by Robert Irwin
A CHRISTIAN ORIENTALIST
On the whole German Orientalists had been successful in emancipating themselves from the old tradition of confessional polemic. However, even in the twentieth century there were some scholars who attacked the history of Islam from a hostile Christian point of view, though the Belgian Jesuit Henri Lammens (1862–1937) was unusual in the depth of his hostility. Lammens, who taught at the Roman Catholic University of St Joseph in Beirut, wrote copiously about the origins of Islam.20 Although he took a critical view of the sources on the subject, his criticisms owed more to confessional hostility than they did to methodological sophistication. His rule of thumbwas that any early source material that was critical of the Prophet was unlikely to have been invented and was therefore true. On the other hand, he scrutinized material favourable to the Prophet and his contemporaries in order to discredit it if possible. Reading the relevant Arabic sources was for him like ‘travelling in a region of mirages’. Lammens’s hypercritical approach to the sources on early Islam led Goldziher to ask: ‘What would remain of the Gospels if he applied to them the same methods he applies to the Qur’an?’ Nöldeke similarly expressed reservations about Lammens’s methodology.
Lammens regarded the Prophet as a lascivious impostor, echoing here the theme of medieval Christian polemics. He attempted to give the rise of Islam a political and economic context that had been previously lacking and in La République marchande de la Mecque vers l’an 600 de notre ère (1910) he suggested that the aristocrats of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca had grown wealthy from spice caravans that travelled through the seventh-century Hejaz. Though there was no direct evidence for any of this, his presentation (or invention) of the socio-economic background was enormously influential and later biographers of Muhammad, such as Montgomery Watt and Maxime Rodinson, relied heavily on the model furnished by Lammens. Only in 1987 was this model systematically analysed and demolished by Patricia Crone in her Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Crone described Lammens as ‘a notoriously unreliable scholar whose name is rarely mentioned in the secondary literature without some expression of caution or disapproval’.21 Lammens, who gloried in his ‘holy contempt for Islam’, admired the Umayyad caliphs, who, he believed, had refused to allow themselves to be dominated by Islam. The seventh-century Umayyad Caliph Mu‘awiya was his particular hero, for Lammens claimed that he was the founder of the Syrian nation. On the other hand, he was not so keen on the priestcraft of the Abbasids. (In these particular prejudices he followed in the footsteps of Wellhausen.) Lammens, who loved Syria, regarded the ArabMuslim conquest as the greatest disaster that had ever befallen that region.
THE PRINCE AMONG SCHOLARS
When one contemplates the career of Leone Caetani, Prince of Teano and Duke of Sermoneta (1869–1935), it is hard not to think of the fictional career of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, as conjured up in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s marvellous novel, Il Gattopardo (1958, translated as The Leopard). Like Fabrizio, Caetani was a scholar aristocrat, but whereas Fabrizio devoted himself to astronomy, Caetani studied the early centuries of Islam. He taught himself Oriental languages and then set about compiling vast annals of the early history of Islam, constructed from lengthy translations selected from the earliest Arabic sources together with analytical commentaries. He was a positivistic disciple of Auguste Comte and had a fiercely critical approach towards those sources. Also in keeping with his positivism, he tended to minimize the role of the spiritual in history, preferring to stress economic and political factors as more important. Conflicts that were apparently religious were usually political or economic in origin. He believed that the increasing desiccation of the Arabian peninsula was a major underlying cause of the Islamic conquests, as the Arab tribes were obliged to leave their former territories and look for better pasturage elsewhere. According to Goldziher, ‘Caetani clearly demonstrates in various parts of his work on Islam, the Arabs’ drive to conquest sprang chiefly from material want and cupidity…’ They pushed out from the arid peninsula in a hunt for lusher territories to dominate. Although Caetani was not a Marxist, his writings gave them plenty to draw upon.
Whereas Becker had presented Islamic culture as one of the heirs of Hellenistic culture, Caetani took the opposite point of view, regarding the Islamic religion as the revolt of the East against European domination and the rejection of Greek civilization. His analytical chronicle, the Annali dell’Islam, was published in ten volumes in the years 1905–26. Although he had planned to take it up to 1517, the year of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, he never completed the full annals for the seventh century. He also worked on another vast enterprise, the Onomasticon Arabicum (an encyclopedia of Arabplace names), but this never got beyond the letter A.22
BROWNE AND LIBERTY
The anti-colonialist Caetani was nicknamed ‘the Turk’ for his fierce opposition to his own country’s occupation of Libya. There has been a marked tendency for Orientalists to be anti-imperialists, as their enthusiasm for Arabor Persian or Turkish culture often went hand in hand with a dislike of seeing those people defeated and dominated by the Italians, Russians, British or French. This was certainly the case with Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926).23 He first became emotionally involved in Near Eastern matters while still a schoolboy, because of his passionate support for the Turks in their war against the Russians (1877–8). Later in life, as an internationally renowned Cambridge professor, he campaigned for Persian freedom and democracy. The young Browne had wanted to enlist in the Turkish army, but the war with the Russians concluded while he was still struggling to teach himself the Turkish language. Instead, he went to read medicine at Cambridge. Then he took up Oriental languages as well and studied Arabic with the mesmerizingly brilliant Edward Palmer. Browne arranged tuition in Persian from a Hindu gentleman in 1880 and later studied with an eccentric Persian, who had invented his own religion and resided in Limehouse.
In 1884 Browne secured a first-class degree in the Indian Languages tripos (Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Hindustani). However, he was told by the Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, William Wright, that one really needed private means to pursue Oriental studies, as there were almost no jobs in the field: ‘And from the Government you must look for nothing, for it has long shown, and still continues to show, an increasing indisposition to offer the slightest encouragement to the study of Eastern languages.’ Browne, who later in his memoir A Year Amongst the Persians recorded Wright’s words, added, ‘Often I reflect in bitterness that England, though more directly interested in the East than any other country save Russia, offers less encouragement to her sons to engage in the study of Oriental languages than any other great European nation.’24 Having been so discouraged by Wright, Browne went to London in 1884 and, in accordance with his father’s wishes, carried on with medicine at St Bartholomew’s. Though work as a medical student was arduous and distressing, he found comfort in reading the Sufis, ‘whose mystical idealism, which had long since cast its spell over my mind, now supplied me with a powerful antidote against the pessimistic tendencies evoked by the daily contemplation of misery and pain… Never before or since have I realized so clearly the immortality, greatness, and the virtue of the spirit of man, or the misery of its earthly environment: it seemed to me like a prince in rags…’25
In 1887 Browne’s destiny changed. He was elected a fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, with some prospect that he might be asked to teach the Persian language. He thereupon resolved to go out to Persia in order to improve his mastery of the language. The shaping role of the Wanderjahre is a recurrent feature in the history of Orientalism. Many of Goldziher’s and Wright’s insights were first formulated as a result of their early travels in the East. Browne wrote a classic of travel literature that is also a chronicle of intellectual exploration. A Year Amongst the Persians details his travels through Persia in 1887–8 and his picaresque encounters with Persian noblemen, mystics, philosophers, Zoroastrian priests, magicians, ‘and social gatherings where wine and mu
sic, dance and song, beguiled away the soft spring days, or the moonlit nights’. Having read Gobineau, Browne had become particularly interested in the messianic Babi movement, but by the time he reached Persia, most of the Babis had deserted that movement and joined the breakaway Baha’i faith. The Baha’is were savagely persecuted by the Persian government and the Shi‘ite religious authorities. The courage of the Baha’is in withstanding persecution led Browne to compare them to the early Christians. While in Kerman, he received a telegram from Cambridge informing him that a lectureship in Persian had just been created and offering him the post. He thereupon returned to England.
A Year Amongst the Persians was published in 1893, and Browne never returned to the land he loved so much. Indeed he hardly ever left Cambridge, even for London. In Cambridge he became a celebrated academic personality – one of the sights of the place. Laurence Graffety-Smith, a student and future member of the Levant Consular Service, described him as follows: ‘Physically considered, he epitomized the processes of evolution: he was short and broad in the shoulder, with a stoop, and grotesquely long arms dangled in his shambling walk. His finely chiselled face was a radiance of intellect and of love for his fellow man.’ Graffety-Smith added that his lectures had the confusion of ‘a pack of hounds’ in full cry’.26 Reader Bullard, another student and future diplomat agreed: ‘As a teacher in the narrow sense he was a joke… but Browne had to be taken for what he was: a meteor, not a locomotive.’27 Browne was impatient with dull-witted students. He was also prodigiously garrulous and spoke at a torrential speed and hardly listened to anything he was told. However, his speech was always entertaining and he was famously convivial. Denison Ross, the future director of the School of Oriental Studies, recalled engaging in table-turning in Browne’s rooms in Pembroke and on another occasion taking Persian hashish there.28
Browne’s mastery of Persian, Arabic and Turkish seems to have been perfect and he was alleged to dream in Persian. However, Cambridge had no professorship of Persian, so in 1902 he became the Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic and lectured on Arabic, and in 1921 he published Arabian Medicine. But his chief publications were in Persian studies, especially the fundamental A Literary History of Persia (4 volumes, 1902–24). He was Britain’s first truly eminent Persianist since Thomas Hyde in the seventeenth century and Sir William Jones in the mid to late eighteenth century. Though Browne was a great expert on medieval Persian poetry, he was even more interested in contemporary Persia, in the Constitutional Movement, in the precariously free Persian press and in Persian resistance to the encroachments of Russian imperialism. According to another of his students who went on to have a distinguished diplomatic career, Sir Andrew Ryan, ‘the last of the dragomans’, Browne ‘valued living oriental languages, not merely because they were still spoken, but because they were spoken by people whose aspirations enlisted his warmest sympathies’.29 In the second volume of The Literary History of Persia, he had written: ‘Year by year almost, the number of independent Muslim states grows less and less, while such as remain – Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Morocco and a few others – are ever more overshadowed by the menace of European interference.’30
Browne chronicled Russian atrocities in Tabriz and elsewhere. Not only did he campaign vigorously against the Russians and the complaisant British Foreign Office, he also agitated in favour of the Boers and for Irish Home Rule and he denounced Anglo-Indian officialdom. As noted, Browne was a specialist in Persian who mostly published in that area. I have lingered over his career partly because he is so interesting, but also because Browne was a superb Arabist. It is not possible to be a first-rate Persianist without a good command of Arabic. As Ann Lambton has pointed out in her Persian Grammar: ‘There is a very large Arabic element in Persian. This element is an indispensable part of the spoken and written word.’31 It is not just a matter of the entry of Arabic loan words into the Persian language, but also of whole phrases and constructions. Moreover, and most important for our purposes, Browne was an important and influential teacher of Arabic. Most of the important British Arabists of the next generation, including Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (1868–1945), the future author of A Literary History of the Arabs, were taught by Browne.
After undergraduate studies in Cambridge, followed by a year with Browne, Nicholson had studied in Leiden and Strasbourg with de Goeje and Nöldeke. Nicholson did important work editing and translating Arabic and Persian texts, especially Sufi ones.32 Some of these had previously been translated by Hammer-Purgstall, but since the latter usually translated them into gibberish, Nicholson did valuable work here. His most important and accessible work was his Literary History of the Arabs (1907). This was intended as a companion volume to Browne’s Literary History of Persia. In this book Nicholson, a classicist to his fingertips, devoted less than three pages to literary developments in the Arabworld after 179 8and, as far as he was concerned, the main literary development in the modern world was the translation of European works into Arabic. The Arabs’ own literary achievements were all firmly in the past, which ‘affords an ample and splendid field of study’. He had read the classics at Cambridge and won the Porson Prize for verses in Greek and he only switched to Arabic and Persian for Part Two of the Cambridge exams. It is not surprising then that his history of Arabic literature is replete with comparisons and allusions to Greek and Roman authors. Pre-Islamic odes were compared to the Odyssey and the Iliad. Thus alMa‘arri is compared to Lucian and Ibn Khaldun to Gibbon. Mas‘udi is referred to as the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’ as well as their ‘Suetonius’. Abu Muslim’s advance west against the Umayyads is compared to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. The Battle of Badr, fought between the followers of Muhammad and the pagan Quraysh, was compared to that of Marathon, fought between the ancient Greeks and Persians. Laus duplex, the Roman rhetorical figure, appears in Arabic also. The Abbasid historians’ maligning of the Umayyads was compared by Nicholson to Tacitus’s misrepresentation of Tiberius. Nicholson took for granted that all of his readers would be familiar with this sort of stuff. He never travelled out to the Middle East. What would have been the point? Indeed, although he taught both classical Arabic and Persian, he was unable to speak either of these languages.
The other striking feature of A Literary History of the Arabs is its heavy debt to continental scholarship. As Nicholson put it in the introduction: ‘the reader will see for himself how much is derived from Von Kremer, Goldziher, Nöldeke, and Wellhausen, to mention only a few of the leading authorities’.33 Although Nicholson knew a huge amount about Arabic literature, he did not like it very much and he found Arabic poetry much more alien than Persian. He judged the Qur’an to be ‘obscure, tiresome, uninteresting: a farrago of long-winded narratives and prosaic exhortations’.34 He preferred Persian mystical poetry and translated an enormous amount of the verses of the remarkable thirteenth-century Sufi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, but even Rumi was described by him as ‘rambling, tedious and often obscure’. Nicholson’s Edwardian style of translation has not worn well. As Franklin D. Lewis notes, ‘Nicholson’s verse translations, which reflect a Victorian sensibility, were already in his own day rather out of touch with the revolution of literary modernism and today sound quite dated and sentimental.’35 Faced with the occasional obscenity in Rumi he translated it into a Latin that was modelled on the erotic Latin verses of Juvenal and Persius. However, for all his limitations, he was a learned, accurate, diligent scholar who did a huge amount to introduce the Western world to the classics of Arabic and Persian literature. His work on Sufism was particularly valuable as he was one of the first to present Muslim mystical experiences as valid rather than drug-induced hallucinations or disguised atheism. Although his protégé and successor as professor, A. J. Arberry, called him ‘the dervish’, there was nothing very wild or exotic about Nicholson. A round of golf was as much excitement as he ever encountered.
Arabic and Persian were taught as dead classical languages by Nicholson and his academic contemporaries. At first sight this
sort of approach was not useful for Britain’s proconsuls, diplomats and adventurers in the Middle East. But then consider that the proconsular mentality was formed by a deep familiarity with Greek and Latin. Lord Curzon, Sir Ronald Storrs, T. E. Lawrence and most of the rest of them were steeped in the Greek and Rome classics. Readings of Thucydides, Herodotus and Tacitus guided those who governed the British empire. Lord Cromer, the proconsul in Egypt, was obsessed with the Roman empire and its decline and fall. Sir Ronald Storrs used to read the Odyssey before breakfast. T. E. Lawrence read the Greek poets during his time as an archaeologist at Carcemish and later translated the Odyssey. Colonial administrators were much more likely to be familiar with the campaigns of Caesar than those of Muhammad and the Quraysh.
THE BELATED REVIVAL OF OXFORD ORIENTALISM
The appointment of William Robertson Smith to the Thomas Adams Professorship in 1870 had established a great intellectual tradition in Arabic studies at Cambridge that would include Edward Palmer and then the twentieth-century professors, Browne, Nicholson, A. J. Arberry and Malcolm Lyons. But the first intellectually commanding figure to hold the Laudian Chair of Arabic in Oxford since the seventeenth century, Margoliouth, was appointed only in 1889.36 David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940), the son of a Jewish rabbi who had converted to Christianity, was born in Bethnal Green. He won a scholarship to Winchester and later read classics at Oxford and was awarded a first. Although he was to make a name for himself as an Arabist, he was first a classicist and he taught Latin and Greek to, among others, the future Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray and the historian H. A. L. Fisher. Murray thought that Margoliouth lectured on Pindar not because he particularly liked the Greek poet’s works, but because they raised difficult textual problems. Margoliouth was an eccentric genius in several languages, including Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. He was also striking in appearance. An Italian maid exclaimed on seeing him, ‘Questo bel animale feroce!’
