For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Though there were certainly fewer individuals who were fluent in Greek, still it was not unknown for scholars to converse in that language (and of course Greek was esteemed as an essential tool for New Testament studies). Besides Latin, Hebrew was also more or less essential for Orientalists because most printers lacked an Arabic font so that scholars who wanted to publish in the field were often reduced to transliterating Arabic words into Hebrew, so that the Arabic Aliph became a Hebrew Aleph, the Arabic Ba a Hebrew Beth, and so forth.

  STUDY AS DEVOTION

  In modern times, Arabic studies have flourished (in so far as they have flourished at all) in university departments. But seventeenth-century universities gave only limited remuneration and support to those who studied Oriental subjects. Therefore the role of the individual patron was much more important. Happily the great and the good took their responsibilities seriously. Such grand and wealthy figures as Archbishop William Laud, Sir Thomas Bodley, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and Sir Henry Savile may have known only a little Arabic, or in some cases none at all, but Arabic studies in the seventeenth century could not have survived and prospered without their benevolent interest. Since few books published on the Middle East could hope to recoup their costs in sales to the public, a subvention from a patron was usually a necessity. As the historian David C. Douglas has written of the slightly later period: ‘It is very easy to ridicule the circumstances that attended the private patronage of letters in the early years of the eighteenth century, and the fulsome compliments of contemporary dedications have nourished the self-satisfaction of an age which prefers the flattery of a large public to the delectation of a patron. But hasty writing designed to extract money as rapidly as possible from the largest number of pockets is not necessarily a better means of producing good books than the effort to please the exigent taste of a cultured and wealthy class.’2 As we shall see, in many cases the patron was actually the initiator of a scholarly project and not just a person to whom application might be made for funding. Laud, Andrewes and others had a clear vision of the direction that they wished scholarship to take.

  Most of the patrons who had the resources and interest to sponsor Orientalist research were churchmen. Most of those who actually did the research were similarly churchmen. Salvation – the salvation of one’s own soul and the salvation of others – was the central issue of the age. Scholars came to Arabic only after studying the Bible and probably Hebrew and Syriac. The study of all three Semitic languages was effectively regarded as part of theology. Very few people, if any, studied Islam for its own sake. Instead, polemical Christians elaborated the outlines of a life of Muhammad and of the rise of Islam that were often intended to be used in intraconfessional polemic. For example, Catholic scholars made use of an exposition of the ‘horrible heresies and perversions’ of Islam in order to attack what they claimed were essentially similar Protestant deviations from the true faith. Was not Protestant denial of the efficacy of intercession by saints and the Protestant adherence to predestination essentially the same as the Muslim position on those matters? The Protestants, for their part, attacked the Pope as a latterday Muhammad and found all sorts of sinister similarities between Islam and Roman Catholicism. The real nature of Islam was not an issue. Protestant scholars also energetically researched the Arabic literature of the Eastern Christian Churches in order to discover in it arguments and precedents to set against such things as the Bishop of Rome’s claim to primacy or the Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory. As the Arabist William Bedwell put it: ‘The writings of the [Christian] Arabs say nothing about purgatory, about the impious sacrifice of the mass, about the primacy of Peter and his apostles, about meritorious justification, and there is not a word about those other figments of the imagination.’3 Protestants also had to fight polemical battles on a second front, against other sectarians. The Socinian sect, which taught that Jesus was not God but only a prophet of God, was obviously vulnerable to the accusation that its doctrine was a form of crypto-Islam. Unitarians, who also rejected the divinity of Christ, could be tarred with the same brush. Followers of Deism, or ‘natural religion’, who denied the supernatural and Christian miracles, were often polemically portrayed as Islam’s fellow travellers.

  As has been indicated in the previous chapter, missions to the East tended to concentrate on trying to win over Oriental Christians rather than to convert Muslims. Incidentally, a leading theme of the histories of the rise of Islam written at this time was that it was a punishment meted out by God to the Eastern Christians for their divisions and decadence. The medieval legend of the sinister Nestorian monk who set Muhammad on the heresiarch’s path remained popular in the early modern period. A few, but only a few, Orientalists thought that it might be possible to win converts among the Muslims. As far as missionaries were concerned what was at stake in winning the argument was the rescue of the souls of the benighted from the flames of Hell. The Muslims, of course, regarded Christian missions in a much less benign light. From the seventeenth-century Christian perspective, Muslims were inferior, not because of their race or culture, but because they professed a faith that was not true and thereby they faced damnation. Even so, there were many who thought it dangerous to engage in debate with the Muslims at all, for there were definite risks inherent in studying Muslim doctrine. In quite a few countries, including England under Cromwell, the printing of the Qur’an continued to be banned.4

  THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH ORIENTALISM

  The seventeenth century, and in particular the decades prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, was the heyday of Arabic and Islamic studies in England. In this period England (together with Holland) achieved a pre-eminence in Islamic studies that it would not regain until the second half of the twentieth century. However, the life and writings of William Bedwell (1563–1632) got English Orientalism off to an unpromising start. Bedwell was the first Englishman to study Arabic since the Middle Ages. Sadly, although he was enthusiastic, he does not seem to have been particularly bright and Erpenius, who studied with him, thought that he was lazy. He started out as rector of St Ethelburga in Bishopsgate. From 1604 onwards he was employed on the translation of the Bible – the King James Version – under the supervision of Lancelot Andrewes, who was then Bishop of Ely. Andrewes paid for Bedwell to go over to Leiden to study Arabic and then found him preferment as a vicar of Tottenham High Cross. For the rest of his life Bedwell would pursue the study of Arabic. (His other lifelong object of study was the measuring techniques of craftsmen.) He is perhaps best known as the author of Mahomet Unmasked. Or a Discoverie of the manifold Forgeries, Falsehoods, and Impieties of the Blasphemous Seducer Mahomet. With a demonstration of the Insufficiencie of his Law, contained in the cursed Alcoran. Written long since in Arabicke and now done into English … as the first half of the title runs, yet it cannot be said that he is well known.

  Bedwell knew little about Arabs and he hated Islam. He saw it as his Christian task to produce an edition of various of the Epistles in Arabic and Latin and he was one of those clergymen who hoped to find support for the status and doctrines of the Church of England in the Arabic writings of Eastern Christian Churches. He also had grander plans and he worked on a dictionary that was going to be vaster than that of the Dutchman Raphelengius, but he never finished it. (It was arranged according to the Hebrew alphabetic order, which would probably have suited a potential readership composed almost entirely of learned clergymen.) He made not particularly convincing efforts to persuade his limited readership that knowledge of Arabic was actually useful, as, he claimed, it was the language of diplomacy from the Fortunate Islands to the China Seas. However, though in this period diplomatic contacts with Morocco were commonly conducted in Arabic, elsewhere in the Middle East, Persian or Turkish was the more common language of diplomacy. Bedwell briefly taught Pococke and Erpenius, but, as we shall see, both these scholars were to surpass him. Bedwell achieved little, but he effectively worked alone, with only sporadic conta
cts with like-minded scholars, most of whom were on the Continent. Although Alastair Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of the man, has written that Bedwell’s life ‘is not just the story of failure, of frustrated plans and unprinted books’, nevertheless that is the impression that persists.5 The English public was not particularly interested in Arabic studies and Bedwell only made as much progress as he did because of the support and encouragement of his patron, Lancelot Andrewes, who seems to have employed him to pursue the researches that he himself did not have time to undertake in detail. It is to Andrewes that we now turn.

  Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), successively Bishop of Ely, Chichester and Winchester, was one of the intellectual stars of the age. Described as ‘an angel in the pulpit’, he was particularly famous for the stylish prose of his sermons, whose meditations were cast in metaphysical mode, relying as they did on erudite speculation, incongruity and far-fetched paradoxes. His sermons drew heavily on his Latin and Greek learning and used textual criticism for homiletic purposes. According to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, King James I, who favoured the bishop because of his preaching, asked a Scottish lord what he thought of the sermons. The lord replied that the bishop ‘was learned, but he did play with his text as a Jack-an-apes does, who takes up a thing and tosses and playes with it, and then takes up another, and plays a little with it. Here’s a pretty thing, and there’s a pretty thing.’ However, according to a more recent critic, Andrewes’s sermons ‘rank with the finest prose of their time’. That critic was the poet T. S. Eliot, who recycled some of Andrewes’s eloquent phrase-making in both the Four Quartets and Journey of the Magi (and in the seventeenth century Andrewes’s sermons had already provided the poet John Donne with literary inspiration).6

  Andrewes believed that the Christian faith could be revived through learning. He pursued his scholarly researches in the morning and ‘he was afraid he was no true scholar who came to see him before noon’. His hours of scholarship were invariably preceded by prayer and sometimes he prayed in Hebrew. His early education had been chiefly in the classics and a Jesuit critic accused him of having acquired his bishopric through reading Terence and Plautus. Andrewes, who was one of the divines who presided over the Authorized Version of the Bible, made himself a master of patristic theology and, allegedly, of fifteen languages. According to Thomas Fuller, author of The History of the Worthies of England, he could ‘almost have served as an interpreter-general at the confusion of tongues’ (that is, after the fall of the Tower of Babel). He had an international reputation and kept up an international correspondence. He was a friend of the scholars Casaubon and Erpenius and it was perhaps under their influence that he acquired a smattering of Arabic. According to Bedwell, Andrewes began work on a dictionary of Arabic but nothing came of it. He owned one of the only two copies of Raphelengius’s Arabic Lexicon in England.7 At one stage, he tried to get the great Dutch Orientalist Erpenius to come to England and, having failed, he seems to have tried to make Bedwell into the English equivalent of Erpenius.

  ARABIC COMES TO OXFORD

  James I was arguably the only learned king ever to sit on England’s throne, apart from Alfred, and it was natural that learned clerics were preferred by him. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 until his beheading in 1645, was pre-eminent among those learned clerics. He had been a pupil of Andrewes and was strongly influenced by his style of Christian scholarship, as well as his commitment to Oriental learning. Laud collected Oriental manuscripts, which were eventually acquired by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.8 In 1630 Laud, who at that time was still Bishop of London, had become Chancellor of Oxford University and, horrified by the somnolent complacency of the place (nothing changes, some would say), he decided to try to raise its scholarship to continental standards. When the seventeenth century opened, Oxford enjoyed an international reputation as a centre for intellectual torpor. Laud was determined to make the place a centre for international learning. The presence of a first-class library in Oxford was one of the necessary preconditions for this intellectual renewal and the formation of the Bodleian Library took place in this century under the patronage of Sir Thomas Bodley, John Selden and Laud himself. Laud also attached great importance to the teaching of Oriental languages. A Hebrew professorship had existed at Oxford from the 1530s. Laud believed that close study of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament would provide vital support for the Church of England in its doctrinal struggle with the Roman Catholics. It already served as a cornerstone for biblical criticism. Arabic was of some use in elucidating some points in Hebrew vocabulary and grammar (though it was really much less useful than partisans for the Arabic language claimed).

  There had already been some abortive attempts to establish the teaching of Arabic at Oxford on a regular basis. In 1610 Abudacnus had arrived in Oxford. ‘Abudacnus’ was a Latinate rendering of the latter part of the name of Yusuf ibn Abu Dhaqan. ‘Joseph, Father of the Beard’, therefore also known as Joseph Barbatus, was a Coptic Christian from Egypt who had travelled around Europe giving lessons in Arabic – to Erpenius among others. Although Abudacnus stayed in Oxford until 1613, he does not seem to have been an inspiring teacher and his sojourn had little lasting impact. One problem was that he spoke the Egyptian colloquial form of the language and could not read classical Arabic properly, whereas those European scholars he had contact with were familiar only with classical Arabic. (Western scholars had little or no sense of the evolution of the Arabic language and its spawning of various colloquial forms.) In 1613 Abudacnus crossed back over to the Continent and resumed the life of a peripatetic scholar manqué.9

  Matthias Pasor (1599–1658), who arrived in Oxford over a decade later, was a more substantial scholar. A former teacher of mathematics and theology at Heidelberg and a refugee from the Thirty Years War, Pasor had arrived in Oxford in 1624, having previously and briefly studied Arabic at Leiden. He taught (though preached might be the better word) that through Arabic one could acquire a better understanding of the Scriptures and, based on that better understanding, the manifold errors of Catholicism could be more easily confuted. Pasor’s Oratio pro linguae Arabicae professione, a speech he delivered in 1626, drew on Erpenius’s earlier oration in Leiden (see below) and Pasor’s speech was in turn to be extensively plagiarized and was plundered by later professors of Arabic as a source for their inaugural lectures. However, Pasor taught Arabic only for a year before moving on to Hebrew, Syriac and Aramaic. Moreover, his studies in Arabic had been hasty rather than profound. Arabic was one subject among many that had briefly engaged his interest.10

  The teachings of Abudacnus and Pasor had provided a fitful inspiration for those at Oxford who had considered studying Arabic. In the early seventeenth century, a real or pretended knowledge of Arabic became a blazon of erudition (as Mordechai Feingold has put it).11 There was a growing belief in the 1620s and 1630s that scientific information of value to astronomers, geographers and mathematicians lay buried in as yet unread Arabic manuscripts. The wealthy and flamboyant Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622), took the lead in promoting this sort of research. Like so many of the leading patrons of Arabic studies, he was himself a classicist. Savile entertained vainglorious dreams of rivalling Europe’s most learned scholar, the mighty Scaliger. Savile translated Tacitus’s history and edited St John Chrysostom. He was also an expert on the text of the Authorized Version of the Bible and on the history of medieval English monasteries and he collected manuscripts. Moreover his classical and antiquarian studies ran in tandem with mathematical and scientific interests. He worked hard but fruitlessly at attempts to square the circle (an intellectual activity that, like the compiling of polyglot Bibles or world chronologies, subsequently went out of fashion). He studied Ptolemy’s treatise on astronomy, the Almagest, and in 1619 he founded the Savilian Chairs of Geometry and Astronomy.12

  In 1643 John Greaves became the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. Greaves (1602–52), a fellow of Merton, was a mathematicia
n and, like the man who endowed his chair, he was convinced that there was still a great deal of worthwhile scientific material to be found in classical and Oriental manuscripts. He was particularly interested in Arabic and Persian writers on astronomy and in 1638–9, encouraged by Laud, Greaves (who at that time was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London) travelled to Italy, Istanbul and Egypt on a hunt for scientific manuscripts. In Istanbul, he suborned an Ottoman soldier to steal a beautiful copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest from the Sultan’s library and in Egypt he made careful measurements of the Great Pyramid. Back in England in 1646 Greaves published Pyramidagraphica or a Discourse on the Pyramids of Egypt. His main interest was in metrology – the units of measurement used by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and others – as well as the measurement of the size of the earth. In 1648 he was disgraced as a Royalist and lost his professorship. (It is curious how closely an interest in Arabic was associated in the seventeenth century with Royalist sympathies.) In enforced retirement he published a number of treatises, including the noteworthy Of the Manner of Hatching Eggs at Cairo (a remarkably early study of battery farming). In 1649 he published Elementa Linguae Persicae, a Persian grammar. His interest in Persian was unusual as Persian was even more of a Cinderella subject than Arabic. Above all, Greaves worked on the Zij, astronomical tables compiled in Persian at the behest of Ulugh Beg, the Timurid ruler of Transoxiana and Khurasan in the fifteenth century. Greaves also studied the fourteenth-century Arab Syrian prince Abu al-Fida’s Geography (but he was dismayed by the numerous errors in that text, including getting the Red Sea quite wrong). Despite Greaves’s hopes for the future of this kind of research, he was one of the last scholars to try to extract useful scientific data from medieval Arabic and Persian manuscripts. Eventually Greaves himself concluded that there was not really any useful geographic information in Abu al-Fida’s work. Greaves, who was keen on getting things printed in Arabic, had a private income, which was just as well, as setting texts up in an Arabic typeface was an expensive pastime.13