Summary
William Robertson Smith, Semitic scholar, whom Said presents in Orientalism as a crucial link in the intellectual chain connecting the White-Man-as-expert to the modern Orient: none of the encapsulated wisdom delivered as Oriental expertise by T. E. Lawrence, Hogarth, Gertrude Bell and the others would have been possible without Smith (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.243-246 / printed p.234-237).
Details
- Aided by comparative and primitive anthropology, Smith grouped together the inhabitants of the Near Orient and wrote on their kinship and marriage customs and on the form and content of their religious practice; the power of his work is its plainly radical demythologizing of the Semites, sweeping aside the nominal barriers presented by Islam or Judaism to construct a hypothetical picture of the development of the social systems consistent with all the Arabian facts, revealing the roots of monotheism in totemism or animal worship despite the veil his Mohammedan sources draw over the old heathenism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.243-244 / printed p.234-235).
- Smith’s work was done with full awareness of the Orientalists — including his savage attack in 1887 on Ernest Renan’s Histoire du peuple d’Israël — and was intended as an aid to understanding the modern Semites; like Burton and Doughty before him he voyaged in the Hejaz, between 1880 and 1881, and brought to its historically ungrounded vocabulary the additional authority of his Semitic studies (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.244 / printed p.235).
- Smith, as quoted, held it characteristic of Mohammedanism that all national feeling assumes a religious aspect, yet that genuine religious feeling is not at the bottom of everything that justifies itself by taking a religious shape, the Arab’s prejudices rooted in a conservatism deeper than his belief in Islam, which Mohammed carried over to facilitate the propagation of his reformed doctrines — a piece of logic, Said argues, in which the principles of identity and noncontradiction do not bind the Orientalist, and everything said about Islam is finally wiped out by the assurance that its quintessential aspects are not Mohammedan after all (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.245 / printed p.236).
- Smith also speaks, as quoted, of the jejune, practical and “constitutionally irreligious habit of the Arabic mind”, of Islam as a system of organized hypocrisy, and of the Arabian traveller as quite different from ourselves; at bottom, Said argues, his vision of the world is binary, and everything knowable about Semites and Orientals receives immediate corroboration directly on the ground (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.246 / printed p.237).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Ernest Renan, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell