ABSTRACT

The first, and certainly most important, problem in modern Middle Eastern history is to find, and then to find a living for, a few historians fully qualified to investigate its problems. It must be realized that the great majority of those who write on Middle Eastern history, medieval or modern, are strictly not historians, but orientalist amateurs of history. The principal tasks of the orientalist lie in the fields of language, literature and general culture, and history is a by-product of our work in these fields. In England and Europe there are at most only some three or four orientalist scholars who are professional historians; the difference this makes can be easily seen when their production is compared with the usual orientalist works on Middle Eastern history. In the United States it would be hard to find as many. The study of any period of Middle Eastern history, medieval or modern, calls for a continuous and concentrated search for and study of considerable bodies of historical documents. The amateur is physically unable to do this because his attention is continually being drawn off to other tasks. Because orientalists have some of the competences necessary for historical study, and because the field was otherwise empty, they have been drawn into it; but the patchwork that we produce, and the gaps in our technical equipment are painfully obvious even (and especially) to ourselves.