Foreword

FOREWORD [I have had to rely entirely in the matter of this Supplement on the advice and far-reaching assistance of my colleague, Professor G. M. Wickens of University College, University of Toronto, and 1 take this opportunity of thanking him for having made the realization of the idea possible. Mr. Wickens has contributed the following foreword. EDITOR] For the layman there is today no shortage of books and articles on the East, whether Near, Middle or Far.' Some are serious and informative , more are light and "newsworthy," many downright trivial and even misleading. The fact that few are written by scholars, or by experts in any real sense of the word, does not, unfortunately, mean that those which are so written always fall perfectly into the first category. But, without the qualifications of scholarship-{)f that increasingly rare attainment of equivalent non-academic expertise (I am thinking, of course, of men such as Sir Reader Bullard, Sir Arnold Wilson, and C. J. Edmonds)-it is safe to say that nothing of any ultimate value to the layman will be produced. He may be amused, he may even gain many irrelevant, uncoordinated fragments of knowledge, or a useful talking point or two; but he will seize nothing of the "inwardness" of another culture, or experience moments of intellectual and spiritual kinship with its representatives. At the most, he will see "problems," without understanding people: he will assuredly never rise to an awareness of himself and his like in their capacity of potential "problems " to others. So much said, it will be realized that the University of Toronto Quarterly, with this number, is not entering into competition with the pundits of Time, Life, Maclean'S, or any of the many other journals that now "process" the East for easy public assimilation. The following articles differ considerably in style and method and subject-matter, but they are drawn together not only by their common preoccupation with aspects of the Islamic Near East, but also by their concern with a 166 G. M. WICKENS total culture as seen and experienced, in little and obliquely, by several specialist workers in respective subdivisions of tlJe field. If all tbe contributors are professional experts, whose understanding is based on the firmest grasp of tbe languages involved, each has long specialized in one or more branches of Islamic Studies: one is of outstanding eminence, tbe doyen of Islamists in tlJe English-speaking world, two are tlJemselves Muslim scholars of an authority acknowledged in both East and West; of the rest, tlJe one who does not at present hold an academic post, has unique qualifications of experience and training, and lives and works at a most sensitive point of cultural interpenetration. The broad plan of the number is clear from tlJe titles: separate articles pass in review tbe political and social life, and tlJe literature, of tbe Arabic-speaking lands, of Iran, and of Turkey; other studies are devoted to two polarities among tlJe gamut of reactions in the life of tlJe area's all-embracing religion, Islam. Each article is self-contained, and was written in total independence of the others, a situation tbat was probably desirable, but which was in any case imposed by tbe scattered locations of the various contributors. Yet tlJere is much in each tlJat will sharpen tbe siguificance of the others; nor do tbe lines of relationship run only vertically, within the linguistic sub-areas of tbe field, but horizontally as well, from one language-culture to anotber. If tbe light that comes from the East has often dazzled and made blind, it is hoped that tbese articles may serve as mirrors, to catch some rays tlJereof and cast tbem back in clarification of their origin. Indeed, a distant examination of the resulting chiaroscuro may provoke desire for closer scrutiny in a light more whole. It is time, willingly or against tbe grain, to admit tbat Robert Bridges' ironical prophecy, in the Testament of Beauty, if ever valid, was so for a very brief term: few Asians now make "outlandish pilgrimage" westward, merely to "worship " tbe ersatz brilliance of "electric light," but the eternal irradiation of the East (will-o'-tbe-wisps...