Straight to the point

“As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria,” remarks the writer Robert Irwin parenthetically in an otherwise scholarly essay on medieval Arabic literature, “I once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat.” No further elaboration is forthcoming, as the essay continues on its learned and impeccably rational course. It is a characteristically Irwinian flourish from someone who, as A.S. Byatt remarked, “in some countries would be taught as their major writer”, and yet in Britain never quite achieved the renown he surely deserved. Yet when Irwin died this month, at the age of 77, British letters lost two writers of world importance. 

For some, Irwin’s primary career was that of the learned scholar of the medieval Near East and the world authority on the One Thousand and One Nights. As such, his devastating dissection of Edward Said’s Orientalism — that unfortunately influential polemic against the Orientalist tradition which Irwin proudly included himself within — was so effective by virtue of its lucid rationality and deep grounding in the source material. Yet the other Irwin — the Sufi mystic, explorer of the occult, and author of a series of strange and destabilising fictions — was more than a mere sideline. Just as in his novels, in which some awful truth threatens or promises to break through into our own staid reality, Irwin’s academic work was shot through with irruptions of mysteries both divine and diabolical. Without either of these Irwins, the academic or the mystic and fabulist, the other could not exist, and British intellectual life would be much the poorer.

“It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided that I wanted to become a Muslim saint,” Irwin opens his reminiscences of the Sixties, Memoirs of a Dervish. The rest of his career would be a working out of this decision, and of its spiritual and intellectual consequences. Trekking to a newly independent Algeria, “that unhappy land” with Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages in his satchel, Irwin set aside the drizzle of English life for the disorientating life of a faqir, or Sufi adept, in a Zawiya, a Sufi monastery. Feverishly learning Arabic through the Qu’ran, whose “powerfully rhythmic text was full of enigma, menace and mystical promises”, Irwin’s spiritual apprenticeship was a time of great boredom interspersed with miracles, for “time and materiality were twisted about in the Zawiya”, just as they would later be in his own writings. 

In the Zawiya, “even animals, birds and insects” were holy, Irwin remembered. “One had to be respectful to the flies that infested the place, for they would talk to you with the voice of the Shaikh.” As he would later matter-of-factly recount, Irwin would there observe the mutability of time and space: “I saw one faqir, who happened to be a dwarf, walk through a wall.” In one ceremony he “distinctly saw smoke rising” from the hands of a fellow adept faqir. “It was just the way things were in this holy place” where “boredom alternated with ecstasy”. Yet whatever the meaning of this all — and Irwin offers the reader no real attempt to find one — it would set his future literary path: “For me my youth was a time of miracles, for I had seen the Shaikh al-‘Alawi’s tomb flash with light.” Returning home to Chobham, “in the Surrey hills, in the midst of the stockbroker belt, home and family, I would prostrate myself before the Ruler of jinn and men and the Judge of the Fiery Pit whose fuel is men and stones.”

No doubt, just as it served him in his brief incarceration in an Israeli jail as a suspected pro-Palestinian terrorist, Irwin’s experience of an English public school education eased his apprenticeship as a Sufi adept. Unhappily educated at Epsom College “where almost everything that was not compulsory was forbidden”, Irwin was “used to confinement” and “inured to lack of privacy on the toilet, bad food and a strict regimen”. In a previous generation, Irwin’s spartan education would surely have moulded him into a colonial administrator. With its rote learning of Latin and veneration of Classical heroes as models for young English gentlemen, his education “was certainly much closer to that practised in the 17th and 18th centuries”. In his rebuke to Said, he observed that the administrators of “the great British imperial proconsuls… owed more to their reading of Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius” than “to any substantial familiarity with Oriental texts”. As such, “I sometimes think of myself as a living fossil, for I was taught in a school where daily chapel services and the study of Latin were compulsory for everyone.” The winding path to the Zawiya, and to the rigours and mortifications of Islamic mysticism, was surely laid in Surrey, even if Irwin never makes the connection explicit. Irwin was of a generation with no more deserts to conquer, no fabled cities to administer: instead, he chose to explore the unseen world, flickering like a shadow at the edge of daily experience. 

It is ironic, perhaps, that Irwin detected in his bête noire Edward Said a fellow victim, or beneficiary, of the English public school system, if at a Levantine remove. Though he chose to identify as Palestinian, Irwin observed, Said was born in Jerusalem more or less by chance, to Anglophone and Anglican Lebanese parents, and educated at Cairo’s Victoria College, “the Eton of the Middle East”, where Arabic was forbidden. Dismissing Said’s blistering (and in Irwin’s telling wildly inaccurate) portrayal of the British Orientalist scholar H.A.R. Gibb, Irwin remarks that “it may be that in Said’s fantasy world Gibb stood in for the headmaster of Victoria College, Cairo.” Just as Irwin’s fiction features uncanny doubles and correspondences, Said and Irwin, on opposing sides of a vitriolic debate as to the merits of the Orientalist scholarly tradition, were strange inversions of each other. Against the Arab breezily dismissive of Islamic culture as he won a dazzling career in English literature stood the Englishman, a self-imposed intellectual exile from “the sheer dowdiness, boredom and conventionality of Sixties Britain”, who would lose himself instead in the wonders and marvels of medieval Arab tradition.

In his masterly defence of Orientalist scholarship 30 years after Said’s thesis, Irwin persuasively shreds Orientalism’s driving argument: that Western scholarly and literary engagement with the Middle East set the stage for its later colonial domination, with a thousand elegant cuts. He lists Said’s numerous errors of fact and interpretation, and mercilessly untangles the logical knots of his argument, rendering the book, just like one of Irwin’s own fantastic novels, a world where “once one has entered the labyrinth of false turns, trompe-l’œil perspectives and cul-de-sacs, it is quite difficult to think one’s way out again.” Indeed, Irwin wrote, “it is a scandal and damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said’s argument about Orientalism could ever have been taken seriously.” 

Why, then, was and is it still so popular? Its advocates, Irwin suspects, have taken to it “not because they care two hoots about the real history of Orientalism, but because they are anti-Zionist or anti-American”. Yet, unlike many of his most vociferous advocates, Irwin shared Said’s disgust with the Israeli occupation of Palestine and America’s enabling role in it — there was very little ground between them on this matter. Irwin praised Said’s dismissive take on the Oslo peace process, as a “surrender” which would “prepare the way for the further erosion of the territories and rights of the Palestinians”, and shared Said’s hope for an equitable one-state solution and doubt that it would ever come to pass. Instead, Irwin’s righteous fury was purely directed at “the malign influence” of a book “which has been surprisingly effective in discrediting and demoralising an entire tradition of scholarship” which Irwin loved, and whose passing as a serious tradition in Britain he lived to mourn. Indeed, in his defence of his academic forebears, and of an Orientalist tradition handed down through personal transmission, we can perhaps discern in Irwin the Sufi disciple as well as the scholar: it was as an adept loyal to the memory of his masters, guardians of an arcane knowledge, that he excoriated Said for heresy. 

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It is perhaps ironic, given the short shrift he gave to Said, that Irwin’s fictions, a series of lurid and beguiling fantasies either set in the Middle East or echoing the intricate worlds within worlds of the One Thousand and One Nights, seemed to vindicate Said’s overall thesis. In his masterpiece, The Arabian Nightmare, both youthful dabblings in the occult and the experience of the Algerian Zawiya were reinterpreted in a dazzling fantasy of high Orientalist Gothic. He tells us of his “North African nightmares” during his youth, where he “invariably became aware of the presence of the Other, a being who was somehow simultaneously and paradoxically dispassionate and malevolent” and “would recite from the Qur’an to drive this creature away”. In such a way, the novel’s themes — the world of dreams intruding into objective reality, the tenuous nature of sanity and the corporeal world — carried over into his scholarly work as if in exorcism. He lavished recurring tropes with both fictional exploration and scholarly attention

As in his fiction, in his scholarship the boundaries between the visible and hidden worlds were gossamer-thin. Even the act of translation, for Irwin, “is like a seance with the dead and what comes out on the planchette will often read like urgent nonsense”. A cultural translator of the East for Western audiences, Irwin’s temperament led him to “giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness”. In his work, subject and object, East and West gaze into each other as in a fairground hall of mirrors, the image becoming more distorted and terrible, yet seductive, at every glance.

A product of the Sixties, and its rejection of staid Englishness, in later life Irwin came to lament “the destruction of Old England”. And there is, indeed, something quintessentially English in Irwin’s work and life, from its sheer, quiet weirdness to the wrestling with contrary impulses for cosy domesticity — he wrote and worked as a happy house-husband — and the yearning to explore new worlds, a voyage for him spiritual as well as physical. Irwin once declared: “Fate is a thoroughly literary affair. Each man has his story, and it is written on him.” In translating his spiritual quest into both fictions of wild inventiveness and scholarship of the highest order, fate surely granted Robert Irwin a literary renown, shimmering into vision, that is yet to take its final dazzling form.

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