For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  42. On Macaulay’s contempt for Indian culture, see David Kopf, ‘The Historiography of British Orientalism, 1772–1992’, in Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine (eds), Objects of Enquiry. The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746–1794) (New York, 1995), pp. 146–9; Kopf, British Orientalism, p. 244; Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 194.

  43. Macaulay quoted in Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 53.

  44. George Cowell, Life and Letters of Edward Byles Cowell (London, 1904), p. 83; cf. Marzieh Gail, Persia and the Victorians (London, 1951), pp. 35–7, 133–6.

  45. Cowell, Life and Letters; ODNB, s.v.

  46. Obituary in The Times, 12 July 1905; Charles Lyall’s obituary of Muir in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1905), pp. 875–9; ODNB, s.v.; D. M. Dunlop, ‘Some Remarks on Weil’s History of the Caliphs’, in Historians of the Middle East, edited by Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London, 1962), pp. 327–9; Jabal Muhammad Buaben, Image of the Prophet Muhammad in the West: A Study of Muir, Margoliouth and Watt (Leicester, 1996), pp. 21–47.

  47. Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt, edited by Jason Thompson (Cairo, 2000), p. 3. For the life and works of Lane, see Jason Thompson’s introduction to the Description (pp. i–xxxii) and Thompson, ‘Edward William Lane’s “Description of Egypt”’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 28 (1996), pp. 545–83. See also Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 168–70; A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London, 1960), pp. 87–121; Leila 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); John Rodenbeck, ‘Edward Said and Edward William Lane’, in Paul and Janet Starkey (eds), Travellers in Egypt (London, 1998), pp. 233–43; Geoffrey Roper, ‘Texts from Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Role of E. W. Lane’, in Starkey and Starkey (eds), Travellers in Egypt, pp. 244–54.

  48. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 23–5; Marzolph and Van Leeuwen, Encyclopedia of the Arabian Nights, vol. 2, pp. 618–20.

  49. J. Heyworth-Dunne, ‘Printing and translations under Muhammad ‘Ali of Egypt: the foundation of modern Arabic’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1940), pp. 325–49; Peter Colvin, ‘Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Great Exhibition of 1851and the School of Oriental and African Studies’, Library Culture, 33 (1998), pp. 249–59.

  50. E. W. Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon, Derived from the Best and Most Copious Eastern Sources (London, 1863), reprinted in 2 vols (Cambridge, 1984); cf. Robert Irwin, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1985, p. 474.

  51. On the life and works of Renan, see J. M. Robertson, Ernest Renan (London, 1924); Jean Pommier, La Pensée religieuse de Renan (Paris, 1925); David C. J. Lee, Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith (London, 1966); Charles Chauvin, Renan (Paris, 2000); Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance passim. On Renan’s modest achievements as an Arabist, see Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Paris, 1881), p. 288; cf. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 201–2.

  52. On Renan’s misapprehensions with respect to Averroes, see Paul Otto Kristeller, ‘Petrarch’s “Averroists”: A Note on the History of Averroism in Venice, Padua and Bologna’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 14 (1952), pp. 59–65; Jean-Paul Charnay, ‘Le dernier surgeon de l’averroïsme en Occident: Averroès et l’Averroïsme de Renan’, in J. Jolivet (ed.), Multiple Averroès (Paris, 1978), pp. 333–48.

  53. The Goncourts are quoted in Lee, Ernest Renan, p. 3.

  54. Ernest Renan, ‘Mahomet and the Origins of Islam’ in Studies of Religious History and Criticism, translated by O. B. Fotheringham (New York, 1864), p. 247.

  55. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (London, 1962), pp. 110–12, 120–23, 135; Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London, 1983), pp. 279–81; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 78–83.

  56. Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘The Pilgrim from Pest: Goldziher’s Study Tour to the Near East (1873–4)’, in Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Mediaeval and Modern Islam (London, 1993), pp. 143–5; Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: From Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam’, in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam, pp. 137–80; cf. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 121.

  57. Quoted in Chauvin, Renan, p. 24; Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (London, 1962), p. 170. See also Robertson, Ernest Renan, p. 23.

  58. On the life and works of Gobineau, see, above all, Jean Gaulmier’s introduction to volume 2 of the Pléiade edition of Gobineau’s works (Paris, 1983). See also Robert Dreyfus, La Vie et prophéties du comte de Gobineau (Paris, 1909), pp. ix–lx; Maurice Lange, Le Comte Arthur de Gobineau. Etude biographique et critique (Strasbourg, 1924); Pierre Louis Rey, L’Univers romanesque de Gobineau (Paris, 1981); Gail, Persia and the Victorians, pp. 56–8; Michael D. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology: The social and political thought of Count Gobineau (London, 1970). Ahmad Gunny, ‘Gobineau’s Perspective on the World of Islam’, International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, 9 (1992), pp. 17–30; Ahmad Gunny, Perceptions of Islam in European Writings (Markfield, Leicestershire, 2004), pp. 262–77; J. Calmard, ‘Gobineau’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater (London, 1985–), vol. 11, pp. 20–24.

  59. Gobineau’s key works on Persia and Central Asia are Trois ans en Asie (Paris, 1859), Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865) and Histoire des Perses, 2 vols (Paris, 1869). See also Robert Irwin, ‘Gobineau Versus the Orientalists’, forthcoming in Adel Adamova, Bert Fragner and Michael Rogers (eds), The Study of Persian Culture in the West (London, 2006).

  60. Gobineau’s main works on cuneiform are Lectures des textes cunéiformes and Traité des écritures cunéiformes, 2 vols (Paris, 1864). See also Irwin, ‘Gobineau Versus the Orientalists’.

  61. For different aspects of nineteenth-century racism, see Léon Poliakov, Le Mythe aryen: Essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes (Paris, 1971); Olender, The Languages of Paradise; Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

  62. On the life and works of Dozy, see Dugat, Histoire des orientalistes, vol. 2, pp. 44–65; Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 181–5; M. J. de Goeje, Biographie de Reinhardt Dozy, translated by V. Chauvin (Leiden, 1883); J. Brugman and F. Schröder, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1979), pp. 36–9; J. Brugman, ‘Dozy. A Scholarly Life According to Plan’, in Willem Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden Oriental Connections, 1850–1940 (Leiden, 1989), pp. 62–81.

  63. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1960), p. 14.

  64. Ibid., p. 74.

  65. Richard Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Now Entitled the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols (Benares and Stoke Newington, London, 1885), vol.1, p. xxiii; cf. Gail, Persia and the Victorians, pp. 36–7.

  66. On Burton’s early attempts to learn Arabic, see Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York, 1967), pp. 43–4; Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York, 1990), pp. 21–2.

  67. John Sparrow, Mark Pattison and the Idea of University Reform (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 110–12.

  68. On the life and works of William Wright, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 206–9; ODNB, s.v.

  69. William Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1874), p. vi.

  70. On the life and works of Palmer, see Walter Besant, The Life and Achievements of Edward Henry Palmer (London, 1883); A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London, 1960), pp. 122–59; ODNB, s.v.

  71. On the life and works of Roberts
on Smith, see John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London, 1912); Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 210–11; Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, pp. 275–80; T. O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion (Chicago, 1974); ODNB, s.v.

  72. On Wellhausen, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 223–6; R. C. Ostle, foreword to Julius Wellhausen, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam, edited by R. C. Ostle (Amsterdam, 1975), pp. ix–xi (‘Introduction’); G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam; The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661–750 (Beckenham, Kent, 1986), pp. 123–5; Josef Van Ess, ‘From Wellhausen to Becker: The Emergence of Kulturgeschichte in Islamic Studies’, in Malcolm Kerr (ed.), Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 42–4; Robert Morgan and John Barton, Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 1988), pp. 76–88, 92–7, 334; Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, pp. 2, 257–74.

  73. Albert Hourani, Europe and the Middle East (London, 1980), p. 14.

  74. Wellhausen cited by Kurt Rudolph, ‘Wellhausen as an Arabist’, Semeia, 23 (1983), pp. 111–12.

  75. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 176–9.

  76. Ibid., pp. 187–9.

  7 A House Divided Against Itself

  1. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, edited by H. A R. Gibb, E. LéviProvençal and J. Schacht, 11 vols (Leiden, 1960–2002).

  2. R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, 2nd edn (London, 1991), p. 4.

  3. Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1955), pp. 211–16; J. Brugman and F. Schröder, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1979), pp. 39–41.

  4. Arminius Vámbéry, ‘The Future of Continental Turkey’, The Nineteenth Century and After (March 1901), pp. 361–2 (cited in Martin Kramer, ‘Introduction’ in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv, 1999), p. 9).

  5. On Vámbéry generally, see L. Adler and R. Dalby, The Dervish of Windsor Castle (London, 1979). On the antagonism between Vámbéry and Goldziher, see Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘The Dervish’s Disciple: On the Personality and Intellectual Milieu of the Young Ignaz Goldziher’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990), pp. 225–66.

  6. Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: From Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam’, in Kramer, The Jewish Discovery, p. 147.

  7. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 187–9.

  8. On the life and works of Goldziher, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 226–31; Jean-Jacques Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident (Paris, 1963), pp. 11–18, 71–5, 97–104, 111–15, 125–7, 239–45, 265–70, 291–2, 304–6; Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher, and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait (Detroit, 1987); Conrad, ‘The Dervish’s Disciple’; Conrad, ‘The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990), pp. 105–26 (this article and the foregoing one by Conrad make numerous connections to Patai’s work on Goldziher’s Oriental Diary); Conrad, ‘The Pilgrim from Pest: Goldziher’s Study Tour to the Near East (1873–1874)’, in Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Mediaeval and Modern Islam (London, 1993), pp. 110–59; Conrad, ‘Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan’, in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery, pp. 137–80; Robert Simon, Ignaz Goldziher. His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in His Works and Correspondence (Leiden, 1986); Shalom Goldman, ‘Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), Nestor of Islamic Studies in the West’, Al-‘Usur al-Wusta, 10 (1998), pp. 49–51.

  9. Conrad, ‘The Dervish’s Disciple’, p. 6.

  10. Albert Hourani interviewed in Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (ed.), Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians (Reading, 1994), p. 42.

  11. Louis Massignon, ‘Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921)’, in Opera Minora, 3 vols (Beirut, 1963), pp. 391–9.

  12. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Pro-Islamic Jews’ in Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East, 2nd edn (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 1993), p. 144.

  13. I. Y. Kratchkowsky, Among Arabic Manuscripts: Memories of Libraries and Men, translated by Tatiana Minorsky (Leiden, 1953), p. 134; cf. p. 124.

  14. Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident, p. 244.

  15. Nöldeke quoted in Simon, Ignaz Goldziher, p. 30. For his life and work more generally, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 217–20; Jaroslav Stetkevych, ‘Arabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics’, edited by Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Studies: A Tradition and its Problems (Malibu, 1980), pp. 111, 113–14; Ulrich Haarmann, ‘L’Orientalisme allemand’, MARS. Le Monde Arabe dans la Recherché Scientifique, 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 75–6.

  16. Nöldecke quoted in Baber Johansen, ‘Politics, Paradigms and the Progress of Oriental Studies. The German Oriental Society (Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft) 1845–1989’, MARS. Le Monde Arabe dans la Recherche Scientifique, 4 (Winter, 1994), p. 82.

  17. Becker quoted in Albert Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’ in Hourani, Europe and the Middle East (London, 1980), p. 60. On the career of Becker, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 318–19; Haarmann, ‘L’Orientalisme allemand’, pp. 70–73; Josef van Ess, ‘The Emergence of Kulturgeschichte in Islamic Studies’, in Kerr (ed.), Islamic Studies, pp. 27–51; Johansen, ‘Politics, Paradigms and the Progress of Oriental Studies’, pp. 84–6; Johansen, ‘Politics and Scholarship: The Development of Islamic Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany’, in Tareq Y. Ismael (ed.), Middle East Studies: International Perspectives on the State of the Art (New York, 1990), pp. 84–6, 88–9.

  18. On Snouck Hurgronje, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 231–3; Brugman and Schröder, Arabic Studies, pp. 44–7; Brugman, ‘Snouck Hurgronje’s Study of Islamic Law’, in Willem Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden Oriental Connections, 1850–1940 (Leiden, 1989), pp. 82–93.

  19. Kurd ‘Ali, Memoirs of Kurd ‘Ali: A Selection, translated by Khalil Totah (Washington, 1954), p. 70.

  20. On the life and works of Lammens, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 292–4; K. S. Salibi, ‘Islam and Syria in the Writings of Henri Lammens’, in Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (eds), Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), pp. 330–42.

  21. Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Oxford, 1987), p. 3.

  22. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 297–99; Fück, ‘Islam as a Historical Problem’, in Lewis and Holt (eds), Historians of the Middle East, pp. 310–11; Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’, p. 59; Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, pp. 71–2. Kurd ‘Ali wrote admiringly of him in his Memoirs, pp. 68–9.

  23. On the life and works of Browne, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 280–81; Marzieh Gail, Persia and the Victorians (London, 1951), pp. 97–104; Edward Denison Ross, ‘A Memoir’, a preface to Edward Granville Browne, A Year Among the Persians, 3rd edn (London, 1950), pp. vii–xxii; A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London, 1960), pp. 160–96; C. Edmund Bosworth, ‘E. G. Browne and His A Year Among the Persians’, Iran, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 33 (1995), pp. 115–22; Bosworth, ‘Edward Granville Browne’, in Bosworth (ed.), A Century of British Orientalists 1902–2001 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 74–86. A full-length biography by John Gurney is in progress.

  24. Browne, A Year Among the Persians, pp. 3–4.

  25. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

  26. Laurence Graffety-Smith, Bright Levant (London, 1970), pp. 6–7.

  27. Reader Bullard, The Camels Must Go (London, 1961), pp. 47–8.

  28. Edward Denison Ross, Both Ends of the Candle (London, 1943), p. 55.

  29. Andrew Ryan, The Last of the Dragomans (London, 1951), p. 23.

  30. Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 2, From Firdawsí to Sa‘dí (London, 1906), p. x.

  31. A. K. S. Lambton, Persian Grammar, revised edn (Cambridge, 1974), p. 181.


  32. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 281–3; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB], edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), s.v.; Arberry, Oriental Essays, pp. 198–232; Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Oxford, 2000), passim, but especially pp. 531–3, 578–9.

  33. R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (London, 1907), p. x.

  34. Ibid., p. 161.

  35. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, p. 578.

  36. On the life and works of Margoliouth, see the obituary in The Times, 23 March 1940, p. 8; obituary by Arthur Jeffrey in Muslim World, 30 (1940), pp. 295–8; obituary by Gilbert Murray in Proceedings of the British Academy, 26 (1940), pp. 389–97; ODNB, s.v.; Jabal Muhammad Buaben, Image of the Prophet in the West: A Study of Muir, Margoliouth and Watt (Leicester, 1996), pp. 49–128; Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 273–8.

  37. Gertrude Bell, The Letters of Gertrude Bell, 2 vols (London, 1927), vol. 2, p. 453; H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London, 1978), p. 205.

  38. Hamilton Gibb in his obituary of Margoliouth in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1940), p. 393.

  39. Lyall quoted by R. A. Nicholson in his obituary of Lyall in Proceedings of the British Academy, 9 (1919–20), p. 495.

  40. On the life and works of Lyall, see the anonymous obituary in Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2 (1921), pp. 175–6; Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 279–80; obituary by Nicholson in Proceedings of the British Academy, 9 (1919–20), pp. 492–6; ODNB, s.v.

  41. On the life and works of Stanley Lane-Poole, ODNB, s.v.; M. Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism (Dublin, 1944), pp. 44–6.

  42. On Salisbury, see Benjamin R. Foster, ‘Edward R. Foster: America’s First Arabist’, Al-‘Usur al-Wusta, 9 (1997), pp. 15–17.

  43. On Torrey, see Benjamin R. Foster, ‘Charles Cutler Torrey (1863–1956), Nobody’s Pet Chicken: Theodor Noeldeke and Charles Cutler Torrey’, Al-‘Usur al-Wusta, 11 (1999), pp. 12–15.