JJ and Irish Orientalism

In his slim volume, THE STORY OF IRISH ORIENTALISM, Malikarjun Mansoor attempts to show the richness of Ireland's contribution to oriental studies and to demonstate that the "island of saints and sages" had a role in the subject of orientalism in ways more than one. "The Island of Saints and Sages" was the title of a lecture James Joyce delivered in Trieste in which JJ linked the Irish language to oriental languages, substantiating his viewpoint by the belief of many philologists that the Irish language belonged originally to the ancient language of the Phoenicians, the originators of trade and navigation. And not without a sense of nationalism, JJ wanted to point out that the Irish preceeded the British in orientalism, thus from a Saidesque viewpoint, orientalism, in the hands of JJ became part af an anti-imperialist strategy that could evoke a sense of Irish identity founded neither on the English language nor on the expansionism in British rule. Mansoor identified himself not with Ireland as a whole but with the Irish ascendancy with Trinity College and with a school that traced its founding in 1591 to Queen Elizabeth who later granted the first charter to the newly constituted East India Co whose trading activities reached as far as my city Mosul in northern Iraq from where mousseline--derived from the word Mosul--was imported to the London markets. Mansoor says that oriental studies did not begin until Trinity College had been founded, and he credits two brothers, Ambrose and James Ussher in late sixteenth century with offering the first lectures in Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac for undergraduates. In beginning of the seventeenth century Dudley Lofts distiguished himself as a superb linguist and translator of texts in Arabic, Persian, and Syriac