Summary
Duncan Black Macdonald, the Orientalist whose The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam (1909) Said uses in Orientalism as the classic statement of the Oriental mind doctrine, and whose conception of Islam as a coherent system passed to H. A. R. Gibb as a formative influence (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.256, 285-286 / printed p.247, 276-277).
Details
- A passage from Macdonald’s The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam (1909), quoted by Gibb, is Said’s typical exhibit of the visual working of Orientalist writing: “The Arabs show themselves not as especially easy of belief, but as hard-headed, materialistic, questioning, doubting, scoffing at their own superstitions and usages, fond of tests of the supernatural — and all this in a curiously light-minded, almost childish fashion” — the governing verb “show” making the Arabs display themselves for expert scrutiny and rejoin the broad designation of “the childish primitive” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.256 / printed p.247).
- Like Lawrence, Macdonald cannot detach his representative characteristics as a Westerner from his role as a scholar; for scholars such as Macdonald, the intimate estrangement from the Orient strengthens the Orientalist discourse itself (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.256-257 / printed p.247-248).
- In Chapter Three, III Said names Macdonald among the five experts in Waardenburg’s L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident whose manifest differences merge into a latent consensus on Islam’s inferiority (recorded in part 5; Orientalism (1978), PDF p.218-219 / printed p.209-210).
- Macdonald is Gibb’s earliest influence as Said presents him: from Macdonald, Gibb derived the concept that Islam was a coherent system of life, made coherent by doctrine rather than by the people who led that life; Macdonald believed that in Islam one could perceive aspects of a still more portentous abstraction, the Oriental mentality (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.285 / printed p.276).
- The opening chapter of The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam is, for Said, an anthology of unarguable declaratives about the Eastern or Oriental mind: the conception of the Unseen is much more immediate and real to the Oriental; “The essential difference in the Oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things”; the Oriental lacks the sense of law, so that for him there is no immovable order of nature; “It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental”; and the summary — inability to see life steadily and whole, and liability to be stampeded by a single idea, is the difference between East and West (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.285-286 / printed p.276-277).
- Said’s judgment: such ideas represent a decision about the Orient, not a fact of nature, repeated from Schlegel to Renan, from Robertson Smith to T. E. Lawrence; neither Macdonald nor Gibb recognizes Orientalism’s own liability to be stampeded by the single idea of Oriental difference (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.286 / printed p.277).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, H. A. R. Gibb, Louis Massignon, Latent and manifest Orientalism