Yet in spite of these figures and others like them, Islam has never been welcome in Europe. Most of the great philosophers of history from Hegel to Spengler have regarded Islam without much enthusiasm. In a dispassionately lucid essay, “Islam and the Philosophy of History,” Albert Hourani has discussed this strikingly constant derogation of Islam as a system of faith.8 Apart from some occasional interest in the odd Sufi writer or saint, European vogues for “the wisdom of the East” rarely included Islamic sages or poets. Omar Khayyám, Harun al-Rashid, Sindbad, Aladdin, Hajji Baba, Scheherazade, Saladin, more or less make up the entire list of Islamic figures known to modern educated Europeans. Not even Carlyle could make the Prophet widely acceptable, and as for the substance of the faith Mohammed propagated, this has long seemed to Europeans basically unacceptable on Christian grounds, although precisely for that reason not uninteresting. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as Islamic nationalism in Asia and Africa increased, there was a widely shared view that Muslim colonies were meant to remain under European tutelage, as much because they were profitable as because they were underdeveloped and in need of Western discipline.9 Be that as it may, and despite the frequent racism and aggression directed at the Muslim world, Europeans did express a fairly energetic sense of what Islam meant to them. Hence the representations of Islam—in scholarship, art, literature, music, and public discourse—all across European culture, from the end of the eighteenth century until our own day.
Little of this concreteness is to be found in America’s experience of Islam. Nineteenth-century American contacts with Islam are very restricted; one thinks of occasional travelers like Mark Twain and Herman Melville, or of missionaries here and there, or of short-lived military expeditions to North Africa. Culturally there was no distinct place in America for Islam before World War II. Academic experts did their work on Islam usually in quiet corners of schools of divinity, not in the glamorous limelight of Orientalism nor in the pages of leading journals. For about a century there has existed a fascinating although quiet symbiosis between American missionary families to Islamic countries and cadres of the foreign service and the oil companies; periodically this has surfaced in the form of hostile comments about State Department and oil-company “Arabists,” who are considered to harbor an especially virulent and anti-Semitic form of philo-Islamism. On the other hand, all the great figures known in the United States as important academic experts on Islam have been foreign-born: Lebanese Philip Hitti at Princeton, Austrian Gustave von Grunebaum at Chicago and UCLA, British H. A. R. Gibb at Harvard, German Joseph Schacht at Columbia. Yet none of these men has had the relative cultural prestige enjoyed by Jacques Berque in France and Albert Hourani in England.
But even men like Hitti, Gibb, von Grunebaum, and Schacht have disappeared from the American scene, as indeed it is unlikely that scholars such as Berque and Hourani will have successors in France and England. No one today has their breadth of culture, nor anything like their range of authority. Academic experts on Islam in the West today tend to know about jurisprudential schools in tenth-century Baghdad or nineteenth-century Moroccan urban patterns, but never (or almost never) about the whole civilization of Islam— literature, politics, history, sociology, and so on. This has not prevented experts from generalizing from time to time about the “Islamic mind-set” or the “Shi’a penchant for martyrdom,” but such pronouncements have been confined to popular journals or to the media, which solicited these opinions in the first place. More significantly, the occasions for public discussions of Islam, by experts or by nonexperts, have almost always been provided by political crises. It is extremely rare to see informative articles on Islamic culture in the New York Review of Books, say, or in Harper’s. Only when the stability of Saudi Arabia or Iran has been in question has “Islam” seemed worthy of general comment.
Consider therefore that Islam has entered the consciousness of most Americans—even of academic and general intellectuals who know a great deal about Europe and Latin America—principally if not exclusively because it has been connected to newsworthy issues like oil, Iran and Afghanistan, or terrorism.10 And all of this by the middle of 1979 had come to be called either the Islamic revolution, or “the crescent of crisis,” or “the arc of instability,” or “the return of Islam.” A particularly telling example was the Atlantic Council’s Special Working Group on the Middle East (which included Brent Scowcroft, George Ball, Richard Helms, Lyman Lemnitzer, Walter Levy, Eugene Rostow, Kermit Roosevelt, and Joseph Sisco, among others): when this group issued its report in the fall of 1979 the title given it was “Oil and Turmoil: Western Choices in the Middle East.”11 When Time magazine devoted its major story to Islam on April 16, 1979, the cover was adorned with a Gérôme painting of a bearded muezzin standing in a minaret, calmly summoning the faithful to prayer; it was as florid and overstated a nineteenth-century period piece of Orientalist art as one could imagine. Anachronistically, however, this quiet scene was emblazoned with a caption that had nothing to do with it: “The Militant Revival.” There could be no better way of symbolizing the difference between Europe and America on the subject of Islam. A placid and decorative painting done almost routinely in Europe as an aspect of one’s general culture had been transformed by three words into a general American obsession.
But surely I am exaggerating? Wasn’t Time’s cover story on Islam simply a piece of vulgarization, catering to a supposed taste for the sensational? Does it really reveal anything more serious than that? And since when have the media mattered a great deal on questions of substance, or of policy, or of culture? Besides, was it not the case that Islam had indeed thrust itself upon the world’s attention? And what had happened to the experts on Islam, and why were their contributions either bypassed entirely or submerged in the “Islam” discussed and diffused by the media?
A few simple explanations are in order first. As I said above, there has never been any American expert on the Islamic world whose audience was a wide one; moreover, with the exception of the late Marshall Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam, posthumously published in 1975, no general work on Islam has ever been put squarely before the literate reading public.12 Either the experts were so specialized that they only addressed other specialists, or their work was not distinguished enough intellectually to command the kind of audience that came to books on Japan, Western Europe, or India. But these things work both ways. While it is true that one could not name an American “Orientalist” with a reputation outside Orientalism, as compared with Berque or Rodinson in France, it is also true that the study of Islam is neither truly encouraged in the American university nor sustained in the culture at large by personalities whose fame and intrinsic merit might make their experiences of Islam important on their own.13 Who are the American equivalents of Rebecca West, Freya Stark, T. E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Gertrude Bell, P. H. Newby, or more recently, Jonathan Raban? At best, they might be former CIA people like Miles Copeland or Kermit Roosevelt, very rarely writers or thinkers of any cultural distinction.
A second reason for the critical absence of expert opinion on Islam is the experts’ marginality to what seemed to be happening in the world of Islam when it became “news” in the mid-1970s. The brutally impressive facts are, of course, that the Gulf oil-producing states suddenly appeared to be very powerful; there was an extraordinarily ferocious and seemingly unending civil war in Lebanon; Ethiopia and Somalia were involved in a long war; the Kurdish problem unexpectedly became pivotal and then, after 1975, just as unexpectedly subsided; Iran deposed its monarch in the wake of a massive, wholly surprising “Islamic” revolution; Afghanistan was gripped by a Marxist coup in 1978, then invaded by Soviet troops in late 1979; Algeria and Morocco were drawn into protracted conflict over the Southern Sahara issue; a Pakistani president was executed and a new military dictatorship set up. There were other things taking place too, most recently a war between Iran and Iraq, but let us be satisfied with these. On the whole I think it is fair to say
that few of these happenings might have been illuminated by expert writing on Islam in the West; for not only had the experts not predicted them nor prepared their readers for them, they had instead provided a mass of literature that seemed, when compared with what was happening, to be about an impossibly distant region of the world, one that bore practically no relation to the turbulent and threatening confusion erupting before one’s eyes in the media.
This is a central matter, which has scarcely begun to be discussed rationally even now, and so we should proceed carefully. Academic experts whose province was Islam before the seventeenth century worked in an essentially antiquarian field; moreover, like that of specialists in other fields, their work was very compartmentalized. They neither wanted nor tried in a responsible way to concern themselves with the modern consequences of Islamic history. To some extent their work was tied to notions of a “classical” Islam, or to supposedly unchanging patterns of Islamic life, or to archaic philological questions. In any event, there was no way of using it to understand the modern Islamic world, which to all intents and purposes, and depending on what part of it was of interest, had been developing along very different lines from those adumbrated in Islam’s earliest centuries (that is, from the seventh to the ninth centuries).
The experts whose field was modern Islam—or to be more precise, whose field was made up of societies, people, and institutions within the Islamic world since the eighteenth century—worked within an agreed-upon framework for research formed according to notions decidedly not set in the Islamic world. This fact, in all its complexity and variety, cannot be overestimated. There is no denying that a scholar sitting in Oxford or Boston writes and researches principally, though not exclusively, according to standards, conventions, and expectations shaped by his or her peers, not by the Muslims being studied. This is truism, perhaps, but it needs emphasis just the same. Modern Islamic studies in the academy belong to “area programs” generally—Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and so on. They are therefore affiliated to the mechanism by which national policy is set. This is not a matter of choice for the individual scholar. If someone at Princeton happened to be studying contemporary Afghan religious schools, it would be obvious (especially during times like these) that such a study could have “policy implications,” and whether or not the scholar wanted it he or she would be drawn into the network of government, corporate, and foreign-policy associations; funding would be affected, the kind of people met would also be affected, and in general, certain rewards and types of interaction would be offered. Willy-nilly, the scholar would be transmuted into an “area expert.”
For scholars whose interests are directly connected to policy issues (political scientists, principally, but also modern historians, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists), there are sensitive, not to say dangerous, questions to be addressed. For example, how is one’s status as a scholar reconciled with the demands made on one by governments? Iran is a perfect case in point. During the shah’s regime, there were funds available to Iranologists from the Pahlevi Foundation, and of course from American institutions. These funds were disbursed for studies that took as their point of departure the status quo (in this case, the presence of a Pahlevi regime tied militarily and economically to the United States), which in a sense became the research paradigm for students of the country. Late in the crisis a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staff study said that the United States’ assessments of the regime were influenced by existing policy “not directly, through the conscious suppression of unfavorable news, but indirectly . . . policymakers were not asking whether the Shah’s autocracy would survive indefinitely; policy was premised on that assumption.”14 This in turn produced only a tiny handful of studies seriously assessing the shah’s regime and identifying the sources of popular opposition to him. To my knowledge only one scholar, Hamid Algar of Berkeley, was correct in estimating the contemporary political force of Iranian religious feelings, and only Algar went so far as to predict that Ayatollah Khomeini was likely to bring down the regime. Other scholars—Richard Cottam and Ervand Abrahamian among them—also departed from the status quo in what they wrote, but they were a small band indeed.15 (In fairness we must note the European scholars on the left, who were less sanguine about the shah’s survival, did not do very well either in identifying the religious sources of Iranian opposition.16)
Even if we leave aside Iran, there were plenty of no less important intellectual failures elsewhere, all of them the result of relying uncritically on what a combination of government policy and cliché dictated. Here, the Lebanese and Palestinian cases are instructive. For years Lebanon had been regarded as a model of what a pluralistic or mosaic culture was supposed to be. Yet so reified and static had the models been which were used for the study of Lebanon that no inkling was possible of the ferocity and violence of the civil war (which ran from 1975 to 1980 at least). Expert eyes seem in the past to have been extraordinarily transfixed by images of Lebanese “stability”: traditional leaders, elites, parties, national character, and successful modernization were what was studied.
Even when Lebanon’s polity was described as precarious, or when its insufficient “civility” was analyzed, there was a uniform assumption that its problems were on the whole manageable and far from being radically disruptive.17 During the sixties, Lebanon was portrayed as “stable” because, one expert tells us, the “inter-Arab” situation was stable; so long as that equation was kept up, he argued, Lebanon would be secure.18 It was never even supposed that there could be inter-Arab stability and Lebanese instability, mainly because—as with most subjects in this consensus-ridden field—the conventional wisdom assigned perpetual “pluralism” and harmonious continuity to Lebanon, its internal cleavages and its Arab neighbors’ irrelevance notwithstanding. Any trouble for Lebanon therefore had to come from the surrounding Arab environment, never from Israel or from the United States, both of which had specific but never-analyzed designs on Lebanon.19 Then too, there was the Lebanon that embodied the modernization myth. Reading a classic of this sort of ostrich-wisdom today, one is struck by how serenely the fable could be advanced as recently as 1973, when the civil war had in fact begun. Lebanon might undergo revolutionary change, we were told, but that was a “remote” likelihood; what was much more likely was “future modernization involving the public [a sadly ironic euphemism for what was to be the bloodiest civil war in recent Arab history] within the prevailing political structure.”20 Or as a distinguished anthropologist put it, “The Lebanese ‘nice piece of mosaic’ remains intact. Indeed . . . Lebanon has continued to be the most effective in containing its deep primordial cleavages.”21
As a result, in Lebanon and in other places, experts failed to understand that much of what truly mattered about postcolonial states could not easily be herded under the rubric of “stability.” In Lebanon it was precisely those devastatingly mobile forces the experts had never documented or had consistently underestimated—social dislocations, demographic shifts, confessional loyalties, ideological currents—that tore the country apart so savagely.22 Similarly, it has been conventional wisdom for years to regard the Palestinians merely as resettlable refugees, not as a political force having estimable consequences for any reasonably accurate assessment of the Near East. Yet by the mid-seventies the Palestinians were one of the major acknowledged problems for United States policy, and still they had not received the scholarly and intellectual attention their importance deserved;23 instead, the persisting attitude was to treat them as adjuncts to United States policy toward Egypt and Israel and quite literally to ignore them in the Lebanese conflagration. There has been no important scholarly or expert counterweight to this policy, and the results for American national interests are likely to be disastrous, especially since the Iran-Iraq War seems, once again, to have caught the intelligence community off guard and very wrong in estimates of both countries’ military capacities.
Add to this conformity betwe
en a docilely plodding scholarship and unfocused government interests the sorry truth that too many expert writers on the Islamic world did not command the relevant languages and hence had to depend on the press or other Western writers for their information. This reinforced dependence on the official or the conventional picture of things was a trap into which, in their over-all performance on prerevolutionary Iran, the media fell. There was a tendency to study and restudy, to focus resolutely on the same things: elites, modernization programs, the role of the military, greatly visible leaders, geopolitical strategy (from the American point of view), communist inroads.24 Those things may at the time have seemed interesting to the United States as a nation, yet the fact is that in Iran they were all literally swept away by the revolution in a matter of days. The whole imperial court crumbled; the army, into which billions of dollars had been poured, disintegrated; the so-called elites either disappeared or found their way into the new state of affairs, though in neither case could it be asserted, as it had been, that they determined Iranian political behavior. One of the experts given credit for predicting what the “crisis of ’78” might lead to, James Bill of the University of Texas, nevertheless recommended to American policy-makers as late as December 1978 that the United States government should encourage “the shah . . . to open the system up.”25 In other words, even a supposedly dissenting expert voice was still committed to maintaining a regime against which, at the very moment he spoke, literally millions of its people had risen in one of the most massive insurrections in modern history.