Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Volume 17: Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia (1800-1914) 9004437886, 9789004437883

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Christian-Muslim Relations A Bibliographical History

History of Christian-Muslim Relations Editorial Board Jon Hoover (University of Nottingham) Sandra Toenies Keating (Providence College) Tarif Khalidi (American University of Beirut) Suleiman Mourad (Smith College) Gabriel Said Reynolds (University of Notre Dame) Mark Swanson (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) David Thomas (University of Birmingham)

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Christians and Muslims have been involved in exchanges over matters of faith and morality since the founding of Islam. Attitudes between the faiths today are deeply coloured by the legacy of past encounters, and often preserve centuries-old negative views. The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, Texts and Studies presents the surviving record of past encounters in a variety of forms: authoritative, text editions and annotated translations, studies of authors and their works and collections of essays on particular themes and historical periods. It illustrates the development in mutual perceptions as these are contained in surviving Christian and Muslim writings, and makes available the arguments and rhetorical strategies that, for good or for ill, have left their mark on attitudes today. The series casts light on a history marked by intellectual creativity and occasional breakthroughs in communication, although, on the whole beset by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. By making this history better known, the series seeks to contribute to improved recognition between Christians and Muslims in the future. A number of volumes of the History of Christian-Muslim Relations series are published within the subseries Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History.

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hcmr

Christian-Muslim Relations A Bibliographical History Volume 17. Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia (1800-1914) Edited by David Thomas and John Chesworth with Clinton Bennett, Douglas Pratt, Karel Steenbrink

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LEIDEN BOSTON 2021

Cover illustration: Painting by J. Collier of Edward Henry Palmer (1884), Professor of Arabic at Cambridge and translator of the Qur’an. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://lccn. loc.gov/2009029184

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/ brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-7350 ISBN 978-90-04-43788-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44239-9 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

CONTENTS Foreword ........................................................................................................ ix List of Illustrations and Maps  ................................................................. xiv Abbreviations ................................................................................................ xvi Clinton Bennett, Introduction: Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia in the 19th century ......................................................... 1 Alison Dingle, The 19th-century Holy Land. English authors and the writing of a new biblical landscape .................................................. 23 Maryse Kruithof, The contribution of missionaries to the study of Islam in the Netherlands in the 19th century ..................................... 35 Simon Sorgenfrei, Diplomats, missionaries and a migrant merchant. Muslim-Swedish relations, 1800-1914 .................................... 47 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen, The impact of Islam and Muslims on Denmark in the 19th century ................................................................. 55 Nora S. Eggen, Islam and Norway in the 19th century ......................... 65 Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914 ................................ 79 Great Britain .................................................................................................. 81 Joseph White Dean Mahomet John Evans Robert Southey Charles Mills Robert Taylor Charles Forster Godfrey Higgins English Romantic poets and Islam

Clinton Bennett .................... 83 Michael H. Fisher ................. 91 Clinton Bennett .................... 98 Stuart Andrews ..................... 104 Clinton Bennett .................... 125 Clinton Bennett .................... 133 Clinton Bennett .................... 139 Clinton Bennett .................... 148 Jeffrey Einboden ................... 156

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Contents Thomas Carlyle Robert Fargher Edward Lane Joseph Wolff F.D. Maurice Ernest Frederick Fiske John Muehleisen Arnold John Davenport Matthew Arnold E.A. Freeman W.R.W. Stephens Monier Monier-Williams William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli Edwin Arnold English translators of the Qur’an Reginald Bosworth Smith Isaac Taylor Kesnin Bey Ernest de Bunsen Five Victorian women travellers in  the Ottoman world C.H. Robinson Richard F. Burton Emilie Loyson-Meriman F.A. Klein Lord Cromer W.H. Abdullah Quilliam Wilfrid Scawen Blunt David S. Margoliouth Early 20th-century missionary conferences Nineteenth-century British novelists on Islam Egypt General Mission

Michael T. Shelley ................ 165 Christine Talbot .................... 176 Michael T. Shelley ................ 180 Benno Herr ............................ 200 Michael T. Shelley ................ 209 David Emmanuel Singh ..... 220 Peter G. Riddell ..................... 224 Clinton Bennett .................... 231 Syed Faiz Zaidi ...................... 238 Clinton Bennett .................... 243 Clinton Bennett .................... 252 David Emmanuel Singh ..... 259 Clinton Bennett .................... 265 Clinton Bennett .................... 278 Andrew O’Connor ................ 286 Clinton Bennett .................... 294 Clinton Bennett .................... 307 Katherine Jennings .............. 316 Clinton Bennett .................... 324 Diane Robinson-Dunn ........ 330 Clinton Bennett .................... 356 Alison Dingle ......................... 368 Angela Berlis .......................... 384 Michael T. Shelley ................ 389 Michael T. Shelley ................ 393 Jamie Gilham ......................... 404 Jamie Gilham ......................... 427 Michael T. Shelley ................ 445 Serkan Ince ............................ 459 Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak 

468

Michael T. Shelley ................ 485

The Netherlands  ........................................................................................... 491 Willem Bilderdijk J.B.J. van Doren Salomon Keijzer Reinhart Dozy

Karel Steenbrink ................... 493 Karel Steenbrink ................... 499 Karel Steenbrink ................... 503 Marcel Poorthuis .................. 509



Contents Frans Lion Cachet Representations of Islam in the works of Dutch Protestant missionaries, 1850-1900 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje

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Aleida Maaike Derksen ...... 516 Maryse Kruithof .................... 525 Frans Wijsen and Karel Steenbrink .............................. 540

Scandinavia  ................................................................................................... 559 Carsten Niebuhr Pehr Malmström Ivar Ulrik Wallenius Georg August Wallin Gustaf Erik Eurén Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig August Ferdinand van Mehren Johannes Østrup Frants Buhl

Jørgen Bæk Simonsen ......... 561 Klaus Karttunen ................... 570 Klaus Karttunen ................... 573 Klaus Karttunen ................... 576 Klaus Karttunen ................... 582 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen ......... 584 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen ......... 592 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen ......... 598 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen ......... 604

Contributors .................................................................................................. 611 Index of Names ............................................................................................ 615 Index of Titles ............................................................................................... 629

FOREWORD David Thomas Christian-Muslim relations, a bibliographical history volume 17 (CMR 17), the second of the 19th-century volumes, covers Great Britain, the Netherlands and the countries of Scandinavia in the period 1800-1914. While it is characterised by works that continue the time-honoured Christian prejudices towards Islam, it also includes works that show dramatic departures from these. Attitudes that had persisted for centuries are still evident, chief among them that Muḥammad was a fraud, the Qur’an an unoriginal selection from the Bible, and Islam an uninspiring set of beliefs with an unimpressive ethic. But in these countries, there are clear hints of initiatives to examine Islam without preconceptions, to discover what Muslims believe and how they live, and to understand Islam as a historical and religious reality. In the 19th century, the United Kingdom was the major Christian country with connections to the Islamic world by virtue of its established trading connections with Islamic states, and the Ottoman Empire in particular, and its increasing occupation of territories with large Muslim populations. Travellers’ tales about exotic places, and translations of Arabic and Persian texts, together with British authors’ writings based on them, created a desire to know about cultures whose ways were alien and about a world that differed in every way from home. Hence the appearance of works that informed without prejudice, and unprejudiced examinations of fundamental features of Islam. Works appeared that overturned earlier notions about the character and status of the Prophet Muḥammad, the origins and contents of the Qur’an, and the nature of Islamic society. As British colonies were established in parts of the Islamic world, missionaries followed. Mission societies proliferated in the 19th century, and large amounts of missionary literature appeared, from letters home to reports for mission boards and full-scale polemical rebuttals of Islam. Some were written for home constituencies, describing missionaries’ experiences and occasionally revealing appreciation for Muslims and their culture, and others were directed against Muslims, for whom they not infrequently repeated or reshaped ancient arguments.

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Like the United Kingdom, the Netherlands also possessed colonies with large Muslim populations. These were largely in South East Asia, where trade in spices and exotic goods involved the Dutch closely in the local rulers’ squabbles about succession and rivalries over territory. Whereas the British tended to avoid religious matters, the Dutch found themselves deeply immersed in disputes between Muslim groups that sought to assert their particular version of Islam. It not infrequently happened that one ruler or religious leader would enlist the help of the local Dutch administration against another, forming a Muslim-Christian alliance against a fellow Muslim. Often drawing on the information provided by missionaries, scholars wrote extensively about Islam in the Netherlands’ Asian colonies, disputing the orthodoxy of the beliefs they were told about and arguing over the legitimacy of the hybrid forms of popular belief. Back home in the Netherlands, the established tradition of scholarship on Islam continued, with emphasis on the editing and study of texts as well as discussion of the familiar topics of the moral uprightness of Muḥammad and the human or divine origin of his proclamations. By contrast with these two colonial powers, in the countries of Scandinavia there was little knowledge of Islam as a lived religion. In the absence of possessions in the Islamic world, few people had met Muslims or heard much about them. Nevertheless, works on Islam did appear and, even though the Lutheran Church discouraged positive assessments of the other faith, there were attempts to give objective accounts of Muḥammad and the origins of Islam, as well as close studies of the Arabic text of the Qur’an. Scandinavian explorers who went to the Arab world seemed largely indifferent to the faith of the people they encountered, though Danish missionaries worked among Arab Muslims, and Swedish missionaries encountered Muslims in Central Asia and the Congo. While there was interest in the Islamic world, very few people dissented from the view that Islam as a faith lacked the depth and sophistication of Christianity, and the great majority regarded the character of Muḥammad as flawed, either by the political success he met in his later years or by his tendency to give in to his physical appetites. However, counteracting this were notable attempts to look at the faith and its founder without religious bias, and to evaluate the culture of Islam in its own terms. At the same time, over-simple depictions of the Islamic world turned it into a place of wild and dangerous allure, the exact opposite of the rational sobriety of the Christian West.



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The aim of the CMR series is to provide full analytical accounts of all the known works that were written by Christians and Muslims about the other and against the other throughout the world in the period 600-1914, as well as accounts that provide direct or indirect evidence of the attitudes that were expressed. As in earlier volumes, here the editors have been generously helped by scholars both new and well-established. In some instances, they have produced entries that not only sum up knowledge and research about a work or author but also take it forward. Like its predecessors, CMR 17 starts with introductory essays that outline the historical and social background in the parts of the world to be covered. Following these come the entries that make up the bulk of the volume. The principle has been to choose works written substantially about or against the other faith, or containing significant information or judgements that cast light on general attitudes towards it. By their nature, apologetic and polemical works are included, while letters and works of travel and history also frequently qualify. Sometimes the reason for including a work may not seem obvious because its direct references to Islam are few, though it repeatedly emerges that the work attests to particular attitudes in the way it is structured or its information has been selected, or occasional insults about the other faith point to the bias of its author. Everything is present that has been judged to contribute in any significant way towards conveying the information about the religious other that was possessed by 19th-century people in northern Europe, and towards constructing the impressions about the religious other that they generally held to be true. In most cases, this principle is easily applicable, though in some instances it proves difficult. The approach has therefore been inclusive (some might think too inclusive), especially regarding works that contain only slight though insightful details or that appear to touch only obliquely on relations. Another principle is that inclusion of works within this volume, like its predecessors, has been decided according to the date of their author’s death, not the date when the works themselves appeared (the date of publication is used where the author is not known). The adoption of this approach has led to evident anomalies at the beginning, where authors may have died in the early 19th century but were mainly or almost entirely active in the 18th century. Other criteria could have been adopted, such as an author’s most active period, though while this could have worked for some it would not have helped at all for many others. When it comes to the end-date of the volume, the year 1914, this principle has

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been relaxed. There is no plan to continue the CMR series beyond the early 20th century, and so, for the sake of completeness, authors who died after 1914 have been included, provided their main period of activity occurred before this limit. Another principle is to place the entry according to the location where the work was written, or, in the case of more than one work, where the majority were written. This means that certain British and Dutch authors who may be expected to be included here do not appear. Instead, the entries on them will be included in the volumes on South Asia, Africa, South East Asia or elsewhere as appropriate. Each entry is divided into two main parts. The first is concerned with the author: it contains essential biographical details, an account of their main intellectual activities and writings, the major primary sources of information about them, and scholarly studies on them from the mid20th century onwards. A small number of entries are concerned with clusters of authors who were active at roughly the same time and wrote on the same theme, in which case they are situated in the sequence of entries as appropriate. Without aiming to be exhaustive in biographical detail or scholarly study, this section contains enough information to enable readers to pursue further points about the authors and their general activities. The second part of the entry is concerned with the works of the author that are particularly devoted to the other faith. Here the aim is completeness. A work is named and dated, and then in two important sections its contents are described, with emphasis on its attention to Islam or Christianity (a handful of works in this region were written by Muslims), and its significance in the history of Christian-Muslim relations is appraised, including its later influence. There follow sections that list publication details (manuscripts where known, and then editions and translations, except in cases of well-known and popular works, where a selection of the most significant editions and translations is listed) and studies from roughly the middle of the 20th century onwards. Both these sections are intended to be fully up to date at the time of going to press. Like preceding volumes in the series, CMR 17 provides information that will enable a work to be identified, its importance appreciated, and editions and the latest studies located. Each work is also placed as far as possible together with other works from the same region that were written at the same time, though this grouping should be regarded as more a matter of organisational expediency than anything else. Proximity between entries is not an indication of any direct relationship between the works on



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which they were written, let alone influence between them (though this may sometimes be discernible). In this period, just like any other, it is as likely that an author was influenced by a work written in another country or century as by a work from their immediate locality or time. The task of producing CMR 17 has involved numerous contributors, and it is pleasing to note how many have readily agreed to write entries, and have sometimes produced entries that will remain authoritative for many years to come. Under the direction of David Thomas, the work for this volume was led by John Chesworth (Research Officer), Clinton Bennett (team leader for the United Kingdom and Scandinavia) and Karel Steenbrink (the Netherlands), who are members of a much larger team that comprises 26 specialists in total, covering all parts of the world. Several other scholars gave assistance in identifying relevant material, finding contributors and generally lending their expertise. Without their help and interest, the task of assembling the material in this volume could not have been completed. Among many others, special gratitude goes to Charles Tieszen for coordinating work on the essays, and also to Klaus Karttunen, Michael T. Shelley and Jørgen Bæk Simonsen. In addition, Carol Rowe copy-edited the entire volume, Phyllis Chesworth compiled the indexes, Lydia Jesudason worked on the illustrations and Louise Bouglass prepared the map. We are deeply indebted to everyone who has contributed to bringing this volume into being, not least colleagues at Brill, Leiden, who in a time of lockdown and stress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic produced it with their usual efficiency. Extensive efforts have been made to ensure the contents of the volume are both accurate and complete, though in a project that crosses as many boundaries of time, place, language and disciplines as this it would be unrealistic and rash to claim that these have fully succeeded. Details must surely have been overlooked, authors and whole works could have been ignored, new historical works may have come to light, new dates and interpretations may have been put forward, and new editions, translations and studies published. Therefore, corrections, additions and updates are cordially invited. They will be incorporated into the online version of CMR and into any further editions. Please send details of omissions and corrections to David Thomas at [email protected].

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 1 2 3 4

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8 9 10 11

T.M. Baynes, coloured lithograph of Dean Mahomet (Deen Mahomed). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection Library; no. 6123i ................................................................................ 92 Samuel Laurence, portrait of F.D. Maurice, oil on canvas, exhibited 1871. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London; NPG 1042 ............................................................................. 211 Henry van der Weyde, photograph of Edwin Arnold, 1881. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum; RP-F-2001-7-67-75 .................... 280 Map of Arabia from George Sale’s The Koran: Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, ed. Richard Davenport, London, 1861, at the end of the volume. Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library ......................................................................... 289 Frontispiece from The governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, London, 1865. Courtesy of the British Library; 070348 Public domain Mark 1.0 ....................... 342 Clarke, Cambridge, photograph of Charles Henry Robinson in Hausa dress. Frontispiece from Hausaland, or fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, London, 1897. Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library ....................................... 361 Photograph of Richard Burton. Frontispiece to Lady Burton’s edition of her husband’s Arabian nights, ed. I. Burton and J.H. McCarthy, vol. 2, London, 1886. Courtesy of Qatar National Library; 00014180 ............................................. 369 G.C. Beresford, photograph of Lord Cromer. Frontispiece to Modern Egypt, New York, 1908. Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library .................................................................................... 395 Report of a speech by Abdullah Quilliam, ‘Islam and Protestantism’, The Crescent. Courtesy of the Abdullah Quilliam Society ................................................................................ 416 ‘Map to illustrate the spread of Islam’, in S. Zwemer, Islam: A Challenge to Faith, New York, 1907. Courtesy of Internet Archive; OL24831797M ..................................................................... 461 L. de Koningh and Hilmar Johannes Backer, print of Willem Bilderdijk. Courtesy of Amsterdam City Archives; 010097016570 ...................................................................................... 494

12 13

14 15 16

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

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Photograph of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje in Mecca, January 1885. Courtesy of Images NRC.NL; 24423572-000734 .............................................................. 541 Koene and Com., Studio photograph of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. Courtesy of the University of Leiden Digital Collections; PK-F-58.1439 recto. Creative Commons CC-BY License .................................................................................... 555 Engraving of the Great Mosque in Mecca, in Beschreibung von Arabien, Copenhagen, 1772. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg; 0432 CC-BY-SA 4.0 ..... 566 A page from Corani Sura LVII Arabice et Suethice. Courtesy of the National Library of Finland; Dissertations of the Royal Academy of Turku (4175) ......................................... 574 Photograph of Johannes Østrup. Courtesy of Copenhagen Museum; 79806 ......................................................... 600

Map of Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia ................... 80

ABBREVIATIONS DNB Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 1885-1996; https://www.oxforddnb.com/ ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online; https://gale.com/ intl/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE ESTC English Short Title Catalogue; http://estc.bl.uk ICMR Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society MW The Muslim World ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004-; http://www.oxforddnb.com Q Qur’an VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)

Introduction: Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia in the 19th century Clinton Bennett With regard to Christian-Muslim relations, the long 19th century can be dated from Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1798 through to 1914, the beginning of World War I. Napoleon’s expedition prompted a move away from the attitude towards Muslims and the Islamic world that had dominated the 18th century in Europe, when the emphasis had been on similarities rather than differences between Christians and Muslims, who were all part of a common humanity. After 1798 this changed, and most Europeans tended to assume there was an irreducible difference between Christians and Muslims, the West and the East. The lands of Islam were seen as waiting for European intervention in order to civilise, educate, map, explore, research and define them. Muslims ceased to be seen as potential partners in dialogue that could benefit both sides, and were expected only to listen to European and Christian monologues that would tell them how to be human, how they should view their own religion and cultures, what they should study in educational institutions and how their societies should be governed. This view of the Muslim other, which Edward Said (1935-2003) calls ‘Orientalism’,1 was predicated on racist assumptions about European superiority, and about Europe’s supposed moral duty to supervise the affairs of the non-Western world. As this Introduction shows, dialogue did not completely disappear, but the Orientalists denounced both Christian and Muslim participants as unrepresentative and deviant. Not all Orientalists were Christian, but many Christians shared the view that non-Europeans were essentially inferior and needed European oversight. Said characterises this as the almost entirely self-serving construction of an imaginary Orient with only a tenuous resemblance to the reality it claimed to describe. Often produced by colonial officers and missionaries, it was vested with an authenticity that overrode anything 1 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978.

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introduction

a real Oriental spoke or wrote. It was a distorted reality to which those who had more romantic notions of the Orient as a place for adventure and forbidden pleasures also contributed. The overriding assumption was that all Muslims and all Asians were the same and that neither Islam nor the Orient could change socially or morally. The consequence was that Islam either had to be sidelined in terms of influence, or totally eradicated. Great Britain and the Netherlands were already governing or occupying Muslim-majority areas as the long 19th century began, and they acquired more territory as the century progressed. They were also involved in commerce and trade with the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim-majority states. In contrast, no other northern European state had colonies with large Muslim populations, although Sweden and Denmark had diplomatic and commercial contacts. Whether a country governed Muslim-majority colonies or not had some impact on the degree to which its citizens subscribed to Orientalism’s binary polarity. Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and others in such places as Ireland and Iceland may have questioned or simply not shared at least some Orientalist assumptions that most people in Britain and the Netherlands took for granted, although the Swedes, who towards the very end of the long 19th century organised and ran Iran’s police force (1911-15), certainly saw their role as a civilising mission in a land they described as backward and barbaric. Finnish experience is also distinctive in terms of Christian-Muslim relations, because Tatars, representing an early Muslim presence, settled in Finland from 1870. In this survey, developments in diplomatic relations, missionary encounters, the presence of Muslim migrants in northern Europe and the role of converts, are explored in order to analyse their impact on Christian-Muslim relations. A contrast will also be considered between the ways in which the British and the Dutch colonial projects affected Christian-Muslim relations and how some Danes challenged the Orientalist view of a stagnant, unchanging Orient, and positioned themselves instead as ‘non-threatening actors’ when they went to the Orient. The writings of missionaries who held less hostile approaches to Islam also influenced some people in northern Europe towards more conciliatory views. Nor, for a variety of reasons, did all British and Dutch writers fully exhibit Orientalist attitudes. Among others, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) from his Scottish background, and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), informed by his Jewish background, were known for their criticism of the Orientalist mentality. Individual attitudes could be more complex, of course, even ambiguous or nuanced in various ways, rather than replicating the typical Orientalist view of a William Muir (1819-1905) or a Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936). Muir, who served in



Clinton Bennett

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India, saw Islam as civilisation’s enemy, while Hurgronje, who served in the Dutch East Indies, thought that Islam could be Christianised by jettisoning all its political and legal aspects. He thought that, by forging an accommodation with ‘humanism’, Muslims could enjoy social equality with Europeans because cultural differences between them would be minimised. But his hope that this would end Muslim objections to being ruled by Westerners was too optimistic. Both saw their writings on Islam as bene­fitting the states they served, and for Muir they also supported Christian missionary outreach. Scholarship, colonialism and Christian mission were often closely allied, even when it was official government policy to remain neutral on religious matters. A web of intersections makes a monolithic representation of Christian-Muslim relations during any historical period impossible. However, some common factors did help to shape perceptions of Muslims and of Islam across northern Europe, including the memory of raids by Turkish pirates, the capture of seamen off the Barbary coast, efforts to free these by ransom or through diplomacy, including the system of safe passes that Denmark, Sweden and the Dutch purchased between 1712 and 1838,2 and commercial and economic activity in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. During the 19th century, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden all held Ottoman capitulations (trading concessions). Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands: Orientalism, and its discontents Colonial background Taking the Orientalist attitude as dominant, after describing some of the best known and most influential Orientalist writers in Britain and the Netherlands, this survey analyses the contributions of several individuals who did not fully subscribe to, or who parted company from, the dominant mentality. Together with France, the British and the Dutch were the main colonial powers during the 19th century, overtaking Spain and Portugal. The largest Dutch territory, today known as Indonesia, was 2 The Netherlands signed a treaty guaranteeing safe passage with Algeria in 1712, Sweden in 1729 and Denmark in 1747. Until then, funds to ransom Danish captives were mainly collected in churches. This system ended in 1838 when Algeria ceased privateering. See E. Gǿbel, ‘The Danish “Algerian sea passes”, 1747-1838. An example of extraterritorial production of human security’, Historical Social Research 35 (2010) 164-89.

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predominantly Muslim, while the British governed substantial Muslim populations in India, Malaysia, Egypt (after 1882) and elsewhere in Africa. The British also exercised considerable power in a number of Muslim-majority protectorates, such as Aden (from 1872), the Trucial States (from 1820) and Bahrain (from 1880). From 1907, when the AngloRussian Convention was signed, which excluded Russia from interfering in Afghanistan and Tibet but split Iran into Russian and British spheres, Britain was also de facto an imperial power in Iran. All this was part of the Great Game3 between Russia and Britain as they vied for imperial power. Iran had granted a British prospector the concession to explore for oil in 1901, and after this the Anglo-Persian Oil Company would channel almost all Iran’s oil revenue’s into British hands. The Great Game was the backdrop to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901).4 Britain’s main concern was to protect its sea routes to India, and its political and commercial interests there, and also to outflank Germany. The protection of India, and British investments in the Suez Canal, also lay behind Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882, although Egypt officially remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914, when the British declared it a Protectorate. Also behind Britain’s increased interest in both Egypt and in Iran towards the end of the 19th century was a shift in Britain’s relations with the Ottoman Empire away from friendship and support to indifference and disengagement in the expectation that the empire would soon crumble, leaving more areas for British colonial expansion. As Britain withdrew from the Ottoman Empire, reducing commercial and other activities, Germany stepped in, which further complicated the strategic and economic picture. The British and Dutch colonial projects in the East began through chartered companies that enjoyed monopolies on trade. These were the British East India Company (1640) and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) (1602). However, after the anti-British revolt in India of 1857, which the British saw as primarily Muslim-led, the Government of India Act (1858) transferred authority from the Company to the Crown. The Dutch government had wound up the VOC in 1799, and taken direct control of its territories. British policy in India did not allow Christian missionaries to work there until 1813, and both colonial 3 The term ‘Great Game’ is attributed to Arthur Conolly (1807-42), a British political officer in India, who often travelled disguised as Ali Khan. 4 Kipling uses the term frequently in the novel. For example, R. Kipling, Kim, Garden City NY, 1912, pp. 158, 181, 216, 218, 234, 246, 248, 271, 276, 305, 315, 333. See S. Khattak, ‘Nineteenth-century British novelists on Islam’, in CMR 17, 468-84.



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powers adopted an official policy of non-interference in their subjects’ religious beliefs and practices, though they also saw missionaries as allies in the tasks of civilising and subjugating. After 1857, Indian Muslims were increasingly regarded as prone to rebellion and untrustworthy, and their religion as repressive. William Muir, a senior colonial official and an active supporter of Christian mission through his writings and as a patron, summed this up when he wrote, ‘Christian nations may advance in civilization, freedom and morality, in philosophy, science and the arts but Islam stands still.’5 Here, he expressed the typically Orientalist idea of a static Islam, incapable of change. In his biography of Muḥammad, he also surmised that the Prophet had oscillated between satanic and divine influence, but in the end had committed conscious fraud and compromised with evil.6 Initially, Dutch attitudes towards Islam, according to a missionary publication, were rather favourable, and ‘conversion to Christianity’ was ‘frowned upon’,7 though later, after rebellion began in Aceh in 1873, the government became more friendly towards missionaries. Colonial governments found ways of undermining many aspects of local cultures and religions through the educational institutions they created and their curricula. In the East Indies, where from 1889 Hurgronje worked as adviser to the government on religious matters, the authorities ‘developed’ a policy of ‘not seeing’, ignoring ‘Islamic influences […] while exaggerating and essentializing the influence of pre-Islamic ideals’.8 Hurgronje saw Islam as the main obstacle in achieving his goal of unifying ‘the colonial state with the Dutch motherland’.9 ‘Islam,’ he wrote, is ‘excessively full of rubbish which has become entirely useless, and for nine or ten centuries they have not been submitted to a revision deserving of that name.’10 This could be achieved by stripping Islam of all its social and political aspects so that 5 W. Muir, The Caliphate, its rise, decline and fall. From original sources, London, 1891, pp. 289, 597. See A. Powell, G. Nickell and A. Guenther, ‘William Muir’, in CMR 21 (forthcoming). 6 W. Muir, The Life of Mahomet, London, 1858, vol. 1, pp. 90-1. 7 A. McConnell, R.W. Moody and A.P. Fit, Record of Christian work, East Northfield MA, 1905, vol. 24, p. 244. 8 R.W. Hefner, Civil Islam. Muslims and democratization in Indonesia, Princeton NJ, 2000, p. 32. 9 D. Jung, ‘“Islam as a problem”. Dutch religious politics in the East Indies’, Review of Religious Research 51 (2010) 288-382, p. 289. 10 C.S. Hurgronje, Mohammedanism. Lectures on its origin, its religious and political growth, and its present state, New York, 1916, p. 139. These lectures were presented in 1914. See F. Wijsen and K. Steenbrink, ‘Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje’, in CMR 17, 540-58.

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while Muslims would remain Muslim in devotional practices, they would become Dutch in opinions, values and national loyalty. On his advice, the authorities relaxed controls on ‘religious’ Islam while stiffening those on ‘political’ Islam.11 Hurgronje, who performed the ḥajj in 1884 posing as a Muslim, and disguised himself as Hajji Abdul Gaffar in Aceh during the rebellion there, and Muir, who headed the intelligence department in north west India during the 1857 revolt, blurred the distinction between their scholarly pursuits and involvement in espionage in support of their colonial governments. This is part of Said’s ‘dialectic of knowledge and control’.12 Missionary attitudes A typical Dutch attitude to Islam in the early 19th century can be seen in the writings of Jan Scharp (1756-1828).13 In 1820, the Dutch Missionary Society, which had been founded in 1797, appointed him to prepare students for work among Muslims. In the lectures he delivered, he characterised Muslim life as sensuous and immoral, full of ‘slave girls, female dancers and male prostitutes’ and ‘the unbridled passion for perverse relations and the carnal expectations of a never-ending life, full of lascivious passions and indulgences of all kinds of lust’.14 The Dutch Arabist and historian Reinhart Dozy (1820-83) portrayed Islam as inferior, even though he did not write from an explicitly Christian position.15 In his widely translated Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne, jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides, 711-1110 (4 vols, Leiden, 1861) he ‘ignored and degraded the values of the Muslims, characterized the Muslim community as despotic and evaluated and interpreted the history

11 Hefner, Civil Islam, p. 32. 12 Said, Orientalism, p. 36. 13 Scharp’s 1799 doctoral thesis at Duisburg, ‘Dissertatio inauguralis de veterum et recentiorum obtractationibus veritatem religionis Christianae non labefactantibus’, was on how Muslims fight against the Gospel. 14 J. Scharp, Muhammedanismus, Amsterdam, 1824, p. 24. Cited from the MS at the Dutch National Archives, Utrecht, as translated by K. Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and conflicts, 1596-1950, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 57. 15 Johannes Avetaranian (1861-1919), a former Muslim who worked with the Swedish Mission in Kashgar, in present-day Xinjiang, China, wrote in his posthumously published autobiography, A Muslim who became a Christian (trans. J. Bechard, Hertford CN, 2002), that Dozy ‘did not base himself on Christianity and criticized Islam without being able to offer people something else, something better’, commenting that a famous preacher wrote a ‘series of articles against’ him (p. 173). His name is also spelled Awetaranian.



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of Islam according to Western perspective and imagination’.16 He wrote that Muḥammad would sob and weep like a woman, suffered from epilepsy, lacked martial courage, had a morbid disposition and liked to wander aimlessly and self-commune in ‘lonely valleys’.17 The degree to which Muslims in al-Andalus and elsewhere had made an original contribution to knowledge as opposed to merely preserving the legacy of Greek learning became contested. In Ireland in 1829, Charles Forster (1787-1871), an eccentric but erudite Church of Ireland clergyman, who was perhaps less likely to subscribe to imperialistic arrogance, wrote that, while Europe was ‘slumbering in […] intellectual torpidity […] the Arabs were’ giving ‘a new spirit of life and knowledge to the Western world’. He saw Islam as the ally, not the foe, of Christians, the fulfilment of God’s promise in the Bible that Ishmael’s heirs would be blessed, thought that Christian-Muslim intellectual exchange in Spain was an example of ‘providential coincidence’,18 and believed that Christian-Muslim cooperation could help the progress of human civilisation. But others scorned the possibility that Muslims could have contributed anything of value to humanity’s intellectual heritage. Writing in 1888, Canon Malcolm MacColl (1831-1907), a strong supporter of William Ewart Gladstone’s anti-Turkish policies, pronounced that Islam was both ‘fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed to Christianity’ and ‘essentially and historically incompatible with civilisation’,19 which sounds like William Muir. In The Eastern Question (1877), MacColl argued that the ‘glories’ of Baghdad’s golden age owed nothing to Islam, since wherever it spreads Islam closes people’s minds ‘to the entrance of any purer light’.20 Some missionaries did develop less confrontational approaches to Islam, including William Henry Temple Gairdner (1873-1923) in Egypt and Walter Ayscoughe Rice (18611948) in India and Iran, whose writings were influential among British Christians. Gairdner moved away from the emphasis on differences between Christianity and Islam towards engaging with Muslims about their

16 E.A. Jamsari and M.N. Talib, ‘Eurocentrism in Reinhart Dozy’s Spanish Islam. A history of the Muslims in Spain’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5/29 (2014) 74-80, p. 74. 17 R. Dozy, Spanish Islam. A history of the Moslems in Spain, trans. F.G. Stokes, London, 1913, p. 12. See M. Poorthuis, ‘Reinhart Dozy’, in CMR 17, 509-15. 18 C. Forster, Mahometanism unveiled, London, 1829, vol. 2, p. 52. See C. Bennett, ‘Charles Forster’, in CMR 17, 139-47. 19 M. MacColl, ‘Islam and civilization’, Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature 47/6 (1888) 835-49, p. 835. 20 M. MacColl, The Eastern Question. Its facts and fallacies, London, 1877, p. 199.

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perceptions of Christianity and using that as his guide to formulating a response that started with where they were.21 Rice tried to find ways of expressing Christian beliefs that would enable Muslims to grasp their intent, seeing them as symbols of a mystery rather than as literal descriptions of divine reality.22 He thought Christians could use the Qur’an to support their preaching, departing from the consensus that it was fabricated and had little or no value in evangelising Muslims. During the 19th century, British Protestant missions took an increasing interest in evangelising Muslims. In most missions, decisions from the field had to be approved by the headquarters office at home. This resulted in copious correspondence as well as detailed minutes concerning requests for permission to undertake activities and grants of money to be used for setting up and operating printing presses. Anglican missions that were active in areas with a Muslim presence included the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG, founded in 1701), Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (CMS, founded in 1799) and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA, founded in 1857). Non-conformist denominations also established missions, including the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS, founded in 1792), the London Missionary Society (LMS, founded in 1795) whose members were mainly Congregationalists, the Edinburgh Mission Society, later Church of Scotland Mission (CSM, founded 1797, whose members were Presbyterians), and in addition various Methodist Missions from the late 18th century.23 In the latter part of the 19th century, several non-denominational missions were started with a focus on the Middle East; these included the 21 See R.A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya. Biographical history of Christian missions, Grand Rapids MI, 2004, p. 244, and W.H.T. Gairdner, The reproach of Islam, London, 1909. See M.T. Shelley, ‘W.H. Temple Gairdner’, in CMR 19 (forthcoming). 22 W.A. Rice, Crusaders of the twentieth century. Or, the Christian missionary and the Muslim, London, 1910. Despite the use of ‘crusader’ in the title, Rice’s approach to Islam was less hostile than that of most missionaries. 23 See D. O’Connor et al. (eds), Three centuries of mission. The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701-2000, London, 2000; C.P. Williams, The ideal of the self-governing church. A study in Victorian strategy, Leiden, 1990; K. Ward and B. Stanley (eds), The Church Mission Society and world Christianity 1799-1999, Richmond, 2000; A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, History of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. 1. 1859-1909, London, 1955; B. Stanley, The history of the Baptist Missionary Society, Edinburgh, 1992; S. Thorne, Congregational missions and the making of an imperial culture in nineteenthcentury England, Stanford CA, 1999; A. Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion 1700-1914, Manchester, 2004. Details of the archives of these societies can be found through MUNDUS Gateway to missionary collections in the United Kingdom; www.mundus.ac.uk.



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British Syrian Mission (founded in 1860) and the Egypt Mission Band founded in 1898 (from 1903, it was named the Egypt General Mission [EGM]).24 Many missions worked in several fields, such as the Middle East and in addition Africa, Asia or the Caribbean. In all these areas, missionaries and local workers encountered Muslims and corresponded with their mission headquarters about ways to evangelise them or to counter resistance from them. The British committees discussed the actions to be taken and made decisions about requests for additional funds. The challenges faced in different fields led to different approaches towards Muslims. 25 The missionary societies produced newsletters and reports for their supporters, which served to inform readers about the work in the field and to raise awareness. For example, the CMS published Church Missionary Intelligencer, and the EGM published EGM News and The Muezzin. A call to prayer, for children. Missionary societies also worked with publishing societies to produce evangelistic material. The main publishers were the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK, founded in 1698), the Religious Tract Society (RTS, founded in 1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS, founded in 1804). These societies published tracts and books for the missions and provided grants for printing presses in the field. One of the earliest of these was the press established in Malta in 1815 for the Mediterranean Mission of the CMS jointly with the RTS and BFBS. This produced Christian Scriptures in Arabic to be distributed in the Ottoman Empire.26 In 1819, the SPCK set up an Anti-Infidel Committee to oversee the production of suitable material, then, in 1834, a Tract Committee. The latter met monthly and approved the contents, publication and reprinting of 24 The British Syrian Mission and Egypt General Mission joined with other Middle Eastern missions in 1978 to form Middle East Christian Outreach (MECO). The MECO archives are held at the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford. See M.T. Shelley, ‘Egypt General Mission’, in CMR 17, 485-90. 25 In October 1875, CMS held a two day conference on Missions to the Mohammedans to discuss strategies, see Church Missionary Intelligencer (January 1876) 6-14. See entries on British missionaries and societies in CMR vols 18-21 which reflect these different approaches. For example, M.T. Shelley, ‘F.A. Klein’, in CMR 17, 389-92, ‘W.H. Temple Gairdner’, in CMR 18; A.F. Climenhaga, ‘Ajayi Crowther’, and J. Chesworth, ‘W.E. Taylor’, in CMR 19; M.J. Vaughan, ‘Church Missionary Society in South Asia’, and G. Nickel, ‘Carl Pfander’, in CMR 23 (all forthcoming). 26 K. Cragg, ‘Being made disciples. The Middle East’, in K. Ward and B. Stanley (eds), The Church Mission Society and world Christianity 1799-1999, Richmond, 2000, 120-43, pp. 122-3.

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tracts. The societies also printed material in a variety of languages for the mission field.27 The intersection of mission and colonialism Technically, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, (1841-1917) was Britain’s senior diplomatic in Egypt between 1883 and 1907, though he actually exercised almost absolute power in what was effectively a British colony. Cromer saw his task as to protect the route to India and ensure that Egypt paid for its own occupation. Unlike many colonial officials, he did not really see himself as a civiliser because he feared that educated Egyptians would tend to oppose British rule. However, without learning Arabic he adopted a patronising attitude that assumed he knew Egyptians and their needs better than they did themselves. In Modern Egypt (1908), he magisterially declared that the chief characteristic of the Oriental mind is ‘want of accuracy’,28 displaying the attitude that Orientals were the same everywhere, and implying that his book would help colonial administrators anywhere across the empire. ‘Islam,’ he boldly stated, ‘cannot be reformed; that is, Islam reformed is Islam no longer’ but ‘something else’, and he went on to cite Muir’s statement on Islam’s static nature.29 Indeed, the Egyptian’s ‘lethargic and suspicious […] Eastern mind […] does not want to be reformed’.30 In 1890, Cromer appointed a Scottish missionary, Douglas Dunlop (1861-1937), as adviser to the Education Department, to which Cromer allotted less than one percent of the state budget.31 Dunlop only appointed British teachers, set out to minimise the use of French and Arabic, and deleted religion from the curriculum. Believing that Egyptians would only value an education for which they paid, his government schools charged fees, and he also designed the curriculum to ‘cooperate with the religious work of a Christian mission by raising the level of intelligence and moral tone, and so preparing the ground, in important respects, for the rooting and fruit-bearing of Christian truth’.32 As with Muir and many other colonial 27 On the relationships between missions and the processes involved in producing tracts, see J.A. Chesworth, ‘The use of scripture in Swahili tracts by Muslims and Christians in East Africa’, Birmingham, 2008 (PhD Diss. University of Birmingham) pp. 42-55, 59-64, 79-100. 28 E. Baring, Modern Egypt, London, 1908, vol. 2, p. 146. 29 Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 229. 30 Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 161. 31 D.M. Reid, Cairo University and the making of modern Egypt, Cambridge, 1990, p. 18. See M.T. Shelley, ‘Lord Cromer’, in CMR 17, 393-403. 32 The Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missions Record 18 (1891/2) p. 422.



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officials who supported Christian missions, Dunlop found ways to blur the distinction between Christian and colonial interests. Britain’s shift in its Turkish policy Gladstone’s Bulgarian horrors, a diatribe against widespread massacres of Bulgarians by Ottoman troops published in 1876, shifted British opinion towards an anti-Ottoman policy away from the previous friendship that had seen Britain fight alongside Turks against Russian expansion in the Crimean War (1853-6). Gladstone wrote that, while Muslims elsewhere might be mild, chivalrous or cultivated, the Turks were different because in Turkey Islam was ‘compounded by the peculiar character of a race’.33 Wherever the Turks went, ‘civilisation disappeared from view’,34 and as a government of ‘force’ not of ‘law’ Gladstone saw the Ottoman administration as illegitimate. Opposed to Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policies, he all but attributed some of the blame for the massacre of Bulgarian Christians to Disraeli and his fellow Turcophiles. Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby (1826-93), recorded in his diary that Gladstone’s Horrors was ‘the most violent’ book that ‘had been written’ and that it denounced ‘the Turks as unfit to exist’.35 News of the atrocities had taken several months to reach England, which Gladstone blamed on deliberate efforts to censor it. In fact, the pro-Ottoman British ambassador in Istanbul, Henry Elliott (1817-1907), claimed that the extent of the massacres was being exaggerated and that there had also been ‘atrocities against innocent Muslims’.36 However, Gladstone’s ‘fiery pamphlet’ did much to ‘destroy pro-Turkish feeling in Britain’.37 Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92), Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was a staunch supporter of Gladstone’s Turkish policy. In The history and conquests of the Saracens (1877) Freeman stated that ‘nothing is to be hoped for from the so-called Turkish reforms’38 and that the prime minister (Disraeli) was seeking to ‘keep the plain truth’ of 33 W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors and the question of the East, London, 1876, p. 12. See C. Bennett, ‘William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli’, in CMR 17, 265-77. 34 Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors, p. 13. 35 Entry for 7 September 1876, in J. Vincent (ed.), The diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, London, 1994, p. 324. 36 A. Heraclides and A. Dialla, Humanitarian interventions in the long nineteenth cent­ ury. Setting the precedent, Manchester, 2015, p. 151. 37 M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923. A study in international relations, London, 1966, p. 194. 38 E.A. Freeman, The history and conquests of the Saracens, London, 1877, p. viii. The first edition was published in 1856, and Freeman updated it in 1877 to remind the public

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Turkish atrocities from the people.39 No ‘Mahometan government’ could allow non-Muslims ‘real political equality’,40 so since this evil cannot be changed ‘it must be got rid of’.41 ‘In truth,’ the government of ‘the Turk is no government at all’42 but ‘is a gang of robbers’.43 Freeman contrasted Western civilisation, as ‘progressive, legal, monogamous, and Christian’, against the ‘East as stationary, arbitrary, polygamous and Mahometan’, subject to a ‘sameness and monotony’ that was absent in the ‘history of any Western country’.44 Yet Freeman criticised Muir for introducing his subjective opinion into his historical writings, and for suggesting that Muḥammad was inspired by Satan,45 though he himself made sweeping statements about East-West differences based on nothing more than his personal opinion. Freeman offered this critique of Muir in his review of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s rebuttal of Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1856-61) – although Muir and Khan enjoyed a friendly relationship – where Freeman characterised Khan as overrating his ‘knowledge and his power of reasoning as compared with those of his Christian opponents’.46 Others dismissed Khan’s modernist version of Islam as ‘Islam no longer’. Romantic and pseudo-Orientalist literature. Colonialism under scrutiny When Scharp criticised some for elevating and whitewashing Islam,47 he may have had in mind the writings of several Romantic poets. Among these, Willem Bilderdijk (1757-1831), whose ideas Bernard Lewis (19162018) compared to Forster’s, represented Muḥammad as a Christian at heart, ‘a tool in the hands of a Benevolent Providence’, and thought that

about the lessons his book contained on the brutal nature of the Turkish treatment of non-Muslim subjects. See C. Bennett, ‘E.A. Freeman’, in CMR 17, 243-51. 39 Freeman, History and conquests, p. ix. 40 Freeman, History and conquests, p. x. 41 Freeman, History and conquests, p. xi. 42 Freemen, History and conquests, p. xii. 43 Freeman, History and conquests, p. xiii. 44 Freeman, History and conquests, p. 3. 45 E.A. Freeman, ‘A series of essays on the life of Mohammed and subjects subsidiary thereto, by Syed Khan Bahadur’ (review), British Quarterly 55 (January 1872) 100-35, p. 107. Reviews were published anonymously, but it became an open secret that Freeman wrote this essay. 46 Freeman, ‘Series of essays’, p. 102. 47 See Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism, p. 57.



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Muslims should be approached through the Qur’an.48 In Britain, Lord Byron (1788-1824), who toured in the Ottoman East, adopted a Muslim child and had his portrait painted wearing Albanian dress, could be inaccurate when he wrote about Islam, which he saw as monolithic and misogynist, but he liked much of what he saw when he went to the East. He spoke with respect of Turkish ‘opinion, manners, and dress’,49 and even hinted that he had become a Muslim.50 This represents a romantic re-imagining of the Orient that saw expression in Byron’s pseudoOriental Turkish tales.51 Disraeli, whose Jewish background may have predisposed him to view the Ottomans favourably, admired Byron and followed in his footsteps during his own tour of the East. Lewis comments that the ‘prevalence of Jews – and especially of conscious Jews – among Orientalists and Turcophiles is more than coincidence’.52 Lewis suggests that recollections of how Jewish life had thrived in Muslim Spain and elsewhere inspired the hope of a new Jewish-Muslim alliance. Disraeli saw Judaism, Christianity and Islam as different expressions of the same monotheistic faith, and called for ‘theocratic equality’53 between them. In his novel Tancred (1847) he describes Christianity as ‘Judaism for the masses’,54 and Arabs as Jews on horseback.55 The three faiths’ shared origin was for Disraeli ‘far more important than their religious, cultural and historical differences’.56 His character Sidonia praises Muslim tolerance in Spain, and says that it ‘is difficult to distinguish the follower of Moses from the votary of Mahomet’ since ‘both alike built palaces, gardens and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of states, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, 48 B. Lewis, Islam in history. Ideas, people and events in the Middle East, Peru IL, 1992, p. 9, citing a letter written on 11 February 1823. See K. Steenbrink, ‘Willem Bilderdijk’, in CMR 17, 493-8. 49 P. Cochran, ‘Introduction’, in P. Cochran (ed.), Byron and Orientalism, Cambridge, 2006, p. 47. 50 Byron may have contemplated becoming a Muslim. However, Bernard Blackstone argues that he was not ‘close’ to converting, but did actually convert. See ‘Byron and Islam. The triple Eros’, Journal of European Studies 4 (1974) 325-65. 51 The Giaour (1813), The bride of Abydos (1813), The corsair (1814), Lara (1814), The siege of Corinth (1816) and Parisina (1816), all published in London. 52 Lewis, Islam in history, p. 147. 53 B. Disraeli, Tancred, or, The new crusade, London, 1880, pp. 291, 367, 433. See Bennett, ‘William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli’. 54 Disraeli, Tancred, p. 427. 55 Disraeli, Tancred, p. 253. 56 A. Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli, New York, 2008, p. 138.

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and rivalled each other in renowned universities’.57 Disraeli’s East was a source of wisdom from which Europeans could learn; ‘Why not study the Orient? Surely in the pages of the Persians and the Arabs we might discover new sources of emotion, new principles of invention, and new bursts of fancy’.58 ‘The East,’ Disraeli wrote, ‘is a career’,59 and while, for many who travelled through, worked in or explored the Orient, attitudes of ineffable Western superiority distorted all they saw, some did not fully subscribe to the Orientalist view. Sir Richard Burton (1821-90) and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), in addition to seeing the Orient as a place for adventure where, like Kipling’s Colonel Creighton and Kim and the real life Arthur Conolly, skilled Europeans could slip in and out of disguise as natives without being detected, admired aspects of Islam and had more complex understandings of the Orient than their reputations as jingoistic imperialists suggest. While Said represents Kipling as thoroughly Orientalist,60 his assessment of Burton is more nuanced: Burton was fascinated by Eastern sexuality, and saw the Orient as something that could be possessed and mastered, but he also hovered between ‘Orientalist objectivity and personal aesthetics’ and ‘absorbed Oriental systems of behaviour and belief’.61 In Britain, several other writers distanced themselves from the dominant, negative assessment of Islam by writing what can best be described as works of apologetic about Muḥammad. Apology for Mohamed (1829) by Godfrey Higgins (1772-1833), a magistrate, antiquarian and freemason, has attracted praise from Muslim authors. In his 1929 edition, M. Abu’lFazl praises Higgins and Reginald Bosworth Smith (1839-1908), author of Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874), for endeavouring to ‘bring about an understanding between […] two great sister religions, whose mission is not to spread hatred but to further the cause of Love and concord between mankind according to the inspiring influences of their respective World-Teachers’.62 Smith thought that Christians and Muslims should be friends not foes in the quest for human unity, ‘a unity which rests upon 57 B. Disraeli, Coningsby, or, the new generation, Leipzig, 1833, p. 195. 58 In his ‘Introduction’, pp. 7-48, to the 1989 Penguin edition of Kim, Said writes that ‘Kipling could no more have questioned this difference, and the right of the white European to rule, than he would have argued with the Himalayas’ (p. 10), and calls Kim a ‘master work of imperialism’ (p. 45). 59 Said, Orientalism, p. 379, index entries for Burton. See A. Dingle, ‘Richard F. Burton’, in CMR 17, 368-83. 60 B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming. The rise of Iskander, London, 1861, p. 330. 61 Disraeli, Tancred, p. 141. 62 M. Abu’l Fazl (ed.), Mr Godfrey Higgins’s Apology for Mohamed, Lahore, 1929, pp. vivii. See C. Bennett, ‘Godfrey Higgins’, in CMR 17, 148-55.



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the belief that ‘the children of one Father may worship Him under different names; that they may be influenced by one spirit, even though they know it not, that they may all have one hope, even if they have not one faith’.63 John Davenport (1789-1877), a self-taught teacher of Oriental languages who wrote mainly on erotic subjects, had financial help from Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98) to publish his Apology for Mohammed and the Koran in 1869. He in turn helped Khan with his Essays on the life of Mohammed (1870); in fact, Khan cites both him and Higgins. Freeman, on the other hand, accused Davenport of plagiarising several pages from his own History and conquest, and suggested that this reflected negatively on Khan.64 The charge appears to be true, but Davenport’s sources are otherwise carefully footnoted and his tone and approach to the subject is the very antithesis of Freeman’s. Davenport described Muḥammad as the ‘greatest man’ that Asia could claim and ‘one of the rarest and most transcendent geniuses the world’ has produced.65 Views from Scotland In Scotland, Walter Scott, when he portrayed Saladin in The Talisman (1825) as cultured, chivalrous and honourable, would have known that this challenged negative Orientalist tropes. Some were also shocked by his choice of a Jewish heroine in Ivanhoe (1819), which he saw as a tribute to those thousands of Jews who were unjustly persecuted and killed by crusading Christians. In addition to affirming the humanist spirit that had informed many 18th-century thinkers when writing about Islam and Muslims, Scott saw some commonalities between Scottish clans and their culture and Afghan and Persian mountain peoples. In an 1816 essay, he listed as common to Scots and Afghans ‘the nature of their favourite sports, their love of their native land, their hospitality, their address, and their simplicity of manners’.66 This is an example of how the particularities of context, in this case Scotland and Scott’s interest in Scottish identity vis-à-vis Englishness, allowed him to assert similarity where others saw only difference. Said’s assessment of Scott is somewhat more critical than this; he represents him as regarding Orientals 63 R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, London, 1874, pp. xi-xii. See C. Bennett, ‘Reginald Bosworth Smith’, in CMR 17, 294-306. 64 Freeman, ‘Series of essays’, p. 101. 65 J. Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, London, 1869, unpaginated ‘Preface’. See C. Bennett, ‘John Davenport’, in CMR 17, 231-7. 66 W. Scott, ‘On the Culloden Papers’, Quarterly Review 14 (January 1816) 283-332, p. 289.

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as ‘first an Oriental, second a human and last again an Oriental’.67 Scott also admired Byron and, among Scottish writers, Sir John Malcolm (17691833), an employee of the East India Company, who rejected the Orientalist contrast between the Eastern and Western minds and wrote that ‘human nature is always the same, in whatever garb it is clothed’.68 Scott cited Malcolm in his 1816 essay, and corresponded with him over many years. Converts and Muslim migrants in 19th-century Britain A major development in Christian-Muslim relations in Britain during the 19th century was the presence of Muslim migrants, mainly in port cities. As early as 1810, Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) from Bengal established London’s first Indian restaurant. In 1794, he published a reverse travelogue entitled simply Travels, which offers insight into how ‘diasporic identity is constructed in the eighteenth century’.69 Also, some upper- and middle-class, as well as working-class English men and women converted to Islam, several of them assuming leadership roles among the Muslim community. Jamie Gilham’s Loyal enemies, which describes the experiences of converts between 1850 and 1950,70 recounts how from the beginning British Muslims had to deal with the suspicion that they were disloyal to the state. Early converts, such as William Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), looked to the Ottoman sultan as the representative of ‘universal Islamic fraternity’,71 while Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) developed a ‘love for the Turks’ after travelling in the Ottoman Empire. He helped establish an Ottoman Committee in 1912 to defend the integrity

67 Said, Orientalism, p. 102. Said comments on a passage in The Talisman (p. 41) where a Saracen agrees with a Crusader that his race is descended from Iblis and should therefore be ‘feared’. Said sees this as a ‘feeble historicism’ by which Scott makes the scene ‘medieval’, demonstrating ignorance of and hostility towards Islam (p. 101). However, the fact that Scott places words in a Crusader’s mouth or even his Saracen interlocutor’s does not automatically mean that he believed the words spoken by his characters, while his sympathetic portrait of Saladin deliberately challenged popular anti-Muslim ideas. 68 J. Malcolm, The history of Persia, from the most early period to the present time, London, 1815, vol. 2, p. 620. The son of a tenant farmer, Malcolm rose through the ranks of the East India Company’s army and benefitted from colonialism, but he respected Indians and did not fully subscribe to the notion of European superiority. 69 M. Narain, ‘Dean Mahomet’s “Travels”, border crossings, and the narrative of alterity’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 49 (2009) 693-716, p. 693. See M. Fisher, ‘Dean Mahomet’, in CMR 17, 91-7. 70 J. Gilham, Loyal enemies. British converts to Islam, 1850-1950, London, 2014. 71 Gilham, Loyal enemies, p. 67.



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of the Ottoman Empire against those who wanted to see its demise.72 Quilliam was blunt in criticising what had dissatisfied him about Christianity, including its lack of unity, ‘difficulties with the discoveries of science and the problems caused by modern Biblical scholarship’, and he used all three to attack Christianity as ‘failed and flawed’.73 Converts tended to retain some non-Muslim habits such as drinking alcohol, although Quilliam was a strong advocate of temperance. This pioneered the process of adapting Islam to British culture in ways that made it ‘transferrable to a non-Muslim Western post-Christian secular democracy’.74 Several peers converted, including the fifth Baron Headley (1855-1935) and the third Baron Stanley (1827-1903). Zainab Cobbald (1867-1963), formerly Lady Evelyn Murray, converted after visiting Libya in 1911. These aristocrats gave Islam a degree of social acceptability that it lacked when it was exclusively associated with foreigners. By the end of the long 19th century, Ahmadiyya missionaries from India were active in London where they ‘took possession of Woking mosque’ in 1913.75 Built in 1889, this was at the time ‘the only overt architectural symbol of Islam in England’.76 The missionaries began to shape Islam’s appeal in order to take advantage of the increasing British interest in ‘esotericism and Eastern spirituality’, which, in their view, Islam could address and Christianity could not.77 Despite the contentious beliefs of the Ahmadiyya, mainstream Muslims, including diplomats from Islamic states, were attracted to their functions.78 Danish and Swedish perceptions of Islam in the 19th century Denmark and Sweden both traded with the Ottoman Empire and held capitulations (trading concessions). In the early 18th century, King Charles XII of Sweden (r. 1697-1718) was forced into exile in the Ottoman Empire between 1709 and 1714. When he returned to Sweden, he introduced coffee, meatballs and other items. In addition, so impressed was

72 Gilham, Loyal enemies, p. 218. 73 R. Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain. The life and times of Abdullah Quilliam, Markfield, 2010, p. 37. See J. Gilham, ‘W.H. Abdullah Quilliam’, in CMR 17, 404-26. 74 R. Geaves, Islam in Britain. Muslim mission in an age of empire, London, 2018, p. 163. 75 Geaves, Islam in Britain, p. 102. 76 Geaves, Islam in Britain, p. 108. 77 Geaves, Islam in Britain, p. 164. 78 Geaves, Islam in Britain, p. 162.

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he by the way in which any Ottoman subject could communicate comments or complaints to the sultan through the impartial ombudsman without fear of reprisal that he also established the office of ombudsman in his homeland. In 1727 and 1733, the Ottomans had sent diplomatic delegations to Stockholm to negotiate payment for the considerable expenses that Charles had accumulated during his exile and, in 1737, they granted Sweden a capitulation. Further, in 1739, Sweden and the Ottomans entered into an Alliance for Peace, Unity and Friendship, the first treaty of this nature. Subsequently, the two realms enjoyed cordial relations, while Uppsala University later developed Turkic studies and acquired a large collection of Ottoman manuscripts, art and artifacts. In the late 19th century, the newly formed Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (founded in 1878) developed an interest in evangelising Muslims. They began to work in Tabriz, Iran, in 1889, but due to tension with missionaries already active, in 1894 they decided to transfer to Kashgar in Eastern Turkestan (now the Chinese province of Xinjiang), where Nils Fredrik Höijer (1857-1925) had started working in 1892. At the Kashgar mission, a convert from Islam, who was baptised in Tabriz and had taken the Armenian name Johannes Avetaranian, pioneered outreach to Uyghur Muslims using the approach of reading ‘parts of the Gospel that were the least offensive to Muslims’ and trying to avoid confrontation.79 While translating the Gospel into the local Turkic dialect, he consulted Muslim ulama for help with grammar, but few Muslims converted and some of those who did later reverted to Islam. Over time, the Swedes began to concentrate on educational and medical work instead of evangelism. They set up the first Arabic printing press in 1912 and, in addition to Christian literature, they ‘also produced a variety of official forms for the regional government’.80 However, reports sent back to Sweden painted a bleak picture of Muslim life in the province: ‘very few children’ on leaving the local run schools ‘can read, and still fewer can write. […] They very soon forget what they have learned.’ ‘Judged by Christian standards’, parents did not seem to know how to bring up their children, who ‘run perfectly wild’, pay no attention ‘to cleanliness’ and ‘learn all the evil things they see in their homes and in the streets, and are applauded as being clever when they use bad words’.81 79 E.E. Tamm, The horse that leaps through clouds. A tale of espionage, the Silk Road and the rise of modern China, Vancouver, 2011, p. 123. 80 L. Benson, ‘Education and social mobility among minority population in Xinjiang’, in F.S. Starr (ed.), Xinjiang. China’s Muslim borderland, Armonk NY, 2004, 190-215, p. 192. 81 The Missionary Review 36 (1913) pp. 772-3, citing a Swedish missionary in Kashgar.



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The close commercial and diplomatic relationship between Sweden and the Ottomans, it seems, did not prevent some Swedes from adopting ideas of civilisational superiority. This is reflected in the reports and writings of Swedes who ran the Iranian Police Force between 1911 and 1915. In these ‘the relationship between the Swedish officers and the Persians is perceived and described in terms of an encounter between a modern Europe and an uncivilised Persia, whose foremost traits were chaotic and unorganized conditions and primitive natives’.82 However, moving to Egypt in 1909, the Swedish artist Ivan Agelii (1869-1917) enrolled at alAzhar (the first European officially to register), studied Arabic and Islamic philosophy, and became an initiated member of a Sufi order, taking the name ʿAbd al-Hādī ʿAqīlī. His initial interest in Islam was sparked by reading Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), for whom divine providence lay behind the faith,83 and through contact with the Theosophical Society in Paris. Later, converts to Inayat Khan’s Sufi order in Sweden (established in 1924) looked to Agelii as a ‘pioneering figure’.84 Danes developed less hostile, polarised views of the East and of Muslims. According to Martin Zerlang, this was ‘because they were not involved in the project of colonizing the east’ and were more interested in ‘looking for similarities rather than difference’.85 Jonas Kauffeldt examines the careers of several Danes who travelled in the East and whose reputations for opposing colonialism later helped to position Denmark favourably in ‘forging commercial relations’ as neutral actors on the world stage.86 The explorer Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) admired the Bedouins’ ‘spirit of liberty’ and hatred of despotism, and saw them as inherently noble. This contributed to a ‘rehabilitation for the East, an acceptance that its inhabitants were not necessarily lacking of positive qualities’.87 The Danish Missionary Society sent Einar Prip (1868-1939) to Syria in 1898. His ‘influential letters’ home from the mission there ‘were studied in many mission groups’,88 but reported little success in attempts to evan82 M. Fazlhashemi, art. ‘Sweden ii. Swedish Officers in Persia, 1911-1915’, in EIr. 83 See E. Swedenborg, Divine providence, trans. G.F. Cole, West Chester PA, 2010, pp. 186, 200-2. 84 S. Stjernholm, ‘Sounding Sufi’, in F. Piraino and M. Sedgwick (eds), Global Sufism. Boundaries, narratives and practices, London, 2019, 193-208, p. 195. 85 M. Zerland, ‘Danish Orientalism’, Current writing. Text and reception in Southern Africa 18 (2006) 119-35, p. 119. 86 J. Kauffeldt, ‘Danes, Orientalism and the modern Middle East. Perspectives from the Nordic periphery’, Tallahassee FL, 2006 (PhD Diss. Florida State university), p. 8. 87 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, pp. 6-7. 88 F. Markusen, ‘Prip, Eimar’, in G.H. Anderson (ed.), Biographical dictionary of Christian missions, Grand Rapids MI, 1999, p. 549.

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gelise Muslims. Like the Swedes in Kashgar, the Syrian mission primarily worked in the educational and medical fields, and on attempting to reform the faith of Orthodox and other local Christians. In 1904, Oluf Hǿyer (1859-1930) and his wife Maria (1858-1939) founded the Danish Church Mission in Aden, following Samuel Zwemer’s call for Christian work there. A critic of European colonialism, Hǿyer also questioned the ‘myths that had been constructed about the Ottomans over the centuries’, praising their ‘protection’ of minorities and of ‘freedom of movement’.89 He developed friendly relations with Muslims, and wrote of the gracious hospitality he received, though he told the local governor that ‘Islam had done nothing to improve’ people’s lives over the centuries and that Islam was a ‘strictly exterior religion’ that failed to transform people’s hearts and presented an ‘impediment to civilization’,90 all of which reflects negative Orientalist tropes. He did not hesitate to use confrontational tracts ‘that the Ottomans alleged were disparaging of the Quran and likely to incite the Arab population’.91 Similarly, his wife Maria, who had access to local homes, saw little to like inside the women’s quarters, which she said ‘lacked the qualities of a true home’ and provided a ‘poor foundation for societal development’.92 Yet, even when Arabs ‘abandoned their religion’, they often did not then embrace Christianity.93 It seems that the Muslim elite were sufficiently ‘confident in the strength of their faith’ not to see the Hǿyers as a threat, and continued to treat them ‘with tolerance and grace’.94 Maria thought that Danes were especially suited for missionary work in Arabia and to achieve its ‘spiritual conquest’ because of their ‘Viking spirit of adventure and fearlessness’.95 Perceptions of Islam in Denmark were also shaped by the influential theologian and politician Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), who contributed to the development of modern Danish identity in a way that is comparable to Scott’s role in Scotland. In popular lectures delivered from 1861 to 1863 and published in 1871 as Kirke-Speil eller Udsigt over den christne Menigheds Levnetsløb (‘The Church, mirror or view of the life lived by the Christian congregation’), Grundtvig gave Danes a view of Muslims that reinforced ideas that Islam was a threat to everything 89 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 71, citing a letter to the home committee, March 1908. 90 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 52. 91 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 73. 92 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 57. 93 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 69. 94 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 52. 95 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 80.



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Danish. However, more exotic, romantic notions of the Orient gained currency in Denmark thanks to the popular play Aladdin, or the wonderful lamp (1805) by Adam Oehlenschläger (1779-1850), based on a story from Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits. Presenting Oriental motifs in ways that appealed to Nordic taste on the one hand, Oehlenschläger’s play encouraged ‘an identification with the East’ that challenged notions of difference.96 On the other hand it appropriated the Orient in order to explore the roots of Danish identity and culture. Observations on Christian-Muslim relations in Norway and Finland during the 19th century During the long 19th century, Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, and neither had direct diplomatic relations with Muslim-majority states nor engaged in extensive international commerce. However, from 1870, Muslim Tatars were recruited as labourers and began to settle in and near Helsinki. Over time, this community became assimilated into Finnish society, although it maintained its religious beliefs and practices. (Today, the Tatars run five mosques and are the oldest ‘permanently settled Nordic Muslim community’.)97 From 1523 to 1814, Norway was united with Denmark, then, from 1814 to 1905, the country was part of the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway. Like Finland, Norway did not engage in direct diplomatic relations during most of the long 19th century, and Muslim migration to Norway did not begin until the 20th century. After 1905, constructions of Norwegian identity concentrated on what distinguished Norwegians from Danes and Swedes. Some argue that, due to the lack of a colonial legacy, Norway resisted dominant Orientalist tropes about racial difference. In their efforts to help forge a distinctive Norwegian identity, the Romantic poets Vilhelm Krag (1871-1933) and the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) employed Oriental motifs to explore the tension between Scandinavian provincialism, which was undesirable, and Parisian cosmopolitanism, which they saw as desirable.98 Instead of contrasting their culture with a backward, barbaric Orient, these poets ‘embraced an imaginary Orient 96 E. Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism. Paris and the cosmopolitan imagination, 1800-1900, Copenhagen, 2005, p. 25. 97 T. Pauha and T. Martikainene, ‘Finland’, in J. Nielsen et al. (eds), Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, vol. 6, Leiden, 2014, 218-28, p. 218. 98 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 19.

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in an effort to identify and construct themselves as a modern, cosmopolitan nation’.99 Krag visited Algeria and Tunisia in 1892, while Hamsun went overland to Turkey in 1889. Hamsun conflated the Orient with his native region of northern Norway. The poems written by Krag and Hamsun may have helped challenge more stereotypical views of Muslims by suggesting that shared humanity between Nordic people and Muslims permitted them to learn from one other. Conclusion Despite the contention that, because of their colonial innocence, Norwegians and Danes might have distanced themselves from attitudes of racial superiority that usually also involved dismissing anything that Islam had to offer, Orientalist tropes were present in the works of some writers. On the other hand, in Britain and the Netherlands, which had colonies with Muslim subjects, although negative Orientalist views of Muslims were undeniably rampant, not everyone subscribed to them. Some, often heirs of 18th-century humanism, still found ways to affirm common ground between Christians and Muslims. Especially in Britain, the presence of Muslim migrants from the mid-19th century, together with aristocratic and elite British converts, meant that Islam ceased to be a religion belonging to distant, exotic locations, and was becoming increasingly visible in the British context. Christian-Muslim encounters now took place at home, as well as in more distant locations. This survey demonstrates that, while Christian-Muslim relations throughout the long 19th century tended to be characterised by monologue on the part of Christians, some participants continued to prefer dialogue and even ventured to suggest that Islam was fulfilling a providential role as Christianity’s ally in progressing God’s purposes for the world.

99 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 12.

The 19th-century Holy Land. English authors and the writing of a new biblical landscape Alison Dingle This essay seeks to show that among English authors the perception of Palestine changed through the course of the 19th century. It began as a land known only to explorers, and ended, for some Protestants at least, as a nascent restored Israel within a biblical temporal framework. If the volume and range of the printed word can be considered a reliable indicator, the biblical Holy Land held genuine fascination for 19th-century Britons. Richard Burton, the British consul in Damascus 1869-71, referred to a condition he called humorously ‘Holy Land on the brain’ (Unexplored Syria, London, 1872, vol. 1, p. 8).1 As well as illustrative works that included maps, architectural diagrams, paintings by such artists as David Roberts and William Holman Hunt, and early photographs, there were also accounts by explorers, reports by missionaries and diplomats, stories by tourists (mainly wealthy middle-class Protestants), ‘scientific’ descriptions by archaeological investigators looking to unearth the biblical landscape, and narratives by Evangelical Christians who saw the imminent downfall of the Ottoman Empire as a sign of the Second Coming of Christ.  Most Europeans who visited predictably saw the land through the lens of the Bible, as well as through earlier accounts. Even in the first part of the century, writers reflected on the emerging historiography of the land, with the armchair traveller Josiah Conder using Edward Clarke’s recently published Travels in the Holy Land (Philadelphia, 1817) and Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor in the years 1817 and 1818 (London, 1823) to produce his own Palestine, or the Holy Land (London, 1824). Irby and Mangles’s Travels and William Rae Wilson’s Travels in Egypt and the Holy land (London, 1823) also inspired the children’s author Barbara Hofland to create Alfred Campbell, a fictional character who supposedly made two journeys to the Holy Land, and in Alfred Campbell the young pilgrim (London, 1821) and The young pilgrim or Alfred Campbell’s return to the east (London, 1826) recounted his own adventures and development as a moral young Englishman, establishing 1 See A. Dingle, ‘Richard F. Burton’, in CMR 17, 368-83.

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himself as a figure that would appear in varied manifestations in religious fiction. Later in the century, bibliographies appeared: the German scholar Titus Tobler published Bibliographia geographica Palestina (Leipzig, 1867) and Reinhold Röhricht Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae (Berlin, 1890), a work that contains nearly 2,000 references to 19th-century works on Palestine by authors from various countries. In the 1880s, the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society dedicated itself to republishing significant classical and medieval texts. Twentieth-century bibliographies include Bibliotheca cisorientalis (Boston, 1973) and Billie Melman’s index of female travellers in Womens’ Orients (Ann Arbor MI, 1992). Eitan Bar Yosef and Eveline van Steen have both surveyed the literature of 19th-century scholarship on the Holy Land,2 and Elizabeth Siberry has analysed 19th-century uses of the crusades.3 Although interest in the region as the setting of biblical events was extensive in the 19th century, travel narratives and the records of visitors show only a minor level of interest in the contemporary Palestine through which they actually travelled. Given that the ‘Eastern Question’4 dominated European politics throughout the century, the compartmentalisation, and later all but absence, of the contemporary social and cultural life of Palestine was all the more surprising, although there were regular and significant exceptions. The narrative of a biblical Holy Land progresses in an inconsistent fashion that exploited the declining power of the Ottoman Empire. In a key location between Egypt and Turkey, it was one of the territorial units that comprised Greater Syria, and its Christian and Jewish populations had wider connections to Europe and Russia. However, where the contemporary society is referred to in accounts, it is often in broader or passing references to significant individuals or to tribal groups in rural and desert areas who were left unconnected to any wider social context. Local people were encountered as mainly translators in the early part of the century, before Cook’s Tours kept Western travellers at a distance from the locals, who as a consequence were deprived of their 2 E. Bar Yosef, The Holy Land in English culture 1799-1917. Palestine and the question of Orientalism, Oxford, 2005; E. van der Steen, Near East tribal societies during the 19th century, London, 2013, p. xii. 3 E. Siberry, The new crusaders. Images of the crusades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Aldershot, 2000. 4 This term summed up the problem facing European governments caused by the economic and political decline of the Ottoman Empire that began from the late 17th century and ended with its collapse after the First World War. Governments were all concerned by the consequences of the collapse of the empire, yet anxious to gain from its decline.



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livelihood.5 When read together, anecdotes and brief mentions suggest that Palestinian society was often in a state of unrest as it suffered from the gradual economic and political decline in wider Ottoman administration. One popular narrative, Alexander Kinglake’s  Eothen  (London, 1844), describes a people who were aware of the terminal decline of the Ottoman state: ‘Every peasant practically felt and knew that in Vienna or Petersburg or London, there were four or five pale looking men who could pull down the star of the Pasha with shreds of paper and ink’ (p. 209). Benjamin Disraeli’s novel  Tancred  (London, 1830) notes the political instability experienced by a Jewish family who left Jerusalem during the 1830s when the Egyptians occupied Syria and Palestine,6 and James Finn’s  Stirring times  (London, 1878) describes Arab tribes who supported either the Turks or the Egyptians. Any observations of the wider contemporary social environment were made from within the biblical focus on the land. One traveller from the 1840s, Eliot Warburton, in The Crescent and the Cross. The romance and realities of Eastern travel (London, 1846), evaluates the geopolitical situation by considering the clash between Turkey and Egypt, concluding that ‘we’ should not return Palestine to the Turks after the Egyptian occupation of Palestine and Syria in the 1830s. His account contains an extended reflection on the areas in which he travelled and, when discussing Palestine, he declares: ‘What a church is to a city Palestine is to the world’ (vol. 2, p. 7), attributing to it a Christian character overriding any other. The Earl of Shaftesbury’s review of another work from the same period,  Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land (in The Quarterly Review 63 [1839] 166-92), describes the Egyptian ruler Muḥammad ʿAlī as a ‘cross of tiger and fox’ (p. 170), and considers the wider political situation from an Evangelical Christian point of view, focusing on the state and prospect of the Jews and his perception of their role in Christian eschatology. Yet, some accounts are by authors who specifically engage with the local society of Palestine, such as the British consuls James Finn (based in Jerusalem during the Crimean War, 1853-6), and Richard Burton (Damascus). Burton’s attitude of occasional antipathy towards Christianity, fashioned from his experience among Muslims, his knowledge of Arabic and his title of ḥajjī, contrasts with Finn’s evangelicalism and philosemitism. Yet the majority of visitors’, descriptions and observations about 5 C. Conder, Heth and Moab. Explorations in Syria in 1881 and 1882, London, 1883, p. 367. 6 See C. Bennett, ‘William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli’, in CMR 17, 265-77

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the contemporary setting are peripheral and coincidental beside the main topic of their interest, which was the land in which figures and stories from the Bible had been set.  Perceptions of the qualities of Muslims When English authors acknowledge contemporaneous Muslims in Palestine, they display a range of knowledge and awareness of Islam and draw on wider notions of Muslims in the 19th century. Some are inevitably more positive than others.7 Describing Muslim worship in Jerusalem, Elizabeth Ann Finn in her novel A third year in Jerusalem (London, 1869), refers to the Nebi Musa pilgrimage, an annual event that brought Muslims from India and Africa, as ‘the most heathenish sight I have seen in my life’ (p. 25). However, other works note the sober nature of Muslim prayer compared with elaborate local Christian forms of worship, even when their authors show little interest in the details of these prayers. Norman Macleod in Eastward (London, 1866) notes ‘What strikes one is the serious, abstracted countenance of the worshipper, which seems to be unaffected by anything taking place around him anymore than if he were alone in the desert. It is reckoned to be a great sin to disturb a man at his devotions’ (p. 26). Muslims are often applauded for their hospitality. Thus, Claude Conder notes that, despite the poverty of the local people, a traveller who is lost and alone at night would meet with friendly guidance (Heth and Moab, p. 373), while Frances Power Cobbe declares that she is safe and comfortable travelling as a lone woman, and describes informative conversations with her dragoman guide (Cities of the past, London, 1864, p. 194). In Stirring times, James Finn, the Jerusalem consul, describes a local battle that was being fought near the site where his family had camped during the summer, and the unexpected courtesy shown to the campers by the combatants of both sides (vol. 1, p. 305). But as a group, Muslims could be perceived as potentially threatening, though often without justification. Thus, Norman Macleod somewhat dramatically imagines Muslims attempting to ‘gain heaven’ (presumably through being killed) by seeking to break into his Jerusalem hotel ‘under the influence of some fanatical 7 See F. Quinn, ‘The prophet as hero and wide easterner’, in The sum of all heresies. The image of Islam in Western thought, Oxford, 2008, 91-124; A. Khalaf, ‘Protestant images of Islam. Disparaging stereotypes confirmed’, ICMR  8 (1997) 211-29.



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furor’ (Eastward, p. 124). His comment, though clearly humorous, still hints at an impression of dangerous alien characters outside his room. Much earlier, Ulrich Seetzen refers to locals who cease their hostility and become friendly when his party produces documentation to show they are travelling under the protection of the governor of Acre, though it is not clear whether this is from a recognition of fraternalism because of the joint Ottoman-British defence of Acre that repelled Napoleon’s forces, or from fear of the governor’s retribution if the travellers came to harm (A brief account of the countries adjoining the lake of Tiberias and the Dead Sea, London, 1810, p. 12). Islam as a faith was viewed in a generally negative light, increasingly so as the century progressed. In novels set in Jerusalem, the Evangelical writers Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Elizabeth Ann Finn depict Jews and Protestants sharing a reaction of disgust as they hear the call of the muezzin, which signifies for them Islamic control over the city. In Tonna’s Judah’s lion (London, 1848), as the travelling party approach the city and hear the muezzin, the narrator tells us: ‘The words were Arabic: with what sickening effect they fell on the ears of those travellers may be imagined’ (p. 240). In Finn’s  Home in the Holy Land  (London, 1866) the narrator describes the muezzin’s call as a ‘note of imposture’ that should inspire genuine Christians to stir up the Eastern Christians and win back the Jews to the faith of Moses (p. 259). Thus, in both novels the muezzin signals alien occupation of the land and also a strong call to unite Jews and Protestants. As the century progressed, Muslims saw their holy sites in Jerusalem, which had previously been accessible to them alone, opened up to tourists, generating Muslim resentment to this apparent infringement of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqṣā Mosque. One early visitor, the Duke of Brabant, having been issued with a firman from the sultan in Istanbul, was entitled to enter, but in order to prevent unrest the governor of Jerusalem had to lock away the temple guards who were ‘faithful to their trust even to ferocity’ (Finn, Stirring times, vol. 2, p. 237) and the visit was conducted in secret. A later visit by a Christian group went much better, when ‘the Moslems […] noted the decorous reverence with which these Christians passed from point to point, and began to understand that to us too, it is indeed holy ground’ (Stirring times, vol. 2, p. 422). Although the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem became accessible to non-Muslims, the tomb of Abraham in Hebron remained contentious and the authorities were worried enough about disorder to refuse the visit of the British Jew Sir Moses

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Montefiore. Despite the urging of the pasha and the offer of payment by Montefiore, the religious authorities refused him entry (Stirring times, vol. 2, p. 237). Religious ‘infringements’, such as the ringing of a new church bell in Nablus, initiated riots that led to loss of life, revealing that concerns over unrest were genuine (Stirring times, vol. 2, pp. 425-7). A significant consequence of the determination by European visitors to see the land they had read about in their Bibles is that many looked on people they came across as figures from biblical stories. Eliot Warburton confesses, ‘The reader may smile, but it was with something like grave respect I looked upon each carpenter in Bethlehem’ (Crescent and Cross, p. 254). Similarly, when Frances Power Cobbe sees a shepherd carrying a lamb, she writes: ‘It was actually the beautiful parable of the gospel acted out before my sight’ (Cities of the past, p. 122). She also comments that the Shaykh of Hebron was dressed in the same way as Abraham would have been (p. 112). There are many other such examples, each demonstrating that, in the imagination of Europeans, the present is forgotten as the Bible is seen to come to life. Cobbe herself articulates this imaginative process that collapses time when she explains that to a certain degree every individual can for himself narrow the distance between him and the great souls of the past by visiting the land where they dwelt, and so cutting off, at least, that perspective of place which adds not a little to the perspective of time. (p. 175)

There is no room here for the Ottoman present, or indeed for the present-day Muslim inhabitants of a land where Israelites and their descendants had once lived and ruled.  The significance of a biblical temporal framework and its implications Cobbe’s recognition of the interconnected nature of perspectives of place and time points to the question as to what the Holy Land actually meant to 19th-century travellers and visitors. She suggests that the proximity to an historical location or scene that carries biblical overtones gives her hope that she may be in ‘biblical’ time by being in a ‘biblical’ place. It is a feeling that the place is sacred because of Christ’s earthly presence, that the Holy Land is considered so because it was the place where Christ came to earth in human form. Many works make this explicit. The illustrated book by John Heyl Vincent and others of 1894 is entitled The earthly footsteps of the man of Galilee. Jesus’s earthly presence gave a status and identity to the land that



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could not be changed. And for visitors such as Cobbe the resemblance between the biblical parable and the present-day appearance of a man with a lamb gave a contemporary commonplace incident historical and religious resonance, where every activity could become a sort of endless repeatable typology. By endowing the land and all its aspects with the patina of religion, travellers who were determined to interpret every experience as an example of biblical life erased the contemporary. The mid-19th century saw the emergence of an apparently scientific approach to the religious interpretation of the land with the publication of Edward Robinson and Eli Smith’s  Biblical researches in Palestine and adjacent regions  (London, 1841), a work that is generally considered to have marked the origins of biblical archaeology.8 Robinson’s conviction that the Bible was a historically accurate document that refuted the native Christian traditions in the land led to his belief that the topography of Palestine could be analysed to correspond to the Bible. He did not initiate this approach, but he popularised it at a time when biblical studies in German universities were undermining the traditional reverential study of scripture. The earlier explorer Edward Clarke had argued that Protestants should ‘instead of viewing Jerusalem as pilgrims, examine it by the light of history with the Bible in our hands’ (Travels in the Holy Land, p. 163). The distinction between a pilgrim’s ‘view’ and the systematic examination of the land based on the Bible anticipates the move towards a specifically Protestant reading of the land that developed through the century. Robinson, like Clarke, refuted the authority of the local Christian presence: ‘All ecclesiastical tradition respecting Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, is of no value, except so far as it is supported by circumstances known to us from scripture or from other contemporary testimony’ (Biblical researches, pp. 374-5). The methods used by Robinson and Smith (the latter was an Arabic-speaking missionary) included interviewing the local people to ask for the traditional names of sites in order to identity lost biblical locations. Ironically, this method unintentionally acknowledged the people’s longstanding historical relationship to the land, contradicting the principle of preferring the Bible over local customs. Robinson’s research anticipated the actual excavations that were conducted later in the century by organisations such as the Palestine Exploration Fund, whose early investigations sought to identify successive ‘biblical’ periods. Their activities paid no attention to post-biblical 8 T. Davis, Shifting sands. The rise and fall of biblical archaeology, London, 2004: ‘Before Robinson geography in Palestine was hearsay; […] after him, it was well on its way to becoming a science’, p. 12.

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Christian traditions or Islamic history. In fact, the Archaeological encyclopedia of the Holy Land, which was published as recently as 2001, despite its thorough and detailed presentation of recent research and excavations, still gives scant reference to the Islamic periods, and is remarkably vague about, for example, the Islamic character of the Old City of Jerusalem.9 The shared text of the Old Testament and its prophecy of the Jews’ return to Palestine, together with the New Testament anticipation of the Second Coming of the Messiah, led to a sense of common understanding that manifested itself in the conception of a Holy Land from which Islam was excluded. Modern Palestine. A philosemitic Protestant landscape Early 19th-century Evangelicalism made a complex response to the shared heritage with the Jews, seen in the emergence of conversion societies such as the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. Though they were widespread, such attitudes were not considered credible and accusations of insanity were directed at Evangelicals who called for the restoration of Palestine to the Jews.10 Novels such as Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (London, 1816) display an attitude towards Jews that begins as hostile but ends as sympathetic, while a considerate portrayal of Jews is also evident in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (Edinburgh, 1819), even though in one scene a knight instructs his Arab slaves to torture the Jew Isaac, with the implication that they have no reluctance to do so. Parallel to the political enfranchisement that saw a change in the status of Jews in England was an increasingly mainstream belief that they were also agents of religious change. The Earl of Shaftesbury (180185) believed that the political situation in the Ottoman Empire could be a sign that the restoration of the Jews was imminent. As an eccentric, but devout, Evangelical who campaigned for legislation against child labour, he saw in the political situation that ‘the tide of action seems to be rolling back from the west to the east: a spirit, akin to that of Moses, when he beheld the Land of Promise in faith and joy, is rising up among the nations’ (‘Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land, by Lord Lindsay’, The

9 A. Negev and S. Gibson (eds), The archaeological encyclopedia of the Holy Land, London, 2001. 10 Bar Yosef, ‘Christian walks to Jerusalem’, in The Holy Land in English culture, 18-60.



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Quarterly Review 63 [1839] 92-166, p. 166).11 Such optimism for the return of the Jews saw James and Elizabeth Ann Finn help it along when, during the Crimean War (1853-6), they established an agricultural project that would employ Jews in Jerusalem in order to bring about ‘the hope of cultivating the desolate soil of their own Promised Land’ (Stirring times, vol. 2, p. 76). And after the Crimean War, settlements began to appear as physical manifestations of this new biblical landscape and eschatological chronology.12 One colonist, the eccentric Laurence Oliphant, combined religious language with economic planning as a way of justifying the taking over of the land. One can hardly wonder at the men of Dan [one of the twelve Israelite tribes], when they came upon it, being fascinated by the luxuriance of the landscape and its charm of position, and then and there deciding to oust the existing peasantry, and occupy as much of it themselves as had not been already appropriated by the tribe of Naphtali.13 I felt a longing to imitate their example; for there can be no question that if, instead of advancing on it with six hundred men, and taking it by force, after the manner of the Danites, one approached it in the modern style of a jointstock company (limited), and recompensed the present owners, keeping them as labourers, a most profitable speculation might be made out of the ‘Ard el Huleh’. (The land of Gilead, Edinburgh, 1880, p. 19)

Here is a manifesto for dispossession, with the ‘present’ owners of the land, villagers and group landowners, to be turned into labourers. His final remark that the Arabs should be given superficial consideration shows no acknowledgement of their attachment to their homeland, or of what may happen to them if they do not wish to work for the new owners. In an article published around the same time, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, Oliphant predicts: ‘The Jewish question and the Moslem question are destined to act and react upon one another’ (The Nineteenth Century 12 [1882] 242-55).14 Although the peoples are described in terms of their religious identity, the commercial and economic benefits 11 See also D. Lewis, The origins of Christian Zionism. Lord Shaftesbury and the Evangelical support for a Jewish homeland, Cambridge, 2010. 12 See R. Kark, ‘The impact of early missionary enterprises on landscape and identity formation in Palestine, 1820-1914’, ICMR 15 (2004) 209-35. 13 For the biblical account referred to here, see Judges 18. 14 The ‘Jewish question’ refers to problems caused by the waves of Jewish refugees that were fleeing from Russia and Eastern Europe as a result of persecution during the last quarter of the 19th century, and the ‘Moslem question’ (or the ‘Eastern Question’) refers to problems connected with the political and economic collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the vulnerability of its subjects.

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are the justification for his proposal. Richard Burton, by no means a conventional Christian, suggested in 1872 that Syria (by which he meant Greater Syria) could become a ‘pied-a-terre’ for the British on the way to India (Unexplored Syria, vol. 2, p. 139). The Christadelphian Robert Roberts' 1877 pamphlet offers a more explicitly religious interpretation of the political situation. Its title is revealing: Prophecy and the Eastern Question: being an exhibition of the light shed by the scriptures of truth on the matters involved in the crisis that has arrived in Eastern affairs showing the approaching fall of the Ottoman empire; war between England and Russia; the settlement of the Jews in Syria under British protectorate; the appearing of Christ, the infliction of Divine Vengeance on Mankind and the setting up of the Kingdom of God (London, 1877). Here, Roberts uses the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation to interpret the geopolitical situation, in which armies from the north and south clash and a Jewish nation will emerge. Turkey is a ‘desolating power’ in the Holy Land ‘on the verge of destruction’ and will fall to the army of Russia (p. 17). The Ottomans were aware of the division that would occur after the collapse of their empire. The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), regarded as the father of Zionism, quotes a conversation between a representative from the Polish Embassy in Istanbul, who was looking to help Jewish groups to buy large plots of Palestinian land, and Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in which the sultan says ‘Let the Jews save their billions. When my empire is partitioned they may get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse will be divided. I will not agree to a vivisection.’15 The declining empire had been an overriding political question for European governments throughout the century and, as it weakened, the political and economic vacuum was filled with a landscape that was depicted using religious language. Oliphant had shown how religious language could be used to defend economic acquisition whilst Burton saw only the economic advantage in controlling the region. The difference between the perception of the Holy Land at the beginning of the century, when Palestine had been a little-known region to the British population, and the end of the century, when it had become the site of an emergent Western regional polity, is great. Yet despite the immense interest directed towards the land by visitors, artists and archaeological investigators, its Arab and Islamic character was, generally speaking, much less commonly 15 R. Patai (ed.), The complete diaries of Theodor Herzl, New York, 1960, vol. 3, p. 379, for 19 June 1896.



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recognised than it had been in earlier times. The increasing numbers of travellers, both sentimental, such as Cobbe, and scientific, such as Robinson, reinforced a biblical narrative and chronology that judged the indigenous Arab Muslim culture as inauthentic. The early Zionist-inspired settlements were material evidence of an emergent biblical Israel in the eyes of later travellers, and signified an eschatological temporality. Not only were Arabs and Muslims being displaced from the physical space, they were being erased by an alternative notion of time.  

The contribution of missionaries to the study of Islam in the Netherlands in the 19th century Maryse Kruithof The study of Islam as a lived tradition received little attention in Dutch universities for most of the 19th century. This is curious, because at the time the kingdom of the Netherlands ruled over a population of almost thirty million Muslims in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Scholars who studied Arabic in Dutch universities focused primarily on the language itself, while those who studied the languages, history and cultures of the Indian archipelago, the Indologists, generally did not pay much attention to Islam. They focused on the ‘true religions’ of the Indies, Hinduism and Buddhism. On the occasions when Islam was the subject of research in Dutch universities, the focus was mainly on major classical texts. No one seemed interested in Islam as a lived tradition, which was mostly due to the lack of suitable source material. Fieldwork was not much undertaken as yet, and ethnology and anthropology were still in their infancy as academic disciplines. This significant gap in Dutch academic discourse only began to be closed at the very end of the 19th century, when in 1884-5 the influential scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1856-1936) joined the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Most of what is known about Islam as a lived tradition in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century does not come from scholarly works, but from what ‘laymen’ wrote in journals, letters or travelogues about their observations during their stays in the colony. This essay focusses on the contribution of a particular group of these ‘laymen’ to the study of Islam in the East Indies: Christian missionaries. It demonstrates that the writings that have come down from them were very useful sources for the academic study of lived Islam, and that academic and non-academic works should not be understood as opposites in this period. Although reports and articles produced by missionaries were generally not intended for critical outsiders, they proved to be useful sources for scholars who did not have opportunities to visit the Indies themselves. Since missionaries often stayed for

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prolonged periods in the field and learned the local languages thoroughly, they could be considered ‘insiders’ by the local population in comparison to other Europeans, and the observations they made of daily life in the colony were particularly appreciated back home. Consequently, missionaries made important contributions to the formalisation of knowledge about non-Western cultures and religions, and to the new scholarly fields of ethnology, anthropology and comparative religion. The study of Islam in Dutch universities The lack of scholarly interest in the religion of Islam is partly the result of centuries-old polemical attitudes in Christian Europe about Islam as a false creed, a subject not worthy of academic attention. The historian Reinhart Dozy (1820-83) did, however, publish works on Islamic history in the second part of the 19th century. He contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Muslim Spain between 1858 and 1861, and in the 1860s he published his three-volume Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne, jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides. 711-1110 (‘Spanish Islam. A history of the Moslems in Spain’).1 In Het islamisme (‘Islam’, 1863), which was aimed at a non-academic audience, he does not show much sympathy for Islam. He looks on it as an irrational faith and an obstacle on the road to modernity, and repeats the age-old European idea that Muḥammad suffered from epileptic seizures that were mistaken for prophetic ‘trances’. Dozy can be considered as a classic ‘armchair’ academic, since his research was based on texts alone.2 L.W.C. van den Berg (1845-1927), who had a background in law and Arabic language, was the first Dutch Orientalist actually to spend time in the Islamic world. He went to the East Indies in 1868, and became an adviser on Oriental languages and Islamic law to the Dutch colonial government. He continued to publish on Islamic law, but is most famous for his work on the Hadhrami community in the Indies, Indonesians of Arab descent.3 This detailed study was based on extensive fieldwork, and was the first of its kind in the world. 1 R. Dozy, Histoire des musulmans d’Espagne jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides, Leiden, 1861; R. Dozy, Spanish Islam. A history of the Moslems in Spain, London, 1913 (English trans.). See M. Poorthuis, ‘Reinhart Dozy’, in CMR 17, 509-15. 2 J. Brugman, ‘Dozy, a scholarly life according to plan’, in W. Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden oriental connections 1850-1940, Leiden, 1989, pp. 62-81. 3 L.W.C. van den Berg, Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l’archipel Indien, Batavia, 1886. See also K. Steenbrink, ‘L.W.C. van den Berg’, in CMR 16, 573-80.



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Van den Berg was opposed many times during his career by Snouck Hurgronje. For example, Snouck published a merciless 162-page review in the Indische Gids of Van den Berg’s book on the Shāfiʿī school of law (1874). Like Van den Berg, Snouck went to the East, first to Jedda and Mecca in 1884-5 to compile a report for the Dutch colonial government on Indonesian pilgrims in Arabia. During his stay, he collected data for his two-volume Het Mekkanische feest, which was published in 1888 and 1889. After spending six months in the field, he returned to the Netherlands to teach Islamic studies at Leiden University. He was not, however, content to spend his career behind a desk in Leiden, and instead aimed at a research or advisory position in the Indies. In 1889, he was appointed as an adviser on colonial affairs to the Dutch government after he had identified the risk to the colony from Islamic fanaticism, jihād and pan-Islamism. He returned from the East Indies in 1906, and successfully continued his academic career in Leiden. Under his influence, the focus in the study of Islam shifted from classical Arabic texts to the study of contemporary Islam in the East Indies.4 Today, Snouck Hurgronje is remembered as the Netherlands’ most influential, though also most controversial, Islamicist. In the absence of anything more recent, Dutch scholars in the 19th century turned to Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën (‘Old and new East Indies’) by François Valentijn, which had been published in 1726.5 They did not initially pay much attention to current works that were being produced in the form of reports by ‘lay authors’ such as colonial officials, traders, linguists, biologists, VOC chaplains and missionaries, who wrote down their observations in letters, diaries or travelogues out of personal interest. Scholars did not consider the works of such ‘amateur ethnographers’ of much value because they were not written with a scholarly purpose and often lacked a clear aim, argumentation or critical insights. Furthermore, the majority of these authors had not lived long enough in one place to develop sufficient understanding of the local language and culture. However, owing to the lack of more suitable material, academics gradually began to make use of this body of sources to learn more about everyday life in the Indies. In particular, the writings of missionaries proved to be very useful, because most of them had lived in the same area for long periods of time and their proficiency in local languages generally exceeded that 4 A. Vrolijk and R. van Leeuwen, Voortreffelijk en waardig. 400 jaar Arabische studies in Nederland, Leiden, 2013, p. 100. See also F. Wijsen and K. Steenbrink, ‘Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje’, in CMR 17, 540-58. 5 Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen, Voortreffelijk en waardig, p. 98. See K. Steenbrink, ‘François Valentijn’, in CMR 12, 575-82.

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of other Europeans because they were dedicated to mastering languages in order to communicate easily with the local population and to translate the Bible. The amount of material produced by missionaries is massive, since they were asked by their organisations to keep diaries, write annual reports and regularly produce pieces for mission journals in order to keep the sponsoring public in the Netherlands aware of the mission’s progress. Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (‘Announcements of the Dutch Missionary Society’; MNZG) was issued by Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (NZG), the largest Dutch mission organisation between 1857 and 1919. A significant part of it was devoted to the study of the languages, cultures and religions of the areas in which the NZG was active. Dutch scholars such as P.J. Veth (1814-95) and Snouck Hurgronje regularly read this journal and used it for their own studies. Islam in mission training curriculums The NZG advocated thorough education for its missionaries. Their curriculum paid special attention to Islam because the mission board believed it was more difficult to convert these ‘civilised gentiles’ than ‘pagans’. As early as 1808, the NZG started to teach its students ‘the axioms of Islam, and the way to counter these’, even though the organisation was not yet active in any Islamic region.6 In 1821, the board created a curriculum to make their students ‘thoroughly familiar with the spirit of Islam’.7 Courses were taught on subjects such as Arabic, the Qur’an, the life of Muḥammad and the history of Islam, although suitable textbooks did not yet exist and the teachers themselves did not have a thorough knowledge of either Islam or Arabic. Jan Scharp (1756-1828), a teacher at the NZG mission school, made an attempt to write a handbook, Muhammedanismus, in the 1820s. He addressed a wide variety of topics, such as the biography of Muḥammad, the Qur’an, ethics, rituals, sacred persons and places, and Sufism. His manuscript, which is 240 pages long, has never been published, but it was known to be part of the curriculum probably until the 1850s, when the NZG finally gained access to an area where Muslims lived.8 Scharp’s book is apologetic in nature, asserting among 6 I.H. Enklaar, ‘De islam in de zendingsopleiding’, in I.H. Enklaar, Kom over en help ons! Twaalf opstellen over de Nederlandse zending in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague, 1981, p. 38. 7 Enklaar, ‘De islam in de zendingsopleiding’, p. 38. 8 Enklaar, ‘De islam in de zendingsopleiding’, p. 49.



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other things that all Muslims hate Christians, that the Qur’an is full of contradictions and untruths, and that Muḥammad suffered from delusions. It does, however, encourage missionaries to be friendly towards Muslims and to argue against Islamic doctrines with rational rather than emotion-based arguments. Scharp discusses various points of contention, such as Jesus’s divine nature, his resurrection and the Trinity, and he provides arguments against Islamic views on these issues.9 George Niemann (1823-1905) taught Oriental languages ​​and Islam at the mission school in the 1840s. Like many others, he was dissatisfied with the available literature on Islam and decided to write a handbook himself, though he was the first to admit that he was not an expert, having only some basic knowledge of Arabic. His Inleiding tot de kennis van den islam (‘Introduction to knowledge of Islam’) was published in 1861 and was used as a text book for years, giving a fair idea of what aspiring missionaries were likely to know about Islam before they left for the Indies. Niemann discusses the origins of Islam, the biography of Muḥammad, the Qur’an and the spread of Islam, including in South East Asia. The work is much less polemical than Scharp’s, and continually encourages readers to place Muḥammad’s words and actions in context, instead of judging him for not espousing modern Western values. While he does not believe Muḥammad was a true prophet, he does not consider him a fraud who deliberately deceived people, and argues that it is quite possible Muḥammad was ‘under the influence of self-deception’ and truly believed he was receiving divine revelations.10 Niemann does agree with Scharp that the Qur’an is a ‘monotonous’, ‘long-winded’ and ‘incomplete’ work.11 Niemann devoted his epilogue to Islam in the Dutch East Indies. He relied on the works by Valentijn, Raffles, Roorda and his own teacher Veth, among others, and of course on the reports of the NZG missionaries working in Java, such as Samuel Harthoorn.12 His general conclusion was that the people of the Indies were not ‘real Muslims’, a widely shared opinion at the time. As he saw it, identifying as a Muslim did not mean much to them, and abstaining from pork was thought enough to be considered Muslim. In particular, people living in the mountainous areas of 9 Enklaar, ‘De islam in de zendingsopleiding’, p. 43. 10 G.K. Niemann, Inleiding tot de kennis van den islam, ook met betrekking tot den Indischen archipel, Rotterdam, 1861, p. 124. 11 Niemann, Inleiding tot de kennis van den islam, p. 47. 12 J. van den Boogert, ‘Rethinking Javanese Islam. Towards new descriptions of Javanese traditions’, Leiden, 2015 (PhD Diss. Universiteit Leiden) p. 104. On Raffles, see M.T.H. Tan, ‘Stamford Raffles’, in CMR 16, 523-9.

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the interior were hardly influenced by Islam at all. Even though there were mosques, priests and other ‘Muhammedan institutions’ everywhere, the people still held on to all sorts of superstitious ideas and traditions that went directly against Islam.13 J.C. Neurdenburg (1815-95) became director of the NZG educational programme in 1864. He made various changes to the curriculum, which he considered substandard, and put greater emphasis on pedagogical skills so that missionaries would be better equipped to get involved in education. This was in line with his belief that the people of the Dutch East Indies must be raised to a higher level of development before they could truly understand the Christian message.14 He also drastically revised the programme’s course on ethnology. From the 1870s on, the work of the Leiden ethnologist G.A. Wilken, who was Neurdenburg’s son-in-law, was used. In the course on Islam, George Niemann’s book was replaced by Johannes Haurie’s Der Islam (1882), the tone of which was closer to that of Scharp’s book, and thus a lot more negative. After the turn of the century, the educational programme was completely redesigned because the NZG, the Utrechtse Zendingsvereniging (UZV) and the Sangi en Talaud Comité (STC) merged their training programmes into the De Nederlandse Zendingsschool (NZS), founded in 1905 in the NZG headquarters in Rotterdam. The admission requirements were raised and the quality of the programme was considerably improved. In 1917, the NZS moved to Oegstgeest to make it easier for the students to follow courses at Leiden University. This resulted in the professionalisation of the study of Indonesian languages, cultures and religions, including Islam. For example, Snouck Hurgronje taught Arabic and Islam to NZS students for over 25 years.15 Consequently, collaboration between academics and missionaries became more common in the 20th century, and the boundaries between these categories faded when, after the turn of the century, academically trained theologians were deployed to the mission fields.

13 Niemann, Inleiding tot de kennis van den islam, p. 413. 14 C. de Jong, ‘Van Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap tot Hendrik Kraemer Instituut. Twee eeuwen Nederlandse zendingsopleiding’, in G. Schutte, J. Vree and G. de Graaf (eds), Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlands protestantisme na 1800, Zoetermeer, 2012, 57-76. 15 De Jong, ‘Van Nederlandsch Zendeling Genootschap tot Hendrik Kraemer Instituut’.



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Missionaries on Islam in Java The majority of missionary reports and letters consist of observations of daily life around the mission stations. Most missionaries were settled in little villages, away from other Europeans, who resided mainly in the urbanised coastal areas. And since they usually stayed in the same district for years, they became familiar with the local community and sometimes formed close friendships. This resulted in sources of unique value. The topics they discussed in their writings vary from local histories and legends to descriptions of everyday objects. They also studied local religious traditions in detail, because they were convinced a missionary must be well aware of ‘false beliefs’ in order to disprove them. These writings provide valuable information about Indonesian society, and particularly in Java, where most Dutch missionaries were stationed after access was granted around 1850. They allowed Orientalists and Indologists at Dutch universities to catch a glimpse of how Islam was practised in Javanese society. The sources show, however, that the missionaries had great difficulty distinguishing between normative Islam and the reality of lived Islam. The Islam they encountered in the field was often different from what they had learned about in their textbooks. This reinforced the widely shared idea that the Javanese should not actually be called Muslims. In other words, the missionaries had preconceived ideas about what Islam was and how a Muslim should live, and then decided whether or not local tradition fitted into this picture. Missionaries frequently witnessed customs that had their roots in religious traditions other than Islam, such as animism, Buddhism and Hinduism, leading them to conclude that the Javanese adhered to syncretistic forms of belief. They applied the term in a negative sense, with the connotation of an illogical fusion of conflicting ideas, which they thought demonstrated that the Javanese were backward and irrational and had to be civilised before they could become ‘true Christians’. This notion fitted well with the colonial discourse, in which people of the colonies were depicted as underdeveloped. By emphasising the irrationality of Indonesian people, culture and religion, both Dutch colonial rule and Christian mission were legitimised, and the work of the missionaries, not only in the church but also in schools and medical clinics, was deemed necessary to civilise the people of Java. These writings demonstrate that missionaries had difficulty in assessing local religious traditions. They agreed that ‘real Islam’ did not exist in Java, but to describe the local tradition as animistic, Buddhist or

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Hinduist was neither accurate nor adequate. The NZG missionary Samuel Harthoorn (1830-81) coined the term ‘Javanism’ to describe Javanese folk religion, a concept that illustrates how the Islamic identity of Javanese people was progressively minimised. An expression that often occurs in missionary sources, that Islam in Java was nothing more than a thin veil covering pagan religion, was adopted by Dutch scholars who had never visited Java themselves. For example, the ethnologist P.J. Veth, who used articles from the MNZG for his research, also minimised the Islamic character of Javanese society in his book Java.16 It was Dutch missionaries who were the first Westerners to notice a split in the Muslim community in the second half of the 19th century.17 An increasing number of modern, activist Muslims had begun to challenge the ‘Islamicness’ of those Javanese Muslims who they thought were only ‘nominal’ in their faith. They distanced themselves from these ‘heretics’ by calling themselves wong putihan (‘white people’), and they called the supposedly nominal Muslims wong abangan (‘brown people’). For the majority, being Javanese meant living according to Javanese adat, the customary traditions of their forefathers, but now suddenly this lifestyle became known as abangan, though many were probably not even aware of the existence of this label until the end of the century. Furthermore, putihan Muslims were not necessarily seen as ‘more pious’ or ‘better’ Muslims by the majority of Javanese society, but were initially perceived as elitists who had partially removed themselves from the Javanese social and cultural environment. The abangan aimed to oppose Arab influence and the attempted purification of Javanese Islam by emphasising local religious beliefs and practices. The NZG missionary Wessel Hoezoo (1826-96) was the first Westerner to describe the distinction between these two branches of Javanese Islam, when in a letter to the board of the NZG in 1856 he called the abangan ‘secular’ because they did not live according to sharīʿa law.18 In 1857 and 1858, he and his colleague Ten Zeldam-Ganswijk explained that, although the abangan did not abide by Islamic law, they certainly considered

16 P.J. Veth, Java, geografisch, etnologisch, historisch, Haarlem, 1875-84. 17 M.C. Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese society. Islamic and other visions (c.1830-1930), Leiden, 2007. On missionary attitudes, see M. Kruithof, ‘Representations of Islam in the works of Dutch Protestant missionaries, 1850-1900’, in CMR 17, 525-39. 18 W. Hoezoo, Brief aan het NZG bestuur (16 February 1855) Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1102-1: 210, Utrechts Archief.



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themselves Muslim,19 and Harthoorn warned that the putihan were growing and gaining increasing influence in Java.20 Apart from these individual comments, however, nothing was written about this development in more detail. This changed with the work of Carel Poensen (1836-1919), another NZG missionary who in 1869 was the first to identify a schism between the putihan and the abangan: ‘The Javanese distinguish themselves into the Bangsa Putihan and the Bangsa Abangan, although they are all Muslims.’21 In the 1880s, Poensen wrote about these two branches in detail, in his book Brieven over den Islam uit de binnenland van Java (‘Letters about Islam from the interior of Java’). In this he vividly described Java as a dynamic society in which Islam was gaining ground and the lines between different social groups were hardening. He reported that the numbers of pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) and Meccan pilgrims were increasing fast, that pilgrims were spreading ‘more true ideas about the spirit and essence of Islam to the people’, and that now the Javanese were better Muslims than in previous generations.22 However, Poensen felt that the increasing influence of these puritan Muslims in the country was a dangerous development, since their message was anti-colonial, and he considered the abangan ‘more innocent’ and easier to approach for missionaries.23 After all, he argued, they had little understanding of Islamic dogmas and sharīʿa, and it was thus easier to debate with them. The publisher of Poensen’s book asked P.J. Veth to write a preface. Veth was familiar with Poensen’s work in the MNZG and considered these letters an interesting source on daily life in Java. Nevertheless, his preface was not overly positive. He described the letters as incoherent and at times inaccurate, and concluded that Poensen had explained a good number of things poorly. Snouck Hurgronje then wrote a review of the book in the Indische Gids and agreed with Veth’s arguments, though he felt that his preface was ‘too critical and unpleasant’.24 Snouck argued against the notion that Islam was only superficially rooted in Java, admitting that 19 M.C. Ricklefs, ‘The birth of the abangan’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 162 (2006) 35-55. 20 S.E. Harthoorn, ‘De zending op Java en meer bepaald die van Malang, uit het jaarverslag 1857’, in MNZG 4 (1860) 105-38, 212-53. 21 C. Poensen, ‘Iets over Javaansche naamgeving en eigennamen’, MNZG 14 (1870) 30417, p. 312. See M. Kruithof, ‘Carel Poensen’, in CMR 16, 551-4. 22 C. Poensen, Brieven over den islam uit de binnenlanden van Java, Leiden, 1886, p. 4. 23 Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese society, pp. 35-55. 24 C. Snouck Hurgronje, ‘Carel Poensen, Brieven over den Islam uit de binnenlanden van Java’, Indische Gids 8 (1886) 1092-1102.

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syncretistic forms were present but arguing that Christianity in Europe was also mixed in with all kinds of pre-Christian elements. Moreover, he disputed the way in which Poensen compared Javanese Islam with Islam in the Middle East, where superstitions and folk traditions were just as common as elsewhere, and thought it was foolish to suggest that Arabs practised ‘pure Islam’.25 He considered Poensen’s judgement clouded because he probably only had close contact with less devout Muslims, since a truly devout Muslim would avoid all contact with unbelievers. Despite these points of criticism, Snouck concluded his review on a positive note: ‘To be fair, I must immediately add that his work surpasses the countless works written by lay authors about these subjects and that he never pretends to present analyses of these subjects in general.’26 He warmly recommended the book to a general audience, but agreed with Veth that it would have been more interesting for scholars had Poensen only shared his experiences. Poensen was upset about the review and wrote angrily to the director of the NZG that Snouck lacked all experience to criticise his work. After all, at the time Snouck had not yet visited the Indies.27 Despite the criticisms levelled against it, Poensen’s letters were considered a valuable contribution to the academic study of Islam in the Dutch East Indies, and he is still regarded as one of the first ethnographers of Javanese village life. Conclusion Dutch missionaries made a significant contribution to the study of Islam in the Dutch East Indies, although it must be admitted that their work was often coloured by the then dominant colonial discourse of racial and religious superiority. The Javanese population was often portrayed in a derogatory manner, and it was judged that Java’s hybrid religious tradition was the result of irrationality and incomprehension. Nevertheless, the missionaries focussed on lived Islam, something academics had not yet begun to study. And while the academics sometimes criticised the quality of the missionaries’ ethnological papers, they nevertheless made use of them as sources for their own research.

25 Snouck Hurgronje, ‘Brieven over den islam’, p. 1095. 26 Snouck Hurgronje, ‘Brieven over den islam’, p. 1100. 27 Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1102-1: 935, C. Poensen, Letter to J.C. Neurdenburg, 9 May 1885.



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The missionaries’ most valuable contribution to the study of Islam in Java was to identify and write about the schism that was taking place between the putihan and abangan. In particular, Carel Poensen’s detailed descriptions of abangan practices were not only valued by esteemed scholars in his own time, but are still among the most valuable sources on 19th-century Javanese Islam. Missionary writings on these two diverging branches repeatedly emphasised, however, that both contained syncretistic elements, reaffirming the dominant idea that the people of Java should not be called Muslims, a notion that would be repeated many times well into the 20th century in both missionary and scholarly works.

Diplomats, missionaries and a migrant merchant. Muslim-Swedish relations, 1800-1914 Simon Sorgenfrei In 1908, the Ottoman ambassador to Sweden, Cherif Pasha (1865-1951), together with his numerous delegation, left his 20-room apartment at Kommendörsgatan 32 in Stockholm for the last time.1 Pasha was a supporter of the Young Turk movement, and later a leading Kurdish nationalist and a vocal critic of the Ottoman massacres of Armenians in 1915.2 In many ways, he was a man of the times to come, rather than of the old Ottoman Empire, and he was also to be the last of the Ottoman ambassadors in Sweden. Diplomatic relations between Sweden and Islamic countries stretch as far back as the Swedish nation itself, and to its founder King Gustav Vasa (r. 1523-60). Even though relations between what today is Sweden and Islamic cultures stretch back at least 1300 years to the Viking Age,3 the first Muslims known to have arrived in Sweden did so during the nation’s early years. Thirty-three years after the founding of the Kingdom of Sweden by Vasa in 1523, during a war against its Russian neighbour, a Tatar Muslim, called Bissura in the archival documents, was leading discussions with Vasa about a Swedish-Tatar alliance against their mutual enemy.4 This Bissura or Bichura (probably the more correct form of his name) then went to Crimea, where he successfully persuaded the Tatar khans to agree to the Swedish king’s proposals. But by the time Bichura had made his way back to Stockholm in 1558, Vasa had established peaceful relations with Russia, so a Swedish-Tatar alliance was never established. Nevertheless, through contacts such as this, a new element was introduced into Sweden’s eastern 1 H. Özoğlu, Kurdish notables and the Ottoman state. Evolving identities, competing loyalties, and shifting boundaries, Albany NY, 2004, p. 111. 2 ‘Turkish statesman denounces atrocities’, New York Times, 10 October 1915; https:// timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1915/10/10/301824872.pdf. 3 T.J. Hraundal, ‘New perspectives on eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic sources’, Viking and medieval Scandinavia 10 (2013) 65–97; W. Duczko, Viking Rus: Studies on the presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, Boston, 2004. 4 G. Jarring, ‘Sveriges diplomatiska förbindelser med tatarerna på Krim’, in M. Bergquist, A.W. Johansson and K. Wahlbäck (eds), Utrikespolitik och historia, Stockholm, 1987, 83-90.

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policy, and for centuries the search for ties with Tatars and Turks would remain prominent in Swedish foreign policy.5 These contacts also had an influence on Swedish academic life, as Queen Christina (r. 1632-54) brought Professor Christian Ravius (1613-77) from Oxford to Sweden, where he was to establish the study of Oriental languages at Uppsala University. It seems, however, that he was difficult to work with, and at Uppsala they doubted if ‘he was really playing with a full deck’.6 In the 1600s, Swedish diplomats in Islamic nations also produced reports on their visits to the Tatar khanates, as well as to the Sublime Porte. The most important of these is arguably Clas Brorson Rålamb’s (1622-98) Diarium under resa till Konstantinopel 1657-1658 (‘Diary of a journey to Constantinople, 1657-1658’), which also contains the first general description in Swedish of Islam as a religion.7 Rålamb’s delegation to Constantinople and the Swedish legation established there in 1657 is an example of how relations with the Ottoman Empire grew more important during the 17th century, though they were not always peaceful. In 1687, for example, the Swedish nobleman Nils Bielke (1644-1716) took part in the battle of Harsány Mountain in Hungary against the Ottomans. He was successful, and brought back to Sweden a great war bounty of tents, weapons, horses, two dromedaries and their keeper, a man named Shiaba in Swedish documents from the time. These dromedaries and poor Shiaba were given as a gift to the Swedish King Karl (Charles) XI (r. 1660-97), who had them painted by the court artist David Klöcker Ehrenstraal (1628-98).8 From the year 1593, every person living in Sweden had been required by law to be baptised into the Lutheran Church, so in 1692 Shiaba was baptised in Sankt Nicolai kyrka in Stockholm and given the name Nils after his former owner. This means that he must have lived, nominally at least, as a Muslim in Sweden between 1688, when he arrived, and 1692, making him the first Muslim known to be resident in Sweden.9 5 S. Lundqvist, ‘Gustav Vasa och Europa. Svensk handels- och utrikespolitik 1534-1557’, Uppsala, 1960 (PhD Diss. Uppsala University) pp. 360-2. 6 E. Swiecicka, ‘Den diplomatiska trafiken mellan Sverige, Tatariet och Osmanska riket, från Gustav Vasas tid till Karl XII’, in R. Boström Andersson (ed.), Den nordiska mosaiken. Språk- och kulturmöten i gammal tid och i våra dagar. Humanistdagarna [15-16 mars] vid Uppsala universitet 1997, Uppsala, 1997, 291-305. 7 C. Rålamb, Diarium under resa till Konstantinopel 1657-1658, Stockholm, 1963. See also, K. Ådahl (ed.), The sultan’s procession. The Swedish embassy to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1657-1658 and the Rålamb paintings, Istanbul, 2006. See G. Larsson, ‘Clas Rålamb’, in CMR 8, 649-53. 8 The painting still hangs at Drottningholm castle, outside Stockholm. 9 S. Sorgenfrei, Islam i Sverige. De första 1300 åren, Stockholm, 2018, pp. 37-9.



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Twenty years later, Swedish-Ottoman relations intensified as King Karl (Charles) XII (r. 1697-1718) escaped into Ottoman Moldavia after a defeat by the Russians at Poltava in 1709. Until 1714 he lodged in the cities of Bender and Varnitza, together with parts of the Swedish army and administration, and so for this period Sweden was run from Islamic territory.10 Both the king and many of his retainers borrowed large sums from the sultan and from private lenders. About 60 of these, Ottoman Muslims, Jews and Christians, later followed the army back to Sweden, where they stayed in the city of Karlshamn from 1715 to 1719 or later.11 The 1593 law requiring all to be baptised was still in force, but these Ottoman creditors of course wanted to practise their own religion. In response, the king, who was under pressure from his creditors, wrote a letter in which he gave permission for this as long as they did so behind closed doors. This letter of Karl XII is the first example of any sort of religious freedom in Sweden.12 This incident resulted in a stronger Ottoman diplomatic presence in Sweden, with diplomats and ambassadors initially coming to collect the debt owed by Karl XII. The first of these, Mustafa Aga, arrived in 1733 and, as mentioned above, the last, Cherif Pasha, left in 1908.13 During these years the study of Oriental languages and cultures that Queen Christina had envisioned were in place, and partly led the way to translations of the Qur’an into Swedish. The first, by the army officer Fredrik Crusenstolpe (1801–82), was published in 1843, and the second, by Carl Johannes Tornberg (180777), professor in Oriental languages at Lund University, was published in 1874. When Cherif Pasha left Sweden, Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen (18661953), professor of Oriental languages at Lund and Uppsala Universities, was about to begin a translation that was published in 1917. Zetterstéen’s translation is still used today, even though newer ones are available.14 This brief overview suggests that Swedish-Muslim relations from the birth of the Swedish nation up to the early 20th century were primarily diplomatic (and sometimes less than diplomatic) in character. In the late 19th century, however, new and different forms of relations began 10 P. From, Kalabaliken i Bender. Karl XII:s turkiska äventyr, Lund, 2018. 11 J.T. Westrin, ‘Anteckningar om Karl XII:s orientaliska kreditorer’, Historisk Tidskrift 20 (1900) 1-56. 12 Sorgenfrei, Islam i Sverige, pp. 42-7. 13 For a detailed study of historical relations between Sweden and Islamic cultures, see T.J. Arne, Svenskarna och Österlandet, Stockholm, 1952; also K. Ådahl, S. Unge Sörling and V. Wessel (eds), Sverige och den islamiska världen. Ett svenskt kulturarv, Stockholm, 2002. 14 J. Hjärpe, ‘Swedish translations of the Qur’an in a historical perspective’, Lir Journal 2/13 (2013) 7-18.

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to emerge, both through Swedish missionaries in Asia and Africa and through Muslims – or at least one Muslim – moving to Sweden. Swedes and Muslims in the missionary fields Even though Sweden had interests in the colonial slave trade, primarily in St Bartolome and Ghana, it was not a colonial power at such.15 Swedes did, however, partake in missionary endeavours following the footsteps of the colonisers in both Asia and Africa. In these missionary fields, Swedish missionaries established new sorts of contacts with Muslim cultures, resulting in a massive production of information about Islam distributed both in missionary circles and among the public. Research concerning the impact of missionary reports, as well as articles, books and lectures intended for a broader audience, still needs to be carried out. Of special interest might be the Swedish mission in the Belgian and French Congo, which began in the early 1880s and lasted about a century, and the mission in East Turkestan from 1892 to 1938. In the Congo, the missionaries found themselves in competition for souls with Muslim colonial agents and missionaries, while in Kashgar Muslims were the prime targets for proselytisation.16 In both places, knowledge about Islam and local Muslim culture was necessary. As the missionaries often stayed for long time periods in the same location, they gained extensive knowledge of local languages, cultures and religions. Missionary reports, books, articles and letters home became important means of informing friends, families and congregations, as well as an interested public, about life and culture in the field. Such books and reports often contained not only elaborate descriptions of local cultures but also photographs.17 For example, Karl 15 H. Lindqvist, Våra kolonier. De vi hade och de som aldrig blev av, Stockholm, 2015. 16 G. Janzon, ‘“Den andra omvändelsen”. Från svensk mission till afrikanska samfund på Örebromissionens arbetsfält i Centralafrika 1914-1962’, Uppsala, 2008 (PhD Diss. University of Uppsala); R. Odén, ‘Wåra swarta bröder. Representationer av religioner och människor i Evangeliska fosterlandsstiftelsens Missions-Tidning, 1877-1890’, Uppsala, 2012 (PhD Diss. University of Uppsala). 17 H. Nielssen, I.M. Okkenhaug and K.H. Skeie (eds), Protestant missions and local encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unto the ends of the world, Leiden, 2011; A.M. Claesson, ‘Kinesernas vänner. En analys av missionens berättelse som ideologi och utopi’, Lund, 2001 (PhD Diss. Lund University); P. Hällzon, Tjiltän mazar i Yarkand och De sju muhammedanernas mazar i Kaltala. Jämförande forskning mellan två helgongravar i Östturkestan (Xinjiang), 2014, available at http://www.istanbulvanner.se/pdf/ Projektbeskrivn2014_PatrickHaellzon.pdf. For the close connections between mission and academia, see also G. Larsson, ‘H.S. Nyberg’s encounter with Egypt and the Muʿtazilī school of thought’, Philological Encounters 3 (2018) 167-92.



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Edvard Laman (1867-1944) spent no fewer than 28 years in the Congo, 18911919, and wrote a great number of reports from there. He was also engaged in evangelising parts of Central Congo to ‘stop Muhammedanism spreading’ in the region.18 An example of the books he wrote is Där mörkret skingras. Mission, kultur och forskning bland Afrikas folk (1924; ‘Where the darkness is shattered. Mission, culture and research among Africa’s peoples’), which primarily describes indigenous religion in the Congo in the late 19th century.19 Arguably the most important missionaries in East Turkestan were Gösta Raquette (1871-1945) and his wife Evelina Raquette (1869–1927), of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden. Gösta Raquette was active as a missionary in Kashgar, Baku and Bukhara, as well as in the Jharkhand province of India, west of Kolkata, from 1895 to 1913. During his time in the field, he studied local languages, culture and religion, and through his publications he imparted a great deal about the local Islam he encountered. Back in Sweden, he later became a renowned scholar of Turkic languages at Lund University. He also developed a keen interest in Muslim cultures and traditions, documented in books such as ‘A contribution to current knowledge of the Eastern-Turkestan dialect’ (1909), ‘Eastern Turkic grammar’ (1912-14), and Muhammeds religion. Ett tvärsnitt genom Islams politiska och religiösa liv fram till våra dagar (1935; ‘The religion of Muḥammad. A cross-section through Islam’s political and religious life to today’). Swedish missionaries also encountered Muslims in Russia. In 1884, Nils Fredrik Höijer (1857-1925) met a man he described as a mullah and dervish from Erzerum in Turkey by the name of ‘Schuckri’. He had converted to Christianity some years earlier and taken the name Johannes Avetaranian. He later followed Höijer back to Sweden, and joined the mission in Kashgar.20 Ebrahim Umerkajeff. Establishing Islam in Sweden Schuckri/Avetaranian went to Sweden as a former Muslim, and the same period also saw the arrival of the first Muslims in modern times. In the 18 Janzon, ‘“Den andra omvändelsen”’, p. 139. 19 B. Söderberg, Karl Edvard Laman. Missionär - språkforskare – etnograf, Stockholm, 1985. 20 A.P. Larsson, Tjugofem år i Ryssland. Missionär N.F. Höijers erfarenheter och äfventyr under sin verksamhet bland ryssar, tatarer, armenier, kurder, perser, turkar, kineser m. fl. österns folk, Stockholm, 1906, pp. 215-19. See also ‘Svenska nyheter’, Vestkusten 4/26 (January 1899), p. 6.

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1870s, Swedish laws on religion had become more relaxed, making it easier for non-Protestants both to settle in Sweden and to become Swedish citizens.21 Even though Islam was not among the religions referred to in the law (presumably because there were no Muslims in the country), it appears that the new climate made it easier for the few Muslims who arrived before the full law of religious freedom was passed in 1951. Hence, when the Tatar Muslim Ebrahim Umerkajeff (1877-1954), from Penza in western Russia, arrived in Sweden in 1897 or 1898, he could do so without converting or hiding his religious identity. He is the first Muslim known to have settled in Sweden in modern times. There are gaps in our knowledge regarding Umerkajeff’s early years in Sweden, and the reason goes back to King Gustav Vasa. In 1555, Vasa introduced a Swedish border policy, which required everyone travelling in Sweden to carry ‘road letters’ (vägbrev) stating where they had come from and where they were going, while from 1606 everyone crossing the Swedish border was required to carry a passport.22 This latter regulation was abolished in 1860, with the result that we know less about people moving in and out during these years. In response to the political turmoil in Russia, control of Russian migrants to Sweden was instituted in 1906, and from 1914 passports were required for everyone travelling in Europe.23 Thus, when Umerkajeff arrived, there was little control of Russian subjects, which explains why the documentation is scarce in Swedish archives. From 1919, when Umerkajeff applied to become a Swedish citizen, archival material reveals something about his early years in Sweden and his granddaughter Vera Tunmar has also recorded her memories of him.24 Ebrahim came as part of a Russian delegation of furriers to the Allmänna konst- och industriutställningen (General Art and Industrial Exposition of Stockholm), which was held at Djurgården from 15 May to 3 October 1897. There, he met his future wife, Maria Elisabeth Hult (1876-1955), who also worked in the fur and textile industry. In an alternative account, Umerkajeff informed the police that he was born on 15 October 1877, and 21 P. Karlsson Minganti and I. Svanberg (eds), Religionsfrihet i Sverige. Om möjligheten att leva som troende, Lund, 1997. 22 A.-B. Lövgren, Staten och folk på väg. Pass i Sverige från Gustav Vasas tid till 1860, Lund, 2018. 23 A.-B. Lövgren, ‘Rätten att färdas fritt’, in L.M. Andersson (ed.), Rätten. En festskrift till Bengt Ankarloo, Lund, 2000. 24 A longer biography of Ebrahim Umerkajeff, based on this material, is available in Sorgenfrei, Islam i Sverige, pp. 58-64, as well as in S. Sorgenfrei, ‘Establishing Islam in Sweden. The first Tatar community and Muslim congregation in Sweden and their sources’, Studia Orientalia Electronica 8 (2020) 82-95.



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his parents were farmers named Letejeff and Keline Umerkajeff. In his home village, he attended what the report calls a Muslim school between the ages of seven and 12. At the age of 16, he stopped working on his father’s farm and became a furrier with his elder brother, Gaffor Umerkajeff, and followed him on business trips in Russia and Finland. In 1898, he was drafted into the army, but was discharged because of a heart condition. He came to Stockholm on 25 December 1898 (the year after the exhibition at Djurgården), and in 1899 he also visited Denmark and Norway, before deciding to settle and start a business in Sweden.25 In 1906, Umerkajeff received permission to run his own business, and he founded the Ryska Pälsvaruaffären (the Russian Fur Store) which was for many years located on Birger Jarlsgatan 38 in the business centre of Stockholm. In 1900 he married Maria Elisabeth Hult, and their son Hussein Umerkajeff was born the following year. There was no Muslim community in Sweden at that time, and Islam was not yet a religion approved by the Swedish state (this would not happen until 1951), so when Ebrahim and Hussein Umerkajeff were accepted as Swedish citizens in 1919, they registered as (Muslim) members of the state church, belonging to the congregation of Hedvig Eleonora at Östermalms torg.26 Hussein was then a student and a quite successful junior athlete. He would later become a furrier like his father.27 Ebrahim Umerkajeff was instrumental in founding the first Muslim congregation in Sweden in 1949, Turk-Islam Föreningen i Sverige för Religion och Kultur (‘Turkish-Islamic Association in Sweden for Religion and Culture’) five years before he died.28 But that is another story.

25 Ebrahim Umerkajeff Justitiedep Konseljakt 1919-05-02 no. 34, Swedish National Archives. 26 Ebrahim Umerkajeff Justitiedep Konseljakt 1919-05-02 no. 34, Swedish National Archives. 27 S. Sorgenfrei, ‘Sverige första Muslim?’, Religionsvetenskapliga kommentarer (2017), available at http://religionsvetenskapligakommentarer.blogspot.com/2017/11/sveriges -forsta-muslim.html. 28 See S. Sorgenfrei, Islam på Öfre Östermalm. Historien om Sveriges första muslimer, forthcoming.

The impact of Islam and Muslims on Denmark in the 19th century Jørgen Bæk Simonsen This chapter examines relations between Denmark and the Islamic world during the 19th century by presenting a number of Danes who were active among Muslims, with brief comments about what they transmitted about Muslim beliefs, manners and customs back in Denmark. As far as is known, in the 19th century no Muslims visited Denmark or settled for shorter or longer periods in the country, and no Muslim diplomatic missions were received by the government. Nevertheless, Islam and Muslims were certainly present in the consciousness of the Danish public. Danish theatres featured plays inspired by figures from the Islamic world, such as Aladdin and the Prophet Muḥammad, literary works reflected knowledge of the Islamic world, and artworks interpreted themes from the Orient. When the Tivoli Gardens were set out in Copenhagen, several of its buildings, including the concert hall, showed the influence of forms and decorative expressions developed in Islamic architecture. Like other European countries in the late 19th century, Denmark was visited by troupes of entertainers that included Nubian and Bedouin performers.1 The context Denmark’s relations with the Islamic world in the 19th century contrasted strikingly with the 18th century, when Danish trading companies and their huge fleets of merchant ships had eagerly participated in growing international trade. To develop this increasing economic interaction, the Danish state signed a series of trade agreements with the Moroccan Sultan Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh (r. 1757-90) in 1753, 1767 and onwards until 1830, with the Ottoman sultan in 1756, and with a number of local 1 See M. Zerlang, ‘Østerlandsk på dansk’, in K. von Folsach, T. Lundbæk and P. Mortensen (eds), Den arabiske Rejse. Danske forbindelser med den islamiske verden gennem 1000 år, Århus, 1996, and ‘Orientalism and Modernism. Tivoli in Copenhagen’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20 (1997) 81-110.

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corsair chiefs in Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli in 1746, 1751, 1752 and 1762. In several of these instances, agreements led to the establishment of a permanent Danish diplomatic presence in places along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Denmark also received diplomatic delegations from the Moroccan sultan and the ruler of Tripoli, underlining the significance on both sides of the developing economic relations. King Frederik V (r. 1746-66) sponsored a scientific expedition to Yemen in the years 1761-7. Headed by Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815),2 this was expected to answer a number of questions posed by scholars from various European universities and learned societies. Niebuhr’s reports after his return were read throughout Europe. These links between Denmark and the Islamic world largely ceased at the beginning of the 19th century. Although Denmark was formally neutral in the Napoleonic wars, Copenhagen was bombarded by the English fleet in 1807, and Danish naval vessels together with a great number of merchant ships were confiscated. The inevitable result was a dramatic decline in Danish trade with Africa and Asia. It might be added that through the 20th century, relations between Denmark and the Islamic world changed again. The arrival in the country of migrant workers from Morocco, Turkey and Pakistan from the late 1960s onwards, joined later by their families in their new home, prompted a fundamental and lasting shift in the relationship between Denmark and the Islamic world. The Muslim presence increased during the following decades as groups of refugees from the Middle East applied for political asylum away from civil wars, interstate wars in the region and systematic oppression by authoritarian rulers. These dynamics gave birth to permanent communities of Muslims in Denmark.3 Military advisers in Algeria and Egypt The decreasing economic links between Denmark and the Islamic world during the 19th century led to a reduction, though not a cessation, of formal connections. A number of Danish army officers were professionally active in Algeria and Egypt, and when they returned home they 2 See J.B. Simonsen, ‘Carsten Niebuhr’, in CMR 17, 561-9. 3 See J.B. Simonsen, Islam i Danmark. Muslimske institutioner i Danmark 1970-1989, Århus, 1990; J.B. Simonsen, ‘Globalization in reverse and the challenge of integration. Muslims in Denmark’, in Y.Y. Haddad (ed.), Muslims in the West. From sojourners to citizens, Oxford, 2002, 121-30; L. Kühle and M. Larsen, Danmarks Moskeer. Mangfoldighed og samspil, Århus, 2019.



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published memoirs of their experiences and of the lives of the people they lived among, their social customs and their religious beliefs and practices. Adolph Wilhelm Dinesen (1807-76) applied as a young army officer for temporary leave from the Danish army, and in February 1837 he joined the French Foreign Legion to take part in the struggle against the local Muslim resistance that had been provoked by the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. This resistance was headed by ʿAbd al-Qādir (1807/8-83), and Dinesen was involved in fighting from 1837 to 1839. Shortly after his return home, in 1840 he published Abd El-Kader og Forholdene mellem Franskmænd og Arabere i det nordlige Afrika (‘ʿAbd al-Qādir and relations between the French and the Arabs in North Africa’). This was one of the very first books published in Europe about ʿAbd al-Qādir and his jihād against the French colonialists. The book offers a description of the struggles and battles in which Dinesen took part, and gives a detailed account of the French conquest of Constantine in October 1839. The young Danish officer’s description of ʿAbd al-Qādir is positive, although he wrongly depicts him as the leader of a national awakening that had been ignited by the French invasion. From a professional point of view, Dinesen was very impressed by the military strategy followed by this young man, who had been elected by the locals to be leader of their jihād. In March 1838, Dinesen was rewarded for his service in the French Foreign Legion with the highest honour. He never returned to Algeria, and lived the rest of his life in Denmark.4 Another Danish officer, Peter Daniel Bruun (1856-1931), also volunteered for service in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. He was granted one year’s leave from the Danish army, signed a contract with the Foreign Legion and was introduced to his new assignment in Sidi Bel Abbès south of Oran. The city was originally established as a Foreign Legion encampment shortly after the invasion in 1830, and during the following decades it increased in size, acquiring all modern facilities and attracting a large number of European settlers. Bruun arrived in November 1881 and, after a few weeks’ training, he was posted to Ain Ben Khalil in the Atlas mountains, further south in the border region between Morocco and Algeria. At this time, the French Foreign Legion was placing smaller army units in minor villages to combat the Bu Amama movement that was challenging the legitimacy of the French claim to the area. During engagements with the Bu Amama, Bruun became involved in developing a new strategy to 4 A.W. Dinesen, Abd El-Kader og Forholdene mellem Franskmænd og Arabere i det nordlige Afrika, ed. R.A. Boserup and F. Pouillon, Copenhagen, 2006.

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increase the mobility of the French army by using mules to create a kind of mounted infantry. This had positive results for the French troops as their mobility and speed of movement was increased. In an article published in a military magazine after his return to Denmark, Bruun offered a careful and detailed description of this new strategy. He stayed in the area for a while, but the harsh climate and the inadequate living conditions for the troops deterred him. He left the French Foreign Legion in January 1882 and returned to Denmark. Bruun wrote a number of articles and books about his experiences in Algeria. In 1883 he published four articles entitled ‘Feltliv i Sahara’ (‘Camp life in Sahara’) in a Danish magazine called Fra alle lande, giving a detailed description of how soldiers of quite different nationalities serving in the French Foreign Legion fought against the locals, and also made passing remarks about local customs. In 1893, he published Algier og Sahara. Billeder fra Nomade- og Krigerlivet (‘Algeria and Sahara. Pictures of life among nomads and warriors’). Bruun never returned to Algeria, though he visited Tunisia several times, and in 1895 he published Huleboerne i syd Tunis. Erindringer fra et ophold hos Kalifen af Matmata, translated into English in 1898 as The cave dwellers of southern Tunisia. Recollections of a sojourn with the Khalifa of Matmata. In this he gave a detailed description of a Tunisian Muslim society headed by a leader who was regarded by them as caliph.5 The Danish officer Søren Adolph Arendrup (1834-75) served for several years as a controller in a cannon factory in Finspong, Sweden. He was employed there between 1863 and 1868, and acquired great in-depth knowledge of the production of modern cannons. In 1868, he was recommended to spend some in Egypt, as his wife had died from tuberculosis and it was feared his lungs had also been contaminated. In the following years, he visited Egypt several times and was offered a job by the Khedive Ismail Pasha (r. 1863-79) who at the time was reforming his army. His application for release from the Danish Army was accepted in November 1874, and shortly after he was appointed adjutant to the khedive.6 Arendrup had only limited practical experience, but in 1875 he was put in charge of a military expeditionary force numbering 3,400 men that was sent by the khedive into Ethiopia to fight locals who continued to obstruct his efforts to expand Egyptian control of the area. The offensive initially 5 D. Bruun, Huleboerne i syd Tunis. Erindringer fra et ophold hos Kalifaen i Matmata, Copenhagen, 1895. 6 See J. Kauffeldt, ‘Danes, Orientalism and the modern Middle East. Perspectives from the Nordic periphery’, Tallahassee FL, 2006 (PhD Diss. Florida State University), p. 17.



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succeeded in gaining control and subduing local opponents, but on 16 November Arendrup’s force was ambushed at Gundet, close to the present border with Eritrea. Arendrup fell, along with 1,200 of his soldiers, and the mission turned out to be a disaster.7 Danish judges in les tribunaux mixtes in Egypt When the Egyptian economy finally went bankrupt in 1876, a new legal system was introduced that would favour the many foreigners who were economically active in the country. The mixed courts were rooted in a century-old legal tradition in the Middle East according to which European powers were granted extra-territorial legal rights for their citizens in civil and criminal matters. From 1875, all foreigners became subject to the mixed courts located in Cairo, Alexandria and Mansura. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several high-ranking Danish judges served in them: Just Johan Holten from 1876 to 1883, Carl Johannes Ussing from 1883 to 1886, Carl Valdemar Kraft from 1896 to 1920 and Didrik Galtrup Gjedde Nyholm from 1896 to 1922. Holten’s I dansk og ægyptisk Statstjeneste (‘In the service of the Danish and Egyptian state’), which was published in 1923 after his death, describes in some detail the legal and administrative challenges that were faced by judges who served in these courts. The book also offers an interesting account of how a Danish legal expert interpreted developments in British-ruled Egypt.8 Danish missionaries in the Islamic world during the 19th century During the second half of the 19th century, Christian missionary groups intensified their presence in many parts of the Islamic world, and a number of Danish missionaries participated in these revived efforts to propagate Christianity. Back in 1616, the Danish King Christian IV (r. 1588-1648) had established the East India Trade Company, and in 1620, after negotiations with the local Hindu ruler, the company established a trade centre in Tranquebar, followed in 1755 by another centre in Serampore. From the beginning, these centres employed Danish missionaries. In 1821, members of the Danish Church (Den Danske Folkekirke), acting in their private capacities, established the Danish Mission Society 7 Kauffeldt, ‘Danes’, p. 38. 8 J.J. Holten, I Dansk og Ægyptisk statstjeneste, ed. C. Dumreicher, Copenhagen, 1923.

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(Det Danske Missionsselskab, DMS) to propagate Christianity in Asia and Africa. It is difficult to estimate how much support was given to these efforts by ordinary Danes, though the story of Einar Prip (1868-1939),9 a young student of theology at the University of Copenhagen, proves that there definitely was some. During the summer of 1891, Prip had a visionary experience of being called by God to engage in evangelisation among Muslims. At the time, the DMS refused his request to be a missionary, so, when he finished his studies 1894, he applied again to become a missionary in India, but once more his request was declined because of his weak health.10 Prip was born into a family that included many clergy. His father had visited Jerusalem in 1895 and had met Theodor Schneller (1856-1935), director of Syrische Weisenhaus, a German refuge for Syrian and Armenian children that had been established in 1860 as a result of the severe clashes between Muslims and Christians, first in Mount Lebanon and then in Damascus. During their conversation, Prip’s father had told Schneller about his son and his wish to become a missionary, and they agreed that the young man would be employed for a couple of years by Syrische Weisenhaus as a teacher and assistant, and at the same time he could learn Arabic. During the winter of 1897-98, Prip was invited by a number of Christian congregations in the Copenhagen area to talk about his plans for missionary work, and at a meeting on 10 March 1898, a private group established the Østerlandsmissionen in order to support him. At the same meeting, a network was set up to guarantee the dissemination of the letters and reports that Prip was requested to send back to Denmark to inform his supporters about his work.11 Prip left for his first trip to the Middle East in March 1898. During a visit to Bethlehem in April that year he met a group of Bedouins, who impressed him by their manners and their interest in discussing religion. As a result of this, the conversion of Bedouins became an important part of his missionary plans. The Holy Land was an area of great interest to a large number of Christian missions, so he decided that he would work on the other side of the River Jordan. He was advised by other missionaries to cooperate in his work with an educated and experienced medical doctor, as the Bedouins were in dire need of medical care. Prior to his departure 9 See C. Bennett, ‘Introduction’, in CMR 17, 1-22, pp. 19-20. 10 See H. Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter. 9 kapitler af Danmissions Islam historie, Copenhagen, 2005, p. 38. 11 Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 43.



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in 1898, Prip had actually discussed with Rudolf Fox Maule (1875-1940), a student of medicine, the possibility of engaging in missionary work together.12 In August 1900, Prip returned to Denmark, but he agreed with Schneller beforehand that he would return to Jerusalem to act as his deputy while Schneller returned to Germany for half a year, and then for the following one or two years to become an inspector of the Syrische Weisenhaus. In January 1901, Prip again went to the Middle East to investigate further where to establish a formal and institutional missionary mission. Maule arranged in the autumn 1901 to be assigned to the Victoria Hospital in Damascus to increase his medical knowledge, and at the same time to learn Arabic.13 In August 1902, Prip and Maule visited the Qalamun district between Damascus and Homs, where the Presbyterian Church of Ireland was active in a number of villages. They were offered the opportunity to take over the missionary work in the area and, after discussions with their supporters in Denmark, an agreement was reached in July 1905. Østerlandsmissionen took over the administration of a number of schools, a clinic, a number of church facilities and five small Christian congregations in the villages of Nebk, Deir Atiye, Yabrud, Karjaten and Hafar. The population in the Qalamun district numbered around 60,000, and of these about 10,000 were Christians. Irish missionaries had succeeded in converting a few members of the Greek Orthodox Church or the Syrian Orthodox Church, but they had never succeeded in converting local Muslims. Østerlandsmissionen continued the schools for boys and also established schools for girls. The medical presence was expanded as Maule set up a pharmacy, and in the years before the outbreak of World War I plans were discussed to establish a hospital. In 1912, Prip was relieved of his work running the schools as a new missionary was assigned, which gave him more time to concentrate on his missionary efforts. The running of the schools was handed over to Alfred Nielsen (1884-1963), the most significant of all Danish missionaries in the Arab Islamic world. He published several books about Christian mission in the Arab world and the many challenges missionaries had to face, and also several books about Islam. During the 1930s, he engaged in a debate with Rashīd Riḍā (1865-1935) in

12 Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 39. 13 Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 40.

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Riḍā’s famous journal Al-Manār on Christian mission in the Islamic world, and also published articles in the journal The Moslem World.14 When World War I broke out all employees were called back to Denmark but, after the end of the war and the establishment of the French Mandate in 1920, the work in Qalamun was resumed. In 1924, Østerlandsmissionen opened a hospital in Nebk, and a few years later a nurses’ training college was added. The schools for both boys and girls were also continued and even expanded, but the missionary efforts to convert local Muslims proved fruitless. New initiatives were set up for religious dialogue in Damascus by Alfred Nielsen and one Muslim converted, though he soon converted back to Islam.15 In 1901, another private Danish missionary initiative was started. Oluf Høyer (1859-1939)16 worked as a police officer in Copenhagen for many years, and had no professional religious education. But he was a dedicated believer, and he finally decided to become a missionary. In 1895, he initiated a Brotherhood of Civil Servants in the Police and, through this organisation, money was raised to finance a two-year stay in Lebanon (1897-99) for him and his wife Maria (1858-1939), to learn Arabic and to become acquainted with local and regional manners and customs. When he returned to Denmark, he had decided that Hebron was the place to establish his planned mission. He applied to be ordained as a priest, and at the same time he re-organised his Brotherhood into a formal and legal mission called Missionær Oluf Høyer og Hustrus Missionsvirksomhed i Judea. Finally, in 1903, he was ordained in the German Lutheran Church in Jerusalem in a service led by Einar Prip.17 In May 1901, the couple settled in Hebron to begin their work, but Høyer was not pleased with the situation. He wanted to work in an area where there were no other Christian missions, and in 1902 he read an article by the young American missionary Samuel Zwemer (1867-1952),18 in which the latter argued for a Christian mission in Hadramaut. It was decided 14 See Umar Ryad, ‘Rashîd Ridâ and a Danish missionary. Alfred Nielsen (d. 1963) and three Fatwas from Al-Manâr’, Islamochristiana 28 (2002) 87-107; Umar Ryad, Islamic reformism and Christianity. A critical reading of the works of Muhammad Rashîd Ridâ and his associates (1898-1935), Leiden, 2009. Alfred Nielsen’s articles in The Moslem World are: ‘Damascus as a mission center’, 13 (1923) 160-2; ‘Difficulties in presenting the Gospel to Moslems’, 19 (1929) 41-6; ‘Moslem mentality in the Syrian press’, 20 (1930) 143-63, and ‘The international Islamic conference at Jerusalem’, 22 (1932) 340-54. 15 See A. Nielsen, Min ven sjajken, Copenhagen, 1925, and Muhammedansk tankegang i vore dage, Copenhagen, 1930. 16 See Bennett, ‘Introduction’, in CMR 17, p. 20. 17 See Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 48. 18 See D.D. Grafton, ‘Samuel Zwemer’, in CMR 16, 433-54.



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that Høyer should go to Mukalla, the main city in the area, in order to investigate possibilities. He was well received by the local ruling family, and he soon decided that Mukalla was the right place for his missionary efforts. He went back to Hebron to organise details and, in October 1903, he arrived in Aden in order to obtain official English permission to settle in Mukalla. His application was declined by the English authorities but Høyer nevertheless went to Mukalla, only to find that the local ruler had changed his mind and now declined his request to be allowed to settle. Instead, he obtained permission to settle in Aden, and he established cooperation with a Scottish mission in July 1904. Høyer’s mission was renamed the Dansk Kirkemission i Arabien.19 Høyer still wanted to conduct missionary work in areas where no other Christian missions were active, and he actually managed to obtain permission to establish a mission station in Hudayda on the Red Sea coast, though the plan never materialised because of the outbreak of World War I. For a while, he was also active in Lahaj north of Aden, just outside the area controlled by the British Aden Protectorate. However, disagreements between Høyer’s assistant and a Scottish missionary led to the end of their engagement in the city. The efforts of the Dansk Kirkemission i Arabien continued but without success, as only a very few Muslims converted and most of those who were baptised soon returned to Islam. The mission succeeded, however, in establishing a number of schools for boys and one for girls, and in 1910 it also managed to open a bookshop and a reading room with Bibles and books for people who wanted to learn about Christianity.20 Humanitarian assistance to the Armenians The atrocities against the Armenians committed in the last years of the Ottoman Empire caused international concern. Karen Jeppe (1876-1935) was a schoolteacher who, in February 1902, attended a public lecture by the Danish author and journalist Aage Meyer Benedictsen (1866-1927), who had visited the city of Urfa in south-east Anatolia and had witnessed the suppression of the Armenians. As a result, Benedictsen became a member of Danske Armeniensvenner (‘Danish friends of Armenia’), and was active in drawing public attention to the sufferings of the Armenians. Jeppe was impressed by the lecture, and decided to go to Urfa. 19 Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 149. 20 Nielsen, Tålmodighed forpligter, p. 154.

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Being a teacher by training, she was employed by Danske Armeniensvenner and sent to Urfa to work in an orphanage. At the school, she also organised vocational training for both boys and girls to teach them skills needed to get a job and earn a salary. She engaged in active support for Armenians who were oppressed by the local Ottoman administration, and after World War I she was appointed by the League of Nations to organise humanitarian aid for the many Armenian refugees in the area under the newly created French Mandate.21 Academic contributions of Danish Orientalists to knowledge about Islam and Muslims During the 19th century, a number of Danish Orientalists published works about Islam and Muslims, and about the dramatic changes that were taking place in the Islamic world. Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872) introduced Danish readers to the ways in which Muḥammad was described in the Muslim tradition,22 August Ferdinand van Mehren (1822-1907) introduced examples of contemporary Arabic literature,23 Johannes Østrup (1867-1938) published books on the development of modern Turkey, Morocco, Egypt and Arabia, and translated the Thousand and one nights into Danish,24 and Frants Buhl (1850-1932) published a seminal study of the life of Muḥammad in 1903.25 These books made it possible for Danes to be informed about the political, economic, cultural and religious changes that were going on in the Islamic world.

21 See H.S. Kjær, 1915 – Vidner til det armenske folkemord. Maria Jacobsen, Karen Jeppe, Carl Ellis Wandel, Copenhagen, 2010. 22 See J.B. Simonsen, ‘Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig’, in CMR 17, 584-91. 23 See J.B. Simonsen, ‘August Ferdinand van Mehren’, in CMR 17, 592-7. 24 See J.B. Simonsen, ‘Johannes Østrup’, in CMR 17, 598-603. 25 See J.B. Simonsen, ‘Frants Buhl’, in CMR 17, 604-9.

Islam and Norway in the 19th century Nora S. Eggen Public life in Norway in the 19th century was dominated by a number of nation-building processes. In 1814, following the Napoleonic Wars, Norway was granted independence from union with Denmark and adopted its own constitution. But lack of international recognition for its new status compelled it to accept the king of Sweden as ruler in a personal union that lasted until 1905. In consequence, Norway had no foreign services of its own through the 19th century, though it did have its own parliament and a growing number of national institutions, the most important being the Kongelige Frederiks Universitet founded in 1811. Moves were made to construct a national identity, including endeavours to recover the pre-Danish past and to celebrate an authentic language and culture. While this was taking place, cultural ties to Denmark were maintained,1 and a growing cultural elite also sought inspiration from wider European intellectual and cultural developments. Among these developments was a growing interest in non-Christian religions in general and Islam and the Middle East in particular. Scholars had for many years included in their reading historical introductions to Islam and Judaism, along with translations of the Qur’an, accounts from travellers in the Islamic world and books on Arab history and the Arabic language,2 many of the contents of these were probably copied from or were heavily inspired by European predecessors.3 With Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria (17981801), a new interest in the East emerged based on fresh knowledge derived from newly available texts, archaeological material and empirical knowledge about Islamic societies. The focus of this essay is on works by 19th-century Norwegian authors for a Norwegian audience. They show that Islam was programmatically 1 E. Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism. Paris and the cosmopolitan imagination 1800-1900, Copenhagen, 2005, p. 105. 2 G. Dahl, Books in early modern Norway, Leiden, 2011, pp. 88, 201. 3 J.B. Simonsen, Islam med danske øjne, Copenhagen, 2004, p. 76.

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regarded as the faith of Turks, Arabs, Orientals or Mohammedans, though they only rarely discuss Islam in a more comprehensive way.4 There is no clear evidence of any Muslims living in Norway in this period. However, Islam or Muslims were referred to directly and indirectly in political as well as academic, literary and religious contexts, more often following traditional misconceptions and imagined projections than genuine dimensions of the faith. The proxy Muslim in religio-political discourse One of the earliest references to a topic related to Islam is from 1804, in an attack written by Bishop Peder Hansen (1746-1810) on the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824). Hauge, a religiously motivated popular agitator for social justice and moral renewal, challenged the religious authorities in Norway and Denmark and, in response, Hansen compared him to the radical 18th-century Arab preacher and reformer, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703-92), hin Muhamedaner Abdul Vachab,5 whose followers constituted a rapidly emerging political challenge to the central Ottoman authorities. This parallel suggests a reversal in perception of the Islamic world from earlier times. From the 16th century onwards, the Ottoman Turks, alongside the Roman Catholic Church, had been seen as a major adversary of Protestant Christianity,6 as is attested in Bible commentaries, Lutheran hymns, sermons and books of prayer, and in church art. But now, at the turn of the 19th century, the Turks were perceived as a modern, civilised, but also weakened force, challenged by Wahhābī religious and political aggression, just as the Norwegian state and Church were challenged by the popular dissident Hauge.

4 The most common designations in the 18th century were ‘Islam’ and ‘muhamedaner’ (with the orthographic variations ‘mahomedaner’, ‘muhammedaner’, ‘mohamedaner’, ‘mohammedaner’ and, until 1940 ‘muselmand’). In the first part of the 19th century ‘Muhammedanisme’ became more common, to be replaced by ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ from the 1970s; N.S. Eggen, ‘Universalized versus particularized conceptualizations of Islam in translations of the Qurʾan in Scandinavia’, Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 18 (2016) 49-91, p. 83 n. 76. 5 F. Ulvund, ‘Wahhabisme som skremmebilde i Skandinavia rundt 1800’, Historisk tidsskrift 97 (2018) 98-114, pp. 109, 112. 6 B. Lavold, ‘Tyrkerfrykt i Norge fra 1500- til 1800-tallet’, Arr 31 (2019) 71-85.



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An early Muslim voice Before the Kongelige Frederiks Universitet was founded in 1811, higher learning was sought in Denmark or elsewhere in Europe, but from 1822 Arabic was taught together with other Semitic languages as part of a preparatory programme intended mainly for students of theology.7 In 1829, the first teacher of Arabic, Christopher Andreas Holmboe (17961881), Professor in Eastern Languages at Oslo, published a work of Islamic theology: excerpts from İmam Birgivī Mehmed Efendi’s (1523-73) Vasiyyetnāme.8 This was probably the first time a Norwegian audience had been presented with a Muslim voice and with the tenets of Islam in the words of a Muslim scholar, although in translation. Holmboe based his translation on the French translation by J. Garcin de Tassy (Exposition de la foi musulmane, 1822), which he had probably come across when he was in Paris learning Oriental languages with Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838). Instead of translating the French title, he chose to call his translation Katekismus, eller Udtog af Tyrkernes troeslære, til bruk for ungdommen (‘Catechism, or extract of Turkish doctrine, for the use of young people’). Martin Luther’s Small catechism had been the most important textbook for children since compulsory elementary school had been introduced in 1739,9 and it was first published in Norway in 1800, by which time Lutheranism had become a defining element of Norwegian identity.10 By linking his translation of this Islamic text to the catechism, Holmboe was suggesting a Muslim equivalent to a work that was familiar to everybody. Overlapping ideological and cultural fields One young reader of Holmboe’s translation may have been Henrik Wergeland (1808-45), a poet and historian, who became a spokesperson for cultural dialogue and a vehement opponent of the constitutional ban on Jews. In the discussions prior to the new constitution of 1814, 7 Both Sweden and Denmark already had long-standing university traditions, though the political circumstances meant that Norwegian students had mainly studied in Copenhagen; N.S. Eggen, ‘From handmaiden of theology to handmaiden of area studies. Philological approaches to Arabic-Islamic studies in Norway’, ICMR 29 (2018) 445-64, p. 451. 8 B.P.A. Elberkevi, Katekismus, eller Udtog af Tyrkernes troeslære, til bruk for ungdommen, trans. C.A. Holmboe, Christiania, 1829. 9 A. Aschim, ‘Luther and Norwegian nation-building’, Nordlit 42 (2019) 127-41, p. 129. 10 Aschim, ‘Luther and Norwegian nation-building’, pp. 129-30.

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the question of freedom of religion was hotly debated.11 While some delegates opted for a formulation allowing general freedom, the preparatory committee opted for a paragraph granting freedom only to the Evangelical Lutheran Church. In his Norges constitutions historie (‘History of the Norwegian constitution’, 1841), Wergeland commented that in 1814 the founding fathers had apparently not envisioned the possibility that non-Christians such as Muslims or Buddhists would want to enter the country.12 The Dissenter Act of 1845 later allowed churches other than the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be established, leading to discussion about the religious and legal status of the Quakers and Mormons. In the mid-19th century, it was argued that Mormons should not be defined as Christians, but have the same status as Jews and Muslims – the Norwegian sociologist Eilert Sundt (1817-75) described them as ‘American Turks’13 – and it was claimed that Mormonism was despotic, immoral and irrational, a subversive threat to Norwegian society and akin to Islam and communism. Although from a legal point of view religious tolerance was growing, society at large was still almost completely Evangelical Lutheran in character. Wergeland wrote about Moroccan Jews impressing him with their confident dignity and nobility and about the opposite demeanour among German Jews, who lived under restrictions, which had made him realise the moral danger of repression.14 His eagerness to confront the prejudice he perceived was also a motive in a series of anecdotes about Turks that were attempts to change prejudice against them.15 Inspired by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–81) play Nathan der Weise, in his poem De tre (‘The three’) Wergeland describes how a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian meet in the caravanserai of a desert oasis, spend the night in friendly conversation and in the morning pray and praise God, each in his own way. Although the Muslim’s praise echoes a Muslim prayer – Allah! Allah! stor og god!/Evig være Allah priset! (‘Allāh! Allāh! Great and good!/ Ever may Allāh be praised!’) – there is no clear reference to the Qur’an or Prophetic Hadith. There are also many inaccuracies, among which are the direction of prayer not being towards Mecca and the Kaʿba having a dome. Wergeland 11 F. Ulvund, ‘“Grundlovens Taushed”, høgsterett og religionsfridomen mellom Grunnlova og dissenterlova’, Teologisk Tidsskrift 3 (2014) 385-407. 12 H. Wergeland, Norges konstitusjons historie, Oslo, 1997, p. 533. 13 F. Ulvund, ‘Travelling images and projected representations’, Scandinavian Journal of History 41 (2016) 208-30, p. 220. 14 H. Wergeland, Hasselnøtter, Oslo, 1997, pp. 232-3, 244-5. 15 L. Amundsen and D.A. Seip (eds), Henrik Wergelands samlede skrifter, Oslo, 2008, vol. 5, pp. 304-7.



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probably never met a Muslim and there is no evidence that he had very detailed knowledge of Islam, but the figure of the Muslim (Mollah) in the poem serves to represent Wergeland’s principle that ‘every religion has a mild and loving heart’.16 In another instance, the figure of the Muslim serves as a discussant in an account of the ‘triumph of Christianity’.17 Wergeland also translated (via German) the poem Farys (from the Arabic fāris, ‘horse rider’) by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Here, the figure of the Arab, a lonely horseman striving against the elements and reaching for insights of a higher order, is both an exotic individual and a symbol. That in the original poem he was actually a Pole seems irrelevant to Wergeland’s requirements.18 On the contrary, to a Goethian Romanticist such as Wergeland, a Pole disguised as an Arab engaged in a Polish national struggle was just the right figure to represent his own aspirations. Although he was writing in a literary language that was still largely Danish in structure and vocabulary, Wergeland was instrumental in forming a particular Norwegian identity and independent Norwegian literature. In this endeavour, the Orient became a trope used to mark a separate Norwegian identity. The second half of the century saw a new phase in nation building, in which the movement for cultural independence, in addition to the ongoing struggle for political independence, was directed as much against Sweden as against Denmark. This was symbolised in a conflict over Norway’s shared national pavilion with Sweden at the Exposition universelle in Paris in 1867.19 Furthermore, Norway’s identity was thrown deeper into ambiguity by all the Scandinavian countries being placed in a ‘realm of foreignness’, together with places such as Egypt and North Africa.20 The exhibition also called into question some of the assumptions about the Orient that were then current, and from the mid-19thcentury it became evident that Europeans and Orientals could no longer be imagined as opposed categories of beings.21

16 H. Jæger et al. (eds), Samlede skrifter, Kristiania/Oslo, 1919, vol. 3, pp. 307-13. 17 Amundsen and Seip, Henrik Wergelands samlede skrifter, vol. 2, p. 232. 18 The poem celebrated the Polish count Wacław Rzewuski (1784-1831), an equestrian and an Orientalist scholar; E. Krag, ‘Adam Mickiewicz og Henrik Wergeland, et dikt og en oversettelse’, Edda 48 (1948) 408-36. 19 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 109. 20 N. Kaufman, Place, race, and story. Essays on the past and future of historic preservation, London, 2009, p. 204. 21 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 156.

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In his play Peer Gynt (1867), Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) explored the opposition between Norway and the contemporary East.22 He sends his boastful and deceitful protagonist Peer Gynt off into the world, where he is confronted with his delusions of grandeur. As Elisabeth Oxfeldt has argued, the East is not portrayed here only as an imaginary space, because the protagonist’s claimed identity is challenged not only by Europeans but also by Orientals. In Morocco, Anitra, the daughter of the Bedouin chieftain whom Peer sees as an archetypical noble savage, though morally and intellectually inferior, turns out to be a real person who puts on an act to fool the orientalising Peer.23 Moreover, with Peer’s sojourn in Egypt, Ibsen’s critique extends to the scientific Orientalists, and their tendency to turn ‘their object of study into a European field of concepts’.24 On the other hand, in real life Ibsen himself seems to have harboured the very objectifying attitude that he critiques in his literary work. In 1869, together with the Egyptologist Jens Lieblein (1827-1911), he visited Egypt as a representative of the king of Sweden and Norway at the opening of the Suez Canal.25 The brief notes he published about this journey reveal a typical Orientalist outlook, and a need to identify a fundamental core difference between himself and the Oriental other.26 In his poem Ballonbrev til en svensk dame (‘Balloon letter to a Swedish lady’) he describes the journey as ‘a dream’, implying that what he experienced was unreal.27 Other than superficial descriptions of the ancient landmarks and monuments he saw, most of it consists of descriptions of his fellow travellers. His scattered notes suggest that his interactions with Egyptians were limited to some mule-drivers and children asking for money, although his contemporary, the writer Nordahl Rolfsen (1848-1928), observed that the dignified Algerian religious and military leader Amīr ʿAbd al-Qādir (1807-83) had made a deep impression on him.28

22 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, pp. 108, 135. 23 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 141. 24 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 153. 25 I.M. Okkenhaug, ‘Henrik Ibsen, khedivens gjest i Egypt i 1869’, in K.A. Kjerland and A.K. Bang (eds), Nordmenn i Afrika – Afrikanere i Norge, Bergen, 2002. 26 Henrik Ibsen, ‘Abydos’, in F. Bull, H. Koht and D.A. Seip (eds) Henrik Ibsens samlede verker, vol. 15, Oslo, 1999, 340-51. Lieblein wrote several articles for the Norwegian news­ paper Morgenbladet (1869-70), but Ibsen’s announced article on Egypt never appeared. 27 Henrik Ibsen, ‘Ballonbrev til en svensk dame’, Morgenbladet, 8 January 1871. 28 N. Rolfsen, Læsebog for folkeskolen, tredje del, Christiania, (1894-7) 1905, p. 80.



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The academic field One of the defining debates in 19th-century Norway was the role of language in the ongoing movement towards political and cultural independence, and towards a national identity. This urgent matter was linked to the academic question of the origin of the Scandinavian languages, and hence to cultural ownership of literature surviving from before the time of enforced union with neighbouring countries. This engaged disciplines such as history, archaeology, linguistics and philology. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, because documentary and archaeological evidence was scarce, works by Arab historians were recognised as welcome sources for the study of medieval Scandinavian history. Among the Arabic sources, Ibn Faḍlān’s (877-960) Risāla, a vivid account of his travels around the Volga region in 923, was to become the most popular.29 In 1869, Christopher Holmboe published a translation of parts of Ibn Faḍlān’s account of funeral rituals.30 Together with other Arabic works that were collected and edited by Alexander Seippel (1851-1938), Professor of Semitic Languages in Oslo, in the two-volume Rerum normannicarum fontes arabici (1896-1928),31 Ibn Faḍlān’s travelogue became a standard source for research on Norse history. The people he called Rūs were identified with the Vikings, and thus an Arab and by default a Muslim voice was acknowledged as providing a perspective onto the remote Norwegian past. Academic interests in Islam, Muslims and the Islamic world had several dimensions. Interest in Muslim languages, ideas and religious beliefs was partly sparked in connection with missionary endeavours. However, these studies also became important for Norwegian self-understanding and ultimately for defining national identity. Danish remained the official written language of Norway until 1885. From the 1840s two movements developed. One looked to incorporate features of the language spoken by the Dano-Norwegian urban elites, while the other sought to construct a new grammar and vocabulary based on dialects from various parts of the country. These endeavours resulted in the official endorsement by the Parliament in 1885 of two forms of the written language. Seippel was an 29 Eggen, ‘From handmaiden of theology’, p. 450. 30 A. Ibn Fozlan, Om nordiske Begravelsesskikke, trans. C.A. Holmboe, Christiania, 1869. Holmboe also published the translations Antar (1881) and Kalila og Dimna (1880). 31 A. Seippel, Rerum normannicarum fontes arabici, Oslo, 1896-1928; later revised, expanded and translated in H. Birkeland, Nordens historie i middelalderen etter arabiske kilder, Oslo, 1954.

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advocate for a language based on spoken dialects, and he translated the Bible into this.32 In addition, he translated some Persian poetry and wrote poetry inspired by Oriental works, and he also translated stories from the Alf layla wa-layla (Soga um Sindbad Farmann: Eit Æventyr or Tusund og ei nott, 1900).33 As linguistic and literary experiments, in these works Seippel included many words from the vernacular that were so unfamiliar to his readers he had to explain them in footnotes. In this way, Seippel was interpreting the Orient through a rural Norwegian experience, and Norway through the Orient.34 The literary field Towards the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Norway saw a renewed interest in Orientalism. This was largely inspired by Friedrich Nietzche’s (1844-1900) Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-5), and the Eighth Orientalist Congress in Stockholm and Kristiania in 1889. The congress included a large contingent of international scholars (including a representative of the Ottoman sultan), most of whom attended the week-long public convention in Stockholm and some the three-day gathering that followed in Oslo, which was on a smaller scale though still public.35 Employing various literary Orientalist tropes, the poet Vilhelm Krag (1871-1933) wrote in 1890 his neo-Romantic fantasy poem Fandango, which was replete with exotic dreams but also mourned the loss of the exotic as escape.36 Following a trip to Algeria and Tunisia in 1892, he published a travelogue in which the poet imagines himself in different roles through a range of stereotypical tropes.37 Another literary voice was Dorothea Reinhardt (1867-1933), who under the name Doris Rein published a number of plays dealing with contemporary concerns set in the framework of a biblical

32 S. Lomheim, ‘Alexander Seippel 1851-1938,’ Norsk oversetterleksikon, 2017, https:// www.oversetterleksikon.no/2017/05/12/alexander-seippel-1851-1938/. 33 A. Seippel, Persiske dikt etter Omar Kajjam, Hafis, Karabkuhi, Kristiania, 1912, expanded in Norsk-austerlendsk divan, Kristiania, 1923; Soga um Sindbad Farmann, eit Æventyr or Tusund og ei nott, trans. A. Seippel, Christiania, 1900. 34 A. Lande, S. Lomheim and G. Stubseid, Sjønna på Elbursfjell - Alexander Seippel – livet og livsverket, Kristiansand, 2001, p. 79. 35 K.U. Nylander, Orientalistkongressen i Stockholm-Kristiania, några skildringar från utlandet, Uppsala, 1890. 36 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 191. 37 V. Krag, Sange fra Syden, Bergen, 1893.



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or Oriental narrative.38 In the play Monime, the protagonist is a Greek woman who has been seduced by the Persian king, with Fatime as her obedient and oppressed servant who, under Monime’s guidance, courageously escapes with her.39 In the play Botheira, the protagonist is an independent desert woman with whom the Andalusian caliph falls in love, although convention stands in the way of a free and equal relationship.40 Love is a main literary motive in the Romantic setting, and the Oriental elements may be understood as literary props. However, the plays may also be read as a critique of Oriental culture, or as driven by Reinhardt’s own protest against the conventions and inequality between the sexes in her own culture. In some of Knut Hamsun’s (1859-1952) literary works, a lost Orientalist fantasy serves as a rejection of the Romantic project, and it comes to symbolise existential instability on both a personal and a national level.41 Like others before him, Hamsun set out in 1899 to gain first-hand knowledge of the Oriental other, and he travelled east with his wife, visiting Russia, the Caucasus and Constantinople. In his fictionalised travelogue I Æventyrland: Oplevet og drømt i Kaukasien (‘In wonderland. Experienced and dreamt in the Caucasus’),42 Hamsun displays an ironic distance to the Orientalist traveller. However, in the same year he also published the stage play Dronning Tamara (‘Queen Tamara’),43 in which the plot revolves around tensions between the Christian queen, her prince consort and a Muslim khan. Here, Hamsun conflates Christianity with what he perceived as negative values, such as ascetism and strictness, and Islam with positive sensuality. Nevertheless, each protagonist must find their place in a hierarchical order; to Hamsun an equal relationship between a Christian and a Muslim was just as inconceivable as an equal relationship between a man and a woman. Further Oriental themes appeared in a series of articles by Hamsun under the title Under Halvmånen(‘Under the crescent moon’).44 Here, in a 38 Lande, Lomheim and Stubseid, Sjønna på Elbursfjell, pp. 72-4; T. Ingrid, Sørlandsforfattere gjennom tidene, skjønnlitterære forfatterskap 800-1999, Bergen, 2002, pp. 111-12. 39 D. Rein, Monime, historisk drama i en akt, Kristiania, 1893. 40 D. Rein, Botheira, dramatisk digtning i fem akter, Kristiania, 1907. 41 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, p. 200. 42 K. Hamsun, I Æventyrland: Oplevet og drømt i Kaukasien, Copenhagen, 1903. 43 M. Žagar, ‘Knut Hamsun’s taming of the shrew? A reading of Dronning Tamara’, Scandinavian Studies 70 (1998) 337-58. 44 K. Hamsun, ‘Under Halvmånen’, Aftenposten (February-March 1903), repr. in K. Hamsun, Stridende liv, skildringer fra vesten og østen, København and Kristiania, 1905, pp. 189-318.

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Constantinople that closely resembles the traveller’s own world and with Muslim inhabitants who seem indifferent to his presence, the protagonist cannot remain imperialistic or detached, but is driven to conceive of an earnest, idealistic vision of a harmonious mixture of Muslim and Christian cultures.45 There is ambiguity throughout these literary works. On the one hand, Orientals, and implicitly Muslims, represent a noble though distant reality and, on the other, this reality is reshaped into a set of tropes that serve the political and cultural needs of Norwegian society. The religious field Mobility was relatively high during the 19th century. Large numbers of Norwegians emigrated, especially to North America, and others lived abroad for limited periods, often in the capacity of missionaries and sometimes diplomats. Missionaries were important sources of information and impressions for the audience back home in Norway, through magazines, visits and occasional longer works.46 Until 1905, few Norwegians held diplomatic posts,47 though Peter Blom (1828-1912), a priest from the small town of Drammen, was appointed chaplain at the Norwegian-Swedish consulate in Constantinople from 1858 to 1864. Within a few years of his return to Norway and a small parish at Hamar, he wrote Fra Østerland (‘From the East’),48 an account of Muslim faith and practice. In the introduction, he acknowledges his debt to a certain Reverend Pfander. The German missionary Carl Gottlieb Pfander (1803-68) had long experience of missionary work in India, Persia and adjacent countries, and wrote a number of books, among them a confrontational Christian apology, Mizān al-ḥaqq, which was originally written in German and translated into Persian, Arabic, English and other languages, 45 E. Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia. Travelogues of Africa, Asia and South America, 1840-2000, Minneapolis MN, 2010, p. 61. 46 On Norwegian missionaries, see H. Nielssen, I.M. Okkenhaug and K.H. Skeie, Protestant missions and local encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Leiden, 2011. 47 H. Leira and I. Neumann, ‘Consular representation in an emerging state. The case of Norway’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 3 (2008) 1-19, p. 15; L. Miller and J. Ojala, ‘Consular services of the Nordic countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Did they really work?’, in G. Boyce and R. Gorski (eds), Resources and infrastructures in the maritime economy, 1500-2000, Newfoundland, 2001, 23-41, pp. 32-4. 48 P. Blom, Fra Østerland, Christiania, 1875. Blom also published a travelogue, Reise til Jerusalem og Omegn, Kristiansand, 1870.



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and which caused some controversy.49 Pfander lived in Constantinople during the same period as Blom, and it is likely that Blom benefitted both from his written work and from personal contact. However, Blom also based his account on his own observations and experiences in Constantinople and on journeys in the region. In a number of textbooks and introductory works, separate sections or chapters presented Muḥammad, the fundamentals of Islam, and its history and people.50 They often depicted Muḥammad as a brave but despotic imposter, the Qur’an as a mixture of misunderstood borrowings from Arab, Jewish and Christian sources, and Islamic teachings as fanatical and immoral. Lutheran Denmark-Norway was governed by the lex regia, according to which the king held absolute power. This was not strongly disputed until the 19th century, when moves to separate the religious from the political sphere also led to changed perceptions of Islam. In the second half of the century, textbooks tended to distinguish between Islam as a belief system, which they criticised from a Christian standpoint, and the general political history of and developments in the Middle East and the Islamic world.51 Blom’s book seems to have been the first complete work about Islam and Muslims written by a Norwegian in the Norwegian language. It is a combination of personal experiences and reflections, narratives of travel, descriptions of religious rituals, buildings such as Hagia Sofia (long ago converted into a mosque) and relics of the Prophet from the Topkapi palace, and summaries of the main tenets of Islam, the teachings of the Qur’an and the history of the early Islamic community. The book also contains a number of observations on contemporary practices and developments. Blom often expresses admiration for what he witnesses, such as his personal audience with Sultan Abdulmecid I (r. 1839-61), who is described as humane and fair in granting his subjects new freedoms (a reference to the Tanzimat reforms). However, this admiration is mixed with contempt for what Blom sees as a religious tradition without any real spiritual depth. He often refers to concepts from the Bible and Christian doctrines and, as a devout Lutheran, he includes in his criticisms some non-Lutheran 49 C. Bennett, ‘The legacy of Karl Gottlieb Pfander’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20 (1996) 76-81; A.A. Powell, Muslims and missionaries in pre-Mutiny India, Abingdon, 2014. 50 I.L. Husby, ‘“Den falske religion”. En studie av forestillinger om islam og muslimer i dansk-norske og norske oversiktsverk og lærebøker i perioden 1750-1914’, Bergen, 2018 (MA Diss. University of Bergen), p. 45. 51 Husby, ‘“Den falske religion”’, p. 74.

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Christian practices he witnesses, such as the ceremony of celebrating the miracle of the holy fire each year on Holy Saturday in Jerusalem. Blom writes as a Christian, though he did not work as a missionary, unlike Ludvig Olsen Fossum (1879-1920), who was one of the few Norwegian missionaries working in predominantly Muslim areas. He worked among Kurds and translated the New Testament, a Kurdish grammar and other books into one of the Kurdish languages.52 Fossum was deeply engaged in the missionary cause and, although he was based in America, he was motivated by the lack of material in Norwegian. In 1911, he published a book on the history of ‘the false Prophet’ in order to raise awareness of the importance of missionary work in guiding ‘two hundred and thirty million Muhammedans in the Orient’ to salvation.53 In the same year, 1911, another short book was published by the leading Theosophist Eva Blytt (1867-1937), Muhamed: Islams store profet (‘Muḥammad, the great prophet of Islam’).54 Blytt studied Theosophical teachings in London between 1901 and 1904, and visited the Theosophist headquarters in Adyar, India, in 1911.55 The orientation in her book is very different from those of either Blom or Fossum. It sees a positive role for Islam, even in the development of Christian European culture, and describes Muḥammad as ‘the youngest crown in the glorious company of divinely guided Masters’.56 Blytt also confronts several traditional accusations about Muḥammad’s personal life and his career as a prophet. These publications, concerned in various ways with the religious message of Islam, demonstrate that there was a certain interest among Norwegians in the Prophet and Islamic faith and practice. They were sometimes mentioned in the press, but there is no evidence that they generated much public debate. In Sweden, the first translation of the Qur’an had been published in 1843, but in Norway it was not until 1980 that a complete

52 N. Eden, ‘The first Kurdish periodical in Iran’, International Journal of Kurdish Studies 20 (2006) 215-33. 53 L.O. Fossum, Muhammedanismen, land, forholde og personlighed der frembragte den, Mayville, 1911. 54 E. Blytt, Muhamed, Islams store profet, Kristiania, 1911. 55 S.E. Kraft, ‘Theosophy in Norway’, in H. Bogdan and O. Hammer (eds), Western esotericism in Scandinavia, Leiden, 2016, 570-7, p. 572. It was probably members of the Theosophical Society who invited the Sufi master Inayat Khan to Oslo and Bergen in 1924, and who became the first Sufi disciples in Norway; E. Pasnak, ‘En Sufimester i Bergen’, På Høyden (1 November 2019), https://https://pahoyden.khrono.no/ inayat-khan-manuskript--og-librarsamlingen-pamflett/en-sufi-mester-i-bergen/416784. 56 Blytt, Muhamed, Islams store profet, p. 11.



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translation first appeared,57 though Norwegian students of Arabic were already reading qur’anic passages as part of their studies, and an unpublished translation of the whole text, based on Ludwig Ullmann’s German translation (1840), indicates that there was interest in the Qur’an around the turn of the century.58 In 1914, Wilhelm Schencke (1869-1946) was appointed the first professor of the History of Religion at the University of Oslo.59 This appointment represented a new approach to Islam within the framework of the nascent discipline of History of Religions. Schencke was philologically trained and worked extensively on the Qur’an, producing a full translation together with comments referring to several works of classical tafsīr. On New Year’s Eve 1914, he published a brief article in the newspaper Tidens Tegn entitled ‘Røster fra religionerne’ (‘Voices from the religions’) with a translation of Sūrat al-fātiḥa. His complete translation is now lost. It was not until the mid-20th century that Muslims made an impact on Norway by their presence. However, as has been seen, in the 19th century they and their faith were by no means unknown in the country.

57 N.S. Eggen, ‘On the periphery. Translations of the Qurʾān in Sweden, Denmark and Norway’, in S. Hanna, H. El-Farahaty and A.-W. Khalifa (eds), Routledge handbook of Arabic translation, London, 2019, 65-80, p. 68. 58 N.S. Eggen, ‘Koranoversettelser i Norge’, Norsk Oversetterleksikon, 2017, http:// oversetterforeningen.no/koranoversettelser-i-norge-en-sniktitt-pa-norsk-oversetterleksikon/#more-10422. 59 S. Halden, ‘Wilhelm Schencke. En omstridt pioneer, etableringen av religionshistorie som et akademisk fag i Norge’, Oslo, 2007 (PhD Diss. University of Oslo).

Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914

Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia

Great Britain

Joseph White Date of Birth February 1746 Place of Birth Stonehouse, Gloucestershire Date of Death 23 May 1814 Place of Death Oxford

Biography

Joseph White’s date of birth is not recorded. He was baptised in Stroud on 19 February 1746, the eldest son of Thomas White (d. 1804), a journeyman weaver, and Elizabeth née Harmer (d. 1772). Initially, White was hometutored and began working for his father until family friends, noticing his aptitude for learning, paid for him to attend schools in Ruscombe and then Gloucester. Assisted by John Moore (d. 1805), later Archbishop of Canterbury, he entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1765 and graduated in 1769. He was ordained deacon in 1769 and priest in 1775. On Moore’s advice, he began to study Syriac, Arabic and Persian, which resulted in his election as the fifth Laudian professor of Arabic in 1774. In 1784, he delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford. White resigned his fellowship in 1787 to accept the living of Melton, Suffolk, and in 1788 he was made a prebendary of Gloucester Cathedral. In 1791 he married Mary Turner (d. 1811), and in 1804 succeeded to the Regius Chair of Hebrew at Oxford and became a canon of Christ Church. In 1806, he published a revised version of Edward Pococke’s Specimen historiae Arabum with an annexe on the history of Abū l-Fidāʾ. He died at home on 23 May 1814, and is buried in Christ Church.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary A letter to R.B. Gabriel, D.D. in answer to facts relating to the Rev. Dr. White’s Bampton lectures. By a member of one of the universities, London, 1789 J. White, A statement of Dr. White’s literary obligations to the late Rev. Mr. Samuel Badcock, and the Rev. Samuel Parr, L.L.D., Oxford, 1790 The Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1814, pp. 626-8 (obituary) J. Gorton, art., ‘White, Joseph’, A general biographical dictionary, vol. 3, Q-Z, London, 1833 (no page numbers)

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R.B. Gardiner (ed.), The registers of Wadham College, Oxford, London, 1895, vol. 2, pp. 119-20 Secondary D.S. Margoliouth, rev. M.J. Mercer, art., ‘White, Joseph’, in ODNB D.S. Margoliouth, art., ‘White, Joseph’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Sermons preached before the University of Oxford Date 1784 Original Language English Description Joseph White’s Bampton Lectures for 1784 were delivered as nine sermons at Oxford University and published as Sermons preached before the University of Oxford that year. Their subject was a comparison of Christianity and Islam. In 1785, a second edition was published in London to which White added a tenth sermon preached at the University Church on 1 July 1784. This was on ‘The duty of attempting the propagation of the Gospel among our Mahometan and Gentoo subjects in India’. In this 1785 edition, the sermons run for 527 pages followed by notes for another 87 pages. (All the references that follow are to this edition, unless otherwise stated.) After preliminary remarks to introduce his subject in Sermon I, White sets out in Sermon II (pp. 49-104) to examine the conditions that prevailed when Islam was ‘proposed to the world’ (p. 60) and how it spread. The first cause for its appearance was the corruption of Christianity, including the worship of Mary and veneration of relics, fractious rivalry between sects, the decline of learning, and the wealth and ‘pride’ of the clergy (p. 71). In the chaotic political and religious state of Arabia, this made the impostor Muḥammad’s success possible (p. 73). Describing Arabia as a tribal society, White identifies idolatry as the dominant religion, although there were also Jewish and Zoroastrian communities. Politically and religiously, the region was divided into competing factions. Muḥammad would craftily ‘adapt his schemes’ to accommodate elements of various creeds in order to attract the followers of these and indulge their prejudices. He would even claim to be reforming Christianity (p. 78). Since neither civilisation nor learning had made much progress in Arabia, and Mecca was known for its ignorance, Muḥammad was able to



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take advantage of the situation to ‘assert his divine commission’ (p. 79). He preached a paradise that pandered to the Arabs’ passions and imagination, and adorned it with ‘gardens’ and ‘blooming beauties’ to ‘excite their desires’ (p. 83). Muḥammad seized on the doctrine of God’s unity as his ‘fundamental doctrine’ because this was easier for people to grasp than the more sublime but mysterious Trinity (p. 85). Once he had attracted enough followers through ‘persuasion’, he abandoned this and took up the sword ‘to compel men’ to embrace his creed (p. 87). After overcoming opposition, he was able to subdue Mecca, destroy the idols that surrounded its sacred shrine, and establish himself as temporal as well as spiritual leader. The streets of Medina (to where he had migrated from his native Mecca) became crowded with visiting ambassadors seeking alliances, and Muḥammad’s troops went out to convert or defeat all enemies of the faith. As leaders, he chose talented men of ability who were also animated by zeal. Muḥammad was a ‘genius’ in unifying Arabia by combining military skill and religious enthusiasm (p. 92). After his death, his successors conquered such a vast territory that Europe was threatened by Islam’s ‘intolerable bondage’ (p. 95). His ‘artful impostor’ was not spread in accordance with divine will but due to the circumstances of the time and by violence (p. 100). Islam crushed all dissent. Sermon III (pp. 105-60) goes on to reject the claim that Islam’s success is a sign of divine favour. In this sermon, White contrasts what he sees as the divine agency behind the spread of Christianity with the purely human agencies that spread Islam. Far from accommodating itself to people’s predispositions, Christianity demanded radical changes in their morality and conduct. Christianity ‘laboured’ under so many ‘disadvantages’ that only divine agency could explain its expansion (p. 154), nor was it imposed by a tyrant or (at least for the first 300 years) ‘countenanced by the influence of government and authority’ (p. 160). Sermon IV (pp. 161-207) turns to the life of Muḥammad in more detail. His followers ‘uniformly’ paint the brightest picture of him as an example of every mental and moral perfection. This is markedly different from the ‘portrait’ presented by Christians, who represent him as vile, immoral and contemptible, though Christian zeal has resulted in ‘unjustified extremes’ that have ‘injured the cause they stood forth to defend’ (p. 165). Yet even if Muḥammad’s better qualities are admitted, ‘objections may still be raised to his bold and impious pretensions’ (p. 166). The rest of this sermon elaborates on this.

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Muḥammad led millions into error. His ambition propelled him from obscurity onto the stage of history as founder of a great empire, which justly qualifies him as one of the most ‘stupendous’ men in history (p. 170). Although he belonged to a noble family, he was born poor and never knew ‘parental affection’. Later, his commercial pursuits took him to Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where he benefitted from exposure to these civilisations. Through 15 years about which nothing is known (p. 74), he developed a love of solitude, and in the lonely cave of Mount Hara (Ḥirāʾ) he ‘shunned’ human society. In this silence he ‘laid the foundations for his future greatness’ (p. 175). Convinced that idolatry was absurd and that Christianity was hopelessly divided, he ‘meditated a religion’ that could embrace pagan, Jew and Christian (p 177). He seized on a simple doctrine of one God, and added the ‘obligation of believing’ that he himself was God’s prophet (p. 178). Then he constructed a ‘motley and misshapen superstructure’ by selecting and blending elements from Judaism and Christianity into a religion that was adapted to the ‘sentiments and manners’ of people who inhabit warmer climes. It would have been too risky to pretend to be preaching a new religion, so instead he claimed to be restoring the original religion that God had given ‘to all the sons of men’ (p. 179). Muḥammad’s claim that he was reviving the Arabs’ ancestral faith helped him to attract followers after pretending to receive revelations from God via Gabriel. After three years’ preaching in secret to a few friends and family members, his public ministry began. He faced ridicule but also won converts. His motives became mixed after he fled ‘to a secure’ retreat (Medina) (p. 188), at which point conquest, ambition and indulging his fondness for women became dominant. He could be both cruel and merciful towards the vanquished, and his revelations came to his rescue as a means of silencing criticism. By claiming illiteracy, he compounded his imposture by passing off his utterances as divine speech that was too eloquent to be his own composition. In what he says here, White does not dispute that Muḥammad reformed the ‘manners of the Arabs’, or that Islam contains true principles borrowed from Christianity. But his point is that Islam’s faults outweigh the good elements within it. Sermon V (pp. 209-49) compares this outline of Muḥammad’s life with the life of Christ, in whom ‘every virtue that adorns humanity’ is seen. Muḥammad seized the sceptre but Jesus declined ‘the reality of dominion’ (p. 231): Jesus’s miracles were all acts of benevolence (and not demonstrations of power), and he often swore those whom he healed to secrecy (so



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as not to advertise knowledge of his power). Even the ‘most lofty and partial representation’ of Muḥammad’s life ‘shrinks’ in comparison with this (p. 243): Jesus called people to repent, Muḥammad called them to conquest; Muḥammad’s ‘revelation’ was ‘inconsistent’, first designating Mecca as the direction of prayer, then Jerusalem (in Muslim biographies, the direction of Muslim prayer was first Jerusalem then Mecca), while Jesus was consistent and did not change his teaching to accommodate circumstances; Muḥammad lured converts with his ‘monarchy’, and Jesus rode meekly into Jerusalem on a donkey. Sermon VI (pp. 251-81) discusses Muḥammad’s claims to receive revelation from God via the angel Gabriel, a notion, says White, that he derived from the Bible. His ‘infatuated followers’ took these revelations as too sublime to be the work of ‘one who professed himself unlearned’ (pp. 255-6), instead taking them to be miraculous, and looked on the Qur’an as a more permanent miracle than the transitory miracles of Moses and Jesus. White does not wish to detract from the Qur’an’s ‘real merit’, but he rejects its supernatural origin. He suggests that any suspicions about Muḥammad’s apparent ‘sincerity’ were obscured by his success, just as his followers’ zeal caused them to overlook any imperfections in his character. He describes some of the Qur’an’s teachings about God’s attributes and argues that these were borrowed from the New Testament, and he contends that when Muḥammad described heaven and hell he was unable to borrow extensively from the Bible and so resorted to describing them in sensual terms (p. 268). Lacking Arab predictions of the coming of a prophet to which he could point, and finding none in the Bible, although his followers have ‘laboured to discover these’, Muḥammad claimed that the Bible had been corrupted, though the evidence of ancient manuscripts disproves this. Sermon VII (pp. 283-332) turns to the proofs on which Jesus rested his claims to be a ‘divine teacher’. Compared with Muḥammad’s, White finds these compelling. Sermon VIII (pp. 333-83) discusses in more detail the Qur’an’s claims to be revealed scripture. White again attributes most of its contents to the Bible, though it contains many errors because of Muḥammad’s ‘gross and mistaken ideas of the Christian Trinity’ (p. 341). Muḥammad also drew on Talmudic legends and ‘spurious gospels’ to compile his book (p. 351). Instead of improving on the system of morality he found in the Bible, however, Muḥammad ‘debased and weakened this’ (p. 352). Though the Qur’an borrows from the Law and the Gospel, it perverts both (p. 355).

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Concerning the denial of Christ’s crucifixion in Q 4:157, White points out that an early Christian ‘sect’ taught that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, so this was not original to Muḥammad (p. 358). White also refers to the Gospel of Barnabas in which Judas, not Jesus, died on the cross. White asserts that the Qur’an is inconsistent not only with earlier scriptures but also with itself, mentioning the doctrine of abrogation. Sermon IX part 1 (pp. 385-431) contrasts the impact that Christianity has had on the nations that adopted it with Islam’s impact on those nations where it prevails. The latter suffer from a decline in learning, a ‘deep pause in philosophy’, due to Islam’s ‘brutal barbarity’, which discourages any ‘spirit of learning’ (p. 390). But Christianity produces a ‘spirit of courtesy and humanity’ (p. 389). Sermon IX part 2 (pp. 433-63) contrasts the influence of the two religions on human morality. Islam makes people contemptuous of those who do not follow it. The sword is the Muslims’ most prized possession, and they see paradise as reward for their ‘labours in the desolation of humanity’ (p. 444). They are hostile to all other peoples, so that Islam divides humanity while Christianity unites people. Islam is too tied to the prejudices of one country, Arabia, and of one age, the 7th century. On the other hand, Christians pray for all people. The additional Sermon X (pp. 465-526) was addressed to members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) as an encouragement to mission. Some claim that God delights in the variety of religions in the world (p. 476) and that it does not matter which god, or how many gods, people worship as long as they practise good morality (p. 480). People’s moral consciousness derives from notions of ‘Himself’ which God has ‘implanted’ in them (p. 487), and all nations have received some witness to God’s ‘power and providential care’. Hence, when missionaries attempt to change people’s ‘laws and employment’ they should pay attention to their ‘religious tenets and modes of worship’ (p. 489). Muslims in the East were ‘lifted far above the ignorance of barbarians and the ferocity of savages’ by the teachings of Muḥammad, which makes them receptive to the ‘sublimer doctrines of Christianity’ (p. 495). After all, they ‘are subjects of well-regulated states’, ‘observers of established laws’, ‘civilised by the intercourse of agriculture and commerce, and polished by the use of letters and the arts’ (pp. 496-7). False as their religion is, it has ‘many articles of belief in common’ with Christianity. Muslims believe in one God, honour Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and allow that the ‘Pentateuch and the Gospels are sacred books’.



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White wanted SPG missionaries to evangelise Muslims, and offered what he saw as a new approach. But even his tentative and partial view that Islam could be used as a stepping stone to Christian faith would have challenged most missionaries at the time. The next part of the chapter summarises the history of Muslim rule in India. It argues that Muslim piety merits some ‘reverence’ (p. 512), and that spreading the Gospel must be accompanied by efforts to improve Muslims’ civil and political rights, and their welfare. Together with respect for what their religion already teaches, this attitude will convince them that Christians are genuinely interested in their well-being. This form of approach will gradually prepare people’s minds for ‘an impartial and serious discussion of such evidences as may be brought to support’ Christianity, ‘which really and solely is the true’ religion (p. 514). The extensive notes at the end of the book cite sources and qur’anic passages, and supplement the main text. One note states that the Qur’an of the Sunnīs differs from that of the Shīʿa ‘in many places’ (p. xlix), while another gives lengthy citations from the Gospel of Barnabas, which White himself translated from a Spanish MS in the possession of George Holme (d. 1765), Rector of Headley in Hampshire (pp. lxix-lxxvii). Apart from fragments in Sale’s Koran, these are the only surviving passages from this lost MS of the work. White’s main source for Muḥammad’s biography was Jean Gagnier’s translation of Abū l-Fidāʾ’s biography of Muḥammad, De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis (Oxford, 1723). Significance White was widely cited well into the 19th century. Many saw his work as among the best on Islam by a Christian, though some were critical. For example, Charles Forster noted an inconsistency between Sermon IX, in which White referred to a ‘pause’ in learning among Muslims (p. 390), and Sermon X, where he described Muslim societies as well regulated and ‘polished by the use of letters’ (Mahometanism unveiled, London, 1829, vol. 1, p. 43). Godfrey Higgins cited White six times in his Apology, but he thought that White’s academic position left him no choice but to describe Muḥammad as a crafty impostor (Apology for Mohamed, London, 1829, p. 9). In sermon X, White realised that hostility towards Islam would fail to attract a positive response from Muslims and invited missionaries to identify common ground between Christianity and Islam. Sermon X inspired the SPG to begin work among Muslims (D. O’Connor, Three centuries of mission, London, 2000, p. 54).

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Despite White’s repeated use of the term ‘impostor’, other writers also saw hints in his work of a more positive appreciation of Muḥammad than was commonly held. For example, Albert Hourani (d. 1993) cited White’s description of Muḥammad’s ‘genius’ and ‘greatness of mind’ as evidence that while he rejected Muḥammad’s religious claims White credited his human achievements (Islam in European thought, Cambridge 1991, p. 12). White’s Bampton Lectures stimulated new interest in Islam at Oxford and elsewhere, which resulted in some Christians, including Charles Forster and Godfrey Higgins, who were less reluctant than he to risk their careers because of their different circumstances, building on White while expressing much more admiration for Islam than he felt able to. Unsurprisingly, these authors attracted positive Muslim responses to their writings while White’s did not. Publications J. White, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford, 1784, London, 1784; 008929124 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. White, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford … to which is now added a sermon preached … July 4, 1784, London, 17852 J. White, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford … to which is now added a sermon preached … July 4, 1784, London, 17853, repr. 1789; 591047936 (digitised version of 1789 repr. available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) J. White, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford … to which is now added a sermon preached … July 4, 1784, London, 17924; ESTC T130160 (digitised version available through ECCO) J. White, A comparison of Mahometism and Christianity in their history, their evidence, and their effects. Sermons preached before the University of Oxford, in the year 1784, London, 1811; 008929124 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies Anon., ‘White’s Sermons and Bampton Lectures’, The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 58 (1784) 452-62 Clinton Bennett

Dean Mahomet Deen Mahomed Date of Birth 1759 Place of Birth Patna, Bihar, India Date of Death 24 February 1851 Place of Death Brighton, England

Biography

Dean Mahomet was raised a Shīʿī Muslim, descended from Afshar Turkish and Arab immigrants to India in the 17th century. At the age of 11, he joined the East India Company’s Bengal Army as a camp follower. Under the patronage of an Anglo-Irish subaltern officer, Godfrey Evan Baker (d. 1786), he rose to the rank of Subedar (Indian captain) while campaigning against Hindu rulers across north India (1769-84). He emigrated with Baker to the latter’s hometown of Cork, Ireland, where he converted to Anglican Christianity and, in 1786, he married an AngloIrish gentlewoman, Jane Daly, with whom he had several children, all raised as Anglicans. Since the Anglican Church required both parties in its marriages to be Anglicans, Dean Mahomet’s motives for conversion may have been pragmatic rather than religious. To explain his Islamic Indian culture sympathetically, he wrote and published in 1794 his two-volume autobiographical narrative Travels. Around 1800, he moved with some of his family to London, where he adapted his culture to British tastes. First, he worked for the Hon. Basil Cochrane (1753-1826), providing allegedly Indian medical practices for British patients: ‘shampooing’ (whole-body massage therapy based on Indian champi) and Indian medical steam baths. He also assumed for himself the honourific ‘Sake’ (shaykh) and Anglicised his name to Deen Mahomed. Although his first wife was evidently still alive, in 1806 he married Jane Jeffreys in St Marylebone Parish Church. In 1810, he opened his ‘Hindostanee Coffee House’ near Portman Square, London’s first Indian restaurant run by an Indian. It purveyed Indian-style curries and hookahs, as well as fine wines. Despite excellent reviews, the enterprise did not succeed and he declared himself bankrupt in 1812.

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Illustration 1. Coloured lithograph of Dean Mahomet (Deen Mahomed)



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From 1814, Dean Mahomet worked in the coastal resort of Brighton as a shampooer and seller of medications that he advertised as Indian. From 1815, he ran his own bathhouses, the most prominent of which was the purpose-built ‘Mahomed’s Baths’ on King’s Road, overlooking the sea. As ‘the Shampooing Surgeon’, he attracted an elite European clientele which included Kings George IV (r. 1820-30) and William IV (r. 1830-7). He published two self-promoting books: Cases cured by Sake Deen Mahomed, shampooing surgeon, and inventor of the Indian medicated vapour and seawater bath (Brighton, 1820), and, in three editions, Shampooing, or, benefits resulting from the use of the Indian medicated vapour bath (Brighton, 1822, 1826, 1838). In these, he omitted his earlier life in Cork and London, and claimed 1749 as his birthdate, inserting a decade as a trained surgeon in the East India Company’s service. After another bankruptcy in 1841, Dean Mahomet reduced his shampooing practice, operating from his home for a decade. His descendants were all Anglican. His grandsons included Dr Frederick Akbar Mahomed (1849-84), a noted physician, and James Deen Kerriman Mahomed (18531935), a Church of England clergyman.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Dean Mahomet, The travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the Honourable the East India Company written by himself, in a series of letters to a friend, Cork, 1794 MS London, British Library – Add 8145-47 (Abū Ṭālib Khān, Masīr Ṭālibī fī bilād afranji [Talib’s travels in the lands of the Franks], 3 vols, see vol. 1, fols 97-8; partly trans. Charles Stewart, Abu Taleb Khan, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan … 1799 … 1803; written by himself in … Persian, 2 vols, London, 1810, 18142, see vol. 1, pp. 124-5) Secondary J. Stewart Cameron, ‘A brief history of the Mahomed family, the offspring of Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851)’, unpublished, 2015 (personal communication from the author, 15.9.2015) R. Visram, Asians in Britain. 400 years of history, London, 2002 K. Teltscher, ‘The shampooing surgeon and the Persian prince. Two Indians in early nineteenth-century Britain’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2 (2000) 409–23 M.H. Fisher, The first Indian author in English. Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) in India, Ireland, and England, Delhi, 1996

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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The travels of Dean Mahomet Date 1794 Original Language English Description In 1794, Mahomet wrote and published in Cork The travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the Honourable the East India Company written by himself, in a series of letters to a friend as an autobiographical travel narrative about his career in India, ending with his arrival in Britain in 1784. In the original duodecimal edition, the work comprises two volumes, and totals 403 pages (102 pages in Fisher’s edition). Mahomet uses the popular epistolary style, which creates a more personal relationship between the reader and the author. Thus, he begins each of the 38 letters in his book with ‘Dear Sir’, but he does not seem to have any real or imagined person as his intended Christian European reader. While he occasionally responds to the expectations he imputes to his readers, he never even pretends to dialogue with his fictional correspondent. Each letter (chapter) describes a phase of his life, an aspect of his religion or culture, or the battles between the British and Indian Hindu rulers or forest-dwelling insurgents. Several letters detail Muslim rituals that the author attended, including circumcisions, marriages, funerals and Muḥarram commemorations (chs 12-14, 37). He also describes the beliefs, diet and cremations of Hindus (ch. 18). The work includes three original plates. The frontispiece shows the author wearing European-style clothing and is captioned ‘Dean Mahomet, an East Indian’, and there are also plates showing the procession of an Indian Muslim ruler, and an illustration of an Indian soldier (sepoy) saluting an Indian officer (like himself). Mahomet’s Travels is the first book ever written and published in English by an Indian. Since he wrote this two-volume work while he was living in Cork, its form and content reveal the perspective and goals of an early Muslim immigrant to Europe. It is thus an innovative example of a genre that came to be called by later scholars ‘reverse travelogues’, accounts written in or about Europe by non-Europeans. However, unlike many other authors of such works, Mahomet does not address his fellow non-Europeans or explicitly discuss his life in Europe (although occasionally in passing



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he briefly compares conditions and peasant lifestyles in India with those around him in Ireland). Instead, he ends his narrative with his arrival in England, prior to his settling in Ireland, nor does he mention his marriage. We can see from the form and content of Mahomet’s book that he tried to adapt and incorporate for his own purposes the dominant Christian society around him while also retaining his Indian and Muslim identity. He evidently wished to demonstrate to his Anglo-Irish readers that he personally was capable of authoring and publishing a sophisticated and elegant book in English, and was therefore a worthy member of elite British society. His etched frontispiece portrait (facing the title page) shows him in European garments and hairstyle. In the course of his writing, he makes occasional allusions to classical authors such as Seneca and Martial. At the same time, he clearly wished to assert to these readers the morality and virtues of his own Muslim community in India. Many of his chapters describe distinguished features of this community, including religious, cultural and social ceremonies and the courts and processions of Muslim princes in north India (one illustration shows such a procession). Further, Mahomet’s descriptions of Hindus suggest that his representation of Indians was not exclusively about Muslims. To assist Anglophone readers unfamiliar with India, Mahomet includes a glossary of ‘Persian and Indian terms’. However, in this and some other sections (for instance his descriptions in chs 25-6 of Surat and Bombay, which he never visited), he copies without attribution from John Henry Grose, Voyage to the East Indies (London, 1766), and also lifts sections about the Prophet Muḥammad, betel-nut (pan) chewing and ‘dancing girls’ (chs 15, 27), although he knew about these from personal experience. In addition, he copies short passages from Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe … and the East Indies (London, 1777). In many instances, he modifies the words and implications of these earlier authors in light of his own sentiments. For example, Grose wrote: As to [the Prophet] Mahomet himself, there is a faint reverence kept up for his name […] not so much a veneration for Mahomet for its object, as the unity of the Supreme Being; in the invocation of which, if they joined the commemoration of his name, it was purely out of gratitude for his being the missionary of that unity […] and so far from addressing him as a saint, that in their moschs [mosques] and orisons, they do not pray to him but for him, recommending him to the divine mercy. (Grose, Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 175-6, 180)

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Dean Mahomet writes: The Mahometans are strict adherents to the tenets of their religion, which does not, by any means, consist in that enthusiastic veneration for Mahomet so generally conceived: it considers much more, as its primary object, the unity of the supreme Being, under the name of Alla: Mahomet is only regarded in a secondary point of view, as the missionary of that unity […] and so far from addressing him as a deity, that in their oraisons, they do not pray to him, but for him recommending him to the divine mercy. (Mahomet, Travels, ch. 14)

While today this would be condemned as plagiarism, at the time Mahomet was writing the practice was common. The far more famous and influential Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-97) had already published The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (London, 1789). That book was a model for Mahomet and other non-whites who were seeking to prove themselves fully human to British audiences, both abolitionists and proslavery advocates. Indeed, Equiano visited Cork in 1791 on one of his many anti-slavery lecture tours. Unlike Equiano, however, for whom becoming Christian was a major transforming event in his life and autobiography, Mahomet does not mention his own conversion. Instead, Mahomet refers to both Indian Muslims and Christian Anglo-Irish people as ‘we’. This suggests that Mahomet identified himself as simultaneously a member of several cultural communities, with expertise in traditions associated with Muslims, Christians and Hindus. Significance As the first book ever published by an Indian in English, Mahomet’s Travels was innovative, but only limited evidence has survived about its impact on Christian-Muslim relations at the time of its publication or later. The pre-publication endorsement of his work by 320 subscribers from among the social elite in the Cork region indicates how authorship of this work solidified Mahomet’s status. Of the 238 males who subscribed, over 85 percent were gentlemen distinguished by a title, rank or the epithet ‘esquire’, while less than 15 percent bore the label of mere ‘Mr’. Included among the male subscribers were 17 members of the nobility, 10 military officers (up to the rank of colonel), 17 clergymen (including three bishops), and three medical practitioners. The 82 women, who made up over a quarter of the subscribers, included a viscountess, five ladies, and several honourables (daughters of titled families). Nonetheless, there are few known surviving copies in Ireland: vol. 1 in the Irish



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National Library and both volumes in the Catholic Ursuline Convent in Cork. However, publishing in Cork meant that this work emerged on the margins of the British literary world. No published reviews in major British journals or newspapers have come to light. Nor did Mahomet’s Travels receive much notice among Indians. One Indian Muslim traveller, Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani (1752-1806), chanced upon Mahomet in Cork in December 1799 and noted that he had written this book (Abu Talib could not read English and his own Persian language ‘reverse travelogue’, Masīr Ṭālibī fī bilād afranji, shows no indication of being influenced by Mahomet). Indeed, growing numbers of other Indian Muslim authors from the late 18th century wrote ‘reverse travelogues’ about their lives in Britain, using Persian, Arabic or English. But again, these works show no awareness of Mahomet’s book. The only known copy of Mahomet’s Travels found in India is in the National Library, Kolkata, evidently brought back from Britain by Dwarkanath Tagore (17941846) after his visit to Britain in 1842. Publications Dean Mahomet, The travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the Honourable the East India Company written by himself, in a series of letters to a friend, Cork, 1794; ESTC T131912 (digitised version available through Wellcome Library) Dean Mahomet, The travels of Dean Mahomet, an eighteenth-century journey through India, ed. M.H. Fisher, Berkeley CA, 1997 Studies Fisher, First Indian author Michael H. Fisher

John Evans Date of Birth 2 October 1767 Place of Birth Usk, Monmouthshire Date of Death 25 January 1827 Place of Death Islington, London

Biography

John Evans was born in Usk, Monmouthshire, on 2 October 1767. In 1783, he entered Bristol Baptist College, where he was tutored by his relative, Caleb Evans (d. 1791). In 1783, he matriculated at King’s College, Aberdeen, where he completed three semesters before transferring to Edinburgh, from where he graduated in 1790. In 1791, he accepted an invitation to become pastor of the General Baptist Church at Worship Street, Islington, London, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was ordained on 31 May 1792, the year he also opened a school where he taught throughout his life. He married Mary Wiche, daughter of a Baptist minister, in 1795. Evans was a prolific writer, publishing sermons, school books and accounts of places of interest. His most widely read work was A sketch of the several denominations into which the Christian world is divided, which was first published in early 1795 and by the time of Evans’s death had sold over a million copies in 15 editions. He earned little from it, because he sold the copyright soon after writing it. Evans lost the use of his limbs from illness in 1815, but he continued to preach. He died at home, 7 Pullin’s Row, Islington, on 23 January 1827. He was one of the best-known Dissenting writers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary John Evans, The juvenile tourist, or, excursions into the West of England, London, 1818 (contains autobiographical details) ‘Rev. John Evans, LLD’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 97 (1827) 369-71 (obituary) Secondary G. Goodwin, and L.E. Lauer, art. ‘Evans, John’, in ODNB G. Goodwin, art. ‘Evans, John’, in DNB



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Sketch of the denominations Date 1795 Original Language English Description First published in 1795, John Evans’s Sketch of the denominations into which the Christian world is divided to which is prefixed an outline of atheism, Deism, Theophilanthropism, Judaism and Mohammedanism with a chronological table of the leading events of ecclesiastical history, from the birth of Christ to the present time went through multiple editions both during and after his lifetime. In the Dedication to the 13th edition of 1814 (unless indicated, all references are to this edition), he attributes the success of the work to the ‘correctness of its delineations’ and to its spirit of ‘peace on earth and good will towards’ all. In his view, nothing hinders the progress of religion more than bigotry and the falsehoods that ‘sects’ too often ‘promulgated about each other’ (p. xxxix). He wants to encourage a ‘more just knowledge of each other’s tenets’. Following this comes the main text, which consists of 382 pages. The ‘sketch’ of ‘Mahometanism’ is only six pages long (pp. 47-53). It briefly follows Muḥammad’s life up to the time his revelations began, explaining that he had spent 15 years in a cave planning his religion, which is a ‘compound of paganism, Judaism and Christianity’ (p. 48). While it holds the Bible in ‘great reverence’, Islam is replete with ‘absurd representations’, although the Qur’an proclaims God’s unity, and also confirms the mission of Christ (p. 48), though it depicts Muḥammad as the Paraclete (which Evans sees as providing ‘powerful collateral proof of the truth of Christianity’, pp. 48-9). The Qur’an was ‘dealt out slowly’ over ‘twentythree years’ by the angel Gabriel and its description of the end times was calculated to impress ‘the fervid imagination of the eastern nations’, as was its picturing of paradise as sensual (p. 49). Among earlier works that expose the errors in Islam, Evans refers to Humphrey Prideaux’s The true nature of imposture, fully display’d in the life of Mahomet (1697), Joseph White’s Bampton lectures (1784), George Sale’s Koran (1734), Joshua Toulmin’s Dissertations on the internal evidences and excellence of Christianity (1795), and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (vol. 5, 1788). He continues with a quotation from the Congregational minister John Clarke of Boston (d. 1798), who wrote that,

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when he saw the extent that Muḥammad borrowed from Judaism and Christianity and contemplated him marching with ‘the Koran in one hand and in the other a sword’, he was not surprised that he achieved success (An answer to the question, why are you a Christian, Boston, 1785, p. 13). Based on a recent work published in Istanbul, Evans summarises Islam’s ‘creed’ as follows: the Qur’an was given to Muḥammad in the same way that the Torah was to Moses and the Gospel to Jesus; Adam was the first prophet; the righteous will reside in paradise and the wicked in hell for fifty thousand years; believers will each have ‘basins’ (pools) for their use in paradise. Islam can be divided into faith and practice. Faith comprises belief in God, angels, books, prophets, resurrection and judgement, and the final decrees, and practice comprises ablutions, alms, fasting, pilgrimage and circumcision. But Muḥammad’s religion lacks symmetry; it is a ‘heterogenous compound of various religions’ designed to accommodate ‘the prejudices and passions’ of Eastern races (p. 52). In the 1841 edition, the editor makes a few additions to the part on ‘Mahometanism’, which now runs from p. 46 to p. 55. These are sections on ‘Worship, rites and ceremonies’ (pp. 51-2), sects, where he outlines the differences between Sunnī and Shīʿa Islam (pp. 52-3), and the geographical distribution of Muslims. On the last, he comments: ‘It is a matter of serious regret, that Mahometanism exceeds Christianity in extent of territory, and is little short of the latter in the number of its professors’ (pp. 53-4). This is followed by estimates of the relative numbers of pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims in the world. Evans subdivides Christians into Greek and Eastern churches, Catholics and Protestants, and exhorts readers to aid in the work of preaching the Gospel to all people (p. 55). This suggests that while his stated aim was to depict different religions and denominations accurately in order to do justice to their beliefs, his overall intention was to provide accurate information that would assist missionary outreach. Evans seems to have subscribed to the Orientalist contrast between East and West that was often expressed in terms of ‘our mind’ versus ‘the Oriental mind’, the former rational and the latter irrational. His reference to Prideaux’s The true nature of imposture, which was widely regarded as the definitive refutation of Islam, indicates his agreement with Prideaux’s hostile, negative assessment of Muḥammad. On the other hand, Evans did not offer a detailed evaluation of Muḥammad’s character or conduct in such areas as his multiple marriages or alleged intolerance, although he did characterise Muḥammad’s religion as spread by the sword.



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Significance This brief description of Islam was read by over a million people in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, as well as the United States, and it was probably the only source of information on Islam for many of its readers. Its significance lies in the way its contents echo the attitude towards Islam of many contemporary Christian writers, who saw it as a hodge-podge of various religions designed to pander to the passions, prejudices and vices of Eastern people. Few Baptists at this time wrote anything on Islam, although several had included Muslims in their pleas for religious toleration. It is possible that, as brief as his treatment was, Evans was the first Baptist to write on Islam in any detail. Later in the 19th century, Samuel Green of Lion Street Chapel, Walworth, wrote The life of Mahomet (1840), which also attributed Islam’s spread to the sword but made some attempt to ameliorate traditional criticism of Muḥammad’s multiple marriages by referring to biblical precedents and to common practice in Arabia at the time. Green also thought that Muḥammad was sincere during the first phase of his mission (p. 81), while Evans seems to have thought his motives were spurious from the very beginning. Like Evans, Green accused Muḥammad of ‘fraud, perfidy, cruelty and injustice’. He displayed certain ‘social virtues’ because they were necessary to ‘maintain the reputation of a prophet’, but these by no means compensated for his ‘numerous other vices’ (p. 129). Citing among others Prideaux, Sale and Gibbon, Green’s sources of information overlapped with Evans’s. These early Baptist writings on Muḥammad more or less perpetuated the traditional negative tropes. Perhaps, as dissenters who automatically attracted the suspicion of the Church of England establishment, Baptist authors were anxious to demonstrate their conformity to the dominant negative assessment of Islam vis-à-vis the Christian gospel. Most significant for Christian-Muslim relations here is that someone who set out to provide ‘juster knowledge’ of other religions and denominations ended up repeating such errors as Muḥammad’s 15 years in a cave, and in the earlier editions omitting the five daily prayers. Nevertheless, even to include Islam in a book mainly about branches of Christianity suggests that Christians found it increasingly difficult to ignore any claims that Islam enjoyed some kind of relationship with Christianity.

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Publications J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations to which is prefixed an outline of atheism, Deism, Theophilanthropism, Judaism and Mohammedanism with a chronological table of the leading events of ecclesiastical history, from the birth of Christ to the present time, London, 1795 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, London, 1795 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations into which the Christian world is divided, London, 17952; ESTC T059349 (digitised version available through ECCO) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, London, 17963 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations into which the Christian world is divided, Philadelphia PA, 17974; Series 1, no. 32101 (digitised version available through Early American Imprints) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations of the Christian world, London, 18025 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, London, 1803 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Wilmington DE, 1804 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, London, 180710 repr. 1808; 007679550 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Boston MA, 1807 (new enlarged edition); 008924254 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Burlington NJ, 1812 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Newark NJ, 1813; 008924255 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Bennington VT, 181412 J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, London, 182715; 100685271 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Sketch of the denominations, Amherst MA, 1832 (from the 15th London edition); 008407650 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Evans’s sketch of the various denominations of the Christian world, Edinburgh, 1837, repr. 1845; 008924256 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Evans, Evans’s sketch of the various denominations of the Christian world, ed. J. Burns, London, 184118, repr. 1842, 1861; 600050497



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(digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) J. Evans, Evans’s sketch of the various denominations of the Christian world, Glasgow, 1851 J. Evans, Golwg ar wahanol grefyddau y byd. Yn nghyd a darluniad teg o’r amrywiol bleidiau Cristionogol ac anffyddol, Carmarthen, 1866 (Welsh trans.) Clinton Bennett

Robert Southey Date of Birth 12 August 1774 Place of Birth Bristol Date of Death 21 March 1843 Place of Death Keswick

Biography

Robert Southey was the youngest of the ‘Lake poets’ – four years younger than William Wordsworth and two years younger than Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born in Wine Street, Bristol, where his father had a draper’s shop, by the age of 12 he had attended four local schools while living in four different houses, including that of his aunt in Bath. After two years of private tutoring, he entered Westminster School in April 1788, four months before his 14th birthday. He left Westminster under a cloud because of his article in a school magazine condemning corporal punishment, and he went up to Oxford a term late. It was at Oxford that Southey first met Coleridge (a Cambridge man) in 1794. Later that year, they co-operated in writing The fall of Robespierre. An historical drama. From January 1795 they shared lodgings in Bristol, where they soon became brothers-in-law on marrying Bristol sisters, whom they planned to take to their projected Utopian community in America. Instead, Southey’s uncle took him to Lisbon, where he encountered traces of Islamic culture at first hand. But Southey’s Bristol at the end of the 18th century showed a surprising awareness of the Muslim faith. The Subscription Library, founded in the late 1730s, held the 1764 edition of George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an (1734), and when Southey’s private library was sold after his death, the catalogue listed a 1786 French translation of the Qur’an and copies of the 1795 and 1801 English editions of Sale’s translation. Mohammed Sharafuddin, in Islam and Romantic orientalism (London, 1996) writes of Southey that ‘no other Romantic writer had absorbed George Sale’s excellent translation of the Koran to the same degree’ (p. 49). In 1766, Bristol’s new theatre (soon to become the Theatre Royal) opened with a production of Mahomet the impostor. A tragedy as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane by His Majesty’s Servants (1744), an adaptation for the English stage of Voltaire’s Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le



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prophète, which had three Paris performances in 1742 before being banned. The tendentious title of the Drury Lane text was shortened to Mahomet for Bristol’s 1766 production, which was revived in 1783, when Southey, aged nine, was already (thanks to his aunt) a seasoned theatre-goer. Southey does not record having seen the Bristol production, though he was well acquainted with his aunt’s collection of playbills. Early in 1795, Southey gave a course of historical lectures in Bristol. The seventh of 12 lectures was entitled ‘State of the Eastern Empire, to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; including the rise and progress of the Mohammedan religion and the crusades’. The text has not survived. Returning from Portugal in 1796, Southey published an account of his Iberian travels and his first collection of poems (both in 1797). He abandoned thoughts of careers in the church or the law, and decided to live by his pen. He was revolted by what he saw of Spanish Catholicism, and wrote in Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), ‘Almost I regret the Moors: what has that country gained by their expulsion? A solemn and cleanly superstition has been exchanged for the filth and ferocity of the Monks; and the dogma of Mary’s immaculate conception has taken the place of the divine legation of Mohammed’. In 1797, his and Coleridge’s names appeared in the subscribers’ list for A series of poems containing the plaints, consolations, and delights of Achmed Ardebeili, supposedly translated by Charles Fox. Published by Bristol’s Joseph Cottle, there was a suspicion that the poems were Fox’s own compositions. The Critical Review certainly identified some poems as ‘the offspring of a Bristol brain, instead of a province of Persia’. Fox’s sympathetic picture of Islam painted here was gained from what he calls an ‘intimate acquaintance with a native of Persia’ – a Shīʿī ‘of liberal sentiments and extensive information’. His 30-page introduction, besides explaining the long-running conflict between Sunnīs and Shīʿīs, rebuts popular misrepresentations of Islam. He quotes a commentator’s example of Muslim teaching: ‘Suffer, in combating your passions, and subjecting them to the service of God; persevere in the endeavour to unite your hearts to the will of the most Merciful; resigning yourselves to him during the afflictions of life, and acquiescing in all things to the order of his providence’. The poems themselves echo Muslim piety: ‘HEAVEN guards the just – shall ACHMED then complain?/ TEN thousand armies cannot vanquish FATE’. That sounds close to the fatalism of Southey’s Thalaba. Whatever the Bristol influences upon Southey, by 1799 he and Coleridge were more engaged in writing a narrative poem on Muḥammad than

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with the Orient in general. By mid-December he had acquired Vie de Mahomed by Henri de Boulainvilliers and soon sent Coleridge a transcription of Francis Bacon’s sardonic account of Muḥammad’s famous failure to move mountains. Southey had derived ‘much amusement and matter’ from Ludovico Marracci’s hostile Alcorani textus universus, and was now ‘qualified in doctrinals to be a Mufti’. Coleridge contributed a mere 14 lines to this poem (Complete poetical works, 1912, vol. 1, p. 274), while Southey managed just over a hundred, beginning with Muḥammad’s escape from Mecca. The project was abandoned, but Southey’s sketch of the proposed poem survives in his Commonplace book (series 4), and the fragment of uncompleted text is in Robert Southey: Poetical works 1793-1810, London, 2004, vol. 5, pp. 475-6. Southey’s Joan of Arc was attacked by the weekly Anti-Jacobin as ‘unpatriotic’. His second narrative poem, Madoc, was on the legendary 12thcentury Welsh prince who supposedly discovered America. Not published until 1805, it was finished in 1799, and on the same day Southey wrote the first 100 lines of Thalaba the destroyer. Published in 1801, this new narrative poem set in Arabia is one of two epic poems written by Southey on Islamic themes. The other, Roderick the last of the Goths, features the clash between Christianity and Islam in Islamic Spain. Appearing in 1814 – a year after Southey became Poet Laureate – Roderick carried on its front page not only Southey’s appointment as laureate, but also his even newer honorific title of Member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Ironically, Southey accepted the laureateship just as his Life of Nelson (1812) became a best-seller. His second and last ‘mythological’ poem had already been written: The curse of Kehama, on Hinduism, in 1810. From now on his laureate duties – commemorative odes on royal marriages, births and deaths – would prove a distraction. Despite this, by 1820 Southey had written a three-volume History of Brazil (1810-19) and a three-volume History of the Peninsular War, finally completed in 1832. His most urgent writing of the 1820s challenged proposals for Catholic emancipation, which would allow Irish Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament. His Book of the Church (1824) was a history of the English Church from Roman times to the expulsion of James II. It was written in the Lake District, where he had joined Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1803, and where Wordsworth (15 miles away) was composing a hundred Ecclesiastical sonnets on the same theme. Southey lived to see Catholic emancipation (1829), the Great Reform Act (1832) and the social and administrative reforms of the 1830s. In 1838,



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having published his collected poetical works in ten volumes, he began to suffer from dementia. He died five years later, to be finally succeeded as laureate by Wordsworth. Southey predicted that he himself would gain more fame as a historian than as a poet. His prose works, including his contributions to The Edinburgh Annual Register and (from 1809) the Quarterly Review, suggest that his prediction was prescient.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary C.C. Southey (ed.), The life and correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols, London, 1849-50 (see the autobiographical letters to John May in vol. 1, pp. 1-157, 235-6) J.W. Warter (ed.), Selections from the letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols, London, 1856 J.W. Warter (ed.), Southey’s Commonplace book, 4th series, London, 1876 K. Curry, (ed.), New letters, 2 vols, London, 1965 Collected letters of Robert Southey, ed. L. Pratt, T. Fulford and I. Packer, College Park MD, 2005-17 (Romantic Circles online, critical edition from the University of Maryland; parts 1-6, covering 1792-1821, contain many previously unpublished letters and corrections of errors or bowdlerisms in the two 19th-century editions) Secondary P. Cheshire, ‘Orientalism Bristol fashion. Charles Fox and Achmed Ardebeili, the Persian Romantic’, Coleridge Bulletin 54 (Winter 2019) 1-17 W.A. Speck, Robert Southey. Entire man of letters, London, 2006 (the definitive scholarly biography) G. Carnall, art. ‘Southey, Robert (1774-1847)’, in ODNB K. Curry, Southey, London, 1976 (the best short biography) L. Madden (ed.) Robert Southey. The critical heritage, London, 1972 G. Carnall, Robert Southey and his age. The development of a conservative mind, Oxford, 1960 J. Simmons, Southey, London, 1945

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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Thalaba the destroyer Date 1801 Original Language English Description Even before he went abroad in 1795, Southey had conceived a programme of epic poems on religious ‘mythologies’. In the introduction to his Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanæ (1826), written at the height of his clash with Catholic critics over Catholic emancipation, he explains that when a boy at Westminster School he had ‘formed the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the work of an heroic poem’. Among those ‘mythologies’ he included the Catholic Church, thus demonstrating that this was no purely Oriental project (Collected letters, part 4, letter 2172). If Southey’s recollection in the preface to his collected poetical works (1837-8) is correct, he began planning Thalaba four years before any thought of joining with Coleridge in writing Mohammed. In the summer of 1796, he had sent Grosvenor Bedford a list of various tragedies and romances he hoped to write. Among them was ‘my Oriental poem of The destruction of Dom Daniel’ – a den of sorcerers from the Arabian nights, which Southey seems to have met in Antoine Galland’s multi-volume translation of 170417. In his own notes to Thalaba, he remarks: ‘The Arabian Tales certainly abound in genius; they have lost their metaphysical rubbish through the filter of a French translation’ (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, p. 194). And in the preface to the 1838 edition of Thalaba, Southey describes the poem as ‘the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale’. Its inspiration is the Domdaniel story of ‘a seminary for evil Magicians under the roots of the Sea’ (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, p. 3). How does this Oriental theme relate to Islam as the first of Southey’s promised ‘mythologies’? Tim Fulford, editor of the 2004 critical edition of Thalaba, describes the poem as ‘an odd and often uneasy hybrid, a moralizing epic in the dress of romantic entertainment’ (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, p. viii). Yet Southey tells Joseph Cottle in August 1798 that, in reviving the Domdaniel tale, he intends ‘to show off all the splendour of the Mohammedan belief’ (Collected letters, part 2, letter 344). Southey devotes seven pages in the fourth series of his posthumously published



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Commonplace books to a random collection of ideas for his Domdaniel poem. Immediately after the Gibbon extracts for the aborted Mohammed is an early draft where the hero’s name is Thalamma. The Upas tree and the Turkish recipe ‘for making poison from a red-haired Christian lad’ belong to this early section. But Southey added later episodes in which Thalamma becomes Thalaba, a providential wind saves the hero when he is praying, and both the sorcerer Mohareb and the witch Khawla are introduced. The poem, published in 1801 as Thalaba the destroyer, a metrical romance, was still referred to in Southey’s letters in 1799 as Domdaniel. Yet in September 1798, he tells his Unitarian Norwich friend William Taylor that the poem will have ‘all the pomp of Mohammedan fable, relieved by scenes of Arabian life’ – including ‘the voluptuousness of Persian scenery and manners’ (Collected letters, part 2, letter 347). Does Southey’s youthful Unitarianism perhaps explain his interest in Islam? For Nigel Leask, Southey ‘presented Islam as a rational Unitarian religion’ (British Romantic writers and the East, Cambridge, 1992, p. 26), while Daniel E. White (Early Romanticism and religious dissent, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 164-5, 227 n. 60), besides documenting Southey’s Unitarian beliefs, recalls that a century earlier Islam and Socinianism were frequently bracketed together. However, it seems likely that Southey’s interest in Islam came from more immediate influences. In a new preface to Thalaba written for the 1837-8 edition, he claims that the poem was ‘neither crudely conceived nor hastily undertaken. I had fixed upon the ground, four years before [in 1795], for a Mohammedan tale; and in the course of that year the plans had been formed and the materials collected’ (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, p. 4). Two-thirds of Thalaba was already written by April 1800, when he and his uncle left again for Portugal, where the remainder would be completed. Thalaba, a poem of 6,000 lines, comprises 12 ‘books’. It is written in an experimental irregular metre, described by the predictably hostile British Critic as ‘so unlike verse or sense’ that, were not ‘the lines divided by the printer, no living creature would suspect’ them to be verse (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, p. xxii). Yet, for the modern reader, the unusual metre works well. The hero is a young Muslim whose destiny is to destroy the evil sorcerers and magicians of the Domdaniel sub-oceanic cave, but in the very act also to destroy himself. The dramatic interest resides in whether Thalaba will remain faithful in following his destiny. Southey objected to the notice in the first issue of the Edinburgh Review (October 1802), notably Jeffrey’s ‘total overlooking of the Mohammedan principle of Fatalism

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which pervades and ought to pervade the whole story’ (Collected letters, part 2, letter 756). And when William Taylor reviewed Thalaba in the Critical Review of December 1803, Southey reminded his friend that ‘fatalism is the cornerstone of Mohammedanism’. He added ruefully: ‘I ought to have explained my design – that of exhibiting the various mythologies of the world in a set of poems founded upon the characteristic of each’ (Collected letters, part 3, letter 943). As the poem opens, Thalaba is in no mood to praise Allah. His mother, widowed by the murder of her husband, expresses pious resignation to Allah’s will: ‘Praised be the Lord!/ he gave, he takes away,/ The Lord our God is good!’ Thalaba demurs: ‘Why are my brothers and my sisters slain?/ Why is my father killed?/ Did ever we neglect our prayers,/ Or ever lift a hand unclean to heaven?’ (Robert Southey: poetical works, vol. 3, book 1, lines 37-47). Yet Thalaba accepts that his fate, for good or ill, lies in Allah’s hands: ‘Shall I distrust the providence of God/ Is it not he who saves?/ If Allah wills it not/ Vain were the Genii’s aid’ (book 4, lines 489-92). As the poem traces Thalaba’s successive encounters with the machinations of sorcerers, the death of his bride Oneiza, the privations of desert travel (which he declines to mitigate by use of magic), the pleasures of the earthly paradise (which he disdains), the hero remains confident in his destiny. He tells Oneiza; ‘Remember Destiny/ Hath marked me from mankind’ (book 7, lines 120-1). It is not always clear, however, whether it is Allah or the world of magic (represented by the ring of the dead sorcerer, Abdaldar) that keeps Thalaba safe. Instead of burying the ring, he wears it in ‘God’s name and the Prophet’s’. As the witch Khawla complains: ‘Blindly the wicked work/ The righteous will of Heaven!/ The doom’d destroyer wears Abdaldar’s ring!/ Against the dangers of his horoscope/ Yourselves have shielded him’ (book 9, lines 348-52). When in Book 5 Thalaba first meets Mohareb, the sorcerer sneers that ‘Allah and the Prophet, they had failed/ To save thee, but for Magic’s stolen aid’ (book 5, lines 449-50). Thalaba at once takes off the ring and casts it into a ‘bubbling pit’. The confrontation ends with Thalaba hurling Mohareb and his sword into ‘the upwhirling flood’. The victorious Thalaba addresses the unseen guardian angels: ‘I go to root from earth the Sorcerer brood/ Tell me the needful Talisman.’ The answer comes back: ‘The Talisman is Faith’ (book 5, lines 490-515). On his way towards the distant mountains, Thalaba passes by the sensuous delights of the earthly Paradise where guests are ‘quaffing the delicious juice/ Of Shiraz golden grape’. But Thalaba does not taste the wine



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because he knows that the Prophet forbade ‘that beverage the mother of sins’ (book 6, lines 319-23). Thalaba also resists temptation when a troop of females begins to dance: ‘Transparent garments to the greedy eye/ Gave all their harlot limbs’ (book 6, lines 355-6). Instead, he rescues a young woman from a pursuing rapist. She is Oneiza, ‘his own Arabian maid’ (book 6, line 413). Thalaba and Oneiza go forward together on their daunting journey. At the sound of subterranean thunder, ‘Allah save us!’ Oneiza cries, ‘there is no path for man/ From this accursed place!’ (book 7, lines 85-7). Thalaba responds: ‘Is there not God, Oneiza? Remember Destiny/ Hath marked me from mankind!’ (book 7, lines 120-1). They find themselves in a world where sorcery seems to hold sway, Yet when vengeance is about to be exacted on Thalaba by ‘the monster Bird’, it is the arrow shot from Oneiza’s bow that kills the creature. ‘Then darkness covered all./ Earth shook, Heaven thundered/ And amid the yells/ of Spirits accursed, destroyed/ The Paradise of Sin’ (book 7, lines 245-56). Thalaba and Oneiza view the desolation: ‘the rocks were rent/ The path was open,/ late by magic closed’ (book 7, lines 263-4). Arriving at the sultan’s court, Thalaba is given a hero’s welcome. But when he tells Oneiza that they are to be married, it is Oneiza’s turn to remind Thalaba of his destiny. She begs to be taken to Mecca to serve in the Temple: ‘Bind thou thyself my veil, to human eye/ It never shall be lifted’ (book 7, lines 36970). They nevertheless marry, and when the wedding guests depart there emerges from the bridal chamber none other than Azrael, Islam’s Angel of Death come to take Oneiza. As grieving husband and Moath, father of the bride, stand together, Oneiza’s spirit audibly urges the hero to pursue his purpose so that ‘in the bowers of Paradise/ In vain I may not wait thee, O my Husband’ (book 8, lines 153-7). Thalaba meets a hermit. Having heard Thalaba’s story, the Dervise (Southey’s spelling) responds: ‘Repine not, O my son!/ In wisdom and in mercy Heaven inflicts,/ Like a wise Leech, its painful remedies’ (book 8, lines 238-40). As Thalaba sets off again, he encounters an old woman spinning, and finds that he is back among the sorcerers. After binding him with her magic thread and cutting off a piece of his hair to cast into the fire, she utters incantations worthy of the witches in Macbeth. The archwitch Khawla arrives and takes Thalaba as a prisoner to Mohareb’s island fortress, where the youth faces the very magician whom he had thrust into the bitumenous pit. Unaccountably, Mohareb restores to Thalaba the discarded ring of Abdaldar, while insisting on the dominance of earthly power: evil and good ‘are but words’. Thalaba responds fearlessly in echoes

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of St Paul: ‘Yes, ye have me here/ In chains; but not forsaken, tho’ opprest;/ Cast down, but not destroyed./ Shall danger daunt,/ Shall death dismay his soul, whose life is given/ For God and for his brethren of mankind?’ (book 9, lines 211-15). Thalaba escapes with the help of Maimuna, a repentant sorceress, and, continuing his destined journey, enters a cottage with an open door where he finds Laila newly woken by his arrival. Having assured herself that he is human, Laila wants to keep him with her but, when her father appears, Thalaba realises that it is Okba, his own father’s murderer. As the youth rushes forward with an arrow, Okba warns him: ‘My hour is not yet come!/ But thou mayest shed the innocent Maiden’s blood,/ That vengeance God allows thee.’ Told by Okba that he must kill Laila if he himself is not to die, Thalaba refuses to harm the innocent. Okba draws his dagger and moves to kill Thalaba, but to no avail: ‘All was accomplished. Laila rushed between,/ To save the saviour Youth/ She met the blow and sunk into his arms,/ And Azrael from the hands of Thalaba/ Received her parting soul’ (book 10, lines 435-45). As the penultimate chapter opens, the narrator points the moral of Thalaba’s survival and Laila’s death: ‘O fool to think thy human hand/ Could check the chariot-wheels of Destiny!/ To dream of weakness in the all-knowing Mind/ That his decrees should change’ (book 11, lines 1-4). Okba curses Thalaba and his Muslim God, but it is Laila’s spirit in the guise of a green bird that shows the way. She persuades Thalaba to pray for the redemption of her father – the prime target of the hero’s vengeance. Thalaba renounces revenge, and departs in a waiting dog-drawn sledge. He is brought to a brook where a small boat is waiting, ‘and at the helm a Damsel stood’ (book 11, line 379). She dismisses the weary dogs, and invites Thalaba to embark with her. When they make landfall, the damsel sends Thalaba ashore to perform his last ablutions and to pray. The final book begins with Thalaba casting Abdaldar’s magic ring into the sea and crying aloud: ’Thou art my shield, my trust, my hope, O God!/ Behold and guide me now,/ Thou who alone canst save’ (book 12, lines 3-5). Thus Thalaba renounces any further help from the world of magic, although he is still supported by the spirits of Oneiza and her father. Thalaba descends to the nether regions, where he encounters Okba, Laila’s father. They fight, and though Thalaba has Okba at his mercy, he remembers Laila’s plea and relents – at which the voice of the Prophet is heard giving Thalaba his reassurance. The hero knows that his last hour has come. He confronts the idol that supports the roof of the cave, and as



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he drives his sword ‘hilt-deep’ into the idol’s heart, ‘The Ocean-Vault fell in, and all were crushed./ In the same moment at the gate/ Of Paradise, Oneiza’s Houri-form/ Welcomed her husband to eternal bliss’ (book 12, lines 496-503). In the 2004 edition, Southey’s writing of Thalaba can be charted chronologically in the manuscript, as a marginal mark in each book (except the last) records the date of completion – from July 1799 to July 1800. The first eight books were written in England by the end of January 1800, Book 9 (started at Falmouth in April 1800) was finished in Lisbon by the end of May, and the three last books were written in Lisbon or Cintra by 19 July 1800. However, redrafting – especially incorporating Humphry Davy’s suggestions for Book 12 – delayed publication until well into 1801. The poem’s dualistic world system allows the sorcerers to play a part in directing Thalaba’s progress. That implies taking the magicians’ world seriously, though Southey ensures that it is Allah who decides the outcome. There are some two dozen references to Allah in the poem, over 50 to the Muslim ‘God’, and various appeals to Mahomet (Muḥammad) or ‘the Prophet’. More significantly, Islamic fatalism and resignation are central to Southey’s narrative. This is emphasised in the endnotes, running to over 100 pages in the 2004 Poetical works, which reveal Southey’s wide reading in Arabian travel literature. Tim Fulford, the modern editor, lists a selection of 39 titles cited by Southey, who owned more than half of them, including Thomas Shaw’s Travels, or Observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant (1738), and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s Collections of travels (1684) in a French edition of 1692 (with Southey’s autograph). On Muslim beliefs, Southey appeals to the English translation of Carsten Niebuhr’s Description de l’Arabie (1774), George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an (1795), Joseph Morgan’s Complete history of Algiers (1728) and Constantin François Volney’s Travels through Syria and Egypt (1788). Significance The text of Thalaba suffered major changes and additions before Southey’s final version in the 1837-8 edition. M.H. Fitzgerald’s preface to the Oxford edition of 1909 considers the second edition (1809) ‘an immense improvement on the first, and is in its turn far inferior in symmetry and polish to the final version of the poem as it appeared in 1838’. There were intermediate editions in 1814 and 1821. Shelley so much admired the poem that he allegedly learned it by heart. His own uncensored original of The revolt of Islam (1818) revived the incest theme of Voltaire’s Mahomet le prophète, and its adaptation for the London (and Bristol)

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stage. Fulford points to a connection between the veiled maiden in Shelley’s Alastor and the pre-history of Maimuna, Southey’s sorceress. In the third part of Apologia pro vita sua (1864), John Henry Newman refers to ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba, for which I had an immense liking’. And in 1850 he is recorded as claiming that ‘Thalaba has ever been to my feelings the most sublime of English poems – I mean morally sublime’ (Curry, Southey, p. 160). Coleridge, as Fulford suggests, may have been writing Kubla Khan at the same time as Southey was beginning Thalaba. Yet for all its Arabian nights flavour, Southey’s poem is more than an exercise in Orientalism. Its significance is that it is a firstgeneration Romantic poet’s sympathetic treatment of Islam, two-thirds of it written in Bristol where interest in Islam was thriving. Publications Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1801 (digitised version of Oxford, 1991 facsimile available through Project Gutenberg) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1809; 280 f.2049 and 280 f.2050 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer. A rhythmical romance, 2 vols, Boston MA, 1812 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in Poetical works, London, 1814, vols 3 and 4; 280 f.2343 and 280 f.2344 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in The poetical works of Robert Southey, London, 1815, vols 3 and 4 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1821 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in The poetical works. Complete in one volume, Paris, 1829 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in The poetical works of Robert Southey, London, 1838, repr. 1846, 1849, vol. 4; 280 e.3432 (digitised version of the 1838 edition available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1853; 280 s.221 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, The poetical works of Robert Southey. Joan of Arc Madoc - Thalaba the destroyer - The curse of Kehama, London, 1853 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer. A rhythmical romance, in Southey’s poems, London, 1854, vol. 2 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, New York, 1856



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Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in H.T. Tuckerman (ed.), The poetical works of Robert Southey, Boston MA, 1860, repr. 1884, vol. 4; 280 s.222 (digitised version of 1860 edition available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1901 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, in M.H. Fitzgerald (ed.), Poems, Oxford, 1909 Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, edited with a critical introduction and notes by T. Fulford, in L. Pratt (ed.), Poetical works 1793-1810, 5 vols, London, 2004, vol. 3 (text of 1801, with variations from all later editions and from surviving MSS; this is the only critical edition of the poem, the introduction representing the latest scholarship, examining origins, composition, publication, reviews, editions, later reception, extant MSS, and endnotes, including notes on Southey’s extensive notes; note also Robert Southey, ‘Mohammed’ [a fragment] in Poetical works 1793-1810, vol. 5, pp. 175-6) Robert Southey, Taraba aku o horobosu mono, trans. Hideo Doke, Tokyo, 2017 (Japanese trans.) Studies The most thorough specific study is the editorial introduction by Fulford, in Poetical works 1793-1810. J. Einboden, Islam and Romanticism. Muslim Currents from Goethe to Emerson, London, 2014 E.E. Beshero-Bondar, ‘Southey’s Gothic science. Galvanism, automata and heretical sorcery in Thalaba the destroyer’, Genre 42 (2009) 1-32 L. Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the contexts of English Romanticism, Aldershot, 2006 F. Lo, ‘Southey, Shelley and the Orientalist quest. Geography and genre’, European Journal of English Studies 6 (2002) 143-58

Roderick the last of the Goths Date 1814 Original Language English Description In September 1809, Southey advised his brother Harry on a projected history of the crusades: ‘You must acquaint yourself thoroughly with the

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whole grievous history of Mahommedanism.’ The introduction ‘should contain a view of the moral & political system of the Koran, i.e. Islam as Mohammed taught it; and an account of its mythology as held by his followers, for the Christianity of the Vatican is not more unlike that of the Gospel in its mythology, than that of the present Mufti is to what Ali fought for’ (Collected letters, part 3, letter 1679). The 1856 Warter edition of Southey’s letters revealingly alters ‘grievous’ to ‘previous’ (Selections, vol. 2, pp. 161-4). By 1809, when the second edition of Thalaba appeared, the focus of Islam for Southey had shifted from Arabia to the Iberian Peninsula, where Spaniards were locked in their Guerra de la Independencia – Britain’s Peninsular War against Napoleon. Already in 1808, Southey had republished his Letters written […] in Spain and Portugal, excising his barely suppressed regret expressed in earlier editions at the expulsion of the Moors. His translation of the Chronicle of the Cid (also in 1808) had a similar Iberian topicality, but the introduction offers a harsh judgement on Islam. He remains ambivalent about Muḥammad himself, who, he says, in framing his new religion ‘aimed at making its ritual less burdensome, its morality more indulgent, and its creed more rational than that of other nations’ (Chronicle of the Cid, 1808, p. xvii). Southey decided that Muḥammad ‘probably believed the pure theism he preached’ (p. xvii), but that he ‘attempted nothing like a fabric of society: he took abuses as he found them. The continuance of polygamy was his great and ruinous error.’ The Muslim ‘imprisons his wives, and sometimes knows not the faces of his own children’ (p. xix). William Taylor remonstrated against such language, particularly Southey’s description of the Qur’an: ‘There is nothing in the Koran which affects the feelings, nothing which elevates the imagination, nothing which enlightens the understanding, nothing which ameliorates the heart: it contains no beautiful narrative, no proverbs of wisdom or axioms of morality; it is a chaos of detached sentences, a mass of dull tautology. Not a solitary passage to indicate the genius of a poet can be found in the whole volume’ (p. xviii). Southey’s introduction also contains the historical starting point of Roderick the last of the Goths, which was finally published in 1814, a year after he became Poet Laureate. Unlike Thalaba, where almost all the personages are fictitious, Roderick’s 33-strong cast has only four fictitious characters, though of the remainder four are dead before the poem begins, and another is ‘the creation of monkish legends’ (Later poetical works, vol. 2, p. 10).



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As early as 1805, three years before British troops landed in Portugal, Southey mentioned a possible poem on Prince Pelayo, cousin of the deposed King Roderick, and crowned king of the Asturias in 718. Southey nevertheless told Taylor that he was still thinking of treating Muḥammad ‘philosophically’ (Collected letters, part 3, letter 1094). It was nearly five years before Southey started writing his poem on Pelayo, for which (he tells his uncle) he needed ‘four books all of fabulous notoriety’ (Collected letters, part 3, letter 1769). They were: Crónica del Rey Don Rodrigo con la destruycion de Espana y como los Moros la ganaron (1587); Isidore of Seville, Crónica majora; Pedro de Corral, Crónica Sarracina (1600s); Pedro de Royas, Historia de la imperial ciudad de Toledo (1654-63). Southey owned his own copy of the last title. While the context of Thalaba is Arabian legend, Roderick is set early in the 8th century, when the Moors invaded northern Spain. The 7,000-line poem begins with King Roderick’s reported violation of Florinda, which drove her father, Count Julian, to side with the Moors in their destruction of the kingdom of the Visigoths. In his introduction to The Cid, Southey condemns the historical Julian for having ‘betrayed his country and renounced his religion’ in order to avenge the rape of his daughter (p. xiv). If in Thalaba Southey seems easily to accommodate his own views to Islamic traditions, Roderick is focused on Christian-Islamic conflict. In Thalaba, magic competes with Islamic fatalism, while in Roderick, Spanish patriotism shares the stage with opposition between two Abrahamic faiths. A mere 15 lines into the first of 25 ‘books’ of Roderick, the reader encounters the Muslim conquest of Spain: ‘The Musslemen upon Iberia’s shore/ Descend. A countless multitude they came:/ Syrian, Moor, Saracen, Greek renegade,/ Persian and Copt and Tatar in one bond/ Of every Faith conjoin’d.’ Southey’s account begins where Walter Savage Landor’s Count Julian ends, with Roderick in disgrace and on the run. The name of Julian’s raped and banished daughter is altered from Landor’s ‘Covilla’ to ‘Florinda’. In the aftermath of the battle between Muslim and Christian armies, the defeated Roderick stands isolated on the battlefield, separated from his much loved horse Orelia. A lightning strike snaps his sword blade from its chain, leaving its hilt ‘glued there in Moorish gore’. He casts aside his ‘horned helmet and enamelled mail’, and in peasant garb steals ‘like a thief in darkness from the field’ (Later poetical works, vol. 2, book 1, pp. 93-103). The following drama lies in Roderick’s flight, Julian’s pursuit, Florinda’s confession that she loves Roderick, the reception of the dying Julian into

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the church of his birth, his reconciliation with Florinda, and her death without knowing that the ‘priest’ to whom she has confessed is Roderick himself. During his solitary wandering dressed as a cleric, Roderick survives on alms and proffered bread. Viewing the dead on the battlefield, he reflects on the indiscriminate impact of war, where ‘helmet and turban, scimitar and sword,/ Christian and Moor in death promiscuous lay’ (book 3, lines 199-200). Amid the carnage, Roderick meets Adosinda, who owes her survival to a Moor with ‘libidinous eyes’ (book 3, line 319). He had reserved her for ‘an hour of dalliance’, but when she was taken to his tent she killed him with his own scimitar and made her escape. She now places her hands between those of Roderick, the supposed priest, and vows ‘to rouse the land against/ This impious, this intolerable yoke’ (book 3, lines 401-8). Roderick (living his assumed role) tells her that she must efface her stains of mortal sin, and in redeeming this ‘lost land’ work out redemption for herself. Arriving at St Felix Abbey, Roderick describes himself to Abbot Odoar and Archbishop Urban as ‘a sinful man/ One who in solitude hath long deplored/A life mis-spent’ (book 4, lines 199-201). The abbot insists that Pelayo is the only hope of Spain, and urges Roderick to find the prince, who is held hostage at ‘the Conqueror’s court’. There he must tell Pelayo that the mountain rebels are ‘unsubdued’ and that his hour has come (book 4, lines 278-83). At a wayside inn, a man whose sons were killed in battle curses ‘King Roderick’s soul’. An old man defends the unrecognised Roderick, arguing that the Moors would have crossed from Africa even if Julian had not ‘beckon’d them!’, and that the overthrow of Gothic rule would soon have occurred from other causes, ‘Though Julian’s daughter should have lived and died/ A virgin vowed and veiled’ (book 5, lines 608). Roderick recognises the old man as Siverian, his own foster-father, who believes that both his son and Florinda are dead. At Cordoba, Roderick and Siverian find Pelayo at court in sackcloth, observing his annual night-time vigil in memory of his adulterous mother who ‘from the bed of death,/ Call’d for forgiveness’ (book 7, lines 2-3). Roderick urges Pelayo to head the resistance to the Moorish occupation, invoking the spirits of his royal ancestors, who look down on him ‘from fields/ Laid waste and hamlets burnt and cities sack’d’ (book 7, lines 125-6). Roderick clinches the appeal by kneeling and paying homage to Pelayo, and Florinda reveals her identity to the surprised and confused prince, entreating his prayers. Pelayo had last seen her at Roderick’s court



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‘glittering in beauty and innocence’, and he is shocked by the change in her face ‘bearing its deadly sorrow character’d’ (book 9, lines 31, 42). She is distraught that Orpas, the apostate bishop of Seville, now converted to Islam, claims her as his bride. By embracing Islam and allying with the Moors, Julian has left his daughter ‘friendless and worse than fatherless’. She asks Pelayo for safe conduct to some Christian land ‘where Christian rites are free’ (book 9, lines 106, 111). Roderick and Florinda, have not recognised each other, but her confession to the ‘priest’ is full of excuses for Roderick and admissions of her love for him and of her secret ambition to be his queen. She regrets that fateful kiss – ‘Alas! more guiltily received than given’ – but vengeance mastered her and in her agony she cursed the man ‘whom I loved best’ (book 10, lines 283, 356-7). Roderick can now tell his mother, who is in the camp and takes him for a cleric, that her son has been forgiven by Florinda. Pelayo rallies his troops, aided by Roderick’s rhetoric: ‘Thy country is in bonds; an impious foe/ Oppresses her; he brings with him strange laws/ Strange language, evil customs and false faith/ And forces them on Spain’ (book 12, lines 166-70). With Pelayo’s mountain forces mobilised, the Muslims are urged on by their commander, Abulcacem, to attempt an assault. He himself leads the charge, shouting: ‘Allah is great!/ Mahommed is his prophet!’ The Moors suffer heavy casualties and are temporarily repelled (book 13, lines 16-18). In the evolving narrative, Roderick reveals his identity to his fosterfather, and Archbishop Urban crowns Pelayo as king of Spain. In the Muslim camp, Prince Orpas, apostate bishop of Seville, chides Julian for failing to convert Florinda to Islam. Orpas doubts both her Christian commitment and her filial loyalty. Julian retorts that, if Orpas were still a Christian bishop, and he himself an Arian denier of the Trinity or a Jew, ‘Thy proper business then might be to pry/ And question me for lurking flaws of faith./ We Musselmen, Prince Orpas, live beneath/ A wiser law.’ The Moorish commander agrees: ‘Well hast thou said, and rightly may’st assure/ Thy daughter that the Prophet’s holy law/ Forbids compulsion’ (book 20, lines 219-24). Southey does not need to underline the irony of the commander’s following ultimatum to Pelayo’s troops, ‘in the Caliph’s name’. It is admittedly a military ultimatum, yet nevertheless calls for repentance as well as surrender, and proclaims the unstoppable advance of Islam as it rolls eastwards from the ‘subjugated west’ until ‘all nations join, and Earth/ Acknowledge, as she sees one sun in heaven,/ One God, one Chief, one Prophet, and one Law./ Jerusalem, the holy City bows/ To holier

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Mecca’s creed; the crescent shines/ Triumphant o’er the eternal pyramids’ (book 20, lines 268-80). A regrouped Moorish army pitches camp within earshot of Pelayo’s troops, who can hear the Muslims’ evening call to prayer. Count Julian is in his tent, ‘his ablutions Moor-like he had made/ And Moor-like knelt in prayer, bowing his head’ (book 21, lines 51-2). Julian is re-united with his daughter, Florinda, who reports that the Muslim messenger sent to fetch her ‘Told me that I should be restrained no more/ From liberty of faith, which the new law/ Indulged to all’ (book 21, lines 84-6) – thus confirming the Muslim commander’s promise (book 21, lines 252-7). Roderick, still dressed as a priest, confronts Julian. The apostate declares that creeds like colours are but accidents, their respective values imponderable. And so ‘from every faith/ As every clime, there is a way to Heaven’ (book 21, lines 191-6). Roderick is less ecumenical: ‘God pardon the unhappy hand/ That wounded thee! but whither didst thou go/ For healing?’ Instead of seeking divine forgiveness, he had, in order that ‘the Moorish sword might do thy work/ Received the creed of Mecca’. Roderick expects to die, as Julian, at last recognising him, prepares to strike: ‘Earth could not hold us both, nor can one Heaven/ Contain my deadliest enemy and me’ (book 21, lines 307-8). As Florinda throws herself to the ground in agonising prayer, her father relents. The news comes that Abdalaziz, Moorish governor of Spain, has been overthrown by a popular rising. There is confusion in the Moors’ camp. Julian opposes precipitous action against Pelayo’s strong defensive position. But Orpas has secret information from Guisla, Pelayo’s disloyal sister. Julian mournfully reflects that ‘Woman, woman/ Still to the Goths art thou the instrument/ Of overthrow/’. Orpas counters that instead he should say that Allah thus ‘By woman punishes the idolatry/ Of those who raise a woman to the rank/ Of godhead, calling on their Mary’s name/ With senseless prayer’ (book 22, lines 141-9). The Muslim commander, Abulcacem, declares: ‘Great is the Prophet whose protecting power/ Goes with the faithful forth! The rebels’ days/ Are number’d; Allah hath deliver’d them/ Into our hands’ (book 22, lines 160-3). Orpas mistrusts the truthfulness of Count Julian’s adherence to the Muslim cause, and the apostate cleric plots his assassination, which Abulcacem approves: Orpas shall have Julian’s lands, then Florinda he ‘may’st take or leave’ (book 22, lines 221-3). The Muslim force is on the march, as Pelayo’s scouts shadow its every move. The Moors press on, but are soon crushed by ‘huge trunks and stones/ And loosen’d crags’ (book 23, lines 250-2). While the Moors are



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again repulsed and in disarray, a Moorish assassin strikes Julian, and the treachery of Orpas is exposed. Julian asks, with failing voice, to see his daughter before he dies, and Florinda is at last reconciled with her father. Julian tells Roderick that he wishes to die ‘in the faith wherein my father died’ (book 24, lines 178-9), and Roderick receives Julian’s final confession and profession of the Christian faith, and pronounces absolution. The deceased Julian’s forces now support Pelayo. Roderick reports that Florinda has died after receiving her father’s blessing: ‘One sacrament, one death, united them’ (book 25, line 50), and he reclaims his horse Orelio, which he last saw in the heat of battle. As a weakened Muslim army approaches, Roderick leads the charge with his priestly robes flowing as ‘death’s black banner’ (book 25, line 199). As he witnesses the course of the battle from a hilltop, Abulcacem accepts defeat with Islamic fortitude and addresses the Prophet: ‘A hard and cruel fortune hast thou brought/ This day upon thy servants! Must I then/ Here with disgrace and ruin close a life/ Of glorious deeds? But why should man resist fate’s irreversible decrees, or why/ Murmur at what must be?’ (book 25, lines 249-54). When the battle against the Moors is finally won, Roderick’s bloodstained horse is found without its rider. The Goth’s last king had wished to die in battle, and ‘with Florinda in the grave/ Rest in indissoluble union joined’ (book 25, lines 560-1). Amid the clash of faiths and cultures Roderick the last of the Goths is a love story after all. The notes to Roderick make fewer concessions to readers than the notes in Thalaba. Latin quotations from Isidore of Seville and long citations in Portuguese or Spanish are not translated. More than half of the 37 titles that are cited as sources in the Roderick notes were owned by Southey, almost all in Spanish or Portuguese. Southey emphasises that his Count Julian differs from Landor’s Tragedy of Count Julian (1812), while appreciatively quoting Landor’s verse. Southey also quotes 18 lines of Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811) to demonstrate the ‘singular contrast’ to his own Roderick. In two separate notes Southey devotes a total of 25 pages of translated excerpts from Pedro de Corral’s Crónica del Rey Don Rodrigo. Significance Roderick the last of the Goths, featuring Christian defeat of Muslim, seems to show that any sympathy the younger Southey had for Islam had evaporated by the time he wrote it. Unlike Thalaba, there is no Muslim hero to identify with. Instead Islam is presented primarily as a conquering religion. Yet in his notes to Roderick, Southey gives Muslims credit for

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the religious toleration accorded to the previously persecuted Spanish Arians. The Moors procured for those anti-trinitarian Christian heretics ‘an interval of repose, till the Inquisition was established, and by its damnable acts put all other horrors out of remembrance’. (Later poetical works, vol. 2, p. 208) Similarly, translating his copy of Décadas de Asia … (1778-88) by the Portuguese humanist João Barros (1496?-1570), Southey records: ‘The Moors did not say that they came against the Christians but against the Goths, who had usurped Spain; and it appears that to the people of the land it mattered little whether they were under Goths or Moors; or indeed it might not be too much to say that they preferred the Moors’ (p. 239). And when he cites Jean Gagnier’s Vie de Mahomet on the miracle of Mahomet’s levitating tomb, Southey, while referring to ‘the Impostor’s tomb’, concedes that the fables surrounding it ‘are modest in comparison with those which the Franciscans have invented to magnify their founder’ (pp. 285-6). Yet unlike Thalaba, which waited eight years for a second edition, Roderick was an instant success. There were two versions of the first edition, and further editions in 1815, 1816, 1818, 1826, and 1837-8. There are also far fewer corrections or additions in successive editions than in Thalaba, but the notes are far less helpful for an understanding of the faith and culture of Islam. Roderick has suffered considerable neglect for almost two centuries, but its popularity in the 1820s, when the second generation of Romantic poets had their eyes fixed on the abortive revolt of the Greeks against the Ottoman Turks, suggests a significant connection. And Byron’s active support for the Greeks’ rebellion against their Muslim overlords led to his contracting a fever that cost him his life. Byron, normally no admirer of Southey’s poetry, was complimentary about Roderick, observing that if Southey ‘had never written anything else he might safely stake his claim upon the last of the Goths’ (L.A. Marchand (ed.), Lord Byron’s letters and journals, 13 vols, London, 1973-94, vol. 4, p. 255). Publications Robert Southey, Roderick, the last of the Goths, London, 1814 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, London, 18152 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, London, 18153 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, Philadelphia PA, 1815; 280 f.2276 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, London, 18164 Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, London, 18185; VET.ENGL. II.A.1-2 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) Robert Southey, Roderick, le dernier des Goths, trans. M.B. de S. [A.A. Brugière], Paris, 1820, repr. 1821 (French trans.); 11645.cc.32 (digitised version available through the British Library) Robert Southey, Rodrigo de Goth, koning van Spanje, trans. K.W. Bilderdijk, The Hague, 1823-4 (Dutch trans.); 478 F 19 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, London, 1826 Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in The poetical works. Complete in one volume, Paris, 1829 Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in The poetical works of Robert Southey, London, 1838, repr. 1846, 1849, vol. 9 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Southey, Roderick, le dernier des Goths, trans. chevalier de Caqueray, Paris, 1840 (French trans.); YK-4979 (digitised version available through BNF) Robert Southey, Roderigo, o, L’ultimo de’ Goti, trans. G.B. Martelli, Milan, 1841 (Italian trans.); 60.B.62 (digitised version available through Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in The poetical works of Robert Southey, London, 1853 Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in H.T. Tuckerman (ed.), The poetical works of Robert Southey, Boston MA, 1860, repr. 1884, vol. 9 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, ed. H. Morley, London, 1891 Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in ed. M.H. Fitzgerald, Poems, Oxford, 1909 (biographical table, editor’s preface, editorial notes, 1838 text with 1814 and 1838 prefaces; the 1838 text contains Southey’s account of two anonymous French translations in prose) Robert Southey, Roderick the last of the Goths, in Robert Southey, later poetical works 1811-1838, 4 vols, London, 2012, vol. 2, ed. D. Saglia, (text

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Studies M. Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism. Literary exchanges with the Orient, London, 1996, p. 49 Pratt, Robert Southey and the contexts of English Romanticism Stuart Andrews

Charles Mills Date of Birth 29 July 1788 Place of Birth Greenwich Date of Death 9 October 1826 Place of Death Southampton

Biography

Charles Mills, the youngest child of Samuel Gillam Mills (d. 1808), surgeon to the queen, and his wife, Catherine née Richison (d. 1798), was born in Greenwich, England, on 29 July 1788. A sickly child, Charles was privately educated at a school run by a local clergyman. In 1804, he joined the firm of Williams and Brookes of Lincoln’s Inn. Although he intended to qualify as a lawyer, he became preoccupied with reading works of Christian theology and Church history (Skattowe, Memoir, p. 14). Later, his interests broadened to include ‘Oriental literature’ (Skattowe, Memoir, p. 42). He also read periodical publications to follow current affairs, and began writing articles and pamphlets, often anonymously, on a wide range of topics. In 1810, Mills studied with James Humphreys (d. 1830), a respected barrister, but he contracted tuberculosis and went to convalesce in Nice (1814-15). On his return to London, after travelling in Italy and Germany, he found it difficult to continue with his legal career since he had ‘not been in the actual practice of his profession for more than two years’ (Skattowe, Memoir, p. 59), and firms did not want to risk offering him a place. By then, he had completed An history of Muhammedanism (1817), and he now devoted himself to historical and literary pursuits. Several other works followed. Among these, The history of the crusades (London, 1820 and later editions) and his last work, The history of chivalry (2 vols, London, 1825; an American edition followed in 1826) also dealt with subjects relevant to Christian-Muslim relations. In The history of the crusades, Mills concluded that the crusades ‘had retarded the march of civilisation, thickened the clouds of ignorance and superstition, and encouraged intolerance, cruelty and fierceness’ (History of the crusades, vol. 2, p. 373). Mills’s writing led to correspondence with Sir Walter Scott. Although Mills had criticised Scott for disregarding historical accuracy in his novels, Scott expressed admiration for Mills’s ‘talents and industry’ (Goodwin and

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Lloyd, ‘Mills’, p. 262). While Mills and Scott shared some Orientalist assumptions and cannot be described as anti-imperialists, they considered that there was much that was positive in non-European peoples, cultures and religions. Mills was an admirer of Edward Gibbon, but he did not always agree with his opinions, and criticised him for aiming ‘at the destruction of Christianity’ by removing God from history (History of the crusades, 1828 edition, vol. 1, p. xxiv). Mills died from tuberculosis on 9 October 1826 in Southampton, where he had moved for health reasons. An obituary that appeared in several publications described him as ‘a profound divinity scholar, an acute critic’ whose name as an ‘historian [...] will perish only with our language’ (Annual biography, 1827, p. 469).

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Anon., ‘Charles Mills, Esq’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 140 (December 1826) 599600 (obituary) Anon., ‘Charles Mills’, The annual biography and obituary for the year 1827, London, 1827, pp. 469-70 (obituary, reprinted from The Monthly and European magazines) A. Skattowe, A memoir of the life and writings of Charles Mills, London, 1828 (Skattowe was a friend of Mills and a legal executor of his estate) Secondary G. Goodwin, rev. M. Lloyd, ‘Mills, Charles’, in ODNB E. Siberry, The new crusaders. Images of the crusades in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Abingdon, 2000 (discusses Mills’s History of the crusades, pp. 10-14) G. Goodwin, art. ‘Mills, Charles’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations An history of Muhammedanism Date 1817 Original Language English Description Charles Mills’s An history of Muhammedanism, comprising the life and character of the Arabian prophet, and succinct accounts of the empires founded by the Muhammedan arms. An inquiry into the theology, morality, laws, literature, and usages of the Muselmans, and a view of the present



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state and extent of the Muhammedan religion was first published in 1817. When it was still in manuscript form Mills gave it to his brother. His brother’s friend, Sir John Malcolm (d. 1833), who had served in the East India Company army and led diplomatic missions to Iran, caught sight of it and asked to borrow it, and after a meeting with Mills Malcolm assisted him with its publication, also suggesting some revisions and making his personal library available to Mills to facilitate this. It is divided into seven chapters together with a short preface (pp. v-viii), and is 409 pages long. The second edition, published in 1818, amounts to 484 pages and adds new material and references, including much more on legal matters in ch. 5. All references below are to this edition unless otherwise stated. One of Mills’s main sources was Edward Gibbon’s The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) – a criticism of Mills’s work was that it ‘too palpably reflected the diction and manner of Decline and fall’ (Skattowe, Memoir, p. 65). He also drew on Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens (using the 1857 edition), Jean Gagnier’s De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis (1723), a Latin translation of Abū l-Fidāʾ’s biography of Muḥammad, Al-sīra l-nabawiyya, and his Vie de Mahomet (1732), George Sale’s Koran and preliminary discourse (1734), Ludovico Marracci’s annotations to his translation of the Qur’an, which Mills thought a ‘mine of learning’ but aimed more at refuting Islam than at instructing Christians (pp. 286-7), the writings of Edward Pococke (1604-91), ‘from whom it is not often safe to differ’ (p. 9), Thomas Thornton, Johan Jacob Reiske, Adriaan Reland and several of Sir John Malcolm’s works. He also consulted a number of French works, regarding Claude-Étienne Savary’s biography of Muḥammad in the Introduction to his Koran (1786) as the best of those compiled from different sources rather than ‘one manuscript’ (p. 9). He thought Humphrey Prideaux ‘dull’ and, like Marracci, ‘prejudiced’. These writers lost their ‘charity’, ‘candor’ and ‘love of truth’ when the subject was Muḥammad, while Henri de Boulainvilliers ‘bestowed [...] absurd praises’ on him (p. 36). Mills does not say so explicitly, but he implies that his aim was to write a balanced biography. The chapters cover the life of Muḥammad (pp. 1-43), the undivided caliphate (pp. 44-132), the divided caliphate with a dissertation on the causes for Islam’s successful spread (pp. 133-80), the Tartar empires (pp. 181-275), the Qur’an and Muslim beliefs (pp. 276-375), the literature and science of the Islamic world (pp. 376414), and Islam’s present state and extent (pp. 415-84). Mills avoids direct, negative comparisons between Christian truth and Islamic falsehood, but such terms and remarks as ‘the Muhammedan

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delusion’ (p. ix), the ‘pretended apostle’ (p. 16) who ‘artfully acknowledged the divinity’ of the Jewish and Christian revelations, and the supposed incident in which ‘Gabriel descended from heaven to absolve’ Muḥammad ‘from the laws on polygamy and concubinage’ (p. 41) all reflect traditional Christian criticisms of the Prophet as motivated by worldly goals. Mills borrows from Gibbon the description of Muḥammad and his successors wielding a sword in one hand and the Qur’an in the other (pp. vii, 84; see Gibbon, Decline and fall, London, vol. 5, 1788, p. 170), and repeatedly calls Muḥammad a ‘fanatic’ and an ‘enthusiast’, although the latter is not meant entirely negatively because it includes his insistence on the worship of one God, which he proclaims ‘in every part of the Koran’ (p. 291). In fact, Muḥammad’s ‘master passion’ was ‘religious enthusiasm’ (p. 36). As a youth, Muḥammad was pious and morally decent (pp. 36-7). However, once he began his religious mission he became a wild fanatic. He compromised his high ideals with concessions to the ‘passions and prejudices of his countrymen’ (p. 37), and his main aim became to rise to the leadership his people. Yet his ‘politeness to the great’ and ‘affability to the humble’, as well as his talents for ‘persuasion’ and ‘command’, won him respect (p. 38). He was eloquent, and in performing most social and domestic duties he ‘disgraced not his assumed title of the apostle of God’ (p. 39). He also followed a modest life-style and, although he possessed the ‘cruelty which characterises the Asiatic mind’ (p. 40), some of his laws showed compassion and mercy. Islam’s early successes under the first four caliphs were partly due to the enthusiasm that ‘descended on Muhammed’s disciples’ (p. 43). This, with the appeal of a sensual paradise and the ‘military character’ of the Arabs, and later of the Tartars, led to victory after victory (p. 173). Ishmael’s progeny believe themselves entitled ‘by force or fraud’ to recover their lost heritage, making ‘robbery a national principle’ (p. 175). Mills describes acts of cruelty and destruction such as the ʿAbbasids’ murder of 80 descendants of Muʿāwiya in Damascus, even though they had surrendered and had accepted an offer of protection (p. 104). However, he also describes various treaties with Christian subjects and how, after Jerusalem’s surrender, the Caliph ʿUmar declined to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so as not to turn it into a mosque. Conquered people were offered conversion or death, although Christians and Jews living in the empire were permitted to practise their faiths on payment of a tax and agreement to observe certain limitations, including prohibition of using saddles, displaying crosses and ringing bells (p. 65). On Saladin, who Walter Scott would depict in



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The talisman (1825) as the model of courtesy and chivalry, Mills comments that his Christian enemies had to confess ‘his virtues’. When Saladin won Jerusalem from the crusaders, even though they had ‘murdered’ every Muslim they could find, he did not retaliate and left ‘them a temple for the performance of their worship’ (p. 154). He founded colleges and schools and spent almost all his revenue on ‘charity and public works’, so that when he died there was hardly enough left to pay for his ‘unostentatious funeral’ (p. 155). He heard the petitions of his humblest subjects and performed his religious duties ‘with a scrupulosity worthy of a companion of Muhammed’ (p 154). Mills argues that fanaticism was not unique to Islam. Elsewhere, he attributes the massacre in Jerusalem, which he describes vividly, to the Christians’ ‘insatiable fanaticism’, which disregarded ‘supplication and resistance alike’. ‘Fanaticism’ had ‘stripped morality from religion and misery completed the triumph of vice over virtue’ (History of the crusades, London, 1820, vol. 1, p. 257). Nor did all converts embrace Islam under compulsion. In China, for example, the methods of conversion employed by Muslims were ‘wise and humane’, taking abandoned Chinese children into care and instructing them in Islam (p. 417). In his description of Islamic rule in al-Andalus, Mills praises the buildings, public baths, libraries and academies, all built at a time when Christian Europe was ‘buried in darkest ignorance’ (pp. 141-2). Later, describing Arab contributions to learning, he acknowledges that they ‘introduced learning into Europe’. He does not credit them with many inventions, but they were successful in uniting ‘ancient and modern letters’, for which Europe owes them ‘respect and gratitude’ (p. 402). Yet, once societies adopted Islam ‘they remained stationary’, and change became a profanity (p. 179). In discussing the Qur’an’s ‘literary history’, Mills describes how the muṣḥaf was compiled and ratified under the third Caliph ʿUthmān (p. 278); he goes on to refer to belief in its inimitability and uncreatedness, and outlines its contents. In typical Christian style, he calls it ‘incoherent’ and full of contradictions, fables and mistakes, which Muslim scholars correct by declaring that some verses abrogate others. He describes the development of vowel markings and other orthographic features (p. 282), and also various translations of the Qur’an. Mills touches on the Muslim belief in ‘absolute predestination’ (p. 294), together with the assumption that the Bible is so corrupt ‘that scarcely any portion of the originals remained’ at the time the Qur’an was written down (pp. 294-5), and the teaching that ‘Jesus escaped from the Jews’

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and was taken up into heaven, which was borrowed from ‘some early heretical Christians’ (p. 295). He refers to legends about the final Judgement, and about the Antichrist and Jesus appearing ‘in Syria’ (p. 300), and attributes the change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca to Muḥammad’s wish to avoid being seen as a ‘servile imitator’ of Judaism and Christianity (pp. 307-8). Significance Several Orientalist tropes that became standard by the end of the 19th century find early expression in this work, among them the assumption of racial characteristics that produce warlike tendencies, despotism and cruelty, and the claim that Muslim societies remain static. These appear in such later works as E.A. Freeman’s History and conquests of the Saracens (1856) and in the writings of William Muir. However, even though Mills did make some pejorative statements, he was more prepared to acknowledge positive features of Muslims and their history, including their contributions to learning and their comparatively lenient treatment of defeated opponents. In addition, his comments on Christian fanaticism and cruelty in The history of the crusades depart from the common assumption that valour, toleration and virtue were exclusively Christian virtues, while cruelty and intolerance characterised all Muslims. Benjamin Z. Kedar comments that Mills found his sources for the crusaders’ massacres of Muslims in Jerusalem ‘not gory enough for him’, so he added an additional detail that Muslims were ‘thrown from the tops of churches and of the citadel’ (Kedar, ‘Jerusalem massacre’, p. 47, referring to Mills, History of the crusades, vol. 2, p. 257). Mills set out to ‘extract the substance’ of available works on Islam and to present these in a ‘connected and concise account’ (p. x), and he arguably achieved this. An anonymous reviewer wrote that the book had given ‘much pleasure and instruction’, and commended it to the public because it dealt with a religion professed by millions of Britain’s Asian subjects (Anon., ‘Mr Mills’s “An history of Muhammadenism”’, p. 44). But as attitudes about the us-them polarity became dominant, some saw Mills’s book as too favourable to Islam. A Baptist missionary in India in 1884 observed that Mills did not ‘write in an anti-Muḥammadan spirit’ (Bate, Examination, p. 234). By no means free of traditional Christian criticisms of Islam or of Orientalist tropes, An history of Muhammadenism was nonetheless more positive than many earlier and contemporary works. Mills was a devout Christian but, writing from outside the academic sphere and as a layman,



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he was perhaps able to shift towards a less hostile view of Islam. He did not go as far as the independent scholar Godfrey Higgins did in Apology for Mohamed (1829), or even as far as Charles Forster. Writing from an isolated Irish parish where he saw Islam as a potential ally with Christianity in civilising the world, Forster cites Mills several times and remarks that, for someone who could ‘sometimes think so well’, it was a pity that he had not ‘raised himself above the task of a compiler’ (Mahometanism unveiled, London, 1829, vol. 2, p. 485). However, Mills’s book shows that a writer in his position, with access to the sources available at the time, could question the traditional Christian claim that Islam was a thoroughly evil religion, and could argue that Islam had done some good in the world. Most significant, though, is how the work, which was well reviewed and received when it was written, was replaced as a standard text by much more destructive works whose authors, because they had lived among Muslims and had access to earlier sources, claimed an authority that overrode Mills’s. What in the early years of the 19th century can be seen as progress in terms of better understanding between Christians and Muslims, even if modest, was reversed and obscured by subsequent contributions that displaced it in popularity and influence. Publications Charles Mills, An history of Muhammedanism, comprising the life and character of the Arabian prophet, and succinct accounts of the empires founded by the Muhammedan arms. An inquiry into the theology, morality, laws, literature, and usages of the Muselmans, and a view of the present state and extent of the Muhammedan religion, London, 1817; 015203538 (digitised version available through Europeana) Charles Mills, An history of Muhammedanism, comprising the life and character of the Arabian prophet, and succinct accounts of the empires founded by the Muhammedan arms. An inquiry into the theology, morality, laws, literature, and usages of the Muselmans, and a view of the present state and extent of the Muhammedan religion, London, 18182; 008967150 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Charles Mills, Histoire du Mahometisme, comprenant la vie et le caractere du prophete arabe. Une relation succincte des empires fondes par les armes mahometanes, des recherches sur la theologie, la morale, les lois, la literature et les usages des musulmans; avec un tableau de l’état actuel et de l’etendue de la religion Mahometane, trans. P. Tiby, Paris, 1825 (French trans.)

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Charles Mills, Histoire du Mahometisme, comprenant la vie et le caractere du prophete arabe. Une relation succincte des empires fondes par les armes mahometanes, des recherches sur la theologie, la morale, les lois, la literature et les usages des musulmans; avec un tableau de l’état actuel et de l’etendue de la religion Mahometane, trans. P. Tiby, Guernsey, 1826; 2BZ181919402 (digitised version available through Östereichische Nationalbibliothek) Studies B.Z. Kedar, ‘The Jerusalem massacre of 1099 in the Western historiography of the crusades’, in Crusades, ed. B.Z. Kedar et al., vol. 3, London, 2016, 16-76 J.D. Bate, An examination of the claims of Ishmael as viewed by Muḥammadans, Allahabad, 1884 Skattowe, Memoir Anon., ‘Mr Mills’s “An history of Muhammadenism”’, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany 5 (January 1818) 38-44 Clinton Bennett

Robert Taylor Date of Birth 18 August 1784 Place of Birth Edmonton, Middlesex Date of Death 5 June 1844 Place of Death Tours, France

Biography

Robert Taylor was born in Edmonton, London, on 18 August 1784, the sixth son of John and Elizabeth Taylor. After his father’s death, his uncle, Edward Farmer Taylor of Bridgnorth, Shropshire, became his guardian. He was boarded at a school in Edmonton, before becoming a pupil of Samuel Partridge, house surgeon of Birmingham General Hospital, in 1801. From 1805, Taylor studied medicine at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals, London, qualifying as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1807. However, he decided to seek ordination and entered St John’s College, Cambridge, to read theology. He graduated in 1813, and was ordained deacon on 14 March and priest on 28 October the same year. He served as curate at Midhurst and as perpetual curate at Easebourne, both in West Sussex, until 1818, when he resigned after being accused of heresy. He had embraced a deistic view and was sceptical about the historicity of much of the Bible. For some time, he assisted at Edmonton, Tottenham and Newington without a formal appointment, finding it difficult to secure a preferment. However, he managed to obtain another curacy, at Yardley, Birmingham, in 1819, though the Bishop of Worcester dismissed him in 1820 for his unorthodox preaching. His family thought it best for him to leave England and offered him an allowance to do so. Taylor went to Dublin, where he taught at a school and assisted in a parish until Archbishop Magee discovered this and objected. In Dublin, Taylor began to write articles criticising the church and, founding the Society for Universal Benevolence, he delivered one Sunday morning lecture in a hired theatre. A riot outside the venue during his second such lecture on 28 March 1824 ended this venture. Taylor returned to London, where he petitioned Parliament for a licence to preach ‘natural religion’. Under the auspices of the Christian Evidence Society, of which he styled himself the Orator, he lectured in various venues until 1826, when he rented a former chapel where he officiated

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in full vestments at Sunday morning services based on the Anglican liturgy, which he thought to be sublime (McCalman, ‘Popular irreligion’, p. 53). In 1827, he purchased Salter’s Hall Chapel in Cannon Street, which he renamed Areopagus. That year, he published Holy liturgy, or divine service on the principles of pure Deism. He attracted large audiences, and so had sufficient income to finance his operation. Befriending the radical publisher Richard Carlile (d. 1843), who printed the proceedings of the Society for Universal Benevolence in The Republican, he now had patronage. Taylor aimed to ‘establish what he called a rational form of public worship’ (‘Ominous experiences’, p. 555). He was tried for blasphemy and imprisoned on 24 October 1827, on top of which he forfeited his property. While in jail, he wrote Syntagma of the evidences of the Christian religion (1828) and The Diegesis (1829). After serving his sentence, Taylor resumed lecturing at Richard Carlile’s premises and at the Universalist Church, Finsbury Square. In 1829, he set out with Carlile on an ‘infidel home missionary tour’, challenging clergy and college heads at Cambridge, where he wore his academic dress to engage with them in debate. They were ‘evicted from five different lecturing halls’ during the tour (Parolin, Radical spaces, p. 199). By May 1830, he was conducting services at the Rotunda, Blackfriars Road, where preaching on the Devil earned him the nickname, which he embraced, of the Devil’s Chaplain. He published his collected sermons, initially as weekly pamphlets, under the title The Devil’s pulpit (1831-2). On 6 July 1831, he was again imprisoned for blasphemy after the Society for the Suppression of Vice complained about his Easter sermon. Released in 1833, he married and, to avoid paying damages to another woman who sued him for breach of promise, he moved to Tours, France, where he practised medicine until his death on 5 June 1844.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary R. Taylor, The trial of the Rev Robert Taylor, AB MRCS. Upon a charge of blasphemy, with his defence as delivered by himself, London, 1828 There is extensive correspondence between Taylor and Carlile in The Lion 3 (1829) as well as advertisements for the lectures they gave; https://www. amazon.co.uk/Lion-Vol-January-Classic-Reprint/dp/0282340491 R. Taylor, ‘Memoir’, prefixed to The Devil’s pulpit, 1831-2, pp. xiii-xv (contains autobiographical details, arranged by Carlile)



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Anonymous, ‘Mr Robert Taylor’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1844) 550-1 (obituary) Anonymous, ‘Ominous experiences’, The Christian Life 8/140 (1882) 555 (describes Taylor’s liturgy) Secondary C. Parolin, Radical spaces. Venues of popular politics in London 1790-c. 1875, Canberra, 2010, pp. 4, 199, 213, 217, 243, 255, 259 A. Gordon, and K.D. Reynolds, art. ‘Taylor, Robert’, in ODNB I.D. McCalman, ‘Popular irreligion in early Victorian England. Infidel preachers and radical theatricality in 1830s London’, in R.W. Davis and R.J. Helmstadter (eds), Religion and irreligion in Victorian society, London, 1992, 51-67 J. Venn and J.A. Venn, ‘Robert Taylor’, Alumni Cantabrigienses, vol. 2, part 6, 1954, 128-9 A. Gordon, art. ‘Taylor, Robert’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The fifty-seventh oration Date 1826 Original Language English Description ‘The fifty-seventh oration, being in refutation of the Bishop of London’s eighth proposition containing his comparison between Christ and Mahomet’, was Taylor’s response to Bishop Beilby Porteous’s assertion that Islam was the invention of ‘man’ while Christianity was ‘derived from God’. He first delivered it to the Christian Evidence Society on 14 February 1826. It was published in The Republican the same year (pp. 201-8), and it was reprinted in numerous editions on both sides of the Atlantic. In what he wrote, Porteous was evidently aware of some facts about Muḥammad, though he repeated many popular tropes that show Christianity is true and Islam false. As a Deist, Taylor may have decided to respond to these arguments because he detected some divine initiative behind Islam. He begins by commending the bishop for recognising Muḥammad’s status at birth and for using peaceful persuasion during the first 12 years of his mission. He also contrasts Porteous’s remarks with those of Bishop Jeremy Taylor (d. 1667), who had described Muḥammad as

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a ‘base epileptic’ whom God ‘was pleased to suffer’ to set up a religion that now covers a vast territory, so that one bishop saw Muḥammad as a ‘fraud’ and the other as God’s instrument. Recent authors, including George Sale (d. 1736) and Edward Gibbon (d. 1764), have ‘robbed’ the clergy of their ‘original way of telling the story’ (‘Oration’, p. 202), for it was now known that the proper name of the religion is ‘Islam’ and that ‘Mohammed’ is the ‘more proper name of the Arabian prophet’, who was ‘noble in reason’ and ‘excellent in faculties’ and ‘in action’ was ‘like an angel’ (‘Oration’, p. 203). Interpreting Isaiah 52:3 to describe Jesus as lacking any physical beauty, Taylor asks why God would send one messenger into the world with all the advantages of birth, appearance and fortune, and another, Jesus, who had none of these? If Muḥammad was successful because he began his mission during a time of ignorance, his detractors need to explain how such an age succeeded ‘the age of divine revelation’ and why the light that was to lighten ‘the Gentiles shone so dimly’ (‘Oration’, p. 203). Proving Islam to be ‘false’ does not prove that Christianity is true any more than references to absurdities in the Qur’an prove the superior reason of the New Testament. Those who laugh at Muḥammad communicating with an angel or ascending to the seventh heaven riding Burāq choose to believe that Christ ‘communicated with the devil’ and rode ‘up into the skies upon nothing at all’. Porteous’s claim that not even Jesus’s enemies impugned his ‘moral character’ (Summary, p. 73) was contrary to the Gospels, which record that he was called a ‘gluttonous man,’ a ‘wine bibber and a friend of publicans and sinners’. That stain cannot be attributed to Muḥammad, who forbade alcohol. Describing the annual Muslim fast, Taylor challenges Porteous’s judgement that Islam panders to people’s ‘carnal appetites’ (‘Oration’, p. 204). As for the sensual pleasures promised in paradise, Taylor sees this as more reasonable than Christianity’s reduction of the afterlife to one of there being ‘no sense at all’. On polygamy, Muḥammad accepted a practice that already existed: he did not abolish it, but he limited the number of wives to four. Citing Q 4:3, Taylor comments that this does not mandate four wives but allows up to four provided all are treated equitably. Taylor does not see in this provision the ‘unbridled licentiousness’ of which Christians accuse Islam (‘Oration’, p. 206). Christianity regards it as sinful for men to ‘even look upon a woman’, and Jesus spoke cruelly and with scorn to his mother, and requires from wives ‘abject and passive obedience’ to their husbands. Muḥammad disliked celibacy and said that husbands should treat their wives as they themselves wished to be treated (‘Oration’, p. 206).



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Taylor does not offer a ‘vindication’ of Muḥammad’s character because he was ‘an impostor’. Yet, Taylor asks, what would become of us if we rejected religions on the grounds that their founders had been impostors? He does not advocate Islam because ‘it is not the faith’ of Britain ‘established by law’ (‘Oration’, p. 207), though on the other hand he thinks it would be a great deal cheaper as it lacks priests. Would an historical and moral examination of Islam ‘shrink from’ comparison with Christianity? Taylor refers to Edward Gibbon’s remark that before the time of Constantine, Christianity ‘with all its miracles’ managed to prevail over less than a twentieth of the Roman Empire, and to George Sale’s observation that it took Islam ‘less than a century’ to spread over more territory than the Romans ever ruled, and that many nations embraced Islam that ‘never felt the force’ of Muslim arms (‘Oration’, p. 207). Taylor thinks that Islam’s collection of a tax from non-Muslims to allow them to practise their religion is comparable to Christians ‘paying’ people to practise Christianity. Of the two religions, says Taylor, Islam is not the worse. Significance Taylor’s rebuttal of Bishop Porteous shows how someone who identified himself as a freethinker, but championed a religion freed from irrational content, could challenge popular tropes about Islam. On the one hand, Taylor was marginal to mainstream Christianity in early 19th-century Britain, but on the other, he had a following in radical circles and his notoriety guaranteed a readership for his various publications within that constituency: The Republican had 5,000 subscribers. Iain McCalman acknowledges that Taylor, who preached ‘several times a week to capacity crowds’, has been ‘viewed as an eccentric, ephemeral figure’, but thinks that he was a ‘more significant and representative’ figure in 19th-century England than has generally been allowed. After all, he ‘was able to attract substantial radical audiences’ (McCalman, ‘Popular irreligion’, p. 51). Describing himself as a ‘pure Deist’, he places himself in this Oration alongside a number of other Deists, Unitarians, Arians and rationalists (including several Freemasons) who questioned the dominant Christian view that Islam was anti-Christian and bankrupt of any moral virtues or genuine spiritual value. Such writers include Henry Stubbe (d. 1676), John Tolland (d. 1722), George Sale, Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) and the more recent Godfrey Higgins (d. 1833), who described himself as a ‘pan-deist’, and believed that the various religions had a common origin in human pre-history. Higgins thought that Taylor was unfairly persecuted, and cites him in his posthumously published Anacalypsis

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(1836). Although Higgins’s Apology for Mohamed was not published until 1829, some common ground can be identified between him and Taylor in that both commended the lack of a priesthood in Islam and its rejection of celibacy. It is difficult to assess whether Taylor’s ‘Oration’ itself had much impact on thinking about Christian-Muslims relations, given his notorious reputation as a critic of the church. But the questioning by writers such as Taylor of the view that Christian truth excluded the truth of all other religions, however radical, may have contributed to the thinking of some who later argued that Christianity and Islam should exchange hostility for friendship, and see each other as allies not foes. In contrast to a writer such as Reginald Bosworth Smith (d. 1908), who dared to re-think how Christians should regard Islam, yet remained in good standing with the religious establishment, Taylor revelled in being an outsider and an irritant, but may have played a small role in improving Christian appreciations of Islam in the long term. Publications R. Taylor, ‘The fifty-seventh oration, being in refutation of the Bishop of London’s eighth proposition containing his comparison between Christ and Mahomet’, The Republican 13/7 (1826) 201-8; 000502952 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies McCalman, ‘Popular irreligion’ (does not discuss ‘Oration 57’, but gives a modern analysis of Taylor’s ideas on religion) Clinton Bennett

Charles Forster Date of Birth 16 February 1789 Place of Birth Ballyconnell, Ireland Date of Death 30 August 1871 Place of Death Stisted, Essex

Biography

Charles Forster was born in Ballyconnell, Ireland, on 16 February 1789, the second son of Charles Forster (d. 1832) and Mary Morgan (d. 1827). The Forsters were members of the Church of Ireland and Forster’s older brother, James William Forster (1794-1861), became Archdeacon of Aghadoe. Forster studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and was ordained deacon and priest in 1813, becoming curate at Abington where his friend John Jebb (1775-1833) was the incumbent. Between May 1821 and April 1822, he was a Prebendary of Cashel and, when Jebb became Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe in 1822, Forster re-joined him as domestic chaplain, also serving as Examining Chaplain for the diocese and, from 1826, as Chancellor of Ardfert. On regular visits to England with Jebb, Forster was drawn into the social circle of London’s Clapham Sect centred around William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Charles Simeon (1759-1836), who recruited evangelical chaplains to serve with the East India Company, and the economist Henry Thornton (1760-1815). On 31 August 1833, Forster married Laura Thornton (1809-79). This was shortly before Jebb died on 9 December 1833. Forster then moved to England as perpetual curate of Ash, Kent, until 1838, when he was appointed to the living of Stisted, Essex. He remained there until his death on 30 August 1871. Forster was a prolific writer. His first book, Discourses on subjects of scripture history, was published in 1823, followed by Critical essays on Genesis chapter 10 and Matthew, ch. 2, 17, 18, in 1826. Other publications included his Correspondence between Bishop Jebb and Alexander Knox (1834), the Life of John Jebb (1836) and The one primeval language (1852). It is his 1829 book, Mahometanism unveiled, which has considerable significance for Christian-Muslim relations, arguably challenging the then dominant view that Islam was Christianity’s foe. Another work, although not directly concerned with Islam, The historical geography of Arabia (1844), was nonetheless cited by two of the most renowned 19th-century

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writers on Islam, William Muir (1819-1905), who saw Islam as civilisation’s enemy, and Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98), who wrote his Series of essays on the life of Mohammed (1870) to refute Muir. There is little doubt that some of Forster’s writing was arcane and somewhat eccentric, which caused his grandson, the novelist E.M. Forster, to dismiss his work as ‘worthless’ (Marianne Thornton, pp. 145, 163), but his 1829 book represents an important contribution to the development of a Christian response to Islam.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary C. Forster, Mahometanism unveiled. An inquiry, in which that arch-heresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation, of the Christian faith, London, 1829 (some autobiographical references) H. Cotton, Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ. The succession of the prelates and members of the cathedral bodies in Ireland, vol. 1, Dublin, 1851 (records Forster’s appointments at Cashel, p. 61, listing his publications, and at Ardfert, p. 447) J.D. Seymour, The succession of parochial clergy in the united diocese of Cashel and Emly, Dublin, 1908, p. 69 (records Forster’s appointment at Abington) J. Venn and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge, 1944, vol. 2, pt 2, p. 538 (incorporation of Forster’s BD at Cambridge) E.M. Forster, Marianne Thornton. A domestic biography, 1797-1887, London, 1956 (some reminiscences about the author’s grandfather) Secondary F. Boase, Modern English biography, Truro, 1892, vol. 1, p. 1083 (lists Forster’s appointments from 1834)

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mahometanism unveiled Date 1829 Original Language English Description Charles Forster’s Mahometanism unveiled. An inquiry, in which that archheresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation of the Christian faith, was published in two volumes in London in 1829. A second edition



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was published in 1853. Vol. 1 begins with a dedication to Bishop John Jebb (pp. v-xv; all references are to the 1829 edition), in which Forster reveals that the idea for the book dated from a conversation between himself, Jebb and William Phelen (d. 1830), then Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin (p. x). He also acknowledges the assistance of Alexander Nicoll (d. 1828), Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, whom he thanks for ‘making extracts from the Oriental books and MSS in the Bodleian Library’ (p. xiii), and Sir Robert Inglis (d. 1855), who provided him with access to ‘rare articles’ and unpublished writings by ‘the learned’ George Sale (d. 1736). Following the Dedication, the text is arranged in 13 sections. After the Introduction (vol. 1, pp. 1-110), vol. 1 has seven sections, and vol. 2 has six, followed by the Conclusion (vol. 2, pp. 361-80) and four appendices, ending on p. 455. Forster’s aim is to inquire ‘into the character of Mahometanism, and the causes of its success, upon new and untried ground’ (vol. 1, p. 3), after he has found previous attempts unsatisfactory. He prefixes the whole text with Samuel Johnson’s remark that there are but two ‘objects of curiosity in the world: the Christian world and the Mahometan world: all the rest may be considered as barbarous’. Forster sets out to offer an ‘impartial review’ of Islam’s history (although by calling Islam ‘an arch-heresy’ he cannot have been completely impartial), and challenges statements and judgements about Islam that were influenced by ‘preconceived systems’ that bent facts to support ‘undigested theories’ (vol. 1, p. 4). He begins with a sketch of Islam’s origin in 7th-century Arabia and its rapid spread, which, he observes, ‘is the favourite argument of Mahometans themselves in support of their creed’ (vol. 1, pp. 5-12). What he finds more significant is Islam’s ‘permanency’, which ‘has never been accounted for’ (vol. 1, p. 12). While reasonable explanations had been offered for Islam’s origin as a system that ‘addressed itself to the prejudices and passions of mankind’ and ‘silenced opposition by force’, none had yet been advanced for its durability. In addition, it has an extraordinary ability to ‘absorb’ the religions with which it comes into contact (vol. 1, pp. 18-19). Yet Forster does not think that Islam’s ‘pure and naked monotheism’ or its simple ritual offers enough to explain its attraction (vol. 1, p. 20). He proposes that earlier explanations have overlooked the outworking of God’s providential purposes (vol. 1, p. 58), so his own thesis is that secondary, human causes fail to explain either Christianity’s or Islam’s success (vol. 1, p. 66), and that the only ‘adequate’ explanation lies in God’s ‘special and superintending providence’ (vol. 1, p. 68).

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Forster turns to the Bible to identify a key that can provide Christians with an understanding of Islam’s providential role. Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, each carried a promise through which God intended to accomplish a temporal and a spiritual purpose (vol. 1, p. 71). God’s promise to the first was ‘predominantly a spiritual blessing’, and his promise to the second was ‘predominantly [...] a temporal’ one (vol. 1, p. 72). The purpose of the book is to examine Islam’s providential role (vol. 1, p. 74). Forster argues that, although Islam’s moral code falls far short of Gospel standards, when it is compared with the Mosaic law ‘precedents and comparisons’ can be identified (vol. 1, pp. 75-6). Moses’s character and morality throw Muḥammad’s ‘into the shade’, but given the circumstances of Muḥammad’s birth, surrounded by idolatry and paganism, ‘surprise [...] that his moral code was not better, may fairly be exchanged for admiration that it was not worse’ (vol. 1, p. 78). Nor can Muḥammad be accused of ignoring the ‘superior light’ of the Gospel, which had already superseded the Mosaic code, because Arabian Christianity was totally corrupt (vol. 1, p. 80). However, why would God permit the rise of a ‘spurious faith’? Forster, who calls Islam an ‘arch-heresy’, argues that its over-emphasis on God’s unity was necessary to sweep aside both the ‘parody of Christianity’ that existed in the East and the pagan religion of Ishmael’s descendants (vol. 1, p. 83). Forster goes on to argue that Providence used Islam to chastise Arian and other false versions of Christianity in the Middle East, North Africa and in Spain, but was halted by Charles Martel at Tours (vol. 1, p. 85) so that Catholic Europe ‘sustained the Moslem storm uninjured’ (vol. 1, p. 84). When Muslims again attacked Europe in the 17th century, Providence protected her and ‘set bounds for ever to the Turkish empire and faith’ (vol. 1, p. 86). Again, Forster describes Judaism and Christianity as legitimate and Islam as ‘spurious’ because of Isaac’s legitimacy and Ishmael’s illegitimacy (vol. 1, p. 90), which in his view makes Jesus the true Messiah and Muḥammad a ‘counterfeit’ (vol. 1, p. 90). Forster argues that it was necessary for God to maintain a distinction between the two religions because, had Islam more closely resembled Christianity, there would be greater confusion about their relative claims (vol. 1, p. 91). He sees Christian-Muslim hostility as rooted in God’s words that Ishmael’s hand would be against all people (Genesis 16:12) (vol. 1, p. 94). He attributes the period of the Crusades to this rivalry between relatives, yet Ishmael would also ‘dwell in the presence of all his brethren’, pointing to Islam’s contribution to scientific and intellectual progress’. Christian missionaries



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who ignored ‘pre-existing light’ in Islam and other religions are misguided, because Islam does not oppose Christianity but prepares the way for its ‘eventual acceptance’ (vol. 1, p. 98). Following this Introduction, Section I (vol. 1, pp. 113-61) examines the biblical basis of Forster’s theory about Christianity and Islam as the respective blessings promised to Isaac and Ishmael. Section II (vol. 1, pp. 162209) examines what Forster saw as ‘prophetical anticipations’ of Christ and of Muḥammad, and this continues in Section III (vol. 1, pp. 210-79). Section IV (vol. 1, pp. 280-314) examines historical analogies between Islam and Judaism, Section V (vol. 1, pp. 325-63) moral analogies across the three Abrahamic faiths, and Section VI (vol. 1, pp. 364-402) doctrinal analogies between Judaism and Islam. Volume 1 ends with Section VII (vol. 1, pp. 403-27), which compares the religious rites of Islam and Christianity. Volume 2 begins with Section VIII (vol. 2, pp. 1-93), which examines the Bible and the Qur’an. Section IX (vol. 2, pp. 94-111) compares Muslim and Christian ‘sects and heresies’, and Section X (vol. 2, pp. 112-41) compares Islam and ‘Popery’. Section XI (vol. 2, pp. 142-99) argues that the Crusades fulfilled God’s words about Ishmael’s enmity toward others, while Section XII (vol. 2, pp. 200-45) discusses Christianity’s and Islam’s roles in the areas of civilisation, and their impact on national character in the spheres of economics and commerce. Section XIII (vol. 2, pp. 246-360) continues with each religion’s influence on literature, science and philosophy, where Forster points to numerous contributions by Muslim scholars to knowledge in such fields as mathematics, medicine and the natural sciences, and describes their ‘crowning achievement’ as the ‘invention [...] of experimental philosophy’ (vol. 2, p. 50). He points out how works written by Muslims were translated into European languages, and describes how the schools, libraries and universities of Europe were modelled on those of the Islamic world. The many footnotes show the breadth of Forster’s reading. Among sources that he frequently cites are Edward Gibbon’s The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens (1718), Joseph White’s Bampton Lectures, works by George Sale including his Koran (1734), A.N. Matthews’s translation of Mishkāt al-masābīḥ (1809-10) a collection of Hadith, and Edward Pococke’s Specimen historiae Arabum (1649). With the exception of Humphrey Prideaux’s The true nature of imposture (1698), and references to Islam in George Miller’s Lectures on the philosophy of modern history (1818-20), most of the works Forster consulted cannot be described as anti-Muslim polemic.

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Unlike most Christians who wrote about Islam’s spread, Forster challenges the theory that this was entirely due to use of force. He commends Saladin for his treatment of the Christians in Jerusalem at the time of the Third Crusade (vol. 1, p. 470), and breaks ranks with many who claimed that Muslims only passed on to Europe what they had copied from the Greeks by arguing that Muslims made important contributions to scientific and intellectual progress. In Christian literature, ʿUmar’s sword is everywhere, while ‘the example of al-Mamun [the early ʿAbbasid caliph who encouraged rational investigation] and his illustrious successors is forgotten’ (vol. 1, p. 48). His discussion of the Crusades perhaps also breaks new ground by identifying some positive Christian-Muslim exchanges. Christians, he says, took back to Europe Muslim notions of chivalry and medical knowledge that saw expression in medieval romantic poetry and later inspired Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton: he relates Paradise lost to the mental images and influences of Islam (vol. 2, pp. 321-3). Culturally, his argument reduces the distance between Islamic and Christian contexts, and sees the former as less alien. Finally, Forster thinks that Christians should look on Islam as an ally not as a foe, because the two religions will, in time, converge into one providential faith (vol. 1, p. 110). He does not describe in detail how this will happen, but suggests that Islam has an upward trajectory, that is, over time it moves closer to Christianity. Together with Christianity, Islam has in the past acted beneficially ‘on a vast scale on the civil and social, moral and spiritual interests of mankind’ (vol. 1, p. 108), and ultimately there would be ‘one great consummation – the glorious fulfilment of the two-fold covenant of God with Abraham, in its social and intellectual aspect, by the eventual re-union of his sons Isaac and Ishmael as joint civilizers of the world’ (vol. 2, p. 360). Forster links this with biblical passages about the ingathering of the Gentiles. He sees Islam as a necessary complement to Christianity, commenting that, without Ishmael, Isaac remains incomplete (vol. 2, p. 277). Significance Forster’s book was widely discussed in some very lengthy reviews, and continued to be mentioned in later 19th-century works, including William Muir’s The Mohammedan controversy (1897), which reprised Muir’s earlier reviews and essays, most fully his review in The Calcutta Review (July-December, 1845). Contemporary reviews, which were all anonymous, included those in the Literary Gazette 13 (1829) 300-1, The Eclectic Review, 3rd series (1 May 1829) 381-405, The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review 7 (January 1830) 1-44, The Edinburgh Review



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50 (January 1830) 287-44, The Monthly Review (August 1829) 475-91, and The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 3rd series 8 (October 1829) 681-9 and (November 1829) 753-65. As well as criticisms that accused him of blasphemy and of betraying the cause of Christian mission, some reviewers praised him for providing much useful, little-known material. Forster responded to the most critical review, from The British Critic, in A vindication of the theory of Mahometanism unveiled (1830), a tract of 60 pages, in which he also cites other, more favourable reviews. In defence of his thesis that God’s promise to Ishmael had a spiritual aspect that found fulfilment in Islam, here Forster argues that, while he did represent Islam as fulfilling this promise, he primarily identified this with the preservation in Arabia of Abraham’s religion. Islam is a ‘providential arrangement’ that grew ‘from out of the Ishmaelitish covenant’ (Vindication, p. 31). Responding to the critic’s claim that non-Arab Muslims could not be seen as spiritual descendants of Ishmael, Forster described this as a ‘private opinion’ that lacked any convincing or substantial argument (Vindication, p. 36). Referring to Mahometanism unveiled (vol. 2, p. 475 n. 51), Forster appears to agree that Satan inspired Muḥammad but adds that this was ‘not permitted only, but directed and ordained by God’; he had ‘shunned to put’ this ‘more prominently before the public’ (Vindication, pp. 40-1). His footnote describes how God ‘put [...] lying spirits [...] into the mouths of false prophets’, though he remains convinced that Islam has a share in the fulfilment of God’s purposes and promise to Abraham (Vindication, p. 48). Two significant references to Forster, by F.D. Maurice (d. 1872) and John Davenport (d. 1877), show that his book continued to appeal to those who developed more friendly views of Islam, although some who did not share his approach also mentioned the book, such as T.P. Hughes (d. 1911) in A dictionary of Islam (London, 1885, p. 405) and Samuel Zwemer (d. 1952) in Arabia. The cradle of Islam (New York, 1900, p. 421, also referencing Forster’s Historical geography, London, 1844, p. 416). An Urdu translation of Davenport’s An apology for Mohammed and the Koran (1869) did become very popular among Indian Muslims, as Muir feared Forster’s book might. The English edition of Davenport’s work was financed by Syed Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), who, in order to refute Muir, wrote A series of essays on the life of Mohammed (1879), which Davenport helped prepare for publication. Maurice referred to Forster’s ‘learned and ingenious speculations’, and said that, although he himself chose to deal ‘with more popular views upon the subject’, he thought that ‘as far’ as Forster’s book

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‘evidenced a desire to deal fairly with facts which Christian apologists have often perverted, [...] it must have done good, even if the basis upon which it rests should be found untenable’ (Maurice, The religions of the world, London, 1854, p. iv). Other later references to Forster were less generous. For example, Matthew Arnold (d. 1888) dismissed Forster as a misguided amateur whose ‘two thick volumes’ were ‘aberrations’ that suffered ‘from want of check’ (Essays in criticism, London, 1903, pp. 59-60), while Ernest Renan (d. 1892) thought that Washington Irving’s Lives of Mahomet and his successors (1850) showed ‘true progress’ when compared with Mahometanism unveiled, which he thought ridiculous (Studies of religious history, New York and Paris, 1893, p. 156). Nonetheless, the book continued to attract notice. W.E. Gladstone (d. 1898), whose government reversed Britain’s pro-Ottoman policy, read Forster as a student at Oxford when he was researching how to engage in ‘controversy with infidels’ (P.J. Jagger, Gladstone. The making of a Christian politician, Eugene OR, 1991, p. 191). More recently, Philip C. Almond describes Forster’s book as ‘the last major attempt in nineteenth century England to interpret Islam from the perspective of a Christian apocalyptic history’ (Heretic and hero. Muhammad and the Victorians, Wiesbaden, 1989, p. 5), suggesting perhaps that the book’s apocalyptic content was quickly seen as outdated and did not attract the level of interest from Muslims that some other texts did. This may be what Salahuddin Khuda Bukhsh had in mind when he appeared to refer to Mahometanism unveiled as the apex of ‘the spirit of hostility’ that marked the writings of early European scholars on Islam, though, he commented, ‘things are changing’ (‘A Mohammedan view of Christianity’, in A.S. Peake and R.G. Parsons [eds], An outline of Christianity, London, 1926, vol. 5, 245-55, p. 245). However, his reference is ambiguous because he might have meant that Forster’s book pioneered the change or that it represented the last breath of what he called ‘fanatical fervour’. Publications Charles Forster, Mahometanism unveiled. An inquiry, in which that archheresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation of the Christian faith, 2 vols, London, 1829; 001934742 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Charles Forster, Mahometanism unveiled. An inquiry, in which that arch-heresy, its diffusion and continuance, are examined on a new



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principle, tending to confirm the evidences, and aid the propagation of the Christian faith, 2 vols, London, 1853, repr. Charleston SC, 2009, Sacramento CA, 2019 Studies C. Bennett, In search of Muhammad, London, 1998, pp. 104-7 C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992, pp. 19-45 C. Bennett, ‘Is Isaac without Ishmael complete? A nineteenth-century debate revisited’, ICMR 2 (1991) 42-55 W. Muir, The Mohammedan controversy. Biographies of Muhammad, Edinburgh, 1897, pp. 42-50 Charles Forster, A vindication of the theory of Mahometanism unveiled against the strictures of a writer in No. XIII. of the British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, London, 1830; 590379700 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) Clinton Bennett

Godfrey Higgins Date of Birth 30 January 1772 Place of Birth Owston, Yorkshire Date of Death 9 August 1833 Place of Death Skellow Grange, Yorkshire

Biography

Godfrey Higgins was born at Owston, Yorkshire, on 30 January 1772, the only son of a wealthy landowner, Godfrey Higgins, and his wife, Christiana. After attending Hensworth Grammar School, he began studies at Cambridge in 1790. He later entered the Inner Temple, London, but he did not receive a licence to practise law. In 1794, he inherited his father’s estate at Skellow Grange, Yorkshire, and ran it for the rest of his life. He married Jane Thorpe in 1800. In 1803, during the scare created by Napoleon’s feared invasion, he was commissioned as a captain in the West Yorkshire militia. As a landowner and local magistrate, Higgins became known for his reformist ideas, often in alliance with Quakers. He supported repealing the Corn Laws, better working conditions for minors and the lowering of taxes. He was elected to the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Society of Antiquaries, and was an active member of these bodies. Interested in the Druids, he became ‘Chosen One’ in the Druid order founded by John Toland (d. 1722) in 1717, and wrote The Celtic Druids (1827-9). Higgins also joined the Freemasons, becoming a Master Mason, and in 1829 Grand Steward of the Prince of Wales’s Lodge in London, where he kept a home. In the posthumously published Anacalypsis (1836), he identified the Israelites as originally Buddhists from India. The book also traced the origin of the Freemasons to the Jerusalem Temple. He described himself as a ‘pan-deist’, following a supposedly secret global movement that traced all religions to a common origin. Though his ideas were hardly mainstream, Higgins regarded himself as a Christian. He died on 9 August 1833 at his Yorkshire home, after visiting Cambridge for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary G. Higgins, Anacalypsis. An attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saitic Isis, or an inquiry into the origin of languages, nations and religions, London, 1833, pp. v-vii (includes autobiographical remarks) Secondary A. Gordon, and M. Young, art. ‘Higgins, Godfrey’, in ODNB M. Abu’l-Fazl, ‘Memoir of the author’, in Mr Higgins Apology for Mohamed and the Koran, Allahabad, 1929, ix-xiii A. Gordon, art. ‘Higgins, Godfrey’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia Date 1829 Original Language English Description Godfrey Higgins’s An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia called Mohamed, or the Illustrious was published in London in 1829. Following the Preface (pp. xi-xii, misprinted as vii), the main text runs for 108 pages, with an appendix following. There are no chapter divisions, though Higgins numbers his paragraphs (237 in all), and it is difficult to identify any particular organisation of the work into subjects or themes. Higgins’s main sources, which he indicates in footnotes, were George Sale’s Koran (1734), Joseph White’s Bampton lectures (1784), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (vol. 5, 1788), and Humphrey Prideaux’s Life of Mahomet (1697). Sale is referred to as ‘the very learned’ (p. 58), while White, ‘preaching to the ultra-orthodox University of Oxford’, ‘admitted to many of the truths of the followers of Mohamed’ (p. 5). Higgins admired Gibbon, but thought that Prideaux was too confident in claiming to know the ‘private sentiments’ of Muḥammad and of other actors in the narrative (p. 15). Higgins starts with a sketch of Muḥammad’s life (pp. 1-21), making it clear there is no evidence that he ‘pretended to be a prophet’, though in his time the word ‘prophet’ did not ‘necessarily imply any supernatural power or influence’ (p. 4).

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Turning to the reliability of the sources about Muḥammad and his teachings, Higgins warns that the Companions’ accounts should not be trusted because they must have been biased (p. 21), and that the Qur’an cannot be accepted as consistent when the earliest forms in which it was transmitted were so precarious (p. 22). The version that existed in the time of the third caliph, ʿUthmān, was so ‘full of errors, corruptions and mistakes’ that he ordered all copies to be burnt and ‘published a new one’ (p. 23). Nevertheless, the Qur’an is uniform in style and does not look like a multi-authored work (later in the Apology, Higgins identifies ʿUthmān as the author of many parts of the Qur’an, p. 96). Next, Higgins discusses the charge that Muḥammad was ‘a rogue, hypocrite, liar and villain’ (p. 25). Although the critics say that he had two aims, to enjoy women and to become ruler of the world, he remained faithful to his first wife Khadīja for 22 years, and after her death he was allowed many wives by ‘the laws of his country’ (p. 26). If he had political ambitions, he could have engineered a powerful position for himself in Mecca or even claimed to be the expected Jewish Messiah and set himself up in Jerusalem (pp. 27-8). But the best way to evaluate Muḥammad’s character is to examine what ‘all parties agree that he taught’, which can be summed up as: returning good for evil (p. 28), belief in One God, prayer, fasting and alms-giving (p. 29). Continuing his defence, Higgins cites examples in the Old Testament of prophets and leaders of Israel, including David and Solomon, who had many wives, and questions why in Muḥammad’s case this attracts so much censure (p. 32). Jesus ‘nowhere expressly forbids it in any of the twenty gospels’ that were written by various ‘sects’. Further, all would agree that the banning of games of chance is a positive prohibition (p. 35), and so is forbidding alcohol, yet critics accuse Muḥammad of ‘pandering to the passions of his people’ (p. 36). As for the criticism that Islam allows the consumption of opium, which is just as bad as drinking alcohol, this substance was unknown to Muḥammad so he could not have been expected to ban it since he did not claim to see into the future (p. 36). As for the ‘sensual paradise’ he proclaimed, it must be admitted that no paradise ‘could be imagined that is not sensual’ (p. 37). But Muḥammad did not make sensual enjoyment the highest pleasure; he identified that as the contemplation of the face of God (p. 38). In any case, many Muslims interpret these promised pleasures figuratively not literally (p. 39). Compared with the relics, objects of veneration, holy water and images that proliferate in churches, nothing disgraces Islam’s places of worship, nor do Muslims



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resort to indulgences or death-bed repentance in order to acquire salvation like Roman Catholics, or teach the ‘efficacy of faith without works’ like Lutherans (p. 42). In Islam, it is sufficient to adore God without either mystery, the mediation of priests or ‘pretended miracle’ (p. 42). ‘Like the gospel of Jesus, the Koran is the poor man’s friend’ because it ‘is no respecter of persons’ (p. 42) and ‘repeatedly inculcates charity’, not as a ‘merit, but as a strict [...] duty’ (p. 43). On the criticism that Islam permits war against unbelievers, Higgins exonerates Muḥammad by attributing this to ʿUthmān’s version of the Qur’an and points out that Christians did the same during the crusades. Nor is it valid to say that Muslims place too much reliance on externals such as ritual washing and prayer, because Islam stresses the importance of inner devotion and reverence (p. 44). The Qur’an teaches that God accepts repentance, though not from those who commit evil, which explains why Islamic states are less immoral than Christian nations. Christians who chastise Muḥammad for allegedly ‘making converts by intimidation’ ignore their own preaching that unbelievers will be damned. On Muḥammad’s Night Journey and Ascent, which the Muslim ‘doctors of the law’ see as a ‘vision or dream’ rather than a physical event, Higgins observes that Christians ‘make themselves merry’ by ridiculing this account, though they dislike those who ridicule their own religion. Jesus and Muḥammad both neglected to abolish slavery, though domestic slavery among Muslims is not nearly as cruel as the Atlantic slave trade or the ‘plantations of the West Indies’ (p. 48). Further, while Muḥammad did not end slavery, he did regulate it, and his command that ‘no man should hold his brother’ Muslim in slavery saw the emancipation of many thousands of slaves. Higgins continues his defence by mentioning further aspects of Islam that show its superiority when they are compared with Christianity. Christians unfairly accuse Muslims of bigotry and intolerance, but in Islamic nations Christians live peacefully in their properties, and have their priests, churches and religious services. The Spanish Inquisition put Moriscos to the sword, when conquering Muslim armies left Hindus, Persians and others unharmed as long as they paid their tax. Some Muslim rulers have ‘been guilty of great cruelties’ (p. 52), but this was despite, rather than because of the teachings of Islam (see Q 2:257, here cited as 256), and ‘it is a very great mistake to suppose that’ Islam ‘was propagated by the sword alone’ (p. 53). Christians look down with contempt on Muslims, but they were once ‘the most liberal and enlightened’ of people. Europeans

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owe Muslims a greater debt than they do to the scholars of the ancient world (p. 55). Destructive acts by individual Muslims, such as the burning of the library of Alexandria by the Caliph ʿUmar (which is historically doubtful), should not be seen as representative of Islam as a whole, and indeed Christians destroyed more than books in one place when they condemned heathen works (p. 57). Nor have Muslims feared subjecting their religion to ‘fair examination’, much to Prideaux’s ‘chagrin’. Jesus’s disciples fled when he was crucified, but Muḥammad’s helped him to triumph over his enemies. On the wisdom of a priest-free religion, Higgins suggests that this aided Islam’s literary and scientific achievements (p. 62) at a time when priestand monk-ridden Europe was mired in the Dark Ages (p. 63). Critics may accuse Higgins of atheism (p. 64), but to him priests were tools of the elites, while true religion was of and for the common man. That Islam developed within a confused, disorganised Christian world that was at war with itself represents a wonder of history. Muḥammad came to reform Christianity and rescue it from its corruptions (p. 68), establishing a form of unitarian Christianity. This is why the Qur’an draws attention to Jesus’s ministry as a messenger from God and calls him the Messiah, son of Mary, a Word and a Spirit from God (p. 69, alluding to Q 4:171), but never Son of God. Some Christians would have seen Islam’s rapid rise as reason enough to convert. Others would see in the faith nothing that was ‘repugnant’ to what as Jews and Christians they already believed. Islam’s success could be seen as the confirming miracle that some thought necessary (p. 72). Some have accepted that Muḥammad was the Paraclete whom Jesus had promised, translating this name as ‘famous’ or ‘illustrious’ (evidently reading the noun Paraklētos in John’s Gospel as the adjective periklutos), which ‘in Arabic is the meaning of the word Mohamed’ (p. 73). Many scholars have accepted this prediction, and after all God ‘thought proper to inspire him [...] in such a way and in such circumstances as would insure (sic) success’ (p. 87). Some critics see cruel punishments in Islam, but penalties in the Mosaic code are equally cruel by modern standards (p. 93). Christians have debated whether Muḥammad could read and write, but then they have gone on to call the Qur’an his creation (p. 95). As a member of the leading clan of Mecca, it is likely that Muḥammad was literate and left behind some written record of his teachings (p. 96). But it is not likely that much of this remains, because little of the Qur’an compiled at the time of the Caliph ʿUthmān can be directly attributed to Muḥammad.



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The Qur’an’s consistency of style is due to it being wholly re-written by ʿUthmān (p. 97). In fact, neither the Qur’an nor the Gospels may be entirely reliable as records of what Muḥammad or Jesus said. Christians throughout the ages have fancied themselves as full of the Holy Spirit. Muḥammad might reasonably have supposed himself to have a similar ‘internal divine sensation’ (p. 101). No one can judge that someone who makes this claim is lying, because only the person claiming such inspiration knows the truth. Muḥammad might belong to one or more of three classes of men, a philosopher like Socrates, a fanatic like John Wesley, or ‘merely an impostor’ (p. 102). A combination of the first two is most likely. In its doctrinal simplicity, Islam is philosophical while Muḥammad’s conviction that his revelations came from God was fanaticism, though there is no justification to call him an impostor (p. 104). Higgins concludes this bold and challenging set of comparisons with what he sees as a promising development, namely that Muslim rulers were sending their ‘young men to the West for education’ (p. 108). Higgins believed that Christians for the most part misrepresented Muḥammad and his religion, and in this book he challenges many of their criticisms in order to be fair to the ‘millions of inhabitants of Oriental countries’ in whose welfare members of the Royal Asiatic Society were ‘meritoriously’ interested (p. xi). Significance A number of books were written to refute Higgins’s Apology. George Wyatt, an Anglican clergyman (d. 1856), wrote that it was ‘more of the character of an attack on Christian priests, Christian writers, Christian believers, and even upon Christianity itself, than of the object for which it is professed to be written’ (Wyatt, Letter, p. 5). He thought it would do more harm to Higgins’s ‘good name’ than benefit to Muḥammad (p. 6). Peter Inchbald (d. 1838), a former fellow of University College, Oxford, regretted that Higgins had not directed his attention to subjects which ‘are more suitable to engage the leisure of a country gentleman than theological and metaphysical speculations’ (Inchbald, Animadversions, p. 1). He claimed that he had no feelings of intolerance towards Muslims, but was concerned for them because they ‘adhere to a system’ which he considered ‘delusion’ (Inchbald, Animadversions, p. 2). He thought that rather than writing works such as this, Higgins would have been better engaged in forming agricultural societies or improvements in his community.

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These responses to Higgins show that Christians who ventured to rethink how Islam should be understood risked ostracism or being themselves labelled as Muslims. Later, when Muslims discovered Higgins’s Apology, they understandably praised it, even though his view of how the Qur’an was written hardly agreed with the Muslim version. They saw enough in his endorsement of Muḥammad’s divine vocation and in his defence of Muḥammad to refer to him, for example, as ‘the able learned Mr. Godfrey Higgins’, as did Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (Series of essays, p. 16), who lists ‘Edward Gibbon [...], Godfrey Higgins, Thomas Carlyle and John Davenport’ as defenders of Islam from ‘prejudiced and illiberal antagonists’ (Khan, Series of essays, p. xxi). Khan cites Higgins on slavery (Series of essays, p. 21), on Titus Burckhardt’s conversion to Islam (Series of essays, p. 27), on Islam’s alleged intolerance (Series of essays, p. 31), and on the corruption of Christian scriptures (Series of essays, p. 20). Mirza Abu’l-Fazl edited and published the Apology, which was out of print, in Lahore in 1929, with subject headings, notes, an introduction and additional appendices. Kecia Ali claims that Higgins was the originator of several arguments that became popular in Muslim writings, including Muḥammad being permitted by law to have a number of wives, and the supposed link between female development and the climate of Arabia (Ali, Lives, pp. 148, 165, the latter referring to Higgins, Apology, p. 34). In this way, the ‘arguments by a British non-Muslim survive to be used two centuries later by Muslim apologists in works read by Muslims, though ostensibly directed towards refuting Western critics’ (Ali, Lives, p. 150). Publications G. Higgins, An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia called Mohamed, or the Illustrious, London, 1829; 001931440 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Higgins, Himāyat al-islām, trans. ʿAbd al-Vudūd, Bareilly, 1873 (Urdu trans.) G. Higgins, An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia called Mohamed, or the Illustrious, New York, 1895 G. Higgins, Mr Godfrey Higgins’ Apology for Mohamed, ed. M. Abu’lFazl, Allahabad, 1929, repr. Lahore, 1974 (with introduction and additional chapter on Islam by M. Abu’l-Fazl) G. Higgins, An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia called Mohamed, or the Illustrious, Charleston SC, 2015



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Studies K. Ali, The lives of Muhammad, Cambridge MA, 2014 P.C. Almond, Heretic and hero. Muhammad and the Victorians, Wiesbaden, 1989 Sir S.A. Khan, A series of essays on the life of Mohammed, London, 1870 P. Inchbald, Animadversions on a work entitled ‘An apology for the life and character of the celebrated prophet of Arabia, called Mohamed’, London, 1829 G. Wyatt, A letter to Godfrey Higgins, Esq, London, 1829 Clinton Bennett

English Romantic poets and Islam Date 1798-1818 Original Language English Islam played a critical, though often overlooked, role in the formation of English Romanticism, with Muslim sources exerting influence on each of the primary figures of the movement, from William Blake to Lord Byron, spanning the 1770s and the 1830s. Recruiting Enlightenment scholarship for artistic inspiration, the Romantic poets built upon the philological efforts of 18th-century English Orientalists including George Sale’s influential translation of the Qur’an (The Koran, London, 1734), Robert Lowth’s exposition of Near Eastern poeticity in his De sacra poesi Hebræorum. Prælectiones academiæ Oxonii habitæ (Oxford, 1753), and William Jones’s contributions to the journal Asiatic Researches (1784-94). Highlighting thematic overlaps between Islam and English Romanticism, this entry examines works of the following authors, listed chronologically below by date of birth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Famed for his collaborations with William Wordsworth, especially their landmark  Lyrical Ballads  (1798), Coleridge’s authorial career merged diverse genres from intimate lyrics to dense philosophical prose, while also witnessing dramatic shifts in theology and politics, beginning with Unitarian radicalism in his youth to conservative Anglican apologetics by the end of his life. Robert Southey (1774-1843): A friend of Coleridge while still a student at Oxford, Robert Southey’s early years as a revolutionary poet and political radical led to more traditional acclaim, and he was ultimately named Poet Laureate in 1813. This national honour was, however, due largely to Southey’s international interests, penning verse epics that appealed to traditions abroad, with his Orientalist investments exhibited especially in  Thalaba the destroyer  (1801) and  The curse of Kehama  (1810) (see the entry on Southey in this volume). George Gordon Byron (1788-1824): The most famed, or infamous, of English Romantic poets, Lord Byron’s celebrity arose from his adventurous life as well as his episodic lyrics set in foreign lands. He translated his Eastern travels into best-sellers, including Childe Harold’s pilgrimage (1812, 1818) and a series of  Turkish tales  (1813-16). Byron ended his life as the



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‘martyr of Missolonghi’, succumbing to illness while supporting Greek resistance to Ottoman rule. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): Although he was sent down from Oxford for writing  The necessity of atheism  as an undergraduate, much of Percy Shelley’s mature poetry reflects deep engagement with religious ideas, mythical traditions, and metaphysical speculations, while it also grapples with political disappointment triggered by the failures of the French Revolution. Taking refuge like Lord Byron in the Mediterranean world during his final years, Shelley’s life would also terminate abruptly. He drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia at the age of 29 years. Mary Shelley (1797-1851): Daughter of the pioneering feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley is best known for her 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus, which stemmed from her stay in the summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva with other prominent Romantics, including Lord Byron and Mary’s soon-to-be husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although she was celebrated for her prose fiction, Mary Shelley pursued diverse authorial efforts throughout her later life, undertaking not only editorial work and biographical studies, but also penning lyric poems published in the 1820s and 1830s. Far from being a mere passing interest for English authors between 1770 and 1830, Islam intersected and aided articulation of core Romantic concerns, three categories of which are outlined broadly below. The poet as prophet Blurring boundaries between conventionally discrete vocations, the Romantics are celebrated for equating ‘the poet’ and ‘the prophet’, deeming the authentic ‘poet’ to be ‘a seer of the apocalyptic vision and the expounder of the Word of God’ (Northrop Frye’s words, describing Christopher Smart’s Jubilate agno in Frye’s pioneering study of William Blake, Fearful symmetry. A study of William Blake, Princeton, 1969, p. 176). This aesthetic-apocalyptic intersection encouraged and contoured Romantic engagement with Islam, and with the Qur’an in particular. Unlike the Greek New Testament, the Arabic Qur’an is distinguished by its ‘poeticity’ (for this term, see T. Hoffmann, The poetic Qurʼān: Studies on qurʼānic poeticity, Wiesbaden, 2007), although the scripture itself rejects, of course, any association with human composition (e.g. Q 69:41). For the Romantics, the Qur’an’s poeticity invited theoretical interest as well as practical appropriation, as exemplified by Lord Byron’s extended

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engagement with it. While he was still a student at Cambridge in 1807, Byron sketched a catalogue of ‘poets’ who ‘distinguished their respective languages by their production’ which included ‘Mahomet, whose Koran contains the most sublime poetical passages far surpassing European poetry’ (Einboden, Islam and Romanticism, pp. 114-15). Seven years later, in his second Turkish tale, ‘The Bride of Abydos’ (1814), Byron invokes the ‘Koran’ within his verse composition, naming it among an array of aesthetic riches that surround the poem’s eponymous ‘bride’, Zuleika (see Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, 245-6). Perhaps the most theatrical appeal to the Prophet Muḥammad in Romantic poetry is to be found at the cataclysmic conclusion of Robert Southey’s Thalaba the destroyer (1801), in which Thalaba invokes the ‘Prophet of God’ immediately before his own sacrificial death. The poem concludes as he is sent a vision of his departed wife in the ‘Houri-form’ of ‘Paradise’ (Einboden, Islam and Romanticism, p. 101).   Ellipsis and fragments More specific features of qur’anic form correspond with Romantic commitments, including the Muslim scripture’s non-linear narratives and elliptical style (ḥadhf), formal features that seem to dovetail into English Romanticism’s ‘taste for fragments’, a phrase first voiced by the leading critic of Romanticism, Francis Jeffrey, in his condemnation of Byron’s earliest Turkish tale (as quoted and discussed by Janowitz, ‘The Romantic fragment’, p. 442). In light of this overlap, it is only to be expected that Muslim identities and idioms should affect some of Romanticism’s most celebrated ‘fragments’, as well as fragmentary compositions now largely forgotten. For both classes of poems, Coleridge provides apt examples. In his early career, he entered into a collaboration with Robert Southey, planning an extended poem to be centred on the career of Muḥammad, entitled ‘The flight and return of Mohammed’. Now largely neglected, this prospective epic yielded only brief fragments. Coleridge’s contribution commences with standard Romantic tropes, opening with the self-referential invocation ‘Utter the song, O my soul! the flight and return of Mohammed / Prophet and priest’ (Einboden,  Islam and Romanticism, pp. 82-3). Southey’s few surviving lines are less mythical but more dramatic, imagining the Prophet’s precarious and agonising refuge in the cave of Thawr, as



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he and his Companion Abū Bakr hid from pursuers from Mecca on their flight to Medina. Quite the opposite to ‘The flight and return of Mohammed’ in fame is another ‘fragment’ by Coleridge, his ‘Kubla Khan’, a brief poem written in 1797 but not published until 1816. An unfinished dream vision, it nebulously synthesises Orientalist tropes, the product of Coleridge’s reading of Purchas his pilgrimage, the 17th-century English compilation of global travelogues which prominently features coverage of the Near and Far East (see J.L. Lowes, The road to Xanadu, p. 328).  Pedagogy of cultural collapse Paralleling English Romanticism’s conflicted engagements with the French Revolution and its fraught aftermath, British works of the period often portray moments of cultural decline, offering ambivalent lessons gleaned from the fall of civilisations. These moments are frequently framed in appeals to the ‘Orient’ in general, and to the Muslim world in particular. For instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) testifies to the decadence of Eastern antiquity, featuring a ‘traveller’ from the contemporary Islamic world who reports on the ‘colossal wreck’ of Egypt’s pharaonic past (The complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, p. 115). In this same year, Shelley also revised his 1817 Laon and Cythna to appear under the title The Revolt of Islam in 1818, a revolutionary fantasy centred on the overthrow of ‘Othman’, which Shelley prefaces with an autobiographical meditation on the bitter ‘lesson’ of France’s failed revolution (The complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, p. 115). Also in this same year, Mary Shelley published the first edition of her Frankenstein, which features a pivotal pedagogic episode with its own conspicuous Middle Eastern contexts. At the heart of her novel, Shelley describes how the Monster obtains his education by overhearing Felix’s instruction in language and history of Safie, an ‘Arab maiden’ who fled to Europe from her Turkish Muslim father (Einboden, Islam and Romanticism, pp. 155-8). Not only does the Monster receive his instruction with such ‘Arabian’ roots, but his materials for cultural study also claim Orientalist origins. The core text that educates the Monster on human history is The ruins; or, meditation on the revolutions of empires, a rumination on imperial decline triggered by a tour of modern-day Muslim lands written by the French Arabist

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and Middle Eastern traveller Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf Volney (Frankenstein, p. 114). These pedagogical depictions of cultural ruin invoke Islam either textually or allegorically. Lord Byron, however, unlike his fellow Romantics, actually travelled in Muslim lands, and versified his instructive experiences in his  Childe Harold’s pilgrimage. Traversing Ottoman territories from 1809 to 1811 – not only Anatolia, but Albania and Greece – Byron appealed to his own youthful experiences to narrate the adventures of Childe Harold, noting, for instance, his protagonist’s hearing ‘the nightly solemn sound’ of the ‘Muezzin’s call’, which Byron records as signifying ‘There is no god but God!—to prayer—lo! God is great!’ (Einboden, Islam and Romanticism, p. 129). Again, it is the lesson of imperial decline that Byron’s  Pilgrimage  stresses. As the young Childe Harold approaches Ottoman Greece at the beginning of the second Canto, the poem meditates on the aged Acropolis as ‘a nation’s sepulchre! / Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. / Even gods must yield—religions take their turn: / ’Twas Jove’s—’tis Mahomet’s—and other creeds / Will rise with other years, till man shall learn / Vainly his incense soars’ (Works of Lord Byron, vol. 8, p. 67). Envisioning Europe’s toppled classical past from the Ottoman Acropolis, Byron also pivots forward, glimpsing a future beyond the Romantic age in which all ‘creeds’ are banished from this historically holy space.  Significance Engagements with Islam by the English Romantics had significant repercussions, both obvious and immediate, and also more lasting and harder to discern. Most unmistakable was the Romantics’ anticipation of Islamic interests in the Victorian Age. Although born the same year as the late Romantic lyricist John Keats, 1795, Thomas Carlyle’s career extended up to the last decades of the 19th century, and is often associated with conservative retrenchment in the wake of Romanticism’s radical excesses. And yet, akin to his more idealist predecessors, Carlyle expressed an ambiguous fascination with Islam. Departing from the Romantic admiration for qur’anic aesthetics, Carlyle found only ‘endless iterations’ in the Muslim scripture (Einboden, ‘The Western literary tradition’, p. 600). However, Carlyle also wrote an influential lecture on Muḥammad, ‘The hero as prophet’, a broad biographical treatment that was included in On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history (London, 1841). More patently in the spirit of Romantic precedents, however, was another Victorian writer, who invoked Muslim precedents



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not for political, but poetic, usages: Edward Fitzgerald, whose Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám appeared in 1859. A literary paraphrase rather than a literal rendition of the original, Fitzgerald’s popular version of the Persian verses was fashioned in the wake of his youthful reading of the Romantics and their own concerns with the Muslim world. For instance, as early as 1835, Fitzgerald had highlighted to his friend John Allen his literary favourites: Lord Byron’s ‘The corsair’, one of the Turkish tales, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor, which portrays the ideal ‘Poet, wandering on, through Arabie, / And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’ (Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, 2 vols, London, 1894, vol. 1, p. 37). Cultivating a taste for Byron while himself a budding poet, Fitzgerald also shared the same schooling as his predecessor, entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1826, two decades after Byron himself had gone up to Cambridge. More importantly, it would be at Cambridge during the century that followed Fitzgerald’s  Rubáiyát  that Romantic legacies of Islamic reception would most conspicuously persist. The year after the Rubáiyát appeared, Edward Henry Palmer, a Cambridge native, started his life-long infatuation with Islamicate languages in 1860, influenced by the university lecturer in Hindustani, Sayed Abdullah (M.A.S. Abdel Haleem,  Exploring the Qur’an. Context and impact, London, 2017, p. 261), and also stemming from markedly Romantic roots. The early literary exercise for which Palmer initially garnered attention was his rendition of Thomas Moore’s 1817 Orientalist poem  Lalla Rookh  into Persian, a rendition of a Romantic precedent that Palmer prefaced with the basmala itself. The original manuscript of the translation, now housed in St John’s College Library, eventually passed to his Cambridge student, Edward Granville Browne, who would become the University’s leading Orientalist by the opening of the 20th century. In 1902, the year that he was elected the Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, Browne began publishing his Literary history of Persia, a multi-volume work that occasionally contextualises Muslim literary traditions by appealing to Romantic poetry, especially the verse of Byron (A literary history of Persia, vol. 1. From the earliest times until Firdawsí, London, 1902, p. 107). Edward Browne’s own student (and his eventual successor at Cambridge) was Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, whose famed translations of Sufi poetry would play a vital role in popularising Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī in the West. Recalling his Cambridge predecessors, both Palmer and Browne, Nicholson also incorporates Romantic precedents into his writings on Islam. His The idea of personality in Sufism (Cambridge, 1923), for example, accents qur’anic tensions

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between divine transcendence and divine immanence, attributing to the Prophet himself ‘two voices, one certainly louder and more frequent than the other, yet “each a mighty voice”. One voice declares that Allah sits on His throne’, while ‘the other proclaims that Allah is the reality (al- Ḥaqq) which shall remain when all else has passed away, that He is the Light of heaven and earth, that He is nearer to us than our neck-vein, that wherever we turn He is present with us’ (Idea of personality, pp. 5-6). Weaving together various qur’anic verses, Nicholson enlivens this passage with a single English phrase that he signals is a direct quotation. The words ‘each a mighty voice’ comes from the sonnet ‘Thought of a Briton on the subjugation of Switzerland’ by none other than William Wordsworth, as Nicholson himself admits in a footnote to his passage (Idea of personality, p. 5). A century earlier, Islamic texts – spanning the Qur’an and Sufi verses – had helped catalyse and contour English Romantic poetry. Reciprocally, by the beginning of the 20th  century, Romantic poets would enjoy an unexpected afterlife, with their verse fragments supplementing scholarly portraits of the Qur’an, recruited to encourage English appreciation of Islam’s textual origins. Publications As there are numerous editions of each work mentioned, only the earliest editions and translations are given, together with the edition used in this entry. George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s pilgrimage, a romaunt, and other poems, London, 1812; 100072299 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s pilgrimage, a romaunt, and other poems, London, 18122  (at least 5 editions were published during 1812); 003141362 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron,  Childe Harold’s pilgrimage,  canto the third, London, 1816; 100073107 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron,  Childe Harold’s pilgrimage,  canto the fourth, London, 1818; 100072396 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, The Giaour. A fragment of a Turkish tale, London, 1813; 100072953 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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George Gordon Byron, The bride of Abydos. A Turkish tale, London, 1813; 100072325 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, The corsair. A tale, London, 1815; 10007310 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, The siege of Corinth, a poem; Parisina, a poem, London, 1816; 005261036 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, Der Gjaur. Bruchstück einer türkischen Erzählung, trans. A. Nordstern, Leipzig, 1820 (German trans. with English parallel text); 100740934 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron, Oeuvres de Lord Byron, trans. A. Pichot, 6 vols, Paris, 1830-5 (French trans.); 011548045 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron,  Works of Lord Byron. With his letters and journals, and his life, 17 vols, ed. T. Moore, London, 1832-3; 008587832 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) George Gordon Byron,  Ho Gkiaour. Temachion Tourkikou diēgēmatos, trans. K. Dosiou, Athens, 1873 (Modern Greek trans.); 100387958 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical ballads with a few other poems, London, 1798; 100072907 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel; Kubla Khan, a vision; The pains of sleep, London, 1816; 600002934 (digitised version of 18163 available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, 3 vols, London, 1818, 102286691 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus. The 1818 text, ed. J. Rieger, Chicago IL, 1982 (edition quoted) Percy Byshe Shelley, Laon and Cythna, or, The revolution of the golden city, London,  1817; 100073045 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Percy Byshe Shelley, The revolt of Islam. A poem in twelve cantos, London, 1818 (revised edition of Laon and Cythna); 100073051 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)

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Percy Byshe Shelley, Nozze Gaggiotti-Riva, trans. R. Ascoli, Ancona, 1895 (Italian trans.) Percy Byshe Shelley,  The complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. D.H. Reiman, N. Fraistat and N. Crook, 3 vols, Baltimore MD, 2000-12  Robert Southey,  Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 1801 (digitised version of Oxford, 1991 facsimile available through Project Gutenberg) Robert Southey, Thalaba the destroyer, 2 vols, London, 18092; 000782185 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)  Robert Southey,  The curse of Kehama, London, 1810; bl-003448648 (digitised version available through Historical Texts) Robert Southey,  Poetical works, 1793-1810, ed. L. Pratt and T. Fulton, 5 vols, London, 2004 Studies J. Einboden, ‘The Western literary tradition and the Qur’an. An overview’, in Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah (eds), The Oxford handbook of qur’anic studies, Oxford, 2020, 592-604 J. Einboden,  Islam and Romanticism. Muslim currents from Goethe to Emerson, London, 2014 A. Janowitz, ‘The Romantic fragment’, in D. Wu (ed.), A companion to Romanticism, Oxford, 2013, 442-51 T. Hoffmann, The poetic Qurʼān. Studies on qurʼānic poeticity, Wiesbaden, 2007 J. McGann, art. ‘Byron, George Gordon Noel,  sixth Baron Byron’, in ODNB J. Beer, art. ‘Coleridge, Samuel Taylor’, in ODNB R. Rothwell, art. ‘Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft’, in ODNB M. O’Neill, art. ‘Shelley, Percy Bysshe’, in ODNB G. Carnall, art. ‘Southey, Robert’, in ODNB M. Sharafuddin,  Islam and Romantic Orientalism. Literary encounters with the Orient, London, 1994 J.L. Lowes, The road to Xanadu. A study in the ways of the imagination, Princeton NJ, 1986  N. Frye, Fearful symmetry. A study of William Blake, Princeton NJ, 1969 Jeffrey Einboden

Thomas Carlyle Date of Birth 4 December 1795 Place of Birth Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland Date of Death 5 February 1881 Place of Death London

Biography

Thomas Carlyle, author, lecturer, biographer, historian and commentator on political and social issues, was born on 4 December 1795 in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, the second of James Carlyle’s ten children and the eldest of nine from his marriage to his second wife, Janet. James was a stonemason, farmer, and staunch Calvinist. Thomas’s education began early in the home; his mother taught him how to read and his father taught him basic arithmetic. His formal education began at the age of five in the village school in Ecclefechan. In 1806, his father enrolled him in Annan Academy to prepare for university, and in 1809 he entered the University of Edinburgh, where he read broadly but especially enjoyed mathematics. Following his departure from the university in 1814 without a degree, he earned his living as a maths tutor for two years at Annan and then for two years at Kirkcaldy. He did not enjoy school-mastering, and even though his parents intended that he would enter the ordained ministry he decided this was not for him. In December 1819, he returned to Edinburgh University to study law, supporting himself by private teaching and writing articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. However, after three years he gave up the study of law in order to pursue a literary career. Around this time, he also began a serious study of German, and developed a deep admiration for German literature, especially the writing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. On 17 October 1826, Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, the daughter of a successful physician of the town of Haddington. During most of their married life, she suffered from varying degrees of poor health. They lived in or near Edinburgh for a number of years, but in 1834 settled in 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives. Initially, they lived in or just above poverty, but after a couple of years Carlyle began to enjoy success in publishing. Some of his more famous literary works were Sartor resartus; The French Revolution; Lectures on the

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history of literature; Critical and miscellaneous essays; On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history; Past and present; The life and letters of Oliver Cromwell; Latter-day pamphlets and The history of Friedrich II of Prussia. In 1865, the students of Edinburgh University elected Carlyle Lord Rector. This was an honorary office and his sole duty was to deliver an address, which he did in April 1866. While there, he received news that his wife had died in London. She was buried in Haddington. During his remaining years Carlyle produced a number of essays but no great work. He died on 5 February 1881. A burial at Westminster Abbey was offered but refused, according to his own wish. He was buried at Ecclefechan, Scotland, near his parents.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle. A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835, 2 vols, London, 1882 J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle. A history of his life in London, 1834-1881, 2 vols, London, 1884 T. Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. C.E. Norton, 2 vols, London, 1887 C.R. Sanders and K.J. Fielding (eds), The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 2 vols, Durham NC, 1970 Secondary F. Kaplan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, in ODNB, vol. 10, 150-63 R.L. Tarr, Thomas Carlyle. A descriptive bibliography, Pittsburgh PA, 1989 F. Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle. A biography, Ithaca NY, 1983 L. Stephen, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, in DNB, vol. 3

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history Date 1840 Original Language English Description In May 1840, Carlyle gave a series of six public lectures in London. They were published in the same year under the title On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history. His basic premise in the work was that all history is made by great persons, heroic figures with supreme power of vision or action, who deserve our respect. They are all essentially of the



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same stuff, whether they be poet, prophet, priest, man of letters, king or other. Such are the persons featured in this work, and they are all offered as equally great or heroic. Carlyle uses numerous words for the heroic quality: genius, sincerity, originality, inspiration, intuition. Heroes all have the ability to see into the true heart of things, and the power to distinguish between the essential and the superficial. An important aim of the book is to establish a right, in some cases a new, interpretation of certain great men (he does not highlight any women) of the past. Here the focus is on the second lecture, in which Carlyle presents Muḥammad as an example of ‘The hero as prophet’. It occupies 59 pages in the 1841 British edition of the published lectures, which is used here. Carlyle explains that he has chosen Muḥammad (he uses the form ‘Mahomet’, which was not uncommon at the time) ‘not as the most eminent Prophet’, but as the one he is ‘freest to speak of’, though he does not explain what he means by this. Although he does not regard Muḥammad as ‘the truest of the prophets’, he does ‘esteem him a true one’ and intends to say as much good about him as possible, considering it untenable that he was a scheming imposter or falsehood incarnate, as many at the time believed (pp. 69-70). In Carlyle’s view, sincerity ‘is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic’ (p. 72), and he contends that Muḥammad was sincere, ‘that he did mean some true thing’ (p. 76). He then goes on to explain what this was. He describes the environment in which Muḥammad lived and carried out his ministry. He considers the pre-Islamic Arabs as ‘a gifted noble people’ (p. 76), manifesting a devout though polytheistic religiosity. He describes the Kaʿba at the centre of the great mosque in Mecca and the Black Stone embedded within it, and explains its association with Hagar and Ishmael, noting that it serves as the qibla (the direction faced during prayers) for Muslims worldwide. Carlyle is familiar with the basic outline and details of Muḥammad’s life, which he reviews in summary fashion for his audience. Christianity, he believes, had penetrated into Arabia ‘and could not but, of itself, have produced fermentation there’ (p. 82). Along the way he notes that, in his view, Islam is closely related to Christianity, and that Muḥammad was influenced by Christian teachings. In this regard, he highlights a journey Muḥammad made with his uncle Abū Ṭālib to Syria, where he encountered Christianity, suggesting he heard and saw things that influenced him, even if unconsciously, and ‘were to ripen in a strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day’ (p. 84). Then, a few pages later, Carlyle

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says that the essence of Islam is its call to submit to the one God, which he believes is also the essence of Christianity. This leads him to say, ‘Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither had it been’ (p. 91). It seems that his purpose in making this point was not to criticise Islam, but to say that its message resonates with what can be found more universally. He quotes Goethe: ‘If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam?’ (p. 90) He notes that Muḥammad was known from an early age as al-amīn, ‘the faithful’. He was ‘A man of truth and fidelity […] A serious, sincere character […] A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man’ (p. 85). To claims that it was only later in life that Muḥammad commenced a ‘career of ambition,’ he retorts, ‘I have no faith whatever in that’ (pp. 86-7). The ‘impostor-hypothesis’ is ‘not credible,’ but is ‘worthy chiefly of dismissal’ (p. 89). Since for Carlyle sincerity is a principal quality of heroes, this is part of his contention that Muḥammad must be considered a hero. As for the charge that Muḥammad propagated his religion by the sword, whether he did so or not is, in Carlyle’s judgement, not an argument for the truth or falsehood of a religion, for, after all, even Christianity has not always disdained the sword. Carlyle is confident that a thing can struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of […], very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. (p. 99)

As for Islam overcoming the Eastern Churches, Carlyle held a low view of them, referring to them as ‘those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead!’ (p. 101). Islam had a right to devour them, as well as the idolatry that was prevalent in Arabia. Carlyle knows how central the Qur’an is to Muslim belief and practice, that Muslims regard it ‘with a reverence which few Christians pay even to their Bible’ (p. 103). He is familiar with the Qur’an through George Sale’s translation, which he says ‘is known to be a very fair one’. Yet he finds it ‘as toilsome reading’ as he ever undertook, ‘a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite – insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran’ (p. 104). He acknowledges that he is at a disadvantage because he is not an Arab. He continues:



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Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven […] as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was! (p. 105)

However, it comes from a heart intending to reach other hearts, and Carlyle considers its primary character to be its genuineness. Understandably, he dismisses the charge that Muḥammad manipulated the revelations for his own advantage because, although the Qur’an ‘is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul […] untutored, that cannot even read’, it was nevertheless a soul that was ‘fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words’ (p. 106). In Carlyle’s judgment, sincerity is ‘the merit of the Koran’ (p. 108). Carlyle challenges claims that Islam is an easy religion. It has rigorous fasts, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine. He also addresses the stereotype that Muḥammad was driven by base motives such as sensuality and the pursuit of wealth; he was frugal, even mending his own clothes and footwear. If this were not the case, those who became his followers over a period of 23 years would not have come to revere him. Carlyle, however, does not praise Muḥammad’s morals without qualification: ‘We will not praise Mahomet’s moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true’ (p. 118). In Islam, there is no turning of the other cheek as Christianity calls for, but, Carlyle notes, if revenge is pursued, it is to be in measure, not beyond justice. Moreover, Islam teaches the equality of all people, and care for the poor and needy. As for the afterlife, according to Carlyle, although what Muḥammad taught about Paradise and Hell is sensual, exaggerated sensuality is the work of Muslim scholars, not of Muḥammad. In the Qur’an, the highest joys of Paradise will be spiritual. Carlyle closes by repeating that Islam ‘is a kind of Christianity’. It has a genuine element of the highest spiritually that is not ‘hidden by all its imperfections’. He counsels his audience: ‘Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it.’ For 12 centuries, it has provided lifeguidance for a fifth of humanity, who have heartily believed and tried to live by it. He cannot resist a favourable comparison with Christians, who from early in their history, with the possible exception of the Puritans, have not ‘stood by their Faith as the Moslems do by theirs, – believing it

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wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it’. Muḥammad brought to the Arabs ‘a birth from darkness into light’, and nothing less than ‘a HeroProphet […] sent down to them with a word they could believe’, a great man ‘as lightning out of Heaven’ (pp. 123-5). Carlyle’s aim in ‘The hero as prophet’ was not to give an historical reconstruction of Muḥammad’s life, and at several places the information he provides is factually incorrect. For instance, he says that the Kaʿba was built over the well of Zamzam, though it is situated near it, and that ʿAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of Muḥammad and the fourth caliph, was assassinated in Baghdad, though the place was Kufa. On the whole, however, the details he gives are accurate, and these few errors do not affect his argument. According to Montgomery Watt, Carlyle seems to have been dependent on George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an with its Preliminary Discourse (Watt, ‘Carlyle on Muhammad’, p. 253), and there are also indications that he was familiar with Edward Lane’s An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians. Carlyle is selective in what he recounts about Muḥammad’s life, no doubt because a principal purpose was to offer a reappraisal of Muḥammad’s character and to counter prejudicial stereotypes that were common in his own day. Norman Daniel observes that, taken in isolation, none of what Carlyle says was new, but in toto it makes a strong impression (Islam and the West, p. 292). Significance On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history has continued to attract attention. It has been republished numerous times since it first appeared in 1840 all the way up to the present, including a free Amazon Kindle edition. ‘The hero as prophet. Mahomet: Islam’, is just one of six essays in the collection, but it has aroused keen interest in and of itself. Montgomery Watt, one of the 20th century’s premier Western scholars of Muḥammad, found Carlyle’s argument about Muḥammad’s sincerity compelling (Muhammad, prophet and statesman, p. 232). In Watt’s estimation, Carlyle’s lecture ‘is the first strong affirmation in the whole of European literature, medieval and modern, of a belief in the sincerity of Muhammad’ (‘Carlyle on Muhammad’, p. 247), after centuries in which Muḥammad had been called an imposter, an anti-Christ, and a son of the devil. Perhaps the greatest merit of Carlyle’s essay is that, in its historical context, it was ‘an important step forward in the process of reversing the medieval world-picture of Islam as the great enemy, and rehabilitating its founder, Muhammad’ (‘Carlyle on Muhammad’, p. 254).



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Carlyle is frequently praised in Muslim writings as a non-Muslim who was able to ‘appreciate’ Muḥammad. For example, Salahuddin Khuda Bukhsh lists him with several others, including Reginald Bosworth Smith (Studies Indian and Islamic, London, 1927, p. 6). However, he gives a less positive assessment in the third essay, ‘The hero as poet’, where he writes, ‘It was intrinsically an error, that notion of Mahomet’s, of his Supreme Prophethood, and has come down to us inextricably involved in error to this day’, and it had been a ‘questionable step’ for Carlyle to have said that Muḥammad was ‘not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum, no Speaker but a Babbler’ (On heroes, p. 181). He may have had second thoughts following reaction to his praise of Muḥammad a few days earlier, suggesting how difficult it was at the time for anyone to challenge the dominant tropes and stereotypes. Khwaja Kamaluddin writes that having ‘enveiled, as it were, the beauty of the holy Prophet to the Western eye, the old cry was so furiously raised against him that he had to tone down his eulogies of the Prophet in his subsequent writing’ (The ideal prophet, Dublin OH, 2011, p. 1). Publications On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history has been republished numerous times individually, with another of Carlyle’s writings, and in collections of his works. The list below includes the earliest editions and translations, together with recent critical editions. T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, [1840]; 011627421 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, 1841; 009730157 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, New York, 1841; 001417109 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, 1842; 011619521 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, New York, 1842; 100157478 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)

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T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, Cincinnati OH, 1842; 100072999 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, 1846 T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, New York, 1846 (repr. 1849, 1851, 1852, 1854, 1857, 1859, 1861, 1866, 1869, 1879, 1881); 009775454 (digitised version of 1846 edition available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, 1852; H.misc. 62 l (digitised version available through MDZ) T. Carlyle, Über helden, heldenverehrung und das heldentümliche in der geschichte, trans. J. Neuberg, Berlin, 1853 (repr. 1890, 1893, 1898, 1901, 1912, 1917, 1927; German trans.); 110376206 (digitised version of the 1893 edition available through National Library of Scotland) T. Carlyle, Sartor resartus and heroes and hero-worship, Uniform Edition, vol. 6, London, 1858; 001416954 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, Heroes and hero-worship, London, 1870 T. Carlyle, Heroes and hero-worship, London, 1872 T. Carlyle, Les héros le culte des héros et l’héroïque dans l’histoire, trans. J.B.J. Izoulet-Loubàtières, Paris, 1888 (repr. 1900, 1905, 1908, 1914, 1918, 1928, 1938; French trans.); bpt6k9692628h (digitised version of 1888 edition available through BNF) T. Carlyle, Bohaterowie. Cześć dla bohaterów i pierwiastek bohaterstwa w history, Warsaw, 1892 (Polish trans.); 168153 (digitised version available through Społeczna Pracownia Digitalizacji ŚBC przy) T. Carlyle, Eiyū sūhairon, Tokyo, 1893 (Japanese trans.) T. Carlyle, Gli eroi, trans. M. Pezzè Pascolato, Florence, 1897 (repr. 1918; Italian trans.) T. Carlyle, Geroi i geroicheskoe v istorii, trans. I.F. Pavlenkova, St Petersburg, 1891 (repr. 1898; Russian trans.) T. Carlyle, Eiyūron, trans. Bansui Doi, Tokyo, 1898 (repr. 1909; Japanese trans.) T. Carlyle, The hero as prophet. Mahomet: Islam, New York, 1902; 001931358 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Carlyle, Zes lezingen over helden, heldenvereering en heldengeest in de geschiedenis, trans. J. Wesselink-van Rossum, Utrecht, 1902,



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Amsterdam, 1907 (repr. 1923; Dutch trans.) X 2348: 45/46 (digitised version of 1907 edition available through Delpher) T. Carlyle, Herojima, heroizmu i obožavanju heroja u istoriji, trans. B. Knežević, Belgrade, 1903 (repr. 1988; Serbian trans.) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, London, 1904 (repr. 1928, 1950, 1965) T. Carlyle, Los héroes, el culto a los héroes y lo heroico en la historia, trans. P. Umbert, Barcelona, 1907 (repr. 1959, Mexico, 1976, Madrid, 1985, Mexico, 2000; Spanish trans.) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history and Essays on Goethe, London, 1908 T. Carlyle, Sartor resartus and On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, London, Toronto, 1908 (repr. 1913, 1916, 1918, 1921, 1926) T. Carlyle, Al-abṭāl wa-ʿibādat al-buṭūla, trans. Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī̄, Cairo, 1911 (repr, 1930, Beirut, 1982; Arabic trans.) T. Carlyle, Om heroer, herodyrkelse og det heroiske i historien, trans. M. Scharling Dragsdahl and C. Dragsdahl, Copenhagen, 1916 (Danish trans.) T. Carlyle, Über Helden, Heldenverehrung und das Heldentümliche in der Geschichte, trans. E. Pfannkuche, Leipzig, 1919 (repr. 1924; German trans.) T. Carlyle, ʻAl giborim, ʻavodat giborim u-midat ha-gevurah be-divre hayamim. Shishah shiʻurim, trans. Isar Yosef ben Mosheh Ainhoorn, Warsaw, 1920 (repr. 1922; Hebrew trans.) T. Carlyle, Helden und Heldenverehrung, trans. E. Wicklein, Jena, 1922 (German trans.) T. Carlyle, Hoi hērōes, Athens, 1924 (Greek trans.) T. Carlyle, Helden und Heldenverehrung, trans. P. Baudisch, Berlin, 1924 (repr. 1926; German trans.) T. Carlyle, Los héroes. Culto a los héroes y lo heróico en la historia, trans. J. Wolfson, Madrid, 1932 (repr. Buenos Aires, 1941; Spanish trans.) T. Carlyle, Par varonįem, varonīgumu vesture, trans. Zenta Maurin̦ a, Riga, 1936 (Latvian trans.) T. Carlyle, Los héroes, de su culto y de lo heroico en la historia, trans. J. Farrán y Mayoral, Barcelona, 1938 (repr. 1957; Spanish trans.) T. Carlyle, Ying xiong yu ying xiong chong bai, trans. Zeng Xubai, Shanghai, 1932 (repr. 1937; (Chinese trans.) T. Carlyle, ‘Hīro-hīro warasip’, arathāta, kalādhārī, kalādhārīpūjā, Amritsar, n.d. (Punjabi trans.)

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T. Carlyle, Muḥammad Rasūl Allāh, trans. ʿUbaydurraḥmān ʿĀqil Raḥmānī, Bombay, n.d. (Urdu trans. of chapter on Muḥammad) T. Carlyle, Eiyū oyobi eiyū sūhai, trans. Yanagida Izumi, Tokyo, 1941 (repr. 1949; Japanese trans.) T. Carlyle, Gli eroi e il culto degli eroi e l’eroico nella storia, trans. R. Campanini, Turin, 1942 (repr. 1952, 1960, Milan, 1990; Italian trans.) T. Carlyle, Kārairu senshū, vol. 2, trans. Yukio Irie, Tokyo, 1962 (Japanese trans.) T. Carlyle, Ying xiong yu ying xiong chong bai, trans. Xin He, Tai bei shi, 1963 (repr. 1973; Chinese trans.) T. Carlyle, Yŏng ung sungbaeron, trans. Si-in Pak and Jieun Bak, Seoul, 1972 (repr. 2016; Korean trans.) T. Carlyle, Gli eroi e il culto degli eroi e l’eroico nella storia, trans. G. Spina, Milan, 1992 (Spanish trans.) T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, ed. M.K. Goldberg, J.J. Brattin and M. Engel, Berkeley CA, 1993 (critical edition) T. Carlyle, Hrdina jako božstvo. Ódin, pohanství a skandinávské báje, Brno, 1994 (abridged Czech trans.) T. Carlyle, Teper’ i prezhde, trans. P.K. Medvedevoĭ, Moscow, 1998 (repr. 2008; Russian trans.) T. Carlyle, Les héros, trans. F. Rosso, Paris, 1998 (French trans.) T. Carlyle, Os heróis, trans. Á. Ribeiro, Lisbon, 1956, 19632 (repr. 2002; Portuguese trans.) T. Carlyle, Hősökről, Budapest, 2003 (Hungarian trans.) T. Carlyle, On heroes and hero-worship and the heroic in history, Amazon Kindle edition, 2013 T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, ed. D.R. Sorensen and B.E. Kinser, New Haven CT, 2013 (includes critical essays) Studies T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, ed. D.R. Sorensen and B.E. Kinser, New Haven CT, 2013 (includes critical essays) D.J. Trela and R.L. Tarr (eds), The critical response to Thomas Carlyle’s major works, Westport CT, 1997, pp. 93-139



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T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history, ed. M.K. Goldberg, J.J. Brattin and M. Engel, Berkeley CA, 1993 (critical edition) C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992 A. Hourani, Islam in European thought, Cambridge, 1991, p. 19 R.L. Tarr, Thomas Carlyle. A descriptive bibliography, pp. 88-97, 447-50 A. Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, London, 1980, pp. 64-5 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978 W.M. Watt, Muhammad. Prophet and statesman, London, 1961, p. 232 N. Daniel, Islam and the West. The making of an image, Edinburgh, 1960, pp. 292-3 T. Andrae, Mohammed. The man and his faith, New York, 1960, pp. 175-7 W.M. Watt, ‘Carlyle on Muhammad’, The Hibbert Journal 53 (1954-5) 247-54 Michael T. Shelley

Robert Fargher Date of Birth 1803 Place of Birth Maughold, Isle of Man Date of Death 12 August 1863 Place of Death Isle of Man

Biography

Robert Fargher is the likeliest compiler and editor of The imposture unmasked; or, a complete exposure of the Mormon fraud, published in 1841. Most of what is known about him has to do with his publications and political and legal entanglements. Born in 1803 in the parish of Maughold, Isle of Man, Fargher converted to Methodism in his youth. At the age of 14, he spent three years working as a private secretary in London, then returned to the Isle of Man, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He was apprenticed to a newspaper called The Manx Advertiser, a paper that supported the political establishment and the Established Church. Fargher is best known for founding with William Walls in 1833 the newspaper Mona’s Herald, which was dedicated to political reform, dissent and temperance. For example, it called for members of the Isle of Man’s House of Keys to be popularly elected rather than appointed by the governor. Fargher wanted the Isle of Man to remain independent from the United Kingdom and saw political reform as a way to maintain that independence. He was prosecuted three times for libel for material published in Mona’s Herald, though not written by Fargher, that was critical of a member of the House of Keys. Twice he resisted his imprisonment, though ineffectively, by refusing to leave the jail until he was informed he could appeal his case. In neither instance was an appeal granted. These prosecutions nearly shut down Mona’s Herald, but a fellow editor lent him sufficient funds to carry on. Also a teetotaller and temperance advocate, Fargher launched the Isle of Man Temperance Guardian and Rechabite Journal in 1836, which later merged with the British Temperance Advocate. He especially opposed fellow Methodists who were connected to the liquor trade. Fargher did not live to see his efforts realised. He died, blind and enfeebled, in 1863, four years before the first free election of members of the House of Keys.



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Secondary F. Coakley, ‘Fargher, Robert’, A Manx note book. Methodist personalities, 2001; http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/methdism/people/f.htm J. Belchem, ‘The onset of modernity, 1830-80’, in J. Belchem (ed.), A new history of the Isle of Man. The modern period, 1830-1999, vol. 5, Liverpool, 2000, 18-93 W.T. Kneale, ‘The trials of a Manx radical. The life and times of Robert Fargher, 1803-1863’, The Journal of the Manx Museum 6 (1959-60) 89-93

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The imposture unmasked Date 1841 Original Language English Description This 32-page pamphlet, entitled The imposture unmasked; or, a complete exposure of the Mormon fraud: Being a critical review of the Book of Mormon, and an exposé of the character of Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Martin Harris, Parley Pratt, and other leading actors in the Latter-day Saint delusion, was a compilation of two articles from two British periodicals, Mona’s Herald and Central Advertiser and the Athenæum, and a third article from the Baptist Register, the origin of which is unknown. Each article attempted to expose the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) as a fraud, and its prophet and leading elders as religious imposters. Several tactics the authors used were rhetorical comparisons to and invocations of Islam and Muḥammad. These references are sprinkled throughout the document. They assume a Protestant conviction that Islam was a counterfeit religion and its prophet a fraud. The overall tone of the broader publication is Protestant Christian, even though one of the articles is from the Athenæum, ‘a literary publication of high character, and unconnected with any religious party’ (Imposture unmasked, p. 4). The authors express bewilderment and anxiety about the successes of early Mormonism, especially in Great Britain, and the compilation as a whole attempts to convince its readers that Mormonism is an imposture by attacking the character and credibility of its prophet, Joseph Smith, and its early American leaders, Sidney Rigdon, Martin

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Harris, Parley Pratt, and others. Each article also comments extensively on the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith claimed he had translated from golden plates he had retrieved from a mountainside in New York State. Authors in the pamphlet attack Smith’s prophetic call to translate the book, question the existence of the golden plates, and dispute the accuracy of the contents of the book itself. One of the three articles in The imposture unmasked is from the periodical Mona’s Herald, though it is impossible to know whether Fargher penned it himself. The article from the Athenæum was written by William Cooke Taylor and reprinted from vol. 710 of the magazine (3 April 1841 pp. 2513). It briefly notes similarities between Joseph Smith’s and Muḥammad’s accounts of their first revelations (pp. 6-7). The article from the Baptist Register mentions similarities in accounts of Smith’s and Muḥammad’s revelations, though this is more concerned with the ‘spirit’ of Mormonism, which the author declares ‘is the same by which Mohammed actuated his primitive followers – the spirit of Mohammedanism’ (p. 23). The author fears that Mormons may take up the sword and ‘be to this continent what Mohammedanism was to the continent of Asia’ (p. 19). This anxiety is fuelled by what the author considers to be ‘bloody fanaticism’ among the Mormons that, like the ‘fanaticism’ of Islam, could drive believers to violence (p. 24). Significance The pamphlet offers a glimpse of the perceptions of Islam among Protestant Christians through the lens of anti-Mormon polemic. It is a fairly early iteration of an enduring anti-Mormon rhetorical convention that lasted in various forms from the 1830s through to the early 20th century, which linked Mormonism to Islam. These links demonstrate not only perceived similarities between Smith’s and Muḥammad’s prophetic calls and revelations, and extra-biblical literature, but also the conviction that both religions were dangerous and delusional, and threatened the Christian moral order with religious fanaticism and a violent spirit. All three of the essays compare early Mormonism in the United States and Great Britain to Islam, suggesting that both Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and Muḥammad, the founder of Islam, should be regarded without question as false prophets invested in spreading their religions through violence. Links between the two faiths expanded when in 1852 Mormons publicly announced their practice of polygamy, which antiMormons again linked to Islam.



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Publications No copies of the first edition are known to exist. R. Fargher, The imposture unmasked; or, a complete exposure of the Mormon fraud: Being a critical review of the Book of Mormon, and an exposé of the character of Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Martin Harris, Parley Pratt, and other leading actors in the Latter-day Saint delusion, Douglas, Isle of Man, 1841 (2nd edition) Studies M.S. Hill, ‘The shaping of the Mormon mind in New England and New York’, BYU Studies 9 (1968) 351-72 (repr. in L.W. Cook and D. Quayle Cannon (eds), A new light breaks forth. Essays in Mormon history, Salt Lake City UT, 1980, 9-31 W. Riley, The founder of Mormonism. A psychological study of Joseph Smith, Jr., New York, 1902, p. 436 Christine Talbot

Edward Lane Edward William Lane Date of Birth 17 September 1801 Place of Birth Hereford, England Date of Death 10 August 1876 Place of Death Worthing, England

Biography

Edward William Lane was born on 17 September 1801 in Hereford, England, the fourth of five children, to the Reverend Theophilus Lane and Sophia Gardiner Lane. He was educated in the grammar schools of Bath and Hereford, and contemplated attending Cambridge University. However, after a visit there he changed his plans and decided not to go to university at all. Instead, he went to London and became apprenticed as an engraver. During the early 1820s, Egypt, then a subject of popular fascination, captured his imagination. He devoted his free time to the study of its history and people, and the Arabic language. The strain of English winters on his poor health, coupled with his passionate interest in Egypt, made him decide to travel there in the summer of 1825, and he arrived in Cairo at the beginning of October. He immersed himself as deeply as possible into local life, adopting the clothing and lifestyle of the ruling Turkish elite, believing he could more easily pass for a Turk than for an Egyptian, and he took the name Manṣūr. He spent some months in Cairo learning about the city, studying its people, and improving his facility in Arabic. He associated almost exclusively with Muslims, and acquired a wide circle of Egyptian friends and acquaintances, though they were almost exclusively male. Wanting to know more about Islam, he visited all the major mosques, and studied the Qur’an, Hadith and Muslim practices. Before long, he could recite large sections of the Qur’an, and even prayed alongside Muslims in the mosques, although he never declared himself a Muslim. He mostly abstained from European company, although he did interact with European, mostly British, Egyptologists and Orientalists who gathered in Egypt during the 1820s. He twice travelled up the Nile into Nubia,



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focussing on ancient sites and monuments, but also carefully observing town, village and rural life along the way. With a large collection of notebooks and sketchbooks in hand, he returned to England in the summer of 1828, having been away nearly three years. On his return to England, Lane completed writing a book, which he titled Description of Egypt. In the form of a travelogue, it narrated his time in Egypt, including his trips up river, and contained work on numerous detailed illustrations that he made himself. Although this work was not published during his lifetime, it did provide material that went into the creation of his most famous publication, An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians. However, before this task could be completed, Lane resolved to make another visit to Egypt to gather additional material. This second visit (December 1833-August 1835) was devoted to a close study of the people of Cairo. Lane lived in the Muslim quarter, resumed the name Manṣūr and Turkish dress and lifestyle associated almost exclusively with Muslims, and attended as many of their religious ceremonies, festivals and entertainments as possible. He even had himself circumcised. The resulting book, which contained many drawings made by Lane himself, was first published in December 1836 in two volumes, and became an immediate success. Lane’s next major work, which he accomplished in England, was a translation of the Thousand and one nights. It came out in monthly instalments (1838-41) illustrated with woodcuts (it later appeared in three volumes). It did not include all of the stories, but is particularly noteworthy for the copious notes Lane produced to aid the reader’s understanding. He also completed his Selections from the Kur-án (1843). Before the latter publication appeared, Lane returned to Egypt (1842) for a third time with a new project in view, the preparation of an ArabicEnglish lexicon, because only in Cairo could he do the lexicographical research he would need. He spent seven years there working on this project, which was to consume the remainder of his life, although he was not able to complete it. The cost of the whole undertaking was met by Lord Prudhoe, who became the fourth Duke of Northumberland in 1847, and after his death by his widow. Lane continued to work diligently on the lexicon after he returned to England (1849), usually putting in ten- to twelve-hour workdays. Through many of these years, he had the assistance of Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Dasūqī in Egypt. Five volumes were published between 1863 and 1874. Lane died in Worthing, Sussex, on 10 August 1876, before the full work was completed. The remaining three volumes came out

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posthumously between 1877 and 1893 under the editorship of his greatnephew, Stanley Lane-Poole. Nothing like this had previously existed in English. Like Modern Egyptians, the lexicon has never gone out of print, and is still a highly regarded reference work. In 1840, Lane married a woman nearly 20 years his junior, Nefeeseh by name, a former Greek slave who came into his care during his first residence in Egypt. They had no children. Although no British university recognised Lane’s accomplishments, he became an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature (1858) and the Royal Asiatic Society (1866), a corresponding member of the Institute of France (1864) and an honorary member of the German Oriental Society (1871), and was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature by the University Leiden (1875). From 1863, he received a civil-list pension from the British government.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E.W. Lane, An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833, -34, and -35, partly from notes made during a former visit to that country in the years 1825, -26, -27, and -28, London, 18605 S. Lane-Poole, Life of Edward William Lane, London, 1877 E.W. Lane, Description of Egypt. Notes and views of Egypt and Nubia, made during the years 1825, -26, -27, and -28: Chiefly consisting of a series of descriptions and delineations of the monuments, scenery, &c. of those countries; the views, with few exceptions, made with the camera-lucida, ed. J. Thompson, Cairo, 2000 Secondary J. Thompson, Edward William Lane, 1801-1876. The life of the pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist, Cairo, 2010 J. Thompson, art. ‘Lane, Edward William’, in ODNB G. Roper, ‘Texts from nineteenth-century Egypt. The role of E.W. Lane’, in P. Starkey and J. Starkey (eds), Travellers in Egypt, London, 2001, 244-54 J. Thompson, ‘Edward William Lane’s “Description of Egypt”’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996) 565-83 L. Ahmed, Edward W. Lane. A study of his life and works and of British ideas of the Middle East in the nineteenth century, London, 1978 A.J. Arberry, ‘The lexicographer. Edward William Lane’, in Oriental essays. Portraits of seven scholars, London, 1960, 87-121 S. Lane-Poole, art. ‘Lane, Edward William’, in DNB



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Description of Egypt Date 1825-8 Original Language English Description One outcome of Edward William Lane’s first stay in Egypt from 1825 to 1828 was a manuscript titled Description of Egypt: Notes and views in Egypt and Nubia, made during the years 1825, -26, -27, and -28: Chiefly consisting of a series of descriptions and delineations of the monuments, scenery, &c. of those countries; The views, with few exceptions, made with the camera-lucida. He worked hard to have it published, but this was not realised in his lifetime. Jason Thompson, an American scholar who has written an excellent detailed biography of Lane, finally succeeded in seeing Description of Egypt through to publication at the beginning of the 21st century. In its published form, it comprises the editor’s introduction (17 pages) and notes on the text and illustrations (7 pages), 574 pages of text by Lane, a list of the 160 illustrations in the book (5 pages), and a bibliography compiled by the editor (9 pages) to serve ‘as a reference tool for identifying works that Lane mentions in his text, often in passing and with incomplete bibliographic information’ (p. 580; all references are to the Description, unless otherwise stated). There is no index. The text is divided into 39 chapters plus a supplement on the ancient Egyptians. The first 14 chapters (pp. 1-157) include descriptions of Alexandria and its environs, Lane’s journey up the Nile from Alexandria to Cairo, and information about the climate, diseases and agricultural life of Egypt. Finding little in the narratives of European travellers about the history and topography of Cairo and its environs, and much of that incorrect, he made sure his own account was not lacking such information. This set of chapters concludes with historical sketches of the Islamic dynasties of Egypt and the rise and rule of Muḥammad ʿAlī following the French evacuation of the country. While a principal purpose of this residence in Egypt was to see the antiquities, Lane says another chief purpose was to study ‘the language and literature of its modern inhabitants’ and to familiarise himself with their manners and customs, and in doing so to confine himself ‘almost exclusively’ to contact with Muslims, assuming their dress and adopting their mode of life (p. 5). Therefore, within these first 14 chapters are

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found descriptions and comments that show Lane’s keen interest in observing and describing Muslim practices and festivals. He describes visits to mosques and attendance at congregational prayers. He sometimes joins in listening to a lecture, sitting on the floor in the circle around the speaker. He describes briefly the general layout of the larger mosques in Cairo, then briefly names and describes the most distinguished mosques, giving a couple of pages to al-Azhar Mosque, claiming that no sight in Cairo interested him more than its interior. He considered it unsafe for an undisguised Christian to enter the mosques (pp. 83-8). He notes that he separated himself as much as possible from Europeans, spoke Arabic, and conformed to the manners of his Muslim neighbours, including giving up eating with knives and forks and abstaining from wine and pork (p. 90). While seeing much to admire in the rule of Muḥammad ʿAlī, Lane also bemoans the treatment of Egypt’s peasantry (pp. 155-7). In the remaining chapters, 15-39 (pp. 159-507), Lane narrates his visits to numerous ancient sites and monuments from the Pyramids at Giza and along the Nile Valley to the Second Cataract in Nubia. He resolved to treat his seven-man crew, all Muslims, courteously. He refused to inflict physical punishment on the captain of the boat ‘to inspire due respect’ among the crew as he said many foreign travellers were advised to do, although he does not identify the source of the advice. He served, at their request, as their timekeeper for breaking the daily Ramaḍān fast, and gave them more meat, plus coffee, for the ifṭār meal. Surprised at their lack of religious knowledge, he sometimes corrected them with a quotation from the Qur’an or the Hadith, but he does not give any examples that would allow us to assess his own proficiency. He was careful not to offend their religious sensitivities (pp. 218-20), though in a few places he slips and uses the terms ‘Mohhammadan religion’ (e. g. pp. 100, 452) or ‘Mohhammadan faith’ (e.g. pp. 447, 455) to refer to Islam. Such instances are so rare, however, that one is inclined to attribute them to oversights in Lane’s process of editing a massive manuscript. During ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā in 1827, he and a travelling companion sacrificed a sheep for those helping them in their explorations around Fayyum (p. 239). He shares an anecdote about a discussion he engaged in with a Turkish officer when both were dinner guests at Edfu. When it was suggested to the Turk that Lane, though an Englishman, was thought to be a Muslim, the Turk questioned him about the nature of Christ. Lane cited what the Qur’an says – Jesus was the word of God, a spirit proceeding from God, and was born of the Virgin Mary without a natural father, but by a miraculous



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act of God – asking his reader, ‘What Christian might not thus express himself?’ The Turk denied the truth of these assertions, but their Muslim host supported the accuracy of what Lane asserted about the Qur’an. He was also able to recite other qur’anic passages on request (pp. 407-8). As for Christians in Egypt, Lane shows very little interest. He observes that, like Jews, they are distinguished by the colour of their turbans (p. 78) and tend to be concentrated in certain quarters of Cairo (pp. 80-1), and that there are Christian residents and several Coptic convents and churches in the area known today as Old Cairo (pp. 95-6). On his journeys upstream, he finds the Copts ‘of all Christians, the most bigoted’ (p. 274), and along the way mentions the ruins of ‘a large Christian settlement’ (p. 330), the remains of a couple of Christian convents (pp. 336, 357) and churches (pp. 364, 390), notes that in the city of Isna there are about 300 Coptic families (p. 394) and a few in Edfu and Aswan (p. 404), and that early Christians converted some ancient pre-Christian temples into churches (e.g. pp. 472, 476, 481, 484, 486, 502). However, none of these observations is given more than a sentence or two. It seems Lane had little first-hand experience of Christians in Egypt. The text concludes with a lengthy supplement in which Lane describes various aspects of ancient Egyptian life (pp. 508-74). Significance The contents of Lane’s Description of Egypt are heavily weighted towards ancient Egypt. In that respect, it preserves an important record of Lane’s careful and detailed descriptions and drawings of ancient sites and monuments, some of which have suffered much damage or even disappeared since he saw them. The book is also valuable for his descriptions of and reflections on Cairo, the Egyptian political situation, and the inhabitants of Egypt and Nubia at the beginning of the second quarter of the 19th century. As one reviewer notes, it ‘is especially instructive to read these parts of the book as preliminary sketches for his later Manners and Customs’ (Wilfong, ‘Review’, p. 219). On this visit, he began to develop and hone his skills as a careful observer, illustrator and writer. He is distinguished from many travel narrators by his ability to use the language of the people, so that his narrative is grounded in more than a visual observation of the people; his ability to use Arabic allowed him to penetrate beyond what he saw. It is commendable that he strove to understand and be respectful towards the people with whom he interacted. The illustrations in the book, many of which Lane made with the camera-lucida, preserve for us ‘pictures’ of Egypt at the time, including the state of ancient monuments,

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the topography of Alexandria and Cairo, mosques, street life and people and their dress. His panoramic views of Cairo (figs 15, 16) show a city very different from today, so much closer to how it had looked for centuries, ‘just before the forces of growth, Westernization and modernization began to transform it’ (Thompson, Edward William Lane, p. 92). To compose his account of the rise and rule of Muḥammad ʿAlī (pp. 10457) ‘Lane drew upon a wide range of sources, including personal observation and interviews, consular contacts, and his own conversations with Muhammad ‘Ali’. It is particularly noteworthy that he drew upon his own manuscript copy of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī’s ʿAjāʾib al-athār, becoming the first Westerner to recognise the importance of this work (Thompson, Edward William Lane, pp. 577, 578). He also drew upon another important Arab historian, al-Maqrīzī, in composing his chapter on the Muslim dynasties of Egypt (pp. 98-103) and his brief history of Nubia (pp. 444-54). This shows how significant he considered the use of such primary sources and his ability to use them in their original language. In the last analysis, it must be said that this book provides little information about the state of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt at that time; it is rather an exemplary work reflecting a very particular form of Western interest in an appreciation of Islam. Publications MS London, BL – Add MS 34080-34088 (1825-8) Edward Lane, Description of Egypt: Notes and views in Egypt and Nubia, made during the years 1825, -26, -27, and -28: Chiefly consisting of a series of descriptions and delineations of the monuments, scenery, &c. of those countries; The views, with few exceptions, made with the cameralucida, ed. J. Thompson, Cairo, 2000 Studies Thompson, Edward William Lane T.G. Wilfong, ‘Review of Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt’, Near Eastern Archaeology 64 (2001) 219-20 J. Thompson, ‘Editor’s introduction’, and ‘A note on the text and illustrations’, in Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt, Cairo, 2000, pp. ix-xxxii Thompson, ‘Edward William Lane’s “Description of Egypt”’ Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, esp. pp. 77-126



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An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians Date 1836 Original Language English Description Lane’s An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians was originally to be part of his Description of Egypt but sometime in 1833, as the Description lay unpublished, he removed the chapters about the modern Egyptians in the hope of publishing a separate work. Before doing so, however, he resolved to return to Egypt to collect additional information, which he did. Once back in England, he completed the writing of Modern Egyptians, which was first published in 1836. This work thus combines the observations he made during his first residence (18258) with those made during the second (1833-5). The first 33 pages (references are to the fifth edition of 1860) comprise the title page, publication information, table of contents, a list of illustrations, editor’s preface, author’s preface and an advertisement for the third edition. This is followed by 598 pages of text, which consist of an introduction, 38 chapters, a supplement and six appendices. The book concludes with a 21-page index. A comprehensive overview of the book is not possible here, so only a brief sketch will be given. In the preface (pp. xiii-xx), Lane outlines the way in which he sought to fit in with local life, though not hiding from his closest acquaintances the fact that he was English. He dressed as a Turk, associated almost exclusively with Muslims of various levels in society, and sought to conform to their customs, including abstaining from eating foods forbidden by Islam, not drinking wine, and not using knives and forks at meals. He acquainted himself with their religious ceremonies, and hired two professors of Arabic and Islam to tutor him, whom he also consulted to authenticate, correct and add to the information he derived from conversations with others. The book presents a seemingly comprehensive picture of the middle and upper classes of Muslims in Cairo, who Lane estimates comprised about four-fifths of Cairo’s 240,000 and seven-eighths of the country’s nearly two million inhabitants at the time (pp. 22-3). Chapters 1-2 and 4 describe personal characteristics and dress (pp. 25-52); infancy and the early education of children, particularly boys (pp. 53-63); and, aspects of

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civil government, such as the structure and machinery of the law, its officers and their duties (pp. 110-31). Three chapters (pp. 132-97) discuss domestic life, including meal customs, marriage and marriage ceremonies, divorce and polygamy, and life among the poorer people. Two chapters describe courtesies when meeting and visiting people (pp. 198-206), and language, literature and science (pp. 207-21). Two treat superstitions, under which Lane includes belief in jinn, ‘ifreet, ghouls, miracles attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad, veneration of deceased saints and the evil eye (pp. 222-62), followed by another chapter describing magic, astrology, and alchemy (pp. 263-75). In describing the people’s character, Lane highlights the Egyptians’ benevolent spirit and charity to the poor, their cheerfulness, hospitality, filial piety, respect of the young for their elders, patriotic love and wit, but also their indolence, obstinacy and lack of truthfulness (pp. 276-306). Succeeding chapters describe industry (pp. 307-30), the use of tobacco, coffee, hemp and opium (pp. 331-5), the public baths (pp. 33643), games (pp. 344-52), music, including the call to prayer and chanting of the Qur’an (pp. 353-76), public dancers (pp. 377-82), serpent-charmers and performers of tricks (pp. 383-90), and the romances told by professional story-tellers and reciters in the cafes (pp. 391-425). Lane devotes three chapters to periodic public festivals (pp. 426-99), such as a Sufi dhikr ceremony at the Ḥusayn Mosque (pp. 432-3), the return of pilgrims and the maḥmal (the camel that had carried the new cloth covering for the Kaʿba) from Mecca (pp. 434-42), festivities around mawlid al-Nabī (the birthday of the Prophet) in considerable detail (pp. 442-56), festivities around the birthday of Ḥusayn, the grandson of the Prophet (pp. 457-66), and the procession of the kiswa (the cloth that covers the Kaʿba) through the streets of Cairo and the departure of the caravan of pilgrims for Mecca (pp. 480-7). Lane was aware that some of the festivals he describes were falling into disuse, and he wanted to preserve a memory of them (p. 457). He also gives a chapter to describing more private festivities, such as entertainment in homes, Qur’an recitations, dhikr rituals, marriage ceremoniess, and celebrations attendant upon the birth of a child, the circumcision of a boy, and admission into a trade (pp. 500-10). His closing chapter describes the preparation of a deceased person for burial and the more common funeral processions, including the religious rituals performed in the mosque, at the burial site and after the funeral (pp. 511-28). Lane concludes the main text by stating that he has ‘described the manners and customs of the Muslims of Egypt in the various stages and circumstances of life, from the period of infancy to the tomb’ (p. 528).



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Ch. 3 and the Supplement of Modern Egyptians merit more attention because of their relevance to the history of Christian-Muslim relations. In ch. 3, ‘Religion and laws’ (pp. 64-109), Lane wants his readers to know from the very first sentence how foundational this chapter is to the principal theme of the whole book: As the most important branch of their education, and the main foundation of their manners and customs, the religion and laws of the people who are the subject of these pages must be well understood, not only in their general principles but in many minor points. (p. 64)

He accurately and clearly describes the basic beliefs and practices of Muslims, generally taking care to avoid sweeping generalisations, acknowledging, for instance, the diversity that exists in the Sunnī and Shīʿī expressions of Islam. He focuses on the Sunnī expression because it predominates in Egypt, though, again, he points to the diversity that results from Sunnīs following one or other of the four commonly recognised schools of law (pp. 64-5). His discussion of principal beliefs revolves around the first Pillar of Islam, the shahāda, and then prophets, scripture, angels, the last day, and God’s decree of good and evil. He corrects some misconceptions and stereotypes common among Christians, pointing out that, according to Islam, females will not be excluded from paradise, and that no one will be admitted to paradise by his or her own merits but purely by the mercy of God. He also outlines accurately what Muslims believe about Jesus, and is aware that Muslims regard the Bible as having been altered (pp. 65-8). His discussion of the most important practices revolves around the other four Pillars of Islam: prayer, almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage. He gives most attention to prayer (ṣalāt), describing the ritual ablutions in great detail, the times for and the call to prayer, and the various movements of a rakʿa as performed by those who follow the Ḥanafī school of law and the phrases Muslims recite at each stage, providing pictorial illustrations of the various movements. Without sounding judgemental, he reports that there are few who do not sometimes or often neglect this duty, and many who scarcely ever pray (pp. 68-79). Turning to the Friday congregational prayer, he describes the usual layout of a mosque, its furniture and personnel and the sermon, even summarising one (pp. 80-90). In explaining why he has written so fully about Muslim worship, he states it is because his fellow Englishmen ‘in general have very imperfect and erroneous notions on this subject; many of them even imagining that the Muslims ordinarily pray to their Prophet [italics

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original] as well as to God’, although he acknowledges that many Muslims frequently implore the Prophet and even numerous saints to intercede with God for them (p. 90). Lane treats the remaining three Pillars much more briefly, although what he says is sufficient for introductory purposes. He concludes this section on the most important practices by discussing war against enemies of Islam, although he does not use the word jihād (pp. 90-3). It is very interesting that when we compare the 1860 fifth edition with the 1836 first edition, we see that Lane revised this paragraph on war considerably. In a footnote in the 1860 edition, he indicates that he had been misled by the opinion prevalent in Europe that the laws of ‘holy war’ were more severe than he found them in fact to be in the Qur’an. The Qur’an, he discovered, ‘taken in context’, does not justify unprovoked war (p. 93 n 2). In the remainder of this chapter, Lane briefly describes numerous legal rules: prohibitions against drinking wine, eating pork and other forbidden foods, gambling, usury, games of chance and the production of images (pp. 94-5) and laws pertaining to marriage, polygamy, divorce, inheritance, debt, theft, adultery, drunkenness, apostasy and blasphemy (pp. 96-109). The book is not devoid of observations about Coptic Christians. Earlier in the volume, Lane notes that Christians, like Jews, wear distinctively coloured clothing (p. 34), that Muḥammad ʿAlī curbed mistreatment of Christians by Muslim compatriots (p. 110 n. 3), and that church clerics exercise certain civil functions (p. 125). He notes that Jews, Christians and Muslims when sick sometimes seek the prayers of a cleric of one of the other communities, and that many Christians frequently visit Muslim saints, ‘kissing their hands, begging their prayers, counsels, or prophecies; and giving them money and other presents’ (p. 235). Lane’s more detailed treatment of Christians, however, comes in second section of material that deserves to be highlighted (pp. 529-56), where he explains that he despaired of gaining insight into the Coptic community because of the Copts’ reluctance to speak with foreigners, but at length he found one who would talk to him. He estimates that there are not more than 150,000 in the whole country, and about 10,000 in Cairo. The majority belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, although a small portion are Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox. He informs the reader about the derivation of the terms ‘Copt’ and ‘Coptic’. In his view, the Copts differ ‘but little from the generality of their Muslim countrymen’ (p. 530), ‘the hatred with which even the modern Copts regard [...] all other Christians who are not of their own sect is much greater than that which they bear



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towards the Muslims’ (p. 532). He notes that Coptic adult males were still required to pay the jizya, in different gradations depending upon economic class and whether they lived in Cairo or the countryside. Yet, they were not ‘despised and degraded by the government as they were a few years ago’ (p. 542). Whereas prior to Muḥammad ʿAlī they were not generally allowed to ride horses, in Lane’s day this restriction was being withdrawn. One great advantage they enjoyed, ‘much envied by most of the Muslims’, was immunity from military service, although Lane notes that this had been lately withdrawn (p. 542). He gives some space to Coptic clerical orders, schools, church layout, fasts and feasts, dietary restrictions, marriage festivities, divorce and funeral ceremonies. He concludes this section by referring to a few moments of Coptic history under Muslim rule, using information derived from al-Makrīzī’s history of Egypt: the harsh conditions in the early decades due to the jizya tax; the requirement to wear distinctive clothing in the time of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847-61); the persecutions endured in the reign of the Fāṭimid Caliph al-Ḥākim (r. 996-1021); the destruction of churches in 1321 during the rule of the Mamlūk Sultan Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn; the conversion of many Copts in order to escape harsh conditions from the mid14th century until the accession of Muḥammad ʿAlī, under whom their situation began to improve (pp. 548-52). Significance The manners and customs of modern Egyptians was an immediate success. The first edition sold out within a fortnight. Four revised editions appeared in the following few decades, the 5th and last in 1860, and it has been reprinted numerous times since. In the early 21st century, one can readily purchase a new copy, even a Kindle edition. As Jason Thompson rightly notes, ‘in the long run it became one of the most influential and widely read books ever written about the Middle East’ (Thompson, Edward William Lane, p. 394). One of Lane’s principal motives was to record traditional ways of living before they disappeared. Modern Egyptians gives snapshots of Egypt, and more particularly Cairo, in the second quarter of the 19th century, when it was still almost untouched by European influences. These come through the lens of one person, but he had Egyptian conversation partners from whom he received a great deal of information and who helped him to understand, and the book is remarkable for its accurate detail. The carefully drawn and detailed illustrations served as important visual aids for its original audience, and remain valuable aids for historians who try

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to picture Cairo in the first half of the 19th century. For this reason, it is still ‘a basic text for historians of the Arab world’ and ‘a highly readable work for the interested reader’ (Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, p. 119). It is listed in the bibliographies of various types of studies of Egypt and the wider Middle East. Modern Egyptians has also provided a good primer for making Islam understandable to Western readers, and with noteworthy sympathy. Perhaps most importantly it does this by elucidating the intimate connection between religion and its social expression. As Leila Ahmed writes, this was something new in Europe: For the first time in England, and in Europe, Islam and its culture were presented not as a set of beliefs to be intellectually grasped, analysed, rejected, or an assortment of social and political modes to be defined and criticised, but as a lived experience. [...] The disclosure of Islam and its culture as the language of experience, as an all-enveloping reality […] was to have the greatest impact on Lane’s contemporaries. (pp. 117, 119)

She notes that this impact can be seen on Thomas Carlyle, who after reading Modern Egyptians wrote, ‘These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it!’ (see Carlyle, ‘The hero as prophet’, in On heroes, heroworship, and the heroic in history, London, 1841, p. 123). Lane evinced a genuine respect for the religiosity of Muslims and deemed Islam akin to Christianity, because it proclaims the same God, has a high regard for Jesus and other prophets, and observes many similar moral precepts. This is not to say he was never critical of Islam and Muslims, but it seems he was able to make a distinction between Islam as revealed in the Qur’an and as practised by Muslims (Thompson, Edward William Lane, p. 333). Lane and his works, and particularly this book, continue to be the focus of scholarly discussion, both appreciative and critical. Modern Egyptians receives considerable attention in the biographies of Lane written by Leila Ahmed and Jason Thompson. It is also a target of criticism in Edward Said’s influential Orientalism (1978). Said finds it ‘illuminating’ to read ‘not as a source of Oriental lore, but as a work directed towards the growing organization of academic Orientalism’ (Orientalism, p. 164). His treatment of Lane has drawn criticism from other scholars, among them John Rodenbeck, who says Orientalism’s ‘least satisfactory pages have been recognized as the six (159-64) in which Said passes sentence on Edward William Lane’ (Rodenbeck, ‘Edward Said and Edward William Lane’, p. 233). He accuses Said of a ‘persistent misconstruction and misquotation



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of Lane’s words’, and as displacing ‘the real Edward William Lane with a grotesque imposture’ (p. 237), and even questions whether Said had read Modern Egyptians. Lane makes a few comments here and there about the attitudes of some Muslims regarding Christianity and behaviour toward Christians, but there is no sustained discussion of the subject. In fact, he shows little interest in the Christians of Egypt. Hoda Gindi has recently criticised his slight and often disparaging treatment of the Copts, which is all the more unfortunate because Modern Egyptians attained such high authority for the accuracy of its information (Gindi, ‘Copts of Egypt’, esp. pp. 106-7). Other Arab scholars, including Najib al-‘Aqiqi, Ahmad Amin, ‘Abd al-Hamid Yunus, ‘Abd al-Rahman Zaki, and A.L. Tibawi, ‘have, in general, been favourable towards Lane, and have not regarded him with that mistrust which many other European Orientalists have attracted’ (Roper, ‘Texts’, pp. 251-2). Publications The following is not a complete list. For each entry a shortened form is used for the original English title, which is: An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833, -34, and -35, partly from notes made during a former visit to that country in the years 1825, -26, -27, and -28. E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, 2 vols, London, 1836; 011544756 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, 2 vols, London, 18372 E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, 2 vols, London, 18423 (repr. 1846, 3 vols); 100869923 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, 2 vols, London, 18464; 007705617 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Sitten und Gebräuche der heutigen Ägypter, trans. J.T. Zenker, Leipzig, 1852 (German trans. based on 3rd edition of 1842; 2nd German edition, 4 vols, 1856); H.afr. 5704 f-1-3 (digitised version of the 1856 edition available through MDZ) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 18605 (repr. 1871, in 2 vols); 011619362 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)

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E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 1890 (repr. from 3rd edition of 1842); 001605216 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 1895 (does not identify from which edition it is printed) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, Paisley, Scotland, 1896 (does not identify from which edition it is printed); 102627801 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 1908 (repr. 1923; does not identify from which edition it is printed) E.W. Lane, Al-Miṣriyyūn al-muḥaddithūn. Shamāʾiluhum wa-ʿādātuhum, trans. ʿAdlī Ṭāhir Nūr, Cairo, 1950 (Arabic trans.) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, New York, 1973 (printed from 5th edition) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 1978 (reprint of an 1895 volume, but does not identify on which edition that is based) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, London, 1986 (does not identify from which edition it is printed) E.W. Lane, Nravy i obychai Egiptian v pervoĭ polovine XIX v., Moscow, 1982 (Russian trans.) E.W. Lane, ʿĀdāt al-Miṣriyyīn al-muḥaddithīn wa-taqālīduhum, trans. Suhayr Dassūm, Cairo, 1991, repr. 1999 (Arabic trans.) E.W. Lane, De moderna Egyptiernas seder och bruk, trans. B. Ericson, Furulund, Sweden, 1998 (Swedish trans.) E.W. Lane, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, 2 vols, Cambridge, 2013, repr. of 1836 edition According to Thompson (Edward William Lane, p. 393), there have also been Spanish and French translations, the last never published. Studies Thompson, Edward William Lane J. Rodenbeck, ‘Edward Said and Edward William Lane’, in P. Starkey and J. Starkey (eds), Travellers in Egypt, London, 2001, 233-43 Roper, ‘Texts’ H. Gindi, ‘The Copts of Egypt. Neither Christian nor Egyptians?’, in P. Starkey and J. Starkey (eds), Interpreting the Orient. Travellers in Egypt and the Near East, Reading, 2001, 97-110



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J. Rodenbeck, ‘Dressing native’, in Starkey and Starkey, Interpreting the Orient, 65-100 Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, pp. 107-26 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978, pp. 158-65 Arberry, ‘The lexicographer’

Selections from the Kur-án Date 1843 Original Language English Description Cognisant that the English-speaking world was generally ignorant and misinformed about the beliefs and practices of Islam, Lane believed that some familiarity with the contents of the Qur’an would help to alleviate this lack. Certainly, most English-speaking readers found the Qur’an difficult to read and understand. For instance, Thomas Carlyle in his public lecture on Muḥammad described the Qur’an, which he read in George Sale’s 1734 translation, as follows: ‘I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; – insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber’ (Carlyle, ‘The hero as prophet’, in On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, London, 1841, pp. 104-5). Perhaps Carlyle’s complaints suggested to Lane the idea of providing a fresh translation. Yet, as the title indicates (in full, Selections from the Kur-án: commonly called, in England, the Koran; with an interwoven commentary/translated from the Arabic, methodically arranged, and illustrated by notes, chiefly from Sale’s edition: to which is prefixed an introduction, taken from Sale’s preliminary discourse, with corrections and additions), Lane did not attempt to provide a translation of the whole Qur’an. Sale’s full translation was already available and was enriched with an abundance of notes. Lane appreciated that English-speaking readers often found the Qur’an’s contents perplexing for their ‘real or apparent want of connexion’ and their unintelligibility (Selections, p. iii), so he decided to provide his own translation of extracts, organised around themes, with explanatory notes. The

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1843 British edition, which is comprised of 7 pages of prefatory material followed by 317 pages of text, is discussed here. The first principal section of the book, the ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1-96), is organised around the following three topics: the Arabs before Muḥammad (pp. 1-51), the establishment of Islam (pp. 52-82), and the Qur’an (pp. 8396). Lane’s ‘Introduction’ is essentially a reproduction of the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to Sale’s translation. While it does not reproduce the whole of Sale’s ‘Discourse’, what it does include is almost word-for-word from Sale. However, Lane has shifted some of Sale’s material around, and has added information from several more recent sources, such as Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia. For instance, whereas Sale states that the distance between Mecca and al-Ṭāʾif is about 60 miles, Lane, drawing on Burckhardt, says it is about 72 miles, and he draws on Burckhardt to describe the interior of the Kaʿba (pp. 6-7). Lane inserts material regarding Muḥammad’s polygamy, noting that ‘he is constantly upbraided on that account by the controversial writers’ for whom this is evidence of Muḥammad’s sensuality and that he is ‘consequently an imposter’. Lane counters this thinking by stating that in Muḥammad’s time polygamy ‘was frequently practised in Arabia and other parts of the east, and was not counted an immorality’ (p. 58). To this he adds ‘a more rational apology’ for Muḥammad’s conduct. From age 25 to 50, he was content with one wife, until she died. Lane considers it unlikely that a sensual man in a country where polygamy was common would be content to live 25 years with one wife who was 15 years his senior. He suspects that a more probable reason why Muḥammad later took so many wives was his desire for a male heir (p. 59). Another interesting insertion Lane makes into the Sale material reflects his personal experience in Cairo, namely the popular practice of chanting the Qur’an, which, he says, is generally done by Muslims ‘in a very impressive and peculiar manner’ (p. 89). A comparison between Lane’s and Sale’s translations shows that Lane made some significant revisions, perhaps because his residency in Cairo made him alert to Muslim sensitivities. For instance, in a number of places Sale refers to Muslims as ‘Mohammedans’ (The Koran, London, 1890, pp. 53, 54, 90, 92); Lane changes this to ‘Muslims’ (pp. 94, 95, 96, 8, 10). Sale uses ‘Mohammedan’ as an adjective (pp. 6, 32); Lane uses ‘Muslim’ (pp. 16, 56). Sale uses ‘Mohammedism’ (p. 43); Lane changes it to ‘ElIslam’ (p. 82). Lane also utilises language that is less judgemental than Sale’s. For instance, Sale says of the Black Stone embedded in the Kaʿba that Muslims ‘fable that it is one of the precious stones of paradise’ (p. 91),



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while Lane has, ‘They say that it is one of the precious stones of Paradise’ (p. 10). Regarding the stone on which Abraham stood to build the Kaʿba, Sale says that Muslims ‘pretend to show his footsteps, telling us he stood on it when he built the Caaba’ (p. 92). Lane has, ‘They say that he stood on it when he was building the Kaabeh […] and that it bears the impression of his foot’ (p. 10). Sale says that, after Muḥammad married Khadīja and began to enjoy an easier life, ‘he formed the scheme of establishing a new religion, or, as he expressed it, of replanting the only true and ancient one’ (p. 30). Lane, on the other hand, uses more neutral language: Muḥammad, 15 years after his marriage to Khadīja, ‘announced […] that he was sent by God […] to restore the only true and ancient religion’ (p. 53). Whereas Sale contends that ‘one of the most convincing proofs’ that Islam ‘was no other than a human invention’ is that it ‘owed its propagation and establishment almost entirely to the sword’ in contrast to ‘the divine original of Christianity’, which prevailed ‘by mere dint of its own truth’ (p. 38), Lane edited this out of the Sale material. In contrast, Lane says, ‘Unprovoked war is clearly contrary to the letter and spirit of the Kurán’, while war against first aggressors ‘is enjoined as a sacred duty’ (p. 70). Finally, Sale refers to stories in the Qur’an being ‘taken from’ the Old and New Testaments (p. 49); Lane speaks of them as ‘related nearly as in the Old and New Testaments’ (p. 90). When we turn to Lane’s translation of qur’anic excerpts, although he is dependent on Sale’s translation, he does not follow it slavishly. As for his use of Sale’s notes, Leila Ahmed states: Lane checked Sale’s notes against the Arabic commentaries from which they were ostensibly derived, and he discovered, as he states in his preface, what had not till then been known: that Sale’s notes were derived from [Ludovio] Maracci’s Latin Koran and the notes to it, and not directly from Arabic works. Lane’s occasional additions […] are also the fruit of his own direct consultation of Arabic sources. (Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, pp. 183-4)

The principal Arabic commentary used by Lane is Al-Jalālayn. When he utilises Sale’s explanatory notes, he identifies them as Sale’s. Lane’s italicised notes are interwoven within the translated text. He helpfully identifies chapter and verse numbers of the excerpts at the conclusion of each. After providing a translation of the opening chapter of the Qur’an, which he titles ‘The initial prayer’ (pp. 97-8), Lane organises his translated excerpts around the following themes: premonition (pp. 99-100); God and God’s works (pp. 101-13); predestination (pp. 114-15); angels and jinn (pp. 116-18); prophets, apostles, and divine books (pp. 119-20); Adam and

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Eve (pp. 121-4); Abel and Cain (pp. 125-6); Noah and the flood (pp. 127-33); ʿĀd and Thamūd (pp. 134-7); Dhū l-Qarnayn (pp. 138-41); Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac (pp. 142-57); Jacob, Joseph, and his brothers (pp. 158-76); Job (pp. 177-8); Shuʿayb (pp. 179-81); Moses and his people (pp. 182-225); Saul, David and Solomon (pp. 226-42); Jonah (pp. 243-4); certain Israelites in the time of Ezekiel (p. 245); Ezra (p. 246); the Messiah (pp. 247-66); the flood of al-ʿArim (pp. 267-8); Muḥammad and the Qur’an (269-79); believers and unbelievers, their conduct and characters (280-8); the resurrection, judgement, paradise and hell (289-312); and miscellaneous extracts (313-17). Significance A.J. Arberry judged Selections from the Kur-án to be ‘not a great book’ (‘The lexicographer’, p. 107). Its production was marred by numerous printing errors, because Lane left for Egypt before the proofs were ready for correction. It made no significant impact on either scholars or the general public, and was soon superseded by the complete Qur’an translations of Rodwell (1861) and Palmer (1880) (Roper, ‘Texts’, p. 248). It has been said that Lane’s primary objective in producing it was to make money (Thompson, Edward William Lane, p. 472), and so Arberry dismissed it as a ‘pot-boiler’ (‘The lexicographer’, p. 107). Nevertheless, the idea of producing a selection of qur’anic passages in comprehensible translation organised around themes is a useful way of introducing its contents to readers, particularly novices. Others have attempted the same, examples being Arberry’s own The holy Koran, an introduction with selections (1953) and Kenneth Cragg’s Readings in the Qur’an (1988). While thus not a direct contribution to Christian-Muslim relations, the work is significant in being an early attempt at a modern thematic appreciation of the Qur’an by a Westerner and for being part of the corpus of this particular author. Publications E.W. Lane, Selections from the Kur-án: commonly called, in England, the Koran; with an interwoven commentary; translated from the Arabic, methodically arranged, and illustrated by notes, chiefly from Sale’s edition: to which is prefixed an introduction, taken from Sale’s preliminary discourse, with corrections and additions, London, 1843; 011639625 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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E.W. Lane, Selections from the Kur-án, revised and enlarged by S. LanePoole, London, 1879, 1890, repr. 2000; 001925655 (digitised version of 1879 edition available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Selections from the Kur-án, rev. and enlarged by S. LanePoole, Boston MA, 1879; 005783335 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Lane, Selections from the Kur-án, revised and enlarged by S. LanePoole, New Delhi, 2003 Studies M.S. Shah, ‘Edward William Lane on interpreting the Holy Qur’an’, ICMR 21 (2010) 287-97 Thompson, Edward William Lane, esp. pp. 471-3, 572-3 Roper, ‘Texts’, p. 248 Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, esp. pp. 178-91 Arberry, ‘The lexicographer’ Michael T. Shelley

Joseph Wolff Date of Birth Uncertain; probably 9 November 1795 Place of Birth Weilersbach, Hochstift Bamberg, Germany Date of Death 2 May 1862 Place of Death Isle Brewers, Somerset, England

Biography

Joseph Wolff was probably born on 9 November 1795, as is indicated on his gravestone. However, two other years are mentioned: a German archive gives 1794 and his autobiographical writings mention 1796, as well as 1795. Wolff was born a Jew. His father David Wolff (or Levi) was the rabbi of Weilersbach. According to his memoir, Wolff started to challenge the religious beliefs of his family at the age of seven. Five years later he left his home to become a Christian. He subsequently travelled around Europe, and was finally baptised into the Roman Catholic Church at Prague in 1813. Wolff followed his dream to become a missionary by entering the Collegio di Propaganda Fide in Rome (1818). During his studies, he criticised the Catholic dogma of the infallibility of the pope, which resulted in his expulsion from the Vatican. In 1819, he took up an invitation to come to London from the British banker and Member of Parliament Henry Drummond, who became a life-long sponsor. Under the influence of Edward Irving, the founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, Wolff converted to Anglicanism and became a millenarian. Despite his conversions, he remained proud of his Jewish ancestry, and never ceased to underline his identity as a Jew who accepted Jesus Christ as the Messiah. In contrast, his attitude towards the Catholic Church was very hostile. Supported by a scholarship from the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, Wolff studied theology under Charles Simeon, and read Arabic, Persian, Chaldean and Syriac at Cambridge under the well-known Orientalist Samuel Lee. He later became a life-long freelance missionary, financed by various patrons and the revenues from his publications. During his first two journeys, between 1821-6 and 1827-31, to the Mediterranean, Palestine, Persia and Egypt, Wolff concentrated on the mission to the Jews and the distribution of the Gospels in various languages.



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He published his experiences in the three-volume Missionary journal and memoir, which made him a better-known missionary in Britain. His journey in 1827-31, and another during 1835-8, are described by Wolff in Journal of the Reverend Joseph Wolff, in a series of letters to Sir Thomas Baring. During the first of these travels, he visited north-western Europe, the Mediterranean and Egypt, with the goal of finding the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The following journey brought him to Yemen, Ethiopia, India and the United States, where he preached before the House of Congress and was ordained deacon by the bishop of the Episcopal Church of New Jersey. A year later, in 1838, he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Dromore, Northern Ireland. Although he encountered Islam during these travels, the focus of his descriptions was more on Judaism. However, in 1831-4 and 1843-5, which are covered by the publications described below, Wolff came into close contact with Muslims. He finally settled at Isle Brewers, Somerset, England, where he ministered in a small parish until his death. In the last years of his life, he was initiated as a Freemason and travelled throughout the country to earn money by giving vivid lectures about his eventful life.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J. Wolff, Missionary journal and memoir of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, 3 vols, London, 1824, 1828, 1829 J. Wolff, Journal of the Reverend Joseph Wolff in a series of letters to Sir Thomas Baring, Bart., containing his missionary labours from the years 1827 to 1831; and from the years 1835 to 1838, London, 1839 J. Leech, The church-goer. Rural rides or calls at country churches, Bristol and London, 1847, pp. 233-41 J. Wolff, Travels and adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, D.D., LL.D., Vicar of Ile Brewster, near Taunton, and late missionary to the Jews and Muhammedans in Persia, Bokhara, Cashmeer, etc., London, 1861 J. Lauchert, ‘Joseph Wolff’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 44, Leipzig, 1898, 39-41 Secondary T. Flynn, Western Christian presence in the Russias and Qājār Persia, c. 1760-1870, Leiden, 2017, esp. pp. 799-857 E.I. Carlyle and T. Endelmann, art ‘Wolff, Joseph’, in ODNB H. Leach, ‘From Bavaria to Bokhara to Isle Brewers. The extra-ordinary life and times of the Revd. Dr. Joseph Wolff, DD’, Asian Affairs 38 (2007) 318-36

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H.E. Hopkins, Sublime vagabond. The life of Joseph Wolff missionary extraordinary, Worthing, 1984 J. Wolff, A mission to Bokhara, ed. G. Wint, London, 1969

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects Date 1835 Original Language English Description Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects by the Reverend Joseph Wolff during his travels between the years 1831 and 1834 from Malta to Egypt, Constantinople, Armenia, Persia, Khorossan, Toorkestaun, Bokhara, Balkh, Cabool in Affghanistaun, the Himalayah Mountains, Cashmeer, Hindostaun, the coast of Abyssinia, and Yemen, published by Wolff himself in 1835, was largely financed by private subscribers who ordered the book in advance. Its 523 pages of text are written in journal style. Wolff reports on travels between 1831 and 1834 that took him from Malta via Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Persia and the khanates of Central Asia to India, Yemen and Abyssinia. Originally, his objective was the search for the biblical Ten Lost Tribes, believed to be somewhere in these regions. But he came into contact with numerous Muslim groups and individuals. In addition to remarks about Sunnīs and Shīʿīs, he gives ethnographic information about Muslim minorities such as ʿAlawīs (Nuṣayrīs) and Ahl-i Ḥaqq, and he records many conversations on religion between himself and Muslims. These usually circle around exchanges over traditional points of disagreement between the two religions, such as, on the Christian side, the divinity of Christ, a rational explanation of the Trinity and the prediction of Jesus in the Old Testament, and, on the Islamic side, the legitimacy of the Qur’an as a holy book, the prediction of Muḥammad in the Bible, and the question of the Seal of the Prophets. As well as concentrating on Christology as a key point of his missionary message, Wolff makes efforts to share his millenarian views. He was completely convinced that the second coming of Christ would take place in the very near future, and was very pleased to discover Christ’s important role in Shīʿī expectations of the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.



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According to his calculations based on his exegesis of the Book of Daniel, Christ’s second coming would be in 1847. For many of his Muslim interlocutors, especially in India, it was new to meet a Briton with such a sense of urgency about the imminent apocalypse. Wolff’s Christology and millennialism can be studied in reports of two written exchanges that took place in Delhi and Lucknow in 1832. Both consist of four statements. While the Delhi debate covers seven pages (Wolff, Researches and missionary labours, London, 1835, pp. 372-9), that with the mullahs of Lucknow is as long as 16 pages (pp. 393-409). In Delhi, Wolff argued with Maulana Muhammad Ishaq, who can be regarded as one of the most influential mullahs of the time. His critical questions to Wolff about specific details of the doctrine of the Trinity show a deep engagement with Christian thought. According to the report, Wolff tries to build his response on the principle that Muslims accept the Bible and that there are contradictions in the Qur’an. Thus, he criticises his opponent for using verses from the Qur’an as arguments, given that Christians reject the book. It seems implausible that Muhammad Ishaq would not have replied with the old accusation of taḥrīf, the adulteration of the Bible by Christians, but there is some reason to assume that Wolff did not always publish the full answers of his opponents. In Lucknow, the local Shīʿa were very interested in Wolff’s apocalyptic beliefs because of their own belief in the appearance of the Mahdī. They invited him to an official religious debate (munazara) at the king’s court, before which their leader, Maulana Sayyid Muhammad, exchanged several letters with him, parts of which are reproduced in the book. Wolff reports that the mullahs of Lucknow owned an Arabic Bible, and the Arabic translation of the New Testament by Henry Martyn. This resulted in deep discussions about the exegesis of particular biblical verses. The mullahs found a prophecy of the twelve Shīʿī Imams in Genesis 17:20, and saw Muḥammad predicted in the phrase that Wolff would read as ‘burden upon Arabia’ in Isaiah 21:13, which had been translated in their Bible as ‘prophecy over Arabia’. In addition, they discovered five predictions of Muḥammad or the Mahdī in Isaiah 21:7; John 5:32; John 1:26-7; Matthew 3:11; and Revelation 2:26-7. In Wolff’s mind, Muḥammad was, of course, not predicted in the Bible, although Islam as a political kingdom was. He links it with the prophecy of the four apocalyptic beasts in Daniel 7:5, and suggests that the second beast, the bear that ‘devours more flesh’, symbolises Islam’s bloodthirstiness and cruelty.

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Remarkably, Wolff’s style of debating seldom appears as apologetic or polemic. Of course, in his account he always wins his arguments and reveals the ‘false’ interpretations of his interlocutors but, by including their letters and other writings, he acknowledges their rational approach and their attempt to understand the Bible, and appreciates a style of debate consisting of an exchange of arguments rather than just denunciations of the opponent. All in all, Wolff gives both unfavourable and favourable assessments of Islam. On the one hand, he repeatedly accuses all Muslims, Shīʿīs and Turkmen of being liars, impostors and immoral barbarians. In particular, he thought slavery, which was widely practised and was approved by mullahs in Bukhara, represented one of the major cruelties in the Middle East. Equally, he criticises the military character of Islam, the immorality found at sites of pilgrimage and the intellectual darkness of the people of the desert. But then on the other hand, he frequently applauds the curiosity, piety, wisdom, tolerance and hospitality of the individuals who hosted him or conversed with him about religion. For example, he mentions that he developed a kind of friendship with Abbas Mirza, the crown prince of Persia, who seems to have been one of the first to call him ‘Mullah Youssuf’, a term he later used quite often to introduce himself to Muslim interlocutors. In addition, he shows great admiration for ascetic Sufis and the nomadic people of the desert. He admires their search for a personal connection to God, and prefers their genuine feeling for religion to the intellectual curiosity of educated Persians. In these parts of the book can be felt Wolff’s deep feeling for a spiritual approach to religion and his opposition to the modern rationalist movement in European theology. He is convinced that some kind of religious light can more readily be found in Sufism or Arabic tales than in the rational approach of theologians at home. For him, the human mind is everywhere the same, and the divine spirit can thus be found in a Naqshbandi Sufi just as in a prophet of the Old Testament. Jesus, he is convinced, ‘brings many to himself, in a way that we know not’ (p. 363). This ambivalent representation of Islam and Muslims may be rooted in harsh accusations against Wolff by his home audience. At various points in the report, he defends himself against the imputation of being a friend of Islam or even a convert. Thus, the impression arises that, while he admires many aspects of the alien religion, he is constantly looking for a proper attitude towards Islam that will be comprehensible to his British readers and subscribers.



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Significance Unfortunately, research about Joseph Wolff and his works is still in its infancy, and his influence in Britain can only be estimated. It seems probable that his millenarian views and his positive attitude towards Islam would have been discussed at home, and he had influential evangelical supporters such as Edward Irving and Henry Drummond, who helped him to finance his travels and publications. For them, he was probably an important communicator of their religious views at home and oversees. Wolff and his books are still very well-respected in the evangelical milieu today. Indeed, several non-academic writings present him as one of the greatest missionaries of the 19th century. (Y. Davy, Trail of peril. The life of Joseph Wolff, Washington, 1984; V. Robinson, The restless missionary, Milton Keynes, 2013). Wolff’s visit to Delhi and Lucknow had a clear local impact (Powell, Muslims and missionaries, pp. 110-31). William Bowley, a Church Missionary Society missionary stationed near Varanasi, who rejected Wolff's millenarian approach, read in a newspaper about the munazara and then contacted the mullahs of Lucknow in 1833. Muhammad Ali, one of them who was willing to continue the conversation with Christians and knew that Wolff's millenarian views were not common among English missionaries, answered with a pamphlet ‘containing the Rev. Mr. Wolffs proceedings at Lucknow, and his controversy with Mussulmans’ (a translation was published with additional letters in several issues of the Christian Intelligencer (Calcutta) from October 1838 to February 1839; cited in Powell, Muslims and missionaries, pp. 117, 132). Bowley was thus able to resume the exchanges, thanks to the open atmosphere of debate that had been created by Wolff’s stay, though he could never really deepen the contact because his approach proved to be too apologetic. This episode shows that Muslims in north Indian towns were at this time interested in discussions about matters of faith. They were revived when Karl Gottlieb Pfander entered the stage some years later. Publications J. Wolff, Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects by the Reverend Joseph Wolff during his travels between the years 1831 and 1834 from Malta to Egypt, Constantinople, Armenia, Persia, Khorossan, Toorkestaun, Bokhara, Balkh, Cabool in Affghanistaun, the Himalayah Mountains, Cashmeer, Hindostaun, the coast of Abyssinia, and Yemen, London, 1835;

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006762593 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects, Philadelphia PA, 1837 (revised edition); 008625325 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects, Cambridge, 2012 Studies A. Powell, Muslims and missionaries in pre-mutiny India, London, 2003, pp 110-31

Narrative of a mission to Bokhara Date 1845 Original Language English Description Narrative of a mission to Bokhara. In the years 1843-45 to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly was published in two volumes in 1845. In the same year, a nearly unchanged edition was released in a single volume in New York, followed by a German translation in 1846. The book comprises the report of Wolff’s last journey in the years 1843-5 to Bukhara. During a diplomatic embassy to the khanate, two British officers, Arthur Conolly and Charles Stoddart, were imprisoned. Rumours of their decapitation spread fast in England but Wolff, calling Conolly a good friend, did not believe this. Since no official mission was sent, Wolff, who was one of the very rare Europeans ever to have been to Bukhara, decided to solve the mystery of their fate on his own. The Narrative of a mission to Bokhara tells the story of his journey, his imprisonment as a spy, and his release through the help of a Persian embassy sent by his friend Abbas Mirza. Throughout the book, Wolff introduces himself as a ‘mullah from England’ or ‘Christian dervish’ in order to create the persona of a deeply religious, altruistic person in search of a friend, rather than of someone on an official mission. In general, Christian-Muslim relations are not a main focus of the work, but it does contain a remarkable biography of the Prophet Muḥammad (vol. 2, pp. 7-23). During his imprisonment in Bukhara, Wolff was asked by the Sunnī mullahs to write a biography of Muḥammad from a non-Muslim point



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of view. He obeyed, and later added the story to Narrative of a mission. Generally speaking, his biography follows Muslim traditions, though with a few exceptions. According to his account, the Prophet’s mother Āmina did not originate from the Banū Zuhra, a branch of the Quraysh tribe, but from the biblical tribe of the Zarhites (Numbers 26:13), thus being of Jewish descent. Further, during Muḥammad’s childhood, the monk Baḥīrā (who in Wolff’s opinion was a Mandaean, not a Nestorian) predicted a great future for the boy and, when the two met again some years later, he instructed the young man in the ancient scriptures and introduced him to a Jew named Salomo, who told him about the Jewish expectations of the Messiah, an idea that stimulated Muḥammad’s imagination. Here, Wolff mingles Muslim and Christian traditions about the monk and his influence: he follows the Islamic account of Ibn Isḥāq and al-Ṭabarī by describing Baḥīrā as the one who predicted a great future for Muḥammad (though he says nothing about prophethood), and he follows in part the Christian tradition that Baḥīrā was known as Muḥammad’s teacher of the Jewish-Christian scriptures and more importantly as the co-author of the Qur’an, hence transforming the holy book into some kind of Christian heresy. But Wolff says nothing about this, and instead explicitly refers to the divine character of the Qur’an. Wolff depicts Muḥammad as a brave, just, eloquent and morally upright person and a good husband. He particularly emphasises his desire for knowledge and interest in foreign cultures and languages. Muḥammad emerges as an assertive statesman and victorious warrior, thus a leader in worldly matters, though Wolff says nothing about the religion of Islam. Curiously, ʿAlī, Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and later caliph, is described very attractively, and as the Prophet’s immediate successor. This represents a typically Shīʿī position. Of course, as a captive who could not risk his life, Wolff would understandably have given a predominantly positive description of Muḥammad, but the designation of ʿAlī as Muḥammad’s intended successor would not have been acceptable to the mullahs of Bukhara. Maybe Wolff added this detail later in order to show his gratitude to the Persian ambassador who negotiated his release. Whatever the case, the deliberate presentation of this complimentary biography to a British audience is noteworthy, though it must be judged in its historical context. Four years earlier, in 1840, Thomas Carlyle had published On heroes and hero worship, and the heroic in history, in which Muḥammad is represented as a heroic figure like Napoleon and JeanJacques Rousseau, and he is not a false prophet or a liar but a genius. This work was one of the earliest European attempts to establish a positive

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image of Muḥammad, and Wolff’s decision to include his account of Muḥammad into his narrative about his own exploits in Bukhara must be seen as in harmony with it. Significance According to the Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, Wolff’s biography of the Prophet was enthusiastically accepted by the emir and his religious scholars. The leading mullah of Bukhara is even quoted as saying: ‘It is remarkable with what prudence Joseph Wolff has contrived to state his sentiments without giving offence, and at the same time delivers with sincerity the sentiments of wise Christians with regard to our Prophet’ (vol. 2, pp. 24-5). Many copies were produced and sent to Kabul, Samarkand and elsewhere, though the full impact of Wolff’s work, both in Britain and Central Asia, has yet to be properly researched. Publications J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara. In the years 1843-45 to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly, 2 vols, London, 1845; 011600356 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara. In the years 1843-45 to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly, New York, 18452 (repr. Cambridge, 2014); 001235402 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, Dr. Wolff’s Sendung nach Bokhara zur Erforschung des Schicksals des Oberst Stoddart und Capitän Conolly, trans. E. Amthor, 2 vols, Leipzig, 1846 (German trans.); Geo.u. 528 eb-2 (digitised version available through MDZ) J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, London, 18473 J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, London, 18484; 011533414 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, Edinburgh, 18485; 009472223 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Wolff, A mission to Bokhara, ed. G. Wint, London, 1969 J. Wolff, Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, New York, 1970 Studies Flynn, Western Christian presence, pp. 817-57 Benno Herr

F.D. Maurice John Frederick Denison Maurice Date of Birth 29 August 1805 Place of Birth Normanston, Suffolk Date of Death 1 April 1872 Place of Death London

Biography

John Frederick Denison Maurice, generally known as F.D. Maurice, was born on 29 August 1805 in Normanston, Suffolk, England, the fourth of Michael and Priscilla Maurice’s eight children, and their only son. Although his father was a Unitarian minister, the family were not united concerning religious affiliation. His mother and elder sisters eventually abandoned Unitarianism, as did Maurice. Maurice received his early education from his father, and in 1823 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to study law. He took a first-class degree in civil law in 1827, but was unable to graduate because he refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Anglican statement of faith. Despite this, over the next few years he resolved to become a priest in the Church of England, and he entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1830 to prepare for ordination. In March 1831, he was baptised into the Church of England, and in November of that year graduated with a second-class degree. He was ordained to the priesthood in January 1834, and appointed to a curacy at Bubbenhall, Warwickshire, where he remained until January 1836, when he was appointed chaplain to Guy’s Hospital in London. Maurice was elected to a professorship in English literature and history at King’s College, London, in June 1840. In 1845, he delivered the Boyle lectures in London, which were published in 1847 as The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity. In his lifetime this was the most popular of his writings. When a theological department was established at King’s College London in 1846, Maurice was appointed one of the professors. In the summer of that year, he was also elected chaplain to Lincoln’s Inn, which afforded him the opportunity to resign from Guy’s Hospital. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, he was the spiritual leader of the ‘Christian

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Socialists’, holding that Christianity rather than secularist principles could provide the only sound foundation for the reconstruction of society. In 1854, he founded the first Working Men’s College to promote the ideals of the Christian Socialist movement. In October 1853, he was dismissed from King’s College because he concluded that no limit could be set on God’s love, including beyond death, and thus he could not accept that impenitent sinners were consigned to eternal punishment. He was presented with the living of St Peter’s, Vere Street, London, in July 1860, which he occupied until October 1869. In October 1866, he was elected Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University. In addition to this, in 1870 he accepted the offer to serve at St Edward’s, Cambridge, where he had no pastoral duties beyond regular preaching, though it also gave no income. His declining health led him to resign from St Edward’s on 30 March 1872, and he died just two days later, on 1 April, at Bolton Row, Piccadilly. He was buried in Highgate cemetery. Maurice married twice, first in 1837, and then again in 1849. His first wife died in 1845, leaving him with two sons, one of whom, also named Frederick Denison Maurice, edited and published a two-volume collection of his father’s letters. While Maurice’s influence on Anglican thought declined in the first half of the 20th century, it has revived since World War II, and he is now considered an important contributor to the Anglican theological tradition. Indeed, in the estimate of one author, he was ‘the Church of England’s most original thinker during the nineteenth century’ (Quinn, To be a pilgrim, p. 191).

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary F.D. Maurice and J.F. Maurice, The life of Frederick Denison Maurice, chiefly told in his own letters. Edited by his son, F. Maurice. With portraits, London, 1884 J. Tulloch, ‘“Broad Church”. F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley’, in J. Tulloch (ed.), Movements of religious thought in Britain during the nineteenth century. St Giles lectures, London, 1885, 254-94 Secondary B.M.G. Reardon, ‘(John) Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872)’, in ODNB F. Quinn, To be a pilgrim. The Anglican ethos in history, New York, 2001, pp. 191-4, 216-20 C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992, pp. 46-73 E.R. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists, Cambridge, 1987 B.M.G. Reardon, Religious thought in the Victorian age. A survey from Coleridge to Gore, London, 19802



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Illustration 2. Portrait of F.D. Maurice

T. Christensen, The divine order. A study in F.D. Maurice’s theology, Leiden, 1973 F.M. McClain, Maurice. Man and moralist, London, 1972 O. Brose, F.D. Maurice. Rebellious conformist, Athens OH, 1971 A.R. Vidler, F.D. Maurice and company. Nineteenth-century studies, London, 1966 A.M. Ramsey, F.D. Maurice and the conflicts of modern theology, Cambridge, 1951 L. Stephen, ‘Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872)’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Religions of the world and their relations to Christianity Date 1847 Original Language English Description In his 1691 will, Robert Boyle provided funding for the annual preaching of eight sermons, which he instructed should be ‘for proving the Christian

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Religion against notorious Infidels, to wit, Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans’. These sermons were to assist and encourage all who undertook ‘propagating the Christian Religion to foreign parts’. Further, the lecturer should be ready to address the objections to Christianity from the adherents of other religions (Maurice, Religions of the world, pp. 1-2; all references are to the 6th edition, 1886), and speak to anyone’s questioning whether English Christians were ‘really carrying truth into the distant parts of the earth when we were carrying our own faith into them’. Perhaps the other religions are more suited to their particular contexts than Christianity (p. 3). F.D. Maurice was appointed to deliver the Boyle lectures during a oneyear period 1845-6. They were subsequently published in 1847 as The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity. The 6th edition of 1886 is 250 pages long. It begins with 22 pages of prefatory material – title page, a word of thanks to the bishop of London who appointed Maurice to deliver the lectures, table of contents and the preface – followed by 250 pages of text in which he examines world religions, with special focus on Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and ‘defunct’ ancient Greek, Roman, Persian and Egyptian religious systems. Here our concern is what he says about Islam. Claiming ‘there are deep truths implied in each’ (p. 53), Maurice does not intend to discuss other religions in detail, but aims to disclose ‘their main characteristical principle’, to know what is good in them, and how that good ‘may be preserved and made effectual’ (p. 10). He will not consider them in their historical order, but according to the influence they have exerted over humanity. Then in the first lecture (pp. 1-33) he gives Islam the place of honour. Maurice commences his discussion by considering five explanations given in the 17th and 18th centuries for the success of Islam, each of which he judges inadequate. First, he says, although Islam is ‘essentially warlike’, this does not account ‘for its spread over so large a portion of the earth’. One must explain why Muslims have been ready to fight and die (pp. 1215). Second, human credulity cannot account for why Islam has spread and flourished. Although the human propensity to believe an impostor may help explain Islam’s success, it does not provide the key to the secret of its diffusion, vigour and permanence (pp. 15-16). Third, even though the Old and New Testaments must have influenced Muḥammad, and he must have gained sympathy among Jews and Christians ‘by professing his sympathy with much of the teaching in their holy books’, this cannot account



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for his success (pp. 16-18). Fourth, his character ‘cannot satisfactorily explain the charm by which his religion worked its way’. It must be explained why he had such a great and enduring impact upon humanity, more powerful than even the Qur’an, and which is all the more difficult to explain because of Islam’s strictures on the worship of human beings (pp. 18-21). Fifth, even Muḥammad’s rejection of idolatry and his proclamation of an uncompromising monotheism cannot fully account for Muslim faith and power (pp. 21-2). Maurice then asks whether Islam’s success is due to God’s righteous judgement upon guilty nations, for example, on the Christians of the East who sank into the worship of images, moral corruption, philosophical theories and religious controversies, not so different from avowed pagans. ‘The awe of an Absolute Eternal Being, to be obeyed as well as to be confessed, was passing away in some’, and ‘had scarcely been awakened in others’. What inspired Muslims was the conviction that ‘God verily is’, and humanity is God’s ‘minister’ to accomplish God’s will upon earth. This has been ‘the inspiring thought’, ‘the principle’ that has emboldened and made Muslims invincible (pp. 22-4). Yet, in Maurice’s judgement, Islam can thrive only while it aims at conquest, that is, by proclaiming the sovereignty of one God who employs humans to declare this and impose it upon the world. It does not proclaim ‘a great moral Being who designs to raise His creatures out of their sensual and natural degradation; who reveals to them not merely that He is, but what He is – why He has created them – what they have to do with Him’ (p. 28). Maurice says humanity has demands that ‘will not be satisfied by being told that [it] is the servant of an absolute Will’, but these demands must somehow ‘be reconciled with that great truth’ (p. 31). To explain how Islam is related to Christianity, Maurice considers it necessary to see it in relation to the Jewish side of Christianity, particularly as set forth in the Old Testament. From this we learn what are the important points of agreement between Christianity and Islam. First of all, as with Islam, the leading characteristic of the Old Testament is its witness to one living, acting, speaking and ruling Being. According to Maurice, ‘there is nothing in Christianity so primary and fundamental as this belief’ (pp. 133-5). Second, like Islam, the next most obvious characteristic of God in the Old Testament is that God makes God’s will known to humanity: God speaks and people can hear and obey God’s voice. Like Muslims, Christians have inherited this conviction from Judaism (pp. 1357). Third, Muslims believe that God’s utterances are recorded in a sacred

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book that has authoritative status. The Israelites also believed that God’s communications should be preserved in written form, a conviction shared by Christians (pp. 137-8). Fourth, like the ancient Israelites, Muslims have seen themselves as called by God to proclaim God and to put down whatever stands in opposition to God. Christians, too, have seen themselves as acting on God’s behalf (pp. 138-40). Fifth, in ancient Israel, the kings saw themselves as reigning by covenant with God, which the people also believed. Muslims similarly saw the caliphs as reigning in the name of God. The Byzantine Empire could not withstand the Muslim armies indefinitely because this sense was fading there, while Western Europe was able to resist because its kings saw themselves as reigning in the name of God (pp. 140-2). Having indicated points at which Christianity and Islam both have affinity with Judaism, Maurice next turns to discuss what distinguishes them from it. What is striking about the Old Testament record is that God continually declares God’s Name to humanity, which for Maurice means that God is not chiefly teaching humanity that God exists, but about God’s character, ‘what manner of Being He is’. The prophet’s task is to make known this character and how he and the people, as individuals and nation, fall short of this being in whose image they have been created, and whose Name it is their task to proclaim. However, this revelation could not be delivered in a book; it could only emerge in a gradual history of divine and human acts (pp. 146-8). Yet, this history is always pointing to completion in a person ‘who shall be the manifestation of God’, God’s perfect image, ‘who should establish righteousness, should open the unseen world, should unite earth and heaven’, and ‘establish a universal kingdom’. Christians claim this has happened in Jesus Christ. God designs that this should be made known to all of humanity and all people brought into this kingdom. All who acknowledge ‘the true King’ are commissioned to serve this end. This, however, was a power that manifested itself in weakness. ‘He who most proved Himself to be Divine, did so by becoming one with the poorest and vilest.’ This Loving Will is the ground of all things (pp. 148-51). Islam, in contrast, has regressed to the sole principle of God’s sovereignty, and ‘cares nothing for the gradual unfolding of a Name through a history of living acts’. The sovereign God it proclaims is ‘a mere Will governing all things’, ‘not a loving Will’. It witnesses not to ‘a Personal Being’ but to ‘a dead necessity’. The principle of God’s sovereignty, the ‘one, allsufficing maxim’ of Islam, was merely the starting point of Judaism and



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Christianity, both of which have adhered to a historical, progressive revelation of God, to the extent that at the centre of Christian faith is a man who was one with God (pp. 151-3). Christianity shares with Islam ‘the belief in an Absolute Living God actually ruling in the world’ who seeks out humanity. Islam’s weakness is that this is not accompanied by ‘other kindred truths, which belong to the essence of Christianity’ (p. 165), the chief of these being the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Christians, however, must not forget the great truth of a living and sovereign God taught by both Judaism and Islam. They must not sever their doctrine of Christ from this absolute and eternal ground, for ‘then that doctrine loses all its meaning, becomes a shadow, and not a substance – a dogma, not a living word’ (p. 156). Christians, of course, must use discretion in exalting and imitating aspects of Judaism and Islam (pp. 156-9). Despite this caution, Maurice goes on to say, ‘The Christian has no right to undervalue any good thing which he finds in any Jew or Mahometan; it flows from a principle which he ought to hold fast, and which ought to produce the same or better fruits in him’ (p. 159). He makes use of the Apostles’ Creed to demonstrate how Christians could acknowledge truths in Islam even while they have more to profess. If they ‘believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth’, they should acknowledge ‘that Will which Jews and Mahometans acknowledge as the ground of all things’, but also confess ‘it as a loving and fatherly Will’. If they ‘believe in Jesus Christ […] conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’, who ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried […] and rose […] from the dead’, they should also ‘feel and understand that there is indeed a Man who will reign over the world, and judge it as Jews and Mahometans teach’, but they will also profess ‘that this Man is the Son of God and the Son of Man […] who has already set up His throne in the highest region of all, and calls upon every voluntary creature in his heart and spirit to do Him homage’. If they ‘believe in the Holy Ghost […] the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting’, they should feel a divine power working in them to make them ‘more completely servants of a Human King and of the Divine Will’ and ‘more triumphant over death’ than Jews or Muslims could imagine (pp. 160-1). The terms of the Boyle Lectures required Maurice to address the missionary enterprise, which he does particularly in the last of his eight lectures. The earliest Christians did not go forth preaching Christianity. The essence of their proclamation was the crucified man as the Son of God,

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which is good tidings for the whole of humanity. Maurice commends the strategy of St Paul in Athens, who assumed that the Athenians were searching for God and worshipping God, even if ignorantly (Acts 17:22-3). They wanted a human image of God to supplant the images they had made for themselves. They wanted one who exhibits humanity in its perfection, and regarded whoever would do so as divine. Paul adapted his teaching ‘to all that was sound and true in the Greek mind’. He did not compel the Greeks to cease believing ‘in powers ruling in the Sun or Moon, or over any portion of the earth’, but only to acknowledge Christ as ‘the King of kings, and Lord of lords’. The Gospel was offered as the missing centre: ‘The Greek had a world without a centre; the preachers of the Gospel made the centre known to him. What could revolve about it, fell into its proper orbit; what determined to move independently of the centre, was seen to be unnatural and distracted.’ Early Christians similarly interpreted the Gospel in relation to other cultural contexts – Egyptian, Roman, and Gothic (pp. 219-24). Christianity, however, encountered one of its greatest obstructions in Persia’s dualistic Zoroastrianism. It was Islam with its proclamation that the earth is the possession of one God, who has no equal or rival, even an evil one, that succeeded here. The Persian Empire and Zoroastrian (which Maurice calls ‘Magian’) faith collapsed before it. Here, Islam witnessed effectively to one portion of the Gospel, ‘the kingdoms of this earth are God’s’, while it denied the other half, ‘and His Christ’s’. Here, Maurice argues, is a demonstration that ‘God can raise up the strangest instruments to do His work’, even if an essential portion of the Gospel is missing (pp. 224-30). For Maurice, it is vital that Christ is presented as the missing centre. However, missionaries must witness to Christ, not some limited perceptions of him. Their task is not to make Europeans of others, for Christ did not take on the nature of a nationality, but of humanity. The only effective proclamation is ‘the old Gospel that the Son of God the Deliverer of Man has appeared and will be shown hereafter to be the Lord of the universe’. The ‘absolute need all creatures have’ is ‘a Living God who will reveal to us Himself: what relation there is between us and Him; how He works to bring us to know His purposes, and to move in accordance with them’ (pp. 239-40). While Maurice believes that Christian disunity has damaged missionary efforts, he does not renounce mission. Since English people ‘were engaged in trading with other countries, or in conquering them, or in keeping possession of them’, communication is inevitable. It is therefore important to ask, ‘what kind of communication shall we hold with



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these people […] if they are spiritual creatures?’ Even more important, the claim that Christianity is for all humanity cannot be tested unless it seeks to relate to people ‘in all possible conditions’. To limit it to one nation, such as England, is not a sufficient test. It is important to engage with people of other religions to determine how well Christianity in fact addresses all humanity and ‘explains the problems of our human life’. Only in this way can it be truly determined that what Christianity claims to be true ‘is not of man, neither by man; but that it is for men, here and everywhere’ (pp. 246-50). Significance This lecture is the only place where Maurice deals with Islam. Even though his work is not grounded in actual encounter with people of other faiths, still, as Clinton Bennett has noted, ‘this book was a serious attempt by a young but eminent theologian to develop a theology of religions, based on those sources which were available to a scholar who was not a professional Orientalist and whose aim was to write a theology of religions rather than a comparative study of religion’ (Victorian images of Islam, p. 46). In that respect, ‘Maurice was one of the first mainstream British theologians to give serious consideration to a theology of religions’ (p. 47). There were critical responses to Maurice’s thinking about other religions (pp. 64-73). Some rejected his idea that Muḥammad witnessed to God, and that Islam could be anything other than a curse, refusing to accept his notion that something divine lies at the heart of other great religions. Others were positive towards what he said about Christianity aiding what is good in other religions while displacing what is erroneous. ‘Generally, though with several notable exceptions, Maurice’s theology was anathema to missionaries and to their supporters at home’, some seeing ‘his overall theological position […] as being itself inimical to the cause of missions’ (p. 66). One prominent exception is the Anglican missionary W.H.T. Gairdner (1873-1928), who served for nearly three decades in Egypt. He spoke with gratitude of thinkers such as Maurice, who ‘warm and help and fortify the lonely Christians who face Islam’ (quoted in Shelley, ‘Life and thought of W.H.T. Gairdner’, p. 56). For instance, he agreed with Maurice’s assertion that Muslims have been most successful when motivated by faith in a living God who wills and acts and impels humankind to act, but periods of ebullition have only been temporary, being followed by a state of apathy and stagnation. Like Maurice, Gairdner asserted that a larger conception of God is needed than ‘unconditioned, irresponsible, arbitrary Will-Power’ to produce a persistent effort

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by humankind to advance along a course shown to it by God, a course confided not to slaves who do not know what their Lord does, but to friends capable of feeling sympathy with the goal and of being fellowworkers in working it out (Gairdner, Reproach of Islam, pp. 136-8). Later in Gairdner’s career, while he still held that the predominant thought in Islamic theology is the will and power of God, there were new accents in his treatment of the Muslim view of God. He gave more attention to the spiritual dimension of Muslim faith in God, particularly as found in mysticism. In this respect, God is not so radically separate from his creation as Gairdner had formerly thought (Shelley, ‘Life and thought of W.H.T. Gairdner’, pp. 214-16). This became one of a number of aspects of Islamic thought and devotional life with which he had sympathy – points of continuity between Christianity and Islam that could serve as a preparatio evangelica, and which the Christian message and experience could enrich (Shelley, ‘Life and thought of W.H.T. Gairdner’, pp. 208-68). Similarly, Christopher Lamb has suggested that Maurice also influenced another major figure of the later 20th century, Kenneth Cragg (Lamb, Call to retrieval, pp. 15-16), who called Christians to retrieve what is true and wholesome in Islam and restore to Muslims the Christ they have missed. In concluding his study of Maurice, Bennett expresses regret that, apart from a few passing references in his sermons, Maurice never returned to this subject. Maurice must thus be criticised for failing to provide accurate information about the teachings and history of Islam and ChristianMuslim relations. ‘Further research would have shown that Islam can flourish without wielding the sword. It would also have shown more positive examples of interaction between Islam and Christianity’ (Bennett, Victorian images, p. 72). Publications F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, London, 1847; 008681708 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, London, 18482 F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, Cambridge, 18523; 011609858 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, Boston MA, 18543; 008681709 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, Cambridge, 18614; 008410302 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, London, 18775; 006524878 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, London, 18866; 007666806 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.D. Maurice, The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity, Cambridge, 2009, repr. of 1847 edition Studies F. Quinn, The sum of all heresies. The image of Islam in Western thought, Oxford, 2008, pp. 109-11 C. Lamb, The call to retrieval. Kenneth Cragg’s Christian vocation to Islam, London, 1997 Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, pp. 46-73 A. Hourani, Islam in European thought, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 19-22 M.T. Shelley, ‘The life and thought of W.H.T. Gairdner, 1873-1928. A critical evaluation of a scholar-missionary to Islam’, Birmingham, 1988 (PhD Diss. University of Birmingham) W.H.T. Gairdner, The reproach of Islam, London, 19092 Michael T. Shelley

Ernest Frederick Fiske Date of Birth 1815 Place of Birth Cambridge Date of Death 4 November 1850 Place of Death Cambridge

Biography

The exact date of Ernest Frederick Fiske’s birth is unknown but he is thought to have been born and baptised in 1815. He was the son of a solicitor, Thomas Fiske, and spent some time working in that profession himself. On 29 June 1836, he became Master Extraordinary to the Court of the Lord Chancellor, involving him in the execution of court orders and allied tasks. Fiske completed a BA in 1846 and MA in 1849, the year before his death, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was appointed President of the Cambridge Union in 1844, and was awarded the Maitland Prize for his extended essay titled ‘The respective peculiarities in the creeds of the Mahomedan and the Hindu which stand in the way of conversion to the Christian faith’ (Cooper, Annals, vol. 5, p. 24). The essay was published in Cambridge in 1849. Fiske died on 4 November 1850, aged 35, and was buried in Cambridge.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary The London Gazette for the year 1836, London, 1836, vol. 2, p. 1227 The Cambridge University Calendar for the Year 1844, Cambridge, 1844, p. 316 Secondary C.H. Cooper (ed.), The annals of Cambridge, vol. 5 (1850-6), Cambridge, 1908, p. 24 J. Venn and J.A Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses. A biographical list of all known graduates… from the earliest times to 1900, vol. 2, pt 2, Cambridge, 1944, p. 506



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The respective peculiarities in the creeds of the Mahomedan and the Hindu Date 1849 Original Language English Description Fiske was not shy of missionary activism and ‘the cause of Christian truth in the East’ (Respective peculiarities, p. v). Nor was the University of Cambridge reticent in this regard: the aim of the award for which the essay was submitted was ‘the propagation of the Gospel, through Missionary exertion, in India and other parts of the heathen world’ (p. v), and no less a person than the vice-chancellor, together with two other members of the university approved by the Senate, decided the winner. Addressed to the master and fellows of Emmanuel College, this extended essay, The respective peculiarities in the creeds of the Mahomedan and the Hindu which stand in the way of conversion to the Christian faith, comprises five parts in 147 pages. It won the Sir Peregrine Maitland Prize for the year 1848. Though it is called an ‘essay’, it really reads and feels like a book. It is structured in five parts, each with a number of chapters. Part 1 focuses on the elements in the Muslim creed that obstruct Muslim conversion to Christianity. Part 2 reviews the sacred books and religious sects of the Hindus, and also covers the caste divisions. It has the same aim of highlighting how these elements obstruct the conversion of Hindus. Part 3 examines the impact of philosophy on Islam and Hinduism, and Part 4 offers historical examples of change or transformation, especially where there is evidence of the influence of Christianity. Part 5 brings the discussion together by offering a summary without ignoring the positives in these religions that probably also account for the resistance of their followers to conversion. In his arguments concerning Islam, Fiske contends that, even though both Islam and Christianity are monotheistic, a number of factors keep them apart. The tone of his writing exudes the confidence of one who thinks that having political power is a sign of one’s own superiority and the superiority of one’s faith. The description of Islam is informed by a sense of absolute confidence in Christianity, and there is not much appreciation of any continuities between the Christian faith and Islam. This is

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clearly a far cry from the positions of many other missionary-Orientalists such as W.H.T. Gairdner (1873-1928) and J.N. Farquhar (1861-1929). For Fiske, what keeps Muslims from the Christian faith is a complex matter involving the characteristics of Islam as a theological and sociological system. On the theological side, the list is long: the assertion of divine unity excluding the Trinity; the notion and place of the prophetic office; the notion of direct revelation leading to the ‘sacred record’ (the Qur’an); and an eschatology without atonement. On the sociological side, again the list is long: strict ritualism; ‘despotism’; ‘the pleas of passion’; and ‘religious bigotry’. These, to Fiske, are traits of a ‘stable system’ in that it keeps Muslims trapped in their faith, but its disadvantage for the missionary is that it also prevents Muslims from responding positively to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Fiske shows a surprising level of awareness and knowledge of the context in which Islam arose and developed. Notwithstanding his rather dark description of Islam, he acknowledges the advance of the religious innovations under the Mughals (especially the Emperor Akbar, 1542-1605), Arabic literature, and the influx of philosophy in Islam, but he remains uninterested in the significance of philosophy in the ‘protestant sub-traditions’ of the Sufi brotherhoods and Sufi works, such as the writings of the theosophist Ibn ʿArabī (1165-1240) (pp. 100-4). It is here, he says, that Islam creates a revolutionary space for rethinking the nature of divinity and humanity, but also permission to accord ‘a higher position’ to sainthood (arguably above that of prophecy), and with Jesus or ‘his reality’ (the logos) as the main object of veneration. Fiske concedes a grudging appreciation for some goodness in Islam only when he contrasts Islam with Hinduism, e.g. when he offers ‘a summary of the principle peculiarities in the two Creeds’ (p. 127). He considers the theism of Islam as ‘sublime’, but simplistically dismisses Hindu belief as ‘pantheistic’ (p. 129). He considers the Arab as possessing an ‘energetic temperament’ and displaying steadfastness in holding to his creed; in contrast, the Hindu is dismissed as possessing ‘dreamy indolence’ and oscillating between ‘mysticism and negative vagueness’ (p. 131). There is among the Hindus and the Muslims, he says, sufficient balance of religious demand and ‘laxity to gratify the passions’, all of which helps in preventing conversion (p. 140). Fiske does not end in hopelessness but rather in a grander vision for Christianity than his juxtaposed descriptions of Islam and Hinduism justify. Taking the example of the characters of St Paul and Henry Martyn, his



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encouragement to Christians is to regard the hindrances they encounter ‘as motives to increased exertion’ (p. 145). He ends with a fantastic picture of the future of Christianity: ‘the priests of Hindustan’ stand on ‘the banks of the Ganges’, ‘their dark complexion’ pointing ‘them out as natives of the land’; ‘yet they shall be priests of the Holy Catholic Church, with the Gospel in their hands’, the Brahmins (high) and Chandals (low) ‘with brotherly love and Christian charity […] bow […] before the Cross of the SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD [sic]’ (p. 147). He offers no such grand vision of Islam and Muslims responding to Christ. Significance This work and its context throw light on 19th-century English missionary attitudes and understandings, especially with respect to Islam. However, although it was published and gained some attention, it does not appear to have had particular impact. Its significance lies in the way it represents a whole religious and social attitude, and in the confidence it exhibits about the relationship between Christianity and the other faiths it discusses. Publications E.F. Fiske, The respective peculiarities in the creeds of the Mahomedan and the Hindu which stand in the way of conversion to the Christian faith, Cambridge, 1849 (repr. s.l., 2015) David Emmanuel Singh

John Muehleisen Arnold Johan Mühleisen Date of Birth 6 August 1817 Place of Birth Zell, Württemberg Date of Death 9 December 1881 Place of Death Cape Town, South Africa

Biography

Johan Mühleisen’s childhood and young adulthood were spent in Germany and Switzerland. He was born in the Kingdom of Württemberg and, after completing school, he trained as a Lutheran missionary at the Swiss Basel Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft from 1836 to 1840. In his early twenties, his life entered a new phase. He moved to England, where he added Arnold to his German family name, and was received into the Anglican Communion in 1841. He then spent most of the 1840s in various mission field roles. Half a year was spent in Jerusalem, where he was ordained on 17 March 1842 by Bishop Alexander of Jerusalem. He then served with the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) in various locations in East Africa and Abyssinia until 1844, after which he was sent to Bombay, India, where he was involved in preaching, and also, significantly, studying Arabic and Islam. The 1840s were formative years in his life, as he developed an interest in Islam and a determination to contribute to the evangelisation of Muslims. In 1848, ill health meant that Muehleisen Arnold had to return to England, where he devoted the next decade to a prolific output of written works. He also took on a range of roles. He founded the Moslem Mission Society in London in 1850, while also taking up the post of chaplain at St Mary’s Hospital, London, serving there from 1852 to 1861. Along the way, Muehleisen Arnold undertook doctoral studies at Tübingen University, completing a thesis on a comparative study of Christianity and other faiths. During these years, he was active in scholarly associations, being appointed a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, a member of the Egyptian Literary Association, and a member of the German Oriental Society. In the early 1860s, Muehleisen Arnold returned to the mission field for a final and extended phase of his life. This time, he went first to the Dutch



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East Indies, where he took up the post of British consular chaplain in Batavia. He became proficient in the Malay language, and in 1870 founded the Malay Christian newspaper Biang-Lala (‘Rainbow’). After a brief sojourn in London in 1875, Muehleisen Arnold moved to Cape Town in South Africa, where he was appointed rector of St Mary’s Church, Papendorp. This parish had been founded in 1859 to focus on evangelism among the Cape Malay community. Muehleisen Arnold was sent there by the CMS as it was considered that his experience in Java and other Muslim locations would equip him well for working among Cape Malays. He served there until his death in 1881. Muehleisen Arnold was a prolific author. Many of his general works show an inclination towards apologetics, which was to influence his writings on Islam. Notable among them are English biblical criticism, and the authorship of the Pentateuch, from a German point of view (2nd edition 1864), and Genesis and science: or, the first leaves of the Bible (London, 1875). His very first book was based on his doctoral dissertation and provided an early window into his views of Islam, shaped by his experience in the mission field. In True and false religion (1853), a study and assessment of the world’s religions, Muehleisen Arnold distinguished between genuine religion (Christianity) and other faiths, relating the distinction to the issue of universal relevance: Genuine Religion bore its national character no longer than was absolutely necessary; and it is the only system of Religion which bears this universal character; for even the Religion of Islam has only the appearance, but not the reality, of this universality. But what it could not have, partly on account of its dogma of predestination, partly on account of its ritual, it would substitute by a fanatical application of external force. (p 189)

In this work, Muehleisen Arnold focuses in on the question of polygamy as evidence of stark differences between Christianity and Islam: We are rather compelled to look upon polygamy as contrary to nature, which is further evident from the fact that polygamy does away with, or leaves scarcely a shadow behind, of spiritual love in the marriage state. The external part of marriage is altogether the ruling one in polygamy; this, again, is very significant in the religion of Islam and other systems of spurious Religion. Christianity is a spiritual Religion, and the spirit of genuine Religion only could bring marriage back into the sphere of the Spirit. (pp. 264-5)

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Muehleisen Arnold’s writings on Islam also involved calling Christians to serve in mission, as seen in his short work, albeit with a long title, The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Moslems, in connection with the Church of England; its first appeal on behalf of the 186 millions of Mohamedans (London, 1860). His last work was based on his service in Cape Town, and particularly considered methods of evangelistic approach to the local Cape Malay community. It was entitled Kind words and loving counsel to the Malays and other Moslems (1879) though, despite its title, its pages include the same kind of comparative discussion of Christianity and Islam that advantaged the former, as had been seen in his earliest writings. An example from Kind words is as follows: Christians became a church, that is, a company of the people who love and serve the true God amongst all nations – people of peace, people of truth, who love no kind of slavery, because all people had been called to enter together as one family into the House of God. […] The Moslems, on the other hand, have conquered many countries, have made themselves kings by violence, they delight in fighting and conquering and bringing people to slavery. […] They follow Ishmael who was a fighting man, and a man of this world, who was born of a concubine through the lust of the flesh, who was not the promise of God. (p. 5)

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J.M. Arnold, The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Moslems, in connection with the Church of England; its first appeal on behalf of the 186 millions of Mohamedans, London, 1860 J.M. Arnold, ‘A mission amongst the Malays of Cape Town’, The Mission Field (2 July 1877) 245-8 Moslem Mission Society [J.M. Arnold], Special appeal for its work among the Malays of South Africa, London, 1877 J.M. Arnold, Kind words and loving counsel to the Malays and other Moslems, Cape Town, 1879 Letter to the editor by ‘A Moslem’, ‘In Memoriam. J.M. Arnold, D.D.’, The Cape Times (13 December 1881), p. 3, col. 8 ‘In Memoriam. Reverend J.M. Arnold, B.D., Ph.D.’, The Mission Field (1 May 1882) 161-2 Secondary ‘Christ Church Watney Street (1841-1951)’; www.stgitehistory.org.uk/chchwatneystreet.html



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J. Smith, ‘The life, work and legacy of Carl Pfander, 19th century apologist to Islam’, Melbourne, 2017 (PhD Diss. Australian College of Theology), pp. 130-1 E. Salie, ‘Christian missionary discourse, propaganda, and “Die verdommde cruis”. An analysis of Reverend Dr. J.M. Arnold’s mission to Muslims in colonial Cape Town, 1875-1881’, in E. Salie, Orientalism, European hegemony, Christianity and Islam in the Western Cape, South Africa, c.1806-1880s, (s.l.) 2016, 118-52; https://www.academia.edu/31106646/ Christian_Missionary_Discourse_Propaganda_and_Die_verdommde_ cruis_An_analysis_of_Reverend_Dr._J._M._Arnold_s_mission_to_Mus lims_in_colonial_Cape_Town_1875-1881 N. Gunson and J. Godschalk, ‘Manuscript XXVIII. An early ethnography of the Geelvink Bay people, West New Guinea’, The Journal of Pacific History 49 (2014) 95-121 T. Etefa, Integration and peace in East Africa. A history of the Oromo nation, New York, 2012, pp. 140-2 A. Lake, ‘All Saints Jakarta, 1819-2002. From mission station to international church’, Melbourne, 2003 (MTh Diss. Australian College of Theology) D.A. Pratt, ‘The Anglican Church’s mission to the Muslims in Cape Town during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A study in the changes of missiological methods and attitudes’, Grahamstown, 1998 (MTh Diss. Faculty of Divinity, Religion and Theology, Rhodes University) A. Badham, ‘History of St. Mary’s Woodstock’, Cape Town, 1989 (BA Diss. University of Cape Town) Art. ‘Mühleisen-Arnold, John’, in D.C. Gilman, H.T. Peck and F.M. Colby (eds), The New International Encyclopædia, vol. 12, New York, 1903, 685 W.T. Gidney, The history of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, from 1809 to 1908, London, 1908 Anon., ‘Batavia’, Berigten van de Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging 9 (1868) 131-3

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Ishmael. A natural history of Islamism and its relation to Christianity Date 1859 Original Language English Description This work appeared in three editions, Ishmael. A natural history of Islamism and its relation to Christianity, 1859, 524 pages, The Koran and the Bible, or Islam and Christianity, 1866, 496 pages, and Islam. Its history,

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character, and relation to Christianity, 1874, 414 pages. The first sentence in the Preface to the first edition provides a revealing window into Muehleisen Arnold’s view of Islam, expressed in the context of the Indian mutiny of 1857-8: ‘Had it not been for the recent outbursts of Moslem fanaticism, it would almost have been forgotten, that Islamism maintains an unequivocally hostile relation to Christianity’ (p. v). Muehleisen Arnold’s views of Islam relate not only to the perceived behaviour of Muslims, but also the essential teachings of the faith, which he regarded as heresy. This can be seen in the following quotation. A cursory view of those heresies which successively denied the Divinity of Christ before the days of Mohammed, will convince us that Islamism merely reproduced and extended the already existing elements of apostacy [sic] in a new form, instead of striking out a fresh path of religious error. We should however be much mistaken, if we were understood to place Islamism on a level with those heresies which were now and then ejected from the body of the Church, but we recognize in its system a rank and most pernicious apostacy [sic] of a peculiar type. Whilst Islamism however introduced a new element of delusion, it gathered up and embodied the characteristic principle of those heresies, which denied the Godhead of the Redeemer. (pp. 3-4)

Muehleisen Arnold’s objections to Islam had diverse aspects, but at the centre lay the Islamic view of Jesus Christ: ‘However indefinite and multiform their system may have been, one thing was clear and decided, that they denied the Godhead of Christ and lowered Him to the level of mortal man’ (p. 6). As far as Muehleisen Arnold was concerned, earlier Christian heresies had laid the groundwork for Islamic views of Christianity. That the creed of Mohammed absorbed the various heresies which denied the Divinity of Christ is evident, from the fact that they vanish from the Church on the rise of Islamism; and it is not less remarkable that they remained dormant till the 13th century, when Islamism sustained a fatal blow by the dissolution of the Kaliphate in the year A.D. 1258. (p. 13)

However, Muehleisen Arnold was at pains to stress that Christianity and Islam do not share a family relationship but rather come from quite different origins. Islamism is organically connected with the worst kinds of Christian heresy, but to assume it to be a Christian heresy, as some writers have done, is to take for granted that it sprang up within the Church, and that Mohammed himself was an apostate from the Christian faith. […] [However] the Church […] does not by any means establish the creed of Mohammed to be



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a Christian sect; heresy according to its etymological signification implying a separation or departure from orthodox faith and practice. (pp. 14-15)

Muehleisen Arnold’s appraisal of Islam is drawn from an acceptance of the literal historicity of Old Testament records, about which he writes: the sons of Israel and the sons of Ishmael to this day stand in the world as two separate and distinct nations, unchanged from what they were in the pristine ages of their existence, retaining their ancient manners and customs to a considerable extent, and what is still more remarkable, their distinctive peculiarities of character. (p. 27)

His commitment to evangelising Muslims is clear in his book, though Muehleisen Arnold sees the challenges as great: ‘Being inflated with gross superstition, wild fanaticism, inconceivable pride and a special animosity against the Christian, the Mohamedan is far more difficult to convert than even the Jew’ (p. 29). His perspective on the Prophet of Islam is given in especially uncomplimentary terms: ‘Mohammed the Arab Prophet must be considered a type of Antichrist’ (p. 93). And further: He [Mohammed] was the chosen instrument of the Evil One for the originating of an unparalleled delusion, which should maintain the most active and lasting antagonism to Christ’s religion; and direct satanic agency which in the course of time he vainly persuaded himself to be the inspiration of Heaven. (p. 95)

Significance Of all his prolific writings, Muehleisen Arnold is known best for this study in Christian apologetics to Islam, published in three editions. Although each edition polished the language and expression of the preceding editions, the content and tone of Ishmael in all its editions remains largely the same. His approach was essentially comparative and negatively evaluative, one which advantaged Christianity over Islam in the eyes of readers. His work had an impact among the missionary community but received mixed reviews. An anonymous writer in the Cape Argus periodical of 10 February 1874, reviewing the third edition, acknowledged the rigorous methods of Muehleisen Arnold in providing footnote details and researching historical personages. However, he noted that where ‘the author has to supply from his own mind and judgment taking the facts of history into consideration as [to] the character (personality) of Mohammed as a whole and the relation of Islamism to Christianity, we deem exceedingly poor, one-sided and erroneous […] slight and unsatisfactory’.

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Muehleisen Arnold’s writings have been largely relegated to the shelves of libraries, occasionally consulted by researchers examining mission history. He represents a stage in the history of Christianity that has largely passed, but which represents an important thread in the fabric of mission history and in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Publications John Muehleisen Arnold, Ishmael. Or, a natural history of Islamism and its relation to Christianity, London, 1859; 32044018172221 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) John Muehleisen-Arnold, The Koran and the Bible. Or, Islam and Christianity, London, 18662; (OC) 101 f.48 (digitised version available through Bodleian Library, Oxford) John Muehleisen Arnold, Islam. Its history, character, and relation to Christianity, London, 18743; 32101073312124 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) John Mühleisen Arnold, Der Islam. Nach Geschichte, Charakter und Beziehung zum Christenthum, Gütersloh, 1878, repr. 1880 (German trans.); H.g.hum. 12 cg (digitised version available through MDZ) Studies Smith, ‘The life, work and legacy of Carl Pfander’, pp. 139-44, 170-9, 2257, 234-7, 240-7, 251-7, 262-8, 272-7, 282-3 Anon., ‘Review of Islam and Christianity’, The Cape Argus (10 February 1876), p. 3 Peter G. Riddell

John Davenport Date of Birth 8 June 1789 Place of Birth London Date of Death 11 May 1877 Place of Death London

Biography

John Davenport was born on 8 June 1789 at 8 Huggin Lane, London. His father was a silk manufacturer and dealer, with a warehouse at his home address. John was probably home schooled by his father to enter the silk business, though as a result of learning several languages including Arabic (there is no information about how or where he did this) he was able to earn his living by writing and teaching. He married Mary Anne Quick, daughter of the comic actor John Quick (The Gentleman’s Magazine 101 [1831] p. 474). He wrote books on such topics as aphrodisiacs, phallic worship, erotic physiology and impotency, which W.V. Murat regards as ‘serious and erudite’ and as containing ‘a great deal of interesting information’ (A study of erotic literature in England, Norderstedt, 2019, p. 90). He also developed an interest in Islam, which resulted in An apology for Mohammed and the Koran (1869). In later life, and especially after his wife’s death, Davenport experienced financial hardship and had to be supported by friends and by the Royal Literary Fund. He died in penury at 15 Alfred Street, London, on 11 May 1877. He is usually described as a Deist.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary A.S. Ashbee, Index librorum prohibitorum. Being notes bio-biblio-icono-graphical and critical on curious and uncommon books, London, 1877, vol. 1, pp. 87-9 (the only known biography of Davenport) A.S. Ashbee, Centuria librorum absconditorum, London, 1879, p. xiv (note on Davenport’s death)

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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations An apology for Mohammed and the Koran Date 1869 Original Language English Description Davenport’s An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, privately printed for the author in London in 1869 within Davenport’s network of ‘underground’ works on subjects that mainstream publishers would not risk printing. It is 182 pages long, divided into four sections: ‘Mohammed: a biography’; ‘The Koran and its morality’; ‘Charges against Mohammed refuted’; and ‘Beauties of the Koran’. An indication of Davenport’s approach is given by his quotation from Thomas Carlyle: ‘I confess I can make nothing of the critics of these times, who would accuse Mohammed of deceit prepense; of conscious deceit generally’ (On heroes, heroworship, and the heroic in history, London, 1841, p. 106). Davenport states in the Preface that Muḥammad’s claims should not be ‘examined and criticised’ from a Christian and modern point of view, ‘but from an Eastern one’ (1882, p. iii; the references that follow are all to this edition unless otherwise stated). He should be judged as a 7th-century religious reformer, and as such merits being ‘acknowledged as the greatest man whom Asia can claim as her son’. When the change in the Arabian Peninsula after his appearance is examined, ‘to attribute his advent to mere chance would be to doubt the over-ruling power of Divine Providence’ (p. iv). In section 1, ch. 1 (pp. 1-22) begins with a description of Muḥammad’s life up to the time of his early ministry in Mecca. Davenport gives a reasonably conventional account, and makes clear that Muḥammad’s experience of revelation was real: he became ‘subject to dreams, ecstasies and fancies’ (p. 14), which could have been ‘swoons connected with a morbid excitability’, though they were not epilepsy, and the angel appeared with the first revelation. The authenticity of this and subsequent revelations is proved by the fact that his first converts were among his closest friends and family, who knew him and would have been aware of any inconsistencies in his conduct. In this chapter, Davenport cites as sources Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5 (1788), George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an (1734), and Charles Forster’s Mahometanism unveiled (1819). Davenport credits one passage describing the Kaʿba to Johann Ludwig



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Burckhardt (d. 1817), though without referencing the source (p. 5; this is also cited by other contemporary authors, who likewise omit mention of the source, e.g. G. Bush, The life of Mohammed, New York, 1858, p. 215). Ch. 2 (pp. 23-39) continues the biography up to the middle of Muḥammad’s ministry in Medina, where he united in his person the roles of ‘monarch, general, judge and priest’ (p. 32). Referring to criticism of Muḥammad’s multiple marriages as proof of his sensuality, Davenport points out that for 25 years he had only one wife without any male issue, and now, as was permitted by the law, he took ‘the many wives he did’ in the hope of fathering a son (p. 26). His marriage to Zaynab, the wife of his former slave and adopted son Zayd, came after Zayd consented to release her from a marriage that was unhappy (the majority of critics hold that Muḥammad pressurised him into this), thus allowing Muḥammad to marry her legally. Ch. 3 (pp. 40-59) covers Muḥammad’s correspondence with various foreign rulers, his military expeditions, the Meccans breaking the truce they had made with him and his successful siege of the town, followed by events up to his death on 8 June 632. Continuing his defence, Davenport extols Muḥammad’s simple lifestyle, his generosity and eloquence, and quotes Thomas Carlyle on his sincerity: ‘The word of such a man is a voice direct from Nature’s own heart’ (pp. 53-4). He ridicules the legend that Muḥammad’s tomb was suspended by magnets at Mecca, and dismisses the language of writers such as Humphrey Prideaux (d. 1724) as ‘vituperative’ and various attempts to find the number of the beast in Muḥammad’s name as absurd (pp. 52-3). Section 2, which contains two chapters, begins with ‘The Koran’ (pp. 6385). Davenport gives an outline of its structure and themes, and emphasises its central importance in Islam: it ‘regulates everything, from the ceremonies of religion to those of daily life, [...] from morality to crime’ (p. 72). Muḥammad ‘confessed and adored an infinite and eternal Being, without form or place, without issue or similitude’ (p. 73), and had no time for priestly mediators. This was the teaching of Jesus, for whom Muslims have a high regard (p. 74), but Christians later invented the doctrine of the Trinity and their beliefs fell into corruption. They needed a prophet to reform their religion (p. 75), and this was Muḥammad, who did not set out to start a new religion but to restore and renew the religion of Moses and Jesus. Islam, the summation of the teachings he gave, unifies all areas of life (p. 80) and does nothing to offend reason.

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The second chapter of this section (pp. 88-126), which is untitled, covers Arab and Moorish contributions to science and philosophy, and acknowledges Europe’s debt to these achievements. Davenport repudiates the charge that Muslims destroyed the library at Alexandria, and contrasts Muslim tolerance and enlightened civil policies with many European and Christian acts of ignorance and barbarism. He provides a long list of these, contrasting British ‘misrule’ in India with Islamic rule there, and he cites the Ottoman sultan on the deceptiveness of the British: ‘No reliance is to be had on England; she buys and sells all mankind’ (p. 120). He concludes the chapter with references to injunctions in the Qur’an about truthfulness and honesty, toleration and charity. Section 3, which comprises one chapter (pp. 131-61), begins by reducing charges brought against Muḥammad to four: that he originated a false religion to indulge in his ambition and lust; that he propagated it with the sword, causing misery and bloodshed; that he offered his followers a sensual paradise; and that by legalising polygamy he encouraged licentiousness. Here, Davenport re-visits and expands on his previous defences of Muḥammad, who ‘was wholly free from the vice of ambition’. On the charge of sexual licentiousness, Davenport lists sexual misconduct among biblical figures, and goes on to exonerate Muḥammad of insincerity and imposture. On the second charge, he acknowledges that this may be true to some extent, but argues that, compared with Moses’s commands to slaughter whole nations, Muḥammad exercised mercy and spared women and children (p. 142) in a way that compares favourably with Christians, who have engaged in ‘ceaseless, bloody and unprofitable religious disputes’ (pp. 142-4). On the third charge, Davenport reiterates that Muslims interpret the Qur’an’s descriptions of paradise as figurative and not literal (pp. 153-64), and on the fourth charge, he again points out that polygamy was already prevalent in the Middle East and in Africa before the time of Muḥammad, who in fact limited the number of wives. Citing Montesquieu (1755), he also suggests that women mature much earlier in hot climates, and are ‘marriageable at eight, nine, ten years of age’. The final section (pp. 163-82) consists of qur’anic passages on a wide range of subjects, including charity, creation, God, reward and punishment, justice towards orphans and generally, the prohibition against alcohol, and the penalty for slander. Significance In a review of A series of essays on the life of Mohammed by Syed Ahmad Khan, E.A. Freeman commented that no copies of Davenport’s Apology



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could ‘be found in any of the regular publishers’ catalogues’ (Freeman, ‘Review’, p. 101), indicating that it did not have a large circulation when it appeared. Freeman accuses Davenport of plagiarising passages from his own History and conquests of the Saracens (pp. 42, 46, 55, and 59, copied on pp. 140 and 141 of the Apology), which Khan then cited. There is little doubt that these comments, initially anonymous, hurt Davenport’s reputation, at least as far as this book was concerned, and affected any impact it might have had in Britain. A review in the Church Missionary Intelligencer (July, 1872, pp. 193-208), ‘On Mahomet and Mahometanism’, contrasted what the anonymous reviewer called Davenport’s apology with William Muir’s facts, and suggested that Davenport’s enthusiasm for his hero had resulted in an offensive publication that could only hinder Christian mission. He doubted that Davenport was a Christian. The book had ‘the power to do evil’, the reviewer said (p. 197), and Indians should ‘bear in mind that it embodies the eccentricity of an individual, not the feelings of a community, nor the deliberate judgment of learned men’ (p. 197). In India, a missionary conference on Christian literature in Urdu and Hindi held in February 1875 lamented that Davenport and others were endorsing the ‘Broad Church Mohammedanism’ of Syed Ahmad Khan and Syed Ameer Ali Khan, ‘an educated barrister of the Inner Temples’, which was as far removed from orthodox Islam as Charles Voysey’s or John Colenso’s views were from orthodox Christianity. Missionaries needed to be better prepared to counter this by reading William Muir’s biography of Muḥammad, which Khan’s book had set out to refute (Conference on Urdu and Hindi Christian Literature held at Allahabad 24th and 25th February 1875, Madras, 1875, p. 20). Another review article lamented that Muslims in India ‘supposed’ that Davenport ‘was an eminent clergyman of the Established Church of England’ (Anon., ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’, Church Missionary Intelligencer [July 1874], 225-37, p. 225). On the other hand, Muslims embraced Davenport’s book enthusiastically and in its 1870 Urdu translation, which was financed by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, it became a best seller in India. Khan himself counted Edward Gibbon, Thomas Carlyle, Godfrey Higgins and Davenport among those Europeans whose ‘talents’ he would always ‘cherish and respect’ (A series of essays on the life of Mohammed and subjects subsidiary thereto, London, 1870, p. xxi). He cites Davenport on polygamy, Christian atrocities, epilepsy (a ‘stain on’ Muḥammad’s ‘character’), and the charge that Islam was spread by the sword as a ‘monstrous lie’. In 1880, the Native

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Opinion Press of Bombay printed an English edition. Likewise, Alexander Russell Webb (d. 1916), the leading American convert to Islam, identified Davenport’s Apology as among the books that ‘led him to see Islam as an instantiation of “rational” or “universal” religion [...] outside of [...] priestcraft’ (A. GhaneaBassiri, A history of Islam in America, Cambridge, 2010, p. 117). Known to be a Deist, it is likely that Davenport, who was not a clergyman, in company with some others from the margins of Christianity was able to develop a positive appraisal of Islam because he had no vested interest in defending, or remaining in good standing with, the Christian establishment. His book might not have been published were it not an ‘underground’ production, as were his books on erotica. Many people, too, would find Davenport’s allegation that colonial subjects did not benefit from British rule, but that it was oppressive and greedy, as objectionable as his view of Islam. Davenport’s most significant contribution to ChristianMuslim relations lies in his challenge to Christians to examine their own history and claims before criticising Muslims for similar conduct, and to ask themselves how faithful they are to Jesus’s teachings. He challenges Christians to recall the adage: ‘Those who live in glass houses should not be the first to throw stones’ (Apology, p. 135). Publications John Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, London, 1869; 011600359 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) John Davenport, Muʾayyid al-Qurʾān, trans. M.A. al-Raḥman, Delhi, 1870 (Urdu trans.) John Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, London, 1882 John Davenport, Tāʾīd i Muḥammad wʾa-Qurʾān, Lahore, 1891 John Davenport, ʿUzr-i taqṣīr bih pīshgāh-i Muḥammad va Qurān, trans. Ghullām Riz̤ā Sa‌ʾīdī, Tehran, 1956, repr. 1965, 1969 (Persian trans.) John Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, Ghum, Iran, 1971 John Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, Lahore, 1975 John Davenport, ʿUzr-i taqṣīr bih pīshgāh-i Muḥammad va Qurān, trans. Ghullām Riz̤ā Sa‌ʾīdī, Tehran. 2009 (Persian trans.) John Davenport, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran, London, 2013 (with Introduction by Amina Inloes)



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Studies A.A. Powell, Scottish Orientalists and India. The Muir brothers, religion, education and empire, Woodbridge, 2010, pp. 201, 207, 212, 217 n. 23 E.A. Freeman, ‘Review of A series of essays on the life of Mohammed and subjects subsidiary thereto, By Syed Khan Bahadur’, British Quarterly Review 55 (January 1872) 100-35 Clinton Bennett

Matthew Arnold Date of Birth 24 December 1822 Place of Birth Laleham, Middlesex (present-day Surrey) Date of Death 15 April 1888 Place of Death Liverpool

Biography

Born in 1822 in Leleham, along the Thames from Windsor, Matthew Arnold was one of the most influential writers of the Victorian age, known for his poetry and criticism. He was educated at Rugby School, where his father Thomas Arnold was headmaster, then at Winchester and Oxford, graduating in 1844. In 1851, he became one of Her Majesty’s inspectors of schools, and remained in this post for 35 years. In the same year, he married Fanny Lucy Wightman, with whom he had six children. Part of one of his best-known poems, Dover beach, which was published in 1867, was written during their honeymoon. In his capacity as schools inspector, Arnold travelled widely through England, and realised the need for reform not only in education but also in the cultural and intellectual life of the country, which he regarded as tending towards materialism and lacking in curiosity. His prose writings, which replaced poetry as his main occupation in his later life, brought him public attention as the leading critic of his day Arnold died in Liverpool in 1888.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Matthew Arnold, Culture and anarchy. An essay in political and social criticism, London, 1869 A.P. Stanley, The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold, London, 1877 Anon., ‘Matthew Arnold’ (obituary notice), The Times, 17 April 1888 (repr. in Eminent persons. Biographies reprinted from The Times, vol. 4, 1887-1890, London, 1893, pp. 87-96) G.W.E. Russell (ed.), Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888, 2 vols, London, 1895-6 W.P. Herbert. English men of letters. Matthew Arnold, London 1902 Anon., ‘Matthew Arnold. December 24, 1822-December 24, 1922’, The Nation 115/2999 (1922) 708-9



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R. Garnett, art. ‘Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)’, in DNB Secondary L. Meglio, Religion as the key to culture. An Arnoldian interpretation of Victorian texts, 2011, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/meglio.html S. Collini, art. ‘Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)’, in ODNB C. Scheinberg, ‘Victorian poetry and religious diversity’, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Victorian poetry, Cambridge, 2000, 157-79 N. Murray, A life of Matthew Arnold, London, 1996 H. Fraser, Beauty and belief. Aesthetics and religion in Victorian literature, Cambridge, 1986 L. Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, a life, Cambridge MA, 1983 A.L. Rowse, Matthew Arnold. Poet and prophet, London 1976 J.H. Buckley, The Victorian temper. A study in literary culture, Cambridge, 1964 J. Hillis, The disappearance of God. Five nineteenth-century writers, London, 1963

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations A Persian passion play Date 1871 Original Language English Description Arnold’s essay, ‘A Persian passion play’, is a rare instance of a detailed analysis by an English writer of specifically Shīʿī aspects of Islamic history. Arnold delivered it initially as a lecture at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1871. It was published in the Cornhill Magazine the same year, and in Essays in criticism in 1887 (vol. 2, pp. 46-101). The 1887 edition is used here. The work centres on Shīʿī annual re-enactments of the passion and death of Muḥammad’s grandson al-Ḥusayn in the battle of Karbalāʾ in 680, when he, his family and supporters were killed by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazīd. Arnold had recently seen a performance of the Oberammergau Passion play, which portrays the life and passion of Jesus Christ. In the essay, he makes a comparison between the two, questioning whether the religious emotion witnessed in the Persian play presents a ‘better parallel’ to the Christian passion play than Greek tragedies. In this, he followed Arthur de Gobineau (d. 1882), whose works he used, and he also drew on Edward Gibbon’s The history of decline and fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776-89).

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Arnold gives an outline of the events that led up to al-Ḥusayn’s death, when ʿAlī, al-Ḥusayn’s father and Muḥammad’s cousin, was passed over as Muḥammad’s successor, and his supporters set up an opposition to the Ummayad rulers of the Islamic community. For Arnold, al-Ḥusayn and his followers, in their sacrifice of themselves and their families at Karbalāʾ, enacted a kind of representation of the sacrifice of Jesus, and also of the suffering of ‘our Indo-European kinsmen, the Persians’, who were conquered by the Arabs (p. 90). With the help of Gobineau, Arnold describes how the marriage of alḤusayn with Shahar Bano (Shahrbānū), daughter of the Persian king, Yezdejerd (Yazdegerd), united the descendants of ʿAlī with the Persian royal house. It was from this that the dramatic re-enactment of al-Ḥusayn’s passion emerged. For Arnold and Gobineau, the tradition of performing the play merits serious attention because it ranks alongside Greek drama in intensity (Latin, English, French and German plays are mere pastimes). Arnold makes frequent comparisons between Christianity and Islam. An example arises from the story of the meeting between Muḥammad’s cousin Jaʿfar and the king of Abyssinia, the Negus, when a small group of Muslims fled there from the persecution they were suffering in Mecca in 615. When the Negus heard their account of Muḥammad’s teachings, he picked up a piece of straw and declared to Jaʿfar: ‘Between your religion and ours there is not the thickness of this straw in difference.’ It is as though Arnold sees this as showing that Islam is equivalent to Christianity, dismissing all polemical theory that condemns Muḥammad as fabricating Islam merely to rebut Christianity. Other examples of comparisons are the scenes in the play of Joseph and Jacob, who are revered by both Muslims and Christians, being told by the angel Gabriel of the sufferings of ʿAlī and his family (p. 61), and of a Christian girl being persuaded to convert to Islam by Jesus, who favours the martyrs of Karbalāʾ (p. 88). Arnold evidently found Persian themes attractive. Before ‘A Persian passion play’, he had written the poem Sohrab and Rustum (1853), based on a story about the Persian hero Rustum and his son from Ferdowsī’s epic, the Shahnameh. Earlier than this, in his poem The sick king in Bokhara (1849), he echoed the French critic Ernest Renan (d. 1892) in referring to Islamic law as the most resistant to culture and religion, a bar to progress and modernity that causes the sickness of the king. This poem, in which the Asian king is not physically sick but is affected by the imposition of laws he finds impossible to follow, reflects Arnold’s aversion to orthodoxy



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in religion and the malpractices of clergy, exploring universal political and moral problems in an Oriental setting. Through his exposition and discussion of the play, Arnold presents ʿAlī and his family as devout believers, who unflinchingly put the principles of their faith into practice, so that their examples reveal the humane face of Islam and show that it is ludicrous to presume the essence of Christianity is absent from the religion of ʿAlī. The Shīʿī victims were mild, selfless and martyrs for their faith, exhibiting qualities that drew individuals to them and made them popular among ordinary people. Significance Compared with other works on Shīʿī Islam by Europeans at this time, the essay shows acute awareness of the inner spiritual aspects of Shīʿism. When many contemporary writers referred to Shīʿism, they merely pointed to the initial schism between Sunnīs and Shīʿīs that had resulted from disagreements over who should lead the Muslim community following Muhammad’s death. In contrast, Arnold regarded both religions as indistinguishable in their teachings and code of life, and demonstrated that Islam is fundamentally conducive to goodness. He praised Muḥammad for his religion, his ethical vitality, his hatred of idolatry and his right judgment, and rejected the polemical view that Muḥammad’s message represents a mere rehashing of Judaism. Known to have admired Baruch Spinoza (d. 1677), Arnold believed in universal values, the worth of all people, and the ability to distinguish moral right from wrong. As one who did not follow Anglican orthodoxy closely, he was in a position to see good outside his own church, and to acknowledge and celebrate it. Publications Matthew Arnold, ‘A Persian passion play’, Cornhill Magazine 24 (1871) 668-87; 000522322 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Matthew Arnold, ‘A Persian passion play’, in M. Arnold, Essays in criticism, London, 1887, vol. 2, 46-101 Matthew Arnold, ‘A Persian passion play’, in M. Arnold, Essays in criticism, London, 1895, 223-64 Matthew Arnold, ‘A Persian passion play’, in M. Arnold, Essays in criticism, London, 1898, 223-64; 100480543 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.H. Super (ed.), The complete prose works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 7. God and the Bible, Ann Arbor MI, 1970, 30-9

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Matthew Arnold, ‘A Persian passion play’, in M. Arnold, Essays in criticism, Stockton CA, 2002, 46-101 S.F. Zaidi, Victorian literary Orientalism, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 145-63 Studies G. Nash, ‘Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan’s and Matthew Arnold’s quest for the religion of modernity’, Religion & Life 46 (2014) 25-50 S.F. Zaidi, Victorian literary Orientalism, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 97-108 Scheinberg, ‘Victorian poetry and religious diversity’, 157-79 M.W.R Jarrett-Kerr, ‘Arnold versus the Orient. Some footnotes to a disenchantment’, Comparative Literature Studies 12 (1975) 129-46 M. Gail, Persia and the Victorians, London, 1951, pp. 57-8, 120-1 Syed Faiz Zaidi

E.A. Freeman Edward Augustus Freeman Date of Birth 2 August 1823 Place of Birth Harborne, Staffordshire Date of Death 16 March 1892 Place of Death Alicante, Spain

Biography

Edward Augustus Freeman was born in Harborne, now part of Birmingham, England, the son of John Freeman and his wife Mary Anne. His father died in 1824, and his grandmother assumed the care of him and his siblings. After attending private boarding schools, he matriculated on a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1841 (having lost a scholarship contest the previous year to Matthew Arnold). Attracted by the Oxford Movement, he contemplated ordination. He decided against this, but remained interested in church issues throughout his life. He graduated in 1845, and was elected a probationary fellow at the college (J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, Oxford, 1888, vol. 2, p. 493). In 1847, he married Eleanor Gutch, daughter of his former school master. He pursued an academic career at Oxford, and in 1884 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, nominated by his friend William Gladstone. Freeman stressed that politics and history are inseparable, famously saying ‘History is past politics and politics present history’ (Lectures to American audiences, Philadelphia, 1882, pp. 207-8). He was a prolific writer, contributing hundreds of reviews and articles to journals. He is mainly known for his five-volume The history of the Norman conquest, its causes and results, published between 1870 and 1876. With his son-in-law, Sir Arthur Evans (d. 1941) the archaeologist, he campaigned in favour of Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman state following the uprising in 1878. Known for his antisemitic views, Freeman, who always referred to Benjamin Disraeli in private correspondence as ‘the Jew’ and never by name (Wohl, ‘Ben JuJu’, p. 89), also believed that Turks had no place in Europe. In accord with this, he wrote The Turks in Europe (1877), and expressed typical Orientalist views about European progress and Eastern

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stagnation in The history and conquests of the Saracens, originally published in 1856 (revised in 1877) as a contribution to the ‘Eastern question’. He also wrote The Ottoman power in Europe (1877) and a review of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s A series of essays on the life of Mohammed (1870), in which he appraised a series of recent works on Islam. Freeman received a number of honours for his anti-Ottoman campaigning. His dislike of Disraeli and of Muslims was informed by ideas of Aryan supremacy. Some impressions of the United States (1883) reveals how racist theory influenced his observations on a visit there. For him, Englishness was inextricably intertwined with a Teutonic identity. He died in Spain on 16 March 1892, having travelled there for health reasons.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E.A. Freeman, Some impressions of the United States, New York, 1883 W.R.W. Stephens, The life and letters of Edward A. Freeman, 2 vols, London, 1895 E.A. Freeman, Essays of Freeman, Froude, Gladstone, Newman, Stephen, etc., New York, 1909 Secondary G.A. Bremner and J. Conlin, Making history. Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian cultural politics, Oxford, 2016 F. Barlow, art. ‘Freeman, Edward Augustus’, in ODNB A.S. Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”. Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian political cartoon’, Jewish History 10 (1996) 89-134 J.W. Burrow, ‘Introduction’, in E.A. Freeman, The history of the Norman conquest of England, London, 1974, xi–xxxi W. Hunt, art. ‘Freeman, Edward Augustus’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Islam in the works of E.A. Freeman Date 1856, 1872 Original Language English Description E.A. Freeman’s attitudes towards Muḥammad and Islam are mainly to be found in The history and conquests of the Saracens, which was first published in 1856. Some years later, in 1872, he wrote a review article on recent works about Muḥammad for The British Quarterly Review, in



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which he repeated many of his earlier thoughts and also added significant new ones, making this a virtual supplement to his earlier work. The six chapters that make up The history and conquests of the Saracens are essentially lectures delivered to the Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh in 1855. These are: ‘The world at the coming of Mahomet’ (pp. 1-37); ‘Mahomet and his creed’ (pp. 38-73); ‘The undivided caliphate’ (pp. 74-114); ‘The Saracens in the east’ (pp. 115-60); ‘The Saracens in the west’ (pp. 161-202); ‘The later dynasties of Persia and India’ (pp. 203-18). Twenty years after the first edition, Freeman produced a second edition in 1876, with a new preface. This was followed by a third edition in 1877, from which the citations below are taken unless otherwise stated. In the first edition, Freeman suggests that there may be an advantage in such a treatise as this being written by someone such as himself who was ‘not an Oriental scholar’. Since he looked ‘at Eastern history through Western eyes’ and was naturally inclined to give most attention to the parts of ‘the subject which, either in the way of connection or contrast, possess some bearing upon the history of the West’, he thought his survey might ‘be acceptable to a considerable class of readers’ (1856 edition, p. xxi). He indicates that he is drawing on his own article ‘Mahometanism in the East and West’ (The North British Review 23/46 [1855] 449-80), which was a review of William Erskine’s A history of India under the first two sovereigns of the house of Taimur, Babur and Humayun (1854), and E.S. Creasy’s History of the Ottoman Turks (1854). In his preface to the second and third editions, Freeman points out that, at the time he was working on his lectures, the ‘people of southeastern Europe were striving for freedom [...] from the foulest tyranny on earth’ (1876 edition, p. ix). Yet the Prime Minister (Benjamin Disraeli) was making ‘the evil deeds of the oppressors a subject of brutal merriment’, and was trying to hide the truth from the public (p. ix). It was a struggle between right and wrong and Disraeli, in supporting the Ottomans, was on the wrong side (p. x). Even the best Islamic government could not allow non-Muslims ‘real political equality’ because this was contrary to Islam’s ‘first principles’ (p. x), and any Turks who wanted ‘reform and toleration’ were actually violating the teaching of their own religion. Here, Freeman was communicating his concern about recent events in Bulgaria, where, during a revolt, Christians had been massacred by the Ottoman rulers. Neither the Foreign Secretary nor Disraeli was inclined to take the Christians’ side, and Freeman was setting out to show in his account of Islam that there could never be justice or fairness for non-Muslims

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under an Islamic government. In 1877, as a ‘companion’ to his History and conquests, Freeman published The Ottoman power in Europe (315 pages), which expands his view of the Ottoman Empire as despotic and his support for the creation of independent states in the Balkans. There, he argues that Britain could not afford to sacrifice ‘the people of Aryan and Christian Europe to an Asian mystery’ (p. xix), and claims that the Turks, ‘though [...] long settled in Europe’, never ‘became European’ (Ottoman power in Europe, p. 48). Islam and Christianity were not only rival faiths, but ‘religions which represent rival systems of social and political life’ (Ottoman power in Europe, p. 63), so there could never be peace or harmony between states that adhered to their different teachings. In ch. 1 of History and conquests, Freeman sketches the geo-political background to Muḥammad’s life, and also presents what he sees as characteristic features of the East and West. These inform the whole of his work. He contrasts the West as ‘progressive, legal and monogamous and Christian’ against the East as ‘stationary, arbitrary, polygamous and Mahometan’ (p. 3). Christianity in the West prescribes no single political system, allowing for the development of democracy, while the Islamic East ‘knows no government but the will of arbitrary rulers’ (p. 2). The East did produce ‘a sort of civilization’ but unlike Europe it then stood still, giving rise to a ‘sameness and monotony’ not found in any Western country (p. 3). Freeman’s early references here to Muḥammad describe him as a ‘wonderful man’ (p. 6) who left his stamp not on one nation alone but on ‘the whole oriental world’. However, he counters praise for Muḥammad’s success as a ‘reformer in the history of his own age and country’ with his role ‘as a destroyer in the general history of the world’ (p. 6). He gives the date of Muḥammad’s birth as 569 (p. 9; conventionally 570), and says he was born into a region that was dominated by the competing Eastern Roman and Persian Empires. He outlines pre-Islamic Arab religion, and refers to various Christian communities and to some Christians who worshipped Mary as a ‘sort of goddess’ (p. 27; an echo of Q 5:116). The Kaʿba, he says, almost became a Christian church two months after Muḥammad’s birth when Abraha tried to subdue Mecca (p. 27). Had Abraha succeeded, Muḥammad would have lost idolatry, which was the main spur that led him to begin his preaching, and history would have been different (p. 28). In ch. 2, turning to Muḥammad’s prophetic career, Freeman states that he wants to ‘do justice to the illustrious man’ whom he reveres along with other legislators and reformers, but he abhors Muḥammad’s destruction of Eastern Christianity, and his admiration for Muḥammad as a benefactor



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in his own ‘age and country’ does not mean that he sees anything of merit in his ‘degenerate disciples’ of later times or in the ‘modern Turk’ (p. 32). He credits Muḥammad for sweeping away idolatry in Arabia, but not for instituting Islam’s ‘law’ that is practised ‘beneath the spreading cupola of St Sophia’ (p. 31). He can admire and even love Muḥammad, but cannot bring himself to ‘love the Turk’. Among writers who ‘ventured to do some justice’ to Muḥammad, Freeman mentions George Sale (d. 1736) and Edward Gibbon (d. 1794). For himself, instead of writing a detailed biography of Muḥammad, his intention is to focus on ‘points [...] which [...] illustrate his character and mission’ (p. 33), namely the beginning of his mission in Mecca, his first use of arms and his ‘invitation to nations’ outside Arabia (p. 34). Thus, he outlines the first years of Muḥammad’s mission, when he attracted no more than a small group of followers, and nothing could be alleged against him that ‘a higher morality [...] could condemn’. He ‘may have been an imposter’ and his ‘virtues may have been hypocrisy’, but Freeman sees no reason to ‘assert this’ of a man whose ‘action creates a presumption in his favour’ (p. 35). Later, when ‘the persecuted apostle’ became ‘the triumphant warrior’, despite ordering the death of 700 captives (the Jewish tribe of Banū Qurayẓa in Medina) and marrying ‘multiple wives’, he never wholly abandoned ‘his old mission and old virtues’ (p. 36) and still remained God’s humble servant (p. 37). It was in Muḥammad’s later life, after his ‘appeal to the sword’, that ‘something [...] baser’ took hold of him (p. 40). He became unscrupulous, ‘cruel and perfidious’, attacking his enemies during the ‘sacred months’ and ‘producing’ a qur’anic verse to justify this (Q 2:194), and personally exceeding the limit of four wives, thus failing to obey his own law (p. 44). Was he, Freeman asks, an ‘imposter?’ (p. 46). Did he invent his mission or was it divine? Freeman thinks that only a ‘consciousness of really righteous intentions’ could have carried Muḥammad throughout his career. If imposture, it was carried out very impressively. But Freeman judges that Muḥammad was initially sincere. He ‘produced’ revelations that were not the result of ‘conscious fraud’ (p. 48) but, thinking that all his thoughts were impulses from heaven, he may have confused his passions with divine inspirations, suffering from a form of ‘self-delusion’ (p. 48). For pagan Arabs, Islam was an admirable development, but Muḥammad erred when he tried to spread it because it was a national faith that was ‘ill suited’ to be ‘transplanted’ beyond Arabia’s borders (p. 53). Christianity allows political freedom to develop local systems, but Islam imposes despotism. Islamic nations may be energetic at the beginning, but they quickly

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stagnate, so, while Muḥammad was undoubtedly his people’s greatest reformer and benefactor, more than ‘any mortal man’ he hindered ‘the progress alike of truth and civilization’ (p. 59). The remaining chapters cover the history of the caliphate. After describing the undivided caliphate, Freeman turns to the ‘Saracens’ in the East and then in the West. He sees tyranny everywhere. With the break down of strong central rule, Muslims became pirates and plunderers. Freeman’s British Quarterly Review article of 1872 was published anonymously, as reviews were at the time. In this essay, he reprises ideas from History and conquests, and also includes new material. He first comments on Syed Ahmad Khan’s A series of essays on the life of Mohammed (1870), and then goes on to survey other recent biographies of the Prophet. He welcomes the book as a ‘sign of a new spirit among [...] thoughtful’ Muslims (‘Review’, p. 100), though he thinks that Sir Syed was fulfilling Muḥammad’s bidding to make ceaseless war on infidels ‘in a new shape’. Sir Syed’s aim is to show that Islam provides a fully formed basis for religious and political systems and can meet other systems on equal terms. Freeman responds that Muslims are currently discontented under British rule because they cannot accept equality with people of other faiths. Given that there is consequently a struggle between Islam and Christianity, it is necessary for Christians to have a ‘right understanding of Mahometan history’ (‘Review’, p. 104). Few European scholars are equipped to rise to this challenge, though some such as Gustav Weil (d. 1889), Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893) and Sir William Muir (d. 1905) can take it up (‘Review’, p. 106). Freeman goes on briefly to discuss details of Islam that may loom large in Christian minds. He accepts the ‘essential genuineness’ (‘Review’, p. 113) of the Qur’an, but points to deficiencies in the sources for Muḥammad’s biography because they tend to be hagiographical and originated some time after his death. Nevertheless, based on these sources, a sketch of Muḥammad’s life can be attempted. As in History and conquests, he accepts that Muḥammad was initially sincere and took his followers closer to the truth. His early revelations contained no plan for a commonwealth or dogmatic teaching, and while Westerners might find them ‘incoherent and unintelligible’, they flowed from the mouth of a man ‘whose whole soul’ was ‘given to the contemplation of the goodness of God and of the ingratitude and wickedness of man’ (‘Review’, p. 117). Nothing but his firm conviction in his mission could have ‘borne him through the contempt and persecution’ he endured in Mecca, and his original message, if flawed by later standards, was an improvement ‘on anything which his



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hearers had heard before’ (‘Review’, p. 118). As Aloys Sprenger claimed, it is plausible that Muḥammad suffered from epileptic seizures that resulted in a ‘kind of hysteric madness’ (The life of Mohammad, Allahabad, 1851, vol. 3, p. xiv), though the early revelations do not show signs of this. Instead, William Muir suggested a satanic cause for Muḥammad’s ‘revelations’, but this is a religious inference and not historically acceptable. Freeman himself is inclined to see Muḥammad’s revelatory utterances as resulting from divine influence and, in the early phase of his life, Muḥammad can be seen as a ‘true servant of God’ (‘Review’, p. 119). Freeman contends that the form of Christianity Muḥammad knew was flawed. He knew of Jesus’s virgin birth, but other details about Jesus seem to be derived from non-canonical sources (‘Review’, p. 121). It is not surprising that he rejected some of the doctrines, such as the Trinity, as he heard of them in such debased forms. To Freeman, the Qur’an’s teaching about Judaism and Christianity is ‘strangely fluctuating and uncertain’ compared with its ‘unflinching denunciation of [pagan Arab] idolatry’. He cites as evidence the very different verses in Q 5:73, which promises Jews, Christians and Sabeans paradise if they believe in God and His future judgment, and Q 5:43, which accuses Jews and Christians of tampering with their scriptures (p. 121). Freeman dates the decline in Muḥammad’s character from the hijra in 622, and his appeal to the sword (‘Review’, p. 127). As he became a statesman and a warrior, Muḥammad allowed himself to yield to temptations, though even as his ‘heart was led astray by the acquisition of power’ he ‘retained most of his personal virtues’. He lived simply; he was generous and did not accumulate personal wealth. It was Muhammad’s ‘sexual laxity’ that most represents a moral flaw (p. 130). By the time of his death, he had given his followers a religion and a jurisprudence that were incomparably better than those they replaced, had swept away idolatry, ended female infanticide, and even improved the condition of women. It was when his system moved outside Arabia that it became humanity’s worst enemy, a blight on every land to which it spread. It contained enough truth to present a barrier to greater truth (p. 132). Yet, Christians should do justice to whatever is good in Islam (p. 134), and a Muslim such as Sir Syed should be admired for challenging Christians to meet on ‘the fair field of reasonable discussion’.

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Significance Freeman expressed typically Orientalist attitudes towards Islam, Islamic history and the life of Muḥammad. Although he rebuked William Muir for allowing his Christian faith to stand in his way as a critical historian, his own political and religious convictions are just as evident. In fact, his statements about European and Christian superiority represent classic Orientalist assumptions about a binary difference between Christianmajority Europe and the Muslim East. He summed these up by contrasting the West as ‘progressive, legal and monogamous and Christian’ with the East as ‘stationary, arbitrary, polygamous and Mahometan’. Nor did Muslims have the resources to succeed in reforming Islam, another popular Orientalist trope. Operating outside the Orientalist establishment, Freeman’s works provide an example of how pervasive Orientalist views were in 19th-century Britain. Subscribing to the theory that Aryan people were intellectually superior, his writings also reveal a distinctly racial bias. He believed that Turanians and Semites had ‘joined forces’ to oppose ‘the West, Christianity, and the Aryans’, and that Jews were part of this alliance, which explained ‘Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policy’ (Steinberg, Race, nation, p. 127). In the context of Christian-Muslim relations in 19th-century Britain, preoccupied as it was with its policy towards the Ottoman Empire and with the task of running its colonies in which millions of Muslims lived, Freeman’s writings would have confirmed the view of Islam as ‘stationary, arbitrary, polygamous’ and incapable of reform, which was already accepted by many in the United Kingdom. His status as an Oxford academic, too, would have added some authority to this evaluation of Islam as retrogressive and alien to European culture. On the other hand, his representation of Islam as benefitting the people of Arabia of Muḥammad’s time, and his unwillingness to accuse Muḥammad of imposture and a complete moral decline, might have enabled some readers to question the view that Muḥammad was a total reprobate, scoundrel and fraud. As an example of a thoroughgoing Orientalist appraisal of Islam, Freeman’s work remains important and, bringing together Victorian politics, race theory, Orientalism and other threads, is worth close scrutiny. However, his fear of cultural contact between Europe and the Orient hardly encourages mutually open dialogue and exchange between Christians and Muslims.



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Publications E.A. Freeman, The history and conquests of the Saracens, London, 1856 (repr. London, 1870) E.A. Freeman, ‘Review of A series of essays on the life of Mohammed and subjects subsidiary thereto, by Syed Ahmed Khan Bahador’, British Quarterly Review 55 (1872) 100-35; 000050440 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.A. Freeman, The history and conquests of the Saracens, London, 18762; 001865863 (digitised version of 1876 edition available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.A. Freeman, The history and conquests of the Saracens, London, 18773, Whitefish MO, 2004; London, 2015 E.A. Freeman, The Ottoman power in Europe, London, 1877, Charleston SC, 2009, London, 2017; 001246373 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies O.Y. Steinberg, Race, nation, history. Anglo-German thought in the Victorian era, Philadelphia PA, 2019 D. Bell, ‘Alter orbis. E.A. Freeman on empire and racial diversity’, in D. Bell, Reordering the world. Essays on liberalism and empire, Princeton NJ, 2016, 321-40 V. Morrisroe, ‘Eastern history with Western eyes. E.A. Freeman, Islam and Orientalism’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16 (2011) 25-45 Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”’ C.J.W. Parker, ‘The failure of liberal racialism. The racial ideas of E.A. Freeman’, The Historical Journal 24 (1981) 825-46 Clinton Bennett

W.R.W. Stephens William Richard Wood Stephens Date of Birth 5 October 1839 Place of Birth Haywards Field, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire Date of Death 22 December 1902 Place of Death Winchester

Biography

William Richard Wood Stephens was born at Haywards Field, Stonehouse, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, on 5 October 1839. He was the eldest son of Charles and Catherine Stephens. Delicate as a child, he was taught at home until he went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1858. He graduated in 1862 (Alumni Oxonienses, p. 1350), was ordained in 1864, and moved to be curate of Staines, Middlesex. In 1866, he moved to Purley, Berkshire, and in 1869 he married Charlotte Jane Hook, daughter of the Dean of Chichester, whose Life and letters he later published (1878). Through Dean Hook, he became vicar of Mid Lavant, West Sussex, in 1870, and lectured at Chichester Theological College from 1872 to 1875. From 1875, he served as prebendary of Wittering, near Chichester, which involved delivering lectures in the Cathedral. He was rector of Woolbeding, West Sussex, from 1876, and in 1895 he was appointed Dean of Winchester. In 1877, as a contribution to the ‘Eastern Question’ over British policy towards the Ottoman Empire, he gave lectures on Christianity and Islam, published as Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran. Other publications include The relations between culture and religion. Three lectures (1881) and The life and letters of E.A. Freeman (1895), who had strong antiOttoman opinions. Stephens died in Winchester deanery on 22 December 1902, and is buried in the Cathedral graveyard.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, London, 1877 ‘Obituary. The Dean of Winchester’, The Guardian, 31 December 1902, p. 4, col. 4 W. Hunt, art. ‘Stephens, William Richard Wood’, in DNB (draws on personal knowledge and information)



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Secondary W. Hunt, revised N. Banerji, art. ‘Stephens, William Richard Wood’, in ODNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran Date 1877 Original Language English Description Stephens’s Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran was published simultaneously in London and New York in 1877. The chapters had been presented in the form of lectures during Advent 1876 as a contribution to the ‘Eastern Question’, which revolved around whether Britain should oppose or favour the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Stephens explains in his preface that, if religious differences lie at the root of this question, then Christians, particularly specialists in theology, need to establish what these differences are, what difficulties they place in the way of Christians and Muslims enjoying ‘amity’, and whether and how these difficulties can be ‘surmounted’. He wants to do justice to Muḥammad and his religion, unlike those who see him as a ‘fiend’ and Islam as ‘diabolical’ (pp. vi-vii; all references are to the 1877 edition unless otherwise stated). On the other hand, he wants to show that the differences between the two religions are not of ‘degree’ but of ‘kind’, citing Matthew Arnold that Christianity shows ‘God seeking after man’ while other religions show ‘man seeking after God’. He says that some see imaginary resemblances that place ‘peace and goodwill between the rival creeds [...] on a rotten foundation’, but he himself will not ignore ‘real and vital distinctions’ (p. vii). Stephens lists the following among his sources: George Sale’s Koran (1743), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5 (1788); William Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1858-61), which he describes as ‘impartial, reverent and Christian in tone’; Aloys Sprenger’s Life of Mohammad (1851); Gustav Weil’s Mohammed der Prophet (1843), which was more readable than Sprenger; Reginald Bosworth Smith’s Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874), though its ‘partiality’ detracts from its accuracy and value; (p. ix) E.A. Freeman’s History and conquests of the Saracens (1876); and Joseph White’s Bampton Lectures (1784), which he considers a fair representation of the ‘narrow estimate of Mahomet prevalent in the

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last century’. He also cites several passages from George Finlay’s History of Greece under foreign domination (1857). Lecture 1, ‘The origin of Christianity and Mohammedanism. Sketch of the life and character of Mahomet’ (pp. 1-51), begins with an explanation of why Stephens intends to ‘contrast’ rather than to ‘compare’ the two religions: ‘contrast’ places two subjects which have some resemblance side by side to identify ‘points of unlikeness’, while a ‘comparison’ assumes some dissimilarity and looks for ‘points of likeness’ (p. 2). The former approach is best suited to ‘bring into prominent relief the vital differences between Christianity and Islam’ (p. 3). The old view of Muḥammad as an ‘artful impostor’ found in White, Humphrey Prideaux and ‘even [...] Gibbon’ is no longer tenable, though the pendulum is swinging too far in the opposite direction as some paint a too attractive picture of Islam. Such people seem to regard Islam with more favour in proportion to their ‘disposition to doubt or to reject the Gospel of Christ’ (pp. 4-5). Stephens sketches some apparent similarities between the two religions: both were founded by one person, who initially faced opposition; their scriptures bear some comparison in ‘sublimity of language’ and in teaching; both religions inspire followers with ‘proselytising zeal’ and have lasted for centuries. However, aiming to ‘discover differences’, he turns to an examination of Islam’s origins (pp. 6-7) and proceeds with an outline of the state of the world in 570 when Muḥammad was born. He demonstrates how, in Arabia, religion had degenerated into a form of monotheism that included worship of other deities, and how the various tribes were disunited and at war with one another. All the indications showed that the time was ripe for a ‘master mind’ who would unify the Arabs and annex neighbouring states (p. 14). That mind was Muḥammad, whom Stephens calls Mahomet as ‘the more usual European form of the name’ (p. 16). The biography of Muḥammad that follows traces the main stages of his life in detail. In the Meccan period, Stephens refers to the trading journey when Muḥammad met a Christian monk who may have taught him something of the Gospel, and his possible meetings with Jews and Christians at the annual fairs held near Mecca (pp. 17-18). In the Medinan period, he notes how Muḥammad’s changed status in the community led to both ‘worldly success’ and the beginning of a grave moral decline (p. 34). The earnest preacher became a ‘fanatical despot’ and it grew hard to distinguish Muḥammad’s ‘religious zeal’ from his ‘personal ambition’. Military expeditions increased so much that from about the fifth year of the hijra ‘the Koran becomes little better than a military gazette’ (p. 35). There



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is also an obvious trend in the way that every obstacle encountered by Muḥammad gave rise to its own ‘fresh revelation’. Near the end of his life, his dream was accomplished, Mecca surrended and the idols of the pagan cult were destroyed. Two years later Muḥammad fell ill and died (p. 38). Stephens goes on to compare Muḥammad with Jesus, always to Muḥammad’s disadvantage. He concludes with the observation that, although Muḥammad may have been a genius, everything about him was Arab and Oriental – Arabian sensuality, subtlety, dreaminess, frenzy, all ‘have their place [...] in the great prophet’s character’ (p, 50). In contrast, Jesus’s character showed no sign of ‘any nationality’ but was ‘universal’ and ‘eternal’. Lecture 2, ‘The theology of the Bible and that of the Koran contrasted’ (pp. 52-90), begins by contrasting the style of the Bible, which was composed by many authors but is essentially one book with ‘one divine purpose and design’ (p. 53), with that of the Qur’an, which ‘has no continuity of design, but great uniformity in expression’ (p. 54). There is no ‘coherence between the parts’ (p. 55), and only the Book of Mormon approaches it as a ‘travesty of the Bible’ (p. 57). Its one merit lies in its style and ‘partly in the truths which it inculcates’. Turning to the contents of the Qur’an, Stephens decides it contributes nothing new to understanding of the divine-human relationship. It shows that what Muḥammad knew about the Bible did not come from reading its text, but was probably ‘culled’ from the Talmud, Targums and Midrash and from spurious Gospels. This led to the assumptions that Christians worshipped ‘companions’ of God and their offspring, and that the Trinity comprised Father, Son and Mary (pp. 74-5). He declares that the teaching of the Qur’an can be summed up as ‘the submission of obedient fear to a power’, which ‘fails to meet the profoundest religions needs of man’ (p. 84). This places Islam not only infinitely below Judaism but also below Magianism and Brahmanism, ‘which in other respects it excels’. Lecture 3, ‘Moral teachings of the Bible and of the Koran contrasted’ (pp. 91-126), continues in the same manner. In every respect, the teachings of the Qur’an about individual and communal behaviour are inferior to those of Christian scripture. Stephens criticises Islam’s obligatory devotional duties for tying people to the rigid and precise performance of ‘certain religious functions’ which lack ‘intrinsic merit’ (p. 121), and for making morality ‘abstract’ rather than an expression of love for God and neighbour. The Qur’an fails to deal with sin as a whole, or to depict the fallenness of human nature (p. 123), while the New Testament teaches that

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people cannot be saved by keeping the Law but only through the death of Christ; the Qur’an teaches duty towards God, the Bible teaches love of God; the Qur’an teaches that salvation is achieved by following rules, which fails to foster either humility or hope. Lecture 4, ‘The practical results of Christianity and Islam’ (pp. 127-68), asks whether humanity has benefitted from Islam’s existence or is worse off because of it. Stephens refers to what he calls the ‘law of concomitant variations’, that if people prosper where a religion is strong but not where it is weak ‘there must be something in it that is conducive to prosperity’ (p. 128), and that if the opposite is true, there must be something that is averse to prosperity in the religion, which therefore ‘cannot be divine’. He argues that Islam may have come as a blessing to communities that were poor and disadvantaged, but when it has been imposed on ‘people possessing higher forms of civilization, and [...] a purer faith’, it has proved a curse. Islam’s ‘immediate effect’ among ‘barbarous races’ is to raise people ‘in the scale of humanity’ (p. 132), but among advanced people it has been an ‘enormous evil’ (pp. 132-3): tolerating no rival, it compelled people to bow before it and ‘exterminated’ the existing Greek ‘civilization’ to ‘destroy Greek influence’, and even in Spain, where Muslims carried the arts and sciences to a ‘higher degree of perfection’ than was achieved elsewhere ‘under Arab rule’, this was limited in scope and only benefitted the few (p. 135). Stephens argues that the decrease in the size of Christian populations under Islam was due to their extermination, not to their converting to Islam. In Persia, where Islam became the national religion, it might have flourished, but instead it split into ‘a multitude of contending sects’ (p. 138). Persians are the best educated of Muslim peoples, but their country is the least well-managed, and suffers from cruelty and famine. It is the Moghuls of India who provide the ‘most favourable example of Mohammaedan rule’ (p. 139) and Akbar the Great led a life unblemished by crime, but his standing as a ‘veritable Mussulman’ is questionable due to his eclectic religious ideals (p. 140). On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire has succeeded in making the populations under its rule ‘permanently miserable’, and much of its territory lies uncultivated and in ruins, even though it is richly blessed in natural resources (pp. 142-3). In a word, when it is ‘left to itself’, Islam has ‘the knack of consuming energy and retarding progress’ (p. 149). It is evident that Islamic states are generally less prosperous and less progressive than Christian states. The main reason is because of the three evils of polygamy, despotism and slavery, all of which ‘Christianity



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and Western nations abhor and repudiate’ (p. 155). While they pre-dated Islam in Oriental society, they are sanctioned in the Qur’an, with the result that, should moral or social reform take place, Islam would ‘cease to be Islam’ (p. 158). Stephens concludes by suggesting that, even though Christians and Muslims may live together side by side for centuries, it is the former who show they are ‘progressive’ and the latter remain ‘stationary’. The Church can ‘accommodate itself to every race’, but Islam remains tied to Oriental habits and peoples (p. 163). It would be difficult to reproach Christians for holding an ‘attitude of harsh hostility or contempt’ towards Muslims, though Christians should acknowledge Islam’s truths as well as its errors, and see Muslims as erring siblings whom they are ‘bound to honour, respect and even love’ (p. 165). Significance When Stephens’s book appeared, most reviews were positive. One reviewer in The Literary World 8 (1877) described it as ‘the best Christian introduction’ to the Qur’an he knew (p. 43). The Church Quarterly Review 4 (1877) called it ‘a well informed and dispassionate survey of the inherent and practical differences between’ the two religions (p. 278). M.P.L. in The Unitarian Review 8 (1877) thought that the book made too much of Jesus’s ‘supernatural character’, but considered it ‘interesting and valuable’ and conscientiously written in a ‘clear and attractive style’ (p. 451). The Library of the world’s best literature (vol. 30, New York, 1902) stated that Stephens’s estimate of Muḥammad was ‘fair for a conservative churchman’, but that his ‘statement of the position of Christianity’ was ‘less judicial and liberal’ than his ‘estimate of Mahometanism’ (p. 293). The book also attracted attention from Muslims. In A critical exegesis of the popular jihad (Calcutta, 1885), Chiragh Ali (d. 1895), a colleague of Syed Ahmad Khan, disagreed with Stephens’s remarks on Islam as ‘stationary’ and as too legally rigid (p. lxxxviii), and in The proposed political, legal and social reforms in the Ottoman Empire (Bombay, 1883) he also disagreed with the claims of Stephens and Reginald Bosworth Smith that Muḥammad sanctioned slavery (pp. 171-2). More recently, Mohammad Talaat Ghunaimi in The Muslim conception of international law (The Hague, 1968) takes issue with Stephens on his claim that Muslims are characteristically aggressive (p. 148). Christianity and Islam shows how popular Orientalist assumptions of civilisational, religious and even racial superiority were in Victorian Britain, where ideas of social evolution placed the Europeans at the

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top of the developmental scale. Stephens spoke with some authority as a Prebendary of Chichester, and added his theological voice to those of W.E. Gladstone and E.A. Freeman from the fields of politics and historical scholarship as a direct counter to the views of Reginal Bosworth Smith, who defended the Turks’ character and criticised Gladstone’s pro-Russian policy. The work is perhaps most significant as an example of how far a conservative Christian thought he could go in finding anything admirable in Islam. He perhaps assumed a position that lay between the almost total repudiation of Islam in William Muir’s work and what was then seen to be the overly positive approach of Smith, Davenport and others, who were dismissed as misguided and biased. Publications W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, London, 1877 W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, New York, 1877; 100139188 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, Dahlonega GA, 2002 W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, Piscataway NJ, 2009 Studies C. Bennett, ‘W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam’, in W.R.W. Stephens, Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran, Piscataway NJ, 2009, xxiii-xxvii Clinton Bennett

Monier Monier-Williams Date of Birth 12 November 1819 Place of Birth Bombay Date of Death 11 April 1899 Place of Death Cannes

Biography

Monier Monier-Williams was born in what was then Bombay on 12 November 1819. He was educated in England from 1822, and entered Oxford University in 1837. Two years later, he was selected to work for the East India Company and, after clearing his civil service examination, he entered the company’s college at Haileybury, waiting to be assigned to travel to the East. His plans changed when he received news of his brother’s death and he returned to Oxford, this time to University College, to study Sanskrit under Horace Hayman Wilson (1786-1860), who was well-known as a collector of Sanskrit manuscripts as well as Vedic and classical works. He graduated in 1844, and took up an appointment as professor of Sanskrit, Persian and Hindustani at Haileybury. He was appointed Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1860, being preferred over the German philologist Friedrich Max Müller because of his commitment to Christian mission and evangelism in India, a condition of the chair. Monier-Williams did not see any contradiction between scholarship on the East and the practical work of evangelisation. His interest in scholarship in the service of evangelisation is clear from his inaugural lecture at Oxford, ‘A study of Sanskrit in relation to missionary work in India’ (1861). Significantly, one of his main books, Hinduism, was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (London, 1877). Unlike Max Müller, Monier-Williams was not an ‘armchair academic’. He made several visits to India in the years 1875, 1876 and 1883, and he sought funds among civil servants and Indian princes for the funding of the Indian Institute in Oxford, which he founded in 1883. Its main aim was to train civil servants for service in India. While his main focus was on India, in his works he says much in passing about Islam. Broadly speaking, it appears he saw Islam as a challenge to Christianity and believed its influence over India had to be countered.

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Williams was knighted in 1876 and made Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1887, when he added ‘Monier’ to his family name. He died on 11 April 1899 in Cannes in the south of France, where he spent several months each year after retiring from Oxford in 1887.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary M. Monier-Williams, A study of Sanskrit in relation to missionary work in India. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford, on April 19, 1861, London, 1861 M. Monier-Williams, ‘How can the University of Oxford best fulfil its duty towards India? Lecture given at the opening of the Indian Institute’, Oxford & Cambridge Undergraduates Journal 16 (October 1884) 337-8 (report of lecture) M. Monier-Williams, ‘Notes of a long life’s journey’ (unpublished memoir, Indian Institute Library, Oxford) Secondary W.J. Johnson, art. ‘Monier-Williams, Sir Monier’, in W.J. Johnson (ed.), A dictionary of Hinduism, Oxford, 2009 A.A. Macdonell, revised J.B. Katz, art. ‘Williams, Sir Monier Monier- (1819-1899)’, ODNB G. Evison, ‘The Orientalist, his Institute and the Empire. The rise and subsequent decline of Oxford University’s Indian Institute’, Oxford, December 2004 (unpublished paper by the Indian Institute librarian) T. Thomas, ‘East comes West’, in T. Thomas (ed.), The British. Their religious beliefs and practices 1800-1986, London, 1988, 72-102, pp. 85-91 R. Symonds, Oxford and empire. The last lost cause?, New York, 1986 E.J. Sharpe, ‘The legacy of J.N. Farquhar’, Occasional Bulletin (Overseas Missionary Research Center) (April 1979) 61-4, p. 61 H. Morris, Sir Monier Monier-Williams, KCIE, the English pandit, London, 1905

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Modern India and the Indians Date 1878 Original Language English Description Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, 244 pages long, was first published in April 1878. It was largely composed of articles that Monier-Williams had written for The Times,



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The Athenæum, The Indian Antiquary and similar publications about his travels in India in the late 1870s. A second edition followed in the same year, and a third edition appeared in September 1879. In response to criticism, this was enlarged to 365 pages, divided into 17 sections. As it was in the form of travel writing, Monier-Williams did not feel the need for a preface or an introduction. Though a lot more modest in size compared to Monier-Williams’s other works, this is more significant for an understanding of his views on Muslim-Christian relations. Two initial references to Muslims he encountered on the journey out are of interest. The first concerns his observations about the differences between the Indian Muslim sailors and the English sailors on the ship: the Muslims performed better ‘under a hot sun’, were ‘more tractable and docile’ and ‘never get drunk’ (p. 10). The second is an account of the Muslims on board being willing to ‘even sometimes eat pork if we have nothing else to offer’. They settled any religious qualms about this by tying the pig to be slaughtered to the end of a line and dragging it through the water behind the ship. When they hauled it in, they called out solemnly: ‘Go away, pig; come hither, fish.’ When he speaks of the ‘religious creeds’ in India, Monier-Williams lists Islam alongside Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity as the four major religions. He compares Islam to Judaism by likening Indian Muslims amid the idols of India to the Hebrews amid the idols of Egypt and Canaan, and describing Islam as ‘an illegitimate child of Judaism’ that arose in Arabia as a sort of ‘protest against the Sabeanism, idolatry, and fetish stone-worship’ of the time (p. 163). Its emphasis on divine Unity was supposed to be in continuity with God’s revelation to Abraham, though ‘through Ishmael, rather than through Isaac’ (p. 163). In the initial period of Islam, Muḥammad and his early followers did not see any fundamental opposition between their faith and Judaism or Christianity, and the movement was developing into ‘a sect of Christianity’ until Muḥammad was exposed to ‘the corrupt Christian doctrines’, particularly belief that God was a Trinity, and this led to the development of a new religion instead of another ‘Eastern Church in Arabia’ (p. 163). So a movement that appeared to have started well was corrupted by ‘a self-deluded enthusiast’ (p. 163). At first, Muḥammad saw himself as being in line with the biblical prophets, but there was a parting of ways in the context of changing power relations in Medina. Also, in Mecca persuasion was the method used by Muḥammad against the adherents of idolatry, but when he gained power ‘the force of circumstances compelled him to adopt a more summary

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method of conversion. His conversions were then made at the point of the sword.’ Thus, Muḥammad the prophet became ‘a conqueror and a ruler, and Islam became as much a polity as a religion’ (p. 164). Monier-Williams notes that the majority of Indian Muslims were converts from a Hindu background and often from a low caste, causing them to prefer Islam to Christianity. Although they were ‘more active and intelligent than Hindus’, their adherence to the Qur’an tended to ‘make them more intolerant, more sensual and inferior in moral tone’. Furthermore, they fared worse than Hindus in education: ‘They are certainly proud and bigoted, and are often left behind by the Hindus for the simple reason that they refuse to avail themselves in the same way of the educational advantages we offer’ (p. 165). Monier-Williams is clear about the relationship between Islam and Christianity: ‘I have no hesitation in declaring my conviction that [Christianity] has more points of contact with Hinduism […] than with Buddhism, Jainism, or even Islam’ (pp. 165-6), because Hindus are more open to accepting sinfulness, sacrifice and the need for supernatural revelation, and their scriptures were not the work of one individual, like the Qur’an, but are like the Bible, which represents ‘a process of gradual secretion and progressive expansion’. The most significant part of the book with regard to Monier-Williams’s views about Indian Islam and its relation to Christianity is where he expresses his ideas about ‘the prospects of the missionary enterprise’ and offers a comparison between Islam and Christianity in India (pp. 238-45). He questions why Islam is so ‘hopelessly hostile’ to Christianity, and why Christians have been so helpless in reaching out to Muslims (p. 238). His answer is long and detailed. He argues first that Christian missionaries are just as intolerant towards Islam as Muslims are towards Christianity, and that there is need for a more sympathetic approach to Muslims, one involving the affirmation of everything that is good in Muḥammad and Islam and ‘the common ground which belongs to the Bible and the Kuran’ (p. 239). He goes on to say that since the central doctrine of Islam, the unity of God and submission to His will, is shared with Christianity because both are Abrahamic in origin, missionaries could approach the Muslim by saying, ‘I also, like Abraham, am a Muslim’, which would be a meeting ‘on the ground of his own Kuran’. The churches should also place greater emphasis on God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, so that attention is drawn more to the being of God itself than to ‘the Man Mediator’. Further, while Christians claim divine revelation for the Bible ‘through the minds of men’, they are maybe not fair to the Qur’an, which claims to be ‘a record



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of the actual words of the Almighty’, and also arrogant in presuming to convert Muslims without knowing the Qur’an in its original language, or Muslim commentaries on it. (This shows an extraordinary level of sympathy that is rare among missionaries and missionary scholars.) Lastly, Christians should set examples to Muslims in the ways they conduct their lives. They should also adopt the ‘wisdom of the serpent’ by acknowledging ‘the Unity of the Godhead’ and the ‘excellence of Muhammad’s teaching’ in places where praise is due, thereby inducing Muslims ‘to meet us half-way’, which can lead to an honest but ‘tender’ and ‘gradual’ prompting towards the fuller recognition of ‘the complex existence of the Almighty God’ perceived in Christianity in place of ‘their stern monotheism’. After this practical advice, Monier-Williams goes on to express his true opinions about Islam, and is as harsh as any medieval polemicist. He condemns Islam as ‘the religion of a spurious Jesus and the precepts of a spurious Gospel’, and the Qur’an as no more than ‘Muhammad’s pretended revelations’ gleaned from ‘the followers of a debased form of Christian doctrine’ that was confected into ‘a corruption of Judaism and Christianity’. Islam started well in affirming continuity with both earlier religions, but then it lost its way. Apart from enabling people in the West to see into the life and thought of Indians (mainly Hindus, but also Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists), Modern India and the Indians does not provide any groundbreaking insight or original contribution to Indology. Monier-Williams does not appear to have been a scholar of particular distinction, certainly not of the same eminence as Max Müller, whom he trumped for appointment at Oxford. On the surface, the work does not appear to contain much about Christians and Muslims, since it purports to be mere jottings about ‘impressions, notes and essays’ on ‘modern India and the Indians’. But it does offer something new in the respect it shows for Muslim ethics, in proposing continuity between Islam and Judaism, and in portraying Muslims as distinct within Indian society. However, it shares the shortcomings of many 19th-century European works of its kind, for example in expecting Islam to reflect features that are characteristic of Christianity such as the acceptance of sin and the need for a saviour, judging Islam as ‘a debased form of Christian doctrine’, a ‘corruption of Judaism and Christianity’, and ‘hopelessly hostile’ and ‘intolerant’ towards Christianity, and condemning Muḥammad as having received only ‘pretended revelations’.

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Significance Monier-Williams’ apparently ‘positive approach’ towards Islam was a precursor to the ideas of W.H.T. Gairdner and Louis Massignon, whose works point to a definite continuity and close connection between Christianity and Islam. However, he differed from these later scholars in employing the gesture of acknowledging similarities between certain teachings of Islam and Christianity mainly as a ploy to attract the interest of Muslims with a view to leading them towards conversion. It is likely that he actually thought the similar features were the result of borrowing by Muḥammad. This explicitly missionary approach may have attracted some readers of the work, though it is not known to have been credited to him. Publications M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, 1878; 001266256 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, 18782 M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, 18793; 007707705 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, 18874 M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, 18915; 001867158 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, Delhi, 1971, repr. 1987 M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, Abingdon, 2000 M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, Boston MA, 2005 (facsimile of 2nd edition) M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, Charleston NC, 2010 M. Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians. Being a series of impressions, notes and essays, London, Abingdon, 2013 David Emmanuel Singh

William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli Date of Birth 29 December 1809; 21 December 1804 Place of Birth Liverpool; London Date of Death 1889 May 1898; 19 April 1881 Place of Death Hawarden, North Wales; London

Biography

William Ewart Gladstone was born in Liverpool on 29 December 1809. His father, Sir John Gladstone (born as Gladstones; he changed the family name in 1835), was a wealthy merchant who had moved to Liverpool from his native Scotland in 1787. His mother was Anne MacKenzie Robertson. William attended a preparatory school in Seaforth near Liverpool between 1816 and 1821, then Eton, followed by Christ Church, Oxford, in 1828. He graduated with double first-class honours in 1831. Although he enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn in January 1833, he had no intention of pursuing a legal career but had set his sights on entering Parliament, which he did as the Conservative Member for Newark in 1832. After holding several junior posts in the government, in 1843 he became President of the Board of Trade, but resigned in 1845 over the increase in funding for Maynooth Seminary in Ireland. He switched constituencies several times over his parliamentary career, ending as Member for Midlothian. He was chancellor of the exchequer three times (1852-5, 185966 and 1873-4, the last time while he was also prime minister), and in 1859 he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal Party. He became prime minister for the first time in 1868, and for the rest of his career he alternated in this position with Benjamin Disraeli. A devout Christian, Gladstone disliked Disraeli’s pro-Ottoman policies. In 1856, when the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War, he objected in Parliament to the claim that this bound the Christian powers to maintain ‘Turkey as a Mohamedan state’ and spoke of Christians living under ‘the Mohamedan yoke’ (Hansard, vol. 142, 1856, cols 93-4, 97; references to Hansard cite the column numbers). When in 1876 the Ottomans crushed a rebellion in Bulgaria, killing thousands of Christians, though he was ill in bed, he wrote the pamphlet Bulgarian horrors, which succeeded in shifting public opinion against the Ottoman Empire and vilified Turks as a race of monsters who should be driven out of Europe. Despite his attempt to

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blame Turkish barbarity on their race and not on their religion, this confirmed for many the idea that Islam retards human progress. In his second term as prime minister, Gladstone withdrew military advisers from Turkey. British trade thereupon declined owing to Turkey’s suspension of dividend payments and the general belief that the Ottoman Empire would not survive. However, while he supported autonomy for Christian populations under Ottoman rule, he did not actually call for their complete independence, but allowed that the Ottoman Empire could retain titular sovereignty. He tended to be more pro-Russian than Disraeli because at least Russians were Christian, if of a dubious type. He retired as party leader in 1875, but uprisings in Bulgaria against the Ottoman state caused him to return to centre stage. He retired from Parliament in 1895 and died on 19 May 1898 in his home, Hawarden Castle, in North Wales. Benjamin Disraeli was born in Bloomsbury, London, on 21 December 1804, the eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli and Maria Basevi. His father ceased practising as a Jew after a quarrel with his synagogue, and had all his children baptised into the Church of England. Benjamin was baptised on 1 July 1817, and dropped the apostrophe from his name in 1821. He was sent to a private school in Walthamstow between 1817 and 1821, when he entered a law firm and enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn in 1824, though his uncle, who was a barrister, soon advised him to switch to a literary career. He wrote his first novel, Vivien Grey, in 1826. Inspired by Lord Byron’s eastern tour, he set out on travels in the Middle East in 1830, but these ended precipitously when his companion, his sister’s fiancé, died of smallpox in Egypt. His second novel, Contarini Fleming, appeared anonymously in 1832. Politically ambitious, he stood for Parliament unsuccessfully three times as an Independent Radical and once as a Conservative before winning his first seat in Maidstone, Kent, in 1837. He married the wealthy Mary Anne Lewis in 1839. In 1841, he was elected Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury, then, in 1847, for Buckinghamshire, which he represented until he was raised to the House of Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876. He served twice as chancellor of the exchequer (in 1852 and 18589). In February 1868 he became prime minister, serving until December that year. In 1874, the Conservatives won the general election and Disraeli began his second term as prime minister. Known for his pro-Ottoman sympathies, Disraeli’s response to the massacres carried out by Ottoman troops in Bulgaria in 1876 was that reports were exaggerated. However, public opinion sided with Gladstone’s anti-Turkish stance and, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Disraeli had to accept the formation of four



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independent Balkan states. The Congress also allowed Austria-Hungary to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ended Russia’s threat to the Ottomans, which Disraeli had feared, though Russia was able to keep some territory in the Balkans. Gladstone was unhappy with aspects of the Treaty because he objected to the powers taking over any territory in the Balkans (Hansard, Series 3, vol. 242, 1878, cols 672-717). Also, the Treaty failed to address Greece’s border disputes with Turkey. Gladstone would have been happy with autonomy for the Balkans, rather than full independence. The motion to censure the Treaty failed, but Queen Victoria created Disraeli a Knight of the Garter for his role in the Congress. Disraeli led the government from the House of Lords after 1876. Though he was a practising Christian, Disraeli was proud of his Jewish heritage, strongly supported the emancipation of the Jews and peopled his novels with heroic Jewish characters to help instil pride in Jewish past accomplishments and future possibilities. In his novels, he depicted Islam and Islamic civilisation sympathetically, and wanted to encourage a Jewish-Christian-Islamic alliance. Opponents made spiteful remarks about his Jewishness behind his back and were suspicious that his ‘Semitic’ and ‘turkophile prejudices’ might compromise British interests (O’Kell, Disraeli, p. 483). Gladstone wrote in 1878 that he thought Disraeli’s ‘crypto-Judaism’ resulted in policies that were harmful to British interests (Moneypenny and Buckle, Life, vol. 6, p. 58). He was referred to as ‘Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew, and Jew Premier’, ‘the traitorous Jew, veritable Jew, haughty Jew or even the abominable Jew’ (Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”’, p. 89). Disraeli retired in 1880 after Gladstone won the general election. He died on 19 April 1881 in Mayfair, London, and was buried in the parish graveyard of St Michael and all Angels, Hughenden, where Queen Victoria erected a memorial to him.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary T. Macknight, The Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli, M.P. A literary and political biography addressed to the new generation, London, 1854 (a contemporary biography by the editor of a Belfast newspaper) W.E. Gladstone, The Berlin Treaty and the Anglo-Turkish Convention speech, London, 1878 W.E. Gladstone, A chapter of autobiography, London, 1868 W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors and the Question of the East, London, 1876 W.E. Gladstone, Political speeches in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1880

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M.G. Wiebe et al. (eds), Benjamin Disraeli. Letters, 6 vols, Toronto, 1982-2009 G.E. Gladstone, M.R.D. Foot, ‎ ‎ H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone diaries, Oxford, 1968-1994 Secondary R.P. O’Kell, Disraeli. The romance of politics, Toronto, 2013 J. Parry, art. ‘Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield’, in ODNB H.G.G. Matthew, art. ‘Gladstone, William Ewart’, in ODNB A.S. Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”. Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian political cartoon’, Jewish History 10 (1996) 89-134 W.F. Moneypenny and G.E. Buckle, The life of Benjamin Disraeli, 6 vols, New York, 1910-1920 H.W. Pearse, art. ‘Gladstone, William Ewart’, in DNB T.E. Kebbel, art. ‘Disraeli, Benjamin’, in DNB G.B. Smith, The life of William Ewart Gladstone, 6 vols, New York, 1880-99

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Parliamentary remarks on the Ottoman Empire and Muslims, and attitudes in their writings Date 1876-80 Original Language English Description Throughout their careers, the two rival politicians, the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli and the Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, both party leaders and at various times prime minister, disagreed on British policy towards the Ottoman Empire and held opposing views on Islam. Their very different perspectives clashed dramatically in 1876 following the anti-Ottoman uprising in Bulgaria (April-May), during which approximately 15,000 Christians were massacred and about 36 villages were burned by the Ottoman army and irregular troops. In June, the House of Commons began to debate how Britain should respond. Under Disraeli’s government, Britain was an ally of the Ottomans committed to defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, provided military advisers, and was heavily invested in commerce and trade and a major loan provider. News of the massacre was slow to reach Britain, and broke in the media before the government released any information. Although some mention was made of Christian fatalities in May, it was an article by Edwin Pears (d. 1919), a British barrister who lived in Constantinople, on the



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‘Moslem atrocities’ published in the Daily News on 23 June 1876 that prompted questions in Parliament. The Daily News sent the American journalist J.A. MacGrahan (d. 1878) to Bulgaria to investigate. MacGrahan’s correspondence from Bulgaria, which had already enjoyed a wide readership through reprints in various newspapers, was republished in The Turkish atrocities (London, 1876). On 26 June 1876, William Edward Forster (d. 1886), Liberal MP for Bradford and a social reformer, asked the government to confirm or deny the allegations that Turkish troops and irregulars had massacred Christian civilians in Bulgaria, citing the Daily News. Disraeli, as prime minister, replied that the government had ‘no news’ in its ‘possession which justifies the statements’ to which Forster had referred. He suggested that perhaps Christians had attacked Turkish settlers who ‘were then obliged to defend themselves’ (Hansard, vol. 230, 1876, cols 425-6). Later, while they admitted that atrocities had occurred, the government took the position that both sides were to blame. Speaking on 31 July, Disraeli stated that he was not prepared to say that the atrocities had ‘all been committed by one side’, and disputed the number of fatalities (Hansard, vol. 231, 1876, col. 202). Gladstone, in his speech, saw no alternative but to call on the European powers to oversee the granting of autonomy to the Christian-majority provinces where there were insurrections, since the Turkish government could not be trusted to carry out reforms that would address subject peoples’ grievances, although he greatly desired to ‘maintain the integrity of the Turkish empire’ (Hansard, vol. 230, 1876, cols 172-202). On 19 July, Walter Baring (d. 1915), second secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople, had been sent to Bulgaria to investigate what had happened. His report, published on 10 September 1876, largely confirmed the version of events in the Daily News. While Disraeli thought that this did not merit any change in British policy and that Britain should honour her treaties with the Ottoman Empire, Gladstone began to campaign to end Britain’s support for Turkey, and wrote Bulgarian horrors from his sick bed over three days. Gladstone had officially retired but, returning to the front benches, he succeeded in reversing Britain’s policy towards the Ottomans. Bulgarian horrors is a tract of 64 pages, dated 5 September 1876, five days before the release of Baring’s report that had been privately submitted to the government on 1 September. The Bulgarian revolt followed insurrections in Herzegovina and Bosnia, and triggered the Russo-Turkish War (1877-8), in which Russia intervened to liberate Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro from the Ottomans. Claiming to be the protector

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of Eastern Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire, and regarding the Balkan Slavs as their kin, Russia both defended Bulgaria’s demand for autonomy and supported the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro. Gladstone’s aim was to inform the British public of the Turkish government’s ‘true character’ and the reasons why Britain’s policy was ‘questionable and erroneous’ (Bulgarian horrors, 1876 edition, p. 12). Referring to the Turkish race, he stated that it was not a question of ‘Mahometanism simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar characteristic of a race’. Turkish Muslims were neither the ‘mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain’, but ‘the one great anti-human specimen of humanity’ (pp. 12-13). Wherever they went, ‘civilization disappears from view’. They governed solely by force as opposed to law. Their guide for this life was a ‘relentless fatalism’, while their promise for the next life was ‘a sensual paradise’ (p. 13). Their advance cursed the whole of Europe, which was united in opposing this ‘common enemy’, who, since they lacked intellectual capability, devolved a lot of authority onto ethnic and religious minorities, which helped to compensate for the ‘deficiencies of Turkish Islam’ (p. 14). Now, an empire that had had to borrow large sums from European banks was ‘at war’ with the peoples of its Balkan provinces. Twenty years previously, Britain and other European powers had tried to remodel Turkey’s ‘administrative system’ and, helping Turkey win the Crimean War, they had given her two decades of ‘repose’ (p. 15). Now the Bulgarian atrocities revealed the viciousness and barbarity of Turkish rule, yet the British government was slow to admit that the massacres had occurred, and tried to obscure what happened by attributing blame to both sides. Gladstone referred to the newspaper reports, and to questions and responses in parliament. He cited a report from Eugene Schuyler (d. 1890), the American Consul-General in Constantinople, who joined MacGrahan’s team in Bulgaria. Dated 22 August, this stated that he had found no evidence of anyone who was Muslim (as opposed to Christian) being killed in ‘cold blood’, of women who were Muslim being violated, or of a mosque being ‘desecrated or destroyed’ (Bulgarian horrors, p. 28), which all pointed to Muslims, not Christians, as the aggressors. He judged that Schuyler’s reporting was especially reliable because America had no vested interest in the matter, while European states did (p. 34). He described a British fleet in the region at the time that stood by while the insurrection was proceeding. This, for him, implicated Britain in the atrocities. Such a fleet



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should be used to ‘protect innocent lives’ (p. 43). British inaction had ‘gravely compromised’ the ‘honour of the British name’ (pp. 49-50). He insisted that Turkish ‘executive power’ must be ‘excluded’ from the Balkans but, since he remained committed to maintaining the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, he recommended that ‘titular sovereignty’ could be retained. Thus, no European powers should exercise sovereignty within ‘the present limits of the Turkish empire’. Disraeli, he said, in defending the status quo wanted to perpetuate the Turk’s ‘airy promises, his disembodied reforms, his ferocious passions, and his daily, gross, and incurable misgovernment’ (p. 55). Britain should withdraw ‘moral and material support’ to ‘the maintenance of Turkish administration in Bulgaria’ (p. 57), should cease being the ‘evil genius’ whose support for the Turks baffled civilised people (p. 58), and should join the central powers (the Concert of Europe, comprising Germany, Britain, France, Italy and the AustriaHungarian Empire) in overseeing Turkey’s withdrawal from the Balkans. The new autonomous states would need to reach an accommodation with their Muslim minorities, but ‘in none of these provinces has it been in the main a case of war between conflicting religions or local races: nearly the whole of the mischief has lain in the wretched laws, and the agents at once violent and corrupt, of a distant [...] Power’ (p. 61). Gladstone argued that the only reparation that could be made for Bulgaria’s tragedy would be the Turks’ eviction from Europe ‘one and all, bag and baggage’ (p. 62). Three days after publishing the tract, which sold 40,000 copies in less than a week, Gladstone spoke to a large crowd at Blackheath, making the first speech to rouse public support for his proposed change in policy on the ‘Eastern Question’. The Russo-Turkish war, which ended with the Treaty of San Stefano on 3 March 1878, took place before the next general election in Britain, which Gladstone won. In the treaty, the Ottomans were to grant independence to Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, to give autonomy to Bulgaria and to cede territory in the Caucasus to Russia. However, the other members of the Concert of Europe objected and convened a congress in Berlin to revise the treaty (13 June-13 July 1878). In Berlin, the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro was ratified and Bulgarian autonomy confirmed, though the territory was divided into three provinces, only one of which was returned to the Ottomans. This was in order to thwart Russia’s aim of controlling a satellite Greater Bulgarian state in the region. Austria-Hungary was allowed to occupy Bosnia, and some territories that had been ceded to Russia were returned to the Ottomans, as was

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part of Romania. In agreeing to the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro at Berlin, Disraeli went further than Gladstone in supporting their autonomy. On 3 June, immediately before the Berlin Congress, Britain signed a Convention with the Ottomans, negotiated in secret, that placed Cyprus under British administration for a fee. If Russia relinquished her newly acquired territories in Asia, however, Britain would leave Cyprus. The Convention also pledged continued British military support for the Ottoman Empire in return for promises of reform. Gladstone responded to the Treaty of Berlin and to the Anglo-Turkish convention in a speech on 30 July 1878. He criticised the treaty for failing to include a resolution of Greece’s border disputes with the Ottomans (Greece’s independence had been recognised in 1832), for obliging Britain to defend Turkey’s Asian provinces, and for lacking parliamentary approval (Berlin treaty, 1878 edition, p. 28). On Cyprus, he disliked the secrecy of the negotiations, and again objected that it undermined parliament’s treaty-making prerogative. He ridiculed the government’s claims that it would provide a strategic port to protect access to the Suez Canal, asking where the funds to build such a port or to garrison it were coming from. Cyprus was not even on ‘the road to India’ but was ‘250 miles away’ (Political speeches, p. 285). In November 1880, Gladstone withdrew Britain’s military advisers from the Ottoman Empire, and soon afterwards Germany sent replacements. British banks also ceased making loans to the Ottoman Empire; they had already stopped buying bonds when the Ottomans halted dividend payments in 1875. The consequent collapse of the Ottoman financial system soon led to the creation of the European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881. Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 reduced any remaining political influence she had in Istanbul. Although an antiimperialist, Gladstone justified intervention in Egypt on the grounds that Egypt was technically still governed by the Khedive (the Ottoman viceroy) with British advisers, and that this was essential to prevent anarchy and to maintain peace and order (24 July 1882, Hansard, 1882, vol. 272, col. 1586). This same argument would be routinely used in India to resist Indian demands for independence right through to the end of British rule. Increased German involvement, and the departure of the British, prepared the way for the Ottomans’ decision in 1914 to enter World War I as an ally of Germany. Gladstone thought that Disraeli’s Turcophile views placed his Jewish interests above those of the state, although his own more favourable view of



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Russia was also based on religious sympathy. ‘Russia’, he had declared, was ‘the natural leader of Christendom in the east’ and had been sucked into Turkish affairs by the decay and abuses of the Ottoman Empire (I. St John, Gladstone on the logic of Victorian politics, London, 2010, p. 79). During the Bulgarian atrocity debate, Disraeli’s Jewishness and his defence of the Ottomans were ‘turned against him and utilized to present him as dangerously un-English’. Much of the criticism of his views focused on ‘his being a Jew’ (S.B. Borgstede, ‘All is race’. Benjamin Disraeli on race, nation and empire, Zurich, 2011, p. 16). Disraeli’s pro-Ottoman policies were probably linked with his idea that Jews, Christians and Muslims enjoyed a ‘theocratic unity’, and that as soon as their differences were resolved a spiritual renaissance would replace the West’s preoccupation with materialism and lead to civilisational renewal. Disraeli’s ideas about religion inform several of his novels, especially Coningsby (1844) and Tancred (1847), in which some of the same characters are featured, including Sidonia, a Jew who extolls Muslim tolerance in Spain. In Coningsby, Sidonia tells the novel’s hero that it ‘is difficult to distinguish the follower of Moses from the votary of Mahomet’ since ‘both alike built palaces, gardens and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of state, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, and rivalled each other in renowned universities’ (Coningsby, 1844 edition, p. 195). In Contarini Fleming, Disraeli reveals that his East was a source of wisdom from which Europeans could learn, not the despotic, backward desert of the Orientalists: ‘Why not study the Orient? Surely in the pages of the Persians and the Arabs we might discover new sources of emotion, new principles of invention, and new bursts of fancy’ (Contarini Fleming, 1881 edition, p. 330). In Tancred, Disraeli’s hero travels to Palestine in the hope of penetrating the mystery of the East and gaining a better understanding of the origin of Christianity. He visits Mount Sinai and is told by an angel to preach the ‘doctrine of theocratic equality’, which meant that he was to promote Jewish-Christian-Muslim cooperation (Tancred, 1880 edition, p. 291). Jews are ‘Arabs on horseback’ and Christianity is ‘Judaism for the multitude’ (Tancred, pp. 253, 427). Disraeli also called Jews ‘Mosaic Arabs’ (Coningsby, p. 204), and wrote that God had always communicated to the descendants of Abraham, never ‘to a European’. Tancred (Lord Montacute) said that he would not ‘impugn the divine commission of any of the seed of Abraham when asked whether he would affirm Muḥammad’s divine inspiration’, and continued, ‘there are doctors of our church who recognise the sacred office of Mahomet, though they hold it to be [...] limited and local’ (Tancred, p. 261).

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Significance Gladstone tried to avoid blaming Islam for everything he saw as wrong with the Ottoman Empire by attributing its faults to the combination of race and religion. However, when he contrasted Muslim Turks with the mild Muslims of India, the cultured Moors of medieval Spain and the chivalrous Muslims of crusader Syria, he was in fact saying that, just as the Turks’ barbarism and cruelty were racial and not religious characteristics, so the finer qualities of Indians, Moors and Arabs were due to their race, not to Islam. Islam was responsible for neither positive nor negative qualities and was therefore bankrupt as a force for good in the world. Thus, he could use the term ‘Mahometan fanaticism’ (Bulgarian horrors, p. 42) and object to Christian powers being committed to help preserve Islamic government, which he thought the Treaty of Paris had imposed on Britain (6 May 1856, Hansard, vol. 142, 1856, col. 94). Although Gladstone tried to tell his readers that they should not think all Muslims behaved like the Turks, given the popular conflation of the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Turk’, few would have been inclined to follow his advice. He also saw religion as part of national identity, which meant that, for him as a committed Christian, Islam was an alien faith that belonged elsewhere, not in England. Muslims have sometimes described Gladstone as hating Islam, and this is epitomised in a story that has circulated among the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s. He is supposed to have held up a copy of the Qur’an in the House of Commons and declared that there would be ‘no peace for the Empire [...] as long as this book exists’ (M. Frampton, The Muslim Brotherhood and the West, Cambridge MA, 2018, p. 161), with another version describing him tearing up his copy as he spoke (Frampton, Muslim Brotherhood, p. 463). There is no official record of any such event, but this has not prevented the story from being repeated by, among others, Rafiq Zakaria (Muhammad and the Quran, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 59) and Akbar Ahmed (Postmodernism and Islam, London, 1992, p. 182). The earliest reference to this story is found in an article, ‘The perils of a propaganda’, in The New Age 24 (1919) p. 321, by the pro-Ottoman British convert to Islam, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (d. 1936). Gladstone’s ‘dislike of Islam’ also influenced his policies in Egypt (E. Biagini, ‘Exporting Western and beneficent institutions. Gladstone and Empire, 1880-1885’, in D. Babbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone centenary essays, Liverpool, 2000, p. 214). For example, the Egyptian education department, run by Douglas Dunlop (d. 1937), a former missionary (who



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was theoretically no more than its senior adviser), replaced Arabic and French with English and dropped religion from the curriculum. Disraeli’s pro-Ottoman policy, had it continued after 1880, may have seen a very different history unfold in which the Ottoman Empire did not side with Germany, was not defeated by the allies or divided up into mandates, including that of Palestine, which eventually led to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Perhaps few writers have had an impact on events in the Islamic world comparable to that of Gladstone and Disraeli, because their views of the Ottoman Empire, and of Islam, translated into British national policy. Britain had enjoyed a close relationship with the Ottomans since the reign of Elizabeth I (see C. Bennett, ‘Elizabeth I’, in CMR 8, 106-30). When Gladstone returned to power in 1880, he ended this relationship almost overnight. What is most significant here for Christian-Muslim relations is that the actions of those who exercise political power at any given time can undo what has taken centuries to build. Gladstone’s ability to mobilise public support for his loudly expressed anti-Ottoman views, and his less loudly declared anti-Islamic views, drowned out the voices of those who called for Muslim-Christian friendship and cooperation, including Disraeli. Gladstone took what he believed to be the moral position on Turkey, and saw himself as occupying higher moral ground than Disraeli. During the 2016 referendum campaign in Britain on whether to remain in the European Union or leave it, some used Turkey’s potential membership of the EU as an argument for leaving, thereby reviving Victorian ideas that Islam is an ‘obstacle to progress’ and is at odds with Western civilisation (M. Pugh, Britain and Islam, New Haven CT, 2019, p. xi). Publications Disraeli’s novels have been published many times; only selected editions and translations are listed here. B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming. A psychological autobiography, London, 1832; 008664338 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, and Alroy, London, 1850, repr. 1853; 007915040 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, London, 2004 B. Disraeli, Coningsby. Or, The new generation, London, 1844; 100115185 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)

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B. Disraeli, Novels and tales by the Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 9. Coningsby. Or, The new generation, London, 1881; 006105962 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) B. Disraeli, Coningsby. Or, The new generation, New York, 2013 B. Disraeli, Tancred. Or, The new crusade, London, 1847; 007915043 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) B. Disraeli, Novels and tales by the Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 8. Tancred. Or, The new crusade, London, 1881; 006105962 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) B. Disraeli, Tancred. Or, The new crusade, Charleston SC, 2015 W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors and the Question of the East, London, 1876; 009260521 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors and the Question of the East, Whitefish MT, 2014 W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian horrors and the Question of the East, Norderstedt, 2017 W.E. Gladstone, Bŭlgarskite uzhasi i Iztochniiat vŭpros. Urotsi po klane, ili, Povedenieto na turskoto pravitelstvo vŭv i okolo Bŭlgariia, trans. D. Minkov and P. Dimitrov, Sofia, 2018 (Bulgarian trans.) W.E. Gladstone, The Berlin Treaty and the Anglo-Turkish Convention. Speech of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone MP in the House of Commons on Tuesday July 30, 1878, Manchester, 1878; 590418935 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) W.E. Gladstone, The Berlin Treaty and the Anglo-Turkish Convention. Speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday July 30, 1878, London, 1878 W.E. Gladstone, Political speeches in Scotland, March and April, 1880, Edinburgh, 1880 W.E. Gladstone, Political speeches in Scotland, March and April, 1880, Edinburgh, 1880 (revised edition); 590419049 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) W.E. Gladstone, Political speeches in Scotland, March and April, 1880, Whitefish MT, 2007 Hansard. The official report of debates in Parliament (searchable database HANSARD 1803–2005 available through api.parliament.uk) Studies D.S. Katz, ‘Disrael’s Eastern career, 1830-1880’, in D.S. Katz, The shaping of Turkey in the British imagination, 1776-1923, Cham, 2016, 127-98



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A. Heraclides, ‘The Bulgarian atrocities. A bird’s eye view of intervention with emphasis on Britain, 1875-78’, in A. Heraclides and A. Dialla, Humanitarian intervention in the long nineteenth century. Setting the precedent, Manchester, 2015, 148-68 C. Whitehead, ‘Reading beside the lines. Marginalia, W.E. Gladstone, and the international history of the Bulgarian horrors’, The International History Review 37 (2015) 864-86 T. Braun, Disraeli the novelist, Abingdon, 2016 M. Flavin, Benjamin Disraeli. The novel as political discourse, Eastbourne, 2005 D.R. Schwartz, Disraeli’s fiction, London, 1979 Clinton Bennett

Edwin Arnold Date of Birth 10 June 1832 Place of Birth Gravesend, Kent Date of Death 24 March 1904 Place of Death London

Biography

Edwin Arnold was born in Gravesend on 10 June 1832, the third son of Robert Coles Arnold (d. 1866), a local magistrate, and Sarah Ann Arnold, née Pissey (also Pizzi and Pizey) (d. 1889). He attended King’s School, Rochester, where he won prizes for Greek and Latin, and also studied at King’s College, London, continuing to University College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1856. He married Catherine Biddulph in 1855 (the first of three wives; his second was American and the daughter of a member of the Transcendentalist Club, and his third was Japanese). After teaching English at King Edward’s School, Birmingham (1854-6), he was appointed Principal of the Government College at Poona (later known as Deccan College), India. He was soon elected a Fellow of Bombay University. In India, he learned Sanskrit, Arabic, Turkish and Persian and later studied Sinhala. In 1860, he published Education in India, arguing that Eastern and Western learning should be synthesised. He reported that of his 50 students only one was a Muslim, and that Indians resented ‘the insult’ that ‘ignored their knowledge’ (Education in India, p. 38), by which he meant that the curriculum excluded any reference to Indian literature or religion. The first of his several translations of Sanskrit texts, The Book of good counsels, was published in 1861. He began writing A history of the administration in India under the late Marquis of Dalhousie (1862-4), but in 1861, while visiting England following the death of his son from cholera, his career changed when he successfully applied for the post of leaderwriter at The Daily Telegraph. He rose through the ranks to become chief editor in 1873. After 1888, in semi-retirement, he was retained as a travelling commissioner. As a journalist, Arnold wrote thousands of lead articles and supported Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative government and the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-88). In 1878, he drafted the foreign policy section of the Queen’s speech, read out at the opening of the session of



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Parliament (Wright, Interpreter, p. 51). W.E. Gladstone blocked his nomination for the Poet Laureateship because he disliked his religious and political views. In 1874, Arnold sent George Smith (d. 1876), the Assyriologist, to Nineveh and, in partnership with the New York Herald, he sent Henry Morton Stanley (d. 1904) to search for David Livingstone. In the same year, he proposed the building of a ‘Cape to Cairo railroad’. However, he is mainly remembered for his poetry, which did much to attract interest in the East generally and in Eastern religions in particular. In 1875, his Indian song of songs, translated from Jayadava’s Gita-Govinda, appeared. He published A simple transliteral grammar of Turkish in 1877 as a ‘small service’ to ‘the great matter of “Justice to Islam”’ during debate on the ‘Eastern problem’ (pp. 5-7). His most acclaimed work, The light of Asia, published in 1879, narrates in blank verse the story of the Buddha’s life. This began a long association with Buddhism; Arnold co-founded the Budh-Gaya-Mahabodhi Society in 1891 to restore ancient Buddhist sites, and became the International Buddhist Society’s first honorary member (1903). When he visited Sri Lanka in 1886, Buddhist monks presented him with a bowl and a yellow robe. His treatment of Buddhism tended to invite readers to recognise an affinity with Christianity. He saw himself as a ‘practising Christian’, and attended various Unitarian churches (H.P. Blavatsky, Complete works, vol. 12, Wheaton IL, 1950, p. 721). Both the Theosophical Society and members of the Transcendental Club, Cambridge MA, appreciated and promoted his writings. In 1882, Arnold published Pearls of the faith, or, Islam’s rosary, which was the first of several Islam-related works and, together with Song of songs and the Light of Asia, the final part of what he called his ‘Oriental trilogy’ (Pearls, p. 5) ‘expounding the beauties of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam’ (M.E. Gibson, Anglophone poetry in colonial India, Athens OH, 2011, p. 260). His Poems (London, 1882) include ‘King Saladin’ (Poems, pp. 113-31), ‘The caliph’s draught’ (Poems, pp. 132-6) and ‘After death in Arabia’ (Poems, pp. 189-92). His translations, With Sa’di in the garden and Gulistan, being the Rose-garden of Shaikh Sa’di, were published in 1888 and 1899, respectively. ‘The song celestial’, his popular translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, appeared in 1885. Mahatma Gandhi (d. 1948) considered this the best of all the translations he had read (M.K. Gandhi, An autobiography or the story of my experiments with truth, Ahmedabad, 1927, p. 165).

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Illustration 3. Photograph of Edwin Arnold

In 1886, Arnold revisited India, touring many Buddhist sites, and wrote a prose account of his journey, India revisited (1886). In 1889, he set out for the East again accompanied by his daughter, this time becoming fascinated with Japan. While there, he shocked other English residents by wearing Japanese clothes and because he spent almost all his time with Japanese, ‘by whom he was highly thought of on account of his Buddhistic leanings’ (‘Death closes career’). He visited Japan again in 1892. Arnold died at his London home on 24 March 1904. Apart from his Telegraph articles, some of which were reprinted in his books, his total literary output numbers about 32 works (F.W. Bateson, The Cambridge bibliography, Cambridge, 1940, p. 328).



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Edwin Arnold, Education in India. A letter from an ex-principal of a government college to his appointed successor, London, 1860 Edwin Arnold, India revisited, London, 1886 Edwin Arnold, Japonica, London, 1891 ‘Death closes career of Sir Edwin Arnold’, San Francisco Call 95/116 (25 March 1904) p. 2 (obituary) Secondary J.P. Phelan, art. ‘Arnold, Sir Edwin’, in ODNB W. Peiris, Edwin Arnold. Brief account of his life and contribution to Buddhism, Kandy, 1970 B. Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West. Sir Edwin Arnold, New York, 1957 S. Seccombe, art. ‘Arnold, Sir Edwin’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary Date 1882 Original Language English Description Edwin Arnold’s Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman) was published in London, New York and Boston in 1882. Further editions followed almost annually, with the ninth appearing in 1910. Arnold dedicated the book to his ‘many friends in America’. He lists all the divine names and adds an ‘illustrative legend, record, tradition or comment drawn from Oriental sources’ (1883 edition, p. 3; this edition is used for citations here). The text is written in blank verse. Sometimes, Arnold paraphrases a passage from the Qur’an that either contains the name, or casts ‘some light upon it’ (p. vi). His aim is to present Islam’s ‘general spirit’ in a ‘new and not unacceptable form’. The Qur’an, he says, must always be ‘replete with interest for Christendom’, because ‘Islam was born in the desert with Arab Sabæanism for its mother and Judaism for its father’ and had ‘Eastern Christianity’ as its ‘foster-nurse’, while Muḥammad held Christ and the ‘religion that bears his name’ in ‘profound reverence’ (p. vi). Islam’s ‘soul’, he writes, ‘is its

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declaration of the unity of God.’ The Apostle Paul invoked the ‘unknown God’ (Acts 17:23), and no less sublime was Muḥammad’s abolition of all the idols in Arabia to establish worship of the God Most High. That ‘marvellous and gifted teacher’ created an empire that encompasses a sixth of humanity and ‘must be conciliated’ (p. vii). It cannot be ‘thrust scornfully aside or rooted out’. Islam shares ‘the task of educating the world with its sister religions’ (p. 4). Arnold wrote the book in the Scottish Highlands while taking a rest from politics, and so was away from libraries. This is why he asks for ‘indulgence from the learned’ (p. viii). He hopes that it will invite ‘juster thoughts than sometimes prevail of Islam, of its founder and votaries’, and help readers to think with Muḥammad’s ‘thoughts, since this alone permits the necessary sympathy’ (p. 5). Pearls of the faith completed his Oriental trilogy by presenting the ‘simple, familiar and credulous, but earnest spirit and manner of Islam’ from ‘its own points of view’, in the same way that his Indian song of songs had sought to translate into English a ‘subtle and lovely’ Hindu idyll and The Light of Asia had tried to present Buddhism’s ‘far-reaching doctrines’ (pp. viii). The main text of Pearls of the faith runs to 304 pages, with notes on pp. 307-19. Page 1 has ‘Allāh’ in Arabic script, with ‘Allah! Bi-’smi-ilah! Say that God is One, Living, Eternal, and Besides Him None’ in English below it. Following this, each section begins with one of the Names in Arabic, followed by an English sentence. The first is Al-Raḥmān, followed by ‘Say Ar-Rahmân! The Merciful. Him call, For He is full of Mercy unto all’ (p. 2), followed by a four-page poem. This pattern is repeated for each Name, with most of the 99 sections taking between two and five pages. Arnold’s main source was George Sale’s translation of the Koran (1734). The subtitle of Pearls of the faith – with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman) – suggests that he consulted an Indian Muslim, although nothing is known about the identity of this expert, and he could be a literary fiction. The notes at the end explain the location of places mentioned, add details on Islamic beliefs and practices, and give additional comments on qur’anic references. Significance Arnold’s role in opening up interest in Buddhism in the West is widely acknowledged and celebrated. His books on Indian religion have been highly praised and are still widely read. They were publicised by the Theosophical Society and by Transcendentalists. His Islam-related work



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is less well known. He is credited with helping to popularise the notion that the West had much to learn spiritually from the East, though David Walker comments that Arnold’s best known book, The light of Asia, ‘had relatively little to do with Islam’ because ‘many more people in the late nineteenth century were prepared to believe that the “progressive West” could learn from “non-Islamic” religions and cultures rather than from Islam which they saw as “stagnant” and “utterly backward”’ (Walker, ‘Cultural decline’, pp. 42-3). This suggests that Europeans who developed a fascination for the esoteric and exotic East usually excluded Islam because it lacked the appeal of other religions. On the other hand, Edwin Calverley described Pearls of the faith as ‘probably the best example of the sympathetic interests that the new knowledge of the Muslim East produced’ (Calverley, ‘Islamic religion’, p. 110). There is some evidence that Pearls and other poems by Arnold contributed to the development of Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘concept of a world syncretic faith’. Hearn (d. 1904), who, like Arnold, had a Japanese wife and wore Japanese dress, believed that if more Europeans read Persian and other Eastern literature, including Saʿdī’s Gulistan, they would eventually embrace a universal religion (Yohannan, ‘American Transcendentalists’, p. 209). As a work intended to do ‘justice’ to Islam and to attract a sympathetic response, Pearls of the faith may be unique in Victorian poetry: other poems contain Islamic allusions but, whether complimentary or pejorative, they are almost always incidental to the main narrative. The shah and the Ottoman sultan both decorated Arnold for his writings on Islam, which indicates a high degree of appreciation for his work. In contrast, Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), a scholar of Arabic and Islam then employed at the British Museum, wrote a scathing review of Pearls of the faith. He complained about philological errors in the Arabic, that Arnold’s poetry was below the standard of his earlier works, that he wrote of the Deity with an ‘affectionate tone’ that Muslims lacked, and that what he presented was ‘not Mohammed’s Koran but the gloss of Jelal ed-din Er Rûmy’. Muḥammad’s ‘original speeches had no touch of mysticism, and the introduction of this element destroys the value of Mr Arnold’s commentary’. The ‘Islam represented’ in the poem was a mixture of Persian and Buddhist ideas that threw a ‘mystical Sûfi atmosphere’ around ‘orthodox Muslim dogma’ (Lane-Poole, ‘Review’). Christian writers often attributed external influence to Sufi Islam, including Buddhism, to undermine its attractiveness and its claim to be a bona fide expression of Islam. Arguing

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that the notion of divine-human intimacy is alien to orthodox Islam, Christians routinely dismissed Sufism as a later invention by Muslims to compensate for the lack of love within Islam’s teachings. Lane-Poole was saying that Arnold’s attractive depiction of Islam was misleading because Sufi Islam was an aberration, which may indeed be closer to Christianity but had no connection with real Islam. Here, Lane-Poole used his scholarly reputation to tell Muslims what is and is not authentically Islamic, which was a common Orientalist trope. Arnold parted company from Orientalists such as Lane-Poole by attempting to listen to Muslim voices – hence his reference to the Indian Muslim collaborator in his title. Responding to Lane-Poole’s criticism, Brookes Wright pointed out that readers did not realise that the poem’s ‘rough lines’ were an attempt to convey the Qur’an’s own style, ‘which is […] strongly rhythmical marked by irregular rhymes and assonance’ (Wright, Interpreter, p. 120). Publications Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman), New York, 1882 (eight further editions published up to 1910) Edwin Arnold, Poetical works of Edwin Arnold. Containing The light of Asia, The Indian song of songs, Pearls of the faith, New York, 1882; 102274503 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman), London, 1883; 000244460 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman), Boston MA, 1883; 000244462 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Edwin Arnold, Poetical works of Edwin Arnold. Containing The light of Asia, The Indian song of songs, Pearls of the faith, New York, 1883; 000387237 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman), London, 18843 Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, London, 18844; 100526293 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Edwin Arnold, The poems of Edwin Arnold. Containing The light of Asia; Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary; and the Indian Song of songs. To which is added Indian poetry: from the Sanscrit of the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva; two books from “The Iliad of India” (Mahabharata); “Proverbial wisdom” from the Shlokas of the Hitopadesa, and other oriental poems, New York, 1889, pp. 194-354; 000244456 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah, Lahore, 1954 Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the faith, or Islam’s rosary, being the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah (asma-el-husna) with comments in verse from various Oriental sources (as made by an Indian Mussulman), Madras, 1982 Studies J.D. Yohannan, ‘American Transcendentalists’ interpretations of Sufism. Thoreau, Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn’, in M. Aminrazavi (ed.), Sufism and American literary masters, Albany NY, 2014, 191-212 D. Walker, ‘Cultural decline and survivalist narratives. The battle for civilisation’, in F. Mansouri and S. Akbarzadeh (eds), Political Islam and human security, Cambridge, 2006, 32-48 E.E. Calverley, ‘Islamic religion’, in T.C. Young (ed.), Near Eastern culture and society, Princeton NJ, 1966, 99-116 Wright, Interpreter, pp. 120-3 (on Arnold’s Islam-related poems) S. Lane-Poole, ‘Review of Pearls of the faith’, The Academy 556 (1882) 462-4 Clinton Bennett

English translators of the Qur’an Biography

The 19th century saw the publication of four noteworthy editions of the Qur’an in English. These were by R.A. Davenport (c. 1777-1852), J.M. Rodwell (1808-1900), E.H. Palmer (1840-82) and E.M. Wherry (1843-1927). Richard Alfred Davenport was born in Lambeth, south London, around 1777. He wrote a wide variety of works, including in 1822 The life of Ali Pasha of Tepeleni, Vizier of Epirus, surnamed Aslan or the Lion, a biography of Ali Pasha of Ioannina (d. 1822), a notorious Ottoman ruler who attracted much Western attention because of his despotic behaviour. This seems to be the first indication of Davenport’s interest in the East before the publication in 1825 of his edition of George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an. He also edited other literary works, such as William Mitford’s (d. 1827) History of Greece. He died in 1852 in south London. John Medows Rodwell was an Anglican clergyman and translator of works from Arabic and Hebrew. He was born at Barham Hall, Suffolk, on 11 April 1808. In 1825, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and later served as Rector of St Peter’s, Saffron Hill, London (1836-43), and as Rector of St Ethelburga-the-Virgin, Bishopsgate (1843-1900). It was during this latter appointment that he produced most of his scholarly work. In addition to translating the Qur’an in 1861 (the work for which he is best known), Rodwell published his own translations of the book of Job (1864) and the prophecies of Isaiah (1881). He also engaged in the translation and cataloguing of Ethiopic and Coptic manuscripts. He died in 1900 in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. Edward Henry Palmer was a linguist, explorer and scholar of the Middle East. He was born in Cambridge on 7 August 1840. In 1863, he began studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and in 1867 he became a fellow in Oriental studies. He demonstrated himself to be a gifted linguist, having studied Romani, French, Italian, Persian, Hindustani and Arabic, a talent that led to his success as an academic and explorer. Palmer made his first journey to the Arab world in 1868, when he joined the Palestinian Exploration Fund’s Sinai survey, to trace the journey of the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. He returned in 1869-70, and travelled on foot from the Sinai desert to Jerusalem alongside Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake and two Bedouin guides. These two journeys led to the



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publication in 1871 of The desert of the Exodus and Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin. He was Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge from 1872 to 1881, during which time he completed his translation of the Qur’an and published other works such as a grammar of Arabic (1874) and a dictionary of Persian (1876). He also wrote entries on Ferdowsī, Ḥāfiẓ and Ibn Khaldūn for the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1882, the British government asked him to return to the Middle East. He was tasked with ensuring that Arab shaykhs would not join forces with Egyptians to resist the British occupation, thus helping to secure control of the Suez Canal. After initial success in negotiating with Bedouins, he and two companions were ambushed and killed in the desert in August 1882. Elwood Morris Wherry was an American Presbyterian missionary based largely in the Punjab region of India. He was born in South Bend, Pennsylvania, in 1843, and was educated at Jefferson College, graduating in 1862. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1867, and was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in the United States and appointed to be a missionary. He spent a total of 46 years engaged in missionary activity in India, split between two trips. In addition to producing a new edition of Sale’s translation of the Qur’an, he published numerous works to support his missionary activity, including Methods of mission work among Moslems (1906), Islam and Christianity in India and the Far East (1901) and Our missions in India, 1834-1924 (1926). He died in Cincinnati in 1927.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary F. Watt, art. ‘Davenport, Richard Alfred’, in DNB S. Lane-Poole, art. ‘Palmer, Edward Henry’, in DNB J. Venn, Biographical history of Gonville and Caius College, 1349-1897, vol. 2, Cambridge, 1898, 198 C. Bendall, art. ‘Rodwell, John Medows’, in DNB E.M. Wherry, Our missions in India 1834-1924, Boston MA, 1926 H. Chisholm, art., ‘Palmer, Edward Henry’, Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 20 (11th edition), Cambridge, 1911, 644 A.F. Haynes, Man-hunting in the desert. A narrative of the Palmer search-expedition 1882, 1883, London, 1894 W. Besant, The life and achievements of Edward Henry Palmer, London, 1883 Secondary H.J. Spencer, art. ‘Davenport, Richard Alfred’, in ODNB

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E. Baigent, art. ‘Palmer, Edward Henry’, in ODNB C. Bendall, revised A. McConnell, art. ‘Rodwell, John Medows’, in ODNB S.E. Brash, ‘Presbyterians and Islam in India’, Journal of Presbyterian History 62 (1984) 215-22 J.C.B. Webster, The Christian community and change in nineteenth century north India, Delhi, 1967 M. Dumas, art., ‘Wherry, Elwood Morris’, in Dictionary of American biography, vol. 20, New York, 1936, 65-6

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Nineteenth-century English Qur’an translations Date 19th century Original Language English Description The works discussed here are the four most salient editions of the Qur’an to be published in English in the 19th century. Two of them were new translations of the Arabic text and two were refashioned editions of George Sale’s landmark translation first published in 1734. Davenport’s The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed; a new edition, with a memoir of the translator (1825), is an updated edition of George Sale’s translation. Davenport inserted a short memoir entitled ‘A sketch of the life of George Sale’ (six pages in the first edition), which is followed by an advertisement noting that the edition incorporates hundreds of readings from the French translation of the Qur’an by Claude-Étienne Savary (d. 1788). This new edition was originally printed in two volumes, the first containing Sale’s ‘Preliminary discourse’ and the first eight suras, and the second suras 9-114. Rodwell’s translation, entitled El-Ķorân; or The Ķorân: translated from the Arabic, the suras arranged in chronological order; with notes and index, appeared in 1861 (followed by a second in 1876). Apart from the general quality of the translation, the most noteworthy features are extensive cross-referencing with biblical material and in particular the presentation of the text in a chronological order. In arranging suras, Rodwell drew upon Gustav Weil’s Mohammed der Prophet, William Muir’s Life of Mahomet, and especially Theodor Nöldeke’s Geschichte des Qorāns. E.H. Palmer likewise produced his own translation, The Qur’ân, which appeared in 1880. It was published in two parts, the first containing the introduction and the first 26 suras, and the second the remaining suras.



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Illustration 4. Map of Arabia from Richard Davenport’s edition of George Sale’s translation of The Koran

The introduction gives a full account of the life of Muḥammad, the origins of the Qur’an, and introductory details about Islam (the introduction was later omitted and the two volumes combined). Palmer tries to keep to a simple rendition of the Arabic in order to capture the ‘rugged simplicity of the original’ (The Qur’ân, vol. 1, p. lxxix), and explicitly moves away from the higher literary approach of Rodwell and Sale. In instances of difficult passages or ambiguous Arabic words, he follows the interpretations of the acknowledged classical commentator al-Bayḍāwī (d. 1286). Following Davenport, E.L. Wherry produced a new edition of Sale, A comprehensive commentary on the Qurán: Comprising Sale’s translation and preliminary discourse, with additional notes and emendations; together with a complete index to the text, preliminary discourse, and notes. It was divided

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into four volumes: vol. 1 (1882) contains Wherry’s own preface, Sale’s preface and ‘Preliminary discourse’ followed by the first two suras; vol. 2 (1884) suras 3-13; vol. 3 (1885) suras 14-40; and vol. 4 (1886) suras 41-114 and the index. Wherry retained Sale’s extensive notes and footnotes (which are clearly marked as such) and also added his own commentary throughout, both on the text of the Qur’an and on Sale’s analyses. To suit the Indian context in which he was working, he also used the verse numbering of a popular Urdu translation. He prefaced each sura with an introduction and an analysis of its core teachings, drawing heavily on the scholarship of Sir William Muir. The distinctive feature of Davenport’s edition is his sketch of Sale’s life, which depicts him as a sincere Christian against accusations that he placed Islam on par with Christianity. He tries to rescue Sale’s dispassionate approach to the Qur’an. Rodwell argues that the Qur’an was the work of one man and is a witness to the development of his ideas. He thinks that Muḥammad began his career as a thoughtful enquirer into divine truth, but eventually fell victim to his own eagerness to realise his vocation, trying to convert people by any means, including deceit and falsehood in Mecca and tyranny and violence in Medina. Muḥammad was ultimately a victim of self-deception, a great though imperfect character’ (El-Ḳorân, 1876, p. xxii). Rodwell’s was one of the most influential translations, weaving its biblical commentary throughout its footnotes and presenting Muḥammad as the student of Oriental Christians, Arabian Jews and heterodox Christian groups such as the Ebionites, thus gaining familiarity with Jewish and Christian legends and general lessons from the Bible. He thought that Muḥammad possessed an incomplete and distorted understanding of Christian scripture, and what he learned he recast for his own purposes. He was an admirable yet flawed individual who changed to adapt to his shifting circumstances and employed biblical motifs as it suited him. Palmer, particularly in his introduction, gives a picture of Muḥammad and the Qur’an that is generally free from polemic, though he incorporates motifs that are common to Western perceptions. Thus, Muḥammad borrowed material from the Talmud and other Jewish and Christian sources through individuals he met, but confused the meanings and details of what he was told. Palmer maintains that Muḥammad suffered from epilepsy, hallucinations and both voluntary and involuntary deceptions. His Night Journey was the result of one such fit of hysteria. On the other hand, Palmer praises Muḥammad for working for the good of his fellow Arabs and highlights his success in uniting through a common



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religious sentiment. His epileptic fits notwithstanding, Muḥammad was no mere impostor but rather a sincere man devoted to the well-being of his community. Palmer also argues that Muḥammad’s belief in the unity of God was indeed the ancient faith of Abraham, and bringing Arabs to a grander understanding of the one God was his original contribution to the history of religions. He also venerated Jesus, and might have been a Christian if the Christianity found in Arabia had not been so corrupt, sectarian and neglectful of the teachings of Christ. Wherry prepared his edition of Sale to help Christian missionaries in India better to understand Islam. Even so, he generally maintains a sober attitude towards the text and Muḥammad, attempting to maintain middle ground between the idealised Muḥammad of Western apologists and the figure described by Christian polemicists. He intends his commentary as a help towards advancing the cause of truth by laying bare the teachings of the Qur’an. Nonetheless, he highlights particular verses and passages that are the most problematic for missionary endeavours. Thus, Q 19 is an example of Muḥammad’s misrepresentation of the Bible, suggesting both his own scant familiarity with the text and his reliance on informants who were themselves ignorant of their own traditions, while Q 33 and the story of Muḥammad’s marriage to Zaynab, who was previously married to his adopted son Zayd, is the most decisive indication of the spuriousness of Muḥammad’s prophetic claims. For Wherry, this episode and its subsequent justification through supposed new revelation clearly demonstrate Muḥammad’s carnality, selfishness and fraudulence. Throughout his commentary on these and other passages, Wherry challenges Muslim apologists to respond to his assessments. Significance These editions were instrumental in shaping the attitudes of Christians and people in the English-speaking world towards the Qur’an, Muḥammad and Islam. They all attempted to assist the interpretation of the Qur’an through extensive introductions and copious footnotes and commentary, and most of them drew heavily on Orientalist scholarship and Muslim commentaries. Although only Wherry’s was explicitly intended for apologetic purposes, all these editions locate the origin of the Qur’an with Muḥammad himself and present his teachings as garbled and incomplete versions of Christianity and Judaism. At the same time, they present an understanding of the Qur’an that was rooted in the biography of Muḥammad and largely dependent on the Muslim exegetical tradition, rather than European polemical traditions.

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The translations provide a window into perceptions of Islam that were being impressed upon English readers. They assert the human origin of the Qur’an and present Muḥammad as fallible and imperfect. However, through their introductions, prefaces and extensive footnotes they also endeavour to interpret the Qur’an for its own sake, in a manner that was not very different from that found in exegetical works by Muslims themselves. Publications R.A. Davenport (ed.), The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed; a new edition, with a memoir of the translator, 2 vols, London, 1825; 008408081 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.A. Davenport (ed.), The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed; a new edition, with a memoir of the translator, 2 vols, London, 1838; EPK15 (digitised version available through Early Western Korans Online) R.A. Davenport (ed.), The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed; a new edition, with a memoir of the translator, 2 vols, London, 1844; A.or. 563 (digitised version available through MDZ) R.A. Davenport (ed.), The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed; a new edition, London, 1861 (the 1861 edition combined the two volumes into one; many later editions of Sale are derived from Davenport’s edition); 006569310 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.H. Palmer (trans.), The Qur’ân, 2 vols, Oxford, 1880-2, repr. 1900, Delhi, 1965; BP109 KOR pt 1/pt 2 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) E.H. Palmer (trans.), The Qur’ân, ed. R.A. Nicholson, London, 1928, repr. 1953, 2007 (single volume edition without Palmer’s introduction); BP109.P.34 KOR (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) J.M. Rodwell (trans.), El-Ķorân; or The Ķorân: translated from the Arabic, the suras arranged in chronological order; with notes and index, London, 1861; Sem. 3.239 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) J.M. Rodwell (trans.), El-Ķorân; or The Ķorân: translated from the Arabic, the suras arranged in chronological order; with notes and index, London, 18762; 100603438 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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J.M. Rodwell (trans.), The Koran, revised G. Margoliouth, London, 1909 (Everyman’s Library edition) J.M. Rodwell (trans.), The Koran, ed. A. Jones, London, 1994 (heavily revised version of the 1909 edition) E.M. Wherry, A comprehensive commentary on the Qur’an. Comprising Sale’s translation and preliminary discourse, with additional notes and emendations, 4 vols, Boston MA, 1882-6; BP109.S3 1882 v.1-v.4 (digitised version available through Robarts Library, University of Toronto) E.M. Wherry, A comprehensive commentary on the Qurán. Comprising Sale’s translation and preliminary discourse, with additional notes and emendations, 4 vols, London, 1882-6; 01sale-04sale (digitised version available through Princeton Theological Seminary Library) E.M. Wherry, A comprehensive commentary on the Qurán. Comprising Sale’s translation and preliminary discourse, with additional notes and emendations, 4 vols, London, 1896 Studies M. Ebenezer and C.M. Ramsey, ‘A comprehensive commentary on the Qur’án’, in CMR 16, 375-80 B.B. Lawrence, The Koran in English. A biography, Princeton NJ, 2017, pp. 38-47 A.M. Guenther, ‘The image of the Prophet as found in missionary writings of the late nineteenth century’, Muslim World 90 (2000) 43-71 M. Ebenezer, ‘American Presbyterians and Islam in India 1855-1923. A critical evaluation of the contributions of Isidor Loewenthal (18261864) and Elwood Morris Wherry (1843-1927)’, Glenside PA, 1998 (PhD Diss. Westminster Theological Seminary) A.R. Nykl, ‘Notes on E.H. Palmer’s “The Qur’ân”’, JAOS 56 (1936) 77-84 Andrew O’Connor

Reginald Bosworth Smith Date of Birth 28 June 1839 Place of Birth West Stafford, Dorset Date of Death 18 October 1908 Place of Death Bingham’s Melcombe, Dorset

Biography

Reginald Bosworth Smith was born on 28 June 1839 in the rectory, West Stafford, Dorset, where his father, Reginald Southwell Smith (d. 1896) held the living. Smith was educated at Milton Abbas School, Blandford, and at Marlborough College before going to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1858. He graduated in 1862, and in 1863 he was elected a fellow of Trinity College, though in 1864 he left Trinity to join the staff of Harrow School. In 1865 he married Flora Wickham. The headmaster encouraged staff to pursue interests outside their usual academic specialties, and in 1874 Smith delivered a series of lectures on Islam at the Royal Institution. He published these as Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874). An expanded edition appeared in 1876, and a 3rd edition in 1889. Setting out in this to do justice to Islam, Smith challenged many negative tropes and dared hope that Christians would one day recognise Muḥammad as a true messenger from God. His next book, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878), drew on his classical studies and was also based on lectures presented at the Royal Institution. Interested in Indian affairs, he accepted an invitation to write the biography of Lord Lawrence (d. 1879), whom he had met. This was published in 1883. Smith declined an invitation to speak about Islam at the 1887 Church Congress because he did not think he could do justice to the complex relationship between Islam and Christianity in the time allotted. In his place, Canon Isaac Taylor (d. 1901) spoke, sparking a heated debate about whether Islam or Christianity was superior, and whether Islam was more suited to non-Europeans than Christianity. Smith contributed an essay, ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, on this topic, published in The Nineteenth Century (1887). Smith resisted denigrating Christianity, although he did criticise some missionary practices. Nevertheless, he remained in good standing with missionary agencies and spoke at several missionary conferences.



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As a result of his first book, Smith became friends with and received communications from eminent Muslims and others, who appreciated what he had written, including Syed Ameer Ali (d. 1928), the author of The spirit of Islam (1891), the hookah smoking Arabist George Badger (d. 1888), Edward Blyden (d. 1912) and the missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes (d. 1911) (Grogan, Memoir, p. 188). Smith left Harrow in 1901 and moved to Dorset. He continued to speak on Islam and related topics and, in 1903, he gave an address on the British Empire and Christian mission at the annual meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which published the text of his talk. In 1905, he spoke on Islam and Christianity at the Weymouth Church Congress. He died at his home on 18 October 1908.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION E. Graham, revised M.C. Curthoys, art. ‘Smith, Reginald Bosworth’, in ODNB E. Graham, art. ‘Smith, Reginald Bosworth’, in DNB E.F. Grogan (Smith’s daughter), Bosworth Smith. A memoir, London 1909

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mohammed and Mohammedanism Date 1874, 1889 Original Language English Description Smith’s Mohammed and Mohammedanism. Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February and March, 1874 was first published in 1874. The book’s four chapters had been presented as lectures to a small audience at Harrow, and then at the Royal Institution, London, in February and March of that year. An American edition appeared in 1875, and a second edition followed in 1876, with revisions informed by critical comments, mainly that the first edition was ‘too favourable’ to Islam. His response was to say that many people had approached Islam ‘only to vilify and misrepresent it’, so he had set out not to ‘treat it with a cold and distant impartiality’ but with ‘something akin to sympathy and friendliness’ (p. ix). A third, expanded edition was published in 1889. (The references that follow are to the 1889 edition unless otherwise stated.)

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In this edition, the prefaces to the second (pp. vii-xiv) and third (pp. xv-xxi) editions are reprinted, both of them listing Smith’s sources, which included William Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1858-61), Aloys Sprenger’s Life of Mohammad (1851), Jean Gagnier’s Vie de Mahomet (1732), Edward Gibbon’s The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 5 (1877), several translations of the Qur’an, E.A. Freeman’s The history and conquests of the Saracens (1856) and A.N. Matthews’s translation of Mishkāt al-masābīḥ (1809-10) for the sayings of Muḥammad. In addition, he names several works on ‘comparative religion’, among them F. Max Müller’s Chips from a German workshop (1868) and F.D. Maurice’s Religions of the world (1846), and also Syed Ahmad Khan’s Essays on the life of Mohammed (1870) and Syed Ameer Ali’s A critical examination of the life and teachings of Mohammed (1873). In his eyes, these two Muslim writers ‘advocate something of the spirit, and arrive at some of the results’ that it was his ‘object to urge from the Christian stand-point’ (p. xxi). Smith’s approach to studying Islam was to attempt to set aside his preconceived ideas and prejudices, and rely on the Qur’an and Muslim sources ‘to arrive as nearly as may be to the truth’ (p. xvi). This was because he thought that Christians were tempted to project their personal ideas onto Islam and to stress its differences from Christiaity. Doubting that Christianity would ever replace Islam in the East, he suggested that Christians could learn from Islam and Muslims from Christianity, and that this would make them more, not less, Christian and Muslim. ‘As children of one Father, even though Christians and Muslims worship God differently, influenced by one Spirit’ (p. xvii) they might experience a type of unity. Smith challenged Christians, when they wrote about Islam and other religions, to ‘turn the mirror in’ upon themselves by making sure that they treated others as they wished to be ‘judged and treated’ by them (p. ix). Divine inspiration was to be found in ‘all the greatest thoughts of men’, because God had given all people ‘a knowledge of Himself’. He was not exclusively possessed by any single creed (p. xi). Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1-62), begins with a description of the ‘science of comparative religion’ as a new venture that might be tempted to make ‘ill-considered’ generalisations (p. 1). However, Smith suggests principles that can be ‘provisionally’ identified: religion is as old as humankind; it was initially ‘moral rather than theological’; and it aims to raise people gradually towards God not ‘to bring God down to people’ (pp. 2-3). He disagrees with those who claim that Islam is less interesting than other religions because it ‘is less original’ (p. 9), referring to Ernest Renan’s Études



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d’histoire religieuse (Paris, 1863) and asking why ‘lack of originality’ should be a reproach to a religion, for after all Christianity is heavily indebted to Judaism (p. 11). Smith estimates the number of Muslims in the world and sketches Islam’s geographical spread, and he refers to the current success of Muslim mission in Africa compared with Christian mission: ‘Musulman missionaries exhibit a forbearance, a sympathy, and a respect for native customs and prejudices, and even for their more harmless beliefs’, which Christians ‘would do well to imitate’ (p. 35). Muslim converts abandon polytheism, sorcery and drunkenness, and become more moral. They become thirsty for literature and for ‘the works of science and philosophy’ (p. 36). In contrast, the abolition of slavery is the only benefit that Christians have so far conferred on Africa, and the white man is generally regarded as ‘an object of terror, and his professed creed as an object of suspicion and repugnance’. So far, Islam has ‘done most for Africa’, and an Islam ‘purified by Christian influences’ is likely to benefit Africa. Christians should overcome religious prejudice when they write about Islam. While the idea that all religions are equally true is unlikely to attract much support, the study of comparative religion is confirming that all religions ‘contain some truth’ (p. 53), and Christianity does not have a mono­ poly on goodness and truth (p. 55). Christians who claim that Christianity is the most sublime religion and their scriptures superior to other sacred books should ‘acknowledge’ that sincere Muslims or Buddhists ‘arrive at the same conclusions concerning their own faiths’ (p. 57). So, Christian missionaries may continue to evangelise, but instead of trying to replace other faiths they should attempt to ‘infuse a Christian spirit into’ them. They should recognise them as ‘non-Christian’ or as ‘half-Christian’, and not as ‘anti-Christian’ (p. 58). Appendix I (pp. 293-9) adds substance to the points Smith makes in this lecture. He argues that a revolution in Islam similar to the Protestant Reformation would result in greater similarity between Islam and Christianity. Referring to David Livingstone’s views on Islam’s destructive role in Africa as the opposite of his own, he suggests that Livingstone based his position solely on the Arab slave trade in south and south-east Africa, where the Arabs practised a ‘degraded’ Islam. Livingstone claimed that only Christians make converts, though against this Richard Burton stated that only Muslims achieve success, and that Muslim missionaries in Sierra Leone were peacefully winning converts under a Christian government. They were following Livingstone’s own ideal of what

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Christian missionaries should be like (p. 244). Too many Christian missionaries referred to Muḥammad as ‘the false prophet’, and even Henry Martyn had preached to Muslims without having read a word of the Qur’an (p. 247). A number of missionaries saw no merit in Islam, though individuals such as Thomas Patrick Hughes (d. 1911) and Bishop George Cotton (d. 1866), Smith’s former headmaster, had ‘in reality much in common’ with his point of view that Islam contained ‘an immense amount of good’. Ch. 2, ‘Mohammed’ (pp. 63-131), begins with an account of early Christian polemic against Islam, and the errors in portrayals of Islam. Polemicists accused Muslims of worshipping Muḥammad ‘as a God’ (p. 64), and attributed all kinds of crimes to him. There was no change during the Reformation, when hatred of him seemed to be the inverse of knowledge about him. Even translations of the Qur’an into European languages, with voluminous refutations attached to them, did not improve this situation. Then, finally, secular historians such as Edward Gibbon began to make materials for an impartial judgement available (pp. 70-1). Smith’s own aim is to claim about Muḥammad only what he claimed about himself. He praises Jean Gagnier (d. 1740) for his pioneering use of Islamic sources, though Gibbon’s unfair treatment of Christianity detracts from his account of Muḥammad, and, while William Muir (Life of Mahomet, 1857-61) makes much more information available, his work’s ‘scientific value’ is impaired by his ‘theological assertions’ (p. xviii). From these preliminaries, Smith now turns to describe Arabian society at the time of Muḥammad’s birth, and gives an outline of his early years up to his marriage to Khadīja. His temperament was ‘nervous and excitable’ (p. 96), and he was ‘liable to fits’. Smith comments that ‘whether epileptic or not’ (according to the diagnosis given by Aloys Sprenger), these ‘involved strange physical phenomena’ (pp. 96-7). Smith contines with Muḥammad’s life, describing his first revelation, the preaching that followed and his Luther-like adherence to his vocation. In fact, if Luther had known more about Muḥammad, he might have ‘welcomed him as a brother’ (p. 101). He traces the early years of Muḥammad’s ministry and the opposition from the Meccans, resulting in his migration to Medina, where he gained support and was able to take his place in the ‘theatre of the world’ (p. 105). Had Islam ended then, Smith comments, ‘strangled in its cradle’, Arabia would have continued to practise human sacrifices, murder infant girls and worship idols. In all the lands to which Islam would spread, drunkenness, slavery, cruelty and gambling would



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have continued ‘unchecked’, while Europe’s dark age would have been even darker without the learning that was borrowed from Moorish Spain. Smith thinks that only someone who sincerely believed in ‘the reality and goodness of his cause’ could have accomplished what Muḥammad did (p. 108), adding that those who were most intimate with him were the first to believe in his mission. Yet if Muḥammad’s sincerity is accepted up to the time of his migration, can it still be affirmed after this? Muḥammad did undergo a change: revelations came more swiftly and ‘seem more suited to the caprices of the moment’, the ‘convenient but dangerous doctrine of abrogation’ appeared for the first time (p. 114), and he relaxed the limitation on polygamy for himself, which was a ‘blot’. Nevertheless, Smith does not think that Muḥammad was ‘a sensualist or a voluptuary in the ordinary sense’ since he ‘imposed exceptional privations’ on himself (p. 114), and his marriage to Zaynab (whose husband, Muḥammad’s foster-son, supposedly divorced her at his request) does not deserve the ‘interpretation usually placed upon it by Christians’. A lengthy footnote (pp. 115-16) goes into more detail about instances in Muḥammad’s life that are used by Christian biographers to reveal flaws in his character, arguing that isolated incidents do not support the overall accusation of ‘pious fraud’ because Muḥammad maintained a modest lifestyle and did not compromise the ‘central truth’ of his mission (p. 119). Smith finds Muḥammad’s consistency throughout his life remarkable, from the ‘shepherd of the desert’, ‘the Syrian trader’, the ‘solitary of Mount Hira’, ‘the reformer in the minority of one’, ‘the exile of Medina’ to the ‘conqueror’ of Arabia (p. 119). He may at times have given way to temptation, but there was no marked decline in his morals, no ‘gradual sapping of moral principles’. Overall it can be said that he was convinced of the truth of his mission yet did not claim that spiritual rewards were waiting for him after his death unless God covered him with mercy (p. 130). He never claimed to be any more than God’s servant and prophet. Ch. 3, ‘Mohammedanism’ (pp. 132-87), covers such subjects as Muḥammad’s teachings about God’s Unity, other Articles of Faith, the Five Pillars, Islam as the religion’s proper name, Muḥammad’s wars, the Qur’an, Jewish influence, Christianity at the time of Muḥammad, whether Muḥammad was a fatalist, and the issue of miracles. Identifying three issues as particularly attracting debate, Smith defends the Islamic view of miracles, fatalism and wars for the sake of religion (p. 156). Expanding on religious wars later on in Appendix II (pp. 301-3), he argues that Christian wars have been as ferocious as Muslim wars, and sometimes more so.

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There is the example of Muslim clemency when Jerusalem surrendered to the Caliph ʿUmar compared with the bloody massacres committed by the crusaders when they captured the city in 1099. The Muslims never destroyed a city as they advanced across North Africa, while the British burned their enemies’ capital in the Gold Coast war of 1874 (p. 302). While numerous instances of Christian mass killings can be given, by contrast Abū Bakr’s rules of engagement spared women, civilians, animals, crops and places of worship (p. 185). Ch. 4, ‘Mohammedanism and Christianity’ (pp. 188-291), discusses some Christian misperceptions about Islam: practices of slavery and polygamy, teachings about heaven and hell, treatment of orphans and widows, success in proselytising despite the absence of priests, reverence for Christ, whether it is a curse or a blessing to the world, the Wahhabi movement, and what modifications to it might be necessary. Smith recognises limitations and defects, but points to equivalents in Christianity and also to customs and institutions in the Islamic world that must be judged superior to any in Christian societies. In general, these do not amount to a case for the complete rejection of Islam. Regarding Jesus, Smith argues that Muḥammad’s information about him came from Christian traditions and apocryphal gospels, making it extraordinary that he venerated Jesus as much as he did. Christian worship of saints and relics in Arabia in his time, together with the doctrine of the Trinity, seemed to Muḥammad to conflict with his belief in one God: to him, Trinity was Tritheism. However, he saw Jesus as the greatest of the prophets, who restored sight to the blind, made birds from clay, was a word and a spirit from God, denied being God’s son and was not crucified. Q 5:116 suggests that Muḥammad thought the Trinity comprised Father, Son and Mary, which some Christians in Arabia might have believed, pointing to the fact that Christianity in Arabia had been tried and ‘had failed’. Smith quotes E.A. Freeman’s words that, as a 7th-century Arabian reformer, Muḥammad was ‘the greatest of reformers’. Freeman, however, judged that Muḥammad’s mistake was to expand Islam outside Arabia, but Smith contests this (p. 236), because Islam has had more success than Christianity in converting Asians and Africans. Here, Islam has been beneficial, and Christians should rejoice at good wherever they see it. Christianity has succeeded mainly among what Smith calls higher races, while Islam succeeds where Christianity fails among uncivilised peoples. No Islamic nation has embraced Christianity, while superficially Christian nations have converted to Islam. Less sublime than Christianity,



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Islam is ‘admirably suited to the region in which it was born’ (p. 239). On the other hand, Islam has never continued to thrive in countries such as Spain, which are of a ‘wholly different nature’, though Islamic Spain, while it lasted, was a blessing to the whole world (p. 243). Likewise, Sicily knew its best government and prosperity under Islamic rule. Islam may not be a world-wide religion, but it is beneficial in the East and in Africa. It is futile to compare Jesus with any other religion’s founder because of who he is, but there are points in which Jesus and Muḥammad ‘approximate each other’, and it is more just to focus on these points even if the contrasts are as sharp as the resemblances. Christianity is the more elevating of the two, so that an Averroes stands below Newton, an ʿAlī below a St Paul. Muḥammad’s life is disfigured by ‘one huge moral blemish’, while Jesus’s was sinless. Muslims learn about God from the Qur’an’s teaching, while Christians become united with God in a ‘union with Christ’ (p. 249). Nevertheless, Islam is the ‘nearest [...] in approach to Christianity’ and the religion that the ‘unprogressive part of humanity’ is most likely to embrace (p. 256). Islamic nations have stagnated while, propelled by ambition and a ‘blundering philanthropy’, Christians are annexing large portions of the Islamic world. Can Islam’s ‘dry bones’ live again (p. 257)? Muḥammad predicted that a reformer would appear in each century, and Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792) can be cited as a modern reformer whose aim was to rid Islam of corrupt practices and bring renewal in the form of Islamic education and the strict prohibition of alcohol. Too many missionaries have treated Islam as their ‘deadly foe instead of as a potential friend of Christianity’, at the same time wondering at their lack of converts (p. 281). How should civilisation and Christianity deal with Islam? It is important to accept that there is a great amount of flexibility within the Islamic tradition, and it would be wrong to think that it is ‘reconcilable with one narrow form of government or society only’ (p. 282). Bearing this in mind, Christians would do well to learn about Islam from what is actually happening in the Islamic world instead of from outmoded stories, and, in place of competing, the two religions could each rejoice ‘in the success of the other, each supplying the other’s wants in a generous rivalry for the good of humanity’ (p. 286). Smith concludes with a ‘few words more about’ Muḥammad. Unlike other conquerors he is never given the title ‘great’, yet considering his achievements, he seems to stand above all such men (p. 287). He spurned living in a palace or receiving a fixed revenue for his leadership. If any man

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could claim that he ruled by divine right it was Muḥammad, who ruled without the supports of power (p. 289). Even his contemporaries who rejected his mission describe his simple life-style, truthfulness, justness and piety. So if Christians are to win Muslims, ‘they must change their tactics’, pay Muḥammad the homage he is due, and stress how much Islam resembles Christianity, not where it differs. Instead of trying to sweep Islam away, Christians should breathe new life into it and build on the truths it already has (p. 290). Islam is below Christianity, yet of all the ‘great teachers and benefactors of the human race’ it is Muḥammad who ‘comes next to Christ’ (p. 291). In 1887, Smith was invited to speak on Islam in Africa at the Wolverhampton Church Congress. He declined out of concern that the time allotted, about 20 minutes, was insufficient to do justice to the topic. Isaac Taylor (d. 1901) took his place, and drew heavily on Smith’s book. He spoke very disparagingly about Christian missionaries and was thought to be lifting Islam above Christianity, causing an explosive response that continued in print for some time. Smith responded in 1887 with an article entitled ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, in which he took issue with some of the things Taylor had said. At least one missionary thought it was amusing that Smith should chastise Taylor for ‘promulgating’ what were essentially his own ideas ‘in an exaggerated form’ without any of the ‘modifications and explanations’ Smith thought necessary. In the words of C.R. Haines (d. 1935), Smith started ‘back in horror, like another Frankenstein, at the monster he had created’ (Islam as a missionary religion, London, 1889, p. v), though the difference between the two was more in their tone than in their substance. While Smith’s writing did attract harsh criticism from missionaries, unlike Taylor he remained in good standing with the missionary community. In 1903, he addressed the annual meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and in 1905 he finally spoke on Islam at the Weymouth Church Congress. No doubt some of his views had changed, but the paper he presented substantially reconfirmed his idea that missionaries should dwell on common ground with Islam, and present Christianity in its simplest form. Smith did not exonerate Muḥammad of all criticisms. He himself subscribed to some Orientalist ideas about whether nations tend towards progress or remain static, and there is a hint of racist assumptions in his description of Africans. However, he parted company from most on the matter of Muḥammad’s sincerity in all the phases of his life, resisting the



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more popular view that, while he was initially sincere, he became selfserving and deceitful after 622. He also opposed the claim that Islam was always the enemy of learning, and Freeman’s contention that Muslim government was always despotic. In comparing the ferocity of Islamic and Christian warfare, he also broke new ground in challenging the view that Christians were more peaceful than Muslims. Significance Smith’s Mohammed and Mohammedanism was written as an exercise in comparative religion, a new field at the time. His aim, to investigate Islam as an unbiased, objective scholar, was one that other writers shared, though some were seen to promote Islam at the expense of Christianity. These included such authors as Godfrey Higgins (d. 1833) and John Davenport (d. 1877). As a serving priest, Isaac Taylor may not have intended to be seen as anti-Christian, but he was vilified by the missionary press in a way that Smith was not. Early reviews by Arabists and other scholars praised Smith for rendering ‘a clear, unbiased and unambiguous verdict’ (E.W. Blyden, ‘Mohammedanism and the negro race’, Fraser’s Magazine 12 [November 1875] 598-615, p. 599). George Percy Badger (d. 1888), an Arabist, former missionary, and member of the British mission to Zanzibar in 1872, commended Smith for bringing to his ‘chivalrous task considerable research among the best European Orientalists’, and for executing this ‘with a union of candour and reverence befitting a subject of such monumental importance as the religion of a sixth of the human race’ (‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’, The Contemporary Review 26 [June 1875] 87-102, p. 88). Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), later professor of Arabic at Trinity College Dublin, observed that, while Smith made no claim to having carried out original research, this was no longer needed. What was needed, he said, was ‘the mind that can see the true meaning of the facts and grasp the complete character of the great man whose life they mark out’ (The Academy 5 [June 1874] 623-4, p. 623). E.H. Palmer (d. 1882), professor of Arabic at Cambridge, agreed with Smith that Islam opposed neither peace nor progress, but disagreed with his defence of Muḥammad’s moral behaviour at Medina (The Quarterly Review (1877) 203-37, p. 221). In contrast to these reviews, which question aspects of Smith’s book but praise his scholarship, the missionary press was highly critical. George Knox (d. 1891), editor of The Church Missionary Intelligencer and a former East India Company chaplain, said that Smith had merely revived arguments that had already been proposed by John Davenport. Although

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Knox thought Smith provided ‘nothing of any importance’ to shed light on the subject, he continued with a lengthy review (‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’, Church Missionary Intelligencer [July 1874] 224-38). He also regretted that Smith had listened to Matthew Arnold, who had attended the lectures, and to F.D. Maurice (p. 224), who saw religions as mutually complementary, and who Smith praised for having ‘penetrated far deeper than is allowed’ (Mohammed and Mohammedanism, 1889, p. 134). Knox rejected Smith’s claim that Islam offered Africans any benefit at all. In fact, Islam was a ‘bane’ wherever it was found, and no truce must be made with it or with any other form of error. Rather, Christians were to use all legal means to ‘rid the world’ of Islam (p. 237). While Knox would have preferred to make no more mention of Smith’s book, in November that year he published a review by T.P. Hughes because of his reputation as a missionary scholar of Islam (‘An Indian missionary on Muhammad and Muhammadanism’, Church Missionary Intelligencer [November 1874] 330-40). Hughes commended William Muir and Aloys Sprenger’s books on Muḥammad as safer guides than Smith’s, and argued that Islam opposed Christianity and could not be seen as its ‘twin brother’, as Smith claimed (‘Indian missionary’, p. 335). In ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’, published in The British and Foreign Evangelical Review (January 1877) 1-28, John Robson (d. 1908), who had pioneered the United Presbyterian mission to Rajputana (1860-72), struck a more positive note. He described the book as ‘the result of careful investigation’ that had rendered a service to Christians (p. 3), but he insisted that Christians ‘will never recognise Mahomed as a “prophet” unless they renounce the prayer, “Our Father which art in heaven”’ (p. 26). Robson judged that Islam and Christianity were as ‘antagonistic as it is possible for two theistic religions to be’ (p. 13). Between Mohammed and Mohammedanism and his later addresses at missionary meetings, Smith’s suggestions for how Christians should approach Muslims appear to have gained some support from both missionary and Muslim friends. The latter included Syed Ameer Ali and the Ottoman government, who conveyed their gratitude for his ‘attempt to do justice to Islam’ through Ambassador Musurus Pasha (d. 1891). In India, a Muslim magazine, Awadh Akhbar, published a letter headed ‘Good news for Mussulmans’, which commended Smith’s book to its readers (‘India in 1876’, in Mission Life 8 [1877] 153-66, p. 163; this was a periodical edited by J.J. Halcombe, published between 1866 and 1885). Smith’s daughter later wrote that African Muslims still prayed for her father in their mosques



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for having ‘attempted to do justice to Islam, as a civilizing and elevating agency’ (Grogan, Memoir, p.141). Muslim writers frequently cite Smith as a Christian who sympathised with Islam, quite often wrongly identifying him as a clergyman. See, for example, A.M. Hemaya, Islam. A profound insight (Cairo, 2011, p. 152), and E. Ali, ‘Promoting love and unity among mankind’, Muslim Post (23 November 2016 - an online journal); https://www.themuslimpost.com/ promoting-love-and-unity-among-mankind/. His lectures succeeded in influencing both Christians and Muslims towards a new understanding of their mutual relationship. Syed Ameer Ali wrote that his book gave him ‘a far higher idea of Christianity’ than he had previously ‘possessed’ (Grogan, Memoir, p. 148). His hope that one day Christians might recognise Muḥammad as a ‘prophet’ went beyond what most Christians had proposed and identified an important area for future consideration within Christian theology. The fact that, unlike Higgins, Davenport and earlier writers such as Henry Stubbe (1676) and John Toland (1722), who also approached Islam with sympathy and defended Muḥammad from many traditional criticisms, Smith remained recognisably part of mainstream Church thinking. This makes him a more representative participant, on the Christian side, in Christian-Muslim relations, than some other writers. Publications R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism. Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1874, London, 1874; 100132546 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, New York, 1875 (with an appendix containing Emanuel Deutsch’s article on ‘Islam’); 006524837 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, London, 18762; 009777358 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, London, 18893, repr. 1958; 001931277 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, Lahore, 1974 R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, New Delhi, 1996 R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, San Diego CA, 2002 R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, Charleston SC, 2012

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R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, London, 2016 R.B. Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, Norderstedt, 2019 Studies C. Bennett, In search of Muhammad, London, 1998, pp. 120-5 C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992, pp. 74-102 Grogan, Memoir Clinton Bennett

Isaac Taylor Date of Birth 2 May 1825 Place of Birth Stanford Rivers, Essex Date of Death 18 October 1901 Place of Death Settrington, Yorkshire

Biography

Isaac Taylor was born on 2 May 1825 at Stanford Rivers, Essex, the son of Isaac Taylor (d. 1865), who held several patents for inventions, and Elizabeth Medland. Taylor studied at King’s College, London, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1853. He was ordained deacon in 1857 and priest in 1858. Several curacies followed, before he became vicar of St Matthias, Bethnal Green, London, in 1865. In 1869 he moved to Holy Trinity, Twickenham, and in 1875 to Settrington, Yorkshire, where he remained until his death. He married Georgiana Ann Cust in 1865. Taylor became known for his work in philology through such books as Words and places (1864) and The alphabet (1883), in which he applied Darwinian selection theory to the development of letters. He also wrote The origin of the Aryans (1890), which he located in Finland. In 1887, when he spoke on Islam at the annual Church Congress, a mission-oriented meeting which met that year in Wolverhampton, he suggested that Islam was better suited to Africans than Christianity. This address received a hostile response from supporters of Christian mission, prompting Taylor to travel to Egypt to investigate whether Muslims were as ignorant, barbaric and intolerant as his critics claimed, and whether Christians and Muslims could enjoy fraternal relations. His findings were that, if Christians returned to Jesus’s ‘pure teachings’, they would find little that divides them from Muslims (Leaves from an Egyptian note-book, p. 104). In the same year he also wrote two essays, ‘The great missionary failure’ and ‘Missionary finance’, which continued to criticise Christian mission as an expensive failure, though he did exempt Moravians, the Salvation Army, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and Alexander MacKay (d. 1890), a CMS missionary in Uganda. Among Taylor’s critics in the debate that followed, George Knox, editor of the Church Missionary Intelligencer, dismissed Taylor’s argument as ‘absurd, ignorant and vulgar’ (‘Rejoinder’, p. 780). But he did have some supporters,

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including the African explorer Joseph Thomson (d. 1895) (see Bennett, Victorian images, pp. 181-2). The debate continued until 1890, with many letters to The Times. Taylor died at Settrington on 18 October 1901.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Isaac Taylor, ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, in C. Dunkley (ed.), The official report of the Church Congress, held at Wolverhampton [...] 1887, London, 1887, 325-31 Isaac Taylor, Leaves from an Egyptian note-book, London, 1888 G. Knox, ‘A rejoinder’, Church Missionary Intelligencer (December 1887) 713-38 I. Taylor, ‘The great missionary failure’, The Fortnightly Review 50 (1888) 488-500 I. Taylor, ‘Missionary finances’, The Fortnightly Review 50 (1888) 581-92 Anon., The Athenæum 3861 (26 October 1901) 559 (obituary) Art. ‘Taylor, Isaac’, in DNB (no contributor recorded but based on ‘personal knowledge’) J. Venn, and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge, 1954, vol. 2, pt 6, p. 125 Secondary C.E.A. Cheesman, art. ‘Taylor, Isaac’, in ODNB C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992, pp. 181-91

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Writings on Islam Date 1888 Original Language English Description Taylor’s Leaves from an Egyptian note-book was published in 1888. Following the Preface (pp. v-vii), the text of 16 chapters runs to 157 pages. Many of the contents first appeared in the St James Gazette. On 5 October 1887, Taylor had addressed the Church Congress at Wolverhampton, stepping in when Reginald Bosworth Smith declined the invitation. His address was delivered in the session on the Church in Africa (see the report of the Congress, pp. 325-31), and it created controversy because Taylor was perceived as praising Islam at the general expense of Christianity and Christian missionary endeavours in particular. He thought



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Islam was more suitable for Africans than Christianity because of the stage in development they had reached, arguing that instead of trying to convert Africans, Christians should actually promote Islam (p. 326). Reports from missionaries and from ‘lay travellers’ described how, once Africans embraced Islam, filthiness gave way to cleanliness, cannibalism to dignified respect for life, and drunkenness to sobriety, while hospitality became a ‘religious duty’ (p. 327). In contrast, wherever European trade was expanded, drunkenness increased. In a word, more Africans were ‘debauched or destroyed’ by English ‘gunpowder, gin and scrofula’ than have benefitted from becoming Christian (p. 327). Taylor suggested that Islam must be of God, and rather than regarding Islam as anti-Christian, Christians should see it as ‘half-Christian’ or even as an ‘imperfect Christianity’ or a ‘reformed Judaism’ (p. 331). Muslims honoured all the Hebrew prophets and also Jesus as the Messiah and as a Word and Spirit from God (Q 4:171), and though Islam fell short of Christianity, it was not antagonistic to it. Wherever it spread, it swept ‘corruption and superstition’ away and taught that God was merciful, replacing ‘religious frauds and frolics’ with ‘prayer, almsgiving, fasting and benevolence’ (p. 328). It prepared people for the eventual reception of the higher truths of the Gospel. On the two well-known issues of slavery and polygamy that were raised in criticism of Islam, Taylor argued that the former was not a Muslim institution as such but was only tolerated by Muḥammad as a ‘necessary evil’, while ‘intelligent’ Muslims now regarded monogamy as better suited to the present times, and called for the abolition of polygamy (p. 330). So, instead of attacking Islam, Christians should stress commonalities between it and Christianity and give credit where it was due. In some respects, Muslim morality was actually superior to Christian, as, for example, regarding drunkenness, gambling and prostitution (p. 331). Muslims may never be converted but perhaps Islam might be transformed into Christianity. As Christ did not destroy the Jewish Law but fulfilled it, so Christians might aim to ‘fulfil what is lacking in the Koran’ (p. 331). These remarks attracted much vitriolic criticism. Postcards informed Taylor that he must be ‘an awful man’, others called him a ‘traitor’, and a newspaper denounced him as a Goliath ‘defying the armies of the living God’ (Leaves, p. 125). As a result, he decided to visit Egypt, ‘the headquarters of Islam’, to investigate at first hand allegations ‘of the barbarism, ignorance’ and ‘profligacy’ of Muslim nations (p. v), and did so, accompanied by his wife as part of a larger party, from December 1887 to January 1888.

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A Muslim acquaintance translated his address into Arabic in November 1887, and the couple were well received. In Leaves, Taylor informs readers that he is recording his observations and conclusions because they differ ‘widely from the views prevalent in England’ (pp. vi-vii). In ch. 1, he begins by giving a vibrant account of street life in Cairo (pp. 1-12), before describing his observations on the state of education in Egypt, which many English people claimed was limited in scope. He sees libraries stocked with both Islamic and European texts on a wide range of subjects, including Buddhism and Christianity (p. 14), and complains that Al-Azhar is starved of funds by the British authorities, thus ignoring the opportunity to bring ‘Islam into line with Western science’. He notes that wealthy Egyptians send their sons to be educated in Europe, and that Egyptian Christians occupy important posts in government. He has encountered less ‘religious fanaticism’ in Egypt than in England (p. 20). Ch. 2, on education and culture, challenges the claim that Muslims are uneducated and ignorant, pointing out how little the British-controlled government in Egypt spends on education. In fact, wealthy Egyptians send their children to Europe for education. Ch. 3, ‘The English occupation’, offers a rather surprising defence of English rule in Egypt. Taylor says it is necessary to maintain the peace and is even regarded as benign by Egyptians, who appreciate British sup­ervision. He goes on to discuss polygamy, the first of several contentious issues covered in his Church Congress address. He states that the ‘polygamous Moslem’ of whom much is spoken in England hardly exists (p. 39). Polygamy is decreasing even among those of high rank, and some Egyptians now see polygamy as evil (p. 41). Also, despite the comparative ease of obtaining a divorce, this too is rare and seen as ‘disreputable’ (p. 43). In fact, ‘the home is more sacred in the East than in the West’ (p. 45). He says that he showed one pasha a sermon by an English bishop that castigated Islam as causing ‘indescribable depravity’ wherever it spread, to which the Egyptian responded that there was more vice in London, Paris or Vienna – ‘cities which he knew well’ – than in Cairo (p. 47). Ch. 4, ‘Black or white’, describes Britain’s peace-keeping role, and in ch. 5, ‘Polygamy’, Taylor reports the popular opinion among Egyptians that it is not possible to fulfil the Qur’an’s requirements that a husband should treat all his wives equally, and that the practice should be ‘rooted out’ of Muslim society (p. 41). In ch. 6, ‘The harem’, Taylor continues about the status of women in Islam. In England, the very word ‘harem’ evokes reproach (p. 49), but his wife visited a harem and reported that it was not the den of vice the



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English imagined. Muslim men supported and housed their female relatives, which partly explained the number of females who occupy the women’s quarters, and it should be recalled that veiling and seclusion are Oriental customs not Islamic rules (p. 51). The emancipation of Muslim ‘women from social restraint’ was ‘only a question of time’, and women were increasingly seen on the streets of Cairo (p. 52). But want of educational facilities for women was a problem, although some schools had been opened and wealthy families were employing European governesses. Admitted to the salon of a high-class woman, Taylor found her well read and as politically informed as ‘her European sisters’ (p. 54). Ch. 7, ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, contrasts somewhat with the contents of ch. 3 by offering a less favourable view of British rule, which Taylor says undermines the authority of local leaders without ‘substituting anything for it which the people could understand’ (p. 56). On the other hand, he does not think there are enough Egyptians capable of forming a competent national government, which is currently a ‘utopian dream’, so British rule is needed in the meantime. Ch. 8 turns to the institution of the kourbash, the punishment of whip and stick administered by police and other officials. The British had abolished it but Taylor’s informants thought that this was a mistake, because it was preferable to a fine or prison (p. 66). Taylor sees the abolition of the kourbash and also the corvée (forced-labour), the subject of ch. 9, as examples of ‘overhasty applications of Western nations to an Eastern country’ (p. 71). Forced labour is needed when the Nile floods and dykes have to be strengthened at a moment’s notice, thus while the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, could take pride in abolishing the corvée, his action had a negative economic impact in Egypt, because it was now difficult to repair the infrastructure (p. 73). Ch. 10 focuses on slavery, a subject about which Taylor asked his informant many questions. Although he knows that slavery is ‘indefensible’ and drives Englishmen to ‘fury’, Taylor thinks that abolition in Egypt would leave former slaves worse off. They were almost all domestic and were rarely found outside urban areas. If they were freed, their masters would feel an obligation to continue to maintain them at added cost (p. 78). Slaves were quite often given in marriage to relatives, and ended up receiving part of their former master’s property (p. 79). Intrigued, Taylor commented that this was ‘a very curious arrangement’, to which his informant replied that people knew their slaves’ characters better than those of other suitors, and this kept property in the family (p. 79). Ch. 11 describes

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Taylor’s visit to the tourist destination of Luxor, a ‘paradise for the invalid’ (p. 82), courtesy of Thomas Cook’s agency. Ch. 12, ‘English and native administration’, reports on the opinions of some Egyptians in senior posts whose view of recent reforms differed from those of English officials. The latter thought that reforms had not ‘gone far enough’, the former that they were ‘inexpedient’. Taylor describes some Europeans employed in Egypt as inept and the cause of financial loss, while they received much higher salaries than their Egyptian counterparts. Ch, 13, ‘Mahommedans on Mohammedanism’, reports the results of Taylor’s conversations with Muslims about their own religion. Many thought that they had been libelled by Christians (p. 103). Regarding Christians as ‘brother-believers’, they complained that Christians in return called them infidels and did not respect the Qur’an as Muslims did the Bible. His informants admitted that their conduct did not always meet Islam’s highest standards, but they thought that much of this was due to practices that had been added to Islam. They thought that Islam and Christianity had been corrupted and that both would benefit from reform, while jettisoning corrupt practices might result in ‘one pure faith’ that Muslims and Christians could both follow (p. 105). Taylor comments on how Muslims cite the Bible to justify certain of Islam’s practices, including polygamy and slavery. On Islam’s alleged inability to progress, Taylor’s informants replied that, compared with Western science, Islam had fallen behind, though it had previously led the world in scientific and intellectual pursuits, and could do so again (p. 112). He was told that in Cairo more Christians converted to Islam than Muslims to Christianity (p. 113). Ch. 14 discusses the foundations of Islam. The Qur’an is the basis of the faith, but Muslims are not barred from also recognising the Bible’s authority (p. 115). Muslims see Muḥammad as a reformer of Christianity, because, while Jesus ‘put kindness and compassion’ into his followers’ hearts, by Muḥammad’s time Christianity had become corrupt, and he set out to correct errors that even Christians admit exist. The lack of miracles performed by Muḥammad, they said, actually confirmed his status because he could easily have deceived people with ‘pretended miracles’ (p. 119). They saw Islam’s rapid spread as confirming its divine origin. While Christians have identified Muḥammad as the ‘little horn’ of Daniel 7:8, and Islam as the ‘locusts coming up out of the bottomless pit’ of Revelation 9:3, Muslims connect these with the Crusader Godfrey de Bouillon (d. 1100), who ‘massacred seventy thousand Moslems’ at the capture of Jerusalem (p. 120). Educated Muslims reject the Christian charge that they believe in a ‘material, sensual paradise’ (p. 121). They interpret the Qur’an’s descriptions as



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figurative (citing Q 3:7), just as Christians understand passages in the Song of Solomon as allegory (p. 123). The subject of ch. 15 is the possibility of a Muslim reformation. Taylor found that Muslims in Egypt, and also elsewhere according to reports, were ‘questioning the finality of their old beliefs’ and were anxious to see a reform in Islam comparable to the Protestant Reformation (p. 126). They hoped that this would bring Islam closer to Christianity. Taylor cites some appreciative Muslim comments on his Church Congress address (pp. 12731. One correspondent proposed the formation of a united church that combined Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount with Islam’s prohibitions of alcohol, gambling and cruelty to animals, which is close to the suggestions of Ernest de Bunsen’s Islam, or true Christianity (London, 1889, p. 155). Taylor describes how enthusiastically he had been received at Al-Azhar, and suggests that it is the hostile tone of Christian missionaries towards Islam that explains their failure to convert Muslims. Next, Taylor suggests that, as Unitarians are not ‘usually’ denied ‘the Christian name’, the same might be extended to Muslims (p. 135). In fact, Muslim recognition of Jesus goes further than that of Unitarians. Muslim denial of the crucifixion is the most problematic for Christians, though they consider that it would have been unworthy of God to allow the killing of someone who was sinless. Thus, as in the case of Isaac, whom Abraham was ordered to sacrifice, a ‘substitute was provided’ (p. 137). Ch. 16, which concludes the book, supplements Taylor’s observations on his trip to Luxor with notes from the diary of one of his female travelling companions. Significance When Reginald Bosworth Smith contributed to the controversy generated by Taylor’s Church Congress address, he explained that he had declined the invitation to speak because he thought it was impossible to do justice to the topic of Islam in Africa in ‘the twenty minutes allowed’ (‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, The Nineteenth Century 22 [1887] 791-81, p. 792). He went on to say that Taylor was heavily indebted to his own Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874), and had ‘promulgated’ Smith’s views ‘in an exaggerated form’ without any of the ‘modifications and explanations’ Smith himself thought necessary. While Smith’s and Taylor’s aims were more or less identical (that is, to express a ‘sympathetic appreciation of a great [...] and kindred religion’), Taylor had ‘rushed with headlong heedlessness into all the dangers’ that Smith had anticipated (Smith, ‘Mohammedanism’, p. 793). Smith acknowledged that he agreed with many of

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Taylor’s conclusions (which was not surprising because he was agreeing with himself), and while he did not wholly endorse Taylor’s criticisms, his response was among the few that did not totally condemn Taylor. This condemnation began during the Church Congress itself when, in a discussion session, Herbert Geldart of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa accused Taylor of telling ‘250 millions in Africa to follow Islam’ (Proceedings, p. 347). Taylor’s address attracted critical responses in letters to The Times and a number of journals, and continued to do so ‘well into 1890’ (Prasch, ‘“Which God for Africa?”’, p. 52). Joseph Thomson (d. 1895) did defend him (The Times, 14 November 1887, p. 4), and qualified support was offered by Thomas Patrick Hughes (d. 1911), the author of A dictionary of Islam and a missionary who had adapted to the local Afghan culture (‘Missions to Muslims’, Andover Review 9 [1888] 1-18). Hughes interpreted Taylor’s thesis to mean that Christians had failed in the way they propagated the Gospel among Muslims rather than as doubting the truth of the Christian message (p. 2). Conversely, as Taylor describes in Leaves, Muslims responded more positively to his views. His Church Congress address was quickly translated into Arabic by an acquaintance of his who was a friend of Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935), all three being members of the Society for the Harmony and Conciliation of Religion that called for improved relations between the three Abrahamic faiths. Taylor became associated with this Society and communicated with ʿAbduh (Kateman, Interlocutors, p. 89). In Egypt, these men were proponents of reforms such as the introduction of Western science into the educational curriculum and schools for girls, though when girls’ schools were opened, Lord Cromer, who opposed women’s suffrage at home, tried to sabotage them by raising the fees (L. Ahmed, Women and gender in Islam, New Haven CT, 1992, p. 153). Publications Isaac Taylor, ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, in C. Dunkley (ed.), The official report of the Church Congress, held at Wolverhampton [...] 1887, London, 1887, 325-31 Isḥāq Ṭaylur [Isaac Taylor], ‘Aḥwāl al-Muslimīn fī Ifrīqiya’ [The conditions of Muslims in North Africa], trans. Mīrzā Bāqir, Thamarāt alFunūn 14/656 (1887) [no page nos] Isḥāq Ṭaylur [Isaac Taylor], ‘Al-Islām wa-l-Muslimūn’ [Islam and Muslims], trans. Mīrzā Bāqir, Thamarāt al-Funūn 14/683 (1888) 2-3



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Isḥāq Ṭaylur [Isaac Taylor], ‘Al-Qurʾān wa-l-kutub al-munzala’ [The Qur’an and the revealed books], trans. Mīrzā Bāqir, Thamarāt alFunūn 14/690 (1888) 2 Isaac Taylor, Leaves from an Egyptian note-book, London, 1888; 001968831 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies A. Kateman, Muhammad ‘Abduh and his interlocutors. Conceptualizing religion in a globalizing world, Leiden, 2019 Bennett, Victorian images, pp. 181-91 T. Prasch, ‘Which God for Africa? The Islamic-Christian missionary debate in late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 33 (1989) 51-73 Clinton Bennett

Kesnin Bey Eugène-Jacques Chesnel Date of Birth 1850 Place of Birth Unknown Date of Death Unknown Place of Death Unknown

Biography

Very little is known about the 19th-century French writer Eugène-Jacques Chesnel (b. 1850), who gave himself the title Kesnin Bey. Bare details about his life are scattered through the two works in French about AngloOttoman affairs that he published under his own name in 1887 and 1888.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E. Chesnel, Plaies d’Égypte. Les anglais dans la vallée du Nil, Paris, 1887 E. Chesnel, Les Anglais en Égypte. Leurs défaites au Soudan, Paris, 1888 ‘A Frenchman on the Turks’, The Spectator, 22 September 1888, pp. 21-2 ‘Reviews. Truths about Turkey’, The Daily Telegraph [Sydney], 22 December 1888, p. 13 ‘The real Turkey’, Time [London], 1888, p. 417 S. Shahid Bey, Islam, Turkey, and Armenia, and how they happened. Turkish mysteries unveiled, St Louis MO, 1898

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Le mal d’Orient. Moeurs turques The evil of the East, or; truths about Turkey Date 1887 Original Language French Description Kesnin Bey’s Le mal d’Orient. Moeurs turques was published in 1887, appearing in English as The evil of the East, or; truths about Turkey in 1888.



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It is not a theological work: Bey states that he does ‘not intend to start any theological discussion which might at once make the reader skip’ any contents of the book (Evil of the East, 1888, p. 33; references below are to this translation). Instead, it is more a general commentary – an individual account of the author’s experiences in Istanbul, and his perceptions of Ottoman religious, cultural, political and social institutions. The thrust of the work is that ‘disillusion awaits’ the European reader (p. xi), because it is too easy for them simply to ascribe the ‘decadence of Oriental nations’ to ‘Islamism’ (p. 33), and it flatters ‘Christian self-respect’ and gives Christians revenge ‘for the epithet of “dogs” which the Mussulman so liberally and freely bestows upon them’ (p. 33). But while Islam indeed ‘created that strange reality we call the East’, it is also true that Islam is ‘no more hostile to civilisation than any other religion’ (p. 33). Bey’s estimation is that Europeans inscribe an Orientalist fantasy upon the Ottoman Empire, imagining a place that is on the one hand lavish and perfume-scented, and on the other ferocious and inequitable. This has obscured the ‘reality’ of the region, a reality that Bey intends to elucidate for the reader, free from error or fancy. It is his intention, then, to ‘unveil’ Turkey. The veil is a material symbol that is romantically associated with Islam by so many Westerners, including Bey himself, who describes the way a Muslim man, after receiving the nuptial blessing from an imam, returning to the bed-chamber and reciting a special prayer, may at last ‘strip off the veil and contemplate the charms of her who hitherto had been half hidden from his gaze’ (p. 44). Ch. 2, to which this description of marriage between Muslims (preferable to the ‘humbug and grimacing’ of Christian marriage) belongs (p. 44), deals specifically with religion. It serves as the focus for the following analysis. To begin, Bey’s description of the office of the ulama, ‘theologians, men of learning’ (p. 34), is thin, as is his discussion of Islamic jurisprudence. His comments are designed only to support the basic premise that ‘politics, justice, and learning’ in Turkey are organised and enforced according to Islam. He criticises waqfs at greater length, claiming that this ‘disastrous’ institution is responsible for bleeding dry great swathes of the Ottoman Empire, and has strangled agricultural prosperity and concentrated wealth in the mosques or, more specifically, the ‘personnel of the mosques’, including the shaykh, the muezzin, imams and mullahs, as well as their families and households (p. 35). These personnel represent a ‘fundamental vice of Ottoman society’ because they consume without being productive. By way of the waqf institution, a tradition consecrated by Islam,

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‘the Turk’ cares only for his own ‘majesty’ and the material endowment of the empire. Bey refers repeatedly to Turks as vain and ‘dreamy’ and unable to tend to the ‘matter-of-fact’ aspects of life, unlike Christian Armenians, who govern commerce within Ottoman lands, and Christian Greeks, whose agrarian economy is more productive and efficient when compared to Turkish agriculture. He draws these distinctions to a head as follows: ‘To put the thing in a nutshell: it is the Christian who maintains the Mussulman’ (p. 36), which is the reason why Muslims ‘disdain’ Christians. He suggests that to dispense with waqfs would do a great service to Ottoman society at large, but this will not happen because the ‘head of religion’ would not ‘dispossess that religion’ of waqfs: ‘Vaqouf [sic] will live as long as Islamism endures’ (p. 37). Bey is clear that harem-keeping is another religiously-sanctioned practice, and he goes as far as to say that polygamy is the ‘characteristic trait in Asiatic morals’ just as the minaret is the ‘distinguishing feature of Oriental architecture’, both defining aspects of Ottoman culture and civilisation and both born of Islam (p. 34). The harem, a favourite mise en scène fancifully imagined by European artists and authors, is approached with realism here. Bey critiques the ‘burlesque’ construction of the harem enjoyed in the European imagination, favouring instead a ‘cold appraisal’ that will find polygamy neither superior nor inferior to monogamous Christian marriage, even for the woman, who, though ‘kept in a state of civil and social inferiority’, is nonetheless the mistress of her own home (p. 40). Bey also soothes European anxiety about Christian women being sold into harems and converted to Islam, thereby suffering both bodily and spiritual debasement. He starts by ridiculing the ‘ludicrous’ French and English notion of the harem as a palace with a ‘fierce, turbaned Pasha’ glimmering with gold and jewels, wielding a scimitar or smoking a narghile, attended by his slave-wives, who are ‘veiled in gauze’ and recline upon ‘rich carpets in every voluptuous posture of temptation and allurement’ (pp. 40, 41). No visual example of the ‘burlesque’ harem is given, but there are several famous examples of harem scenes by the contemporary artists Eugène Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. In reality, Bey posits that the Islamic prescription of polygamy is far more ‘hum-drum’ and not at all orgiastic or dangerous, in general not even for women. In fact, the Qur’an ‘in delicate fashion’ secures the rights of the women of the harem to some equity and privilege, regardless of religion or nationality (p. 41). Later he cites his own anecdotal evidence (as



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he often does in the work), recalling a Turk who once told him that the ‘Mussulman wife is always watching how she can captivate her husband’ because she strives to be noticed and to secure privileges for her offspring and therefore must compete with her rivals to do so (p. 42). By contrast, the Christian wife gives up being ‘amiable to her husband’ because she is sure of her indispensability to him (pp. 41, 42). Bey scoffs at the image of the husband armed with weaponry, saying that violence and ruthlessness are not a feature of harem life, though he concedes that as ‘young Turkish females become less ignorant’ they naturally incline towards the Western, and Christian, approach to marriage (p. 43). Like mosques and minarets, and especially the harem, Islamic topographies are ‘unveiled’ somewhat equivocally for European readers. Bey writes that in the villages, where there is little or no schooling, the hoja will ‘chant to the peasant children’ the first verses from the Qur’an accompanied by rhythmic swaying, which is essential to ‘the Oriental’ in order properly to digest the matter that they teach and are taught (p. 39). Lacking instruction in Arabic, peasants are ‘doomed to hopeless ignorance’, because they are likely to receive the qur’anic revelation only by gesture or feeling and will never comprehend it (p. 39). Just as he believes the sultan, at the time Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), would never abolish waqfs, he also believes the ulama would jealously guard their authority as interpreters of the Qur’an. Every one of them is ‘ever fearful lest the Holy Books should be translated’ into Turkish, while Europeans are forbidden to leave Turkey with a copy of the Qur’an (p. 40). Again, the emphasis is upon the concentration of authority (this time by way of knowledge, whereas waqfs are material currency) at the top among the clerical class, and the deprivation of the masses. The Ottoman powers trade in the systematic enforcement of ignorance among their own people, and any rebellion against this social order is dealt with harshly, violently and conspicuously: when they wake, residents of Istanbul regularly see bodies floating in the Bosphorus. What Bey refers to as fanaticism is another major theme of the book. Instead of lambasting a tendency towards fanatical religiosity, as many of his contemporaries did, he believes that it is ‘fanaticism which has made Turks and Arabs great’ because their leaders have retained rather than dissolved the ‘immutable’ relationship between state and faith (pp. 46, 47). He writes that ‘Turkish fanaticism’, which is the ‘hatred cherished by believers in the Coran for all other religions’, is neither irrational nor primitive but ‘perfectly logical’ and actually a pure expression of patriotism (p. 47). He concludes that the ‘depression and enervation’ that has

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beset Ottoman polities can ‘thus never be attributed to the doctrine of Mohammed’ (p. 47). If Turkey is indeed ‘the sick man of Europe’ – and he agrees that it is – it is due to Ottoman ‘sloth and ignorance’ and because Istanbul has become effeminate, sensual and soft, having lost what once made it great. In his view, enervation and decay have gripped Istanbul in large part because Turks are fatalistic, despite the fact that ‘such a doctrine is nowhere to be found in the Coran’ (p. 48). Fatalism was commonly considered an ‘Asiatic’ trait, and it refers to the belief that death is inevitable, determined by Allāh, and that judgement awaits every soul. Yet Bey believes the Turkish ruling class has manipulated the Qur’an in order to ‘avoid the trouble of making the slightest effort’ (p. 48). Had Turks instead retained the ‘stirring life of battle and conquest’ that was led by their forebears, rather than lapsing into a fatalistic, flaccid existence, Turkey would be thriving rather than dying (pp. 47, 48). A lack of ‘religious sentiment’ and fervour has degraded the empire from its own centre – and here Bey observes that fanaticism and polygamy are both receding in the capital, and it has cost the centre of the empire its dynamism and vitality. Further to this analysis, Bey writes that Ramaḍān is less than strictly observed in Turkish cities and is left to the ‘poor classes’ (p. 49). He is critical of the fasting month because it induces Turks to sleep all day and engage in ‘carnival orgies’ from sunset to sunrise (p. 49). In Istanbul there is, too, a phenomenon of ‘non-observance’ of laws regarding alcohol consumption. Many European sources from the period suggest that the qur’anic injunction against khamr (wine) has value, as it encourages sobriety and civility, but he describes how the elite population circumvent Islamic prohibitions by claiming that cognac, mastic, wine and brandy are medicines rather than pleasure beverages. He recalls an old imam marvelling at how much champagne his ‘snowy turbaned head could stand’, and how much wine, beer and kirsch he himself had been offered in the capital during Ramaḍān (p. 50). Chapter 11 is where Bey adds his voice to the chorus of mid-to-late-century literature that debated whether or not the Tanzimat Reforms represented a sincere effort on the part of the Sublime Porte. He is concerned about the ways that reform could benefit Ottoman Christians – a preoccupation in other English-language sources – and also about the way Muslim minorities may be treated as the Ottoman Empire collapses. He makes some comparisons between Islam and Christianity, but he does not compare dogma or consider the differences theologically. Instead, his accounts are personal impressions of late-Ottoman culture, and he theorises about



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the effect of religion on that culture. His judgement is that it is untenable for Christians and Muslims to live together, for just as the ‘Christian perverts the Turk’ so too the ‘Turk perverts the Christian’ (p. 192). The ‘worshippers of Christ’ who live and pray ‘in the midst of the worshippers of Mahommed’ are degraded by the contact (p. 192). Fanaticism and fatalism are two major themes that Bey discusses from a religious perspective, though they are not institutionally enforced. His conclusion is that it is ‘Christians who have corrupted the Turk’ because ‘contact with the Christian turns the Turk into a hypocrite [because] European civilisation, instead of making him better, only emasculates, softens, debases him’ (p. 191). The notion of the perfumed and effeminate, and therefore ineffectual, official was in currency at the time Bey was writing about his experiences in Istanbul, and it is repeated emphatically here. A distinction to be made, however, is that Bey believes a lack of religious fervour, the forgetting of the conquering roots of Islam, and the mixing of Islam with Christianity and other minority faiths, are the main factors that account for the enervation that plagues Istanbul and is infecting Turkey and the empire. This is a novel thesis. Bey tackled many of the tropes and types that were accepted as personifying the Turkish character and Ottoman culture and civilisation that had been constructed by contemporary authors, some of whom treated their subject with more empathy (turcophile) than enmity (turcophobe). Le mal de l’Orient is, however, neither apologetic nor polemical but anecdotal, with some academic merit. Its elucidating, or unveiling, project seems to replace one trope with another. The Turk has acquired a ‘seeming softness of manner’ and is effeminate and a weak leader who has been emasculated by his attempts to copy European manners and customs, and because he prefers an idle and soft existence to that modelled by the Prophet Muḥammad (p. 46). It is both contact with Christian culture and inherent flaws in the ‘Asiatic character’ that have diluted the potency and power of Ottoman culture. Christians and Muslims should be segregated because this ‘indigestible mix of races and religions’ is mutually destructive (p. 192). Bey seeks to tell the ‘truth’ to the European about the East and so to unveil those mysterious eastern lands. But telling ‘truths about Turkey’ will only reveal the actual ‘evil of the East’. His interest in Islam is not strictly theological, nor does he claim to be a devout Christian himself, but religion features significantly in his profiling, othering and understanding of ‘the Turk’. Le mal de l’Orient thus contributes to the substantial volume of European literature discussing the Ottoman Empire partly, if

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not wholly, from an interfaith perspective during the ‘sick man of Europe’ debate and the broader Eastern Question discourse. It also reveals Bey’s attitude about the viability of Turkey as a ‘European nation’ – a question that would come into play a century later regarding the accession of that nation to the European Union. Significance This commentary was written by an obscure author, and it does not appear to have been widely read or much celebrated. It was published first in French and then in English and was noted by only a few publications. One review, published in the conservative magazine The Spectator, attributes to Bey the ‘bright literary faculty of his race’ and interprets the thesis of the work as that race and religion have mixed too much in Ottoman territories (The Spectator 61 [1888] p. 21). The reviewer adds that ‘on the whole, the judgement passed is correct’, and that ‘doom’ is due someday soon to fall upon the Ottoman Empire. A contributor to Time magazine finds the book’s thesis and conclusions not wholly convincing, but says it is without doubt a ‘memorable record’ and ‘singularly interesting and instructive’ (Time: A Monthly Magazine 19 [1888], p. 417). Another review from further afar, recorded in the Australian Daily Telegraph, is less concerned with the text and more with making the point that European policy facilitating ‘reforms’ (those of the Tanzimat) is foolhardy, since Ottoman rulers are incapable or unwilling to enact them. The reviewer is buoyed in his opinion with evidence of the ‘hopeless state of debasement and degradation’ that afflicts Turkey (The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 22 December 1888, p. 13). These reviews, albeit brief, reveal something of the confusion the text created for the critical reader. Publications Kesnin Bey [E. Chesnel], Le mal d’Orient. Moeurs turques, Paris, 1887, repr. 1890; Y-D4qK68oB8C (digitised version available through Google Books) Kesnin Bey [E. Chesnel], The evil of the East, or; truths about Turkey, London, 1888; 1045109050 (digitised copy available through California Digital Library) Studies D. Gürpınar, ‘The rise and fall of Turcophilism in nineteenth-century British discourses. Visions of the Turk, “young” and “old”’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2012) 347-72 B. Jezernik, Imagining ‘the Turk’, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009



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M. Soykut, Historical image of the Turk in Europe, 15th century to the present. Political and civilisational aspects, Istanbul, 2003 L.P. Peirce, Imperial harem. Women and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, New York, 1993 R. Kabbani, Europe’s myths of Orient. Devise and rule, Bloomington IN, 1986 Katherine Jennings

Ernest de Bunsen Ernst Christian Ludwig von Bunsen Date of Birth 11 August 1819 Place of Birth Rome Date of Death 13 May 1903 Place of Death London

Biography

Ernst Christian Ludwig von Bunsen, or Ernest de Bunsen, was born in Rome on 11 August 1819, where his father, Baron Christian von Bunsen, was the Prussian envoy to the Vatican. His mother was Frances Waddington (1791-1876). Bunsen attended a school for cadets in Berlin and joined a regiment of the Prussian Guards in 1837. He served until 1843, when, on extended leave due to illness, he visited London, where his father had become Prussian Minister (1841-54). He married Elizabeth Gurney (d. 1845), daughter of Samuel Gurney, a wealthy British banker and philanthropist, and settled in London, where he worked for his father as secretary at the embassy. Bunsen regularly visited Germany and Italy, and for a brief period worked for the Prussian royal family. He wrote books on religion and biblical archaeology, becoming an early member of the Society for Biblical Archaeology, where he presented many papers. He was a member of the planning committee for the second International Congress of Orientalists when it met in London in September 1874. In The angel-messiah of Buddhists, Essenes and Christians (London, 1880), he argued for a link between Buddhism, the Essenes and Jesus. Then, in 1889, he published Islam, or true Christianity. He knew Syed Ameer Ali (d. 1928), and his home was a popular gathering place for scholars of religion. Bunsen died in London on 13 May 1903 and was buried in Leytonstone graveyard. When he died, he was working on a scheme to unify the Christian churches.



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary R.K. Douglas (ed.), Transactions of the Second International Congress of Orientalists, London, 1874, p. 447 The Times, 15 May 1903 p. 10 (obituary) Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 33rd session, London, 1903, p. 255 (death notice) Secondary S.E. Fryer and J. Hawke, art. ‘Bunsen, Ernest de’, in ODNB S.E. Fryer, art. ‘Bunsen, Ernest de’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Islam, or true Christianity Date 1889 Original Language English Description Bunsen’s Islam, or true Christianity, including a chapter on Mahomed’s place in the Church was published in 1889. Following the Introduction (pp. vii-xi), the main text comprises four chapters: ‘Messianic expectations’ (pp. 1-35); ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (pp. 36-85); ‘Stephen and Paul’ (pp. 86-128); and ‘Mahomed’s place in the Church’ (pp. 129-70); together with two appendices: ‘The constellation of the Serpent and the sign of Virgo’ (pp. 171-2), and ‘The future of Israel’ (pp. 173-6). In the first three chapters, Bunsen reprises arguments from The angel-messiah (London, 1880), and ch. 4 was originally published in the Asiatic Quarterly Review (1889). A briefer version was also published in Miscellaneous Notes and Queries in 1896. In the Introduction, Bunsen presents his idea that a single divine spirit, called by some Ahura-Mazda, by others Bodhi and Brahma, inspires people to intuit the harmony between the human and divine wills. Bunsen writes of ‘God within nature’ communicating essentially the same message in multiple religious traditions. Jesus had ‘proclaimed the hidden doctrine that the Holy Spirit is present in mankind’ (pp. x-xi). Then Paul converted to the faith of Stephen, the first Christian martyr and an Essene, and a dissenter from both the Jewish and Christian faiths. The Essenes had taken their doctrines from Buddhism, while Islam was derived from Syrian

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Ebionites who remained loyal to Jesus’s original teaching and rejected Paul’s apostolic claims (p. xii). Paul overturned Jesus’s authentic teaching (p. xi) by declaring that Jesus was the Angel-messiah. Ch. 1 begins by surveying the tendency among religions to contrast ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, identifying their chief deities with the former. The concept of a Messiah originated in Mahayana Buddhist sources, ‘which refer to the incarnation of Buddha as Angel-Messiah’ (Angel-messiah, p. 18). Jesus was not the Angel-messiah that the Essenes expected but the ‘Son of Man’ as referred to in Daniel 7:13-14, a human messenger (p. 35), which is why Jesus himself used the title ‘Son of Man’ (p. 27). His mission was to convince people that God’s spirit lies within them and that the Law is ‘written on the tables of the heart’ (p. 25). In ch. 2, Bunsen claims that the prophets had kept the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in people hidden until the time of John the Baptist, believing that the Spirit had not yet appeared (p. 38). Jesus did not bring the Spirit into the world, but ‘called forth consciousness’ of its ongoing presence (p. 45). Like the Essenes, John the Baptist expected an Angel-messiah (p. 47) who would inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven, but Jesus preached that the Kingdom was already present (p. 84). The prophets were mistaken in predicting the coming of what was already present, and were the ‘builders who rejected the stone’ of Psalm 118 (p. 84). The reason why Jesus told his disciples to tell ‘no man that he was the Christ’ was because he made no such claim (p. 84). In ch. 3, Bunsen discusses the identity of Stephen (Acts 6:8), one of the deacons appointed in Jerusalem by the first Christian community, and traces how the message he held was transmitted to Paul. Stephen was an Essene, and knew the teachings the Essenes had received from India. Paul knew these teachings, and it was he who introduced the main Christian doctrines of Jesus as Son of God and his resurrection from the dead. Ch. 4 turns to Muḥammad, and explains that he evidently did not acknowledge Paul as an apostle, because it can be seen that ‘every one of his peculiar doctrines’ was excluded from the Qur’an. In fact, the Qur’an is closer to ‘aboriginal Christianity’ than has been acknowledged. While there is Buddhist influence behind the Essenes’ doctrine of an Angelmessiah (p. 130), the Qur’an is palpably a record of original Christianity as preserved by ‘a Christian sect in Arabia’ (p. 131). Some Christians in Arabia worshipped Mary, and the most numerous, the Ebionites, repudiated Paul as an ‘apostate from the Law’, recognised only Matthew’s Gospel and preserved ‘aboriginal Christianity up to the fourth century’ (p. 132).



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Muḥammad’s success in recovering Jesus’s original teaching should be attributed to the role of the Ebionites ‘and to divine guidance’ (p. 132). Instead of teaching that God sends angels at intervals, which is a Buddhist and Alexandrian doctrine, Muḥammad explained that what distinguishes prophets from their contemporaries is possession ‘of the Spirit in greater power’ (p. 134). Without citing chapter and verse, Bunsen mentions various qur’anic passages on Jesus as a Spirit and Word from God (p. 135; see Q 4:171) and on Muḥammad as continuing in the footsteps of the prophets, confirming the Gospel ‘wherein there is guidance and light’ (p. 136; see Q 5:46). Muḥammad was sent to ‘explain’ what had been ‘hidden of the book’ and to call people to ‘the right way’ (p. 136). Neither the twelve Apostles nor Muḥammad regarded Jesus as the Angelmessiah; they saw him as an anointed man, showing that Muḥammad’s Christian informants held to the pre-Pauline doctrine. Nothing in the Qur’an hints at any knowledge of the doctrines of Jesus’s pre-existence as creator of the world, his atoning death on a cross, his resurrection after three days, or the Spirit descending after this (p. 142). Nor does the Qur’an know anything of Paul’s doctrine of original sin (p. 150). Bunsen refers to the early Christian heretic Cerinthus (d. c. 100), who believed that it was the man Jesus who died on the cross not the divine Christ, who departed before the suffering began. The Qur’an ‘absolutely denies’ Jesus’s crucifixion and makes no mention of a personal return on a cloud (p. 143). Muḥammad, though, had some conception of Jesus’s return and reserved a grave for him in Medina (pp. 145-6). In response to the doctrine of the Trinity, which ‘the church seems to have introduced in the second century’, the Qur’an asserts that there is one God and that Jesus, the Messiah, is a Word and Spirit from God (p. 147). Jesus was ‘but a servant’ (p. 148), while Muḥammad mistakenly thought that he was himself the promised Paraclete. In the final appendix, ‘The future of Islam’, Bunsen discusses a number of features of Islam that show it is the equal of Christianity in its moral teachings. Strikingly, he thinks that Muslims can in good conscience pray the Lord’s Prayer, and would benefit from understanding the Qur’an as a record of human experience and a repository of wisdom that is ‘enlightened by the holy Spirit’ rather than as ‘a compendium of revelations’ (p. 159). He remarks that Muḥammad introduced reforms that improved women’s lives and that Europeans have failed to acknowledge this. Muslim women had more rights than English women did under the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act (p. 163).

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On the final page, Bunsen repeats his belief that, in rejecting Pauline doctrines, Muḥammad had acted under ‘special divine guidance’. On the one hand, Bunsen’s ideas about Pauline Christianity as corrupt, and his view of Jesus as a man guided by the Holy Spirit rather than as Son of God and the Second Person of the Trinity, place him outside the Christian mainstream and disqualify him from being seen as a representative figure in Christian-Muslim relations. On the other, his views have some resemblance to those of John Toland (d. 1722), among others, who saw Islam as a version of Christianity and compared qur’anic verses to non-canonical Christian texts, finding the idea of a non-crucified Jesus in early Christian sources. Like Toland, Bunsen applied scholarly developments in biblical studies to his treatment of Islam. Significance Bunsen’s ideas about Islam as capable of reform were unusual at a time when many argued that Islam was static, incapable of change, and an obstacle to human progress. He rejected this Orientalist trope. He thought that Islam needed to be supplemented with the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer and a more explicit understanding of the availability of the Spirit in human life, but he opposed the Christian conviction that Muslims needed to abandon Islam in order to have any hope of salvation. The American convert to Islam, Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (d. 1916), read Bunsen’s article ‘Mahomed’s place in the Church’ in Miscellaneous Notes and Queries in 1896, and responded immediately in the same journal, confirming that Bunsen correctly identified the Christianity of Muḥammad as anti-Pauline. There is no evidence that Bunsen was aware of anti-Paul polemic in Islamic literature but, in portraying Paul as deviating from Jesus’s teaching, he was, in fact, continuing a lengthy tradition (see P. Gray, Paul as a problem in history and culture, Grand Rapids MI, 2016, pp. 41-7; it can be added that there are curious similarities between Bunsen’s explanation of how Paul distorted original Christianity and how the true form of Christianity was transmitted to Muḥammad by Christians who had preserved it in the Arabian desert, and accounts by early Muslim historians whose versions of this story are now only known in fragmentary form). However, Webb observed, Bunsen was wrong to describe Muḥammad as acquiring his knowledge of Jesus through intellectual methods when these were purely spiritual. Nevertheless, Webb commended the article to all Christians, ‘for it may lead some of them to compare the teachings of Mohammed and Jesus and use their efforts to unite true Christians and Moslems upon the platform of the one true faith’



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(p. 128 1/2). He reprinted copies of Bunsen’s article at his own expense for distribution through his American Muslim Propagation Movement. This is an early example of a Muslim helping to circulate the writing of a Christian about Islam that in his view contributed to better understanding between Christians and Muslims. Although Bunsen may be seen as a marginal figure within the Christian tradition, his interest in promoting unity suggests that he did not abandon his Christian identity. Bunsen thought that Christians could return to a purer faith by learning about original Christianity from the Qur’an, and that Muslims could also benefit from an Islam supplemented by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. This call for mutual exchange can be seen as pioneering in the context of Christian-Muslim relations, anticipating calls for this type of encounter by such 20th-century thinkers as Hans Küng. Syed Ameer Ali (d. 1928), who knew Bunsen, listed ‘Mahomed’s place in the Church’ in his selected works on Islam (Ali, Islam, London, 1906, p. 75). Publications E. de Bunsen, ‘Mahomet’s place in the Church’, Asiatic Quarterly Review 7 (April 1889) 259-89; 007911138 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E. de Bunsen, Islam, or true Christianity, including a chapter on Mahomed’s place in the Church, London, 1889; 100321937 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E. de Bunsen, ‘Mahomed’s place in the Church’, Miscellaneous Notes and Queries 14/2 (1896) 40-8; 006050995 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E. de Bunsen, ‘The future of Islam’, Miscellaneous Notes and Queries 14/3 (1896) 61-9; 006050995 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Al-Ashari, Muhammad’s place in the Church, Scotts Valley CA, 2018 (reproduces Bunsen’s chapter and Webb’s response, with an editorial preface); https://www.amazon.com/Muhammads-Church -Muhammad-Alexander-Russell/dp/1720648921 Studies M.A. Webb, ‘Criticisms on “Mahomed’s place in the Church”’, Miscellaneous Notes and Queries 14/6 (June 1896) 128 1/4-1/2 Clinton Bennett

Five Victorian women travellers in the Ottoman world Date 1840-90 Original Language English Various social, political and economic changes occurred during the mid- to late 19th century, making it possible for more English people to travel to the Middle East than ever before. The declining power of the Ottoman Empire and increasing Western influence and presence in that part of the world, combined with a growing economy in England and advances in communication and transportation, particularly steamship travel, gave rise to new forays into the Eastern Mediterranean, including middle-class tourism. As a result of new opportunities and interests, Middle East scholarly and travel writing, which had been an overwhelmingly androcentric activity, saw a considerable influx of women (see Shepherd, Zealous intruders, pp. 170-92; Melman, Women’s Orients, pp. 31-2). This essay considers five books by five female Victorian authors published during the years 1840-91, focusing specifically on how each understood and represented Islam. They are:  The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo  (1844) by Sophia Lane Poole (1804-91), sister of the Orientalist scholar Edward William Lane, with whom she lived and worked in Cairo; Eastern life, present and past (1848) by Harriet Martineau (1802-76), well-known writer, sociologist, feminist and abolitionist; Letters from Egypt (1862-9) by Lucie Duff Gordon (1821-69), translator and travel writer; Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople (1865) by Emmeline Lott, obscure governess to the five year-old son of Ismail Pasha, the Turkish viceroy of Egypt; and  The women of Turkey and their folk-lore  (1890-1) by Lucy Garnett (1849-1934), linguist and ethnologist. Although these authors could all be described as educated Englishwomen from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, when it came to engaging with Muslim teachings and practices abroad and making those experiences meaningful to readers, their individual approaches varied considerably. As a result, their work, considered together, sheds light on their diversity as women, as writers, and in terms of Anglo-Muslim and Christian-Muslim relations.  



five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world 331 Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo

Sophia Lane Poole was born Sophia Lane in Hereford in 1804, where her father was a prebendary of the Cathedral, and in her mid-twenties she married Edward Poole, the vicar of Alvaston in Derbyshire. The two separated, and in 1842 she left England with her sons, Stanley and Reginald, and went to Cairo to live with her brother Edward William Lane, the renowned Orientalist scholar. Edward had encouraged Sophia to travel to Egypt in the hope that she would be able to complement his An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians (1836) by providing descriptions of places that he as a man could not enter, such as the harems and the women’s baths. In fact, her book provides the first published account in English of Egyptian female domestic life by a firsthand observer (Baigent, ‘Sophia Lane Poole’). Yet Poole did not limit herself or her writing to such interiors. Like her brother, she was interested in Egyptian culture and society more generally, from the ordinary people in the marketplace to the medieval architecture towering above them. As the family lived not among Europeans but rather with local Egyptians in one of the older neighbourhoods, Poole had plenty of opportunities to see both. In Cairo, she learned Arabic and became an amateur ethnographer. Since she dressed as other Egyptian woman did in public, with her face veiled and her body covered from head to toe, she could visit the mosques and shrines that non-Muslims were not permitted to enter. In addition, her appearance had the added advantage of allowing her to study Egyptian people acting as they normally would, as opposed to altering their behaviour, either consciously or unconsciously, in response to the presence of a Westerner. As a thoughtful observer generally unnoticed by those around her, Poole could enrich her factual accounts of Muslim practices with descriptions from daily life. For example, her discussion of Ramaḍān in 1842 includes not only the exact routine of praying, fasting, eating and sleeping that was followed by her neighbours each day, but depicts a street scene in which just a few choice details allow the reader to glimpse some of the challenges of going without food or drink from sunrise until sunset, including the struggle with monotony. She notes the ‘varieties of deportment’ among the people during one ‘intensely hot’ afternoon in the middle of the month: some have short tempers, others ‘are sitting idly, holding an ornamented stick, or with a string of beads in their hands’, still others, boys who are fasting for the first time, but men as well, attempt to distract themselves with a child’s toy (Poole,  Englishwoman, London, 1844, vol. 1, letter VII,

332 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world pp. 107-8; all references are to this edition, which is 247 pages long and contains 28 letters). Her ability to convey moods as well as describe scenes secured her place in literature. It also helped to make her book popular with a general readership: a second edition appearing in the United States the year following publication in England (for her place in literature, see Abdel-Hakim, ‘Sophia Poole’, p. 107). Detailed descriptions of Muslim rituals and festivities also contribute to the book’s ethnographic value. Jane Robinson notes that Sophia Poole ‘tempered the sensationalist – with a serious study’ complementing Lane’s work and qualifying her ‘admirably’ to write the text that would accompany Francis Frith’s photographs of Egypt in the 1850s (Robinson, Wayward women, p. 305). For example, Poole gives a precise account of the ‘Procession of Mahmal’ as it made its way through Cairo’s main streets prior to the ḥajj (vol. 1, letter VIII, pp. 116-23). From it, the reader is able to visualise each section, from the two men who led the procession while engaged in a mock sword fight, to the various orders of dervishes, each with their own coloured flags, beating drums and reciting the names of God. In Poole’s narrative, even seemingly minor features, such as the supplies at the rear, including firewood and mesh’als (staffs topped with cylindrical iron frames that could be filled with inflammable material to be used as torches; she provides Lane’s definition of a  meshʿal  from his  Modern Egyptians, 3rd edition, London, 1846, part 1, p. 254), are used to evoke the image of that mass of pilgrims journeying through the desert in the cool of night and carrying small fires to light their way. Here, as elsewhere in the book, she supplements her own observations with her brother’s research, explaining that, while the Mahmal appears as a litter covered in red brocade atop a camel, she knows from his Modern Egyptians that it is, in fact, empty, a symbol of the sovereign that has been sent to Mecca every year since the rule of Sultana Shajar al-Durr in the 13th century (E.W. Lane, Modern Egyptians, 3rd edition, part 2, p. 203). Poole peppers her descriptions of Egypt with her own impressions, experiences and anecdotes, which tend to depict her Muslim subjects in a light that is neither entirely positive nor entirely negative. For example, during the Mahmal procession, she witnessed a group of Muslim boys beating a ‘Frank gentleman’, as was allowed at that particular time and place. However, others intervened and with difficulty were able to protect him, showing great kindness (vol. 1, letter VIII, p. 117). Along the same lines, while discussing Cairo’s mosques she notes that, while many are ‘doubtless monuments of sincere piety’, she had heard a story of one erected by



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a man who tyrannised the poor and then poisoned the ‘chief ‘Ulama’ who dared to confront him for his hypocrisy (vol. 1, letter X, pp. 154-5). In these cases, Poole does not present moral behaviour as reflecting a ChristianMuslim divide or in terms of a hierarchy between the two religions, but rather shows that human nature is as varied in the Islamic world as her readers would have known it to be in England. Corruption and treachery might exist, but so too did genuine piety and the brave soul who would stand up to an oppressor. Wanton cruelty might exist, but so too did kindness.  In terms of cruelty and other types of undesirable behaviour, Poole presents Egyptian Muslims as morally superior to both Coptic Christians and a number of ‘nominal Christians’ who visited or lived in Cairo. For while she acknowledges that the laws in Egypt allow the Muslim man to act like a tyrant to those in his household, she also believes that such cases are very rare and only common among the lower classes, an assumption that Victorians often made with regard to domestic violence in England as well (vol. 2, letter XVII, p. 18; letter XVIII, p. 24). Among the Copts, however, she explains that the problem is both serious and endemic. Stating her Christian bias, while at the same time seeming to undermine it, she relates how Muslims behave more like Christians than the Copts do. It is not surprising, then, that she considers both groups to be in need of Western missionaries (vol. 2, letter XXIV, pp. 95-6). Yet even those missionary efforts are hampered when other Europeans travel to Cairo and act in ways that give her faith a bad reputation among the local residents (vol. 1, letter VII, pp. 109-10). By repeatedly making it clear that she considers Christianity superior to Islam, Poole is able not only to criticise the behaviour of certain Christians, but also to present Muslims in a positive light. For example, she expresses admiration for the Muslim ability to integrate prayer into daily life, whether in the form of sonorous voices regularly heard throughout the city, the dedicated believer taking time for God in the busy marketplace, or the Arab boatman who recited the first sūra of the Qur’an before the beginning of each voyage. Still, even though she relates feeling ‘affected’ by the call to prayer, experiencing a ‘degree of veneration’ in the marketplace, and wishing that English people would follow the example of the boatman, she also takes care to explain to the reader that the proper reaction when witnessing Muslim prayer is to feel ‘a mixture of pity and admiration when we believe our fellow creatures to be in earnest in the service of God, however mistaken their opinions’ (vol. 1, letter III, p. 51; vol. 1, letter I,

334 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world pp. 23-4). Similarly, Poole’s reference to the ‘pathetic history’ of Ḥusayn, the grandson of Muḥammad who was martyred, and her assertion that Islam was in decline, allowed her to describe him as possessing a combination of ‘many of the highest Christian virtues’ to an ‘eminent degree’ and to convey the beauty and sanctity of the Imām Ḥusayn mosque without fear of betraying her faith. She comments on the fervour and devotion of the pilgrims who visited Ḥusayn’s tomb and the exquisiteness of the ‘virgin marble, pure and white with cleanliness’, a scene so striking and imposing that anyone witnessing it would ‘never believe that El-Islam is on the wane’ (vol. 1, letter XI, pp. 158-60). Time and time again, Poole reassures her readers that, although she finds certain aspects of Islam and Muslim behaviour praiseworthy, her sympathetic observations should never be interpreted as putting Islam on an equal footing with Christianity.   Harriet Martineau, Eastern life. Present and past Harriet Martineau was an esteemed and prolific writer, journalist, intellectual, sociologist and reformer. She helped popularise the ideas of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, and campaigned for the rights of women and the abolition of slavery. She was born the daughter of a textile manufacturer in Norwich and into a family that followed Unitarianism, a belief system that informs her discussion of religion in Eastern life. Present and past (523 pages). Billie Melman notes that ‘Martineau’s travels precipitated her transformation from a Necessarian Unitarian to a Positivist’ (Women’s Orients, pp. 39-40; see also, Webb, ‘Harriet Martineau’). Throughout the book, she strives to appreciate commonalities and universal truths in the various religious systems she encounters, while acknowledging the limits of her particular vantage point. As she explains, the quality and need for reverence is inherent in all human beings and ‘every permanent reverential observance has some great Idea at the bottom of it’. The goal, then, for both writer and reader is to ‘endeavour to apprehend the Idea concerned’ not to deride the way it is manifested or focus on aspects of it that initially might seem off-putting or even shocking (Martineau, Eastern life, 1848 edition, pp. 106-7). Still, despite this open-minded approach, she did not regard all belief systems and practices as having equal value. Her identification with Christianity is expected, and her fascination with ancient Egyptian religion is exceptional. She had sympathy for Islam, but of a kind that seems



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more strained and obligatory than spontaneous and natural. She even admits to her own struggles with it. Ultimately, she pronounces that Islam is good, but inferior to Christianity and unable to endure in the future. Like Poole, she judges the Christianity of the Middle East harshly. Since she saw it as a corruption of the true faith, she did not make any effort to focus on areas of common ground with her own Christianity or look for the foundational idea at the bottom of the devotional practices of Eastern Christians. The book begins in Egypt, and there the reader is introduced to Martineau’s love of the ancients. She explains how modern English people judge the ancient Egyptians unfairly when labelling their beliefs and practices as ‘idolatry’ without considering the theological principles that underpin them. After all, those women and men no doubt had reasons for cherishing sacred animals as quite different from what people of the 19th  century might conceive them to be. She goes on to emphasise the limits of contemporary knowledge by asking the reader to imagine how little someone 5,000 years from now would be able to learn of Christianity simply by seeing the remains of a cathedral, particularly if that person felt unsympathetic towards the religion. Applying her universalist approach to visiting the monuments of Upper Egypt, she relates that she experienced the ‘depth and solemnity’ of the ideas at the foundation of ancient devotional practices (Eastern life, pp. 106-7). She later makes the point that just as the ‘spirit of brotherhood’ should unite human beings throughout the world or ‘across space’, that same spirit should exist across time as well (p. 138). Part of Martineau’s respect for and interest in the religion of the ancient Egyptians had to do with the influence she regarded it as exerting first on Judaism and then on Christianity. For she traces the beliefs in a supreme god, an afterlife with retribution, and a moral system based on concepts of good and evil all to the long-gone people of the Nile Valley (pp. 184-5). She also likens their god Osiris to the Judeo-Christian concept of a Messiah and reflects that it is impossible to look at tomb chambers, with representations of a serpent, tree of life, separation of land and water, and first vegetation and then animals appearing on new surfaces, without thinking of the book of Genesis (pp. 140, 182). In fact, with the exception of her visit to Cairo, both her journeying in the Middle East and the narrative describing it follow a trajectory that broadly conforms to the chronology of the Bible. She began in pharaonic Egypt, where Moses studied with members of the priesthood and learned much that would inform the faith and philosophy of his people (p. 139). She moved on to Sinai, as had the ancient Israelites, and she tells her readers how experiencing that barren

336 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world and desolate place first-hand and imagining how difficult the exodus must have been, especially for the Hebrew mothers carrying suckling infants, gave her a sense of ‘true pity’ that she never had felt previously (p. 304). Finally, she arrived in Palestine to discover the ‘haunts of Jesus’, where the people and stories of the New Testament came alive for her (p. 432). The contrast between Martineau’s keen interest in Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs and their ancient Egyptian roots, and her preference for avoiding the same level of engagement with Islam is most obvious when her attitude towards visiting Cairo is compared with her approach to the rest of Egypt and Palestine. As the above discussion indicates, Martineau cared a great deal about depth, both historical and intellectual. Generally, she was not content with the superficial, but looked for the underlying idea at the foundation of ancient Egyptian religious practices and contemplated the actions and even the feelings of the men and women from previous eras who inhabited or made their way through the lands she visited. Had she approached Cairo with this same level of curiosity and interest, she would have found centuries of Arab and Islamic history to explore and layers of meaning behind a variety of devotional practices. However, when she was there she made a deliberate effort not to be serious. As she explains to her readers, Cairo, like other Arab cities, can be experienced as a ‘wonderful and romantic dream’, but in order to have that experience one must make an effort to forget the solemnity of the pyramids to the west and the temple ruins to the south and avoid any inquiry into what lies beneath the surface. She advises instead enjoying the city by focusing on the ‘show of things’, like the butterfly fluttering around flowers but indifferent as to whether or not they are rooted in soil or wet sand (Eastern life, pp. 243-4). Nevertheless, Martineau acknowledges Islam’s significance in the Middle East and the world, and the ‘diversity of faiths’ that have contributed to it, which, given her generally universalist and liberal outlook, necessitated some sort of sympathetic engagement with the religion. In her book, she rejects common Western misconceptions about Islam, such as that it is the religion of sensualism and of the sword (Eastern life, pp. 488 and 499 respectively). She also relates its emphasis on charity, and declares it to be essentially good. Despite her belief that Cairo was full of the superficial, she still visited religious sites there and allowed herself to be moved by them, pronouncing the Sultan Ḥasan mosque as a place of such peace and solace that it is ‘sacred to all who have hearts’. In fact, she describes being impressed by how welcome and comfortable the poor



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who lived there were made to feel, noting that even though Christians talk a great deal about equality, she had never felt that principle manifested as strongly in any Christian church as she had in the Ḥasan mosque on the day she visited (pp. 246-7). She regarded Islam as superior to the type of Christianity practised in the Middle East, even blaming the ‘idolatry’ of the Christians there for their lack of interest in converting Muslims, freely using a term she considered objectionable when it was applied to the ancient Egyptians (pp. 279-80, 497-9). For all her efforts, an appreciation of Islam did not come naturally for Martineau; it is laboured. For example, she reminded herself to keep an open mind with regard to the harem system and polygamy. But after visiting only two harems she concludes that it is ‘hell on earth’ and causes the deterioration of mind and soul (pp. 259-64). She even admits that, while she did not consider herself as someone with a ‘crusading spirit’, she nevertheless felt a sense of ‘momentary ill-will’, an ‘absurd and illiberal emotion’ of which she was later ashamed, upon seeing that a mosque had been erected near Hebron where John the Baptist may have lived (pp. 37980). It is not entirely surprising then, that when she compares Christianity with Islam at the end of the book, she comes to the conclusion that the former is superior to the latter. Her assessment is based upon a combination of vague generalisations and Orientalist prejudices. In her view, while Christianity is based on principles that foster the development of reason and conscience in its followers, Islam has precepts that may be appropriate for Easterners and children but prevent it from ever becoming a permanent or universal faith (pp. 498-9). Martineau struggled with the prejudices of others as well as her own. Over the course of her journey she repeatedly encountered displays of intolerance and bigotry committed by Muslims, Christians and Jews towards one another, sometimes in the form of an insult and other times expressed in physical violence. On occasion she became the target. Often, she would try to understand what factors may have motivated the aggressor. However, by the time she arrived in Jerusalem, her patience had worn thin. There she lamented the animosity that the followers of all three religions had towards one another and in the very place that all believed to be holy. She comments: ‘Looking at religion as she now appears in this, her throne and sanctuary, we find but a hideous idol which has usurped the oracles, instructing men to be proud before God and hate one another’ (Eastern Life, p. 409). Towards the end of the book, she reveals her ‘painful but salutary’ realisation that the hostility she witnessed among Christians,

338 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world Muslims and Jews in Palestine is only really an exaggeration of what is thought and said in English households and associations (pp. 496-7). Her public profession of atheism in 1851, two years after the appearance of Eastern life, may have shocked her contemporaries, but should not be altogether surprising to those who read her book.  Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt Lucie Duff Gordon was born Lucie Austin in Westminster, London, in 1821. Although her father held a series of positions in government, law and university life, his chronic ill health meant that the family suffered from financial instability and relied upon her mother’s earnings as a translator to survive. Despite this, as a child Lucie had opportunities to travel, study foreign languages and interact with prominent Victorian intellectuals. With a Unitarian mother and a utilitarian-minded father, it is not surprising that she took an interest in matters of philosophy and religion. During a period when her family was living in northern France, she frequently conversed with the local Catholic priest, and at the age of 14 she came to the conclusion that ‘one person worships God under one form, one under another, each choosing the form or image most congenial to his or her imagination, but it is the same Creator and Preserver everywhere’ (Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, pp. 79-80). At the age of 18, she married Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, becoming Lady Lucie Duff Gordon. The couple had three children, were known for their liberal politics, and entertained literary figures, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. Lucie also established a reputation as a translator. However, in 1851 she contracted tuberculosis, and ten years later her health had deteriorated to the point that she was forced to leave England for the warm, dry climate of Egypt. She then spent the seven remaining years of her life living on a house built atop temple ruins in Luxor. Her Letters from Egypt (371 pages long, containing 55 letters) were written during this period. They were edited by her mother, and published for the first time in 1865, receiving both popular interest and favourable reviews (Robinson-Dunn, ‘Introduction’; Harper, ‘Lucie Duff Gordon’). While in Egypt, Duff Gordon approached Islam with the same sympathetic engagement and open-minded interest that had inspired her contemplation of various types of Christianity as an adolescent, and she found much to appreciate in the faith. She had long philosophical and



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religious discussions with learned Muslims who lived in the Luxor area, including Shaykh Yussuf with whom she studied the Qur’an in Arabic (Letters, Piscataway NJ, 2010, p. 133; all references are from this edition). Her own Unitarian-influenced understanding of Christ as a prophet but entirely human was confirmed by her new companions, and she continually found similarities between Christianity and Islam. She even wrote of a ‘common faith contained in the two religions’ that had been obscured by misunderstandings and misinterpretations by religious authorities over the centuries (pp. 127, 196). On the level of popular culture, however, she saw how the Coptic Christians and Muslims in Egypt had no difficulty coming together for celebrations, ceremonies and other events, in some cases keeping alive traditions that had existed since pharaonic times. She had a real connection with the Muslim inhabitants of Upper Egypt, and was able to educate her English readership about the Egyptians in a way that most writers could not. After all, she was not just passing through the area; these were the people with whom she spent her last years. She lived very much as they did, enjoying their company, both male and female, and spending many long hours smoking and talking among them. She cared for the sick in her area, helping patients with gastric fever, malaria and dysentery as well as more minor ailments, services which earned her the Arabic name Noor-ala-Noor or ‘light from the light of God’ (Frank,  Lucie  Duff Gordon, pp. 282-3, 302; Duff Gordon,  Letters, pp. 1578). She wrote of their tolerance and true piety, explaining that far from exhibiting ‘Muslim fanaticism’ they were the ones likely to be persecuted by Christians. She also noted the charity of her neighbours, a quality that must have been especially impressive given their simple lives and relatively few possessions (pp. 31, 365). A brief consideration of the contrast between Duff Gordon and Harriet Martineau’s portrayal of the Muslims of Upper Egypt sheds light on the phenomenon of Orientalism. For Duff Gordon, the Egyptians captured her attention. Their lives, concerns and beliefs were more important than the ruins upon which she lived. In other words, the remains from the time of the pharaohs served as a backdrop to the modern corner of the Islamic world that she felt privileged to enter. With Martineau the order of priorities is reversed. The ancient is foregrounded, and the Arab ‘mud hovels’, when they are mentioned, appear only as a nuisance that spoils the outline of the magnificent architecture and perhaps dirties it as well (Martineau, Eastern life, p. 150). In the same way, she feels a thrill when she reflects upon the awe the ancient Greek historian Herodotus had for the

340 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world god Osiris (p. 137), while the sight of Muslims praying is only noted in terms of its peripheral decorative value, as they and others along the ridge cut striking figures against an orange sky (pp. 156-7). Martineau’s Orientalist tendency to push the contemporary Muslim inhabitants of Upper Egypt to the margins of her consciousness in order to concentrate her mental energies on resurrecting or imaginatively recreating the world of the ancients, despite her liberal and universalist leanings, serves to underscore the extraordinary nature of Duff Gordon’s circumstances and her abilities, both of which allowed her to do the opposite in her life and book, thereby transcending commonly accepted barriers between East and West. Interestingly, Duff Gordon applied the same approach to understanding Islam that Martineau advised when studying the religion of the ancient Egyptians, which was not to dismiss practices or beliefs simply because they seemed objectionable on the surface, but rather to look for the reverential idea at their root. Duff Gordon did just that with regard to Muslim women who covered their faces. For while the veil was usually perceived as a signifier of difference between the West and the East and between Christianity and Islam, she came to the conclusion, through her own observations as well as from reading and discussion, that in fact it represented polite gender conventions, an issue of importance to English Christians as well as to Egyptian Muslims. She relates a conversation with Shaykh Yussuf in which she explained that, for the Englishwoman, ‘the outward respect shown to us by our men was  our  veil’. By finding common ground over a foreign practice, she was able to redefine what had become a formidable cultural barrier for many Westerners as really just a ‘superficial’ manifestation of a familiar principle (Duff Gordon, Letters, p. 164). For the most part, gender issues did not pose great difficulty for her. After all, she was comfortable in male as well as female company, she understood the many legal rights that women had in Islam, and praised them to her readers, and she did not encounter female seclusion, which would have been impractical in the farming villages and nomadic tribes where she lived. She was accepted and respected by her neighbours in Egypt, and she conversed freely on religion, politics and family matters. In addition to  Noor-ala-Noor, they referred to her by the noble titles of  alamīra  and  shaykha  (Rasāʾil min Miṣr, trans. Aḥmad Khākī, p. 11). While they realised that technically she was a Christian from a Christian background who never converted to Islam, they, like her, found religious categories to be less meaningful than the common ground they shared. As a



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result, they welcomed her to Muslim events and sacred spaces and recited passages from the Qur’an for her benefit when she was ill. This mutual identification and bond that Duff Gordon had with the Egyptians among whom she lived seems to have been profound. Towards the end of her life she expressed the desire to die ‘among my own people in the Saeed [Upper Egypt]’. One Egyptian felt so certain of her genuine goodness and belonging that he assured her that even if she had to be buried as a Christian, the angels would move her to a Muslim tomb. After her death, two imams recited the Qur’an as her body was prepared for burial (Duff Gordon, Letters, pp. 198, 382; Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, p. 350).  Emmeline Lott, The English governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople  Very little is known about Emmeline Lott’s life and background, other than what appears in her books. In them she identifies herself as English, relates that she learned to speak Turkish and Arabic, and makes a number of references that seem to indicate having spent time in Europe and possibly India. She was most likely a young widow when she accepted the position of governess to Ibrahim Pasha, the five-year-old son of Ismail Pasha, the Turkish Viceroy of Egypt (r. 1863-79). Lott arrived in 1863, but left before fulfilling the terms of her two-month contract due to illness. Drawing upon her time spent in three harems, one near Cairo, one in Alexandria and one in the imperial palace outside Constantinople, she wrote The governess in Egypt, which was published in 1865 (vol. 1 is 317 pages long, containing 16 chapters, and vol. 2 is 311 pages, containing 12 chapters). The book was not well received critically but it was popular; Jane Robinson notes that her books became immediate best sellers (Wayward women, p. 142). Michael Wojcik states that it received only one positive review (‘Emmeline Lott’, p. 235, quoted in Marino, ‘British, middle-class woman’, p. 107). Lott lived in Brighton after returning from the Middle East and is believed to have written about her experiences as a governess out of economic necessity (Marino, ‘British, middle-class woman’, pp. 101-2), a plausible explanation, given that what she describes is nothing short of horrific. The book is overwhelmingly negative. In it, she presents herself as being misunderstood, hated and deprived of basic necessities, even food. While the word ‘harem’ refers to the women’s and children’s quarters in the Muslim home, which were supposed to be sacred and, therefore, forbidden to men outside the immediate family, in Lott’s narrative both

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Illustration 5. Portrait of Emmeline Lott in a form of Egyptian woman’s dress. Frontispiece of The governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople

it and the people who inhabit it appear hideous and grotesque. The accounts she gives tap into a number of familiar assumptions and discourses associated with ideas about the Christian civilising mission in the context of British imperialism. However, unlike the representations of harem life created for the purpose of attracting Christian women to missionary work, which encouraged a certain degree of identification with their counterparts in the East, albeit as oppressed, inferior sisters, Lott’s obsession with what she sees as the ugliness, filth, depravity and general meanness of the harems and their supposed guardians, the eunuchs who ‘bow the knee to that sovereign ruler of Egypt, Prince Baksheesh’, most likely would give pause to any female contemplating the mission field (English governess, 1866, vol. 1, pp. 182-3). Lott makes her position clear in the book’s preface, where she states that her purpose in writing is to reveal what life is like in the harems of



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Egypt and Constantinople, and states that they ‘cannot but be considered as secret institutions for the corruption of women’ (English governess, vol. 1, pp. viii-ix). Her low opinion of the harem, combined with that of females in general, creates a particularly lethal combination. Later in the book, she even comments on how, given the seeds ‘of every wicked quality [...] are already slumbering in the hearts of women’, it should come as no surprise that the harems serve as ‘hotbeds’ for their growth because no ‘culture of the intellect or soul’ exists within them to check the development of those tendencies (vol. 2, p. 305). Deprived of intellectual and spiritual life, the women of the harem deteriorate, mind, body and spirit, and focus their energies on various types of intrigue, including murder. For example, Lott tells the story of a princess who faced no consequences after having the head of her husband’s lover, who also happened to be one of her slaves, served to him on a dish. She also relates that death by poisoning was a common occurrence and a fate she only narrowly escaped herself (English governess, vol. 1; the story of the head is on p. 277, and the poisoning on p. 218). When they are not involved in some sort of deceit, the harem’s ‘inmates’, as she calls them, spend their days either sleeping or in a wine- and narcotic- induced haze. While other English women who visited the domestic quarters of the Muslim home often found beauty there, especially when the ladies presented themselves wearing their most precious jewellery and gowns (Robinson-Dunn, The harem, pp. 135-40), Lott sees only the ‘sickening’ contrast between glittering diamonds and the unworthiness of those who wear them. In her mind, it is ‘quite a monstrosity, an absolute sin’ to put jewels on slaves, given their ‘repulsive’ looks and ‘repugnant’ habits (English governess, vol. 1, pp. 260-1). Like a number of contemporary reformers and other Victorians, Lott conflates the harem and Muslim gender relationships more generally with prostitution (Robinson-Dunn, The harem, pp. 130-5). As she explains, droves of European men, ‘the scum of the earth’, who live in Ottoman dominions ‘hesitate not to tread in the footsteps of the votaries of the Koran’ by entrapping European women and forcing them into that life (here Lott quotes a man she met while travelling, whom she presents as a reliable source, English governess, vol. 1, pp. 19-20). She describes the ‘inmates’ of the harem as wearing filthy dresses ‘just as one might imagine the greatest slatterns in the back slums of St. Giles would be seen walking about in when all their finery had been pledged’. These statements complement others she makes about Turkish and Egyptian men regarding women as ‘marketable commodities’, like bales of merchandise only valued for the

344 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world price in gold that might be obtained for them (vol. 1, reference to St Giles, p. 235, and commodities, p. 18). In Lott’s narrative, the Muslim women with whom she lived remained perpetually unclean, a bodily state that for her Victorian readers would have indicated ‘moral pollution’ as well (Marino, ‘British, middle-class woman’, p. 105; with regard to purity, Marino refers to Melman, Women’s Orients, p. 130). Lott was obsessed with filth, regularly commenting on dirt, insects and vermin wherever she happened to be. She frequently describes feeling revolted not only by her physical surroundings but by habits, ways of talking and behaviour generally. She reminds the reader of her delicacy and refined sensibilities, which so often seem to be offended. Even the public baths, long associated with cleanliness in the Islamic world and celebrated in Orientalist art and literature, are presented by Lott as home to a painful and disgusting ritual, a kind of ‘torture’. As she explains, first you are ‘scalded with boiling water like a dead pig’, then you are ‘kneaded about like a lump of dough until your whole body looks like a mummy’, and finally any benefits gained from the washing are immediately undone by the heavy application of cosmetics, dyes and salves. The whole process was an ‘abomination’ to a woman whose mother taught her to cleanse with nothing but ‘healthy cold water’ (English governess, vol. 1, p. 175). Lott’s writing can be seen as an attempt to elevate her status from that of an ‘obscure self-supporting governess [...] a problematic borderline figure between classes and spheres’, to that of a lady by presenting herself as a defender of Victorian values and as part of an enlightening mission, a champion of British propriety and rectitude (Marino, British, middle-class woman’, pp. 102-3; for comments on Lott’s lack of British social support, see Miller, ‘Imperial feminine’, p. 233). There is, however, something peculiar and profoundly personal about Lott’s account that cannot be explained by imperialism or Christianity alone. For example, she describes the dirty trays left after the princesses had dined as provoking stomach-churning disgust. Yet even by her own account, they were nothing more than trays with crumbs and bits of food left on them, a sight that, while not particularly appealing, is nevertheless fairly ordinary in the realm of human experience (English governess, vol. 1, p. 131). Also, unlike the Christian missionary or imperial reformer who would have had, or at least expressed, belief that they could change or in some way improve people whose outlook or behaviour they found objectionable, Lott was only too happy to leave the harems of Egypt never to return, flippantly telling her readers:



five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world 345 Better where awful mountains rise With raging tigers dwell, Then share the halls of Paradise With women who merit hell. (English governess, vol. 1, p. 314)

With so little information available regarding Lott’s life apart from the time spent in Egypt and Constantinople, it is impossible for the modern reader to know or even imagine what experiences may have affected her ability to interact with the Muslims she encountered and coloured her narrative. As a person she is as shrouded in mystery as the veiled and almost completely covered figure that she presents on the frontispiece of her book. Even though Christians, like Jews, are referred to in Islam as ‘people of the book’ with their own divine revelation, Lott as a Christian repeatedly refers to Muslims regarding her as an unbeliever and even a dog. For example, ‘I was a Kopek, “a dog”, of an Englishwoman, a Howadjee [traveller], an unbeliever, a Pariah, whom Moslems and Jews despised and spat at’ (English governess, vol. 1, p. 316). She also relates that the women among whom she lived would neither pet nor allow dogs in the harem, based on the conviction that when unbelievers died, their spirits went into the bodies of such animals (vol. 1, p. 164). Finally, she had to ‘battle for the privilege of divine worship’ in a place where ‘the bells of the hated Giaours’ [Christians’] call to prayer was the summons of the Shaytan (devil)’ (vol. 1, p. 316). This is in part a play on words, as one of the slaves of the harem is named Shaytan, and Europeans summoned their servants with a bell. Still, the assumption by others that Lott and her faith are evil is consistent with the overall tone of the narrative. Yet, for all its negativity with regard to Muslims and the harems that Lott briefly inhabited, one scene stands out in her narrative because of its stark contrast to the tone of the book overall. In it she describes the princesses she taught as interested in knowing how she prayed and what her Bible, or her ‘Koran as they termed it’, was like. She explains that, when she performed her ‘devotions’ in front of them and read aloud from the scriptures, they behaved ‘most decorously’, watching her silently and intently. When Lott finished, a chorus of voices repeated the Arabic words for ‘Pretty! pretty!’ and ‘Beautiful! beautiful!’ (English governess, vol. 1, p. 254). Lucy Garnett, Women of Turkey and their folk-lore  Lucy Garnett was born the daughter of a surgeon in Sheffield, in 1849. Later in life she became known as a writer, folklorist and ethnographer,

346 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world her most important achievement being her contributions to Balkan folk literature. She learned Greek in Salonica and Turkish in Smyrna (modern Izmir), and her book Women of Turkey and their folk-lore (616 pages long) is based on her studies and observations during the eight years she spent in the Ottoman Empire. Melman notes that Garnett was the ‘first ethnographer to have devoted a whole study to women in a Middle Eastern country’ (Women’s Orients, p. 106). Garnett’s definition of Turkey included South Eastern Europe as well (see Fowler, ‘Lucy Mary Jane Garnett’). The bias with which she approaches her work takes the form of racialised nationalism, a position made clear and explicit at the beginning. In the preface, she explains that her motivation for studying the peoples of Turkey stems, in part, from the belief that they belong to the oldest, most historically interesting and diverse races of ‘that White Variety of Mankind, the conquerors and civilisers of all other people’. She later goes on to state that it is her ‘earnest desire’ to excite interest in the cause of the ‘Eastern nationalities’ she presents (Garnett, Women of Turkey, vol. 1, the reference to race is on p. xxi, and the reference to nationality is on p. lxxviii). As offensive as these attitudes would be considered today, her reification of nation and race creates a perspective that is particularly conducive to examining the fluid nature of religious categories and identities among the inhabitants of Anatolia and South Eastern Europe during the 19th  century. For it often seems that those she studies were not so much ‘Christians’ or ‘Muslims’ but rather ‘peoples’, such as Kurds, Albanians or Osmanlis, who, over the course of generations, engaged dynamically with Christianity and/or Islam. Each group adopted certain beliefs and practices from those religions, ignored others, and in some cases combined influences from both, all while retaining elements from their own unique cultural and spiritual heritage that predated exposure to monotheistic teachings. In addition, true to her commitment to the role of ethnographer, Garnett remains for the most part detached and objective when presenting the people she studies. She focuses on documenting rather than evaluating their customs and traditions. Even her discussion of the ways in which Islam benefits women is an attempt to provide a counterbalance to the extremely negative views that most Westerners held with regard to the treatment of Muslim women. The ease with which peoples could adopt Christian or Muslim religious practices and identities or even exchange one for the other appears



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repeatedly in Garnett’s work. The itinerant ‘Gipsies’ or Roma presented themselves as Christian or Muslim depending upon where they happened to be living at any given time, although they were distrusted partly for that reason. The Kurds, Circassians, Yuruks, Tatars, Osmanlis and Albanians all incorporated aspects of both religions into their lives and worldviews. The Albanians were particularly interesting in this regard. For, as Garnett explains, not only did Christian and Muslim Albanians visit each other’s shrines and places of worship, but when they intermarried the sons would be raised as Muslims and the daughters as Christians (vol. 2, p. 267). Yet this freedom and creativity with regard to religion, which might seem to indicate a desirable open-mindedness and tolerance, did not make Albanians immune to conflict that manifested itself in religious terms. For example, Garnett tells a story of a wedding between a Muslim groom and Christian bride in which, during the celebratory firing of guns into the air, some of the Muslim guests could not resist making a nearby cross their target, an insult to which the bride’s family retaliated by desecrating the mosque with pig’s blood (vol. 2, pp. 269-70). In another story Garnett explains how as a result of a disagreement with their priest, an entire congregation of Christian Albanians decided to convert to Islam on the spot. Yet because, according to legend, the Madonna ‘Our Lady of Skodra [Scutari]’ felt betrayed by this and left her shrine, Christians and Muslims began attending mass together every year on the anniversary of her departure to show respect, though even during that service, Garnett could not help but notice that the worshippers’ waists looked like ‘perfect arsenals, bristling with pistols and yataghans of every shape and pattern’ (vol. 2, pp. 267-9, quotation on p. 269). While Albanians might have identified themselves as either Christians or Muslims, a number of them still swore oaths to one another not in the name of the Virgin and saints nor of Allāh and Muḥammad but rather as their ancestors had, to the sky and earth, mountain and plain, or sun and moon (vol. 2, p. 267). Garnett makes frequent mention of peoples who combine reverence for nature stemming from early pantheistic beliefs with later monotheistic influences. The nomadic Yuruk tribes, for example, believed in Genii who lived in the mountains and streams, and they read the Qur’an not in mosques, for which they had no use, but rather by their sacred trees (vol. 2, pp. 210, 213). She also understands that certain mystical traditions within Shīʿa Islam allowed for the gradual transition from pantheism to monotheism, as in the case of the Circassians of the eastern highlands, who had only been converted in the previous century

348 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world by a dervish missionary (vol. 2, pp. 194-5). Similarly, she explains that, because certain Kurdish tribes had been exposed to ‘vague mysticism’ interwoven with Shīʿa doctrines, as opposed to the Sunnī ‘Semitic notion’ of an absolute Allāh, they could convert without renouncing the faith they still held in a sea and land deity who acted as a sort of guardian angel to them (vol. 2, pp. 140-1). Garnett carefully documents a number of other practices not clearly linked to pantheism or nature worship but most likely stemming from belief systems that existed prior to exposure to either Abrahamic religion. Often they fall into the general category of ‘superstition’ and play a role in shaping the worldview of both Christians and Muslims in the regions she studies. It seems that every group of people she encountered had particular rituals or charms for warding off the evil eye, preventing illness and attracting good fortune. The Yuruks believed that the future could be read in reflections in water and grains of wood, and those among them who wore a cross on their foreheads did so not as a statement of Christian identity, but rather because they believed that the image itself would bring good luck (vol. 2, p. 213). One of the more unusual combinations of religion and ‘superstition’ was the Armenian custom of taking care to bless each article of clothing as it was added to a person’s wardrobe, in the name of either Christ, the Virgin Mary or Muḥammad, in the belief that doing so was the only way to prevent the djinns borrowing them and wearing them for their own festivities (vol. 1, p. 242). While the tone of her book is objective overall, Garnett becomes an advocate when it comes to the position of women in Islam and challenges the assumption commonly held amongst Westerners that Muslim women are oppressed. She presents ample evidence to refute Montesquieu’s assertion that Muslims believe women do not have souls: verses from the Qur’an, female contributions to Hadith literature, and the great respect that figures such as Khadīja and ʿĀʾisha continued to receive amongst the faithful. Like males, Osmanli females prayed, fasted and visited holy places (vol. 2, pp. 498-505). Garnett also explains how all women, both free and enslaved, had legal and enforceable rights regarding themselves and their children. While she realises that slavery as practised in contemporary Turkey was not in accordance with true Islam, as it was not limited to non-Muslim prisoners of war, she still regards it and the harem system with which it was intertwined as more humane than the slavery practised in the West (vol. 2, pp. 382, 403, 433-51).



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Aspects of the above arguments were not unfamiliar to Westerners who sought sympathetic engagement with Islam, and they appear in the writings of other Victorians, including Duff Gordon. Garnett’s most original and significant contribution with regard to the issue was to provide examples from her fieldwork of the power, freedom and influence that women could have in Muslim societies. For example, she explains how, among nomadic Kurds, both sexes were considered equal within the domestic circle, and women were also actively involved in tribal affairs. In addition, they had considerable personal liberty, and one popular Kurdish folktale entitled ‘The maiden champion’ tells the story of how the region’s rulers were descended from two proud and successful warriors, a Frankish female and a Muslim male (vol. 2, pp. 113, 174-8). Along the same lines, Garnett notes that Albanian Muslim women carried firearms and were ‘always ready for a fray’. Often they negotiated peace agreements ‘in the privacy of the harems of the chieftains’, in part because it was safer for them to enter enemy encampments than it was for the men (vol. 2, pp. 220-2). With regard to veiling, Garnett explains how while the Osmanlis living in Constantinople, with its crowded streets and diverse population, must veil themselves, other Muslims, including Kurds, Circassians, Tartars and Albanians, only veil when not among their own people (vol. 2, pp. 121, 193, 215, 348, 428-9).  Garnett also documents women’s independent religious associations and networks. She explains how societies of female dervishes and pious women had existed amongst the Osmanlis for centuries, and that enslaved black women who had converted to Islam continued to worship the African god Yavroube at female-only lodges run by Kolbashi, who were at once priestesses and presidents of their organisations. In addition to their spiritual dimension, these associations provided a degree of protection and mutual support (vol. 2, female dervishes p. 507, and African traditions pp. 415-17). While others in the larger Osmanli society may not have seen the importation of African religious ceremonies as compatible with Islam or even as legitimate, Garnett simply reports what she has learned about them in the same objective way that she describes any number of practices and beliefs that originated outside the Abrahamic tradition but continued after the introduction of monotheism. Like Sophia Poole, Lucy Garnett employed an ethnographical approach to understanding Muslim societies and writing about them for an English-speaking audience, though Garnett’s method was grounded more

350 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world in empiricism, as she carefully recorded new knowledge and included primary source material, while Poole tended towards the literary. Still, both provide valuable contributions. Both also learned the languages of those they studied and lived for years among them. Given that the subject of Garnett’s research included peoples who lived nomadically or in small villages in remote areas, it would have been impossible for her to have done her work unnoticed. As much as she strove to act as an objective observer, her very presence as a foreigner would have altered the behaviour of others in ways she, and maybe even they, could not possibly have known. Poole, however, was able to walk through parts of Cairo and visit places of cultural interest without drawing attention to herself by covering every part of her body except her eyes, just like Muslim Egyptian women. As a result, she had a rare opportunity that neither her Orientalist brother nor any of the other authors examined in this essay had, the ability to see without being seen. Significance Like Sophia Lane Poole and Lucy Garnett, both Harriet Martineau and Lucie Duff Gordon provide detailed narratives that made a contribution to knowledge at the time they were published and to later generations. However, their stories also had an added personal, philosophical dimension. When it came to matters of religion and spirituality, both cared deeply about finding truth, and their encounters with Muslims in the Middle East prompted real reflection on Islam and its relationship to Christianity. Interestingly, both came from family backgrounds that included some element of Unitarianism. This influenced their approaches, although with vastly different outcomes. Duff Gordon, who was slowly dying from tuberculosis, found beauty and truth in Islam just as she had in Christianity, and came to the conclusion that the two faiths were in essence the same and separated only by ignorance and confusion. Martineau took the opposite tack and, over the course of her journey, became increasingly disillusioned with religion of all types, espousing atheism not long after her return to England. In terms of their degree of exposure to Muslim society, Martineau and Duff Gordon occupied opposite ends of the spectrum. As Duff Gordon’s health deteriorated, she became less and less involved with English people and Westerners in general; her Arab neighbours had become her new family. Martineau, on the other hand, experienced Egypt and Palestine with a



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travelling party, an isolated group whose members relied upon each other for company and companionship and had little or no meaningful interaction with Muslims whose paths they crossed. In addition, her deliberate decision to go unveiled meant that she would be recognised immediately as an outsider wherever she went. Yet while Martineau’s contact with Muslims was much more superficial than Duff Gordon’s, that alone does not explain their different attitudes towards Islam and their conclusions about it, for even immersion in a Muslim environment did not guarantee a more sympathetic view of that faith, as Emmeline Lott’s book clearly demonstrates. While these five authors, Lott, Duff Gordon, Martineau, Garnett and Poole, were all educated Englishwomen from middle- or upper-middleclass backgrounds who encountered Muslim societies in the Middle East and wrote about their experiences, all within the same 50-year period, the similarities between them in no way predisposed them to hold identical or even necessarily similar views when it came to Islam or the relationship between Muslims and Christians. Each approached questions of cultural difference, faith and gender from her own individual perspective and came to independent conclusions, usually grounded in a particular set of circumstances. Each of their books has a distinct voice, tone and purpose. When considered together, they testify to the diversity of thought and opinion, even among what might appear to the modern reader to be a fairly homogenous group, as well as providing a wealth of historical information on 19th-century Muslims and Muslim societies in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and South Eastern Europe. Publications Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, first series, 2 vols, London, 1844; 100576175 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, first series, 2 vols, Philadelphia PA, 1845; 011204383 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, second series, vol. 3, London, 1846; 008614992 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Sophia Lane Poole,  The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, London, 1851

352 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world Sophia Lane Poole,  The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, London, 1853; 101686239 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Sophia Lane Poole, Ḥarīm Muḥammad ʿAlī Bashā, trans. ʿAzza Karāra, Cairo, 2000 (Arabic trans.) Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, introduced by ʿAzza Karāra, Cairo, 2003  Harriet Martineau, Eastern life. Present and past, 3 vols, London, 1848, repr. 1850; 001862600 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Harriet Martineau, Eastern life. Present and past, Philadelphia PA, 1848; 008642294 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Harriet Martineau,  Eastern life. Present and past, London, 18752; 008642296 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Harriet Martineau,  Eastern life. Present and past, Boston MA, 18762; 100536714 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) D.A. Logan (ed.),  Harriet Martineau’s writing on the British Empire, 5 vols, London, 2004 (vols 2 & 3)   Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 1863-1865, London, 1865; 011631573 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Lucie Duff Gordon, Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt, revised edition, ed. J. Ross, New York, 1865 Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 1863-1865, London, 18663 Lucie Duff Gordon, Lettres d’Égypte, trans. J. Ross, Paris, 1869, repr. 1998 (French trans.); 12149/bpt6k6208273r  (digitised version available through BNF) Lucie Duff Gordon, Last letters from Egypt. To which are added letters from the Cape, London, 1875 (with a memoir by J. Ross); 008642325 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Lucie Duff Gordon, Last letters from Egypt. To which are added letters from the Cape, London, 18752, repr. 1886 Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt. Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt, London, 1902



five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world 353 Lucie Duff Gordon,  Letters from Egypt, New York, 1902, repr. 1904; 011590211 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, Cairo, 1938 Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 1863-1865, New York, 1972 Lucie Duff Gordon, Rasāʾil min Miṣr. Ḥayāt Lūsī Daff Jūrdūn fī Miṣr, 18621869, trans. Aḥmad Khākī, Cairo, 1976 (Arabic trans.) Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, intr. S. Searight, London, 1983 Lucie Duff Gordon,  Letters from Egypt, intr. R. Robinson-Dunn, Piscataway NJ, 2010 Lucie Duff Gordon,  Letters from Egypt, 1863-1865, Cambridge, 2010 (letters I-LV) Lucie Duff Gordon, Last letters from Egypt. To which are added letters from the Cape, intro. J. Ross, Cambridge, 2010 Emmeline Lott,  The governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, London, 1865; 600081071/600081072 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) Emmeline Lott, The English governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, 2 vols, London, 18662 Emmeline Lott,  Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, Philadelphia PA, 1867, repr. 1885; 100769914 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Emmeline Lott,  Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople. The English governess in Egypt, New York, 1893 Emmeline Lott, The English governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, Charleston SC, 2010   Lucy Garnett,  The women of Turkey and their folk-lore, vol. 1.  The Christian women, London, 1890; 006808119 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Lucy Garnett,  The women of Turkey and their folk-lore, vol. 2.  Jewish and Muslim women, London, 1891; 2597 (digitised version available through Nineteenth Century Collections Online) Lucy Garnett,  The women of Turkey and their folk-lore, London, 1893 (two vols in one)

354 five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world Lucy Garnett,  Türkiye’nin kadınları ve folklorik  özellikleri, trans. N. Elhüseyni, Istanbul, 2009 (Turkish trans.) Lucy Garnett, The women of Turkey and their folk-lore, Charleston SC, 2010 Studies E. Marino, ‘A British, Middle-Class woman in the harem. Emmeline Lott’s The English governess in Egypt. Harem life in Egypt and Con­ stantinople  (1865)’,  International Journal of Travel Writing  2 (2013) 98-109 D. Manley (ed.), Women travelers in Egypt. From the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Cairo, 2012 D. Logan,  Harriet Martineau, Victorian imperialism, and the civilizing mission, Farnham, 2010 E. Dzelzainis and C. Kaplan (eds), Harriet Martineau. Authorship, society and empire, Manchester, 2010 D. Robinson-Dunn, ‘Introduction’, in L. Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, Piscataway NJ, 2010 K. Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon. A passage to Egypt, London, 2007 M. Roberts,  Intimate outsiders. The harem in Ottoman and Orientalist art and travel, Durham NC, 2007 D. Robinson-Dunn,  The harem, slavery and British imperial culture. Anglo-Muslim relations in the late 19th century, Manchester, 2006 R.K. Webb, art. ‘Harriet Martineau’, in ODNB E. Baigent, art. ‘Sophia Lane Poole’, in ODNB R. Fowler, art. ‘Lucy Mary Jane Garnett’, in ODNB L.M. Harper, art. ‘Lucie Duff Gordon’, in ODNB S.S. Abdel-Hakim, ‘Sophia Poole. Writing the self, scribing Egyptian women’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 22 (2002) 107-26 L. Bernasek, ‘Unveiling the Orient, unmasking Orientalism. Sophia Poole’s  Englishwoman in Egypt’,  Cairo Papers in Social Science  23 (2002) 50-79 S. Foster and S. Mills (eds),  An anthology of women’s travel writing, Manchester, 2002 M. Miller, ‘The imperial feminine. Victorian women travelers in Egypt’, in S. Najmi and R. Srikanth (eds), White women in racialized spaces, Albany NY, 2002, 227-41 M. Wojcik, art. ‘Emmeline Lott’, in B. Brothers and J. Gergits (eds), Dictionary of literary biography, vol. 166. British travel writers 1837-1875, Detroit MI, 1996, 235-9



five victorian women travellers in the ottoman world 355 J. Rees,  Writings on the Nile. Harriet  Martineau, Florence Nightingale [and] Amelia Edwards, London, 1995 J. Robinson, Wayward women. A guide to women travelers, Oxford, 1994 B. Melman, Women’s Orients. English women and the Middle East, 17181918. Sexuality, religion and work, Ann Arbor MI, 1992 N. Shepherd, The zealous intruders. The Western rediscovery of Palestine, London, 1987 V. Pichanick, Harriet Martineau. The woman and her work, 1802-76, Ann Arbor MI, 1980 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1979 A. Khākī, ‘Muqaddima’, in Lucie Duff Gordon, Rasāʾil min Miṣr. Ḥayāt Lūsī Daff Jūrdūn fī Miṣr, 1862-1869, trans. Aḥmad Khākī, Cairo, 1976 Diane Robinson-Dunn

C.H. Robinson Charles Henry Robinson Date of Birth 27 February 1861 Place of Birth Keynsham, Somerset Date of Death 23 November 1925 Place of Death London

Biography

Charles Henry Robinson was the son of George Robinson, an Irish Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Henrietta. He was born on 27 February 1861 in Keynsham, Somerset, where his father was vicar. His father moved to St Augustine’s, Everton, in 1868, and Robinson attended the Royal Institution School in Liverpool, from where he matriculated to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1880. He graduated in 1884, and was ordained the same year. In 1889, he became a Fellow of St Augustine’s College, Canterbury, then from 1890 to 1893 he was vice-chancellor of Truro Cathedral and vice-principal of the Chancellor’s School. There, he met and married Clare Arnold, head mistress of the girls’ high school. She died in 1906, and Robinson married Cicely George in 1907. During 1892, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent Robinson to report on the condition of the Armenian Church in response to a request from them for assistance. He also visited Jerusalem to meet the Armenian patriarch (Robinson, Charles H. Robinson, p. 14). Following this, he was chosen to lead an expedition to Kano by the newly formed Association for the study of the Hausa language and people, established in 1891 in honour of his brother, John Alfred Robinson of the Church Missionary Society’s Niger mission, who died in Lokkoja in 1891. He left England on 30 April 1893, and landed in Tripoli on the North African coast two weeks later, going on to Tunis, where he spent six months studying Hausa and Arabic. His original plan was to reach Kano by crossing the Sahara, but he decided that the overland route was too dangerous, nor would the French authorities ‘give their approval’ (Robinson, Hausaland, p. 25). Returning to Britain, he set out again on 1 July 1894, sailing down the west coast of Africa then up the Niger River as far as Loko, from where he



c.h. robinson

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continued on foot to Kano. He arrived there on 23 December and stayed until 1 April 1895, arriving home on 24 July. He set down his travels and observations in Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan (1896), which has chapters on Islam and on the ḥajj. His study of Hausa resulted in Hausa grammar (1897), Dictionary of the Hausa language (1899) and other texts, which went through several editions. When Nigeria became a protectorate, Robinson revisited his travels in Nigeria, our latest protectorate (1900), with a chapter on Islam’s prospects in Africa (Nigeria, pp. 190-8). Between 1897 and 1906 he also lectured on the Hausa language at Cambridge. He was literary secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for 22 years from 1902. As a contribution to the debate about British policy towards the Ottoman Empire, he wrote Mohammedanism. Has it any future? (1897). In 1910, Robinson took part in the Edinburgh International Missionary Conference, where he was one of only two attendees with experience in Africa, although by then his interest had shifted to India and he chaired the sub-commission on Hinduism (B. Stanley, World Missionary Conference, Grand Rapids MI, 2009, p. 209). Robinson contributed several volumes to the field of mission studies, including History of Christian missions (1915), The conversion of Europe (1917) and The story of the SPG (1921). He died on 23 November 1925, still in post, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, London, 1896 C.H. Robinson, Nigeria, our latest protectorate, London, 1900 J. Venn and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, vol 2, part 5, Cambridge, 1953, p. 326 Secondary S. Baldi, ‘The Robinson papers’, Africa. Rivista Trimestrale di Studi e Documentazione dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 32 (1977) 435-9 F. Robinson, Charles H. Robinson. A record of travel and work, London, 1928 (biography by Robinson’s sister)

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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan Date 1896 Original Language English Description Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan was published in London in 1896, soon after Robinson returned from his travels in North and West Africa. The main text is 304 pages long, preceded by an Introduction (pp. v-vii) and containing 20 chapters and four appendices. Robinson actually made three trips to Africa during the period May 1893 to July 1895, sponsored by the Hausa Association. The first two were unsuccessful, but on his third attempt, accompanied by Dr T.J. Tonkin, a medical missionary, he finally reached Kano on 23 December 1894, staying there until 1 April 1895. It is this period that forms the main substance of the book. Chs 13, ‘Mohammedanism in Central Soudan’ (pp. 184-95; all references are to the 1896 edition unless otherwise stated), and 14, ‘The pilgrimage to Mecca’ (pp. 196-204), are concerned mainly with Islam. In ch. 13, Robinson describes how Islam spread in Hausaland, where one-third of the population were Muslim, though in large towns half were ‘nominal Mohammedans’ (p. 184). Kano had ‘one small and miserable looking mosque’, but mosques were not generally found; Hausa lack the ‘religious fanaticism’ seen in the Eastern Sudan, attested by the fact that few copies of the Qur’an were to be seen (p. 185). He found that observation of Ramaḍān was one of the main obstacles to becoming Muslim because abstaining from liquids all day was unsuited to the climate, and even professed Muslims ‘in reality evaded’ (p. 185) keeping the fast. His departure from Kano was delayed for two days by the celebration of ʿĪdal-fiṭr when the king offered up ‘public prayers’ outside the city wall. This, Robinson wrote, was the only time that people ‘came together for any religious service’ (p. 186). In ch. 13, Robinson also comments on someone within the Church of England who had recently, while ‘professing themselves Christian’, claimed that Islam was not only as good as Christianity but also stood a better chance of spreading among ‘a large portion of the human race’ (p. 187). He almost certainly had in mind Canon Isaac Taylor (d. 1901), whose 1887 Church Congress address caused controversy by representing



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Islam as more suited for Africans than Christianity. On the basis that Hausaland was representative of how Islam impacted ‘a formerly heathen race’ (p. 187), Robinson challenges Taylor’s claim. Islam, Taylor had said, first introduced people to a civilisation that was far more advanced than theirs, and second reduced the consumption of alcohol. However, Robinson argues that Islam can claim no credit for ending the gin trade, because this had been stopped by the Royal Niger Company (p. 190), and that Hausa culture owed much to the pre-Islamic period, while the ‘blind prejudice and ignorance’ of Islam tended to impede development (p. 191). He cites W.G. Palgrave’s view that only when the Qur’an and Mecca disappear from Arabia will Arabs ‘assume their place in the ranks of civilization from which Mohammed and his Book have held them back’ (W.G. Palgrave, Journey through Central and Eastern Africa, London, 1865, vol. 1, p. 175). Slavery too blotted Islam’s copy book. In principle, much could be said in favour of Islam, but its practice failed to live up to its promise (p. 192). Robinson observes that no serious Christian missionary work had taken place among the Hausa (p. 192), but he does not think that quick results would be possible: it would take many generations before Africans formed the same moral character that the English inherited as a ‘sort of birthright’ (p. 194). Ch. 14, on the ḥajj, returns to a topic on which Robinson writes earlier in the book, when he describes his Arabic teacher’s pilgrimage experience. This included being seized as a slave until he convinced his captors that he was a pilgrim, and almost being recruited into the Sudanese Mahdi’s army (p. 17). By the time he reached Mecca, he was penniless, and he ended up spending four years there before he was able to return home. In this chapter, Robinson describes the dangers involved in making the pilgrimage but says that, despite this, thousands of Hausa do so annually, although primarily because they can earn considerable sums as ḥajjīs, who are believed to have the power to make charms that can cure or cause illness (p. 198). Many pretend to be ḥajjīs so that they can profit from the sale of amulets. Robinson’s description of Mecca and the pilgrimage draws on the accounts of Richard Burton and J.L. Burckhardt, as well as those of Hausa pilgrims. In his Conclusion (pp. 273-9) Robinson poses the question of what Britain should do with the ‘vast territories’ she now governs. Without discussing the morality of imperialism, Robinson sees Britain’s role as one of civilising and Christianising its colonies. He suggests that colonies could be ‘governed and exploited [...] to the mutual advantage of the governors

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and the governed’ (p. 276). To this end, he supports the building of railways, which will make it easier and more economical to transport goods and even assist in the campaign to end the slave trade by opening up alternative commercial activities (p. 278). When Nigeria became a British protectorate in 1900, Robinson returned to his experiences in Hausaland, adding more historical material in Nigeria, our latest protectorate. In ch. 13, on Islam’s prospects in Africa, he predicts that either Islam or Christianity will replace paganism by the end of the century, though he thinks Islam is ‘played out’, at least in Africa (Nigeria, p. 194). It may have abolished ‘cruel, inhuman customs’ in some districts and introduced people to a civilisation ‘which they would not easily have gained by other means’, but Islam is also responsible for Africa’s ‘great open sore [...] slavery’ (p. 195). Islam only offered limited benefits in the past, and can only do the same in the future (p. 196), so Christians must conclude that Islam’s influence ‘should be curtailed’ (p. 197). As long as Muḥammad remained in Mecca (before migrating to Medina), Robinson is able to see him as having a genuine divine commission (p. 198), but Christians need to show that their religion is the more ‘excellent way’ by explaining the Qur’an’s ‘half truths’ in ‘the light of Christian faith’. In the Conclusion, Robinson again states his conviction that Britain has a providential role to fulfil in Africa, which is to introduce ‘Christianity and Christian forms of government’. He praises the sacrifices of missionaries, administrators and soldiers who sacrificed their lives in this cause (Nigeria, p. 210). Robinson was prepared to see ‘half truths’ in the Qur’an, although he did not elaborate on these or engage directly with the Qur’an itself, either in Hausaland or in other writings. He thought, however, that Christians should recognise whatever good they saw in Islam and find ways of building on this. Thus, Robinson cannot be said to have had a completely negative view of Islam. On the other hand, for him, negative aspects heavily outweighed positive, and Christians needed to win the struggle for dominance in Africa. His critique of Islam, almost wholly based on first-hand observation, would have had the ring of authority for many of his readers. His convictions about the moral benefits of British imperialism and about Britain’s role in acquiring an empire with its ‘never setting sun’ (Hausaland, p. 276) being inseparable from the task of spreading Christianity would have assured many that acquiring other people’s lands and ruling them was actually for these peoples’ benefit.



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Illustration 6. Photograph of Charles Henry Robinson in Hausa dress. Frontispiece of Hausaland, or fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan

Robinson clearly thought that the forms of government that Britain introduced in her colonies were both Christian and superior to those that existed before, including Muslim forms. He did not explain exactly how the system of colonial governments that allowed indigenous people very little say in their own affairs was either Christian or moral. He blamed slavery in Africa on Islam, without also admitting that Christians enslaved people and justified slavery by citing the Bible. Significance Hausaland shows that a Christian committed to Christian mission was able to see something positive in Islam even though, when he encountered the faith as it was lived, his conclusions were almost entirely negative. His work, which was especially influential among missionaries and those who worked, like him, for mission agencies headquarters in England, is an example of how, during the era of ascendant British

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imperialism, Christian views about Islam could not be discussed without reference to colonialism and the Orientalist conviction that the nonWestern world needed European guidance and supervision. No other civilisation could match Europe’s, and Islam’s certainly fell very short. Some in Victorian England who were less inclined to see British imperialism and Christian mission as an unqualified good or even as moral, found ways to see Islam in a more positive light. Among these, Mary Kingsley (d. 1900), who also travelled in West Africa, reached different conclusions about the comparative merits of Christian mission and of Islam. She commented that she failed to see Christian missionaries had ‘achieved any great good’ (West African studies, London, 1899, p. 478). Europeanisation actually ‘destroyed the good portion’ of African customs which allowed the ‘imperfect in it, as in all things human, to flourish’ (p. 383). However, she told Mary Slessor (d. 1915), a missionary whom she exempted from her criticisms, that ‘she would like to disguise herself and travel in North Africa and live among the Muslims’ (K. Frank, A voyager out, London, 2005, p. 134). She also did not witness the same degree of drunkenness that Robinson reported, saying that there were many more drunks to be seen on any Saturday night in London for a few hours than in the whole of West Africa for a whole week (Travels in West Africa, London, 1904, pp. 492-3). Robinson may have seen what he wanted to see regarding drunkenness, so that he could claim that Islam did not even achieve abstinence, to which it is in theory committed. For her part, Kingsley, who supported the opening up of the gin trade in Africa, may also have seen what she wanted to see – that Africans were no more prone to alcoholism than other people. In terms of ChristianMuslim relations, even when information is presented as factual reports based on personal observation this should be scrutinised and compared with other available reports because both Christians and Muslims can see in each other’s practices what their agenda allows them to see. Publications C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, London, 1896; 001971093 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, London, 18972; 102321408 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, London, 19003



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C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, Chestnut Hill MA, 2005 C.H. Robinson, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles through the Central Soudan, Cambridge, 2011

Mohammedanism. Has it any future? Date 1897 Original Language English Description Robinson wrote Mohammedanism. Has it any future? in 1897. It begins with a short Introduction (pp. v-vi) by the Bishop of Ripon, William Boyd Carpenter (d. 1918), followed by the main text of 81 pages divided into five chapters. Bishop Carpenter commends recent scholars for their impartial study of religions, which sets them ‘in true perspective’ from an ‘historical point of view’, and no longer dismisses them as ‘inventions of the evil one’ (p. v). However, the question needs to be asked whether ancient spiritual movements are as vital today or do they ‘meet the need of an age only’ (p. vi). He commends Robinson as having observed Islam at first hand in Africa, and not writing ‘as a philosophical theorist’ (p. vi). The five chapters begin with ‘The story of Islam’ (pp. 1-15), in which Robinson first justifies his book. He explains his main concern as whether Christian mission would succeed in making an ‘impression’ on Islam. Before attempting a description of Islam’s influence on the Hausa he sketches Muḥammad’s life (pp. 4-6), commenting that for good or bad he ‘influenced the world [...] more than any human being who has ever lived’. After 40 years living as an ‘ordinary citizen’, he began to declare to the few who were willing to listen that God had commissioned him to ‘recall the Arab race’ to the worship of the one God, and the religion that Abraham had practised. Robinson is prepared to recognise Muḥammad at this stage in his prophetic career as a ‘genuine prophet’ who was ‘justified in believing that he had received a Divine Commission’ (p. 5), though this contrasted sharply with his later life. Robinson claims that the only Christians Muḥammad encountered were heretics, and that, if he had encountered true Christianity, he would have spent his life proclaiming it (p. 81). After 12 years and several attempts on his life, Muḥammad was forced to leave Mecca on 16 June 622. Until then, his character had been ‘without reproach’ (p. 6) but now he made physical force equal with

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morality, and force became ‘inseparably’ linked with his followers. He died in 632, predicting a rapid decline in knowledge of the Qur’an that would leave only the ‘appearance’ of Islam in the world (p. 6). The next two pages summarise the spread of Islam and describe the Battle of Tours in 732 as one of the most ‘critical’ in human history. Robinson concedes that a religion that is still spreading after more than a thousand years merits ‘admiration and respect’, and asks what might explain Islam’s success. His answer is that this was almost entirely due to the fact that Muḥammad’s first ‘converts were a race of soldiers’ (p. 10), but he also says that Islam contains a ‘large measure of truth’, is ‘admirably adapted to the nature and capacity of the average’ person, and has resisted change (p. 12). However, after the hijra Muḥammad ‘abandoned the eternal distinction between right and wrong’ (p. 15) and made morality arbitrary, unlike Christianity which advocates a moral standard that is higher than people think it possible to attain (p. 12). Robinson concludes that it is ‘exceedingly improbable’ that Islam will either develop or return to the pure practice of Muḥammad (p. 17). Ch. 2, ‘Is Mohammedanism the religion best suited to the African native?’ (pp. 18-33), is concerned with the part of the Islamic world of which Robinson had experience. Isaac Taylor (d. 1901) and others argued that Islam was better suited for Africans than Christianity, and suggested that Christians should abandon efforts to gain African converts. Racist ideas about the limited capacity of Africans to benefit from Christianity’s allegedly higher moral expectations also informed this view. Robinson agrees that Africans find Islam attractive, and thinks it is ‘better suited’ to them than Christianity, though this is only true if the aim is to maintain existing moral standards and not to raise them. Asking whether Islam has succeeded in civilising Africans (assuming they are in need of this), he turns to his experience among the Hausa. In answer to the claim that Islam has introduced a civilisation there that is ‘in advance of what previously existed’, and has restrained its converts from excessive consumption of alcohol (p. 21), he declares that alcoholic consumption is rife among Hausa Muslims, and comments that Islam may have raised them above pagan superstition but it has left them bereft of any higher aspirations and bigoted (p. 24). Islam also encourages slave raiding, which has flourished in Hausaland more than anywhere else in the world (p. 27). He says the claim that greater contact between the Hausa and Islam’s original home in Arabia might improve their moral conduct is mistaken. He cites William Palgrave (d. 1888), who had ‘spent the greater part of



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his life in Arabia’ and even led Muslim prayer in mosques, on how ‘evil’ Arabian Muslims were (p. 29). Ch. 3, ‘Mohammedanism and the Churches of the East’ (pp. 34-49), draws on Robinson’s visit to Armenia. He says that the Islamic regions in the East that were formally Christian need to be re-Christianised, and the way to do this is not by sending missionaries from London or New York but through the ancient Churches. This would be a slow process, because in his view the only place where there has been any real attempt to conduct mission is India (pp. 50-63). In ch. 5, ‘Islam versus Christianity in Africa’ (pp. 67-81), Robinson returns to his experiences in Africa, asserting that Christianity failed to spread widely there because of internal quarrels between Christians, which weakened Christianity and assisted the spread of Islam. Uganda was currently the only place where Christian missionaries were encountering Muslims, and converts were abandoning the slave trade and financing mission work despite ‘bitter opposition’ (p. 72). The underlying problem is that the continuing influence of the Qur’an makes it impossible for Islam to ‘develop from within’ (p. 77). Robinson confidently declares that Islam is a declining influence in the world (p. 78), yet Christians should not weaken Muslims’ faith without offering them true Christianity in return. Describing the First Crusade as an attempt to crush Islam by force, Robinson invites his readers to engage instead in a ‘nobler and more difficult crusade’, to preach and explain Christianity to Muslims (p. 80). Robinson’s sketch of Muḥammad’s life is much less disparaging than many others written by Christians during the 19th century. While he sees a moral decline between Muḥammad in Mecca as a sincere seeker for truth and the allegedly self-indulgent Muḥammad in Medina, he is less explicit in his criticism of Muḥammad’s conduct than many other Christian writers who devoted pages to describing his marriages, treatment of critics and other perceived moral lapses. Robinson hints that Muḥammad himself conveniently produced the verse that set ‘no limit to the number of his wives’ (p. 14, referring to Q 33:50), but he does not labour this or describe the Qur’an as a complete forgery, or ascribe it to Satanic influence. Though he was almost certainly familiar with William Muir’s Life of Mahomet (1858-62), which also represents Muḥammad at Mecca as a sincere truth seeker and at Medina in moral decline, Robinson maintains a more even, less polemical tone throughout. He does criticise some Christian writers for going too far in their rehabilitations of, or apologies for, Muḥammad, though he does not name them. One may have been Reginald Bosworth Smith (d. 1908), who, responding to reviews of his Mohammed and

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Mohammedanism (1874) in his second edition (1876), remarked that several thought his account ‘too favourable’ (p. ix). Robinson may have set out to position himself somewhere between Muir and Smith. Robinson’s reference to the claim that Islam was better suited to Africa than Christianity suggests that he was familiar with the debate sparked by Isaac Taylor’s 1887 address at the Wolverhampton Church Congress that led to many articles and letters to The Times for the next two years. In his contribution to this debate, Smith sided with Taylor, while criticising him for going too far in his critical approach towards Christian mission. Smith did not call for this to halt but suggested that Christians could learn lessons from Muslim missionaries. However, Robinson was much more defensive of Christian mission and more critical of Islam’s spread, which he saw as retarding civilisation and morality. Robinson conflates the interests of Christian mission and British imperialism, which he believed had a moral mandate and providential role to improve the lives of those under its rule. Not only was Islam a retarding influence, but it had no future in Africa. He sees Uganda as having strategic importance in preventing Islam’s extension further south, and welcomes the new protectorate in Nigeria (1900) because it will aid Christianity’s spread and hinder Islam’s. Though he recognised a measure of truth in Islam, Robinson thought Christian faith necessary for salvation. He believed that heretical Christians had led Muḥammad astray and that he fell short of the charge of full-blown imposture that so many Christians had levelled at him (p. 5). His conviction that Islam could not be reformed led him to represent the modernist Muslim thinker Syed Amir Ali as preaching a version of Islam that was actually Islam no longer. It was a mistake, he thought, to suppose that Ali ‘is a representative spokesman of Indian Muslims’ (p. 65). Smith, who became a friend of Ali’s, welcomed his reformist efforts while another writer on Islam’s future, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (d. 1922), was enthusiastic about the ‘liberal Ulama of Al Azhar’ in Egypt who were laying a foundation for the ‘social and political Reformation of all Islam’ (The future of Islam, London, 1882, p. vii). Significance Robinson’s ideas about Islam’s deficiencies and Christianity’s merits, as well as his confidence that imperialism would benefit subject peoples, place him within the Orientalist category. He had much in common with William Muir, who also conflated the interests of colonialism and Christian mission. Yet, unlike Muir he was prepared to see some good in



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Islam, and even recommended missionaries to read the Qur’an before approaching Muslims; Muir thought that Islam only represented a barrier to the spread of Christianity. Despite this resemblance, Robinson’s overall view of Islam as portrayed in this book can be identified as shifting towards the more positive assessments of those writers who stressed common ground between Islam and Christianity. These writers believed that Islam could be a foundation on which Christianity could build. What is significant is that Robinson enjoyed considerable respect among missionaries, while most of those who saw merit in Islam wrote from outside, and often with contempt for, mainstream Christianity. Publications C.H. Robinson, Mohammedanism. Has it any future? London, 1897; 009013390 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Clinton Bennett

Richard F. Burton Date of Birth: 19 March 1821 Place of Birth: Torquay, Devon Date of Death: 20 October 1890 Place of Death: Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire

Biography

Richard Francis Burton was born in Torquay, Devon, on 19 March 1821. Biographers talk of his early life, much of which was spent in France and Italy, instilling in him a sense of adventure but also a feeling of being an outsider. He had a younger brother, Edward, and a sister, Catherine Eliza, whose daughter Georgiana was to write an early biography of him. His father had determined that Richard should become a clergyman, ‘a career choice’ that J.S. Cotton in the DNB describes as ‘preposterous in retrospect’, so he sent him to Oxford. He was expelled (rusticated), and his father finally allowed him to join the army. He enlisted in the Bombay Native Infantry of the East India Company army, and quickly mastered several Eastern dialects with the same ease that he had absorbed the European languages of his childhood. He became so proficient that he was able to adopt a number of native disguises in order to undertake covert missions for the company.  Two biographers, Edward Rice and Mary Lovell, imply that Burton was more interested in the society of Indians than that of army colleagues and it is during this time that he became seriously interested in Indian religions. There is some possibility that he converted to Brahminism and Sufism during his period there but, whether or not this is the case, his successful acquisition of Indian languages points to a serious study of the beliefs that underpinned Indian society. This talent, allied to what appears to be an unquenchable curiosity for even minor social and cultural details, makes his writings a valuable and fascinating source of ethnographic detail.  Burton played up to his image as an outsider, but historical perspective and more recent scholarship have situated him outside the mainstream of his own society though still firmly an agent of empire.  It was during the period of his employment by the East India Company (1842-53) that Burton formulated the plan to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Muslim, and he made the trip as a Pathan in 1853. As a result of this expedition, he undertook further journeys to visit the city



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of Harar in East Africa and, with John Speke, to discover the source of the River Nile and Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika (1858). He visited America in 1860 and wrote about Mormonism and a trip to Salt Lake City. In 1861 he married Isabel Arundell.  He was appointed to consular positions in West Africa (1861-4) and South America (1865-9), and his long-held ambition to be posted to Damascus was eventually granted but short-lived (1869-71). His final appointment was in Trieste (1872-90) and it was here that he died, having been knighted in 1886.  Burton is probably best-known today for his account of the journey he made to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, which is discussed below, and also for his translation of  Alf layla wa-layla  (‘The thousand and one nights’), the collection of frequently bawdy tales that for many epitomise the character of medieval Arab society. This translation shows the breadth and depth of his interest in Arabic and insights into the society in which he spent many years, but without providing anything of significance about relations between Muslims and Christians. 

Illustration 7. Photograph of Richard Burton signed Al-Ḥājj ʿAbd Allāh, from Lady Burton’s edition of her husband’s Arabian nights

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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary A.B. Richards, A short sketch of the career of Richard F. Burton, London, 1880 F. Hitchman, Richard F. Burton K.C.M.G. His early private and public life with an account of his travels and explorations, 2 vols, London, 1887 I. Burton, The life of Sir Richard F. Burton, 3 vols, London, 1893 G.M. Stisted, The true life of Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton, London, 1896 J.S. Cotton, art. ‘Burton, Sir Richard Francis (1821-1890)’, in DNB T. Wright, The life of Richard Burton, London, 1906  N.M. Penzer, An annotated bibliography of Sir Richard Francis Burton K.C.M.G., London, 1922 (Penzer went through previous bibliographical material, highlighting many errors and omissions. Obviously a great fan of Burton, he lamented the poor treatment Burton had received not only in life but also posthumously. He produces a tabulated list of works and a bibliography of articles. Appendices describe Burton’s own library and biographies of him, revealing that there were several sketches of his life during his own lifetime. Penzer mentions rare items that no longer exist, as his library was lost during World War II. This text is a true labour of love.) Secondary T. Assad, Three Victorian travellers. Burton, Blunt, Doughty, London, 2017 J. Wallen, ‘Sir Richard Burton as totemic pantomime demon in postcolonial theory’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 6 (2017) 255-71 J. Wallen, ‘Sufi, Christian or Buddhist? Richard Francis Burton’s “parameters of belief”’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 2 (2013) 110-16 G. Nash (ed.), Travellers to the Middle East. An anthology, London, 2012 I. Ghose, ‘Imperial player. Richard Burton in Sindh’, in T. Youngs (ed.), Travel writing in the nineteenth century. Filling in the blank spaces, London, 2006, 71-86 (draws attention to multiple layers of Burton’s identity as he adopts native dress, and argues that Burton’s idea of imperialism is performative) D. Kennedy, The highly civilized man. Richard Burton and the Victorian world, Cambridge MA, 2006 (argues that Burton was a man of his time who resisted the confines of his age but was also confined by them) J. Thompson, art. ‘Burton, Sir Richard Francis (1821-1890)’, in ODNB Miroku Nemeth, ‘The Orientalist and the dervish. Representation of al-tasawwuf and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton’, Fresno CA, 2001 (MA Diss. California State University) D. Kennedy, ‘“Captain Burton’s oriental muck heap”. The Book of the thousand nights and the uses of Orientalism’, Journal of British Studies )2000( 39 39-317 (argues that Burton used the Nights as a way of criticising British morality and ‘Mrs Grundy’, not least its attitudes towards homosexuality) M. Lovell, A rage to live. A biography of Richard and Isabel Burton, New York, 1998 J. Casada, Sir Richard F. Burton. A biobibliographical study, London, 1990



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E. Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. The secret agent who made the pilgrimage to Mecca, discovered the Kama Sutra and brought the Arabian Nights to the West, New York, 1990 (suggests that Burton’s conversion to Islam was partially genuine, even if he was never a devout Muslim, and that he practised taqiyya, the Shīʿī principle of dissimulation) Yassin Salhani Ma-at, ‘Sir Richard Burton. A study of his literary works relating to the Arab world and Islam’, St Andrews, 1978 (PhD Diss. University of St Andrews)

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Sindh and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus Date 1851 Original Language English Description In 1847, Burton had produced a report for the army entitled Notes relative to the population of Sind, and much of this appeared in this work Sindh and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus of 1851 (422 pages). The book, like the report, is thorough and detailed; it was republished in 1973 in Karachi in a series of historical reprints for use in the Pakistani curriculum. Chs 1 and 2 describe the geopolitical and historical aspects of Sindh, and chs 1-5 describe cultural aspects, including Sindhi writers and legends. Ch. 4 describes the intellectual background to the culture and argues for the Arabic naskhī calligraphic script in education and administration from among the many in use at the time (Sindh, 1851 edition, pp. 134-57). He describes it as ‘par excellence, the alphabet of Asia […] in elegance of appearance, and brevity without obscurity, it yields to no other written character’ (p. 155). Here, Burton’s undoubted admiration for the language and culture is clear, but what is less clear is whether the primary tone is that of a bureaucrat or a scholar.  By breaking the population down into different ethnic as well as religious groups, he examines the history of the region in a manner that is far more detailed than would serve the purposes of colonial rule; he shows clearly genuine and sustained interest in the region. The running header

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at the top of each page is HISTORY OF SINDH yet he also discusses, for example, the establishment of schools and languages of instruction with an eye to Western educational structures (pp. 150-2) and he uses the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ when he discusses colonial policy. He concludes by acknowledging the divisions between the Hindus and Muslims, but suggests that grievances arise from Sindh being a society in economic and social transition from native to British rule. However, he advocates supporting the education of the people and argues that their literary history is a powerful weapon that can be employed for the purposes of British rule. In ch. 7, ‘Present state of society in Sindh’, Burton gives an illustration of the manners and customs of the people of Sindh by quoting from Sayyid Hasan Ali’s Lizzat nisa sharai (‘The lawful enjoyment of women’), a book of marriage advice principally on the duties of a good wife (p. 158). The chapter goes on to describe the drinking of alcohol and various types of intoxicants, including hemp and opium, that are produced and consumed in the country. After this, Burton goes on to describe ‘the peculiarity of the national faith’ (p. 172). He compares the Sindh adoption of Islam with the European adoption of Christianity, arguing that Protestantism took much from the Druidism of the northern countries, whilst the Mediterranean countries retained elements of pantheism that have inspired the arts and sciences of civilisation. Burton seems to draw a comparison between the people of southern Europe (Catholics) and the Sindhi and ‘Hindoo’, in that both call upon saints and holy men to intercede for them (p. 205). Similarly, Islam in Sindh owes much to Hinduism and has retained elements from India and Persia (pp. 172-3). Superstition abounds, one example being the belief that an alligator in a pool near Kurrachee (Karachi) will grant wishes in return for offerings of goat meat (pp. 173-4). The social and cultural aspects of Sindh history and society are contextualised and explained, frequently with a humour that reflects the humanity of Burton’s subjects. Although the text portrays Sindhis as people with a sense of their own history and culture, Burton’s conclusions are the racialised ones of his Victorian contemporaries, reflecting his own background and that of his Western Christian readers.  Ch. 8 (pp. 198-231) deals with Sufism, ‘tasawwuf’, and begins by referring to a well-known book on the subject by Sir William Jones. Burton repeats the uncertainty expressed there as to whether the origin of Sufism is in Persia or India. Shīʿī Muslims believe that Sufism originated with the house of ʿAbbās, the second dynasty of Islam, but Burton notes that ‘There is a certain wonderful resemblance between Tasawwuf and the [Indian]



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Vedantic system’, in that both share the idea of an attempt to emancipate the soul from the ‘tyranny of impure matter’ (p. 199). Significance The tone of Burton’s work is anthropological. It strives towards descriptive objectivity, which is unsurprising given that he was employed as an East India Company officer. Yet his attention to linguistic and literary details points to the future direction of his interests. As a result of his recommendation here, naskhī script was adopted throughout Sindh. Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote an account of his retracing of Burton’s Sindh adventures, comments that Burton’s work was used by the Pakistani education ministry (Sindh revisited, p. 149). Publications R.F. Burton,  Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, London, 1851; 102195044 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, Karachi, 1973 R.F. Burton, Sindhu ain Sindhu mātharī’a ma vasandar qaumon, trans. Muḥammad Ḥanīf Ṣiddīqī, Hyderabad, 1976, repr. Jamshoro, 1995 (Sindhi trans.) R.F. Burton, Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, New Delhi, 1997 R.F. Burton,  Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, Ottowa, 1997 R.F. Burton, Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, New Delhi, 1998 R.F. Burton, Sindh, and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus, New Delhi, 2000 Studies C. Ondaatje,  Sindh revisited. A journey in the footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, London, 1996

 

Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah Date 1855-6 Original Language English

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Description Burton made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina while on an extended period of leave from the East India Company in 1853. He wished to travel as a born Muslim to whom the rites of Islamic worship came naturally, and he adopted three identities during the journey: on the boat to Alexandria, an Indian mirza; the Persian dervish Shaykh Abdallah, as whom he planned to make the pilgrimage until he was advised in Cairo not to claim any Persian connection; and in consequence a Pathan, an Afghan with Indian parents. Reading his account, one becomes aware that on some occasions the narrator is actually the mirza or Abdallah the pilgrim, while on others it is the under-cover Burton relating his journey for his Western readers. The text is, perhaps inevitably, peppered with pejorative and racially denigrating stereotypes, yet it also frequently includes positive and often admiring descriptions of Eastern manners and customs. Although a present-day reader will see Burton’s opinions as inflected with racist and Orientalist attitudes, it is clear that in the context of his time his standpoint was among the mildest of racist opinions.  Often, when he writes admiringly about Islam and Muslims, it is as a Western observer and participant in the culture, and not as the Easterner in disguise. On his return, Burton set up an organisation, ‘The Hadjilik, or Pilgrimage to Mecca syndicate limited’. It is unclear whether this was for European Muslims, Indian Muslims, or anyone else, and it came to little as a money-making scheme. Norman Penzer says that it was an altruistic project for the comfort and security of pilgrims (Annotated bibliography, p. 49), though it raises questions about Burton’s motives for making the journey to Mecca and his thoughts about it afterwards. For later scholars it is one more frustratingly obscure aspect of Burton’s career and interests that seem open to vastly differing interpretations.  The journey itself was full of difficulty, danger and physical challenges. Faced with the constant threat of detection, Burton had lent money to every member of his pilgrim group, and perhaps this led them to accept the less credible aspects of his adopted persona. Whether they believed in his character or not, Burton describes a good-natured adventure shared with the warmth and camaraderie of his travelling companions, perhaps cemented by incidents such as an attack by Bedouins that resulted in the caravan barely stopping until it reached Medina (vol. 1, pp. 272-5). During the voyage from Suez to Yenbo (Yanbuʿ) on the east coast of the Red Sea, Burton trod on a sea anemone and suffered from an infected foot (vol. 1, p. 221).



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This conveniently allowed him to travel in a litter and make surreptitious notes, though his detailed descriptions of both the landscape and the rituals followed in Mecca and Medina owe as much to J.L. Burckhardt's Travels in Arabia (London, 1829) as to his notes. Burton also includes in appendices accounts of earlier journeys undertaken by Christians to Mecca: Vertomannus, Joseph Pitts and Giovanni Finati. Significance Burton performed the pilgrimage in 1853 and was celebrated for his bravery and audacity; in the public mind, it was to become one of the defining events of his life, while he himself used the title ḥajjī for the rest of his life. Norman Penzer, Burton’s most sustained bibliographer, lists eight editions of the work between the first three-volume edition of 1855-6 and the popular edition of 1913, a sign of its popularity. Publications R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, 3 vols, London, 1855-6; 009833286 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, 2 vols, London, 18572, repr. 1885, Delhi, 2013; 100765919 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, Boston MA, 1858; 101745785 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton, Peregrinacion a la Meca y Medina, Madrid, 1860 (abridged Spanish trans.) R.F. Burton, Reisen nach Medina und Mekka und in das Somaliland nach Härrär in Ost-Afrika, trans. K. Andree, Leipzig, 1861 (German trans.); It.coll. 2 s-1 (digitised version available through MDZ) R.F. Burton,  The guide-book. A pictorial pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. including some of the more remarkable incidents in the life of Mohammed, the Arab lawgiver, London, 1865 R.F. Burton, Voyages du Capitaine Burton à la Mecque, aux grands lacs d’Afrique, et chez les Mormons, trans. H. Loreau, Paris, 1872, repr. 1878 (abridged French trans.); bpt6k304052t (digitised version available through BNF) R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, Leipzig, 1874

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R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, ed. T.L. Wolley, London, 18793, repr. 1906 R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, ed. I. Burton, 2 vols, London, 1893, repr. 1898, Uckfield, 2006 (memorial edition); 001266056 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, ed. I. Burton, intro. S. Lane-Poole, London, 1913 R.F. Burton,  Meine Wallfahrt nach Medina und Mekka, Berlin, 1924 (German trans.) R.F. Burton,  Mi peregrinacion a la Meca y Medina, trans. A. Cardín, Barcelona, 1984-90 (Spanish trans.) R.F. Burton, Riḥlat Bīritūn ilā Miṣr wa-l-Ḥijāz, ed. end trans. D. ʿAbd alRaḥmān ʿAbd Allāh al-Shaykh, Cairo, 1994-5 (Arabic trans.) R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, 3 vols, Frankfurt am Main, 1995 R.F. Burton, A secret pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, London, 2004 R.F. Burton, Persönlicher Bericht einer Pilgerreise nach Mekka und Medina 1853, ed. and trans. U. Pfullmann, Lenningen, 2005 (German trans.) R.F. Burton, Voyage à la Mecque. Relation personnelle d’un pèlerinage à Médine et à la Mecque en 1853, trans. H. Loreau, Paris, 2007 (abridged French trans from 1872 edition)  R.F. Burton,  Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah, Cambridge, 2011 Studies Penzer, Annotated bibliography, pp. 44-60 (briefly outlines the details of Burton's journey and records editions up to reprints of the 1913 edition)

 

First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar Date 1856 Original Language English Description After his success in the guise of a Muslim making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Burton made a visit to the Muslim town of Harar in Ethiopia.



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Western adventurers and traders had never been permitted within this sacred city because of a tradition that, if they entered within the walls, its destruction would follow. Burton determined to travel as Hajj Abdullah, the same identity he had adopted to go to Mecca, but he abandoned this disguise during the journey. Word had got around that an Ottoman official was in the area, and it was better for Burton to travel as himself rather than be mistaken for a Turk. Ch. 4, ‘The Somal, their origin and peculiarities’ (1856 edition, pp. 7089; this is the edition used here), describes the origins of the East African Somal, and then gives details about the genealogies Burton had taken from conversations with the locals. He frequently notes similarities between East Africa and Arabia, and goes into detail about Arab history and tradition, making comparisons with current practices in East Africa, as well as noting similarities in language. He says of the Somal: ‘They dislike the Arabs, fear and abhor the Turks, have a horror of Franks [Europeans], and despise all other Asiatics who with them come under the general name of Hindi (Indians)’ (p. 109). He describes them as following the Shāfiʿī legal school of Islam (p. 112), and of observing auspicious and inauspicious months, burying their dead only during the latter (p. 114). On their beliefs he comments: ‘The Somal, as usual amongst the heterogeneous mass amalgamated by El Islam, have a diversity of superstitions attesting their pagan origin’ (p. 113), including their reverence for holy trees and cairns.  In ch. 8, Burton gives an account of relations between Harar and the Abyssinians that had been characterised by animosity between the Islamic city and the Christian Ethiopians from the time of the invasion by the Arabs (p. 306). On the fall of Egypt and Palestine to the Ottomans, the townspeople attacked Abyssinian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem and sold the young into slavery. Significance One review of First footsteps began: ‘In Mr Burton’s case, it is hard to say where the barbarian ends and the civilised European begins’ (Saturday Review, 26 July 1856), a description that Burton would undoubtedly have relished. A barbarian character was deemed essential for travelling into a region that was little known, except for pre-Ottoman Portuguese Jesuit missionaries such as Jeronimo Lobo. Burton’s account of the people of the region and their history has been judged comprehensive enough to be translated into one of the local languages, as well as into Spanish.

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Publications R.F. Burton,  First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar, London, 1856; 011600552 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Premiers pas dans l’Afrique orientale, par le capitaine R. Burton, Brussels, 1857 (French trans.); DT401 B9714 (digitised version available through Robarts Library, University of Toronto) R.F. Burton, First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar, ed. I. Burton, London, 1894, repr. 1904 (memorial edition); 001609737 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar, London, 1910 R.F. Burton, Primeros pasos en el Este de África. Expedición a la ciudad prohibida de Harar, trans. M. Pérez, Barcelona, 1987 (Spanish trans.) R.F. Burton,  First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar, Cambridge, 2011  R.F. Burton,  Sahankii Richard Burton ee bariga Afrika, London, 2017 (Somali trans.) Studies T. Jeal, Explorers of the Nile, London, 2011, pp. 56-64 A. Moorehead, The White Nile, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 22-30

Unexplored Syria Date 1872 Original Language English Description This two-volume work of 360 and 400 pages is an account of Burton’s journeys through Syria, undertaken during his residence in Damascus as consul between 1869 and 1871. Its full title is Unexplored Syria. Visits to the Libanus, the Tulúl el-Safá, the Anti Libanus, the northern Libanus and the ‘Aláh. Burton’s appointment was fraught, and he was to be recalled after only two years in the post and at short notice after he came into ‘contact with a tyranny and an oppression which even that land of doleful antecedents cannot remember’ (vol. 1, p. xiv) in the person of one of the Ottoman officials and senior diplomats. However, he blamed the Jewish community for his recall, and this animosity possibly led to the tone he took when he later wrote The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam.



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According to Burton himself, Unexplored Syria is a ‘pot pourri’ of a book. Isabel contributed the first chapter of vol. 1, and Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, the Burtons’ travelling companion, who had worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund, contributed appendices to both volumes. On their travels, Burton and Tyrwhitt-Drake conducted several surveys of sites of antiquity, and ‘carried off the cream of discovery’ (vol. 1, p. ix), though they realised that so much more remained unexamined. Drawing on his knowledge and experience of Islamic societies, Burton expresses admiration for the Muslims and Arabs he meets, and considers them able and resourceful: ‘The people are capable: there is literally no limit that can be laid down to the mother-wit, to the ambition, to the intellectual capabilities of its [Syrian society’s] sons. […] They are the most gifted race that I have, as yet, ever seen’ (vol. 1, p. xiii). He has nothing but praise for the people, their civilisation and religion, though there are qualifications. During a visit to the classical temple of Baalbek, Richard and Isabel Burton, alongside Tyrwhitt-Drake and Edward Palmer, concluded that the monument was in danger of collapse, and they initially gained the support of the Ottoman authorities in engaging an engineer. But the Ottoman governor changed his mind, in Isabel’s phrase, ‘à la Turque’ (vol. 1, p. 39), causing Isabel to complain that these people saw no value in their heritage. Later, Burton himself reveals that this indifference extends to Muslim sites, and he speculates that few Damascenes could point out the resting place of such significant a figure as Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, even though it stood in their city (vol. 1, p. 134). Burton said that he maintained good relations with both Christians and Muslims, claiming that the Muslims prayed for his return to them when he was recalled to London (vol. 2, p. 229). He mentions that he also corresponded with the Christian Primate of Antioch (vol. 1, p. 107), whom he describes in the warmest terms. He also recalls an affinity with the Maronites, explaining that he is ‘not ashamed to own a community of faith’ (vol. 1, p. 108). These communities he describes as happy and free from the corrupt Ottoman rule. In other places in  Unexplored Syria, Burton appears to look on Muslims much more favourably than on Christians, and he describes feeling at home among Muslims. On one occasion he experiences poor hospitality in the Christian village of Banyo, only to encounter subsequently a Muslim who insists upon Burton sharing a generous meal (vol. 2, pp. 150-1). He considers that, despite their relatively greater wealth, Christians see hospitality as a chance to extort a few

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miserable piastres, while for Muslims it is a ‘sacred duty’. He says of the difference, with a tinge of facetiousness, ‘I can’t help thinking that in the peculiarly constituted native mind religion has something to do with it’ (vol. 2, p. 148).  Significance Burton was consul during a time of much unrest in Damascus. The massacres of 1860 had seen widespread violence and there was tension among the different faiths. The official British attitude was to maintain equilibrium, which involved supporting the Jewish community. Burton dissented from this, and in his time in Damascus he affirmed his affiliation to Islam and Arab culture and also developed an anti-Jewish sentiment that was to stay with him. His affinity with local people and his belief in their good regard for him indicate that he felt at home in an Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim society. How far this is ascertainable is unsure, though a biography of Burton and his wife, Mary Lovell’s A rage to live, confirms Burton’s own assessment. Lovell affirms Burton’s role in preventing violence after an incident of proselytising that saw a missionary, Mentor Mott, incur the anger of the city’s Muslim population. She cites two Damascus residents, Jane Digby and William Wright, who believed that Burton urged the protection of the Jews and Christians and prevented a repetition of the massacres of 1860. Publications R.F. Burton and C.F. Tyrwhitt-Drake,  Unexplored Syria. Visits to the Libanus, the Tulúl el-Safá, the Anti Libanus, the northern Libanus and the ‘Aláh, 2 vols, London, 1872; 001863467 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton,  Das Land Midian, trans. U. Pfullmann, Berlin, 2004 (German trans.) R.F. Burton, Unexplored Syria, Cambridge, 2013  Studies S. Assi, ‘The original Arabs. The invention of the “Bedouin race” in Ottoman Palestine’,  International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 50 (2018) 213-32 R. Burns, Damascus. A history, London, 2005, ch. 15, pp. 249-70 Lovell, A rage to live I. Burton, Inner life of Syria, from my private journal, London, 1875 (Lady Burton’s memoir of their time in Syria) 



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The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam Date 1898 Original Language English Description This work was not published during the lifetime of either Richard or Isabel Burton, and there is no certainty that it was ever intended to be published. Its three sections were written independently and at different points in Burton’s life (together they total 351 pages). The most contentious by far is that concerning the Jews, which repeats familiar anti­ semitic tropes and stereotypes. The third part, ‘El-Islam’, includes details about Jesus by way of showing the progression of monotheism that culminated in Islam. Jesus offered a religion of ‘the highest moral loveliness, showing what an imperfect race can and may become’ (p. 315). St Paul raised the Gentile to the level of the Jew and abolished time-wasting rituals in favour of a simpler system that would be applicable for the whole world. But gradually the systems created by the early Church eroded, and Islam arrived when Christianity was in need of reform (p. 321).  Burton argues that modern Western enquiry into Islam is more concerned with finding flaws than with seeing the faith for what it is, a source of truth, merit and beauty for a fifth of the world’s population. He identifies four errors that should be corrected: First, Islam is for ‘still undeveloped and uncultivated minds’. Burton replies that Islam is full of devotional works that are the products of a literary and culturally developed society (p. 322). Second, criticism of Islam is that it is a faith of ‘pure sensuality’. Burton says that this error possibly came about because of the sensual descriptions of paradise in the Qur’an, or the permission for men to have four wives. He offers geographical explanations for polygamy, and alludes to the strict conditions under which it is permitted.  He also mentions the strict laws that limit indulgence, prayer according to precise guidelines, fasting, modesty towards women, bans on gambling and taking financial interest (p. 328). Third, Muḥammad began as an enthusiast and ended as an imposter (p. 330). Burton argues that, if we doubt whether Muḥammad is genuine, we should also doubt others who claimed inspiration, such as prophets. There is much about the murder of innocents in the Old Testament,

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and other acts that are only excusable because they are sanctioned by God (p. 332). Fourth, Muḥammad incorporated earlier practices into Islam. Burton responds that Moses did the same. However, much in the Qur’an is from the principles of Judaism and the Pentateuch, but with some dietary modifications. Islam offers a definition of the human that makes them accountable for their own actions and capable of salvation in a manner different from Christianity. The faith has a noble simplicity (p. 343).  In the portion of the work devoted to Islam, Burton uses the term the ‘saving faith’ (for one example, see p. 338) to describe it with regard to individual salvation but also, possibly, with regard to the saving of Africa from destruction by European colonisation. Biographers describe his preference for Muslims over converts to Christianity during his time in West Africa. In 1861, in a letter from West Africa to Richard Monckton Milnes, he wrote: ‘The fact is there is no salvation for Africa but El Islam’ (quoted in Lovell, Rage to live, p. 398). He signed the letter, as he frequently did, Abdallah, the Muslim name he had adopted for his pilgrimage to Mecca. He argues that Islam holds many progressive and culturally sophisticated elements. Significance There is debate about whether Burton wished this work to be published or to be burned along with other papers and letters. As it was published after the death of Isabel, this question remains unanswered, though its negative effect upon Burton’s reputation is undeniable. The work shows a breadth and depth of reading about the common origins of the Abrahamic faiths and how they relate to the polytheistic traditions of India and Egypt. Publications R.F. Burton,  The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam, London, 1898, repr. Uckfield, 1985; 001247612 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton, The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam, Chicago IL, 1898; 009833826 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.F. Burton, The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam, Hollywood CA, 1974 R.F. Burton, The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam, London, 2011



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Studies G. Alderman and C. Holmes, ‘The Burton book’,  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18 (2008) 1-13 (an examination of Burton’s interest in the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, arguing that The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam was published by W.H. Wilkins to spread anti-semitic propaganda) Lovell, Rage to live  A. Vincent, ‘“The Jew the Gypsy and El-Islam”. An examination of Richard Burton’s consulship in Damascus and his premature recall, 1868-1871’,  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society  117 (1985) 155-73 (examines official correspondence to argue that Burton’s motives in writing were supportive of the poor and the victims of usury) Alison Dingle

Emilie Loyson-Meriman Date of Birth 2 June 1833 Place of Birth Oswego, western New York State Date of Death 3 December 1909 Place of Death Paris

Biography

Emilie Jane Butterfield, a descendant of religious refugees, was born on 2 June 1833 in Oswego in western New York State. Her father, Amroy Butterfield (d. 1836), was a Presbyterian pastor; her mother, Mary Lamb, was the descendent of a puritan pastor. In 1851, she married Captain Edwin Ruthven Meriman (d. 1867), by whom she had two children, Ralph (b. 1854), who died as a young man, and Mary (1859-64). In 1854, she started writing political and religious articles for local newspapers, later writing for The New York Times. In 1863 and 1867, she travelled to Europe. During her second visit, she met in Paris the famous preacher at Notre Dame Cathedral, Père Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912), a strong advocate of the equality of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. In 1869, Hyacinthe Loyson left the Carmelite Order because of his open view on other traditions. Both Emilie, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1868, and he protested against the papal dogmas of the First Vatican Council of 1870, and they subsequently joined the newly emergent Old Catholic movement, collaborating closely with its spiritual leader, the Bavarian church historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890). In September 1872, the couple married in London, and in 1873 they moved to Geneva. In that same year their son, Paul-Emmanuel Hyacinthe (1873-1921), was born. The family returned to France in 1878, where, with Anglican support, in 1879 Hyacinthe founded the Catholic Gallican parish in Paris, which remained under his leadership until 1893. From the time she first met Hyacinthe, Emilie's biography is entwined with his. It is necessary to speak of both in order to have the context for understanding Emilie’s work. The relationship between Emilie and Hyacinthe, which had brought together Protestantism and Catholicism, constituted the foundation for the subsequent development of their ideas. They continuously expanded the notion of ‘reunification’, from reunification or reunion within Christianity



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(influences from Döllinger can be traced here) to the reunification of different faiths. In particular, the reconciliation of the three monotheistic religions increasingly interested them. Encouraged by Emilie, who was very fond of travelling, the couple undertook several journeys to Constantinople and two to North Africa and Palestine. The first of these, from December 1894 to spring 1895, was to Algiers, the second, from 29 October 1895 to May 1896, to Algiers, Tunis, Malta, Egypt and Palestine. The regions they visited were under French (Algiers) and British (Malta, Palestine) sovereignty. Emilie published her accounts of these travels about ten years later. During these journeys to the ‘Orient’, Hyacinthe gave lectures in several places to audiences that included Protestants, Catholics, Freethinkers and Muslims, and in Tunis also Jews, generally on themes such as ‘The reconciliation of religions and the unity of races’. The journeys, the practicalities of which Emilie managed as ‘agent’, were inspired by the couple’s perception of the important role of religion in establishing international peace. Ultimately, the aim of their travels was nothing less than the reunification of the children of God: Jews, Christians and Muslims. In their attempt to achieve this goal, on their arrival in a new town they sought out the often highly educated local religious leaders in order to enter into conversation. Emilie also had access to women, and she tried to make contact with common people. Her special interest was in the role of women in Islam. For Emilie, Islam was a lived religion characterised by high moral norms and practices. As a consequence of these encounters, her travel account is notable for its focus on religion and for its portrayal of the active role of women. Indeed, it was quite unusual at that time for married women to appear in public or to take an active part in religious debate, as she did. She met religious leaders and was allowed to enter al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. In order to further her aims (for example towards a better religious education of women), Emilie founded the  Alliance des femmes orientales et occidentales pour le progrès des relations amicales entre toutes les nations, of which she became the first president. Its aim was ‘to create a bond of sympathy, both religious and human, between women of the Orient and the Occident, or even the whole world, without consideration of differences of cult and civilization’. Men were welcome to join the Alliance as well. Emilie would continue to promote the Alliance and its aims until her death in 1909. In many ways, the Loysons were ahead of their time. Their commitment to the reconciliation of religions arose from deeply held conviction, which also led them to propose the building of a mosque in Paris – a plan

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that was only realised after the First World War in 1926 in the Quartier Latin. But the Loysons also remained children of their own time and of their own cultural – and indeed national – contexts. Islamic culture remained foreign to them, as did its language (they spoke only French and English), and they demonstrated some tendency to idealise the ‘Orient’. Nevertheless, they sought and found an entry to Islam and to Arab culture. They experienced real hospitality and high regard.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève – Loyson Papers, esp. fr. 3906, Madame Hyacinthe Loyson, The evolution of a soul. Autobiography, vol. 1 (to be published with comments by Angela Berlis) [Emilie Loyson], Alliance des femmes orientales et occidentales pour le progrès des relations amicales entre toutes les nations, Paris, 1903 Madame Hyacinthe Loyson, To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems, Chicago IL, 1905 Secondary A. Berlis, ‘Mediale Trauer um einen streitbaren religiösen Aktivisten. Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912)’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte / Contemporary Church History 31 (2018) 363-80 A. Berlis, ‘Sympathy for Mussulmans, love for Jews. Emilie Loyson-Meriman (1833-1909), Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912) and their efforts towards interreligious encounter’, in C. Methuen, A. Spicer and J. Wolffe (eds), Christianity and religious plurality, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2015, 285-301 A. Berlis, ‘Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912) dans le vieux-catholicisme. Un esprit libéré des frontières religieuses’, in F. Amsler and S. Scholl (eds), L’apprentissage du pluralisme religieux au XIXe siècle (1907-1815). Le cas genevois dans son contexte suisse, Geneva, 2013, 189-214

To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems Date 1905 Original Language English Description In 1905, Emily Loyson-Meriman published her travelogue, To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems. Its 325 pages describe her travels in the Orient with her husband, and their encounters with people of other religions, which – unusually for the time – took place on a footing of equality. After an Avant-propos by the former



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mayor of Jerusalem, Yousseff Zia Pacha El Khalidy, and a preface by the Prince de Polignac, Colonel of the French army in Algiers, the book is perhaps best described as ‘a fragmentary record of some of the various travels in foreign lands’ (p. 1). It ranges over the journey as a whole and the encounters of the couple ‘in the lands of Islam’ (title of ch. 1) and ‘in the home of Islam’ (title of ch. 2), placing this journey in the contemporary political context of its time, and giving it a religious meaning as almost a quest to Jerusalem. In the ‘Introduction which is a confession’ (p. 1), Loyson introduces the method of interreligious encounter and dialogue. It is, in effect, a plea for exchange of gifts, which are identified as the ‘great achievements’ of Christianity and the ‘treasures of priceless worth’ of Islam, and for an encounter without prejudice or overridden by feelings of superiority. For her ‘unusual sympathy’ for Muslims, as well as for representatives of other religions, Loyson defends herself to her readership as being an ‘orthodox Christian’, by which she means a rightly believing Christian who is fulfilling her religious duty of love for neighbour. But she is also a visitor, whose role is fundamentally that of an observer, yet also one who wants to encounter ‘our fellow-men whom we knew not’ (p. 7) and enter into dialogue with them. The presupposition of her intentions and writing is the principle of the one, loving God who unites religions. The aim of her book is thus to promote a ‘great religious and social reform’ (p. 9) in which the author plays an initiating role. The subsequent 38 chapters lead the reader on a journey to Jerusalem, which is a meaningfully sacred place for all three monotheistic religions. Along the way, the local situation and encounters with the mostly high educated religious leaders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are described and discussed, and where applicable their everyday religious practices and relations with each other, and with respect to the local political context. Loyson’s special interest is the role and situation of women; she signals the need of further education for Muslim women. The book includes several photographs that show religious sites, and also people in traditional clothes. Significance To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam can be seen simply as a religious travel guide, but it is more than that. It is in effect a plea for interreligious encounter, based on the idea of a loving God who desires to unite the three religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and so presupposing a context of equality of interlocutors. The significance for Christian-Muslim

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relations at the time it was written lies in the highly appreciative perspective on Islam it gives. Loyson sees Islam in some respects as even superior to Christianity: ‘superior to Catholicism or Protestantism from the point of view of the Unity of God, and the purity of worship’ (p. 95). The positive regard shown towards Muslims is notable. To some extent this reflects an Orientalist approach, though in the context of the time it was quite unavoidable. Certainly, Loyson is a ‘propagandist’ who advocates to her well-educated and socially well-positioned readership her and her husband’s idea of interreligious reconciliation. This includes political consequences for peace, tolerance and an acceptance of the religious ‘other’ – especially Muslims and Islam – that is almost ahead of its time, via a book published ostensibly for a broader audience. Not yet widely known or studied, this book and its reception are yet to be researched. There have been no translations into other languages or further editions. Publications Madame Hyacinthe Loyson,  To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems, Chicago IL, 1905; 4523488 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust digital Library) Madame Hyacinthe Loyson,  To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems, Pisctaway NJ, 2002, 2019 Studies Berlis, ‘Sympathy for Mussulmans, love for Jews’ Berlis, ‘Mediale Trauer um einen streitbaren religiösen Aktivisten’ Berlis, ‘Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912) dans le vieux-catholicisme’ Angela Berlis

F.A. Klein Frederick Augustus Klein Date of Birth 1827 Place of Birth Strasbourg Date of Death 1903 Place of Death Europe; precise location unknown

Biography

Born in Strasbourg in 1827, Frederick Augustus Klein studied at the Basel Mission Institute and then spent time at the Church Missionary Society College, Islington, for instruction in Anglican Church doctrine and practice. He completed his studies there in June 1851, and was ordained into the Anglican priesthood. Called by the Church Missionary Society (CMS), he left for Palestine in 1851, where he served at Christ Church in Nazareth until 1855. He then relocated to Jerusalem, where he remained until 1877. In that year, he went to Germany and engaged in Arabic translation. Klein returned to the Middle East in 1882, this time going to Cairo when, in the wake of the British occupation, the CMS reopened the work it had abandoned 20 years before. Here he did evangelistic work among Muslims and established worship services in Arabic. He returned to Europe in 1893, and there continued his translation work. He also revised the Arabic version of the Book of Common Prayer. He died in 1903. Klein is perhaps best remembered for his 1868 discovery of the Moabite Stone, which dates from about 840 BCE, at Dhiban, east of the Dead Sea. Now preserved in the Louvre Museum, it contains an inscription by the Moabite king, Mesha, in which he recounts his victory over Israel (see 2 Kings 3:4-27).

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E. Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1899, vol. 2, pp. 72, 143, 206, 282; vol. 3, pp. 114, 116, 119, 514, 515, 530

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D.S. Margoliouth, ‘Notices of books. The religion of Islam. By the Rev. F.A. Klein’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, new series 39 (1907) 429 E. Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1916, vol. 4, pp. 125, 258 Secondary J. Murray, art. ‘Klein, Frederick Augustus’, in Biographical dictionary of Christian missions, New York, 1998, 370 J. Murray, Proclaim the good news. A short history of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1985, pp. 136, 138 L.L. Vander Werff, Christian mission to Muslims, the record. Anglican and Reformed approaches in India and the Near East, 1800-1938, South Pasadena CA, 1977, pp. 158, 168 R.J. Williams, art. ‘Moabite Stone’, in The interpreter’s dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3, Nashville TN, 1962, 419-20

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The religion of Islám Date 1906 Original Language English Description Klein’s The religion of Islám, published posthumously in 1906 (the 1979 reprint has been utilised here), consists of 241 pages of text plus six pages containing the title page, publication information, and table of contents. Most of the text is in English, but many terms, names and numerous quotations are also provided in Arabic. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-36), ‘The sources or foundations of Islam’, discusses the four traditionally recognised sources for Muslim legal practice: 1. the Qur’an – its inspiration, collection, various readings, Meccan and Medinan suras, the theory of abrogation, commentaries, and English translations; 2. Sunna/Hadith, including the standard canonical collections; 3. ijmāʿ; and 4. qiyās. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the four Sunnī schools of law. Chapter 2 (pp. 37-110), ‘The doctrines of Islam’, outlines the Six Articles of Faith: God; angels; divinely inspired books; prophets and apostles; death, resurrection, the last judgment, paradise and hell; and predestination.



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Chapter 3 (pp. 111-16), ‘The imamate’, focuses very briefly on the Sunnī caliphate. Chapter 4 (pp. 117-226), ‘fiqh’, describes various Muslim practices. It begins with an explication of four of the Five Pillars: prayer (ṣalāt, but also other types of prayer), alms (zakāt), fasting (ṣawm, but also various other types of fasting), and the pilgrimage (principally the ḥajj but also the ʿumra). Klein notes that some add a sixth pillar, namely, jihād, which he translates as ‘Holy War’. He also touches briefly on numerous other topics in this chapter, too many to enumerate but including plunder, captives, apostasy, rebellion, transactions, marriage, abortion, divorce, slavery, oaths, inheritance, giving evidence in court, slaughtering animals, food and drink, usury, debt, partnership, making donations, wills, religious endowments, punishment, drunkenness, and theft. Chapter 5 (pp. 227-41), ‘The sects of Islam’, describes briefly various theological, political, sectarian and spiritual movements: the Mu‘tazila, Shi‘a, Khawarij, Murgia, Nijjariyya, Mushabbiha, Ash‘ariyya, Sufis, Wahhabis, Druze, and the Babis. In spite of the information provided in this chapter, the book would be more accurately characterised as an introduction to Sunnī Islam. The book does not contain either an index or a bibliography. In his review, D.S. Margoliouth notes that it was edited by friends of Klein and published posthumously, which may account for this absence. A lot of information is contained in footnotes, many of them quite lengthy, with one extending over seven pages (pp. 71-7). The occasional factual mistakes (e.g. in the description of the ḥajj it is noted that Muslims walk between the hills of Safa and Marwa ‘in remembrance of Abraham’, p. 168, rather than Hagar) suggest that Klein was not able to edit the work. Significance The book demonstrates more than superficial familiarity with Islam. It is evident that Klein gave considerable effort to gaining familiarity with both Muslim and European writings on the matters it covers. It is particularly noteworthy how much information the book provides in Arabic rather than simply through transliteration. Yet, while this shows Klein’s proficiency in Arabic, it also makes much of the contents inaccessible to many readers, and raises the question of who the intended audience was. Although many works of this kind have appeared since it was published, the book is still occasionally cited or listed in a bibliography (e.g. R. Miller, Muslim friends, their faith and feeling. An introduction to Islam, St Louis MO, 1995, pp. 259 n. 10, and 412).

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There are a few places where a late 19th-century missionary and/or Orientalist bias becomes apparent. For instance, in the section in which Klein describes the Qur’an as a source or foundation of Islam, he writes, ‘Though Muhammad pretended that every word of the Qur’an was the result of divine inspiration, it must become evident that by far the greater portion of it consists of materials collected from Jews, Christians, Sabeans, Magi and pagan Arabs’ (p. 21). In the section describing the ablutions in preparation for the ritual prayer he writes: ‘The celebrated collections of Traditions also, as well as the standard works on Fiqh, contain pages and pages of most minute and often obscene and disgusting explanations on what constitutes impurity and defilement, which cannot be given here. In practice they do not allude to moral purity as a preparation for prayer. We see also to this day the most pious Muslims far more anxious concerning the outward and ceremonial than about inward and moral purity’ (p. 132). Such judgments are, however, rare. The work remains an important example of how a 19th-century western missionary could engage in serious and careful study of Islam. This includes acquiring a proficiency in the Arabic language that would allow the author to explore important Muslim sources necessary for preparing such an introduction. Publications F.A. Klein, The religion of Islám, London, 1906 F.A. Klein, The religion of Islám, Lahore, 1960, 1974 F.A. Klein, The religion of Islam, London, 1971, 1979, 1985 F.A. Klein, The religion of Islam, New Delhi, 1977, 1987 F.A. Klein, The religion of Isl’am, Delhi, 1982 F.A. Klein, Religion of Islam, New York, 2004, 2013, 2015 Studies Margoliouth, ‘Notices of books’ Michael T. Shelley

Lord Cromer Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer Date of Birth 26 February 1841 Place of Birth Cromer Hall, Norfolk Date of Death 29 January 1917 Place of Death London

Biography

Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer, also Lord Cromer, was born on 26 February 1841 at Cromer Hall in Norfolk, England. He was the youngest child in a large family, one of the sons of Henry Baring and his second wife Cecilia. On his father’s side, he was a grandson of Sir Francis Baring, co-founder of Barings Bank in London. He was not directed towards a career in the family bank, but at the age of 11 was sent to the Ordnance School at Carshalton to begin preparation for admission as a cadet at the age of 14 to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1858 and posted to Corfu, where he met his future first wife, Ethel Errington, and became an aidede-camp to the high commissioner, Sir Henry Storks. He followed Storks to Malta, and then accompanied him on a special mission to Jamaica. In 1868, he was admitted to the Staff College in Camberley, Surrey, passing out at the head of his class in December 1869. He next took a post in March 1870 in the War Office. When his cousin Lord Northbrook went out to India as viceroy in 1872, Baring accompanied him as his private secretary. The four years he spent there opened the way for a career as a colonial administrator. He returned to London in 1876, resumed work in the War Office, and in June married Ethel Errington. In early 1877, Baring was appointed the first British commissioner on the four-person Caisse de la Dette Publique, which was set up to deal with Egypt’s failure to meet the interest on its growing international debt. He served in this post for a little more than two years, resigning in the spring of 1879, but shortly after his return to London he was persuaded to accept the position of British controller in the joint Anglo-French ‘dual control’

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of Egypt’s finances. After only a short time in this post, he was appointed the financial member of the viceroy’s council in India, arriving there at the end of 1880. In September 1883, Baring returned to Egypt to take up the post of British Agent and Consul-General. This came on the heels of the British occupation of 1882, and so was ‘a diplomatic post of acute political sensitivity and importance’. His task was ‘to uphold the commitment to an early withdrawal while simultaneously imposing on the Egyptian government the drastic administrative reforms required to reduce the public debt and pay off the foreign bondholders’ (Darwin, ‘Evelyn Baring’, p. 823). While he had success in restoring Egyptian solvency, the withdrawal of the British military forces did not occur during his many years as Agent and Consul-General. Theoretically, he had ‘the same influence on the Egyptian government as did any other member of the diplomatic corps, and with the same rank; but in actual fact his influence was unbounded. [... He] became the uncrowned ruler of Egypt’ (al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, pp. 65-6). However, his task was complicated by the various changes in prime ministers and cabinets in Britain during this period, turmoil in the Sudan where the Mahdist revolt had short-term success in throwing off Anglo-Egyptian control, Egyptian opposition to the occupation, and the interference of other European powers. It was a high-pressure position, which he managed for 24 years. Baring retired in 1907, having suffered from declining health for several years. His wife died in 1898 and, in October 1901, he married the considerably younger Lady Katherine Thynne (1865-1933), daughter of John Alexander Thynne, fourth Marquess of Bath. He remained active in retirement, producing a series of books and articles. These included Modern Egypt, his account of his years in Egypt, which has been called ‘one of the classic works of Victorian imperialist writing’ (Darwin, ‘Evelyn Baring’, p. 826). In the spring of 1908, as his health improved, he took up his seat in the House of Lords. He was also active in other ways – for instance, as chairperson of the small committee that produced the draft plan for the creation of the School of Oriental Studies in London, and, curiously, as a major opponent of women’s suffrage. Following a stroke, he died at his home in London on 29 January 1917, and was buried in Bournemouth cemetery, Hampshire, next to his first wife Ethel. A memorial tablet was later placed in Westminster Abbey.



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Illustration 8. Photograph of Lord Cromer. Frontispiece to Modern Egypt

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols, London, 1908 The Earl of Cromer, Speeches and miscellaneous writings, 1882-1911, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 1912 The Earl of Cromer, Political and literary essays, 1908-1913, London, 1913 The Earl of Cromer, Political and literary essays, second series, London, 1914 The Earl of Cromer, Political and literary essays, third series, London, 1916 Secondary R. Owen, Lord Cromer. Victorian imperialist, Edwardian proconsul, Oxford, 2004 J.D. Darwin, art. ‘Baring, Evelyn, first Earl of Cromer (1841-1917)’, in ODNB A.L. al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer. A study in Anglo-Egyptian relations, London, 1968 R.L. Tignor, Modernization and British rule in Egypt, 1882-1914, Princeton NJ, 1966 G.D. Hogarth, art. ‘Baring, Evelyn, first Earl of Cromer (1841-1917)’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Modern Egypt Date 1908 Original Language English

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Description Modern Egypt, in two volumes, was first published in 1908 (the 1908 New York edition is used here). Vol. 1 is divided into three parts, which make up the first 27 chapters, comprising 592 pages, and vol. 2 begins with the conclusion to part 3 (which begins in vol. 1), followed by parts 4-7, making up chs 28-62 and comprising 571 pages. Cromer’s two-fold objective for the work was ‘to place on record an accurate narrative of some of the principal events which have occurred in Egypt and in the Soudan since 1876 [...] and to explain the results which have accrued to Egypt from the British occupation of the country in 1882’ (vol. 1, p. 1). He also mentions two other aims, one to counter inaccuracies in the British public’s perception of British policy in Egypt, and the other to provide guidance for dealing with some of the challenges of ‘Oriental administration’, where ‘the broad lines which […] reforms must take are traced out by the commonplace requirements of European civilisation’ (vol. 1, pp. 2-5). Cromer did not write Modern Egypt with the purpose of describing Islam, though he does make numerous references to it and to Muslims throughout the two volumes. He does not hesitate to express his views about the superiority of European, and particularly British, ways and observes that ‘religion enters to a greater extent than in Europe into the social life and laws and customs’ of Orientals (vol. 1, p. 7). In his judgement, Arabic-speaking Muslims are not able to run a country properly on their own, while the ulama of al-Azhar, who are ‘by far the most important and influential’ of the various classifications of the people, would not be a positive force for needed change in Egypt: The corruption, misgovernment, and oppression, which would have prevailed, if the influence of this class had become predominant, would probably have been greater than any to which Egypt had been exposed at previous periods. An attempt would have been made to regulate, not only the government, but also the social life of the country upon those principles of the Mohammedan faith which are most antiquated, obsolete, and opposed to the commonplace ideas of modern civilisation. (vol. 1, pp. 325-6)

What Egypt needed was the introduction of European civilisation, and ‘the special aptitude shown by Englishmen in the government of Oriental races pointed to England as the most effective and beneficent instrument’ for accomplishing this task (vol. 1, p. 328). In vol. 2, Cromer devotes chs 34-8 to describing the different types of people living in Egypt. He takes a dim view of the social role of Islam.



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He allows that it greatly benefits ‘a primitive society’, but he agrees with Stanley Lane-Poole that, although Islam is great because it has taught people to worship one God, as a social system ‘it has been a complete failure’ (vol. 2, p. 134). He offers several reasons for this judgement: it keeps women in a position of inferiority; it ‘crystallises religion and law into one inseparable and immutable whole, with the result that all elasticity is taken away from the social system’; it permits slavery; it is ‘an intolerant religion’; it ‘admits of no compromise’, and ‘unlike Christianity, tends to engender the idea that revenge and hatred, rather than love and charity, should form the basis of the relations between man and man’, even inculcating ‘a special degree of hatred against those who do not accept the Moslem faith’ (vol. 2, pp. 134-9). The result is an insurmountable barrier between Muslims and Christians. While he points to some differences between Christians and Muslims as regards beliefs and ceremonies, briefly discussing heaven, prayer, fasting, the fine arts and cleanliness, Cromer is more concerned about differences in ‘mental and moral attributes’. He claims that Christians, who now become Europeans, are concerned about accuracy, careful reasoning and the future, despise intrigue and have high powers of organisation, while Muslims are just the opposite (vol. 2, pp. 145-54). He concludes: The differences between Eastern and Western habits of thought constitute a barrier interposed between the Egyptian and the Englishman almost as great as that resulting from differences of religion, ideas of government, and social customs. Indeed, this difference of mental attributes constitutes perhaps the greatest of all barriers. (vol. 2, p. 154)

Cromer returns to the issue of the place of women in Muslim countries, referring to their ‘degradation’. He sees two radical differences between the position of Muslim women and European women. First, Muslim women are veiled when they appear in public, while European women are exposed to the public. The only restraints placed on the latter are selfimposed. Second, Muslim societies are polygamous, European societies are monogamous, although he mentions that in recent years the practice of monogamy has been gaining ground among ‘the more enlightened Egyptians’. The seclusion of Muslim women ‘exercises a baneful effect on Eastern society’. It ‘cramps the intellect’ and has a deleterious effect on the mental development of women. The effects of polygamy are even worse. It destroys family life, whereas monogamy fosters it. Yet, Cromer applauds the greater outward respect shown to parents and the elderly in Islamic society compared with the West (vol. 2, pp. 155-60). In light of the

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foregoing, Muslims cannot hope to rule themselves or reform their societies. As Roger Owen has noted, Cromer’s notion of difference allowed him to deploy a host of politically self-congratulatory terms to laud British rule in Egypt (Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 355), calling it a ‘mission’ and claiming that the Englishman ‘came not as a conqueror’ but as ‘a saviour of society’ (vol. 2, pp. 123-4). Cromer devotes ch. 35 (vol. 2, pp. 168-99) to the Muslims of Egypt, dividing them into three categories: Turks and Turco-Egyptians, Egyptians and Bedouin. Noting that it is a misnomer to speak of Turks in Egypt, he describes Turco-Egyptians, those people of Turkish ancestry who have become ‘more Egyptian and less Turkish in character and habits of thought’. At the beginning of the British occupation, they occupied the principal positions of government and were the chief landowners (vol. 2, pp. 169-73). Cromer gives most space in the chapter to the second category, Egyptians, which he subdivides into three groups: the hierarchy, the ‘squirearchy’, and the ‘fellaheen’ (vol. 2, pp. 173-98). The first subgroup is comprised of the ulama and the pashas, of which he gives much more space to the former, chief among whom are the Grand Mufti, the head of al-Azhar University, and the Grand Qadi. He briefly describes the role of each, and then singles out five of the ulama for special recognition, and two of these he refers to as friends. One is Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905), who was, says Cromer, a ‘different and […] a very superior type’ of ʿālim, ‘did his work well and honestly’, ‘a man of broad and enlightened views’. Although ‘somewhat dreamy and unpractical’, he was a ‘genuine Egyptian patriot’. He was, however, in reality ‘an agnostic’ and, like Syed Ahmad Khan of India, too suspected of heterodoxy to be followed far by conservative Muslims, and not sufficiently Europeanised to attract Egyptians who mimic European ways. Yet, in Cromer’s view, people such as he and Syed Ahmad Khan deserve encouragement and support, because ‘they are natural allies of the European reformer’. ‘Egyptian patriots […] will find in the advancement of the followers of Mohammed Abdu the best hope that they may gradually carry out their programme of creating a truly autonomous Egypt’ (vol. 2, pp. 179-80). The other friend was Shaykh Muḥammad Bayram (1840-89), ‘a devout Moslem’ especially interested in how to bring Islam into harmony with modern society. He was ‘a type of the best class of Moslem’, one who could meet Christians ‘and discuss matters of common interest without stirring the fires of religious strife’. Yet, Muslims such as he do not ‘have a plan capable of resuscitating a body’ like Egypt (vol. 2, pp. 181-4). Cromer calls the second sub-group of the second category of Egyptian Muslims ‘the squirearchy’. For the most part, they consist of the village



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mayors and shaykhs (vol. 2, pp. 186-92). The third subgroup are the fellaheen, for whom Cromer has genuine sympathy because of the difficult lives they live (vol. 2, pp. 192-8). Cromer identifies the Bedouin as the third category of Muslims in Egypt but, for the purposes of the narrative and argument of Modern Egypt, he considers them negligible, because they do not have much influence on British policy (vol. 2, pp. 198-9). Cromer devotes ch. 36 to the Christians in Egypt (vol. 2, pp. 201-27), dividing them into three categories: the Copts, the Syrians and the Armenians. He notes that the Copts number 608,000 according to the 1897 census, the vast majority belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Church, although he is aware that there were small Coptic Catholic and Coptic Evangelical communities as well. What he says about the Coptic Christians is confined to the Orthodox. He sees no need to talk about ‘the special tenets’ of their creed, but concentrates solely on the fact that ‘the Christianity of the Copt has been as conservative as the Islamism of the Moslem’ (vol. 2, p. 201). The difference is that Islam inherently forbids change, whereas Coptic Christianity, ‘which admits of progress, has been surrounded by associations antagonistic to progress’ (vol. 2, p. 202). The Copts have ‘been arrested by barriers very similar to those which have applied in the case of the Moslem. [...] The minority must of necessity submit to the influence of the majority. […] The Copt […] has, without knowing it, assimilated himself to the Moslem’ (vol. 2, p. 203). Cromer acknowledges that the Copts have ‘suffered from hasty generalisation’. Most Britons, he says, have learned about them and other Egyptians from Edward Lane’s Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians, but Lane knew ‘little about the Copts’, acquiring his information from one Copt ‘who certainly gave a most unfavourable account of his co-religionists’. Cromer believes Lane’s assessment ‘appears to err greatly on the side of severity’ (vol. 2, pp. 204-5). Nevertheless, he goes on, while Copts ‘deserve great credit for the steadfastness with which they have adhered to their faith in the face of persecution’, it is ‘impossible to indicate any moral quality in respect to which the Copt […] is notably superior to the Moslem’ (vol. 2, p. 206). Nor can it be said that the Copts have shown themselves intellectually superior to Muslims. One might expect that they would be favourable towards the English reformer, but no, this has not been the case. Many, Cromer believes, expected they would be treated more favourably by English Christians, and they have been disappointed that this has not happened. Cromer, however, is hopeful that, because there are advocates for reform in the church, the future bodes brighter (vol. 2, pp. 206-13). In spite of his sympathetic comments about

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the Copts, he generally regards them as one with Egyptian Muslims, as he states most baldly when he writes: ‘The only difference between the Copt and the Moslem is that the former is an Egyptian who worships in a Christian church, whilst the latter is an Egyptian who worships in a Mohammedan mosque’ (vol. 2, pp. 205-6). As for Syrian Christians, Cromer has no idea how many there are in Egypt, but the number is small. That said, their importance does not derive from their numbers but from the positions they occupy, particularly as civil servants. Often able to work in French as well as Arabic, while generally more Francophile, they also show themselves amenable to working with the British (vol. 2, pp. 213-19). The Armenian Christian community is similarly very small, consisting for the most part of shopkeepers, though a few have occupied high positions in the Egyptian government. Cromer’s contact with a few Armenians leads him to regard them, together with the Syrians, as ‘the intellectual cream of the near East’ (vol. 2, pp. 219-20). In ch. 37 (vol. 2, pp. 228-44), he reflects on the ‘Europeanised Egyptians’. For his objectives of reform in Egypt, they occupy an important place. At this point, he makes one of his most often quoted statements: ‘In dealing with the question of introducing European civilisation into Egypt, it should never be forgotten that Islam cannot be reformed; that is to say, reformed Islam is Islam no longer; it is something else; we cannot yet tell what it will eventually be’ (vol. 2, pp. 228-9). In support, he quotes William Muir: ‘Christian nations may advance in civilisation, freedom, and morality, in philosophy, science, and the arts, but Islam stands still. And thus stationary, so far as the lessons of history avail, it will remain’ (vol. 2, p. 229, quoting Muir, The Caliphate, its rise, decline and fall, London, 1891, p. 597). Why in Cromer’s view do Europeanised Egyptians occupy an important place? Because in a majority of cases they are only nominal Muslims. Indeed, they are generally agnostics. The problem is that, by cutting themselves adrift from the sheet-anchor of their creed, they have no ‘effective moral restraint’, unlike free thinkers in Europe who may not be believing Christians but nevertheless hold to ‘the code of Christian morality’ (vol. 2, pp. 230-2). Cromer prefers not to speculate on where the forces currently at play in the Muslim world will lead. He wonders, however, whether a revival of the Islam of the Qur’an and Hadith is only a ‘dream’, and that ‘the Europeanised Egyptian […] is the first, not the last, word of reformed Moslem society’, and perhaps, ‘in the course of time, some higher moral and intellectual



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ideal will be developed’. He also cautions European politicians ‘to abstain, on utilitarian grounds, from any measure which is calculated to undermine Moslem faith more than the strict requirements of the case demand’. Those who guide the state machine should beware of how they ‘shake the whole moral fabric of Eastern society. It is dangerous work, politically, socially, and morally, to trifle with the religious belief of a whole nation’ (vol. 2, pp. 233-4). Significance Modern Egypt was written with an English-speaking audience in mind. The British reviews of it were ‘mainly laudatory’ (Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 359), and it ‘was an immediate success in the bookshops, selling over 9,000 copies in Britain in its first two and a half years and 4,000 in the United States. This had increased to 15,000 of the “dear” edition and 17,000 of the “cheap” by 1915’ (Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 362). As noted earlier, Cromer did not write Modern Egypt with a view to introducing Islam and Muslims to his audience. He was not a scholar of Islam, although he was familiar with some of the writings of scholars such as William Muir, Ernest Renan, Edward Lane and Stanley Lane-Poole, which here and there he refers to in order to support his views. Even though he spent about 25 years in Egypt, and much of his work was conducted in French and he learned a little Turkish, he never learned any Arabic. Nevertheless, ‘more than anyone else Cromer was responsible for the turn that Anglo-Egyptian relations took’ between the years 1882 and 1907 (al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, p. xi). What he says about Islam and Muslims is important for what it reveals about the thinking of this most prominent colonial administrator. He was familiar with Muslims from his experience in India and Egypt, and they were among those he labelled ‘Orientals’. Edward Said has rightly characterised Cromer’s thinking in saying: ‘One of the convenient things about Orientals for Cromer was that managing them, although circumstances might differ slightly here and there, was almost everywhere nearly the same. This was, of course, because Orientals were almost everywhere nearly the same’ (Said, Orientalism, pp. 37-8). Cromer does not give sufficient attention to the diversity of Muslims even within Egypt, let alone Muslims worldwide. This made it easier for him to create an image of the Egyptians as people who need help, particularly British help. What he says about the plight of Muslim women is particularly curious, even hypocritical. He sees them as bound to a position of inferiority. Yet, he was a major opponent of women’s suffrage in Britain in his retirement years!

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In the view of Leila Ahmed, there was more than hypocrisy involved here. She sees Cromer as an example of how the Victorian colonial paternalistic establishment appropriated the language of feminism in the service of its assault on the religions and cultures of Other men, and in particular on Islam, in order to give an aura of moral justification to that assault at the very same time as it combated feminism within its own society. (Ahmed, Women and gender in Islam, p. 152)

She notes that even as Cromer expressed such views his policies ‘were detrimental to Egyptian women’. For instance, he placed restrictions on government schools and raised school fees, which had a negative impact on both girls’ and boys’ education, and he discouraged the training of female doctors. Mindful of Cromer’s anti-women’s-suffrage work in Britain, Ahmed concludes, Feminism on the home front and feminism directed against white men was to be resisted and suppressed; but taken abroad and directed against the cultures of colonized peoples, it could be promoted in ways that admirably served and furthered the project of the dominance of the white man. (Ahmed, Women and gender in Islam, p. 153)

As for Cromer’s statement that ‘Islam cannot be reformed [… because] reformed Islam is Islam no longer’, his contemporary Muḥammad ʿAbduh believed that religious reform was possible and would produce social reform. However, he also believed that education was vital to religious reform, because education was necessary to create an enlightened public opinion (al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, p. 94). Cromer was often criticised for not giving sufficient attention and financial assistance to education. Perhaps this was because he feared the sort of reforms ʿAbduh was aiming for, assuming that religious reform would help foster nationalist sentiments (Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p. 147). It was also one way of ensuring that the British would continue to be ‘needed’, because there was not a sufficient cadre of educated Egyptians to succeed in self-government. Publications The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols, London, 1908; 5166 (digitised version available through Empire Online) The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols, New York, 1908; 001607807 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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The Earl of Cromer, Das heutige Aegypten, trans. D.M. Plüddemann, Berlin, 1908 (German trans.); 561697 (digitised version available through Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt) The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols, New York, 1909; 100103018 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, London, 19112 (two volumes in one); 100583867 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, New York, 1916 (two volumes in one); 001607808 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, London, 2000 The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, Cambridge, 2010 The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, Charleston SC, 2012 The Earl of Cromer, Miṣr al-ḥadītha, trans. Ṣabrī Muḥammad Ḥasan, [Cairo], 2014 (Arabic trans.) Studies Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 352-62 L. Ahmed, Women and gender in Islam. Historical roots of a modern debate, New Haven CT, 1992, pp. 127-68 P. Mansfield, A history of the Middle East, New York, 1991, pp. 85-113 A. Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, London, 1980, pp. 12-13, 98-9 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978 al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer Michael T. Shelley

W.H. Abdullah Quilliam William Henry Abdullah Quilliam Date of Birth 10 April 1856 Place of Birth Liverpool Date of Death 23 April 1932 Place of Death London

Biography

William Henry Quilliam was born in Liverpool in 1856 into a prosperous Wesleyan Methodist family. He studied law and became a qualified solicitor in 1878. The following year, he married Hannah Johnstone, and the first of their four children was born in 1880. Concurrently, Quilliam had an extra-marital relationship with Mary Lyon, by whom he had five children. Quilliam visited Morocco in 1882 and, on his return to England, he studied the Qur’an and Islam. He was troubled by aspects of Christian theology, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and sought an alternative to the Methodism in which he had grown up. He turned to Unitarianism, but quickly rejected all forms of Christianity. Drawn to Islam as a simple and rational faith, he became a Muslim of the Sunnī Ḥanafī tradition, and took the name ‘Abdullah’. In 1887, Quilliam made his conversion public when he began to defend and propagate Islam through lectures. He initially appealed to members of the nonconformist and temperance organisations in which he was raised. He made a few converts and established the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI), though he and his community immediately experienced discrimination from locals, who considered them to be heathens and regarded Quilliam’s public championing of the Ottoman sultan and caliph, Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), as unpatriotic. In 1889, Quilliam found a permanent home for the LMI at Brougham Terrace, Liverpool, in a lateGeorgian house that he converted to include a lecture theatre and prayer room for both British converts and the many Muslims who passed through this international port city. Visitors from other faiths were also welcomed to the Institute. During the following two decades, Quilliam facilitated



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the conversion to Islam of approximately 300, predominantly British, Christians (Gilham, Loyal enemies, p. 98). Quilliam attracted attention throughout the Islamic world and was feted by Muslim rulers and leaders. He claimed that whilst visiting Morocco in 1893, he was made an honorary ‘Doctor of Mussulman Law’ and ʿālim, or ‘learned man’. He also claimed that in 1894 the Ottoman sultan-caliph conferred on him the honorific title ‘Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles’, effectively the supreme authority on Islam in Britain and leader of British Muslims (he said that the title was confirmed by the rulers of Afghanistan, Morocco and Persia). Quilliam understood the importance of print to spread his message. His first lecture, ‘Fanatics and fanaticism’, was published in pamphlet form in 1889. Collections of his many subsequent lectures that defended, explained and propagated Islam included The faith of Islam (1889), The religion of the sword (1891), Studies in Islam (1895), The religions of Japan (1906) and Footprints of the past (1907). Keen to control his propaganda, in 1892 Quilliam installed a printing press at the LMI and established the Crescent Printing Company, which produced most of his publications. These included a newspaper, The Crescent. A weekly record of Islam in England (1893-1908), and a journal, The Islamic World (1893-c. 1907). In May 1908, Quilliam abruptly left Liverpool for Turkey after fabricating evidence in a divorce case. The LMI closed and its Muslim community dispersed. But the the sultan-caliph was deposed by the Young Turk ‘revolution’ in 1908, and Quilliam returned to England. When Hannah died in November 1909, Quilliam married Mary Lyon, but settled in London with a new mistress. In an attempt to distance himself from his past, he adopted the pseudonym of Professor or Doctor Henri Marcel (sometimes Haroun Mustafa) Léon, or de Léon. He was closely involved in the Woking Muslim Mission (established in 1913) and supported campaigns to defend the Ottoman Empire/Turkey during and after the First World War. But as ‘Léon’ he vigorously pursued other interests. He edited two journals, The Philomath and The Physiologist, and wrote about diverse subjects, including Pipe fishes (1916), Influenza (1922) and The diffraction of light (1931). He died in London in April 1932, and was buried in the Muslim area of Brookwood Cemetery near Woking in Surrey.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W.H. Quilliam, The faith of Islam. An explanatory sketch of the principal fundamental tenets of the Moslem religion, Liverpool, 1889

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Anon., ‘The founder and president of the Liverpool Moslem Institute. A biographical sketch’, Religious Review of Reviews 1 (1891) 164-6 M.-ul-Mamoon, An account of the rise of Islam in England, Dacca, 1891 W.H. Quilliam, ‘Islam in England’, Religious Review of Reviews 1 (1891) 159-64 J.J. Pool, Studies in Mohammedanism. Historical and doctrinal, with a chapter on Islam in England, Westminster, London, 1892, pp. 394-404 ‘H.’, ‘Islam in England’, The Islamic World 1/12 (April 1894) 1-6 H.M. Léon, ‘Some leaves from the life-history of a busy life’, The Crescent (16 May 1900) 307-10 Anon, ‘The Sheikh ul Islam for the British Isles. Mr W.H. Quilliam’, The Manx Sun (19 October 1901) 7 ‘A man of many parts. Mr. W.H. Quilliam and his varied life’, The Liverpool Freeman (8 July 1905) 11 Anon., art. ‘Leon, Henri Marcel’, in Who was who, 1929-1940, London, 1947, 802 Secondary J. Gilham and R. Geaves (eds), Victorian Muslim. Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West, London, 2017 J. Gilham, ‘“Upholding the banner of Islam”. British converts to Islam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute, c. 1887-1908’, Immigrants & Minorities 33 (2015) 23-44 J. Gilham, Loyal enemies. British converts to Islam, 1850-1950, London, 2014, pp. 51-121 R. Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain. The life and times of Abdullah Quilliam, Markfield, Leicester, 2010 J. Guildford, art. ‘Quilliam, William Henry’, in ODNB G. Beckerlegge, ‘Followers of “Mohammed, Kalee and Dada Nanuk”. The presence of Islam and South Asian religions in Victorian Britain’, in J. Wolffe (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 5. Culture and empire, Manchester, 1997, pp. 221-67

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The Islamic World Date 1893-c. 1907 Original Language English Description The Islamic World was a journal edited by Quilliam and published by the Crescent Printing Company in Liverpool between May 1893 and c. 1907. It was initially produced monthly, with a volume and issue number, but from January 1898 it was issued every two months and then irregularly



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(and undated) from January 1899 until the last number was published in about August or September 1907. It was printed on A5 paper with blue card wrappers that included a list of contents on the front and advertisements from the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) and the Crescent Printing Company on the back. Each issue usually comprised 32 pages of single-column text, and was initially sold at six pence per issue, or for a yearly subscription at seven shillings. The first issue explained that it was ‘dedicated to the interests of Islam throughout the globe’ (Islamic World 1/1, May 1893, back cover). As its title indicates, it embraced the concept of the umma, and it focused on mainly political rather than religious or spiritual issues as they affected Islam and Muslims globally. Since, for Quilliam, the centre of the Islamic world was Turkey with the Ottoman sultan-caliph Abdul Hamid II in Constantinople, his journal was pro-Turkish and pro-Ottoman. The Islamic World extensively covered the ‘Eastern Question’ and events in the Ottoman Empire during the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, with articles sometimes reprinted from other publications. A regular feature for some years was a ‘Resume of political events’, which focused on the history and politics of the Ottoman Empire and the court of the sultan-caliph. Many pages, however, were also devoted to affairs and concerns in other parts of the Islamic world, particularly within the British Empire. The Islamic World retained a global focus, but to some extent it partly replicated The Crescent by also reporting about the position and growth of Islam in Britain, especially in Liverpool, and contained news about the LMI and British Muslims (the March 1894 issue was devoted to the memory of the British Muslim convert W. Obeidullah Cunliffe, who had recently died). The Islamic World was not an academic journal, but many of its articles, written by Muslims from across the world, were more substantial and engaged more thoroughly with political discourse and Islamic issues than those published in The Crescent. Although the scope and content of The Islamic World were mainly political, the core discernible theme in terms of Christian-Muslim relations was its promotion and defence of Islam and Muslims, typically by comparing and contrasting Christian and Islamic faith, practices and societies. Prior to its launch in 1893, Quilliam stated that The Islamic World’s ‘motto’ would be ‘Islam for the world, and the world for Islam’ (Crescent, 11 February 1893, p. 32). From the start, the journal promoted Islam as a more viable faith than Christianity, proved by its rapid spread across parts of the modern world, especially Africa. In an introduction to the first issue, Quilliam noted:

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w.h. abdullah quilliam There is a mighty awakening of intellectual thought among the nations upon this subject. Christianity is expiring – slain in the polemical strife of its professors. What remains after its decease? One of only two alternatives – Atheism, with its clammy cold grasp of an eternal death; or Islam, with its simple, child-like, unbounded faith in the One, the only true God, and life for evermore. (Islamic World 1/1, May 1893, p. 1)

For Quilliam: The spread of the English language throughout the world is paving the way for lucid explanations of God’s true faith to be circulated in all lands. ‘Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war’, and who shall say but that it is the unerring mind of a Divine Providence that has designed this as the peaceful medium to give Islam to the world, so that all nations may believe and testify that He is the only God, and that Mahommed is His Prophet. (Islamic World 1/1, May 1893, p. 2)

Pertinently, this first introduction was followed by the partial transcript of a lecture entitled ‘The Moorish conquest of Spain’ (Islamic World 1/1, May 1893, pp. 2-6), and many reports and articles about the spread of Islam, particularly in West Africa and India, followed in future issues. Although Quilliam wrote hundreds of articles for The Islamic World, early on he relied on receiving content from almost exclusively Muslim contributors from around the world. Consequently, the first volumes offered a little more critical opinion than was to be found in The Crescent. As long as their goal was the unity of Muslims and preservation of the umma and the Ottoman caliphate, these authors were able to raise uncomfortable issues such as extremism and sectarianism. In 1895, for example, a writer called ‘Salahudin’ contributed a short article entitled ‘Misdirected zeal’, which characterised some mullahs as ‘great barriers in the way of improvement’. The author urged readers to break the spell which held us so long, to unfetter the sweet, seducing charms of fanatical unreason, to gain the solemn march of progress, to eradicate the notion of sectarian differences, to be of help to our country, and to unite the flag of Mohamedan unity. (Islamic World 2/22, February 1895, pp. 309-10)

The promotion of Islam necessitated a defence of the faith and practices of Muslims. Again, in The Islamic World the defence focused on the politics of Islam, but occasional articles considered religion and religiocultural practices. After all, as W. Obeidullah Cunliffe explained in a posthumous article published in 1897:



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There is, probably, no subject upon which more ignorance has been displayed, nor any that has been approached with less candour or more prejudice than [Islam]. And today Christians generally, with few exceptions, know or own as little of the real truth about Islam and its adherents as the darkest medieval ages, and evince a spirit as inimical, vindictive and unfair towards them as the bigots of bygone centuries. (Islamic World 4/47, March 1897, p. 321)

For Cunliffe, ‘In the minds of most Christians the Moslem is still regarded as an uncultivated barbarian and heathen, and as filthy, ignorant and most vicious’ (Islamic World 4/47, March 1897, p. 322). Addressing the problems they encountered, another British Muslim convert, J.W. Hollingsworth, drew parallels with the experience of English Roman Catholics: The difficulties presented by the opposition of our opponents can hardly be greater than those encountered and overcome by the Roman Catholic bishops during the last century and a half, and which resulted in the restoration of the Apostolic hierarchy of England. (Islamic World 2, 15 July 1894, p. 83)

Quilliam regularly wrote articles for The Islamic World (as well as The Crescent) in which he sought to address ‘stupid and manifest errors’ about Islam and Muslims, ‘such as that the Prophet’s coffin hangs in mid-air in a case, retained in this position by a complex system of loadstones, or that Muslims believe that women have no souls’ (Islamic World 2/17, September 1894, p. 138). In 1894, Quilliam reprinted verbatim a rare interview he had given to a Christian literary supplement, St. Paul’s, in which he was permitted to give a spirited defence of progressive Islam and Muslims. He argued that: the existence of a healthy Moslem body in this country will not fail to influence beneficially the whole Islamic world. We don’t propose to be active disturbers in anything; that policy, I am certain, would do more harm than good, so far as the East is concerned. We are for progress, however, and shall work quietly in that direction. (Islamic World 1/12, April 1894, p. 5)

Quilliam explained that ‘one of the things in respect of which Christians have much misjudged Mohammedans’ was the issue of slavery: The influence of the better class of Mohammedans of the present day is rather against than in favour of slavery, but it should not be forgotten that the position of the Mohammedan slave is rarely a despicable one. He is a member of the household, and it is in his power to rise to a position in the Government. I have known very many instances in which slaves have

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w.h. abdullah quilliam refused to accept their freedom, and I have never known a case of the illtreatment of a slave. (Islamic World 1/12, April 1894, p. 5).

Pushed by the interviewer to explain Islamic prohibitions against women, Quilliam explained that he hoped for the expansion of women’s education in the Islamic world, and argued that polygamy was ‘on the decline all the world over, and it is declining more rapidly in Mohammedan communities than in any others. Monogamy is the rule rather than the exception.’ There were, he maintained, ‘conditions of life in which polygamy is perfectly justifiable, where the first wife, for instance, becomes a leper or a lunatic’ (Islamic World 1/12, April 1894, p. 6). On the issue of divorce, ‘the facilities are undoubtedly too great, but they are by no means so great as is commonly supposed, and the teachings of [Islam] are strongly in favour of the maintenance of the union. Its teachings are that God loves a happy marriage and hates unjust divorce’ (Islamic World 1/12, April 1894, p. 6). Just like The Crescent, articles published in The Islamic World compared and contrasted Christianity and Islam, particularly their rites and rituals, to demonstrate the superiority of Islam. Indeed, the articles repeated the same arguments made in The Crescent. For example, in ‘Philosophy in religion’, published in two parts in The Islamic World during 1893, Quilliam admitted that Christianity was a ‘great’ faith, but was ultimately ‘imperfect’ because, in contrast to Islam, it lacked the two essentials of religion: reason and practicability (Islamic World 1/4, August 1893, pp. 1-2). During its first five years in particular, The Islamic World included articles and letters from an international group of writers. In 1895, it was advertised as ‘a High-class Monthly Magazine, which numbers amongst its contributors the leading and most learned Muslim writers throughout the world’, and this was endorsed by the scholarly English review, Miscellaneous Notes and Queries (Crescent, 2 January 1895, back cover; Miscellaneous Notes and Queries 13 [1895], p. 88). The claim was perhaps exaggerated, but contributors included high-ranking Turkish officials and some high-profile Muslim figures, such as an Ottoman shaykh al-Islam on ‘The doctrine of Islam’ (1893); the West Indian writer and diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden on ‘Study and race’ (1893); the Sierra Leone Muslim leader Alimami Mohammed Gheirawani with an impassioned letter of thanks to Quilliam for his support of Muslims in West Africa (1893); a Hyderabadi princess on ‘A visit to a Turkish sultana’ (1895); the American Muslim convert Nafeesa Mary T. Keep on ‘The position of women under Islamic law’ (1895); and the Indian civil servant and Islamic scholar Abdullah Yusuf



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Ali on ‘Islam and Soofeeism’ (1896) and ‘Islam, science, and speculation’ (c. 1905). Within Britain, The Islamic World had a limited circulation mainly by subscription, though it was also sold by agents in Liverpool and London. It received modest critical attention, primarily from the secular and freethinking press, including The Agnostic Journal, which republished an article on polygamy in 1897, and Watt’s Literary Guide (later the New Humanist), which considered The Islamic World to be an ‘eccentric and interesting magazine’ (reprinted in Crescent, 3 April 1895, p. 106). It is unlikely that The Islamic World had a wide non-Muslim readership in Britain, and very few Christian writers contributed: a rare exception was towards the end of the journal’s life, in about 1906, when a series of favourable lectures on Muḥammad and Islam by the Reverend H.D. Roberts of the Hope Street Unitarian Church, Liverpool, was republished with the author’s permission (Islamic World 6/79, c. 1906, pp. 225-53). After five years of continuous publication, Quilliam struggled to sustain the quality of The Islamic World’s contents. Despite the decision to publish the journal every two months in the same 32-page format, noticeably fewer international writers contributed, leaving Quilliam to fill the void with increasingly long and wayward essays and transcripts of his lectures (the entire contents of the May/June 1898 issue were penned by Quilliam). Quilliam reported as early as 1896 that, like The Crescent, The Islamic World was not covering its costs and that 800 subscribers were in arrears with their payments (Islamic World 4/39, July 1896, p. 78). Nevertheless, certainly in the 1890s, The Islamic World had a wide reach and some impact internationally. It was circulated to the many countries that also received The Crescent, as well as LMI vice-presidents, patrons and committee members across the globe. Quilliam stated that The Islamic World was sent to Muslim rulers and leaders, including the court of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in Turkey, the Amir of Afghanistan, and the head of the Ismailis, the Aga Khan. Notably, some commercial advertisements in the journal had Arabic and Hindustani translations. Extracts and articles from The Islamic World were reprinted in other publications, and vice-versa. When, for example, in 1896 a spiritualist Australian journal, This World and the Next, reported that the Liverpool Muslims had recently discussed spiritualism, that report was printed in The Islamic World. Eric Germain has argued that the reproduction of the Australian report in The Islamic World

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w.h. abdullah quilliam shows the dialectic action of the international diffusion of Liverpool’s publications. They helped Australian converts and some literate Muslim traders to feed the local press with English-made ‘Islamic propaganda’, and, in return, the press clippings of foreign presses quoting the activities of the Liverpool [Muslim] Institute reinforced and exaggerated its real international impact. (Germain, ‘Southern hemisphere’, p. 128)

However exaggerated, The Islamic World’s unquestionable reach and influence in Australia, as well as India, South and West Africa and the USA, has been clearly documented (see Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence’, and Germain, ‘Southern hemisphere’). In the USA, Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb based his monthly journal, The Moslem World (1893), on The Islamic World, and Quilliam contributed a poem to its first number in May 1893 (Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence’, p. 116). Naturally, Quilliam also reprinted favourable reviews and endorsements from overseas in his journal. The Revue des Revues of Paris, for example, described The Islamic World as ‘a most curious and interesting publication’ (reprinted in Islamic World 1/10, February 1894, p. 15); and a letter from E. Mustapha Behauddin, at the Bureau of the Press Foreign Office in Constantinople, described it as an ‘interpreter of the Mussulman religion’ that defends Islam ‘against the prejudices and imputations of the Christian world’ (Islamic World 2/14, June 1894, p. 50). Significance The Islamic World was the first regular journal published in the West to focus on politics, culture and society from a Muslim perspective, and it thereby complemented its ‘sister’ publication, the weekly Crescent. As with The Crescent, The Islamic World used the range of contemporary Victorian spellings for Muslim names and words transliterated from Arab. It provides today a valuable record of the history and politics of Islam in late Victorian and Edwardian society, especially in the West. It had no direct competition during its lifespan. Its closest competitor was, from 1901, The Review of Religions, an English-language journal published in India by the Ahmadiyya community, but which concentrated on religion rather than political discourse (notably, The Review of Religions and The Islamic World each carried advertisements for the other). From 1913 onwards, content more similar to that of The Islamic World also featured in the British Lahori Ahmadi monthly journal, Muslim India and Islamic Review (later The Islamic Review), to which Quilliam and other British Muslims previously connected with the LMI contributed.



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One significant element of this work is that it gives evidence of the presence of Islam within a hitherto effectively exclusive Christian society, both with respect to the United Kingdom and further afield, and so to a new and emerging dimension of Christian-Muslim relations. No longer the province of dialogical engagement with the Muslim ‘other’ in another land, nor even the encounter with the Muslim traveller or visitor to the Christian land – in echo of the travels and encounters of Western and Christian visitors to Muslim lands – but rather now the dimension of an interreligious dialogical engagement within a common cultural and linguistic context and with interlocutors for whom difference is purely that of religion. This is the arena of relations with converts who necessarily situate their new religious identity and commitment within the same cultural milieu as the dominant (in this case Christian) religion and cultural tradition, and who bring this commitment to bear upon the same social and political issues as does the dominant religion. Thus, an element of rivalry and competition is likely to have been more prevalent in this relationship. Publications The Islamic World, ed. W.H.A. Quilliam, 1893-c. 1907; most copies have been digitised by the British Library and are available through http://www.abdullahquilliam.org B.D. Singleton (ed.), The convert’s passion. An anthology of Islamic poetry from late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, [Rockville MD], 2009 (poetry from The Islamic World) Studies B.D. Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence. America, West Africa and beyond’, in J. Gilham and R. Geaves (eds), Victorian Muslim. Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West, London, 2017, 11331 (the international impact of Quilliam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute, including The Islamic World) A.M.S. Dajani (Al-Daoudi), ‘The Islamic World, 1893-1908’, Victorian Periodicals Review 47 (2014) 454-75 Gilham, Loyal enemies, pp. 51-121 (Quilliam and the LMI, including The Islamic World) Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain, pp. 59-250 (Quilliam and the LMI, including The Islamic World) E. Germain, ‘Southern hemisphere diasporic communities in the building of an international Muslim public opinion at the turn of the twentieth century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the

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w.h. abdullah quilliam Middle East 27 (2007) 126-38 (the international impact of the LMI, including The Islamic World)

The Crescent Date 1893-1908 Original Language English Description The Crescent was a weekly newspaper edited by Abdullah Quilliam and published by his Crescent Printing Company in Liverpool between 1893 and 1908. It was modelled on the popular ‘penny weeklies’ produced by Christian organisations in the same period, printed on cheap paper and initially sold in Britain for one halfpenny or one penny, including postage. Initially it comprised eight two-column pages with green paper covers displaying advertisements for mainly Liverpool-based businesses, as well as the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) and Crescent Printing Company. In July 1895, The Crescent was expanded to 16 two-column pages without the green paper covers, but in the following years the total number of pages per issue was sometimes fewer than 16. In stark contrast to contemporary Christian newspapers, The Crescent was the first – and only – weekly to promote and defend Islam and Muslims in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The editorial for the first issue stated confidently: ‘We make no apology for our appearance, for we think that none is required. We are here, and we trust that future success will justify our existence’ (The Crescent, 14 January 1893, p. 3). Its subtitle was ‘A weekly record of Islam in England’ and, indeed, it gave a detailed account of Islam and Muslims in Liverpool and elsewhere in Britain. In addition, it documented the development of Islam and the position of Muslims in the British Empire, from West Africa to Australia, as well as other parts of the world, including the USA. From its inception, it also covered foreign affairs and events, especially in the beleaguered Ottoman Empire, as they affected Muslims. Whilst its main focus remained Britain and British Muslims, from 1895 onwards The Crescent was advertised as ‘a record of Islamic progress throughout the world’ (3 July 1895, p. 9). The Crescent’s content comprised editorial notes, notices and reports about LMI events (lectures, debates, social meetings, festivals, weddings and funerals) and people (including details about Quilliam’s many



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professional and public engagements, updates on his family and British Muslims, including reports of their achievements, marriages, illnesses and deaths); letters from Muslims, especially in Britain, the British Empire and Turkey; a running record of new conversions to Islam; articles and poetry written overwhelmingly by Quilliam but also prominent converts such as LMI vice-president John Yehya-en-Nasr Parkinson and other mainly British Muslim contributors; relevant extracts of articles from other newspapers and periodicals; and summaries and transcripts of lectures about the religion, politics and history of Islam and Muslims. Quilliam dominated the LMI and British Islam before the First World War. He was the first ‘native’ British Muslim missionary and influenced the beliefs and practices of other converts, as well as being the founder and only president of the LMI (which he sustained financially from his own pocket), and, from 1894 onwards, the Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles, which he said was endorsed by the Ottoman sultan-caliph. The Crescent’s content almost wholly reflected the opinion of its only editor and principal writer, and many of the other contributors, mostly British Muslim converts, echoed their shaykh’s views on religion and politics. Quilliam was a Muslim missionary with the aim of ‘converting the British nation to Islam’ (Crescent, 28 June 1905, p. 413), and as editor of The Crescent he sought to show genuine respect for aspects of Christian theology and society, whilst exposing its defects to advance the case for Islam. However, given this mission and the negative response of non-Muslims to the LMI and its members, The Crescent was more often than not antagonistic towards Christianity and Christians. Two core themes in terms of Christian-Muslim relations are evident in the many thousands of pages of The Crescent: a comparison of Islam and Christianity, which seldom included positive appreciations of the latter; and a rigorous defence of Islam and Muslims, which encompassed the politics as much as the religion of Islam. First, Quilliam used The Crescent to propagate Islam as a viable religion, essentially for Britons but also others living in a non-Muslim, primarily Christian, polity. As a former Christian and zealous religious convert, Quilliam confidently compared and contrasted his past and present faiths in The Crescent, often in the form of summaries or extant texts of his many public lectures. In contrast to popular opinion, Quilliam argued that Islam was a natural faith for Westerners, especially Britons: In the British Isles we are taught to be logical, and to think and reason for ourselves. Islam as a reasonable and logical faith appeals to men’s reason,

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Illustration 9. ‘Islam and Protestantism’, report of a speech given by Abdullah Quilliam Effendi, in The Crescent (10 October 1900) 234-5

and therefore is likely to be adopted by those who reflect and think and have the courage of their convictions. (Crescent, 3 June 1896, p. 774)

Quilliam’s confidence stemmed from his absolute belief in Islam as the final revelation of God, and therefore ‘a return to first principles’ (Crescent, 5 August 1893, p. 227). An article entitled ‘The prophets as naturalists’, published in The Crescent in February 1893, set the tone for all future issues. Quilliam highlighted ‘the uniformity of the teaching of all the prophets from Adam to Mahomed’, but argued that Christianity became corrupted with ‘idle ceremonies and man made creeds’ around the time of St Paul. He therefore ‘invited the Christians’ to ‘return to the primitive teaching of Christ which they would find was simply the pure religion of Islam as taught by our Prophet’ (Crescent, 4 February 1893, pp. 20-1). For Quilliam in The Crescent, Protestant (the dominant religious denomination in England) views of the Trinity were ‘based upon a misconception of the word referring to Jesus Christ, which had been rendered into their [the Christians’] translation of the Bible, by the term Son, but



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which could more appropriately be rendered Messenger’. Quilliam therefore replicated the following words from the Letter to the Hebrews by replacing ‘son’ with ‘messenger’: ‘God, who at sundry times in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His messenger’ (Crescent, 10 October 1900, p. 235, paraphrasing Hebrews 1:1). Quilliam argued that this was the ‘true Muslim doctrine’ because every Muslim recognised Jesus as one of several prophets; the Prophet Muḥammad never claimed Islam to be a new religion; he simply declared it to be the original true religion given to Adam, preached by Noah, followed by Ibrahim (Abraham), taught by Musa (Moses), and practiced by Issa (Jesus Christ), and purified by Muhammad from the misunderstandings and corruptions, particularly such as had crept into it among the Christian sects in Arabia. (Crescent, 10 October 1900, p. 235)

In contrast to modern Christianity, Islam was consistently presented in The Crescent as a simple faith. An 1896 article by Quilliam entitled ‘Mystery of man’ argued that ‘human beings seemed to be involuntarily attracted to what was mysterious, and priests of all religions had played upon this feeling to make persons slaves to dogma and theological absurdities. Islam had no priesthood and no mystery, its dogmas were few and simple.’ Quilliam concluded that the only ‘dogma’ in Islam could ‘easily be summarized under the following headings: 1. The belief in the existence of a Supreme being, One and Eternal; 2. The brotherhood of man; 3. A hereafter; 4. Personal responsibility for individual actions; 5. The succession of inspired teachers’ (Crescent, 16 December 1896, pp. 1224-5). The idealised concept of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘unity’ in Islam was frequently invoked in The Crescent. Quilliam was eager to point out in its pages that there was a constant stream of Muslim worshippers at the LMI from all corners of the globe. In 1899, for example, The Crescent reported that ‘a large number of Indian Muslim sailors attached to vessels lying in the port’ had visited the LMI: ‘Their dusty countenances stood in happy contrast with the fairer visages of their British brethren, and bore evidence to the reality of the great bond of Islamic fraternal unity’ (Crescent, 6 September 1899, p. 147). This was sharply contrasted with what W. Obeidullah Cunliffe, a British Muslim who wrote regularly for The Crescent (and The Islamic World) until his death in 1894, identified as the ‘disintegration’ of contemporary Christian society, with discord and disunity rife, and Christianity itself, in his view, splintered into more than 260 ‘different divisions’ (Crescent, 18 March 1893, p. 70; 25 March 1893, p. 80).

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Quilliam and his protégés, notably Professor Henry Nasrullah Warren, who was a chemist, also argued vigorously in The Crescent that, unlike Islam, modern Christianity was out of step with contemporary science. Whilst Christianity was antipathetic towards science, Islam was founded on a scientific basis and was therefore in harmony with it. Importantly, the teachings of the Qur’an supported in particular the discoveries of geologists and archaeologists, and deepened rather than diminished the British Muslims’ belief in a Creator-God and faith in a rational religion. Surely, argued Quilliam in 1902, if ‘Jews and Christians believed in the inspiration of the prophets of old time, […] by what logic, therefore, could they deny the inspiration of Muhammad […], whose claims to inspiration rested on a firmer and surer historical basis than any of those who had preceded him’ (Crescent, 31 December 1902, p. 426). Despite the evident tensions, Islam was essentially ‘not an antagonistic faith towards Judaism or Christianity; it was the via media, the middle way, in which all could meet and walk hand in hand’ (Crescent, 5 August 1893, p. 227). The Liverpool Muslims, their Institute and newspaper were not, however, well received locally or nationally. For example, responding to a series of articles by Quilliam in The Crescent in 1897 that declared the Bible to be ‘false’, the Christian Soldier wrote that ‘Imprisonment for life is too merciful a punishment for Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, the British representative of the two kindred fiends – Satan, Sultan of Hell, and “Abdul-Damned” [the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II], his Grand Vizier on earth’. The Christian Soldier article was reprinted in the Crescent (24 February 1897, p. 125). Quilliam also frequently reported the many instances of intolerance and discrimination directly experienced by Muslims in Liverpool and elsewhere in Britain, and usually attributed this to Christian bigotry. These reports therefore featured as part of Quilliam’s propaganda, to confirm that modern Christian society was broken and lacked the values that morally and materially raised Islam above Christianity and Muslim societies above Christian societies. To give just two examples in Liverpool: first, in January 1895 The Crescent reported that the LMI muezzin and British Muslim convert, A. Hassan Radford, was pelted with stones encased in snow as he went to call Muslims to prayer. The first of several articles about the incident was ironically titled ‘More evidences of Christian goodwill’ (Crescent, 9 January 1895, p. 15). The Crescent reported with some relish that one of the ‘fanatical Christians’ arrested by the police for attacking Radford was a Sunday school teacher, George Jones (Crescent, 16 January 1895, p. 19); and that



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Mr Jones later told the judge in court that he could not leave the Muslims alone because ‘They are heathens, and don’t worship God’ (Crescent, 23 January 1895, p. 27). In September 1897, the anniversary of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s accession was celebrated at the LMI. The Crescent noted that ‘large crowds of Christians assembled on the road opposite the Mosque’ to watch the celebratory firework display laid on by Quilliam: whilst most locals simply enjoyed the display, ‘a considerable gang of ruffians shouted “Remember Armenia”, “Down with the Turks”, “To h-l with the Mohammedans”’, and ‘tried to force their way into the Mosque’. A defiant Quilliam relayed in The Crescent that the ‘ruffians’ were ‘held back’ by a group of the Muslims, who were also pelted with stones: ‘The word was then given to charge the Christians, and this was done, the Muslims advancing with a cry of “Allah Akbar”, and the terrace rapidly cleared’ (Crescent, 8 September 1897, p. 567). The many other instances of discrimination reported in The Crescent in 1897 alone included the news that Quilliam had received ‘a very abusive letter’ from a local Christian which called the shaykh a ‘renegade’, ‘turn-coat’ and ‘religious weather-cock’ (Crescent, 18 August 1897, p. 521); and that Quilliam was uncharacteristically reluctant to publish the name and address of a ‘young Christian woman’ who had converted to Islam at the LMI because ‘some malicious person, presumably Christian’ had sent ‘most objectionable and insulting letters and postcards’ to new converts whose details were announced in The Crescent (10 February 1897, p. 89). Given this hostile reception and a more general antipathy towards Islam and Muslims in Britain in this period, there was, despite Quilliam’s rhetoric, very little positive appreciation of Christianity or the beliefs and practices of Christians in The Crescent. Although hundreds of nonMuslims – primarily practising or nominal Christians – visited the LMI, very few directly contributed to The Crescent. Those who did, of course, gave positive appreciations of Islam and Muslims. For example, Judge Bushman visited the LMI in 1903, and wrote his ‘Impressions of a mosque’: ‘I am bound to say that the services of the Mosque are very refreshing, as well as instructive’, and ‘Muslims, like barbers’ poles, are not half so bloodthirsty as they are painted’ (Crescent, 1 April 1903, p. 204). The second core theme in terms of Christian-Muslim relations is The Crescent’s rigorous defence of Islam and Muslims, especially the sultancaliph Abdul Hamid II, who was popularly despised in Britain. As late as 1905, Quilliam admitted to his protégés that: ‘Their position was that of pioneers. They had to smooth down the barriers and obstacles raised by

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the prejudice and bigotry of those of other faiths, through their ignorance of Islamic principles and bigotry’ (Crescent, 28 June 1905, p. 403). Articles and letters published in The Crescent sought to dispel a wide range of entrenched myths and stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. These included the idea that Islam was fatalistic and only fit for the ‘inferior’ ‘races’ of ‘the East’; that Muḥammad and his followers led sinful lives and promised a sensual paradise; that Islam was spread by war and ‘the sword’; and that it was unprogressive, as evidenced by the inferior status of women and the continuation of polygamy and slavery in Muslim societies. Quilliam particularly used The Crescent to address the question of women and polygamy in Islam. He attacked the ‘foolish statements, which are absolute and wicked falsehoods’ about women in slavery and their ‘extreme degradation’, social and legal position, and the idea that Muslims believed women had no souls and were not allowed to enter Paradise: ‘No one thoroughly acquainted with the social and religious life of Muslims, could, or would, if honest, venture to make such assertions’ (Crescent, 21 October 1903, p. 267). He typically compared and contrasted the social and legal position of women in Christian and Muslim lands. He maintained, for example, that Islam had always provided for a wife to obtain a separation from her husband on certain grounds, which had not been the case in English law until the late 19th century; ‘the position of women under Islamic law’, he concluded, ‘was in no case more unfavourable from that of many European women, whilst in many respects she occupied a decidedly better legal position’ (Crescent, 29 November 1905, p. 342). The defence of Islam in The Crescent very often strayed beyond matters of religion and socio-cultural codes into politics as they affected Muslims. Quilliam was devoted to the sultan-caliph Abdul Hamid II at a time when Britain, along with Russia and France, sought to undermine and dismantle the Ottoman Empire. Many pages of most issues of The Crescent were therefore dedicated to discussions and polemics about the so-called ‘Eastern Question’, or the fate of the Ottoman Empire, and the series of crises that affected it in this period. Quilliam authored most of the articles, in an attempt to expose the partiality and hypocrisy of British opinion and reportage about the issue. For example, in 1903 The Crescent reported in detail Quilliam’s intervention at a town hall meeting called by the Bishop of Liverpool to denounce alleged Turkish atrocities against Christians in Macedonia. The council chamber was ‘crowded with Christian clergymen and a large number of the female members of their congregation’. Quilliam was heckled when he rose to challenge the allegations. This was,



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The Crescent reported, evidence of Christian ‘bias and prejudice’. Quilliam argued that if the Bishop’s resolution to urge the British government to put pressure on Turkey to end atrocities and guarantee ‘good government’ for the future was passed, then surely the British government must also protest to the Russians about the recent anti-Jewish pogrom in Kishinev as well as the ‘general ill-treatment’ of Jews throughout the Russian dominions; it must also protest to the government of the United States about the savage treatment of blacks in the American South, and to the Belgians about the exploitation of ‘natives’ in the Congo. In short, ‘who said it was the duty of England, as a Christian nation, to champion the cause of humanity in every portion of the globe?’ (Crescent, 28 October 1903, pp. 275-9). Quilliam also used The Crescent (and The Islamic World) to issue a formal series of provocative fatwas (legal opinions) that generally appealed for Muslim unity. The first appeared in The Crescent in March 1896 in protest against British attempts to suppress the ‘revolt’ in the Sudan with Egyptian Muslim soldiers. Quilliam warned that, ‘For any True-Believer to take up arms and fight against another Muslim is contrary to the Shariat, and against the law of God and His Holy Prophet’ (Crescent, 25 March 1896, p. 617). Another fatwa was published in The Crescent the following month: At the present time union is more than ever necessary among Muslims. The Christian powers are preparing a new crusade in order to shatter the Muslim powers, under the pretext that they desire to civilize the world. This is nothing but hypocrisy, but armed as they are with the resources of Western civilization it will be impossible to resist them unless the Muslims stand united in one solid phalanx. (Crescent, 22 April 1896, p. 681)

Notably, in 1905 The Crescent was banned in Bulgaria because it was deemed to ‘irritate the Greek and Muslim inhabitants of Bulgaria against the Government of Bulgaria’ (Crescent, 17 May 1905, p. 314). The Crescent sometimes recorded details of the many non-Muslim visitors to the LMI, especially Christian clergy and missionaries such as John J. Pool and Dr H. Martyn Clark, who later wrote critical accounts of the Institute for their own propaganda (Gilham, Loyal enemies, pp. 92-3). Letters from Christian clergy were very rarely published in The Crescent, and only if they provided Quilliam with an opportunity to expose defects in the theology or practice of Christianity. Despite its propagandist aims, there is also little evidence in The Crescent of active cooperation between Muslims and Christians outside the LMI, beyond a running record of Quilliam’s civic duties and engagements as a high-profile lawyer in Liverpool and, to some extent, as the president of a

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religious institution and Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles. The Crescent recorded, for example, his invitations to official events such as Liverpool’s memorial service for Queen Victoria in 1901, and its coronation procession for King Edward VII the following year. Christians were antagonistic towards the British Muslims, but the latter were not entirely faultless and The Crescent occasionally recorded instances of outright provocation for propagandist purposes. It reported, for example, that the annual Church Congress at Great Yarmouth in 1907, ‘gravely discussed the advance of Islam, and admitted that the Crescent was overcoming the Cross in the rapidity and number of its converts’. While the Congress was discussing the question, ‘the Sheikh [Quilliam] had persons engaged outside the building distributing copies of “The Crescent”’ (Crescent, 9 October 1907, p. 233). There are, in fact, more substantive descriptions of cooperation between the Liverpool Muslims and the local Jewish communities, whom Quilliam recognised as a marginalised and at times maligned religious group. The Crescent reported Quilliam’s visits to and speaking engagements at synagogues and Zionist societies in Liverpool and elsewhere in England. The Crescent used the wide variety of Victorian spellings for Muslim names and words transliterated from Arab interchangeably: ‘Muhammad’, for example, was spelt as ‘Mahomed’, ‘Mahommed’ and ‘Muhammad’; Muslims were referred to as ‘Mahommedans’, ‘Moslems’, ‘Muhammadans’, ‘Muhammedans’ and ‘Mussulmans’ as well as ‘Muslims’; and the ‘Qur’an’ was spelt as ‘Koran’ and ‘Quran’. As a vehicle for propaganda and in the absence of surviving records, it is difficult to ascertain the number of subscribers to or readers of The Crescent. Soon after its launch in 1893, the LMI Committee agreed to issue 150 free copies each week (Crescent, 18 February 1893, p. 38). However, Quilliam later reported several instances of newsagents and libraries rejecting free copies for distribution. An article entitled ‘Bigoted brutal Bootle’ in 1896, for example, relayed that the Free Public Library and Museum in Bootle, Merseyside, had declined gratis copies of both The Crescent and The Islamic World, but readily stocked Christian publications that were ‘loud in their tirades against Turkey and Islam’ (Crescent, 19 February 1896, p. 538). When the second volume of The Crescent commenced in July 1893, Quilliam indicated that there were already some 5,000 weekly subscribers, and that he aimed to double that number (Crescent, 22 July 1893, p. 216). It was noted in the first issue of 1895 that The Crescent had ‘already



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attained an extensive circulation in the British Isles, in addition to which thousands of copies of the Paper are sent regularly abroad to subscribers’ (Crescent, 2 January 1895, front cover). However, the first issue of 1896 stated that the aim was to achieve 5,000 subscribers per week by the end of that year – which suggests that the original number of subscribers was wildly exaggerated or that the initial readership had rapidly declined (Quilliam admitted in The Crescent in 1896 that 50 people had been ‘struck off’ the list of subscribers because their subscriptions were over 12 months in arrears [Crescent, 24 June 1896, p. 827]). Despite his many other commitments, Quilliam was, nonetheless, determined to continue both The Crescent and The Islamic World. He wrote in 1896 that he regarded their publication as ‘one of the most important features of our work. […] Although the importance of the lecture work is very great […] yet the printed matter we issue is read by thousands and thousands every week’ (Crescent, 15 July 1896, p. 875). Moreover, ‘too much attention could not be bestowed upon their literature’, since ‘odd copies of the “Crescent” left in the waiting-rooms of railway stations have got in the hands of persons who have subsequently written to us for further information about the faith’ (Crescent, 18 July 1906, p. 459). Copies were also distributed after Quilliam’s public lectures, and at the LMI. Several British Muslims, especially outside Liverpool, confirmed that they had become interested in Islam after reading The Crescent. Within Britain, The Crescent was primarily read by Muslims and included accounts of their communities, especially in London and Manchester, as well as letters from fledgling British Islamic organisations such as the pan-Islamic Anjuman-i-Islam (later the Central Islamic Society). As would be expected, it was most warmly received by the secular and freethinking press, especially The Agnostic Journal, which called it ‘a bright little journal’ and argued that the Liverpool Muslims’ presence in our midst will lead to a better understanding of the Islamic faith, a better appreciation of its virtues, and a more generous feeling toward its adherents. As the greatest Muslim power in the world, Great Britain cannot afford to ignore, still less to sneer at, the followers of the crescent and the star. (The Agnostic Journal, 18 January 1896, p. 37)

In May 1896, Quilliam mockingly reprinted in The Crescent an extract from the Christian Soldier which concluded that he was ‘standing on the brink of hell and damnation’, and contrasted this with a quote published the same month in The Agnostic Journal which argued that ‘Sheikh Quilliam, of the Crescent, will probably be one of the 10,000 angels who

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drag the car full of infidels to their doom’ (reprinted in Crescent, 3 June 1896, p. 778). Significance The Crescent was the first newspaper written by and for Western Muslims. There was no near-equivalent publication in Britain until the Woking Muslim Mission commenced publication of its monthly Muslim India and Islamic Review (later The Islamic Review) in February 1913, which included contributions by Quilliam, John Yehya-en-Nasr Parkinson and other former members of the LMI (Gilham, Loyal enemies, pp. 1278). Today, The Crescent provides a unique record of the history of Islam and Muslims in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the British Empire and beyond. Moreover, its authors explicitly and implicitly identified and addressed issues and questions about Christian-Muslim relations – especially around the establishment, practice and indigenisation of Islam in a Christian context, as well as matters of cooperation, tolerance and intolerance between Christians and Muslims – that are no less pertinent in the 21st century. Notably, The Crescent had a significant reach beyond Britain. An article introducing the sixth volume in 1895 boasted that: ‘Probably no journal of its size has such an extended circulation as the Crescent […]. The victorious Japanese, as well as the stolid Chinamen, equally peruse its pages. The Muslim in icy Tobolsk or St. Petersburg reads the same intelligences from its columns as his Islamic brother on the Equator’ (Crescent, 3 July 1895, p. 10). Quilliam claimed that subscribers were based in more than 30 countries, which is a realistic figure, not least because letters and articles were published from Muslims scattered across the world, and copies were sent to LMI vice-presidents, patrons and Committee members in Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Cape Colony, Egypt, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Morocco, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the South African Republic (Transvaal), Sri Lanka, Turkey and Uganda. It was also sold by a small number of shops and agents in diverse places, including the River Gambia Colony and Turkey. By 1896, The Crescent and The Islamic World were on the exchange lists of 100 ‘foreign journals’ in various languages, which meant that extracts from both publications were republished globally (Crescent, 15 July 1896, p. 874). They were both also regularly advertised in other contemporary Muslim publications, including the Indian Ahmadiyya community journal, The Review of Religions. However, whether from mismanagement, lack of subscribers, or both, The Crescent was never financially viable. At the 1896 LMI annual general



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meeting, Quilliam stated that, ‘Financially [The Crescent] is a loss, and I am afraid it will remain as such for a considerable period, but this is a contingency that we must boldly face and be prepared to meet.’ Quilliam admitted that he personally paid for the salaries of the printers, as well as two clerks from his solicitor’s office, who devoted three days per week mailing out The Crescent and The Islamic World (Crescent, 15 July 1896, pp. 874-5). In July 1907 (a year before its demise), it was noted that The Crescent was still published ‘at a financial loss to the editor. This should not be, and if the circulation was increased to at least double, then the loss would be no longer felt’ (Crescent, 3 July 1907, p. 9). Quilliam also confirmed this in a letter to the Indian Review of Religions, and admitted that ‘we find it most difficult to get subscriptions’. The editor of the Review of Religions expressed his dismay at this state of affairs: ‘I am sorry to see that even such a paper in which the whole Muhammadan world should have interest does not pay its expenses’ (The Review of Religions, 4 [November 1905], p. 448). That an Indian editor should acknowledge the importance of The Crescent to the Islamic world is evidence of its international impact. Though not as extensive as Quilliam claimed, its influence on both established and new Islamic communities in Australia, India, South and West Africa and the USA is well documented (Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence’; Germain, ‘Southern hemisphere’). In the USA, the American Muslim convert and missionary, Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb, directly modeled his short-lived weekly The Voice of Islam (1893-4) on The Crescent (Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence’, p. 116). Canada’s first Theosophical journal, The Lamp, opined that ‘very few Christians who condemn their Moslem brethren’ had read the Qur’an and it therefore welcomed both The Crescent and The Islamic World, which were ‘published in the interests of Islam in the West, and it is to be wished that Christian readers could have access to these journals and learn what this great religion really teaches’ (reprinted in Crescent, 2 October 1895, p. 213). Publications The Crescent. A weekly record of Islam in England, ed. W.H.A. Quilliam, 1893-1908 (all copies, apart from 1894, have been digitised by the British Library and are available through http://www.abdullahquilliam.org)

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B.D. Singleton (ed.), The convert’s passion. An anthology of Islamic poetry from late Victorian and Edwardian Britain [Rockville MD], 2009 (poetry from The Crescent) Studies B.D. Singleton, ‘Abdullah Quilliam’s international influence. America, West Africa and beyond’, in J. Gilham and R. Geaves (eds), Victorian Muslim. Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West, London, 2017, 113-31 (demonstrates the international impact of Quilliam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute, including The Crescent) Gilham, Loyal enemies, pp. 51-121 (discusses Quilliam and the LMI, including The Crescent) Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain, pp. 59-250 (discusses Quilliam and the LMI, including The Crescent) E. Germain, ‘Southern hemisphere diasporic communities in the building of an international Muslim public opinion at the turn of the twentieth century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007) 126-38 (the international impact of the LMI, including The Crescent) Jamie Gilham

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Date of Birth 17 August 1840 Place of Birth Petworth, Sussex, England Date of Death 10 September 1922 Place of Death Shipley, Sussex, England

Biography

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was born into an English landowning family in 1840. When his father died two years later, his mother found comfort in the High Church, then in 1851 converted to Roman Catholicism. Her three children were subsequently received into the Catholic Church. Blunt was educated at Twyford School, Stonyhurst, as a boarder, and at St Mary’s College, Oscott, Birmingham. Blunt entered the diplomatic service in 1857. He served for 11 years as a secretary of legation in Europe and South America, during which time he also wrote poetry. His first posting in 1859 was to Athens, to a position vacated by the Honourable Henry Stanley (1827-1903), who had just rocked the British establishment by converting to Islam; Blunt met Stanley in 1860 after a sojourn in Turkey. He was struck by the visible vice and squalor in Constantinople, which he considered to be the Christian element; the city’s beauty was, he thought, Islamic (Longford, Pilgrimage, p. 25). In 1861, Blunt read Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species (1859) and he argued with colleagues about Darwin’s evolutionary theories, which he found difficult to reconcile with his Catholic teaching. His faith was finally shattered when, in 1872, both his siblings died from tuberculosis. He rejected the idea of an afterlife and struggled to believe in God, but respected other believers. Blunt married the wealthy Lady Anne King (1837-1917) in 1869, and quit his diplomatic position to concentrate on writing and travel. He also became squire of the family estates following his brother’s death. At Crabbet Park, Sussex, the Blunts founded the influential Crabbett Arabian Stud. They established a second home and stud in Egypt. The Middle East and North Africa appealed to the romantic Blunts. Wilfrid returned to Turkey with Lady Anne in 1873, and the following year they went to Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, central Arabia, and in 1875-6 to India. They admired the communal life they found in Islamic society, and in the Arabian Bedouin they discovered ‘not only a people

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of primitive goodness but a government of simple justice and freedom’ (Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, p. 92). Blunt was politicised as a result of his travel in the Islamic world, much of it colonised, or about to be so, by European imperialists. Blunt studied Arabic and Islam in England and Egypt in 1879-81. In Egypt, he met by chance a young shaykh of Al-Azhar University, the liberal reformer and Egyptian nationalist, Muḥammad ʿAbduh (c. 1849-1905). He convinced Blunt that ‘what was needed for the Mohammedan body politic was not merely reforms but a true religious reformation’. Blunt believed that, if Islam and the Islamic world were in any sense moribund, it was the fault of autocratic, reactionary and corrupt Ottoman rule. To achieve a reformation, the caliphate needed to be reconstituted ‘on a more spiritual basis’, and this could only be achieved with an Arab caliph (Blunt, Secret history, p. 106). While visiting Jedda in 1881, Blunt realised that he needed to work from within Islam to help nurture the reformation anticipated by modernists like ʿAbduh. His blueprint for revival was published as The future of Islam (1882). He was, however, astounded when the British suppressed the Egyptian nationalist-reformist movement and occupied Egypt in 1882. Politically isolated, he shifted from ‘benign’ to ‘a fully-fledged and belligerent anti-imperialism’ (Nash, From empire to Orient, p. 24), as shown in his epic poem, The wind and the whirlwind (1883), in which he predicted the dismemberment of the British Empire. Blunt’s diaries describing the national awakening of Egyptians after the occupation were published as Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt (1907). Banned from entering Egypt, Blunt returned to India in 1883. His articles about Indian constitutional reform were published as Ideas about India in 1885. That same year, he made the first of several unsuccessful attempts to become a Member of the British Parliament, advocating Home Rule for Ireland. He returned to poetry and published works championing nationalist causes, including The new situation in Egypt (1908), India under Ripon (1909) and The land war in Ireland (1912). He spent his final years separated from Lady Anne, and was an invalid. He almost reconverted to Catholicism and considered Islam, but he died an agnostic. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried on his Sussex estate without a religious ceremony.



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W.S. Blunt, Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt. Being a personal narrative of events, London, 1907 W.S. Blunt, My diaries. Being a personal narrative of events, 1888-1914, 2 vols, London, 1919 and 1920 E.M. Forster, Abinger harvest, London, 1936, pp. 309-21 (two critical essays about Blunt, written 1919-20) E. Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 1840-1922, London, 1938 Secondary L. Villa, ‘A “political education”. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs and the Egyptian revolution (1881-82)’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17 (2012) 46-63 W. Dockter, ‘The influence of a poet. Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills’, Journal of Historical Biography 10 (2011) 70-102 G.P. Nash, From empire to Orient. Travellers to the Middle East, 1830-1926, London, 2005 E. Longford, art. ‘Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen’, in ODNB H.V.F. Winstone, Lady Anne Blunt. A biography, London, 2003 R. Nourallah, ‘Introductory essay’, in W.S. Blunt, The future of Islam, ed. R. Nour­ allah, London, 2002, 1-50 A. Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, Basingstoke, 1980, pp. 87-103 E. Longford, Pilgrimage of passion. The life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, New York, 1980 T.J. Assad, Three Victorian travellers. Burton, Blunt, Doughty, London, 1964 Earl of Lytton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. A memoir by his grandson, London, 1961

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The future of Islam Date 1882 Original Language English Description Blunt originally wrote The future of Islam in the summer and autumn of 1881 as a series of five essays with the same title for the influential English magazine The Fortnightly Review. They were serialised between August 1881 and January 1882. He always intended eventually to publish them as a single volume. He wrote in the preface to The future of Islam that the essays ‘were intended as first sketches only of a maturer work which the author hoped, before giving finally to the public, to complete

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at leisure, and develop in a form worthy of critical acceptance, and of the great subject he had chosen’. For Blunt, however, events such as the French invasion of Tunisia and the nationalist uprising in Egypt (and its potential impact in British India) ‘have marched faster than he at all anticipated, and it has become a matter of importance with him that the idea they were designed to illustrate should be given immediate and full publicity’ (Future, p. v). The future of Islam was hastily assembled, with the consequence that there is repetition across its chapters. The book version was published in London in 1882. It comprises the original five essays (215 pages) by permission of The Fortnightly Review, with a tenpage preface written by Blunt in Cairo in January 1882. The future of Islam is a polemic, primarily aimed at ‘practical Englishmen’ (Future, p. 144). Blunt conceived the book after meeting shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh, who was a disciple of the founding father of Islamic modernism, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (c. 1839-97). Blunt wrote the book just after his return from a research trip to Jedda (1881), a town that he expected to be ‘less provincial than […] Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople’ (Future, p. 3). His arrival in Jedda coincided with the ḥajj, when the town was crammed with ethnically diverse Muslims from across the world. ʿAbduh had shown Blunt that Islamic society could be revived, but it was not until he visited Jedda that he truly understood Islam as a ‘living faith’ ripe for a reformation. In Jedda, he was ‘astonished at the vigorous life of Islam, at its practical hopes and fears in this modern nineteenth century, and above all at its reality as a moral force’ (Future, p. 6). Blunt aimed in The future of Islam to show his compatriots how a ‘Mohammedan reformation’ could be achieved from within Islamic society. For Blunt, Islam had been progressive until the 11th century; in the late 19th century a reformation was only possible by removing the caliph (who for the majority Sunnī Muslims was Muḥammad’s successor as leader of the Islamic community) from Ottoman Turkey (the Ottomans had assumed the caliphate in 1517), and reinstating the caliph in Arabia, where ‘he would be free to act as the Successor of the Apostle should, and would breathe the pure air of an unadulterated Islam’ (Future, p. 100). The future of Islam was, then, also a platform for Blunt’s championing of the Arabs. He argued that attempts by the Ottoman Turks in particular, but also by Egyptians, to revive Islamic society through modern secular laws had created anarchy and weakened the moral basis of Islamic society, which was the faith and law of Islam (Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, p. 94). For Blunt, the current Ottoman sultan and caliph, Abdul



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Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), who was widely despised in 19th-century Britain as an incompetent despot, lacked the intellect and will to effect a revival. Blunt believed that Islam could only be strengthened through ijtihād (independent human reasoning), by reinterpreting Islamic law in the light of modern European morality, and by restoring the ‘true’ caliphate, with a spiritual function and authority. Astutely, he foresaw that the Ottoman Empire and caliphate would soon perish. He argued that, when that time came, a council at Mecca should select an Arab caliph. If Blunt’s intended Western Christian readership was generally likely to agree with his assessment of the Ottoman sultan and caliph, it was unlikely to support his case for Islam, let alone its reformation. In late 19th-century Britain, the dominant view was that Islam was monolithic and moribund, and that Muslims were inferior. To make his argument, then, Blunt structured his polemic around a largely positive explanation of the faith, practices and politics of Islam and Muslims, for which he apologises to ‘Mohammedans’ in the preface: A stranger and a sojourner among [Muslims], he has ventured on an exposition of their domestic griefs, and has occasionally touched the ark of their religion with what will seem to them a profane hand; but his motive has been throughout a pure one, and he trusts that they will pardon him in virtue of the sympathy with them which must be apparent in every line that he has written. He has predicted for them great political misfortunes in the immediate future, because he believes that these are a necessary step in the process of their spiritual development; but he has a supreme confidence in Islam, not only as a spiritual, but as a temporal system the heritage and gift of the Arabian race, and capable of satisfying their most civilized wants; and he believes in the hour of their political resurgence. (Blunt, Future, p. ix)

By way of introduction, in the first chapter of the book, Blunt offers a ‘Census of the Mohammedan world’, mainly derived from his factfinding trips to Jedda, Egypt and Syria ‘in the almost exclusive society of Mussulmans’ (Future, p. 3). He seeks to dispel the popular Victorian belief that Islam was monolithic by outlining the variety to be found in different Islamic countries and by explaining the sects of Islam and ‘schools’ of Islamic theology. He is not impartial: he criticises the ‘Hanefite school’ of the ‘Osmanli race’ (the Ottoman Turks), which he equates with ‘the high and dry party of Church and State, if such expressions can be used about Islam’ (p. 16). For him, ‘The Turkish Ulema have always insisted strongly on the dogma that the ijtahad [sic], that is to say the elaboration of new

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doctrine, is absolutely closed; that nothing can be added to or taken away from the already existing body of religious law’ (p. 17). Blunt argues that Islam is a monotheistic faith, that ‘in its simplest form Islam was but an emphatic renewal of the immemorial creed of the Semites’ (Future, p. 142). Islam is, moreover, not moribund or ‘destined yet awhile to perish’, but a ‘living’ reality ready for reformation. He admits that, by taking this position, ‘I am running counter to much high authority among my countrymen’ (p. 134). He understands that popular opinion has been shaped by negative impressions of the Ottoman sultan and caliph. Whilst he thinks that the Scottish diplomat and rabid Turcophile David Urquhart (1805-77) was ‘the first exponent of Mohammedanism to Englishmen’, he is adamant that Urquhart was writing at a time when, in the 1830s, ‘the Hanefite teaching of Constantinople had not begun to be questioned’, and ‘No such thing as a liberal religious party then existed anywhere’ in the Islamic world. Fifty years later, he asserts, there exists ‘a large section of godly and legal-minded men [who] have ranged themselves on the side of liberal opinion, and serious attempts have been made to reconcile a desire of improvement with unabated loyalty to Islam’ (pp. 135-6). These men are, he continues, not merely ‘political intriguers’ familiar to his readers (such as the Ottoman reformer, Midhat Pasha, 1822-83), but ‘men of sincere piety’. Blunt argues that these liberal Muslims would introduce moral as well as political reforms into the practice of Mohammedans. These have it in their programme to make the practice of religion more austere while widening its basis, to free the intelligence of believers from scholastic trammels, and at the same time to enforce more strictly the higher moral law of the Koran, which has been so long and so strangely violated. (Future, p. 136)

Notably, Blunt compares these new liberal and pious Muslims to ‘the “Reformers” of Christianity’, arguing that ‘some of the circumstances which have given them birth are so analogous to those which Europe encountered in the fifteenth century that it is impossible not to draw in one’s own mind a parallel.’ The logical conclusion, then, is that ‘Islam, too, will work out for itself a Reformation’ (Future, p. 137). Blunt promotes the Arabs as the harbingers of reform and revival, first by asserting the influence of ‘Arabian thought’ on Britain itself: Chivalry, a notion purely Bedouin, is hardly yet extinct among us. Romance, the offspring of pre-Islamic Arabia, is still a common motive of our action, and our poets express it still, to the neglect of classic models, in the rhymed verse of Yemen. The mass of our people still pray to the



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God of Abraham, and turn eastwards towards that land which is Arabia’s half-sister, the Holy Land of the Jews. (Future, pp. 143-4)

For Blunt, there is ‘some reason to hope that, were Arabian thought once more supreme in Islam, its tendency would be in the direction of a wider and more liberal reading of the law, and that in time a true reconciliation might be effected with Christendom, perhaps with Christianity’ (p. 161). The problem, as he sees it, is that a revival necessitates ijtihād, to reconcile sharīʿa, the ‘written code of law’, with ‘the modern needs of Islam’; and his solution is to install a reforming Arab caliph, who would ideally be based in the Arab world. Importantly, Blunt argues that sharīʿa was framed long before European colonisation of Muslim lands. It was, therefore, ‘not suspected that Mohammedans would ever be subjects of a Christian power, or that the Mohammedan State would ever need to accommodate itself to Christian demands in its internal policy’ (Future, p. 161). Blunt wrote The future of Islam before the British occupation of Egypt. He was – and remained – an English patriot but was not, in 1881, the more belligerent ‘anti-imperialist’ that he became just a year or so later. He was from a particular class and generation of English country squires that regarded colonies as something of a burden rather than a privilege; he certainly did not agree with the ‘right to rule’ that was propounded by the ‘New Imperialists’ of the late 19th century. For him, the British presence overseas could and had been a source of great benefits, and this is clear in The future of Islam as well as in later works, including Ideas about India (1885) and India under Ripon (1909). He did not think it essential for Britain to extend its rule, but was conscious of the obligations of that rule where it existed (Hourani, Europe and Islam, pp. 101-2). Though he was somewhat sceptical about the future of the British Empire, it follows that Blunt posited an Islamic revival to be in the interests of his own country. He therefore calls for ‘a new departure’ in British policy towards the Islamic world, in favour of one that is ‘worthy of England’s high sense of duty, and conformable to her true interests’ (Future, p. 173). This is, he argues from the outset, essential if Britain is to ‘maintain even for a few years her position as the guide and arbiter of Asiatic progress’, and prevent revolt in India (Future, p. 3). He therefore explicitly appeals for an improvement in Christian-Muslim relations: I would urge that while it is to Mohammedans themselves that we must look to work out their ultimate regeneration according to the rules of their own law and conscience, Christendom can still do much to influence

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wilfrid scawen blunt immediate results. The day of religious hatred between Moslem and Christian as such is, I hope, nearly at an end; and though political strife is unfortunately renewing the old quarrel in North Africa, there is no danger now of its becoming on Europe’s part a crusade. Christendom has pretty well abandoned her hopeless task of converting Islam, as Islam has abandoned hers of conquering Europe; and it is surely time that moral sympathy should unite the two great bodies of men who believe in and worship the same God. (Future, p. 172)

Blunt reflects further on historical relations between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. He believes that, since Britain took no part in ‘the bitter wars waged by the Latin and Greek Empires against the growing power of the Ottoman Turks’ and ‘had withdrawn from the [Crusades] in the still honourable stage of the adventure’, she ‘came, therefore, into her modern relations with Mohammedans unprejudiced against them, and able to treat their religious and political opinions in a humane and liberal spirit, seeking of them practical advantages of trade rather than conquest’ (Future, pp. 191-2). He argues that, by contrast, the sentiment of ‘Continental Europe’ towards Islam is ‘one of social hostility and political aggression’: It is true that most of them no longer put forward religious zeal as the motive of their action, or the possession of the Holy Sepulchre as its immediate object; but under the name of ‘civilization’ their crusade is no less a continuous reality, and the direction of their efforts has not ceased to be the resumption by Europe of political control in the whole of the provinces once forming the Roman Empire. (Future, pp. 175-6)

For Blunt, Britain is, therefore, in a unique position ‘now to acknowledge Mohammedanism as something not to be merely combated and destroyed, but to be accepted by her and encouraged’ (Future, p. 172). He optimistically argues that the special nature of Britain’s position towards Muslims has not been unappreciated. In spite of the deceptions on some points of late years, and recent vacillations of policy towards them, the still independent nations of Islam see in England something different from the rest of Christendom, something not in its nature hostile to them, or regardless of their rights and interests. They know at least that they have nothing to dread from Englishmen on the score of religious intolerance, and there is even a tendency with some of them to exaggerate the sympathy displayed towards them by supposing a community of beliefs on certain points considered by them essential. Thus the idea is common among the ignorant in many Mussulman countries that the English are Muwahedden, or Unitarians, in contradistinction



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to the rest of Christians, who are condemned as Musherrakin, or Polytheists. (Future, pp. 192-3)

Blunt believed that it was both logical and prudent that, as soon as the Ottoman Empire fell, Britain should step in as adviser and protector of Islamic countries: She cannot destroy Islam, nor dissolve her own connection with her. Therefore, in God’s name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue. This is the only worthy course, and the only wise one, wiser and worthier, I venture to assert, than a whole century of crusade. (Future, pp. 213-14)

The future of Islam was Blunt’s first, and is arguably his most enduring, substantive political work. He spent several years researching Islam and Muslim life before writing the book, but as it is a polemic, his appraisals of ‘the Arabs’ (a classification that Blunt does not unpack satisfactorily), compared with the Ottoman Turks, are rather one-sided. Blunt was especially taken with the Arab Bedouin, and his perceptions of their religious beliefs (as simple) and form of government (as free from bureaucracy) were somewhat blinkered by his romanticism. Yet, Blunt manages to tease out the essence of the faith of Islam and, moreover, gives the reader a succinct overview of the practices of Muslims and demographics of the Islamic world in the late 19th century. His generally very positive appraisal of Islam, written primarily for a British audience, was bold and, whilst not unique, novel for the time that he was writing. Other Victorian Britons, typically enlightened scholars and amateur Orientalists like F.D. Maurice (1805-72) and Reginald Bosworth Smith (1839-1908), also challenged popular attitudes and images of Islam and Muslims (Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992). Blunt consciously writes in a style and language that is familiar to his readers (with the result that he uses different contemporaneous spellings of key words interchangeably, for example ‘Mohammedan’, ‘Moslem’ and ‘Mussulman’ for Muslim). He deploys clever analogies between the Christian Reformation and an Islamic revival, and proffers his arguments and solutions to be in the interest of Britain. He is, however, less conciliatory than Christian writers such as Maurice and Boswell Smith. Indeed, he unapologetically and directly confronts contemporary prejudices and misunderstandings about Islam and, the Ottoman Turks and Sultan Abdul Hamid II aside, Muslims. He argues that Islam is a monotheistic religion that was – and remains at heart – ‘a rationalistic creed’ which has materially contributed to European culture and is ‘a living and controlling moral

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force in the world’ (Future, pp. 153-44, 133). Notably, Edward Said believed that, of all the ‘great twentieth-century Oriental experts in England and France’, Blunt alone failed to express ‘the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient’ (Orientalism. Western conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth, 1978, p. 237). Significance The book was reviewed widely in Britain and the colonial press, though inevitably commentators focused on its politics (which divided opinion) rather than its Christian-Muslim themes. Blunt himself wrote in 1895 that the original essays that were collected in The future of Islam ‘produced a considerable effect in England and also among the English-reading Moslems of India, and found their way, to some extent, in translation to Egypt’ (Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt, London, 1907, p. 122). The book was certainly translated into Urdu, for which Blunt wrote a new preface whilst visiting India in January 1884 (India under Ripon. A private diary, London, 1909, p. 124). Notably, he claimed in his India diary that he would have to ‘leave out some of the passages referring personally to Sultan Abd-el-Hamid [II]’ to ‘satisfy all parties’ both in India and Turkey as ‘the book, to do good, must not be condemned as unorthodox’ (India under Ripon, p. 123). He mentions in the same diary that, whilst in Calcutta in 1884, ‘Five friends of Jemal-ed-Din [al-Afghani] called to express their sympathy with “The Future of Islam”. They were all young men, students and enthusiasts, hating England, I am afraid, with all their hearts’ (India under Ripon, p. 123). This statement – written after the British occupation of Egypt – undermines Blunt’s claim in The future of Islam that ‘Mohammedans’ trusted ‘the English’. Blunt’s translator in India also told him in 1884 that the English-language edition of The future of Islam had ‘already done individual good, and he cited the instance of two of his friends who had been much affected by it, one of them to the extent of inducing him to abandon atheistic ideas and resume the practices of religion’ (India, p. 124). As far as can be ascertained, The future of Islam was not translated in extenso into Arabic, but it nevertheless had some (political) impact in the Arab world. Writing in mid-1882, Blunt noted that the original Fortnightly Review articles had been translated into Arabic in Cairo, ‘and read and approved by my friends in the Nationalist press’ (Blunt, ‘The Egyptian revolution. A personal narrative’, The Nineteenth Century 12 (1882) 324-46, p. 332). Perhaps this was the version read by the pioneering Arab nationalist ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī (c. 1849-1902). Sylvia Kedourie has shown



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that al-Kawākibī’s book, Umm al-Qura (1898), was directly inspired by The future of Islam. Kedourie speculates that, since al-Kawākibī did not speak English (or any other European language), Blunt’s book might actually have been read aloud to him in translation (Kedourie, ‘Abd al-Rahman’, pp. 48-9, 79). Banned in the Ottoman Empire, Umm al-Qura advocated Arab independence from Ottoman rule and Arabia as the centre of a religious revival with an Arab caliphate. This was, Kedourie argues, a new and radical position for an Arab writer of the late 19th century (Kedourie, ‘Abd al-Rahman’, pp. 80-1). The book itself would probably have had a stronger impact in the Islamic – and especially the Arab Muslim – world if Blunt had persevered with his campaign. However, a naturally restless man and easily distracted, he soon moved on to write about nationalist politics in Egypt, India and Ireland. The future of Islam was not republished in Blunt’s lifetime but, since falling out of copyright, is now available in numerous extant ‘print-on-demand’ versions, as well as a definitive edited and annotated edition published by RoutledgeCurzon in London and New York in 2002. The book today is an important historical political work that astutely foretells events, not least the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the deposition of the sultan-caliph. Yet, Blunt’s overall aim, the installation of an Arab caliph, was not realised in his lifetime, and just over a year after Blunt’s death the caliphate was abolished by the Republic of Turkey. Blunt realised that his book became quickly outdated, writing in about 1885 that ‘I look upon the work as still of serious value, if only historically, as showing the condition of the Mohammedan hopes and fears of the day when it was written’ (Secret history, p. 92). The politics of the book are indeed dated, but Blunt’s core themes – to encourage the reform and revival of Islam, and to build stronger Christian-Muslim relations – are as relevant today as they were in the last decades of the 19th century. Publications W.S. Blunt, ‘The future of Islam. Part I. Census of the Mohammedan world. The haj’, The Fortnightly Review 30 (1881) 204-23; 555036996 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) W.S. Blunt, ‘The future of Islam. II. The modern question of the caliphate’, The Fortnightly Review 30 (1881) 315-32; 555036996 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library)

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W.S. Blunt, ‘The future of Islam. III. The true metropolis – Mecca’, The Fortnightly Review 30 (1881) 441-58; 555036996 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) W.S. Blunt, ‘The future of Islam. IV. A Mohammedan reformation’, The Fortnightly Review 30 (1881) 585-602; 555036996 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) W.S. Blunt, ‘The future of Islam. V. England’s interest in Islam’, The Fortnightly Review 31 (1882) 32-48; 555036995 (digitised version available through the Bodleian Library) W.S. Blunt, The future of Islam, London, 1882; del.B559 F78 (digitised version available through Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) W.S. Blunt, The future of Islam, ed. R. Nourallah, London, 2002 (annotated edition) Studies Nourallah, ‘Introductory essay’ and ‘Postscript’, in W.S. Blunt, The future of Islam, London, 2002, 1-55 S.G. Haim, ‘Blunt and al-Kawakibi’, Oriente Moderno 35 (1955) 132-43 S. Kedourie (née Haim), ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1849-1902). In relation to the trend of Muslim-Arab political thought’, Edinburgh, 1953 (PhD Diss. University of Edinburgh), pp. 79-90

India under Ripon. A private diary Date 1909 Original Language English Description Like The future of Islam, Blunt’s India under Ripon originated as a series of essays written for The Fortnightly Review. The essays, entitled ‘Ideas about India’, were based on observations made during Blunt’s tour between September 1883 and March 1884, and were published in The Fortnightly Review between August 1884 and March 1885. When the five essays were published as a slim volume titled Ideas about India in London in 1885, Blunt added an introduction and appendix. Almost 25 years later, Blunt lightly edited the original essays and prefaced them with his detailed personal diary of the India tour to produce a 15-chapter volume with appendices of letters relating to his travels. He retitled the new, enlarged book



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India under Ripon. A private diary, and it was first published in London and Leipzig in 1909. This is the edition referred to here. The new title, India under Ripon, historicised the expanded book. Lord Ripon (George Robinson, 1827-1909) was a radical Liberal politician, and viceroy of India between 1880 and 1884. Blunt, who met him during his tour of India, shared Ripon’s progressive belief that effective government in India should prepare its peoples for eventual self-government. Ripon’s radical reforms, not least the repeal of strict press laws and his ‘Ilbert’ Bill (1883), which proposed that Indian magistrates and district judges should exercise jurisdiction over Europeans, raised important questions about British rule in India and galvanised political consciousness among Indians in the late 19th century (A.F. Denholm, art. ‘Robinson, George Frederick Samuel, First Marquess of Ripon’, in ODNB). A strapline on the title page of India under Ripon indicates that the book was intended as a continuation of Blunt’s 1907 Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt, which is a personal account of the national awakening of Egyptians following the occupation in 1882. In the introduction to India under Ripon, Blunt notes that he might alternatively have named it ‘The awakening of India’ because ‘it describes the condition of Indian things at the time of Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, which was in truth the awakening hour of the new movement towards liberty in India, the dawn of that day of unrest which is the necessary prelude to full self-assertion in every subject land’ (India, p. 1). India under Ripon is, then, partly another polemic – albeit milder than The future of Islam – which argues for constitutional reform in India. With hindsight, following the quarter century between writing the original essays and republishing them in the 1909 edition, Blunt felt that Ripon was India’s ‘best and wisest Viceroy’ (India, p. 326). However, he thought that Ripon’s ‘mission of reform’ had been a failure, not least because it had been undermined early on by the British occupation of Egypt, which ‘put back the clock of reform and self-government for at least a generation’ (India, p. 5). Blunt had previously made ‘a flying visit’ to India in 1879 as the guest of the previous viceroy, Lord Lytton (1831-91), but had been confined to his summer residence in Shimla, where he mixed almost exclusively with British society and therefore ‘knew nothing for certain about native India’ (India, p. 7). Blunt notes in the introduction that he returned to India in the winter of 1883-4 as an independent traveller with the sole intention of meeting ‘native’ Indians ‘as far as was possible on a basis of free intercourse’

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(India, p. 7). He was in India ‘as a Home Ruler in the East’, but had ‘no intention of exciting to rebellion’; rather, he wanted ‘to ascertain what the true feeling of the country was towards its English masters, and what the prospect of India’s eventually gaining her freedom’ (India, pp. 11, 7-8). The Christian-Muslim themes in India under Ripon are, consequently, less prominent than in The future of Islam. The original essays and the diaries were not intended to give an exposition or discussion about Islam and Muslim culture. Instead, in addition to an analysis of Indian politics, the book (and the diaries in particular) contains descriptions of Blunt’s many encounters with Muslims, from his arrival at the southern port of Tuticorin (Thoothukudi) and as he travels north via Madras (Chennai), Hyderabad, Calcutta (Kolkata), Patna, Lucknow, Delhi and, finally, to Bombay (Mumbai) in the west. Blunt meets Hindus, Parsis and Sikhs, but most of his meetings and casual encounters are with Muslims. This was not coincidental: Blunt arrived in India fresh from his public championing of Egyptian nationalists and actively sought to meet Muslims. He was aware that Islam was a minority religion in India, and that consequently Indian Muslims felt disempowered in the imperial power structure. Blunt was keen to meet Indian Muslims to understand better their political, economic and social conditions and concerns. Before leaving Europe for India, Blunt met in Paris a ‘small group’ of exiled Egyptian nationalists. They included the Islamic modernist Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (c. 1839-97), who advised Blunt how ‘to get the real confidence of the Moslems’ in India: ‘He said that my being an Englishman would make this very difficult, for all who had any position to lose were in terror of the Government, which had its spies everywhere’ (India, pp. 1213). However, al-Afghānī wrote a number of letters of introduction, which gave Blunt access to scores of Muslims once he arrived in the subcontinent. Blunt recounts that before his arrival he read the Qur’an and gave up drinking wine. Indeed, he came closer than before to considering Islam as a viable faith. When he landed at Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), in October 1883, he told the ‘Mohammedan’ welcoming delegation that ‘The Muslims have no better friend than I’ (quoted in E. Longford, Pilgrimage of passion. The life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, New York, 1980, p. 201). This sentiment, along with al-Afghānī’s introductions, ensured that Blunt was also met and embraced by delegations of Muslims wherever he went on Indian soil. Blunt’s India under Ripon consequently offers a roll call of late-Victorian Indian Muslims: of princes and noblemen (nawabs), religious and political leaders, scholars, government officials, and provincial shaykhs,



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imams and educators. He discusses poverty, politics and religion with Sunnīs, Shīʿīs and the spiritual head of the Ismāʿīlīs, Aga Khan II (Aqa Ali Shah, 1830-85). He cannot avoid the British (who ‘live in a world of their own’; India, p. 51), but he does his best to do so. He especially relishes being free from British interference in the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad, where he befriends the new prime minister, Mir Laiq Ali Khan, Salar Jung II (1862-89) and, later, the nizam of Hyderabad (Asaf Jah VI, 18661911), whose formal investiture in Delhi he attends in February 1884. From Hyderabad, Blunt visited Calcutta. By the time he reached the old capital of the British Raj, he was persuaded that some kind of ‘revolution’ was needed to effect real change in India (India, p. 95). He suggested to the early Muslim modernist, Nawwab Bahadur Abd al-Latif (1828-93), that the economic and political status of Indian Muslims would not be lifted through the British secular education system, and therefore advocated the establishment of a ‘Mohammedan university’ modelled on Al-Azhar in Cairo. He details his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convince the nizam of Hyderabad to finance the building of the university. He also describes his encounters with a number of other early Indian nationalists in Calcutta. In December 1883, Blunt was the only European to attend the first Indian Association of Bengal conference, which became the model for the Indian National Congress in 1885. He rightly recognises the event as ‘a really important occasion’ and ‘the first stage towards a National Parliament’ (India, p. 114). In his speech to the conference, he says that he looked forward to ‘complete self-government. I believed all nations were fit for selfgovernment, and few more so than the Indian’ (India, p. 116). The diaries in India under Ripon also outline a speech Blunt gave in January 1884 to the pan-Islamic Anjuman-i-Islam: ‘I likened their position to that of the Catholics in England, and told them what efforts had been made by these in the way of founding colleges on a religious basis, and a university.’ Blunt argued that ‘a great opportunity was offered them thus of assuming the intellectual leadership of Islam’ now that Egypt had been occupied by the British (India, p. 127). The rest of his tour continued in the same vein, with more speeches and many more meetings with Muslims high and low. He had, in fact, met so many people that, in early January 1884 – two months before he completed his tour – Blunt confided to his diary that, ‘This constant talking and writing is beginning to affect my nerves’ (India, p. 125).

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At the end of his Indian diary, Blunt notes that he ‘left Bombay [in March 1884] with an entire intention of returning the following winter, and of making a new tour for the collection of the funds necessary for the proposed Mohammedan University’ (India, p. 227). However, preoccupied with Egyptian and, later, Irish nationalism, he never returned to India. He admits in India under Ripon that ‘I wasted so great an opportunity for good as then seemed open to me’, and that ‘while I still continued to interest myself in the fortunes and misfortunes of India, I never again aspired to take a leading part in its affairs’ (India, pp. 227, 230). Blunt was disappointed that, in the quarter century since the publication of his original Fortnightly Review essays, he had witnessed ‘a change in the attitude of the white races of mankind towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and in their avowed conduct towards them’: The old religious teaching, Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental inequalities of the human kind which, true as a statement of fact, has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at large. (Blunt, India, p. 233)

By 1909, Blunt’s arguments for constitutional reform in India were nonetheless palatable to more Britons, though it would take almost 40 years for Indian independence followed by a brutal Partition to settle some of the grievances that Blunt heard from Indian Muslims and which he relayed and sought to address in India under Ripon. Significance In terms of Christian-Muslim relations, the significance of Blunt’s India under Ripon lies in its detailed documentation of his meetings and discussions with Muslims from across India and its social strata. While it is evident that he relished these encounters, he sometimes appears to be a little too pleased with himself and, despite his good intentions, somewhat pompous in his interactions. He was, after all, an onlooker and writer, and on rare occasions his observations read as quasi-anthropological. For example, in Calcutta he meets a maulana (religious scholar) who ‘has all the signs of breeding an Arab should have, his thumb going well beyond the forefinger joint, his complexion clear and dark and his features regular. Also, he is thin and has the eager frank manner of an Arab, and the lack of reserve’ (India, p. 105). Blunt is opinionated and eager to tell the



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Muslims what he thinks they should do to improve their political and economic situation. When, for instance, he is visited in Hyderabad by ‘a native teacher at the Moslem school’, he shows the teacher ‘that he was leaning on a broken reed if he trusted Constantinople for a reformation’, and recommends that Muslims ‘should take to trade, learn English, and compete with the Hindus’ (India, pp. 70, 73). Blunt records in his diary that the teacher ‘complained terribly of the tyranny of the English officials and their brutal manners’, and asked him ‘how it was that I was different from them, that I made him sit down on the same sofa with myself, that I addressed him politely, and did not treat him as a slave’. Blunt explained that ‘there were degrees of good breeding amongst us, and that the better the breeding the greater the politeness’ (India, pp. 73-4). In a footnote to the final page of India under Ripon, Blunt states that his idea of constitutional reform for India was ‘scoffed at’ in the 1880s ‘as fanciful and Utopian’, but in 1909 ‘the Asiatic world has marched on, and English opinion to-day seems to have awakened at last to its recommendations as a coming necessity’ (India, p. 326). Blunt’s views were indeed radical, though not unique, when he wrote the first version of the book in 1883-4. He notes in his India diary in January 1884 that the Anglo-Indian Pioneer newspaper described him as a ‘revolutionist’ who was ‘stirring up sedition in Patna and other Mohammedan centres’. For Blunt, ‘Good hearty abuse as a revolutionist can do me nothing but good’ (India, p. 153). Back in England in 1885, Blunt considered that his ‘Ideas about India’ essays for The Fortnightly Review were, I think, the first complete and fearless apology of Indian home rule which had been published; and they were accordingly, with one or two kindly exceptions, torn to pieces by the English editors of Calcutta, Bombay, and the rest of the great towns. The native press, on the other hand, has loudly approved them, and supported with generous warmth the position taken by their author. (Blunt, Ideas, pp. vii-viii)

Critics in Britain and its empire were of course surprised, even alarmed, that Blunt had freely sought the opinions of Indian Muslims on issues that threatened the stability of imperial rule. Reviewing the original Ideas about India in 1886, The Age newspaper in Australia noted that Blunt ‘was admitted into native society in a way that is quite impossible for Englishmen in general’, but wondered whether, ‘Mr. Blunt has been a little influenced in his estimate of men and things by this cordiality’ (The Age, Melbourne, 13 February 1886, p. 13).

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Biographers and critics alike have long debated whether Blunt was driven by vanity. There was undoubtedly a strain of vanity in his character, but he also had ‘a natural sympathy for the oppressed and an almostinstinctive aversion to injustice’ (R. Nourallah, ‘Introductory essay’, in W.S. Blunt, The future of Islam, ed. R. Nourallah, London, 2002, 1-50, p. 11). These sentiments were, perhaps, shaped by his experience of converting to Catholicism in the 1850s, when anti-Catholic attitudes and violence against Catholics in England increased. He was, moreover, passionate, stubborn and impulsive. His interactions with Muslims, in India and elsewhere, were also driven by a paternalism that sprang from his sense of responsibility to the colonised. When the Hyderabadi schoolteacher asked Blunt why he visited and cared for the Muslims, he explained that ‘in youth I had led a life of folly, and that I wished to do some good before I died, and that I had received much kindness from the Moslems, and learned from them to believe in God, and so I spent a portion of every year among them’ (India, p. 74). Publications W.S. Blunt, ‘Ideas about India. Part I. The agricultural danger’, The Fortnightly Review 36 (1884) 164-78 W.S. Blunt, ‘Ideas about India. II. Race hatred’, The Fortnightly Review 36 (1884) 445-59 W.S. Blunt, ‘Ideas about India. III. The Mohammedan question’, The Fortnightly Review 36 (1884) 624-37 W.S. Blunt, ‘Ideas about India. IV. The native states’, The Fortnightly Review 37 (1885) 234-48 W.S. Blunt, ‘Ideas about India. V. The future of self-government’, The Fortnightly Review 37 (1885) 386-98 W.S. Blunt, Ideas about India, London, 1885; 2015.180750 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) W.S. Blunt, India under Ripon. A private diary, London, 1909 (repr. New Delhi, 2015; 2015.44338 (digitised version of 1909 edition available through Digital Library of India) Jamie Gilham

David S. Margoliouth David Samuel Margoliouth Date of Birth 17 October 1858 Place of Birth London Date of Death 22 March 1940 Place of Death London

Biography

David Samuel Margoliouth, the only son of Ezekiel Margoliouth and his wife Sarah (née Iglitzki), was born in London on 17 October 1858. His father, a convert from Judaism, became an Anglican missionary to Jews. After attending Hackney Collegiate School, the young Margoliouth received a scholarship to Winchester College in 1872. From there, he proceeded in 1877 to New College, Oxford, where he was to remain until his death. He was awarded first class honours and won prizes in a variety of languages, becoming proficient in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. From 1881 to 1889, he was a fellow of New College, and in 1889 was elected Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, a position he held until he retired in 1937. He travelled abroad extensively, including spending time in India, Cairo and Baghdad. In addition to serving as a university professor, Margoliouth was an Anglican priest, having been ordained in 1899. He never undertook parochial responsibilities, but occasionally preached in an Oxford city church. In 1896, he married Jessie Payne Smith, herself a scholar and daughter of Robert Payne Smith, the Dean of Canterbury and a well-known Syriac scholar. They had no children. She died in 1933, and he on 22 March 1940. Margoliouth’s mastery of some of the most difficult branches of Arabic literature is evident in several of his publications, such as his book on Arabic papyri in the Bodleian Library (1893), Chrestomathia Baidawiana (1894), which is a translation of al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary on Sura 3 of the Qur’an, and The letters of Abu’l-‘Alā (1898). He also collaborated with his wife to produce A compendious Syriac dictionary (1927), based on her father’s Thesaurus Syriacus. Margoliouth served as a member of the council of the Royal Asiatic Society, and was its director in 1927 and president from 1934 to 1937. The honours conferred on him include a fellowship of the

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British Academy (1915), a DLitt of Durham University (1922), and membership of the German Oriental Society and the American Oriental Society. He was held in high regard by other scholars of his day. Arthur Jeffery called him ‘the last of the giants, whose name will ever be remembered alongside those of de Sacy, de Goeje, Fleischer, Nöldeke, Goldziher and Reinhardt Dozy’ (Jeffery, ‘David Samuel Margoliouth’, p. 295). Hamilton Gibb wrote in a similarly laudatory tone, calling Margoliouth ‘the leading Arabic scholar in England’ and ‘the chief representative of Oriental Studies in Great Britain’ (Gibb, ‘Obituary notice’, p. 392).

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary H.A.R. Gibb, ‘Obituary notice. David Samuel Margoliouth, 1858-1940’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3 (1940) 392-4 A. Jeffery, ‘David Samuel Margoliouth’, MW 30 (1940) 295-8 Secondary Art. ‘Margoliouth, David Samuel (1858-1940)’, in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13, Farmington Hills MI, 20072, p. 528 A.F.L. Beeston, art. ‘Margoliouth, David Samuel (1858-1940)’, in ODNB J.M. Buaben, Image of the Prophet Muhammad in the West. A study of Muir, Margoliouth and Watt, Leicester, 1996, pp. 49-55 G. Murray, art. ‘Margoliouth, David Samuel (1858-1940)’, in DNB

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mohammed and the rise of Islam Date 1905 Original Language English Description First published in 1905, and with three editions printed that year (references here are to the third edition), Margoliouth’s Mohammed and the rise of Islam contains 472 pages of text preceded by 26 pages of prefatory material and followed by three maps and 9 pages of index and glossary. The book is divided into 13 chapters. In his preface (pp. iii-ix), after applauding the earlier European scholars Gustave Weil, Caussin de Perceval, Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Aloys Sprenger and William Muir for their skill in discovering and utilising some of the early original Muslim sources, Margoliouth points out defects in Muir’s and Sprenger’s lives



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of Muḥammad, even though he considers them classics. He describes Muir’s work as ‘written with a confessedly Christian bias’, and Sprenger’s as ‘defaced by some slipshod scholarship and untrustworthy archaeology’ (p. iv). This raises the expectation of something different from Margoliouth himself. He would draw on sources that had been published after Sprenger and Muir wrote: the Musnad of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, the Tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī, the Iṣāba or dictionary of individuals who knew Muḥammad compiled by Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalānī, and the works of the polymath ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ. While acknowledging that care must be taken in utilising Hadiths because of possible fabrication, he would follow the scholarly lead of Ignaz Goldziher, Theodor Nöldeke and Julius Wellhausen in determining what credible historical information can be culled from them. Margoliouth claims to write from the standpoint suggested by the title of the series in which the book was published, ‘Heroes of the Nations’. He regards Muḥammad ‘as a great man, who solved a political problem of appalling difficulty, the construction of a state and an empire out of the Arab tribes’. Margoliouth aims ‘to do justice to his intellectual ability and to observe towards him the respectful attitude which his greatness deserves’, though he does not intend the book to be ‘either an apology or an indictment’ (pp. vi-vii). Ch. 1, ‘The birthplace of the hero’ (pp. 1-44), describes the context in which Muḥammad was born and grew up, giving attention to such topics as the Quraysh tribe, Meccan trade, political organisation within Mecca, pre-Islamic religion, morals, the institution of marriage, the presence of Jews and Christians, and national fairs. In Ch. 2, ‘Early life of Mohammed’ (pp. 45-82), Margoliouth provides commonly known information about Muḥammad’s first 40 years from childhood to the beginning of his prophetic ministry. He compliments Muḥammad’s instinctive ability to judge people (p. 63), his development into ‘a respected’ though ‘undistinguished tradesman’ (p. 72), and his possession of ‘the soundest and sanest common-sense’ (p. 79). In addition to this, however, he finds ‘curious confirmation’ of the old Christian claim that Muḥammad may have been an epileptic, even though ‘some of the signs of severe epilepsy – biting of the tongue, dropping what is in the hand, and gradual degeneration of the brain power – were wanting’ (pp. 45-6). While accepting that as a child Muḥammad was not taught to read or write, Margoliouth states that he travelled extensively within and outside Arabia while accompanying caravans, during which ‘he would appear to have picked up information’,

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including stories, anecdotes and expressions, that found its way into the Qur’an (pp. 57-9). He ‘derived a sort of biblical phraseology’ from contact with Arab Jews and Christians, which he later utilised (pp. 60-1). In Margoliouth’s view, although Muḥammad ‘sympathised in one point or another’ with both Jews and Christians, he knew there were doctrinal differences between them and also between groups of Christians. Moreover, Christianity was closely associated with Byzantium, ‘and Mohammed was far too great a patriot to contemplate the introduction of a foreign yoke’. It would therefore have been ‘a serious mistake’ for him to become a Jew or Christian. It followed that a ‘fundamental dogma of his system’ was that ‘he was God’s Prophet’, which meant he could identify points of agreement with the two earlier monotheistic religions while also highlighting his distinctiveness (pp. 76-7). Ch. 3, ‘Islam as a secret society’ (pp. 83-117), discusses Muḥammad’s experience of revelation, the propagation of the message during the early years of his ministry, the first converts and what attracted them, the evolution of Muslim prayer, which combined elements of Jewish and Christian prayer, the way in which Muḥammad may have acquired knowledge of biblical stories, and the development of the term ‘Muslim’. As for Muḥammad’s experience of revelation, Margoliouth describes how he could make the form and manner of the qur’anic utterances appear to be supernatural in origin, likening him to the modern medium, comparing him with the founder of the Mormons, Joseph Smith, and suggesting that Muḥammad may have feigned symptoms of epileptic fits to make people think he was receiving divine communications. While for some this would raise the question of Muḥammad’s sincerity, Margoliouth says the issue of sincerity is of little consequence ‘to those who are studying merely the political effectiveness of supernatural revelations’ (p. 89). Ch. 4, ‘Publicity’ (pp. 118-51), moves from the secret to the public preaching of Islam in Mecca, describing the opposition faced by Muḥammad, but also the steadfast support of those who chose to accept his message and the protection he received from his uncle Abū Ṭālib, who did not. Margoliouth contends that he even found support among Jews and Christians in Mecca. Ch. 5, ‘History of the Meccan period’ (pp. 152-84), enumerates some of Muḥammad’s most prominent opponents and converts, and describes many of the early Muslims seeking refuge in Abyssinia, the boycott of the Hāshim clan, the incident of the satanic verses, the deaths of Khadīja and Abū Ṭālib, and Muḥammad’s search for protection after the latter was gone. Margoliouth gives some space to Muḥammad’s multiple



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marriages after Khadīja’s death, attributing them not to ‘gross passion’ but to political motives, a means of consummating a victory, or the desire to have a son. Ch. 6, ‘The migration’ (pp. 185-233), details the history of Yathrib pertinent to understanding why Muḥammad was invited there, giving particular attention to its various tribes and the conflicts between them, including the role of the Jewish tribes, and how the person and message of Muḥammad appealed to them. In Margoliouth’s view, ‘the soil of Yathrib was thoroughly prepared for Islam’ because it had been ‘ailing from long years of civil strife’ (p. 198). He then describes the migration of the Muslims of Mecca to Medina and Muḥammad’s initial efforts to organise the community there. According to Margoliouth, he became the object of ‘the devotion and adulation’ that until then had been given to idols, ‘and though he never permitted the word worship to be used of the ceremonies of which he was the object, he ere long became hedged in with a state which differed little from that which surrounded a god’ (p. 216). Yet, he refrained from adopting accoutrements of power common among monarchs, such as silk robes and jewels. Margoliouth also notes how the character of the qur’anic revelation ‘entered on a new stage of its existence, serving as a medium of legislation’ and ‘as an official chronicle in which current events were criticised from the Prophet’s standpoint’ (p. 217). He reports several instances in which a suggestion of a Muslim follower soon became the basis for a revelation, noting that this rarely raised a suspicion of imposture. He also reports examples of revelations incorporated into the Qur’an that Muḥammad himself forgot or were preserved by only one person or were modified by the Prophet ‘when convicted of hasty and impracticable legislation’ (pp. 219-20). Margoliouth closes the chapter with a discussion of the ‘Hypocrites’, the agreement commonly known as the Constitution of Medina, and Muḥammad’s relations with the Jews there. Ch. 7, ‘The battle of Badr’ (pp. 234-74), commences with a discussion of the difficulties faced by the migrants in earning a livelihood, and how raiding Meccan trade caravans that passed near Medina was a solution to this problem. Margoliouth provides a sketch of the raids leading up to the first major battle of the Medinan period at Badr, where the Meccan forces outnumbered the Muslims two to one, but the latter prevailed with significantly fewer casualties. He attributes the Muslims’ victory to their ‘discipline and steadfastness of purpose’ (p. 264) and concludes, ‘No event in the history of Islam was of more importance than this battle: the Koran rightly calls it the Day of Deliverance, the day before which the Moslems

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were weak, after which they were strong’ (p. 269). At the beginning of ch. 8, ‘Progress and a setback’ (pp. 275-308), Margoliouth does not hesitate to speak about the evolution of Muḥammad ’s position at Medina following Badr as ‘tyranny’: satirists were assassinated; the Jewish clan of Qaynuqāʾ, ‘doubtless the wealthiest of the inhabitants of Medinah’ (p. 280), were stripped of their possessions and exiled. The chapter closes with a detailed account of the Battle of Uḥud, in which the Muslims suffered a defeat at the hands of the Meccans. Ch. 9, ‘The destruction of the Jews’ (pp. 30937), narrates the banishment of the Jewish clan of Naḍīr from Medina, Muḥammad’s marriage to the divorced wife of his adopted son Zayd, the Battle of the Trench, the siege of the Jewish Qurayẓa tribe and the execution of their men and enslavement of their women and children. Ch. 10, ‘Steps towards the taking of Meccah’ (pp. 338-76), recounts the events that led up to the taking of Mecca in 630: the attempted pilgrimage of 628, the Treaty of Ḥudaybiya, the raid on and subjugation of the Jews of Khaybar, the sending of letters to other rulers summoning them to embrace Islam, and the pilgrimage to Mecca in 629. Ch. 11, ‘The taking of Meccah’ (pp. 377-409), commences with an account of defeat at the Battle of Muʾta against Byzantine forces in late 629, followed by the capture of Mecca in January 630, the battle against the coalition of the Hawāzin and Thaqīf tribes at Ḥunayn, and the failed siege of Ṭāʾif. Ch. 12, ‘The settlement of Arabia’ (pp. 410-43), describes the instituting of a taxation system in the developing state, domestic disputes between the Prophet and his wives, the military campaign to Tabūk, and the delegations that came to Muḥammad at Medina from various parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Ch. 13, ‘The last year’ (pp. 444-72), recounts Muḥammad’s last year, beginning with his ‘Farewell Pilgrimage’ to Mecca in which he established the pilgrimage rites in perpetuity, his family life, his reception of deputations, his expectations for the treatment of women and slaves, and his death. Margoliouth says that Muḥammad’s ‘extraordinary success had cast something like a spell over the whole of Arabia’. His followers so revered him that ‘recognition of his prophetic claim was to the end a sort of incense whose perfume never staled’ (p. 456). Significance According to Hamilton Gibb, ‘With the appearance of Mohammed and the rise of Islam […] Margoliouth for the first time came before the wider public as an interpreter of Islam’ (‘Obituary notice’, p. 392). His use of original Islamic sources is impressive. However, he often uses information found there to raise awkward questions or make provocative points,



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which can be seen as revealing a hostile, polemical edge. One contemporary Muslim writer could on the one hand say of Margoliouth that ‘his erudition is certainly beyond all reproach’, but on the other hand observe that ‘his writings on Islam are, unfortunately, marred by a strong bias and have, in consequence, been regarded with mistrust in the Muslim East’. In his view, this was the reason Oxford University was not at that time ‘sufficiently popular as a centre of Islamic studies with students from the East’ (Inayatullah, ‘Three British Orientalists’, p. 535). The most thorough review and incisive critique of Margoliouth’s book is found in J.M. Buaben’s Image of the Prophet Muhammad in the West, which is based on his doctoral thesis. He notes that prior to Margoliouth’s Mohammed and the rise of Islam, there had been very little new material on Muḥammad in the West since William Muir’s work early in the second half of the 19th century. Yet, while Margoliouth’s work received acclaim in the West, ‘Muslims have largely been suspicious of its value as an academic work’ (Image of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 49). Buaben discusses Margoliouth’s book in relation to negative medieval images of Muḥammad, including how it perpetuates some of them, his use and interpretation of sources, what he says in this book in relation to his other writings, throughout offering a fair, at times understandably derisive, critique. Publications David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the rise of Islam, London, 1905; 006534455 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the rise of Islam, London, 19052; 001930175 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the rise of Islam, London, 19053, repr. New York, 1906; London, 1923; New York, 1927, 1931, 1972, 1978, 2006; New Delhi, 1985; Piscataway NJ, 2003; 006534456 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies Buaben, Image of the Prophet Muhammad, pp. 55-128 Gibb, ‘Obituary notice’ Shaykh Inayatullah, ‘Three British Orientalists’, Islamic Culture 11 (1937) 534-6

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Mohammedanism Date 1911 Original Language English Description Margoliouth’s Mohammedanism was first published in 1911 (no date is given in the book, but a subsequent printing places it in that year). A revised edition, which is used here, appeared in 1912. It is 255 pages long: the first six pages contain the title page, publication information, table of contents, and a note on chronology, with the book itself divided into seven chapters, concluding with a bibliography. It does not have an index. Ch. 1, ‘The Islamic world’ (pp. 7-41), describes the spread of Islam in the world in historical and contemporary perspectives, and also reveals some of Margoliouth’s biases. It commences with a brief discussion of terminology. He is aware that the religion is known by the Arabic infinitive ‘Islam’, and the adherents are known by the Arabic participle ‘Muslim’, which he says are equivalent to ‘monotheism’ and ‘monotheist’. Yet, he informs the reader that the system is also called ‘Mohammedanism’ after Muḥammad, and Muslims are also known as ‘Mohammedans’, because they accept the proposition that Muḥammad ‘is the main and indeed ultimate channel whereby the will of the Creator of the world has been revealed to mankind’ (pp. 7-8). Curiously, he titles the book Mohammedanism, to which usage Muslims object, but throughout the book he consistently uses the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Moslems’. Margoliouth goes on to describe the number of Muslims in the world in the year 1906. He notes that the very ‘earliest mode of propagation was by persuasion’, but from the eighth year of the hijra, that is, late in the life of Muḥammad, Islam ‘was in the main disseminated by the sword, for even where the conquered were not compelled to adopt it, they were reduced by rejection of it to a tributary caste’ (pp. 8-9). However, he acknowledges that conversions have at times resulted from more peaceful, persuasive methods, such as the efforts of traders or colonists, and the purchase or capture of children who were subsequently raised as Muslims. While seeming at first to pay tribute to diversity among Muslims, Margoliouth turns to culturally biased, indeed racist, characterisations, such as: ‘Beauty among the Islamic peoples is chiefly due to admixture with Circassian blood, but also with Greek and Armenian; literary and scientific ability has usually been the result of the entry into Islam of Indo-germanic elements; the great Islamic authors are mostly Persians’ (pp. 11-12). Indeed, he uses even



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more blatant racist language: ‘Monotheism, polytheism, and the rest are not free from racial and climatic affinities’, although ‘these are too subtle to admit of analysis’. However, ‘some indications’ of the racial factor ‘may be traced; no Asiatic nor African province which has been conquered by Islam has ever thrown it off, not even when it has come under Christian rule; in Europe it has secured no permanent abode. In Spain, in Sicily, in Malta, in Greece, it is a memory’. (p. 13). Thus, lighter-skinned people are less credulous! He concludes with a geographical and climatic argument: ‘Islam is a religion of the Heat Belt, the part of the earth’s surface which lies between 30° N. latitude and 30° S. latitude, with a mean temperature of 68 F’ (p. 14). Islamic government, when functioning properly is, Margoliouth contends, a ‘theocracy, the rule of the community by God Himself, and so by His representative’ (pp. 14-15), even when there have been several viceroys of God ruling simultaneously, and in spite of the fact that ‘since the close of the Umayyad period […] the whole of Islam has never been under one nominal head’ (p. 16). Margoliouth describes three of the most prominent Islamic empires: the Ottoman, Persian and Moroccan. He notes that many Muslims live under European colonial rule, and refers to Britain as ‘by far the greatest Moslem power in the world’, although ‘it does not appear that our nation has ever colonized on Moslem territory, i.e. established permanent communities of its sons thereon’ (p. 23). He then sketches the history of Islam in India, Afghanistan, Beluchistan and Egypt, in each of which Britain played a major role. This is followed by lands in which the French, Russians and Dutch exercised dominion, Islam in China, and several smaller Muslim communities elsewhere. Ch. 2, ‘Mohammed and the Koran’ (pp. 42-74), commences with a brief description of pre-Islamic Arabia and the theological, social and moral ills that aroused Muḥammad’s deepest indignation. This is followed by a sketch of significant moments and developments in Muḥammad’s ministry in Mecca and Medina, and how popular veneration of him created ‘a legendary biography’ that gradually became ‘imbedded in the genuine material’ (p. 60). The chapter closes with a discussion of the Qur’an, explaining the Islamic notion of revelation, the character of the revelation embodied in it, its contents, the preservation and probability of its authenticity, and its interpretation and sources. As for the latter, Margoliouth notes that for Muslims God is the source, which with respect to the question of sources only allows the question, ‘To what extent do the contents of the book correspond with other known pre-existing literature?’ (p. 73)

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In response to this question, he mentions some of the common material one finds in the Bible and the Qur’an, but avoids asserting that the former was a source of the latter. Margoliouth begins ch. 3, ‘The Islamic state’ (pp. 75-114), by suggesting that Muḥammad probably thought of Islam more as a nation than as a religion, and his legislation was intended ‘to create a military state’. The five daily ‘Prayers’ constituted a drill; the fasting month a test of endurance and an education therein; enthusiasm was provoked by the magnificence of the claim to form the leading caste on earth, with a right to the possessions of all who did not belong to it, and the alternatives between spoil and Paradise. Probably, however, even more enthusiasm was inspired by the belief that the fighting was in the cause of God. (pp. 76-7)

He recounts the development of various forms of religious and political leadership, and the special recognition of people who were descendants of the Prophet. He describes the condition of the dhimmī communities under Islamic rule, contending that as Islam ‘was far nearer Judaism than Christianity’ so ‘outside Arabia the triumph of the new system meant for Judaism a new lease of life’ (p. 84). On the other hand, for Christians ‘the change meant in some places security from sectarian persecution […] but it everywhere meant a loss of caste, transference from equality of a kind to inferiority’ (p. 84). Even so, Jews and Christians enjoyed certain benefits: ‘Professions and industries requiring intellectual ability drifted into their hands. […] Any place in the state, except that of head of it or leadership of the army, could be theirs’ (pp. 85-6). On occasion, Christians have even fought alongside Muslims in the military. He devotes over five pages to slavery and its abolition in Muslim lands, claiming that ‘the countries in which it still thrives are those Moslem lands which have least felt European influence – Arabia and Morocco’ (p. 90). When Margoliouth turns to forms of government in Islamic lands, we again see his cultural and racial bias combined with the climatic and geographical argument come to the fore. He claims that autocracy was the dominant form of government in Islamic states until the 19th century, when the wave set in motion by the French Revolution reached Turkey in Europe and then Asia; but it has scarcely found its way seriously into the Heat-Belt, and its appropriateness to the Heat-Belt may be questioned, since the demand for widespread intellectual activity which constitutional government makes cannot easily be met. (p. 93)



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Revolutions in the sense of changes of the form of Government never occurred till European ideas had circulated in Islamic countries; no rights or safeguards for personal liberty – nothing, in short, for which European parties have contended – was ever demanded or won. (pp. 97-8)

Government that utilised a cabinet whose members held assigned portfolios could be ‘found in reformed Islamic states’, but it was ‘borrowed from European systems’ (p. 99). The chapter closes with discussions of criminal law, punishments imposed for violations, and Islamic jurisprudence. Margoliouth notes the importance of both the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet in Islamic jurisprudence, and the critical methods developed to sift out authentic Hadiths from those that were not. In his judgement, the results of these endeavours may not be as highly regarded by Europeans as they are by Muslims, ‘but they are of considerable value nevertheless’ (p. 111). He again, however, resorts to the climatic and geographical argument to account for ‘the fundamental difference between Islamic jurisprudence and European jurisprudence’: ‘It obviously arises from the physical conditions within and outside the Heat-Belt.’ European jurisprudence, he argues, ‘is an experimental science […] of endless correction and amelioration’, while Islamic jurisprudence considers ‘legislation as absolutely beyond man’s capacity: all his business is to know and administer a set of rules revealed by God’ (pp. 111-12). Ch. 4, ‘Islamic theory and practice’ (pp. 115-53), treats various Muslim practices, commencing with circumcision and burial. Once again Margoliouth has recourse to the climatic and geographical explanation: ‘It is probable that this initiation into life [i.e. circumcision] […] is due to physical conditions connected with the Heat-Belt. To the same we may ascribe the Islamic practice of burying immediately after death.’ He even regards the marrying of a daughter as soon as possible as ‘a matter connected with climate’ (pp. 115-16). He then sketches the obligatory practices, that is, the Five Pillars, mentioning just briefly the shahāda, but providing a little more detail about prayer (ṣalāt), the Ramaḍān fast, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and alms (zakāt), and the extent to which, and variations in how, these are observed, including expectations of women and children, as well as practices unique to Shīʿīs. Margoliouth devotes ten pages to a list of things lawful and unlawful to Muslims, including certain foods, wine, images, music and dancing, polygamy, divorce and female use of the veil. As for polygamy, his cultural bias again appears when he states, ‘In general it may be said that in proportion to European influence polygamy has become scarce and the status of woman improved’ (p. 134).

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Margoliouth turns next to matters of Islamic theology, which he deals with in a cursory manner, enumerating ‘the doctrines which most orthodox Moslems would probably be found to hold’ (p. 139). These include the relation between divine power and the freedom of the human will, the categories of beings as recognised by Islam, namely, God, angels, humanity and jinn, and the role of prophets as intermediaries between God and humanity. As for ethics, he remarks, ‘Probably few systems dictate with so much detail as Islam the conduct and even the etiquette of life’ (p. 145). He regards the overall record of Islamic states as ‘a spectacle of disorder’ (p. 147), and ‘the stagnation of Islamic countries’ is ‘a fact’. Although it cannot be said that they ‘have contributed nothing to the common stock of human invention and discovery […] there has been no continuity of progress such as Europe has for some centuries been witnessing’ (p. 149). Margoliouth disagrees with those who attribute this to Muslims being paralysed by the belief that things are foreordained. ‘Moslem annals,’ he writes, ‘show no lack of ambition, of far-reaching schemes, or of the resolute pursuit of aims’ (p. 150). He attributes it, rather, to climate or race. For some reason, the same annals that can be used to argue against attributing it to determinism cannot be used to argue against his views on climate and race! At the beginning of Ch. 5, ‘Islamic sects’ (pp. 154-92), Margoliouth states that ‘the test’ for distinguishing what is a sect and what is not ‘is ability to pray behind the same imām, or leader’ (p. 155). On this basis, he divides the sects into ritual, political and theological. The ritual sects are the four Sunnī schools of law, and Margoliouth gives examples of the differences between them. The principal political sects he highlights are the Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kharijites, Wahhabis, Murids and Sanusis, and he notes where they have held sway or had a significant impact during the course of Islamic history. The chapter closes with a quick review of two theological sects, the Muʿtazila and the Murjiʾa. Ch. 6 discusses ‘Preachers, saints, and orders’ (pp. 193-226). The earliest preachers, according to Margoliouth, had the power of edifying. They were deeply versed in the Qur’an and the Tradition of the Prophet. They were often ‘victims of a common fallacy: because Mohammed or Abu Bakr had done something, therefore it was right’. They in turn argued that ‘because something was right, therefore Mohammed or one of the Companions had said or done it’. This furnished ‘copious material for edification’ (p. 196). Yet, contends Margoliouth, it appears the Friday mosque sermons did not ordinarily communicate this edifying material, focusing instead on more



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worldly and political associations. It was the Sufis who provided edifying religious and moral guidance. Margoliouth then discusses Sufi orders, including their leadership, the responsibilities of members, unusual feats, and dhikrs. He closes the chapter by addressing the question of Islam’s future prospects, disagreeing with those who prophesy its future extinction. It will not be superseded by Christianity to which Muslims are notably resistant. He concludes: ‘What is therefore to be expected is neither the supersession nor the abolition of Islam, but its accommodation to the conditions imposed upon the world by European science, so far as climatic conditions permit’ (p. 224). Chapter 7, ‘Islamic art, literature, and science’ (pp. 227-51), gives a brief overview of architecture, decoration in the form of geometric design and calligraphy, poetry, fictional and historical literature, biographical dictionaries, geographical treatises, studies of foreign customs and religions, medicine, philosophy, and grammatical and lexicographical studies. Margoliouth speaks highly of Islamic poetry, but notes that poetic styles are limited. Here, again, he has recourse to the climate-geography argument to help account for this: ‘That Arabic poetry could not rise beyond the styles which have been sketched is in the main due to the unsuitability of the Heat-Belt for continuous intellectual effort, but in part to the elaborate technique which constitutes Arabic versification’ (p. 233). Significance Margoliouth presents a learned overview of Islam. He disagreed with those who considered it in a process of hopeless decline and bound to be superseded by Christianity. However, his view of Islam was coloured by his recourse to geographical, climatic, culturally-biased and racial interpretations. It is such thinking that led Albert Hourani to write of him, ‘In his mind there was a streak of fantasy, or perhaps of irony, which led him sometimes to propose untenable theories’ (Hourani, Islam in European thought, p. 33). He concluded that, if Islam is to be relevant in the future, it must accommodate itself to the conditions imposed by European science. Its hope for change lies not in an internal stimulus but in an external one, one originating in Europe. While there were Muslim intellectuals of the time who argued that there are aspects of Western thought and science that Muslims must be ready to adopt (e.g. Muḥammad ʿAbduh), they advocated for this in a more judicious manner than Margoliouth seems to have had in mind. While Margoliouth was a scholar of great learning, he provided little, if any, food for thought

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to those whose thinking and behaviour was prejudiced by thoughts of Western superiority and ‘the white man’s burden’. Publications David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, London, 1911; oocihm.65540 (digitised version available through Canadiana online) David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, London, 19122, rev. ed.; 006759215 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, London, 19203, new rev. ed.; BP161.M35 (digitised version available through Archive.org) David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, London, 19284 David Margoliouth, Islamismo, trans. C. Riba, Barcelona, 1929 (Spanish trans.) David Margoliouth, Islamismo, trans. C. Riba, Barcelona, 1935, rev. ed., repr. 1949 (Spanish trans.); 006524839 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, London, 1936 David Margoliouth, Mohammedanism, New Delhi, 2013 Studies F. Quinn, The sum of all heresies. The image of Islam in Western thought, Oxford, 2008 A. Hourani, Islam in European thought, Cambridge, 1991 A. Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, London, 1980 Michael T. Shelley

Early 20th-century missionary conferences Cairo 1906; Edinburgh 1910; Lucknow 1911 Date 1906-11 Original Language English Description Several Christian missionary conferences were organised in the early years of the 20th century, mainly by Protestant missionary societies. Their aim was to discuss problems in fields of mission and to promote evangelisation through the development of new missionary approaches at a time when evangelisation was encountering difficulties, especially among Muslims. The most important of these conferences were held in Cairo in 1906, Edinburgh in 1910, and Lucknow in 1911. Missionaries generally saw great opportunities in the colonial expansion of Western powers – especially Great Britain – at the beginning of the 20th century and extended their work to new areas where the colonial powers were politically dominant. In addition, the decline of the Ottoman Empire motivated Christian missionaries to evangelise Muslims within Ottoman domains. In these new situations, many recognised the particular challenges presented for work among Muslims. Cairo 1906: ‘First missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world’ A very important participant in these missionary conferences was Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952), one of the most famous Protestant missionaries of the 20th century. He lived for 38 years (1890-1929) in Arabia and Egypt, and was largely responsible for and chairman of the ‘first missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world’, held in Cairo on 4-9 April 1906. Its ecumenical character was reflected in the participation of 62 representatives from 29 mission agencies, as well as external visitors. The conference report contains 15 papers, among them: ‘How to reach and teach illiterate Moslems’, ‘Work among illiterate Moslems’, ‘Work among educated Moslems in Cairo’, ‘Preparation of workers for work among Muslims’, and ‘The student movement and Islam’. Many were published in a volume entitled Methods of mission work among

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Moslems, and the remaining texts with contributions to discussion, resolutions, etc. appeared later (cf. Methods of mission work among Moslems, pp. 29-40, 41-58, 59-78, 211-30, 231-2). The report mentions the following as the results of the conference: missionaries and Church bodies now had a more comprehensive awareness of the problems relating to mission among Muslims; the methods used in evangelistic efforts could be given greater uniformity in order to avoid past mistakes; the production of literature for Muslims could now be coordinated more efficiently. Two additional results were that the Church could now see that Islam was its major rival in mission, and could recognise the urgency of its duty to the millions of people in Africa, India and China to prevent their conversion to Islam (The Mohammedan world of to-day, pp. 41-50, 147-71, 173-83, 185-204, 247-64; cf. Methods of mission work among Moslems, pp. 7-11), and that while all Muslims followed the one Qur’an, varied forms of belief and practices in different places presented specific challenges (W. Goldsack, ‘How to reach and teach illiterate Muslims’, in Methods of mission work among Moslems, p. 29). A topic that played a predominant role at all three conferences was the creation of Christian literature for Muslims. In his lecture in Cairo, William St Clair Tisdall (1859-1928) gave an outline of the situation of Christian literature in various languages and called for more works to be produced. He pointed out that sometimes too much attention was paid to the production of controversial literature, and too little to books for teaching about Christianity. The best way to remedy this was to train local converts so that they could write works of instruction in their mother tongue. Arthur T. Upson (d. 1959), who worked in Egypt, seems to have followed this suggestion, because he used the convert ʿAbd Allāh al-Khaṭīb, who had previously composed khuṭbas for the mosque, to write Christian sermons (Methods of mission work among Moslems, pp. 86-7). From the Cairo Conference and Tisdall’s lecture on Christian literature, there emerged a new realisation that was to be important for the Edinburgh and Lucknow conferences. This was the need for Christian works written directly in various local languages that could have more direct appeal than translations. Edinburgh 1910: ‘World missionary conference’ In 1910 the second major world missionary conference was held in Edinburgh, with representatives attending from most parts of the world. The initiator of this conference was the American Methodist John Mott



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Illustration 10. ‘Map to illustrate the spread of Islam’, from S. Zwemer, Islam: A Challenge to Faith, facing p. 57, showing ‘the needs and opportunities of the Mohammedan World from the standpoint of Christians’

(1865-1955), while Samuel Zwemer played an important role in the proceedings as a member of the organising committee and spokesperson for missionary work among Muslims. The most important biblical text for participants was Matthew 24:14, understood to mean that the Second Coming of Christ was dependent on successful missionary work. This idea that mission could accelerate the return of Christ was a motivation for missionaries in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. While over a thousand missionaries attended the conference, the subject of Islam was not given the attention that Zwemer felt was appropriate. He spoke about the ‘problem of Islam’ and the challenge it posed to world evangelisation, while others reported on the openness of Muslims in India, Russia, parts of Turkey and Persia, and on advances in Africa and the feasibility of mission in Arabia. It was agreed that the problem was the sheer fact of high Muslim populations rather than the theological challenge posed by Islam, and the general consensus was that the solution to the ‘problem of Islam’ was intensified mission to Muslims. One concrete result was a plan for a quarterly publication entitled The Moslem World.

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This first appeared in January 1911 with Zwemer as its editor, and became a leading missionary journal. The conference was attended by 1,215 delegates, all of them, apart from 170 from continental Europe, from Great Britain or the United States, an indication of the extraordinary missionary zeal of the Anglo-American world. None of the eight commissions of which it was composed dealt specifically with Islam, for the reason that it was dedicated to the non-Christian world as a whole and to mission as a world enterprise. Nevertheless, Islam played an important role in the reports as well as in the conference’s programme and meetings. Commissions I and IV in particular dealt with Islam. In Commission I, ‘Carrying the Gospel to all the non-Christian world’, it was pointed out that missionaries in India testified that Muslims were friendlier and more open than they had been a generation previously, and that missionaries in the Ottoman Empire reported on the willingness of Muslims to participate in Christian assemblies, which also applied to Muslims in Persia. The political upheavals in Islamic countries were seen as an advantage that should be exploited for mission. Commission I also emphasised the numerical population of Muslims worldwide and considered the spread of Islam, especially in Africa, as a danger that had to be stopped. The advance of Islam in Equatorial Africa raised the crucial question of whether the ‘dark’ continent should become Islamic or Christian. Commission III, ‘Education in relation to the Christianisation of national life’, dedicated a whole chapter of its report to the Islamic countries in the Middle East and dealt with missionary education methods in Muslim mission fields. In Commission IV, ‘The preparation of missionaries’, Islam was presented in an extremely discriminatory way. Commission V also dealt with the preparation of missionaries. It made recommendations for missions among Muslims by particularly emphasising the need for a thorough study of the particular religion with which the missionary was to deal and excellent language knowledge. Commission VII, ‘The home base of missions’, addressed Islam on the relationship of missionaries and indigenous converts to Islamic governments, as in Persia and Turkey. The report of Commission VIII, on ‘Co-operation and the promotion of unity’, recommended the organisation of regular conferences on missionary work among Muslims. The Edinburgh Conference was attended by a number of missionaries engaged in the study of Islam. George Robson (d. 1911) and Karl Kumm (d. 1930) pointed out the advance of Islam in Africa and the resulting ‘Muslim danger’ there. L.E. Hogberg (d. 1924) reported on the situation in East Turkestan, while William H.T. Gairdner (d. 1928) called for support for the missionary work in Egypt, and Johannes Lepsius (d. 1926) spoke



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about the need for Christian literature for Muslims. Samuel Zwemer gave a general report on mission to Muslims and the problems faced by missionary work among them. He argued that the conference should emphasise the Christian opportunities and duties that could lead to the evangelisation of the Islamic world. Annie van Sommer (d. 1937), who worked for the Zenana Mission and helped to create Christian literature in Arabic in Egypt, was also present in Edinburgh. The conference brought together some 40 people interested in Islam. These laid the foundation for the later Lucknow Conference (1911, see below). The Edinburgh conference drew attention to the lack of suitable literature, a point especially emphasised by Johannes Lepsius and made earlier at Alexandria. Mission strategy changed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century as a result of missionaries having learned lessons from the lack of success achieved among Muslims by missionary work of a strictly apologetic character. The appeal for suitable literature is an example of the transition from destructive to constructive tactics in missionary work. Apart from the theological relevance of the conference, Edinburgh was seen as strategically important for world mission because a new strategy had been drafted there. This included the transition from polemics to appeal and invitation in people’s own languages, though it was precisely this strategy that sparked criticism. It was objected that concentration on the goal of mission did not correspond to the actual meaning of mission, because it paid little attention to the message that was to be conveyed. Furthermore, there was criticism that the specific teachings of the various churches were disregarded because of the wish to have as many churches as possible participate in order to achieve the goal of world mission. It is therefore unclear what was at the centre of the conference: the churches’ search for unity among themselves or mission to the world. Lucknow 1911: ‘Second missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world’ As he had led the organisation of the Cairo Conference in 1906, Samuel Zwemer also organised a second Christian consultation with the same focus in Lucknow, India, in 1911. The lack of attention to Islam at the Edinburgh conference was made up for here with a gathering of 40 delegates who worked for the evangelisation of Muslims, including Zwemer himself, who had made only a few converts from former Muslims. This ‘failure’ was one of the reasons for the organisation of the missionary conferences.

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At the Lucknow Conference, Muslims in India were the main topic, and a greater degree of missionary commitment to the Muslim world was sought and demanded. Christian missionary societies had been founded in many areas of India. Hindus and people from lower castes converted to Christianity in large numbers, but missionaries met with great resistance from Indian Muslims. This led missionary thinkers to pessimistic attitudes about the general prospects of mission among Muslims. The conferences in Cairo and Lucknow (and to a slight extent also in Edinburgh) were therefore interested in finding new ways of evangelising Muslims. Zwemer attached special importance to the conversion of Indian Muslims because they represented a numerically significant group. As he put it: ‘The chief numerical strength of the Mohammedan Faith, however, is in India, which has a larger Moslem population than all Africa and far more than the total population of Arabia, Persia, Egypt and the Turkish Empire combined. By the last census the number of Moslems in India is 62,458,077’ (Moslem problem and peril, p. 5). The Lucknow Conference, which took place in the assembly hall of Isabella Thoborn College on 23-28 January 1911, therefore concentrated exclusively on missionary work among Muslims and the discussion of new mission strategies. It was attended by 160 delegates from 54 missionary societies. Among the participants were Zwemer, H.U.W. Stanton, E.M. Wherry (d. 1927), W.H.T. Gairdner (d. 1928), and George Alfred Lefroy (d. 1919). The conference was strongly interested in practical solutions, so the organisers proposed a programme of discussions and papers to formulate comprehensive ideas for the beginning of a new mission strategy. The image conveyed of Islam was mostly negative. However, some voices attributed the failure thus far to the fact that Islam was always criticised without acknowledgement of its good points, and argued that, instead of polemics and apologetics, mission should be conducted with appeals and invitations. In Lucknow, the participating churches and missionary societies agreed to master the difficult task of evangelising Muslims in cooperation with one another. This way, not only should missionary work succeed but the progress of Islam should also be stopped. The conference formulated the following statement: ‘As the Muslim hajj makes for the spirit of unity and pan-Islamism, so must Christian unity mark all our policy and strategy; there must be one united front and in all great moves the forces at work must move in concert.’ (Mylrea, Wherry and Zwemer, Lucknow, 1911, p. 10). The second important theme of the Lucknow Conference was the special training of Christian missionaries for the conversion of Muslims in view of the strong resistance among them. R.S. McClenahan (d. 1949),



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who was Dean of the American University in Cairo, emphasised that, for the training of missionaries working among Muslims, the appropriate languages and the study of Islamic literature were particularly important, and especially familiarity with the text of the Qur’an (Mylrea, Wherry and Zwemer, Lucknow, 1911, pp. 46-59). On the basis of this claim, many books on Islam were written by missionaries, such as Zwemer’s works and the introduction to the Arabic language for missionaries by A.T. Upson. E.M. Wherry described in detail the production of Christian literature and magazines in Urdu. In his article, Wherry himself raised objections to the Islamic faith and praised aggressive Christian writers (The Mohammedan world of to-day, pp. 147-71). However, this style did not pass without criticism, because many missionaries at the conference no longer saw favourable prospects for these polemical disputations. One of them was Canon John Ali Bakhsh of Lahore, a convert from Islam, who criticised the disputative style of much Christian literature. He claimed that such attacks on Islam had forced Muslims to take an aggressive stance towards the Christian faith. In his view, this was dangerous for the spread of Christianity. He argued that the aggressive style of missionary texts had been counterproductive and through them the idea of the corruption of the Bible had become more frequent among Muslims (Mylrea, Wherry and Zwemer, Lucknow, 1911, pp. 169-170). This change in missionary style had already been observed at the Edinburgh Conference (as above). The advent of the First World War radically and lastingly changed the political order of the world, and the world of missions. The missionary conference planned at Lucknow to take place in Cairo in 1916 never took place. The third and last conference met in Jerusalem in 1924. Significance The gatherings at Cairo and Lucknow, and relevant discussion at the Edinburgh Conference, represent the first large-scale effort by Christians to collaborate on mission to Muslims, to share resources and suggest approaches. Never before had this type of co-ordinated effort occurred. While many of those who participated held traditional negative views of Islam and engaged in aggressive tactics, the general trend was to move away from disputation towards more conciliatory approaches that aimed to cultivate friendship with Muslims and to build on what missionaries saw as Islam’s strengths, while not downplaying what they regarded as its weaknesses. Consequently, some missionaries earned the respect of their Muslim interlocutors, which was itself a development in ChristianMuslim relations.

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Although a direct link between these conferences and the emergence of dialogue as courteous exchange between Christians and Muslims in the mid-20th century may be tenuous, it is noteworthy that some major contributors to these initiatives, such as Jacques Jomier (d. 2008), Kenneth Cragg (d. 2012) and Maurice Borrmans (d. 2017), all of whom served as missionaries in Muslim contexts, can be regarded as having built on the ideas and trends that owe their origin or inspiration to these missionary gatherings. Publications S.M. Zwemer, The Moslem problem and peril. Facts and figures for the layman, New York, 1905, 1907 J.L. Barton, E.M. Wherry, and S.M. Zwemer (eds), The Mohammedan world of to-day, being papers read at the first missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world held at Cairo, April 4th-9th, 1906, New York, 1906 J.L. Barton, E.M. Wherry, and S.M. Zwemer (eds), The Mohammedan world of to-day, being papers read at the first missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world held at Cairo, April 4th-9th, 1906, New York, 19062; 100770793 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.M. Wherry et al. (eds), Methods of mission work among Moslems, being those papers read at the first missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world held at Cairo April 4th-9th 1906, New York, 1906; 008414808 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission I. Carrying the gospel to all the non-Christian world. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 15th June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910; 001936337 (digitised version of vols 1-9 available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission II. The church in the mission field. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 16th June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission III. Education in relation to the Christianisation of national life. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 17th June 1910 together with the discussion on Christian literature, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission IV. The missionary message in relation to non-Christian religions. With



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supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 18th June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission V. The preparation of missionaries. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 22nd June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission VI. The home base of missions. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 23rd June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission VII. Missions and governments. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 20th June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission VIII. Cooperation and the promotion of unity. With supplement: presentation and discussion of the report in the conference on 21st June 1910, Edinburgh, 1910 World Missionary Conference 1910, Report of Commission IX. The history and records of the conference together with addresses delivered at the evening meetings, Edinburgh, 1910 C.G. Mylrea, E.M. Wherry, and S.M. Zwemer (eds), Lucknow, 1911. Papers read and discussions on the training of missionaries and literature for Muslims at the general conference on missions to Muslims held at Lucknow, January 23-28, 1911, London, 1911; 007681875 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) C.G. Mylrea, E.M. Wherry, and S.M. Zwemer (eds), Islam and missions, being papers read at the second missionary conference on behalf of the Mohammedan world at Lucknow, January 23-28, 1911, New York, 1911; 006605616 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies K. Wetzel, Die Geschichte der christlichen Mission, Giessen, 2019 A.T. Upson, ‘Arabic Christian literature since the Lucknow Conference’, MW 3 (1913) 416-20 C. Watson, ‘The world missionary conference at Edinburgh and Islam’, MW 1 (1911) 59-66 A.T. Upson, ‘Story of the Nile Mission Press “Khutbas”’, The Missionary Review of the World 24 (1911) 744-6 G.H. Jones, ‘The Edinburgh Conference and the missionary message in its relation to non-Christian religions’, The Journal of Race Development 1 (1910) 147-55 Serkan Ince

Nineteenth-century British novelists on Islam This entry discusses the works of eight 19th-century British novelists who spent some time living and working in Muslim environments. Orientalist literary works written in Britain in the 19th century rarely departed from the tropes that Europe and Christianity were superior, that the East was despotic and that Islam was a dangerous religion, although they could also romanticise the East as an exotic, alluring venue for adventure. However, novels written by Europeans who spent time in the East sometimes offered alternative perspectives. While researching the works of Rudyard Kipling, Bart Jason Moore-Gilbert developed the category of Anglo-Indian Orientalism, which he contrasted with the Orientalism of Britain and the West, suggesting that Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) had painted too monochrome a picture (Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism, pp. 8-10). Said’s focus on the Arab world neglected Turkey, Iran and South Asia, although he did refer to Kipling (and introduced the Penguin edition of Kim). This entry extends Moore-Gilbert’s category to include literature produced elsewhere in the Orient, including more ambivalence about European superiority and frustration at decisions taken in Britain that failed to take account of local knowledge. While the writers of such works could offer readers an exotic Orient to titillate and entertain them, they also described it as a place where Europeans could be challenged by the food, the climate, diseases and even the boredom and loneliness of colonial service. The works covered here are a selection of a larger genre of literature written outside Britain. Some of them express ambivalence, some challenge tropes, some confirm tropes, and some offer a more ambiguous view of the Orient. James Justinian Morier Born in Smyrna, James Justinian Morier (1780-1849) worked for his father’s company there, and served as a British diplomat in Iran for several years. He first wrote memoranda as a diplomat, and then started writing fiction based on his experiences. His novels, The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), Zohrab the hostage (1832), Ayesha, the maid of Kars (1834), The Mirza (1841), and Misselmah. A Persian tale (1847) conveyed the ambivalent attitudes that Muslims and Christians held for one



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another. The novels are full of an indistinguishable mix of fact and fiction, as Morier himself admitted. He pointed out that, within a decade of interaction with European Christians, change had occurred even in the Muslim attitudes that he depicted. He begged his fellow Christians’ indulgence, as they must also have been acquainted with Muslims whose conduct would have been a credit to Christians. However, for many, it was preposterous to suggest that Christians could look to Muslims as examples of anything other than blind fanaticism, irrationality and violence. Some readers were shocked that he could depict a Muslim such as his character Hajji Baba, who was based on a real person, in such a positive way (Khattak, Victorians, p. 63). On the other hand, Morier saw Islam as a ‘great lie’ that continuing contact between Europe and the East would soon uncover. He can best be described as ambivalent towards Islam and to the possibility that Christians and Muslims might become friends. Morier’s vision that interaction between the two peoples would bring them closer found expression in the friendship that developed between him and Hajji Baba (a sobriquet denoting respect, essentially for Muslim pilgrims, but also used more generally), on whom he based the novel Hajji Baba of Ispahan, which he wrote after his retirement from government service. It became popular as an Oriental Gil Blas and went into several editions. The Persian ambassador of the time objected vociferously to the satire implicit in it, which was based on the experiences of the first Persian ambassador to England. In the advertisement to the second edition, Morier even explains that he was given the journal of Hajji Baba, who was the aide to the same Persian ambassador. He had first met this person by chance in Tocat, where he had stopped for a rest, when Hajji Baba’s servant asked him to come and see his master who was undergoing treatment and needed cheering up. To show his appreciation of his friend’s efforts in curing him, Hajji Baba gave him his journal so that he should publish it. Morier was delighted and, after editing the text, published it as The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan. Then ensues a picaresque tale reminiscent of the occidental version of Arabian Nights (Khattak, Victorians, p. 62). In Zohrab the hostage (1832) Morier made up for any earlier sympathetic inclination he may have displayed towards Muslims. The villain of the book is the despicable shah, a zealous promoter of his religion. He usurps power by initially killing his brother, the legitimate ruler, and capturing the rightful heirs, his nephew and niece Amima. In true Machiavellian fashion, the shah disposes of a neighbouring ruler, his friend who had helped him to attain power, although poetic justice is done when Zohrab,

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the son of this friend, falls into the shah’s hands and he tries to make political capital out of his hostage. Zohrab escapes, and a series of adventures is set in motion, so that eventually Amima is also rescued. The story is woven around the love between Zohrab and Amima, which arises from a chance encounter between them and survives the villainous machinations of the shah in his determination to maintain power. It is unfortunate that Morier did not follow his own specification and clarify the division between fact and fiction here. That division would have made the novel more credible if Morier had not reduced it to an indictment of Islam in general (Khattak, Victorians, p.63). In Ayesha, the maid of Kars (1834) Morier again tries to be even-handed by allowing some commendable features to appear in his Muslim characters. He juxtaposes European and Turk to give himself ample opportunities to create scenes that would be highly popular with a contemporary audience. Bringing the novel closer to home would make it more intensely felt, so Ayesha’s father is depicted as an Englishman who had settled in Athens so that his child would grow up under Attic influences. Other characters include the Greek Zabetta and her lover Suleiman, who run away from their employer, taking the employer’s baby with them. They raise the child as a Muslim in order to appease Suleiman’s conscience, and they name her Ayesha. Osmond, the hero, is the quintessential Englishman of the age. On a journey through Turkey, he sees Ayesha while passing through Kars and falls in love with her, so he decides to extend his stay in order to see more of her. Osmond is aided in this endeavour by Zabetta, who arranges for the two to meet on the roof terrace, but a muezzin sees the couple alone and raises the alarm. An investigation is launched, and Osmond is subjected to a religious inquisition. The mufti gives him the option of conversion or death. The pasha, who is sympathetic towards him, arranges a sporting event as a distraction in order to allow him to escape. Osmond flees and seeks refuge with Cara Bey, the villain, the epitome of all deceits and tyrannies, cruelties and loathsome sensualities, who exemplifies all the wickedness a traveller is expected to encounter on a journey through Turkey and Persia. Cara Bey, a Yezidi chief, treacherously decides to abduct Ayesha himself and to imprison and eventually poison Osmond. However, Osmond manages to rescue Ayesha from his castle with the help of Russian soldiers. Many adventures ensue, but the story ends with Ayesha’s baptism and her resumption of her original name, Mary. The preface to the second edition, and also the early chapters, are full of attacks



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on Muslim characters. These attacks disappear in the second volume and only surface again towards the end (Khattak, Victorians, p. 70). Philip Meadows Taylor The thread of partiality towards Muslims was strengthened by Philip Meadows Taylor (1808-76) who went to India at the age of 15 and served in a variety of military and civilian posts until his retirement in 1860. In Tippoo Sultaun. A tale of the Mysore war (1840), a cohort led by a local ally, bringing reinforcements to the beleaguered Tippoo, experience many adventures before they reach him and witness his final stand against the British. Interwoven is the story of a fresh aristocratic English conscript and the travails he endures before his final rescue. Taylor did not depict Tippoo Sultaun, a historical character who ruled a powerful Indian state, as the monster or bogeyman who was conjured up to chasten or frighten children during earlier days of Anglo-Indian conflict when Tippoo’s might was at its strongest. Instead, Taylor’s perceptive narrative points to a genuine feel for the people and land, which make the depiction both entertaining and authentic. The novel is also authentic in its portrayal of characteristics of the populace, such as the cook Zulficar grumbling to his horse Motee, the exhaustion of the travellers and the details of the terrain they were passing through (Tippoo Sultaun, London, 1880, p. 4). The narrator thinks that Tippoo Sultaun had not been a ‘perfect Musulman’, describing him as childish, lustful and lacking morals, which presumably implies that a better Muslim would be a moral person, and suggests that morality is not a Christian monopoly. While it is deeply imbued with the colours of India and its inhabitants, the novel maintains the trope of Christian superiority over Muslims, though this is perceptibly lighter than in works that were written earlier by other writers. Charles Murray Charles Murray (1806-95), also a diplomat turned author, was British Consul General in Cairo (1846-52), and later ambassador in Persia (18545), where he alienated the shah and had to shut the embassy, in part sparking the Anglo-Persian war (1856-7). In contrast to both Morier and Taylor, he was anything but ambivalent in polarising good Christian and bad Muslim. In his story Hassan, or the child of the pyramid (1857), an

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abandoned baby is taken in by travelling Muslims. When he grows up, he exhibits an exemplary character, which Murray attributes to his true identity as a Christian. The reluctance of Christian readers to accept that Muslim characters could be noble, and their tendency to identify those with higher characteristics as coming from Christian descent continued late into 19th-century fiction. Murray’s Nour-ed-dyn (1883), published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, is a moral fable in which the use of Muslim names and terms is no more than a device to lend exotic colour. William Delafield Arnold Murray’s inimical attitude was balanced by William Delafield Arnold (1828-59), who went to India as an ensign in an East India Company regiment in 1848. After attending Rugby School followed by a very brief period at Oxford, he transferred to the civil service and became the Punjab’s first director of public education. He quickly took religion out of public schools so that Hindus and Muslims did not have to study the Bible and, with the participation of local communities, he pioneered the provision of village-based schools for girls. His Oakfield; or, Fellowship in the East (1854) is a militantly moral novel, which the East India Company strongly resented because it offered a critical comment on British rule in India and the futility of missionary efforts. Nevertheless, Arnold also, seemingly unconsciously, implies an attitude of Western superiority when he says, for example, that a comparison of Dak bungalows in India with the inns of England cannot be justified. In the novel, Oakfield leaves Oxford without sufficient vocation to enter the church, and instead enrols as an officer in the military forces of the East India Company. In Hajepoor, he is revolted by the ‘ribaldry’ of his fellow officers and he boycotts the mess, an example that converts the young Vernon, who dies piously after a river accident. Oakfield goes up country to Allahbad, where he becomes friendly with a wise magistrate, Mr Middleton. He refuses to be provoked into a duel by the local mess bully, Stafford, who speaks coarsely to Middleton’s daughter Fanny. Oakfield is provoked, however, into horsewhipping Stafford’s insolent emissary and is court martialled, though he is exonerated. He participates in the Sikh Wars of 1846, and later he becomes a magistrate, administering justice to the natives of whom he has a higher opinion than most Englishmen. He dies after six years of exhausting efforts to raise the moral tone of the colony.



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William Wilson Hunter Another Raj civil servant, William Wilson Hunter (1840-1900), used his novel, The old missionary (1895), to illustrate the critical report that he had written earlier on how Muslims working in the civil service had been relegated to menial positions. In the story, Trafalgar Douglas, the elderly medical missionary, works in an isolated hill station unattached to any church agency and attended by a single Muslim servant. He has found a ‘serene’ place ‘beyond the perturbations of dogma’ (p. 74). His aim is simply to help people, and he spends a lot of time settling local disputes while making few converts. Some of the more zealous of these converts begin to pray for what they regard as his true conversion, and one of them, a deacon, is outraged when Douglas will not permit the reading of the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday (p. 124). The group would appeal to his superiors except that he has none, even though the congregation is officially Anglican. He finds India’s ancient religious literature deeply spiritual and rejects the notion that millions will be eternally damned because they do not explicitly affirm the Christian faith. Lillias Hamilton If the time spent by representatives of the Raj in the countries where they worked was brief, it is not surprising that the assumptions they expressed in their writings were superficial. One example of this is Lillias Hamilton’s (1828-1925) A vizier’s daughter. A tale of the Hazara war of 1900, which is set in Kabul and has as its heroine Gul Begum, the princess of a rebellious faction that is eventually subdued. It contains a portrait of the amir, whom Hamilton describes as ‘no Mohamedan’ (London, 1900, p. 16) because he pursues a policy of reconciling feuds rather than one of retaliation, which in her view is required by the Qur’an (see Bennett, ‘Retribution in Islam’, p. 15). Her estimation of the Afghan amir echoes the view of Morier, who also thought that Islam demands retribution: as he writes in Misselmah. A Persian tale (1847), ‘The law of retaliation is ever imperative upon a Muhammadan’ (p. 46). Although Hamilton went to Afghanistan at a time when few, if any, English women travelled there at all, let alone without husbands or companions, she expressed aversion ‘to cultures other than her own’ (Khattak, Victorians, p. 65), and she found nothing commendable in Afghanistan, where there was no joy, peace, rest, comfort or ease. If her readers thought that her story lacked

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any ‘ray of hope’, she had at least succeeded in drawing a fair picture of Afghanistan. As in Oakfield’s The old missionary, the Anglo-Indian trope of sacrificing comfort that was demanded by life in the East appears here. John W. Sherer A corresponding attitude of superiority and disdain was expressed by John W. Sherer (d. 1911), the son of a senior Bengal civil servant. He served in various government posts in India and rose to the Indian Bench before retiring. He wrote numerous books on India, including A princess of Islam (1897), in which he continues the trend when the Englishman George asserts that the secret that had enabled Europeans, despite every disadvantage, to override those Asiatics with whom they had been brought into contact was the superiority of the Western over the Eastern character. The novel begins when George is asked to marry a Muslim princess by her uncle, the nawab of an Indian state. In Islamic terms this is very unusual and it is against the wishes of the princess’s relatives and in defiance of religious practice. After the marriage, George leaves his Indian bride at home and goes away to England. There he marries again, and the abandoned Indian wife dies after hearing about his new bride (Khattak, Victorians, p. 64). Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is widely considered to be the quintessential Victorian in terms of his attitude of effortless superiority and racial stereotyping, epitomised in his poem ‘The white man’s burden’ (1899), which refers to the so-called moral mission of civilising the non-Western world (he wrote it about the America-Philippines War). The idea that East and West are irreconcilably and inalienably different owes much to his writing. His work contains many sweeping generalisations about Oriental dishonesty, chaos and need of moral supervision, yet in ‘The ballad of East and West’ (1889), the poem from which an East-West polarisation is derived, he implies an exception to this rule: ‘There is neither East nor West […] / When two strong men stand face to face’ (Collected verse, p. 136). Like others, Kipling could be ambivalent about European superiority. His depiction of missionaries who lump ‘nine-tenths of the world under the title of heathen’ (Kim, p. 100; references are to the 1914 edition) is far from sympathetic. He looked on certain races as masculine



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and martial, others as effeminate and weak, though clever and cunning: thus, Afghans and Rajputs fitted the first category while Bengalis fitted the second (see Kim, p. 324, for the trope of Bengali deceit: ‘He lied to them like a Bengali’). In his last work, Kim, Hurree Babu, assistant to Colonel Creighton the British official, though clearly knowledgeable, is depicted as ‘the stereotypical [...] ontologically funny native, hopelessly trying to be like us’, but incapable of emulating Creighton’s efficiency or achievements (see Said, Orientalism, p. 33). In contrast, the rugged, red-haired Mahbub Ali, the main Muslim character, is manly and skilled at his work (see the illustration facing p. 136). Muslims, especially from frontier zones, fitted Kipling’s concept of masculinity and muscular religion that is reflected in several of his characters. Thus Ali, depicted as devout, was based on someone he knew (Hopkirk, Quest, pp. 60-1). Possibly influenced by the Freemasons, whom he joined in 1885 while working in Lahore, Kipling grew to ascribe the same basic moral truths to all major religions, and he could be markedly sympathetic towards Islam. His view is probably summed up in the words he gives to his character Mahbub Ali, ‘The matter of creeds is like horseflesh. [...] Therefore, I say in my heart the faiths are like horses. Each has merit in its own country’ (Kim, pp. 164-5). Kipling admired and cited the Qur’an, habitually referred to God as Allāh (Salesses, ‘God and Allah’, p. 1), described visits to Al-Azhar and to mosques, and portrayed Cairo as a sorceress that captured his heart (Letters of travel, p. 240). In the ‘Ballad of East and West’, he gives an interpretation of Q 2:178 on retribution (Collected verse, pp. 136-41) that is much closer than in other writers to a Muslim view that encourages restitution not retribution (see Khattak, Victorians, pp. 117-19) In Kim, the hero (who, like the young Kipling, was ‘more fluent in Hindustani than in English’; Hopkirk, Quest, p. 19) slips into and out of the dress of both Hindus and Muslims and passes himself off as each with ease, and he can recite the Qur’an as if he were a mullah. In one scene, he acts like a Muslim when he greets his teacher in the Muslim way, although he is no longer playing that role. After asking himself earlier in the novel who Kim, ‘friend of all the world’, is, whether ‘Musulman, Hindu, Jain or Buddhist’? (p. 164), in the end he decides to be content with being Kim (pp. 331-2), while nothing he says repudiates any of these religious identities. Rather, he identifies himself with the clay of India herself: ‘It was clay of his clay.’ It can be concluded that he embraced India’s multiple religious identity.

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Kipling said that Allāh had given him ‘two separate sides to my head’ (‘The two-sided man’, Kim, epigraph to ch. 8, p. 150), meaning that he saw the world through both European and Indian lenses. It is difficult to find anything negative about Islam in Kipling, while he found Hinduism much less attractive: thus, in Kim, Ali is Kim’s ‘real mentor’ rather than the Buddhist lama (James, ‘Illustration’, p. 388). On the one hand, Kipling could not imagine an India without British rule. On the other, he thought that the unwillingness of the British to recognise India’s cultural richness and their support for Christian evangelism did more harm than good: ‘Western civilization,’ he wrote, was a ‘devastating and a selfish game’ (Letters of travel, p. 247), and superiority did not always translate into improving much in India. In his short story ‘The head of the district’ (1890), London’s appointment of a Hindu as district commissioner in a mainly Muslim area was a disaster (see Morey, ‘Kipling’, p. 109). Scott cites Kipling’s words from ‘The man who was’ (1890) that Asia is not going to be civilised by following the methods of the West because ‘there is too much Asia’ (‘Kipling’, p. 310; see ‘The man who was’, p. 99). Significance British writers who lived in the East almost all shared the dominant European attitudes of racial, religious, moral and civilisational superiority that saw the East in need of supervision and guidance. Many of the writers discussed above were engaged in tasks related to governing India or representing Britain in the Muslim world, and were thus present in the East as colonial or diplomatic officials. Many were professionally engaged in collecting information that the colonial authorities used for purposes of control, thus fitting Edward Said’s representation of the Orientalist enterprise as one of a ‘dialectic of information and control’, as ‘knowledge gives power’ (Orientalism, p. 36). Hunter, for example, was largely responsible for the voluminous A statistical account of Bengal (London, 1875-7), while Arnold and Taylor had important civil service posts that involved compiling reports and imparting information to their superiors. Kipling, a private citizen, was not officially part of the colonial system, but he fully subscribed to the need to produce information so that the East could be mapped, understood and governed. Archaeology and historical reconstruction, too, helped to tell the East’s story from the West’s point of view. Taylor engaged in significant archaeological research, while many of Kipling’s characters produced surveys, reports or dictionaries. Hunter’s missionary, though half-blind, was working on a dictionary of the local language (Old missionary, p. 26).



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Despite this, some of the works surveyed depart from the dominant paradigms or hint at ambiguities, such as the lack of moral character among the British servants of the Raj depicted in Oakfield, who were supposedly there to bring morality to Indians, or the possibility, suggested in Morier’s novels, that Muslims could set an example worthy enough for Christians to follow. Some would think it preposterous and unacceptable for an English boy such as Kim to be trained by a Muslim whom he respected and admired. On the other hand, Murray clung to the trope that good Muslims must somehow be descended from Christians. Some of these residents in the East were misinformed about Islam and other religions, and some perpetuated negative tropes. However, those who presented the East as interesting, with a rich spiritual legacy, or as a place where European superiority was not always obvious may have contributed to the development of a less polarised view of East-West relations, including those between Christians and Muslims. Kipling was an advocate of racist ideas, yet the India he depicted was a place where racially superior Englishmen experienced ‘thwarted dreams, [...] disillusionment, heat, disease, loneliness, boredom’, while ‘its paradoxical counterpart, social claustrophobia, conspired to grind down all but the hardiest souls’ (Morey, ‘Kipling’, p. 109). In some ways Kipling did ‘know ’ India, because he moved outside the seclusion of the British cantonment, where many English only ever encountered Indians as their servants, into the streets and alleys of Lahore, when he worked there as a journal editor. His ‘intimacy’ with and ‘love’ of the city ‘inspired some of his most powerful writing’ (Hopkirk, Quest, p. 54). According to David Scott, although he is usually represented as the bard of Western imperialism, Kipling does not quite fit Said’s paradigm ‘with regard to religion’, since his work ‘has sympathetic undertones for non-Western cultures’ (Scott, ‘Kipling’, p. 325). In Kipling’s work, the Orient is not reduced to a single essence. He presents a variety of ‘Orientalisms’ (Morey, ‘Kipling’, p. 121), challenging Said’s singular notion of a fixed image in the Western mind. Kipling undermines one of the dominant tropes of Orientalism, the assumption of irreconcilable differences between the ‘European mind’ and the ‘Oriental mind’, by making Kim so very comfortable with his hybrid self that he could think and act like an Oriental (see e.g. Kim, pp. 30, 270). Scott suggests that at times Kipling ‘undercut binary divides’ and ‘cultural supremacy’ (Scott, ‘Kipling’, p. 324), thus undermining the claim made by the missionary in Kim that ‘one can never fathom the Oriental mind’ (p. 109) by blurring the ‘us-them’ boundary. Said’s introduction to the Penguin edition describes

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Kim as a great work of the imagination, but sees it as unrelentingly imperialist, written from the point of view of a ‘massive colonial system’ (p. 10), of India as unchanging and incapable of change (p. 9), and as replete with references to the binary difference between East and West. India could never become independent. In contrast, Morey sees Kipling’s work as revealing ‘how British imperialism’s grasp on power-knowledge was always slippery and uncertain’ (Morey, ‘Kipling’, p. 106), which makes the claim that Britain was in total control of India’s destiny somewhat dubious. With specific reference to Christian-Muslim relations, several of the works surveyed here exhibit an ambivalence about the viability of the imperial project, pouring doubt on Europe’s superiority over all other races, accompanied by ambivalence about the judgement that Muslims could not be good people. The protagonist in Hunter’s The old missionary thinks that many non-Christians in India live ‘good lives’ and will not go to hell (p. 102). This opens up the possibility that Christians might rethink their relationships with Muslims and, as is suggested in The old missionary and by Kipling’s view of universal religious truth, perhaps pay less heed to the need to persuade Muslims to accept every single dogma of traditional Christian teaching. Might some type of hybrid religious identity be possible? Kim’s multiple religious identity has many precedents in pre-colonial India, where religions were not perceived as ‘ timeless essences – closed, self-contained and mutually exclusive’, but as porous and capable of cross fertilisation and even dual or multiple membership (R.M. Eaton, The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, Berkeley CA, 1993, p. 129). The British wanted to pit different religious communities, castes and ethnicities against one another because this played into their claim that their presence was needed to prevent bloodshed and discrimination against minorities. Bart Moore-Gilbert argues that, in the late 19th century, Anglo-Indian writers shifted from a more positive view of Hindus and a very negative view of Muslims to seeing the former as troublemaking anticolonial activists and the latter as likely allies in maintaining the Raj in order to prevent a Hindu take-over of India (Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism, pp. 3-4). Hinduism was represented as ‘idiotic’, and Islam as a more appealing, even rational religion. This reflects the divide-and-rule policy that wanted to encourage Hindu-Muslim rivalry, but at the same time it represents a change in how Muslims were perceived. Despite some of this literature expressing ambivalence and even challenging the dominant paradigm of Christian superiority and Muslim inferiority, as well as the need to convert Muslims to the Christian faith, very



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little really changed on the ground during British rule. Nevertheless, a few readers in Britain may have decided after reading this literature that the West is not as superior as people took it to be, and that positive engagement with other religions, including Islam, was worth pursuing. A few may have concluded that conversion might not be the only goal of encounter between people of a different faith. Publications Where there are many editions, such as for Kipling’s works, only the earliest are listed, together with critical editions and first translation into other languages. Punjabee [W.D. Arnold], Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East, London, 1853 W.D. Arnold, Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East, London, 18542; 011547723 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.D. Arnold, Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East, Boston MA, 18552; 011628303 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.D. Arnold, Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East, Leicester, 1973 (repr. Of second edition with Introduction by K. Allott) L. Hamilton, A vizier’s daughter. A tale of the Hazara War, London, 1900; 2597 (digitised version available through Nineteenth Century Collections Online) L. Hamilton, Die Tochter des Wesirs. Eine Erzählung aus dem HazaraKrieg, trans. G. Baumann, Bubendorf, 2000 (German trans.) L. Hamilton, A vizier’s daughter. A tale of the Hazara War, Kabul, 2004 L. Hamilton, Dukhtar-i vazīr, trans. Gul Hussayn Aḥmadī, Kabul, 2012 (Persian trans.) W.W. Hunter, The old missionary, Oxford, 1895, repr. 1896, 1897; 006252221 (digitised version of 1896 printing available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Yussuf [R. Kipling], ‘A ballad of East and West’, Macmillan’s Magazine 61 (December 1889) 123-4; 5977134 (digitised version available through British Periodicals Collection II) R. Kipling, ‘The head of the district’, Macmillan’s Magazine 61 (January 1890) 228-40; 6072601 (digitised version available through British Periodicals Collection II) R. Kipling, ‘The man who was’, Macmillan’s Magazine 61 (April 1890) 465-72; 5979717 (digitised version available through British Periodicals Collection II)

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R. Kipling, ‘The white man’s burden’, McClure’s Magazine 12/4 (1899) 290-2; 135628529 (digitised version available through American Periodicals Series) R. Kipling, Life’s handicap, London, 1891, ‘The man who was’, 84-101, ‘The head of the district’, 101-29; 009977446 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Kipling, Fra Indien. Fortaellinger, trans. A. Ipsen, Copenhagen, 1892 (Danish trans.; 99122197983405763 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) R. Kipling, Berättelser från Indien, trans. H. Cavallin, Stockholm, 1907 (Swedish trans.) R. Kipling, Au hasard de la vie, trans. A. Savine, Paris, 1910 (French trans.); bpt6k6292720z (digitised version available through BNF) R. Kipling, Indiĭskie razskazy, St Petersburg, 1910 [?] (Russian trans.) R. Kipling, Nel vortice della vita, trans. M. Malatesta, Milan, 1928 (Italian trans.) R. Kipling, El hándicap de la vida, trans. A. Poljak, Madrid, 1989 (Spanish trans.) R. Kipling, Aki király akart lenni válogatott elbeszélések, trans. Sári Júlia, Budapest, 2010 (Hungarian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, London, 1901; 9781139541176 (digitised version available through Cambridge Library Collection) R. Kipling, Kim, Garden City NY, 1901; 004512510 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. A. Halling, Copenhagen, 1901 (Danish trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, hela världens lilla vän. Berättelse från Indien, trans. E. Boheman, Stockholm, 1901 (Swedish trans.) R. Kipling, Kim. Roman, trans. L. Fabulet and C. Fountaine-Walker, Paris, 1902 (French trans.); bpt6k6288785w (digitised version available through BNF) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. M. Gąsiorowska, Warsaw, 1902 (Polish trans.) R. Kipling, Kim. Ein Roman aus dem gegenwärtigen Indien, Berlin, 1908 (German trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, Moscow, 1909 (Russian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim. Romanzo indiano, trans. P. Silenziario, Milan, 1913 (Italian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim (Bombay Edition of the Works of Rudyard Kipling 15), London, 1914; 100024792 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)



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R. Kipling, Kim, trans. H. Leiviskä, Hämeenlinna, 1917 (Finnish trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. J. Izquierdo Croselles, Madrid, 1921 (Spanish trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. Z. Bartos, Budapest, 1926 (Hungarian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim. Kulturna slika suvremene Indije, trans. M. Ratković, Zagreb, 1928 (Serbian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. C.J. Hambro, Oslo, 1929 (Norwegian trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. R. Slootjes, Helmond, 1933 (Dutch trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. B. Pereira, Sao Paulo, 1934 (Portuguese trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, trans. Miyanishi Hōitsu, Tokyo, 1952 (Japanese trans.) R. Kipling, Ḳim. Sipur me-ḥaye Hodu, Tel Aviv, 1954 (Hebrew trans.) R. Kipling, Jimu, trans. Xinmei Tang, Taipei, 1981 (Chinese trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, ed. E. Said, London, 1989 R. Kipling, Kim, trans. Zainal Abidin Bakar, Kuala Lumpur, 1989 (Malay trans.) R. Kipling, Kim, Ho Chi Minh, 1998 (Vietnamese trans.) R. Kipling, Kim kı̄ kahānı̄ aur cı̄te ke nishān, trans. Afzaal Ahmad, Muhammad Afzal, Lahore, 2000 (Urdu trans.) R. Kipling, Kim. Authoritative text, backgrounds, criticism, ed. Z.T. Sullivan, New York, 2002 R. Kipling, Kima, trans. Binaẏa Mohana Śaikīẏā, Guwahati, 2005 (Assamese trans.) R. Kipling, K’im, trans. Ch’ang-su Ha, Paju, 2007 (Korean trans.) R. Kipling, Collected verse of Rudyard Kipling, Garden City NY, 1907, ‘The ballad of East and West’, 136-41, ‘The white man’s burden’, 21517; 004458119 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Kipling, Letters of travel (1892-1913), London, 1920 J.J. Morier, The adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan in England, London, 1824, repr. 1828, 1835; 007690926 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.J. Morier, The adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan in England, Philadelphia, 1824; 008669757 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.J. Morier, Die bunten Abenteuer Hadschi Babo’s von Ispahan, trans. F. Schott, Vienna, 1825 (German trans.); L.eleg.g. 577 g-41/42 (digitised version available through MDZ) J.J. Morier, The Mirza, London, 1841

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J.J. Morier, The adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan in England, London, 1850 J.J. Morier, The adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan in England, London, 1856; 008667520 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.J. Morier, The adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan in England, London, 1863 J.J. Morier, Haji Babayi arkatsnerě Parskastanum, trans. Mkrtichʻ Karapetian, Tbilisi, 1904 (Armenian trans.) J.J. Morier, Sarguzasht-i ḥàjì Bàbà-yi Isfahànì, trans. Mìrzà Ḥabìb Dastàn (not Shaykh Ahmad-i Kirmani as recorded on title page), Calcutta, 1905 (Persian trans.) J.J. Morier, Pokhozhdeniia Khadzhi Baby, trans. N. Khardzhiva, Moscow, 1931 (Russian trans.) J.J. Morier, Hadji Baba uit Ispahan, trans. G.W.J. Drewes, Arnhem, 1948 (Dutch trans.) J.J. Morier, Ḥājī Bābā Iṣfahānī, trans. Mīrzā Qalīc Begu, Hyderabad, 1961 (Sindhi trans.) J.J. Morier, Les aventures de Hadji Baba d’Ispahan, trans. E.J. Finbert, Paris, 1983 (French trans.) J.J. Morier, Isfaḣanly Hajybabanyn majăralary, trans. Zakir Săfăroghlu, Shahin Khălilli, Baku, 1993 (Azerbaijani trans.) J.J. Morier, Las aventuras de Hadjí Babá de Ispahán, trans. M. Pereira, Barcelona, 2001 (Spanish trans.) J.J. Morier, İsfahanlı Hacı Baba’nın maceraları, trans. Sevcan Tıknas, Ankara, 2004 (Turkish trans.) J.J. Morier, Yisifahan de Hazhi Baba, trans. Hong Ren, Beijing, 2008 (Chinese trans.) J.J. Morier, Zohrab the hostage, London, 1832, repr. 1833, 1837; P.o.angl. 249 p-1-3 (digitised version available through MDZ) J.J. Morier, Zohrab, Stockholm, 1834 (Swedish trans.) J.J. Morier, Zohrab der Geissel, trans. F.L. Rhode, Hanau, 1837-8 (German trans.) J.J. Morier, Suhrāb. Qismatī az vaqāyʻa-i salṭanat-i Āghā Muḥammad Khān Qājār, trans. Ḥasan Nāṣir, Tehran, 2003 (Persian trans.)



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J.J. Morier, Ayesha, the maid of Kars, London, 1834, repr. 1846, 1856, 1878; P.o.angl. 249 q-1-3 (digitised version of 1834 edition available through MDZ) J.J. Morier, Ayesha, eller Den sköna flickan i Kars, Stockholm, 1836 (Swedish trans.) J.J. Morier, Aejischa, die Jungfrau von Kars, trans. F.W. Bruckbau, Augsburg, 1838 (German trans.); P.o.angl. 249 m-1/2 (digitised version of 1834 edition available through MDZ) J.J. Morier, Ayesha, the maid of Kars, Paris, 1843 J.J. Morier, Misselmah. A Persian tale, Brighton, 1847; BL:A0021847128 (digitised version available through Google Books) C.A. Murray, Hassan, or the child of the pyramid, London, 1857; 008720173 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) C.A. Murray, Hassan, or the child of the pyramid, Edinburgh, 1901; 007668466 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) C.A. Murray, Nour-ed-dyn, or the light of the faith. An eastern fairy tale, London, 1883 M. Taylor, Tippoo Sultaun, London, 1840; 006131540 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Taylor, Tippoo Sultaun, London, 18802, repr. 1883, 1887, 1898; 100763540 (digitised version of 1880 edition available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Taylor, Tippoo Sultaun, New Delhi, 1986, repr. 2001, 2003 J.W. Sherer, A princess of Islam, London, 1897; bl-003366592 (digitised version available through Historical Texts) Studies P. Morey, ‘Kipling and “Orientalism”. Cracks in the wall of imperial narrative’, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20 (2018) 106-22 E. James, ‘Kipling and book illustration’, in J. Bryant and S. Weber (eds), John Lockwood Kipling. Arts and crafts in the Punjab and London, New York, 2017, 361-99 B.J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism, Abingdon, 2014 C. Bennett, ‘Retribution in Islam (Q 2:178). Fact and fiction in Victorian literature’, Victorian Review 37 (2011) 13-16 D. Scott, ‘Kipling, the Orient and Orientals. “Orientalism” reoriented?’, Journal of World History 22 (2011) 299-328

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J.J. Salesses, ‘God and Allah in the works of Rudyard Kipling’, Forum on Public Policy 2 (2009) np; http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow nload?doi=10.1.1.521.5568&rep=rep1&type=pdf S.K.K. Khattak, Islam and the Victorians. Nineteenth century perceptions of Muslim practices and beliefs, London, 2008 S.L. Cohen, art. ‘Hamilton, Lillias Anna (1858-1925)’, in ODNB J.S. Cotton, rev. S. Gopal, art. ‘Hunter, Sir William Wilson (1840-1900)’, in ODNB R. Garnett, rev. D. Washbrook, art. ‘Taylor, Philip Meadows (1808-1876)’, in ODNB S. Lane-Poole, rev. E. Baigent, art. ‘Morier, James Justinian (1782-1849)’, in ODNB H.E. Maxwell, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, art. ‘Murray, Sir Charles Augustus (1806-1895)’, in ODNB T. Pinney, art. ‘Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865-1936)’, in ODNB K. Prior, art. ‘Arnold, William Delafield (1828-1859)’, in ODNB P. Hopkirk, Quest for Kim. In search of Kipling’s Great Game, Oxford, 1997 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978 Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak

Egypt General Mission The Egypt General Mission (EGM) was an interdenominational body of British Protestants established in 1898. It began when a band of seven young men from England and Northern Ireland agreed to commit themselves to missionary service in Egypt, inaugurating what was initially known as the Egypt Mission Band. It was renamed the Egypt General Mission in 1903. Its missionaries were laymen and laywomen whose primary objective was the evangelisation of Muslims. The mission’s work commenced in Cairo. After two of the group tried to initiate work in Upper Egypt in Abnoub, a village north of Asyut, the EGM shifted its work to Lower Egypt (the Delta), where it progressively expanded its efforts into various cities and villages, including Bilbeis, Shibin al-Qanatir, Alexandria, Suez, Ismailia, Tel al-Kabir and the Cairo suburb of Ezbet alZeitoun. At one time, it had over 60 missionaries in Egypt, two-thirds of whom were women. EGM missionaries established schools for both boys and girls, provided medical care through a hospital and dispensaries, held meetings for Muslims, operated book depots, and produced and distributed Christian literature. Much of their work centred on women, out of concern about female illiteracy, marriage at young ages, polygamy and high divorce rates. Missionaries did not represent any single church and did not organise a church of their own. They urged converts, who were few in number, to join other bodies, in most cases the Evangelical Church, which had been established by American Presbyterian missionaries. In December 1955, the Egyptian government announced Law 583, which declared that private schools in Egypt were required to teach the subject of religion to their Egyptian pupils in accordance with the pupils’ own religion and the syllabus set by the government. They were not allowed to teach pupils any religion other than their own or have them participate in religious activities other than their own, even if this was approved by their guardian (Sharkey, American Evangelicals, p. 198). Rather than comply, the EGM closed two of its schools, in Port Said and Ismailia. Then, as a result of the attacks launched by Britain, France and Israel on Egypt in October 1956, the Egyptian government deported Britons and these deportations ended the Egypt General Mission (Sharkey, American Evangelicals, pp. 200-1, 203).

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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary EGM News, London, 1900-14 C. Inwood, ‘Introduction’, in G. Swan, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, London, 1923 Archives Oxford, Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies – includes copies of the books discussed, as well as EGM News (1900-45), The Muezzin, a call to prayer (a missionary magazine for children and young people published bimonthly between 1908-15), mission records, diaries, and correspondence Secondary H. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt. Missionary encounters in an age of empire, Princeton NJ, 2008

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Egypt General Mission Date 19th century Original Language English Description A number of publications include references ranging from a sentence to several paragraphs about the EGM, and there are also five short booklength treatments. Here, attention is concentrated on four of the latter, although one of these is a revised version of the fifth. They are treated in chronological order of publication. The first,‘Blessed be Egypt’. A missionary story, edited by W.J.W. Roome, takes its main title from Isaiah 19:25. It appeared in 1898, shortly after the Egypt Mission Band was first formed and consists of 104 pages. The main text covers pages 11-104, divided into six chapters. The first is an introduction (pp. 11-13), followed by ch. 2 (pp. 14-28), a brief description of the work of earlier Protestant missionaries in Egypt, which expresses the conviction that the first seven missionaries of the Egypt Mission Band had been called by God to contribute to this work. Ch. 3 (pp. 30-9) tells how the original seven came to the conclusion that it was to Egypt they should go, their ‘desire being to strengthen the hands of those already working there’ (p. 37). They saw ‘ample scope’ for themselves ‘in helping the workers who are labouring in the field, and in breaking up new ground’. They believed they were ‘going into the very citadel of Mohammedanism’, but went in the confidence that ‘with God all things are possible’ (p. 38). In



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Ch. 4 (pp. 40-71), each of the seven briefly recounts his spiritual journey and they tell how they came individually to the conclusion that they were to go to Egypt. Ch. 5 (pp. 73-92) describes briefly the land of Egypt and its people, and the closing chapter (pp. 93-104) speaks of the necessity of prayer in support of mission in general, and gives suggestions of what to pray for, particularly as regards the task of winning ‘dark Egypt for Jesus’ (p. 99). The second publication, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, which takes its title from Luke 22:35, was written by George Swan, one of the seven original missionaries. It first appeared in 1913 and has been reprinted in revised editions, which are discussed below. The third publication, In troublous times, also written by Swan, is a sequel to ‘Lacked ye anything?’. Published in 1923, it consists of 96 pages divided into seven chapters, and tells the story of the EGM during the years of World War I, hence the title. In addition to the mission’s traditional work, it reports on the work done among British Commonwealth troops who were stationed in Egypt for shorter or longer periods of time. The EGM missionaries, like those of other mission agencies, contributed to the troops’ medical as well as spiritual needs. The book also tells stories, especially in ch. 6, titled ‘Living stones’ (pp. 74-83), about numerous Muslim individuals who benefitted from the mission’s work, stories that would tug at the heartstrings of supporters and other readers back home, a common feature of missionary publications of the time. In 1932, the revised edition of ‘Lacked ye anything?’ appeared, 89 pages long consisting of the title page with publication information (p. 1), a foreword (pp. 3-4) and the preface to the first edition (p. 5), followed by the main text (pp. 6-88), which is divided into ten chapters, and a final page (p. 89) giving information about the EGM. This short book brings the history of the mission up to date from World War I to the date of publication. It utilises material from the two publications by Swan mentioned above and adds some new material, principally in the final two chapters (pp. 67-88). The first of these takes ‘a forward glance at what remains to be done’ (p. 67), expressing regret that there is so much opportunity in Egypt, a ‘land bound to-day by the chains of Islam’, but an insufficient number of missionaries to take advantage of it. There is a need, says the author, for ‘a real revival amongst God’s people in the homelands’ to inspire people to commit themselves to missionary service and to provide funding to support the work (pp. 723). The final chapter recounts past experiences that confirmed for EGM personnel that God hears and answers prayer, particularly in the form of financial support.

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The fifth publication is Wonders in Egypt: The story of the Egypt General Mission by Irene E. Naish. The title page does not indicate where or when it was published, but the library call number on the copy accessed indicates that the date of publication was 1951. It consists of 59 pages. The first four pages comprise the title page, a foreword, and a map of Lower Egypt. The main text (pp. 5-57) is divided into seven chapters, followed by two pages describing ‘the challenge of Egypt’ and information about the EGM. The booklet incorporates material found in books previously published about the EGM but adds new information to bring the story up to date. By the time it was published, the EGM was nearing the end of its life in Egypt. The introduction notes that the lone survivor of the original seven missionaries, George Swan, had recently celebrated his jubilee of service. Egypt had undergone major changes since the mission started its work: the status of foreigners had altered so that they, including the missionaries, were now subject to Egyptian law, and there had been major improvements in public health services, transport and education (pp. 5-11). The booklet then reviews the EGM’s history. Ch. 2 (pp. 12-18) retells the story of how the seven original missionaries made the decision to commit themselves to service in Egypt. The third chapter (pp. 19-24) recounts what they accomplished in the first five years (1898-1903), focusing on Arabic study and the opening of mission stations in Alexandria, Bilbeis, Shabin alQanatir and Suez. Ch. 4 (pp. 24-31) covers the period 1904-21, when there was a gradual change from ‘the vigorous evangelism’ of the early years to ‘institutional work’ (p. 25). However, while other missions were working among the Coptic Christians to stimulate a spiritual awakening, EGM missionaries sought to maintain their focus on Muslims through educational, medical and literature work, the latter including the translation of parts of the Bible into Egyptian colloquial Arabic. The EGM also established a ‘Home of safety and peace’ as a refuge for girls who might be taken away from school to be married at a very young age. The fifth chapter (pp. 31-7) describes the concern to train Egyptians to be spiritual leaders and the importance of prayer to their lives and work. Ch. 6 (pp. 37-46) recounts the period 1922-47. Colportage work – distribution of portions or the whole of the Bible and tracts – up and down the Nile River Valley, and expansion of the work from the eastern into the western part of the Delta, receive particular attention, the most tolerated and productive work being boys’ and girls’ education. We learn that by the outbreak of the Second World War, the number of EGM missionaries stood at 63, a nine-fold increase from the original seven. The concluding chapter (47-57) notes that



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general world unrest following the Second World War and rising nationalism in Egypt mean that ‘it is impossible to foresee developments’ (p. 47). However, when one avenue of work closed another opened. For instance, when a school was closed, the possibility of opening a new hospital developed. Also, the distribution of Christian literature was hurt by restrictions of what could be printed during the war, but the increase in literacy created a greater demand for reading material. However, new government regulations in the late 1940s prohibited teaching of the Bible as part of the mission’s school syllabi, although an effort was made after school hours to reach children with the Gospel. At the time of publication, the EGM was supporting over 40 missionaries and about 70 Egyptian workers in the Nile Delta (p. 58). Significance These book-length publications are not scholarly works but popular accounts designed to attract support for the work of the EGM. Nevertheless, they give some idea of how EGM missionaries viewed Islam and Coptic Orthodox Christianity. Both are seen in a negative light, which was quite typical of Western missionaries. These texts also provide information about the methods used by the EGM in its efforts to spread the Christian message. As was the case with other missions, education, medical care and the distribution of Christian literature were the missionaries’ primary methods. There was apparently no thought that such services should be provided simply as a contribution to the well-being of fellow humans. The approach adopted left the members of the EGM open to the frequent Muslim charge that they exploited the helplessness of the sick, the poor, the uneducated, the young and the elderly, in order to propagate their message. Publications W.J.W. Roome (ed.), ‘Blessed be Egypt’. A missionary story: being some account of present missionary effort in Egypt, and the story of the Lord’s leading of the Egypt Mission Band, London, 1898; 007671952 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Swan, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, London, 1913 G. Swan, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, Melbourne, 1919 G. Swan, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, London, 1923

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G. Swan, ‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission, London, 1932, revised edition G. Swan, In troublous times, London, 1923 I.E. Naish, Wonders in Egypt. The story of the Egypt General Mission [London, 1951] Studies Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt J.T. Addison, The Christian approach to Muslims. A historical study, New York, 1942, pp. 147, 167 C. Watson, Egypt and the Christian crusade, Philadelphia PA, 1907, pp. 202, 274 Michael T. Shelley

The Netherlands

Willem Bilderdijk Date of Birth 7 September 1756 Place of Birth Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of Death 18 September 1831 Place of Death Haarlem, The Netherlands

Biography

Born in 1756, Willem Bilderdijk was the son of a physician who had political vision and ambitions, but who worked mostly as a tax collector. At the age of six, Willem seriously injured his left foot and, for the next ten years, he had to remain at home, where he developed his knowledge through wide reading. He proved to be multi-talented, excelling in drawing, poetry and the study of law, philology, languages, geology, mathematics and many other subjects. He loved writing poetry, most often historical or didactic. In 1776, he won a prestigious literary prize for a poem about the influence of poetry on politics and became the national poet laureate. It is estimated that, in all, he wrote about 300,000 lines of verse. In 1782, he finished law studies at Leiden University and became a lawyer in The Hague. He sided with the conservative Orangist party against the Republicans, and when the Prince of Orange, William V (r. 1751-1806), who had fled to the eastern parts of the Netherlands, was able to return to The Hague in 1787, Bilderdijk became his chief legal adviser. When Dutch political life was affected by the spread of French Revolutionary ideas, Bilderdijk gave up his position and left the country, going first to England and then, in 1797, to Germany. He remained there until 1806, when he became a personal assistant to the French king in the Netherlands, Louis Napoléon (r. 1806-10). From 1817 to 1827, he taught history as a private tutor in Leiden, working for the renewal of Dutch Calvinism. He wrote several polemical works against the ideals of the Enlightenment and looked on religion more as a romantic sentiment than as a philosophical doctrine. He regarded the protagonists of the 18th century Enlightenment not as theologians but as ‘neologians who reject the doctrine of atonement and accept Jesus as a prophet, equal to Confucius or Muhammad’ (Leliefeld, Over het leven van een zonderling genie, vol. 3, p. 259).

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Illustration 11. Bust of Willem Bilderdijk wearing a turban

In his personal life, Bilderdijk had friends among the political and academic elite, but also many opponents, and he knew periods of poverty as well as better times. His first marriage in 1785 was not a success. He lived for a number of years with another woman, whom he met in England in 1795. A divorce was arranged in 1802, enabling him to live openly with his new wife, with whom he had already had five children (four of whom had died soon after birth). As a poet and artist, he was also a frequent user of opium and was known to wear a Turkish turban, showing himself to be an eccentric man of literature and the arts. He died in Haarlem in 1831.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W. Bilderdijk, De bezwaren tegen den geest der eeuw van Mr. I. da Costa toegelicht, Leiden, 1823



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W. Bilderdijk, Geschiedenis des Vaderlands, Amsterdam, 1832-5 I. da Costa (ed.), De Dichtwerken van Bilderdijk, 15 vols, Haarlem, 1856-9 Secondary R. Honings, Star authors in the age of Romanticism. Literary celebrity in the Netherlands, Leiden, 2018 (esp. pp. 29-66, ‘A Calvinist celebrity’) G. Leliefeld, Over het leven van een zonderling genie, Mr. Willem Bilderdijk, 4 vols, Berlicum, 2012-15 R. Honings and P. van Zonneveld, De gefnuikte arend. Het leven van Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), Amsterdam, 2013 L. Engelfriet, De missie van een genie. De spirituele wereld van orangist Willem Bilderdijk, Amsterdam, 2010 J. van Eijnatten, Hogere Sferen. De ideeënwereld van Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), Hilversum, 1998 R.A. Kollewijn, Bilderdijk. Zijn leven en zijn werken, 2 vols, Amsterdam, 1891

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations De Marokkane ‘The Moroccan woman’ Date 1805 Original Language Dutch Description This didactic poem of 33 quatrains is a dialogue between a Christian prisoner in Morocco, who is waiting for his ransom to arrive, and a Moroccan Muslim woman. She expresses her love for him, but also fears that he despises her religion. She asks: ‘Why do you honour Allāh, but do not include Muḥammad?’ The Christian responds that he believes in Allāh, the One, but also honours His only born son, Issa. The woman declares that Muslims know the stories about Jesus, like Christians, and respect him. After they exchange ideas, she concedes that the Qur’an ‘does not allow us to call [Jesus] a creature’, and she asks to be baptised. The Christian prisoner baptises her in the name of the Trinity, and she gives him enough gold for his ransom. The Christian adds that, although he cannot put his faith in Muḥammad, he was still the founder of a great empire, a poet and a prophet in one person, and the most effective destroyer of idolatry. Thus, the poem ends happily.

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This was not the first of Bilderdijk’s poems to contain Islamic references. In the 1780s, he studied Eastern languages and Arab and Persian poets such as Ḥāfiẓ, al-Mutanabbī and Ibn Durayd. When he left the Netherlands, he wrote a poem loosely based on the qaṣīda (elegy) of the 10th-century poet Ibn Durayd, Treurzang van Ibn Doreid (‘Elegy of Ibn Durayd’, The Hague, 1785), employing the edition and Latin translation by Everardus Scheidius (Abu Becri Mohammedis ebn Hoseini ebn Doreidi Azdiensis, Katsijda ’l Mektsoura sive Idyllium Arabicum, Harderwijk, 1768 and 1786). The 21 pages of the poem and the 60 pages of commentary emphasise the will to overcome adversity and follow one’s ambitions, and they express the passion for individual freedom that was the possession of the nomadic Arabs. Over the years, Bilderdijk made at least 15 translations of Arabic and Persian poems (see Jan de Hond, Verlangen naar het oosten, Leiden, 2008, p. 378), among them Spreuken en voorbeelden van Muslih Eddin Sadi, getrokken uit zijne Rozengaard (Rotterdam, 1828), a loose translation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān (‘Flower garden’) based on the Latin translation of Georgius Gentius (Amsterdam, 1651). Bilderdijk changes the Muslim readers to whom the poem was originally addressed to Christians, with the effect that these Christians are then directed to heed the wisdom of the Muslim poet. An example comes in the following quatrain: Not knowledge of scripture or sharp debating, Only effective faith makes a Christian. Even though you devour all of the Bible, When self-indulgence creeps into the heart, it forgets everything.

Significance Although Bilderdijk did not write a systematic overview of Islam from a Christian perspective, in his short pieces and the notes in his various works he formulated a coherent opinion about Islam that challenged a number of negative stereotypes. For example, he found nothing to condemn in Muḥammad’s multiple marriages and his positive statements about sexuality, and he thought Muḥammad’s readiness to join in battle and lead fighting was a positive aspect of his character. For him, Muḥammad was comparable with Constantine the Great and Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, who was to be understood not as pious in a pietistic way but according to the true meaning of the Latin strenuus, ‘courageous’ or ‘brave’ (references in van Eijnatten, Hogere sferen, p. 280). These views all conflicted with accepted opinions of his time, seeing value and worth



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in Islam and the figure of Muḥammad, while the majority view saw only immorality and baseness. Bilderdijk went even further. In his earlier writings such as his translation of Ibn Durayd’s qaṣīda, he considered the achievements of the Islamic world comparable and even equal to the highest products of Greek and Roman antiquity, and thus relevant for the cultural development of people in his own time. Despite all this, Bilderdijk realised full well that Islam could not be compared with Christianity. In 1824, he wrote to Izaäk da Costa, a Jew who had converted to Calvinist Christianity and was a close friend: ‘Muḥammad wanted to reform and improve Nestorianism, although he knew only one writer of the Gospels, Matthew. It is not only the Jews who will have to make a choice for or against the Christ, because I see a new dawn rising in the East. Just as the Jews have to be brought to Christ through rabbinical writings, the Mahometans will be brought through the Koran’ (see Van Eijnatten, Hogere sferen, p. 646). Bilderdijk’s poem De Marokkane is an example of this dream. Publications Willem Bilderdijk, De Marokkane, Amsterdam, 1805 Willem Bilderdijk, ‘De Marokkane’, in Nieuwe Mengelingen, vol. 2, Amsterdam, 1806, 89-97; 100865283 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Willem Bilderdijk, ‘De Marokkane’, in Nieuwe Mengelingen, vol. 2, Groningen, 1817 Willem Bilderdijk, ‘De Marokkane’, in Nieuwe Mengelingen, vol. 2, Utrecht, 1835, 75-80 Willem Bilderdijk, ‘De Marokkane’, in I. da Costa (ed.), De Dichtwerken, vol. 1. Romancen en balladen, Haarlem, 1856, 226-31; 008618458 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies A. Vrolijk, Arabic studies in the Netherlands, Leiden, 2014 Honings and van Zonneveld, De gefnuikte arend Van Eijnatten, Hogere Sferen, pp. 102-3, 210, 645 Engelfriet, De missie van een genie. De spirituele wereld van orangist Willem Bilderdijk J. de Hond, Verlangen naar het Oosten. Oriëntalisme in de Nederlandse cultuur ca. 1800-1920, Leiden, 2008, pp. 150-5 L.Th. Monfils, Willem Bilderdijk bibliografie, Amstelveen, 2006

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M. Goud and A. Seyed-Gohrab, De Perzische muze in de polder. De receptie van Perzische poëzie in de Nederlandse literatuur, Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 22-6 L. Engelfriet, Bilderdijk en het Jodendom, Zoetermeer, 1995 K. Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and conflicts, 1596-1950, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 58-9 Karel Steenbrink

J.B.J. van Doren Jan Baptist Jozef van Doren Date of Birth 2 March 1791 Place of Birth Gent/Gand Date of Death 14 August 1873 Place of Death Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands

Biography

Nothing is known about Jan Baptist Jozef van Doren’s family, or his early life. In 1808, he began a military career when he entered the FrenchBelgian revolutionary army. After the defeat of Napoleon, he continued his profession in the Dutch-Belgian army. The Dutch King Willem I (r. 1815-40) decorated him for his bravery at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. However, unhappy with his duties in post-Waterloo Netherlands, he applied in 1821 for a position in the Dutch colonial army and was sent to the Dutch East Indies. There he soon rose to high positions in administration and management. He mentions that he had a trusted Javanese personal servant who gave him much information during his first decade in the colony. After a furlough in Europe (1830-2), he was sent on an inspection tour to Ambon and nearby islands. He returned to Europe in 1839. In 1845, Van Doren retired from the army and started a career as a writer, producing more than 30 works that ranged in size from the 750 pages of his two-volume Reis (1851) to pamphlets of not much more than 30 pages. His books in this period were signed from the eastern districts of the Netherlands and from Ghent. He had shown the plan for his longest work (Reis) to King Willem II (r. 1840-49) as early as 1840, and received a positive reaction. He finished it in 1847 but it was not published until 1851. It is based partly on his personal experience and partly on material in his personal library. Written in a simple style aimed at the not so well-informed reader, much of his work is a mixture of entertainment and polemic. He often entered debate, especially with the liberal Protestant minister Dr W.R. van Hoëvell, showing himself to be a no-nonsense military man,

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an outspoken Roman Catholic or at least anti-Protestant, and someone weary of extravagant aspirations and great development plans.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J.B.J. van Doren, Reis naar Nederlands Oost-Indië, of Land- en zeetogten gedurende de twee eerste jaren mijns verblijfs op Java, 2 vols, The Hague, 1851 F. Jos. van der Branden (ed.), Biographisch woordenboek der Noord- en Zuidnederlandsche letterkunde, Amsterdam, 1888, 212-13

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Het voor en tegen van de uitbreiding des evangelies onder de Javanen, ‘Concerning the spread of the Gospel among the Javanese’; Bij wien ligt de schold van de gruwelijke gebeurtenissente Bandjermasin? ‘Who is the cause of the terrible events in Banjarmasin?’ Date 1852; 1861 Original Language Dutch Description In his brief pamphlet Het voor en tegen van de uitbreiding des evangelies onder de Javanen (‘Concerning the spread of the Gospel among the Javanese’), only some 20 pages long, Van Doren attacks the prominent Protestant Reformed minister and politician Wolter Robert van Hoëvell, as well as some other contemporary authors, for their views about mission in the Dutch East Indies. Against Van Hoëvell, he argues that Jesus’s commandment in Matthew 28:19, ‘Go and make disciples of all nations’, must be understood as ‘nations’ that are pagan. Javanese Muslims have a religion that must be respected ‘because they pray to the same God, albeit in another manner’, and furthermore ‘they are not only more tolerant than the Muslims of Turkey, Arabia, Hindustan or other Mahometan countries, but they surpass us Christians by far in this respect’ (p. 5). Therefore, Christian proselytising should be restricted to pagans, and not practised among Muslims. In addition, he argues that the conversion of



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Muslims to Christianity will not be helpful for colonialism, citing the 1817 anti-colonialist war on the island of Saparua in the Moluccas, which had been led by Christian groups. He refers to the proposal made in 1831 by the colonial official Resident Valk, that in public schools classes on religion should be given ‘under supervision of the colonial government [by] learned and honest men [who] should teach the ethical lessons of Islam that are most often in line with the Gospel’ (p. 13), and in several places he criticises the behaviour of European men in the Indies who lived with a local housekeeper and produced children without marrying her. He argues that they should follow the example of the Muslims of the country, and act with far greater propriety and restraint than they do. In 1857, a contest for succession to the throne of the Sultanate of Banjarmasin resulted in a conflict between one party that sought support in Muslim religious circles, and another that sought support from the Dutch administration. After a civil war of about three years, the colonial rulers’ candidate won. In his pamphlet, Bij wien ligt de schuld van de gruwelijke gebeurtenissen te Bandjermasin en het zich verspreiden van duizende fanatieke mekkagangers op Java? (‘Who is the cause of the terrible events in Banjarmasin and the spread of thousands of fanatical Meccan pilgrims in Java?’), 51 pages long, Van Doren criticises the liberal Governor General A.J. Duymaer van Twist (r. 1851-6), who, in 1853, abolished the severe administrative and financial restrictions on going to Mecca for pilgrimage, and thereby created a substantial group of some 12,000 new ḥajjīs, who spread fanaticism throughout the archipelago. In addition, he criticises Van Twist for his ineffective management of affairs at the court in Banjarmasin. Van Twist supported the son of the previous sultan’s overtly non-Muslim second wife, who was Chinese, against more traditional and pious Muslims. Compared with the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8, the Banjarmasin civil war was relatively restricted, limited to the Banjar region of south Kalimantan without spreading to the whole colony. Nevertheless, the war warned the colonial administration that it needed to be more sensitive and informed in dealing with Islam as an important factor in social life and politics (pp. 23-6). Significance In these pamphlets, Van Doren shows that opinions about the state of Muslims are related to religious and social position. He was a Roman Catholic soldier on the margins of the politics of the colony, which was dominated by Protestants who had already started active missionary work. A conflict between the governor general and the Catholic clergy

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had resulted in the expulsion of Roman Catholic clergy from the colony in the 1840s. This may have added to Van Doren’s often repeated and very negative judgment of the (Protestant) Christians in the colony, whereas he held extremely positive views about the Muslims of Java. He remained an outsider in the debate about the progress of the colonial situation because he was never at the centre of power, either in Indonesia or after his return to the Netherlands. Van Doren’s influence was very limited. While his two short pieces were mentioned by Van Hoëvell in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië, the major journal about Dutch colonialism, they received no more than mild criticism as though they carried little relevance, and only his pamphlet about the Banjarmasin war made it into Boland and Farjon’s great bibliographical survey, Islam in Indonesia (p. 83). Publications J.B.J. van Doren, Het voor en tegen van de uitbreiding des evangelies onder de Javanen, The Hague, 1852; Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden / 1429 F 143 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) J.B.J. van Doren, Bij wien ligt de schuld van de gruwelijke gebeurtenissen te Bandjermasin en het zich verspreiden van duizende fanatieke mekkagangers op Java? Amsterdam, 1861; Koninklijke Bibliotheek / 196 C 70 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) Studies I. Syamtasiyah, ‘Politics and economy of Banjarmasin Sultanate in the period of expansion of the Netherlands East Indies government in Indonesia, 1826-1860’, Tawarikh. International Journal for Historical Studies 3 (2012) 155-76 I. Syamtasiyah, Kerajaan Banjarmasin di Ambang Keruntuhannya, 18251859, Bogor, West Java, 1996 K. Steenbrink, Beberapa Aspek tentang Islam di Indonesia abad ke-19, Jakarta, 1984, pp. 46-51 B.J. Boland and I. Farjon, Islam in Indonesia. A bibliographical survey, Dordrecht, 1983, p. 83 Sartono Kartodirdjo et al. (eds), Sejarah nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, 1976, vol. 4, pp. 179-87 W.R. van Hoëvell, ‘Indisch literatuuroverzicht’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 2 (1851) 431-4 W.R. van Hoëvell, ‘Europese kolonisatie in Nederlandsch Indië’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 1 (1851) 14-29 Karel Steenbrink

Salomon Keijzer Date of Birth 18 January 1823 Place of Birth Kampen, Holland Date of Death 25 February 1868 Place of Death Delft, Holland

Biography

Salomon Keijzer (also written as Keyzer and Keyser) was born into a Jewish family. In September 1843, he became a student in Leiden University, where he combined study in the law faculty with the study of Hebrew and Arabic. On 11 June 1847 he defended two doctoral dissertations, one on the Codex Justinianus and one on Talmudic jurisprudence. After teaching Greek for some time at a private institution while also following courses in Javanese in Delft, he was appointed lecturer (in 1859 full professor) at the Royal Academy for the Training of Civil Engineers, the institute in Delft that prepared officials for the Dutch East Indies. This institute combined the practical requirements for these officials (the construction of roads was an important duty, as well as canals for irrigation), with qualifications for public administration and control of civil courts. Keijzer had to teach Islamic law, and soon after he began Javanese language as well. In the debate about the religious affiliation of the majority of the population of Indonesia, Keijzer took a somewhat extreme position. Unlike those who held that Islam was only a thin upper layer that hid deeper sentiments and practices of Hinduism and traditional religions, he defended the viewpoint that in legal matters Dutch policy should be that Islam was the official religion of the majority of the country’s population and that local ‘deviations’ from official Muslim doctrine should be seen as exceptions. Although he never visited the Dutch East Indies, he saw it as his responsibility, or even his calling, to train his students in orthodox Islamic rules and thinking, especially Shāfiʿī law, on the basis that, in their respective colonies, the British and French had become well acquainted with Ḥanafī and Mālikī law. As a third colonial power (ahead of the Russians in fourth place), the Dutch ruled over the largest Islamic society that followed the Shāfiʿī school of fiqh.

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Keijzer died at the age of 45 after being ill for several months, leaving his wife with six children, the eldest only 15 years old.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary P.J. Veth, ‘De Delftsche Akademie als instituut tot opleiding voor ambtenaren voor Nederlandsch Indië’, De Gids 17 (1853) 63-94 Secondary C. Fasseur, De Indologen. Ambtenaren voor de Oost 1825-1950, Amsterdam, 1993 (particularly pp. 151-2, 180-3) S. Koolhof, ‘Een vergeten pionier. Mr. S. Keyzer (1823-1868)’, Jambatan. Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis van Indonesië 9 (1991) 55-69

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Islam in the writings of Saloman Keijzer Date 1854 Original Language Dutch Description In a short period of 12 years, between 1853 and 1864, Salomon Keijzer published 13 works on normative Islam, as well as an abridged reprint in three volumes of the great work by François Valentyn, Oud en nieuw OostIndiën (‘The old and new East Indies’). For his first publication on Islamic law, he took an Arabic work by the 14th-century scholar, Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fayrūzābādī (1329-1414), which was among the Leiden collection of Arab manuscripts. He wrote a quite free Dutch translation 426 pages long, in which he presented in some detail prescriptions for ablutions, ritual prayers, zakāt (always translated as reiniging or ‘purification’), fasting, pilgrimage, trade, marriage and criminal law. On the first page of his introduction he mentions future colonial administrators as his typical readers: In this teaching I want to give an insight into pure Muhammadan law, followed by the deviations from or changes to this law in the Dutch East Indies. If people suggest that I should first of all give an overview of Muhammadan law as it has been applied in the Dutch Indies, I must respond that such teaching can give no profit. (Handboek, p. iii)



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In 1857, Keijzer published a comparison of selected Arab, Javanese and Malay texts on criminal law in Islam. He concentrated on criminal law because the colonial government was preparing a law code specifically for the Dutch Indies. From Arabic sources he summarised a legal treatise by al-Māwardī, from Javanese the Kitab tuhfah, a translation of an Arabic work, and from Malay a translation of sections of Abdurra’uf al-Singkili, Mir’at ul-tullab, a Malay adaptation of Fatḥ al-Wahhāb by Zakariyyā l-Ansārī (c. 1470). Large sections of this Malay work had already been edited by his predecessor at Delft, but Keijzer now added a Dutch translation. Notwithstanding its purpose to present a comparison of ‘international’ Muslim law with Malay and Javanese ‘sources’, the study did not reveal any clear differences and the juxtaposition of the three languages only showed a loose conformity between them. In 1859, Keijzer published another work on Shāfiʿī law, Al-mukhtaṣar fī l-fiqh ʿalā madhhab al-Shāfiʿī, together with a French translation, Précis de jurisprudence musulmane selon le rite Châfeite, par Abou Chodjâ. In the introduction, he again situates the study of Islamic law in the context of the colonial administration of Islamic countries, pointing out that colonial rulers touch many aspects of the lives of their subjects and should therefore have knowledge of the rules by which they are regulated. In 1862, he translated al-Māwardī’s famous Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya as Mawerdi’s publiek en administratief regt van den Islam (‘Mawardi’s public and administrative rule for Islam’). In the Introduction, the first question he puts is whether the most important parts of the Dutch colony in Java and the coastal areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan should be seen as ‘Muhammadan countries’, ruled not by ‘eastern despots or tyrants’ but by a fixed and centuries-old system of Islamic law. The Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya helps him to conclude that the traditional Indonesian rulers should be regarded as heads of Islamic nations. His second question is about the juridical status of a ‘Christian nation ruling in a Muhammadan country’ (pp. xi-xii). Here, he refers to French rule in Algeria for an answer. The French Orientalist M.B. Vincent put this question to some Muslim scholars in Algeria, and their answer was that those who have health and strength should leave their country if it is under colonial rule in order to save their faith, but if that is not possible they may stay in the country as long as they are safe and can follow their religion (M.B. Vincent, Études sur la loi musulmane (Rit de Malek). Législation criminelle, Paris, 1842). To this answer Keijzer himself adds that Dutch legal regulations include Muslim rules about marriage, inheritance and similar matters, and that ‘on solemn

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occasions Allah and Muhammad can be invoked, and the Qur’an is used to take formal oaths’ (p. xii). In the colony, religious leaders are accepted and even accorded Dutch titles, including the rather awkward Moorsche papen (‘Moorish popes’). These examples make it clear that Christian rule in a ‘Muhammadan country’ has a legal foundation. In 1860, Keijzer published a series of five articles in a popular magazine on the annual pilgrimage of Muslims from the Dutch East Indies to Mecca (De bedevaart der Inlanders naar Mekka, ‘The pilgrimage of natives to Mecca’), later published in 1871 as a book. Although the title suggests a report about Islam in Indonesia, the book is based on information about the pilgrimage taken from works about Islamic practice in general and from Dutch colonial government regulations about it. In 1825, measures to decrease the number of pilgrims required those who wished to travel to Mecca to purchase a special passport at the high cost of 110 guilders, and to pay a fine of 1,000 guilders if they returned without it. This was reduced to 220 guilders in 1831, and in 1852 a more liberal Governor General eliminated the payments completely. But then the 1857 mutiny in British India provoked a renewed debate about the dangers of religion, and in 1859 resulted in more complicated administrative measures. In his book, Keijzer gives an objective and factual report about the religious elements of the ḥajj, also referring to the danger of religious fanaticism among returned pilgrims: ‘Their influence is the biggest obstacle to European civilisation’ (p. 120). To help his European readers, he makes the comparison between the ḥajj and the ‘grand tour’ of Europe between 1700 and 1900, according to which the religio-cultural centre of Mecca is for Muslims like Delphi for Greek and later European visitors (p. 185). From his sources, he quotes criticism of the religious value of the ḥajj: Qui multum peregrinatur, raro sanctificatur (‘Those who go on pilgrimage often seldom become saints’, p. 159). On the same page, he quotes the Arab proverb with unpleasant insinuations, Al-ḥarām fī l-ḥaramayn (‘Evil is present in the two holy places’). This is a typical example of his detached and somewhat cynical way of writing. His intended audience was not fellow Orientalists with historical or linguistic interests, nor missionaries or theologians with religious perspectives. He was writing for colonial administrators who wanted good, effective government without any problems. Significance Salomon Keijzer should be placed against the background of the rise of Islamic studies in line with the quickly expanding Dutch colonial administration. The Royal Academy for the Training of Civil Engineers



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in Delft provided a curriculum broad enough to meet the requirements of future officials in the Dutch East Indies. Here, Islam was no longer perceived as a major threat, but as a reality in the life of subjects who were thought to deserve a well-informed colonial government with sufficient knowledge about them not to interfere in aspects of their lives that were entirely personal. When necessary, as in the case of marriages, property and inheritance, colonial officials should make decisions in a right and proper way. Much more than the French or British, the Dutch took religion seriously, and even intervened in people’s lives in support of orthodox Islam, as was later shown by the French Orientalist G.-H. Bousquet. Salomon Keijzer, coming from the first generation of scholars at the Delft Academy, is an eminent example of this tradition that sought to equip colonial officials appropriately. It was later continued by such important scholars as L.W.C. van den Berg, Christaan Snouck Hurgronje, and G.F. Pijper. In later times, there were mixed feelings about the trend set by Keijzer. In his study of the training of colonial officials, Cees Fasseur repeats P.J. Veth’s rebuke of Keijzer in the 19th-century: ‘Why should colonial officials be familiar with the difficult Arab terminology and the complicated history of the differences between the four Muslim legal schools?’ (Fasseur, De Indologen, p. 152). On the other hand, Sirtjo Koolhof calls Keijzer a ‘forgotten pioneer’ who gave attention to the subtleties of the smaller details of the law that regulates the daily life of the Muslims (Pijper, Studiën, pp. 5-6). Publications S. Keijzer, Handboek voor het mohammedaansch regt, The Hague, 1853; 252 F 117 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) S. Keijzer, Het mohammedaansche strafrecht, naar Arabische, Javaansche en Maleische bronnen, The Hague, 1857; 389 G 6 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) S. Keijzer, Précis de jurisprudence musulmane selon le rite Châfeite, par Abou Chodjâ, trans. S. Keijzer, Leiden, 1859 (French trans. of Het mohammedaansche strafrecht); 868 F 26 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) S. Keijzer, Mawerdi’s publiek en administratief regt van den Islam, The Hague, 1862; 468 D 3 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek)

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S. Keijzer, Schetsen uit het leven der inlanders op Java, vol. 1, Amsterdam, 1868 (repr. of a series of articles in Onze tijd in Indië, The Hague, 1860); 191 G 23 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) S. Keijzer, De bedevaart der Inlanders naar Mekka, Leiden, 1871 (repr. of a series of articles in Onze tijd in Indië, The Hague, 1860); RN-499 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) S. Keijzer, Kitab Toehpah. Een Javaansch handboek voor het mohammedaansche regt, trans. T. Door, Leiden, 1874 (Javanese trans. of Handboek voor het mohammedaansch regt); 859 f 14 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) Studies M. Laffan, The makings of Indonesian Islam. Orientalism and the narrations of a Sufi past, Princeton NJ, 2011, pp. 96-9 Koolhof, ‘Een vergeten pionier’ Fasseur, De Indologen (includes frequent references, see esp. pp. 180-3) B.J. Boland and I. Farjon, Islam in Indonesia. A bibliographical survey, Dordrecht, 1983, pp. 162-3 G.F. Pijper, Studiën over de geschiedenis van de Islam in Indonesië, 19001950, Leiden, 1977 G.-H. Bousquet, A French view of the Netherlands Indies, London, 1940 Karel Steenbrink

Reinhart Dozy Date of Birth 21 February 1820 Place of Birth Leiden, The Netherlands Date of Death 29 April 1883 Place of Death Leiden

Biography

Reinhart Petrus Anne Dozy was born in Leiden and remained an inhabitant of the city throughout his life. He started his higher education at the age of 14, under the Arabist H.E. Weijers (1804-40), studying Arabic manuscripts in the library at Leiden University (the so-called Warner Collection). His first publication at the age of 23 was the prize-winning essay Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes (Leiden, 1843). It dealt with the vocabulary applied to all items of Arab clothing. It was already clear to Dozy at this time that the Arabic dictionaries then available were indequate. Later in his life he would return to lexicography in order to remedy this. Dozy wanted to research the history of the Arabs in Spain, although not many sources had yet been published. His dissertation in March 1844 was a history of the ʿAbbādids, who ruled in Seville in the 11th century. The two branches of his scholarly research were already clear: lexicography and the history of Islamic Spain. The first of these resulted in a monumental contribution to Arabic lexicography: Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden, 1877-81). The second resulted in several publications. Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne au moyen âge (Leiden, 1849) is a history of Cid Campeador Rodrigo Días de Vivar (1040-99), better known as El Cid. Another historical study is Histoire des musulmans d’Espagne jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides (Leiden, 1861), which was translated into several languages. In between, he wrote a work that made him famous because of its daring speculations, De Israelieten te Mekka, van Davids tijd tot in de vijfde eeuw onzer tijdrekening (Haarlem, 1864).

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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary M. de Goeje, ‘Levensbericht R.P.A. Dozy’, Jaarboek, 1883, Amsterdam, pp. 12-52 M. de Goeje, Biographie de Reinhart Dozy, Leiden, 1883 C. Snouck Hurgronje, ‘Levensbericht M.J. de Goeje’, Jaarboek, Amsterdam, 1909, pp. 107-66 Secondary A. Molendijk, The emergence of the science of religion in the Netherlands, Leiden, 2005 J. Brugman, ‘Dozy. A scholarly life according to plan’, in W. Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden Oriental connections 1850-1940, Leiden, 1989, 62-81 E. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Het Islamisme ‘Islam’ Date 1863 Original Language Dutch Description Dozy readily drew parallels between Islam and Catholicism, both of which he thought were superstitious and childish and full of incomprehensible ritual formulas (Arie Molendijk, The emergence of the science of religion in the Netherlands, Leiden, 2005, p. 60). This is exactly the ‘enlightened’ attitude he shows in Het Islamisme (Haarlem, 1863). In spite of its length of more than 400 pages, he intended it as a popular account of the emergence of Islam, not as a scholarly work. He realised that his theory about the faith as a continuation of biblical ‘stone veneration’, which he published a year later in 1864, was diametrically opposed to the general opinion among scholars and would not be accepted without elaborate proof. So, he decided not to burden the publication of Het Islamisme with the theory (although in the third edition of 1900 the theory is included). He begins the work by explaining that, before Islam, the Arabs did not accept Christianity (he ignores the pre-Islamic Arab Church) because of its belief in a dying god, which was repulsive to them. He says that Muḥammad suffered from hysteria muscularis, which caused convulsions, and that a characteristic of such sufferers was that they deluded



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themselves in a way that could hardly be distinguished from deceptiveness, although initially Muḥammad was sincere in his faith. Dozy describes Muḥammad’s military campaigns as cruel and oppressive. More strongly, he attributes to Muḥammad himself over-sensitivity to mockery, which explains the execution of a woman and a Jew. Dozy is also convinced that, in the later years of Muḥammad’s ministry, his revelations were no longer spontaneous but rather an instrument he used to convince his followers, as when the honour of his wives was at stake (a reference to ʿĀʾisha’s rumoured infidelity), or the decision about whom he should marry (a reference to his marriage to Zaynab after he forced his foster son to divorce her). Rather startlingly, Dozy declares that it was not Muḥammad alone who was responsible for the execution of the Jewish tribe of Banū Qurayẓa in Medina. It was the entire Semitic race. The biblical story of Esther proves that Jews were capable of as much cruelty as the followers of Muḥammad, for, as the Bible attests, they killed thousands of the followers of the wicked Haman throughout Persia (Esther 8-9). Behind this diatribe lurks Dozy’s belief that the Semitic race was jealous and unheroic, in contrast to the Aryan race, which was generous and brave. This explains why Dozy considered open-minded Sufism a specifically Persian phenomenon rather than an Islamic form of mysticism, because Persians were not Semitic. Significance Examples such as those cited above demonstrate that the significance of Dozy’s popular publication Het islamisme resides not in its factual account of the origins and history of Islam (such as can be found in his impressive studies of Islam in al-Andalus), but in its ideological outlook. In the 19th century, the outward manifestations of religion, such as ritual, language and hierarchy, were considered superstitious tools for suppressing the masses. Only an inward ethical attitude counted. In the ‘enlightened’ levels of society, there was a highly critical attitude towards religion (with the possible exception of liberal Protestantism). So, it is no coincidence that Dozy ends Het Islamisme with some musings about which religion would collapse first, Islam or Catholicism. It is an irony of history that the liberal ‘freethinking’ mentality of the 19th century considered itself highly tolerant, though in reality it perpetuated medieval prejudices against Muḥammad and Islam. This explains why in Dozy’s Het Islamisme can be found motifs such as Muḥammad’s epilepsy, and Muslims’ greed and lust, lack of a spiritual outlook, militant and cruel attitude, lack of a genuine religious imagination, and so

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on. Especially pernicious, because of later developments with their disastrous consequences, was the contrast between the Aryan and the Semitic mentality. This was instrumental in comparing Islam unfavourably with a liberal Christianity that had supposedly been purified from its Semitic intolerance and envy. One perhaps unexpected influence of the work was on thinking about Islam and the person of Muḥammad in the later Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Its translator, Abdullah Cevdet (1869-1932), was an opponent of Ottoman absolutism, traditional Islam and the supernatural elements in religion. His translation understandably raised a storm among traditionalist Turkish Muslims, and caused reactions among Turkish religious scholars that continued well into the 20th century. Publications R. Dozy, Het Islamisme, Haarlem, 1863; 9210 A 28 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R. Dozy, Essai sur l’histoire de l-Islamisme, trans. V. Chauvin, Paris, 1879, repr. Amsterdam, 1966 (French trans.); 001930079 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Dozy, Het Islamisme, Haarlem, 18802; 3022 A 26 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R. Dozy, Het Islamisme, Haarlem, 19003 (revised and updated by H.W. van der Meij); MM03B-100721 - 801 C 1 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R. Dozy, Tarih-i İslâmiyet, trans. Abdullah Cevdet, Cairo, 1908 (Turkish trans.; for an English trans. of Cevdet’s Introduction, see C. Kurzman, Modernist Islam 1840-1940. A sourcebook, Oxford, 2002, pp. 172-4) Studies J. Brugman, ‘Dozy, a scholarly life according to plan’, in W. Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden Oriental connections 1850-1940, Leiden, 1989, 62-81 R. van Leeuwen and A. Vrolijk, ‘Orientalistiek in de Lage Landen: een eigenzinnige polemist, Reinhart Dozy (1820-1883)’, ZemZem 6 (2010) 40-51 E.A. Jamsari and N.M. Talib, ‘Eurocentrism in Reinhart Dozy’s Spanish Islam. A history of the Muslims in Spain’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 5/29 (2014) 74-80 M. Poorthuis and T. Salemink, Van harem tot fitna. Beeldvorming over de Islam in Nederland 1848-2010, Nijmegen, 2011, pp. 40-2, 48, 56, 614



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De Israelieten te Mekka ‘The Israelites in Mecca’ Date 1864 Original Language Dutch Description Reinhart Dozy’s De Israelieten te Mekka, van Davids tijd tot in de vijfde eeuw onzer tijdrekening (‘The Israelites in Mecca, from the time of David to the fifth century of our era’) was published in 1864. It is 214 pages long and divided into two parts, the first concerned with biblical references that prove the existence of stone worship among the ancient Israelites, and the second with the Islamic festival of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Dozy wanted to forge a connection between the religion of the Old Testament and Islam. His aversion to biblical religion and to ‘superstitious’ Christianity, which culminated in ‘irrational’ Catholicism, was exceeded only by his antipathy to Islam, from which he thought progress and enlightenment were completely absent (Molendijk, Emergence of the science of religion, pp. 60-5). He employed his theory of biblical stone worship to explain the significance of the Kaʿba and the Black Stone in Mecca. According to Islamic tradition, Mecca was a centre of worship before Islam, witnessed by the stories of Adam worshipping God there and of Ibrāhīm and Ismāʿīl raising the foundations of the House of God and purifying it (Q 2:125-7). Ingeniously, Dozy connects the Kaʿba to the biblical cult of stones that he identifies in the Old Testament by hypothesising that the tribe of the Simeonites, who are mentioned in early lists of the Israelites (Numbers 25:14, 26:14; 1 Chronicles 27:16) but then disappear from the biblical narrative, were banished from the land of Israel and made their way to Mecca (they were later called Ishmaelites), bringing the worship of stones with them. The ritual of throwing stones at the three pillars representing Satan during the ḥajj, which is explained in Islam by the story of Ibrāhīm stoning Satan when he tried to prevent him from making his way to Mecca, is for Dozy proof of this stone cult, as is the whole festival of the pilgrimage, which was established by the Simeonites when they were banished (in Hebrew, ‘banishment’ is ḥerem), explaining the term used for Mecca, ḥaram (De Israelieten te Mekka, 1864 edition, pp. 77-8). Dozy’s theory shows some similarity with the ideas of the later German scholar Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) about the mythical layers of the

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Bible, though Dozy is more radical, and his approach to Islam is mingled with rationalist prejudice. He was singled out for this by Edward Said as an outstanding example of the Western sense of superiority and ‘antipathy to the Orient, Islam and the Arabs’ (Orientalism, p. 151). Significance To assess the significance of this work it is necessary to give some background. Dozy became involved in a vast religious studies project in the Netherlands, the first of its kind. Inspired by a progressive liberal attitude towards religion in which the supremacy of Christianity was no longer assumed, it aimed to describe the great religions of the world. Cornelis Petrus Tiele (1830-1902), the first Dutch professor of the study of religion, as distinct from theology, who led the project, asked Dozy to treat Islam. As part of the project, the learned Hendrik Kern, founder of Buddhist studies, wrote his magnum opus on the history of Buddhism (1882-4) in which he argued that the Buddha may have been an astral myth rather than a human being. Similarly, Dozy argued that the Old Testament was marked by the veneration of stones, and the characters of Abraham and Sarah themselves should be interpreted as mythical stones. Dozy’s theory is a fine example of speculative thought mingled with a strong bias from his own time, with dubious etymologies and lack of historical insight. Still, his intuition that there must be a continuity between the Israelite (or rather Jewish) religion and Islam has lost nothing of its significance, although it is generally realised nowadays that the biblical canon as such should not be adduced as evidence, but rather its post-biblical narrative enrichments as found in Rabbinic literature (and for that matter, in Christian literature). Publications R. Dozy, De Israelieten te Mekka, van Davids tijd tot in de vijfde eeuw onzer tijdrekening, Haarlem, 1864; 9216 B 5 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R. Dozy, Die Israeliten zu Mekka von Davids Zeit bis in’s fünfte Jahrhundert unsrer Zeitrechnung, Leipzig, 1864 (German trans.); Geo.u. 522 s (digitised version available through MDZ) R. Dozy, De Israelieten te Mekka, van Davids tijd tot in de vijfde eeuw onzer tijdrekening, Utrecht, 1866; 3194 E 37 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek)



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Studies H. Paul, ‘Virtue language in nineteenth-century Orientalism. A case study in historical epistemology,’ Modern Intellectual History 14 (2017) 689-715 A. Molendijk, The emergence of the science of religion, Leiden, 2005 Said, Orientalism K.H. Graf, De Israëlieten te Mekka van Dr. R. Dozy, Utrecht, 1866 H. Oort, The worship of the Baalim in Israel, based upon the work of Dr. R. Dozy, The Israelites at Mecca, trans. J.W. Colenso, London, 1865 Marcel Poorthuis

Frans Lion Cachet Date of Birth 28 January 1835 Place of Birth Amsterdam Date of Death 27 November 1899 Place of Death Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands

Biography

Frans Lion Cachet was born in Amsterdam on 28 January 1835, the second of five children of a Jewish merchant couple, Salomon (Lion) Cachet and Rachel Aletta van Ephraim Hamburger. In 1849, under the influence of Isaac da Costa, the whole family converted to Christianity. Between 1853 and 1857, Lion Cachet underwent theological training at the Scottish Seminary in Amsterdam, founded in 1853. He then spent some time in Ermelo with the Revd H.W. Witteveen, who is said to have inspired him to venture into the mission field. In the spring of 1858, with the blessing and financial support of the Ermelo congregation, Lion Cachet left to be a missionary in South Africa. He worked there for almost 20 years, mostly as a minister in an established congregation, though he is said to have founded eight new congregations, established the Transvaal branch of the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk) and launched a mission to convert the Jews in the Cape. During an intermediate two-year stint back in the Netherlands between 1873 and 1875, he published his memoirs, entitled Vijftien jaar in Zuid-Afrika (‘Fifteen years in South Africa’). He also tried to bring the situation of the Boers in South Africa to public attention. It was then that he first came into contact with Abraham Kuyper, who became interested in the case of the Boers. In 1880, Lion Cachet left South Africa for good, and returned to the Netherlands, where he took up an appointment in Valkenburg near Leiden. Three years later, in 1883, he moved to the Nieuwe Westerkerk in Rotterdam, where he showed support for Abraham Kuyper in his leadership of the schism within the Dutch Reformed Church in 1886 that was known as the Doleantie. The churches originating in the Doleantie chose Java as their mission field and, as delegate of the Synod of Mission, Lion Cachet tried on several occasions to generate support for mission among pagans and Muslims in the Dutch colonies. In 1891, he undertook



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a nine-month inspection trip to central Java on behalf of the provisional synod of the Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken (dolerende) and the Nederlandsch Gereformeerde Zendingsvereniging (NGZV, Dutch Reformed Mission Society). He died of heart failure in Bergen op Zoom in the winter of 1899.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary F. Lion Cachet, Afrikaansche preken, Utrecht, 1874 F. Lion Cachet, Een en twintig dagen. Brieven aan een vriend, over een reisje naar Schotland, over de Vrije Schotsche Kerk en de opwekking, etc, Leeuwarden, 1874 F. Lion Cachet, Vijftien jaar in Zuid-Afrika. Brieven aan een vriend, Leeuwarden, 1875 F. Lion Cachet, Tien dagen te Brighton. Brieven aan een vriend, Utrecht, 1875 F. Lion Cachet, Twee jaren in Holland, Kaapstad, 1877 F. Lion Cachet, Zuid-Afrikaansche stem over Israel en voor Israel, Villiersdorp, Kaapkolonie, 1879 F. Lion Cachet, Isaac Levinsohn de russisch-poolsche Jood. Uit het Engelsch vertaald en van Aanteekeningen voorzien, Amsterdam, 1881 F. Lion Cachet, De worstelstrijd der Transvalers. Aan het volk van Nederland verhaald, Amsterdam, 1882 J.A. Chalmers and F. Lion Cachet, Tiyo Soga, de eerste Kaffer-Zendeling. Eene bladzijde uit de geschiedenis der zending in Kafferland, Amsterdam, 1888 F. Lion Cachet, ‘Art, 19. Rapport en bijlagen Lion Cachet & Rapport der gezamelijke Deputaten Synodi Midden-Java Mei 1892’, in Acta der vierde voorloopige synode van Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken gehouden te Amsterdam 1892, Amsterdam, 1892, 484-517 F. Lion Cachet, Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending, Amsterdam, 1896 F. Lion Cachet, Het land mijner vaderen. Indrukken op eene reis door Egypte en Palestina, Amsterdam, 1902 Secondary D. Nauta, art. ‘Lion Cachet, Frans’, in Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme, vol. 1, Kampen, 1978, 128-9 G. Grosheide, ‘De reis van Ds F. Lion Cachet naar Midden-Java in 1891 en het hervatten van de Zendingsarbeid door de Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland’, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 53 (1953) 61-77, 104-16 G.M den Hartogh, ‘F. Lion Cachet en zijn licentieering te Amsterdam’, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 52 (1952) 161-83 F. Kriel, Die lewe van Frans Lion Cachet. Met besondere toespitsing op sy betekenis vir die sending, Pretoria, 1950

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S. Lohman, art. ‘Lion Cachet, Frans’, in Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, vol. 3, Leiden, 1914, 191-3

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending ‘A year-long inspection trip in the service of the Protestant mission’ Date 1896 Original Language Dutch Description The illustrated book Een jaar op dienstreis in dienst der zending, consisting of 876 pages, is a chronological account of Frans Lion Cachet’s trip to Java in 1891-2. It first appeared in 15 individual sections published by Johan Adam Wormser in Amsterdam over the years 1893-5, and then it was published as a bound book. Lion Cachet undertook his trip in the double function of representative of the provisional synod of the Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken (dolerende) and endorsee of the Nederlandsch Gereformeerde Zendingsvereniging, to inspect the mission in central Java. While contemporary newspapers reported that during his trip he would try to establish sustainable relations with the emerging indigenous churches in Java and would attempt to revitalise the NGZV missionaries, his purpose was in fact more complex. Although not explicitly stated, the immediate reason for it was the contradictory reports from missionaries about the ‘Sadrach affair’, on which he was to give his adjudication. Opponents of the Doleantie in the Netherlands expressed reservations about his trip, stating that he had already sown discord in Africa and the Netherlands, and was therefore likely to do so in Java as well, a foresight that was later proved to be fairly correct. In June 1892, when Lion Cachet returned to the Netherlands, he presented his findings in an official report to the provisional synod of the Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken (dolerende). He made clear that the mission in Java was a huge disappointment, that the spiritual and ecclesiastical circumstances of Javanese Christians were pitiful, and above all that the whole of society in the Dutch Indies was corrupt. In what he writes, Lion Cachet records various impressions of his journey and inspection trip, such as the places and cities he visited, the history



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of the NGZV and its missions in the Dutch East Indies, meetings with missionaries commissioned by the NGZV, visits to the representatives and the work of various Protestant missions, his meetings with important officials and, not least, his encounters with Javanese evangelists and Javanese Christians in central Java. He also uses the opportunity to make remarks about Islam and Muslims. The first time he addresses this subject is when he describes his journey through the Red Sea, passing along the coast of western Arabia. For him, Arabia is synonymous with those who ‘yield’ to Muḥammad and who shed blood in the fight for Islam, and is one of the most powerful strongholds of Satan against the Christian Gospel. By providing a type of rhetorical inquisition, he tries to explain in a denigrating way why Muḥammad acquired so many followers, and why ‘the heresy of Islam’ had been able to spread so far afield and oppress Christianity. In his view, Dutch Christians have been responsible for Java and the Javanese being more attached to Mecca than to their Dutch coloniser. Java, he observes, is one of the most fertile breeding grounds for Islam, from where it has spread to the rest of the Malay Archipelago. He regards the Protestant missions as the means by which Java can now be reclaimed from the violence of Muḥammad. Continuing his journey to Colombo, he also elaborates on the competition faced by the Protestant mission from the Roman Catholics in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Lion Cachet was asked not only to report on the status of the mission in central Java, but also to negotiate with the colonial government to open up mission areas, especially Yogyakarta, which at the time was closed as a region under the rule of a native Muslim leader, in accordance with Article 123 of the Colonial Constitution (Staatsreegeling van Nederlansch Indie). He had to obtain a special permit from Governor General Pijnacker Hordijk to enter central Java, and he was only granted this when he pragmatically chose to be in Java in the relatively neutral role of secretary of foreign affairs of the NGZV. After he returned to the Netherlands, he addressed the issue at several public meetings and also in the book, where he argued strongly against this restrictive law, emphasising what in his eyes was the unfair treatment of Christian missionaries in favour of the Muslim population by the Christian Dutch colonial government. On the basis of his visit, he reports that some of the Christian communities in central Java have ‘fallen back into’ Islam. He also reveals in passing his scathing views about Islam and the difficulties of spreading the Gospel in a ‘dangerous’ Islamic environment. He paints a doomsday

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scenario of the Javanese people, who in his view are poisoned with opium, deceived by Islam, crushed by their Javanese rulers and, worst of all, not blessed with the Gospel. He considers imams and hajjis as particularly dangerous, not only because he regards them as imposters who deceive the Javanese and spread the ‘heresy’ of Islam, but also because they are likely to revolt against the Dutch colonial government. He regards with sorrow the fact that the government cannot do anything about the many Javanese going on pilgrimage to Mecca and becoming hajjis. In his view, only the true Gospel can alter the situation in central Java, though the government obstructs the mission from doing this. To win people over to Christianity and demonstrate the ignorance of hajjis and imams through the common Javanese practice of public (theological) debate, Lion Cachet considers it of the utmost importance that missionaries should be knowledgeable about the Qur’an and the history of Islam. Een jaar op dienstreis is a travel narrative that was written as much for entertainment as to fulfil its purpose as a report. Lion Cachet’s approach in carrying out his visits and his portrayal of the hard-working missionaries and evangelists is often uncongenial, and he regularly refers to his ‘good old’ time in South Africa. His experiences in the Cape, together with his biased opinions and feelings of (racial) superiority, may have blinded him in his assessment of the local situation and circumstances in Java and the ‘Sadrach affair’, resulting in his destructive behaviour and report. Kiai Sadrach Surapranata was an indigenous evangelist who was initially affiliated to the NGZV. He was born in 1835 as Radin Abasa, a Muslim, and trained in Islamic thought and traditional ngelmu (Javanese wisdom). Apart from a brief period of education under the lay missionary F.L. Anthing, he was an autodidact in the Christian faith, with most of his knowledge derived from a few tracts and the Javanese translation of the Gospel of John, which he had received from an evangelist. After spending some time wandering throughout Java, in 1870 he settled in Karangjoso, situated in the NGZV district in central Java. There he worked independently for years, proselytising among the Javanese. Animosity first arose between Sadrach and the Protestant mission in 1878, when missionary P. Bieger wanted to take over the Javanese-Christian communities that had been formed by Sadrach. This was a prelude to what became ‘the Sadrach affair’, a conflict concerning ascendancy and control over these Javanese-Christian communities and the existence of a Javanese form of Christianity.



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In 1883, Sadrach and the missionary J. Wilhelm of the NGZV entered into a collaborative partnership. They shared the view that the Javanese should be taught a Javanese interpretation of Christianity by Javanese evangelists. In addition, they strongly advocated that Javanese Christians should adhere to Javanese customary practices such as circumcision, rituals for weddings, harvests and healing. It was these elements, prevalent in Sadrach’s community and originally rooted in Islam and Javanese-Muslim customs and practices, that caused discord among the NGZV missionaries themselves, and disturbed the board of the NGZV in the Netherlands. From 1887 onwards, a time during which Sadrach can be considered a very successful proselytiser, several complaints about him and the poor evangelical spirit of the Javanese Christians were reported by NGZV missionaries. In response, Wilhelm was reprimanded for permitting Javanese Christians to perform the circumcision ritual, and it was arranged that Lion Cachet should travel on inspection to central Java, when he held consultations with the NGZV missionaries. This confirmed Lion Cachet’s already strong bias against Sadrach, and led to accusations that Sadrach was a heretic and the decision that all ties with him should be cut. He also tried, but in vain, to persuade the colonial government to withdraw the special permit of hulpprediker from Sadrach. Shortly after Lion Cachet departed, on 1 February 1892, a critical article appeared in the Java-bode under the pseudonym ‘Veritas’. The author condemns Lion Cachet for his actions towards Sadrach, and pleads in favour of Wilhelm, who is knowledgeable about and respectful of the Javanese. Unhappy with this article, Lion Cachet wrote a letter to Wilhelm in which he implicitly accused him of spreading these rumours, or indeed of actually being the author of this article. A year later, when Lion Cachet spoke publicly about his trip and findings at the Indische genootschap, he began with a rejection of the allegations made about him in the newspapers. Significance Lion Cachet presented his formal report to the fourth provisional synod of the Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken (dolerende) in Amsterdam in June 1892. In the same year, the Dolerende churches merged with the Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands to form the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. In the synods that followed, the acquisition of the mission of the NGZV by the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands was extensively discussed, and in May 1894 all NGZV activities were transferred to them. From that time on, the mission in central Java

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was led by the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. However, Lion Cachet’s visit and report, in which he dismisses the Javanese evangelist Kiai Sadrach Surapranata and his syncretistic teachings of Christianity, resulted in a complete break between Sadrach’s churches and the Dutch Protestant mission in central Java, leaving the mission destitute with only a handful of Christians in a few posts in Probolinggo, Bagelen and Yogyakarta. L. Adriaanse, who became a missionary in the deprived mission area of Purworejo in 1894, was the first to prepare a study of Sadrach, his doctrine and movement. Many of the later scholars who studied Sadrach used his work as a basis for their own. In Sadrach’s kring (1899) Adriaanse tries to ascertain the historical grounds behind ‘the Sadrach affair’. He strongly criticises Lion Cachet’s conduct, especially denouncing the rough manner of the inspection and the report. In 1907, on the basis of Adriaanse’s study, an article by L.W.C. van den Berg on Javanese Christianity and Sadrach’s churches appeared in De Gids. He considered Sadrach and his movement as nationalistic in two respects: their refusal to assimilate to Dutch culture, and their rejection of the paternalistic authority of the Dutch mission and missionaries. In 1922, De Zending op Midden-Java ten Zuiden by D. Pol was published. It contained a critical review of the events during Lion Cachet’s trip to central Java and the Sadrach affair​. Pol argues that Lion Cachet had been given too broad a mandate, which had resulted in his single-handedly causing the crisis of the Dutch mission in central Java. Furthermore, he argues that Lion Cachet was wrong in his judgement, and concludes that the Javanese Christians did not break with their mentor but followed him, leaving the NGZV empty-handed. In 1922, the Catholic missionary Frans van Lith wrote Kjahi Sadrach, based on the books by Adriaanse and Lion Cachet, and also on private meetings with Sadrach and other leaders of Sadrach’s community. Van Lith was impressed by Sadrach’s personality, and denounced the attitudes assumed by Lion Cachet and the other missionaries (with the exception of Wilhelm), accusing them of suffering from the ‘mental illness of racial superiority’. In the 1930s, several Dutch and Dutch Indies newspapers wrote about the possible resurgence of the Sadrach Christians, who were at that time led by Sadrach’s successor Jotham. In 1956, a scholarly article by Greta Grosheide appeared in the Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift, giving an historical reconstruction and analysis of the Sadrach affair. In the late 1970s, the French historian Claude Guillot examined the topic, and in L’affaire Sadrach: Un essai de Christianisation au XIXe siècle (1981) studied



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Sadrach and his followers as a social movement. Guillot offers an analysis of the hierarchical organisation of this movement, arguing that it was this that enabled missionaries and Sadrach to work together. Sadrach bridged the Javanese and European worlds, proselytising and giving religious instruction among the Javanese, while European missionaries (especially Wilhelm) baptised them. Around that same time, Quarles van Ufford wrote an essay entitled ‘Why won’t you sit down?’ (1980), in which he identifies Sadrach’s movement as one of several examples of religious opposition to and rejection of colonial society at the end of the 19th century. A decade later, and from a different point of view than Guillot, Sutarman Partonadi, a minister of the Christian Church of central Java, conducted his PhD research on Sadrach’s doctrine. He argues for the contextualisation of Christianity, as generations of missionaries since the 1970s had done, and claims that Sadrach’s doctrine should be seen as a form of Christianity that had acquired a Javanese character. Publications Although a formal printed report of the inspection tour was presented to the Synod in 1892, no manuscripts of this are known. F. Lion Cachet, ‘Art, 19. Rapport en bijlagen Lion Cachet & Rapport der gezamelijke Deputaten Synodi Midden-Java Mei 1892’, in Acta der vierde voorloopige synode van Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken gehouden te Amsterdam 1892, Amsterdam, 1892, 484-517; ActaNedGK1892 (digitised version available through Kerchrekt.nl) F. Lion Cachet, Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending, Amsterdam, 1893-5 (15 sections, each of 48 pages) F. Lion Cachet, Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending, Amsterdam, 1896; cach001jaar01_01 (digitised version available through digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren [DBNL]) Studies Th. Sumartana, Mission at the crossroads. Indigenous churches, European missionaries, Islamic association and socio-religious change in Java 1812-1936, Jakarta, 1993 K. Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and conflicts 1596-1950, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 104-6 S.S. Partonadi, Sadrach’s community and its contextual roots. A nineteenth century Javanese expression of Christianity, Amsterdam, 1990 C. Guillot, L’affaire Sadrach. Un essai de Christianisation a Java au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1981

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P.Q. Ufford, ‘Why don’t you sit down? Sadrach and the struggle for religious independence in the earliest phase of the Church of central Java (1861-1899)’, in R. Schefold, J.W. Schoorl and J. Tennekes (eds), Man, meaning, and history. Essays in honour of H.G. Schulte Nordholt, The Hague, 1980, 204-29 G. Grosheide, ‘Sadrach Soerapranata’, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 56 (1956) 112-23, 129-41, 161-76 Grosheide, ‘De reis van Ds F. Lion Cachet naar Midden-Java’ D. Pol, Midden-Java ten zuiden, The Hague, 1922 Archives Semarang, archives of the Jesuit Province of Indonesia – F. van Lith, Kijai Sadrach. Eene les voor ons uit de Protestantsche zenzing van Midden-Java, 1922 (17 notebooks, handwritten; typewritten copy from 1973 by Jan Weitjes SJ) L.W.C. van den Berg, ‘Javaansch Christendom’, De Gids 71 (1907) 235-69 L. Adriaanse, Sadrach’s kring, Leiden, 1899 Aleida Maaike Derksen

Representations of Islam in the works of Dutch Protestant missionaries, 1850-1900 This entry discusses works by the following Dutch Protestant missionaries to the East Indies: Leonard van Rhijn (1812-87), Wessel Hoezoo (182696), Samuel Harthoorn (1830-81), Benjamin Matthes (1818-1908), Wolter van Hoëvell (1812-79), Christiaan Albers (1837-1920), Gerardus Grashuis (1835-1920) and Johannes Kreemer (1869-1900). Christianity first arrived in the East Indies through trade contacts with the Portuguese in the 16th century. For the Dutch traders of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, VOC) the spread of Christianity was not a priority since they feared that proselytising efforts would rouse opposition to their presence, and could hamper their trade interests. After the Dutch government took control over the former VOC territories, the Dutch Reformed Indische Kerk (Indian Church) was founded, which was closely tied to the Dutch government. Since the Dutch state officially adhered to a policy of neutrality in religious matters, the Indische Kerk did not evangelise among the non-Christian population. It was not until the mid-19th century that the Dutch colonial government allowed Christian mission organisations into the colony. The Nederlandse Zendelinggenootschap (Dutch Missionary Society, NZG) decided to send an inspector to Java to study the people, their culture and faith in order to decide which areas of the island were most suitable for founding a mission district and which areas should be avoided. Shortly after the inspection tour (1846-8) by Leonard van Rhijn, the colonial government provided the NZG with a permit to set up its first mission post in Java. From 1857, the NZG published the journal Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (MNZG) to inform their members of the progress of the mission. The MNZG consisted of articles and letters from both board members and missionaries who were active in the Indies. The missionaries wrote about daily activities, their progress and setbacks, but also about the people, cultures and religions they encountered. Empirical knowledge of local cultures and religious traditions was highly regarded within the NZG. In fact, the periodical sometimes bore more resemblance to an ethnological journal than to a mission journal. The second missionary society that gained a permit to set up a mission post in Java was the Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (Dutch Mission

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Association, NZV). It was founded in 1858 by former members of the NZG who considered the NZG too liberal. The NZV filed for a permit to work in a district in West Java in March 1861, but only received permission to start evangelising a few years later. The NZV also published journals to keep people back home informed of the mission’s progress. Its main journal was called Orgaan der Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (ONZV), and was published monthly from September 1860 to 1925. A section in this journal was entitled ‘Observations’, which included descriptions of the history, culture, religion and people, written by the missionaries in order to learn from each other’s observations and to improve their conversion strategies. The Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap (Dutch Bible Society, NBG) was founded in 1814 in Amsterdam in order to stimulate the dissemination of Bibles. It quickly started to distribute Bibles in the Dutch Indies, with the aim of spreading civilisation and supporting Christian mission. At first, the society reprinted the Malay translation by Melchior Leijdecker (16451701), but from the 1820s it sent out language scholars to study the colony’s local languages and to produce grammars, dictionaries and, of course, Bibles. These translators were not directly involved in missionary work, but they too reported their observations on the colony’s religious landscape in reports, articles and sometimes books. The corpus produced by these eight missionaries covers a mixture of subjects, including natural history, geography, history, ethnography and linguistics. The writings provided a large amount of valuable information since missionaries often stayed for prolonged periods in the field and learned the local languages, enabling them to gain a profound, though biased, understanding of the local culture, religion and society. Their works provide valuable information on Islam as a living tradition in the East Indies, though since Islam was considered the main force standing against Christian mission, it is in many cases represented negatively. This entry highlights the works of these eight authors. Together, their writings provide a representative impression of the Dutch missionary discourse on Islam.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Secondary M.J. Kruithof, ‘“Shouting in a desert”. Dutch missionary encounters with Javanese Islam, 1850-1910’, Rotterdam, 2014 (PhD Diss. Erasmus University Rotterdam)



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M.C. Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese society. Islamic and other visions (c.1830-1930), Leiden, 2007 W. Smit, De islam binnen de horizon. Een missionaire studie over de benadering van de Islam door vier Nederlandsche Zendingscorporaties (1797-1951), Zoetermeer, 2003 Th. van den End, De Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging in West Java, 1858-1963, Alphen aan den Rijn, 1991 J.L. Swellengrebel, In Leijdeckers voetspoor, anderhalve eeuw Bijbelvertaling en taalkunde in de Indonesische talen, vol. 1, Amsterdam, 1974

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Representations of Islam in the works of Dutch Protestant missionaries, 1850-1900 Date 19th century Original Language Dutch Description The NZG sent inspector Leonard van Rhijn (1812-87) in 1846 to the Dutch Indies to research the history of the spread of Islam and the possibilities for evangelisation. He had to estimate how people would react to Christian mission and where the mission could expect opposition. Van Rhijn’s tour took two years (1846-8), during which time he sent regular reports to the Netherlands. Remarkably, Islam is not addressed in any of these interim reports, nor in his travelogue, which was published in 1851 under the title Reis door den Indischen Archipel, in het belang der Evangelische zending (655 pages, excluding attachments). In this book, Van Rhijn argues that, while the government worried that the Christian mission could lead to uprisings, this fear was actually unfounded since ‘fanaticism’ was very rare. He gives the example of Christians living peacefully together with Muslims in Surabaya, and maintains that Muslims there even respected their Christian neighbours (Van Rhijn, Reis, p. 165). However, a few pages further on, he contradicts this peaceful image when he argues that the government did have reason to fear the effect of the ever-growing number of hajjis who were returning to Java from Mecca. They upheld a more exclusive form of Islam, Van Rhijn writes, and the more Javanese turned into ‘real’ Muslims the more Dutch colonial rule was at risk, because ‘real’ Muslims hated and despised Christians (Reis,

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p. 174), but he was of the opinion that, in general, the majority of Javanese should not be considered ‘real’ Muslims: What some say about Javanese religiosity or even their fanaticism, after what I saw and heard, I consider at least exaggerated. It may perhaps apply to some priests and pilgrims who have been to Mecca, and especially the Arabs who live in the coastal cities; yet the vast majority finds itself in a stream whose meaning is external, without earnestness or contemplation or anything that resembles true piety. Their religion exists in appearances without spirit and truth: circumcision, muttering a few prayers that are not understood, abstinence from pork and some other uninspired rituals, that is all. They are still half Hindu in the interior areas: they show reverence, yes sometimes homage to images, trees and other objects, as was customary in Hindu times, although this is against Islam. (Reis, p. 140)

On several other occasions, Van Rhijn mentions superstitious beliefs, and says that many Muslims do not abide by the rules of Islam. At the same time, he noticed that Islam was gaining ground, because the number of Arab tradesmen who sought to spread their faith among the local population was steadily increasing, although their growing influence did not necessarily mean that the people were becoming ‘real’ Muslims. In many cases, they just claimed to be Muslims, without having real knowledge of the religion at all. For example, when he visited the mountainous region Tenger in East Java, he concluded that the Tengerrese only pretended to be Muslims to keep peace with the neighbouring peoples. He noted that Allah was increasingly forced upon them and that this resulted in more and more Tengerrese circumcising their sons and adopting other Islamic traditions, though in his view their belief system was hardly affected. Van Rhijn concluded that the Tengerrese were, in fact, still Hindus who worshipped Visnu and Bromo (Reis, p. 197). To him, this was a clear example of the weak state of Islam in the Indies. After this positive report on the chances of a Christian mission, in 1849 the NZG sent Wessel Hoezoo (1826-96) to Semarang. Hoezoo believed that missionaries could use Islamic names and concepts as a starting point to introduce the Javanese to Christianity, so he made a study of a number of Javanese works, including the Anbio. This eminent work, written in Javanese metre, contains biographical narratives of prophets referred to in the Qur’an and the Bible, and a history of Islam in the Indies. It had been partially translated by G.W. Bruckner, and Hoezoo continued his work. He published an article in the MNZG in 1865 entitled ‘Bijdrage tot de kennis van de Bijbelse legenden der Mohammedanen’, in which he included



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a biography of Ngisa (Jesus) from the Anbio. In the notes, he addresses the differences between the Muslim and Christian biographies of Jesus, and concludes that the most important difference is that Muslims believe Jesus was not crucified but was saved by angels, who took him to Mecca and from there up to heaven. In the conclusion, he argues that missionaries should use the name Ngisa, as it is already familiar among Muslims, and that they should not force them to use the name Jesus, which was difficult for the Javanese to pronounce. Hoezoo agreed with his colleagues that circumcising young boys, abstaining from eating pork and the ability to recite a few prayers did not necessarily prove that the Javanese had strong faith. He noticed that they clung on to old superstitions and were not willing to give up the beliefs of their ancestors. However, he also noticed a change that was taking place in Javanese Islam. A small part of the population, mostly of the urban elite who called themselves the Putihan (‘the White People’), were starting to adhere to a more modern, scripture-based form of the faith, though at the same time the majority of the people resisted this intensification of Islam by clinging on to or returning to traditional Javanese practices. The Putihan were now beginning to call these ‘nominal’ Muslims the Abangan (‘the Red People’). The oldest surviving report of these developments in Javanese Islam stems from 1855, when Wessel Hoezoo referred to the Abangan people living near Semarang as ‘secular’ because they did not observe Islamic law (Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 210: Hoezoo, Letter to the board of the NZG, 16 February 1855). Samuel Eliza Harthoorn (1830-81), like his colleague Hoezoo, noticed a change in the Muslim community. He noted in his annual report for 1856 that Javanese Muslims could be divided in two groups. One group, the Abangan, considered themselves Muslim because they were circumcised, though in his view they were not really concerned with other Islamic beliefs and rituals and therefore should not even be addressed as Muslims. The second, much smaller group, the Putihan, were more concerned with their faith and did try to observe the Pillars of Islam. In another article he wrote: ‘These santris and others who observe the prayer times are called the white people, the holy people, contrary to the majority of the people that do not observe the prayer times, who are called the red people as an insult’ (‘De zending op Java’, p. 237). Yet Harthoorn also considered the Putihans’ knowledge of Islam insufficient and argued that, to both groups, being a good Muslim only meant performing prescribed duties. A strong internal belief was not required (‘Iets over den Javaanschen Mohammedanen’).

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It was quite common for missionaries to minimise the position of Islam in the Dutch East Indies and even deny that the population was Muslim. This sentiment is apparent in Harthoorn’s annual report of 1857: To call the Javanese Muslims in a political sense, because Islam is regarded as the state’s religion, is acceptable. However, to assign this label to the folk religion, the religion of the people, which controls their conscience, their existence and behaviour, is not by any means adequate. One cannot call them Brahmins, Buddhists, Shaivists etc. either. To be accurate and to prevent a misunderstanding and false representations it may be useful to refer to the folk religion mentioned above as ‘Javanism’. (Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 259: Harthoorn, Annual report of 1857)

With this comment, Harthoorn was the first to introduce the concept ‘Javanism’ to address local religion, a concept that clearly denies the identity of the Javanese as pure Muslim. He considered the religion of the people an ‘unnatural’ amalgam of beliefs. No one, no matter how much more knowledge he has of Muhammad than other Javanese, is detached from the pantheistic Buddhist beliefs that used to control Java. In particular, the doctrine of transmigration [of souls] is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. For some, this unnatural mixture of beliefs is so obvious that they are called ‘santri pasedj’. (Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 259: Harthoorn, Annual report of 1857)

The translator Benjamin Frederik Matthes (1818-1908) was commissioned by the NBG in 1849 to learn the Makassarese and Buginese languages and to make Bible translations in these languages. During his lengthy stays in south Sulawesi and south Celebes, he not only published several dictionaries and grammar books, but also wrote on local literature, poetry and legends. His ethnographic works include local tales on the spread of Islam in the region. Matthes visited the shrine of Dato-ri-Bandang, which had become a popular pilgrimage site. There, he collected several legends about the walis, the saints who brought Islam to the Indonesian archipelago, and published them in his book Eenige Makassaarsche en Boeginesche legenden in 1850. According to local legends in south Sulawesi, a ship arrived near the shores of Tallo, a kingdom in Makassar, at the beginning of the 17th century. A man named Dato-ri-Bandang alighted on the beach, performed the ṣalāt and recited parts of the Qur’an. Locals who witnessed this strange performance hurried to their king and, when he rushed to the



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beach, he saw five people standing in a circle on a white rock. The king asked the man standing in the middle of circle who he was, and the man answered: ‘I am the prophet Muhammad’ (Matthes, Eenige Makassaarsche en Boeginesche legenden, p. 51). The Prophet took the king’s hands and wrote on them ‘In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, peace be upon you, may Allah’s compassion and blessings accompany you’ (p. 51). The four men accompanying the Prophet turned out to be the Rashidun, the first four caliphs. The king converted to Islam on the spot. After the five men vanished, Dato-ri-Bandang became the king’s teacher in Islam. He taught the king the shahāda and how to perform the ṣalāt, and to recite the Qur’an. The legend concludes that, soon after the king’s conversion, the entire people of Tallo converted. During his search for local literary sources, Matthes found a translation of the Qur’an in Makassarese that was used in a local pesantren. He published a translation of the text in 1860 under the title Proeve eener Makassaarsche vertaling des Koran, but came to the conclusion that it was not a literal translation of the Qur’an and therefore called it a ‘description’. The text was unclear, according to Matthes, and contained numerous unknown Arabic words. But the people who visited the mosque did not understand the prayers and sermons either, as Matthes explains in the introduction, so apparently this did not matter much to those reading the text. Because of this, he considered the Friday prayers a ‘dead ceremony’, which could never bring about true religious feelings (Matthes, Proeve eener Makassaarsche vertaling, ‘Introduction’). Wolter Robert van Hoëvell (1812-79) led a Dutch and Malay-speaking congregation in Batavia from 1837. A decade after his first arrival in the Dutch colony, he embarked on a two-month journey through Java, Madura and Bali to study the peoples, cultures and languages, while visiting several congregations. His three-part travelogue, Reis over Java, Madura en Bali, in het midden van 1847, was published in 1849-54. His general conclusion is that, although Islam had penetrated the interior and even the smallest villages had their own mosques, the people of the Indies could hardly be called Muslims. Even after he witnessed several Islamic rituals, he maintained that knowledge of Islam did not extend beyond outward formalities. They might circumcise their sons, perform prayers in an un­ familiar language and recite Arabic formulas during weddings and funeral ceremonies, but inner religious experience was completely absent (Reis over Java, vol 1, p. 189). He shares his experience of a dhikr ritual of the Sufi Rifāʿī ṭarīqa he witnessed in Cianjur, and considers it nothing more than

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a cheap trick performed by charlatans. The ‘priests’ excited the audience by reciting qur’anic verses while stabbing themselves with an awl. Van Hoëvell comments that the awls must have had retractable blades, but the audience was convinced that prayers to the Prophet had made the ‘priests’ invincible. On another occasion, he visited a mosque in Yogyakarta during celebrations to mark the Prophet’s birthday and reports that 500 men dressed in white performed a dhikr ritual, but to him it was just an outward ritual with no inner meaning. He mentions that the audience did not seem to be the least interested, which confirmed his conviction that the Javanese were not sincere believers. Van Hoëvell witnessed Islam as a lived religion that differed from what he knew from his textbooks about it. He was therefore convinced that Javanese society could not be considered a ‘Mohammedan’ society. He provides examples of how the local population had blended Islamic notions into local religious traditions and mythology. For example, on one occasion Sunan Kalijaga, one of the walis who are said to have brought Islam to Indonesia, and famous for building a mosque in Demak, was shivering with cold during one of his journeys through central Java. When he thrust his walking stick into the ground a fire erupted from the earth to warm him up. According to local myth, the hole became the crater of the Merapi volcano. Christiaan Albers (1837-1920) joined the NZV in 1859 and was sent to Java in the autumn of 1862. The NZV was active in West Java where the Sundanese people were dominant. During his stay of more than 40 years, he wrote countless letters, reports and articles, including many on Islam. In his article ‘De aard van het Mohammedanisme’ for the ONZV, Albers shows that he did not hold Islam in high esteem and thought it very unoriginal: Muḥammad’s doctrine is simply nothing more than a mixture and mutilation of what he found among the Jews and Christians. Furthermore, we notice other elements in Islam that would not be there if they had remained isolated from heathen religions. Parsism had great influence on Mohammedanism, which resulted in Muḥammad being venerated as the original light through which everything that has been created was created. (‘De aard van het Mohammedanisme’, p. 154)

He also argued that, although Islam had reshaped Java’s social landscape, the people did not really practise a religion that was altogether different from before the arrival of Islam. Some words and names had been changed in people’s prayers and the names Muḥammad and Allāh had



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been added, but core convictions had remained unchanged. To him this proved Islam was a powerless religion. In ‘De aard van het Mohammedanisme’, Albers claims that the spread of Islam was intended not to bring peace and salvation to the people, but to gain power over them. The conditions that had to be met to become a Muslim were few, requiring little more than abstaining from eating pork and adopting a Muslim name. As long as newly converted Muslims got rid of any idols at home, they could continue in their old faith as they pleased. Albers claims that even the Sundanese lacked inner conviction, and for them Islam was mostly a way to resist Dutch rule. They claimed the history and language of the Arabs because they had no history of their own: ‘The poor heathen is raised from dust. He must become Muslim; therefore he, who is now nothing, even less than nothing, becomes something against his rulers’ (‘De aard’, p. 159). The religious dimension of Muslim identity is secondary; the main focus is performing one’s duties. While personal relationships between missionaries and Muslim leaders were rare, Albers provides a unique account of a theological debate he had with a hajji before a small audience in 1865 (‘Verslag van zendeling C. Albers’). During the debate he explained that Muḥammad was not predicted in the Bible, but that the term ‘paraclete’ mentioned in John 15:26 and elsewhere refers to the Holy Spirit. He went on to explain what this concept means to Christians, and argued that Jesus is God’s Son rather than a prophet, though his audience neither understood nor accepted this. He remarks in the conclusion that he regularly discussed such matters with Muslims and that these debates usually followed a similar pattern. He realised that Islam was more firmly rooted in west Java than in central and east Java and that the Sundanese were consequently more pious than the Javanese. During the 45 years he spent in west Java, he witnessed Islam growing and people becoming ‘better’ Muslims: In comparison to the Javanese, the Sundanese have never been known for being bad or indifferent Mohammedans, yet nowadays they seem to endeavour to be praised for being good Mohammedans. […] In Cianjur the number of mosques, which can be compared to chapels in Roman Catholic countries, has multiplied. Some seem to be more popular than others, perhaps because of certain teachers, and these are flooded with people a few times a week, both for performing their religious rituals and for following religious classes. (Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1877: Albers, Letter to the board of the NZV, June 1884)

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However, Albers indicates that Muslim leaders were gaining more authority and imposing a more orthodox version of Islam upon the Sundanese. For example, he mentions an order issued in 1888 stipulating that every adult had to perform the ṣalāt on pain of losing their right to an Islamic funeral (Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1877: Letter to the board of the NZV, 16 November 1888). To Albers, measures such as these did not transform the Sundanese into better Muslims, since they only fulfilled these obligations out of fear, not because of true dedication. Gerardus Jan Grashuis (1835-1920) was sent by the NZV to west Java in 1862 to study the Sundanese language and translate the Bible into that language. His first translation, the Gospel of Luke, was set for publication in 1866, but it was poorly received and his translations of Mark and Matthew’s Gospels were put on hold indefinitely. Grashuis quit his position and briefly returned to Rotterdam to teach at the NZV seminary. He returned to Batavia in 1867, this time in government service, but continued his study of the local language and literature. He was of the opinion that Sunda literature was grounded in Islam, and he translated several manuscripts related to Islam. To stimulate the study of the language, he published Zedeleer naar Ghazzali (‘Morality according to al-Ghazālī’) (11 pages) in 1874, which includes parts of al-Ghazālī’s Kitāb al-taṣawwuf in Sundanese. He added an introduction in Dutch, which includes a short biography of al-Ghazālī, and argues that the Sundanese are much better Muslims than their Javanese neighbours. Islam had not been mixed as much with previous religious traditions, such as Buddhism, as it had in central and east Java and, as a result, the beliefs of the Sundanese were less syncretistic. Nevertheless, those who followed all the rules of Islam were extremely rare. The NZG missionary Johannes Kreemer (1869-1900) arrived in east Java in 1869 and worked there until 1900. In De zending op Oost-Java (1888) (8 pages), he says that Javanese Christians behave in more civilised ways than their Muslim neighbours, and are more diligent and trustworthy since they do not gamble, take opium or associate themselves with ‘dancing girls’, and are rarely in contact with the police (De zending, p. 3). He goes on to argue that these Christians hold onto their true Javanese identity, while Arab culture has progressively erased Javanese culture in the Muslim community. He states that spreading Christianity is necessary to maintain Dutch rule in the colony, because the stronger Islam becomes, the stronger the resistance to the rule of the ‘unbelievers’ will be. In his opinion, the colonial government should do much more to contain further



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Islamisation. In his article ‘Wat de Javanen zoal van ons denken’, he argues that Muslims deeply despise Dutch infidels and consider it ḥalāl to steal from them or even kill them. But Kreemer admits that in fact there are a few sincere Muslims whose trust he has earned. This is because they are convinced that, although their religions differ, they worship the same God (p. 122). Like his colleagues, Kreemer regularly claims in his reports that the Javanese are as much ‘heathen’ as they are Muslim. For example, in his article ‘Iets over Djimats’, he describes prevailing traditions such as strong faith in amulets (djimats) which, in his eyes, cannot be reconciled with orthodox Islam. The missionaries found it difficult to differentiate between normative practice and reality in Islam, which led them to think that the majority of people could not be considered ‘real Muhammedans’. They judged indigenous people against their own ideas of Islam, without leaving much room for the people’s representation of themselves. Their writings show that deep personal relationships with Muslims were still limited in the 19th century, and that contacts were often coloured by a polemical attitude of superiority. Consequently, their assessments too often lack a genuine understanding of the religious lives of their informants. Although all missionaries agreed that Islam had not really conquered Java – it was considered to be only a ‘veil’ over the prevailing Javanese religion – they did envy the vast numbers of converts. Why had the Islamic mission been much more successful than their own attempts? The missionaries’ explanation was that, for Muslims, conversion in name was sufficient. They considered Islam a religion with a vast capacity for assimilation, and Muslim missionaries apparently had no difficulty with accepting beliefs and rituals from other religious currents. The missionaries agreed that Muslims in the Indies did not have a sincere relationship with God, since they could not read the Qur’an, and even those who were able to chant parts of it could not understand its message. Islam was a religion that consisted solely of outward rituals that could not affect the soul. They also all agreed that even these rituals were not dutifully performed by the majority, and all of them gave numerous examples of Muslims who did not perform ṣalāt regularly, did not attend the mosque, or violated sharīʿa law. The NZG and NZV had different attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. That of the NZV was more polemical and dismissive than that of the NZG. This is evident in the terminology used in their discourses. The NZV used war-terminology, while the NZG used agricultural terms such as sowing and harvesting (Smit, De islam binnen de horizon, pp. 277 and 287). The

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NZV depicted Islam as a false religion that had been invented by Satan, whereas the NZG spoke of a flawed religion. Both organisations shared the opinion that Islam was a deviation from Judaism and Christianity and lacked originality, and they considered it to be a tradition that was predominantly focused on the expansion of influence and power. Since many missionaries stayed for long periods in the field, some even for many decades, their writings display developments in the religious landscape of their districts. They noticed that, during the second half of the 19th century, Islam had become increasingly embedded in public life, and that people were increasingly following a more exclusivist form. A growing number of people performed the hajj, and numerous pesantren had been opened. Both resulted in an upsurge in Islamic knowledge. A remarkable schism occurred as a result of this Islamisation process in Java, which was first described by missionaries Hoezoo and Harthoorn of the NZG. A group of hajjis and santris sought to strengthen and purify Javanese Islam from ‘foreign’ elements derived from animistic, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. They referred to the majority who followed hybrid and localised versions of Islam as the Abangan (‘the Red People’) and themselves as the Putihan (‘the White People’), but the missionaries emphasised that the religion of the latter was not free from syncretism, which reinforced the dominant idea that the Indies were not really Islamised at all. Significance The writings of these Dutch Protestant missionaries provide detailed observations of everyday life in the Dutch Indies. Their letters and reports are extremely important sources on Islam from a Christian perspective in a time when most colonial officials and academics could not be bothered with the everyday beliefs and practices of the indigenous population. Their observations mostly reflect social praxis and offer interesting examples of lived Islam. Even though they are often biased and superficial, their descriptions show how Islam was internalised in different ways by local people in the region. Publications Authors’ publications are listed alphabetically. Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1102-1: 1877 (Christiaan Albers, ‘Brief aan het hoofdbestuur der NZV, Cianjur 9 juli 1864’)



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Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 1877 (Christiaan Albers, Letter to the board of the NZV, June 1884) C. Albers, ‘Verslag van zendeling C. Albers over de zendingspost Cianjur in het jaar 1865’, Orgaan der Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging 6/7 (1866) 98-105; 422682454 (digitised version available through Delpher) C. Albers, ‘De aard van het Mohammedanisme’, Orgaan der Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging 21/10 (1881) 153-63; 422682454 (digitised version available through Delpher) G.J. Grashuis, Zedeleer naar Ghazzali, Leiden, 1874 G. Grashuis, ‘Een Mohammedaansch traktaatje’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1888) 1-23; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 259 (Samuel Harthoorn, Annual report of 1857) S.E. Harthoorn, ‘Iets over den Javaanschen Mohammedanen en den Javaanschen Christenen’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1857) 183-213; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) S.E. Harthoorn, ‘De zending op Java en meer bepaald die van Malang, uit het jaarverslag 1857’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1860) 105-38, 212-53; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) S.E. Harthoorn, De Evangelische Zending en Oost-Java, een kritische bijdrage, Haarlem, 1863; 115 E 32 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) W.R. van Hoëvell, Reis over Java, Madura en Bali, in het midden van 1847, Amsterdam, 1849-54; 3034 A 27 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) W.R. van Hoëvell, Uit het Indische leven, Zaltbommel, 1860; 1026 A 33 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) W.R. van Hoëvell, Uit het Indische leven, Amsterdam, 18652; KW BJ 48299 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) W.R. van Hoëvell, Aus dem indischen Leben, trans. W. Berg, Leipzig, 1868 (German trans.); PPN673065855 (digitised version available through Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

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Archives Utrecht, Archief Raad voor de Zending – 210 (Wessel Hoezoo, Letter to the board of the NZG, 16 February 1855) W. Hoezoo, ‘Bijdrage tot de kennis van de Bijbelse legenden der Mohammedanen’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1865) 227-40; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) J. Kreemer, ‘Wat de Javanen zoal van ons denken’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1888) 121-5; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) J. Kreemer, ‘Iets over Djimats’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1888) 349-54; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) J. Kreemer, De zending op Oost-Java, The Hague, 1888 J. Kreemer, De zending op Oost-Java, The Hague, 18892 J. Kreemer, ‘Onze heerschappij over Java en de aloude profetieën’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1891) 101-8; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) J. Kreemer, ‘Vijf-en-twintig jaren Zendeling’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (1898) 307-48; 410810142 (digitised version available through Delpher) B.F. Matthes, Eenige Makassaarsche en Boeginesche Legenden, Leiden, 1850 B.F. Matthes, ‘Proeve eener maskassaarsche vertaling des Korans’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 1 (1860) 87-106; V OCT 211 NB: CON (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) B.F. Matthes, Beknopt verslag van een verblijf in de binnenlanden van Celebes, waar Boegineesch gesproken wordt, gedurende zes maanden van 24 april tot 24 october 1856, Makassar, 1861; KL.GES 1861: 18 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) L.J. van Rhijn, Reis door den Indischen archipel, in het belang der evangelische zending, Rotterdam, 1851; 249 E 13 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) Studies Kruithof, ‘“Shouting in a desert”’ Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese society M.C. Ricklefs, ‘The birth of the Abangan’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 162 (2006) 35-55



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K. Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and conflicts 1596-1950, Amsterdam, 2006 Smit, De islam binnen de horizon M. Laffan, The makings of Indonesian Islam. Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past, Princeton NJ, 2003 J.I. Smith, ‘Christian missionary views of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, ICMR 9 (1998) 357-73 Th. van den End et al., Twee eeuwen Nederlandse zending 1797-1997. Twaalf opstellen, Leiden, 1997 Van den End, De Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging I.H. Enklaar, Kom over en help ons! Twaalf opstellen over de Nederlandse zending in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague, 1981 Swellengrebel, In Leijdeckers voetspoor, vol. 1 H. van den Brink, Dr Benjamin Frederik Matthes, zijn leven en arbeid in dienst van het Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap, Amsterdam, 1943 Maryse Kruithof

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje Date of Birth 8 February 1857 Place of Birth Oosterhout Date of Death 26 June 1936 Place of Death Leiden

Biography

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was born from an extra-marital relationship between a Protestant minister and the daughter of another Protestant minister, after which both were expelled from the Protestant Church. This seemingly unimportant fact played a role in his later views of religion. In 1874, Snouck Hurgronje began to study theology at Leiden University, where he graduated in Arabic language in 1878. He wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled Het Mekkaansche feest and obtained his PhD in 1880, when he was only 23 years old. Snouck Hurgronje’s doctoral dissertation dealt with ancient Mecca and the Islamic pilgrimage. His thesis, that it was only after Muḥammad’s break with the Jews in Mecca that he developed an image of Abraham as the founding father of monotheism, was influential though it was contested. According to the argument of the thesis, while he lived in Mecca Muḥammad looked on Abraham as no more than a prophet among other prophets. But when he broke with the Jews in Medina and freed Islam from Judaism, he reinterpreted Abraham as the founder of the true religion, an insight that still plays a role in the relationship between Christians and Muslims. After working as a trainer of colonial administrators, in 1884 Snouck Hurgronje obtained a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Colonial Affairs to study pilgrims from the Netherlands Indies in Mecca. He first stayed six months in the Dutch consulate in Jedda, where he converted to Islam in 1884, taking the name ʿAbd al-Ghaffār. He went on to Mecca for six months, where he developed high esteem for West Javanese aristocrats and scholars of Islam. In 1885, he had to leave Mecca suddenly because he was suspected of collaborating in stealing the Taymāʾ Stone (now in the Louvre Museum). He had nothing to do with this, but the authorities could no longer guarantee his safety.



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Illustration 12. Photograph of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje as al-Sayyid ҅Abd al-Ghaffār, in Mecca, January 1885

He went back to The Netherlands and described his findings in three books about Mecca which, besides descriptions of the history and daily life, contained a huge series of unique pictures. Owing to his in-depth knowledge of Islam and Arabic, and the extensive network he had built up in Mecca, he was invited to go to the Netherlands Indies, where the colonial government feared a revolt against colonial rule by radicalised pilgrims (or ‘fanatics’ in the terminology then current) who were returning from Mecca to the Netherlands Indies, particularly to Atjeh (Aceh). For 17 years, Snouck Hurgronje served the colonial government in the Netherlands Indies as researcher and Advisor on Native Affairs (18891906), and his Office of Native Affairs was the beginning of what is now called the Ministry of Religious Affairs. He travelled to Atjeh several times. Through his intense contacts with Muslim scholars, he was able to give an in-depth description of the resistance of religious elites to Dutch colonial rule, but his advice to the colonial government on this matter was ambiguous: he proposed, on the one hand, the emancipation of ordinary Muslims but, on the other, harsh repression of Muslim clerics. He favoured a strict separation of Islam as religion from Islam as political ideology, and was a strong advocate of ethical politics. Both his wives (he married the second

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after the death of the first) were from respected Muslim families, and had close family ties in the Muslim community. This made him suspect among Dutch colonial administrators, who questioned his loyalty to the colonial government. In 1906, Snouck Hurgronje returned to the Netherlands where he became a professor of Islam at Leiden University. During his time there, he was involved in the publication of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, 1913), but he did not author any major work, and he missed first-hand knowledge of newer developments in the Netherlands Indies, such as the foundation of the Muhammadiyyah movement in Yogyakarta in 1912. Among scholars of Islam there has been a debate about the authenticity of Snouck Hurgronje’s conversion to Islam and his two Islamic marriages. While most Indonesian scholars hold that his conversion was sincere (otherwise his marriages under Islamic law would have been problematic), most Dutch scholars hold that it was a conversion in name only (taking into account Snouck Hurgronje’s earlier expressions of religious scepticism).

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary C. Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islâm. Vier voordrachten gehouden in de Nederlandsch-Indische Bestuursacademie, Leiden, 1911 C. Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide geschriften van C. Snouck Hurgronje, ed. A. Wensinck, 7 vols, Leiden, 1923-7 (Indonesian trans. as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Kumpulan karangan Snouck Hurgronje, 14 vols, Jakarta, 1995-2000) Secondary P.Sj. van Koningsveld, ‘Conversion of European intellectuals to Islam. The case of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, alias ʿAbd al-Ghaffār’, in B. Agai, U. Ryad and M. Sajid (eds), Muslims in interwar Europe. A transcultural historical perspective, Leiden, 2015, 88-104 M. Laffan, The makings of Indonesian Islam. Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past, Princeton NJ, 2011 A. Missbach, ‘The Aceh War (1873-1913) and the influence of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje’, in A. Graf, S. Schröter and E. Wieringa (eds), Aceh, history, politics and culture, Singapore, 2010, 39-62 K. Steenbrink, ‘Sharia debates in colonial and postcolonial Netherlands’, Kultur, the Indonesian Journal for Muslim Cultures 4 (2009) 1-18 J. Aritonang, Sejarah Perjumpaan Kristen dan Islam di Indonesia, Jakarta, 2004, esp. pp. 137-52



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L. Khuluq, Strategi Belanda melumpuhkan Islam. Biografi C. Snouck Hurgronje, Yogyakarta, 2002 Muhamad Hisyam, Caught between three fires. The Javanese Pangulu under the Dutch colonial administration 1882-1942, Jakarta, 2001 Husni Rahim, Sistem otoritas dan administrasi Islam. Studi tentang Pejabat Agama masa Kesultanan dan Kolonial di Palembang, Jakarta, 1998 T. Abdullah, ‘History, political images and cultural encounter. The Dutch in the Indonesian Archipelago’, Studia Islamika 1 (1994) 1-28 K. Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and conflicts, 1596-1950, Amsterdam, 1993 (repr. 2006) P.Sj. van Koningsveld, Snouck Hurgronje en de Islam. Acht artikelen over leven en werk van een oriëntalist uit het koloniale tijdperk, Leiden, 1987 (Indonesian trans., Snouck Hurgronje dan Islam. Delapan karangan tentang hidup dan karya seorang orientalis zaman kolonial, Jakarta, 1989) P. van ’t Veer, Perang Aceh. Kisah kegagalan Snouck Hurgronje, Jakarta, 1985 Husnul Aqib Suminto, Politik Islam Hindia Belanda, Het Kantoor voor Inlandsche Zaken, Jakarta, 1985 H. Algadri, C. Snouck Hurgronje. Politik Belanda terhadap Islam dan Keturunan Arab, Jakarta, 1984 Ahmad Adaby Darban, Snouck Hurgronje dan Islam di Indonesia, Yogyakarta, 1983 P. van ‘t Veer, De Atjeh-oorlog, Amsterdam, 1969 G.-H. Bousquet, La politique musulmane et coloniale des Pays-Bas, Paris, 1939; English trans. A French view of the Netherland Indies, London, 1940

Frans Wijsen

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Het Mekkaansche feest ‘The Meccan festival’ Date 1880 Original Language Dutch Description At the age of 23, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje published and defended his doctoral dissertation at Leiden University on the Meccan ḥajj. In this book of 191 pages, he sought to reconstruct the original Arab festival at Mecca that preceded the preaching of Muḥammad, as well as to identify

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the changes that were introduced to it by the Prophet Muḥammad in the last five years of his life. The first chapter discusses references to the ḥajj within the Qur’an. Here, Snouck Hurgonje emphasises that the ḥajj was not a religious, but an economic and social festival, and sets out his theory about the changing figure of Abraham. Continuing and correcting Aloys Sprenger’s ideas set out in The life of Mohammad (Allahabad, 1851), he establishes a clear difference between the Meccan Abraham, who is only one in a long series of earlier prophets, and the Medinan Abraham, rebuilder of the Kaʿba, the father of Ismāʿīl and ancestor of the Arabs. The second and third chapters discuss in detail the various ceremonies and obligations of the ḥajj, from its preparations to the actual performance. The conclusion stresses that the Muslim ḥajj is a purely religious festival, while its pagan predecessor was more an annual fair centred on trade. In the introduction, Snouck Hurgronje characterises Muḥammad’s move from Mecca to Medina as a move from prophet to politician (‘he left his prophetic robe behind in his hometown’, p. 3), and in the conclusion he reveals how much he himself regrets this. This is summed up in his final sentence: ‘If once (which is not to be foreseen) the hope of Sprenger will become reality, that Muslims will also have their Tübingen School [of reformist thinkers], undoubtedly the Meccan festival will be the first to be deleted from the list of basics that belong to the essence of Islam’ (p. 190). Significance Snouck Hurgronje’s controversial suggestion about the ‘two Abrahams’ was quickly and widely accepted. In a richly documented article, Willem Bijlefeld (‘Controversies around the qur’anic Ibrāhīm’, p. 83) mentions Julius Wellhausen and Frants Buhl among those who welcomed it, adding that the great German scholar Theodor Nöldeke included a substantial summary of it in his Geschichte des Qorāns (pp. 146-7). In his article on ‘Ibrāhīm’ in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (published in the 1920s and 1930s) Snouck Hurgronje states that ‘the figure of Ibrāhīm in the Kurʾān has a history before he finally develops into the founder of the Kaʿba’, and he then summarises the thesis of his doctoral dissertation. In 1933, Farīd Wajdī criticised it at length in Dāʾirat almaʿārif al-islāmiyya (‘Ibrāhīm’; Bijlefeld, ‘Controversies’, p. 82), and in 1952 Edmund Beck published another critique of it (‘Die Gestalt des Abraham’). The debate has continued, with Youakim Moubarac disagreeing with the thesis about the two Abrahams: ‘The figure of Abraham was already



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complete as to deep religious intuition at the beginning of the second Meccan period’ (Abraham dans le Coran, p. 58), and Karl-Wolfgang Tröger (‘Mohammed und Abraham’) and Francis Peters (Children of Abraham) following Moubarac. Rudi Paret (‘Der Islam’) identifies the figure of Abraham as one of the two qur’anic issues (the other is the crucifixion of Christ) that must be faced by Muslim theologians, while Karl-Josef Kuschel criticises Snouck Hurgronje for harbouring theological and strategic motivations: ‘Understandably Muslims themselves regard these theses, which are popular among non-Muslim scholars of religion, as a degradation of the Qur’an and a devaluation of its authority’ (Abraham. A symbol of hope, p. 153). These references, which could be expanded with many more, show that this analysis of Abraham in the Qur’an is still at the centre of the debate concerning ways of understanding Islam, and continues to influence present-day Christian-Muslim relations. Publications Christiaan Hurgronje, Het Mekkaansche feest, Leiden, 1880 (repr. in Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide Geschriften, vol. 1, Bonn, 1923, 1-124); snou004mekk01 (digitised version available through digitale bibliotheek vor de Nederlandse letteren) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, ‘Le pèlerinage à la Mekke’, in G.-H. Bousquet and J. Schacht (eds and trans), Oeuvres choisies, selected works of C. Snouck Hurgronje, Leiden, 1957, 171-213 (partial French trans.) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Perayaan Mekah, trans. Supardi, Jakarta: INIS, 1989 (Indonesian trans.) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Il pellegrinaggio alla Mecca, trans. G. Scattone, Turin, 1989 (Italian trans.) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, The Mecca festival, trans. W. Behn, Wiesbaden, 2012 (English trans.) Studies K.-J. Kuschel, Abraham. A symbol of hope for Jews, Christians and Muslims, London, 1995 (English trans. of Streit um Abraham. Was Juden, Christen und Muslime trennt, Munich, 1994) W.A. Bijlefeld, ‘Controversies around the qur’anic Ibrāhīm narrative and its “orientalist” interpretations’, MW 72 (1982) 81-94 F.E. Peters, Children of Abraham. Judaism/Christianity/Islam, Princeton NJ, 1982

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K.-W. Tröger, ‘Mohammed und Abraham. Der prozeß der Ablösung des frühen Islam vom Judentum und seine Vorgeschichte’, Kairos 22 (1980) 188-200 R. Paret, art. ‘Der Islam’, in H. Mann (ed.), Religionswissenschaft und Theologie, Darmstadt, 1973, 144-61 R. Paret, art. ‘Ibrāhīm’, in EI2 Y. Moubarac, Abraham dans le Coran, Paris, 1958 E. Beck, ‘Die Gestalt des Abraham am Wendepunkt der Entwicklung Muhammads. Analyse von Sure 2, 118 (124) - 135 (141)’, Le Muséon 65 (1952) 73-94 F. Wajdī, art. ‘Ibrāhīm’, in Dā’irat al-maʿārif al-islāmiyya, Cairo, 1933, vol. 1, 28-9 T. Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qurāns, Leipzig, 19092 A.J. Wensinck, Mohammed en de Joden te Medina, Leiden, 1908 Karel Steenbrink

De Atjèhers ‘The Acehnese’ Date 1893-4 Original Language Dutch Description The sultanate of Aceh (also written as Atjeh or Acheh) in northern Sumatra had remained independent from the Portuguese, Dutch and other powers since the mid-16th century. In the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London of 1824, when Sri Lanka was ceded to the British and Bencoolen to the Dutch, its independence was still guaranteed. However, around 1870 the Dutch wanted to prevent the ‘smuggling’ of pepper and other commodities from Sumatra to the freeport of Penang, and also hoped to stop the Aceh corsairs in the Strait of Malacca. The great Aceh War thus started in 1873. In January 1874, the sultan’s palace was destroyed, though it turned out that his central power was already very weak and real authority lay with the scattered feudal lords (teuku, uluebalang), often in rivalry with powerful religious leaders (tengku). This war lasted until the first decade of the 20th century.



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Snouck Hurgronje had met Acehnese pilgrims and students in Mecca in 1884-5. When he came to the Dutch East Indies in 1889, his initial plan was to use his Meccan connections for fieldwork and inquiries among the Muslim community of Aceh. This plan was blocked by the Dutch military governor of the region but, from July 1891 until February 1892, Snouck Hurgonje was still able to carry out his research, albeit from the small territory that was occupied by the Dutch, in fact not more than three percent of the region. He was able to talk to many Acehnese from the independent area as well, due to his reputation as a Muslim and a learned man. In 1893-4, he published the two volumes of his De Atjèhers, totalling nearly 900 pages. The first volume of this extensive ethnographic work begins with the village, its houses, the people’s dress, furniture and government. Then it turns to the districts (mukim), and finally to the central but very weak authority of the sultan. Under ‘rivals to the traditional authorities’, two groups are mentioned: political adventurers and representatives of religion. The two categories often come together in the sayyids, Arabs who claim to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad. Snouck Hurgronje depicts the religious leaders as people who saw ‘a great improvement in their position arising from the invasion of Aceh by a non-Mohammedan power’ (The Achehnese, vol. 1, p. 166; all the references that follow are to this version). The following chapters in the first volume discuss subjects such as the annual cycle of festivals, seasons, agriculture and fishing, and end with family life, marriage, sickness, the life cycle, death and burials. The second volume opens with a chapter on ‘science’, which is in fact on knowledge and instruction about Islam. The long second chapter gives a description of Acehnese works (at that time all in manuscript form, or only available through oral performance). One oral work, the Hikayat Prang Gompeuni (‘The story of the war against the East India Company’), was by the illiterate poet Dōkarim. The story runs from 1873 to 1891 (when he recited it for Snouck), combining mythological stories with conflicts between an anti- and a pro-Dutch party. The third chapter is dedicated to entertainment, from children’s games to gambling and the dances connected with the ratib Sammān. Snouck Hurgronje describes this as a noisy ‘parody’ of the quiet mystical ceremony initiated in the 17th century by Muhammad Sammān, with short poems, sometimes also in Acehnese, such as the following: The holy mosque [at Mecca], Allahu, Allahu, in the holy mosque are three persons:

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christiaan snouck hurgronje one of them is our Prophet, the other two his Companions [Abū Bakr and ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb]. He sends a letter to the land of Shām (Syria), with a command that all Dutchmen shall become Muslims. These Jewish infidels will not adopt the true faith, their religion is in a state of everlasting decay. (vol. 2, p. 220)

Next Snouck Hurgronje describes another religious gathering, the ratib sādati, in which a pretty young boy, dressed as a woman, sings and dances in an erotically charged atmosphere (vol. 2, pp. 221-3). Although Islamic elements are often mentioned, there is a more systematic description of the religion of the Acehnese in vol. 2, ch. 4. Here, Snouck Hurgronje tries at length to correct the idea that pure, true Islam is particularly to be found in Arab countries, while the Islam of the Indies is superficial and unorthodox. To support his argument, he gives many examples of deviations from ‘pure Islam’ among the Arabs of Hadramaut, who were held in high esteem in Indonesia, adding a list of the most important graves of holy men and ‘saints’ who are venerated in Aceh. Snouck Hurgronje goes on to say that the obligation to perform the ḥajj is widely respected, although many Acehnese fail to perform the five daily prayers and, of the many elements of sharīʿa law, only family law is observed. A paragraph on pederasty says it is ‘very widespread’, quoting ‘a highly civilised Acehnese, whose moral standard was much superior to that of the great majority’, who remarked that most of his countrymen held the view that ‘a certain amount of unnatural vice forms a necessary stage in the development of every young man’ (vol. 2, p. 318). The description of religion ends with some outspoken judgements: Of the characteristics nurtured or favoured by Islam, there are some which we, as Europeans, would look upon as virtues, others we should regard as the opposite. The latter have attained a far greater influence over the Acehnese than the former; but in this particular they do not stand alone among the Mohammadans, nor does Islam stand alone among the religions. In the sphere of politics Islam still continues to play in Aceh that leading part, which long has been made impossible for her in the greater Muslim states. (vol. 2, pp. 337-8)

Snouck Hurgronje does not hesitate to censure Acehnese Muslims severely, referring to the Qur’an: This book, once a world-reforming power, now serves but to be chanted by teachers and laymen according to definite rules. The rules are difficult, but not a thought is ever given to the meaning of the words; the Qurʾān



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is chanted simply because its recital is believed to be a meritorious work. This disregard of the sense of the words rises to such a pitch that even pundits who have studied the commentaries, not to speak of laymen, fail to notice when the verses they recite condemn as sinful things both they and the listeners do every day, nay even during the ceremony itself. (vol. 2, p. 343)

In the last section of the book, Snouck Hurgronje abandons the stance of an outside observer for that of a political colonial advisor, dreaming of a future Islam in which the doctrine of jihād is abandoned and Muslims abide by the practically harmless doctrine respecting the last days when a Messiah or a Mahdī will come to reform the world. Then will Islam differ from other creeds only in so far as it upholds another catechism and another ritual as the means whereby eternal salvation may be won. (vol. 2, p. 351)

Significance The two volumes of De Atjèhers were two of the four sections of Snouck Hurgronje’s official report to the governor-general in Batavia, who wanted to send it to the governor of Aceh, but the latter did not want it because he had been given enough advice, had trouble enough with what was happening around him, and had a strategy of his own. Only in 1898, after six more disastrous years in this longest Dutch colonial war, was Snouck Hurgronje asked to assist the new governor in Aceh, General Joannes Benedictus van Heutz. After initial criticism by Anthony Reid and Paul van ‘t Veer, in the 1980s the Leiden scholar Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld criticised Snouck Hurgronje as an academic who was deeply influenced by the wish that Western superiority should rule and reform Acehnese Muslim society. In 1993, the Dutch anthropologist A.A. Trouwborst wrote an introduction to an exhibition on ‘The Acehnese and Snouck Hurgronje’, and concluded that De Atjèhers could still be valued as a solid, informative and coherent example of classical anthropology. But Ibrahim Gade Ismail had already in 1991 defended a doctoral dissertation in which he stated that Snouck Hurgronje had no knowledge of economic developments. For Ismail, the war in Aceh was really about the pepper trade, a war between local feudal rulers and the sultan, who wanted his share of the trade. This, the most important source of conflict, had been disregarded by Snouck Hurgronje, while he had exaggerated the importance of the rivalry between individual feudal rulers and Muslim clerics, and in consequence several generations of officials in Aceh followed a strategy of

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supporting the clerics against the feudal class or vice versa. In this way, Snouck Hurgronje had created a new conflict within Acehnese society, or at least inflated the importance of one that existed. Publications Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, De Atjèhers, 2 vols, Leiden, 1893-4 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, The Achehnese, trans. A.W.S. O’Sullivan, 2 vols, Leiden, 1906; repr. New York, 1984 (English trans.) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Aceh di mata kolonialis, trans. Ng. Singarimbun, 2 vols, Jakarta, 1985 (Indonesian trans.) Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Aceh, rakyat dan adat-istiadatnya, trans. Sutan Maimoen, 2 vols, Jakarta, 1996-7 (Indonesian trans.) Studies Van Koningsveld, ‘Conversion of European intellectuals’ Laffan, Makings of Indonesian Islam K. Steenbrink, ‘Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) en Atjeh’, in L. Dolk (ed.), Atjeh. De verbeelding van een koloniale oorlog, Amsterdam, 2001, 77-97 Ridwan Saidi, Fakta & Data Yahudi di Indonesia serta operasi kaum westernis, orientalis dan spionage intelektual Snouck Hurgronje di Indonesia, Jakarta, 1995 A.A. Trouwborst, De Atjehers van Snouck Hurgronje, Arnhem, 1993 Ibrahim Gade Ismail, ‘Seuneubok Lada, Uleebalang dan Kumpeni. Perkembangan Sosial Ekonomi di Daerah Batas Aceh Timur, 18401942’ [Pepper, feudalism and Dutch colonialism. Social economic development on the boundaries of East Aceh], Leiden, 1991 (PhD Diss. University of Leiden) Van Koningsveld, Snouck Hurgronje en de Islam Aqib Suminto, Politik Islam Hindia Belanda Van ‘t Veer, De Atjeh-oorlog A. Reid, The contest for north Sumatra. Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain 1858-1898, Kuala Lumpur, 1969 J.D.J. Waardenburg, L’islam dans le miroir de l’occident, Paris, 1961 G.-H. Bousquet and J. Schacht, Selected works of C. Snouck Hurgronje edited in English and in French, Leiden, 1957 K. van der Maaten, Snouck Hurgronje en de Atjeh oorlog, 2 vols, Leiden, 1948 J.W. Naarding, Het conflict Snouck Hurgronje-Van Heutz-Van Daalen, Utrecht, 1938 Karel Steenbrink



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Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje ‘Official advice of C. Snouck Hurgronje’ Date 1889-1906 Original Language Dutch Description From 1889 to 1906, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was Advisor on Native Affairs in the Dutch East Indies. Even after his return to the Netherlands, he continued as advisor to the Dutch minister of colonial affairs until his death in 1936. Some 1,400 pieces of advice are listed in the Ministry’s archives. Of these, 675 are of minor importance or just repeat earlier texts, 75 are lost, and only 650 were published between the years 1957 and 1965. However, in their 2,176 pages, they document the work of this most influential Dutch scholar, who not only studied Indonesian Islam but also exerted much influence upon the policy of the colonial administration regarding the daily life of Muslims in Indonesia. The series of pieces of advice is divided into 39 sections, of which only the most important, showing the broad influence of the Dutch colonial government, are noted here. Section 8 deals with competition between Islamic law and Muslim customary or adat law. The longest of the seven pieces collected here discusses inheritance in Minangkabau, where it was not Islamic law but a matrilineal line of inheritance that was followed, at least with regard to houses, land and weapons. In the period 1803-37, Wahhabi fighters had fought against this ‘un-Islamic’ system of inheritance, being finally defeated by the Dutch in bloody wars. The colonial administration was therefore reluctant to give freedom of speech to supporters of Islamic law. Some administrators wanted adat law to be written down and strongly supported. Snouck Hurgronje was generally sympathetic to the defence of customary law against Muslim propaganda, but he considered that any formal codification of customary law under European supervision was not feasible, and would, indeed, be counterproductive. In the future, he foresaw the growing influence of Islamic law in family and inheritance matters, and the weakening of customary law, and his advice was that the colonial government should not interfere where it would certainly lose (Ambtelijke adviezen, pp. 694-709). Section 11 discusses the position of the bupati or regents, who were the local administrators, and their position in terms of religion. The majority

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of colonial officials considered them ‘heads of religion’. They supervised local mosques, controlled mosque finances and regulated the collection of zakāt, and they were sometimes mentioned in Friday sermons as the ‘leader of the faithful’. Snouck Hurgronje repeatedly writes that the text of the Regeeringsreglement van Nederlandsch Indië of 1854 only says that ‘the priests of the natives who are not Christian are placed under the supervision of the princes, regents and chiefs’. He wanted to regard this supervision only as a matter of security and not as active leadership in religious affairs (Ambtelijke adviezen, pp. 742-61). Section 12 includes 14 documents on mosque personnel, especially the penghulu (more or less a combined role of imām and qāḍī), who was leader of the prayers and judge in sharīʿa courts in matters of family affairs and inheritance. Snouck Hurgronje considered such personnel as colonial employees because they were appointed and paid by the Dutch administration. He therefore started a programme to supervise them, with the strange result that Leiden-educated non-Muslim officials interfered in the system. This is best shown by examples taken from section 17, on the religious or sharīʿa courts (Ambtelijke adviezen, pp. 967-8). In Palembang, the authority of the sultan had been abolished in the 1820s, and all his responsibilities had been taken over by the colonial administration, including the supervision of the courts. In the 1890s, Snouck Hurgronje noticed several times during inspections that the judges in the courts were retired police officers with minimal or extremely poor knowledge of the law. He also witnessed the practice that a woman seeking divorce against her husband’s will could come to the court and declare that prayer was not necessary or that there were two gods. She was then declared an apostate (murtadda) and her marriage was automatically declared dissolved. If she came back three months and ten days later and declared that she was wrong and had made mistakes, she would be accepted back as a Muslim and could marry another husband. Snouck Hurgronje protested against this legal strategem to dissolve a marriage, because in his opinion it would ultimately discredit religious jurisprudence. The judges who sanctioned it had been appointed by the colonial government, and consequently the administration should dismiss them and request that only well-educated experts, with a sound knowledge of Arabic and of the law according to the Shafiʿī school, and with good experience in fiqh should be appointed to this position. After such experiences, Snouck Hurgronje took the initiative to examine personally candidates for positions in the more important sharīʿa



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courts. This practice was continued by his successors: the last Advisor for Native Affairs in the colonial period, G.F. Pijper, has given a very detailed description of his examination of candidates in Studiën, pp. 63-96. Section 13 is about control of mosque funds. It contains stories about embezzlement and mosque leaders who suggest that an inheritance is only validated when it is agreed by religious specialists (who received a good ten percent of the sum). One quite curious case was that of the Resident of Surabaya, who ordered that all mosques in his region should donate money to the Christian hospital at Mojowarno. Snouck Hurgronje suggested that the colonial government should condemn ‘the European administration’ because it ‘abuses its power in order to support Christian mission financially by using Muslim funds’ (Ambtelijke adviezen, p. 807). One of the tasks of the penghulu and of the other officially nominated clerics in mosques was the conducting of marriages. During his first years in the Indies, Snouck Hurgronje had given his advice about the new colonial regulation on the registration of marriages. One of his concerns was that they should be carried out by recognised clergy, although he was keen to state that Islam had no true clergy distinct from the laity, as was the case in the Catholic Church. Section 16 is on this topic, and also contains many warnings about mosque personnel charging fees that are too high, and about discrimination against the children of a first, second or third wife: all children are equal, notwithstanding the social status of their mother (Ambtelijke adviezen, pp. 898-9, a section on financial management of mosques, against the practices of native rulers). A quite curious piece of advice is found in section 19 (on ‘church societies’). It discusses the more general position of state and religions. Snouck Hurgronje explains, When I was sent to the Indies in 1889 to study the practice of Islam, Minister of the Colonies Keuchenius in particular impressed on me that, if at all possible, I was to look for a way in which the organisation of the Mohammadan community as a church might be achieved. Thus that statesman, among other things, hoped to relieve the government of the responsibility of appointing penghulus etc. The idea proved to be impracticable. (Ambtelijke adviezen, p. 1072)

Besides the large group of official mosque personnel (penghulu and lower officials), there were a substantial number of informal teachers, mostly attached to boarding schools (pesantren). Section 24 is dedicated to this group. In the late 1880s, they were under suspicion, because some

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of them were among the inner circle of the so-called Cilegon revolt in 1888, in which some colonial officials and members of their families were killed. Snouck Hurgronje tried to lift this suspicion and gave repeated advice against measures to put popular leaders in prison or exile them to remote islands. He also revealed several accusations by orthodox teachers against mystical, heterodox teachers who were suspected of violent revolt, although their ‘only sin was that they were reading or rather singing a popular mystical booklet, not really orthodox Islamic, but definitely in a spirit of universal love for mankind’ (Ambtelijke adviezen, p. 1148). Section 32 covers the ḥajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, for which poor and sometimes illiterate farmers would sell their land, with middlemen, guides and captains of boats all looking for their money. In addition, students in Mecca who made plans to end Dutch rule in the Indies were put under surveillance. Snouck Hurgronje received help with all kinds of questions from the learned Sayyid ʿUthmān ibn Yaḥyā al-ʿAlawī, an Arab publisher in Batavia. He therefore granted him an allowance of 100 guilders per month and an official government appointment as ‘Honorary Advisor for Arab Affairs’. Documents concerning Sayyid ʿUthmān are in section 34. Nearly 200 pages in section 39, the last, are dedicated to political reports from various parts of the vast colony. In Jambi, Snouck gave the same advice as in Aceh, advocating a ruthless policy towards rebels. The first modern Islamic movement, Sarekat Islam, was established in 1912. It resembled a trade union with some aspects of a political party and was viewed positively by Snouck Hurgronje as a school for future independent modern leaders (Ambtelijke adviezen, pp. 2000-15), but by that time he had already returned to Europe. Significance There are several contradictions in the personality and work of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. He saw his position in the colonial state as an educator, pursuing the ideal of an emancipated, modern and welleducated Indonesian people. But in regions such as Aceh and Jambi, he advocated a ruthless policy of subjugation. He favoured the separation of state and religion, and he was not only an advisor but founded an office that quickly grew after his departure and became the model for the current Ministry of Religion in Indonesia. An interesting comparison between French, British and Dutch colonial rule is given by the French colonial official G.-H. Bousquet. After sociological research in the Netherlands in the 1910s, Bousquet (who spoke Dutch



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Illustration 13. Studio photograph of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 1902

and had a Dutch wife) became an official in the French colony of Algeria. In 1936-7, he travelled to British India and to the Dutch East Indies to carry out comparative colonial research. He published the results soon afterwards in French, La politique musulmane et coloniale des Pays-Bas (Paris, 1939), and an English translation followed, A French view of the Netherlands Indies (London, 1940). Bousquet saw British colonial rule as the great example of indirect rule. The British allowed local rulers to act in part on their own authority, and when possible they did not interfere in matters of local custom and religion. Bousquet bluntly called the British lazy and ignorant as to the basics and the actual reality of Islam. They simply abstained from action and did not show much interest in native affairs. The Dutch were just the opposite. They had areas of direct rule and of indirect rule, but in fact they wanted to control everything, and particularly in matters of religion they were much too active. Although Bousquet received substantial help from the office of the Advisor for Native Affairs, he sharply criticised the Dutch benevolence and concern for Muslims as excessive: What would happen if the president of a district court should find his assisting Muslim judges objecting to sitting during Ramadan? An urgent telegram would be dispatched to the Bureau to secure a fatwa; the works of

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christiaan snouck hurgronje learned men of law, not forgetting the commentators and glossers, would be consulted; and finally the Bureau would deliver its opinion. (A French view, p. 14)

In Bousquet’s opinion, the French held the perfect balance between British indifference and the Dutch preoccupation with Islam, because they made a clear distinction between public and private affairs. In public matters, they proclaimed their doctrine of laïcité, or strict separation between religion and state, while in private matters they allowed Muslims to do as they wished, without any interference as long as they obeyed the authorities and lived according to public law. Snouck Hurgronje favoured separation between politics and religion, but his political advice as documented in this collection of his occasional pieces of advice led to the increasing involvement of the colonial government in the daily affairs of the ‘Islamic church’. This involvement developed to such an extent that the Office for Native Affairs that Snouck Hurgronje founded may rightly be viewed as the predecessor and pioneer of the modern Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs (established on 3 January 1946). Snouck Hurgronje tried to differentiate clearly between Islam’s religious ideals and values on the one hand, and its political involvement and aims on the other. When he arrived in the Dutch East Indies in 1889, he discovered an Islam that was largely apolitical but, by his death in 1936, the situation had changed to such a degree that a modern political party and trade union formed on an Islamic basis had already come into existence. Publications MS Leiden, Leiden University Library – Collection Snouck Hurgronje, L.Or 12.288, 18.097 and 18.098 MS The Hague, National Archief, Collectie Ministerie van Koloniën (includes various MSS) E. Gobée and C. Adriaanse (eds), Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje, 1889-1936, 3 vols, The Hague, 1957-65 E. Gobée and C. Adriaanse (eds), Nasihat-nasihat C. Snouck Hurgronje semasa kepegawaiannya kepada Pemerintah Hindia Belanda, 18891936, trans. Sukarsi, 11 vols, Jakarta, 1990-5 (Indonesian trans.) Studies N. Kaptein, Islam, colonialism and the New Age in the Netherlands East Indies. A biography of Sayyid ‘Uthman, 1822-1923, Leiden, 2014 Steenbrink, ‘Sharia debates in colonial and postcolonial Netherlands’



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Hisyam, ‘Caught between three fires’ Rahim, Sistem otoritas administrasi Islam Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam, esp. pp. 76-97 P.Sj. van Koningsveld, ‘Kata Pengantar’ [Introduction], in E. Gobée and C. Adriaanse (eds), Nasihat-nasihat C. Snouck Hurgronje semasa kepegawaiannya kepada Pemerintah Hindia Belanda, 1889-1936, trans. Sukarsi, vol. 1, Jakarta, 1990, xiii-lxix Aqib Suminto, Politik Islam Hindia Belanda B.J. Boland and I. Farjon, Islam in Indonesia, a bibliographical survey, 1600-1942 with post-1945 addenda, Dordrecht, 1983 G.F. Pijper, Studiën over de geschiedenis van de Islam in Indonesië, 19001950, Leiden, 1977 Deliar Noer, The modernist Muslim movement in Indonesia, 1900-1942, Kuala Lumpur, 1973 H. J. Benda, The crescent and the rising sun. Indonesian Islam under the Japanese occupation, 1932-1945, The Hague, 1958 W.J.A. Kernkamp, ‘Regering en Islam’, in W. van Helsdingen (ed.), Daar wèrd wat groots verricht, Amsterdam, 1941, 191-207 G.F. Pijper, Fragmenta Islamica. Studiën over het Islamisme in Nederlandsch-Indië, Leiden, 1934 Karel Steenbrink

Nederland en de Islâm ‘The Netherlands and Islam’ Date 1911 Original Language Dutch Description Nederland en de Islâm. Vier voordrachten gehouden in de NederlandschIndische Bestuursacademie (‘The Netherlands and Islam. Four lectures held at the Dutch-Indian Administrative Academy’) is 101 pages long in the 1911 edition (which is used here) and is the first systematisation of Snouck Hurgronje’s views of Islam, which had previously been guided by practical concerns. It is also more idealistic than his earlier works, which had been guided by the politics of realism. Here, Snouck Hurgronje develops an association theory of national unity, according to

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which Islamic thought and Western humanism can be made compatible if Islam is reduced to its religious contents and its political expressions are excluded (pp. 83-6). More or less the same applies to Muslim-Christian relations: ‘In the practice of national life, Islam and Christianity can relate very well, if the pan-Islamic idea is excluded’ (p. 101). For the same reason, Snouck Hurgronje was critical of Christianity’s attempts to convert Muslims, and he advised the government to distance itself from Christian mission (p. 86). Significance Nederland en de Islâm has echoes of current European political views of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. Like Snouck Hurgronje, many European politicians hold that, as long as Muslims adjust themselves to Europe’s individualised and secularised societies, there is no problem, but as a political force Islam is dangerous and should be restricted. In Nederland en de Islâm, Snouck Hurgronje expresses admiration for the Javanese Muslims’ religious tolerance (p. 87), and holds that many of his Dutch contemporaries could learn from this tolerance (p. 101). In relation to the disagreements over Snouck Hurgronje’s conversion to Islam, the work has huge implications for the present-day study of Islam. If his conversion was a matter of expediency rather than conviction, he was the first example of what scholars of religion now call ‘methodological conversion’ as an alternative to ‘methodological agnosticism’. Given his long-term struggle between religious scepticism, based on his experience of his parents’ mistreatment by the Netherlands Protestant Church, and his sympathy for Islam, based on his Islamic marriages in Indonesia, one can also see Snouck Hurgronje as an early example of what scholars of religions now call ‘dual religious belonging’. Publications Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islâm. Vier voordrachten gehouden in de Nederlandsch-Indische Bestuursacademie, Leiden, 1911 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islâm. Tweede en vermeerderde druk, Leiden, 1915 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islâm, ed. L. Wiewel, with an Introduction by C. Roelofs, Amsterdam, 2016 Frans Wijsen

Scandinavia

Carsten Niebuhr Date of Birth 17 March 1733 Place of Birth Lüdingsworth near Cuxhaven, Germany Date of Death 26 April 1815 Place of Death Meldorf, Germany

Biography

Carsten Niebuhr was born in Lüdingworth, in what is now Lower Saxony, on 17 March 1733. His mother died shortly after his birth, and his father, a farmer and land owner, died when he was 16 years old. Against his will, his guardian took him out of school to work on his farm. When he came of age, Niebuhr went to Hamburg and used his inheritance to obtain a high school qualification. He then went to Göttingen to study applied mathematics in order to become a surveyor. He was a gifted, bright and diligent student, and his professor mentioned him to his colleague Johann David Michaëlis (1717-91), professor of Oriental languages and a renowned international scholar of the Bible. Inspired by the Enlightenment, Michaëlis had argued for the need to send a scientific expedition to Arabia in order to obtain reliable knowledge about plants, animals and geographical locations, as well as groups of people mentioned in the Bible. In 1756, he approached the Danish King Frederik V (r. 1746-66) and encouraged him to sponsor this initiative, in which Niebuhr was to be involved. The king agreed and, on Michaëlis’ strong recommendation, he also agreed to cover the cost of Niebuhr’s extended studies in astronomy and cartography supervised by the internationally recognised astronomer Göttingen Professor Johann Tobias Mayer (1723-62). The expedition, which was scheduled to last for two or three years, left Helsingør for Istanbul in late January 1761, and from there continued to Egypt and Yemen. Two members of the expedition died en route, and the rest decided to return to Denmark via Bombay. On the voyage another two members died and shortly after arrival in India another member died. Niebuhr resolved to continue the expedition alone. From Bombay, he went to Muscat, Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, Jaffa, Cyprus, Jerusalem and Damascus, and travelled through Asia Minor. After a stay in Istanbul, he arrived in Copenhagen on 20 November 1767, the only surviving member of the expedition that had set off in January 1761.

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During the years that followed, Niebuhr published two books based on his carefully written diaries. All the members of the expedition had been required by the Danish king to write diaries on a daily basis and to send copies back to Copenhagen after they were read out to the other members of the expedition. Niebuhr also arranged for the publication of the important botanical and zoological material that had been collected and described by Peter Forsskål. The many plants and animals sent back to Denmark by the expedition can still be found at the University of Copenhagen. Niebuhr’s books won international recognition and were soon translated into French, English, Dutch and Swedish, and parts of the two books also into Danish. His maps of the Red Sea and Yemen contributed further to his international reputation. In 1778, Niebuhr was invited to be in charge of making a detailed scientific description of Norway, which was then under the Danish monarchy, but he refused and instead took a job as a surveyor in the Ditmarshes where he was born. He settled in Meldorf, where he spent the rest of his life until he died in 1815.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien. Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammelten Nachrichten abgefasst, 2 vols, Copenhagen, 1772-4 B.G. Niebuhr, Carsten Niebuhr’s Leben, Kiel, 1817 (an anonymous Danish trans. appeared in the journal Athene [Copenhagen] 8 (1817) 1-37, 117-66) B.G. Niebuhr, Carsten Niebuhrs liv, trans. A. Petersen, Copenhagen, 2004 (Danish trans.) Secondary L.J. Baack, Undying curiosity. Carsten Niebuhr and the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia (1761-1767), Stuttgart, 2014 L.J. Baack, ‘“A practical skill that was without equal”. Carsten Niebuhr and the navigation astronomy of the Arabian journey, 1761-1767’, The Mariner’s Mirror. The International Quarterly Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 99 (2013) 138-52 I. Friis, M. Harbsmeier and J.B. Simonsen (eds), Early scientific expeditions and local encounters. New perspectives on Carsten Niebuhr and ‘The Arabian Journey’, Proceedings of a symposium on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia Felix, Copenhagen, 2013 S.T. Rasmussen (ed.), Den Arabiske Rejse 1761-1767. En dansk ekspedition set i videnskabshistorisk perspektiv, Copenhagen, 1992



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S.T. Rasmussen, Carsten Niebuhr und die Arabische Reise 1761-1767, Heide in Holstein, 1986 (exhibition handbook) T. Wolff, ‘The Danish expedition to “Arabia Felix” (1761-1767)’, Bulletin de l’Institut Océanografique, Monaco, 1968, 582-601 C.F. Wandel, Carsten Niebuhrs Rejse i Jemen eller Det lykkelige Arabien 1762-63, Copenhagen, 1929

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Beschreibung von Arabien ‘Description of Arabia’ Date 1772 Original Language German Description The full title of this work is Beschreibung von Arabien. Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammleten Nachrichten (‘Description of Arabia, from personal observations and news collected in the country itself’). It is 431 pages long. In the Introduction (pp. vii-xlvii), Niebuhr gives a sketch of the itinerary followed by the expedition. They sailed from Helsingør on board a ship of the Danish Navy to Smyrna and then travelled over land to Constantinople. There, they had to wait a while for official documents from the Ottoman sultan. These instructed the local Ottoman administration, as well as other important persons in the provinces visited by the expedition on its way to Yemen, that the Danish expedition was recognised by the sultan and entitled to support as needed. Niebuhr discusses at length the reasons why the expedition was so seriously hit by illness on the way, concluding that a combination of shortage of time to produce answers to the many questions the members of the expedition were supposed to deliver, their excessive demands for comfort and good food on a daily basis, combined with their lack of knowledge of how to react to the climate changes they encountered en route, explained why they all died apart from Niebuhr himself. In line with his analysis, he offers advice on how to organise and conduct future expeditions. The description of Arabia is divided into two sections. The first offers information about the landscape, the climate, the religion of the Arabs, their clothes, houses, food, hospitality and several other things. Niebuhr’s comments on Islam (pp. 18-26) are brief: ‘It is well known that in the

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Muḥammadan religion as in all others you will find different sects, the Turks follow the Sunnī sect and the Persians the Shīʿa sect. Even in Arabia where the Muḥammadan religion was born and still rules you find differences’ (p. 18). This is followed by a short list of sects to be found in the Arabian Peninsula and their historical roots. The Sunnīs constitute the largest group and are present throughout the peninsula, the Shīʿa live in the eastern part of the peninsula and along the shores of the Gulf in general and in Bahrain in particular, the Zaydīs, descendants of the followers of Zayd ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, are predominant in Yemen, and the Ibāḍīs, descendants of the enemies of the fourth Caliph ʿAlī, are found in Oman. Niebuhr also mentions two sects that had recently emerged, one of them headed by Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in Najd. Niebuhr explains that the existence of the different sects was predicted by Muḥammad himself (p. 19), that they all believe in Muḥammad as a prophet, and that the Qur’an is used as the main source of law in all the courts in the region. He says that he had no chance to meet followers of the new sects and had to rely on information he was able to collect from Sunnīs. He underlines that the Zaydīs regard themselves as the authentic followers of Islam, and like the other Shīʿa groups judge it wrong that Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān denied ʿAlī’s claim to the caliphate. But unlike the other Shīʿa groups, the Zaydīs do not scorn these figures, and they denounce the later line of Imams recognised by the largest Shīʿa group. The Sunnīs, the Shīʿa and the Zaydīs all revere the descendants of Muḥammad. In contrast, the Ibāḍīs reject any right through birth to a title or position, whether religious or secular. Neither among the Ibāḍīs in Oman nor among the Zaydīs did Niebuhr encounter dervishes, but in Sunnī cities such as Jedda and Yanbuʿ there were numerous dervish orders. Niebuhr writes: The Turks and the Persians have fought many wars against each other, and as these wars have always been presented as wars of religion the Sunnīs and the Shīʿa hate each other more than they hate followers of other religions. Both sects allow the Christians and the Jews to build churches and synagogues. The Shīʿa do not like Sunnī mosques in Persia; they [the Turks] do not allow the Shīʿa to perform their prayers in public except at the graves of their saints close to Baghdad. For this they have to pay a great deal. In the little kingdom of Yemen where the Sunnīs are as many as their rulers the Zaydīs, the followers of the two sects get on rather well. I have not noticed that they hate followers of other religions, but like the Europeans they despise and disdain the Jews. (p. 23)



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He goes on to say that the Arabs do not try to convert others to Islam either by words or by force; only slaves bought in the market are required to convert. Niebuhr also refers to the presence of Jews in Khaybar in Ḥijāz (p. 25) and in separate parts of many towns in Yemen. He says that Christians in general are treated well, whereas Jews are despised. In the second part of the book, various regions of Arabia are described and the different political dynasties are referred to, followed by observations on places in the Arabian Gulf. The descriptions give answers to many of the questions raised in the Royal Order of December 1760, and the additional questions contained in Michaëlis’s Fragen an eine Gesellschaft Gelehrter Männer of 1762, which was received by Niebuhr in Bombay in August 1764. In his description of Najd, Niebuhr writes: Some years ago a new sect or maybe even a new religion has come into existence in the province of el-Ared that in the future may cause great changes in the traditional religion of the Arabs as well as in their polity. The name of the founder of this new religion was a man called Abd el Wahheb. He was born in Najd and studied the Arab sciences in his native country. Then he spent some years in Basra as well as in Baghdad and Persia. After his return he introduced his teachings to his countrymen and managed to persuade a number of shaykhs in el Ared to join his cause. (pp. 345-6)

He goes on to give a short description of the establishment of the first Wahhābī state, centred in Dirʿiya. Niebuhr had no opportunity to talk with supporters of this new sect, so he had to rely on information gained from conversations with Sunnīs. He writes: As I had no possibility to acquaint myself with supporters of Abd el Wahheb’s sect, I cannot explain with any certainty the teachings of their religion. The Sunnis are their enemies and accordingly, as is usually the case, they try to present the religion of others from its bad side. They will make it hated and have strangers to believe that the differences between the new and the old sects are minor. (pp. 347-8)

Through conversations with a number of Sunnīs, among them an individual who had visited all parts of Arabia, as well as with a learned scholar in Basra, he was able to outline the main positions of the teachings of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, stressing his fierce criticism of the veneration of saints. He demanded that Muslims should worship God alone ‘as the Creator

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Illustration 14. Engraving of the Great Mosque in Mecca, from Beschreibung von Arabien, Copenhagen, 1772, facing page 362

and Governor of everything, and prohibited his followers from mentioning Muḥammad as well as any other prophet or saint in their prayers. They were also prohibited from mentioning his [Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s] name as this might lead to idolatry’ (p. 348). Significance Niehuhr did much to present an objective, non-polemical picture of Arabs and Muslims, and is said to have ‘normalised’ Muslims for his readers. He was a child of the Enlightenment and wrote before Orientalist attitudes of European superiority dominated Western writing on Islam. He considered that Muslims were as cultured as other people, and his writings are replete with examples. His introduction to the teachings of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and the establishment of the first Wahhābī state was one of the first presented to the European public.



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While Beschreibung von Arabien is not an introduction to Islam and Muslims, Niebuhr’s open and curious attitude towards the people he met makes it an important description of the region he visited and of the manners, beliefs and customs of ordinary subjects of the Ottoman sultan. It also introduces his readers to the way in which Muslims practised Islam. Publications C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien. Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammleten Nachrichten, Copenhagen, 1772, repr. 1774, Frankfurt am Main, 1994; 130018769329 (digitised version of 1772 edition available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) C. Niebuhr, Beschryving van Arabie: uit eigene waarnemingen en in’t land zelf verzamelde narigten, Amsterdam, 1774 (Dutch trans.); KW 184 C 27 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) C. Niebuhr, Description de l’Arabie, faite sur des observations propres et des avis recueillis dans les lieux mêmes, trans. F.L. Mourier, Amsterdam, 1774 (French trans.); bpt6k5554730c (digitised version available through BNF) C. Niebuhr, Description de l’Arabie d’après les observations et recherches faites dans la pays même, trans. F.L. Mourier, Paris, 1779 (French trans.); (digitised version available through Zentralbibliotech Zürich) C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien. Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammelten Nachrichten abgefasset, Graz, 1969 (facsimile with an introduction by D. Henze) C. Niebuhr, Beskrivelse af Arabien ud fra egne iagttagelser og i landet selv samlede efterretninger, trans. N.P. Lemche, Copenhagen, 2009 (Danish trans.) Studies G. Bonacina, The Wahhabis seen through European eyes (1771-1830). Deists and Puritans of Islam, Leiden, 2015 Baack, Undying curiosity Friis, Harbsmeier and Simonsen, Early scientific expeditions

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Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern ‘Account of an expedition to Arabia and other surrounding countries’ Date 1774-8 Original Language German Description Reisebeschreibung is a three-volume description of the expedition to Arabia in which Niebuhr took part. Niebuhr published Reisebeschreibung vol. 1 in 1772 (527 pages and 72 pages of illustrations) and vol 2 in 1774 (429 pages with illustrations included in the text). Vol. 3 (469 pages with illustrations included in the text) was published after his death. The text’s strict chronological framework is now and then abandoned in favour of detailed descriptions of cities and localities. The work contains maps of regions and cities, illustrations of houses and people, private and public buildings, landscapes, clothes, shoes, pipes and musical instruments of all kinds used by the local population, and many other illustrations. Information is primarily based on Niebuhr’s own personal experiences, sometimes supplemented with information from people he met. In the Introduction, Niebuhr explains that, in the beginning, he dedicated all his time, in accordance with the king’s orders, to surveying the nature and geography of the various regions, and to collecting information needed to produce new maps. But after the illness he suffered and when he decided to return to Denmark in 1764, he resolved to record the ordinary life and manners of local people. As a result, his travel account offers a plethora of information on how Islam is practised by ordinary people. This information is not organised into systematic descriptions, though Niebuhr does introduce more coherent descriptions than in his earlier work of the Shīʿa rituals during Muḥarram and during visits to the Shīʿa sanctuaries in Najaf and Karbalāʾ (vol. 2, pp. 254-63). He also gives informative accounts of the beliefs of the Druze in Mount Lebanon (vol. 2, pp. 428-39) and of the Nuṣayrīs (ʿAlawīs) in Syria (vol. 2, pp. 439-44), and a much shorter account of the Ismāʿīlīs (vol. 2, pp. 444-5). Significance Reisebeschreibung constitutes a significant academic and scientific contribution to knowledge of large parts of the Arab world during the second



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half of the 18th century. While it is not expressly on Islam and Muslims, it offers throughout insights into the ways various Muslim groups practised their religion. Its comprehensive descriptions of the religion of the Druze, the Nuṣayrīs and the Ismāʿīlīs provide important insights for a Christian European readership into the religious beliefs of these sects. Publications C. Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, vols 1-2, Copenhagen, 1774-8; 008393839 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust digital Library) C. Niebuhr, Voyage en Arabie & en d’autres pays circonvoisins, trans. F.L. Mourier, Amsterdam, 1776-80 (French trans. of vols 1-2; bpt6k118520v (digitised version available through BNF) C. Niebuhr, Reize Naar Arabië en andere omliggende landen Uit het Hoogduitsch vertaald, Amsterdam, 1780 (Dutch trans. of vols 1-2); KF 61-3509, 3510 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) C. Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, and other countries in the East, 2 vols, trans. R. Heron, Edinburgh, 1792, repr. Perth, 1988, Beirut, 1968, Reading, 1994; 001266054 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust digital Library) C. Niebuhr’s, Reisen durch Syrien und Palästina, nach Cypern und Kleinasien und die Türkey nach Deutschland und Dänemark. Mit Niebuhr’s astronomischen Beobachtungen und einigen kleineren Abhandlungen, ed. J.N. Gloyer and J. Olshausen, Hamburg, 1837, repr. Graz, 1968, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, Saarbrücken, 2007 (this part of Niebuhr’s work was published after his death and is often referred to as vol. 3 of his Reisebeschreibunt nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern); 008911901 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust digital Library) Carsten Niebuhr, Rejsebeskrivelse fra Arabien og andre omkringliggende lande, Copenhagen, 2003-5 (Danish trans.) Studies Baack, Undying curiosity Friis, Harbsmeier and Simonsen, Early scientific expeditions Rasmussen, Den Arabiske Rejse Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

Pehr Malmström Date of Birth 11 December 1758 Place of Birth Gunnilbo, Västmanland, Sweden Date of Death 18 September 1834 Place of Death Stora Tuna, Dalarna, Sweden

Biography

Born in 1758, Pehr Malmström studied at Uppsala University, gaining his MA in 1785, and became docent (lecturer) in practical philosophy there. He moved on to become professor of sacred languages (Hebrew and Greek) at the University of Turku in Finland from 1789 to 1795. Besides Hebrew and Greek, he eventually established the teaching of Arabic at the university but he was not happy there, and sought a position in Sweden. In 1795, he was appointed as royal librarian in Stockholm, with responsibility for the censorship of books. Contemporaries described him as a learned and skilled orator, but also haughty and quarrelsome. He had difficulties with money and eventually went bankrupt. His last years were spent as the minister of Stora Tuna, to the north-west of Stockholm. As a professor, he did his best to loosen his subject from its close connection with theology, treating the Qur’an as a subject for teaching and publication, which just a generation before his time would have been impossible.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Anonymous, art. ‘Pehr Malmström’, in Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, vol. 7, Stockholm, 1875-7, 60-9 I.A. Heikel, Filologins studium vid Åbo Universitet, Helsingfors, 1894, pp. 245-7 Secondary K. Karttunen, Mooseksen kirjoista kungfutselaisuuden klassikoihin ja Jerusalemista Siperian tundralle. Aasian-tutkimuksen vaiheet Suomessa, Helsinki, 2011, pp. 95-7, 113-14



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine ‘A sample of the Qur’an in Arabic and Latin’ Date 1793-4 Original Language Arabic and Latin Description Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine comprises two fascicules, together 28 pages long, and gives the text of the Qur’an up to Q 2:48. In the preface, Malmström proudly announces his intention to publish the whole Qur’an, but his plan was interrupted when he moved to Stockholm. The text was based on printed editions and the two manuscripts of the Qur’an that were held in Turku, one bought in Central Europe by Bishop Johan Gezelius the Younger (1647-1718) and donated to the university in 1691, and the other from the library of Carl Abraham Clewberg, who had been Malmström’s predecessor as professor in the mid-18th century. Both these manuscripts were destroyed in the great fire of Turku in 1827. Turku University Press purchased its first Arabic typefaces expressly for this work. Wallenius and others were able to use them for their Oriental publications. Significance Only a meagre sample of Malmström’s grandiose plan was realised and, as it was written in Latin, its use in Finland was mostly confined to the university (although copies were also sent to Swedish and some German universities). In 1794-5, Malmström made use of this work in his lectures on the Qur’an, but it was soon forgotten in the 19th century. Nonetheless, this is an example of how Christians in Scandinavia who had no direct encounter with Muslims wanted to work with Islamic sources first-hand, rather than relying on secondary sources. Such work, albeit incomplete, provided material that could be used to inform thinking about Islam and attitudes towards Muslims. Publications Petrus Malmström, Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine, pt 1, Aboae (Turku), Typis Frenckellianis (the official printer of the university), 1793; 110367 (digitised version available through the National Library of Finland, www.doria.fi)

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Petrus Malmström, Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine, pt 2, Aboae, Typis Frenckellianis, 1794; 110356 (digitised version available through the National Library of Finland, www.doria.fi) Studies Karttunen, Mooseksen kirjoista kungfutselaisuuden klassikoihin ja Jerusalemista Siperian tundralle, pp. 113-14 Klaus Karttunen

Ivar Ulrik Wallenius Date of Birth 30 January 1793 Place of Birth Akaa, Finland Date of Death 23 May 1874 Place of Death Helsinki

Biography

The son of a modest clergyman from Tavastia, Ivar Ulrik Wallenius gained his MA at Turku in 1815, and was appointed to work in the university library. Then, from 1824 to 1852, he was a lecturer in Oriental literature, initially in Turku, then in Helsinki, after the university moved to the new capital in 1828. He seems to have been a very learned, but also a shy and reticent man, who remained unmarried and is hardly ever mentioned in contemporary memoirs. In his long life, he only published the two short fascicles necessary to qualify for a university career, and his later official statements preserved in the university archives are very short and formal. He was acting Professor of Oriental Literature several times, although he never himself applied for the post. He was frugal in his habits and, in his will, he established a scholarship for students of Oriental languages. The breadth of his learning is seen in the number of languages he dealt with in his teaching: Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Armenian.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Helsinki, Helsinki University Archives – Official statements by Wallenius in the minutes of the meetings of the Faculty and of the Senate of the University of Helsinki MS Helsinki, Helsinki city archives – Deed of inventory of his estate made after Wallenius’s death in 1874 Secondary K. Karttunen, ‘From the early days of Finnish Indology, III: Ivar Ulrik Wallenius’, Studia Orientalia 82 (1997) 209–14

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K. Karttunen, Mooseksen kirjoista kungfutselaisuuden klassikoihin ja Jerusalemista Siperian tundralle. Aasian-tutkimuksen vaiheet Suomessa [From Pentateuch to Confucian classics and from Jerusalem to the Siberian tundra. A history of Asian studies in Finland], Helsinki, 2011, pp. 107-8, 115, 30910, 536

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Corani Suram LVII Arabice et Suethice ‘Sura 57 of the Qur’an in Arabic and Swedish’ Date 1816-19 Original Language Arabic, Latin and Swedish Description This translation consists of two short fascicles, 12 and 8 pages long. The short text of Sura 57, only 29 verses, is taken from Ludovico Marracci’s

Illustration 15. A page from Corani Sura LVII Arabice et Suethice, part 1, Turku, 1816, p. 4. Arabic text with Swedish translation and Latin footnotes



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edition of the Qur’an, with Wallenius’s own Swedish interpretation and copious notes in Latin. In the short introduction, Wallenius refers to the old idea of the usefulness of Arabic for a better understanding of Hebrew. Significance The small booklet provided a second glimpse (after Pehr Malmström, 1758–1834) of the Qur’an in Finland, and for the first time with a translation in a modern language. It was probably used as a textbook for Wallenius’s lectures on the Qur’an in 1824-6. Its significance lies in its affording contemporary Finnish Christians access to Islamic literature, and its witness to an interest in the Qur’an that is free from any obvious prejudice or polemical intention. Publications Ivarus Udalricus Wallenius, Corani Suram LVII Arabice et Suethice, part 1, Aboae (Turku): Typis Frenckellianis (the official printer of Turku University), 1816, 1-12; fi-fd2014-00005291(digitised version available through Doria.fi) Ivarus Udalricus Wallenius, Corani Suram LVII Arabice et Suethice, part 2, Aboae (Turku): Typis Frenckellianis, 1819, 13-20; fi-fd201400005290 (digitised version available through Doria.fi) Klaus Karttunen

Georg August Wallin Date of Birth 24 October 1811 Place of Birth Sund, Åland Islands Date of Death 23 October 1852 Place of Death Helsinki

Biography

Born the son of a district registrar in the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, Georg Wallin began his studies at Helsinki University in 1829. As a student he was not particularly remarkable but he learned languages quickly and concentrated on Arabic, gaining his MA in 1836. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, he was interested in the modern language. In his 1839 doctoral dissertation, he discussed the differences between modern and classical Arabic, for which he gained the position of lecturer in Oriental literature. In the years 1840-2, he continued his studies in St Petersburg under the learned Egyptian Muḥammad al-Ṭanṭāwī. In 1842, he was granted a scholarship for fieldwork in Arabia, and he spent the years 1843-9 in the East. Wallin’s experiences in these years are covered in detail in the diaries he kept. They show that he became intensely interested in Bedouin life, so much so that it has been thought he converted from the Lutheran Christianity of his upbringing to Islam. The high point of excitement and danger was his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1845. Back in Finland, Wallin published a short study of Qaṣīdat al-hāʾiyya min ashʿār al-fāriḍiyya by the mystical poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181-1234). This was a demonstration of his qualifications for academic promotion, and as a result he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at Helsinki University in 1851. He was full of ideas. Besides working on the abundant material that he had collected during his years in Arabia, he planned new and even more ambitious fieldwork there. For his students, in 1852 he published a short grammatical poem by Ibn Mālik (d. 1274). His first printed specimens of Bedouin songs appeared in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 5 (1851) 1-23, and 6 (1852) 190–218, 369-78. Tragically, at this point his health collapsed, and he died less than two years after taking up his professorial post.



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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary ‘Presentation of the Royal Premium awarded to Dr. Geo. A. Wallin of Finland, and to Mr. Thomas Brunner of New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 21 (1851) liii-lv Georg Wallin, Studieåren och resan till Alexandria (‘Study years and journey to Alexandria’), Skrifter, vol. 1, ed. K. Öhrnberg and P. Berg, Helsinki, 2010 Secondary P. Berg, ‘Like-minded scholars through the centuries. Mission Georg August Wallin’, Studia Orientalia 114 (2013) 31-7 K. Karttunen, Mooseksen kirjoista kungfutselaisuuden klassikoihin ja Jerusalemista Siperian tundralle: Aasian-tutkimuksen vaiheet Suomessa, Helsinki, 2011, pp. 192-5, 204-10 K. Öhrnberg, art. ‘Wallin, Georg August’, in M. Klinge (ed.), Suomen Kansallisbiografia, vol. 10, Helsink, 2007, 297-8 K. Öhrnberg, art. ‘Wallin, Georg August (1811–1852)’, in J. Speake (ed.), The literature of travel and exploration. An encyclopedia, vol. 3, New York, 2003, 1265-7 P. Aalto, Oriental studies in Finland 1828-1918, Helsinki, 1971, esp. pp. 36-41 W.R. Mead, ‘G.A. Wallin and the Royal Geographical Society’, Studia Orientalia 23 (1958) 1-10 H. Holma, ‘Georg August Wallin 1811-1852’, Studia Orientalia 17 (1952) 1-16 M. Trautz, ‘G.A. Wallin, a forgotten explorer of Arabia’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 19 (1932) 131-50 K.L. Tallqvist, Georg August Wallin. En lefnadsteckning, Helsinki, 1905

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Skrifter ‘Works’ Date Before 1852 Original Language Swedish Description During his travels in Arabia, Wallin kept detailed diaries on all he witnessed, and also described his experiences in long letters to his teacher, Gabriel Geitlin, and to friends and relatives. The manuscript originals of these are now kept in the National Library of Finland.

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Before his death, Wallin began to prepare this material for publication, but he could only make a start, covering no more than the first eight days of his first expedition. This was published after his death by B.O. Schauman as Georg August Wallins första resa från Cairo till arabiska öknen i April 1845, Helsinki, 1853. Soon afterwards, S.G. Elmgren took the diaries and published them in four volumes in a somewhat censored and revised form, and with mistakes because Elmgren knew no Arabic. In 1905, Knut Tallqvist, himself a Semitic scholar, published some of Wallin’s letters and extracts from diaries together with a biography. There are several Finnish and some Arabic translations of these. The definitive edition has appeared over recent years edited by Kaj Öhrnberg and P. Berg (vols 1-3) and K. Öhrnberg, Patricia Berg and Kira Pihlflyckt (vols 4-7). Wallin’s diaries cover all the main stages of his journeys through Arabia, Iraq and Iran. After a stop in Alexandria, he arrived in Cairo in January 1844, having adopted local dress and pretending to be a Muslim called ʿAbd al-Wālī from Central Asia, a Russian citizen. He visited the Nile Delta that summer, and Upper Egypt that autumn. The first Arabian expedition began in April 1845 and lasted until the following March. Wallin had to abandon his original plan to proceed to the Persian Gulf, and instead he joined a pilgrim caravan and thus visited Mecca in disguise, a feat only accomplished by a few Europeans before him. In the second expedition, December 1846-June 1847, he visited Sinai, Palestine and Syria, and in the third, December 1847-June 1848, he went through the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq and, after a visit to Iran, returned via Syria. He finally left the East in August 1849 and visited London, where his travels attracted much attention from the Royal Geographical Society. Three accounts were published in its journal in 1851, 1854 and 1855 (unfortunately with many editorial mistakes). Unlike many travellers of the time, he thrived in the Arabian desert and greatly admired Bedouins and their lifestyle, often expressing the wish to stay among them permanently. In his disguise as a Muslim, he followed the practices of the religion, including the pilgrimage to Mecca. Indifferent to the dangers and hardships he often experienced, he wrote so warmly about the Bedouins that some of his readers gained the impression that he actually adopted Islam. In fact, in his letters and diaries he rarely even mentions religion. It seems that, for him, all doctrinal differences were unimportant – a rare attitude in times when the majority of the Finnish population openly confessed strict Lutheranism. On one occasion he wrote that, for him, it was the same whether a pilgrim went



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to Jerusalem or Mecca (Wallin’s diary for 30 March 1847, in Skrifter, vol. 4, p. 202). Nevertheless, until recently it has been agreed that he only pretended, and in reality he never abandoned traditional Christianity. Significance The few portions of Wallin’s works that were published in his lifetime gave hardly any idea of his wide experience and knowledge. He contributed to contemporary scholarship only a few new details of the partly unknown geography of the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the first few samples of the Bedouin dialect and oral poetry. However, as selections from his diaries and letters were published, and popular books were written about his life and travels, his exploits and experiences gained a wide readership. Such books still continue to appear, and there are even versions adapted for children. He has exerted a great influence on the Finnish conception of Arabs and Islam from his own time to the present, and his example has often been cited as an inspiration to Finnish students of Arabic and the Islamic world. Publications For full details of the manuscript originals of Wallin’s writings, see Georg Wallin, Studieåren och resan till Alexandria (‘Study years and journey to Alexandria’), Skrifter, vol. 1, ed. K. Öhrnberg and P. Berg, Helsinki, 2010, pp. 367-81. Georg Wallin, ‘Notes taken during a journey through part of northern Arabia’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 20 (1850) 293-344 (repr. Cambridge, 1979, German trans., Berlin, 2004); 10.2307/1798039 (digitised version available through JSTOR) B.O. Schauman (ed.), Georg August Wallins första resa från Cairo till arabiska öknen i April 1845 (‘G.A. Wallin’s first journey from Cairo to the Arabian desert in April 1845’), Helsinki, 1853 (extracts) Georg Wallin, ‘Narrative of a journey from Cairo to Medina and Mecca, by Suez, Arabá, Tawilá, al-Jauf, Jubbé, Háil, and Nejd, in 1845’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 24 (1854) 115-207 (repr. Cambridge. 1979, German trans., Berlin, 2004); 10.2307/3698106 (digitised version available through JSTOR) Georg Wallin, ‘Narrative of a journey from Cairo to Jerusalem, viâ Mount Sinai’, trans. N. Shaw, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 25 (1855) 260-90; 10.2307/1798123 (digitised version available through JSTOR)

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S.G. Elmgren (ed.), Georg August Wallins reseanteckningar från Orienten åren 1843-1849 [G.A. Wallin’s travel notes from the East, years 18431849’), 4 vols, Helsinki, 1864-6 K. Tallqvist (ed.), Bref och dagboksanteckningar af Georg August Wallin (‘G.A. Wallin’s letters and diary notes’), Helsinki, 1905 Georg Wallin, ‘Muistiinpanoja itämaan matkalta vuosina 18431849’ (‘Notes from the Eastern journey, years 1843-1849’), trans. T. Kaukoranta, Suomen kansalliskirjallisuus 7 (1931) 379-440 (Finnish trans.) Georg Wallin, Tutkimusmatkoilla arabien parissa. Otteita matkapäiväkirjoista ja kirjeistä (‘Explorations among Arabs. Extracts from travel diaries and letters’), ed. J. Aro and A. Salonen, Porvoo, 1966 Jūrj Awghust Wālīn, Ṣuwar min shimālī jazīrat al-ʿarab fī muntaṣaf alqarn al-tāsiʿ ʿashar, trans. Samīr Salīm Shalabī, ed. Yūsuf Yazbak, Beirut, 1971 (Arabic trans., unreliable compilation from the works of Wallin and others; 2nd edition with a 4-page Foreword in English by Faruk Abu-Chakra, 1991) Georg Wallin, Källan i fjärran öknen (‘[Spring in the distant desert’), ed. G. Schildt, Stockholm, 1976 Georg Wallin, Travels in Arabia (1845 and 1848), Cambridge, 1979 (repr. of Journal of the Royal Geographical Society articles) Georg Wallin, Reisen in Arabien 1845-1848, trans. U. Pfullmann, Berlin, 2004 (German trans. of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society articles) Georg Wallin, Aavikon vaeltaja. Elämä ja päiväkirjat (‘The desert wanderer. Life and diaries’), trans. J. Anhava, ed. K. Öhrnberg, Helsinki, 2007 (Finnish trans.) Georg Wallin, Studieåren och resan till Alexandria (‘Study years and journey to Alexandria’), Skrifter, vol. 1, ed. K. Öhrnberg and P. Berg, Helsinki, 2010 Georg Wallin, Det första året i Egypten 1843-44 (‘The first year in Egypt, 1843-44’), Skrifter, vol. 2, ed. K. Öhrnberg and P. Berg, Helsinki, 2011 Georg Wallin, Kairo och resan till Övre Egypten 1844-45 (‘Cairo and the trip to Upper Egypt, 1844–45’), Skrifter, vol. 3, ed. K. Öhrnberg and P. Berg, Helsinki, 2012 Georg Wallin, Färderna till Mekka och Jerusalem 1845-47 (‘Journeys to Mecca and Jerusalem, 1845-47’), Skrifter, vol. 4, ed. K. Öhrnberg, P. Berg and K. Pihlflyckt, Helsinki, 2013



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Georg Wallin, Norra arabiska halvön och Persien 1847-1849 (‘Northern Arabian Peninsula and Persia, 1847-1849’), Skrifter, vol. 5, ed. K. Öhrnberg, P. Berg and K. Pihlflyckt, Helsinki, 2014 Georg Wallin, Resan hem via London 1849-1850 (‘Homeward journey via London, 1849-1850’), Skrifter, vol. 6, ed. K. Öhrnberg, P. Berg and K. Pihlflyckt, Helsinki, 2015 Georg Wallin, Professorsåren i Helsingfors 1850-1852 (‘Years as professor in Helsinki, 1850-1852’), Skrifter, vol. 7, ed. K. Öhrnberg, P. Berg and K. Pihlflyckt, Helsinki, 2016 Studies For details of studies on Wallin’s writings, see the various volumes of Skrifter, ed. K. Öhrnberg et al. There are also essays in each of the volumes. Among the most important recent studies are the following: P. Berg et al. Dolce far niente in Arabia. Georg August Wallin and his travels in the 1840s, Chicago IL, 2015 P. Berg, ‘The travels of G.A. Wallin and his views on Western influence in the Middle East’, in N. Cooke and V. Daubney (eds), Every traveller needs a compass. Travel and collecting in Egypt and the Near East, Oxford and Philadelphia PA, 2015, 23-32 S. Häggman, Alldeles hemlikt. Georg August Wallins Egypten 1843-1845, Helsinki, 2012 Klaus Karttunen

Gustaf Erik Eurén Date of Birth 20 September 1818 Place of Birth Pori, western Finland Date of Death 13 February 1872 Place of Death Hämeenlinna, southern Finland

Biography

Gustaf Eurén was a many-sided linguist, historian, journalist and populariser, who spent his career teaching Hebrew, Greek and history at high schools (gymnasium) in Turku and Hämeenlinna. Born in 1818, he studied at Helsinki University, graduating in 1844. His extensive literary output includes a Hebrew grammar, two studies about ancient Jewish customs, a selection of the Arabian nights translated from European versions, several Finnish language textbooks and a Finnish-Swedish dictionary. He was no scholar, and freely used the works of others, to the extent that he was even accused of plagiarism.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Secondary K. Karttunen, Mooseksen kirjoista kungfutselaisuuden klassikoihin ja Jerusalemista Siperian tundralle. Aasian-tutkimuksen vaiheet Suomessa [From Pentateuch to Confucian classics and from Jerusalem to the Siberian tundra. A history of Asian studies in Finland], Helsinki, 2011, pp. 350-1 K. Koukkunen, ‘Kaikki sen tietävät. G.E. Eurénin Suomalais-Ruotsalaisen Sanakirjan (1860) synnyttämä polemiikki’ [‘Everybody knows it.’ The polemics caused by G.E. Eurén’s Finnish–Swedish dictionary (1860)], Sananjalka 16 (2004) 116-24



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Muhammedin elämä ja oppi ‘The life and teaching of Muḥammad’ Date 1856 Original Language Finnish Description In the mid-19th century, an objective presentation of Islam was something unheard of in a strictly Lutheran country such as Finland. This book was published cautiously, with the name of its author omitted. In fact, Eurén had no special knowledge of the subject and therefore must have compiled it from Swedish or German sources. The book contains 120 pages and begins with a general description of Arabia and the Arabs. Muḥammad’s life is related in detail, with the account of his teachings beginning at p. 93. This was generally correct according to the knowledge of the time. Significance In this very first account of Muḥammad and Islam published in Finland, Eurén ventured to express ideas that were regarded as revolutionary, even blasphemous, by many. Although he expresses the view that Islam is a false religion, he holds that it is a real religion and not merely a false delusion. Muḥammad was no liar: he was sincere, though mistaken about the errors he proclaimed as divine revelation. Publications Gustaf Eurén, Muhammedin elämä ja oppi, Turussa (Turku), Frenckellin kirjapainossa, 1856 Klaus Karttunen

Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig Date of Birth 8 September 1783 Place of Birth Udby near Vordingborg, Denmark Date of Death 2 September 1872 Place of Death Copenhagen

Biography

Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig was born in Udby, near Vordingborg, on 8 September 1783. His father, Johan Ottosen Grundtvig (1734-1813), was a Lutheran pastor. His mother, Kathrine Marie Bang, initially educated him at home before he went to the local pastor in Jylland from 1792 to 1798, and then to the Cathedral school in Aarhus. From 1800, he studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, graduating in 1803. He then became a private tutor for a noble family in the countryside, maintaining the literary activities he had begun earlier. Inspired by European Romanticism and Nordic mythology, he wrote and published Nordens mytologi eller udsigt over Eddalæren (‘Mythology of the North or Introduction to the Edda’, 1808). He found in this mythology inspiration for a national awakening that was much needed after the British bombardment of Copenhagen and the destruction of the Danish fleet in 1807. He retained his emotional veneration of Nordic mythology throughout his life. In 1810, his father fell ill and asked him to return home to become his assistant. To comply with his father’s wish, Grundtvig had to deliver a public sermon in order to obtain permission to preach in the church. This sermon was fiercely criticised for its critical attitude to the rational approach used in most sermons at the time, but he was granted the licence and was ordained in 1811. In 1812, he published Kort begreb af verdens krønike i sammenhæng (‘Short introduction to the chronicle of the world in context’). His understanding of history was influenced here by the Bible, and accordingly identified creation and the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ as the pivotal points of history. In 1815, Grundtvig applied for a position in the church but without success, and from 1818 he was granted a royal allowance until, in 1821, he was appointed pastor of the rural parish of Præstø. In 1822, he moved to a parish in Copenhagen as curate, serving there until 1826.



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Grundtvig’s ongoing disagreements with the Church convinced him of the need to restore what he perceived as the original and authentic interpretation of Christianity, and in 1825 he formulated his ‘marvellous discovery’ (Møller, ‘Church, state’, p. 236). He now interpreted the Bible not as the direct word of God but as a narrative historical text handed down from generation to generation. Christ formulated his message directly for his Apostles in ‘living words’ (levende ord), and the Apostles and church leaders continued this practice with direct and living quotations of God’s words addressed to parents when they had their children baptised, or to believers when they took part in the Eucharist. In these settings, God’s ‘living words’ were repeated again and again, and His presence was confirmed by believers. In 1825, Henrik Nicolai Clausen (1793-1877), an influential young professor from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, published a book in which he described the church as a society intended to promote a rational and morally founded religion. A few weeks later, Grundtvig published an indignant answer entitled Kierkens gienmæle imod Prof. Theol. Dr. H.N. Clausen (‘The response of the church against Prof. Theol. Dr. H.N. Clausen’), in which he accused him of formulating and defending false doctrines. Clausen took Grundtvig to court, and he was sentenced for defamation and placed under lifelong censorship, which was lifted in 1837. Grundtvig continued his studies in history, and from 1829 to 1831 he spent extended time at a number of libraries in England. On his return home in 1832, he published a revised and expanded edition of Nordens mytologi, in which he introduced a new interpretation of the link between the human and the divine, formulated in his well-known dictum: ‘First human, then Christian’, which meant that the human had always been a divine creation, and with Christianity the final and eternal religious truth was revealed. Between 1833 and 1843, he published Haandbog i verdens-historien efter de bedste kilder I-III, et forsøg (‘Handbook of world history according to the best sources I-III, an attempt’). In this work, he abandoned his previous understanding of history as a course planned and orchestrated in detail by God. God was certainly active and present in the world by his words when children were baptised and when believers participated in the Eucharist, but He had no direct influence on historical events. History was the stage for human beings living their daily lives, struggling for power and debating how to solve problems and confront new challenges. In this world history, he presented for the first time to the

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Danish public information about Islam and Muslims derived directly from Muslim historical sources, rather than European polemical works. In 1835, Grundtvig was banned from church employment for seven years, and was allowed to resume ministry in 1842 as pastor of the church at the Vartov hospital in Copenhagen. He was elected a member of the Danish constitutional assembly of 1848 and participated in the deliberations to prepare the constitution that was accepted in 1849. He was elected to parliament several times. Both as a politician and as a recognised intellectual, he defended the rights of the individual, demanded freedom of religion, and always argued for a strong institutional separation between the Danish state church on the one hand and the public school system on the other. As a result of this, he became involved in the establishment of private schools for children (friskoler) and of high schools for young people (folkehøjskoler). In 1861, he was given the titular rank of bishop. Grundtvig’s idea of the living word and his theological understanding of baptism and the Eucharist as moments in which God is present with believers had implications for his understanding of Christianity. He strongly opposed all efforts of both the church and the state to interfere in the way believers practised their Christian belief, though at the same time he remained a staunch supporter of the official Danish Church as it was institutionally set up in the constitution of 1849. During his lifetime, Grundtvig became an inspiration for many (referred to as grundtvigianere), and his views and ideas are still of great importance when Danish history, Danish language and Danish traditions are considered. He died in Copenhagen on 2 September 1872.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary H. Brun, Biskop N.F.S. Grundtvigs levnetsforløb, udførligst fortalt fra 1839. Et bidrag fra H. Brun, I-II, Kolding, 1882 S. Johansen and H. Høirup, Grundtvig’s erindringer og erindringer om Grundtvig, Copenhagen, 1948 (with notes from some of Grundtvig’s diaries and recollections by people who knew him) N.F.S. Grundtvig, Dag- og udtogsbøger I-II, ed. G. Albeck, Copenhagen, 1979 (an edition of parts of Grundtvig’s diaries) Secondary J.F. Møller, Grundtvig’s død, Aarhus, 2019 O. Korsgaard, Grundtvig rundt. En guide, Copenhagen, 2018



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O. Korsgaard and O.K. Pedersen (eds), Building the nation. N.F.S. Grundtvig and Danish national identity, Montreal, 2015 J.F. Møller, ‘Church, state and reform in Denmark’, in J. van Eijnatten and P. Yates (eds), The dynamics of religious reform in Northern Europe 1780-1920, Leuven, 2010, 229-46 A.M. Allchin, N.F.S. Grundtvig. An introduction to his life and work, Aarhus, 1997, 20152 S. Auken, Sagas spejl. Mytologi, historie og kristendom hos N.F.S. Grundtvig, Copenhagen, 2004 O. Vind, Grundtvigs historiefilosofi, Copenhagen, 1999 F. Lundgreen-Nielsen, ‘Grundtvig og danskhed’, in O. Feldbæk (ed.), Dansk identitetshistorie, vol. 3, Copenhagen, 1992, pp. 9-187 H. Grell, Skaberånd og folkeånd. En undersøgelse af Grundtvigs tanker om folk, folkelighed og deres forhold til hans kristendomssyn, Aarhus, 1988 K.E. Bugge, ‘Grundtvig, Nicolai Frederik Severin’, in S. Cedergreen Bech (ed.), Dansk biografisk leksikon, vol. 5, Copenhagen, 1980, pp. 318-27 K.E. Bugge, Skolen for livet. Studier i N.F.S. Grundtvigs pædagogiske tanker, Copenhagen, 1965 K. Thaning, Menneske først. Grundtvigs opgør med sig selv I-III, Copenhagen, 1963 W. Michelsen, Tilblivelsen af Grundtvigs historiesyn. Idehistoriske studier over Grundtvigs verdenskröniker og deres litterære forudsætninger, Copenhagen, 1954 P.G. Lindhardt, Grundtvig. An introduction, London, 1951

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Haandbog i verdens-historien ‘Handbook of world history’ Date 1833-43 Original Language Danish Description This huge work is intended as an introduction to world history (its full title is Haandbog i verdens-historien efte de bedste kilder. Et forsøg, ‘Handbook of world history according to the best sources. An attempt’). It was published in three volumes in 1833, 1836 and 1843. In the Introduction, Grundtvig defines Christianity as the only ‘Godly truth that lasts eternally’. His personal belief, expressed in 1825 in his well-known epithet ‘human first, then Christian’, had convinced him of the correct way to understand the link between ‘church and school, belief and science, historical

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and eternal’ (Møller, ‘Church, state’, p. 236). He now perceived historical changes as a result of the human struggle for improvement, recognising them as a consequence of human agency, not a plan laid out by God. This is also emphasised in the book’s title, where his interpretation of world history is defined as no more than an attempt, reminding his reader that his analysis of events may be questioned by others. In line with this, he explains how his interpretation of history is based on the best available sources, emphasising that an analysis of historical events must be based on sources stemming from the contemporary time and context. Nevertheless, the chronological frame of vol. 1 (686 pages) remains loyal to the Bible, beginning with creation and following the narrative down to the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Vol. 2 (689 pages) covers the Middle Ages, and vol. 3 (416 pages) more recent history. This approach to history results in a quite new description of the Arabs, Islam and Muḥammad. As Grundtvig explicitly bases his analysis of world history on a principle of the separation of the sacred from the profane, his description of Muḥammad and Islam rests on an historical analysis of the birth of Islam and the impact of Islam and Muslims on world history, rather than on Islam’s relation to other religions and the inevitable comparison that would arise. His description of Arabs and Islam is to be found in vol. 2, The middle ages, where two sections, ‘Byzantium and the Arabs’ and ‘The church and the crusades’, offer an introduction to the impact of Islam and Muslims on world history. As a historian, Grundtvig does not accept Muḥammad’s claim to be a prophet chosen by God to receive a revelation, and he explains Islam as the creation of Muḥammad. He repeatedly emphasises how his analysis of Muḥammad and Islam rests on the use of the best available sources, as is underscored in the title of his book. He uses the Qur’an (whose spirituality and poetry he acknowledges; vol. 2, p. 146) in George Sale’s English translation of 1734, and relies on classical Muslim historical works in European languages, such as Jean Gagnier’s translation of the Muslim historian Abū l-Fidāʾ’s (1273-1331) Al-mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar (‘The concise history of humankind’), as well as Bahāʾ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād’s (1145-1235) biography of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn. Grundtvig was the first historian to introduce the Danish public to the ways in which the Prophet Muḥammad was described in the classical Muslim tradition, and the first to use the Qur’an in his attempt to describe the birth of Islam as a historical phenomenon. The Enlightenment historian Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) had been the first to introduce Muḥammad as a historical person and to inform the Danish public about Islam, but the



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description he had given was based on the works of other European historians. As a result of Grundtvig’s decision to use the best primary sources available, in his work Islam is not characterised as an inherently militant religion, as had often been the case in the European medieval tradition. Grundtvig had written about Muḥammad some years earlier in Kort begreb af verdens krønike i sammenhæng (‘Short introduction to the chronicle of the world in context’), published in 1812. In this work, he explained how Muḥammad introduced a distorted interpretation of the belief in one God to the people of Mecca and transformed the Arabs into an army of Muslim conquerors who were driven by the promise of paradise as a reward for responding to his call. However, the community soon abandoned Muḥammad’s original teachings for the benefits and temptations of this world (Copenhagen, 1871 edition, pp. 58-62). This very brief account reflects popular attitudes of the time towards Islam, and does not reveal any intimation that they were based on religious bias. In later years, Grundtvig again brought an aspect of Islam into his writing. Between 1861 and 1863, he delivered a series of public lectures on church history for his followers and students. These were published in 1871 as Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christne menigheds levnetsløb (‘The church, mirror or view of the Christian community’s way of life’). He returns to the crusades, and outlines the main events and characters in the same historical way as in Haandbog i verdens-historien, but he says nothing to add to the earlier work. Significance Grundtvig broke with the medieval tradition of portraying Islam as a debased offshoot of Christianity, and treated Muḥammad as a figure of history rather than as a demonically inspired opponent of true faith. He was the first Danish author to set accounts of Islam on an impartial footing, and to remove its appearance and history from the sphere of theology to that of history. His discussions of Islam and Muslims did not exert much influence on other authors but, since his work on world history was used at the many high schools for young people ( folkehøjskoler) that were established by his supporters in all parts of the country, his views were generally known to the Danish public. Publications N.F.S. Grundtvig, Haandbog i verdens-historien. Efter de bedste kilder. Et forsøg I-III, Copenhagen, vol. 1, 1833; vol. 2, 1836; vol. 3, 1843, repr.

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1862; 518A (an interactive digitised version of the volumes is available through grundtvigsvaerker.dk) N.F.S. Grundtvigs udvalge værker 1-10 (‘Selected works of N.F.S. Grundtvig’), ed. H. Begstrup, Copenhagen, 1904-9, vols 6 and 7 Studies Vind, Grundtvigs historiefilosofi Michelsen, Tilblivelsen af Grundtvigs historiesyn

Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christne menigheds levnetsløb ‘The church, mirror or view of the Christian community’s way of life’ Date 1871 Original Language Danish Description Through the years 1861-3, Grundtvig delivered a number of public lectures on church history for his followers and students. These were published in 1871 as Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christen menigheds levnetsløb (398 pages). The book offers an impressive interpretation of the development of Christianity both dogmatically and historically. It contains several critical judgements of Muḥammad’s claim to be a prophet and of Islam’s perception of itself as the final monotheistic revelation to correct the way in which Jews and Christians perceived themselves. It makes a number of passing references to Islam on the margins of its portrayal of God’s directing of history, as, for example, when it explains the crusaders retrieving Jerusalem, Nicea and Antioch from Muslim possession as part of the divine plan. Kirke-speil has two extended sections on Islam, the first offering a detailed introduction to the teachings of Islam, and the second an account of the crusades. On the surface, the crusades were legitimised by religion, but at the same time they provide an example of how the Catholic Church and the Vatican promoted their own political and economic power. In this respect, the Church was just like Muḥammad, who also used his religion as a political device.



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Grundtvig had earlier written about Muḥammad in Kort begreb af verdens krønike i sammenhæng (‘Short introduction to the chronicle of the world in context’), published in 1812. Here, he explained how Muḥammad introduced a distorted understanding of the belief in one God to the people of Mecca, and how he managed to mobilise the Arabs and transformed them into an army of conquerors who were driven by the promise of paradise as a reward for heeding his religious call. However, the Muslim community soon abandoned the original teachings of Muḥammad for the benefits and temptations of this world. Significance Grundtvig’s ideas about Danish identity continue to play a significant role in contemporary discussion and debate in Denmark especially following the changing composition of the population with growing immigration and an increase in the number of refugees applying for political asylum. Grundtvig’s introduction to Islam and Muslims and his views and attitudes pertaining to Danishness have inspired many critics to perceive the migration of people from other parts of the world as a new threat to anything defined by them as Danish and as such something to defend and to maintain. While Grundtvig’s view of Islam was not entirely negative, his claim that Muslims had abandoned Muḥammad’s religious teaching in favour of political and worldly gain would have left his hearers with a jaundiced impression of Islam as a not very desirable faith. Grundtvig saw Christianity as the result of God acting within history and also through nations such as Denmark eventually to bring the kingdom of God to fulfilment. He saw a cause and effect relationship between Danish identity and Christianity, which left no room for Islam and other faiths. He believed that Denmark, as ‘Queen of the Northern races’ had a providential role to play in implementing God’s ‘mission to the world’ (S. Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s critique of Christian nationalism, Oxford, 2011, p. 69). True Christianity has to be expressed through the national language by a process of becoming integral to and inseparable from national culture. This process takes centuries. In this view, Islam, with its insistence on using Arabic, remains exotic and foreign. Publications N.F.S. Grundtvig, Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christne menigheds levnetsløb. Efter mundtligt foredrag 1861-63, Copenhagen, 1871; 011547537 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

August Ferdinand van Mehren Date of Birth 6 April 1822 Place of Birth Helsingør, Denmark Date of Death 14 November 1907 Place of Death Fredensborg, Denmark

Biography

August Ferdinand van Mehren was born on 6 April 1822 in Helsingør, to Kjøbmand J.F. van Mehren, a merchant, and Claudine Amelia, née Liebmann. He finished high school as a private student and entered the University of Copenhagen in 1838 to study Greek and Latin. Along with his formal studies, he also studied Semitic languages and, financed by his father, he went to Leipzig to study Arabic under the supervision of Heinrich L. Fleischer (1801-88). He went on to study Persian and the Old Testament with J. Olshausen (1800-82) at the University of Kiel. In 1848, he obtained his doctoral degree with a thesis on a letter by the Arab Naḥda philologist and poet Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1800-71) to the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), and de Sacy’s 1822 edition of Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim ibn ʿAlī l-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt. In April 1849, Mehren was invited by the University of Copenhagen to lecture in Arabic and Semitic languages, and in 1854 he was appointed professor of Semitic languages. He became a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1867. He retired from the University in 1898, and died in Fredensborg on 14 November 1907.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Secondary V. Thomsen, art. ‘Mehren, August Ferdinand Michael van’, in C.F. Bricka and P. Engelstoft (eds), Dansk biografisk leksikon, vol. 15, Copenhagen, 1938, 435-8



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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Works Date 1849-99 Original Language Danish, French and Arabic Description August van Mehren participated in the collective effort by a number of European Orientalists to publish descriptions of the many Oriental manuscripts in various collections around Europe. In 1851, he published Codices Hebraicos et Arabicos continens, which includes a careful description of the Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. This was followed in 1857 by Codices Persicos, Turcicos, Hindustanicos &c. continens. In 1853, he published Die Rhetorik der Araber, a contribution still mentioned in academic research on classical Arabic rhetoric (e.g., Halldén, ‘What is Arab Islamic rhetoric?’). Mehren wrote several studies on Arab geographical literature, and in 1857 published a comprehensive introduction entitled Fremstilling af de islamitiske folks almindelige geographiske kundskaber (‘Exposition of the Islamic peoples’ general geographical knowledge’), followed by a number of partial translations into French of Shams al-Dīn al Dimashqī’s (d. 1327) geographical work Nukh(a)bat al-dahr fī ajāʾib al-barr wa-l-baḥr (‘The choice of the age. Wonders of land and sea’). In 1866, Mehren was invited by the Imperial Russian Academy to publish a critical edition of this work, and in 1874 he published a complete French translation. In 1867-8, van Mehren visited Egypt and wrote a diary of the trip, which is now in the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen. Unpublished and incomplete, this offers a description of the country seen through the eyes of a well-educated European Orientalist. During his stay in Cairo, van Mehren carefully copied a number of inscriptions from important historical monuments in Cairo and from tombs in Kerafat (the City of the Dead). It has been stated that van Mehren showed no interest in the contemporary Arab and Islamic world, but this is incorrect. In 1872, he published a few contemporary Arabic popular texts, giving the members of the Academy and the Danish public a chance to see what popular literature in the Arab metropolis had to offer. In 1873, he published an article on neo-Arabic romances, and it can be seen from the introduction to Câhirah og Kerâfat, historiske studier under et ophold i Ægypten 1867-68 (Cairo, 1870), as well as from entries in his unpublished diary, how he spent time

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familiarising himself with the Arabic dialect spoken by ordinary Egyptians. He was, however, not at all happy to see how the classical Arabic language he was familiar with from his studies and which he had carefully analysed in Die Rhetorik der Araber was unknown to many Egyptians. He emphasised that it was almost impossible to find an educated person in Cairo who had mastery over classical Arabic grammar. In line with this, it is no surprise to find a number of rather negative comments on the spoken dialect with which van Mehren became familiar during his stay in Cairo. His diary has an entry, dated 23 November 1867, noting that he had decided to collect information about local words used for ordinary daily items because these were not found in the available dictionaries. In the introduction to Câhirah og Kerâfat, he mentions his wish to visit both Damascus and Baghdad in the future, though he never did so. In another entry in his diary, dated 28 November, he writes: ‘The days are passing like moments for me. The stay belongs to the most interesting parts of my life and I only fear not to use each moment in the right way.’ Van Mehren also published on Islamic religious thought and philosophy. In several contributions, he analyses the importance of the 10thcentury theologian Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī and his role in the development of Islamic religious thought, and he edited and translated a number of minor works of the philosophers Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd. Significance Van Mehren’s significance lies in the study of classical Arabic rhetoric, his descriptions of the manuscripts in the Royal Library in Copenhagen and his edition and translation of the geographical work of al-Dimashqī. His writings on romances, popular literature and philosophy from the Islamic world made accessible to Christians in Denmark and elsewhere aspects of Arab and Muslim life that contrasted with the dominant Orientalist tropes about Islam as stifling creativity, and as offering little of interest apart from false doctrines. This challenged the assumption of a binary polarity between Christian Europeans and the Muslim Arab world that not only denied that Islam has any spiritual validity but denigrated the cultural and intellectual achievements of Muslims. This new slant on the world of Islam provided a basis for finding common ground between Christians and Muslims.



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Publications A.F. van Mehren, Die Rhetorik der Araber, Copenhagen, 1853 (repr. Hildesheim, 1970); 002048926KGL01 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) A.F. van Mehren, Fremstilling af de islamitiske folks almindelige geographiske kundskaber [‘Exposition of the Islamic peoples’ general geographical knowledge’], Copenhagen, 1857; 008693696 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.F. van Mehren, Syrien og Palestina. Studie efter en arabisk geograph fra slutningen af det 13de og begyndelsen af det 14de aarhundrede med en indledning, Copenhagen, 1862; 100730411 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.F. van Mehren, Cosmographie de Chems-ed-Din Abou Abdallah Mohammed ed-Dimichqui, texte arabe, St Petersburg, 1866 (repr. Leipzig, 1923; Osnabruck, 1982); 001875947 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) MS Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek – Diary of trip to Egypt A.F. van Mehren, ‘“Abu Schadufs Klagesang” og en Variation af Romanen om “Abu Zaid”’ [‘“Abu Schaduf’s elegy” and a variation on the novel about “Abu Zayd”’], in A.F. van Mehren, Et par bidrag til bedømmelse af den nyere folkelitteratur i Ægypten, Copenhagen, 1872, 37-71; 130021587071 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Den ny-arabiske romance’ [Neo-Arabic romance], in H.P. Holst (ed.), For romantik og historie, vol. 10, Copenhagen, 1873, 235-74; 130021587037 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Islams reform ved Abu-l-Hasan el-Ashari i slutningen af det 3die aarhundrede H. og Uusigt over denne religions videre udvikling’ [The reform of Islam by Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī at the end of the third century A.H. and a prospect of the later development of this religion], in Oversigt over det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskabs forhandlinger og dets medlemmers arbejder i aaret, Copenhagen, 1877, 33-71; 100867249 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Exposé de la reforme de l’islamisme commencée au IIIème siècle de l’hégire par Abou-’l-Hasan Ali el-Ash’ari et continuée

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par son école. Avec des extraits du texte arabe d’Ibn Asâkir’, in V. de Rosen (ed.), Travaux de la 3e session du congrès international des Orientalistes, vol. 2, St Petersburg, 1879, 167-332; 12148/bpt6k6580044s (digitised version available through BNF) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Tre afhandlinger af Avicenna om sjælen’ [‘Three pieces by Avicenna on the soul’], in Oversigt over det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskabs forhandlinger og dets medlemmers arbejder i aaret, Copenhagen, 1881, 105-19; digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek A.F. van Mehren, ‘La philosophie d’Avicenne (Ibn Sina) exposée d’après des documents inédits’, Le Muséon 1 (1882) 389-409, 506-22 A.F. van Mehren, ‘Avicenna’s forhold til Islam og hans anskuelser om sjælens theoretiske og praktiske udvikling i verden’ [‘Avicenna’s view of Islam and his ideas about the theoretical and practical development in the world’], in Oversigt over det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskabs forhandlinger og dets medlemmers arbejder i aaret, Copenhagen, 1883, 63-92; 111408007099 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Les rapports de la philosophie d’Avicenne avec l’islam considéré comme religion révélée et sa doctrine sur le développement théorique et pratique de l’âme, § II. Le développement de l’âme durant son séjour terrestre par voie théorique et pratique’, Le Muséon 2/4 (1883) 561-74; 2015.56342 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Les rapports de la philosophie d’Avicenne avec l’islam considéré comme religion révélée et sa doctrine sur le développement théorique et pratique de l’âme, Introduction’, Le Muséon 2/3 (1883) 460-74; 2015.56342 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Vues d’Avicenne sur l’astrologie et sur le rapport de la responsabilité humaine avec le destin. Introduction’, Le Muséon 3 (1884) 383-403; 2015.56343 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Le traité d’Avicenne sur le destin’, Le Muséon 4 (1884 [January 1885]) 35-50; 2015.56344 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Vues théosophiques d’Avicenne. Sa doctrine des moyens d’acquisition de la beatitude céleste et de la condition des



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illuminés’, Le Muséon 4 (1884) 594-609; 2015.56344 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Vues théosophiques d’Avicenne. Sa doctrine des moyens d’acquisitions de la beatitude celeste et de la condition des illumines’, Le Muséon 5 (1886) 52-67; 2015.56346 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘L’allégorie mystique Hây ben Yaqzân d’Avicenne analysée et en partie traduite par M.A.F. van Mehren’, Le Muséon 5 (1886) 411-26; 2015.56346 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, ‘Om oprindelsen til det i den orientalske filosofi oftere forekommende navn Hay ben Yaqzân’ [On the origin of the often used name Hay ben Yaqzân in Oriental philosophy], in Oversigt over det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskabs forhandlinger og dets medlemmers arbejder i aaret, Copenhagen, 1886, 45-58 A.F. van Mehren, ‘Études sur la philosophie d’Averroës concernant son rapport avec celle d’Avicenne et Gazzali’, Le Muséon 8 (1889) 20139; 2015.56349 (digitised version available through Digital Library of India) A.F. van Mehren, Traités mystiques d’Abou Ali al-Hosain b. Abdallah b. Sina ou d’Avicenne, 4 parts, Leiden, 1889, 1891, 1894, 1899; digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek Studies P. Halldén, ‘What is Arab Islamic rhetoric? Rethinking the history of Muslim oratory art and homiletics’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005) 19-38 F. Løkkegaard, ‘Semitisk-Østerlandsk filologi’, in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979, Copenhagen, 1979-2001, vol. 8, 477-509 (this introduction to the study of Semitic philology at the University of Copenhagen contains a short evaluation of Mehren’s contribution to Oriental studies in Denmark) Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

Johannes Østrup Johannes Elith Østrup Date of Birth 27 July 1867 Place of Birth Copenhagen Date of Death 5 May 1938 Place of Death Copenhagen

Biography

Johannes Østrup was born in Copenhagen on 27 July 1867 to Hans Frederik Østrup and Hustru Anna née Schebel. He enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1884, graduating in 1890 with a BA in Danish and an MA in Greek and Latin. Along with his degree subjects, he also studied comparative linguistics, Sanskrit and Semitic languages under the supervision of August Ferdinand van Mehren. While he was still a student, Østrup published translations of classical Arabic poetry and fairy tales. In 1891, at the age of 24, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation Studier over Tusind og en Nat (‘Studies in The thousand and one nights’), and became the youngest doctor of philosophy in the history of the University of Copenhagen. The thesis was translated into Russian in 1905 and into German in 1925, and is still considered a seminal contribution in academic research on The thousand and one nights (see U. Marzolph, R. van Leeuwen and H. Wassouf (eds), The Arabian nights encyclopedia, Santa Barbara CA, 2004). Østrup then went to the Middle East for two years to improve his knowledge of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, staying first in Cairo and then in Damascus. While in Cairo, he collected material relating to the medieval description of Egypt by ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad al-Kindī (867-961), which he published after his return in 1896 with the Arabic text and a Danish translation. As a classical historian, he also gave time to inspecting the route taken by the Persian Emperor Cyrus when he marched against the Greeks, as described in the classical Greek tradition. He published the results of this investigation in 1894, and in 1906 he published an analysis of the possible Semitic influence on Homer. In 1896, Østrup spent some time in Strasburg as a private student of Theodor Nöldeke, but his interest in the contemporary Arab Muslim world awakened by his long stay in the region was clearly stronger than his interest in more classical Oriental studies.



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While in Damascus, he had collected local orally transmitted stories and in 1897 he published Contes de Damas, containing popular Damascene stories in transcription with a French translation and a short grammatical introduction to the Damascus dialect. In 1927, his interest in social history was documented in a publication on Orientalske Høflighedsformler og Høflighedsformer. En kulturhistorisk Sammenligning (‘Oriental phrases of honour and forms of courtesy. A cultural comparison’), which was translated into German in 1929. During his stay in Damascus, Østrup conducted an archaeological survey of the 4th-century ruins of the Byzantine city of Rusafa on behalf of the Royal Danish Geographical Society. The results were published in 1895. He bought an Arabian horse to reach the ruins in the Syrian desert and conduct the survey. Being a passionate rider, he decided to return to Denmark on horseback, and in 1894 published Skiftende horizonter (‘Shifting horizons’), describing his journey home. It was translated into Swedish in the same year. When Frants Buhl was appointed professor of Semitic languages in 1898, in recognition of Østrup’s international academic standing the University of Copenhagen appointed him docent in Semitic languages and literature, and in 1918 he finally became professor in Islamic culture, a position he held until he retired in 1937. He introduced lectures and courses in modern spoken Arabic, and Ottoman and modern Turkish, and served as rector of the University for two years, 1934-5. Østrup’s stay in the Middle East in 1891-3 made him aware of the increasing importance of the region for Europe, and the consequent responsibility of scholars to disseminate information about the changes that were taking place there. As a result, he published widely on developments in the Arab and Muslim world, wrote for the general public in several leading Danish papers and often lectured on Danish radio. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, he was engaged in a number of feasibility studies to find out if it was economically sustainable for grain to be produced in Mesopotamia and transported by train to Europe. He visited the area in 1907-8 and 1910-11, but the outbreak of war meant that the plans never materialised. The feasibility studies, and his efforts to communicate with the general public, made Østrup an early example of an ‘area expert’. In 1925, Østrup published a translation of a number of Arab fairy tales, revising an early 19th-century Danish translation of The Arabian nights from French by Valdemar Thisted in 1895-6. Finally, in 1927-8, he published a complete Danish translation of the work from Arabic. In 1911, a hoard of silver coins from the Islamic world, dating back to the 10th century, was

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Illustration 16. Photograph of Johannes Østrup

found in the village of Terslev, south of Copenhagen, providing evidence of close trade connections between Scandinavia and the Middle East. Østrup published an analysis of the coins bearing Kufic inscriptions, and went on to produce a catalogue and a description of individual coins among them, Catalogue des monnaies arabes et turques du cabinet royal des médailles du Musée de Copenhague, published posthumously in 1938. Østrup died in Copenhagen on 5 May 1938.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Johannes Østrup, Skiftende Horizonter. Skildringer og Iagttagelser fra et Ridt gennem Ørkenen og Lilleasien (‘Shifting horizons. Descriptions and observations during a horseback journey through the desert and Asia Minor’), Copenhagen, 1894 Johannes Østrup, Erindringer (‘Memories’), Copenhagen, 1938



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Secondary P. de H. Gudme, art. ‘Johannes Østrup’, in Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd edition, vol. 16, Copenhagen, 1984, 214-16

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Profeten Muhammed. En folkelig fremstilling ‘The Prophet Muhammed. A popular introduction’ Date 1911 Original Language Danish Description Østrup never specialised in the study of Islam but he did write several minor works on the faith, written for the general public and, in 1911, he published Profeten Muhammed. En folkelig fremstilling (‘The Prophet Muḥammad. A popular introduction’), which is 96 pages long. He underlines the need for such a book, discussing briefly the state of international research on Islam and Muḥammad in the early 20th century, and referring to the need for increased public knowledge of Islam at a time when the Islamic world’s importance for the West was increasing. The European perception of Islam in general and of Muḥammad in particular was, as he saw it, still too strongly influenced by medieval Christian prejudice. The book gives an interpretation of Muḥammad as a historical figure and offers a careful introduction to the revelations he claimed to receive from the one and only God. Østrup offers an analysis of Muḥammad’s life, emphasising that he never abandoned his religious belief or his honest way of dealing with people, in spite of his increasing political commitment to creating a new polity based on the revelations. He argues strongly against an understanding of Islam’s prophet as an imposter: ‘He made people believe his message because he believed in it himself’ (p. 88). In line with this, he explains Muḥammad’s religious legacy as follows: As a founder of a religion, Muḥammad was primarily a politician. He neither intended to threaten the individual person away from the burden of responsibility or to be devastated by the weight of conscience. It is said in the Qur’an that God only burdens a man in accordance with his abilities and this sentence contains one of the central thoughts in Islam: it is an easy and comfortable religion. (p. 81)

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In Østrup’s view, Muḥammad was straightforward and honest: Muḥammad’s gifts were of a strange and complex nature. He was, as we have seen, not a profound and sharp thinker. Apparent logical contradictions were left unexplained. In line with this, the religious system he established never became a philosophical masterpiece, but its simplicity served its purpose. (pp. 88-9)

The life of Muḥammad is interpreted by Østrup as a lifelong effort to attain his perceived goals. He was successful to the extent that he knew how to act and how to overcome the many challenges he met during his life. In 1914 and 1923, Østrup published two more popular works on Islam: Islam. Den Muhammedanske religion og dens historiske udvikling i kortfattet fremstilling (‘Islam. The Muḥammadan religion and its historical development briefly presented’; 1914), which emphasises the need for Europe to see Islam and Muslims as active and engaged in the emerging modern world, well capable of adjusting to new social, economic and cultural challenges, and Islam i det nittende århundrede (‘Islam in the 19th century’; 1923), which discusses the many changes that were occurring throughout the Islamic world, emphasising once again how Islam, like all other religions, has had to adapt and formulate new approaches as old norms are eroded by ever increasing interaction with the rest of the world. These two works show that Østrup tended to see Muslims and non-Muslims as occupants of a shared world rather than of two separate, mutually opposed worlds. Significance Østrup’s view of Muḥammad and of Islam both challenged and perpetuated negative tropes. On the one hand, he contested medieval Christian perceptions while, on the other, he could still conclude that Muḥammad was a shallow thinker unskilled in logic and, further, that Islam lacked a philosophical legacy. Nevertheless, his attempt to write for a popular readership gave more people access to material they could use to question common assumptions about Islam and to rethink their views. Particularly in his later works, Islam. Den Muhammedanske religion and Islam i det nittende århundrede, Østrup challenged the often-stated contention in Orientalist texts that Islam is static and incapable of change, encouraging creative exchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims.



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Publications Johannes Østrup, Profeten Muhammed. En folkelig fremstilling, Copenhagen, 1911; 130023303451 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) Studies J.B. Simonsen, Islam med danske øjne. Danskernes syn på islam gennem 1000 år (‘Islam seen through Danish eyes. Danes’ views about Islam over 1000 years’), Copenhagen, 2004 F. Løkkegaard, ‘Semitisk og Østerlandsk filologi’, in Københavns Universiteit 1479-1979, vol. 8, Det Filosofiske Fakultet – I. Del, Copenhagen, 1979 (an introduction to the study of Semitic philology at the University of Copenhagen) Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

Frants Buhl Frants Peder William Buhl Date of Birth 6 September 1850 Place of Birth Copenhagen Date of Death 24 September 1932 Place of Death Hillerød

Biography

Frants Peder William Meyer Buhl was born on 6 September 1850 in Copenhagen, the son of Frants Peder William Buhl and Freda Wilhelmine Buhl (née Görnemann). After finishing High School in 1868, he began to study theology at the University of Copenhagen. From the very beginning, he became interested in the study of the Old Testament, and therefore also pursued studies in Semitic philology in general and Arabic in particular. He graduated in 1874 and went to Vienna and Leipzig to continue his studies. In 1878, he submitted his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Sproglige og historiske bidrag til den arabiske grammatik med udvalgte textstykker af Ibn al-Hâgibs as-Sâfija’ (‘Linguistic and historical contributions to Arabic grammar with selected passages from Ibn al-Ḥājib’s Al-shāfiya’). In 1880, he became a lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen and, in 1882, was appointed professor with the Old Testament as his academic field. While he was still studying in Leipzig, Julius Wellhausen’s seminal Geschichte Israels was published and, in an article, ‘Naar er femte Mosebog affattet?’ (‘When was Deuteronomy composed?’), published in Theologisk Tidsskrift in 1878, Buhl expressed doubts as to the results presented by Wellhausen. However, in a number of articles during the 1880s, he gradually accepted the results of the critical research by Wellhausen and others, not least the division of the Pentateuch into several different and independent sources. During the following decades, he contributed a number of important books and articles published in Danish, German and English, using the same critical approach in his studies of various parts of the Old Testament.



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In 1890, Buhl was invited to Leipzig as successor to Franz Delitzsch (1813-90), who had resigned his position as professor in Old Testament studies and died shortly afterwards. Buhl’s decision to accept the invitation was partly a result of the academic and public debates provoked by the new critical approach to studies of the Old Testament. More conservative and traditional circles at the University of Copenhagen, as well as important Christian groups, considered Buhl to be the spearhead of the new critical approach to the texts of the Old Testament, and were strongly critical of his views. This prompted him accept the invitation. However, in 1898 Buhl accepted an invitation from the University of Copenhagen to return as successor to Professor August Ferdinand van Mehren (1822-1909), and so he became professor of Semitic and Oriental languages. Although he was now affiliated to the Faculty of Arts, he continued in Old Testament studies and soon also invested time in studies of Arabic and Syriac-Aramaic. After his return to Copenhagen, he published several important studies about Muḥammad, the Qur’an, and early Islamic history, as well as more general studies of Islam. He also published a few studies on the Jewish Elephantine papyri from Upper Egypt. A large number of these papyri were written in Aramaic and attracted international interest as they contained references to a Jewish tradition older than extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. Buhl withdrew from his chair in 1922 and was succeeded by Johannes Pedersen (1883-1977), one of his many gifted students. He died on 24 September 1932 at Hillerød, North Zealand.

MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION P. de Hemmer Gudme, ‘Minder om Professor Frants Buhl’, Gads Danske Magasin (1932) 555-6 (obituary) J. Pedersen, art. ‘Buhl, Frants Peder William’, in P. Engelstoft (ed.), Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, vol. 3, Copenhagen, 1934, 340-4 J. Pedersen, ‘Frants Buhl, 6. Sept. 1850-24. Sept. 1932. Tale holdt i Videnskabernes Selskabs Møde den 3. Marts 1933’, in Oversigt over Videnskabernes Selskabs Forhandlinger 1933, Copenhagen, 1934, 21-46 J. Pedersen, ‘Frants Buhl’, Acta Orientalia 12 (1934) 1-5 (obituary) I. Buhl, Erindringsglimt I-II, Herning, 1975-6 (memoir by Buhl’s daughter) L. Grane, ‘Det teologiske Fakultet 1830-1925’, in Københavns Universitet 1479-1979, vol. 5. Det teologiske Fakultet København, 1980, 442-8 (this offers a description of the debate among members of the Faculty during the 1880s as a result of Buhl’s introduction of the new critical approach to the study of the Old Testament)

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J.B. Simonsen, Islam med danske øjne. Danskernes syn på islam gennem 1000 år, Copenhagen, 2004 K. Jeppesen, ‘Frants Buhl as an Old Testament scholar. The Isaiah commentary in Danish’, in K.J. Dell et al. (eds), Genesis, Isaiah and Psalms. A Festschrift to honour Professor John Emerton for his eightieth birthday, Leiden, 2010, 153-62 J. Høgenhaven, ‘Biblical scholarship in Northern Europe’, in M. Sæbø (ed.), Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The history of its interpretation, vol. 3. From Modernism to Post-Modernism (The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Part I. The nineteenth century – a century of Modernism and Historicism, Göttingen, 2013, 223-43 J. Høgeshaven, ‘Frants Buhl som gammeltestamentlig teolog’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 78 (2015) 202-24

Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Islam in Buhl’s works Date 1878-1914 Original Language Danish Description Buhl studied Arabic as a student of theology, and during his early academic years he only published a few articles on Islam and the Arabs, and also a short book, Muhammeds liv og lære (‘Muḥammad’s life and teaching’, 1901). His appointment as professor of Semitic languages in 1898 resulted in the publication of Muhammeds liv, med en indledning om forholdene i Arabien før Muhammads optræden (‘The life of Muḥammad with an introduction to the general conditions in Arabia prior to the advent of Muḥammad’) in 1903, and of ‘Ein paar Beiträge zur Kritik der Geschichte Muhammeds’ (‘A few contributions in criticism of the history of Muḥammad’) in Orientalische Studien Theodor Nöldeke zum siebzigsten Geburtstag in 1906, signalling a shift in his academic interests. With an approach clearly inspired by his studies on the Old Testament, Buhl offers in Muhammeds liv og lære a careful analysis of Muḥammad’s life based on a critical reading of all available Arabic sources, so offering an historical interpretation of the Prophet’s life. Muḥammad is analysed as any other human being would be, and his life, his ideas and visions as we know them from the Qur’an, and his action in creating the Muslim umma, are historically contextualised, explained and discussed in line



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with the principal approach developed during Buhl’s many years studying the Old Testament. Buhl’s careful and thorough analysis was published in 1930 in a German translation by H.H. Schaeder, Das Leben Muhammeds. This soon became an internationally recognised academic biography of Muḥammad, and Buhl was invited to write the entry on Muḥammad for the first edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1936). In 1910, he published a contribution to the early history of the Shīʿa entitled Alidernes stilling til de shi´itiske bevægelser under Umajjaderne (‘The attitude of the supporters of ʿAlī to Shīʿa movements under the Umayyads’), and in 1914 he published a small general introduction to Islam entitled Muhammedansimen som verdensreligion (‘Muḥammadanism as a world religion’). In 1921, Buhl published a critical analysis of the Arabic sources depicting ʿAlī’s efforts to succeed Muḥammad as leader of the umma, entitled ʿAlî som prætendent og kalif (‘ʿAlī as pretender and caliph’). In the same year he published Quranen. Et Udvalg i kronologisk rækkefølge (‘The Qur’an, a chronological selection translated’), a Danish translation of parts of the Qur’an set out in chronological order. It was succeeded in 1924 by Muhammed’s religiøse forkyndelse efter Quranen (‘Muḥammad’s religious prophesies according to the Qur’an’), which offers a meticulous and critical introduction to the thought of Muḥammad as presented in the Qur’an, and in the same year ‘Zur Korânexegese’, an article in Acta Orientalia. In 1926, Buhl published an article that discusses whether Muḥammad claimed his religion was universal or for the Arabs only, with the title ‘Fasste Muhammed seine Verkündigung als eine universelle auch für nichAraber bestimmte Religion auf?’ (‘Did Muḥammad intend his proclamation as a universal religion also for non-Arabs?’), and he also contributed several entries to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, The Jewish Encyclopedia and KirkeLeksikon for Norden. Like the Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (d. 1936), Buhl thought that Muḥammad’s main belief was eschatological, which explained his vivid depiction of the punishment awaiting evil-doers. This was influenced by his contact with Christians, and initially he had no intention of establishing a new religion, aiming only to prepare people for the approaching judgement. The idea of Islam’s global mission developed only after Muḥammad came under Christian influence. Buhl argued that if Muḥammad’s motives had been purely worldly and insincere, Islam would be an effect without a cause and would not have succeeded as it did

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in meeting the religious and moral needs of Arabs or of the many ethnic groups that embraced his teaching. Significance Das Leben Muhammeds, the German translation of Buhl’s Muhammeds liv, was regarded as the standard work on Muḥammad until the mid20th century, and his discussion of the sources for Muḥammad’s life is still considered one of the best. W.M. Wattt described the book as ‘a balanced […] study’ (Muhammad. Prophet and statesman, Oxford, 1961, p. 244). R.A. Gabriel, writing in 2007, describes the notes in Buhl’s book as ‘of great value’ (Muhammad, Norman OK, p. 242). On the one hand, his speculations about influences on Muḥammad and what had motivated him may be seen as properly lying outside the remit of an objective scholar of religious history, although Buhl’s writing on Muḥammad avoided polemics and intruding explicitly Christian opinions into his historical reconstruction. On the other hand, his work represents the intersection between biblical and Islamic studies. His interpretation of Muḥammad as an apocalyptic preacher is an early example of how a scholar applied a theme that was dominant in biblical scholarship at the time he was writing to the study of another religion. His work is significant for Christian-Muslim relations as an example of how a scholar reduced distance between Christianity and Islam by treating Islam as a religion that could be dealt with in the same terms as his own. Islam was not so utterly different that it could not be analysed using the same categories and concepts as he applied to Christian and biblical study. Publications F. Buhl, Muhammeds liv og lære, Copenhagen, 1901 F. Buhl, Muhammeds liv. Med en indledning om forholdene i Arabien før Muhammads optræden, Copenhagen, 1903; 130016349098 (digitised version available through Det Kongelige Bibliotek) F. Buhl, ‘Ein paar Beiträge zur Kritik der Geschichte Muhammeds’, in Orientalische Studien Theodor Nöldeke zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. C. Bezold, Gieszen, 1906, pp. 7-22 F. Buhl, Alidernes stilling til de shi’itiske bevægelser under Umajjaderne, Copenhagen, 1910 F. Buhl, Muhammedansimen som verdensreligion, Copenhagen, 1914 F. Buhl, ʿAlî som prætendent og kalif, Copenhagen, 1921; 1798.118.22 (digitised version available through Princeton University Library)



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F. Buhl, Quranen. Et udvalg i kronologisk rækkefølge, Copenhagen, 1921 F. Buhl, Muhammed’s religiøse forkyndelse efter Quranen, Copenhagen, 1924; 919651 (digitised version available through Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt) F. Buhl, ‘Fasste Muhammed seine Verkündigung al seine universelle auch für Nicharaber bestimmte Religion auf?’, Islamica 2 (1926) 135-49 F. Buhl, Das Leben Muhammeds, trans. H.H. Schaeder, Leipzig, 1930, repr. Heidelberg, 1955 and 1961 (a revised and expanded German trans. of Muhammeds liv, Copenhagen, 1903; there is no English translation, but Buhl’’s article ‘Muḥammad’ in EI1, vol. 3, pp. 641–57 is essentially a summary); 4670298 (digitised version, of 1955 edition, available through Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt) F. Buhl and A.T. Welch, art. ‘Muḥammad’, in EI2, vol. 5, Leiden, 1960, 360-76 (a revised version of Buhl’s article in the first edition; Welch omits lengthy discussions of topics no longer thought relevant, though he shares Buhl’s views on the most important issues and does not revise Buhl’s conclusions on these) Studies J.B. Simonsen, Islam med danske øjne. Danskernes syn på islam gennem 1000 år, Copenhagen, 2004 Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

Contributors Name Stuart Andrews Clinton Bennett

Angela Berlis Aleida Maaike Derksen Alison Dingle Nora S. Eggen

Affiliation Honorary Librarian of Wells and Mendip Museum Faculty member, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at New Paltz

Entries Robert Southey Introduction; Edwin Arnold; Reginald Bosworth Smith; Ernest de Bunsen; John Davenport; John Evans; Charles Forster; E.A. Freeman; William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli; Godfrey Higgins; Charles Mills; C.H. Robinson; W.R.W. Stephens; Isaac Taylor; Robert Taylor; Joseph White Emilie LoysonMeriman

Vice-Chair, Department of Old Catholic Theology, University of Bern Docent, Department of Frans Lion Cachet History, Radboud University Nijmegen Assistant Librarian, The 19th-century University of Birmingham Holy Land; Richard F. Burton Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Islam and Norway Theology, University of Oslo in the 19th century

612 Name Jeffrey Einboden Michael H. Fisher Jamie Gilham Benno Herr

Serkan Ince

Katherine Jennings Klaus Karttunen

Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak

Contributors Affiliation Professor, English Department, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb IL  Robert S. Danforth Emeritus Professor of History, Oberlin College, Oberlin OH Independent Historian, United Kingdom Research Assistant, Professorship for Religious Studies and History of Religion, Goethe University Frankfurt Research Assistant to the Chair of Islamic Doctrine, Centre for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen Doctoral Candidate, Faculty of Theology, University of Bern Docent, South Asian and Indo-European Studies, Asian and African Studies, Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki Governor/Secretary WKK Educational Scholarships, Islamabad

Entries English Romantic poets and Islam Dean Mahomet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; W.H. Abdullah Quilliam Joseph Wolff

Early 20th-century missionary conferences Kesnin Bey Gustaf Erik Eurén; Pehr Malmström; Ivar Ulrik Wallenius; Georg August Wallin Nineteenthcentury British novelists on Islam

Contributors 613 Name Maryse Kruithof

Affiliation Senior Lecturer, Humanities, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Andrew O’Connor

Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, St Norbert College, De Pere WI Chair of Interreligious Dialogue, Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Professorial Research Associate, Department of History, SOAS University of London Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit MI Director Emeritus, A Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago Chicago IL

Marcel Poorthuis

Peter G. Riddell

Diane RobinsonDunn Michael T. Shelley

Entries The contribution of missionaries to the study of Islam in the Netherlands in the 19th century; Representations of Islam in the works of Dutch Protestant missionaries, 1850-1900 English translators of the Qur’an Reinhart Dozy

John Muehleisen Arnold Five Victorian women travellers in the Ottoman world Thomas Carlyle; Lord Cromer; Egypt General Mission; F.A. Klein; Edward Lane; David S. Margoliouth; F.D. Maurice

614

Contributors

Name Jørgen Bæk Simonsen

Affiliation Associate Professor, Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

David Emmanuel Singh

Research Tutor, Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

Simon Sorgenfrei

Associate Professor, Study of Religions Department, Södertörn University, Stockholm

Karel Steenbrink

Emeritus Professor, Department of Religion, University of Utrecht

Christine Talbot

Associate Professor, Gender Studies Program, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley CO Honorary Professor, Christiaan Snouck Department of empirical Hurgronje and practical religious studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen Researcher, Aligarh Muslim Matthew Arnold University, Aligarh, India

Frans Wijsen

Syed Faiz Zaidi

Entries The impact of Islam and Muslims on Denmark in the 19th century; Frants Buhl; Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig; August Ferdinand van Mehren; Carsten Niebuhr; Johannes Østrup Ernest Frederick Fiske; Monier Monier-Williams Diplomats, missionaries and a migrant merchant. Muslim-Swedish relations, 1800-1914 Willem Bilderdijk; J.B.J. van Doren; Salomon Keijzer; Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje Robert Fargher

Index of Names Numbers in italics indicate a main entry. Abangan (‘the red people’) 42-3, 45, 529, 536 Abbas Mirza, crown prince of Persia 204, 206 ʿAbd al-Ghaffār, see Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 2-3, 5-6, 35, 37-8, 40, 43, 507, 540-58, 607 ʿAbd al-Hādī ʿAqīlī, see Ivan Agelii  19 ʿAbd al-Qādir, Algerian amir 57, 70 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī 186 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī 436-7 ʿAbd al-Wālī, see Georg August Wallin  576-81 ʿAbd Allāh al-Khaṭīb 460 Abd el Wahheb, see Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb 66, 301, 564-6 ʿAbduh, Muḥammad 314, 398, 402, 428, 430, 457 Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman sultan 32, 319, 404, 407, 411, 418-20, 431, 435-6 Abdullah Yusuf Ali 410-11 Abdulmecid I, Ottoman sultan 75 Abdurra’uf al-Singkili 505 Abel, biblical character 198 Abraha 246 Abraham, patriarch, see also Ibrāhīm 27-8, 88, 142, 144, 145, 197-8, 261-2, 273, 291, 313, 363, 391, 417, 433, 513, 514, 540, 544-5 Abrahamic faiths 117, 143, 262, 314, 348-9, 382 Abrogation of scripture 88, 299, 390 Abū Bakr, first caliph 159, 300, 456, 548, 564 Abū l-Fidāʾ 83, 89, 127, 588 Abū Ṭālib, uncle of Muḥammad 167, 448 Abyssinia and Abyssinians 202, 224, 240, 377, 448 Aceh (Acheh, Atjeh) and Acehnese 5-6, 541, 546-8, 549-50, 554 Aceh War 546, 549

Adam, first human 100, 197, 416-17, 513 Aden 4, 20, 63 al-Afghānī, Jamāl al-Dīn  430, 436, 440 Afghanistan and Afghans 4, 15, 314, 374, 405, 411, 424, 453, 473-4, 475 Agelii, Ivan, see also ʿAbd al-Hādī ʿAqīlī  19 Ahmadi, Ahmadiyya 17, 412, 424 Ahmad Khan, Sir Syed 12, 15, 150, 145, 154, 234-5, 244, 248, 257, 296, 398 Akbar the Great, Mughal emperor 222, 256 Al-Aqṣā Mosque 27 Al-Azhar Mosque and University 19, 184, 310, 313, 385, 396, 398, 428, 441, 475 ʿAlawīs (Nuṣayrīs) 202, 568, 569 Albania and Albanians 13, 160, 346-7, 349 Albers, Christiaan  525, 532-4 Alexandria 59, 152, 183, 186, 234, 341, 374, 463, 485, 488, 578 Algiers and Algeria  3, 22, 56, 57-8, 70, 72, 385, 387, 427, 505, 555 Ali Khan, see Arthur Conolly 4, 14, 206 Ali Pasha of Ioannina 286 ʿAlī, fourth caliph 170, 207, 240-1, 301, 564, 607 Alliance des femmes orientales et occidentales 385 Alliance for Peace, Unity and Friendship 18 Ameer Ali, Syed 235, 295, 296, 304, 305, 324, 329 America and Americans 62, 74, 76, 104, 106, 125, 177, 183, 236, 269, 270, 278, 281, 287, 295, 328-9, 369, 410, 421, 425, 427, 446, 460, 462, 465, 474, 485 American Muslim Propagation Movement  329 American Turks for Mormons 68 Āmina, mother of Muḥammad 207 Anatolia 63, 160, 346

616

Index of Names Angel-messiah 326-7 Anglicans and Anglicanism 8, 91, 93, 134, 153, 156, 200, 209, 210, 217, 224, 241, 286, 356, 384, 389, 445, 473 Anjuman-i-Islam (Central Islamic Society)  423, 441 Antichrist, Muḥammad as 229 Antioch 379, 590 Apostles of Jesus 197, 390, 327, 585 Apostles’ Creed 215 Arabian Peninsula 232, 328, 450, 564, 578, 579 Arendrup, Søren Adolph  58-9 Arians 119, 122, 142, 137 Armenians 18, 47, 60, 63-4, 318, 348, 356, 399, 400, 445, 452, 573 Arnold, Edwin  278-85 Arnold, John Muehleisen, see also Johan Mühleisen 224-30 Arnold, Matthew  146, 238-42, 243, 253, 304 Arnold, William Delafield  472, 476 Aryans 244, 246, 250, 511-12 Aryan supremacy 244 Atjeh, see Aceh (Acheh)  5-6, 541, 546-8, 549, 554 August Ferdinand van Mehren 64, 592-7, 598, 605 Avetaranian, Johannes, see also Schuckri 6, 18, 51 Bacon, Francis  106 Badger, George Percy  295, 303 Baghdad 7, 170, 445, 561, 564, 565, 594 Baḥīrā, monk 207 Balkan states 246, 267, 270-1, 346 Bangsa Abangan (‘the red people’) 42-3, 45, 529, 536 Bangsa Putihan (‘the white people’) 42-3, 45, 529, 536 Banū Qurayẓa 247, 450, 511 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) 8 Baptists 98, 101, 130 Baring, Evelyn, Earl of Cromer, see also Lord Cromer 10, 314, 393-403 Barros, João  122 Batavia 225, 531, 534, 549, 554

al-Bayḍāwī 289, 445 Bedouins 19, 55, 60, 70, 286-7, 374, 398-9, 427, 432, 435, 576, 578-9 Bengal and Bengalis 16, 91, 441, 474, 475 Benjamin Disraeli 2, 11, 13-14, 25, 243-4, 245, 250, 265-77, 278 Benjamin Frederik Matthes  525, 530-1 Berg, L.W.C. van den 36-7, 507, 522 Berlin Congress, see also Congress of Berlin 266-7, 271, 272 Berlin, Treaty of 272 Bey, Kesnin, see also Eugène-Jacques Chesnel 316-23 Bible, see also abrogation of scripture, corruption of the Bible 7, 23, 26, 28-9, 38, 63, 66, 72, 75, 87, 99, 129, 133, 142, 143, 154, 168, 189, 202-4, 255-6, 262, 290-1, 312, 335, 345, 361, 416, 418, 454, 465, 472, 488-9, 496, 511, 514, 526, 528, 530, 533-4, 561, 584-5, 588, 605 Bilderdijk, Willem  12, 493-8 Birgivī Mehmed Efendi 67 Black Stone 167, 196, 513 Blom, Peter  74-6 Blunt, William Scawen  366, 427-44 Blyden, Edward Wilmot  295, 303, 410 Blytt, Eva  76 Bombay (Mumbai) 95, 224, 236, 259, 278, 368, 440, 442, 443, 561, 565 Boulainvilliers, Henri de 106, 127 Bousquet, Georges-Henri 507, 554-6 Bowley, William  205 Boyle Lectures 209, 211-12, 215 Brahma, Brahmanism and Brahmins 223, 255, 325, 368, 530 British and Foreign Bible Society 9 British East India Company 4, 16, 91, 93, 127, 139, 259, 303, 368, 373-4, 472 British Syrian Mission 9 Browne, Edward Granville 161 Bruun, Peter Daniel  57-8 Buddha 279, 326, 514 Buddhists and Buddhism 35, 41, 68, 148, 212, 261-2, 263, 279, 282, 283, 297, 310, 324, 325, 514, 530, 534 Buhl, Frants  64, 544, 599, 604-9

Index of Names Bulgaria and Bulgarians 11, 243, 245, 265, 266, 268-71, 273, 421 Bunsen, Ernest de 313, 324-9 Burāq 136 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig 196, 233, 375 Burckhardt, Titus  154 Burton, Isabel 379, 381, 382 Burton, Sir Richard Francis 14, 23, 25, 32, 297, 359, 368-83 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 13, 16, 122, 156-7, 158, 160, 161, 266 Cachet, Frans Lion  516-24 Cain, biblical character 198 Cairo 59, 180-1, 183-6, 187-8, 190-2, 196, 279, 310-12, 330, 331-3, 335-6, 341, 350, 374, 385, 389, 430, 436, 441, 445, 471, 475, 485, 578, 593-4, 598 Cairo 1906, missionary conference 45960, 463-6 Calcutta (Kolkata) 51, 97, 205, 436, 440-1, 442-3 Calvinists and Calvinism  165, 493, 497 Cape Malay community 225-6 Carlyle, Thomas 154, 160, 165-75, 192, 195, 207, 232, 233, 235 Carsten Niebuhr 19, 56, 113, 561-9 Cevdet, Abdullah  512 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 279, 424, 440, 519, 546 Charles XII, King of Sweden 17-18 Charles Forster 7, 12, 89, 90, 131, 139-47, 232 Charles Henry Robinson 356-67 Charles Mills 125-32 Charles Murray 471-2, 477 Chasseboeuf Volney, Constantin-François de 113, 160 Cherif Pasha 47, 49 Chesnel, Eugène-Jacques 316-23 Chiragh Ali 257 Christ see also Jesus 23, 28, 86, 99, 135, 136, 143, 184, 200, 202, 214, 215-16, 218, 222-3, 228, 239, 254, 256, 281, 291, 300, 301, 302, 309, 321, 326-7, 339, 348, 416, 417, 461, 497, 545, 584-5 Christiaan Albers 525, 532-4

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 2-3, 5-6, 35, 37-8, 40, 43, 507, 540-58, 607 Christian Evidence Society 133, 135 Christian IV, King of Denmark 59 Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands 521 Christian Socialists 209-10 Christina, Queen of Sweden 48-9 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 8-9, 205, 224-5, 307, 356, 389 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, see Mormons 68, 177-8, 369, 448 Church of Scotland Mission 8 Cilegon revolt 554 Circassians 347, 349, 452 Clapham Sect 139 Clarke, Edward  23, 29 Clarke, John  99-100 Clausen, Henrik Nicolai  585 Cobbald, Zainab, see Lady Evelyn Murray 17 Cobbe, Frances Power  26, 28, 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 104, 105-6, 108, 114, 156, 158-9 Colonialism and colonialists 3, 10, 12, 16, 19, 20, 57, 362, 366, 501, 502 Companions of Muḥammad 150, 456, 548 Concert of Europe 271 Conder, Claude Reignier  25, 26 Congress of Berlin 266-7, 271-2 Conolly, Arthur, see also Ali Khan 4, 14, 206 Constantine the Great 137, 496 Constantinople 48, 73-5, 105, 268-70, 341, 343, 345, 349, 385, 407, 412, 427, 430, 432, 443, 563 conversion to Christianity 5, 30, 60, 91, 96, 200, 220, 221, 222, 264, 464, 473, 479, 500, 526 conversion to Islam 128, 129, 154, 191, 262, 371, 404, 405, 415, 452, 460, 470, 531, 535, 542, 558 Copts and Coptic Orthodox Church 185, 190-1, 286, 333, 339, 488, 489 Coran for Qur’an 319-20 Cork 91, 93, 94, 96-7

617

618

Index of Names Corral, Pedro de 117, 121 Corruption of the Bible 154, 203, 465 Costa, Izaäk / Isaac da 497, 516 Cottle, Joseph  105, 108 Crimean War 11, 25, 31, 265, 270 Cromer, see Lord Cromer 10, 314, 393-403 Crucifixion of Christ 88, 313, 327, 545, 584 Crusades and crusaders 8, 16, 24, 105, 115, 125, 129, 130, 142-4, 151, 274, 300, 312, 365, 421, 434-5, 589, 590 Crusenstolpe, Fredrik  49 Cunliffe, William Obeidullah  407-9, 417 Damascus 25, 60-2, 128, 369, 378-9, 380, 561, 594, 598-9 Daniel, Book of 32, 203, 312, 326 Danish Church Mission 20 Danish Mission Society 59-60 Dansk Kirkemission i Arabien 63 Danske Armeniensvenner 63-4 Darwin, Charles  307, 394, 427 Davenport, John 15, 145, 154, 231-7, 258, 303, 305 Davenport, Richard Alfred 286, 288, 289, 290 David Samuel Margoliouth 391, 445-58 David, King of Israel 150, 198 Dean Mahomet, also Deen Mahomed 16, 91-7 Deism and Deists 133, 135, 137, 148, 231, 236 Delhi 203, 205, 440-1 Denmark 2-3, 17, 19, 20-1, 53, 55-8, 60-2, 65, 66, 67, 69, 75, 561-2, 568, 591, 594, 599 Devil 134, 136, 170, 345 Al-Dimashqī, Shams al-Dīn 593-4 Dinesen, Adolph Wilhelm  57 Disraeli, Benjamin 2, 11, 13-14, 25, 243-4, 245, 250, 265-77, 278 Dissenters 68, 98, 101, 325 Dōkarim, poet 547 Döllinger, Ignaz von 384-5 Doren, Jan Baptist Jozef van 499-502 Dozy, Reinhart  6, 7, 36, 446, 509-15 Duff Gordon, Lady Lucie 330, 338-41, 350, 351

Dunlop, Douglas  10-11, 274 Dutch Bible Society, see also Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap (NBG) 526, 530 Dutch East India Company, see also Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) 4, 37, 525 Dutch East Indies 3, 5, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 499, 500, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 518, 519, 522, 525-6, 527, 530, 532, 536, 542, 547, 548, 551, 554, 555-6, 558 Dutch Mission Association, see Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (NZV) 525-6, 532-6 Dutch Missionary Society, see Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (NZG) 6, 38-40, 42-4, 525-6, 527-9, 534-6 Dutch Reformed Church 516-17 Dutch Reformed Missionary Society, see Nederlandsch Gereformeerde Zendingsvereniging (NGZV) 517, 518-22 E.A. Freeman 11-12, 15, 130, 234-5, 243-51, 253, 258, 296, 300, 303 Earl of Shaftesbury 25, 30 Eastern Question 24, 31, 244, 252, 253, 271, 279, 322, 407, 420 Ebionites 290, 325-7 Ebrahim Umerkajeff  51-3 Edgeworth, Maria  30 Edinburgh International Missionary Conference 1910 357, 459, 460-3, 464, 465 Edinburgh Mission Society, later Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) 8 Edward Henry Palmer 161, 198, 286-7, 288-9, 290-1, 303, 379 Edward Lane, see also Manṣūr 120, 18099, 330-2, 399, 401 Edwin Arnold 278-85 Egypt Mission Band, later Egypt General Mission (EGM) 9, 485, 486 Elwood Morris Wherry 286, 287, 289-91, 464, 465 Emilie Loyson-Meriman  384-8 Emmeline Lott 330, 341-5, 351

Index of Names English Romanticism 156, 158, 159, 160 The Enlightenment 156, 493, 561, 566, 588 Equiano, Olaudah 96 Ernest de Bunsen 313, 324-9 Ernest Frederick Fiske 220-3 Essenes 324, 325-6 Esther, biblical character 511 Ethiopia and Ethiopians 58, 201, 376, 377 Eugène-Jacques Chesnel, see Kesnin Bey  316-23 Eurén, Gustaf Erik 582-3 Evans, John 98-103 Eve, first woman 198 Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, see also Lord Cromer 10, 314, 393-403 Ezekiel, Book of 32, 198 Ezra, prophet 198 F.A. (Frederick Augustus) Klein 389-92 F.D. (John Frederick Denison) Maurice   145-6, 209-19, 296, 304, 435 Fargher, Robert  176-9 Finland 2, 21, 53, 307, 570, 571, 575, 576, 577, 583 Finn, Elizabeth Ann  26-7, 31 Finn, James  25, 26-8, 31 Fiske, Ernest Frederick  220-3 Fitzgerald, Edward  161 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht  446, 592 Forster, Charles 7, 12, 89, 90, 131, 139-47, 232 Forster, E.M. 140 Fossum, Ludvig Olsen  76 Fox, Charles  105 Frans Lion Cachet 516-24 Frants Buhl 64, 599, 604-9 Frederik V, King of Denmark 56, 561 Freeman, E.A. (Edward Augustus) 11-12, 15, 130, 234-5, 243-51, 253, 258, 296, 300, 303 Freemasons 14, 137, 148, 201, 475 French Foreign Legion 57-8   Gabriel, Archangel 86-7, 99, 128, 240 Gagnier, Jean  89, 122, 127, 296, 298, 588 Gairdner, William Henry Temple  7, 8, 217-18, 222, 264, 462, 464

Galland, Antoine  21, 108 Garnett, Lucy  330, 345-51 Gentiles 38, 136, 144, 381 Georg August Wallin 576-81 Gerardus Grashuis 525, 534 German Lutheran Church 62 Germany 4, 61, 125, 224, 271-2, 275, 324, 389, 493 Gibbon, Edward  99, 101, 109, 126, 127-8, 136-7, 143, 149, 154, 232, 235, 239, 247, 253, 254, 296, 298 Gladstone, William Ewart  7, 11, 146, 243, 258, 268-77, 279, 311 Gobineau, Arthur de 239-40 Godfrey de Bouillon 312 Godfrey Higgins 14-15, 89-90, 131, 137-8, 148-55, 235, 303, 305 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 165, 168 Gospel and Gospels 6, 18, 28, 84, 87, 88, 89, 100, 101, 116, 136, 142, 151, 152, 153, 200, 216, 221, 222, 223, 254, 309, 314, 326, 327, 462, 489, 497, 501, 519-20, 534 Gospel of Barnabas 88, 89 gospels (‘spurious’, apocryphal or from sects) 87, 150, 255, 263, 300 Grashuis, Gerardus 525, 534 Greece and Greeks 7, 73, 117, 122, 144, 157, 160, 182, 212, 216, 239-40, 256, 267, 272, 278, 318, 339, 346, 421, 424, 434, 445, 452, 453, 470, 497, 503, 506, 570, 582, 592, 598 Greek Orthodox Church 61, 100, 190 Green, Samuel  101 Grose, John Henry  95-6 Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederik Severin  20, 64, 584-91 Gustaf Erik Eurén 582-3 Hagar, mother of Ishmael 167, 391 Hagia Sofia 75 Hajj Abdullah, see Sir Richard Francis Burton  14, 23, 25, 32, 297, 359, 368-83 Hajji Abdul Gaffar, see Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje 2-3, 5-6, 35, 37-8, 40, 43, 507, 540-58, 607

619

620

Index of Names al-Ḥākim, Fāṭimid caliph 191 Hamilton, Lillias  473-4 Hamsun, Knut  21-2, 73 Ḥanafī school of Islamic law 189, 404, 503 Hansen, Bishop Peder 66 Harar, Ethiopia 369, 376-7 Haroun Mustafa (de) Léon, see William Henry Abdullah Quilliam 16-17, 404-26 Harriet Martineau 330, 334-8, 339-40, 350-1 Harthoorn, Samuel Eliza 39, 42-3, 525, 529-30, 536 Hauge, Hans Nielsen  66 Haurie, Johannes  40 Hausa and Hausaland 356-7, 358-60, 363-4 Hearn, Lafcadio  283 Hebrew language and people 83, 141, 261, 286, 309, 336, 445, 503, 513, 570, 573, 575, 582, 593, 605 Hebrews, Letter to the 417 Hell 87, 100, 169, 198, 300, 337, 345, 390, 418, 423, 478 Helsinki, Helsinki University 21, 573, 576, 582 Henri Marcel (de) Léon, see William Henry Abdullah Quilliam 16-17, 404-26 Higgins, Godfrey  14-15, 89-90, 131, 137-8, 148-55, 235, 303, 305 Hindus and Hinduism 35, 41, 59, 91, 94-6, 106, 151, 212, 220, 221-2, 261-2, 262-3, 279, 282, 357, 363, 372, 377, 440, 443, 472, 475-6, 478, 503, 528, 536 Hindustan, Hindustani 161, 223, 259, 286, 411, 475, 500 Hoëvell, Wolter van 499, 500, 502, 525, 531-2 Hoezoo, Wessel  42, 525, 528-9, 536 Hofland, Barbara  23 Hogberg, L.E. 462 Höijer, Nils Fredrik  18, 51 Holberg, Ludvig  588 Hollingsworth, J.W.  409 Holmboe, Christopher Andreas  67, 71 Holten, Just Johan  59

Holy Land 23-4, 28, 30, 32, 60, 433 Holy Spirit 153, 262, 325-8, 533 Hǿyer, Oluf and Maria 20, 62-3 Hughes, Thomas Patrick  145, 295, 298, 304, 314 Hunter, William Wilson  473, 476, 478 Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck 2-3, 5-6, 35, 37-8, 40, 43, 507, 540-58, 607 Ḥusayn (al-Ḥusayn), grandson of Muḥammad 188, 239-40, 334 Iberian Peninsula 116 Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Muḥammad see also Wahhābīs 66, 301, 564-6 Ibn ʿArabī 222 Ibn Faḍlān 71 Ibrāhīm, prophet, see also Abraham 417, 513, 544 Ibsen, Henrik 70 Inayat Khan 19, 76 Inchbald, Peter 153 Indian Institute, Oxford  259 Indische Kerk (Dutch Reformed) 525 Indologists and Indology 35, 41, 263 Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) and Indonesians 3, 5, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 499, 500, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 519, 525-6, 530, 532, 542, 547, 548, 551, 554, 555-6, 558 Inquisition 122, 151 Iran and Iranians 2, 4, 7, 18, 19, 127, 468, 578 Irving, Washington  146 Isaac Taylor 294, 302, 303, 307-15, 358-9, 364, 366 Isaac, son of Abraham 142-4, 198, 261, 313 Isaiah, Book of 136, 203, 286, 486 Ishmael (Ismāʿīl), son of Abraham (Ibrāhīm) 7, 128, 142-4, 145, 167, 198, 226, 229, 261, 513, 544 Ishmaelites 145, 513 Isidore of Seville 117, 121 Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt 58, 330, 341 Ismāʿīl for Ishmael 513, 544 Ismāʿīlīs 441, 568, 569 Israelites 28, 148, 198, 214, 286, 335, 513

Index of Names Issa for Jesus 417, 495 Istanbul 11, 27, 32, 100, 272, 318, 319, 320-1, 561 Ivar Ulrik Wallenius 571, 573-5 Jacob, patriarch 198, 240 Jaʿfar, cousin of Muḥammad 240 Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī 161, 283 James Justinian Morier 468-71, 473, 477 Jan Baptist Jozef van Doren 499-502 Japan and the Japanese 278, 280, 283, 424 Java and the Javanese 39, 41-5, 225, 499, 500, 502, 503, 505, 516-17, 518-23, 525-6, 527-36, 540, 558 Javanism 42, 530 Jayadava 279 Jebb, Bishop John 139, 141 Jedda 37, 428, 430-1, 540, 564 Jeffrey, Francis  109, 158 Jeppe, Karen  63-4 Jerusalem 25, 26-7, 29-30, 31, 60-2, 76, 87, 119, 128, 129-30, 144, 148, 150, 224, 286, 300, 312, 326, 337, 356, 377, 387, 389, 465, 561, 579, 588, 590 Jesus, see also Christ 28, 39, 86-8, 100, 129-30, 136, 142, 150-3, 184, 189, 192, 200, 202, 204, 214-15, 222, 228, 233, 236, 23940, 249, 255, 257, 263, 291, 300-1, 307, 309, 312-13, 324, 325-9, 336, 381, 416-17, 487, 493, 495, 500, 529, 533 Jews 2, 13, 15, 24-5, 27, 30-2, 49, 67-8, 75, 84, 86, 100, 119, 128-9, 150, 152, 185, 190, 200, 207, 212, 213, 215, 229, 243, 247, 24950, 254, 266-7, 272-3, 290, 299, 309, 325, 337-8, 345, 378, 380, 381, 385, 392, 418, 421-2, 433, 445, 447-8, 449-50, 454, 497, 503, 511, 514, 516, 532, 540, 548, 564-5, 582, 590, 605 Johan Mühleisen, see John Muehleisen Arnold 224-30 Johannes Kreemer 525, 534-5 Johannes Østrup 64, 598-603 John Ali Bakhsh 465 John Davenport 15, 145, 154, 231-7, 258, 303, 305 John Evans 98-103

John Medows Rodwell 198, 286, 288-90 John Muehleisen Arnold 224-30 John the Baptist 326, 337 John W. Sherer 474 Jones, Sir William  156, 372 Joseph White 83-90, 99, 143, 149, 253-4 Joseph Wolff, see also Mullah Youssuf 200-9 Joseph, scriptural character  198, 240 Judaism 13, 65, 86, 99, 100, 130, 142-3, 201, 213-15, 241, 249, 255, 261, 263, 267, 273, 281, 291, 297, 309, 335, 382, 384, 387, 418, 445, 454, 536, 540 Judas, betrayer of Jesus 88 Judgement, Last 100, 130, 198, 213, 320, 607 Kaʿba 68, 167, 170, 188, 196-7, 232, 246, 375, 513, 544 Kalimantan 501, 505 Kano 356-7, 358 Karachi 371-2 Karbalāʾ 239-40, 568 Karl (Charles) XII, King of Sweden 17, 49 Kashgar 6, 18, 20, 50-1 Keep, Nafeesa Mary T.  410 Keijzer, Salomon  503-8 Kesnin Bey, see also Eugène-Jacques Chesnel 316-23 Khadīja, wife of Muḥammad 150, 197, 298, 348, 448, 449 Khan, Sir Syed Ahmad  12, 15, 150, 145, 154, 234-5, 244, 248, 257, 296, 398 Khaybar 450, 565 Khuda Bukhsh, Salahuddin 146, 171 Kiai Sadrach Surapranata  520-3 Kindersley, Jemima  95 Kinglake, Alexander  25 Kingsley, Mary 362 Kipling, Rudyard  4, 14, 468, 474-8 Klein, F.A. (Frederick Augustus)  389-92 Knox, George  303-4, 307 Kolkata (Calcutta) 51, 97, 205, 436, 440-1, 442-3 Koran, see Qur’an 100, 116, 128, 151, 158, 168-9, 195, 197, 232-3, 254, 255, 283, 309, 343, 345, 422, 432, 449, 453, 497 Krag, Vilhelm  21-2, 72 Kreemer, Johannes  525, 534-5

621

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Index of Names McClenahan, Robert Stewart  464 Magianism, see also Zoroastrianism 84, 216, 255 Mahdi, Sudanese 359, 394 Mahdī, eschatological figure 203, 549 Laman, Karl Edvard  50-1 Maḥmal procession 188, 332 Landor, Walter Savage  117, 121 Mahomed, see also Muḥammad 304, Lane, Edward (William), also 325, 328, 329, 416, 422 Manṣūr 120, 180-99, 330-2, 399, 401 Mahomed, Deen, see also Dean Mahomet  Lane-Poole, Stanley  182, 283-4, 303, 397, 16, 91-7 401 Mahomedaner, see also Muslim(s) 66 Leijdecker, Melchior  526 Mahomet, see also Muḥammad 13, 95-6, Léon, Henri Marcel de, see Quilliam, 113, 122, 135, 158, 160, 167, 169, 170, 171, William Henry Abdullah 16-17, 404-26 245, 253, 254, 273 Leonard van Rhijn 525, 527-8 Mahomet, Dean, see also Deen Mahomed  Lepsius, Johannes  462-3 16, 91-7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  68 Mahometan(s), see also Muslim(s) 12, 84, Lillias Hamilton 473-4 96, 141, 212, 215, 246, 248, 250, 270, 274, Lith, Frans van 522 497, 500 Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) 404-5, Mahometanism 99, 100, 141, 235, 245, 407, 411-12, 414-15, 417-19, 421-3, 424 257, 270 Livingstone, David  297 Mahommed, see also Muḥammad 119, London Missionary Society (LMS) 8 321, 408, 422 London Society for Promoting Christianity Mahommedanism 116 among the Jews 30, 200 Lord Byron, see also Byron, George Gordon   Mahommedans, see also Muslims 312, 422 Malays 225-6, 505, 526, 531 13, 16, 122, 156-7, 158, 160, 161, 266 Malay Archipelago 4, 519 Lord Cromer, see also Evelyn Baring 10, Malcolm, Sir John  16, 127 314, 393-403 Mālikī school of law 503 Lord Ripon, George Frederick Robinson  Malmström, Pehr  570-2, 575 439 Malta 9, 202, 385, 393, 453 Lord’s Prayer 327, 328 al-Maʾmūn, ʿAbbasid caliph 144 Lott, Emmeline  330, 341-5, 351 Manṣūr, see Edward Lane 120, 180-99, Loyson, Hyacinthe 384-6 330-2, 399, 401 Loyson-Meriman, Emilie  384-8 Lucie Duff Gordon, see also Noor-ala-Noor  Margoliouth, David Samuel  391, 445-58 Marracci, Ludovico  106, 127, 197, 574 330, 338-41, 350, 351 Martel, Charles 142 Lucknow 203, 205, 440, 459, 463, 465 Martineau, Harriet  330, 334-8, 339-40, Lucknow 1911, missionary conference  350-1 459, 460, 463-5 Martyn, Henry 203, 222, 298 Lucy Garnett 330, 345-51 Mary Shelley  157, 159-60 Luther, Martin  67, 298 Mary, mother of Jesus 84, 105, 120, 152, Lutheran(s) 48, 62, 66, 67, 68, 75, 151, 224, 184, 215, 246, 255, 300, 326, 348 576, 578, 583, 584 Matthes, Benjamin Frederik 525, 530-1 Matthew Arnold 146, 238-42, 243, 253, MacColl, Malcolm  7 304 MacGrahan, Januarius Aloysius 269, 270 Macleod, Norman  26-7 Kumm, Karl  462 Kurds 76, 346, 347, 349 Kurrachee (Karachi) 371, 372

Index of Names Matthew, Gospel of 203, 326, 461, 497, 500, 534 Matthews, A.N. 143, 296 Maurice, F.D. (John Frederick Denison)   145-6, 209-19, 296, 304, 435 Mediterranean Mission of the CMS 9 Mehren, August Ferdinand van 64, 592-7, 598, 605 Melman, Billie  24, 330, 334, 344, 346 Messiah 30, 142, 150, 152, 198, 200, 207, 309, 326, 327, 335, 549 Methodist Missions 8 Michaëlis, Johann David  561, 565 Middle East Christian Outreach (MECO)  9 Mills, Charles  125-32 Mission Covenant Church of Sweden 18, 51 Mohamed, see Muḥammad 149, 152 Mohamedan, mohamedaner for Muslims 66, 229, 265, 408, 473 Mohammed, see Muḥammad 105, 116, 136, 178, 228-9, 232, 283, 298, 320, 328, 359, 447-8, 453, 456 Mohammedans, mohammedaner for Muslims  9, 66, 105, 108, 109, 196, 358, 396, 400, 409-10, 419, 428, 430, 431-4, 435-7, 440-3, 452, 459, 464, 532-3, 547 Monier Monier-Williams 259-64 Montefiore, Sir Moses 26-7 Montenegro 269-72 Montesquieu 234, 348 Moors, for Muslims 105, 116-22, 161, 234, 270, 274, 299, 506 Moore, Thomas 161 Morier, James Justinian 468-71, 473, 477 Moriscos 151 Mormons for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 68, 177-8, 369, 448 Morocco 56, 57, 64, 70, 404-5, 424, 454, 495 Moses 13, 27, 30, 87, 88, 100, 142, 198, 233, 234, 273, 335, 382, 417 Moslems for Muslims 27, 142, 169, 226, 228, 269, 310, 312, 328, 345, 397-401, 409, 422, 425, 434, 435, 436, 440, 443, 444, 449, 452, 453-4, 456, 459, 464

Moslem Mission Society 224 Moslem Question, see Eastern Question 24, 31, 244, 252, 253, 271, 279, 322, 407, 420 Muhamedaner for Muslims 66 Muḥammad 5, 7, 12, 14-15, 36, 38-9, 55, 64, 75, 76, 84-9, 90, 95, 99-100, 101, 1056, 113, 116-17, 127-8, 130, 135-7, 142-3, 145, 149-53, 154, 158, 160, 167-70, 171, 177-8, 195-8, 202, 203, 206-8, 212-13, 217, 232-5, 239-40, 241, 244, 246-9, 250, 263-5, 257, 261-4, 273, 274, 281-3, 289-92, 294, 296, 298-302, 303-5, 309, 312, 314, 321, 326-8, 334, 347-8, 360, 363-6, 381-2, 392, 411, 417-18, 420, 422, 430, 447-51, 452-4, 493, 495, 496-7, 506, 510-11, 512, 519, 530-3, 540, 543-4, 547, 564, 566, 583, 588-9, 590-1, 601-2, 605, 606-7, 608 Muḥammad ʿAbduh 314, 398, 402, 428, 430, 457 Muḥammad ʿAlī, viceroy of Egypt 25, 183-4, 186, 190-1 Muḥammad Bayram 398 Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, see also Wahhābīs 66, 301, 564-6 Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā 61-2, 314 Muhammadans for Muslims 130, 422, 425, 473, 504-6, 564, 602 Muhammadiyyah movement 542 Muhammedans, Muhammedaner for Muslims 40, 66, 76, 127, 422, 535 Muhammedanism for Islam 51, 66 Mühleisen, Johan, see John Muehleisen Arnold 224-30 Muir, Sir William 2-3, 5-7, 10, 12, 130, 140, 144-5, 235, 248-9, 250, 253, 258, 288, 290, 296, 298, 304, 365, 366-7, 400, 401, 446-7, 451 Mullah Youssuf, see Joseph Wolff 200-9 Müller, Friedrich Max  259, 263, 296 Murray, Charles 471-2, 477 Murray, Lady Evelyn, see also Zainab Cobbald 17 Muselmand for Muslims 66 Mussulmans for Muslims 205, 256, 304, 317-19, 405, 412, 422, 431, 434, 435 al-Mutawakkil, ʿAbbasid caliph 191

623

624

Index of Names Naish, Irene E.  488 Napoleon Bonaparte 1, 27, 65, 116, 148, 207, 499 Napoleonic wars 56, 65 Nederduitsche Gereformeerde Kerken (Dutch Reformed Church) 517, 518, 521 Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap (Dutch Bible Society, NBG) 526, 530 Nederlandsch Gereformeerde Zendingsvereniging (Dutch Reformed Mission Society, NGZV) 517, 518-21, 522 Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (Dutch Missionary Society, NZG) 6, 38-40, 42-4, 525-6, 527-9, 534-6 Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (Dutch Mission Association, NZV) 525-6, 532-6 the Negus, King of Abyssinia  240 Nestorianism 207, 497 Neurdenburg, Johan Christiaan 40 New Testament 30, 76, 87, 136, 157, 197, 203, 212, 255, 336 Newman, John Henry  114 Ngisa for Jesus 529 Nicholson, Reynold Alleyne 161-2 Niebuhr, Carsten 19, 56, 113, 561-9 Nielsen, Alfred  61-3 Niemann, George 39-40 Night Journey of Muḥammad 151, 290 Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig 20, 64, 584-91 Nöldeke, Theodor  288, 446-7, 544, 598 Noor-ala-Noor, see Lady Lucie Duff Gordon  330, 338-41, 350, 351 Norway and Norwegians 2, 21-2, 53, 65-6, 67, 69-70, 71-2, 74, 75-6, 77, 562 Nubia and Nubians 55, 180, 184, 185, 186 Nuṣayrīs (ʿAlawīs) 202, 568, 569 Ockley, Simon  127, 143 Oehlenschläger, Adam  21 Old Testament 30, 150, 197, 202, 204, 212, 213-14, 229, 381, 513, 514, 592, 604-5, 606-7 Oliphant, Laurence  31-2

Orientalists and Orientalism 1-2, 3, 5, 13-14, 15-16, 20-1, 22, 36, 41, 64, 70, 72, 73, 100, 114, 126, 130, 156, 159, 161, 180, 192, 193, 200, 217, 222, 243, 250, 257, 273, 284, 291, 302, 303, 317, 324, 328, 330, 331, 337, 339, 340, 344, 350, 362, 366, 374, 388, 392, 435, 468, 476, 477, 505-6, 507, 566, 593, 594, 602 original sin, doctrine of 327 Osmanlis 346, 347, 348, 349, 431 Østerlandsmissionen 60-2 Østrup, Johannes  64, 598-603 Palestine 23, 24-5, 26, 29-30, 32, 86, 200, 273, 275, 336, 338, 350-1, 377, 385, 389, 578 Palestine Exploration Fund 29 Palestine Pilgrims Text Society 24 Palgrave, William Gifford  359, 364 Palmer, Edward Henry  161, 198, 286-7, 288-9, 290-1, 303, 379 Paraclete, Muḥammad depicted as 99, 152, 327 Paradise 85, 88, 99, 110, 111, 113, 128, 136, 150, 158, 169, 189, 196-8, 234, 249, 270, 312, 345, 381, 390, 420, 454, 589, 591 Parkinson, John Yehya-en-Nasr  415, 424 Paul, Apostle 112, 216, 222, 282, 301, 325-7, 328, 381, 416-17 Pauline Christianity 327-8 Pears, Edwin 268 Pehr Malmström 570-2, 575 Pelayo, King of the Asturias 117-21 Peninsular War 116 Pentateuch 88, 382, 604 Perceval, Caussin de 446 Percy Bysshe Shelley 113-14, 157, 159, 161 Pfander, Carl Gottlieb  74-5, 205 Philip Meadows Taylor  471, 476 Pickthall, Muhammad Marmaduke  16, 274 Pillars of Islam 189, 529 pirates 3, 248 Pococke, Edward  83, 127, 143 Poensen, Carel  43-4, 45 polygamy 116, 128, 136, 178, 188, 190, 196, 225, 234-5, 256, 299, 300, 309-10, 312, 318, 320, 337, 381, 397, 410-11, 420, 455, 485

Index of Names Poole, Sophia Lane  330, 331-4, 335, 349-51 Porteous, Bishop Beilby 135-6, 137 Portugal 5, 105, 109, 117 Presbyterians 8, 61, 88, 287, 304, 384, 485 Prideaux, Humphrey  99-101, 127, 143, 149, 152, 233, 254 Prip, Einar  19, 60-2 the Prophet for Muḥammad 5, 55, 75, 76, 86, 95, 110-13, 119-21, 128, 136, 158, 162, 167, 170-1, 188-90, 206-8, 229, 248, 255, 262, 299, 321, 363, 408-9, 416-17, 421, 448-50, 454, 455, 456, 531-2, 544, 547, 564, 588, 606 Protestants and Protestantism 8, 23, 27, 29, 52, 66, 100, 177-8, 297, 313, 372, 384-5, 388, 416, 459, 485, 486, 499, 500-2, 511, 519-20, 522, 525, 536, 540, 558 Putihan (‘the white people’) 42-3, 45, 529, 536 Quakers 68, 148 Quilliam, William Henry Abdullah 16-17, 404-26 Qur’an, see also Koran 8, 13, 20, 38-9, 49, 65, 68, 75-6, 77, 87-9, 99-100, 104, 113, 116, 127-9, 136, 143, 150-4, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161-2, 168-70, 180, 184-5, 188, 190, 192, 195-8, 202-3, 207, 213, 222, 232, 234, 247-9, 255-7, 262-3, 274, 281-2, 284, 286-7, 288-91, 292, 296, 298-9, 301, 312, 318-20, 326-9, 333, 339, 341, 347-8, 35860, 364-5, 367, 381-2, 390, 392, 400, 404, 418, 422, 425, 440, 445, 448-9, 453-6, 460, 465, 473, 475, 495, 506, 520, 528, 530-2, 535, 544-5, 548, 564, 570, 571, 575, 588, 601, 605, 606-7 Radford, A. Hassan  418 the Raj 441, 473, 477-8 Rålamb, Clas Brorson  48 Ramaḍān 184, 320, 331, 358, 455, 555 Raquette, Gösta and Evelina  51 Rashīd Riḍā, see Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā  61-2, 314 Ravius, Christian 48

Reginald Bosworth Smith 14, 15, 138, 171, 253, 257-8, 294-306, 308, 313, 365-6, 435 Reinhardt, Dorothea (Doris Rein) 72-3 Reinhart Dozy 6, 7, 36, 446, 509-15 Reiske, Johan Jacob  127 Reland, Adriaan 127 Renan, Ernest  146, 240, 296, 401 Revelation, Book of 32, 203, 312 Rhijn, Leonard van 525, 527-8 Rice, Walter Ayscoughe  7-8 Richard Alfred Davenport 286, 288, 289, 290 Richard Francis Burton, Sir 14, 23, 25, 32, 297, 359, 368-83 Robert Fargher 176-9 Robert Southey 104-24, 156, 158 Robert Taylor 133-8 Roberts, Henry David 411 Roberts, Robert  32 Robinson, C.H. (Charles Henry) 356-67 Robinson, George Frederick, Lord Ripon  439 Robson, George 462 Robson, John  304 Roderick, King of the Visigoths 117-22 Rodwell, John Medows  198, 286, 288-90 Romania 269-72 Royas, Pedro de 117 Rudyard Kipling 4, 14, 468, 474-8 Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn  161, 283 Russia, Russian(s) 4, 11, 21, 24, 31, 32, 47, 49, 51-3, 73, 258, 266-7, 269-73, 420-1, 453, 461, 470, 503, 578, 593, 598 Russo-Turkish War 269, 271, 278 Sabeans and Sabeanism 249, 261, 392 Sacy, Silvestre de 67, 446, 592 Saʿdī, Persian poet 283, 496 Sadrach Affair, see also Kiai Sadrach Surapranata 518, 520-1, 522-3 Said, Edward  1, 6, 14-15, 16, 192-3, 401, 436, 468, 475-7, 514 Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) 15, 16, 128-9, 144, 270, 279, 379, 588 Salahuddin Khuda Bukhsh 146, 171

625

626

Index of Names Sale, George 89, 99, 101, 104, 113, 127, 1367, 141, 143, 149, 156, 168, 170, 195-7, 232, 247, 253, 282, 286, 287, 288-91, 588 Salomo 207 Salomon Keijzer 503-8 Samuel Eliza Harthoorn 39, 42-3, 525, 529-30, 536 Samuel Taylor Coleridge  104, 105-6, 108, 114, 156, 158-9 Saracens 16, 117, 245, 248 Sarah, wife of Abraham 514 Satan, satanic 5, 12, 145, 229, 249, 365, 418, 448, 513, 519, 536 Saul, King of Israel 198 Savary, Claude-Étienne  127, 288 Scharp, Jan  6, 12, 38-40 Schencke, Wilhelm  77 Schneller, Theodor  60-1 Schuckri, see Johannes Avetaranian 6, 18, 51 Scott, Sir Walter 2, 15-16, 20, 30, 121, 125-6, 128 Seal of the Prophets 202 Second Coming of Christ 23, 30, 202-3, 461 Seippel, Alexander  71-2 Serbia, Serbian 269-72 Sermon on the Mount 313, 328-9 Shāfiʿī school of law 37, 377, 503, 505, 552 Shaftesbury, Earl of  25, 30 Shams al-Dīn al Dimashqī 593-4 Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles, see W.H. Abdullah Quilliam 405, 415, 422 Shelley, Mary 157, 159-60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 113-14, 157, 159, 161 Sherer, John W.  474 Shīʿa Islam, Shīʿīs, Shīʿism 89, 91, 100, 105, 189, 202-4, 207, 239, 241, 347-8, 372, 441, 455-6, 564, 568, 607 Simeon, Charles  139, 200 Sinai, Mount 273, 286, 335, 578 Sindh, Sindhi, Sindhis 371-3 slaves, slavery, slave trade 6, 30, 50, 96, 151, 154, 182, 204, 218, 226, 233, 256-7, 297-8, 300, 309, 311-12, 318, 334, 343, 345, 348, 349, 359-61, 364-5, 377, 391, 397, 409-10, 417, 420, 443, 450, 454, 565

Smith, Joseph  177-8, 448 Smith, Reginald Bosworth  14, 15, 138, 171, 253, 257-8, 294-306, 308, 313, 365-6, 435 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 9, 259, 472 Society for the Harmony and Conciliation of Religion 314 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 8, 88-9, 295, 302, 357 Solomon, King of Israel 150, 198 Sommer, Annie van 463 Son of God, referring to Jesus 152, 215, 216, 326, 328 Son of Man, referring to Jesus 215, 326 Sophia Lane Poole 330, 331-4, 335, 349-51 Southey, Robert  104-24, 156, 158 Spirit from God, for Jesus 152, 300, 309, 327 Sprenger, Aloys  248-9, 253, 296, 298, 304, 446-7, 544 Sri Lanka (Ceylon) 279, 424, 440, 519, 546 St Paul 112, 216, 222, 282, 301, 325-7, 328, 381, 416-17 Stanley, Henry, Baron 17, 427 Stephen, first Christian martyr 325-6 Stephens, William Richard Wood  252-8 Stockholm 18, 47, 48, 52, 53, 72, 570, 571 Stubbe, Henry  137, 305 Suez Canal 4, 70, 272, 287 Sufis and Sufism 19, 38, 76, 161, 162, 188, 204, 222, 283-4, 368, 391, 372, 457, 511, 531 Sundt, Eilert  68 Sunnīs 89, 100, 105, 189, 202, 206, 241, 348, 390-1, 404, 430, 441, 456, 564-5 Swan, George 487-8 Sweden 2-3, 17-19, 21, 47-50, 51, 52-3, 58, 65, 67, 69-70, 76, 77, 570 Syed Ahmad Khan, Sir 12, 15, 140, 145, 154, 234-5, 244, 248, 257, 296, 398 Syed Ameer Ali 235, 295, 296, 304, 305, 324, 329 syncretism 41, 44-5, 522, 534, 536 Syria and Syrians 19, 20, 24-5, 32, 60-1, 65, 86, 117, 130, 167, 168, 270, 274, 299, 325,

Index of Names 378, 379, 399, 400, 427, 431, 548, 568, 578, 599 Syrische Weisenhaus 60-1 al-Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar 207, 447 taḥrīf 154, 203, 465 Talmud 87, 255, 290, 503 Tanzimat Reforms 75, 320, 322 de Tassy, Garcin 67 Tatars 2, 21, 47-8, 52, 117, 347 Taylor, Isaac 294, 302, 303, 307-15, 358-9, 364, 366 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy  135 Taylor, Philip Meadows  471, 476 Taylor, Robert  133-8 Taylor, William  109-10, 116-17 Theosophists and the Theosophical Society 19, 76, 222, 279, 282, 425 Thisted, Valdemar 599 Thomas Carlyle 154, 160, 165-75, 192, 195, 207, 232, 233, 235 Thomson, Joseph 308, 314 Thornton, Thomas  127 Tisdall, William St Clair  460 Tolland, John  137 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth  27 Tornberg, Carl Johannes  49 Toulmin, Joshua  99 Trinity, doctrine of the 39, 85, 87, 119, 202-3, 222, 233, 249, 255, 261, 300, 327-8, 404, 416, 495 Turks and Turkey 11, 12, 16, 22, 24-5, 32, 47, 48, 51, 56, 64, 66, 68, 105, 122, 180, 184-5, 187, 243, 245-6, 247, 248, 265-7, 269-70, 271, 274, 275, 317, 318-22, 346, 348, 351, 377, 398, 405, 407, 411, 415, 419, 421-2, 424, 427, 430-1, 434-5, 436-7, 454, 461-2, 468, 470, 500, 564 Twist, Albertus Duymaer van 501 Tyrwhitt-Drake, Charles  286, 379 ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, second caliph 128, 144, 152, 300, 548, 564 Umerkajeff, Ebrahim  51-3 Unitarians and Unitarianism 109, 137, 152, 156, 209, 279, 313, 334, 338-9, 350, 404, 411, 434

Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) 8, 307, 314 Upson, Arthur T.  460, 465 Urquhart, David 432 ʿUthmān, third caliph 129, 150-3, 564 ʿUthmān ibn Yaḥyā al-ʿAlawī 554 Uyghur Muslims 18 Valentijn, François  37, 39 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), see also Dutch East India Company 4, 37, 525 Vincent, M.B.  505 Virgin Mary, see also Mary 84, 105, 120, 152, 184, 215, 246, 255, 300, 326, 348 Volney, Constantin François  113, 160 Voltaire 104, 113 W.H. Abdullah Quilliam 16-17, 404-26 W.R.W. Stephens 252-8 Wahhābīs 66, 300, 391, 456, 551, 565, 560 Wallenius, Ivar Ulrik  571, 573-5 Wallin, Georg August 576-81 Warburton, Eliot  25, 28 Warren, Henry Nasrullah  418 Webb, Mohammed Alexander Russell  236, 328, 412, 425 Weil, Gustav 248, 253, 288, 446 Wellhausen, Julius  447, 544, 604 Wergeland, Henrik  67-9 Wessel Hoezoo 42, 525, 528-9, 536 Wherry, Elwood Morris  286, 287, 289-91, 464, 465 White, Joseph  83-90, 99, 143, 149, 253-4 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 366, 427-44 Wilhelm, Jacob 521-3 Willem Bilderdijk 12, 493-8 William Wordsworth 104, 106-7, 156, 162 William Delafield Arnold 472, 476 William Ewart Gladstone 7, 11, 146, 243, 258, 268-77, 279, 311 William Henry Abdullah Quilliam 16-17, 404-26 William Muir, Sir 2-3, 5-7, 10, 12, 130, 140, 144-5, 235, 248-9, 250, 253, 258, 288, 290, 296, 298, 304, 365, 366-7, 400, 401, 446-7, 451

627

628

Index of Names William Richard Wood Stephens 252-8 William Wilson Hunter 473, 476, 478 Woking Muslim Mission 405, 424 Wolff, Joseph, see also Mullah Youssuf 200-9 Wollstonecraft, Mary 157 Wolter van Hoëvell 499, 500, 502, 525, 531-2 Wolverhampton Church Congress 302, 307, 308, 366 Word from God for Jesus 152, 184, 300, 309, 327 Wordsworth, William  104, 106-7, 156, 162 World War I 1, 61-4, 272, 386, 487 Wüstenfeld, Ferdinand  446 Wyatt, George 153  

Yazīd, Umayyad caliph  239 Yemen 56, 201, 202, 432, 561-2, 563-5 Yogyakarta 519, 522, 532, 542 Young Turk movement 47, 405   Zakariyyā l-Ansārī 505 Zarhites 207 Zayd, adopted son of Muḥammad 233, 291, 450 Zaydīs 564 Zaynab, wife of Muḥammad 233, 291, 299, 511 Zetterstéen, Karl Vilhelm  49 Zoroastrian and Zoroastrianism, see also Magianism 84, 216, 255 Zwemer, Samuel  20, 62, 145, 459, 461-2, 463-5

Index of Titles Numbers in italics indicate a main entry. ‘De aard van het Mohammedanisme’ 532-3 Abd El-Kader og Forholdene mellem Franskmænd og Arabere i det nordlige Afrika 57 Account of an expedition to Arabia and other surrounding countries, see Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern 568-9 An account of the manners and customs of the modern Egyptians 170, 181, 182, 185, 187-95, 331, 332, 399 The Acehnese, see De Atjèhers 546-50 The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan  468-9 Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya  505 Aladdin, or the wonderful lamp 21 Alastor 114, 161 Alcorani textus universus (Marracci) 106, 127, 197, 574-5 Alf layla wa-layla, see Thousand and one nights  72, 369 Alfred Campbell the young pilgrim  23-4 Algier og Sahara. Billeder fra Nomade- og Krigerlivet 58 ‘ʿAlī as pretender and caliph’, see ʿAlî som prætendent og kalif 607 Alidernes stilling til de shi´itiske bevægelser under Umajjaderne 607 Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 551-7 Anacalypsis 137-8, 148 Anbio 528-9 The angel-messiah of Buddhists, Essenes and Christians 324, 325, 326 Animadversions on a work entitled ‘An apology for the life and character of the celebrated prophet of Arabia, called Mohamed’ 153 Annual report of 1857 (Haarthoorn) 530

An answer to the question, why are you a Christian 100 ‘Anteckningar om Karl XII:s orientaliska kreditorer’ 49 Antar 71 An apology for Mohammed and the Koran (Davenport) 15, 145, 231, 232-7 An apology for the life and character of the celebrated Prophet of Arabia (Higgins), see also Apology for Mohamed 14, 89, 131, 138, 149-55 Arabia. The cradle of Islam 145 Arabian nights, see Thousand and one nights 108, 114, 469, 582, 599 De Atjèhers 546-50 Ayesha, the maid of Kars 468, 470-1 Ballonbrev til en svensk dame 70 Bampton lectures, see Sermons preached before the University of Oxford 83, 8490, 99, 143, 149, 253 De bedevaart der Inlanders naar Mekka 506 The Berlin Treaty and the Anglo-Turkish Convention speech 272 Beschreibung von Arabien 113, 563-7 Biang-Lala 225 Biblical researches in Palestine and adjacent regions  29 Bibliographia geographica Palestina  24 Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae  24 Bij wien ligt de schold van de gruwelijke gebeurtenissente Bandjermasin? 500-2 ‘Blessed be Egypt’. A missionary story 486-7 The Book of good counsels 278 Book of Mormon 178, 255 Bosworth Smith. A memoir 295, 305 Botheira, dramatisk digtning i fem akter  73 The bride of Abydos 13, 158

630

Index of Titles Brief aan het NZG bestuur 42 A brief account of the countries adjoining the lake of Tiberias and the Dead Sea 27 Brieven over den Islam uit de binnenland van Java 43 Bulgarian horrors and the question of the East 11, 265, 269-71, 274 Câhirah og Kerâfat, historiske studier under et ophold i Ægypten 1867-68 593 The Caliphate, its rise, decline and fall 5, 400 ‘Carel Poensen, Brieven over den Islam uit de binnenlanden van Java’ 43-4 Cases cured by Sake Deen Mahomed 93 Catalogue des monnaies arabes et turques du cabinet royal des médailles du Musée de Copenhague 600 Childe Harold’s pilgrimage  156, 160 Chips from a German workshop 296 Chrestomathia Baidawiana 445 Christianity and Islam. The Bible and the Koran 252, 253-8 Chronicle of the Cid 116 Church, Book of the 106 The Church, mirror or view of the life lived by the Christian congregation, see Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christen menigheds levnetsløb 20, 589, 590-1 Church Missionary Intelligencer 9, 235, 303-4, 307-8 Cities of the past 26, 28 Codices Hebraicos et Arabicos continens 593 Codices Persicos, Turcicos, Hindustanicos &c. continens 593 Collected verse (Kipling) 474-5 Collected letters (Southey) 108, 109-10, 116, 117 Collections of travels (Jean-Baptiste Tavernier) 113 Commonplace book (Southey) 106, 109 Complete history of Algiers 113 A compendious Syriac dictionary 445 A comprehensive commentary on the Qurán: Comprising Sale’s translation and preliminary discourse 289-93

Concerning the spread of the Gospel among the Javanese, see also Het voor en tegen van de uitbreiding des evangelies onder de Javanen  500-2 Conference on Urdu and Hindi Christian Literature held at Allahabad 24th and 25th February 1875 235 Coningsby, or, the new generation 14, 273 Contarini Fleming. The rise of Iskander 14, 266, 273 Contes de Damas 599 ‘A contribution to current knowledge of the Eastern-Turkestan dialect’ 51 The conversion of Europe 357 Corani Suram LVII Arabice et Suethice 574-5 Correspondence between Bishop Jebb and Alexander Knox 139 The corsair  13, 161 The Crescent and the Cross. The romance and realities of Eastern travel 25 The Crescent. A weekly record of Islam in England 405, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 414-26 A critical examination of the life and teachings of Mohammed 296 A critical exegesis of the popular jihad 257 Crónica Sarracina 117 Crónica del Rey Don Rodrigo con la destruycion de Espana 117, 121 Crónica majora 117 Crusaders of the twentieth century. Or, the Christian missionary and the Muslim 8 ‘On the Culloden Papers’ (Scott) 15 The curse of Kehama  106, 156 Där mörkret skingras. Mission, kultur och forskning bland Afrikas folk 51 Décadas de Asia (Barros) 122 Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, see also The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire 99, 127, 128, 143, 149, 232, 239, 253, 296 Description de l’Arabie, see Beschreibung von Arabien 113, 563-7 Description of Egypt 181, 183-6, 187 The desert of the Exodus and Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin 287

Index of Titles Diarium under resa till Konstantinopel 1657-1658 48 A dictionary of Islam (Hughes) 145, 314 Dictionary of the Hausa language 357 Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes 509 Discourses on subjects of scripture history  139 Dissertations on the internal evidences and excellence of Christianity 99 Domdaniel 109 Dronning Tamara 73 The earthly footsteps of the man of Galilee  28 Eastern life, present and past  330, 334-8, 339 The Eastern Question. Its facts and fallacies 7 ‘Eastern Turkic grammar’ 51 Eastward  26-7 The Edinburgh Annual Register 107 Education in India 278 Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending 518-24 Eenige Makassaarsche en Boeginesche legenden in 1850 530-1 ‘Ein paar Beiträge zur Kritik der Geschichte Muhammeds’ 606 Encyclopaedia of Islam (First edition) 542, 544, 607 Encyclopaedia of Muslim Spain 36 English biblical criticism, and the authorship of the Pentateuch, from a German point of view 225 The English governess in Egypt, see also Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople 330, 341-5 The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo  330, 331-4 Eothen 25 Essays on the life of Mohammed (Syed Ahmad Khan) 12, 15, 140, 145, 154, 234, 235, 244, 248, 296 Études d’histoire religieuse 296-7 Études sur la loi musulmane (Rit de Malek). Législation criminelle 505

The evil of the East, or; truths about Turkey, see also Le mal d’Orient. Moeurs turques  316-23 An examination of the claims of Ishmael as viewed by Muḥammadans 130 Exposition de la foi musulmane 67 Exposition of the Islamic peoples’ general geographical knowledge, see Fremstilling af de islamitiske folks almindelige geographiske kundskaber 593 The faith of Islam 405 Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète, see also Mahomet le prophète  104-5, 113-14 Fandango 72 Farys 69 Fatḥ al-Wahhāb 505 ‘Feltliv i Sahara’ 58 ‘A few contributions in criticism of the history of Muḥammad’, see ‘Ein paar Beiträge zur Kritik der Geschichte Muhammeds’ 606 ‘The fifty-seventh oration’ 135-8 First footsteps in East Africa, or An exploration of Harar 376-8 Footprints of the past 405 Fra Østerland 74 Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus  157, 159-60 Fremstilling af de islamitiske folks almindelige geographiske kundskaber  593 The future of Islam 366, 428, 429-38, 438, 439, 440, 444 Genesis and science: or, the first leaves of the Bible 225 Georg August Wallins första resa från Cairo till arabiska öknen i April 1845 578-81 Georg August Wallins reseanteckningar från Orienten åren 1843-1849 578-81 Geschichte des Qorāns 288, 544 The Giaour. A fragment of a Turkish tale 13, 158 Gil Blas 469

631

632

Index of Titles The history of Persia, from the most early period to the present time 16 The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire 99, 127, 128, 143, 149, 232, 239, 253, 296 History of the Ottoman Turks 245 The history of the crusades 125-6, 129, 130 Handboek voor het mohammedaansch regt  History of the Saracens 127, 143 Home in the Holy Land  27 504 Huleboerne i syd Tunis. Erindringer fra et Haandbog i verdens-historien  585, 587-90 ophold hos Kalifen af Matmata 58 Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l’archipel Indien 36 I Æventyrland: Oplevet og drømt i Handbook of world history, see Haandbog i Kaukasien 73 verdens-historien 585, 587-90 I dansk og ægyptisk Statstjeneste 59 Hansard 265, 267, 269, 272, 274 Ideas about India 428, 433, 438, 443 Harem life in Egypt and Constantinople, The imposture unmasked; or, a complete see also The English governess in exposure of the Mormon fraud 176, Egypt  330, 341-5 177-9 Harrington 30 In troublous times 487 Hassan, or the child of the pyramid 471-2 India revisited 280 Hausa grammar 357 India under Ripon. A private diary 428, Hausaland, or, Fifteen hundred miles 433, 436, 438-44 through the Central Soudan 356-7, The Indian Antiquary 261 358-63 Indian song of songs 279, 282 On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in Indische Gids 37, 43 history 160, 166, 166-75, 192, 195, 207, Inleiding tot de kennis van den islam  232 39-40 Heth and Moab 25, 26 The interesting narrative of the life of Hikayat Prang Gompeuni 547 Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa 96 Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne 6-7, Ishmael. A natural history of Islamism and 36, 509 its relation to Christianity 227-30 Historia de la imperial ciudad de Islam (Dozy), see Het Islamisme  36, Toledo 117 510-12 The historical geography of Arabia 139-40 ‘Islam and civilization’ (MacColl) 7 History and conquests of the Saracens  Islam and Christianity in India and the Far 11-12, 130, 235, 244, 244-8, 253, 296 East 287 History of Christian missions 357 Islam and missions, being papers read at History of Greece (Mitford) 286 […] Lucknow, see also Lucknow, 1911  History of Greece under foreign domination 463-7 (Finlay) 254 Islam as a missionary religion 302 A history of India under the first two Islam. Den Muhammedanske religion og sovereigns of the house of Taimur, Babur dens historiske udvikling I kortfattet and Humayun 245 fremstilling 602 An history of Muhammedanism 125, 126-32 Islam i det nittende århundrede 602 A history of the administration in Islam. Its history, character, and relation to India under the late Marquis of Christianity, see also Ishmael. A natural Dalhousie 278 good counsels, The Book of 278 ‘Good news for Mussulmans’ 304 The governess in Egypt, see The English governess in Egypt 330, 341-5 Gulistan, being the Rose-garden of Shaikh Sa’di 279, 283, 496

Index of Titles history of Islamism and its relation to Christianity 227-30 Islam, or true Christianity 313, 324, 325-9 Islam. The Muḥammadan religion and its historical development, see Islam. Den Muhammedanske religion og dens historiske udvikling i kortfattet fremstilling 602 The Islamic World 405, 406-14, 417, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425 Het Islamisme 36, 510-12 De Israelieten te Mekka 509, 513-15 The Israelites in Mecca, see De Israelieten te Mekka 509, 513-15 Ivanhoe 15, 30

170, 195-7, 232, 253, 282, 286-7, 288-90, 588 The Koran and the Bible. Or, Islam and Christianity, see also Ishmael. A natural history of Islamism and its relation to Christianity 227-30 The Koran. Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed (Davenport) 286, 288-92 Kort begreb af verdens krønike i sammenhæng 584, 589, 591 Kubla Khan 114, 159

‘Lacked ye anything?’ A brief story of the Egypt General Mission 487 Læsebog for folkeskolen, tredje del 70 Lalla Rookh  161 The land of Gilead 31 Java, geografisch, etnologisch, Laon and Cythna  113, 159 historisch 42 Lara 13 The Jew, the Gypsy and El-Islam 378, Leaves from an Egyptian note-book 307, 381-3 308-15 Journal of the Reverend Joseph Wolff 201 Journey through Central and Eastern Africa  Das Leben Muhammeds, see Muhammeds liv og lære 606-9 359 Lectures on the philosophy of modern Jubilate agno  157 history 143 Judah’s lion  27 ‘Iets over Javaansche naamgeving en eigennamen’ 43 Kalila og Dimna 71 A letter to Godfrey Higgins, Esq 153 Karl Edvard Laman. Missionär – Letter to J.C. Neurdenburg, 9 May 1885 språkforskare – etnograf 51 (Poensen) 44 Katekismus, eller Udtog af Tyrkernes ‘Letter to the board of the NZG, February troeslære, til bruk for ungdommen 67 1855’ 529 Katsijda ’l Mektsoura sive Idyllium ‘Letter to the board of the NZV, June 1884’  Arabicum 476 533 Kierkens gienmæle imod Prof. Theol. Dr. ‘Letter to the board of the NZV, November H.N. Clausen 585 1888’ 534 Kim 4, 14, 468, 474-6, 477-8 The letters of Abu’l-‘Alā 445 Kind words and loving counsel to the Letters from Egypt  330, 338-341 Malays 226 Letters from the Island of Teneriffe … and Kirke-speil eller udsigt over den christen the East Indies 95 menigheds levnetsløb  20, 589, 590-1 Letters of Edward Fitzgerald 161 Kitab tuhfah 505 Letters of travel (Kipling) 475-6 Kjahi Sadrach 522 Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land   Koran (Savary) 127, 288 25, 30 El-Ķorân; or The Ķorân: translated from the Letters written during a short residence in Arabic (Rodwell) 198, 286, 288-93 Spain and Portugal 105, 116 Koran and preliminary discourse (Sale)  The life and letters of E.A. Freeman 252 89, 99, 104, 113, 127, 143, 149, 156, 168,

633

634

Index of Titles The life and teaching of Muhammad, see Muhammedin elämä ja oppi 583 The life of Ali Pasha of Tepeleni, Vizier of Epirus, surnamed Aslan or the Lion 286 The life of Mahomet (Green) 101 Life of Mahomet (Muir) 5, 12, 253, 288, 296, 298, 304, 365, 446 Life of Mahomet (Prideaux), see also The true nature of imposture 99, 100, 143, 149 Life of Mohammad (Sprenger) 249, 253, 296, 304, 446-7, 544 The life of Mohammed (Bush) 233 The life of Muḥammad with an introduction to the general conditions in Arabia prior to the advent of Muḥammad, see Muhammeds liv, med en indledning om forholdene i Arabien før Muhammads optræden 606-9 The light of Asia 279, 282, 283 Literary history of Persia 161 Lives of Mahomet and his successors 146 Lizzat nisa sharai 372 Lucknow, 1911. Papers read and discussions on the training of missionaries and literature for Muslims, see also Islam and missions 463-7 Mahomet le prophète, see also Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète 104-5, 113-14 Mahomet the impostor. A tragedy 104 Mahometanism unveiled 7, 89, 131, 139, 140-7, 232 Le mal d’Orient. Moeurs turques, see also The evil of the East, or; truths about Turkey 316-23 Al-Manār 62 De Marokkane 495-8 Masīr Ṭālibī fī bilād afranji 97 Mawardi’s public and administrative rule for Islam 505 Mawerdi’s publiek en administratief regt van den Islam 505 ‘The Meccan festival’, see Het Mekkaansche feest 37, 540, 543-6 Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap (MNZG) 38, 42, 43, 525, 528

Het Mekkaansche feest 37, 540, 543-6 A memoir of the life and writings of Charles Mills 125, 127 Methods of mission work among Moslems  287, 459-60 Les mille et une nuits, see Thousand and one nights 21, 64, 72, 108, 114, 181, 369, 469, 582, 598, 599 Min ven sjajken 62 Mir’at ul-tullab 505 The Mirza 468 Miscellaneous Notes and Queries 325, 328, 410 Mishkāt al-masābīḥ 143, 296 Misselmah. A Persian tale 468-9, 473 Missionary journal and memoir 201 Mizān al-ḥaqq 74 Modern Egypt 10, 394, 395-403 Modern Egyptians, see also An account of the Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians  170, 181, 182, 185, 187-95, 331, 332, 399 Modern India and the Indians 260-4 Mohammed (Southey) 108, 109 Mohammed and Mohammedanism (Bosworth Smith) 14, 15, 253, 294, 295306, 313, 365-6 ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’ (reviews) 235, 303, 304 Mohammed and the rise of Islam 446-51 Mohammed der Prophet (Weil) 253, 288 Het mohammedaansche strafrecht, naar Arabische, Javaansche en Maleische bronnen 505 The Mohammedan controversy 144 The Mohammedan world of to-day 460, 465 Mohammedanism (Margoliouth) 452-8 ‘Mohammedanism and the negro race’ 303 Mohammedanism. Has it any future? 357, 363-7 ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’ 294, 302, 313 Mohammedanism. Lectures on its origin, its religious and political growth, and its present state 5 Monime, historisk drama i en akt 73

Index of Titles Mormon, Book of 178, 255 The Moroccan woman, see De Marokkane  495-8 The Moslem problem and peril. Facts and figures for the layman 464 The Moslem World (Webb) 412 The Moslem World (Zwemer) 62, 461-2 Mr Godfrey Higgins’s Apology for Mohamed  14 The Muezzin. A call to prayer 9 Muhamed: Islams store profet 76 Muhamedansk tankegang i vore dage 62 Muhammed’s religiøse forkyndelse efter Quranen 607 Muhammedanismus (Scharp) 6, 38 Muhammedansimen som verdensreligion  607 Muhammedin elämä ja oppi 583 Muḥammad’s life and teaching, see Muhammeds liv og lære 606-9 Muhammeds liv og lære 606-9 Muhammeds liv, med en indledning om forholdene i Arabien før Muhammads optræden 606-9 Muhammeds religion. Ett tvärsnitt genom Islams politiska och religiösa liv fram till våra dagar 51 Al-mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar 588 Al-mukhtaṣar fī l-fiqh ʿalā madhhab al-Shāfiʿī 505 Muslim India and Islamic Review 412, 424 ‘Naar er femte Mosebog affattet?’ 604 Narrative of a mission to Bokhara 206-8 Nathan der Weise 68 The necessity of atheism 157 Nederland en de Islâm 557-8 The Netherlands and Islam, see Nederland en de Islâm 557-8 The New Age 274 The new situation in Egypt 428 Nigeria, our latest protectorate 357, 360 The Nineteenth Century 31, 294, 313, 436 Nordens mytologi eller udsigt over Eddalæren 584, 585 Norges constitutions historie  68 Notes relative to the population of Sind 371

‘Notes taken during a journey through part of northern Arabia’ 578 Nour-ed-dyn 472 Nukh(a)bat al-dahr fī ajāʾib al-barr wa-l-baḥr 593   Oakfield; or, Fellowship in the East 472, 477 Official advice of C. Snouck Hurgronje, see also Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 551-7 The official report of the Church Congress, held at Wolverhampton 307, 308-9 The old missionary 473, 474, 476, 478 Om nordiske Begravelsesskikke 71 The one primeval language 139 On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history  160, 166, 166-75, 192, 195, 207, 232 Orgaan der Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (ONZV) 526, 532 Orientalische studien Theodor Nöldeke zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 606-7 Orientalism 1, 6, 14, 16, 192, 401, 436, 468, 475, 476, 514 Orientalistkongressen i StockholmKristiania, några skildringar från utlandet 72 Orientalske Høflighedsformler og Høflighedsformer. En kulturhistorisk Sammenligning 599 The origin of the Aryans 307 On the origin of species 427 The Ottoman power in Europe 244, 246-8 Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën 37, 504 Our missions in India, 1834-1924 287 An outline of Christianity 146   Palestine, or the Holy Land 23 Paradise lost 144 Parisina 13 Pearls of the faith, or, Islam’s rosary 279, 281-5 Peer Gynt 70 A Persian passion play 239-42 Persiske dikt etter Omar Kajjam, Hafis, Karabkuhi 72

635

636

Index of Titles Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to elMedinah and Meccah 373-6 The pilgrimage of natives to Mecca, see De bedevaart der Inlanders naar Mekka 506 Political speeches (Gladstone) 272 La politique musulmane et coloniale des Pays-Bas 555 Précis de jurisprudence musulmane selon le rite Châfeite, par Abou Chodjâ 505 A princess of Islam 474 Proeve eener Makassaarsche vertaling des Koran 531 Profeten Muhammed. En folkelig fremstilling 601-3 Prophecy and the Eastern Question  32 The Prophet Muhammed. A popular introduction, see Profeten Muhammed. En folkelig fremstilling 601-3 The proposed political, legal and social reforms in the Ottoman Empire 257 Purchas his pilgrimage 159   Qaṣīdat al-hāʾiyya min ashʿār al-fāriḍiyya  576 The Qur’ân (Palmer) 198, 287, 288-92 Quranen. Et Udvalg i kronologisk rækkefølge  607   Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne au moyen âge 509 Record of Christian work 5 Reis door den Indischen Archipel, in het belang der Evangelische zending 527-8 Reis naar Nederlands Oost-Indië 499 Reis over Java, Madura en Bali, in het midden van 1847 531-2 Reise til Jerusalem og Omegn 74 Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern 568-9 The relations between culture and religion. Three lectures 252 The religion of Islám 390-2 The religion of the sword 405 The religions of the world and their relations to Christianity  146, 209, 211-19, 296

Reports of Commissions I-IV (Edinburgh 1910) 460-3 The reproach of Islam 8, 218 The Republican 134, 135, 137 Rerum normannicarum fontes arabici 71 Researches and missionary labours among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other sects 202-6 The respective peculiarities in the creeds of the Mahomedan and the Hindu 220, 221-3 ‘Review of A series of essays on the life of Mohammed’ (Freeman) 234-5 The Review of Religions 412, 424, 425 The revolt of Islam, see also Laon and Cythna  113, 159 Revue des Revues 412 Die Rhetorik der Araber 593-4 Risāla (Ibn Faḍlān) 71 Roderick the last of the Goths 106, 115-24 ‘Røster fra religionerne’ 77 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám  161 The ruins; or, meditation on the revolutions of empires 159 De sacra poesi Hebræorum. Prælectiones academiæ Oxonii habitæ 156 Sadrach’s kring 522 Samlede skrifter 69 A sample of the Qur’an in Arabic and Latin, see Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine 571-2 Sange fra Syden 72 Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt 428, 436, 437, 439 Selections from the Kur-án 181, 195-9 ‘A series of essays on the life of Mohammed and subjects subsidiary thereto, by Syed Khan Bahadur’ (Review) 12, 15, 234, 244, 248-9 A series of essays on the life of Mohammed (Syed Ahmad Khan) 12, 15, 140, 145, 154, 234, 235, 244, 248, 296 A series of poems containing the plaints, consolations, and delights of Achmed Ardebeili 105 Sermons preached before the University of Oxford 83, 84-90, 99, 143, 149, 253

Index of Titles Shahnameh 240 Shampooing, or, benefits resulting from the use of the Indian medicated vapour bath 93 The sick king in Bokhara 240 The siege of Corinth 13 A simple transliteral grammar of Turkish 279 Sindh and the races that inhabit the valley of the Indus 371-3 Al-sīra l-nabawiyya, see also De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis  89, 127 A sketch of the denominations into which the Christian world is divided 98, 99-103 Skiftende horizonter 599 Skrifter (Wallin) 577-81 Small catechism (Martin Luther) 67 The Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Moslems 226 Soga um Sindbad Farmann, eit Æventyr or Tusund og ei nott 72 Sohrab and Rustum 240 Some impressions of the United States 244 The song celestial 279 Spanish Islam. A history of the Moslems in Spain, see Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne  6-7, 36, 509 Specimen Alcorani arabice et latine 571-2 Specimen historiae Arabum 83, 143 The spirit of Islam 295 Spreuken en voorbeelden van Muslih Eddin Sadi 496 A statistical account of Bengal 476 Stirring times  25, 26, 27-8, 31 The story of the SPG 357 ‘Studier over Tusind og en Nat’ 598 Studies in Islam 405 Studies Indian and Islamic 171 Studies of religious history 146 Sura 57 of the Qur’an in Arabic and Swedish, see Corani Suram LVII Arabice et Suethice 574-5 Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes 509 ‘Svenska nyheter’ 51   The Talisman (Scott) 15-16, 128-9 Tancred, or, The new crusade 13, 14, 25, 273

Thalaba the destroyer  105, 106, 108-15, 116, 117, 121, 122, 156, 158 Thesaurus Syriacus 445 A third year in Jerusalem  26 This world and the next 411 Thousand and one nights  21, 64, 72, 108, 114, 181, 369, 469, 582, 598, 599 The Times 260, 380, 314, 366 Tippoo Sultaun. A tale of the Mysore war 471 To Jerusalem through the lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems 386-8 Travels in Arabia 196, 375 Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor in the years 1817 and 1818 23 Travels in the Holy Land 23, 29 Travels in West Africa 362 The travels of Dean Mahomet 16, 94-7 Travels through Syria and Egypt 113 Travels, or Observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant 113 Treurzang van Ibn Doreid 496 True and false religion 225 The true nature of imposture, fully display’d in the life of Mahomet 99, 100, 143, 149 tuhfah, Kitab 505 ‘Turkish statesman denounces atrocities’  47 The Turkish atrocities 269 Turkish tales (Byron) 13, 156, 161 The Turks in Europe 243   Umm al-Qura 437 Under Halvmånen 73-4 Unexplored Syria. Visits to the Libanus the Tulúl el-Safá, the Anti Libanus, the northern Libanus and the ‘Aláh 23, 32, 378-80   Vasiyyetnāme 67 ‘Verslag van zendeling C. Albers’ 533 Vie de Mahomed (Boulainvilliers) 106 Vie de Mahomet (Gagnier) 122, 127, 296 Vijftien jaar in Zuid-Afrika 516 A vindication of the theory of Mahometanism unveiled 145 Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanæ 108

637

638

Index of Titles De vita et rebus gestis Mohammedis, see also Al-sīra l-nabawiyya 89, 127 Vivien Grey 266 A vizier’s daughter. A tale of the Hazara war  473-4 The Voice of Islam 425 Het voor en tegen van de uitbreiding des evangelies onder de Javanen 500-2 Voyage to the East Indies 95   Who is the cause of the terrible events in Banjarmasin?, see Bij wien ligt de schold van de gruwelijke gebeurtenissente Bandjermasin? 500-2 The wind and the whirlwind 428 With Sa’di in the garden 279 The women of Turkey and their folk-lore  330, 345-50

Wonders in Egypt: The story of the Egypt General Mission 488-9 Works (Wallin), see Skrifter (Wallin) 577-81   A year-long inspection trip in the service of the Protestant mission, see Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending 518-24 The young pilgrim or Alfred Campbell’s return to the east  23   Zedeleer naar Ghazzali 534 ‘De zending op Java en meer bepaald die van Malang, uit het jaarverslag 1857’ 43, 529 De Zending op Midden-Java ten Zuiden 522 De zending op Oost-Java 534-5 Zohrab the hostage 468-70