Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad Ali Khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization, In this artide, I will argue that Said's central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory role to play in our understanding of the work produced in at least one area of scholarship about the Arab and Islamic worlds, namely Arab~IsIamic philosophy from the dassical or medieva.1 period. Moreover. I will claim that it continues to play this role not only for scholarship produced in the West by Western scholars but also within the Arab world itself After recalling some traditional varieties of Orientalism in the study of Islamic philosophy, I will go on to isolate some neo-Orientalist theses and positions. Then I will identify what I call 'oriental Oriental ism' in the study of Islamic philosophy, which originates in the Arab world itself, In conclusion, I will speculate as to why Orientalism persists in scholarship about the Islamic world, more than a quarter of a century after Said first unmasked it Finally, I will distinguish two accounts of Said's interpretive stance and attempt to justify a particular reading of his philosophical framework, Traditional Orientalism Traditional Orientalism is not di~'t1cult to find among the first European scholars who studied Islamic philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, It can be summarized in the form of a few salient theses that were prevalent among such scholars as Ernest. Renan, TJ. de Boer, w.G, Tennemann, and others, For the sake of brevity, I will omline three. Renan is well known for having consid.ered the fslamic philosophical corpus as entirely derivative of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Thc view held by him and others was that Islamic philosophy was Greek philosophy in Arabic letters, As he put it: 'This philosophywas written in Arabic. because this idiom had be(.~omc the learned and sacred language of all Muslim countries~ that is all.'! 1n Rcnan's view, although the Arabsirnparted a national character to their religious creations. poetry, architecture and theological sects, they showed little originality in philoS(}phy, Indeed, 'The true Arab genius, characterized by the poet.ry of the Kasidas and the eloquence of the Qur'an, is absolutely antithetical to Greek philosophy:' Rather, Greek philosophy was introduced to Arab-Islamic civilization thanks to a combination of Persian and Syrian Christian initiative. TJ. De Boer expresses a similar viewpoint in The History (~l Philosoph)' in Islanl: Oriental Wisdom. Astrology and Cosmology de~ livered over to Muslim thinkers material of mHny kinds. but the Form, the formative principle, came to them from the Greeks. In every case where it is not mere enumeration or chance ("oncatenation that is taken in hand, but where an attempt, is made to arrange the Manifold according to positive or logical pOJnts of view, we may conclude with all probability that Greek influences have been at work.:! Among these early students of Islamic philosophy in the West, departures from Greek philosophy we,re often considered misunderstandings rather than iImõ vations; they even attributed to Islamic philosophers a failure to understand the Greeks. rather than ('on sider that they might harbour different views from their illustrious predecessors. Moreover, this attitude took on a racial dimension in Renan, as when he contrasted Aryan rationalism with Semitic religious sensibjlity, charging that. the Arabs are inherently incapable of producing original philosophy and have inherited what. rational ity they have from the Aryan Greeks, Though not absent in recent Western scholarship, thi.s attitude is less common among scholars writing in the twentieth century, Still, clear traces remain. To cite just one example, E.U, Rosenthal claims that I the reason F:irabI views democracy more favourably than Plato .is that he has mi.ssed the irony implicit i.11 Socrates' mock praise of democracy. The possibility that FarlibT holds different views from Plat() on independent grounds is scarcely even considered. In fact. when Rosenthal allows himself to speculate that Farabr may have differed fmm Pl ato, he holds that 'tt is not impossible' thal' he has taken his views from Aristotle despit.e the fact that Aristotlets Politics was almost certainly not known in the Islamic world during the classical period, and never reached these philosophers' Apparently, even a nonexistent Greek text is a more likely source of ideas than the creative faculties of the Islamic philosophers themselves. Another early Orientalist thesis is that philosophy held a marginal place in Islamic culture as a whole, and was restricted to a small group of el ite freethinkers. Some scholars who admit the originality of these thjnkers nevertheless maintain that their innova tive contributions were largely disregarded since they never went further than a minuscule audience. Renan is again the IOCUJ classicus: 'The philosophers in Islam were isolated men, ill regarded, and persecuted .. :.5 The claim is sometimes supported by the esotericism of the lslamic philosophers themselves, since the major figures in the tradition clearly he.ld thm their views and doctrines should be revealed only to a class of intellectuals who alone could grasp their subtleties and abstruse deductivearguments. But one should not take this as an indication of the actual influence of philosophical ideas, since their indirect impact took many forms. First, numerous Arabic terms were coined expressly to denote philosophical concepts, including such llbiqu_itous terms as kamryyah (quantity). ka}:/Iyyah (quality), wu;tld (existence), dhal (essence), jawhar (substance). and so on. Second, given the seamless links between philosophy and natural science, including medicine which was firmly grounded in notions of form "uld matter, the four clements, substance, ~~ssencc and accident M .. , philosophical doctrines and theories penetrated the culture at large thanks to the centrality of medical theory and ptact"' •. Third, many establ ishment figures in Islamic history formulated their mainstream attitudes, at least in part, in react ion to the views of the philosophers. Such central thinkers as al-Ash'arT, al-Gh.zall, 'Ibn J:!azm, al-Shahrastan!, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Khaldon frequently occupied themselves in responding to the philosophers, in the process borrowing their ,'ontepts and inheriting their problematic. Finally, philosophical views OIl such matters as the best tbrm of government, Ihe relation between faith and reason, and the nature 26 of God, among others, were often taken up without acknowledgement. A third thesis prevalent among traditional Orientalists is that philosophy .in [slam was dominated by the struggle between revelation and reason, and obsessed with the dichotomy of intellect (caql), on the one hand, and tradition or revelation (naq/), on the other. This feeds into the conception of Islamic philosophy as a ddensive enterprise, embattled and encircled, rather than one that fashioned its own intel lectual space. This amorphous thesis is bard to refute briefly, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with the content of Arab-Islamic philosophy will know that there is much more to this diverse tradit.ion than a cultural war with orthodoxy. These philosophers did not see themselves as involved in a struggle as much as in an atrempt to exam ine the relationship between revelation and reason. an enterprise they of [en shared with the theologians despite their differences of opinion . Moreover, it is not even accurate to say that the theologians were uniformly more literalist nr orthodox than the philosophers, as the philosophers themselves were often at pains to point out.6 To the extent that the problematic of intellect and revelation did figure in the work of the Islamic philosophers, it did so no more than in medieval Christian philosophy, or indeed in early modern European philosophy. One need look no further than the 'Letter of Dedication ' to Descartes' MeditaTions for a vivid impression of the fragile tension between the theologians and philosophers in seventec11Ih-century France? A more recent twist. to the traditional Orienta list tendency in the study of Islamic philosophy is provided by the work of Henry Corbin. Corbin opposes the three theses that I have identified as being distinctive of tradi tional Orient.list interpretations of Islamic philosophy: its alleged derivativeness, margina lity, nnd conflict with religion. But he continues to view Islamic philosophy as monolithic and essentially different from Western philosophy. Moreover, like some of the traditional Orientalists I have discussed, he links the 'essence' of Islamic philosophy to certain ethnic characteristics and cu lturaJly uniform traits. Corbin concurs with Renan in regarding the genius of the Muslims as residing primarily in the spiritual rather than the rational realm,S But rather than conclude that Islamic philosophy is therefore unoriginal, he takes the spiritual dimension as its defining characteristic, setting it apart from other philosophical traditions: 'In Islam, above all, the history of philosophy and the history of spirituality are inseparable:' More importantly, he regards this allegedly dominant spiritual tendency as a positive attribute, valorizing i. and setting it up as the main contribution of Islamic philosophy. For him, Islamic philosophy represents a system of thought dominated by mysticism, a critique of rational* ism, and an attempt to transcend the logi.c.1 methods inherited from the Greeks. Corbin also characterizes th is philosophy as 'Oriental philosophy'. trading on the ambiguity in the Arabic adjective ishraqi (which is usually translated as 'ilIuminationisC rather Ihan 'eastern' or *Oriental ' ). Therefore, although Corbin dissents from traditional Orientalists in that he regards Islamic philosophy as being original. he concurs with them in considering it to be essentially different in nature from \Vestern philosophy, and in holding that it is stamped by the ethnic character of the thinkers who were instrumental in its development (in his case, Persians not Arabs). Corbin writes that Islamic philosophy .is fundamentally a prophetic philosophy: 'A prophetic philosophy pre* supposes a type of thought which does not allow itself to be bound either by the historical past. .. , or by the limits imposed by the resources and laws of rational Logic:'o In addition, this type of philosophy is esoteric and its 'esoteric meaning is not something one can construct with the support of Logic or a battery of syl* logisms'.l1 Moreover, he insists: 'The significance and continuance of philosophical meditation in Islam can be truly grasped only so long as we do not attempt to see it, at any price, as the exact equjvaJent of what we in the West have for our part called "philosophy" over the last few centuries:12 Though Corbin v.iews Islamic philosophy positively, his interpretation distorts it by portraying it as ex.elusively mystical and anti-rationalist in nature, and represents it as being essentially alien and difficuh to communicate to outsiders ,1) Neo-Orientalism These views, at' least in their ext.reme versions, have declined in prominence, but there is another attitude, very much in the spirit of Orientalism, that cont inues to play a central role in the study of Islamic phil* osophy. Though it may not appear overtly Orientalist in character, and may indeed seem opposed to (raditional Orientalism, the net result of this a.ttitude is to al ienatc and exoticize Islamic philosophy and to downplay its role as philosophy. Before describing the trend I have in mind, I wi ll distinguish it from another tendency wi1h which it is sometimes confused. Some scholars proceed from the notion that philosophy in the Islamic world was so per* secuted that the outward meaning of the text remains hidden and can only be divined through a dose reading .-. ----_ .. __ ._-_ . by experts. Oliver Leaman seems to regard this as the pre-eminent manifestation of Orientalism in the clirrent study of Islamic philosophy, attribut.ing it to Leo Strauss and his followers. As Leaman puts it: The assumption is that Is'Jamie philosophy shou'ld not be regarded as philosophy primarily, but more as a code which needs to be cracked in order to discover Ihe opinions of the philosophers. It is seen as a form of literature which disguises thereal opinions of its writers. and it is the job of the interpreter to find out what these real opinions are, to pierce the layers of conceahlH:.',nt and uncover the genuine beliefs of the author." Leaman regards this as 'Orientalism at its worst', adding that , It implies that the philosophers in the Islamic world could not really be thought of as philosophers just like philosophers everywhere eise, but should be r~gardcd as capable only of a less.er and inferior activity, using philosophicnl Janguage to present unoriginal views in convoluted ways. 15 But it seems to me that this misunderstands the intent of Straussianism. Although the Straussi.n mode of interpretation that Leaman criticizes gjves rise to a n overly narrow view of ls.1amic philosophy and has often led to gross distortions, it is only fai r to add that the method is typically applied across the board. That is to say, Straussians read Farab! in this manner no less than Plato or Machiavelli. This makes it dif* ficult to maintain that their method of interpretation is particularly Orientalist in character, since Strauss and his followers regard persecution to be a hallmark of all philosophical writing and consider philosophy to be engaged in a constanr struggle with religion , in Christendom and the Islam ic world alike. As such, they claim that philosophers in both traditions needed to hide thei r true views, which can only be d,iscerned by rcading between the lines and divining what these philosophers were really trying to say. In short, it does 110t seem useful to characterize (In attitude as Orienta list if it is equally applicable to the Occident. At best, the attitude is Orientalist in practice because in the case of Islamic philosophy this method is more widespread and is applied to the exclusion of others. At one point, the Straussian mode of interpretation was dominant among those who studied Islamic philosophy in the United States. This meant that this became by far the most common way of reading these texts in the West, which led ultimately to an exoticization of the texts. The overall effect of the dominance of Strauss's method when it came to Islamic philosophy may have led to a kind of Oriental ism in practice, even though 27 • the intention of the Straussians was to apply their mel hod to all philosophical writi ng. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Slrauss and his followers did not see the Islamic philosophers as different in this respect from non*Islamic philosophers. There is another, more pervas ive, tendency than the Straussian one among scholars of Islamic philosophy, which .is more properly Oriemalist in charaelef. Although related 10 the attitude Ihat Leaman identi fies, it .i s imporlantly distinct from it; indeed, many of its practitioners are staunch opponents of StraussianisITL There is a prevalent predisposition among those who study medieval Islamic philosophy today to regard their fi eld of scholarship as an exercise in editing and comparing manuscripts . ascertaining their order of composition, paraphrasing texts, tracing lines of influence, and so on. Although such scholarly work is important and shou ld not be neglected, it cannot be a substitute for the more substantive endeavour of critical engagement with the texts. And engagement means reading the texts as works of philosophy: assessing the ir arguments, uncovering their underlying assumptions. and understanding their overall projects. That is not to say that one school of reading should dominate 28 in the interprelation of Islamic philosophy, but those who study it ought to engage in the kind of interpretive e nterprise that one, fi nds in other areas of the history of philosophy. To be sure, there is no broad consensus today on what the method of history of philosophy ought to be when it comes to the Western tradition. But what character.izes most works of scholarship in the history of philosophy is a serious attempt to assess the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of Ihe tex ts. Such work is conspicuously absent in the contemporary study of the history of Islamic phil* osophy. Strictly speaking, what passes for SCholarship in Islamic philosophy today is usually neither what one would consider history of philosophy, nor indeed what is thought of as intellectual history. That is to say, there is also little attempt to reconstruct the historical context of these texts , t.o situate them ,in their i nte1 ~ lectual milieux. to relate them to the social , political and religious debates of their time. and so on. Interesti ngly. some of the most prominent contempOr'dry stude-nls of Islamic philosophy have dillgnosed this problem lucidly. but do not appear to have taken the steps necessary to overcome it. For example, Muhsin Mahdi wriles: One of the strangest criticisms that continues to be made by some of the representatives of the o lder, historical , and philological tradition of Islamic studies in the \Vest has to do with the va lidity of at!.empts to think or rethink the t.houghts of a philosopher such as Alfarabi, Avicenna, or Averroes. This means that one can treat'. their thought historically, biographically, sociologically, and so forth Ihat is good scholarship. BUL to think philosophically when dealing with the works of these phiJosophcrs, that is sa id nOI to be scientific. This v iew makes no sense of c,oufse. 16 After saying thaI the 'concentrated analytical and interpretive ethos' is lacking in the study of hlamic philosophy, Mahd i adds that when he began seriously studying Islamic philosophy, 'This seemed to me to be the task of the neW generation of students who occupy Ihemselves with Islamic philosophy: they must start with understanding the predicament in which they find Ihemselves and figure a way out: 17 But he never explains why ' the new generation of students' did not in fact carry this oul. Similarly, Dimitri Gutas, a scholar who represents an opposing camp among scholars of Islamic philosophy, issues an indictment of 'Arabist historians of philosophy' who have failed ' lO present the results of Iheir research. first, to historians of philosophy in a ... systematic and rationalized way that will exploit the common points of reference and contact, and second, to their colleagues in Arabic and Islamic studies in a way that will make manifest the relevance of Arabic philosophy to Islamic intellectual life in gcneraL'lB Again. Gutas puts his finger on the problem. but does not hazard an explanation as to why thjs task has not been undertaken. Both scholars. central figures in the contemporary study of Arab-Islarnic philosophy. seem to shift onto others the burden of initiating a change in the way the subject is studied. Although both Mahdi and Outas are surprisingly silent on what makes their discipline unwilling to engage with the philosophical content of the texts under StUdY1 we can speculate as to why the unphilosophical manner of interpretation continues to dominat.e in the study of fslamic philosophy. The main impediment to philosophical engagement with these texts is the fact that Islamic philosophy is generally not studied in departments of philosophy in the West. Those who are engaged in studying it are either trained outside philosophy departments. or. if not. are employed outside them. Many (if not most) have appointments in departments of Middle Eastern (or Near Eastern) languages. This reduces the opportunity, either in their research or teaching, to engage with these texts as philosophical texts. Mon.~over, for the student who wants to specialize in medieval Islamic philosophy in the West today, it is almost impossible to do so within a department of philosophy. This presents formidable institutional obstacles to a philosophical examination of the works of med.icval Islamic philosophy and goes a long way to explaining why such forms of scholarly engagement are conspicuously absent:. Indeed. it also shows why, despite their keen awareness of the problem, Mahdi and Outas do not themselves appear to take the necessary steps to address it One should not leave: the impression that every single piece of scholarship on Islamic philosophy has this character; indeed. one could cite notable exceptions to this attitude, But it does suggest that serious structural impediments make it difficult to get around the prevailing tendency that I have identified as 'neo-Orientalist'. While these scholars identify the problem and characterize it accurate1y, other writers seem to miss the point entirely in describjng the Orientalist tendency in studying Islamic philosophy. In an article on 'Oricntalism and Islamic philosophy' in a standard reference work, Ubai Nouruddin criticizes Western scholars 'who arc morc interested in finding something new in the Islamic sciences than in attempting to understand the transmis.sion of the corpus of human knowledge from one people to another'. I. Nouruddin adds that some scholars 'expend much effort in finding faults within the Islamic philosophical system. rather than using their impressive abilities to develop a better understanding of the amalgamation and legacy that have been left by the Islamic philosophers.' Needless to say, exclusive attention to "understand[ing] the transmission of knowledge' and 'understanding the legacy left by the Islamic philosophers' is closely related to what I have been characterizing as the neo-Orientalist attitude. which is interested merely in tracing lines of influence and producing reverential paraphrases. By contrast, a thoroughgoing assessment of what is 'new in the Islamic sciences' and an objective examination of the 'faults' of Islamic philosophical theories would indeed bc closer to the critical practice of the history of philosophy. The fact that Islamic philosophy is studied neither as history of philosophy nor as intellectual history has led to its being viewed as a col1ection of ossifIed artefacts of a bygone civjlization rather than as a set of ideas that are worth engaging with intellectually. The effect of this dominant, mainly philological. tendency is Orientalist t()r two main reasons. The first. is that it regards Islamic philosophy as essentially different from Western philosophy. in that it is not worthy of active philosophical appraisal and evaluation. Though many of the practitioners of this type of reading seem to think that they are doing their subject matter It favour by treating it with such reverence as though they dare not intrude upon the philosophers' arguments the outcome is to exoticize and alienate the texts, Another reason that this t.endency is Orienta list in character is that it leaves the impression that Islamic philosophy, more so than Western philosophy. is inaccessible to a wider public and can only be read and studied by those who have the requisite mastery of a number of languages, religious traditions, and so on. This. in turn. is partly responsible for the continued exclusion of Islamic philosophy from the Western canon. Oriental Orientalism Some recent work on Islamic philosophy by ArabIslamic writers can also be classified as OrientaHst, despite the apparent oddity of applying the label to thinkers from the 'Orient'. which is why I am calling it 'orient.al OrientaHsm'. The main proponent of this attitude is the Moroccan scholar Mul)ammad 'Abid al-Jabia (Mohammed 'Abed al-Jabri), whose influential writings on the so-called 'Arab mind' have generated considerable debate in the Arab world and also received some attention in the West.2H One tinds 29 I in labirf's work a thoroughgoing reductionism that considers what he calls 'Arab reason' to be a unified wbole whose only mode of thought is the 'analogy of the unknown aiter the known' (qiyt/s al-ghi:J 'ib 'ala al-shi:Jhid) .21 J~birl writes: This irrespon.sible practice of analogy has become the invariable element (the constant) that regulates the movements within the structure of Arab reason. This eJement stops time, suspends evolu ~ fion and creates a permanent presence of the past inside the game of thought and inside the affective domain. thus feeding the present with ready-made Solulions.22 This move to reduce an entire intellectual tradition to a single manner of reasoning. which is stagnant and inert by natUJe. is strongly reminiscent of Oriental ism of a traditional sort, and JabirT does lillIe to dispel this initial imprcssion_ He supports his reductionist thesis by saying that 'theoretical thinking in a given society at a given lime constitutes a particular unity endowed with its own armature inside of which the different' movements and tendencies blend in, so to speak:2.1 But despite his attempt to justify this thesis by saying that a similar kind of unity of thought could be attributed to, say, Greek philosophy, Jabir! regards Islamic philosophy to be inferior to Western philosophy in its static and inert characte,f. He puts this quite unequivocally; '10 other words, what we call "Islamic philosophy" did not enjoy a continual and renewed reading of its own history like Greek philosophy or like Ihe European philosophy from Descartes until now:" Though he acknowledges thaI Arab-Islamic thought in the realm of science did evolve and produce innovations, he claims that these a.dvances in the sciences did not have an impact on philosophy. Explicit discussions of the 'Arab mind' or the 'structure of Arab reason' are nowadays somewhat rare 'in serious Western scholarship despite the persistence of such assumptions in political consciousness and in popular discourse. Therefore one is dismayed to find these phrases so casually deployed by a contemporary Arab thinker with such weak justification. But Jabiri's oriental Orientalism goes further, in at least two ways. Firsl , his readings of classical Is lamic philosophy are concerned only with what he calls its 'ideological content' 10 the exclusion of its 'cognitive content'. By his own admission, he has no interest in the arguments and theories of these philosophers, but is rather focused on 'the ideological funclion (socio-pol.itical) to which the author or aUlhors of this thought subordinate thc cognitive material!2s JabirT is not only dismissing the substance of Islamic philosophy in favour of its alleged 30 socio-political role, he is also attributing a similar view to these philosophers themselves, name.ly that the substance of their work is unimportant compared [0 the socio-political function Ihat they wanted it to perform. Indeed. the cognitive material contained in these texts is, according to him, highly repetitive and not innovative in the leas!.'* Echoing traditional OrientaJism, he wriles: 'All the Muslim philosophers' creative activity centred around one problematics, which is usually referred to as the problematics of 'reconciling reason and transmission:" He regards philosophy primarily as a 'mi I itant ideological discourse' dedicated to the service of science and defending rationalism against a kind of irrationalist religious traditi.onalism.:!!! For reasons that seem to have more to do with contem* porary polemics in the Arab world and debates with proponellls of political Islam, JabirT relegates the entire Islamic philosophical corpus to a single ideological function, A second aspect of Jobin's reading, which is quite literal.1y Orientalist in character, is the claim that there is a split among Islamic philosophers between those in the Eastern provinces, whose work was dominated by a kind of anti-Tatlonalist mysticism, and those from the Western regions, who exemplify progressive rarionaJism and are the most effective representatives of Ihe 'militant ideological discourse' that he favours. On his account, the split occurred as a result of the contributions of Ibn STill! (Avicenlla): ' With his Eastern philosophy~ Avicenna consecrated a sp'irituaJist and gnostic trend whose impact was inslrumental in the regression of Arab thinking from all open rationalism .. . to a pernicious irrationalism: 29 That was the fate of philosophy in the East, but. luckily rationaHsm asserted itself in the Islamic West. according to Jabirr.30 He speculates as to why the West became rationalist while the East stagnated in a kind of irrational philosophizing, but the explanation rests on a facile reading of the relationship between philosophy and science.3 ! Not surprisingly, the chauvinism thaI emerges in }fibir!'s privileging of the Arab-Islamic West over the inferior East has met with a degree of resistance in some discussions of his work in the Arab world, and his response has been unrepentanl. In some instances. j t has served merely to exacerbate the problem: I wish thaI: all those who accuse me of being prejud,iced [fa '{I,y_yub. chauvinism] in favour of the rationalist \Vest and against the mystical East (as they put it) would recognize that Ibn SIn:l" with whose philosophy I said, and repeat, Ibn Rushd made a break, is himself from Ihe 'far east ' , from Bukhara. , the land of the Persians. He [Ibn Slna], the gnostic physician aI*Rilzl, and al-GhalaIr all belong to an 'east' that lies far beyond the area that extends from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Persian] Gulf, whose beating heart is: Egy pt." This response is more incriminating than Jabirf's original attempt to distinguish West from East, in that it seeks refuge jn a kind of ethnocentrism that pits Arabs against Persians, insinuating that the ethnic origins of Ibn Srnil, Ghazalr and al-RazI were responsible for their alleged irrationalism. This is quite literally an Orientalist reading of Islamic philosophy, since it defines an 'Orient' within the Orient, whos.e borders lie somewhere to the east of Mesopotamia. We have come full cit'de back to the cultural essentialism of traditional Orientalism, but unlike Renan, J.birT attributes to Persians rather than Semites an incapacity for logical thought, and unlike Corbin he does not view this allegedly Persian irrationalism in a positive light. labirr's reading of Arab-Islamic philosophy is literally Orienta list both in attributing the deadening influence on Islamic philosophy to Persia and central Asia, and in a more extended sense: namely, in its reversion to a one~dirncnsjonal view of Islamic philosophy as being incapable of evolving and as fulfilling a single ideological function. Ironically, JabirT himself accuses an earlier generation of Arab scholars of being insufficiently critical of Ol'icntalism in the study of Islamic philosophy, but his critique is often bizarrely anachronistic and ultimately misses the mark. He berates MU~lafa 'Abd al-Raziq and IbrahTm Madkar, Egyptian scholars writing in the 1930s and 1940s, for lack of sensitivity to the concept of 'Orientalism' as it is currently used, without ever acknowledging the fact they were writing several decades before Edward Said published Orientalisrn (1978). Although Said's name goes unmentioned in Jabirf's essay, he accuses these scholars of not going far enough in criticizing Orientalist readings of Islamic philosophy. He charges that they stilI talk in terms of reinserting Islamic philosophy into the Western tradition, rather than showing it as surpassing medieval Latin philosophy." Presumably, it surpasses it only in terms of its ideological content rat.hqr than its cognitive content since he elsewhere regards all medieval philosophy as of a piece.'" Yet rather than trying to demonstrate that Islamic philosophy is somehow superior, we would be well advised to take a leaf from the work of the earlier generation of Arab scholars whom JabirI excoriates, Their call to reinsert Islamic philosophy into the Western canon serves as a refreshing reminder that what we term the 'West' is more shot through with external influences than conventional taxonomies would have us believe." As Edward Said observed in Culture and imperialism, we all need to situate our history and tradition in a 'geogmphy of other identities. peoples, cultures, and then to study how, despite their differences, they have always overlapped one another, through unhierarchicaI in.fluence. crossing, incorporation, recollection, deliberate forgetfulness, and of course~ conflict: 'The fact is', he concludes, 'that we arc mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed Of.'36 The hybridity of the Western philosophical tradition and its interpenetration with Islamic philosophy is a more useful interpretive framework than the antagonistic one that JabirI espouses. Bacon or Foucault? I have outlined three genres of Orienta list interpretation of Islamic philosophy: a traditional sort dominant in the heyday of Orientalism, a more covert variety that continues to prevail in the study ofIslamic philosophy today, and a home-grown version that is manifest .in the work of at least one contemporary Arab scholar. In doing so, I have argued that the latter two modes of interpretation arc genuinely Orientalist in Edward Said's original sense, in regarding Islamic philosophy as essentially different from Western philosophy and in presenting it as a monolith with a single overriding character. The persisten{:c of Orientalist disc,ourse in c.ontemporary scholarship and its incidence even in the Arab world itself calls fclt a word of explanation. In the conclusion to Orientalism. Said writes that 'despite its failures ... Orientalism flouri shes today.'*37 He adds that, 'It is ". apparent, I think, that the circumstances making Orientalism a continuingly persuasive type of thought will persist: a rather depressing matter on the whole.':;' Said predicts the persistence of Orienta list discourse presumably because of the intransigence of the power relations that he identified as informing Orientalism in the first place. Despite the demise of colonialism of a traditional variety, the web of power relations that continues to govern the relationship between the West and the Middle East still largely reinforces and is reinforced by Orientalist discourse. The phenomenon can be glibly summed up in the slogan 'Knowledge is power.' But, rather than rest with this glib slogan, I want to suggest that there are in fact two readings of this phrase, which might be identified respectively with Francis Bacon and Michel Foucault. On the Baconian understanding of the slogan, knowledge is instrumental 31 • in the projection of power, its perpetuation, and sustenance; it both fceds and is fed by the exercise of power. However, 011 the Foucauldian view. there is no such thing as knowled.ge beyond what various systems of power disseminate as t.heir vision of reality. In my view, Said is more of a Baconian than a Foucauldian on this score. That is to say. he is interested in the way in which the acad.emics and the think-tanks conspire in the. project.ion of power .-. namely by misinterpreting. misrepresenting, misinforming, and omitting what does not fit into their world-view. Despite his obvious debts to Foucault, Said generally sees power-laden discourse as a distort.ion of a fuller and more accurate picture. not just as one more assertion of a will to power, whose only possible response is another. As he puts it in the introduction to Orientalism: Perhaps the most important task. of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism. to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective, But then one would have to rethink the \vhole complex problem of knowledge and power,-w At the end of the work, he explains that 'one way of opening oneself to what one studies in or about the Orient is reflexively to submit one's method to criti~ cal scrutiny.'40 Elsewhere, he has written that a 'full intellectual process' involves 'historically informed research, as well as the presentation of a coherent and carefully argued line that has taken account of altern atives.'4! The possibility of noñcoercivc interactions that lead to more nuanced, responsive and empathic interpretations is precisely what makes me think that Said docs not embrace the more nihilistic aspects of Foucault and is what makes him hold out hope for more meaningful intellectual engagements between the West and the Middle East based on a more equitable power relationship, For the sake of completencss, I should add that some interpreters of Said have considered him to be propounding a kind of cultural relativism. Indeed, there is evidence in his work that may suggest as much. in 11 well-known passage in Orientalism he writes: 32 It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing asa real or twe Orient (ls'lam~ Arab, or what.ever) ... On the contrary, ] have been arguing that 'the Orient' is itself a constituted entity. and that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous. radi(:aHy 'different' inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, (.'ulturc, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea. 42 Yet rather than betraying a kind of simple-minded relativism, ( take this as an admission that no single account of 'the Orient' (or indeed of a subject as large as Islamic philosophy) could claim finality or comprehensiveness, That is not to suggest, howeveT. that there could not be better and worse accounts of such subjects as Islamic philosophy, Arabic calligraphy or Mamlnk architecture. What renders some accounts better than others is not a sitnple matter to determine, and is likely to be domain-specific. I have been arguing in this article that an account of [slamie philosophy that analyses its central arguments and interrogates them is superior to one that merely indicates the provenance of its principal theories. Different standards and guidelines arc undoubtedly more suitable when it comes to different subject matters and disciplines. In all cases, the accounts that we consider to be accurate, perceptive, and marked by superior understanding are likely to be ones that are not warped by being in the service of hegemonic power or colonial domination. Finally, one migbt wonder why, given this explanation f()r the persistence of Orientalism, which is. premissed on asymmet.ries of power, a species of Orientahsm finds its home in the writings of an Arab scholar, based in the Arab world, writing on ArabIslamic philosophy. I will conclude by suggesting that these very same power relations do not just infect scholarship in the West, but have repercussions for the way that Arab scholars view their own intellectual traditions. Many contemporary Arab intellectuals seem to feel the need to set up their own version of the enlightened West within Arab-Islamic history largely because of an overwhelming sense of defensiveness and inferiority vis-a.-vis the We,st. In addition, they sometimes seem wholJy fixated on their differences with political Islam and regard this as the pre-eminent confrontation of their time, distorting their own intellectual traditions in order to fight this cultural war, at least partly because that is the confrontation that looms largest in the mind of the West. This is not an attempt to blame our own Orientalist discourse on the West. but rather a suggestion that the power relations that continue to define the West's relationship to the Middle East have a ripple effect that influences not just Western discourse but Arab discourse as welL Notes I am grateful to Tarif Khalidi, Diane Riskedahl, Peter Hallward and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank audiences at the Conference in Homage to Edward Said. Universitc Paris 7-Denis Diderot, September 2004, and at the Civilizã tion Sequence Program Forum at the American University • of Beirut , February 2005, for helpful feedback. The research and writing of thi.s artkle were made possible in part by a summer grant from the University Research Board of the American Uni versity of Beirut L Ernest Renan, Averroes et I'Averroisme, Calmann Levy. Paris, 1882, p. 90: original emphasis (my translation). 2. Ibid. 3. TJ . De Boer, The Hi:uory of Philosophy in Islam. trans. Edward R. Jones, Dover, New York. 1967 ( 1903), pp. 101 t. He also writes: 'The earliest Muslim thinkers were so fuJly convinced of the superiority of Grce.k knowledge that they did not doubt that it had attained to the highest degree of certainty, The thought of making farther and independent investigations did n.ot readily occur to an Odt~ntal, who cannot. imagine a man without a teacher as being anything else [han a disciple of Satan' (ibid .. p. 28). 4. E.U . Rosenthal , cd., Averroes' Comme1ltary on Plato's Republif, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966 (1956), especially pp. 293-4. 5. Renan , Averroes et I'AYerTot:s-me. p. 173. 6. For instance, Ibn RllShd (Averrocs) points out: 'the Muslims arc unanimous in holding tbal it is nOl ob ligatory either to lake aU the expressions of {he Law in their apparent meaning or to extend them aU from their apparell!' meani.ng by interpretation .• Ibn Rushd. The Dcd slve TreoTl',\'C'. trans. G. Hourani, in Nledieval Political Philm'ophy, cd. R Lerner and M. Mahdi. Cornell University Press, hhacll, 1963, p. 170. 7. Descartes' Lelter, which is addressed to the Dean and Faculty of Sacred Theology at the University of Paris, bet.rays a great. deal of anxiety both about being accused of innovation (hence his illsistence that his arguments are not new), and about venturing wHh reason into the province of faith (to which he responds by saying that faith is m,tde stronger if the anti-religious arguments can be rebutted with rational ones). 8 . There is an almost diametric opposition when it comes to the way in which Renan and Corbin m::lke the link between ethnicity and philosophical s tyle, For Remm, Greek philosophy penetrated islam thanks to the ' Persian spirit , represemed by the Abbasid dynasty ' (A"'erroes er I'Averroi:fme, p. 91), whicb was rationalist in character, in contrast to the 'lyricism and prophetic ism of rhe inhnbitants of the Arabian peninsula ' (ibid., pp. 9091). For Corbin, it is the Persian influenc.e (mediated largely through ShT'ism) that is central to the anti~n\tion * alism and esotcricism of Islamic philosophy, He writes: 'the fate of philosophy in Islam ... cannot be studied i_ndepertdent!y of the sjgnifi(.~ance of Shiism', which he considers to have arisen and nourished in a distinctively Persian cultural milieu. Henry Corbin, Hinory of h * lamie Philosophy, trans. Liadain Sherrard, Kegan Paul, Londoll , 1993 (1964), p. 4; see also pp. xvii, 1921. 207. 9. Ibid., p. xvi . 10. Ibid ., pp. 24-5. II. Ibid., p. 25. 12. Ibid ., p. >v. 13. Corbin's exegesis of Islamic philosophy abounds in Arabic and Persian terms that are supposedly untranslatable and can only be fully grasped by those who know the relevant languages, ,14. o.liver Leaman, 'Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy'. in S.H. Nasr and 0. Leaman, cds, History oj Islamic Philosophy, Routledge. London, 1996, p. 1145. 15. Ibid. , p. 1146. 16. Muhsin Mahdi, 'Oriental ism Imd the Smdy of Islamic Philosophy' , Journal of Islamic Studj~rs 1, 1990, p. 93, 17. Ibid . 18 . Dimitri GUlas, 'The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Essay on the Historiography of A .... J.bic Philosophy ' . British Journal oj Middle EaSler" Studies 29, 2002, pp. 5"'{;. 19. Ubai Noomddin, 'Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy', in E. Craig, eC .. Rout/edge Encyclopedia 0/ Philosoph.y, Routledge, London, 1998. 20. I will confine myself for the most part to quoting from the English trans!<\tion of a seie.ction of hi s work, Mohammed 'Abed al-labri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique, University of Texas Press, Austin TX, 1999. Despite problems with the translation (which however was approved by the amhor) , the pieces collected in this ed.ition arc generally representative of Jab-irT's extensjve l"orpUS in Arabic, ch.ictly his four-volume Naqd ai- 'Aql al- 'Arabr and al-Turl1th wall!atlmhah , Where necessary, I wm also make reference to some of JahifT's unlranslatcd writings in Arabic. 21, al-lahri, Arab-Islamic Philo sophy. p. 19. 22. Ibid. , p. 22. 23. Ibid .. pp. 323. 24. Ibid., p. 39. 25. Ibid., p. 36. 26. Ibid., pp. 38-9. 27. Ibid., p. 38. 28. Ibid .. p. 55. 29. Ibid., p. 58. 30. Ibid., p. 60. 31. See ibid., pp. 121-2. Indeed, evell be.fore Ibn Srnn supposedly distinguished the mystical East from the rational West. JabirT finds faith with the work of Fl1rll.bY (in the east) whose account of the virruou~ city is aJJegcd\y too closely bound to hi s historical c ircumstances to be of much use (see e.g . ibid ., pp. 56, ](4), and whose ncoPlatonism is nol sufl'icienrly rigorous (see , e.g .• ibid .. pp. 96, 99). 32. l:Iasan J:tanafI and Mu~ammad ' A.bid al -JabirT. Ifiwar al-Mashriq wal-Maghrib: Talfhi Sil<;ilat al-Rudad walMIINliqashiJr, Cairo: Maktabat MadbOlT, 1990 (my translation). The reference to Egypt is included presumably because these remarks occur in an exchange wit.h an Egyptian writer. 33. Mui)aJl1Jl1ad . Abid al -Jabiri. 'AI ... lstishr~q fil-Fnlsat'ah Manhajan wa Ru'yatan',in Al-1'ura.th wal-Ifadathah: DirOSa! wa Munilqashtu, Markaz Dirasiit al ~Wi~dah a!- ' ArabIyyah. Beirut. 1991. 34. See al-Jabri. Arab-Islamic Philosophy. p. 4 L 35. Here and elsewhere, 1 deploy the term' Western' not as an essentializing adjective, but mere ly as a conven ient label for the educational curricula, acade-mic institutions, and so on, of contemporary Western Europe and North America. 36. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Knopf. New York , 1993. pp. 330-3 1. 37. Edward W. Said, Orientalism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, p. 322. 38. Ibid., p. 326. 39. Ibid., p. 24. 40. Ibid., pp. 326-*7. 41. Edward W, Said, 'The Politics of Knowledge', Raritan 11, Surnme,r 1991. pp. 1731. 42. SakI, Orienta/ism, p. 322.