*** Now, let us stay with GOLDZIHER (1850-1921, as the modern philologist of Islam par excellence, and the new condition of open “textuality” which he quite in contrast to Nietzsche saluted and furthered. A Jew by descent, a protestant scientist by thinking, brilliant in Arabic and Hebrew, and in the languages of classical antiquity, predetermined for a Chair in Oriental Studies in Vienna, however never appointed there. He lived his meager existence as a secretary of the Orthodox Jewish Community in Budapest, Hungary. However, his daily life was the one of a hardworking private scholar with a slowly growing but ever more recognized and internationally re-known stature. We should note that further to his Islamism, remaining a believing Jew, he attempted to promote the spirit of his local brothers in Budapest. However, he was rejected, denigrated and despised by his socially important religious forefathers. Due to his increasing foreign success, Goldziher was invited by them to lecture about Islam and progressive philology in Germany. His lectures resulted in a drastic attack on Orthodox Judaism and its retarded position towards science. In contrasting his critique of orthodoxy, he praised the example of early Muslim philologists and their disputes over codifications and structural formations of teaching, of textual collections and codifications, of interpretation of Qur´an and the Sunna of the Prophet. Namely, he praised the ´ilm al-hadith movement and its schools as the very key to understand the works of “science” in Islam since its early beginnings.

Earlier in the 1870s, Goldziher with the support of the Viennese Government had been sent to the Orient, Syria, Palestine and Egypt to accomplish his language abilities. He was well received and in Cairo he was accepted to join the al-Azhar University as the first European student. More than that, he was received by Muhammad ´Abduh (1849-1908), the modernist reformer, and befriended by Gamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), the theorist and philosopher, and his group between Cairo, Alexandria and Paris, as the only acceptable European Islam-Scholar. He involved both in his ideas on Science, Judaism and Islam, specifically in response to Ernest Renan’s theory that one should deny the ‘Semites’, the ability to ‘scientific’ apprehension and thinking, because, as Renan saw it, Judaism and Islam, as much as Hebrew and Arab literature, were preoccupied mostly with mythology. At a historically and locally important stage, between Cairo, Alexandria and Paris, Goldziher was setting up a discursive edge of exchange of ideas with these most influential Islamic thinkers, and beyond his own studies of the History of Islamic ideas, his arguments were largely based on his previous extensive study on “Mythology among the Hebrews”, rejecting the Renan-Thesis.

*** With these short remarks on Goldziher and his “science” in fact strongly entailing German enlightened philology, the one of the Fleischer-School in Leipzig, we might be able to see, how strong his inner convictions of universalism, critique and transcendent science came into play in his Islamwissenschaft. I wish to signify this as a decisive step in cross-cultural discourse, namely, the ‘opening up’ of the “TEXT” to the critical judgment, by way of giving attention to sources, transmitters, local contexts and time settings, as well as metaphoric systems. I will not enhance the effects of this critical philology as it became a modern condition of TEXTUALITY, in its confrontation with traditional formal religion. There are many reasons, why the study of this new level of interconnectedness between Modern Islamic thinking and as I wish to name it, TEXTUALITY, came to a halt. One of these reasons are, the appearance of Edward Said’s ORIENTALISM in 1978.  
          
II Orientalism
*** Edward Said’s famous Orientalism-Thesis – sadly enough in a more fundamental way - made us aware of the strong global inter-connectedness of the development of ideas, forms of modern authentication, the effects of ‘opening up’ and of closure of texts: active, reactive, interactive.
There, the issue of Orientalism overshadowed and de-constructed any attempts of pursuing ‘absolute immanence’ in a cultural humanistic way. Instead, an often enough dictated ‘point of view from the local’, and more and more welcomed vantage points of “Difference” became the issues of relentless cultural production of the day, being played forth and down in many constructive and distractive ways. How to avoid Orientalism? This became a question in the forefront of any debate about the treatment of texts in a cross-cultural global perspective.  I do not deny, that the emergence and the history of disciplines like sociology, social anthropology, archaeology, and the deep involvement of modern sciences and the related configurative issues such as the professional character building into the apparatuses of colonial suppression, was adamant in putting all these crucial developments into the wide shadow of Orientalism but also into renewed ideas of Western Difference and superiority. The call for cultural and social recognition of the East, its great history as well as in its decline and its modern suffering became a need.
My question is, not how to avoid Orientalism, but rather how the conscious treatment of these issues could lead perhaps further again to opening-up the closure of “text”. I will – perhaps considered a plasphemy today – “personalize” my critique of Said’s Orientalism and come back to my small case of Goldziher’s Islamwissenschaft. As already mentioned, Goldziher’s pilgrimage to the Orient, i.e. Egypt most important, of 1873-4 and even meeting al-Afghani in Paris again later, crystallizes a new stage treating of cross-cultural textuality: Goldziher’s and Afghani’s polemics against Ernest Renan and the refusal of his denigrating thesis on the Jews and science. The refusal was based not on polemics against a Christian philosopher, nor for the pure better understanding of the stands of Hebrews and Semites towards science, Goldziher’s convictions were in his stand with science and the universality of truth, as much, certainly, as he was influenced by his admiration of Islam and affection to Islamic intellectual history. The very same stance, Goldziher upheld against his orthodox Chief-Rabbi in Budapest in 1917, who had argued that science was hindering and impinging dangerously on religion. In fact, as against the orthodox Jews, Goldziher claimed, Islam is the only religion in which superstitions and healing ingredients are not frowned upon by rationality but by orthodox doctrine. This is where Goldzihers instinctive critique of most pernicious aspects of formal rule in religion becomes so obvious. However, this did not prevent him to remain critical to aspects of Islam of which he did not approve. He admired the unconditional monotheism of Islam and Judaism; he remained a pious and believing Jew and at the same time was respectful of his Muslim colleagues and their scholastic culture. Moreover, he remained a merciless critical scientist, mercilessly analizing Islam as he did with Judaism; dissecting them both to their most detailed historical particulars
During 1887 -1888 Goldziher gave a series of 5 public lectures on the “Essence and Development of Judaism” which never appeared in his collected works. Here indeed he praised Islam as an ideal combination for science and religion. However, in his “Muhammedanische Studien” – Muslim Studies, he created the intellectual History of Islam? – No, he developed an open, modern summary of a cohesive nevertheless debating religious and intellectual community…
To come to grips with Edward Said’s “de-personalized” view on Orientalism, I found it cynical and in the least helpful to relate Ignaz Goldziher with close company to Ernest Renan. What contention he could have had, other than denigrating, to put Goldziher, in one line with Renan, his very counter-idiom, Renan, among the “Orientalists”, as he named them, for whom Islam should be reduced to “tent and tribe”. This speaks more than the pages on Orientalism, in which he denigrates all universalistic and inner commitments of scholars like Goldziher into one raw with colonial Romanticism. These then are Said’s poor judgments and remarks on German Orientalism of the 19th century, cynical remarks of one who knew little about it.
 Can we subsume Goldziher’s mode of knowledge production under the verdict of E. Said’s Orientalism? No!  For me, the epistemic formation of Goldziher’s Islamwissenschaft can hardly be labeled under this verdict. Said’s Orientalism itself, to be clear, should be labeled under the prospects of science, religion, modern ideology and connectedness and with respect to the extent of which individual scholars look for ways out of departmentalized knowledge production and instrumental nihilism.

III Transcendent Empathy
***I have attempted to work out here a sketch on the case of Goldziher’s “Islamwissenschaft”. Indeed, the term comprises both “Wissenschaft on Islam” (science about Islam), as much as “Wissenschaft in Islam” (science in Islam). This stands in strong contradiction to a decisively different term: “Islampolitk”, which was later used by the Dutch Orientalist Snouck Hurgronje (for his appeasing politics in Indonesia, northern Sumatra) and the German C.H. Becker (for his war politics with the Ottomans). Both were scholarly as much as politically important figures in pre- and First World War Times, coming closer, however, allow me to say, to the imperial commitments of “Orientalist Politics” of Bernard Lewis and Edward Said and their followers, although they were very much in contradiction to each other.
 As I have attempted to show, Goldziher’s ‘absolute immanence’ in science and his momentum of interaction with Islam is unique and shattering. This comes specifically in his declining of the borderlines between the texts of world religions, his ‘opening up’ of texts and visions, forming of a new stage of textuality and interconnectedness.
I would like to add shortly another such a momentum of intercultural connectivity, deep and creative as it was for mutual understanding. It is the known case of Michel Foucault in the moment of the Iranian revolution. It was his conviction after a time of philosophical crisis, participation in worker strikes, and ‘wild’ readings, that philosophy should be brought nearer to real events of ideas, encapsulating the very movements of people on the grass roots of the society, This is where he promoted together with some of his Parisian colleagues a working group on “Reportages des idées”, the reporting of the working of ideas in the event of peoples movements, the very reporting about the working of ideas on the ground, here, in the autumn and winter months 1978 in Iran.
In the early days of September in 1978 after having consulted some of his friends and orientalists in Paris, even having visited Imam Khomeini in his Parisian residence garden – an event of which we have an important reportage in Novel Observateur, Foucault settled out for Iran. He described the earthquake of Tabas as a crucial event of ‘transcendence’ interfering in a social movement, and in his following trips to Tehran, he interviewed important people, politicians and intellectuals, as well as having occasional meetings with students and people on the streets. Foucault’s enquiry into the Iranian Revolution, if collected, forms a compendium of about 120 pages, documenting his strong concerns with the manifest processes of the revolution, the moods, the political and psychological engagements and atmospheric symbolism. Most important his very intrinsic descriptions of open forms of delegitimizing in open and successful forms the power of the Shah:
-    repeating the slogans and parts of speeches which were messaged by revolutionary leaders by cassette recorders to the people
-    the symbolism of direct confrontations, the pure bodies, the military, the biomachine of protest
-    most significant, the manifest symbolic power of the chador of women, massing up from the graveyards and burials of martyrs and to come forth to streets confronting the machine guns of the Shah
In all his discussions, reports, comments and essays, Foucault was pre-occupied with one major theme, namely his enquiry of the inherent concept of “political spirituality of Islam”
I am mentioning his deep inclination with this idea in its utopian sense, namely that Foucault was convinced of its revolutionary powers: the global meaning of the event of an idea reversing the cause of Western dominated history: or of what he named the revolution against spiritless times.
I am taking here, Foucault’s very serious and intrinsic discussion of this topic with leaders in Iran, with students and people as documented in these texts, just as one other great momentum of a deep scholarly engagement, an attempt of perspective- and theory-change, a transcendental empathetic inquiry into the cross-cultural dimensions of a concept.
Foucault in the period before his engagement with Iran had an intensive exchange as a secularist Marxist intellectual in Paris with Maurice Clavel on the renewed significance of transcendence in modern science and intellectualism around the term “spirituality”. However, to call his encounter with Iran, just another expression of Foucault’s ’philosophical journalism’, must be considered as a similarly declining and neglecting attitude of the cross-civilisational dimensions of Foucault’s engagement. Foucault retreated from the concept all in all, due to direct interference from friends, he never came back to the issue, and it took on quite different evolvements in the more and more culturally separate worlds of Islam and the West, where the issue of “orientalism”, contrary to its pretentions and calls for mutual recognition, turned into the real motor of separation and Difference-formation.

IV Concluding remark
I attempted to present to you two cases of what I would like to call momentums of cross-civilisational enquiry as a mode of TRANSCENDENTAL EMPATHY:
- Goldziher’s “Islamwissenschaft”, insisting in opening up the texts for mutual concerns and exchanges on critical textuality.
- Foucault’s ‘political spirituality’ as a call for serious mutual engagements, a call for reversing the course of a ‘world without spirit’.
I also hope to have shown the extent to which Goldziher and Foucault, here “Islamwissenschaft” and there, cross-civilizational philosophical enquiry of ‘ideas that happen’, shared a common fate in a world that became increasingly per-occupied with the ‘politics of orientalism’ and the works of so-called ‘recognition’ by way in search of ‘correct’ authentication.