4 - Enlightenment Encounters the Islamic and Arabic Worlds: The German “Missing Link” in Said's Orientalist Narrative (Meiners and Herder)

Summary

THE CRITIQUES OF EDWARD SAID'S 1978 BOOK Orientalism were many and varied, and some of them are addressed in the introduction to this volume. For the purposes of this chapter, the most relevant criticism is that Said did not adequately account for developments in the Germanspeaking lands. Anticipating this criticism, Said attempted to justify his virtual neglect of the German heritage. He argued that he focused on Britain and France because they were “the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies,” and also that “these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history” (17). Further, he attests that “the sheer quality, consistency, and mass of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it above the doubtless crucial work done in Germany, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere” (17). This is certainly true, though Said introduces a slight note of contradiction when he speaks of the “doubtless crucial work” in these countries and then dismisses its quality. With respect to German scholars in particular, though, the salient point is that they were armchair Orientalists—and thus

the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval. There is some significance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan [sic] and Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder, were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France. (19)