The Test of a First-Rate Intelligence

Even the best of Orientalists can be awfully tiresome. Here is Edward G. Browne writing on the challenge of interpreting Hafez:

"That many of the odes are to be taken in a symbolic and mystical sense few will deny; that others mean what they say, and celebrate a beauty not celestial and a wine not allegorical can hardly be questioned; that the spiritual and the material should...be thus mingled will not surprise any one who understands the character, psychology and Weltanschauung of the people of Persia, where it is common enough to meet with persons who in the course of a single day will alternately present themselves as pious Muslims, heedless libertines, confirmed sceptics and mystical pantheists, or even incarnations of the Diety" [Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. III (1902), 299].

Browne here succeeds in painting an entire people as...what? Inconsistent? Is that the charge? Or, perhaps, he means that they are "colorful"--as "Orientals" so often appear to be (in the eyes of Orientalists).

My first response is to quote Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But even that does not quite capture my objection to Browne's ungracious (not to say bizarre) characterization of a people among whom he lived and from whom he benefited enormously.

The fact of the matter is that Browne, like so many of his Orientalist brethren, possessed a religious imagination stunted by Pauline Christianity: he simply could not conceive of the possibility that human beings might live fully in the flesh and in the spirit and that this sort of "well-rounded" existence constituted a perfectly legitimate life of piety. And since he was incapable of conceiving of piety in this way, it was necessarily exotic and just not right.

So, my second response is to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald: "...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" [Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New York: New Directions Books (1945), 69].

Hafez passed that test; Edward Browne, despite his many scholarly skills and accomplishments, fell short--at least when it came to making sense of Hafezian Islam.