The Aryan Dimension of Matthew Arnold's Approach to the Arab-Islamic Orient
Dr. Muhammad A. Al-Da'mi
The East did not appeal to Matthew Arnold (1822-88) the way it did to his Victorian contemporaries who either fell under the spell of The Arabian Nights(1), or held up Eastern life and legacy to forge critiques to British society and ruling classes (2). Unlike such men of letters as Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle and Sir Richard F. Burton (3), Arnold was considered too Eurocentric and over conscious of contemporary cultural and political crises to include Oriental elements in his major arguments, or to admit of possible Oriental influences on Western life and letters.
As his major works show, Arnold is proud of the classical European civilization (4) (especially Greek), and continually aware of the distinction between the Aryan and the Semitic, or between "Hellenism" and "Hebraism", to use his favorite words within this context. Even technically, when dealing with the types of prose, he differentiates between "Asiatic" and "Attic" prose, the former being "prose somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded."(5) But this general attitude should not obscure the fact that his broad humanism does acknowledge the interrelatedness of human civilizations, indicating meanwhile the indebtedness of contemporary English civilization, despite its insistent sense of supremacy, to foreign influences. In a language sonorously echoing that of Culture and Anarchy, he states:
By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign. (6)
But significantly, Arnold's works do exhibit an interest in the East, a relatively forgotten interest that amounts to criticizing the British Orientalist tradition for its failure to cope with French Orientalism. Although writing that "I, who am not an Orientalist" (7), he takes the Oriental studies of France, especially those of the "grave Orientalist"(8) Ernest Renan, as a touchstone to display the inferiority of British Orientalist studies compare to the French. This piece of criticism is meaningful as it shows that Arnold was by no means ignorant of the activities and writings of the major Orientalists whether British or French.
More significant to the interested, particularly to the critics of Orientalism, is the fact that the "presence" of the Orient was there in the back of his mind as it culminated in the writing of " A Persian Passion Play" (1871), a treatise which is always overshadowed by his other works, and frequently overlooked by Arnoldian scholarship. It is feasible, therefore, to shed some light on this work, not only to uncover the seriousness of Arnold's interest in the East, but also to know more about his thought. No less relevant to my purpose is the fact that, though essentially meant to stir the contemporary public to a forgotten and more ritualistic spiritualism via comparisons and contrasts,"A Persian Passion Play" smacks of his Aryanism.
In this work Arnold takes the Christian dramatic performance, called the Ammergau passion play to compare it with "something produced…in the wonderful East from which, whatever airs of superiority Europe may justly give itself, all our religion has come."(9) With an eye on the spiritual dryness of contemporary Britain, for the treatment of which he elsewhere prescribes the "high seriousness of poetry", Arnold seeks the East for its religion that "has still an empire over men's feelings such as it has nowhere else"(PPP. 247). Undoubtedly, the spiritual devotion of the Muslims is used here to magnify the Europeans' disregard for the spiritual and the ritualistic.
While acknowledging Islam to be " a great, powerful, successful religion" (PPP. 289), Arnold criticizes the narrow-mindedness with which Islam was viewed by the Westerners of his time. And while echoing Carlyle's lecture, "The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet: Islam" (May, 1840), with its criticism of such views on Islam, he advances arguments similar to Carlyle's (6) to disprove the received "standard" ideas. He calls upon the people not to be blinded by prejudice or by sheer hostility to Islam, reminding them of the great population of Muslims. He also remarks that Islam was a necessity for certain times and for specific nations who were "at a low stage of mental growth" (PPP. 283).
Despite such condescending pronouncements, Arnold believes that Islam and Christianity are essentially similar. He narrates the story of the Abyssinian Christian king who received the first Muslim refugees early after the announcement of Muhammed's message. Arnold approvingly quotes the Abyssinian monarch's conclusion after the interview with Jaffer (Prophet Muhammed's uncle) that, "Between your religion and ours there is not the thickness of this straw difference" (PPP. 282). Therefore, Arnold adds:
Jaffer's account of the religion of Mahomet is a great deal truer than the accounts of it which are commonly current amongst us. Indeed, for the credit of humanity, as more than a hundred millions of men are said to profess the Mahometan religion, one is glad to think so. To popular opinion everywhere, religion is provcd by miracles. All religions but man's own are utterly false and vain; the authors of them are mere impostors; and the miracles which are said to attest them, fictitious. We forget that this is a game which two can play at; although the believer of each religion always imagines the prodigies which attest his religion to be fenced by a guard granted to them alone. Yet how much more safe is it, as well as more fruitful, to look for the main confirmation of a religion in its intrinsic correspondence with urgent wants of human nature, in its profound necessity. Differing religions will then be found to have much in common. (PPP. 282-283)
Such an approach to Islam, which takes into consideration the "correspondence with urgent wants of human nature," leads Arnold to the recognition of the similarity between Islam and Christianity. But it also misleads him to ethnically biased conclusions. Some inconsistency is inevitably apparent in Arnold's approach to Islam. While he believes in Islam's appropriateness for nations of lower mental levels, he thinks that the difference between this faith and Christianity is the difference between twin brothers. He criticizes what he believes to be the "sensuality" and the "dogmatism" of the holy Qur'an as he finds in those misconceived traits the secret for the success of Islamic missionaries in Africa. "Among the little known and little advanced races of the great African continent," he writes, "the Mohametan missionaries, by reason of the sort of power which this character of the Koran gives, are said to be more successful than ours" (PPP. 283). But Islam's alleged inappropriateness for the "mentally" advanced nations does not obscure the fact of Islam as the twin brother of Christianity. They are not irreconcilable religions as theirs is something of a family quarrel: it is the difference between Saul and David:
Whereas the Bible-people trace themselves to Abraham through Isaac, and Koran people trace themselves to Abraham through Ishmael, the difference between the religion of the Bible and the religion of the Koran is almost as the difference between Isaac and Ishmael. (PPP. 283-284)
With an apparent respect for the feelings of his English readers, Arnold, rather than praising Islam for its virtuous tenets, argues that this religion was a historical necessity for the Arabs of a specific epoch. In his opinion, only "for certain times and certain men Mahomet too, in his way, was a teacher of righteousness" (PPP. 285). And while assuring his readers that Christianity is an improvement on, and a rejuvenation of Judaism, he rejects the idea that Islam is similarly a renewal of Christianity. Rather, Islam is presented as a return to the originally "Semitic" Judaism, devoid of the additional Christian virtues, according to his line of thinking. To support this argument, he falls back on the common theme of Islam being a faith of the sword, a religion which does not foster the "Christian" virtues of mildness, forgiveness, gentleness and selflessness. "Mahometanism," according to him,
Had no such renewing. It began with a concept of righteousness, lofty indeed, but narrow, and which we may call old Jewish; and there it remained. It is not a feeling religion. No one would say that the virtues of gentleness, mildness, and self-sacrifice were its virtues; and the more it went on, the more the faults of its original narrow basis became visible, more and more it became fierce and militant, less and less was it amiable. (PPP. 285)
Arnold goes a step further as he emphasizes the Prophet's knowledge of Judaism before the announcement of his message. "Mahomet was no doubt acquainted with the Jews and their documents," writes Arnold, "and gained something from this source for his religion" (PPP. 284). But though presenting no evidence for this claim, he stresses the Prophet's originality, adopting a language akin to Carlyle's:
But his religion is not a mere plagiarism from Judea, any more than it is a mere mass of falsehood. No; in the seriousness, elevation, and moral energy of himself and of that Semitic race from which he sprang and to which he spoke, Mahomet mainly found that scorn and hatred of idolatry, that sense of the worth and truth or righteousness, judgment, and justice, which make the real greatness of him and his Koran, and which are thus rather an independent testimony to the essential doctrines of the Old Testament, than a plagiarism from them. (PPP. 284)
Arnold's insistence on the Judaic qualities in his account of Islam does not stem from any hostility to this religion. It seems rather to be part of his intellectual make-up that looks down on Semitism as such. His apparent admiration for Prophet Muhammad and for Ali (his cousin and son-in-law) (PPP. 249), does not prove sufficient to make him review his ideas on the Semites, or abandon Renan's wholehearted anti-Semitism.(10) Thus Arnold's high opinion of Prophet Muhammad and other Arab heroes does not exceed the limits of admiration for individual personalities. It is this constantly present "Aryanism" in Arnold's thought that could help us understand his liking for the Persians and their passion plays. He regards these plays as expressing the Persian bitterness at the memory of being defeated by the Arabs, a Semitic race. For him, the Persians are "our Indo-European kinsmen" who were "conquered by the Semitic Arabians" (PPP. 280). No less important, and even formative in his idea of Islam's history, is his belief that Islam is a purely "Semitic" historical phenomenon. Once Islam was imposed on the Aryans, he alleges, it underwent a great schism, a schism which gave expression to "a division of races, rather than a difference of religious belief" (PPP. 280).
Arab-Islamic history is for Arnold a new field for the free play of ideas: it is employed to reaffirm the myth of Aryan superiority, which sought to divide Islam and its world on the basis of ethnicity alone. Without attempting a full understanding of the doctrines and history of Islam, he uses it only to transmit a Christian message of Aryan predilections. His is more than a transitory interest in Islam, an interest that gives him another opportunity to theorize, using the stock ideas presented by Renan on the superiority of the Aryans.
But no matter how significant his ideas on Islam are within the context of the "vanity fair" of Victorian ideas, Arnold's praise of the Persian glorification of Ali and of his sons Al-Hasan and Al- Hussein (the Prophet's grandsons) falls within his Aryan approach to the Islamic Orient. He believes that those great Muslim heroes are saintly figures in Persian eyes simply because they maintained Aryan, not Semitic, virtues. He, therefore, twists the purpose of this treatise from a call on the Christians for a warmer spiritual and ritualistic belief to an occasion to uphold the heroic traits of those great men as essentially Aryan.
Endnotes
1- For a detailed study of the Arabian Nights' impact on Victorian thought and letters, consult: Muhsin J. Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1981). Also relevant is Peter L. Caracciolo's The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of "The Thousand and One Nights" into British Culture, (N.Y.: St. Martin's, 1988).
2- The classical example of this use of the East is Thomas Carlyl's lecture on "The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet: Islam", published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: Collins' Clear-Type Press, ND). For a study of Carlyle's work, consult: Muhammed A. Al-Da'mi's "On Carlyle's Concept of the Arab-Islamic Orient", Orientalism, vol. 2, (Baghdad: Cultural Affairs, 1987), pp. 62-86.
3- For a study of Scott's and Burton's views and presentations of the Orient, consult: Muhammed A. Al-Da'mi, "Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers." Ph. D. diss. (C.I.E.F.L., Hyderabad), 1993, pp. 56-57 and 97-110.
4- David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, vol.4 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), pp. 972-9.
5- Matthew Arnold, "The Literacy Influence of Academies", in The Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. III (London: Macmillan and co., Limited, 1903), p. 69.
6- Ibid., p. 40.
7- Ibid., p. 63.
8- Ibid., p. 63
9- Matthew Arnold, "A Persian Passion Play", in ibid., vol. III. Subsequent references to this work are to this edition and will be incorporated within the text (PPP) followed by page number.
10- For an idea on Renan's influence on Arnold, consult: Flavia M. Alaya, "Arnold and Renan and the Popular Uses of History", Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (Oct., 1967), pp. 551-574.