From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830–1926, and: The Accidental Tourist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and the British Invasion of Egypt in 1882 (review)

While respectfully citing Edward Said's 1978 "deconstruction" of "Orientalism," Geoffrey Nash improves on Said's critique of that ideology by focusing on a number of "travellers to the Middle East" who were, like Said, critical of standard British representations of Islam and of Western imperializing interventions in Egypt, Palestine, Persia, and Turkey. These "counter-Orientalist" travellers include David Urquhart, William Gifford Palgrave, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Edward Browne, and Marmaduke Pickthall. Nash also provides a chapter on Lord Curzon, who was obviously not critically disposed toward the British Empire. "Of the travellers who consciously identified with the eastern peoples whom they encountered, the Tory gentleman and anti-imperialist . . . Blunt, and Cambridge Orientalist . . . Browne, were the most vociferous in announcing their newly found friends to the European world," Nash writes (2). Rather than "reinforcing cultural stereotypes and re-entrenching notions of European supremacy," Blunt and Browne espoused "Egyptian and Iranian nationalism" (2).

Among nineteenth-century travellers to the Middle East, Said pays much attention to Edward Lane, author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and one of the translators of the Arabian Nights, and Richard Burton, author of Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855) and another translator of the Arabian Nights. Lane does not suggest a possible British takeover of Egypt, but Burton was very much in favor of imperializing the entire Middle East. Said also discusses Lord Cromer, Blunt's main adversary in Egyptian affairs. He has little to say about Blunt, however, except to note that he did not express "the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient" (Orientalism 237). Said does not examine Blunt's anti-imperialism, nor does he examine other Victorian critics of imperialism and Orientalism. Besides Blunt, these include the "Turcophile" Scotsman Urquhart, author of The Spirit of the East (1838); Palgrave, whose popular travelogue on Saudi Arabia appeared in 1865, followed by his Essays on Eastern Questions in 1872; Browne, whose many books and essays on Persia and Islamic reform include A Year Amongst the Persians (1893) and Pan-Islamism (1902); and Pickthall, the Edwardian traveller, novelist, and convert to Islam.

In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said addressed some of the criticisms that had been made of Orientalism, in part by including anti-imperialist figures such as Gandhi, Amílcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon. He did not, however, say much more about the anti-imperialists of the 1800s, except to indicate that "in colonies like the Congo and Egypt people such as Conrad, Roger Casement, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt record[ed] the abuses and the almost mindlessly unchecked tyrannies of the white man" (107). Nash's carefully researched study further helps to correct Said's initial picture of a largely monolithic, imperializing Orientalism. A fuller account of anti-imperialism before 1900 remains to be written, however. As C. A. Bayly points out, "indigenous anti-colonial histories in the non-white Empire could trace a much longer pedigree than has been commonly realized. These literary and symbolic resources were, after the 1880s, drawn upon by the first generation of nationalist writers" (Oxford History of the British Empire 5: 57).

A useful complement to Nash is Michael Berdine's detailed study of Blunt. Careful editing would have made it more useful, however; numerous writing glitches creep even into the quotations. For example, we read about Benjamin Disraeli as "'a quite young man'" (31), "'Each town . . . surrounded by its well'" instead of wall (39), and "'some of the wildest deserts inhibited by some of the wildest people in the world'" (40). Nevertheless, Blunt's story is an interesting and important one. From sympathy with Arabic...