For Lust of Knowing - Robert Irwin

For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and Their Enemies
Robert Irwin
Publisher: Allen Lane
£25

Ignorance of Islam, prejudice against Islam - these are both common at a time when it is expedient and desirable that both ignorance and prejudice be dispelled. Millions of Muslims now live in what used to be Christian Europe, and extremist groups, professing zealous devotion to the most puritanical and exclusive form of Islam, have declared war on Western civilisation. This book is therefore timely and welcome. Robert Irwin tells the story of the West's intellectual engagement with Islam over the centuries. He does so through the lives and writings of those scholars dubbed Orientalists - Europeans who immersed themselves in the languages and culture of the Levant, the Middle East and Asia (though he scarcely touches on China). His book is a rejoinder to the late Edward Said's popular and meretricious Orientalism, and a pretty comprehensive demolition of Said's arguments ... Two things especially offend Muslims: that Orientalists should subject the Koran (Irwin spells it Qu'ran) to the sort of textual criticism that for at least 200 years has been directed at the Bible; and that Orientalists (unless converted, as some have been, to Islam) declined to regard Mohammed as the last and most important of God's prophets. Irwin remarks that they don't seem to think that Christians might be just as offended by Islam's denial of Christ's divinity. His book is made up of brief biographical and critical studies of Orientalists from early times to the present day, and a rum lot they often were. It is full of anecdotes and pertinent, often witty, observations; a great pleasure to read.'
The Telegraph

'Irwin passes quickly through the ancient and medieval periods, and in more detail through the last four centuries during which orientalism has been a recognised discipline, dedicated in Irwin's words to "getting things right". He goes wider than the purely academic, mentioning unexpected links such as Arabic/Islamic elements in the stories of Robinson Crusoe and Dracula. He puts half-baked ideas about a "conflict of civilisations" into a saner context, and his most striking conclusion is that Christendom and the west paid rather little attention to the orient and Islam, just as Islamic civilisation paid rather little attention to the west. Today the headlines rarely fail to have some Middle Eastern news in them, and there was a period in the 16th-century when those who knew were seriously disturbed about the Turkish military threat. But most people most of the time have had other things to think about ... Irwin explains that many orientalists came to their scientific researches with dubious motives: Christians who saw Muhammad as a heretic, Protestants or Catholics who attacked Islam as a pretext for attacking each other, free-thinkers (like Voltaire) who praised Islam as a covert way of attacking Christianity. Today some universities seek to exclude Jews from Arabic departments, while others (such as Harvard) have had scruples about pursuing Islamic studies for fear of being accused of anti-semitism. These problems are touched on but not explored in depth, as is the difficult issue, given the fundamentalist nature of Islamic faith, of applying rigorous academic standards to the study of Islam and its history without incurring the wrath of the faithful.'
The Guardian