The Scope of Orientalism 63 twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Arabia was “on the fringe of the Christian world, a natural asylum for heretical outlaws,”** and that Mohammed was a cunning apostate, whereas in the twentieth century an Orientalist scholar, an erudite specialist, will be the one to point out how Isiam is really no more than second-order Arian heresy.** Our initial description of Orientalism as a learned field now acquires a new concreteness. A field is often an enclosed space. The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) dramas technically put together by the dramatist. In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, and dozens more; settings, in some cases names only, half-imagined, half-known; monsters, devils, heroes; terrors, pleasures, desires. The European imagination was nourished extensively from this repertoire: between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century such major authors as Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the authors of the Chanson de Roland and the Poema del Cid drew on the Orient’s riches for their productions, in ways that sharpened the outlines of imagery, ideas, and figures populating it. In addition, a great deal of what was considered learned Orientalist scholarship in Europe pressed ideological myths into service, even as knowledge seemed genuinely to be advancing. A celebrated instance of how dramatic form and learned imagery come together in the Orientalist theater is Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothéque orientale, published posthumously in 1697, with a preface by Antoine Galland, The introduction of the recent Cambridge History of Islam considers the Bibliothéque, along with George Sale’s preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran (1734) and Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens (1708, 1718), to be “highly important” in widening “the new understand 

64 ORIENTALISM ing of Islam” and conveying it “to a less academic readership.”* This inadequately describes d’Herbelot’s work, which was not restricted to Islam as Sale’s and Ockley’s were. With the exception of Johann H. Hottinger’s Historia Orientalis, which appeared in 1651, the Bibliothéque remained the standard reference work in Europe until the early nineteenth century. Its scope was truly epochal, Galland, who was the first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights and an Arcabist of note, contrasted d’Herbelot’s achievement with every prior one by noting the prodigious range of his enterprise. D'Herbelot read a great number of works, Galland said, in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, with the result that he was able to find out about matters hitherto concealed from Europeans.** After first composing a dictionary of these three Oriental languages, d’Herbelot went on to study Oriental history, theology, geography, science, and art, in both their fabulous and their truthful varieties. Thereafter he decided to compose two works, one a bibliothéque, or “library,” an alphabetically arranged dictionary, the second a florilége, or anthology. Only the first part was completed. Galland’s account of the Bibliothéque stated that “orientale” was planned to include principally the Levant, although—Galland says admiringly—the time period covered did not begin only with the creation of Adam and end with the “temps ot nous sommes”: d’'Herbelot went even further back, to a time described as “plus haut” in fabulous histories—-to the long period of the pre-Adamite Solimans. As Galland’s description proceeds, we learn that the Bibliothéque was like “any other” history of the world, for what it attempted was a complete compendium of the knowledge available on such matters as the Creation, the Deluge, the destruction of Babel, and so forth—with the difference that d’Herbelot’s sources were Oriental. He divided history into two types, sacred and profane (the Jews and Christians in the first, the Muslims in the second), and two periods, pre- and postdiluvian, Thus d’Herbelot was able to discuss such widely divergent histories as the Mogul, the Tartar, the Turkish, and the Slavonic; he took in as well all the provinces of the Muslim Empire, from the Extreme Orient to the Pillars of Hercules, with their customs, rituals, traditions, commentaries, dynasties, palaces, civers, and flora. Such a work, even though it included some attention to “la doctrine perverse de Mahomet, qui a causé si grands dommages au Christianisme,” was more capaciously thorough than any work before it. Galland concluded his