Summary
Gustave von Grunebaum, the European scholar at Chicago and then UCLA whose work and institutional authority carried the canonical discourse of Orientalism into postwar American Middle East studies, in Said’s account in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV: a solid oeuvre on Islam as a holistic culture that made, from beginning to end of his career, the same set of essentially reductive, negative generalizations (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.305-306 / printed p.296-297).
Details
- Von Grunebaum came to the United States as part of the intellectual immigration of European scholars fleeing fascism, and thereafter produced his oeuvre concentrating on Islam as a holistic culture; his style bore often chaotic evidence of his Austro-Germanic polymathy and of his absorption of the canonical pseudoscientific prejudices of French, British and Italian Orientalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.305 / printed p.296).
- Said quotes him: Muslim civilization is a cultural entity that does not share our aspirations, and its refusal to accept man as the arbiter or measure of things is connected with “the basic anti-humanism of this [Islamic] civilization”; Arab or Islamic nationalism lacks a formative ethic and “lacks the intellectual vigor of a primary phenomenon” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.306 / printed p.297).
- In most other contexts such writing would politely be called polemical; for Orientalism it is relatively orthodox, and it passed for canonical wisdom in American study of the Middle East after World War II, mainly because of the cultural prestige associated with European scholars, and was accepted uncritically by the field (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.306 / printed p.297).
- The only scholar to undertake a serious critique of his views, in Said’s account, is Abdullah Laroui; von Grunebaum’s Islam is, after all, the Islam of the earlier European Orientalists — monolithic, scornful of ordinary human experience, gross, reductive, unchanging — and at bottom such a view is political, not even euphemistically impartial (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.306-308 / printed p.297-299).
- His pages on Islamic civilization in The Cambridge History of Islam are dotted, in Said’s account, with opaque quotations from Leopold von Ranke, disguising the thesis that Islamic civilization rests on an unprincipled borrowing by Muslims from the Judeo-Christian, Hellenistic and Austro-Germanic civilizations (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.313 / printed p.304).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Abdullah Laroui, The Cambridge History of Islam, Bernard Lewis