150 ; ORIENTALISM work together, in support of each other. What Renan and Sacy tried to do was to reduce the Orient to a kind of human flatness, which exposed its characteristics easily to scrutiny and removed from it its complicating humanity. In Renan’s case, the legitimacy of his efforts was provided by philology, whose ideological tenets encourage the reduction of a language to its roots; thereafter, the philologist finds it possible to connect those linguistics roots, as Renan and others did, to race, mind, character, and temperament at their roots. The affinity between Renan and Gobineau, for example, was acknowledged by Renan to be a common philological and Orientalist perpective;* in subsequent editions of the Histoire générale he incorporated some of Gobineau’s work within his own. Thus did comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient. The main traits of this inequality are worth recapitulating briefly. T have already referred to Schlegel’s enthusiasm for India, and then his subsequent revulsion from it and of course from Islam. Many of the earliest Oriental amateurs began by welcoming the Orient as a salutary dérangement of their European habits of mind and spirit. The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivity, and so forth. Schelling, for example, saw in Oriental polytheism a preparation of the way for Judeo-Christian monotheism: Abraham was prefigured in Brahma. Yet almost without exception such overesteem was followed by a . counterresponse: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably underhumanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth. A swing of the pendulum in one direction caused an equal and opposite swing back: the Orient was undervalued. Orientalism as a profession grew out of these opposites, of compensations and corrections based on inequality, ideas nourished by and nourishing similar ideas in the culture at large. Indeed the very project of restriction and restructuring associated with Orientalism can be traced directly to the inequality by which the Orient’s comparative poverty (or wealth) besought scholarly, scientific treatment of the kind to be found in disciplines like philology, biology, history, anthropology, philosophy, or economics. And thus the actual profession of Orientalist enshrined this inequality and the special paradoxes it engendered. Most often an individual entered the profession as a way of reckoning with the Orient’s claim on him; yet most often too his Orientalist training

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 15! opened his eyes, soto speak, and what he was left with was a sort of debunking project, by which the Orient was reduced to considerably less than the eminence once seen in it. How else is one to explain the enormous labors represented by the work of William Muir (1819-1905), for example, or of Reinhart Dozy (1820-1883), and the impressive antipathy ia that work to the Orient, Islam, and the Arabs? Characteristically, Renan was one of Dozy’s supporters, just as in Dozy’s four-volume Histoire des Mussulmans d’Espagne, jusqu’a la conquéte de f'Andalousie par les Almoravides (1861) there appear many of Renan’s anti-Semitic strictures, compounded in 1864 by a volume arguing that the Jews’ primitive God was not Jahweh but Baal, proof for which was to be found in Mecca, of all places. Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1858-1861) and his The Caliphate, Its Rise, Decline and Fali (1891) are still considered reliable monuments of scholarship, yet his attitude towards his subject matter was fairly put by him when he said that “the sword of Muhammed, and the Kor’an, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty,.and the Truth which the world has yet known.”** Many of the same notions are to be found in the work of Alfred Lyall, who was one of the authors cited approvingly by Cromer. Even if the Orientalist does not explicitly judge his material as Dozy and Muir did, the principle of inequality exerts its influence nevertheless. It remains the professional Orientalist’s job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments, such as those unearthed by Sacy, supply the material, but the narrative shape, continuity, and figures are constructed by the scholar, for whom scholarship consists of circumventing the unruly (un-Occidental) nonhistory of the Orient with orderly chronicle, portraits, and plots. Caussin de Perceval's Essai sur U’histoire des Arabes avant UIslamisme, pendant l'époque de Mahomer (three volumes, 1847-1848) is a wholly professional study, depending for its sources on documents made available internally to the field by other Orientalists (principally Sacy, of course) of documents—like the texts of ibn-Khaldun, upon whom Caussin relied very heavily—reposing in Orientalist libraries in Europe. Caussin’s.thesis is that the Arabs were made a people by Mohammed, Islam being essentially a political instrument, not by any means a spiritual one. What Caussin strives for is clarity amidst a huge mass of confusing detail. Thus what emerges out of the study of Islam is quite literally a one-dimensional portrait of Mohammed,