É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
ESS, Josef van: Goldziher as a Contemporary of Islamic Reform
GOLDZIHER AS A CONTEMPORARY OF ISLAMIC REFORM Josef van Ess Tiibingen In 1890 Goldziher published at Halle the second volume of his Muhammedanische Studien. In the same year, on his 40th birthday, he started writing his diary which he continued until shortly before his death. These works do not have much in common. What Goldziher wrote about Hadith in that second volume may be considered to be the most mature and creative product of his scholarship. The diary, on the contrary, confronts us with an emotional - and sometimes rather unbalanced - inner dialogue which was never intended to be printed. In spite of this dissimilarity, the coincidence, fortuitous as it certainly is, may be apt to put us before a particular question: Why is it that Goldziher's image in the Islamic world is so bad whereas the view which he himself had of Islam was overall so positive? For when Muslims in our days refer to Goldziher as the archetype of the "Orientalist ', this epithet not being an especially flattering expression in their discourse, they mainly think of what he said about Hadith in the aforementioned volume, whereas his own impression of Islam - unrestricted praise as it turns out - comes to the fore in the introductory section of the diary where he describes his stay in Damascus and Cairo. He was relatively young then, 23 years old; we are thus dealing with two different periods in his life. Let us look at both periods and persuasions a little bit further. 1 I. Taken in itself Goldziher's analysis of Hadith does not need any comment. In European scholarship his approach found immediate and mostly enthusiastic approval 2; it has remained influential until today. Even in the Near East his works Some of the points raised in this article have been dealt with in detail by L. I. Conrad in a study published in: I. R. Netton (ed.), Golden Roads. Migration. Pilgrimage, and Travel in Mediaeval and Modern Islam, Richmond 1993, 110 ff: 'The Pilgrim from Pest. Goldziher's study tour in the Near East'. I regret having had no access to this book until my text had already been prepared for publication. Cf. for instance Snouck Hurgronje's reaction in a letter from Batavia dated 5th December 1890 (P. Sj. van Koningsveld, Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft. The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, Leiden 1985, 128) and his later appraisal in: Mohammedanism, New York-London 1916, 20. Somewhat more reserved is 37
