¹ What C. Wright Mills says in Tbe Sociological Imagination, 1959, chap. V. about sociologists in general can be applied more particularly to the Orientalists as a specific group.

² As examples of these differences of perspective: Fazlu Rahman, Islam, London, 1966; Henri Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique, Paris, 1969; Homa Pakdaman on al-Afghānī; Nūr al-Dïn Zeine, Arab Turkish Relations, Beirut, 1958; Anis Sayigh, al Hashimiyün, 1966, and Moh. Ghazzäli, Haqiqat al-qawmiyya al-arabiyya, 1969.

³ This is not an exhaustive study of the work of von Grunebaum. The following are the works utilized: Islam, Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition (referred to subsequently as Isl.), London, 1965; Mediaeval Islam, a Study in Cultural Orientation, Chicago, 1947 (subsequently Med. Isl.); Modern Islam, the Search for Cultural Identity, New York, Vintage Books, 1964 (subsequently Mod. Isl.); "Islamic Literature, Arabic" in Near Eastern Culture and Society, T. Cuyler Young (ed.) pp. 48-65; "The Problem of Cultural Exchanges" in Etudes dediées à Lévi-Provençal, Paris, Maisonneuve, 1962, I, pp. 141-151; Islam Experience of the Holy and Concept of Man, UCLA, 1965 (subsequently Exp. Hol.); The Sources of Islamic Civilization in Der Islam, Berlin, March 1970 (1-54); the dream in classical Islam in Le rêve dans les sociétés humaines, ed. by von Grunebaum and R. Caillois, Gallimard; The Convergence of Cultural Traditions in the Mediterranean Area in Diogenes 71 (Fall 1970), 3-21.

⁴ See essentially "An Analysis of Islamic Civilization and Cultural Anthro pology," Mod. Isl. 40-97.

⁵ In spite of things, there still remains something, as testified to by this sentence in Med. Isl. 62: "The path of civilization goes from East to West… Europe understood with confusion that she had nothing essential more to learn from her old rival (Islam)."

⁶ This idea was vulgarized especially by R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934, chaps. II-III. Cf. the preface by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer to von Grunebaum, Isl., in which the principal ideas are referred back to their Kroeberian origins. The following appears here: "In this sense, one can more easily establish the general cultural structures… of civilisations with sacred literature than one can those of primitive cultures where they remain implicit in as far as they are unconscious canons of choice." Cf. also Med. Isl., 320, Isl., 243, Mod. Isl., 53, 80.

⁷ "Any element chosen by Islam indicates an element rejected." Exp. Hol., 6.

⁸ "The 1001 Nights reproduce on a small scale the spirit of the Islamic civilization in its totality… which is completely syncretist. This shows its vitality by recovering each one of its loans with its inimitable seal." Med. Isl. 319.

⁹ "Islam is eminently human in the sense that it takes man as he is, but it is not humanist in the sense that it is not interested by the discovery and the manifestation of the potential wealth in man," Med. Isl. 230. " Islam was checked in its development in the 11th century and remained an unrealized promise." "Islam, attained; it never made up for its delay (compared with other religions)", Ibid., p. 322. "Islam can not easily be considered as creative in the sense in which ancient Greece and the West since 1500 have been." Ibid., p. 324.

¹⁰ Cf. The structure of the Muslim town, Isl. 141-155. "The unit of the Muslim town is functional, not civic." p. 147.

¹¹ Especially chap. "The Mood of the Time" in Med. Isl. and "Profile of Muslim Civilization," in Isl.

¹² Von Grunebaum, in his contributions to the Cambridge Mediaeval History and elswhere, has clearly outlined the parallelism between the development of the feudal agrarian structures in Byzantium and in the Abbasid Caliphate, between the forms of piety, between the structures of artistic expressions and so on… without there being any mutual influence; it is rather a question of a flowering of the same basic concepts. Cf. Med. Isl., p. 30.

¹³ As far as urban law is concerned, von Grunebaum minimizes R. Brun schwig's research on urban jurisprudence. "The pragmatic nature of a large portion of Islamic jurisprudence is as clearly visible as its refusal to grant any autonomy whatsoever to particular jurisdictions," Isl. 154.; for drama: "If Sunnite Islam has not managed to create a dramatic expression, although it was aware of a Greek heritage and also that of India, this is not due to a simple historical accident, but rather to a conception of man in which the specific conflict of the tragic could not see the light of day," Exp. Hol., 12. This idea was taken up by Moh. Aziza in his thesis L'Islam et le théâtre. For the State: "The beginnings of Christianity and the duality of the administration enabled the West to escape the disorder which, for Islam, was the consequence of the Utopian hope which it put in the organisation of the State," Isl., 135.

¹⁴ Cf. "The Concept of Cultural Classicism," in Mod. Isl., 98-128, published in Classicisme et déclin dans l'histoire de l'Islam, Paris, Maisonneuve, 1957, 1-22. If one refers what is said here to Islam in a specific sense, one arrives logically at: Classicism = Tradition. The observations on classicism in the narrow sense used in literature do not clarify the subject, in fact they do the opposite.

¹⁵ We arrive at this: (Islam) (unitary principle) (Classicism) (Tradition) (decadence). The period of formation (7th-9th centuries) is a confused and at the same time a creative one. Modern Islam is in its turn confused, but negatively because it is content simply to pursue refusal. To specify onself once one has found oneself is, of necessity, to stagnate. This is the import of the article "Convergences of Cultural Tradition" which contains various harsh opinions on Arab nationalism which, according to him, tries to differentiate itself on the basis of what is already given and not on what might or could be, as was the tendency with Islam in its period of formation.

¹⁶ As far as the modern West is concerned (and this is an essential point), von Grunebaum seems to think that it possesses a conspicuous privilege due to the fact that for the first time a culture is taking anti-tradition to be tradition (to stagnate is to die). The West can therefore only perish by accident or by resigning. (Mod. Isl., 96).

¹⁷ In Classical Islam, von Grunebaum halts at the destruction of Baghdad; in Islamic Literature (op. cit.) he notes the importance of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, but this in no way influences his judgements. The examples are taken from all historical periods, indiscriminately.

¹⁸ Cf. Isl., 184-185. He reissues Gibb's assertion that there is not a single book in existence written by a Moslem which gives others and Moslems themselves an exact idea of what Islam is. Von Grunebaum adds that this incapacity will last for a long time to come, because the traditional Moslem does not think of his civilization as one among others, whose structural differences result from the diversity of values and possibilities. By implication we have here a definition of the culturalist method considered as the only scientific method.

¹⁹ Cf. Mod. Isl. 347 n. 16, 336 n. 42. An interesting comparison between slavophiles and Arab nationalists who share in common their Romanticism, Utopia, ambiguity of attitude towards western Europe, and also the fact that they monologue with themselves more than they dialogue with the enemy.

²⁰ "It is not very probable that Islam will be lost in western civilization to the point of forgetting its personality, although it can use the external stimulation as a powerful motor to guarantee its revival," Isl., 244.

²¹ Mod. Isl., 389. He quotes as a successful example Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, by Nirad Chaudhuri, 1951. In fact one cannot find a better example of the most thorough intellectual alienation.

²² "There can be no better way to our own soul than the civilization which a great French scholar has called "The Occident of the Orient," in other words the Islamic world." Exp. Hol., 27.

²³ This division will translate by itself a profound transformation of the State and society.

²⁴ Cf. The judgement on Abû 1-Hasan Nadwī: "He compares an Islam which is essentially outside and above history with the West (or Christianity) which, for him, only exists in history." Mod. Isl., 252.

²⁵ " I maintain that, for our era, cultural anthropology conceived as an human introspection by means of an analysis of culture occupies the central position in the system of sciences," Mod. Isl., 50.

²⁶ " We have a tendency to admire the scholars of the Middle Ages who broke down the barriers which the queen of the sciences—theology—had set up in opposition to a rational investigation of the world. Despite the respect due to their intellectual boldness, it is not always possible to shed the fact of knowing or not knowing whether they had the right to separate themselves from the established system." Med. Isl. 331.

²⁷ Let us recall the recent discussions on the "philosophy" of the Renaissance, which was less "scientific" than the Early Middle Ages. It is enough to remember G. Bruno and Paracelsus and the powerful return of the practice of magic etc…

²⁸ See M. Mahdi, "Remarks on the Theologus Autodidactus of Ibn al-Nafīs," St. Isl., XXXI, 1970.

²⁹ "… the tenacious vitality of this (Islamic) civilization whose answers to the great problems of the human mind still satisfy an eighth of mankind, is truly astonishing." Med. Isl., 346.

³⁰ See Isl. 230. "A new self-interpretation of Islam demands the acceptance of the scientific spirit and criticism."

³¹ Ibid., 244. "Nationalism is the cause of the delay of historiography, of the mental attitude, etc." But how to realise nationalism itself?

³² " It is essential to understand that Islamic civilization is a cultural entity which does not share our profound aspirations. It is not vitally interested in rational introspection, and even less interested by the study of the structures of other cultures, neither as an end in itself nor as a means of reaching a better understanding of its own peculiarities and its own past… One can try to connect this to its fundamental anti-humanism, that is, to its deliberate refusal to accept man, in whatever degree, as the standard or yardstick of things and the tendency towards self-satisfaction… where psychological truth is concerned." Mod. Isl. 55. "The force of Islam comes from the complete equilibrium of the personality which it is capable of producing once it has achieved its acme." Med. Isl. 347. "The sciences (are) fundamentally an invariable system of truths, formal as much as concrete, which were granted to man in storage in a time which is immemorial." Ibid., 328. "Islam… has a flavor about it which cannot be mistaken." Ibid., 324.

³³ Cf. Isl., 58-77, for Arab culture and Rêve… p. 8 and 9. "Before Descartes all civilizations are mediaeval, pre-modern."

³⁴ "All that we can really do is to leave our successors convincing examples of our type of comprehension and the type of truth we have arrived at. Our method will not be lost, but many of our results… will gradually and inevitably become (for those who will follow us) rough documents which will help them to retrace our aspirations." Mod. Isl., 96.

³⁵ One can certainly claim that it is this possibility of reduction which indivi dualizes Islam. Von Grunebaum does not say as much expressly, but one can inter it from many of his opinions. However, one can claim this for any kind of society in a past period and it seems to me impossible to confirm or nullify it. The reconstructions carried out by ethnologists remain, in this sense, always within the framework of ethno-centrism.

³⁶ Such as is represented today by M. Foucault. R. Aron strongly recalls in this respect the methodological affiliation between Foucault and Dilthey. D'une Sainte Famille à l'autre, Gallimard, 1969, 259.

³⁷ This is the basis of many critiques on the research on ideological movements. Since you recognize the priority of the economic factor, deal with economic history and leave ideology alone, they seem to say. Thus they indefinitely oppose a should-be to being because they too do not deal with economic history.

³⁸ The book by Reuben Levy, Social Structure of Islam, Cambridge, 1962, in fact analyses a social structure which is far more normative and theoretical than it is factual.

³⁹ The analyses in my work, L'ideologie arabe contemporaine, Paris, Maspéro, 1967, in effect resemble those of the culturalists, but those who perceive in them a Hegelian idealism have not read the book very well; they have not seen that it only represents one moment of analysis, that it is put in the perspective of the ideologists themselves. It is never stated that ideological evolution is at the basis of social evolution; but only that at a given moment (for reasons whose explanation is not within the scope of the work) the ideological contradictions become important, if not determining factors.

⁴⁰ As an example of extreme subjectivism one can quote numerous studies by Abu Zahra on the history of Fiqh, and by Shawqī Daif on literature. If one does not manage to detect the differences and if one does not manage to systematize them, one will always be prey to the eternal present.