by Robert Irwin
Finally, Dozy’s early work as a research student on the medieval Arabic terminology of costume bore fruit in a wider-ranging work, the Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (2 volumes, 1881). His study of the vocabulary of costume as well as his reading of Quatremère and then of the Spanish Arabic sources had made him aware of the vast number of words that had been circulating in the Arabic-speaking world without being admitted into the famous dictionaries of classical Arabic. As we have seen, Lane had relied on those dictionaries. The other standard dictionary that circulated in the nineteenth century was Georg Wilhelm Freytag’s Lexicon Arabico–Latinum (1830–37), but this was not much more than a revamping of Golius’s seventeenth-century compilation that had in turn been based on the great classical Arabic dictionaries. Dozy’s dictionary was based on words found in texts rather than in other dictionaries, and in many cases he had to guess their meaning from context. His dictionary was the product of wide and discriminating reading and it is regularly consulted by scholars to this day.
A BELATED REVIVAL OF ORIENTAL STUDIES IN BRITAIN
For much of the century Oriental studies were even more stagnant in Britain than they had been in Holland. Dozy was not impressed by Oxford and Cambridge and he judged that these places were held back by ecclesiastical shackles. It is not possible to understand what was happening in British universities in this period without coming to terms with the intense religiosity of the age. G. M. Young, the superbly eloquent historian of Victorian Britain, characterized that period as ‘an age of flashing eyes and curling lips, more easily touched, more easily shocked, more ready to spurn, to flaunt, to admire and, above all, to preach’.63 Intellectual life in Britain throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by theological controversies. Most of the new critical techniques that were now being applied to the study of the Bible had been pioneered by German scholars. Young, having remarked on the challenge posed by the researches of Sir Charles Lyell and other geologists to the traditional chronology laid down by the Bible, went on to observe that a ‘far more serious onslaught was preparing… English divinity was not equipped to meet – for its comfort, it was hardly capable of understanding – the new critical methods of the Germans: it is a singular fact that England could not, before Lightfoot, show one scholar in the field of Biblical learning able and willing to match the scholars of Germany… The flock was left undefended against the ravages of David Strauss.’64 David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (2 volumes, 1835–6) daringly suggested that the miraculous and supernatural events associated with Jesus had been foisted on to his life prior to the composition of the Gospels. The Gospels were then, at least in part, the records of myths. In 1846 Marian Evans (better known as the novelist George Eliot) published a widely read English translation of Strauss’s work. If the life of the Christian Son of God was to be treated in this manner, it was hardly likely that in the long run Muhammad’s biography would escape similar treatment.
In the short term, however, there was little interest in Britain in doing serious research into Islam and the Arabic language. Richard Burton, in his famous (or notorious) translation of The Arabian Nights (1885–8), had pointed out that Britain now ruled over the greatest empire of Muslims ever seen and he thought that this ought to have led to a much greater interest in Muslim languages and cultures.65 This indeed was what might have been expected. Yet Major C. M. Watson, a member of the Imperial Institute, put the paradox plainly in a letter to Sir Frederick Abel in 1887: ‘Although England has greater interests in the East than any other European country, yet for some unexplained reason, she is the most behindhand in encouraging the study of modern oriental languages.’ Like Gibbon, Burton had wanted to study Arabic at Oxford but had been unable to find anyone who was prepared to teach him. When he went up in 1840, it was to study Greek and Latin, but, since this was boring, he set to teaching himself from Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica (1613). The then Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford refused to teach individual students, claiming that he was only paid to teach classes and, since he discouraged those individual students who might have formed such classes, he never had to do any teaching. Burton’s efforts to teach himself were seriously impeded by his failure to realize that Arabic was written from right to left and it was only when he encountered de Sacy’s distinguished Spanish student Pascual de Gayangos in Oxford that this fundamental misapprehension was corrected.66 Later in life, Burton acquired a reputation as a brilliant linguist that seems to have been somewhat inflated.
Like many of his lively-minded contemporaries, Burton hated and despised Oxford. In part, the decay of Oriental studies in Oxford reflected the broader stagnation of British universities in the early nineteenth century. It is a big mistake to project the intellectual power and industriousness of a modern university like, say, Columbia in New York back to nineteenth-century Oxbridge (though Edward Said seems to be assuming this). Besides allowing the sons of peers and similar folk to grow a little older in pleasant and idle surroundings, the wealthy Oxbridge colleges were, as much as anything else, training places for Anglican clergymen. But this was to change.
Mark Pattison, a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and an expert on the lives of Casaubon and Scaliger, put forward proposals for university reform in the 1850s and 1860s that were based on his travels around German universities.67 Oxford in Pattison’s day had only twenty professors to Leipzig’s more than a hundred. There were also far more university students in Germany. A tiny proportion of the population went to university in England. Pattison was particularly impressed by the German scholars in classical studies and their use of philological techniques, as well as their emphasis on institutions and social factors in the history of antiquity. Part of the trouble was that Oxbridge faced little competition within Britain. In the course of the 1820s and 1830s the University of London (consisting at first of University College and King’s College) came into being. The University of Durham was founded in 1832, but it remained tiny until the second half of the twentieth century. The Scottish universities, including Edinburgh and St Andrews, had longer histories, but they did not teach Arabic or Islamic studies.
Serious university reform got under way in the 1870s with a series of parliamentary acts and royal commissions. Fortuitously 1870 was the date at which William Wright was appointed to the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic in Cambridge.68 With this appointment Cambridge acquired an Orientalist of the first rank, something it had not possessed since the seventeenth century: the prestige of Cambridge Orientalism was established. (Oxford, meanwhile, had to wait until 1889 and the appointment of David Samuel Margoliouth to the Laudian professorship. On Margoliouth, see the next chapter.) Wright was born on the frontier of Nepal, the son of a captain in the service of the East India Company. He did a first degree at the University of St Andrews, and went on to the German university of Halle where he studied first Syriac and then Arabic. He also picked up Persian, Turkish and Sanskrit at about the same time. His schooling in German philological techniques was at least as important as the languages he had mastered. He then went on to Leiden, where the redoubtable Dozy was his doctoral supervisor. His research consisted of editing the unique Leiden manuscript of Ibn Jubayr’s Travels. (The Spanish Muslim, Ibn Jubayr, went on haj to Mecca in the late twelfth century and produced a remarkably lively account not just of the Muslim lands he travelled through, but also of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Norman Sicily.)
Wright was appointed to a chair of Arabic at University College, London, and then to one at Trinity College, Dublin, where he also taught Hindustani. While in Dublin, he produced A Grammar of the Arabic Language (1859–62). This was effectively a translation and expansion of an Arabic grammar published in Latin in 1848 by a Norwegian student of Fleischer’s, Karl Paul Caspari. Wright received help from Fleischer, who had made many corrections to de Sacy’s earlier grammar and, in the preface to the second edition of his Grammar (1874), Wright wrote: ‘Professor Fleischer will, I trust, look upon the dedication as a ma
rk of respect for the Oriental scholarship of Germany, whereof he is one of the worthiest representatives.’69 Wright’s Grammar is still in use today, which is a little surprising, as it is rather difficult to use and those wishing to get full value from it should first acquaint themselves with the elements of Latin, Hebrew, Ethiopic and Syriac.
In 1861 he resigned his academic post in order to catalogue the Syriac manuscripts at the British Museum. His edition of al-Mubarrad’s literary anthology, al-Kamil (a ninth-century collection of grammatical and literary studies), was published by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. (His kind of scholarship had a bigger audience in Germany than in Britain.) In 1870 Wright was appointed Thomas Adams Professor at Cambridge, a post he retained until his death. However, despite his intimidatingly deep knowledge of the Arabic language, he really seems to have been much more interested in Syriac Christian literature. Like most nineteenth-century Orientalists, he was far more interested in the Bible than the Qur’an and he also worked on the New Testament Apocrypha and was a member of the Old Testament Revision Committee. He died in 1889 and his Lectures on the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages were published posthumously a year later. Although it is difficult to present this pious and scholarly professor in such a way as to make him seem exciting to a modern readership, nevertheless Wright had effectively made England a major centre for Arabic studies, something it had not been since the days of Pococke, and his achievement was to be consolidated by his near contemporaries Edward Palmer and William Robertson Smith.
Most nineteenth-century Orientalists were, like Wright, creatures of libraries and college committees. But one at least of Wright’s students, Edward Palmer, polyglot, spy and poet, was different.70 Palmer, whose life was the stuff of doomed romance, was born in 1840. He had an undistinguished school career, though it was as a schoolboy that he learnt Romany by frequenting gypsy campsites. He went on to work as a junior clerk with a wine merchant in the City (and it was during this fairly idle period that he mastered mesmerism and mind-reading as well as attending spiritualist seances). He was apt to study eighteen hours a day, a habit that may have exacerbated his always frail health. This phase of his life came to an end when he fell victim to consumption in 1859. During his convalescence in Cambridge, he tried to improve his schoolboy Greek and Latin and then, after meeting an Indian teacher, he took up the study first of Urdu and Persian and then of Arabic and Hebrew. In 1863, as a relatively mature student, Palmer was awarded a scholarship to read classical studies at Cambridge. He achieved only a third-class degree. However Edward Byles Cowell, the Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge and a leading authority on Persian, having tested Palmer’s Persian, succeeded in getting him made a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Palmer supplemented his scant income by writing newspaper articles in Persian and Urdu for an Indian newspaper. In 1869 the Palestine Exploration Fund provided funds for Palmer to begin a topographical survey of the Sinai peninsula. The main point of this and subsequent surveys of the region was to establish the veracity of the narrative of Exodus and to underpin the detail of the biblical narrative more generally by interviewing Bedouin about the place names of the peninsula. Palmer returned there in 1870 to continue with this work. Not only did these desert ventures improve his Arabic, but the desert air was thought to be good for his weak lungs. As a result of his work for the Palestine Exploration Fund, he became friendly with its secretary, Walter Besant, the novelist and later founder of the Royal Society of Literature. The two men shared an enthusiasm for Rabelais, French poetry and Freemasonry and together they wrote Jerusalem, a Short History of the City of Herod and of Saladin, which was published in 1871.
That same year Palmer was appointed to the Lord Almoner’s Chair in Arabic at Cambridge. Unfortunately this professorship was less well endowed than the Thomas Adams Chair and Palmer was paid only £40 a year as professor. However, he did so much lecturing that his salary was eventually increased by £250. In his short life he wrote copiously. Among other things he published The Desert of the Exodus (based on his travels in the Sinai Desert), a short Arabic dictionary, a short Persian dictionary, an edition and translation of the complete poems of the thirteenth-century Egyptian Baha’ al-Din Zuhayr, a not very accurate translation of the Qur’an, and a translation of the New Testament into Persian. He also contributed to a translation of Romany songs and he wrote the article on legerdemain for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His interests were bemusingly wide-ranging and his catchphrase was ‘I wonder what will happen next’. Given his wild, gypsyish temperament, it is not surprising that he became a close friend of the explorer and adventurer, Sir Richard Burton.
Palmer was not happy in Cambridge. His friend Besant thought the university environment very dull, believing that this was in part because of the penchant of English scholars for grammar and in part because of ‘the very recent and still partial emancipation of scholarship from the Church’. Palmer’s approach to the subjects he studied was habitually brilliant but unsystematic. He did not care much for the rules of grammar, preferring to listen to how native speakers used their language. It always rankled with Palmer that he did not get the Thomas Adams chair to which Wright had been appointed. Also despite or because of the amount of teaching he did, he hated teaching: ‘I am tired of residence and of giving elementary lectures, which after all are no part of a Professor’s duty.’ He thought that there must be something better than ‘teaching boys the Persian alphabet’. Besides, the money was dreadful. In 1881 Palmer left Cambridge and became a leader writer on the Standard. As a journalist he wrote articles on an amazing range of subjects.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, the nationalist politician Arabi Pasha took over as Prime Minister and Minister of War in 1882. There were anti-European riots in Alexandria and this led to British and French fears that they might lose control of the Suez Canal. In June 1882 Palmer was sent out on a secret mission to negotiate with, and if necessary bribe, the Bedouin tribesmen close to the Suez Canal and make sure that they did not attack British forces there. The British fleet bombarded Alexandria and in September the British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley defeated Arabi’s forces at Tel el-Kebir. But by then Palmer, aged only forty-two, was dead. He and a couple of British army officers were murdered by Bedouin tribesmen for the gold they were carrying. Palmer is said to have cursed his captors in eloquent Arabic before being shot and hurled over a cliff. Prior to Palmer’s body being discovered and his death confirmed, his friend Richard Burton had been officially commissioned to look for him.
Palmer had picked up subjects as casually as he dropped them. Very few British scholars in the nineteenth century had the proper philological training to participate fully in the advances in Orientalism being pioneered on the Continent. Wright was one exception. William Robertson Smith (1846–94) was another.71 Born and educated in Aberdeenshire, his early education relied heavily on the memorizing of Greek and Latin texts – a pedagogic technique characterized by his biographers as ‘an excellent practice, now unfortunately much disused’. Having taken up Hebrew studies at the Free Church College in Edinburgh, he made repeated visits to Germany from 1867 onwards in order to further those studies. He loved Germany and loved the Germans – except for one thing, which was ‘their laxity in observing the Sabbath’. In 1870 he became Professor of Oriental Languages and Old Testament Exegesis at the Free Church College. After a visit to Göttingen in 1872, he developed an interest in Arabic and as his biographers observe, ‘it was not unnatural that he looked to Germany for instruction and assistance’ in this subject. In 1878 – 9 he toured Egypt and other Arablands in order to improve his Arabic. Back in Britain, Smith became a close friend of William Wright. He also became a favoured protégé of Palmer, though the two men could hardly have been more different. Palmer was a literary aesthete, whereas Smith’s scholarship was powered and underpinned by a stern Christian piety. It was his approach to Christian doctrine that turned him into one of the most controversial figures in Victorian Britain. In 1881
he was dismissed by the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland from the Chair of Old Testament Studies of the Free College in Aberdeen. He was dismissed because of the tenor of various articles that he had written on the Bible for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which, and in publications elsewhere, he made use of German source-critical techniques and treated the Bible as a group of historical documents rather than as the unchallengeable word of God.
Deprived of his Aberdeen professorship, he found work writing more articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he eventually became editor. He was one of the few people, perhaps the only one, to have read through the whole of the Encyclopaedia in its ninth edition. His duties as editor gained him the acquaintanceship of most of the British intellectual and cultural elite of the late nineteenth century, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley and Edward Burne-Jones. Although he had previously published studies of problems in the Old Testament, he now became increasingly interested in the study of primitive rituals, kinship and marriage more generally. He had already published a seminal article on ‘Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament’ in the Journal of Philology in 1880.
After Palmer’s murder, Smith succeeded him in the Lord Almoner’s professorship. As has been noted, this was not well endowed and Smith received £50 a year for delivering one lecture in the course of the year. He moved on to become university librarian before eventually, after his friend Wright’s death in 1889, occupying the rather grander Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic. Although Smith’s chair was in Arabic, he continued to be preoccupied with problems concerning the Bible and the ancient Hebrews. In particular, he worked on the chronology of the production of the various books of the Bible.