When I got back to the university in September 1945 I was out of touch in my academic pursuits but intensely up-to-date on what had been happening in the region. The war had parachuted me into the contemporary Middle East and to a quite active involvement. Obviously my employers were not interested in medieval history. They were not interested in studying history but rather in making it. It was a very interesting time in the Middle East and having seen it at close quarters was absolutely invaluable.
Because I had been appointed to a teaching post in the University of London before I went into the army that job was waiting for me at the end of the war, so I was returning to where I had left off. However, I had to learn my job all over again. During the war years I had acquired a very intimate, specialized knowledge of certain limited aspects of the modern history of the Middle East, but that didn’t help me very much in teaching undergraduates. I had to return to my books and bone up both on the contents of my subject and on the manner of teaching it. All that was not exactly new but something that I hadn’t done for many years and I had to relearn it almost from scratch.
I was one of a generation that was still young in years but prematurely aged in experience and perhaps in wisdom. The immediate postwar period was a good time for young scholars just starting or restarting their careers, a time of rapid and expansive development in the universities. There were six years of students waiting to attend courses and there was money from the government to help things along.
I met Ruth Oppenhejm at a party in London in 1946. She came from a distinguished Danish Jewish family and had been sent to England when she finished high school to improve her English. When war broke out she elected to stay in England rather than return to neutral Denmark—a fortunate choice since the following year Denmark was conquered and occupied, and Danish Jews, including her family, were sent to concentration camps. We married a year after we met. It certainly improved her English.
When my first batch of students graduated, one of them, an Egyptian, gave a little party to which he and his wife invited me and my newly acquired Danish wife. Ruth asked him the subject of his thesis. He told her and she said in bewilderment, “But that’s a subject in Egyptian history.” “Yes,” he said, “I am an Egyptian. What is odd about my studying Egyptian history?” She responded, “There’s nothing odd about your studying Egyptian history. What is odd is that you should come to London to study Egyptian history. I can imagine a Dane going to England to study science, or to study some English subject, but the last thing that would occur to any Dane is to go to England to study Danish history.”
He was rather startled by this and then he gave what I thought was a very good answer. “There are really three reasons why I would come here. One is that although we have more material in Cairo the material is more readily accessible in London and that is important for completing a project within a limited period of time. The second reason is that here we are trained in modern scientific method, which we don’t get at home. And the third reason, to be honest, is that an English Ph.D. counts for more in Egypt than an Egyptian Ph.D.” I was very proud of my student; I thought this was an honest and intelligent answer.
My wife said to him: “Well, of the three points you mention, the really important one is the modern scientific method.” He said, “Yes, I would agree with that.” Ruth then said, “Presumably when you go back and you teach in Egypt, you will teach the modern scientific method that you have learned in England.” He replied affirmatively and she said, “So your students will no longer need to go to the West to study their own history.” “Right,” he answered. Then she mused, “Tell me, how long have Egyptian students been coming to England to study Egyptian history?” There was a deadly silence.
The Arabs in History
In early August 1946, out of the blue, I received a letter that filled me with incredulous delight. It came from the great and famous historian Sir Maurice Powicke, the Regius professor of modern history at Oxford University and a very famous medieval historian. The reader may wonder, as I did, why a medieval historian was the professor of modern history. The explanation given at the time was that at Oxford University modern history begins with the fall of Rome.
The letter from Sir Maurice contained an invitation. He was the general editor, he said, of a new series of short historical books to be published by the house of Hutchinson, and he was actually asking me (and here I quote from his letter)—if I “would be willing to write a short volume of 60,000 words on the Arabs in History” (the title, as the reader will see, was his). He enclosed a document stating in general terms what the series was about, and explained more specifically what he wanted from me for this book. Again I quote, “I don’t want either a textbook or a work of compact reference, but rather a live essay, which might become a little classic among a wealth of learned and topical literature—clear, well-proportioned, authoritative and easy to read. I think that it is needed, and you would have the opportunity to be welcomed as a scholar and as a man interested in affairs.” (This is the language of 1946, and should not be misunderstood.) Sir Maurice went on to say that if I were “inclined to accept this suggestion,” he would be “glad to have some statement about the range and treatment of the book as you envisage it.” I replied, of course, accepting the invitation with enthusiasm, and I submitted the general plan for which he asked.
Two weeks after his first letter, Sir Maurice sent me a second letter indicating his satisfaction with my willingness to “write the book on the Arabs” and adding some further advice: “I gladly accept your general idea of its arrangement. I would only beg you to remember the point to which I attach much importance—that it should not suffer as a work of art from too much detail. In such a subject—so large, important and comprehensive—it would both be impossible to do more than give a selection, and fatally easy to spoil the essay in literary form by a relaxation of attention to its purpose. This is a great chance for a young scholar, just because only a scholar can take it.”
A few days later the mail brought me an even more astonishing document—a real contract from a real publisher with the promise of an advance, in the princely amount of 75 pounds, payable on the delivery and acceptance of the completed manuscript. Seventy-five pounds may not seem very much today; but at that time it was sufficient to buy me a one-month honeymoon in Sweden, and thus enable me to escape from the austerities of postwar Britain and briefly enjoy the luxuries of neutrality. It may give some perspective if I mention that my initial salary on appointment as an assistant lecturer was 250 pounds a year, and that by this time I had reached the exalted figure of 600 pounds a year. So this advance marked a definite change in my economic status.
Looking back now more than half a century later, I am still amazed and bewildered at two things—at Sir Maurice’s trustfulness in issuing this invitation, and at my own temerity in accepting it. After all, I was still very young to be writing a “classic,” and still a relative beginner in my profession: and this, from Sir Maurice’s description of it, seemed more like the kind of book that should be written after a lifetime of scholarship, of teaching, of reflection. It is true that when I received Sir Maurice’s invitation, technically I had been a university teacher for eight years, since my first appointment at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, but of those eight years, only three were actually spent at the university teaching: the first two and the last. The rest of the time I had been on temporary unpaid leave of absence and engaged in war duty—military and other. My war service had left me with an intimate but highly specialized knowledge of certain aspects of the contemporary Middle East, but it had also left my scholarly skills, both of inquiry and of exposition, sadly depleted.
When Sir Maurice’s letter arrived I was just beginning to learn my trade again. My published work was minimal; it consisted of a shortened but otherwise unimproved version of my doctoral dissertation, published not because it was ready for publication but because I was about to go off to the wa
rs and the University of London publications committee offered me what at the time might well have been a last chance. Apart from the thesis, I had published a few other odds and ends; some of them I now look back on with more embarrassment than pride.
Why me? Sir Maurice’s reason for sending this invitation to me rather than to anyone else was certainly not my reputation, which at that time was justly nonexistent, but the recommendation of my former teacher, Professor H.A.R., later Sir Hamilton Gibb. His reason for choosing me rather than any of his other disciples to recommend to Sir Maurice was known to me. He had told me many times that, as far as he knew, I was the first professional historian in Britain to study and teach Arab history.
I think that Gibb was a little hard on himself and on some other scholars; names like Christian Snouck Hurgronje and Julius Wellhausen immediately come to mind, who were good Arabists and who were I think historians in the true sense of that word. But in what one might call the trade-union sense, of holding the professional qualifications of a historian—having an honors degree in history or equivalent and holding a full-time appointment in a history department—he was probably right that Claude Cahen in Paris and I were the only ones. My assistant lectureship in “the History of the Near and Middle East,” created in the autumn of 1938, was, as far as I am aware, the first and for a long time remained the only such appointment in a history department. And it was not until the great expansion of Oriental and African studies in the late forties and early fifties that many new posts were created in universities in Britain, in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. I remained an active member of the history school in London University until 1974, when I moved to Princeton and for the first time found myself a professor not of history but of Near Eastern studies.
The writing of the book took three months; but publishing was a slow and difficult business in those immediate postwar years, and it did not actually appear until 1950. Both of the book’s godfathers, Sir Hamilton and Sir Maurice, declared themselves satisfied, to my immense relief. It was widely and favorably reviewed in the daily and weekly press in England and, later, in scholarly journals both at home and abroad. I was particularly gratified by the fact that the book received on the whole a friendly welcome in the Arab world. One of the outstanding Egyptian historians of the time, Shafiq Ghorbal, actually made it the subject of a broadcast talk, later published as an article, in which he cited it as an example (and this is deliciously ironic given the later turn of events) of the valuable contribution with which Orientalist scholarship could enrich the Arabs’ understanding of their own heritage by placing their history within a larger historical context, at that time little known to them. The book was even translated into Arabic by two respected Arab historians, Nabih Faris and Mahmud Zayid, and published by the optimistically entitled Dār al-‘Ilm li’l-Malāyīn (Science for the Millions) in Beirut. Even more surprisingly, it was included by the Information Office of the Arab League in Washington and New York in the short list of recommended reading for Americans wanting to know more about the Arabs and their history. It was translated into several other Muslim languages (Turkish, Malay and Indonesian) as well as into Chinese and Japanese and various European languages, both Eastern and Western and, all but the last chapter, into Hebrew. I was given two different reasons for the omission of the last chapter from the Hebrew translation: one was that the publisher ran out of money; the other that they didn’t like the last chapter. I don’t know which was the real one; perhaps both. One of the more striking responses was a notification from my Yugoslav publisher that I had an account of 40 dinars in a bank in Zagreb which I was at liberty to collect any time convenient to me. I never actually got round to it.
The welcome to the book was by no means unanimous. It was promptly banned in the newly established Republic of Pakistan because of a disrespectful reference to the Prophet which I had quoted from Dante as an example of medieval European prejudice and bigotry. It is the famous passage in which Dante in his travels in hell encounters the Prophet, condemned as a “seminator di scandalo e di scisma.” (Inferno xxviii, 35). More recently the book has been attacked again, especially and indeed principally by exponents of the new school of epistemology, for similarly weighty reasons.
The English original seems to have been widely read and ran through five editions and a much larger number of impressions. I was then, and to be honest, still remain, puzzled at the continuing success and survival of the book, and even (and this may strike the reader as odd) at times somewhat irritated. This was a book written by a young, immature and inexperienced scholar in three months. I have, after all, written other things since then, based on deeper research and wider knowledge, the fruit of experience and I hope greater wisdom, the preparation of which was measured not in months but in years. Yet until the sudden spike of public interest in the Middle East after 9/11, none of them remotely approached the continuing popularity of this sin of my youth. From the remarks cited above, I am sure the reader will agree that the success of the book owed much to the initial guidance of Sir Maurice Powicke, who pointed me in the right direction, gave me a push and then let me find my own way. Its survival, I suppose, is principally due to the shortage of competing books dealing with Arab history with the same brevity and at the same level of generalization.
The Ottoman Archives
In the autumn of 1949, at the age of thirty-three, I became a full professor and was appointed as the first occupant of the newly created chair of the History of the Near and Middle East in the University of London. I was given a year’s study leave to familiarize myself more closely with the countries and peoples whose history it was my business to teach and write. More particularly, I was eager to explore the libraries and archives and other documentation which must necessarily form the basis of such teaching and writing.
When my wife and I set out for Istanbul in the autumn of 1949, the situation in the region had been transformed beyond recognition. Previously, most of the Arab world, except for the Arabian Peninsula, was under British or French control and access was not difficult. The newly independent Arab states were now asking all applicants for visas to indicate their religion and routinely refusing visas to those who declared their religion as Jewish. Some of my Jewish colleagues were able to circumvent this rule, by the use of such carefully ambiguous terms as “Orthodox” or “Unitarian.” One ingenious lady from New York City even described herself as a “Seventh Avenue Adventist.” Some simply lied. But most of us, even the nonreligious, found it morally impossible to make such compromises for no better reason than the pursuit of an academic career. This considerably reduced the number of places to which one could go and in which one could work. For those interested in North Africa, access was still possible and indeed has remained relatively easy even to the present day but most of the Arab east was closed to Jews.
Since then, there has been some easing of this rule in some Arab countries, but at that time, for Jewish scholars interested in the Middle East, only three countries were open—Turkey, Iran and Israel. The great upsurge of Persian and Turkish studies in Western Europe and the United States in the fifties and sixties may be due in part to this circumstance.
It was in these three countries therefore that I arranged to spend the academic year 1949–50. I began, and indeed spent most of my time, in Istanbul which, because of the unique richness of its libraries and archives, offers special attractions to the historian of the Middle East. I counted on being able to use the collections of Arabic and other Islamic manuscripts in Turkish libraries; I also applied, with little expectation of success, for permission to use the Imperial Ottoman Archives. These archives had been described by various Turkish scholars and a number of its documents had been published, mostly in Turkish journals, in the course of the years. No Westerner had however been admitted to them, apart from a very small number of expert archivists brought in as consultants.
These were the central archives of the Ottoman Empire extending over a period of m
any centuries and including records from even the most distant outposts. It was known that they contained tens of thousands of bound registers and letter books, and millions of documents. It was obvious that these archives would be a precious, indeed an indispensable source for the history of all the lands that had ever formed part of the Ottoman Empire and even, to a lesser degree, those that had had relations with the empire. Access had only been allowed to a limited number of Turkish scholars.
It was my good fortune, rather than any particular merit on my part, which caused me to submit my application precisely at the moment when the custodians of the archives decided to adopt a more tolerant policy and no longer limit access only to their own nationals. I was both astonished and delighted to receive the coveted permit. Feeling rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop or like an intruder in Ali Baba’s cave, I hardly knew where to turn first.
A certain amount of work had been done by Westerners studying the empire and some of it was very good, but it was based on Western archives and sources. The only Ottoman evidence available to them consisted of chronicles and other literary works. The opening of the archives brought a major change in the study and understanding of Ottoman, and, more broadly, European history.
The language of the archives is Ottoman Turkish, which was used during the many centuries of the Ottoman Empire. It has a basically Turkish structure with an immense vocabulary of loan words from Arabic and Persian, as much as, and rather similar to, the vocabulary of Latin, Greek and Norman French words in English. Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script with some additional letters to indicate Turkish sounds that do not exist in Arabic. Different forms of the script were used for different types of documents and for different purposes. The decipherment of these documents presents considerable problems for the modern scholar. Fortunately, there is a large amount of printed material in Ottoman Turkish, including many documents and some, but not many, dictionaries and grammars. These provide a good starting point for a would-be researcher in the archives.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 9