For Lust of Knowing (16 page)

Apart from his work on the polyglot, Pococke produced a complete translation of Bar Hebraeus and he appended to it a history of the Arabs composed by himself. Produced in his later years, this was a major work in the field of Arabic studies. But though Bar Hebraeus,
Historia compendiosa dynastiarum
was published in 1663, it received so little attention that Pococke, depressed, spent less time on Arab and Islamic matters and turned instead to a study of minor Hebrew prophets, which was more likely to lead on to fame and fortune (though in fact it did not do so). Despite his increasing concentration in later years on biblical matters, Pococke was prodigiously energetic and in the course of his career he produced a remarkable body of Orientalist scholarship, some of it in published form and some as lecture notes. The publications included an edition and Latin translation with annotations of the
Lamiyyat
of al-Tughrai (1061–1120), a lengthy
qasida
, or ode, in which al-Tughrai lamented the corrupt times that he lived in and complained that he was neglected in his old age while other younger men were preferred. Since the ode was famous, or notorious, for its obscure language, Pococke's edition,
Carmen Tograi
, was a tour de force. He worked on various other
Arabic texts, dealing with literature, proverbs and history. Pococke's scholarly exploration of texts by among others al-Maydani, al-Hariri, ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi and Ibn ‘Arabshah formed the core of what was still being studied by Arabists right up to the early nineteenth century.

Pococke's best-known Arabic translation was a translation of Ibn Tufayl's twelfth-century Arabic philosophical fable,
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
as
Philosophus Autodidactus
, published in 1671. This story about a foundling, reared by a gazelle on a desert island, who learns first to fend for himself and then to explore the way the universe works and ultimately to discover God, may possibly have had some influence on Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
. Ibn Tufayl's fantasy may also have had a role in shaping English empirical philosophy as it was developed by John Locke and others. Like
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
, Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) is an enquiry into what sorts of things God has fitted humans to know.

Among Pococke's minor works was his translation of an extremely brief anonymous treatise in Arabic on coffee-drinking,
The Nature of the drink Kauhi, or Coffe, and the Berry of which it is made. Described by an Arabian Philistian
(1659). Coffee-drinking originated in Yemen some time around the thirteenth century and spread throughout the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. Pococke is said to have been the first man in England to drink coffee. Those who were suspicious of the new drink claimed that it brought on his palsy. (The Arabauthor, for his part, warned that drinking coffee with milk might bring on leprosy.) For a long time coffee-drinking was to be regarded with great suspicion in some circles, as it was tainted with Mahometanism.
¹⁷
Pococke ranked together with Golius as the greatest scholar of Arabic in the seventeenth century, but he left no disciples who were capable of matching his erudition and acuity.

The Laudian Professorship that was established in Oxford in 1636 had been preceded by the foundation at Cambridge in 1632 of the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic. Thomas Adams was a wealthy draper
and Lord Mayor of London, who hoped that he might, through his benefaction, be instrumental in converting the Muslims. The teaching of Arabic, he felt, should serve the purpose of ‘the enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sitt in darkness'.
¹⁸
Abraham Wheelocke (
c
. 1593–1653), the first scholar to hold the Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic at Cambridge, was fervent against Islam: ‘Set aside some grosse idolatories of the church of Roome, & their Tyrannicall goernment, the onli pressure on the bodie of the Church of Christ is Mahomets Alcoran, I desire to breath out my last breth in this cause, and to my poore skil, I would endeavour to write Notes against the Alcoran in the Language of the Alcoran, which is the Arabick.'
¹⁹
However, he had a rather curious attitude to the ‘Arabick' that he was supposed to teach. He pointed out that it was a difficult language, not particularly useful and besides there were not very many books in that language available in Britain. Consequently he regarded it as part of his academic duty to discourage students from taking up the subject. He was quite successful in this and on one occasion, finding that no pupils had turned up for his lectures, he posted the notice to the effect that ‘Tomorrow the professor of Arabic will go into the wilderness'. He published practically nothing in or on Arabic, though he planned to write a refutation of the Qur'an. Wheelocke was also Reader in Anglo-Saxon and he was much keener on that subject than he was on Oriental matters. In so far as he was interested in the Eastern Churches, it was their possible importance as sources for Anglo-Saxon Christianity that engaged his attention. He also enjoyed composing occasional poetry in Latin. Despite his two professorships, his financial circumstances were always precarious, though not as precarious as those of his successor in the Chair.

The Reverend Edmund Castell (1606–86), the second holder of the Thomas Adams Professorship, from 1667 until 1685, was in some respects a more considerable figure. Like so many of his colleagues, Castell was not in the slightest interested in Islam. Rather, his chief enthusiasm was for trying to establish links with the Eastern Christian Churches. However, he also hoped that Arabic might be useful in identifying obscure plants mentioned in the Bible. He had worked on the London Polyglot Bible and his own work on the
Lexicon
Heptaglotton
(1669), a comparative dictionary of seven languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Arabic and Persian), evolved out of that project. Essentially it was a dictionary of Semitic languages and Persian was included only because it had not yet been demonstrated that Persian was not a Semitic language. (In fact, Persian is an Indo-Aryan language.) If for not much else, the
Lexicon
might be useful for reading the polyglot Bible. It ran to 4,007 pages and included descriptions of the grammars of the various languages.

Castell regarded himself as being on some kind of holiday if he worked less than sixteen hours a day. But he was always miserable and full of complaint and by the time he had finished his polyglot dictionary, people had lost their enthusiasm for studying the polyglot Bible. Castell ruined himself in his typographically extravagant enterprise. Five hundred copies remained unsold at the time of his death and rats ate much of what was left. Yet more copies perished in the Great Fire of London. Not only did he lose a small fortune but he plunged so deep into the study of Oriental languages that he allegedly had forgotten his own. He ended up a half-blind pauper.
²⁰
(Later, as we shall see, Simon Ockley and George Sale were similarly ruined by their Orientalist enthusiasms.)

Although Wheelocke left an unimpressive legacy as an Arabist, he had mastered Persian and he taught this language to Thomas Hyde (1636–1703). Hyde subsequently moved to Oxford. A corpulent and abstracted polymathic scholar, he worked on the Arabic, Persian and Syriac texts of the polyglot Bible. Eventually he combined the post of Librarian of the Bodleian with the Laudian Professorship of Arabic (1691) and the Regius Professorship of Hebrew (1697). Hyde was also alleged to know Turkish, Malay, Armenian and Chinese and he acted as a translator for Charles II. He supervised the printing of the Gospels into Malay. His wide interests also included Oriental games, sea monsters and mermaids. He worked on the star tables of Ulugh Beg that John Greaves had previously made a start on. Like Greaves, he was interested in Abu al-Fida's
Geography
and planned to edit it, but nothing came of this. Hyde regarded the
Historia religionis veterum Persarum
(1700) as his major work, but his account of the pre-Islamic religions of Persia, especially Zoroastrianism, relied so heavily on much later Persian sources from the Islamic era that this
study was of limited value. Certainly it brought him little reward and John Cleland (who did achieve success with his pornographic novel,
Fanny Hill
) remembers Hyde using unsold copies of his study of the religions of Persia to boil his kettle. Hyde had a downbeat view of the value of giving lectures on Arabic, ‘hearers being scarce and practicers more scarce'.
²¹

According to Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), Hyde ‘doth not understand common sense in his own language, and therefore I cannot conceive how he can make sense of anything that is writ in another'. However, Prideaux's own book on Muhammad was to be criticized by a bookseller to whom he offered it for publication, who said he ‘could wish there were a little more humour in it'. This book was
The True Nature of Imposture fully display'd in the Life of Mahomet
, published in 1697.
²²
It certainly was short on humour, as its author used the pretext of a history of the life of the Prophet as a vehicle for denunciations of the Deists and all sorts of religious extremists: ‘Have we not Reason to fear, that God may in the same Manner raise up some
Mahomet
against us for our utter Confusion… And by what the
Socinian
, the
Quaker
, and the
Deist
begin to advance in this Land, we may have reason to fear, that Wrath hath some Time since gone forth from the Lord for the Punishment of these our Iniquities and Gainsayings, and that the Plague is already among us.'
²³
Prideaux, whose life of Muhammad was part of a planned ‘History of the ruin of the Eastern Church', considered the rise of Islam to be a punishment for the Eastern Christians' divisions and heresies. Although he complained about the desperate shortage of books in Arabic, his knowledge of Arabic was either slight or non-existent. (His claim that the Arabic language was very like English raises considerable doubts in my mind.) He drew so heavily on the works of earlier writers that the ‘real nature of the imposture' was Prideaux's pretence to be an Arabist. His book was full of errors, as George Sale in the following century enthusiastically pointed out. Prideaux's
Connection
(1716–18), a historical and theological treatise about the period between the end of the Old and the beginning of the New Testament, was a more substantial and scholarly work. After Pococke's death, Prideaux had been offered the Laudian Professorship, but, fortunately perhaps, he turned it down and Hyde, who was more truly committed to Orientalism,
took it up. However, Hyde's successor as Laudian Professor of Arabic, John Wallis (1703–38), was an unproductive academic nonentity, more fond of good company than learned books, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the prestige and achievements of English Orientalism declined steeply in the eighteenth century.

During the seventeenth century, English Orientalists corresponded regularly with their fellow Protestant Orientalists in Holland. The University of Leiden, founded in 1575 in the immediate aftermath of the Dutch Revolt against Spain, was the centre of Dutch Orientalism and of academic life more generally. Indeed, it was the leading Protestant university in Europe and the place swarmed with British, German and French Huguenot students. In its early years the university drew heavily on French scholarship and Joseph Scaliger was only the grandest of various French scholars whom it recruited. Despite Leiden's vital intellectual life and numerous bookshops, the crusty Scaliger described the place as ‘a swamp within a swamp'. Leiden's Chair of Arabic was established in 1600 and for two centuries thereafter Leiden was to dominate Oriental studies. The groundwork for Leiden's ascendancy in this area was laid by Scaliger and Franciscus Raphelengius, both of whom had studied Arabic with Postel before introducing it to Leiden. (Raphelengius's work on the Antwerp Polyglot Bible for the Plantin Press has been mentioned in the previous chapter.)

Raphelengius moved from Antwerp to Leiden in 1585 and eventually became Professor of Hebrew. He was responsible for setting up the first Arabic press in Holland and was also the first to compile for publication an Arabic–Latin dictionary, the
Lexicon Arabico–Latinum
(posthumously published in 1613, after his death in 1597). In this work, Raphelengius had drawn heavily on a Mozarabic Latin–Arabic glossary, which had been compiled by Arab-speaking Christians living under Moorish rule in twelfth-century Toledo, to assist them in the study of Latin. Clearly this was an awkward source to
draw on for a dictionary intended to guide scholars already fluent in Latin in their study of the unfamiliar Arabic tongue. Postel had acquired the manuscript, but it ended up in Leiden. Raphelengius's dictionary was not a very well ordered or accurate compilation, and the chief market was among biblical scholars, interested in Hebrew and Aramaic.
²⁴

After Raphelengius's death in 1597, the scholar Erpenius (Thomas van Erpe) (1584–1625) saw Raphelengius's dictionary through the press and provided additions and corrections of his own. (Erpenius, in working on the dictionary, followed Scaliger's earlier counsel that Orientalists should make use of Turkish translations of the great medieval dictionaries.) If the Catholic Postel was the first true Orientalist, Erpenius was certainly the first great Protestant Orientalist. Erpenius was a pupil and client of Scaliger and he had also studied with Bedwell, though he failed to learn very much from the latter. In 1613 Erpenius was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages (1613–24). His inaugural oration on the
sapientia
(wisdom) of the Arabs was to be much plagiarized by later professors of Arabic. He had been so quick to learn Arabic that he was accused of using magic to do so (just like Postel before him). Erpenius claimed that Arabic was not a difficult language to learn. (I have to confess that this has not been my experience.) He also debunked the notion that Arabic was useful for studying Hebrew, even though that was why he had himself started to study Arabic and indeed his chief intellectual interest was in the vowelling of Hebrew. He recommended studying Turkish in order to understand Arabic better, in large part because of the usefulness of Turkish–Arabic dictionaries, which enabled him to make many emendations to Raphelengius's dictionary. (It should be noted that in the seventeenth century almost no one thought that Turkish was worth studying in its own right. Whereas the Arabs were respected for their culture and science, Europeans tended to regard the Turks as the barbarous descendants of the Scythians.)