“There is No Orient”: Hodgson and Said

Abstract

’There is No Orient’: Hodgson and Said By Edmund Burke III Presented to American Historical Association Annual Meetings January 2008 Panel on Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam On a sunny January afternoon in 1978, I met for lunch with Edward Said at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. He was spending the year while completing Orientalism, his major book, which would be published in the fall. After an enjoyable meal, Said walked me to my car. As I was preparing to drive away, he suddenly asked whether I thought he should review Hodgson’s three volume work, The Venture of Islam. He’d been asked to consider including it as part of a review essay on books on the Middle East for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Since my own lengthy review of Hodgson’s book was forthcoming in the International Journal of Middle East Studies I sought to encourage him to do so. But he swiftly cut me off: “C’est un Islamologue!” he exclaimed (in French). Coming from Said, this was not encouraging. Such a pity, I thought as I drove down the wooded drive, the encounter with Hodgson’s thought might have surprised him. But of course Said knew what he was doing. When his New York Times Book Review appeared a few months later, it focused on the work of Bernard Lewis. Adding Hodgson would only have muddied the waters. The rest, as they say, is history! The phantom encounter between Hodgson and Said has continued to haunt me. This talk provides an opportunity to speculate on what they might have said to one another. Never fashionable, instinctively a democrat, Hodgson was in some respects the antithesis of Edward Said (1935-2003), a cosmopolitan intellectual who craved the limelight, whereas Hodgson cared little for the comforts of his position, and lived simply, even austerely. At first this comparison may seem forced. Yet despite their obvious many differences, the two men resembled one another in important ways: always brilliant, driven, sometimes abrupt, they excelled in making passionate enemies as well as friends. More crucially, both were deeply suspicious of claims of the superiority of western civilization and the occluding power of discourse (the term discourse was of course unavailable to Hodgson, but as we shall see the concept would have been congenial). Since Hodgson explicitly employed a civilizational frame (indeed one explicitly tied to Islam) in Venture, Said was not wrong to call him an “Islamologue” (a fancy dress French word for an orientalist). Yet, to stop there would have been to miss Hodgson’s penetrating critique of the concept of civilization, and of western imperialism as well. Similar tensions can be found in Said’s thought between his humanist defense of Enlightenment ideals and his strong critique of European imperialism and colonial forms of knowledge. Had he reviewed Venture Said might have found Hodgson to be a congenial discussion partner. The other papers on this panel consider Hodgson’s work as an Islamicist. Here I’d like to think about Hodgson and Said as humanists each of whom had a profound critique of the civilizational paradigm for doing world history.