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H. A. R. Gibb

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Summary

H. A. R. Gibb, the Orientalist whose career Said uses in Orientalism’s Chapter One, IV to illustrate within itself the two alternative approaches by which Orientalism responded to the modern Orient: the traditional approach of his 1945 Haskell Lectures, Modern Trends in Islam, and the area-studies approach of his later “Area Studies Reconsidered” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.114-116 / printed p.105-107).

Details

  • Gibb delivered the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1945 and opened Modern Trends in Islam by ascribing to the Arab mind an intense feeling for the separateness and individuality of concrete events, a “lack of a sense of law” (the phrase is Professor Macdonald’s, as Gibb presents it), and an aversion of the Muslims from the thought-processes of rationalism rooted in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination — which Said calls pure Orientalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.114-115 / printed p.105-106).
  • Said asks, as for modern Islam itself, despite the complexities of Gibb’s otherwise magisterial understanding of it, why it must be regarded with so implacable a hostility as Gibb’s (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.115 / printed p.106).
  • On Said’s reading, if Islam is flawed from the start by permanent disabilities, the Orientalist will oppose any Islamic attempts to reform Islam because reform is a betrayal of Islam, and this is exactly Gibb’s argument (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.115 / printed p.106).
  • Eighteen years later Gibb, speaking as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, agreed in “Area Studies Reconsidered” that “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists”; his formula was the traditional Orientalist plus a good social scientist doing interdisciplinary work, the Orientalist’s expertise serving to remind colleagues that to apply the psychology and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations “is pure Walt Disney” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.115-116 / printed p.106-107).
  • Said had earlier recorded Gibb preferring the designation “Orientalist” to “Arabist”, and Gibb praising Scott’s The Talisman for its insight into Islam and Saladin (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.62, 110 / printed p.53, 101).

Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Anwar Abdel Malek, Bernard Lewis

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