by Robert Irwin
On the whole academics were no longer so very interested in the precise text of the Bible and after the Restoration there was a decline in interest in the polyglot Bible project. Nevertheless, as a young man in France Jean Gagnier (1670?–1740) had become interested in Hebrew and Arabic after being shown a copy of a polyglot Bible. He later moved to England and, having converted to Anglicanism, became an English clergyman. In 1723 he published the Arabic text of the section of Abu al-Fida’s fourteenth-century chronicle that dealt with the life of Muhammad, together with a Latin translation. He became Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic in Cambridge in 1724. Gagnier was a real scholar and he swiftly detected how much of Boulainvilliers’s biography of the Prophet was sheer fantasy, so he produced his own Vie de Mahomet (1732) to refute the errors of the earlier book and to denounce the alleged rationality of Islam (a theme that was sometimes taken up French Deists and rationalists). However, Gagnier’s book had little impact, at least initially.17
Although d’Herbelot and Galland had covered quite wide areas of history and literature, it was two Englishmen, Simon Ockley and George Sale, who pioneered the serious presentation of Islam in a vernacular tongue. Simon Ockley (1678–1720) studied Hebrew at Cambridge and around 1701 started to teach himself Arabic.18 (There was, of course, no one in Cambridge capable of teaching it.) He became a vicar in 1705 and in 1708 he published a translation of Ibn Tufayl’s desert island fable, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, under the title The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai ebn Yoqdhan. Ockley’s English translation had been preceded by Pococke’s Latin one, the Philosophus Autodidactus (1671). It is more likely that Daniel Defoe read Ockley’s English than Pocoke’s Latin before going on to write Robinson Crusoe (1719).
In 1711 Ockley became the fifth person to occupy the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic at Cambridge. Ockley, an enthusiast for Oriental culture, did not think so very highly of his own: ‘So far as fear of God is concerned, the control of the appetites, prudence and sobriety in conduct of life, decency and moderation in all circumstances – in regard to all these things (and after all, they yield to none in importance) I declare that if the West has added one single iota to the accumulated wisdom of the East, my powers of perception have been strangely in abeyance.’ His major work was The History of the Saracens (2 volumes, 1708–18). This covered the early history of the Arabs from the death of Muhammad in 632 (the life of Muhammad having already been covered by Prideaux until the death of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 705). Like several of his predecessors, Ockley was at first primarily interested in the history of the Eastern Church. Nevertheless, as he wrote and researched, he became interested in the history of the Arabs for their own sake and, while he routinely referred to Muhammad as an impostor, he nevertheless portrayed the Muslim Arabwarriors as heroes. Ockley presented the history of a people remarkable both for arms and for learning. Although he was based in Cambridge, he commuted regularly to Oxford because the Bodleian had a much better collection of Arabic manuscripts. In his history he relied heavily on d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque, but since he knew Arabic he also made use of a chronicler whom he believed to be al-Waqidi (d. 823), but whom modern Orientalists prefer to call pseudo-Waqidi, as the chronicle ascribed to Waqidi is a pseudonymous later work containing many legendary elements.
Ockley’s attempts to learn Persian were ‘frustrated by malignant and envious stars’. He noted that his treatment was very different from the generous patronage that Pétis de la Croix received from Colbert. It was still not possible to pursue Oriental studies without the sustained support of a wealthy patron and Ockley was not successful in securing one. His uncouthness and rumours that he was a heavy drinker may have had something to do with this, though it was also the case that the study of Arabic was no longer as fashionable as it had been in the age of Laud and Andrewes. Ockley’s professorship brought him almost no money and his chief but inadequate income came from the vicarage of Swavesey. The second volume of the History of the Saracens was completed in prison in Cambridge Castle, as he was arrested for debt in 1717. At least his jail turned out to be a more peaceful place to do research in than his miserable vicarage. He died in prison, leaving a wife and six children in extreme poverty. He features prominently in Isaac Disraeli’s Calamities of Authors (1813), where he was described as ‘perhaps the first who exhibited to us other heroes than those of Greece and Rome; sages more contemplative, and a people more magnificent than the iron masters of the world’. It was Ockley’s History of the Saracens that got Gibbon interested in Islam and inspired him with the wish to study Arabic at Oxford. Gibbon called him ‘spirited and learned’, adding that his work did ‘not deserve the petulant animadversions of Reiske’.19
Gibbon’s account of the rise of empire of the Arabs, when it eventually came to be incorporated in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, relied heavily not only on Ockley and d’Herbelot, but also on the work of George Sale (1697?–1736). Part of Sale’s attraction for Gibbon may have been the stylish and stately cadences favoured by the writer. As P. M. Holt has pointed out, Sale ‘was the first notable English Arabist who was not in holy orders’. Moreover he was neither an academic nor a traveller. He was a London solicitor, outside the university system, and he learned Arabic from two Syrian Christians in London. Even so, there was a Christian background to Sale’s Orientalism, as he first worked for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, checking its translation of the New Testament into Arabic before, in 1734, producing a translation of the Qur’an into English. (Sale also believed that God had reserved the future glory of the overthrow of Islam to the Protestants.) Sale’s translation relied quite heavily on Marracci’s Latin version and, like Marracci’s version, it was more than just a translation, for it contained a lot of prefatory explanatory matter on the history and culture of Muslims. This ‘Preliminary Discourse’ was translated in France where it attracted Voltaire’s enthusiasm. In the cautionary opening address to the reader, Sale suggested that he did not need to justify publishing his translation of the Qur’an, as Christian faith could not possibly be threatened by ‘so manifest a forgery’. He regarded the Arabs as the scourge of God visited on the Christians for their errors and schisms. He also took the opportunity to denounce ‘the writers of the Romish communion’ for the inadequacies of their refutations of Islam. As he saw it, the Catholic missionaries to Muslim lands were crippled by their worship of images and doctrine of transubstantiation. No sensible Muslim was likely to be won over by such a superstition-ridden religion. ‘The Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success.’
In order to clear space for his translation, he disparaged those of his predecessors, including Robert of Ketton’s Latin translation and Du Ryer’s French one. Marracci’s translation was exact and literal and, though Sale did not like Marracci’s lengthy refutations of Islamic doctrines, he still acknowledged the use he had made of the Latin translation. Although Sale made it perfectly clear that he considered Muhammad to be an impostor, ‘how criminal soever Muhammad may have been in imposing a false religion on mankind, the praises due to his real virtues ought not to be denied him’. Despite this damnably faint praise, many of his readers thought his portrait of the Prophet and the rise of Islam much too favourable and Gibbon called Sale ‘half a Musulman’.20
Those merchants who were not particularly interested in history or Christian polemics, but who wished to learn about the contemporary Middle East, were best served by Alexander Russell’s The Natural History of Aleppo, containing a Description of the City, and the Principal Natural Productions in its Neighbourhood, together with an Account of the Climate, Inhabitants and Diseases; Particularly of the Plague, with the Methods used by the Europeans for their Preservation (1756, revised edition 1794, by his half-brother Patrick). Alexander Russell was from 1745 to 1753 resident physician to the merchant community of the English Levant Company at Aleppo. He was a particular expert on the plague. Indeed, the original intent was to give an account of the plag
ue and a means of countering it. However, the extremely lengthy second chapter covered such matters as population, language, dress, consumption of coffee and tobacco, eating habits, religious ceremonies, family life, entertainments and funerary rites.21 Russell’s book was in its time the classic and authoritative source on everyday life in a Muslim country and was the acknowledged inspiration in the following century of Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Lane in his preface was to praise the ‘excellent and learned work’ of the Russell brothers.22 Like his half-brother, Patrick had strong scientific interests and was a particular expert on botany and on earthquakes. Patrick considerably added to The Natural History of Aleppo and gave it a more human dimension. In his account of Arabic culture he drew upon the researches of Sir William Jones into Arabic literature and it is to him that we now turn.
‘ORIENTAL JONES’
According to the twentieth-century Turcologist Harold Bowen, Sir William Jones (1746–94), also known as ‘Oriental Jones’, mastered thirteen languages and dabbled in twenty-eight.23 As a schoolboy he started off with Hebrew but, finding that language too easy to be interesting, he then moved on to Arabic. He translated bits of the English version of The Arabian Nights back into Arabic for his amusement. (One took one’s amusements where one could find them in those days.) While a student at Oxford, he retained Mirza, a Syrian from Aleppo, to teach him the language. (As in Cambridge fifty years earlier, there was no academic fellow capable of doing the job.) After Arabic, Jones moved on to Persian and Turkish. He translated a life of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah for Christian VII of Denmark and this was published in 1770. Jones’s Grammar of the Persian Language, published only a year later, was really of more use to poets than to imperial administrators, as Jones’s grasp of Persian was somewhat erratic and secondly he was more interested in introducing Persian poets to a European audience than he was in producing a cribfor merchants and administrators working in exotic parts. The Grammar is full of extracts from the famous medieval Persian poets. Jones’s explorations of Persian poetry had persuaded him that European literature was stale and needed liberating from classical models: ‘Asiaticks excel the inhabitants of colder regions in the liveliness of their fancy, and the richness of their invention.’24
On the other hand, though Jones had discovered something fresh and different in Persian poetry, he also thought of it in another sense as perfectly familiar. His sense of the sheer Otherness of Persian poetry being imperfect, he described Firdawsi’s eleventh-century epic, the Shahnama, as being written in ‘the spirit of our Dryden and the sweetness of Pope’. (The justice of this comparison is not obvious to a modern reader.) He also compared Firdawsi to Homer and Hafiz of Shiraz to Petrarch. Jones was keen that gentlemen of leisure should take up the study of Persian: ‘I may confidently affirm that few odes of the Greeks or Romans upon similar subjects are more finely polished than the songs of these Persian poets.’ As with the study of Latin and Greek literature, study of Persian was character-building: ‘There is scarce a lesson of morality or a tender sentiment in any European language to which a parallel may not be brought from the poets of Asia.’25
Though he devoted less time to Arabic literature, he produced a number of important, though error-strewn, translations from Arabic poetry. In 1782 he published the Moallakat(more correctly Mu‘allaqat). This collection of seven pre-Islamic Arabian odes by diverse hands was treated by him as a series of essays in the pastoral. The Arabpoets then became so many Oriental versions of Theocritus on camel-back – herdsmen in lush landscapes singing of their love for some nymph or other. Part of the trouble was that the term ‘Arabia Felix’ (‘Happy Arabia’) had given Jones a quite fanciful notion that a verdant, rather English-looking countryside prevailed in South West Arabia. Though he knew as little about the people as he did about the countryside, he judged the noble and fierce Arabs to be superior to the softer Persians and Hindus. (Such generalizations were common in pre-modern times and not just in Western culture.)
It was impossible to make a living as an Orientalist and, in the introduction to the Persian Grammar, he had complained of the difficulty of finding patronage for Oriental studies. At an early stage in his life Jones’s father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad. However, in the end he had to knuckle down to legal studies and he was called to the Bar in 1774. There were various false turns in his career. For instance, he had hoped to become an MP, but his liberalism, his hostility to slavery and support of American independence counted against him. Nevertheless, in 1783 he was appointed Judge of the High Court in Calcutta and a knighthood came with the appointment. He was happy to sail out to India as, among other things, he hoped to find evidence in India for the Flood of Genesis.
When he set out for Calcutta, he had had no intention of studying Sanskrit. Having once succumbed to that erudite temptation, he was soon declaring that Sanskrit was ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’ and thereafter he switched to the study of Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1786 Jones was the first to make the link between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and declare that the three languages must have descended from a common ancestor. The establishment of an Indo-Aryan family of languages by European philologists is something that has been resented by Edward Said and he appears to doubt the validity of their findings, though he does not explain why.26 Though Jones’s linkage of Sanskrit to a large group of European languages was sound enough, his ethnology was somewhat archaic and confused, as he held that Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Peruvians all descended from Noah’s son, Ham. Ethnologists who came after him tended to make Ham the father of just the black peoples.
In 1784 Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal, the prototype and inspiration for the later learned associations of Orientalists, the Société Asiatique and the Royal Asiatic Society.27 Jones was also the first Orientalist to engage seriously, though briefly, with Turkish literature and, besides that and his other Oriental interests, he was an amateur astronomer, botanist, musician, historian of chess and an expert on pangolins. His explorations of Arabic and Persian poetry were as much or more an event in English literature as they were in Oriental studies. Byron, Southey and Moore all read him. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ owes a great deal to Jones’s Mu‘allaqat. Jones’s researches were also important for German literature. Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) were both inspired by his translations to explore Oriental themes in their poetry – but all that is really the subject of another book.
Although Jones was the great pioneer of Indian studies, his chief heirs in this field were French and German, and Indological and Sanskrit studies were dominated by such scholars as Jean Pierre Abel Rémusat, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Eugène Burnouf and Max Müller. It was the French who set up the first university chair in Sanskrit.28 Many British East India Company officials and soldiers took up Persian or one or more of the Indian languages, but it was rare for such people to acquire more than a colloquial smattering. In La Renaissance orientale (1950) Raymond Schwabargued that the true beginnings of Orientalism are to be found in the late eighteenth century. Although he produced a great deal of evidence for this contention, he was chiefly interested in India and his conclusion is true, at best, only for Indian studies. As we have seen, Arabic studies began as early as the seventeenth century with Postel, Pococke, Erpenius, Golius and Marracci. There were no comparably grand figures in their field in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it does seem to be true that Indian studies took off in the late eighteenth century.
The great French Indologist, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, lived in Mughal India from 1755 to 1761. He published an edition of the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta, as well as a narrative of his travels. He was hostile to the stereotypical portrait of Oriental despotism presented by L’Espr
it des lois (1748), in which Montesquieu argued that despotism, conditioned by material and climatic factors, was pervasive throughout Asia and was savagely arbitrary, demanded blind obedience and was centred around the mysteries of the harem. As far as Anquetil-Duperron was concerned, such a portrait of Asian politics and society could only serve as an instrument of oppression over the peoples of Asia. In Législation orientale (1778), he used his close knowledge of Indian matters to refute Montesquieu’s contentions that Oriental despots were not bound by the law and that there was no private property under the Moghuls.
