as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) were succeeded and later abetted by the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (1808). These missions “openly joined the expansion of Europe.’*? Add to these the trading societies, leamed societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the implantation in the Orient of schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, and the notion of an “interest” will acquire a good deal of sense. Thereafter interests were defended with much zeal and expense. So far my outline is a gross one. What of the typical experiences and emotions that accompany both the scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests aided by Orientalism? First, there is disappointment that the modern Orient is not at all like the texts. Here is Gérard de Nerval writing to Théophile Gautier at the end of August 1843: I have already lost, Kingdom after Kingdom, province after province, the more beautiful half of the universe, and soon I will know of no place in which I can find a refuge for my dreams; but it is Egypt that I most regret having driven out of my imagination, now that I fave sadly placed it in my memory.*? This is by the author of a great Voyage en Orient. Nerval’s lament is a common topic of Romanticism (the betrayed dream, as described by Albert Béguin in L’Ame romantique et le réve) and of travelers in the Biblical Orient, from Chateaubriand to Mark Twain. Any direct experience of the mundane Orient ironically comments on such valorizations of it as were to be found in Goethe's ”Mahometsgesang” or Hugo’s “Adieux de l’hétesse arabe.” Memory