There are plenty more. The 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher specialized in ancient Egyptian and Coptic, alongside his main interest in Hebrew. As well as writing about obelisks, mummies, papyrus and Chinese ideograms, his books dealt with codes and code-breaking, music, Atlantis, birdsong, Noah's ark, magic lanterns, volcanoes, mathematics and pyramidology. Closer to our own day, we have one Oxford University professor who was described by his Italian maid as "Questo bel animal feroce!" and another, one of my own mentors, who cycled naked through the town pursued by the police and escaped by abandoning his bicycle and swimming across a nearby river.
Irwin passes quickly through the ancient and medieval periods, and in more detail through the last four centuries during which orientalism has been a recognized discipline, dedicated in Irwin's words to "getting things right."
Today the headlines rarely fail to have some Middle Eastern news in them, and there was a period in the 16th century when those who knew were seriously disturbed about the Turkish military threat. But most people most of the time have had other things to think about. Never-theless Irwin quotes some fascin-ating exceptions -- for example the fact that Columbus took an Arabic interpreter with him to the new world to help him communicate with people in the East Indies.
Irwin explains that many orientalists came to their scientific researches with dubious motives: Christians who saw Mohammed as a heretic, Protestants or Catholics who attacked Islam as a pretext for attacking each other, free-thinkers (like Voltaire) who praised Islam as a covert way of attacking Christianity. Today some universities seek to exclude Jews from Arabic departments, while others (such as Harvard) have had scruples about pursuing Islamic studies for fear of being accused of anti-semitism. These problems are touched on but not explored in depth, as is the difficult issue, given the fundamentalist nature of Islamic faith, of applying rigorous academic standards to the study of Islam and its history without incurring the wrath of the faithful.
Oliver Miles is a former British ambassador to Libya, Luxembourg and Greece.
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