II: Shi'ism and the Orientalists

When the Egyptian writer, Muhammad Qutb named his bookIslam: the Misunderstood Religion, he was politely expressing theMuslim sentiment about the way the orientalists have treatedIslam and Muslims in general. The word 'misunderstood'implies that at least a genuine attempt was made to understandIslam. However, a more blunt criticism of orientalism, sharedby the majority of the Muslims, comes from Edward said: 'Thehardest thing to get most academic experts on Islam to admit isthat what they say and do as scholars is set in a profoundly, andin some ways an offensively, political context. Everything aboutthe study of Islam in the contemporary west is saturated withpolitical importance, but hardly any writers on Islam, whetherexpert or general, admit the fact in what they say. Objectivity isassumed to be inherent in learned discourse about othersocieties, despite the long history of political, moral and religiousconcern felt in all societies, western or Islamic, about the alien,the strange and the different. In Europe, for example, theorientalists have traditionally been affiliated directly withcolonial offices.' ( 1 )

Instead of assuming that objectivity is inherent in learneddiscourses, the western scholarship has to realize that pre-commitmentto a political or religious tradition, on a consciousor subconscious level, can lead to biased judgement. As MarshallHudgson writes: 'Bias comes especially in the questions he posesand in the type of category he uses, where indeed, bias isespecially hard to track down because it is hard to suspect thevery terms one uses, which seem so innocently neutral...' ( 2 )

TheMuslim reaction to the image portrayed of them by the westernscholarship is beginning to get its due attention. In 1979 thehighly respected orientalist Albert Hourani said: 'The voices ofthose from the Middle East and North Africa telling us that theydo not recognize themselves in the image we have formed ofthem are too numerous and insistent to be explained in terms ofacademic rivalry or national pride.' ( 3 )

This was about Islam andMuslims vis-a-vis the orientalists.However, when we focus on the study of Shi'ism by theorientalists, the word 'misunderstood' is not strong enough,rather it is an understatement. Not only is shi'ism misunder-stood, it has been ignored, misrepresented and studied mostlythrough the heresiographic literature  of its opponents. It seemsas if the Shi'as had no scholars and literature of their own. Toborrow an expression from Marx: 'They cannot representthemselves, they must be represented,' and that also by theiradversaries!The reason for this state of affairs lies in the paths throughwhich the western scholars entered the fields of Islamic studies.Hodgson, in his excellent review of western scholarship, writes:'First, there were those who studied the Ottoman empire, whichplayed so major a role in modern Europe. They came to itusually in the first instance from the viewpoint of Europeandiplomatic history. Such scholars tended to see the whole ofIslamdom from the political perspective of Istanbul, the Ottomancapital. Second, there were those, normally British, who enteredIslamic studies in India so as to master Persian as good civilservants, or at least they were inspired by Indian interests. Forthem, the imperial transition of Delhi tended to be the culminationof Islamicate history. Third, there were the Semitists, ofteninterested primarily in Hebrew studies, who were lured intoArabic. For them, headquarters tended to be Cairo, the mostvital of Arabic-using cities in the nineteenth century, thoughsome turned to Syria or the Maghrib. They were commonlyphilogians rather than historians, and they learned to seeIslamicate culture through the eyes of the late Egyptian andSyrian Sunni writers most in vogue in Cairo. Other paths -- thatof the Spaniards and some Frenchmen who focused on theMuslims in Medieval Spain, that of the Russians who focusedon the northern Muslims -- were generally less important.' (4 )

It isquite obvious that none of these paths would have led westernscholars to the centres of Shi'i learning or literature. Themajority of what they studied about Shi'ism was channeledthrough non-Shi'i sources. Hodgson says: 'All paths were at onein paying relatively little attention to the central areas of theFertile Crescent and Iran, with their tendency towards Shi'ism;areas that tended to be most remote from western penetration.' ( 5 )

And after the First World War, 'the Cairene path to Islamicstudies became the Islamicist's path par excellence, while otherpaths to Islamic studies came to be looked on as of more localrelevance.' ( 6 )

Therefore, whenever an orientalist studied Shi'ism throughUthmaniyyah, Cairene or Indian paths, it was quite natural forhim to be biased against Shi'i Islam. 'The Muslim historians ofdoctrine [who are mostly Sunni] always tried to show that allother schools of thought than their own were not only false but,if possible, less than truly Muslim. Their works describeinnumerable "firqahs" in terms which readily misled modernscholars into supposing they were referring to so many "hereticalsects".' ( 7 )

And so we see that until very recently, western scholarseasily described Sunnism as 'orthodox Islam' and Shi'ism as a'heretical sect.' After categorizing Shi'ism as a heretical sect ofIslam, it became 'innocently natural' for western scholars toabsorb the Sunni scepticism concerning the early Shi'i literature.Even the concept of taqiyya was blown out of proportion and itwas assumed that every statement of a Shi'i scholar had ahidden meaning. And, consequently, whenever an orientalistfound time to study Shi'ism, his precommitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the west was compounded with the Sunnibias against Shi'ism. One of the best examples of thiscompounded bias is found in the way the event of Ghadir Khumwas approached by the orientalists.