For Lust of Knowing (29 page)

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.

In 1885 he also published
Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia
, which drew upon both pre-Islamic poetry and contemporary accounts of Bedouin practice in order to argue that early Arabsociety was matriarchal and matrilocal (that is to say that the husband joined the wife's clan upon marriage).
Mutterrecht
or the power of women in primitive Arabsociety was presented by Smith as a product of Arab sensuality. Over the centuries, however, matriarchy was replaced by patriarchy, and female infanticide and polygamy consolidated male dominance. What was true for the Arabs went for the ancient Hebrews too, for he seems to have regarded the early Jews as camel-rearing Bedouin. For both early Arabs and Hebrews, ‘religious life involved clans living in close fellowship with their clan god'. On the other hand, the perceived natural conservatism of the Bedouin that Muhammad had found so hard to combat, meant that their present manner of life was an excellent guide to the way things were done in biblical times. The scorching hot desert of Arabia was a kind of refrigerator in which ancient Semitic practices were preserved.

In 1889 Smith published his
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites
, which dealt with the rituals of sacrifice, communion and atonement as practised by early Hebrew and Arab tribesmen. He argued that rituals arise before the mythologies or creeds that are constructed around them and that all primitive religions pass through a totemistic stage. True religion originates in magic and superstition but outgrows them. Prophets tailored their messages to the societies and circumstances they spoke to and, if this applied to Samuel and Ezekiel, it also applied to Muhammad. Smith's study of the Hadiths, the body of traditions associated with the Prophet, persuaded him that these had been invented and compiled over a long period in much the same way as Pentateuchal law had been. Smith might have done more but for poor health, and the book does not quite have a finished feel. Although twentieth-century anthropologists like James Frazer and Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to explore the themes that Smith raised, his ideas on totemism and primitive matriarchy are no longer accepted. On the other hand, his argument that tribal genealogies are social constructs, rather than literal records, commands widespread assent
among anthropologists today. He was a fiery, energetic character who regarded slack scholarship as a form of immorality. Every Christmas, but only at Christmas, he read a novel, out of some sort of reluctant sense of cultural duty. As he lay on his deathbed in 1894 he was planning the
Encyclopaedia Biblica
. This great reference work, together with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, must be regarded as the key model for the later, fundamental document of modern Orientalism, the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
.

Smith's views on the slow evolution of both early Jewish law and the Hadith corpus were similar to those of his German friend, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918).
⁷²
Albert Hourani, a leading twentieth-century historian of the Arabs and Islam, argued that Wellhausen and Goldziher were the first people to study Islam seriously.
⁷³
(The slightly younger and more long-lived Goldziher will be discussed at length in the next chapter.) Wellhausen came from a Lutheran background. He had become interested in biblical history after hearing Heinrich Ewald's lectures in Göttingen. Although Ewald was a considerable Arabist and had produced a two-volume
Grammatica critica linguae Arabicae
(1831–3), he was only interested in using Arabic in the furtherance of the study of ancient Israel. This was Wellhausen's prejudice too and his fame today, such as it is, rests chiefly upon his Old Testament researches. In 1878 he produced
Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels
, in which he sought to discover through close source-criticism the real history of the early Hebrew folk, before it was written up and distorted by the post-exilic priesthood. In 1892 Wellhausen became Professor in Göttingen, where he worked closely with Nöldeke, another former student of Ewald's.