Do orientalists dream of electric Arabs?

Published in Daily Sabah, 30.06.2015
Do Orientalists Dream of Electric Arabs?

The way we talk about orientalists, presuming them to be heartless never-do-good agents of imperialism since Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 often reminds me of Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1982) in which the reader is led to question to what extent robots can assume human qualities. They breathe like us, talk like us, walk about like us, but are they human? The last fort of humanity is its consciousness and conscience. Can androids have a consciousness? Can orientalist have a conscience? Whether orientalists have hearts, and can be seen as anything other than armchair and/or archival commentators who have yet to speak to an Arab in the flesh or cultural appropriators who use Arab dreams for their own ends was discussed in a couple of conferences I have been to recently. First was what I shall call the Orientalist Synod held in All Souls College, Oxford, a college name that elicits sighs even in that city where green quads and spires are people's everyday reality. Translators and Arabists had gathered to inform the not so general public about a new series of translations in parallel text that NYU Abu Dhabi has commissioned. The launch was cleverly entitled 'A Corpus Not a Cannon' to prevent endless discussions of why Text A and not Text B is considered 'cannon fodder'. Among the presenters was Robert Irwin, the famous Said detractor, whose book I assign to my students after we have discussed Orientalism. There was no mention of another famous orientalists that has made it to my syllabus, and who had stayed for quite a while in the college we had assembled in: T E Lawrence, a rather large elephant in the room. And we know the kind of swashbuckling romantic Arabs that he dreamt of and claims to have conjured into being. In his stead, perhaps, another orientalist was mentioned as having been caught in a conflict zone somewhere in Arabia and therefore not able to attend the synod. Yet another prominent one, when he stood up to speak about the editorial decisions concerning the translation series, started with 'I have spent the last 40 years of my life feeling guilty. Yes, I am an orientalist, by virtue of my birth'. His European background, he feared and resented, made his work the work of 'an Orientalist' and therefore of dubious ideological provenance. When he talked about his work, it was clear he was passionate about it, and in his words he and those gathered in the room 'eat and drink and breathe this stuff'. Well, fair point. Another doyen of Arabic studies, Humphrey Davies, introduced Leg over Leg by Ahmad Faris al Shidyaq, the book he translated for the series. Shidyaq is a figure associated very much with the Nahda, what one may call the Arab Tanzimat, about the adventures of a character called Fariyaq, complete with linguistic and historical diversions. Davies revealed one of the inner workings of orientalist scholarship attested to by both Said and Irwin (so it must be true) when he described the method he used to translate the very many descriptions of the female form in Arabic, all to do with various body parts. Where the English language failed to provide synonyms for the multifariousness of the Arabic, Davies used easily Anglicized Latin words/verbs to make up neologisms to correspond to the Arabic. Readers of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom will know that Lawrence himself uses Greek to speak of the vastness, shapes and colours of the desert: either because the desert offered a grandness he found difficult to express in English or because he wanted to prove his credentials of possessing all the ancient language knowledge there is to be known. Both Said and Irwin who are very well acquainted with Lawrence's work suggest that the rise of Oriental Studies is closely linked with the fact that there were already too many Classicists and 'oriental languages' was another field where men could gain scholarly capital of understanding an 'ancient' language. And indeed, this meant that many scholars trained in the Classics switched to Arabic in later years to be able to claim a space in academia; such can often be the case today. There is of course much more to be said about the symbiosis of Arabic and Greek and Latin, how translations between them helped survival of the texts. I was made aware of the parity of Arabic and Latin when as language requirement, Heidelberg University was happy to accept my puny Arabic skills instead of the Latin proficiency the doctoral students had to prove (a requirement that has since been lifted). Back in All Souls, the orientalists proved almost as generous as their Arab subjects and we were treated to lunch and tea- they eat and drink like us, and you know it's difficult to think ill of people once you've broken bread with them- during which I was asked whether in Istanbul orientalism was still synonymous with evil white colonialist men. I said yes, pretty much, in response to which my rather wistful orientalist could only wince.

It turns out I was telling only a half truth. After I came back to Istanbul, I attended yet another conference, on postcolonialism this time, and as these things go, we ended up talking much about orientalism. One of the presenters on the day that had been reserved for presentations in Turkish spoke with that endearing mixture of Ottoman and French, very much like a Tanzimat intellectual. His talk was entitled 'Scholarly Orientalism', in which he practically introduced us to the Valhalla of Oriental Studies; European figures, he said, who were truly interested in scholarship, figures who have facilitated our own research into Islamic and Arabic heritage. He seemed to have no qualms about saying 'rahimahullah' for the orientalist scholars who had passed away, and even boasted of 'having kissed the hand' (Turkish show of respect) of a certain scholar who had taught him many things. Here was a man, whose life's work proved that he cared for the Islamic and Arab world and who saw European orientalists, Arabists in particular, as mentors and colleagues rather than evil figures to be reckoned with. Some orientalists will keep on dreaming of that one taxi driver that will lead them on to hidden truths, others will try to read whole nations through their social media use. Orientalists, Muslims (yes of course the two are not mutually exclusive), and Arabs themselves all dream of Arabs as they would have them be. Seek, and thou shalt find, one true orientalist who is in it for the thrill of discovery and for passing on the heritage of the world to generations to come.