The Scope of Orientalism 105 ourselves the neologism). A third, revisionist alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, was considered by only a tiny minority. One index of the crisis, according to Abdel Malek, was not simply that “national liberation movements in the ex-colonial” Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic “subject races”, there was in addition the fact that “specialists and the public at large became aware of the time-lag, not only between orientalist science and the material under study, but also—and this was to be determining—between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism.”**' The Orientalists—from Renan to Goldziher to Macdonald to von Grunebaum, Gibb, and Bernard Lewis—saw Islam, for example, as a “cultural synthesis” (the phrase is P. M. Holt’s) that could be studied apart from the economics, sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples. For Orientalism, Islam had a meaning which, if one were to look for its most succinct formulation, could be found in Renan’s first treatise: in order best to be understood Islam had to de reduced to “tent and tribe.” The impact of colonialism, of worldly circumstances, of historical development: all these were to Orientalists as flies to wanton boys, killed—or disregarded—for their sport, never taken seriously enough to complicate the essential Islam. The career of H. A. R. Gibb illustrates within itself the two alternative approaches by which Orientalism has responded to the modern Orient. In 1945 Gibb delivered the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago. The world he surveyed was not the same one Balfour and Cromer knew before World War I. Several revolutions, two world wars, and innumerable economic, political, and social changes made thé realities of 1945 an unmistakably, even cataclysmically, new object. Yet we find Gibb opening the lectures he called Modern Trends in Islam as follows: The student of Arabic civilization is constantly brought up against the striking contrast between the imaginative power displayed, for example, in certain branches of Arabic literature and the literalism, the pedantry, displayed in reasoning and exposition, even when it is devoted to these same productions. It is true that there have been great philosophers among the Muslim peoples and that some of them were Arabs, but they were rare exceptions. The Arab mind, whether in relation to the outer world or in relation to the processes of thought, cannot throw off its intense feeling for the separateness and the individuality of the concrete events. This

106 ORIENTALISM is, I believe, one of the main factors lying behind that “lack of a sense of law” which Professor Macdonald regarded as the characteristic difference in the Oriental. It is this, too, which explains—what is so difficult for the Western student to grasp [until it is explained to him by the Orientalist}—the aversion of the Muslims from the thoughtprocesses of rationalism. . . . The rejection of rationalist modes of thought and of the utilitarian ethic which is inseparable from them has its roots, therefore, not in the so-called “obscurantism” of the Muslim theologians but in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination.!** This is pure Orientalism, of course, but even if one acknowledges the exceeding knowledge of institutional Islam that characterizes the rest of the book, Gibb’s inaugural biases remain a formidable obstacle for anyone hoping to understand modern Islam. What is the meaning of “difference” when the preposition “from” has dropped from sight altogether? Are we not once again being asked to inspect the Oriental Muslim as if his world, unlike ours—“differently” from it—had never ventured beyond the seventh century? As for modern Islam itself, despite the complexities of his otherwise magisterial understanding of it, why must it be regarded with so implacable a hostility as Gibb’s? If Islam is flawed from the start by virtue of its perinanent disabilities, the Orientalist will find himself opposing any Islamic attempts to reform Islam, because, according to his views, reform is a betrayal of Islam: this is exactly Gibb’s argument. How can an Oriental slip out from these manacles into the modern world except by repeating with the Fool in King Lear, “They'll have me whipp’d for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipp’d for fying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace.” Eighteen years later Gibb faced an audience of English compatriots, only now he was speaking as the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. His topic was “Area Studies Reconsidered,” in which, among other aper¢us, he agreed that “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists.” The new, or second alternative, approach open to Orientalists was being announced, just as Modern Trends exemplified the first, or traditional, approach. Gibb’s formula is well-intentioned in “Area Studies Reconsidered,” so far, of course, as the Western experts on the Orient are concerned, whose job it is to prepare students for careers “in public life and business.” What we now need, said Gibb,