Readable, learned, enthusiastic, this is three books in one: a polemic, a catalogue and a narrative. The polemic is a counter-attack against the late Edward Said's denunciation of orientalism. Said, the doyen of Arab-American intellectuals, argued that orient-alism -- referring to the Middle East and India and largely ignoring China and Japan -- was "a poli-tical doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West."
For Said, orientalism was the lackey of imperialism and racism. Irwin stands for the orthodox view that it is what it claims to be -- the study, as objective as possible, of eastern languages, history, culture and so on.
I must declare an interest. I am, like Irwin, a "living fossil," having been taught Latin and Greek the old way, a way "certainly much closer to that practised in the 17th and 18th centuries than to the system which prevails in the 21st century." From these disciplines I followed a well-trodden path to oriental studies, and I was the pupil of some of the orientalists sketched in his book. I owe them everything both as teachers and as friends, "mentors" to use one classical word that has been reborn in management-speak. Like Irwin I would be flattered if anyone wanted to call me an orientalist.
Much of my professional life as a diplomat was concerned with disputes in which I had to take a neutral position -- Palestine, Cyprus, Northern Ireland. I feel like the man of whom it was said that he sat on the fence so long that the iron entered into his soul.
But when Irwin lays into Said's oeuvre -- "phantasmagorical," "slippery," a "labyrinth of false turns," a "work of malignant charla-tanry" -- I know which side I am on. Damning with faint praise, Irwin adds that he agrees by and large with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel, Kipling's Kim or Glenn Gould's piano playing. I'm not sure I could go that far, if only because reading Said's prose is like walking across a wet ploughed field.
Irwin scores some hits, although it isn't easy to knock out somebody who ducks and dives as skilfully as Said. To take one example, Said refused to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an Indo-Aryan family of languages and criticized a German orientalist who held that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and German had more in common with each other than with Semitic or other language groups. Yet Irwin cannot quite pin Said down. Said was not a flat-earther -- he merely insinuated that we can scarcely trust a German who uses the word Aryan in the same sentence as the word Semitic.
So much for the polemic: Irwin admits that his book would not have been written if Said had never written Orientalism. It's knock-about, as is the tradition of orientalist scholarship. One 17th-century scholar quoted by Irwin said of another that he "doth not understand common sense in his own language, and therefore I cannot conceive how he can make sense of anything that is writ in another."
Irwin's catalogue of orientalists, far from being for specialists only, is a good deal more entertaining than some of the lists that have become a modish Christmas present in recent years.
He selects as the father of orientalism the 16th-century French scholar Guillaume Postel, a child prodigy who occupied the first professorial chair of Arabic in Paris at the age of 29. He became the disciple of a lady called Johanna, the New Eve and Mater Mundi, who claimed X-ray vision and that she could see Satan sitting at the center of the Earth. His writings eventually got him into trouble with the Inqui-sition, who "in an unusually benign frame of mind" decided that he was not a heretic, merely insane. Imprisoned on and off for the last 20 years or so of his life, he continued to command enormous respect for his erudition and his amiable personality.
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