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 Székesfehérvár/ Stuhlweissenburg where Goldziher was born. 3 To him Judaism was primarily a religion of study, and now he discovered that Islam, too, made "a religious duty of study itself'.

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4 In this respect, both religions differed from Christianity where "the layman must know nothing of that which belongs to the studies of the priest". He generalized a bit; what he meant by "Christianity" here was the Catholic milieu in Hungary. But this was not his main point anyway; he was simply struck by the unpretentious devotion to learning which he found among his Muslim friends. This is what explains his enthusiasm; he had had the opportunity of meeting Islam in its human reality when he was in his most impressionable years. Immediate contact with the Islamic world was a rare thing at his time. German orientalists of the 19th century did normally not travel in the Near East; before 1871 the country was too poor (and too fragmented) for that. Nöldeke never went there, nor did Wellhausen. 0 Goldziher, however, belonged to a different tradition. Under the Habsburg monarchy, orientalists had become accustomed to a more practical understanding of their business. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) had been trained as a "Sprachknabe", a language boy, in Istanbul, and Alfred von Kremer (1828-89) had worked for some thirty years in the consular service of the Austrian empire in Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut and elsewhere. Goldziher owed his chance to the pioneering phase of Hungary after 1867; the universities were in need of young talents, and he was sent around in order to learn European methodology, first at Berlin and Leipzig, before his doctorate (which he got at the age of 20) and afterwards at Leiden and Vienna. Finally, when he was already a docent at the University of Budapest, he was offered a scholarship "in order to learn the colloquial language in Syria and Egypt and to get accustomed with Arab bureaucratical methods in the European consulates""', and he gladly agreed. But he never totally complied with the task he had been given the money for. The consuls did not see much of him; he used to visit his Muslim friends instead and to work with manuscripts in the libraries. 7 One month after his arrival in Damascus he entrusted to his diary: "Still I must learn the colloquial Arabic".

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5 He did so in the end'

9, but he impressed his partners by his mastery of the classical language. When the 1

1 Tagebuch 22; Pietsch 75. 1

4 Diary 105. 0 The main exception, after 1871, was Eduard Sachau (1845-1930) who taught at the University of Berlin. 1

6 Tagebuch 54. 3

7 lb. 66. 1

5 Diary 125. 1

9 There is no reason for assuming that he despised the dialects. I le knew a lot about them as is attested by his review of W. Spitta's Grammalik des arabischen Vulgärdialectes von Aegypten

, in ZDMG 35 (1881), 514 ff. (cf. the article by S. Hopkins in the present volume.) 43