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Two: Ex Oriente Lux: Playing Eastern for a Living, 1838–1875
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chapter 2 .................................................................................................................. Ex Oriente Lux: Playing Eastern for a Living, 1838–1875 I n an October 1865 review of William Alger’s compilation Poetry of the Orient, an anonymous reviewer for The Nation asked readers, ‘‘How shall the West be brought duly to appreciate and respect the East?’’ It only made sense for The Nation to raise such an issue. Triumphant abolitionists had recently founded the magazine just as slavery had finally come to an end in the United States, and the future seemed bright for all sorts of progressive causes. However, it was not time to rest on one’s laurels yet, the reviewer continued: ‘‘Ex oriente lux is a true enough motto for the historian and archaeologist ; but with the sun riding high in heaven above our heads, . . . who feels with the Mohammedans, because they bore a chief part in bridging over the dark ages, that knowledge might pass from the classical to the modern world?’’ The Nation charged, ‘‘Our want of sympathy makes us intolerant: we depreciate their personal character, contemn their literature, and stigmatize their religion as childish superstition or as devil-worship.’’ Muslim West Asians had a ‘‘right,’’ he asserted, to protect their religions, languages, and political and cultural traditions from Western pressure—and Americans should help. Of the Alger volume at hand the reviewer advised, ‘‘The highest significance of such a work lies in its interest and e√ect in bringing the Orient to the knowledge and sympathizing regard of the cultivated in our community, the leaders of public opinion.’’∞ To make his case, this writer had used the phrase ‘‘ex oriente lux’’—‘‘from the East comes light’’—a term that had originated in the 1840s as the motto of New England transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson.≤ Soon it became a colloquial term that represented a tried-and-true method of crossing over supposedly controversial ideas about Eastern lands to the Anglo-American middle and upper classes, those ‘‘leaders of public opinion,’’ as The Nation described them. This was not the abstracted ‘‘public’’ composed of political men of ideas, nor was it the plebian, democratic public of firemen’s parades or beer wagon 52 ...Ex Oriente Lux congregations on election day.≥ This public was a book and lyceum public, a particularly self-aware group of self-conceived consumers and opinion makers made up of educated, upwardly mobile Anglo-Americans living mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. The Ex Oriente Lux mode of appealing to such consumers went like this: expose some common misconception as a straw man, then explain ‘‘the truth’’ of the topic, thereby giving one’s message a reformist purpose while flattering the audience as enlightened consumers of knowledge. Because cultural relativism has always existed, the Lux approach seldom revealed any truly new information but instead served as a way to make old insight seem new: ‘‘the East is misunderstood; only progressive people know this.’’ The Lux method of framing information about the Muslim world was an old standby, probably first pioneered by medieval travelers to Asia who debunked European myths about the Islamic world. Translators of Eastern literature and tellers of Oriental tales like Royall Tyler and Washington Irving had employed it when the nation was barely a generation old. By midcentury, the Ex Oriente Lux mode was appearing nightly in commercial venues across the country: magazines, books, lyceum lecture halls, museums, mass-produced illustrations, and local newspapers. In each of these places, audiences were asked to believe they were gaining instruction that set them apart from some imagined, uncritical public characterized by ‘‘common misunderstanding.’’ The Ex Oriente Lux mode worked so dependably because many AngloAmericans wanted to believe they had a special understanding of the Muslim world that marked them as more diligent and more sophisticated than most. Many believed common opinion especially disparaged Muslim North Africa and West Asia because most people uncritically accepted alarmist and cautionary accounts of those lands. Sometimes these cautionary depictions came from missionaries in the Ottoman Empire looking for sympathy, donations, or volunteers stateside; sometimes they came from writers made crabby and hateful by the fatigue and the culture shock of overseas travel. Much of it also seemed to pop up in the penny press, school books, and other cultural products needing villains, whose writers fell back on residual stereotypes about tyranny and slavery materialized in the person of the ‘‘Barbary Pirate’’ or the ‘‘despotic Turk’’ and found in political talk and sailor’s accounts from Revolutionary and early national days.∂ The phenomenon...