The Muslim World in British Historical Imaginations: ‘Re-thinking Orientalism’?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ ‘[B]y Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism … Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’. Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on … the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient … despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Oriental’. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1978: 1995 edition), pp. 2–3, 5.

² Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 4.

³ See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972).

⁴ As Irwin asserts in For Lust of Knowing, p. 302, ‘there are such things as pure scholars. I have even had tea with a few of them’.

⁵ Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 301. See also Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, The New York Review of Books, 29(11) (24 June 1982), pp. 49–56, and the subsequent exchange between Said, Lewis and Oleg Grabar in ‘Orientalism: an Exchange’, The New York Review of Books, 29(13) (29 August 1982), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/6517 (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁶ A.J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960), pp. 239–242; Arberry's own career—as Assistant Librarian in the India Office, his work as ‘a propagandist’ during the war, and his involvement in the Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Inquiry on Oriental, Slavonic East European and African Studies in 1947—somewhat contradicts his wider claims. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to argue that a dialectical relationship exists between politics and scholarship.

⁷ See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963).

⁸ Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 85–86.

⁹ For example, English and Scottish Protestants directed the Bible's prophetic verses against Muhammad as well as the Pope to validate their own beliefs. Many agreed with Martin Luther that ‘Turks and the Pope do not differ in the form of their religion, unless it be in the rituals’, and considered the latter to be the real antichrist and hence a greater menace. Over coming generations they invoked Luther's prayer for Jesus Christ's return to ‘smite both Turk and pope to the earth’. See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 153–154. See also Thomas Burman, Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Even when Islam was praised, its purpose was to make fellow Christians aware of their own shortcomings—the success of Islam as God's punishment for Christian failings.

¹⁰ For more details about the influence of ‘the father of Arabic studies in England’, see Alistair Hamilton, William Bedwell, the Arabist 1563–1732 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), p. 1. For Bedwell's pioneering contribution to the study of Arabic and Islam, see, G.J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome And Learning: The Study Of Arabic In Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 57–63.

¹¹ See Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning. This study offers a rigorous and persuasive analysis of the factors, including the influence of trade with the Ottoman Empire and mistrust of Islam, that first resulted in the ‘boom’ in the study of Arabic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then its rapid decline from the end of the seventeenth century. Bedwell too called attention to the prime importance of Arabic as ‘a tonge which was the only language of religion and the chief language of diplomacy and business and from the Fortunate Islands to the China Seas’, see Arberry, Oriental Essays, p. 12. In the 1620s and 1630s there was a growing recognition that much useful scientific knowledge, contained in Arabic manuscripts, remained worthy of scrutiny. Laud was part of this thinking. He used his influence with King Charles I to advance the collection of such manuscripts. In 1634 he obtained a royal letter to the Levant Company requiring that each of their ships returning from the East should bring one Persian or Arabic manuscript back, see A.F.L. Beeston, The Oriental Manuscript Collections of the Bodeleian Library, 1 (reprinted from the Bodleian Library Record, Vol. 2, 1954).

¹² Religion provided much of the impetus for the study of Arabic in England in this period, primarily as a tool for achieving a deeper understanding of the biblical text, as well as engaging in religious debates with the Muslims in the Middle East. There emerged a desperate desire among the English scholars to establish the Truth about the Bible. David A. Pailin's chapter, ‘The treatment of Islam’, in his Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 104), concludes, ‘With a few exception, Islam is examined in order to show that it is inferior to Christianity and offers no plausible threat to the various proofs of the truth of the Christian revelation’. See also Shereen Khairallah, Arabic Studies in England in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (unpublished PhD thesis, London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1972).

¹³ Sir Thomas Adams became increasingly influential in public affairs and provided considerable patronage. He was elected the Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1643 and a Member of Parliament in the 1650s. He paid for the printing of the Gospels in Persian, and for sending them into the east. See Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning, p. 91.

¹⁴ Protestants and Catholics likened each other to Muslims for deviating from and perverting the true faith and used Islam against Christian sects such as the Socinians, Unitarians and Deists. For example Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677), troubled by ‘heretical’ texts circulating in England, ‘saw that it was essential to defend the divinity of Scripture’ and ‘to justify the New Testament … as genuine, unaltered, and altogether free from additions and diminutions’. Oldenburg was deeply concerned to defend Scripture against his opponents in England who were deploying the charges of corruption and other Islamic objections in their polemics against Trinitarian Christianity. See Justin A.I. Champion, ‘Legislators, Imposters and the Politic Origins of Religion: English Theories of “Imposture” From Stubbe to Toland’, in Silvia Berti, Francoise Charles-Dubert and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Heterodoxy, Spinozism and Free Thought in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 14 (electronic copy also available at http://digirep.rhul.ac.uk/items/3421c5d2-70b7-71fb-2ee3-9aff1d11494c/1/Champion_TRAITE2.pdf).

¹⁵ See J.R. Hale (ed.), The Evolution of British Historiography: From Bacon to Namier (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1964), p. 9. ‘[N]ot only are events related, but their causes and effects explained; the characters of the actors are displayed; the manners of the age described…’, Hale, The Evolution of British Historiography, p. 28.

¹⁶ See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

¹⁷ Edward Pococke (1604–1691) was chaplain for the Levant Co. at Aleppo between 1630 and 1636, during which period he became interested in Arab society. His Specimen Historae Arabum offers a defence of kingly government. Through the study of Arabic authors themselves, he wanted to find out what Muslims really believed: a knowledge of Arabic, he thought, ‘would enable Christians to refute genuine Muslim errors…’ and, hopefully, bring about their conversion, see P.M. Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East (London: Frank Cass, 1973), pp. 17, 21. See also P.M. Holt, ‘The Study of Arabic Historians in Seventeenth-Century England: The Background and Work of Edward Pococke’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 19(3) (1957), pp. 444–455. According to Toomer, Pococke had indeed ‘envisioned the possibility of converting Muslims’ (Eastern Wisedome And Learning, pp. 216–217), but while ‘his attitude towards Muhammad is clearly one of dislike—he regularly uses the title ‘false prophet’ and he charges him with ‘libidousness’ and of ‘laying the bloody foundations of his religion and his empire at the same time’ (Ibid, pp. 223–224)—Pococke refrains from hurling the usual abuses. Indeed, he is credited with having shown a high regard for Arabic as a language—its clarity, elegance and richness—and have celebrating Arab contributions to philosophy and the sciences.

¹⁸ Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: John Starkey and Henry Brome, 1668: reprint, Westmead: Gregg International Publishers, 1972).

¹⁹ This is the subtitle of Prideaux's Life of Mahomet. He intended his text not only as a polemic against Islam but also as a warning that the advance of the Socianian, the Deist and the Quaker ‘may … raise up some Mahomet against us for our utter Confusion’, see Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East, p. 51.

²⁰ While, thanks to sponsorship by Muslim subscribers to the Islamic Society including Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani, Stubbe's text, entitled An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism—with the Life of Mahomet (subtitled, ‘And a vindication of him and his religion from the calumnies of the Christians’) (London: Luzac & Co.), was eventually published in 1911, a number of copies of the manuscript had already been in circulation at the end of the 1670s.

²¹ Stubbe, Mahometanism, p. 141.

²² See, P.M. Holt, A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632–76) and his book (London: Dr. Williams's Trust, 1972), p. 22.

²³ Shairani ‘recognized the work [Mahometanism] as constituting one of the earliest appreciations of Islam we have in English, remarkable for its lack of Christian bias and its intuitive and sympathetic grasp of Muslim faith and practice’. See James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, radical Protestantism and the early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 64.

²⁴ Simon Ockley, The History of the Saracens, 6th edition (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), p. xvi.

²⁵ Ockley, The History of the Saracens, p. 79.

²⁶ Ockley, The History of the Saracens, p. xvi.

²⁷ Ockley writes, ‘The Arabians … since the time of Mahomet have rendered themselves universally remarkable, both by arms and learning’, Ockley, The History of the Saracens. As a ‘modern’ historian, Ockley says, ‘I have let them tell their own story: and I have abstained as much as possible from intermixing reflections of my own, unless where they have appeared a necessity of illustrating something that might not be obvious to persons unacquainted with oriental affairs’, see Arberry, Oriental Essays, p. 45. All the same, Ockley continued in the main to follow Prideaux's line and kept nonconformists and deviant Christians at arms length. And, in his History, he clearly intended to expose and counter ‘a great many Errors’—‘the Whimsies and Conceits of the Arab Enthusiasts … or even that plentiful crop which the Devil has sow'd of them in our times’, Arberry, Oriental Essays, p. 24.

²⁸ George Sale, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed (London: printed for L. Hawes, W. Clarke, and R. Collins, and T. Wilcox, 1764), Vol. I, p. 47. When Sale opined that the Quran was a forgery and that it was absolutely necessary to expose Muhammad's imposture, he, like Prideaux, was parroting the mediaeval church historians. However, Sale's position was a little more complex and nuanced. For instance, he disagreed with Prideaux's uncompromising position that Muhammad ‘made that nation [the Arabs] exchange their idolatry for another religion altogether as bad’, Sale, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed, p. 51.

²⁹ Even in the late eighteenth century, by which time the EIC had become the dominant power in many parts of India, Dalrymple tells us that, in contrast to the later policy of social distance and separation from the so-called ‘natives’, the British in India, including the elite, such as Kirkpatrick, Palmer and Ochterlony, were happy to mingle with Indians—they delighted in Indian cultures and ways of living, loved and married Indian women, adopted modes of Indian dress and spoke Indian languages. See William Dalrymple, White Mughals, Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), pp. xlvi–xlix.

³⁰ See W. Robertson, An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancient had of India (London: printed for A. Strahan [and 2 others], 1791).

³¹ The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, while sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment, asserted the ability of man to affect changes for the better in society and nature, guided only by reason. They were distinguishable in their emphasis on empiricist approach. See Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 2003). The development approach to history, associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, offered a unique and profoundly influential eighteenth-century narrative known as the four-stage thesis. In the works of Smith, Hume and Robertson, from the 1750s to the 1790s, it concluded that the human record was one of material and moral improvement, of cultural development from ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’, and that their society stood at the pinnacle of achievement. Savages did not have the capacity for self-government while serfs, slaves and peasants on the other hand may be so schooled in obedience that their capacity for rationality would be stifled. Only in commercial society were the material and cultural conditions ideal for individuals to realise and exercise their potential. The consequence of this logic was that civilised societies like Britain were acting in the interest of less-developed peoples by governing them. Colonialism, from this perspective, was not primarily a form of political domination and economic exploitation but rather a paternalistic practice of government that exported ‘civilisation’ (later modernisation) in order to foster improvement in native peoples. Despotic government (James Mill does not hesitate to use this term) was a means to the end of improvement and ultimately self-government.

³² Alexander Dow, History of Hindostan (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1772), p. 382.

³³ See, J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Vol. 1.

³⁴ Assessing Muhammad Gibbon asked whether he was an enthusiast or imposter; in Gibbon's view, Muhammad was ‘compelled … to comply in some measure with the prejudices and vices of his followers and employed even the vices of mankind as instruments of salvation’. While the ‘use of fraud and perfidy were subservient to the propagation of faith … the character of Mahomet must have gradually been stained … and the influence of such pernicious habits [assassination] would be poorly compensated by the practice of personal and social virtues … Of his last years, ambition was the ruling ambition; and a politician will suspect, that he secretly smiled (a victorious imposter!)’. See Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: T. Cadell, 1837), p. 883.

³⁵ ‘Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet … From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man [Charles Martel, 732 A.D.]’, see Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen & Co., 1896), Vol. V, Chapter 52, p. 15.

³⁶ The Works of Sir William Jones, edited by Lord Teignmouth (London: John Stockdale, 1807), Vol. I, p. 19.

³⁷ The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. III, p. 216. Montesquieu (1689–1755) developed the concept of despotism in his The Spirit of the Law (1748) as the rule of a single person subject to no restraint, constitutional or moral. During the nineteenth century the concept of ‘Oriental despotism’ became a powerful idea for explaining the supposed backwardness of ‘Oriental’ societies and as a justification for colonial systems. According to this scheme, British rule was the agent of economic modernisation—and thus colonialism, unwittingly, became a progressive force. See Z. Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 45–48, 83–85.

³⁸ The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. II, p. 133.

³⁹ Cited in Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19.

⁴⁰ S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 125.

⁴¹ Jones, ‘To Arthur Lee’, 1 October 1786, letter 443 of Letters, Vol. II, pp. 712–713. Also see John Shore Teignmouth (ed.), Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones (London: J. Hatchard, 1806), p. 236.

⁴² Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 8.

⁴³ Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 22.

⁴⁴ Arberry, Oriental Essays, p. 58.

⁴⁵ John Malcolm in his The History of Persia, from the Most Early Period to the Present Time (London: John Murray, 1815), wrote ‘the prosecution of my public duties first led me to feel the want of a history of Persia’, see M.E. Yapp, ‘Two British Historians of Persia’, in Bernard Lewis and P.M. Holt (eds.), Historians of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 343.

⁴⁶ Malcolm's study of the Persians led him to conclude that they were a barbarian and uncivilised people who did not know the value of liberty and whom preferred peace and security under a strong despot. To him the worst symptom of Persian decay was the debased morality of the people; ‘the Persians are ignorant, deceitful, and capricious, and above all they were vain’. The reason for their lack of progress was Islam: ‘a religion adverse to all improvement’. ‘What’, Malcolm asked, ‘but Barbarians could be the result of such a doctrine?’ That is why ‘there is no example of a Mahommedan nation having attained a high rank in the scale of civilisation’, and hence the need for the British to intervene and forcibly civilise them. See Yapp, ‘Two British Historians, p. 349. Mountstuart Elphinstone, who was in the service of the EIC from his appointment in 1795 until his retirement as Governor of Bombay in 1827, wrote his History of India, published in 1841, in a period when British power was expanding. Like Malcolm, he too presumed that human nature differed in different parts of the world. Europeans and Christianity, in his view, were superior to other peoples and creeds. With regard to Islam, while he considered Muhammad to be a ‘reformer’ and his morality, ‘however [it] may appear to modern Christians’ pure when compared with contemporary practices in Arabia, he nevertheless remained a ‘false’ prophet … and ‘among the worst enemies of mankind … he encouraged intolerance, fanaticism and violence’. See Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India (London: John Murray, 1841), Vol. I, pp. 492–494. In one Indian historian's estimate, Elphinstone maintained an ‘unconcealed contempt for all Islamic institutions in general and the Prophet of Islam in particular’. See Abdur Rashid, ‘The Treatment of History by Muslim Historians in Mughal Official and Biographical Works’, in C.H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 140.

⁴⁷ The Philanthropist (1814) Vol. IV, p. 117 (James Mill's review of William Gilpin's The Lives of Reformers)—cited by J.S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 71.

⁴⁸ Thomas Babington Macualay (1800–1859) was a Whig politician and, in many eyes, ‘the pre-eminent’ nineteenth-century English historian. For him the British Empire was a rational, progressive and benevolent force; its purpose was to bring out ‘a great people sunk in the lowest depth of slavery and superstition’ and make them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens’, quoted in Ronald Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 220.

⁴⁹ In his famous Minute of 2 February 1835, Macaulay claimed, ‘I have never found one among them [‘orientalists’] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ See http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁵⁰ See Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, A Study of His Life and Works and of the British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 1978), p. 95.

⁵¹ Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manner and Customs of the modern Egyptians, 5th edition (London: John Murray, 1860). See also Jason Thompson, ‘Edward William Lane’, Egypt, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 34 (1997), pp. 243–261. It has been suggested that his association with a group of British Egyptologists and orientalists, who had collected in Egypt in the 1820s, may have resulted in the reinforcement of some of his ‘cultural preconceptions, if only unconsciously’, Ibid, p. 255.

⁵² One area of Egyptian society, however, about which Lane could not write accurately because of lack of access to the harem was the female and domestic sphere. His perceptions and accounts, based mainly on conversations with Egyptian men, of inter-sexual relations, Egyptian women's sexuality and behaviour—their ‘immodest freedom of conversation’, ‘their ‘coarse’ language, their licentiousness—were heavily shaped by his regard for and unquestioned acceptance of Victorian propriety. See Lane, Account, pp. 295–296. Later he was helped by his sister, Sophia Poole, who accompanied him on his third trip to Egypt, in correcting the erroneous and adding to the deficient information in his earlier account. See Sophia Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo Written during a Residence there in 1842–1846, edited by Azza Kararah (Cairo: The American University in Cairo, 2003). See also Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim, ‘Sophia Poole: Writing the Self, Scribing Egyptian Women’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 22 (2002), pp. 107–126.

⁵³ While Charles Foster (1787–1871), for instance, accepted the traditional Christian formulations of Islam he also affirmed Muhammad's spiritual sincerity. Sir William Muir's (1819–1905) view of Islam as an enemy of ‘Civilisation, Liberty and Truth’ contrasted with Reginald Bosworth Smith's (1839–1908) rejection of Muhammad's imposture and acceptance of his prophethood. See Clinton Bennett, Victorian Images of Islam (London: Grey Seal Books, 1992). See also Philip C. Almond, Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989).

⁵⁴ W. Montgomery Watt, ‘Carlyle and Muhammad’, Hibbert Journal, liii (1954–55), p. 247. Carlyle quotes Goethe (1749–1832), not entirely accurately, in his positive assessment of Islam: “If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam”, see Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Prophet’, in his On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), p. 52.

⁵⁵ Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Prophet’, pp. 52–53.

⁵⁶ See ‘Sir William Muir, 1819–1905’ in Bennett, Victorian Images of Islam, pp. 103–127. For Muir, ’the sword of Mahomet, and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of Civilisation, Liberty and the Truth which the world has yet known’. See W. Muir, Life of Mahomet (London: Smith, Elder, 1861), Vol. 4, p. 322. Muir believed that Britain's position in India carried special responsibilities—the ‘enlightenment of the people of India depended on her’ not neglecting her ‘noble vocation’—and he saw his national mission to educate to enlighten to civilize the ‘savage’ natives.

⁵⁷ See H.M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (London: Trubner Company, 1867–1877), 8 Vols; Grewal, Muslim Rule in India, pp. 170–171. See also S.H. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: Critical Commentary on Elliot and Dowson's History of India as told by its own Historians (Bombay: unknown publishers, 1939–1957), 2 Vols, in which an enormous number of factual errors as well as flaws associated with reading and interpretation were identified.

⁵⁸ Henry Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relations to Modern Ideas (London; John Murray, 1861), Ch. 4.

⁵⁹ Francis Henry Bennett Skrine, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter, K.C.S.I. (London: Longmans & Co., 1901), pp. 468–469.

⁶⁰ J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1883). Edited and with an introduction by John Gross (London: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

⁶¹ Seeley, The Expansion of England, p. 141.

⁶² Rudyard Kipling appositely captures the sentiment in his 1899 poem, ‘The White Man's Burden’.

⁶³ Alfred Milner, England in Egypt (London: Edward Arnold, 1893); George N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East (London: Longmans, Green, 1894); Hugh Egerton, A Short History of British Colonial Policy (London: Methuen & Co., 1897); Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan & Co., 1908), 2 Vols.

⁶⁴ For a critique of the Empire, see J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbett & Co., 1902). Another example of those dissenting from the virtues and benevolence of the British imperial mission was Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918). See also A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957).

⁶⁵ David Samuel Margoliouth (1895–1940) was Laudian Professor at Oxford until 1937, an ordained Anglican cleric, and self-taught in Arabic. While Margoliouth had many good things to say about Muhammad and Islam, he considered Muhammad and his Muslim followers to be ultimately deeply flawed in several respects. See David Samuel Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (London: G.P. Puttnam's Sons, 1905).

⁶⁶ In India Arnold joined a local group of Muslim reformers who sought to bring together scientific thought with Quranic beliefs. Returning to London in 1904, he taught Arabic at University College London and was appointed to a chair at the School of Oriental Studies in 1921. Katherine Watt, ‘Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam, 1864–1930’, Modern Asian Studies, 36(1) (February 2002), pp. 1–98.

⁶⁷ T.W. Arnold, The Islamic Faith (London: Benn, 1928), p. 77.

⁶⁸ M.A. Stein, ‘Thomas Walker Arnold’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XVI (1930), pp. 439–474.

⁶⁹ ‘Edward Granville Brown and the Persian “Awakening”’, in Geoffrey Nash (ed.), From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 139–168.

⁷⁰ Cromer, Modern Egypt, p. 28. See also Jennifer Kernaghan, ‘Lord Cromer as Orientalist and Social Engineer in Egypt, 1882–1907’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1993.

⁷¹ V.A. Smith, The Oxford History of India (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1919), p. 182.

⁷² Margery Perham (1895–1982), an Oxford University historian, in collaboration with the sometime Governor of Nigeria, Sir Frederick (Lord) Lugard (1858–1945), elaborated the theory of ‘Indirect Rule’ as a rationale for Britain's imperial mission in a more paternalistic mode. See Perham's Colonial Sequence, 1930–1949: A Chronological Commentary upon British Colonial Policy Especially in Africa (London: Methuen & Co., 1967).

⁷³Leonard Woolf in Imperialism and Civilization (L. & V. Woolf, London, 1936) and Leonard Barnes, in The Duty of Empire (Victor Gollancz, London, 1935), mounted robust and trenchant critiques.

⁷⁴ According to Norman Daniel, the ‘new ideas of the Islamic world… took shape in Western Europe during the period of colonial expansion. New images came to be reflected in the old distorting mirror. The inhabitants of modern Europe inherited from their medieval fathers a large and persistent body of ideas about Islam’. See Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. xiii. This book examines the images of the Muslim world in Europe in the modern period. For an example of the reliance on medieval and early modern knowledge of Muhammad and Islam, see the writings of David Samuel Margoliouth (mentioned above).

⁷⁵ See H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, 1st edition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1947: reprinted, New York: Octagon Books, 1975), pp. 5–7, 106–110.

⁷⁶ Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 242.

⁷⁷ See Sir Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).

⁷⁸ Roger Owen, ‘The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century—An ‘Islamic’ Society in Decline? A Critique of Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West’, Review of Middle East Studies, 1 (1975), pp. 113–134.

⁷⁹ Caroline Finkel, ‘“The Treacherous Cleverness of Hindsight”: Myths of Ottoman decay’, in Gerald Maclean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 148–174.

⁸⁰ Bernard Lewis, ‘Communism and Islam’, International Affairs, 30(1) (1954), pp. 1–12.

⁸¹ Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 132.

⁸² Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199009/muslim-rage (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁸³ For a succinct critique of the historical evolution of the ‘Modernisation theory’, see Lockman, Contending Visions, pp. 133–143. Indeed, a number of scholars have demolished the thesis of the hegemonic centrality of Western modernity. S.N. Eisenstadt, for instance, has argued for ‘the idea of multiple modernities’. In his view, ‘the best way to understand the contemporary world … is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’, see ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1) (Winter 2000), pp. 1–29. Roxanne L. Euben suggests that ‘Islamic fundamentalist political thought is part of a transcultural and multivocal reassessment of the value and definition of “modernity”’, see ‘Premodern, Antimodern or Postmodern? Islamic and Western Critiques of Modernity’, The Review of Politics, 59(3) (Summer 1997), pp. 429–459. Francis Robinson more specifically identifies the ‘modernising processes’—attacks on the authority of the past; the individual as the key agent on earth (human will); the accompanying transformations of the self—in ‘Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 42(2/3) (2008), pp. 259–281. In this sense, Islamic reform could, arguably, be seen as a modernising force within many Muslim societies, just as other ‘modernities’ operate within non-Muslim ones.

⁸⁴ Bernard Lewis, in 1954, used the notion of Oriental despotism (Karl Wittfogel's ‘hydraulic society’) to explain the authoritarian and arbitrary character of Islamic social order: see Lewis, ‘Communism and Islam’, p. 9. See also Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957) for a detailed elaboration of his thesis.

⁸⁵ Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (London: Phoenix, 2004), pp. 210, 132; Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), pp. 296–297; Bernard Lewis, ‘The Muslim Discovery of Europe’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 20(1/3) Studies in Honour of Sir Ralph Turner, Director of the School of Oriental and. African Studies, 1937–57 (1957), pp. 409–416.

⁸⁶ Nabil Matar (ed.), In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p. xxii. See also Nabil Matar, ‘Arab views of Europeans, 1758–1727: The Western Mediterranean’, in Gerald Maclean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 126–147.

⁸⁷ Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

⁸⁸ Priyamvada Gopal, ‘The Story Peddled by Imperial Apologists is a Poisonous Fairytale’, The Guardian (London, 28 June 2006). See also Niall Ferguson, ‘America: an Empire in Denial’, The Chronicle Review, 49(29) (28 March 2003); Vivek Chibber, ‘The Good Empire: Should We Pick Up Where the British Left Off?’, The Boston Review, February/March 2005; John S. Saul, ‘“Humanitarian Imperialism”: Ferguson, Ignatieff and the Political Science of Good Empire’, paper given on 5 February 2006 at York University, Toronto, http://www.marxsite.com/Humanitarian%20Imperialism.htm (accessed 8 April 2010); Amartya Sen, ‘Imperial Illusions, India, Britain, and the wrong lessons’, The New Republic, 31 December 2007.

⁸⁹ Stephen Howe, ‘An Oxford Scot at King Dubya's court: Niall Ferguson's “Colossus”’ (22 July 2004) http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-americanpower/article_2021.jsp (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁹⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

⁹¹ Fukuyama argues that—with the end of the Cold War—we have arrived at ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’, see Francis Fukuyama, ‘End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989, http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm (accessed 8 April 2010). He elaborates his thesis further in his later book The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamilton, 1992).

⁹² Jonathan Powell, ‘Why the West Must Not Fear To Intervene’, The Observer, 18 November 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/18/comment.foreignpolicy (accessed 8 April 2010); David Miliband, ‘The Democratic Imperative’, Aung San Suu Kyi Lecture, St Hugh's College, Oxford, 12 February 2008, http://www.davidmiliband.info/speeches/speeches_08_02.htm (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁹³ ‘After all, civilizations and cultures do not enter into dialogue, or do they go to war, and might not legitimately be understood anthropomorphically. What go to war are states, armies and social movements’, see Aziz al-Azmeh, ‘Human Rights and Contemporaneity of Islam: A Matter of Dialogue’, http://www.alati.com.br/pdf/2007/the_universal_of_human_rights/pdf220.pdf (accessed 8 April 2010).

⁹⁴ Delanty, ‘Civilizational Constellations and European Modernity Reconsidered’, in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 45–60.

⁹⁵ See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Oriental Globalization: Past and Present’, in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, pp. 61–73 and John M. Hobson, ‘Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental Europe: The Eastern Origins of European Civilization’, in Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, pp. 107–119.

⁹⁶ Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); L. Jardine and J. Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (London, Reaktion Books, 2000); Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

⁹⁷ See Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar, and Lockman, Contending Visions.

⁹⁸ Jack Goody, ‘Europe and Islam’, in Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, p. 139.

⁹⁹ B.O. Utvik, ‘The Modernizing Force of Islamism’, in J.L. Esposito and F. Burgat (eds.), Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in the Middle East and Europe (London: Hurst, 2003), pp. 43–68.

¹⁰⁰ John M. Mackenzie, Orientalism History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 215.

¹⁰¹ For example, David Urquhart (1805–1877), W.S. Blunt (1840–1922), E.G. Browne (1862–1926), T.W. Arnold (1864–1930) and Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936) all viewed Muslim cultures positively, and argued for their integrity and autonomy. However, in their scheme, British patronage to a greater or lesser degree needed to be deployed in order to reform the Muslim societies with which they engaged. See Geoffrey Nash, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830–1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).

¹⁰² Bernard Lewis, Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (London: Alcove Press, 1973), p. 14.

¹⁰³ ‘[C]ultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be’: Said, Orientalism, p. 67. ‘Representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has said of all operations of language, they are deformations … The Orient as a representation in Europe is formed—or deformed …’, Said, Orientalism, pp. 272–273.

¹⁰⁴ Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, in A.L. Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 222.

¹⁰⁵ Said, Orientalism, p. 23.