Literature Thu, 18 Jul 2019 12:00:46 +0000 Joomla! - Open Source Content Management en-gb Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature

Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature. Edited and translated by NORMAN CALDER, JAWID MOJADDEDI, and ANDREW RIPPIN. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2003. Pp. x + 275. $110 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

As the subtitle suggests, this new work is intended for introductory-level students. To succeed, any such work needs to resolve three problems: the identification of representative texts, of appropriate length, and which cohere in some fashion, so as to illustrate properly the themes and development of a given genre (e.g., Sira, Tafsir); the translation of often formal texts in a language suited to the audience (one with little patience with lexical puzzles and strings of transliterated terms); and a level of annotation that throws sufficient light on the texts without giving the game away. The uneven quality of most previous collections of (classical) Islamic texts suggests impatience with one or more of these steps. On all counts, the present volume works very well. It is strongly recommended, particularly for junior instructors of Islamic studies. More established colleagues may find it difficult to part with their own, oft-tried, readings. Should they cast caution to the wind, however, they will likely find this collection a worthy substitute.

There is some question as to the history of the book's production. Its genesis lies, according to the general preface, in an agreement to produce a book of readings between Norman Calder and a publisher--an agreement left unsigned, sadly, with Calder's untimely death in 1998. Apparently on Jawid Mojaddedi's initiative, he and Andrew Rippin resolved to join a small collection of texts on which Calder had worked with a larger body of material of their choosing. These texts include selections from Rumi's Masnavi from Mojaddedi's recent translation of its first part. Rippin's role is left unclear. In any case, he and Mojaddedi, with the apparent support of Calder's family, have produced a volume that bespeaks a congenial collaboration and which properly reflects Calder's legacy.

The volume itself is handsome, if expensive for a book of its kind, its contents clearly organized. The division and naming of chapters (e.g., "The Life of Muhammad," "Law and Ritual") are uncontroversial and clear. The bibliography, extensive and up-to-date, is divided across the readings, a questionable decision as it is possible to miss the location of a given title. Certain texts, among them Ibn Ishaq's Sira and al-Tabari's Ta'rikh (the well-known translations of which are cited as well), occur in passing only in the introduction to each reading, in the case of these two texts more than once. Unless all sections are used, one risks overlooking a given reference. For a second edition, the authors might consider using the same rubrics but in a single bibliography.

The quality of the book lies, as it should, in its judicious selection of readings. The editors have, in many cases, chosen difficult texts, texts that, while serving the principal purpose of illuminating Islamic belief and tradition, should also serve to generate extended (albeit, in certain circles, uncomfortable) discussion. Rather than content themselves, for example, with Qur'anic material that treats, in straightforward fashion, the theme of serial prophecy and Muhammad's placement therein, the editors include in full Q. 19 (Maryam): 16-36, on Jesus, that speak to the problematic issues of his conception and status as "God's servant" (rather than, of course, the offspring of God or a deity in his own right). Granted, the text was not included for that purpose (see p. 4) but is sure--if, in any case, this reviewer's experience is any measure--to spark (necessary if strained) in-class discussion.

Better still is the decision to provide, at length, illustration of the shaping of Islamic tradition which is not always, despite its obvious place, a feature of other sourcebooks. So, for example, in the chapter on the Qur'an, all of Q. 98 (al-Bayyina) is translated and transliterated. The latter feature allows, of course, for consideration of the Qur'an as recited text (see p. 4). The editors then, in the chapter on exegesis, provide seven selections from principal works--beginning, chronologically, with Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 150/767) and ending with Ibn Kathir (d. 656/1258)--in which the verses of Q. 98 are sorted through along the different paths one would expect. The result, for students, is an extended and probably daunting sense of the history and variety of this branch of Near Eastern/Islamic learning.

The readings are each provided with an introduction. Elegantly written and concise, they are, however, somewhat uneven in intent. Most clarify the significance of a given text and/or author--all to the good. Less consistent, however, is the treatment of context. So, for example, one is told a good amount about the organization and thrust of the Qur'an before tackling the sample texts. But for Hadith, as with the chapter on law and ritual, one is immediately immersed in the texts. Granted, it is the place of textbooks and lectures to make such contexts clear, but, that said, one can hardly repeat things often enough to students, at least all but the best trained, so these introductions might do with a bit of beefing up of this sort.



 Article Title: Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature. Contributors: Matthew Gordon - author. Journal Title: The Journal of the American Oriental Society. Volume: 125. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 2005. Page Number: 449+.

]]> (Super User) Literature Tue, 23 Oct 2018 04:59:46 +0000
Orientalism and Arab-Islamic history: an inquiry into the orientalists' motives and compulsions

"They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented" Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

"Soldiers, from the top of the pyramids, forty centuries look down on you!" Napoleon Bonaparte

As the intellectual outcome of the European affiliation of power with knowledge, Orientalism is a Western cultural phenomenon which is particularly related to the colonial and post-colonial reception of the Orient, its people and history. Orientalism, states Edward W. Said, is "a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the orient, the East, 'them')."(1) As the "strong" and the "familiar" entity, the West finds it automatic and, at times, imperative that "the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks."(2) The frameworks of containment and representation take various forms and apply different techniques. Among the major frameworks are historical presentations and re-presentations. Eric Meyer has very recently reduced Said's argument into the compact structure of a sentence. "Considered as a single metagrammatical sentence," states Meyer, "the ideological syntax of the narrative of Romantic Orientalism might be reduced to the structure of Hegel's Philosophy of History, in which the west as subject defeats the East as object in the battle for world-historical ascendancy."(3) According to this logic, the Orientalist historiography of Eastern civilizations expresses an imperial desire: to subject the "other" and the "other's" past to the imperial will, and to come out with a new "world history" in which the Western power becomes the historical necessity in a "new world order."

Orientalist historiography, in general terms, demonstrates this essential imperial motive, although it also envelops a variety of personal and social compulsions related to the Orientalist himself. But Orientalist historians, together with the majority of the romantic imaginative writers who tackled the East, can rarely escape the imperial will which aims at a:

form of a world historical narrative in which European modernity supersedes a spurious Oriental despotism as the dominant cultural system. The genuinely liberating impulse of Romantic Hellenism thus subsists within and serves to legitimate an imperial narrative that portrays the extension of European dominance over the East as historically inevitable.4

I have considered this "imperial will" as inescapable for both the professional Orientalists(5) and the romantic writers who dealt with Eastern historical materials at large, because the psychological impact of the imperial - with its cultural and economical benefits - has been so imposing that the Western mind as a whole found itself within a general "spirit" (viz. Something of a zeitgeist) which looks down on the East. Moreover, Orientalist writings have often demonstrated a residual fear of Islam, and an archetypal pattern of aggressiveness towards it as an important historical phenomenon which endangered the West for centuries. "Most of the great philosophers of history from Hegel to Spengler," affirms Said, "have regarded Islam without much enthusiasm,"(6) a situation which externalizes the buried, though effective, European memories. The fear of Islam, and of its irresistible Arab host during the Middle Ages,(7) persisted to the colonial and post-colonial periods when Europe became stronger than Asia and Africa. And, I believe that the Western animosity to Islam is, whether conscious or subconscious, a form of a collective and psychological revenge. This is an apt conclusion based on the phenomenon which Said specifies in the following, seemingly sweeping, generalization:

I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice, and political interests. This may not seem a surprising discovery, but included in it is the entire gamut of scholarly and scientific disciplines which, since the early nineteenth century, have either called themselves collectively the discipline of Orientalism, or have tried systematically to deal with the Orient.(8)

Said's "essentialist" framework which traces an omnipresent imperial awareness in every piece of Western writing on the Orient is largely not baseless. But his final accusation is also unfortunate for Oriental cultures at large, and for Oriental histories in particular. The ultimate meaning of Said's and, of course, Meyer's polemic is: every Orientalist is a participant in an Occidental imperial and cultural campaign to control and exploit the East. I believe, however, that as an intellectual movement, and as a cultural phenomenon, Orientalism - especially literary Orientalism - has been of a considerable merit for the Orientals. It is useful not because it serves imperial interests, but because it envelops a complex of cultural, personal and hereditary compulsions which are productive and significant for the intelligentsia of the Eastern countries. In spite of their conscious/unconscious prejudice, Orientalists have offered us foreign perspectives and coercive challenges which have enriched our approaches to our culture and history. Many examples of clever Eastern writings on Oriental history can be traced to the prejudiced and "suggestive" Orientalist writings. Said's generalization, no matter how true it is, could lead to depriving Eastern cultures of this useful (aggressive, impulsive, suggestive) Orientalist challenge. My point is: Said's accusation, that Orientalism supplies agents and expertise to empire,(9) endangers the uses which the Orientals can make of Orientalist literature. The accusation could lead to a termination of Orientalism through specifying the imperial motive, and through overlooking the other motives and compulsions which contributed to the making of the Orientalist effort. His association between Orientalism and imperialism has already led some Orientalists to be embarrassed and hesitant to write on our cultures. This is an undesired result. Nowhere is this fear of "Orientalism" more clearly stated than in an American Orientalist's letter to the writer of the present words. Bernard Weiss uncovers a truant fear of the label "Orientalist":

Edward Said has, of course, put Orientalism in the headlines, so to speak, and since then none of us can go on with his work without giving attention to it. Since Orientalism has acquired a certain notoriety, some of us try to dissociate ourselves from it, which is probably unfortunate.... I once was interviewed by someone from Ruz al-Yusuf in Cairo and soon realized during the conversation that I had better make it clear that I was not an orientalist (mustashriq), lest my name be blackened, a least in Egypt.(10)

My point, simply stated, is that there are certain motives and compulsions, that have affected the Orientalist reception and presentation of Oriental histories, which are not purely imperial. These compulsions have to be studied carefully not because they are important only, but also because they help us complement the Western image of the East. One such compulsion is personal ambition. Arab and Islamic materials have been used as a virgin field which provides new themes and opportunities for some of the authors who desire to excel and utilize "raw" materials outside the exhausted materials of the industrial world. In a letter from Charles Doughty to his fellow Orientalist D. G. Hogarth, he states his reasons for writing his "classic," Arabia Deserta:

The Arabia Deserta volumes had necessarily a personal tone, a principal cause of writing them was besides the interest in the Semitic life in tents, my dislike of the Victorian English; and I wished to show, and thought I might be able to show, that there was something else.(11)

In another revealing letter to Hogarth, Doughty stresses similar aspirations for fame and for enriching the English literary tradition. For him, the "matter of Araby" could be used to make possible a revitalization of the literary excellence of Medieval English:

In writing the volumes "Arabia Deserta" my main intention was not so much the setting forth of personal wanderings among a people of Biblical interest, as the ideal endeavour to continue the older tradition of Chaucer and Spenser, resisting to my power the decadence of the English language: so that whilst my work should be the mere verity for Orientalists, it should be also my life's contribution so far to literature.(12)

This personal ambition applies to one of the most prominent historians, Gustav Weil, whose History of the Caliphate was largely meant by him to rival Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes.(13)

This impulse is true of Washington Irving, who cannot be easily categorized as a servant of empire, though he may share the overall "Western" sense of superiority. In a letter to Prince Dolgorouki (January 1829), he comments on his Conquest of Granada as "a kind of experiment in literature."(14) The experimental urge to tackle Arab historical materials becomes clear in one of his best books The Alhambra, as he dedicates the book to his Russian friend:

You then urged me to write something illustrative of these peculiarities; "something in the Haroun Al-raschid style," that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades everything in Spain.(15)

But Irving's writings on Arab history exceed the literary aspirations which this history provides, because his histories are controlled by an American self-image which he portrays through the Arab past for various purposes. Arab history in general, and Arab history in Spain in particular, indirectly reflect his country's self-image, in addition to expressing the historian's fears and aspirations for what that self-image would preferably be in the future. To establish this self-image, Irving suggests a parallelism between the Arabs' occupation and settlement in the Iberian peninsula for eight centuries on the one hand, and the Americans' possession of the new continent on the other. For him the Arabs "deserved this beautiful country," because they, "won it bravely; they enjoyed it generously and kindly."(16) This statement implies that the European newcomers, who built a "New World" in the American continent also deserve the new continent. The "new nation" which is created by the Arabs' settlement in Spain, that which Irving calls "Morisco-Spaniard,"(17) parallels the new nation which is born in America, which is also a mixture of various races. Irvings's approach to Arab history is, therefore, linked with his belief that the new American republic is the outcome of a rare marriage of two different races in the ancient world: the Arabs (the East, Asia, the Semites, Islam) and the Spaniards (the West, Europe, the Goths, Christianity). He gives this marriage an emblematic expression through the use of the "bridge Pinos" which symbolically links Spain, the Moors, and Columbus on the one hand, and the New World on the other. Pinos is the "scene of many a bloody encounter between Moor and Christian, and remarkable for having been the place where Columbus was overtaken by the messenger of Isabella, when about to abandon Spain in despair."(18)

For Irving, as for very many American authors, the Oriental past is essential for the American vision of what B. Yu calls "the world circle."(19) Geographically, the world circle was incomplete without the discovery of America; and, historically, it was completed through the confrontation/marriage of East and West (in Spain) to give birth to the future (America). Thus, Oriental history serves a personal compulsion to state an American myth. In Irving's parallelism between the Morisco-Spaniards and the Americans, there is a persistent desire to instruct the fellow-Americans through retreating to a historical experience which is similar to theirs. And in both situations, Oriental history is part of the effort to portray a self-image: the desired self-image parallels the Arabs' transformation of Spain into a Qur'anic paradise, while the undesired self-image parallels the tragic downfall of their empire.

The compulsion to use Oriental history to portray the self-image is crystallized in Thomas Carlyle's account of Muhammad and his early Arabs. But here the self-image is deliberately made ugly because Carlyle wanted to criticize his society of laissez-faire and utilitarianism by contrasting it with the ideal of the Arab hero and his hero-worshipping people. Meant to demonstrate the dim self-image of the Victorian society, early Islamic society, its ethics and spirituality, is channeled into a critique of Victorian life and values:

You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the one is death eternal to man, the other is life eternal. Benthamite Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistle on, pleasures and pains on.(20)

This sordid image is followed by a bright picture of the Arabs:

Above all things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, - believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo when he cries, "Who goes?" will hear from the passenger, along with this answer. "There is no God but God." Allah akbar, Islam, sounds through the souls.... (21)

In addition to this desire to criticize contemporary Britain through surveying an Oriental historical ideal, Carlyle has a persistent compulsion which should be associated with his criticism of the British people who were unable to discover and respond to their hero, unlike the Arabs. The underlying compulsion, as David De Laura points out, is Carlyle's presentation of himself as the ultimate hero of the hero-lecturers.(22) Here the self-image is reshaped to be a remedial measure which proposes a new leadership.

There is also a great deal of collective, psychological complexities involved in the Orientalist uses of Oriental history. As R. W. Southern has cleverly shown in his excellent work Western View of Islam in the Middle Ages, the Western idea of an Islamic past since the medieval era was one of fear.(23) After the nineteenth century, when the West became superior (stronger), and when the Islamic world appeared increasingly frail and inviting foreign exploitation, some historians tackled the Arab-Islamic past out of a desire, probably a subconscious desire, to bestir the forgotten medieval fear of Islam. This process of preparing the history of Islam also involves purifying Europe from its long-forgotten fear; it is something of an exorcism, if I may use this expression in such a context. Like a psychoanalyst who empties the memory of his patient from its subconscious fears and complexities, such historians tried to overcome the collective fear (an archetypal pattern, to use Maud Bodkin's expression)(24) by exposing it, belittling it, and by showing its insignificance. The attraction of Arab history for some liberal writers falls within this category of the cathartic and the self-purifying effort. Within this compulsion to flee the European subconsciousness from its ancient residual fear, one could read many Orientalist works that express a strong depreciation of Islamic and Oriental past. In this connection, I would like to specify Cardinal Newman's work on the History of the Turks in their Relations with Europe which I am going to allude to very soon.

Eclecticism is another revealing phenomenon insofar as the compulsions of Western writers are concerned. When writers tackle historical or general subjects they often select a certain Oriental personality, or an Oriental saying, presenting this personality (or saying) as the focus of the writer's admiration. The reader would inevitably develop two impressions. The first impression is that the writer has a wide knowledge which exceeds the limits of his own culture (exposition of the writer's education); and the second impression is that there is nothing in Oriental history which deserves to be recalled except for this personality (or saying). This is especially true of Carlyle's Heroes: while his great heroes are all European, only one Oriental hero is presented within his tapestry of great men. One could not escape the feeling that, while Europe is historically able to produce a great number of heroes, the whole of the Orient, ancient and modern, could not produce but one hero who is comparable with the European heroes. This method of an implicit devaluation of Oriental history and genius is cleverly woven in Emerson's web of historical discourses. When he chooses wise statements of Oriental heroes, within the context of a general subject and in the middle of a great number of Western historical personages, the impression left for the reader is that Oriental history is not worth being referred to except for the allusions included in the author's text.

When dealing with the Arabs in his history of the Turks, Newman treats them favorably as a nation with a "national interior," a nation which is creative and prone to refinement and civilization.(25) But Newman presupposes, suggestively, that since the downfall of their state (caused by the Turks, according to him), the Arabs remained a static nation, frozen in its ancient shape. To further prove that the Arabs were victimized by the barbarian Turks is a situation which implies two points: firstly, that the Arabs should be liberated from the Turkish yoke by a Western (Catholic) intrusion and, secondly, that they are to be given guidance under the mandate of the Western powers. Newman's apparent motives for studying Oriental history are: to distort the Turks, to mobilize European states and sentiments against the Ottoman foe, and to rescue the subject nations of the Turkish empire by freeing (and, of course, colonizing) them. But in addition to these motives, there is an implicit compulsion which can be sensed by the careful reader. It is that to achieve all the goals against the Turks, Europe must identify itself with the roman Catholic Church. While his Apologia pro vita sua offers an apology for his conversion to Catholicism, his History of the Turks offers a "potential" apology for Europe's conversion to Rome.

Empire-building, which is basically a process of annexation of foreign regions, gave the European elite a feeling that the process of annexation involved a parallel annexation of the cultural heritage of the colonized nations. Thus, while Seeley, in The Expansion of England, visualizes a "world state" through the alleged unconscious movement in English and world history to a "Greater Britain" (the God who is revealed in history meant Britain to become a federal empire),(26) other historians considered the past of the Orientals as part of the West's possessions. That is why some writers adopted a paternal and "omniscient" narrator's attitude to Eastern peoples and cultures. "We treated them as children," writes Harriet Martinuea while talking about her Middle Eastern tour, "and this answered perfectly well."(27) The high esteem Western historians express for ancient Eastern civilizations envelops an implicit feeling: that from the time these great civilizations ended, Easterners remained frozen in a state of childhood (not in the Wordsworthian sense, of childhood, of course). Here, the motive is to belittle contemporary Orientals through contrasting them against their ancient grandfathers. This also implies that the study of Eastern histories is the study of the childhood of the human civilization, the civilization which became sophisticated and refined only with European progress.

Nowhere is the Orientalist's sense of "paternalism" shown more coercively than in the writings of Bernard Lewis, a leading figure in the "guild tradition of Islamic studies"(28) at Princeton. He has a thesis: that the Orientalists are not servants of the empire.(29) To verify this thesis, he surveys the merits of Orientalist historiography; and he attempts to contrast the Orientalist histories of India with the "suppressed" histories written by Muslim Indians. His purpose is to demonstrate that the Orientals at large, and Muslim Indians in particular, are unable to write proper history unless they "enjoy" the paternal protection of Britain. It is, according to Lewis, only with the British occupation of India that a proper Indian history was possible. Moreover, British culture is responsible for making the Indians aware of history.(30) He later tries to prove that Orientals have no sense of their own history because they have no sense of identity. "In the vast continents which Europeans called Asia and Africa," states Lewis, "there was not and could not be any comparable sense of identity."(31) He believes that "only Europe represented a kind of real historical entity, with a common culture derived from Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian roots, and a common sense of its own identity."(32) Dismissing Oriental historiography as nothing, he concludes that it is his culture's humanitarian duty to give the Oriental an identity by bestowing a "history" on him:

It was not until modern times that European influence, European power, and finally European scholarship persuaded the inhabitants of Asia and Africa that they were Asians and Africans, and that this fact had some political and historical significance.(33)

Although it is not possible to specify every one of the Orientalists' motives and compulsions in such a limited paper, it is feasible to trace certain patterns in the career of the Orientalists' treatment of Oriental histories. To he sure, each writer requires a case study to uncover his or her compulsions. One of the significant patterns, as Said observes, consists of a general framework which, encouraged by colonial and scientific progress, approaches Oriental histories externally as part of a Western "masculine" will to dominate a passive, "feminized" and "sleeping" East. This is true of the majority of Orientalist historians, from Lord Macaulay(34) to Bernard Lewis. Another pattern is that which is suggested by the same sense of superiority, and which conceives the Oriental past a virgin field to be approached by the Orientalist on behalf of the Oriental. Our histories are also attractive for some Orientalists because they "correspond" to their desire to enact the drama of personal aspiration and ambition, a situation which uncovers an individual and experimental compulsion to prove the ability of the self. The emergence in the nineteenth century of the European nation-states gave rise to chauvinism. Given an unprecedented techno-scientific progress, the European nation-states inspired and encouraged the pursuit of a history which reinforces the Aryan myth. Ernest Renan and Count Gobineau used Oriental history and heritage to respond to an essential motive: to prove that the Semites are mediocre in their abilities to rationalize and think scientifically. This trend largely contributed to the growth of the Nazi and fascist ideology. Annexation of Oriental lands meant the annexation of Oriental cultures "by analogy." Some Orientalists considered themselves responsible for providing histories for the colonized nations. These histories appeared to revolve round one central desire, a desire which aims at proving that all universal history develops to attain a zenith in the European modern civilization. Oriental histories were seen as necessary only as ancillaries for a eurocentric culture. Oriental history also provided the opportunity for some Orientalists to portray the self-image (as a desired image, as an undesired image, and as a contrast). For American writers, Oriental history is part of the history of the old world. It is, therefore, a source of instruction, and the root of the New world that Columbus, the first American, discovered.

Are these Orientalist accounts of the Oriental experience useful or not? Orientalist histories are useful, not only because they show us the image of our past through a different and biased perspective, but also because Orientalist motives and compulsions, distortions and prejudices, provide the Oriental writers with the counter-compulsion and with the incentive to research his own history in an enlightened and objective manner.


  1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 43.
  2. Ibid., p. 40.
  3. Eric Meyer, "'I Know Thee Not, I Loathe Thy Race'" Romantic Orientalism in the Eye of the Other," ELH, 58 (1991), p. 568.
  4. Ibid., p. 661.
  5. By "professional Orientalists" I mean writers whose only specialization is the Orient or an Oriental field, not writers who wrote about, or tackled the Orient as a digression from their major arguments or as a means to support a certain opinion. Men such as Lawrence of Arabia and Charles Doughty are professional Orientalists.
  6. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 13.
  7. R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 13 and 29.
  8. Said, Covering Islam, p. 23.
  9. Said, Orientalism, pp. 196-7, 222-225 and 237-46.
  10. Bernard Weiss' letter of 12 September 1991. Weiss is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Utah.
  11. Quoted in D. G. Hogarth, The Life of Charles Doughty (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 114.
  12. Ibid., pp. 114-5.
  13. Consult: D. M. Dunlop, "Some Remarks on Weil's History of the Caliphs," in Historians of the Middle East. Eds. B. Lewis and P.M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 329.
  14. Quoted in Pierre M. Irrving, The Life and Letter of Washington Irving, Vol II (N.Y.: G.P. Putnam, 1863), p. 366.
  15. Washington Irving, The Alhambra (N.Y.: The Continental Press, n.d.), dedication page
  16. Quoted in Pierre Irving, vol. 11, p. 322.
  17. Washington Irving, p. 34.
  18. Quoted in Pierre Irving, vol. II, pp. 287-8.
  19. Beongcheon Yu, The Great Circle: American Writers and the Orient (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), p. 228.
  20. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. V. Ed. H. D. Traill (N.Y.: Ams Press, 1980), p. 76.
  21. Ibid., p. 76.
  22. David De Laura, "Ishmael as Prophet: Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Self-Expressive Basis of Carlyle's Art," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, II (Spring, 1969), pp. 705-6 and 725-32.
  23. Southern, p. 29.
  24. For an idea about archetypal criticism, consult: Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
  25. John Henry Newman, Historical Sketches, vol. I (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics Inc., 1970), p. 210.
  26. Quoted in Paul Turner, English Literature, 1832-1890, Excluding the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 9.
  27. Quoted in Ibid., p. 273.
  28. Said, Covering Islam, p. 129.
  29. Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 87-8.
  30. Ibid., pp. 88-90.
  31. Ibid., p. 100.
  32. Ibid, p. 100.
  33. Ibid., p. 100.
  34. For an idea about Macaulay's opinion of Oriental historiography, consult: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education (London, Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 351.

Muhammed A. Al-Da'mi is Professor of English and Linguistics in the College of Languages, Baghdad University.

Publication Information: Article Title: Orientalism and Arab-Islamic History: An Inquiry into the Orientalists' Motives and Compulsions. Contributors: Muhammed A. Al-Da'Mi - author. Journal Title: Arab Studies Quarterly. Volume: 20. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 1.

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Edward Said's "Orientalism" revisited


Some of these purchasers may well have been puzzled by the cover of Said's book, which features a reproduction of a painting by one of the artists prominently featured in the exhibition, the Viennese-born, Paris-based Ludwig Deutsch, who did most of his work between 1885 and 1905. Titled A Guard with a Zither Player in an Interior, the cover picture is one of a series by Deutsch of scenes inside North African palaces and harems. To the untutored eye, these paintings seem fabulous. The architecture is sumptuous, the clothing and ornaments are rich and lavish. The whole effect appears to be a highly romanticized celebration of Islamic culture. Moreover, the Nubians standing guard at Deutsch's dwellings, like the black servant attending Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartment, seem to be making a political point, suggesting that it is their Arab masters who are the imperialists in Africa. And yet the exhibition catalogue assures the spectator that this uninformed impression must be naive, because art critics who follow Said have determined that these paintings are primarily a reflection of European arrogance and Western prejudices: "the idea of Oriental decay, the subjection of women, an unaccountable legal system--pictorial rhetoric that served a subtle imperialist agenda"

Edward Said looms large over the current cultural landscape. The influence of this American-Palestinian professor of literature is so great that a remarkable number of commentaries about European art, literature, cinema, music, and history now ritually genuflect to his ideas and to the wider "postcolonial" critique they helped engender. Newspaper reviews of performances of Verdi's Aida now frequently feel bound to cite Said's opinion that the opera is "an imperial notion of the non-European world." Surveys of the American cinema now identify an Orientalist genre that extends from The Sheik through Casablanca to Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the prodigious new reference work Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley, an entire chapter is devoted to Said, giving him as much space as the whole corpus of ancient Greek historians. Above all, he holds sway over the literary criticism of the nineteenth-century novel. His most recent magnum opus, Culture and Imperialism (1993), is a critique not only of those authors like Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad who wrote about Europe's colonies and dependencies, but also of such quintessentially domestic writers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. In the new Penguin Classics edition of Austen's Mansfield Park, the editor's introduction approvingly quotes Said's explanation of the Bertram estate "as part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture" and even the cover blurb feels obliged to call attention to the introduction where "the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in a new postcolonial light." For analyses of this kind, The New York Times in September 1998 declared him "one of the most important literary critics alive."

The book that made Said famous was Orientalism, published in 1978. This is a critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, which has been a scholarly pursuit at most of the prestigious European universities for several centuries. Oriental Studies is a composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts. Said makes it dear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. His focus is on how English, French, and American scholars have approached the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East. He has nothing on the other areas that traditionally comprised the field such as Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Far Eastern cultures, nor does he discuss the attitudes of German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese Orientalists. The period he covers is more restricted than the scholarly field, too, extending only from the late eighteenth century to the present, whereas European scholarship on the Orient dates back to the High Middle Ages. Within his time frame, however, Said extends his examination beyond the works of recognized Orientalist academics to take in literature, journalism, travel books, and religious and philosophical studies to produce a broadly historical and anthropological perspective.

His book makes three major claims. The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands. Said is quite clear about the causal sequence: "Colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact." Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon, a Viceroy of India, agreed that the products of this scholarship--"our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history, and religion"--had provided "the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won." In the late twentieth century, the field helps preserve American power in the Middle East and defends what Said calls "the Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine." Today, however, there is much less interest in the traditional fields of philology and literature. American academic centers for Middle Eastern studies are more concerned with providing direct advice to the government on public policy. Overall, Said submits, his work demonstrates "the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man's difficult civilizing mission."

His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe's self-image. "It has less to do with the Orient than it does with `our' world." The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and "Others." This happens because "the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego." Orientalism led the West to see Islamic culture as static in both time and place, as "eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself." This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The West consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture, as well as "the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior." This became part of its imperial conceit. In 1810, the French author Chateaubriand called upon Europe to teach the Orient the meaning of liberty which he, and everyone after him, believed the Orientals knew nothing about. Said says he thereby provided the rationale for Western imperialism, which could be described by its perpetrators not as a form of conquest, but as the redemption of a degenerate world.

Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise--that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Hence: "its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness." Where this approach first goes wrong, Said says, is in its belief that there could be such a thing as an Islamic society, an Arab mind, an Oriental psyche. No one today, he points out, would dare talk about blacks or Jews using such essentialist cliches. Where Orientalism goes even further astray, he claims, is its anachronistic assumption that Islam has possessed a unity since the seventh century, which can be read, via the Koran, into every facet of, say, modern Egyptian or Algerian society. The notion that Muslims suffer such a form of arrested development not only is false, he maintains, but also ignores more recent and important influences such as the experience of colonialism, imperialism, and, even, ordinary politics.

The faults of Orientalism, moreover, have not been confined to analyses of the Orient. Said claims there have been counterparts in "similar knowledges" constructed about Native Americans and Africans where there is a chronic tendency to deny, suppress, or distort their systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of scholarly disinterest. In other words, Said presents his work not only as an examination of European attitudes to Islam and the Arabs but also as a model for analysis of all Western "discourses on the Other."

This strategy has worked remarkably well. Today, twenty years after his work was first published, Said is widely regarded by students of literature and cultural studies as not only one of the founders of the postcolonial movement in criticism and of multiculturalism in politics, but still one of their chief gurus. This is despite the fact that his work was not original, as Said himself acknowledges. It is a synthesis and elaboration of two separate theses. One was an analysis that emerged among a number of Muslim academics working in Europe in the 1960s. Said cites the Coptic socialist author Anwar Abdel Malek, who wrote in France using the then latest Parisian versions of Freudian and Marxist theory. He accused the Orientalists of being "Europocentric" of failing to pay enough attention to Arab scholars like himself, of being obsessed with the past, and of stamping all Orientals with "a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character." This essentialist conception of the peoples of the Orient, Abdel Malek wrote, expresses itself through an "ethnist typology ... and will soon proceed with it towards racism."

The other source of Said's inspiration also derived from Paris in the Sixties. This is the writing of Michel Foucault, especially his notion that academic disciplines do not simply produce knowledge but also generate power. Said uses Foucault to argue that Orientalism helped produce European imperialism. "No more glaring parallel exists" Said says, "between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism." He also borrowed from Foucault the notion of a "discourse" the ideological framework within which scholarship takes place. Within a discourse, all representations are tainted by the language, culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. Hence there can be no "truths" Said argues, only formations or deformations. No scholar or writer can rise above these limitations, and even a towering figure like Louis Massignon, who dominated French Orientalism until the 1960s, was no more than "a kind of system for producing certain kinds of statements, disseminated into the large mass of discursive formations that together make up the archive, or cultural material of his time."

Said quickly assures us that putting it this way does not dehumanize poor Louis. But what it does mean is that "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." Note that this is not a contingent matter. Said is not merely talking about what Europeans actually did say, but rather what they possibly could say. In short, the prevailing discourse renders Europeans, of necessity, racists.

Before pointing out some of the problems with these arguments, it should be acknowledged that Said does score a few hits. He shows that there were plenty of nineteenth-century European travel writers and journalists who visited the Orient and quickly developed an ill-informed opinion of the Arabs and their religion. It is a surprise to find the historians Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt expressing some agreement with such views. It is not so surprising to find genuine racists of the period--like Joseph Arthur Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races later provided the Nazis with a rationale--espousing such views.

Although Said makes excuses for him, one of the worst offenders in this regard was plainly Karl Marx. Said cites the following passage: 


England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one   destructive, the other regenerating--the annihilation of the Asiatic  society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in  Asia.                                                               

But none of these examples, nor indeed all of them combined, are sufficient to sustain Said's thesis. It is not difficult to show that each of his three main claims about Orientalism is seriously flawed. For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek's analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault's thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism's picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region.

According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them.

In fact, Said's whole attempt to identify Oriental Studies as a cause of imperialism does not deserve to be taken seriously. The only plausible connection he establishes between Oriental scholarship and imperialism is the example of the Comte de Volney, who wrote two travel books on Syria and Egypt in the 1780s suggesting that the decaying rule of the Ottoman Empire in those countries made them ripe for political change. Napoleon used Volney's arguments to justify his brief, ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798, though Volney himself was an opponent of French involvement there. But nowhere else does Said provide an analysis of the thoughts and reasons of the imperial decision-makers at the time they actually entered upon Europe's Oriental adventures. At most, Said establishes that Orientalism provided the West with a command of Oriental languages and culture, plus a background mindset that convinced it of its cultural and technological advance over Islam. But these are far from sufficient causes of imperial conquest since they explain neither motives, opportunities, nor objectives.

Said gives the impression of offering more when he cites speeches and essays by Lord Cromer, Arthur Balfour, and Lord Curzon that paid some recognition to the work of Orientalist scholarship in helping to manage the Empire. But all of these quotations come from works written between 1908 and 1912, that is, more than twenty-five years after the peak of Britain's imperial expansion. Rather than expressing the aims and objectives of potential imperial conquests, these speeches are ex post facto justifications, sanctioned by hindsight. In Curzon's case, the speech, from which the extracts above are quoted, was given in the House of Lords in 1909, four years after he returned from India. It was made to support the funding of a new London school of Oriental Studies. He had been recruited to the school's founding committee and, not surprisingly, was painting its prospects in the best light he could.

Apart from Foucault's grandiose hypothesis that knowledge always generates power, Said provides no support at all for his contention that "colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism" because he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century. Where real historians have attempted this, they have come to quite different conclusions, with trade, investment, and military causes predominating. The decisions of the British to move into North Africa and the Middle East in the 1880s, for instance, were based on rivalry with the French, the need to guarantee the sea routes to India and China, and to protect British financial interests from nationalist challenges after Egypt became bankrupt. Philology did not come into it. Even Lenin has a more convincing explanation of imperialism than Said.

Said's inept handling of historical material is evident throughout the book. He claims that, by the end of the seventeenth century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, whereas in reality the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred years by the Ottomans, and British and French merchants could only land with the permission of the Sultan. Said describes Egypt as a "colony" of Britain, whereas the legal status of British occupation of Egypt was never more than that of a protectorate. This is not merely a semantic difference because a real colony, like Australia or Algeria, was a place where large numbers of Europeans settled, which never happened in Egypt. Even on Islamic history, Said is unreliable. He claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they took over North Africa. The facts are that the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh century, but what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk Turks late in the eleventh century. The fact that these howlers have been preserved in the 1995 edition of the book suggests that Said lacks friends, admirers, or advisers with expertise in history who might have sent him a list of corrections.

Said justifies his decision to omit German Orientalists from his analysis by claiming that German scholars came to the field later than the British and French, and merely elaborated on the work originally done by their European rivals. This claim has generated considerable scorn among contemporary Oriental scholars. Bernard Lewis argues that "at no time before or after the imperial age did their [British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in Germany and neighboring countries." To omit German scholarship in this way is like trying to do a survey of the discipline of sociology without mentioning Weber, Simmel, or Tonnies. It is quite clear, however, where Said derived the incentive for this strategy. The Germans were prominent Orientalists, yet Germany never went on to become an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North Africa or the Middle East. For the Germans, knowledge did not generate power in the way that Foucault's theory said it should. So, rather than admit this or try to explain it away, Said conveniently omits Germany from his survey.

The second part of Said's thesis has just as little to recommend it. The notion that Western culture has needed an "Other" to define its own identity derives from the structuralist version of Freudian theory that became prominent in France in the 1960s. An individual's self-concept, this thesis maintains, emerges only when he recognizes himself as separate from and different from others. Cultures need to go through an analogous process, it is claimed, and so must identify themselves through an alter ego. In other words, the need for an "Other" is built into human nature at both the individual and collective levels. This is a central concept of Said's thesis but, unfortunately, it leads him into a direct contradiction with one of his core methodological dicta: his rejection of essentialism. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he complains that the book has been misread by hostile critics as an essentialist polemic against Western civilization. He says he would condemn any "attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences.... This false position hides historical change." His own approach is "explicitly anti-essentialist." It is difficult, though, to reconcile this assertion with the way he characterizes Western identity. He argues that, from its origins, the West's self-concept was defined by its opposition to Asia. 

   Consider first the demarcation between Orient and the West. It alreadyseems bold by the time of the Iliad. Two of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the East appear in Aeschylus's The Persians, the earliest Athenian play extant, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the very last one extant....

The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.              


These same motifs persist in Western culture, he claims, right down to the modern period. This is a tradition that accommodates perspectives as divergent as those of Aeschylus, Dante, Victor Hugo, and Karl Marx. However, in describing "the essential motifs" of the European geographic imagination that have persisted since ancient Greece, he is ascribing to the West a coherent self-identity that has produced a specific set of value judgments--"Europe is powerful and articulate: Asia is defeated and distant"--that have remained constant for the past 2500 years. This is, of course, nothing less than the use of the very notion of "essentialism" that he elsewhere condemns so vigorously. In short, it is his own work that is essentialist and ahistorical. He himself commits the very faults he says are so objectionable in the work of Orientalists. The proposition that produces this contradiction is the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other. This is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory. It is now such a standard refrain within cultural studies that it usually goes unquestioned. There is, however, very little to recommend it. Although they have long distinguished themselves from the barbarians of the world, Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage. Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism. In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.

The final component of Said's thesis, the allegedly false essentialism of Orientalism, not only contradicts his own methodological assumptions, but is a curious argument in itself. Going back to the origins of a culture to examine its founding principles is hardly something to be condemned. This is especially so in the case of Islam where the founding book, the Koran, is taken much more literally by its adherents than the overt text of the Bible is taken by Christians today. In several countries, the Koran is both a religious and legal text. In others, like Egypt and Algeria, there are political movements prepared to resort to terrorism to have it made the basis of national law and authority. Moreover, one could not understand the most bitter division in the modern Islamic world, that between Shi'ites and Sunnis, without knowing its origins in the conflicts over succession after the death of Muhammed in 632, any more than one could properly understand events in contemporary Northern Ireland without some knowledge of the breach in the Christian world that occurred during the Reformation. One Muslim critic, Sadik Jalal al-'Azm, has argued that the kind of religious essentialism of which Said indicts Orientalism is actually necessary to understand the Muslim mind: 

  [I]t is true that in general the unseen is more immediate and real to the common citizens of Cairo and Damascus than it is to the present inhabitants of New York and Paris; it is true that religion "means everything" to the life of the Moroccan peasants in a way that must remain incomprehensible to present day American farmers.                                        

Of course, Said would be right to complain were Western ideas about Islamic peoples confined solely to stereotypes derived from their founding texts and early history. But it is simply untrue that the whole body of Oriental scholarship has made this kind of mistake. Take Said's claims about economic studies of Islamic countries. He condemns the work of Western observers    

   whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental's fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality. In the Islamic field those cliches held good for literally hundreds of years--until Maxime Rodinson's important study Islam and Capitalism  appeared in 1966.                                                    

Anyone, however, who takes the trouble to read the one book he favors, Islam and Capitalism, will find it actually tells a different story. Rodinson is a Marxist sociologist and his work, like most in its mold, is based on secondary sources. A large section of the book is a debate with, and critique of, those Western economists and their Muslim allies who do not, in fact, see the Arabs as having an inherent "incapacity for trade" but instead regard these societies as capable of adopting capitalist commerce and industry. He discusses in some detail the work of six economic commentators who expressed views of this kind between the 1910s and the 1950s. Though Rodinson agrees there are many observers who share the assumptions identified by Said, and though his main aim is to see Islam adopt socialism, the evidence of his book is a clear refutation of Said's sweeping generalization about Orientalist economics. In a later work, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1987), Rodinson dismisses the kind of homogeneity that Said wants to impose on Oriental Studies, insisting that the field has always included "a multiplicity of issues coming under the jurisdiction of many general disciplines." Outside economic studies, Said's claims about the essentialism of Oriental Studies are just as misleading. Bernard Lewis has produced his own survey of European attitudes towards Islam since the Middle Ages, Islam and the West 0994). He argues that Europe's initial theological and ethnic prejudices had been largely overcome within serious scholarship by the end of the eighteenth century when the study of Islam was established as an academic subject worthy of attention and respect. 

   The Muslims were no longer seen purely in ethnic terms as hostile tribes,but as the carriers of a distinctive religion and civilization; their prophet was no longer a grotesque impostor or a Christian heretic but the founder of an independent and historically significant religious community.  
In other words, rather than being necessarily ethnocentric and racist, Oriental Studies was one of the first fields within European scholarship to overcome such prejudices and to open the Western mind to the whole of humanity. Although each of the three components of Said's thesis is therefore untenable, this is unlikely in the short term to affect his status as an academic celebrity among students of literature and cultural studies in the West. He is not only one of those writers who helped create the current hegemony of identity-group politics and multiculturalism within the university system, but is also one of its chief beneficiaries. In accomplishing this, he has both endorsed the prevailing cult of the victim, upon which identity-group politics are based, and milked it himself to an indecent degree. "My own experiences of these matters" he says in Orientalism, "are in part what made me write this book." 

   The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.     

Coming from any grown man, such wallowing in victimhood would be bad enough, but from a tenured full professor at Columbia University in New York City--that is, from one of the most materially and occupationally privileged human beings on the planet, who enjoys the added indulgence of being permitted to make whatever criticism he fancies of the country that sustains him--it is simply embarrassing. It certainly calls into question the judgment of his more ardent admirers, especially Camille Paglia, who sees him as "an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics seeking for their cultural identity." In the East, however, Said is regarded today in quite different terms. While he acknowledges that translations of his book have won him support among Islamic fundamentalists who see him documenting the violation of Islam and the Arabs by a predatory West, he is much less of an influence in other circles. He has had a highly publicized falling out with the Palestine Liberation Organization, but a better indicator of the regard in which he is widely held would be the notice taken of his views on his own turf, as a cultural critic. It must be something of a disappointment to him to see his analysis of the European arrogance and Western prejudices purportedly built into Orientalist cultural artifacts being completely ignored. For instance, at the time he wrote his book in the late 1970s, about half of the nineteenth-century Orientalist art that was put to auction in London and Paris was being bought by dealers for Arab clients living in the West. Today, collectors of North African, Near and Middle Eastern descent totally dominate the market for these paintings, with Western and Japanese buyers all but priced out. Islamic collectors have voted with their petrodollars. Palaces and mansions throughout North Africa and the Persian Gulf are now liberally adorned with those same portrayals of their culture by Delacroix, Ingres, Gerome, Deutsch, and others that Said and his followers claim are so demeaning. How could their owners be so mistaken? The Moroccan curator Brahim Alaoui has explained that, despite Said, the romantic portrayal of the nineteenth-century Orient by European artists is now regarded as a valued part of Arab and Islamic heritage. 

   That image of the Orient which set the Occident dreaming in the nineteenth century returns something to those Orientals who also seek an image of their past. They find in this painting a world on its way to disappearing: this Orient that is highly colored, shimmering, this Orient of arabesques,  of costumes, and the richness of forms is in the process of being eclipsed  by a much more modern world. The image that was fixed by the Occident in the nineteenth century--the Orientals are now attempting to recover it.                                                                  

(1) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, by Edward Said; Pantheon, 1978; revised edition Penguin, 1995. Keith Windschuttle's most recent book is The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (Free Press).


Publication Information: Article Title: Edward Said's "Orientalism" Revisited. Contributors: Keith Windschuttle - author. Magazine Title: New Criterion. Volume: 17. Issue: 5. Publication Date: January 1999. Page Number: 30.  

]]> (Super User) Literature Tue, 23 Oct 2018 04:55:32 +0000
Curriculum Reform Series : Islamization of Knowledge -- Language and Literature
  1. Introduction


2.0 Islamizing Language Teaching

2.1 Definition of Language

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols through which the members of a social group communicate for cooperation and harmonious coexistence. So language is important for communication in a society. Language or speech faculty is a special gift from Allah (SWT) to human being. The Qur’an refers to this gift: “ It is He who has taught the Qur’an. He has created man. He has taught him speech.” ( Ar Rahman : 2 – 4 ) So it is clear from these verses that Allah created man with the faculty of speech. It is not a particular language, but a capacity to learn any particular human language. So all human languages are equally important.

Allah has given importance to the mother tongue of a particular society. He says, “ These are the verses of the Glorious Book. We have revealed the Qur’an in the Arabic tongue so that you may grow in understanding” ( Yusuf : 1 ) Arabic was chosen as a medium of the last divine message because it happened to the mother-tongue of the last messenger of Islam and of the language community chosen to establish the word of Allah on earth under the immediate leadership of the Prophet ( PBUH ).  The Qur’an invites us to study and respect the diversity of languages and declares it an important sign of divine power at work in the organization of the universe. The Qur’an not only recognizes the existence of the diversity of languages as a manifestation of Allah’s will but also presents it as a challenge for research and understanding.

2.2 Methods of Teaching Language Islamically

As we are living in a global village, it has become essential for us to learn different languages. Language learning depends on the environment where one can listen to a particular language of a social group. In the Muslim countries, majority of the students in a class are Muslims. So it is easier for a language teacher to cite examples from Islamic perspective. Suppose, while presenting sentence structures, a teacher can easily use sentences which are very much relevant to Muslim society and culture. Or while teaching reading comprehension he can select topics from Islamic history, culture or literature. Or for composition a teacher can select topics which give some moral lesson to the students or students become acquainted with Islamic economic or social system. For example, he can tell his students to write free hand composition on human rights in Islam, justice, passion, temperament, honesty, development of morality, Islamic economy, Islamic financial system, property distribution in Islam etc. To develop students’ listening and understanding skills documentary and films based on Islamic values may be shown.

Language is a day to day conversation for communication, cooperation and a harmonious coexistence in a society. It is a medium to express one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, and opinions and even give information or messages to others. So if a language teacher is well equipped with Islamic knowledge and culture, he will be able to present a millions of examples in front of the students which are related to Islamic society and culture. A language teacher has to create an environment in which his students will revolve. So if the environment is highly moral, based on Islamic values, the students will automatically be moral.

3.0 Islamizing Literature Teaching

3.1 Definition of Literature

If language is the structure of a building, then literature is its decoration. Language and literature are inter-related in the teaching learning process. Literature has an inner, deeper, concealed or hidden meaning and beauty which has to be discovered by intensive and careful reading. It is understood by one who has profound learning and understanding. Actually literature is the reflection of the contemporary society.  Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is the written record of man’s spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations; it is the history and the only history of the human soul. It is characterized by its artistic, its suggestive, and its permanent qualities. Its two tests are its universal interest and its personal style. Their object, aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of man rather than his actions. It is one of the most important and delightful subjects that can occupy the human mind. So literature is a form of knowledge. This knowledge is partial but sincere and genuine. It is partial because it is only an individual’s experience of reality. As that individual is a human being his experience can never be complete. Only Allah possesses complete knowledge.

3.2 Methods in Teaching Literature Islamically

The teaching of literature can be an effective means of making students realize the universality and absoluteness of certain values with reference to which writers study man and express their deeply felt understanding of life. As literature is primarily concerned with human life on this earth, it is necessary to present the universal code of morality of good and evil in front of the students. Only then the students will realize what good literature is and what bad literature is. Therefore, it is possible to teach all kinds of literature without disturbing or opposing religious attitudes and feelings. But while teaching, the teacher has to indicate how the writer is confined or not confined within the range of normal human experience, how values invoked by the writer are not highly occult, personal and dogmatic.

Throughout the world, mainly English literature is taught at the college and university level. Some American and Oriental literature are also included as a comparative study. But the literature from the Muslim country is totally ignored. Even in the Muslim universities of Muslim countries, English literature is taught, leaving out Islamic literature. Under this circumstances how will a teacher Islamize literature, mainly English literature? Where most of the literary works are full of immoral acts and incidents and most of the works are presenting polluted society, which are rotten to the core. So it is not possible to Islamize English literature and also it is not possible to leave it out totally. So what can a Muslim teacher do in a Muslim university?

For example, let’s take Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones. Fielding’s purpose in writing Tom Jones is to show human nature and to emphasize the contrast between what is beautiful in it and what is ugly. In this novel most of the characters are immoral and hypocrites. Even the hero of the novel is more or less a licentious person who finds it impossible to resists a woman’s charms or her advances. So while teaching Tom Jones, at first the teacher will present the literary work as it is. He will present the contemporary society on which the work is written. Then he can compare that society with the values of Muslim society. Then he can throw some questions to the students -Are the characters of this novel morally sound? Are the incidents happened in this novel appropriate in any Muslim society? If such type of incidents happens in a Muslim society, how will people react? Or what should be done to change the evil mentality of the contemporary society? So a teacher should make the students aware of the evil deeds which are not permissible in Islam. Vulgarism in literature should be focused through Islamic perspective with the reference to the Qur’an and Sunnah.

Or if a teacher is to teach Paradise Lost by John Milton, how will he coincide Islam in it? The fable of  Paradise Lost, as Milton tells it, may roughly be divided into three parts: the rebellion of the angels and their material conflict with God;  the creation of mankind, the intercession of the Messiah, and the conditions of man’s existence; and wiles of Satan against man, the transgression of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from the Paradise. The subject matter of the poem is taken partly from the books of the Old Testament of the Bible. While teaching this epic, a teacher has to be well versed on the Holy Qur’an. The story of the creation of man and the Fall of man because of Original Sin is presented in Paradise Lost. If a teacher is not well aware of the original intention of Allah ( SWT ) for creating this world and human being, he will not be able to present Paradise Lost in Islamic perspective. For Example, the concept of Original Sin which has no place in Islam is a major factor in this epic. A literature teacher can explain Islam’s view of Original Sin. According to Christianity it is believed that because of the Sin of Adam and Eve (AS) in eating from the forbidden tree, all their descendants have inherited original sinfulness which can only be expiated through accepting Jesus Christ as the savior. But Islam rejects this for five main reasons:

  1. Allah knows that mankind is fallible because He created man from both material and spirit; it is contrary to His justice that He would condemn all mankind for a single mistake made by the first man and woman.
  2. According to the Qur’an both Adam and Eve prayed for forgiveness and were forgiven by God. ( 2 : 37 )
  3. God is both just and merciful and it is not consistent with the mercy of God that He should refuse to pardon Adam and Eve and also condemn succeeding generations as sinful.
  4. It is clear from the Qur’an that Adam and eve were forgiven before being sent down to the earth and so their descendants cannot have been tainted by Original Sin.
  5. The Qur’an says, “no bearer of burden can bear a burden of another”. This shows that God holds each person responsible for his own actions and not the actions of others.

It is also said in Paradise Lost that Adam and Eve (AS) were sent down to earth as a punishment. A teacher has to satisfy his students by giving Islam’s view regarding this issue. According to the Qur’an, Adam and Eve were not sent to the earth as a punishment. Infact, before Adam was even created, Allah said to the angels: “I am going to place a vicegerent (Khalifah) on the earth”. ( 2 : 30 ) Adam was the first vicegerent and all his descendants are vicegerents also. The reason why Adam and Eve spent some time in the Garden is possibly that Allah wanted to teach them, and indeed all mankind, the consequences of obedience and disobedience to Himself.

In this way a literature teacher can explain each and every incident of Paradise Lost by presenting Islam’s concept side by side.

Or while presenting the religious and metaphysical poets like – George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, a teacher must know the Qur’an and as well as Bible very well. Because there are so many Biblical allusions which are also found in the Qur’an. A literature teacher has to explain it from the poet’s point of view as well as Islam’s point of view. So a teacher in Muslim university must have that ability to present Islam properly to the students.

4.0 Recommendations for Islamization of Knowledge

  • Throughout the Muslim world, students enter the university with little knowledge of Islam they acquired at home or in elementary or secondary school. So they do not vision Islam as vibrant, concerning any problem. The student in a Muslim university confronts alien ideologies presented to him in textbook or classroom. Nowhere in the Muslim world is the Islamic vision taught to all students as the western tradition is taught to high school students in the west. In no Muslim university is such a vision part of the basic or core studies program that is compulsory to all students. So every Muslim youth must receive full instruction in the religion, ethics, law, history, culture and literature of Islam.
  • The course materials of the Muslim universities should be revised. It should be an integrated one. Mainly the literature department should include some Islamic literature, literary works on Islamic history, civilization, heritage and culture.
  • Teachers in Muslim universities do not possess the vision of Islam and it is certainly the greatest calamity of Muslim education. Today, Muslim youths are being westernized by Muslim teachers in Muslim universities. So at first the Muslim academicians must be trained with sufficient Islamic knowledge and they must have a good command of Qur’an and Sunnah.
  • Besides Islamization of knowledge in the Muslim countries, in order to combat the world-wide evils of secular education, Faith-Based education is also needed to create a common platform for the followers of all the major regions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. Because a good number of non-Muslim students are taking higher education in Muslim universities. And if non-Muslim students get Faith-Based moral education, one day they themselves will rebel against evils of secular education.
  • To teach literature effectively by following Islamic principles, it should be kept in mind that, literature can not be a substitute for moral teaching. Literature can never replace morality or religion. The main function of literature is to provide enjoyment. So a literature teacher will help the students to realize that any human situation presented in literature can not be applied in real life. If the teacher presents Islamic framework of life in front of the students, they will easily understand the limitations of the literary works.

5.0 Conclusion

For the full realization of the Islamization of knowledge and to get fruitful results from it, at first the Muslim community must realize that it will help the Ummah to regain their status and position in the world which they lost years back. The Muslims need to master the fundamental principles of Islam and Islamic legacy and gain proper knowledge of contemporary social and applied sciences. Muslim community must also be fully acquainted with the Islamic vision and Islamic ideological and methodological notions before trying to Islamize any discipline. A Muslim scholar must have an adequate understanding of the various Islamic texts that related to his special field.

Reference books and articles:

1. The Holy Qur’an
2. Islamic Teaching Course – vol-1
3. Islamization of Knowledge : General Principles and Work Plan- vol-1
4. Islamic Principles and Methods in Teaching of Literature ( an article by Syed Ali Ashraf )
5. Islamization of Linguistics (an article by Sayyid Muhammad Syeed )

]]> (Super User) Literature Tue, 23 Oct 2018 04:53:54 +0000
Islamization of Literature: Origin, Present Context and Some Proposals

Paper presented at a workshop on Islamic Epistemology & Curriculum Reform
2-3 May, 2008, Islamic University Kustia

In and out of the globe, Islam, as a complete code of life, does not leave any issue out of its scope. So very naturally, it takes a special interest in literature because literature, in the most popular definition, is an artistic expression of life. Islam, like literature, deals with all aspects of life, and therefore, as a significant human concern, literature has been duly treated in Islam from its very beginning. It is known that the ancient Arabs, who were of incredible poetic sense, questioned the authenticity of the holy Quran because of its charming language and artistic expression of its themes and style. The Quranic verse was the most significant the language of the holy Quran penetrated the stone like hearts of the unbelievers and made them feel the truth and peace of Islam. They got alarmed and threw an open challenge of debate to the Prophet. As a result an idealistic and aesthetic debate took place on the supremacy of Islam and other contemporary beliefs. It is notable in this regard.that our prophet (sm) encouraged Hassan bin Thabit (R), a famous contemporary poet, to use poetry in order to highlight and defend Islam and the Muslims amid the turmoil of poetic crossfire. In fact, our beloved prophet(sm) was the mastermind who used to supply his poets with necessary thematic and factual information and tips to win the contests.

So, the basic principles of Islamization of Literature found a solid ground and a literary structure from the intellectual conflict and competition between two camps. But though it emerged during the earliest days of Islam it was not flourished as a popular trend of literature as it could be. Consequently, it lost its significance and intellectuality as well as the literary and artistic potentiality. So, over the next few centuries, Muslim literary activities continued flourishing with some sort of secular characteristics. However a good number of writers and critics continued creating literature in pursuit of Islamic ideology, but their efforts, according to many critics, had not enough artistic qualities because they did not maintain two dimensional objectives- such as ideological objective and artistic accountability.

In 1952 Sayyed Kutub, a renowned Islamic scholar, called upon the Ummah, for the first time, to utilize the Quranic versification and style of presentation for the reconstruction of our literary approaches. Because the literature of other languages enriched with western philosophies and ant-Islamic elements, was leaving a serious impact on Islam, the Muslims. In fact, their contents, the themes and the inherent philosophical messages are hostile and contradictory to Islamic ideology. Moreover, such literary works are creating a serious intellectual confusion and a harmful socio-cultural synthesis resulting into a perverted and decayed Islamic identity. So in that crucial period of time Sayyed Kutub suggested a close and aesthetic reading of the holy Quran. Later on some distinguished scholars - namely Abul Hasan Ali al-Nadawi, Nagib al-Kilani, Abdul Basit Badar, Imad aI-Din aI-Khalil, Abdur Rahman Rafat al-Basha and others welcome the concept coining a new name, "Islamic Literature" for the movement. They take initiatives to promote this concept, because trom the ancient time to the present literature has been serving a great purpose as a successful and sophisticated medium of establishing and popularizing a philosophy, doctrine or ideology. This new movement is, thus, a consequential step of Islamization of Literature and an endeavor to revive the literary legacy of the Muslims.

This movement refers to some outputs and proposes some contexts of research and recommendations. These are briefly mentioned below:

The expected outputs of islamisation of literature are:
- Eradication of intentionally created conflict between literature and religion.
- Creation of a positive and harmonious co-existence between the artist and his or her beliefs or values.
- Protection of the standard and values of art and literature from degradation.
- Enable us to fulfill the demand of time, because islamization of literature ensures a balanced and human friendly art and literature

Steps proposed for Islamization of literature:
- Utilizing the opportunity of both print and electronic media by writing articles, features, and broadcasting debate and talk shows on the topic.
- Encouraging the creative writers to practice the concept in writings (poetry, drama, novels, short stories etc).
- Establishing different forums and organizations to get more people connected with the concept.
- Involving the learned people of the world to establish the concept as a better means of literature.

Some proposals to reform the existing curriculum of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature:
- Long term programs to create an Islam- friendly academic atmosphere in the department as well as in the faculty to ease and materialize the reformation.
- Selection of some literary texts that will represent Islamic values and aesthetic outlook.
- Introduction of a special course at MA levels. The course design may be as follows:

Course title-Islamization of Literature: Theory and Practice.

Selected readings:

  1. Islamization-definition, nature and scope, origin and development.
    - Contemporary thinkers and their writings on the concept.
    - Comparison of Islamic and western epistemology.
  2. Islamization of literature-background definition, nature and scope, problems and prosepects.
    -Present context and contemporary development of the issue.
    -Literary works dealing with Islamic culture and ideology.
    -Selected texts: (It may include)
    -Short story:

Amid the multi-faceted cultural and intellectual aggressions by the western world Islamization of Literature deserves our full care and attention. it has become a must for a better and well-balanced world. The practice of this concept the aesthetic entity and glorious cultural legacy of Islam this trend should be nartured, developed and established worldwide.

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:59:57 +0000
Islamization of English Discipline at the Tertiary Level: An Overview

Paper presented at a workshop on Islamic Epistemology & Curriculum Reform 
2-3 May, 2008 at Islamic University Kustia
As Muslims, our prime duty is to lead our life solely for the cause of Allah. But in Bangladesh, we witness that a secular educational system has prevailed over our religious faith and culture. A big gap has been created between what we believe and what we learn. As a result, we are deviated far away from religious path and beliefs. This, in reality, is nothing but a reflection of the world order of the present day. With the legacy of the crusaders and imperialist hegemony, the Westerners consider Islam and the Muslims as a threat to their modern civilization. Consequently, they have been launching a campaign against the mindset and practices of the Muslims and have become successful in engraving the idea in the Muslim psyche that their mental structure, heritage and culture is incapable of keeping pace with the modern civilization. They have employed a number of scholars, researchers and their disciples even among the Muslims to realize some breakthrough in the Muslim world which resulted, ultimately, in inventing the idea of the 'Clash of Civilization'. But the Muslims living in the labyrinth of the Western propaganda are failing to resume their own beliefs and cultural identity and going astray from the path of Allah. They have become helpless target of the intellectual and cultural aggression of the Western world. At the other extreme of this reality, the Western world bored with earthly pleasure and luxury on the one hand, and with the ideas of Freudism, Existentialism and Liberalism on the other, are failing to find out meaning of life. This, according to Taha Jabir Al-'Alwani (2005), is the outcome of their decadent thought which caused intellectual and epistemological deconstructionism. To him, if the modernist thought had already deconstructed religion and the universe, the post-modernist thought had, in fact, deconstructed 'Man'! And the deconstruction is still ongoing, which shows the depth and enormity of the modern era's crisis of meaning and the dire necessity of exploring a transcendental systematic alternative outlook so as to help Man reconstruct the deconstructed . Only the divine writ of the Holy Qur'an 'as the ultimate source of transcendental systematic wisdom'  can show the way to emerge from this spiritual wasteland. Therefore, reintroduction of the Holy Qur'anic teachings is a dire necessity in the present world to save not only the Muslims from their underdevelopment but also the whole mankind.

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:58:18 +0000
The curriculum reform of B.A honours and M.A Syllabus of Bengali Literature of Islamic University, Kushtia. Bangladesh.

Paper presented at a workshop on Islamic Epistemology & Curriculum Reform
2-3 May, 2008, Islamic University Kustia

We believe in reforming the curriculum in Islamic approach. Islam means peace. It also means self-surrender to the world’s creator. There are two kinds of deeds in this universe, one is god and another is bad, i.e. abusive and bad instinctive. We must maintain our sex-life formally and ethically with having a marriage. This claims now bitterly in western civilization. We have a life here and hereafter. We should admit that all good knowledge is the knowledge of the creator. We should defeat the satanic knowledge. All ethical knowledge is not only Islamic but for the welfare of all religions.

  1. b) B.A Honours Syllabus of Bengali literature

Session: 2007-2008
Islamic University, Kushtia, Bangladesh.

Course No.1 03: Ancient and Medieval Bengali Poetry.

Charjapad, edited by Dr. Mohammad Shahidullah is named as Buddhist mystic songs. Kannapa is the most powerful poet of Charjapad, the first proof of Bengali poetry. Kannapa was sorry to observe that some men are coming to the world and another are going back from it. His thus thinking is creator- centred and here works the sensation of truth & the final goal of humankind. So, his poetry may be furnished as the creators goal-related sentiment.

Baru Chandidus has written Srikrishnakirtan, a medieval poetry, edited by Basantaronjon Ray. It is taught in universities as a love story of Radha and Krishna, a physical love story only. But we get in veda that a sinner does not get success in his work We get this information in Srikrishanakitran’s ‘Biroha Khonda’, the Sub-chapter 39. Krishna is a God of the Hindus. He believes in Brahma, the unique creator. Krishna was very much devoted for the love of the creator that he denied to had a sex to Radha. Thus the informal & unethical sex performance was forbidden in this poetry. This outlook of ethical and lawful love and relationship is very much accepted in Islamic epistemology.

Vaisnab Podaboli (The Vaisnab Poetry) is not only written by Biddapoti; chandidas or others but also written by Alaol and Syed Sultan and more other Muslim Poets. The outlook of these Muslim Poets are very much Allah related. They expressed their deep love to the prophet of Islam, Hazrat Mohammad (Sm) & the creator, Allah. So, these poetry may be discussed according to the epistemology of Islam.

Here is an essay written by Bangkim Chandra Chatterjee, named as Biral (The Cat). The essay is about the equity of man. The poor must not be depressed. This outlook is very much accepted by Islamic law and order. Bangkim, himself was very much religious person. Religion my be various kinds; but we should think seriously that the creator is one.

Promoth Chowdhury’s joydeb is an essay. In that essay the essayist denied the abuseness. Islam also is interested of forbidding abuseness.

Course: 207: Folklore Theory and Folk-literature.
Lalon shah is a very powerful mystic poet of Bengal. Rabindranath, the noble   aureate, was influenced by Lalon’s mysticism. Lalon told in one of his song tbat he and Lalon stay in one room but the distance is Lac miles between them. Lalon himself and his soul itself is also very much connected and co-related with each other. The soul bears the proof and immortality of the creator, himself. So, Lalon’s songs may be analysed at the outlook of the creator of the Universe.

Course 302: Modern Bengali Poetry-2
Jibanananda Das is a very genious modem Bengali poet. We find in his poetry, existentialism, Surrealism & Imagism movement’s philosophy. He is an alienated poet. But in ‘Dhusar Pandulipi’ (The Yellow Manuscript) he stated that ( in the poem camp) we are like the dead deer which are in the spring’s moonlit atmosphere. Our consciousness is dead. We should make alive our consciousness. This poet tells in another poem that the men who deem great truth & rule as true, their hearts are the food of vultures and swines. So, Jibonananda expects for the truth & betterment of the world. So, His poetry may be discussed as Islamic epistemology.

Sudhindranath Dutta is called as an aethiest poet of Bengal by the critic. But It can be proved that he had craving for being a believer. He told one of his poem that “Return me the deep belief of my predecessors”. He was a poet & Philosopher. He thought about life very deeply & analysed it in his poetry very elaborately. So, his poetry may be considered as a poet of believer, like Rabindranath or Omiya Charkabarti.

Course: 308: The classical literature (Translation)
Sophocles’s Edipus tragedy is a text of this course. Edipus wanted to discover the truth. But at the last, we see that, he had married her mother and had her children from his mother’s womb & he killed his father. He did not want to do that. His fate was thus, it is called Greek – fate- theory. But when he knew that he was the defaulter, he made his eyes blind and went to the forest admitting the result of his unknown sin. So, Edipus had a craving for honest and sin-free life. So, This tragedy may be taken as the element of Islamic epistemology.

Rubait-e-Omar Khiyam is considered generally as a joyful & abuse poems. But ctually it is not thus. Khaiyam told to make a friendship with the wise; not with the wrongdoers. So, Rubaiyat’s should be discussed as an ethical perspective.

Course 401: Modem Bengali Poetry-3
Farrukh Ahmed is a poet of Bengal Muslim Renaissance. Sat Sagorer Majhi (The boatman of Seven Sea) is taught in this curriculum. In a poem Nishan (The flag) farrukh fells that we are bearing the dead heart by losing our believed soul and we are the followers of only the bad instinct. He saw the pride and prestigious gate of Hera- Mountain where the prophet of Islam Hazrat Mohammad (peace be upon Him) was in the love of Allah. All of his poems are value-riched and very much centred to the love of creator & prophet of Islam. So, All of Farrukh’s poems must be taken as the token of Islamic epistemology.
Course 402: The literature ofRabindranath Tagore: First Part

Here Manoshi (The lover) and Sonar Tari (The Golden boat) the two poetry are taught. Rabindranath feels in his poem Surdaher prarthona (The prayer of Suradas) that we should must be sin free at the time of our prayer. Our eye-sight must be sin-less at the time of observing the naked Goddess. His poetry is full of truth, beauty & welfare of humanity. So, Tagore’s poetry may be considered as Islamic epistemology, because he had the believe in one creator; as we know that he was the follower of Brahma Religions.

Course: 408: The Philosophical Tradition of Bengal.
Lalon shah, Hasan Raja, Pagla Kanai- These three mystic poets are taught in this syllabus. They had deep love and devotion for their creator. Rammohan Ray, Bibekanada and Philosopher Gobinda Chandra Dev are also included of this Syllabus. They expressed their philosophy of love towards both humanity and the creator of the world. Their philosophy is believers Philosophy like Aristotle, Plato & Socrates. So, their essay must be discussed as Islamic epistemology.

  1. b) Syllabus of M.A. of Bengali Literature

Session -2006-2007 Islamic University, Kushtia, Bangladesh.
Here Kazi Nazrul Islam, the revolt poet of Bengal, Jasim Uddin, The village poet of Bengal & Jibanananda Das’s poetry are included in the Syllabus. I have given reason about Jibanananda Das earlier (for honours syllabus) for his belief and love for humanity to teach his poetry as Islamic epistemology, NazruI wrote many Islamic Songs in Bengal. Nazrul told in his poem “Sammobadi”(The equity) to search the creator in the immortal heart’s of the man. Socrates, the Greek philosopher also told to ‘know thyself’. Thus Nazrul’s philosophy is also the philosophy of human soul. This poet’s poetry belongs many elements of Islamic epistemology.

Course: 504: The literature of Rabindranath
In Seshlekha (The last writing) Rabindranath told that the truth is tough; but I loved truth; because truth never betray. In Gitanjoli, Tagore bow down his head towards the creator. In his savvatar Sangkat(The crisis of civilization) essay he believed that a great man will born from our east to save the world humanity. Rabindranath Philosophy was very much dedicated to the creator’s will. There are various religion in the world. But the creator of the all religion is the same. To love not only the human being, but also the all creatures of the world, is man’s principal duty. Men must work for the welfare of the humanity. They should avoid abuse deeds. This is connected with the revealed knowledge. The creator has created us. So, we should follow the path of revealed knowledge. As the meaning of Islam is self-surrender to the creator, a man who admit his creator and surrendered to him may bear any kind of Religion but he carries the essence of Islam. So, all the believers of any religions bear with him actually Islamic epistemology.

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:57:17 +0000
Designing a Syllabus on Islamic Literature

(For Departments of English at the University Level)
Kamiz Alam 
Assistant Professor, Dept of English
Northern University Bangladesh

Paper presented at a Follow-up Workshop on Curriculum Reform
9 November, 2008, Dhaka University

Existing Syllabi
n Courses on Language /
n Courses on Skill Development
n Courses on ELT
n Courses on Linguistics
n Courses on Literature

Courses on Literature
n Anglo- American 
n Continental
n Postcolonial/ Commonwealth

Islamic Literature: WHY Classical Islamic Literature
n An outstanding part of world literature
n Different poetic forms: qasida, ghazel, qitah, masnavi, robai, maqamah
n Eastern perspectives of life: spiritual reality and material existence
n Different Muslim writers’ (of different periods) experience of reality 
n Eastern perspectives of life: spiritual reality and material existence

Classical Islamic Literature
Northern University Bangladesh
Dept of English: Darul Ihsan University

n This course  provides an introduction to classical Islamic literature translated from Arabic and Persian.
n The students should gain an insight into the working of the Muslim mind as expressed in literature and find a useful basis for comparison with literature of the other cultures.

Authors and Texts
n Ibn Ishaq from The Biography of the  Prophet: ‘How Salman Became a Muslim’ ‘Khadija, Daughter of  Khuwalid,  Accepts  Islam’
n Ferdowsi from Shahname : ‘TheTragedy of  Sohrab and  Rostam’
n Faridoddin Attar  from The Conference of the Birds: 
  ‘The Story of Shekh Sma’n’

Classical Islamic Literature: A Proposed Syllabus

n To acquaint students with the rich heritage of Islamic literature
n To  introduce students to  the classical Islamic writers’ experience of reality
n To enable students to make a comparative study between Western literature and classical Islamic literature 
n Faridoddin Attarfrom   The Conference of the Birds: ‘The Story of Shekh Sma’n’
n Jalaloddin Rumi  Robais, Ghazals, Spiritual Couplets (Selected)
n Sa‘di    Golestan from Book I :  ‘On the Nature of Shahs’
n The Thousand and one Nights: ‘Prologue’

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:56:33 +0000
Islamization of Linguistics

Linguistics has been struggling under the stranglehold of religious beliefs, superstitions, and ethnocentrism for centuries. The role and nature of human languages was perceived through the worldview preached by various religions. There have been claims for the divine origin of certain languages, conferring a special status on their speakers. Greeks, for example, believed that their language was superior to all other languages. It was the language spoken by the Olympian gods. Theirs was the only language with regularity, rules, and meaning; all other languages were arbitrary and meaningless, barburoi, whence the modern English word “barbarian.”

In India, where Panini (sixth century B.C.E.) wrote the first comprehensive grammar of a human language, Sanskrit was believed to be the language of gods and worthy to be studied and used by the high caste of Brahmans only. The low-caste Hindus could not listen to the Sanskrit verses from the holy scriptures, and severe punishments were prescribed for such sacrilegious acts. As late as 1912, the Muslim linguist, Mohammad Shahidullah, was denied admission to the master’s course in Sanskrit at the University of Calcutta. The Hindu professors of Sanskrit were shocked at the possibility that a Muslim could be allowed to read and hence defile the Vedas, the holy scriptures of Hindus. They bitterly opposed his admission!

In the Judaeo-Christian world, too, similar unscientific views persisted until recently. Hebrew was God‘s own language, the language spoken in the heavens, the first language spoken on the earth and therefore the mother of all languages in the world. Wonderly and Nida, discussing the impact of early Christian beliefs on linguistics, admit:

One of the factors which retarded linguistic progress was the belief among early Christian writers and persisting well into the Renaissance era, that all languages were derived from Hebrew.‘


It was toward the eighteenth century that linguistics was secularized and freed from religious influences. This process was accelerated when the European linguists discovered Sanskrit and their Indo-European roots, both racial and linguistic. The secular linguists, with a new zeal and vigor, introduced precision and scientific methodology to the study of language affinities, tracing Proto Indo-European roots and discovering the linguistic structures of various languages. Hebrew and Sanskrit were no longer studied as the mothers of all languages or as divine languages. This opened a vast area for research and scientific investigation.

The secular tradition, developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has made linguistics a respectable science. But it has been made into a tool to be used by colonialists, politicians, missionaries, and ethnocentric interest groups to promote their ideologies and impose their languages and cultural and religious standards. We will restrict ourselves to only two such examples.

The most interesting example is the emergence of Marrism under the patronage of Soviet communism. N.J. Marr (1864-1934), a Georgian by birth, dominated Russian linguistic research and led to what may be called Marrism. This school of linguistics tried to establish the intrinsic superiority of the Russian language and the inherent inadequacies of the other Soviet languages. Languages, according to Marrism, were not national but class phenomena and thus Marrism and Marxism were integrated in the study of languages. This provided a justification for imposing Russian, the “inherently revolutionary language,” on the speakers of other languages in the Soviet Union. Robins says that Marrism will be remembered: “as an awful warning of the extent to which modern tyranny can keep fantasy enthroned in defiance of fact.”

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:55:01 +0000
Orientalism in Moby Dick

This article aims to correct some of the basic errors in Melvillian Islamic criticism. One of the classics of Western literature is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the allegorical story of one man’s pursuit of a great white whale. Like all great novelists, Melville was struggling with the great moral issues that transcend individuals and even civilizations. This contrasts with most of modern literature, which exhibits journalistic habits of mind and tends to deal in superficial analysis rather than with the reflective process that gives content to meditation and thought.

Modem literary criticism exhibits the same shallowness. George Orwell explained the problem perhaps when he observed that applying the same standards to such novelists as Dickens and Dostoyevsky and to most contemporary writers is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants.” Critics, he added, don’t do this, because it would mean having to throw out most of the books they get for review.

The value of Melville’s work is that it is possessed of the moral imperative and is designed to lead the forces of wisdom and balance against the spiritual bankruptcy and anarchy of the encroaching materialism in modem Western civilization.

The tragedy of Melville’s work is the superficiality of its reliance on Islamic sources, which Melville had read but only in Orientalist distortion. This tragedy has been compounded by later generations of Orientalists who have used the distortions of Melville to generate their own. Perhaps the most  insidious of these latter-day Orientalists is Dorothy Finklestein, author of Melville’s Orienda, who we shall refer to simply as “the critic.”

Her study of Melville’s Islamic references devotes a complete section to “Muhammad and the Arabs” in the chapter on “Prophets and Conquerers.” Following this, she presents an exhaustive analysis of “Islamic Characters and Symbols.” She harshly rejects Melville’s immature resort to secondary Islamic sources; namely Carlyle’s Hero, Heroworship, and Heroic History, Goethe’s Truth and Poetry, Bush’s Life of Muhammad, Ockley’s Mahomet and His Successors, and last but not least, Humphrey Prideaux’s Life of Muhammad : the True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the Life of Mahomet.

Unfortunately, although the critic impresses upon us that her study will depend on the original source of Islam: The Qur’an, she herself uses outside sources that contribute to a further distortion of Islam. Her criticism of Melville should not delude the reader into trusting her approach. She says: “While the reader gains the impression that Melville had read a ‘Life’ of Muhammad, one feels certain that he did not take the trouble to read the Qur’an.”

Ironically, the critic found innumerable opportunities to substitute her own references for the Qur’an. Commenting on the only direct reference to the Prophet Muhammad (SAAS) in Moby Dick, she relies heavily on John Leo, “The old Barbary Traveller,” whom Melville mentions, and on the authority of the so-called “Arab historians” who affirm that “a Prophet who prophesy’d of Muhammad came forth from a Berber temple on the North African coast, the African temple of the hale.

The Qur’an shows only one who prophesied of Muhammad (SA‘AS), namely, Jesus, whose words are confirmed in the present Bible:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away, else the Comforter [italics added] will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto.

In the Gospel of Barnbas, the word “Comforter” or “Advocate” is the translation of the Greek ‘Proclyte’ or Ahmed which is another term for the ”titles of Prophet Muhammad .”

A confirmation of Jesus’s prophesy is emphasized in the Qur’an, where Allah criticizes those whose deeds are not commensurate with their words, citing Jesus’s position with the Jews:

And remember, Jesus, the son of Mary, said: 0 People of Israel! I am the apostle of God (sent) to you confirming the law (which came) before me and giving Glad Tidings of an Apostle to come after me whose name shall be Ahmad.’

]]> (Super User) Literature Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:53:46 +0000