The Orient Reclaimed

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Found this very interesting in an age of stoked "East versus West" conflicts and "End of History" NeoCon Propaganda....

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The Orient Reclaimed
By Mohamed Omar

SWEDISH ORIENTIALISM | Edward Said's absurd argument that orientalists were merely the product of imperialism is most powerfully refuted by the Swedish tradition of scholars and adventurers who had a real passion for Muslim culture but played no political role in the Orient.

    What a Turk, look at him!
    CM Bellman (1740-1795)

"It should be observed that the Arabs are a very poetic people." So writes Professor HS Nyberg (1889-1974) apropos of his childhood delight at the collection of stories in The Arabian Nights. This short sentence is only one of the myriad of positive judgments the professor of Semitic languages would make about the different peoples which he devoted a large part of his life to studying: Arabs, Persians and Turks. He could describe Muslims in general as "really magnificient types in the history of the life of piety."

HS Nyberg was without doubt one of Sweden's greatest orientalists. His daughter Sigrid Kahle has taken his legacy on through an industrious and comprehensive authorship. It is she who has written one of the best and most easily accessible introductions to the present subject, Edward Said's Orientalism, the Swedish edition of which she provided with a long foreword.

It might be appropriate to begin with some words about Said's now controversial theses. According to Said, "The Orient" is yet another in a succession of Western inventions. It does not exist, he argued, and has never really existed. After Said, the concept of "orientalism" has acquired an almost exclusively unpleasant ring. An undeserved fate in my opinion. This is because Said considers only isolated fragments of the long history of orientalism, and in an imperfect and ideologically directed way.

Firstly Said limits his study to British and French orientalism, that of the colonial powers, and American orientalism. Secondly he lets Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 form the starting point of the age of orientalism. In this way he links academic and artistic orientalism with a political process: imperialism. According to Said, orientalism and imperialism are therefore indissolubly linked. The driving force of orientalism has been to serve political interests. Consciously or unconsciously, Said belittles academic orientalism in Europe during the 17th century. Characteristic of this period is precisely the Ottoman empire's expanding vitality, its richness and its military superiority. The French adventure in Egypt lasted for a mere three years, curtailed in 1801 by a joint British-Ottoman expedition. Between 1801 and 1880 Egypt was not occupied by any European power. The country was not in any strict sense a European colony. On the other hand, it was an Ottoman colony for almost 300 years.

The British writer, Islamic expert and Arabist Robert Irwin has, in his study For Lust of Knowing, set out to revise Said's stereotypical perceptions of the practitioners of orientalism as a bunch of spiteful and arrogant colonial officials. When Said published Orientalism in 1978, it signified a radical change in how the concept was regarded. The orient was therefore subsequently a fiction produced as one element in the West's colonial enterprise. Said's book had a huge impact and today "orientalism" has acquired the meaning of something false, clichéd and almost racist. Phenomena can be dismissed immediately merely by being branded as "orientalist" without a shred of further analysis. Novels, films, plays and pieces of music are declared worthless with just a single adjective—"orientalist."

For Lust of Knowing presents a very different picture. Unlike Said, Irwin considers that the greatest driving force in orientalism has not been serving power, imperialism or the white race, but that the study of oriental languages and cultures in large part had its origins in the desire for knowledge. Irwin paints a likeable gallery of characters, of eccentrics, adventurers and pedants thirsting for knowledge, who all share a burning passion for learning for its own sake. More concretely he claims that the study of oriental languages blossomed in Europe long before there were any colonial conquests in the Middle East. In Germany for example several prominent orientalists appeared while the country still had no colonies, and the same applies, of course, to Sweden. Two of our foremost orientalists in the first half of the 20th century, HS Nyberg and Johannes Kolmodin, were at the same time convinced antiracists and often took the side of and felt empathy for the so-called "other."

Long before Napoleon set foot in Egypt there were, during the 17th century, several capable orientalists in Europe and, as we know, at this time the West had no control over the Orient. On the contrary, the Ottomans were the expanding power in Europe.

Irwin considers that orientalism as a discipline began with Guillaume Postel (1510-81) or with Jacob Golius (1596-1667) and Edward Pococke (1604-91). Postel, "the father of orientalism," was a remarkable man in many ways. Two of his idiosyncrasies were that he considered women to be superior to men, and that Mohammad had been a true prophet.

Irwin's main point is that much of the study of the Orient was actually research for its own sake without any suspicious political or imperialist agenda. He warms to the subject of Kufic libraries, curators and philologists who sat in their chambers cramming Arabic, Hebrew and Persian vocabulary. If we look at the history of Swedish orientalism, Irwin provides a considerably more veracious analysis of its driving forces and motives than does Said. We never played an active part in the power politics in the Orient.

Sweden's contacts with the Islamic Orient are older than our written history. The trade in amber in the Bronze Age may have reached right down to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The Viking Age is, however, the first period in which our forefathers had reasonably well-documented contacts with the Arabs and Islam. Evidence of this is provided by the hoards of Sammanid and Abbasid coins that are dug up occasionally in Sweden. Kahle considers that it is also possible to trace an Islamic influence on Viking Age art and ornamentation.

The Swedish Vikings carried on trade with the east for more than 200 years. Men from Roslagen (North of Stockholm) and Varangians encountered Arabs from the great Islamic empires at trading posts along the Russian rivers and on the Black Sea. Perhaps they even knew a few words of Arabic. The encounter between the Vikings and the Arabic chronicler Ibn Fadlan in the 10th century on the shore of the River Volga is well-known and repeated in most school textbooks. Less well-known is, however, Ibn Fadlan's encounter with some Muslim "Varangians" in Byzantine Constantinople. The Varangians were men from Scandinavia serving as the Emperor's Guard.

"With them we saw a group of 5,000 people, women and men, who had all converted to Islam. They were called al-baringar (Arabic for "Varangians"). A mosque had been built for them in wood so that they could hold their religious services, but they did not know the text and I had to instruct some of them in the prayers," writes Fadlan. The text is reproduced in Araber, vikingar, väringar ("Arabs, Vikings and Varangians") by Stig Wikander (1978). It is amusing how Ibn Fadlan is so shocked at the heathen customs that they retain: "They rate pork very highly. Even some of those who have converted to Islam desire and are very fond of pork." Are these tall tales perhaps an early manifestation of occidentalism? Be that as it may, they do show that the relations between Sweden and the Orient stretch far back in time. Frans G Bengtsson took up the theme of "Viking Muslims" in his classic novel The Long Ships. The hero of the novel is converted to Islam during his stay in Andalusia. Not completely incredible from a historical viewpoint, therefore.

Swedish orientalism during the 19th and 20th centuries is fairly well-known, with names such as CJ Tornberg, KV Zetterstéen, Johannes Kolmodin and HS Nyberg in the academic world. In the world of fine arts we can boast of names such as Carl Snoilsky, Verner von Heidenstam, Gunnar Ekelöf, Anders Zorn, Egron Lundgren and Ivan Aguéli.

Said complains that no European orientalist has ever identified with the Arabs and Islam. This is quite simply wrong. A distinguishing feature of the Swedish orientalists—both the academics and the "practical men" (to borrow a term from Heidenstam)—was instead empathy and real enthusiasm. On June 25, 1865 Count Snoilsky visited the Alhambra in Spain. This results eventually in several poems in which he mournfully recalled the shimmering past of Muslim Andalusia. The beautiful stanzas in "By the Mosque" and "Descendant of the Prophet" are marked by deep empathy. The poet genuinely grieved for the demise of Moorish culture. And Snoilsky is only one of many. Some went even further in their empathy with "the other"; Ivan Aguéli himself became a Muslim.

It is clearly evident to any alert observer that the stereotypical image of the orientalist/colonialist which has been coined by Said has very little to do with our Swedish reality. Admittedly, there have been incidents of racism and ethnocentrism on our part too. We should not conceal that. But these have been more the exception than the rule.

The three orientalists I intend to discuss here are relatively unknown in an orientalist context, which is one of the reasons I have selected them. Another reason is that they have interested me personally, and that I have been working on their writings over recent years. In Sigrid Kahle's solid foreword to Orientalism she only mentions one of them, Kolmodin, and this only in passing. One of them belongs in the 17th century, Johannes Bureus, and two in the 20th century, Johannes Kolmodin and Eric von Post.

The first of the three was active in an age when the ideas of the German physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) were making a triumphal entry into the University of Uppsala. This "Paracelsism" mainly comprised a Neoplatonist and hermetically-based critique of scholasticism.

Johannes Bureus (1588-1652) is primarily known for his archaeological research, as Sweden's first national antiquary and as "the father of Swedish grammar." He himself considered, however, that his main achievements lay in the field of the hermetic and the esoteric sciences. A less well-known aspect of this work is a study of the Qur'an and the Arabic language. Maybe one could equally call him "the father of Swedish orientalism," roughly the Swedish equivalent to Guillaume Postel.

In the summer of 1591, Bureus had more than a year been employed in King Johan's government office. "I began", he says, "from Arbatel to develop an interest in the Kabbalah." (Arbatel is a pseudo-Agrippa). Bureus had previously acquired the knowledge of Hebrew necessary for more advanced studies in the Jewish Kabbalah. In 1584 he learnt unaided Hebreae lingvae primordia. Later in life he devoted himself to advanced studies of Arabic, and in 1628 it happened that Bureus, who had gone to bed on the evening of January 23, began to ponder "a cursive runic script like the Arabic script. Sleep was denied him and he began to write. He was thus attempting to design a way of writing runes which would imitate Arabic calligraphy, and actually produced several practical samples of this.

Bureus read the Kabbalist source text Sefer Yetzirah in Guillaume Postel's edition from 1552, and from this he formulated the vision of how the letters of the alphabet flow from a divine source. Bureus was, incidentally, very familiar with his orientalist colleague Postel. When Postel in a work shows that the Qur'an has its hidden meanings, Bureus notes: Cabala Alcoranica. There are still a great many gaps remaining to be filled by future researchers in Bureus' Kabbalist reading of the Qur'an, primarily in understanding the philosophy of religion which is discernible here. It is perhaps the same universalist approach which is expressed in Antiquitates Scanziana, in which Bureus compares the names of the Tetragrammaton in different tongues. In Latin it is DEUS, in Arabic ALLA, in Hebrew YHWH and in Old Norse GUID.

It is easy to establish how well Bureus fits in with Robert Irwin's description of the orientalist as an eccentric who is eager to learn to the point of obsession. On the other hand, it is only with great difficulty that one can place him in Said's narrow pigeonhole. If at all. 17th-century orientalism in general—and Swedish orientalism in particular—was to a great extent purely cultural, spiritual and intellectual, a real Geisteswissenschaft.

My second example is just as difficult a figure to characterise: Johannes Kolmodin (1884-1933). This remarkable orientalist was the son of missionary and Uppsala Professor Adolf Kolmodin. At the age of only 49 Johannes Kolmodin's career was cut short in Addis Ababa in 1933. He was at that time Emperor Haile Selassie's chief adviser. After having studied Semitic languages and Turkish in Uppsala, Kolmodin travelled to Ethiopia. There he learned Amarinja, Tigrinya and Tigre. He took his doctorate in 1914 in Uppsala with a philological thesis on Eritrean oral tradition.

During his time as a student he joined the conservative student society Heimdal and became its chairman from 1907 to 1909. He was a student of the nationalist-minded professor of History Harald Hjärne, and together they had an obsession with Charles XII. It was this interest in the tragic hero King which led Kolmodin to Turkey, in 1917, in order to research the Swedes' stay at Bender in Turkish archives. The Swedish legation in Istanbul realised his talents and began immediately to make use of them. With his flawless Turkish, his circle of Muslim friends and his political insights, he was soon indispensable as a "dragoman."

After the First World War a man appeared who completely corresponded to Kolmodin's ideal statesman, Mustafa Kemal, or "Atatürk." Kolmodin compared him enthusiastically with both Engelbrekt and King Gustav Vasa. His admiration seemed however partly to blind his reason. When reports about genocide against the Armenians reached him, he refused to believe them. According to Kolmodin they were only rumours spread by American aid organisations with the intention of raising money. With the benefit of hindsight we know that he was speaking against his better judgment.

Kolmodin was loyal to the last to the "father of the people," Atatürk. He was, moreover, active in the Turkish language reform movement, in which the Arabic alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet. Rumour says that it was he who provided the tip about the letter "ö" (as in döner kebab)—but this may be apocryphal.

Quite contrary to Said's stereotype, Kolmodin was deeply critical of European colonialism, and always emphatically distanced himself from all kinds of racism. In a sharp polemic against other conservative thinkers such as Rudolf Kjellén he considered that culture takes precedence over race. What is more, both he and his younger colleague HS Nyberg always stress the Semitic element in Western culture at the cost of the Hellenic.

Our third orientalist belongs together with Dag Hammarskjöld among the small group of top diplomats who have combined a spiritual search, meditation and writing with an active, secular profession in the service of the state. Eric von Post (1899-1990) was born in Trelleborg and advanced rapidly through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was stationed in Berlin, Ankara, Warsaw and Rome. But it was primarily his time as an envoy in Turkey from 1946 to 1951 which came to make the greatest impression. In a letter from Ankara to his fellow diplomat and orientalist Gunnar Jarring, he writes: "After five war years in Berlin and 18 months in Stockholm I finally discovered my freedom." (Eric von Post: Diplomat och poet, några minnesord, "Diplomat and Poet, some Words in Commemoration," 1990).

The sensation of freedom that von Post experienced in Turkey presumably resulted from a deep insight into Muslim culture, literature and religion. His experiences and observations were noted down in the travelogue Strövtåg i Istanbul ("Wanderings through Istanbul",1953). It is, however, in his first collection of poetry, Ramazan (1955) that the empathy with Muslims is most evident. Islam and Muslims are present in every poem: sympathetic and vivid images of Sufis, the Prophet Muhammad and the holy Kaaba. The title is taken from the Muslim month of fasting, when the Qur'an is said to have been revealed to the unlettered Prophet:

    Kroppen är endast öra,
    själen är endast spegel,
    vända mot himmel och Gud.

    (The body is merely an ear,
    the soul is merely a mirror,
    turned towards Heaven and God.)

The three orientalists whose lives and thinking I have touched upon are only a very personal and rather random selection from the abundant sources for research, travelogues, poetry and art which go under the collective designation of "orientalism." At the risk of being accused of vanity, I as a Swede, Muslim poet and in this way a "practical orientalist" in Heidenstam's sense, would like to fit myself into this tradition. I concur whole-heartedly with Robert Irwin when he writes: "If someone chooses to call me an orientalist, I would not take it as a criticism, rather as praise."
End
MOHAMED OMAR
Mohamed Omar is a writer on cultural matters, a poet and editor of the journal Minaret. His latest book is the collection of poetry Faraos förbannelse ("Pharaoh's Curse", Ruin förlag, 2007).

Translated by Phil Holmes


Literature:

Dahlén, Ashk: "Eric von Post – diktare i islams tecken" (Minaret No. 1-2 2007)

Karlsson, Thomas: Adulrunan och den götiska kabbalan (2005)

Lindroth, Sten: Paracelsismen i Sverige (1943)

The Last Dragoman – The Swedish Orientalist Johannes Kolmodin as Scholar, Activist and Diplomat (The Swedish
Institute in Istanbul 2006, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga)

Irwin, Robert: For Lust of Knowing (2006)

Kahle, Sigrid: "Orientalism i Sverige" (Foreword to Edward Said's Orientalism 1993)

Kahle, Sigrid: H. S. Nyberg (1991)

http://www.axess.se/magasin/english.aspx?article=223