The first assumption was no doubt true. The second proved false. There were indeed many translations into English from Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages, but they varied enormously in style, character, interest and, most important of all, accuracy. Inevitably, they reflected the tastes and concerns of the translators, their time, and their intended readers, and therefore omitted much that was of vital concern to the historian. A collection based on existing translations might have been a representative anthology of translators, but not of medieval Islamic history and civilization.
Translation is an art in and of itself and has to be put into a contemporary idiom. Not too contemporary; one doesn’t want to make it so modern that it jars, and I wouldn’t translate a medieval text into slangy English. But I certainly would not try to reproduce an archaic effect by using archaic English. After all, what they wrote was not archaic. The major problem is understanding what the text means, the first part of any translation job. But a second problem, a much more difficult one, in a text of any literary quality, is trying to preserve that quality, or at least preserve some of it, in an English translation.
I began my work by supplementing my cut and paste collection, and finally decided to scrap it entirely and start afresh. The publishers had asked for one volume; in my enthusiasm I produced enough for two, which they agreed to publish.
The resulting volumes consist of a series of excerpts from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew writings, translated into English, and where necessary, with explanatory annotations. Volume I covers politics and war and volume II religion and society, and the whole is entitled Islam, from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople.
Though not a best seller it has maintained a steady level of sales and is available in a paperback edition published by the Oxford University Press. It is probably the most frequently cited and accepted of my various publications. The reason is obvious. It is not often that one has easy and ample access to what the peoples of the Middle East say about themselves and their own history.
Charles Issawi, a friend of mine at Princeton, used to ask from time to time a painful question—which, if any, of your books will still be read a hundred years from now? If any of my publications qualifies, I think this would probably be the one.
In my last year in London, the breakup of my marriage was due in no small degree to a relationship between my wife and one of my colleagues at SOAS. This even appeared as an item in the press. During that year we had a visiting professor from the United States. One day she and I were chatting and she said to me, “You know, your colleagues here really are gentlemen.” I replied, “Yes. I assumed that, but what makes you say so?” “I heard about your divorce,” she said, “and I tried to talk to your colleagues about it but none of them would say a word. Every time I raised the matter they would change the subject or walk away. They really are gentlemen.” I believe this is true and I am most grateful to them for it.
During that last year at the School of Oriental and African Studies we had a visiting professor from Princeton University, Avrom Udovitch, who witnessed the turmoil in my life. It was he who orchestrated that on the day my divorce was final I received three telegrams: one from the chairman of the department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University offering me a chair, one from the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies inviting me to be a member and one from the president of the university urging me to accept these concurrent appointments. It was the first and only time the two institutions had collaborated in this way. I should explain that the two institutions are completely independent and the only connection is that they are located in the same town.
In the months preceding my move from London to Princeton in 1974 I spent some time with an old friend and colleague, Taki Vatikiotis, who had just moved from Princeton to London. We were therefore able to exchange useful information and guidance. One of his remarks was very telling. “Here in London,” he said, “you have friends. In Princeton you will have colleagues, neighbors and in certain situations, allies, but you will not have friends as you understand and use that word here.”
7.
Crossing the Atlantic
1974. A very new year. My devastating divorce was final and I left my country, my job, my life. I arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, a new country, two new jobs, a new life and a new home, with a new woman.
My financial position when I came to Princeton was poor. My lawyer and my ex-wife’s lawyer had agreed that it was to our mutual advantage to settle for a lump sum rather than an annuity. I went along with this but had to borrow extensively in order to produce the lump sum. As a result I was penniless and heavily in debt, and when I moved from London to Princeton I did not even have the minuscule amount of money one was allowed to take out of the sterling zone at that time. What saved the day was that Princeton University’s financial year starts on the first of July and when I arrived in Princeton at the beginning of the academic year in September I had two months’ salary waiting for me. After that my financial position began to improve thanks to lecture fees and book royalties.
One other factor which helped greatly to stabilize my financial position during my early years in Princeton was when, to my utter surprise, I was awarded the Harvey Prize by the Haifa Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. This consisted of $30,000. I spent one-third on a trip to Mexico, put one-third into the stock market and the final third, which proved far and away the most long lasting and valuable, into an addition to my home. This extension to what had been the master bedroom became my study, replete with bookshelves designed as stacks to hold at least half of my fifteen-thousand-volume library. The rest went into similarly constructed stacks in the basement.
My life, and more specifically my adjustment to this small town, was greatly helped by a relationship which had begun not long before I left England. Early in 1974 I met an aristocratic Turkish lady at a reception in the Iranian Embassy. She was just passing through London at the time but we “clicked” and resumed our relationship when I was in the Middle East later that year. After our divorce my ex-wife tried to suggest that it was because of this woman that our marriage broke up. This is false. We met for the first time when the date for the divorce trial had been set, and the relationship did not develop until after the divorce was final. It then developed rapidly, and by the time I moved to America she was willing to come with me. A house was found by the university and we moved in.
After the shattering breakup of my marriage this woman made an enormous and invaluable contribution to what I might call my reconstruction. She restored my faith in life and in myself. She put me back together and I am most grateful to her. She also provided a very successful beginning to my social life in Princeton by organizing truly magnificent dinners, alla Turca. An unexpected bonus was that my Turkish improved dramatically.
Over time it became clear that we had different perceptions of our relationship, and we agreed, after ten years, to end it and she returned to Turkey. We remained friends.
At the time of my divorce my ex-wife and I decided that we would share the house and its contents equally. The house was not a problem as it was heavily mortgaged and what was left after paying off the mortgage was an insignificant amount. More difficult was the division of the contents of the house. Since I was moving to America and she was staying in London it made sense for her to retain most of the furniture and for me to be compensated in other areas. My daughter, who had recently married a physician and migrated to the United States when he took a position at an American hospital, intervened strongly and said that I must keep all the carpets. These were from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East and Melanie insisted that they were an essential part of “who you are and what you do.” My wife agreed to this, but it left some tension between mother and daughter.
This meant that when I came to America and moved into a house I had lots of carpets and pictures, but no furniture. I set out to fill this deficiency.
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bsp; In this I was helped by a very fortunate accident. A few weeks before moving to Princeton I was there on a short visit during which I was invited to dinner by a colleague and neighbor. I was greatly impressed by the beauty and elegance of the furniture in his home. He told me it was made by a Japanese American, George Nakashima, who had a workshop not very far from Princeton, in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I thought this was something worth pursuing and when I moved to Princeton one of the first things I did was to get in touch with Mr. Nakashima.
His methods were unusual. He only made furniture to order and the procedure was that the prospective customer would visit the workshop and discuss with him what pieces of furniture were wanted. He would make some drawings and then take his guest on a tour of his workshop. After some discussion, the customer and the artist would reach agreement on the shape and size of the furniture and then together choose a slab of wood for each item.
This left the question of price. Nakashima’s method was distinctive. He would neither request nor accept any deposit, but waited until he was ready to work on your project. At that point he would provide a figure, and he expected not a deposit but the payment of the entire amount. This was less alarming than one might have thought in that he also agreed that if you did not like the finished product when you saw it he would take it back and refund the entire amount.
I found this unusual but was willing to go along. In due course he called and named an amount, roughly the same as I would have had to pay had I bought these items in a furniture store. I agreed and after a period of weeks the items were delivered. They were gorgeous. Since then Nakashima has become a famous name in the art of furniture making and his works, even the pieces made in his workshop after his death, are highly esteemed and highly priced.
When I was growing up in London my entire family—grandparents on both sides, uncles, aunts, cousins were all within a twenty-minute bus ride. Now my family of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are scattered across the United States, where eventually my whole family, at different times, by different routes, relocated. We are now an all-American family. It is only on rare and special occasions that I am able to meet them face-to-face. Telephone and e-mails provide some compensation but are a poor substitute for proximity.
Princeton
I have never for one moment regretted moving to Princeton. On the contrary, I think this was one of the best decisions and most creative changes in my life. In Princeton I had both the comfortable quietness and collegiality of a small university town, yet a place within the New York–Washington corridor. The architecture for the most part is pleasant, that is to say, deeply familiar to one newly arrived from England. So often the architecture of higher education facilities in the United States is a mixture of the pseudo-phony and the neo-bogus styles. Princeton, or much of it, is an authentic product of its time, or rather of the various successive periods during which it was built.
After my move I gained several substantial advantages. The first was more free time. Thanks to my joint appointment I had to teach only one semester; the rest of my time was free of teaching responsibilities, except of course for the supervision of graduate students preparing dissertations. For a teacher with a sense of responsibility toward his students, and that means most of us, this is a task that goes on all through the year. A second advantage was that being a newcomer from another country, I was free from the kind of administrative and bureaucratic entanglements that had built up, over decades, in England. This was a most welcome relief. I never had much taste nor, I must confess, aptitude for administrative tasks and responsibilities. Had that been my desire, I would have either gone into business in pursuit of real money or into politics in pursuit of real power. I would not have stayed in the university, where neither the money nor the power is real. The satisfactions that the life of a scholar offers are of quite a different character.
Another advantage is that Princeton is a delightful place in which to live and an excellent university in which to teach, with a very high standard of capacity and accomplishment among the students and agreeable colleagues with whom to work. I did learn that at Princeton I had to change my style of lecturing. In the United States I found that the sort of gentle irony which is a normal component of intellectual discourse in England was either missed entirely or misunderstood. People either didn’t see it or they felt obscurely that they were somehow being got at and weren’t quite sure why. For me, not being able to use irony is like cooking without using salt or pepper. Finally, at Princeton I was provided with the kind of infrastructure which English universities simply cannot afford, such as hiring student assistants to find and fetch books from the library, instead of having to go and find them myself. Here too, the time-saving was enormous.
There was another important change; I was growing older, at least physically, and I decided that it was time to start closing the files. During the course of my work as a researcher and as a teacher, perhaps most of all simply as a reader, I had built up a series of files on topics which aroused my special interest. Whenever I came across anything relevant, I made a note of it and put it in the appropriate file. What I have been doing since coming to Princeton is taking these accumulations of material built up over the course of decades, and turning them into books. This is the explanation of what might otherwise seem an extraordinary output in my postretirement—fifteen books—as contrasted with a rather small output in the much longer period of my teaching career.
There are two rather different kinds of books that a scholar, and more particularly a historian, may decide to write. One of them is what you might call a monograph. At a certain moment the historian decides to write a book on such and such a subject. He begins to identify, to read and to study all the relevant and available material, and after three, four, five, six or however many years it may take, he sits down and writes his book. A large proportion of historical books and almost all historical articles published in learned journals fall in this category. Like most younger historians, I produced a number of studies in this category; like most older historians, I have tried my hand at the other category of book, one in which the historian’s source material is, in a sense, the entire literature of a civilization, or at least of a period. His task here is not simply to collect the relevant material for a book and then write it. His material is the accumulation of a lifetime’s reading.
An example of this for me occurred in 1974, when I was invited to deliver the Gottesman Lectures at Yeshiva University in New York City. Given the occasion and the audience, this was an opportunity, indeed an invitation, to go beyond the strict limits of my specialized field of study, and to have a look at the very nature of history, both as a discipline and as a vocation. Most of my illustrative examples were naturally drawn from the field of historical study with which I am most familiar, but I tried to achieve some deeper insights in broader perspectives and reach some more general conclusions. The lectures were first published with the title History Remembered, Recovered, Invented by the Princeton University Press in 1975, and reprinted in various editions after that. The book was well received at the time.
Two of the files I took up dealt with the Muslim discovery of Europe and the position of Jews in Muslim lands. Another dealt with the political language of Islam—a semantic and historical study of the terms used in politics and government in the Islamic world over the course of the centuries. Yet another was on race and slavery in the Middle East.
In addition to several monographs on specific topics, I also prepared a collection of odd bits on various subjects, translated from various languages, that didn’t fit into any of my major projects. They brought an interesting, and sometimes an amusing, diversity to a volume called A Middle East Mosaic. This included such gems as a description of an Italian’s first encounter with a banana, a Turkish diplomat in France seeing the Atlantic tide for the first time, and a number of bewildered comments on the treatment and behavior of women in the Western world. This is one of my favorite books whic
h occasioned one of my favorite reviews, thanking me for enabling scholars and others to quote primary sources on a wide range of topics without having to learn the languages or read the books.
The university provided me the stimulation of able and active colleagues and students, and the feeling, at once comforting and invigorating, of being part of a great scholarly environment. It also gave me the opportunity to keep in touch with the real world and real people, more particularly with the rising student generation. The only negative was that as I was half-time, there was no procedure by which I could be kept informed of administrative processes. The grapevine is usually an effective means of communication, but it is subject to both delay and inaccuracy.
One day, while I was working in my office at Princeton, a professor of Chinese history telephoned and asked if I were free and would be willing to come up to his office for a few moments. He wanted me to meet a visitor from the Beijing Academy of Sciences who he thought would interest me. The visitor was a specialist in the Muslim minorities of the western provinces of China, most of whom speak Turkic languages. I was intrigued. As the gentleman knew no English nor any other European language and I knew no Chinese, my colleague said he would act as interpreter, but only as a last resort. He felt that we should be able to establish some form of communication.
An interesting exercise followed. His guest spoke Uighur Turkish and had some slight acquaintance with Central Asian Turkic languages. I spoke Istanbul Turkish, and also had some slight acquaintance with Central Asian Turkic languages. The relations between them can be as close as between Danish and Norwegian, or as distant as between French and Portuguese. We began, as trained scholars would, by trying to determine rules of sound change. We started with numbers, followed by parts of the body, and were then able to establish a fairly basic form of communication on a limited range of topics.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 18