The Scope of Orientalism 75 Orient. This “militant” Orient came to stand for what Henri Baudet has called “the Asiatic tidal wave.”*> Certainly this was the case in Europe through the middle of the eighteenth century, the point at which repositories of “Oriental” knowledge like d’Herbelot’s Bibliothéque orientale stop meaning primarily Islam, the Arabs, or the Ottomans. Until that time cultural memory gave understandable prominence to such relatively distant events as the fall of Constantinople, the Crusades, and the conquest of Sicily and Spain, but if these signified the menacing Orient they did not at the same time efface what remained of Asia. For there was always India, where, after Portugal pioneered the first bases of European presence in the early sixteenth century, Europe, and primarily England after a long period (from 1600 to 1758) of essentially commercial activity, dominated politically as an occupying force. Yet India itself never provided an indigenous threat to Europe. Rather it was because native authority crumbled there and opened the land to inter-European rivalry and to outright European political control that the Indian Orient could be treated by Europe with such proprietary hauteur—never with the sense of danger reserved for Islam.** Nevertheless, between this hauteur and anything like accurate positive knowledge there existed a vast disparity. D’Herbelot’s entries for Indo-Persian subjects in the Bibliothéque were all based on Islamic sources, and it is true to say that until the early nineteenth century “Oriental languages” was considered a synonym for “Semitic languages.” The Oriental renaissance of which Quinet spoke served the function of expanding some fairly narrow limits, in which Islam was the catchall Oriental example.*” Sanskrit, Indian religion, and Indian history did not acquire the status of scientific knowledge until after Sic William Jones's efforts in the late eighteenth century, and even Jones’s interest in India came to him by way of his prior interest in and knowledge of Islam. It is not surprising, then, that the first major work of Oriental scholarship after d’Herbelot’s Bibliothéque was Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens, whose first volume appeared in 1708. A recent historian of Orientalism has opined that Ockley’s attitude towards the Muslims—that to them is owed what was first known of philosophy by European Christians-—“shocked painfully” his European audience. For not only did Ockley make this Islamic pre-eminence clear in his work; he also “gave Europe its first authentic and substantial taste of the Arab viewpoint touching the

76 ORIENTALISM wars with Byzantium and Persia.** However, Ockley was careful to dissociate himself from the infectious influence of Islam, and unlike his colleague William Whiston (Newton’s successor at Cambridge), he always made it clear that Islam was an outrageous heresy. For his Islamic enthusiasm, on the Other hand, Whiston was expelled from Cambridge in 1709 ~ Access to Indian (Oriental) riches had always to be made by first crossing the Islamic provinces and by withstanding the dangerous effect of Islam as a system of quasi-Arian belief. And at least for the larger segment of the eighteenth century, Britain and France were successful. The Ottoman Empire had long since settled into a (for Europe) comfortable senescence, to be inscribed in the nineteenth century as the “Eastern Question.” Britain and France fought each other in India between 1744 and 1748 and again between 1756 and 1763, until, in 1769, the British emerged in practical economic and political control of the subcontinent. What was more inevitable than that Napoleon should choose to harass Britain’s Oriental empire by first intercepting its Islamic throughway, Egypt? Although it was almost immediately preceded by at least two major Orientalist projects, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and his foray into Syria have had by far the greater consequence for the modern history of Orientalism. Before Napoleon only two efforts (both by scholars) had been made to invade the Orient by stripping it of its veils and also by going beyond the comparative shelter of the Biblical Orient. The first was by Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism, and who traveled . to Asia in order to prove the actual primitive existence of a Chosen People and of the Biblical genealogies. Instead he overshot his early goal and traveled as far east as Surat, thereto find a cache of Avestan texts, there also to complete his translation of the Avesta. Raymond Schwab has said of the mysterious Avestan fragment that set Anquetil off on his voyages that whereas “the scholars looked at the famous fragment of Oxford and then returned to their studies, Anquetil looked, and then went to India.” Schwab also remarks that Anquetil and Voltaire, though temperamentally and ideologically at hopeless odds with each other, had a similar interest in the Orient and the Bible, “the one to make the Bible more indisputable, the other to make it more unbelievable.” Ironically, Anquetil’s Avesta transla