Fuat Sezgin between Orientalism and Occidentalism

I sat down to write the last piece of the year 2019. There are many subjects I think I should write about. There is the Libya subject. What could not be written in the promising horizon of the domestic automobile answer, given immediately and in the most elegant manner to sustainable development for sovereignty, proposed for the whole Islamic world at the Kuala Lumpur Summit!

But as the last piece of benyear, I thought it would be more meaningful to say something about Fuat Sezgin. As is known, the year 2019 was declared the Fuat Sezgin year by our Presidency. I think a great deal needs to be said about him; the thought he put forward needs to be developed by speaking, thinking, working on it, even criticizing it, more. That is why I would like to devote this last piece of the year to him as a requirement of the year 2019.

In undertaking to lay out anew the cadastre of the Islamic heritage of culture, thought, science and technology, Fuat Sezgin undoubtedly on the one hand shakes the West-centered understanding of the history of sciences, and on the other makes a powerful critique of Orientalism.

The literature that Orientalism, which has permeated Western texts of history, science, literature and philosophy, has produced concerning the Islamic world of course has a dimension afflicted with an ethnocentric view. But it would not be right to say that the priority in all of Professor Sezgin's works is the critique of Orientalism. Perhaps one can even say more: What made his works possible is perhaps none other than the Orientalist academy to which he was affiliated.

It is precisely for this reason that the literature Professor Fuat put forward is, in a way, of a nature that could change even the view of Orientalism, or at least could require a fresh look at this subject. His critique of Orientalism is not like the criticisms in Muslim theological circles. He also says that the Orientalists' sole aim was not to colonize Islam out of bad prejudices against Islam, and that among them there is a well-intentioned vein trying to understand and learn the riches, depth and knowledge contained in Islam.

Indeed, just as not all Orientalists are the same, not all of them act with the same motivation. The first Turkish translation of Edward Said's famous book Orientalism was printed with the subtitle "the exploration arm of colonialism," which is not in the original. This is a reductionist approach that lumps all Orientalist literature together. Yet Said himself sees Orientalism as an effort of "knowing" that begins with Westerners' curiosity about the East. The sole aim or will of such an effort of knowing as a whole cannot, of course, be to establish power. The relationship established between knowing and power has Western philosophical roots and of course is not necessary. Indeed, alongside the Orientalist efforts that approach Islam or the East with generally ill-intentioned, prejudiced and colonialist intent, there is also, in the words of the title of the book by Maxime Rodinson, another famous Orientalist, translated into Turkish by Cemil Meriç, "an Islam that fascinates the West."

In fact Rodinson too is ultimately an important Orientalist. Even if he looks from a Marxist historical perspective, he is known for works that draw attention to Islam's contribution to human history and its undeniable place in the formation of Western civilization. He wrote this book, together with Said's book on Orientalism, to say, against the negative atmosphere that suddenly spread across all academic and intellectual circles, that this was not the West's only attitude toward Islam, and that on the contrary Islam always had a brilliant face that fascinated and influenced the West. Moreover, a Western knowledge fascinated by Islam is also ultimately an Orientalist knowledge, but this is not the Orientalism of a Dante. Leonard Binder too, with a similar distinction among Orientalist approaches, underlines the difference between "good Orientalism" and "bad Orientalism."

Fuat Sezgin too, in a conversation with Sefer Turan that was also published as a book, gives, among many examples, the French Orientalist Joseph Toussaint Reinaud. In a period when very few Arabic geography books had been printed, he worked on Islamic geography and made an extraordinary effort to show the traces of Islamic geographers in the history of world geography.

In fact, the person who would take Fuat Sezgin to Germany and thereby have him make a start on the formation of this corpus would be his teacher, who was at heart an Orientalist.

The works Orientalists have done in the field of mathematical geography are very important, but they have recorded their most important successes in the field of human geography. Indeed, in the field of Islamic sciences too, the contributions Orientalists have made to Islamic research are undeniable. Although in the field of hadith a general skepticism prevails that the approaches of many Orientalists are ill-intentioned and aim at planting doubts about hadiths, everyone knows that the first great index, that is, the Concordance, produced through the most meticulous work on 9 hadith books, the 6 great hadith books together with 3 other books, was made not by Muslims but by Orientalists. Perhaps with the spread of the computer this work no longer has its former importance, but throughout the twentieth century, when computer classification and indexing did not exist, this work was an invaluably useful, advancing, developing work for those doing hadith studies.

We devoted the year 2019 to talking about Professor Fuat but it was not enough; so it seems fated that we write the first piece of the year 2020 as well, as a fatiha, about him.