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Islam and the West: I. Sir Hamilton Gibb Between Orientalism and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

William R. Polk
William R. Polk
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Scholars who are committed to single disciplines occasionally appear to lose sight of the fact that these disciplines are conventions, designed to enable the scholar to neglect, while clearly signifying his neglect, many aspects of life in order to concentrate on a few. We historians tend, I believe, to give ourselves license to warn our readers rather less explicitly of our neglect than do economists, political scientists, sociologists, or anthropologists. Yet, we have trained ourselves to pay particular attention to certain facets of the human experience. Some of us compromise with the positions of those we occasionally think of as our more exacting colleagues in the social sciences by adding to the term ‘historian’ various adjectives– ‘social’, ‘economic’, ‘cultural’, or ‘political’.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 131 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 During Sir Hamilton Gibb's lifetime Eastern Orientalism was more an object of study than of intellectual influence. This was particularly true of Egyptian and Indo-Pakistani attempts to reconcile contemporary Islam to both ‘pure’ Islam and avant-garde Western ideas. It was only toward the end of Gibb's life that Turkish Orientalism moved beyond translation of Western studies into its own major field of endeavor—the probing of the sources of its national heritage. Gibb almost entirely missed the complex and sophisticated Israeli Hebrew Orientalism (comparable with the German Orientalism) which sought to elucidate and preserve the Jewish heritage and Arabic Orientalism (comparable with Franco-British Orientalism) which concerned itself with issues affecting Israel national security. It is interesting to note, parenthetically, that Israeli Arabic Orientalism comes closest to fulfilling the intent of the donors to the American area studies programs of the 1950s and 1960s.Google Scholar