Summary
Antoine-Isaac-Silvestre de Sacy (born 1757), presented by Said in Orientalism as the inaugural hero of modern Orientalism in Islamic studies: the first teacher of Arabic at the school of langues orientales vivantes, professor at the Collège de France, resident Orientalist at the French Foreign Ministry, first president of the Société asiatique (1822), and the teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe, whose work put an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice and a scholarly tradition before the profession (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.92, 132-133 / printed p.83, 123-124).
Details
- Sacy was privately tutored at a Benedictine abbey, first in Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean, then in Hebrew; Arabic was the language that opened the Orient to him, since in Arabic, according to Joseph Reinaud as Said presents it, Oriental material, sacred and profane, was then to be found in its oldest and most instructive form (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.132-133 / printed p.123-124).
- The text dates his appointment as first teacher of Arabic at the newly created school of langues orientales vivantes to 1769, as printed, and says he became its director in 1824; in 1806 he was named professor at the Collège de France, and from 1805 he was the resident Orientalist at the French Foreign Ministry, translating the bulletins of the Grande Armée and Napoleon’s Manifesto of 1806; when the French occupied Algiers in 1830 it was Sacy who translated the proclamation to the Algerians, and with Cuvier in 1832 he was made a new peer of France (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.133 / printed p.124). The 1769 date conflicts with the birth year 1757 given on the preceding page; the conflict is held under Open questions on the source page.
- Said’s two great themes of Sacy’s life are heroic effort and a dedicated sense of pedagogic and rational utility: everything he wrote was addressed specifically to students, beginning with the Principes de grammaire générale of 1799, dedicated to his own son, and presented not as a novelty but as a revised extract of the best already done (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.133-134 / printed p.124-125).
- His work is essentially compilatory: the three-volume Chrestomathie arabe (1806 and 1827), an anthology of Arab grammatical writing, an Arabic grammar of 1810, treatises on Arabic prosody and the Druze religion, and commentaries on Calila and Dumna and the Maqamat of al-Hariri; he was also one of the team that produced Dacier’s Tableau historique de l’érudition française, the survey commissioned in 1802 that took in the whole of human knowledge with one coup d’oeil (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.135 / printed p.126).
- Sacy’s heroism as a scholar, in Said’s account, was to have dealt with insurmountable difficulties and produced a whole field where there was none — He made the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy (reported speech in the text, with no quotation marks; Said’s paraphrase of de Broglie) — ransacking the Oriental archives without leaving France, then doctoring, annotating, codifying, arranging and commenting on the texts he isolated (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.136 / printed p.127).
- His theory of fragments held that Oriental literary productions do not merit publication except as extracts, so the Orientalist presents the Orient by a series of representative fragments; his chrestomathies, used in Europe for several generations, came in time to be taken as the Orient itself, canonizing the Orient and begetting a canon of textual objects passed from one generation of students to the next, every major Arabist in Europe tracing his intellectual authority back to him (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.137-138 / printed p.128-129).
- Just as he was the father of Orientalism, Sacy was also the discipline’s first sacrifice, displaced by subsequent Orientalists supplying their own restored Orient; the difference between Sacy and Ernest Renan is the difference between inauguration and continuity (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.139 / printed p.130).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Ernest Renan, Edward William Lane, Philology