Curating Lived Islam in the Muslim World

British Scholars, Sojourners and Sleuths

Iftikhar H. Malik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367770730
• eBook ISBN: 9781000396560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Beginning with the medieval period, this book collates and reviews first-hand scholarship on Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, as noted down by eminent British travellers, sleuths and observers of lived Islam.

The book foregrounds the pre-colonial and pre-Orientalist phase and locates the multi-disciplinarity of Britain's relationship with Muslims over the last millennium to demonstrate a multi-layered interface. Fully sensitive to a gender balance, the book focuses on specially selected individuals and their transformative experiences while living and working among Muslims. Examining the writings of male and female authors including Adelard, Thomas Coryate, Mary Montagu and Fanny Parkes, the book analyses their understanding of Islam. Moreover, the author explores the works of a salient number of representative colonial British women to move away from the imperious wives stereotype and shed light on gender and Islam in Near East and South Asia by illustrating the status of women, tribal hierarchies, historic and architectural sites and regional politics.

Going beyond familiar views about colonialism, travel writings and memsahibs without losing sight of the complex relations between Britain and Asian Muslims, this book will be of interest to academics working on British history, Imperial history, the study of religions, Shi'i Islam, Islamic studies, Gender and the Empire and South Asian Studies.

1 Adelard and Muslim scholarship

Connecting the medieval worlds during the Crusades and Reconquista

Bath’s Adelard (c. 1080–c. 1151), Athelard, Adelardus Bathoniensis, or Adelardus Bata (Latin), was surely one of the earliest and most significant bridgehead between “East” and the “West” at a time when both these civilisational regions, despite their pluralities, either lay indifferent to each other, or were at daggers drawn given the advent of the Crusades and an emerging Reconquista. His exposure to education on the Continent steered him towards a sustained foray in the Middle East in an era when Spain and Sicily were still the western-most focal points of the Islamic civilisation, itself a hybrid trajectory of several preceding intellectual and cultural traditions. As one of the earliest travellers to the Muslim regions while making Antioch as his base for reportedly 7 years, Adelard was the pioneer Arabist, chronicler, commentator, and an interlocutor between Britain and the Muslim world through his works, tutoring of the royalty and induction of Arab numerals besides translating classics such as Khwarizmi’s Zij and Euclid’s Elements from Arabic into Latin.¹ He was a witness and even possibly the beneficiary of the Catholic occupation of Antioch, Jerusalem, Tripoli, and Edessa following the First Crusade within the background of the Norman conquest of his native country, Italy and Near Eastern principalities. His birthplace—a world heritage city—seems to prefer focusing on its Georgian personalities like Beau Nash and the eminent novelist, Jane Austen, leaving its medieval past almost to obscurity. Named after its steaming water springs attributed with several remedies, Bath did not rediscover the Roman structures over those geysers until the 1870s, allowing city’s appropriation of antiquity. Ironically, not enough was written about this West Country mathematician, philosopher, traveller, scientist, translator, and ornithologist though people seem to know more about his contemporary French philosopher, Peter Abelard to the extent that even the former often gets confused with the latter.² Adelard’s personal career, travels, and scholarly works reveal a dynamic, tolerant, and inquisitive seeker of knowledge who went beyond the contemporary othering of the “Orient”; and took upon himself the introduction of Eastern learning into religious and mundane citadels of his native England and beyond.³

To his American–British biographer, Louise Cochran (d. 2012), this “first English scientist,” like other contemporary polymaths, began his profession as a budding ecclesiast before venturing into philosophy, astrology, astronomy, and mathematics, benefitting from a sustained immersion in Arabo–Islamic heritage—all gained while living and travelling among Muslims. Cochran’s study evolved from her interest in this Bathonian while she lived near the city and found Adelard absent from the philosophical and scientific treatises except for a footnote and some early German papers. Her paper for the first-ever conference on Adelard at Warburg Institute in 1984 and collaboration with Charles Burnett resulted in an edited volume 3 years later underpinning a desire to publish a full-fledged book on this rather obscure scholar.⁴ Her 1994 biography remained a unique study of its type that along with other notes and papers she, in 2010, bequeathed to Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI), which reissued it in 2013 with some additional text by Burnett. Despite our limited knowledge about his times and works, Adelard is not only the intellectual face of Medieval Bath, he is also one of the fountainheads in introducing Classical Greek and Near Eastern intellectual heritage back into Europe where a superimposed religious conformity resisted critical or contrarian thinking. According to Bertrand Russell, he was the pioneer translator of Elements, authored by Euclid—the Alexandrian classicist—since the work had been extinct in Europe and it was only from its Arabic translation and commentaries that Adelard was able to render it into Latin.⁵ By introducing classical Greek philosophy, Arabian sciences such as geometry, algebra, astrology, and astronomy, and the Indian research on numerology, Adelard left a lasting imprint, when either that “Orient” was an unknown, obscure landmass of non-White, “uncouth” people of a competitive faith, or was plainly a place of exotic rivals.

Adelard’s exposure to Eastern scholarship and then its transference to Western Europe put him in his own league, long before the travellers, explorers, colonials, fortune seekers, and other curious individuals from these shores began visiting Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Despite his religious upbringing and disciplinary training in scholastics in France, Adelard did not harbour any anti-Muslim rancour that characterised sizeable sections of contemporary West European societies. Situating himself well beyond fanaticism and demonisation, or pejoratively seeing Muslims as bogeymen especially following Pope Urban II’s declaration of the Crusades in 1095 CE, he, instead, opted to construct mutualities with Muslims and thus steered clear of those tormenting channels which wrought havoc on all the three Abrahamic communities during the medieval era. Other than the Crusades as a backdrop of Adelardian quest, the contemporary Muslim+Christian+Jewish interface through Muslim Spain and Sicily featuring both conflictive and communitarian aspects, not only operated as a major incentive, it equally prepared him to undertake an extended journey to the Levant. Thus, while investigating Adelard’s scholastic and theological pursuits, it is imperative to undertake an academic inquiry of the Crusades, Arabo–Norman Sicily and, certainly of Muslim Spain often called Al-Andalus, as the mainsprings of this cross-cultural dialogue. As we see in our own times, not only Muslim Spain and Sicily continue to reverberate in Muslim consciousness as major losses and traumatic mishaps, even the Crusades themselves have also refused to wither away from the memory on all sides.⁶ The remit of our chapter encapsulates the nature of geo-politics of the time when intra-Christian and intra-Muslim schisms were order of the day and amidst this political chaos, daring groups such as the Normans and Turks were able to establish their polities. Despite the factionalist politics at its apex with its attendant communal violence, philosophical and scientific accomplishments especially by Muslims and their outreach certainly allow us to banish long-held epithets such as the Dark Ages for a significant period in human history.

A follower of Adelard, like several others in Bath laments the lack of general information about this greatest medieval scholar in England, who undertook studies on the Muslim world long before anyone else. Thus begins the brief biographical note by Michael Davis: “It could be a valid opinion that Adelard is our greatest Bathonian, by a long way. He was world-famous in his day and, for several centuries, Bath was known primarily as the birthplace of Adelard. However, today, in his native city, he is entirely forgotten in a strange case of civic amnesia. The few people who think they have heard of him get him mixed up with the Frenchman Peter Abelard of the ill-fated love affair with Heloise (they were contemporary and almost certainly met).”⁷ Even an otherwise modern classic on relationship between Islam and the Christian West mentions him only once and that too in an endnote though one may state that Norman Daniel was rather keen on theological issues in this interchange and less on realms such as philosophy and natural sciences.⁸ Various biographical entries do not share a consensual year of Adelard’s birth, and often vacillate between 1079 and 1080 CE, though, in general, 1151 CE remains the year of his demise. This was just a few years after 1066 when 10,000 Normans, led by William the Conqueror (d. 1087) ventured in from across the Channel and captured England, then inhabited by about two million people of predominantly Anglo–Saxon extraction. Interestingly, this was the last time that England capitulated before the invaders from the Continent controlling its landmass and resources besides relegating the natives to a lower hierarchical order. Himself of French extraction but born in Bath, Adelard was just eight when Bath’s Anglo–Saxon church, where Edgar had been enthroned in 973, suffered destruction and a similar fate fell upon the town itself whose mythical founder in prehistory was held to be Bladud. Following the Conqueror’s death there had been a dispute over the royal succession and despite Robert, the Duke of Normandy, being a major contender he did not turn up and instead opted to go on the Crusades to fight Muslims. Consequently, the revolt did not succeed and King William Rufus sold a bruised, war-torn Bath to John de Villual of Tours, who had been the Conqueror’s physician. Reportedly having acquired Bath for 500 silver pounds, John became the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and subsequently moved the Diocese to Bath from the latter and built a new Cathedral possibly aware of the general reputation of Bath as a spa town due to its mineral water springs. Cathedral’s new structure preceded the Abbey and remained one of the grandest of its type in entire Europe. Adelard’s parentage is not that known though one comes across a certain Fastred—possibly his father— who was a tenant of Bishop John de Villual. Adelard is certainly an Anglo–Saxon name, which could have meant a rather subordinate position for his family under the Norman primacy. Adelard’s father must be heading an affluent household since he could afford his son’s education in northern France at Tours and Laon, and like Paris and Chartres, these seminaries offered the best kind of scholastic learning in contemporary Europe.

At a time when colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were still non-existent unlike the famous seminaries in Fes, Bukhara, Cairo, Nishapur, Cordova, Baghdad, and Damascus, the young Englishmen, like their Muslim contemporaries seeking eminent scholars and known madrassas, would attend French seminaries and special schools run by ecclesiasts. Here, the emphasis would be on biblical instruction imparted in Latin through faith-dominated and conformist syllabi whereas the knowledge of other creeds as well as languages and mundane philosophy remained almost non-existent.⁹ Given the understandable logistical and other technical restraints, clergy meticulously controlled and even monopolised academic domains and disciplinary realms with very limited receptivity shown for Greek, Roman, or non-Christian pedagogies. An element of self-sufficiency was in common currency though in reality it was the fear of secular and “alien” influences that deterred these monks and priests from encouraging mundane scholarship. Philosophy, sciences, philology and certainly the study of other Abrahamic traditions, or curiosity about “distant” lands were not prioritised causing a serious disconnect with some vital strands. Following his early education in Bath’s Cathedral school, we find Adelard—like Bishop John—on his way to Tours in 1098 to gain higher instruction in theology. At Tours, Adelard spent 4 years studying Trivium and Quadrivium, inclusive of contemporary sciences and liberal arts, though remained in the lower echelons of the Benedictines. In 1102, he returned to Bath, and 2 years later took a group of younger pupils including his nephew to study in France at Laon.

While in France both as a student and then as a teacher, Adelard informed his nephew of having been inspired through a nocturnal experience with a “wise man of Tours” to immerse himself in astronomy and philosophy, which became his lifelong pursuits. In his dialogues with his nephew as incorporated in his On the Same and the Different (De Eodem et Divers), he talks about this experience by the River Loire in Tours, which germinated some kind of affinity with Platonic philosophy and Ptolemy’s school of geocentric universe. At Laon, Adelard developed closer familiarity with a dustboard abacus and wrote his Regule abaci affirming his interest in mathematics and numerology fully persuaded by the Arab arithmetic that had possibly originated in India but developed in Muslim Spain. As per his biographer, “Regule abaci is a practical book, but Adelard was interested in more than numerical notation. He had shown that he f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Travel narratives and the imperial imperatives: Investigating gender and Islam
• Chapter 1: Adelard and Muslim scholarship: Connecting the medieval worlds during the Crusades and Reconquista
• Chapter 2: Pioneer traveller–observer: Thomas Coryate’s Eastern journeys and discourses
• Chapter 3: Mary Wortley Montagu in the Ottoman World: A formidable non-orientalist
• Chapter 4: Montagu on Gender, Janissaries, Jews, and inoculation in Ottoman Turkey
• Chapter 5: Bridging the gaps: Fanny Parkes among the Indian Muslims
• Chapter 6: Mapping Muslim communities: Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali in India
• Chapter 7: Scholar, spy, and imperial socialite: Gertrude Bell among Muslims
• Chapter 8: Lone scholar and invisible sleuth: Freya Stark and Muslims
• Epilogue: Sojourners and academes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index