Comte de Gobineau and Orientalism: Selected Eastern Writings * Translated by DANIEL O'DONOGHUE and edited by GEOFFREY NASH

Abstract

There seems to be a growing trend among English publishers to make French classics in translation available to the English-speaking public whenever circumstances allow. Thus Pascal’s Pensées (1669) exist not only in the Penguin Classics series translation by J. Krailsheimer and other translations, but a new translation by R. Parish and R. Scholar is planned. The contribution by D. O’Donoghue (translator) and G. Nash (editor) of the works of Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau (1816–82), diplomat and writer, is therefore to be welcomed. Gobineau’s Oeuvres, in the Pléiade edition by J. Gaulmier and J. Boissel (1983), which the team uses, contain some 1800 pages, many of which are devoted to the world of Islam, especially Persia. An English publisher was not likely to be able to accommodate a full English translation of the Oeuvres, even if the translator had used the whole French text. Gobineau has been accessible to the English-speaking reader mainly through A. Collins’ translation of The Inequality of Human Races (1915) and, more recently, through critical studies by A. Gunny in Perceptions of Islam in European Writings (2004), followed by R. Irwin’s The Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006). In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said did discuss Western perceptions of Oriental backwardness and degeneracy when he referred to the racial classifications of Gobineau in Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (1853), but he did not examine them fully. The reputation of Gobineau somewhat suffered because many modern critics identify him exclusively with the ethnological discourse of the period and with authorship of the Essai. Said did not mention Gobineau’s other studies relevant to Orientalism: these show some evolution in the latter’s reaction to the world of Islam. They include the Mémoire sur l’état social de la Perse actuelle (1856), Trois ans en Asie (1858–9) and Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (1865). Despite its title, much of the Mémoire is not about Persia in the 1850s, but rather about the country in the centuries following the Islamic conquest. Basing himself on the French text of volume 2 of Gobineau’s Oeuvres, O’Donoghue has filled in the gap to some extent with a fairly judicious selection of texts. He offers in this volume a translation of almost the entire second part of Trois ans en Asie. From Religions et philosophies the entire section on Babism, with the exception of chapter 12, and two chapters on ‘The Religious and Moral Character of Asiatics’ and ‘The Faith of the Arabs: Origin and Development of Shiʿism’ have been translated. O’Donoghue had privately published the whole of Three Years in Asia and Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia in 2007.