Ibn Warraq: Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History (Part 14)

I agree with you. Scott was a *storyteller*, not an historian.

I don't really see the point of this series, unless it is somehow to denigrate Scott for 'pro-Saracen' propaganda. To which I would retort, islam per se was not a threat at the time Scott was writing, and there were a lot of 19th century writers, artists, who had a romantic view of the East, and the Saracens.

And an image of a 'noble enemy' was fashionable, entertaining, and *romantic.* Just like Valentino as ''The Sheik.''

You wrote: 'Shakespeare was very sexist and antisemitic.' and then followed this arrant nonsense with '..and frankly as an academic I enjoyed reading his (Ibn Warraq's) critique ...'

You, an academic! You wouldn't recognize Literature with a capital 'L' even if it came marching naked up the middle of Main Street playing 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' on a big trombone!

Clown!

The most important point of the series, as stated in part one (which I'll paste below) is to basically show yet another one of those extremely shaky foundations on which Edward Said based his book Orientalism. Such foundations notwithstanding, this travesty of scholarly work would go on to define beyond-politically-correct boundaries of nearly all academic debate on mahoundianism and mahoundians, which are yet to be changed in any significant way that could allow truly honest debate on the bedouin savagery and barbarism epitomized by the cube of the black cube and the backward culture it has spawned.

---------------------------------------

PART I

PREAMBLE.

Genesis of an Idea.

The present essay grew out of my inquiries into something that Edward Said wrote about Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. It took on a life of its own, and grew and grew, and led me into the Crusades generally. What follows is not meant as a complete narrative history of the Crusades -- some superb new histories of the Crusades have appeared in the last ten years [1], I do not need to add to these, even if I could -- rather, I wish to examine some of the myths and legends perpetuated by Sir Walter Scott in his novels on the Crusades, and at the same time I wish to elucidate, if possible, the motives of the Crusaders, and the real origins of the Crusades. I began my studies of Scott’s Crusade novels three years ago with an examination of Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott, Jews and Saracens, and Other Sundry Subjects [2], but never finished them; this present essay is my belated effort to make good on my promise. While recently researching the historical background of Scott’s novel The Talisman, which recounts the exploits of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade, I came across Sir Hamilton Gibb’s biography -- or rather hagiography, as we shall see later -- of Saladin. Gibb [1895-1971], born in Alexandria, Egypt, but later educated in Edinburgh, was one of the last great Orientalists, or as Albert Hourani described him, “the last of the universal Arabists”; a professor at SOAS, then Oxford, and finally at Harvard. I discovered something that delighted me, since the discovery adds a certain poetic symmetry and brings some kind of justification to my study of Scott’s The Talisman. Here is the treasure: Sir Hamilton Gibb not only attended the same school as Scott in Edinburgh, he also immersed himself in Scott’s novel at an early age, and Saladin became his hero; and when he became a historian and university professor, Gibb recommended The Talisman to his students as “a work of art from which they could learn much about Islamic history”. [3]

Three years ago, I began my essay on Scott’s novels with what Edward Said said of The Talisman:

Edward Said, the late Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has, in his influential Orientalism, a characteristically shallow, sneering aside on Sir Walter Scott, and, in particular, on his novel, The Talisman:

In Scott’s novel The Talisman (1825), Sir Kenneth (of the Crouching Leopard) battles a single Saracen to a standoff somewhere in the Palestinian desert; as the Crusader and his opponent, who is Saladin in disguise, later engage in conversation, the Christian discovers his Muslim antagonist to be not so bad a fellow after all. Yet he remarks: "I well thought…that your blinded race had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid you would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of Palestine against so many valiant soldiers of God. I speak not thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people and religion. Strange is it to me, however, not that you should have the descent from the Evil One, but that you should boast of it." For indeed the Saracen does boast of tracing his race’s line back to Eblis, the Muslim Lucifer. But what is truly curious is not the feeble historicism by which Scott makes the scene “medieval,” letting Christian attack Muslim theologically in a way nineteenth-century Europeans would not (they would, though); rather, it is the airy condescension of damning a whole people “generally” while mitigating the offense with a cool “I don’t mean you in particular.”

Not only does Said make the unwarranted assumption that Sir Kenneth is voicing Scott’s thoughts [Said would have done well to heed Waugh’s motto to Brideshead Revisited, “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they”], he misunderstands and or at least fails to mention, the entire import of Scott’s novel, the contrast between the two cultures, particularly in the early chapters, with the Muslim one emerging to its advantage many times over. We come away from the novel with a sense of the chivalrous superiority of the Saracens. [4] (Incidentally, Said accuses Scott, creator of the historical novel, of “feeble historicism”, when he clearly means “historicity”).

Buraq wrote, replying to "Kerry":

You wrote: 'Shakespeare was very sexist and antisemitic.' and then followed this arrant nonsense with '..and frankly as an academic...
................................

Buraq, this is the sort of stupidity master's programs in English are teaching these days about one of the greatest writers in the this or any language.

What reductive idiocy.