The Lectures and the Rejoinder

The previous article followed the forty-year correspondence between Goldziher and Snouck up to just before the Hungarian’s death, and it let the thread rest where the two lives touched for the last time. Now we return to Budapest, to the final years of Ignác Goldziher, the years in which he at last possessed the freedom that had been withheld from him all his life, in which he wrote the works that would define his legacy, and in which he kept a diary that would not speak until half a century after his death and that finally laid bare the bitter interior of this scholarly life. And afterwards, for a theme such as this cannot end with the death of its protagonist, we turn to the rejoinder that the century after him would give to his work, to the Muslim scholars who answered the thesis of the hadith not with indignation but with the sources themselves. Thus this period closes, and with it closes the mirroring around which this theme has been built.

The Free Years

In 1905, at the age of fifty-five, Goldziher was at last made full professor at the University of Budapest. Some sources place the appointment a year earlier, but the picture is clear: only in advanced age, after thirty years of service as secretary of the Neolog Jewish community of Pest, after years of unpaid lecturing, did the greatest connoisseur of Islam that Europe possessed receive the chair that had been his due for decades. In his diary he noted, upon his farewell to the community, that from that day on he was a free man, and the simplicity of those words betrays the weight of everything that had preceded them. Freedom came late, but it came, and the years that remained between 1905 and his death in 1921 were the most fruitful and the most acknowledged of his career.

One must ask what that late freedom meant for a man who had gone without it his entire working life. The years of the nightwork, which the third article described, were over, and for the first time he could devote himself by day, and without the burden of administration, to the research and the teaching for which he had been born. It is no coincidence that it was precisely in this period that his most comprehensive works came into being, the great surveys that were not the fruit of stolen nocturnal hours but of a mind that could at last work in its full breadth. Freedom came too late to undo the injustice suffered, for thirty lost years does not give a chair back, but it came in time to let him bring in one more harvest that would establish his name for good. And it confirmed, in a bitter way, what his whole career had shown, that his genius had never been in question and that only his origin had for so long withheld from him the place that genius deserved.

It was a freedom he had been unwilling to buy at the cost of his loyalty. As the third article of this period described, he had turned down the offers of foreign universities, a chair at Heidelberg, an offer from Cambridge, each time because he did not wish to leave Hungary and his community. He had chosen humiliation over uprooting, waiting over departure. And when recognition at last came, it came in the city where he belonged, among the people with whom he wished to remain, and that made it more precious to him than any foreign chair could have been. The outcast was, in the land that had for so long shut him out, at last received as the scholar he had always been.

Vorlesungen, Islam Explained to Europe

The ripest fruit of these free years was a book that appeared in 1910, under the title Vorlesungen über den Islam, lectures on Islam. It was the first Western standard survey of Islam as a whole, a coherent treatment of the religion in all its dimensions, from revelation and faith to law, theology, mysticism and the later movements. Where nineteenth-century Orientalism had dissected Islam into specialized studies of separate texts and questions, Goldziher here offered for the first time a whole, a figure in which the reader could survey Islam as a living and coherent civilization. Generations of Western students would derive their first systematic knowledge of Islam from this book, and it thereby determined, more than any other work, the image that the educated European held of Islam.

It is important to note that the Vorlesungen was not the work of an enemy. Goldziher wrote with an affection for his subject that is palpable on many pages, with an admiration for the spiritual and intellectual achievements of Islamic civilization that was sincere and that set him apart from the frankly hostile polemicists who portrayed Islam as an error. He had an eye for the beauty of Sufism, for the subtlety of the theological debates, for the moral seriousness of the pious. And yet the book carried within it the legacy of the method, for here too Islam was presented as a historical phenomenon, as a human development to be explained out of its circumstances, and not as a revelation that laid claim to truth. The warmth of the treatment did not change the nature of the gaze. One could describe a religion with love and still reduce it to mere history, and that is precisely what the Vorlesungen did.

It was exactly that combination of warmth and method that made the book so influential, and at the same time so effective in the direction this theme means to point out. An openly hostile treatment of Islam would have put the Muslim reader on his guard at once and shown the Western reader a coarseness he could recognize and distrust. But the Vorlesungen offered no coarseness. They offered understanding, respect and a seemingly unprejudiced account, and precisely for that reason they carried the presupposition of the method imperceptibly over to whoever read the book. The reader came to know Islam as a venerable historical phenomenon, and he came at the same time to know it as no more than that, without ever being told that this reduction was a choice and not a self-evidence. Thus the mirror worked most effectively, not by slandering Islam but by showing it benevolently within a frame that tacitly excluded its own claim. The book became a standard work, reprinted and translated, and for decades the gateway through which the educated Westerner entered Islam, a gateway that admitted him into a building whose most important door, the door to revelation as truth, had been kept closed from the very outset.

Three years later, in September 1913, Goldziher delivered at the University of Uppsala a series of lectures intended as a sequel to the Vorlesungen, this time devoted to the history of Qur’anic exegesis, to the way in which Muslim scholars through the centuries had interpreted the Qur’an. These lectures he reworked and expanded into a book that appeared in 1920, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung, the movements of Islamic Qur’anic interpretation. It remained well into the twentieth century a standard work on tafsir, the exegetical tradition, and it showed once more Goldziher’s exceptional erudition in the Islamic sources. Here too, however, what held for all his work held: he read the tradition from the outside, as a historian who describes the development of human ideas, and the claim of that tradition to explain the revelation of Allah ﷻ fell outside the frame he had set himself.

The Last Books and the Death

Goldziher died on 13 November 1921 in Budapest, seventy-one years old. He left behind an oeuvre that would shape the discipline of Islamic studies for a century, a series of works that are consulted to this day and that, however much one may disagree with their premises, testify to a learning that is rare in the history of any field whatsoever. His Oriental library, the collection of manuscripts and books he had built up over a lifetime, ended up after his death in Jerusalem, where it became one of the foundations of Oriental study at the university then rising there. It is one of the quiet ironies of his legacy that the books of the man who had prayed in Cairo among the pious found their resting place in the city that, in his own contested reconstruction, had been the place to which some had wished to relocate the pilgrimage.

At his death he was honored as one of the greatest Orientalists Europe had brought forth, and that honor was deserved, for no contemporary surpassed him in erudition and few equaled him in acuity. His works had been translated and reprinted, his judgment had carried weight in the learned world for half a century, and the triangle of founders of which the previous article spoke, Nöldeke, Snouck and Goldziher, had now shrunk to two and would soon pass into history. Snouck himself would outlive his old friend by another fifteen years, until 1936, and with his death the generation that had founded modern Islamic studies would have wholly departed.

The recognition he had received in his lifetime was great, but it was also late and it was, as it turns out in hindsight, incomplete, for it touched only the scholar and not the man. What the world knew of Goldziher the scholar was considerable. What the world knew of Goldziher the man remained hidden behind the dignity with which he had borne his humiliations, and it would come to light only after his death, and only long after his death.

The Diary That Waited Until 1978

For there was a diary. Goldziher had begun to write it on his fortieth birthday, on 22 June 1890, in the same year in which the second volume of Muhammedanische Studien appeared, and he had kept it in German, with passages in Hebrew and Arabic, as a private mirror in which he noted what he could confide to no one else. It remained after his death in the possession of his family, and after the death of his son Károly in November 1955 it came into the hands of the rabbi and scholar Alexander Scheiber, who preserved it and eventually prepared it for publication. In 1978 it appeared with the publisher Brill in Leiden, under the simple title Tagebuch, diary, more than half a century after the last line had been written.

What it revealed changed the image one had of Goldziher. Behind the respected scholar, behind the author of the standard works and the recipient of gold medals, a man emerged who had suffered deeply under the exclusion, who had experienced his years as secretary of the community as a slavery, who had felt misjudged and wounded by a world that acknowledged his genius and at the same time withheld from him the place that genius deserved. The bitterness in the diary is at times sharp, at times downright despairing, and it stands in stark contrast to the calm dignity of his published work. Here was the interior of the life we had described from the outside in the third article, and it confirmed what one could there only surmise, that the price he had paid for his scholarship had been higher than any outsider could have seen.

That Goldziher began this diary precisely on his fortieth birthday, in the year in which Muhammedanische Studien was completed, gives the whole a peculiar coherence. While by day and in his published work he was the calm, detached scholar who dissected the hadith and explained Islam to Europe, he confided to the private pages of his diary the man who lay hidden beneath that work, with his hurts and his longings, his anger and his faith. The two registers ran alongside each other a whole life long, the public and the concealed, and only the publication of 1978 laid the concealed beside the public, so that the descendant could see what the contemporary had not known. That the publication appeared, of all places, with Brill in Leiden, in the city that had formed Goldziher as a young man and that had brought forth the friend of his life, is a last quiet connection between the two cities between which this part of the theme has played out.

There lies in this diary a human truth that the theme must not skip over, for it guards us against the ease with which one might reduce a scholar to a mere position in a debate. Goldziher was no abstraction, no thesis, no specimen of the Orientalist gaze. He was a man who had loved and had suffered, who in Cairo had experienced the prayer as the most devout experience of his life and who in Budapest had borne humiliation as a burden that never grew lighter. The criticism of his work, which this theme has pressed without reserve, must not obscure that human truth but let it stand alongside, for both are true, and the one does not undo the other.

The Rejoinder

A book like Muhammedanische Studien cannot be answered with indignation, and the Muslim scholars who set themselves to it in the twentieth century understood that. They understood that the thesis of the hadith could be refuted only on the terrain on which it had been formulated, with the sources in hand, with the scholarly rigor that Goldziher himself had preached but had not applied to the Islamic science of transmission. The rejoinder came late, and it came from various quarters, but it came, and it is today an acknowledged scholarly counter-voice that no serious treatment of the early hadith can any longer pass over.

The first of the great refuters was Mustafa al-Siba’i ﵀, the Syrian scholar who in 1961 published his work As-Sunnah wa-makanatuha fi at-tashri’ al-islami, on the Sunna and its place in Islamic legislation. Al-Siba’i ﵀ took Goldziher’s thesis about the fabrication of the hadith directly in hand, and he focused in particular on the case the fourth article of this period discussed, the accusation against Imam al-Zuhri ﵀ that he had, at the behest of the Umayyads, invented traditions. By reconstructing the actual political situation of that time, by examining precisely the biography and reputation of al-Zuhri ﵀, and by testing the chronology, al-Siba’i ﵀ showed that Goldziher’s reconstruction foundered on the facts, that the supposed meetings could not have taken place and that the honor of one of the greatest transmitters of Islam had been wrongly impugned.

It is telling that al-Siba’i ﵀ wrote his work not as a merely academic refutation but as a defense of something he experienced as living and sacred. For him the attack on the Sunna was not a theoretical matter but an assault on the second foundation of Islamic law, for the Sunna is, alongside the Qur’an, the source from which the community draws its guidance, and whoever undermines its reliability undermines the ground beneath the religious life of millions. That engagement made his work no less scholarly, for he made his case with sources and arguments and not with indignation, but it gave it an urgency that Goldziher’s detached dissection lacked. Where the one studied the hadith as a historical phenomenon to be explained from the outside, the other defended it as an inheritance of which he was himself the heir, and it was precisely that relation from within that enabled him to see the gap over which the gaze from outside had stepped.

More fundamental still was the work of Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami ﵀, the scholar who with his Studies in Early Hadith Literature, originally published in 1968, attacked the edifice of Goldziher and his successor Schacht at its foundations. To grasp the significance of that work, one must first understand how Joseph Schacht had, in the middle of the twentieth century, sharpened Goldziher’s thesis into a system. Schacht studied not the hadith in general but early Islamic jurisprudence, and he formulated about it two propositions that drove skepticism to its extreme. The first was the argument from silence: when a tradition was not cited in an early legal dispute where, had it existed, it would have been decisive, then, so Schacht reasoned, it must at that moment not yet have existed and thus have been fabricated later. The second was the thesis of the retroactive growth of the isnad: the chains of transmission had, according to him, grown not from the Prophet ﷺ forward but from the later scholars backward, supplemented after the fact with ever older links to give a young position a venerable origin. Thus the whole science of transmission was declared to be a gigantic retrospective edifice, and Goldziher’s skepticism forged into an airtight system.

Al-Azami ﵀ did what the Western criticism had neglected: he went back to the earliest sources, to the manuscripts from the first and second Hijri centuries that had been discovered and published since Goldziher’s day, and he demonstrated that the recording of traditions had not begun in the third century but already during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ and at his encouragement. The assumption of a long, formless period of purely oral transmission, the silent foundation on which Goldziher’s whole reconstruction rested, proved on testing against the sources to be untenable. Al-Azami ﵀ documented the early written transmission, he traced the written pages of the Companions ﵃ and their students, and he showed that the thesis of retro-projection lacked the empty span of time that it needed. The argument from silence he turned around, for the silence of a single early source proves nothing so long as one has not shown that the source cited everything that existed, and that no one had shown. The thesis of the retroactive growth of the isnad he tested against the concrete transmission material, and he found not the artificial accretion the theory predicted but transmitters who had really lived, had really met one another and had really passed on to one another, exactly as the Islamic biographical science had established centuries before. In a later work, which he devoted directly to Schacht’s propositions, he took his reasonings one by one in hand and showed how they foundered on the sources. His work has become the backbone of the modern Islamic refutation of the Orientalist hadith skepticism, and it is no coincidence that this same work also carries the theme of the Islamic Sciences elsewhere in this atlas, for it is the same counter-voice that there restores the science of transmission to its full dignity.

Beside them stands the figure of Fuat Sezgin ﵀, the Turkish scholar whose monumental Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, the first volume of which appeared in 1967, has documented the early textuality of Islamic scholarship down to the details. Sezgin ﵀ mapped the manuscript transmission of the earliest centuries so completely that the notion of an exclusively oral transmission could not withstand it, and he thereby provided the bibliographical foundation beneath the refutation that al-Azami ﵀ conducted in substance. Where Goldziher had supposed that the early community hardly wrote and that the transmission was fixed only late, Sezgin ﵀ showed with an overwhelming quantity of manuscripts and catalogue data that there was writing from the very beginning, that the early scholars made their notes and compiled their books, and that the oral and the written transmission were not each other’s successors but each other’s companions, two threads of the same fabric. This finding pulled the ground out from under the thesis the fourth article described, for without a long span of formless oral transmission the reconstruction of retro-projection loses the space in which it had to take place.

Together these three scholars, the one from Syria, the other from India and the third from Turkey, form an answer that is rooted not in indignation but in learning, and that met Goldziher on his own terrain and with his own weapons. It is not an answer that the Muslim world welcomed with jubilation and after which the matter was closed, for the debate between Western hadith skepticism and its critics is alive to this day, and among Western scholars too the voices have since become more nuanced than they were in the days of Goldziher and Schacht. But it is an answer that has stripped the thesis of the mirror of its self-evidence, that has shown that the science of transmission was no pious superstition but a critical discipline of the first order, and that the community which preserved the words of the Prophet ﷺ displayed in doing so a care that nineteenth-century philology sooner underestimated than surpassed. With that the circle of this theme is complete, for what the opening article argued about Nöldeke and the Qur’an returns here about Goldziher and the hadith: Islamic scholarship had, centuries earlier, itself developed the criticism that some thought they had to teach it from outside, and with a fineness that its Western judges have been unwilling to see.

It is worth noting that even within the Western tradition the sharpest condemnation of Goldziher has not always been pronounced. Edward Said, who in his Orientalism of 1978 subjected the entire Orientalist enterprise to a fundamental critique, treated Goldziher remarkably mildly, as if he sensed that this man, more than most of his colleagues, had acted out of sincere love for his subject and not out of the will to domination that Said elsewhere laid bare so mercilessly. That a critic like Said spared him says something about the peculiar place Goldziher occupies, as the most honest and the most loving of the mirror-bearers, and at the same time as the man whose work sowed the deepest doubt.

The Mirror and the Window

What remains, at the end of these two periods, to be said of the mirror. The theme began with an impostor, with a man who under a false name and with a feigned conversion had penetrated the holy city and who had sold his knowledge to a colonial war. It ends with a sincere man, with a scholar who deceived no one, who in Cairo had prayed more devoutly than ever in his life, who had refused every service to power and who had himself belonged to the humiliated. And yet, and this is the lesson this whole construction has meant to teach, with him too the mirror remained a mirror. Even the most honest gaze of the West upon Islam remained a gaze from the outside, which read the revelation as a sediment of its time and which studied the tradition but never let it speak as living authority.

There lies the distinction that this theme means to capture in its final image, the distinction between the mirror and the window. A mirror throws back what stands before it, and whoever looks into the mirror sees in the end himself, his own method, his own presuppositions, his own time, thrown back into the image he believes he is perceiving. A window, by contrast, lets through, it shows what is on the other side, it opens onto a reality that is not the viewer. Orientalist scholarship, however learned and however loving at times, offered a mirror and not a window, for it never let Islam be anything that surpassed the viewer himself. Only he who may hear the tradition from within as living authority, who does not dissect the revelation but receives it, who does not explain the transmission but trusts it, sees through the window what the mirror has always kept hidden.

It is important to state this distinction without making it a condemnation, for the reverence this theme has shown for Goldziher is sincere and it is not withdrawn by this conclusion. He loved Islam more than most of his contemporaries, he treated it with a learning and a finesse that compel admiration, and he prayed in Cairo a prayer that he cherished his whole life as the deepest of his experiences. That the method nonetheless gave him a mirror and not a window is not his personal failing but the limit of a whole approach, and it would be unjust to charge him with a defect that lay in the tool and not in the hand that wielded it. The narrative therefore separates the man from the method, it loves the one and criticizes the other, and it holds that this is the only honest way to do justice to a life such as his.

And with that we return to the image with which the period on Goldziher found its climax, to that exalted Friday in Cairo, when the young scholar rubbed his forehead across the floor of the mosque and was more devout than ever in his life. In that one moment, among the thousands of the pious, he had come near the window. He had, for the duration of a prayer, stood not as a student before Islam but as one praying within it. And it is the tragedy of his whole further life that the method afterwards led him back to the mirror, that the man who had once almost seen what was on the other side spent the rest of his days describing his own reflection.

It is a verse that captures the distinction between the mirror and the window in a single sentence, for it speaks of a seeing that lies not in the eyes but in the heart. Goldziher’s eyes were sharp as few, his learning was unsurpassed, his knowledge of the sources reached further than that of almost all his contemporaries. But the seeing of which this verse speaks, the seeing of the heart that receives the revelation as what it says of itself to be, was not given to him, despite everything he knew. That is no indictment of his person, for the heart is a gift and not an achievement, and the narrative that has followed his life with reverence states this with sorrow and not with reproach.

Thus the period on Goldziher closes, and with it the mirroring of Leiden and Budapest. But the theme itself is not yet at an end, for there is a third mirror, older and in its own way darker than the two preceding. Before Leiden and Budapest learned to read Islam, Saint Petersburg had already learned to govern it, and in the next period we travel to the Russia of the tsars, to the figure of Iosif Igelström, and to a dealing with Islam that took shape not in the study but in the chancellery of the empire.

Sources

• Ignác Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, Carl Winter, Heidelberg (1910)
• Ignác Goldziher, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung, Brill, Leiden (1920)
• Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber, Brill, Leiden (1978)
• Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, Studies in Early Hadith Literature, Cambridge (1968)
• Mustafa al-Siba’i, As-Sunnah wa-makanatuha fi at-tashri’ al-islami, Cairo (1961)
• Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. I, Brill, Leiden (1967)
• Ignác Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols., Halle (1889-1890)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill/Akadémiai Kiadó (1986)