For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  EDWARD POCOCKE

  Greaves had been a protégé of Laud and he became a friend and ally of the man who was perhaps the greatest Orientalist of the seventeenth century, Edward Pococke (1604–91).14 Laud was consistently sympathetic to the cause of Oriental scholarship, and the Laudian Professorship of Arabic was established in 1636 in the first instance to give Pococke suitable employment. Though Laud had never met Pococke, but only corresponded with him about exotic coins, he relied on the emphatic recommendation of Vossius, a Dutch mathematician who was convinced of the value of medieval Arabmathematical manuscripts. Pococke had studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew at Oxford and attended Pasor’s lectures in 1626–7. He went on to learn what he could from Bedwell. However, Pococke was to owe his excellent knowledge of Arabic to his prolonged sojourn in Aleppo from 1630 to 1636 as chaplain to the Levant Company. The Levant Company had been chartered in 1581 to trade in the lands of the Ottoman Sultan. An embassy was then established at Istanbul and consulates in Smyrna and Aleppo. The latter was the Levant Company’s main trading centre or ‘factory’ in Syria and it dealt primarily in cotton, much of which was grown in Syria and Palestine, as well as in silks imported by caravans coming from points further east. The chaplaincy at Aleppo in effect served as a studentship in Arabic and Islamic studies and several other distinguished scholars were to hold this post subsequently, among them Robert Huntington, who used his sojourn there in 1671–8 to collect Oriental manuscripts which he eventually bequeathed to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. However, Pococke was the intellectual star in this learned sequence of Levant Company chaplains.

  On his return to England in 1636, he was given the Chair that Laud had founded. Pococke was Professor not just of Arabic, but also of Hebrew and, although his interest in Arabic was intense and he had a good mastery of the language, nevertheless Arabic took second place to his study of Hebrew and of the Old Testament in Hebrew. He emphasized the value of commentaries on religious matters written by Jews who wrote in Arabic, for example the twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher and physician Maimonides, and one of his major works was an edition of Maimonides’s Porta Mosis, a set of discourses on the Mishna, which Maimonides had written in Arabic but using Hebrew letters. Although today Pococke is chiefly famous (in so far as he is famous at all) as an Arabist, he was a Hebraist of first rank and one of the greatest scholars to work in that field. Like most Orientalists in the early modern period, Pococke studied Arabic in order to understand the Bible better and, like Bedwell, he had a strong interest in the Oriental Christians. Although Pococke’s interest in Islam was entirely hostile, his was a kind of hostility that was conducive to sound scholarship, as he was particularly concerned to discredit Western folklore and crude polemical lies about the Prophet and Muslim doctrine in order that Islam’s real errors could be exposed. It was, Pococke thought, better to study the Qur’an and its commentaries critically than to waste time fabricating incredible nonsense about great magnets holding Muhammad’s tombup in the air and similar medieval legends.

  In 1637 Pococke took time off from his teaching and went to Istanbul to hunt for manuscripts. He did not return until 1641, by which time Laud was imprisoned in the Tower (where Pococke visited him) and the Long Parliament was in session. The years that followed were difficult ones, as Pococke was known to be a fervent Royalist. Under the Commonwealth the Laudian Professor of Arabic received no stipend and Pococke struggled to survive by teaching Hebrew. Though his position was precarious, he was protected to some extent by his international reputation as a scholar, as well as by a few influential friends on the Parliamentary side, most notably the jurist, historian, antiquarian and respected Parliamentarian John Selden (1584–1654). Selden’s interests ranged rather widely and he wrote on matters such as the history of trial by combat and of tithes in medieval England. But he was also interested in Oriental religions, especially those of ancient Syria. His treatise, De Diis Syriis (1617), made him famous as an Orientalist. His Hebrew was good and he had a smattering of Arabic and he collected manuscripts in both languages (and they also ended up in the Bodleian Library). Although Selden’s main Oriental interest was in rabbinical law, he had translated from Arabic a fragment of the Nazm al-Jawhar (‘String of Pearls’), a Christian history of the world from the Creation onwards, written by the Melkite Patriarch of Alexandria, Said ibBitriq Eutychius (876–940). Selden recruited Pococke to assist him in editing a small section of this chronicle in order to make contemporary polemical points against those who maintained the primacy of bishops. Later in 1652 Pococke would produce an edition and translation into Latin of the whole of Eutychius. Erpenius was the only other person hitherto to have translated an Arabic chronicle into Latin.

  Eutychius and what Eutychius had to say about such matters as the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon was Selden’s ruling passion, but, as far as Pococke himself was concerned, the work he did on Bar Hebraeus was much closer to his own interests and of far greater significance for the development of Orientalism in general. Bar Hebraeus, also known as Abu al-Faraj, was a thirteenth-century Christian Arabchronicler who drew heavily on Muslim chronicles to compile his own history from the Creation to his own time. In 1650 Pococke published the Specimen historiae Arabum (1650), in which a long extract translated into Latin from Bar Hebraeus’s work served as a vehicle for the copious annotations that were based on Pococke’s much more general knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture. For a long time this work was to be among the first ports of call for anyone studying the history of Islam.

  During the hard times of the Commonwealth, Pococke, like several other Royalist scholars who were out of favour, also found refuge of a kind in working on a new polyglot Bible. Just as several of the sixteenth century’s leading Orientalists had come together to work on the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, so in 1655–7 a team of English scholars with Oriental interests came together to work on the London Polyglot Bible. Besides Pococke himself, they included Abraham Wheelocke (the Cambridge Professor of Arabic), Edmund Castell (later Professor of Arabic), Thomas Hyde (a Persianist) and Thomas Greaves (like his brother John, an Arabist). The London Polyglot was even grander and more scholarly than the predecessor produced in Antwerp and it included Syriac and Arabic versions of parts of the text. By the seventeenth century, however, most Catholics had come round to the view that the Latin Vulgate sufficed for faith, whereas Protestants were more committed to close philological study of the biblical text. Pococke advised on the Arabic text of the Pentateuch. Wheelocke described the enterprise as ‘the vindicating of the Gospel opposed by ranting enthusiasts in these dayes’.15 The publication of the London Polyglot Bible was not particularly wellreceived. Onecritic denouncedit for ‘affording a foundation for Mohammedanism; as a chief and principal prop of Popery; as the root of much hidden Atheism in the world’.16 The fashion for such grandiose philological projects came to an end with this expensive publication and there were to be no further polyglots.

  Apart from his work on the polyglot, Pococke produced a complete translation of Bar Hebraeus and he appended to it a history of the Arabs composed by himself. Produced in his later years, this was a major work in the field of Arabic studies. But though Bar Hebraeus, Historia compendiosa dynastiarum was published in 1663, it received so little attention that Pococke, depressed, spent less time on Arab and Islamic matters and turned instead to a study of minor Hebrew prophets, which was more likely to lead on to fame and fortune (though in fact it did not do so). Despite his increasing concentration in later years on biblical matters, Pococke was prodigiously energetic and in the course of his career he produced a remarkable body of Orientalist scholarship, some of it in published form and some as lecture notes. The publications included an edition and Latin translation with annotations of the Lamiyyat of al-Tughrai (1061–1120), a lengthy qasida, or ode, in which al-Tughrai lamented the corrupt times that he lived in and complained that he was neglected in his old age while other younger men were preferred. Since the ode was famous, or notorious, f
or its obscure language, Pococke’s edition, Carmen Tograi, was a tour de force. He worked on various other Arabic texts, dealing with literature, proverbs and history. Pococke’s scholarly exploration of texts by among others al-Maydani, al-Hariri, ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi and Ibn ‘Arabshah formed the core of what was still being studied by Arabists right up to the early nineteenth century.

  Pococke’s best-known Arabic translation was a translation of Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century Arabic philosophical fable, Hayy ibn Yaqzan as Philosophus Autodidactus, published in 1671. This story about a foundling, reared by a gazelle on a desert island, who learns first to fend for himself and then to explore the way the universe works and ultimately to discover God, may possibly have had some influence on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Ibn Tufayl’s fantasy may also have had a role in shaping English empirical philosophy as it was developed by John Locke and others. Like Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is an enquiry into what sorts of things God has fitted humans to know.

  Among Pococke’s minor works was his translation of an extremely brief anonymous treatise in Arabic on coffee-drinking, The Nature of the drink Kauhi, or Coffe, and the Berry of which it is made. Described by an Arabian Philistian (1659). Coffee-drinking originated in Yemen some time around the thirteenth century and spread throughout the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. Pococke is said to have been the first man in England to drink coffee. Those who were suspicious of the new drink claimed that it brought on his palsy. (The Arabauthor, for his part, warned that drinking coffee with milk might bring on leprosy.) For a long time coffee-drinking was to be regarded with great suspicion in some circles, as it was tainted with Mahometanism.17 Pococke ranked together with Golius as the greatest scholar of Arabic in the seventeenth century, but he left no disciples who were capable of matching his erudition and acuity.

  ARABIC COMES TO CAMBRIDGE

  The Laudian Professorship that was established in Oxford in 1636 had been preceded by the foundation at Cambridge in 1632 of the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic. Thomas Adams was a wealthy draper and Lord Mayor of London, who hoped that he might, through his benefaction, be instrumental in converting the Muslims. The teaching of Arabic, he felt, should serve the purpose of ‘the enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sitt in darkness’.18 Abraham Wheelocke (c. 1593–1653), the first scholar to hold the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic at Cambridge, was fervent against Islam: ‘Set aside some grosse idolatories of the church of Roome, & their Tyrannicall goernment, the onli pressure on the bodie of the Church of Christ is Mahomets Alcoran, I desire to breath out my last breth in this cause, and to my poore skil, I would endeavour to write Notes against the Alcoran in the Language of the Alcoran, which is the Arabick.’19 However, he had a rather curious attitude to the ‘Arabick’ that he was supposed to teach. He pointed out that it was a difficult language, not particularly useful and besides there were not very many books in that language available in Britain. Consequently he regarded it as part of his academic duty to discourage students from taking up the subject. He was quite successful in this and on one occasion, finding that no pupils had turned up for his lectures, he posted the notice to the effect that ‘Tomorrow the professor of Arabic will go into the wilderness’. He published practically nothing in or on Arabic, though he planned to write a refutation of the Qur’an. Wheelocke was also Reader in Anglo-Saxon and he was much keener on that subject than he was on Oriental matters. In so far as he was interested in the Eastern Churches, it was their possible importance as sources for Anglo-Saxon Christianity that engaged his attention. He also enjoyed composing occasional poetry in Latin. Despite his two professorships, his financial circumstances were always precarious, though not as precarious as those of his successor in the Chair.

  The Reverend Edmund Castell (1606–86), the second holder of the Thomas Adams Professorship, from 1667 until 1685, was in some respects a more considerable figure. Like so many of his colleagues, Castell was not in the slightest interested in Islam. Rather, his chief enthusiasm was for trying to establish links with the Eastern Christian Churches. However, he also hoped that Arabic might be useful in identifying obscure plants mentioned in the Bible. He had worked on the London Polyglot Bible and his own work on the Lexicon Heptaglotton (1669), a comparative dictionary of seven languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Arabic and Persian), evolved out of that project. Essentially it was a dictionary of Semitic languages and Persian was included only because it had not yet been demonstrated that Persian was not a Semitic language. (In fact, Persian is an Indo-Aryan language.) If for not much else, the Lexicon might be useful for reading the polyglot Bible. It ran to 4,007 pages and included descriptions of the grammars of the various languages.

  Castell regarded himself as being on some kind of holiday if he worked less than sixteen hours a day. But he was always miserable and full of complaint and by the time he had finished his polyglot dictionary, people had lost their enthusiasm for studying the polyglot Bible. Castell ruined himself in his typographically extravagant enterprise. Five hundred copies remained unsold at the time of his death and rats ate much of what was left. Yet more copies perished in the Great Fire of London. Not only did he lose a small fortune but he plunged so deep into the study of Oriental languages that he allegedly had forgotten his own. He ended up a half-blind pauper.20 (Later, as we shall see, Simon Ockley and George Sale were similarly ruined by their Orientalist enthusiasms.)

  Although Wheelocke left an unimpressive legacy as an Arabist, he had mastered Persian and he taught this language to Thomas Hyde (1636–1703). Hyde subsequently moved to Oxford. A corpulent and abstracted polymathic scholar, he worked on the Arabic, Persian and Syriac texts of the polyglot Bible. Eventually he combined the post of Librarian of the Bodleian with the Laudian Professorship of Arabic (1691) and the Regius Professorship of Hebrew (1697). Hyde was also alleged to know Turkish, Malay, Armenian and Chinese and he acted as a translator for Charles II. He supervised the printing of the Gospels into Malay. His wide interests also included Oriental games, sea monsters and mermaids. He worked on the star tables of Ulugh Beg that John Greaves had previously made a start on. Like Greaves, he was interested in Abu al-Fida’s Geography and planned to edit it, but nothing came of this. Hyde regarded the Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700) as his major work, but his account of the pre-Islamic religions of Persia, especially Zoroastrianism, relied so heavily on much later Persian sources from the Islamic era that this study was of limited value. Certainly it brought him little reward and John Cleland (who did achieve success with his pornographic novel, Fanny Hill) remembers Hyde using unsold copies of his study of the religions of Persia to boil his kettle. Hyde had a downbeat view of the value of giving lectures on Arabic, ‘hearers being scarce and practicers more scarce’.21

  According to Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), Hyde ‘doth not understand common sense in his own language, and therefore I cannot conceive how he can make sense of anything that is writ in another’. However, Prideaux’s own book on Muhammad was to be criticized by a bookseller to whom he offered it for publication, who said he ‘could wish there were a little more humour in it’. This book was The True Nature of Imposture fully display’d in the Life of Mahomet, published in 1697.22 It certainly was short on humour, as its author used the pretext of a history of the life of the Prophet as a vehicle for denunciations of the Deists and all sorts of religious extremists: ‘Have we not Reason to fear, that God may in the same Manner raise up some Mahomet against us for our utter Confusion… And by what the Socinian, the Quaker, and the Deist begin to advance in this Land, we may have reason to fear, that Wrath hath some Time since gone forth from the Lord for the Punishment of these our Iniquities and Gainsayings, and that the Plague is already among us.’23 Prideaux, whose life of Muhammad was part of a planned ‘History of the ruin of the Eastern Church’, considered the rise of Islam to be a punishment for the East
ern Christians’ divisions and heresies. Although he complained about the desperate shortage of books in Arabic, his knowledge of Arabic was either slight or non-existent. (His claim that the Arabic language was very like English raises considerable doubts in my mind.) He drew so heavily on the works of earlier writers that the ‘real nature of the imposture’ was Prideaux’s pretence to be an Arabist. His book was full of errors, as George Sale in the following century enthusiastically pointed out. Prideaux’s Connection (1716–18), a historical and theological treatise about the period between the end of the Old and the beginning of the New Testament, was a more substantial and scholarly work. After Pococke’s death, Prideaux had been offered the Laudian Professorship, but, fortunately perhaps, he turned it down and Hyde, who was more truly committed to Orientalism, took it up. However, Hyde’s successor as Laudian Professor of Arabic, John Wallis (1703–38), was an unproductive academic nonentity, more fond of good company than learned books, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the prestige and achievements of English Orientalism declined steeply in the eighteenth century.