Sir, – Mariam C. Said’s letter leaves no doubt that her husband Edward Said’s spoken and reading knowledge of modern Arabic was good and I am grateful for that clarification (Letters, May 30). But, in order to assess accurately the quality of Antoine Isaac Sylvestre de Sacy’s work, a good knowledge of classical Arabic would have been needed. I repeat that Edward Said produced no evidence at all that Sylvestre de Sacy tampered with the documents he worked on.
Alexander Drace-Francis (Letters, May 30) quotes Said in the original 1978 introduction to Orientalism as reproaching himself for neglecting to discuss various named German Orientalists. But on the next page Said stated the following: “What German Orientalism scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas and languages almost literally gathered from the orient by imperial Britain and France”. This is false, but Said never retracted this or any other misrepresentation of the Orientalists.
Then Drace-Francis claims that I have missed Said’s point “which was about earlier German Orientalists and their dependence on the French and British bringing manuscripts home in the context of imperial projects”. First, Said did not say that. Second, even if he had, he would have been wrong. German scholars did not sit around waiting for manuscript hand-outs from their British and French colleagues. To take a few examples, the famous Austrian Orientalist Josef von Hammer-Purgstall (1774– 1856) hunted for Arabic manuscripts in Cairo and Istanbul (and these were the best places). Alfred von Kremer (1828–99) was interpreter at the Austrian consulate in Alexandria and then spent time in Istanbul, Aleppo and Damascus accumulating manuscripts. Johann Gotfried Wetzstein (1815–1905), the consul in Damascus, assembled a major collection of manuscripts which ended up in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The Berlin library’s holdings of Arabic manuscripts, most of which had been donated by German scholars, was vast. Eventually, Wilhelm Ahlwardt produced the Verzeichnis der arabischen Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin in ten volumes (1887–99). This was more than just a list of manuscripts. It was a superb work of interpretative scholarship to which British scholars like myself have been indebted. The holdings and catalogue of the library at Gotha are hardly less impressive.
For further information about the Germans, their manuscripts and their libraries, see Johann Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa (1955). I could go on about the Germans and their libraries, full of Arabic manuscripts which they had collected, but I hope I do not have to.
ROBERT IRWIN
39 Harleyford Road, London SE11.
