The Journey to the East

In the previous article we followed the young Ignác Goldziher from his birth in Székesfehérvár to his doctorate in Leipzig and his first years as an unpaid private lecturer in Budapest, and we saw how three traditions converged in him: the orthodox Jewish piety of his father’s house, the philological rigour of German orientalism, and the outlook that reads religion as a growing organism, as the mirror of its own age. We also saw the presupposition he shared with Nöldeke and Snouck, the assumption that the believer is disqualified by his faith from speaking reliably about his own tradition. But there was in Goldziher something the others lacked, a sincere, beating reverence for the world he studied, and that reverence came to light nowhere so nakedly as during the journey he made to the East as a twenty-three-year-old. It is the journey that would mark his life, the journey he would long to return to until the day he died, and it is at the same time the journey that poses the tragic question of this whole theme in its sharpest form. How can a man draw so close to the threshold of faith and yet choose to remain standing on the outside.

We approach here the warmest chapter of the portrait, and it deserves that warmth, for what Goldziher experienced in Damascus and Cairo was no play-acting and no calculation. Where Snouck, a generation later, as we saw in the first part of this theme, would penetrate Mecca under the false name Abdul Ghaffar and with a feigned conversion, Goldziher travelled as himself. He did not conceal that he was a Jew, he did not conceal that he was a European scholar, and precisely as himself he was admitted to the lessons of the mosque that were wont to stand open to no unbeliever whatsoever. The contrast between the two men could not have been greater. The one gained his access through deceit and used it in the service of a colonial war. The other gained it in openness and carried it with him all his life as one of the most precious memories a man can possess. And yet this theme will ultimately have to show that even this honest access issued in a distortion, for that is the law of the false mirror. But that conclusion belongs to a later article. Here it is the journey itself that concerns us, and the love that bore it.

Departure and route

In the autumn of 1873 Goldziher left Europe for the study journey of which he had dreamed all his life, a journey he was able to make thanks to a stipend from the Hungarian government, which sent the gifted young orientalist to the lands of Islam to deepen his knowledge at the source. It was an exceptional favour for a man in his position, an unpaid lecturer without a chair and without means, and it testifies to the standing he already enjoyed despite his youth. The journey took him to the heart of the Islamic world, through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, with longer stays in the two great centres of Islamic learning, Damascus and Cairo, and it brought him into contact with a living scholarly tradition that he had until then known only from books.

The journey led him past the great stations of the Ottoman East, and although the precise stages are not in every respect equally sharply transmitted, the main line is fixed. He set out in the direction of Istanbul, the seat of the caliphate and the capital of the Empire that still gathered the greater part of the Islamic world under its protection, and from there southward to Syria and Palestine, where he visited Damascus and Jerusalem before continuing his way to Egypt and the mosque of al-Azhar. Each of these places carried its own weight for the scholar, for Jerusalem was the city that bound the three traditions of revelation to one another, Damascus the old heart of the caliphate, and Cairo the living centre of Sunni learning. For a man who knew both the Jewish and the Islamic heritage at close hand, this journey was a passage through the layered history of the region from which both had sprung, and he undertook it with the sensitivity of one who recognised something of himself in each of these places.

What distinguishes Goldziher’s journey from that of countless European visitors before and after him is that he came not as a tourist and not as an explorer but as a scholar who had mastered the language. He already spoke fluent Arabic when he arrived, not the learned bookish Arabic alone but the language in a form that brought him into conversation with the people he met, and that mastery opened doors that remained closed to the traveller who had no language. He who enters a country with his dictionary in hand sees the outside. He who enters it with the language in his mouth hears the inside, and Goldziher heard the inside. He could follow the lectures of the scholars, he could speak with the students, he could attend the disputations in which the finest questions of jurisprudence were weighed, and he did all of this with the hunger of a man who at last encountered in the flesh what he had loved from afar.

The nineteenth-century European who travelled to the East usually carried a whole arsenal of images with him before he set foot ashore, and those images determined what he saw. The East was for him the place of ossification and decay, of a once-great civilisation that had come to a standstill, of a faith that held its adherents captive in ignorance, and of a human landscape that called for the guidance of the enlightened European. Edward Said, in his study of orientalism of 1978, described how tenacious this web of prejudices was and how intimately it was interwoven with the power that Europe exercised over the Islamic world, and he demonstrated that European knowledge of the East was seldom a neutral knowledge but almost always a knowledge that mirrored and reinforced the relation of master and subject. It is one of the curiosities of Goldziher’s case, and Said himself noted this, that in this study he judges Goldziher strikingly mildly, for Goldziher fitted only in part the image of the orientalist as an agent of power. He did not travel in order to rule and he did not write in order to serve, and his love for Islamic civilisation was sincere. And yet, as this theme will argue, he too did not escape the structure that Said laid bare, for the structure lies not only in the intentions of the scholar but in the method he employs, and Goldziher’s method remained that of the outsider who judges.

One reads in the testimonies about this journey, and above all in the diary to which he entrusted it, a tone one rarely encounters in a European orientalist of the nineteenth century. There is no condescension, no display of superiority, no cool registration of the foreign. There is reverence, there is wonder, and there is at times an emotion that surprised the young scholar himself. He entered the Islamic world not to condemn or to govern it but to learn from it, and those he met felt this and answered it with a hospitality that would stay with him to the end of his days. The journey was, in other words, an encounter, and that is a word one can seldom use in the history of orientalism.

Damascus and the scholars

In Damascus, the old capital of the Umayyad caliphate and one of the most venerable cities of Islamic history, Goldziher stayed among the scholars and the pious with an intimacy that astonished and delighted him. He visited the mosques, he attended the lessons, and he formed ties with men of knowledge who treated him not as an intruder but as a guest and sometimes almost as a pupil. The city, with its old courtyards, its houses of learning and its unbroken tradition of scholarship reaching back to the earliest centuries of Islam, made a deep impression on the young man, for here he saw with his own eyes what he had known in the books of Leipzig only as text. The tradition of which he had read was here a living practice, handed down from mouth to mouth, from teacher to pupil, in a chain that no one in Damascus regarded as a collection of later fabrications but as the most precious possession of the community.

It is one of the most poignant ironies of his life that it was precisely in Damascus, where the living chain of tradition surrounded him in all its warmth, that Goldziher gathered the impressions he would later work up into a theory that would strip that very chain of its historical reliability. He saw the reverence with which the scholars recited their isnad, the chains of names that connected every tradition to the Prophet ﷺ through a series of trusted transmitters, and he saw how that reverence bore up the whole spiritual life of the city. And yet the man who had seen all this would later write that a great part of these traditions goes back not to the Prophet ﷺ but is the deposit of the party struggles and the ideals of piety of later generations. We are running ahead of events, for that theory belongs to a later article, but it is well to name it here already, so that the reader may feel the tragic tension that hangs over this journey. The scholar received the hospitality of the tradition and would repay it, with the instruments of his method, in a coin that his hosts would have recognised as counterfeit.

The science he saw at close hand

What Goldziher beheld with his own eyes in Damascus was not the dead letter of a text but a science in the practising, and it is useful to dwell on what that science entailed, because his later work would call precisely it into question. The Islamic scholars had developed around the transmission of the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ a critical apparatus that had no equal in the premodern world. Every tradition, every hadith, was preceded by its isnad, the chain of names that connected it to the source through a series of transmitters, and the scholars had built up a whole science to weigh those chains. They examined whether the transmitters could have met one another in time, whether they were known for their reliability and their memory, whether their conduct of life made them trusted transmitters, and they gathered about the transmitters a biographical literature of a scope and a precision that European historiography would approach only much later.

This science, the criticism of the transmitters and the assessment of the hidden defects in the chains, was no naïve belief but a strict methodical enterprise, and the muhaddithin who practised it were no credulous collectors but strict judges who rejected the overwhelming part of what came to their ears as weak or false. Goldziher saw this science in full operation in Damascus and Cairo, he saw the reverence and the severity with which the scholars handled it, and he understood its mechanics better than almost any European before him. This makes his later position all the more remarkable, for he would argue, not out of ignorance but in full knowledge of the matter, that this whole science had let itself be deceived, that the chains the scholars weighed so carefully had in reality been constructed after the fact in order to furnish with authority traditions that had only arisen in later generations. We keep the refutation of that thesis for the article in which the principal work is treated, but we note here that Goldziher did not know from hearsay the science he would attack. He had seen it at work in Damascus.

In Damascus Goldziher also encountered the tensions that pervaded the Islamic world of his time, for the nineteenth century was for the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire a time of pressure and change, of European interference, of reforms and of the question of how the tradition was to relate to advancing modernity. He moved in circles where these questions were alive, and he developed there sympathies that would hold firm his whole life, sympathies for the Muslim reformers who wished to renew Islam from within, and an aversion to the European domination that presented itself as civilisation but was experienced as subjugation. Unlike Snouck, who would place his knowledge in the service of the colonial state, Goldziher would stand all his life on the side of the colonised, and that choice, which we shall draw more sharply in a later article, is rooted in part in what he saw and felt on this journey.

Al-Azhar, the guest among the pious

The high point of the journey, and perhaps of Goldziher’s whole life, awaited him in Cairo, in the mosque and the school of al-Azhar, the venerable institution that since the tenth century had formed the heart of Sunni learning and where the sciences of the Qur’an, the hadith and jurisprudence were handed down from generation to generation. For a European non-Muslim this world was in principle closed, for the lessons of al-Azhar were no public lectures but the sacred transmission of knowledge within the community of the believers, and that a Christian or a Jew should be admitted to it was unheard of. Goldziher counted, as has often been repeated since, as the first European non-Muslim to be admitted to the lectures of the sheikhs at al-Azhar, and he gained that access not by ruse but by the recognition of his knowledge and his sincerity.

The admission did not come to him of itself, for the sheikh who watched over the door first subjected the young scholar to a strict examination, a testing of his knowledge and his bearing, before he permitted him to mingle among the students. One must imagine the significance of this moment. Here sat a European Jew, schooled in the philology of Leipzig, facing the keepers of a tradition that reached back thirteen centuries, and they found him worthy. Not because he passed himself off as a Muslim, for that he did not do, but because his knowledge of the Arabic language and the Islamic sciences was so thorough and his reverence for the learned heritage so unmistakable that the scholars of al-Azhar took him into their midst. It was a recognition from scholar to scholar across the boundary of faith, and it moved Goldziher to the very depths of his being. Let one consider what this openness says about the tradition that made it possible, for the hospitality of al-Azhar was no naivety but an expression of the confidence that truth need not fear its own examination. The sheikhs who admitted the young Jew to their lessons did so not out of indifference to their faith but precisely out of the self-assurance of one who holds that his knowledge can bear the light, and that confidence contrasts starkly with the fearful exclusion with which the European institutions met the Jewish scholar. The mosque that had nothing to hide opened its door. The university that preached neutrality kept it closed. It is a contrast that Goldziher carried with him all his life, and it explains in part why his heart remained pledged to the East while his method was bound to the West.

The atmosphere of al-Azhar in the eighteen-seventies was that of an institution standing at the intersection of centuries-old tradition and the first unrest of the modern age. The great reformers who would shake up the mosque-university a generation later had not yet appeared on the scene, and the lessons still proceeded largely as they had proceeded for centuries, in circles around the pillars of the mosque, where the sheikh was seated and the students gathered around him in half-circles to hear and to comment on his exposition of an authoritative work. Knowledge was not pumped out of a textbook but transmitted from person to person, with the text as occasion and the living voice of the teacher as bearer, and the student who had gone through a work received for it an ijazah, a licence that authorised him to pass the knowledge on in turn with mention of the chain along which he had received it. The whole enterprise was pervaded by the awareness that knowledge is a thing entrusted, an amana, which one does not possess but keeps in order to hand it on faithfully.

Goldziher moved in this world with an ease that surprised him himself, and he gained there friendships and esteem that remained dear to him for the rest of his life. He corresponded afterwards with scholars he had met in Cairo, he followed the developments in the Islamic world with an involvement that went far beyond the professional interest of the specialist, and he continued to reckon himself among the friends of Islamic civilisation at a time when the West treated it predominantly with contempt or with colonial greed. This loyalty is real and one must acknowledge it, for it truly distinguishes Goldziher from most of the orientalists of his generation, and it explains why even his Islamic critics generally treat him with a certain respect that they do not grant a Snouck.

For months he sat in the circle of the students at the feet of the sheikhs and followed the lessons in theology and jurisprudence, and he did so not with the detached gaze of the observer but with the involvement of one who takes part. He asked questions, he took part in the disputations, he gained the esteem of his masters, and he felt himself, as he testifies himself, taken up into a community of knowledge and piety in which he felt more at home than in the lecture halls of Europe where his origin made him an outsider. There lies in this fact a bitter truth that this theme will work out fully in a later article. The mosque of Cairo took up the Jew whom the universities of Europe long kept out, and the pious of al-Azhar treated him with a humanity that the civilised institutions of the West withheld from him. The guest among the pious found in the foreign world a hospitality that his own world refused him.

A conversation that sums up the journey

Among the many conversations that Goldziher held in these months, one exchange may be imagined that sums up the core of his experience, and which we render here, expressly as a reconstruction and not as a transmitted verbatim account, in order to show what was at stake. A sheikh of al-Azhar ﵀, who had taken the young scholar under his wing, might have posed the question that must have been on everyone’s lips, the question of why a Jew took such trouble for a knowledge that was not his own.

These words are not transmitted, and one must read them as an imagining of what the encounter entailed, not as a document. But they sum up the tragedy of Goldziher with a precision that the facts alone cannot reach, for the sheikh lays before him in this imagining precisely the point on which the whole later debate would turn. The Islamic tradition transmits its knowledge in a chain of trust, from heart to heart, and it holds that chain to be the guarantee of the truth. Goldziher would return to Europe and argue, with the instruments of his method, that the chain precisely does not guarantee what it claims to guarantee, that the gold of which the sheikh spoke is in reality the dust of later centuries. He had heard the chain from the mouth of him who bore it, and he judged nevertheless with his books.

The exalted Friday

There is one moment from this journey that Goldziher himself entrusted to his diary in words that have since been inseparably bound to his name, and it is the moment in which the reverence that bore the whole journey condensed into an experience that far overstepped the boundary of science. It was a Friday in Cairo, the Friday that preceded the feast of Muharram, and Goldziher found himself in the midst of the praying multitude in the mosque, among the thousands of believers who bowed down before their Lord in the common prayer. What he experienced there he later described in words that no longer know any distance whatsoever.

He wrote that in the midst of the thousands of the pious he rubbed his forehead over the floor of the mosque, and that never in his life had he been more devout, truly more devout, than on that exalted Friday. One must read these words as they are written, as the testimony of a man who was not play-acting and who had nothing to gain by a lie, for the diary was intended for his own eyes and not for the world. The young scholar who had been raised in the strict piety of orthodox Judaism and who had been schooled in the coolest philology of Europe knelt in a mosque in Cairo among Muslims he did not know, and he experienced there a devotion that surpassed everything he had ever felt. It was not the prayer of a scholar observing a ritual. It was the prayer of a heart that was carried away.

The Islamic tradition knows pre-eminently the awareness that true religion lies not in the outward form but in the disposition of the heart, and the Qur’an speaks of this with a clarity that places Goldziher’s moment in a deeper light. When the revelation wished to teach the believers that it is not the eyes that can truly blind but the hearts, it spoke words that to this day touch the core of piety:

It is a verse that holds the tragedy of Goldziher as in a mirror, for his eyes saw everything. He saw the mosque, the praying multitude, the reverence of the scholars, the beauty of the tradition, and his eyes were sharper than those of any European whatsoever. On that exalted Friday his heart too seemed for a moment to open, touched to the depths by what it felt around it. And yet he would return to the study and treat the tradition that had moved him so deeply as a historical residue, and then it seems almost as if the heart closed again after that one moment and the eye took over. We do not judge here the state of his soul, for that judgement belongs to Allah ﷻ and not to the historian. But we may pose the question that the verse presses upon us. What use is the sharpest eye of Europe, if it sees without the heart being allowed to see along with it.

What a man carries away

In his diary Goldziher went even further than the testimony about the exalted Friday, for he noted there also that during these months he became inwardly convinced that he was himself a Muslim, and that Islam seemed to him the only religion that could satisfy the demands of the philosophical spirit. These words must be rendered with care and with honesty, clinically and without exaggeration in any direction whatsoever, for they have been the object of much debate among the admirers and the critics of Goldziher. They were the words of a diary, written in the glow of an overwhelming experience, and they express an inner disposition, not a deed. Goldziher did not pronounce the shahada, he did not convert, he remained all his life a practising member of the Jewish community and would later, as we shall see, even become the secretary of the Neolog congregation of Pest. The statement in the diary is thus no conversion and one may not blow it up into a conversion, but neither is it nothing, and one may not smooth it away. It is the testimony of a heart that had touched the truth of Islam and that then chose the way of the study rather than the way of surrender.

The scholars have since racked their brains over the question of what these statements really mean, and opinions range from those who see in them an almost-conversion to those who dismiss them as the passing enthusiasm of a young traveller. Honesty compels one to acknowledge that the diary does not fully permit either reading. He who reads a conversion into it ignores that Goldziher remained all the rest of his life a faithful member of the Jewish community and bore his Jewish identity with conviction, even when it slammed the door of the university in his face. He who dismisses the statements as a whim ignores the seriousness and the repetition with which he returned to his love for Islam and the pain with which he later described the decline of the Islamic world under European pressure. The truth lies in the irreducible middle. Goldziher was a man whose heart had been touched by Islam and who nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of that, devoted his life to a science that kept the Islamic tradition at a distance. He lived in the tension between what he had felt and what he believed he had to think, and that tension he never resolved.

It is this tension that makes Goldziher the tragic figure of this theme, and it is well not to force it too soon into a conclusive judgement. A man carries away from such a journey what he carries away, and what brings the one to surrender brings the other to a lifelong yearning that never ripens into a decision. Goldziher carried the memory of the exalted Friday with him all his life, and he continued to love the East and its faith-tradition with a sincerity that none of his contemporaries called into doubt. And yet that same man wrote the work that would devalue the hadith literature in the eyes of the West. The love and the devaluation dwelt in one heart, and he who does not dare to face this understands neither the man nor the problem.

What a method leaves behind

When one lays the journey of Goldziher beside that of Snouck, as this theme inevitably does, then there emerges the distinction that binds and separates the two periods of this series at once. Snouck came in disguise, under a false name, with a feigned conversion, and he abused the hospitality granted him for purposes that his hosts would have abhorred. Goldziher came in openness, as himself, and he received the hospitality as an honour that he held in honour all his life. On the level of character there is an abyss between the two men, and this theme will never cover over that abyss, for Goldziher deserves the warmth that Snouck does not deserve and it would be a mistake and an injustice to tar them both with the same brush.

And yet, and this is the inhospitable insight on which this theme is built, the two men shared a method, and the method left the same thing behind in both cases. For what Goldziher brought back from the East was not merely the memory of an exalted Friday but also the confirmation of the gaze with which he had come, the gaze that treats the living tradition as a historical phenomenon and that sets aside the believer’s claim that his tradition bears truth of divine origin as something on which science need not judge. He had heard the chain from the mouth of him who bore it, he had knelt among the pious, he had called Islam the only religion that could satisfy the philosophical spirit, and he returned to Europe to prove that the chain does not guarantee what it promises. The reverence remained in his heart, but the method sat in his suitcase, and it was the method that would write the work.

One might object that this severity does Goldziher an injustice, that a scholar simply has the duty to weigh his sources critically and that it may not be held against him that he took that duty seriously. And it is true that the critical weighing of tradition is no invention of the West, for the Islamic scholars had, as said, developed it into a fine science centuries before Leipzig existed. The difference lies not in the fact of the criticism but in its presupposition. The muhaddithin criticised the tradition from within, out of reverence for the source and with the intention of separating the genuine from the false so that the community could build on the genuine. Goldziher criticised it from without, out of the presupposition that the tradition is in principle the fabrication of the later community and that the burden of proof rests on whoever claims that a hadith really goes back to the Prophet ﷺ. The distinction seems subtle and it is decisive, for the first attitude seeks the truth within the tradition and the second places itself outside it and declares the tradition a suspect. He who begins as a judge with the presumption of guilt seldom arrives at an acquittal, and that is the reason why Goldziher’s method led him almost inevitably to his conclusions.

Here lies the core of what a false mirror is. A mirror can be perfectly polished, clear, without a single blemish, and yet it gives back only an image and never reality itself, for that is the nature of a mirror. Snouck’s mirror was clouded by deceit and self-interest, and one recognises its distortion easily. Goldziher’s mirror was clearly polished by sincerity and love, and precisely for that reason its distortion is so much harder to recognise and so much more instructive, for it proves that it is not the blemish on the mirror that makes the image an image, but the being-a-mirror itself. He who may read the revelation only as the fabrication of its age sees always only the age and never the revelation, however pure his gaze may be. That is the reason why the most honest orientalist proves most sharply what the deceiver only lets one suspect.

We have followed the young Goldziher up to the threshold that he did not cross, and we have seen the love that would bear his whole life. In the next article we return with him to Budapest, to a life that had no chair in store for him but a lectern and a millstone, for the most gifted Islamic scholar of Europe would for thirty years earn his bread not as a professor but as the secretary of a Jewish community. The exalted Friday lay behind him. Before him lay the closed door.

Sources

• Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait, Wayne State University Press (1987)
• Lawrence I. Conrad, “The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990)
• Ignác Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber, Brill (1978)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1986)
• P. Sj. van Koningsveld (ed.), Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft: The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, Leiden (1985)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)