For Lust of Knowing (33 page)

A Year Amongst the Persians
was published in 1893, and Browne never returned to the land he loved so much. Indeed he hardly ever left Cambridge, even for London. In Cambridge he became a celebrated academic personality – one of the sights of the place. Laurence Graffety-Smith, a student and future member of the Levant Consular Service, described him as follows: ‘Physically considered, he epitomized the processes of evolution: he was short and broad in the shoulder,
with a stoop, and grotesquely long arms dangled in his shambling walk. His finely chiselled face was a radiance of intellect and of love for his fellow man.' Graffety-Smith added that his lectures had the confusion of ‘a pack of hounds' in full cry'.
²⁶
Reader Bullard, another student and future diplomat agreed: ‘As a teacher in the narrow sense he was a joke… but Browne had to be taken for what he was: a meteor, not a locomotive.'
²⁷
Browne was impatient with dull-witted students. He was also prodigiously garrulous and spoke at a torrential speed and hardly listened to anything he was told. However, his speech was always entertaining and he was famously convivial. Denison Ross, the future director of the School of Oriental Studies, recalled engaging in table-turning in Browne's rooms in Pembroke and on another occasion taking Persian hashish there.
²⁸

Browne's mastery of Persian, Arabic and Turkish seems to have been perfect and he was alleged to dream in Persian. However, Cambridge had no professorship of Persian, so in 1902 he became the Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic and lectured on Arabic, and in 1921 he published
Arabian Medicine
. But his chief publications were in Persian studies, especially the fundamental
A Literary History of Persia
(4 volumes, 1902–24). He was Britain's first truly eminent Persianist since Thomas Hyde in the seventeenth century and Sir William Jones in the mid to late eighteenth century. Though Browne was a great expert on medieval Persian poetry, he was even more interested in contemporary Persia, in the Constitutional Movement, in the precariously free Persian press and in Persian resistance to the encroachments of Russian imperialism. According to another of his students who went on to have a distinguished diplomatic career, Sir Andrew Ryan, ‘the last of the dragomans', Browne ‘valued living oriental languages, not merely because they were still spoken, but because they were spoken by people whose aspirations enlisted his warmest sympathies'.
²⁹
In the second volume of
The Literary History of Persia
, he had written: ‘Year by year almost, the number of independent Muslim states grows less and less, while such as remain – Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Morocco and a few others – are ever more overshadowed by the menace of European interference.'
³⁰

Browne chronicled Russian atrocities in Tabriz and elsewhere. Not only did he campaign vigorously against the Russians and the complaisant
British Foreign Office, he also agitated in favour of the Boers and for Irish Home Rule and he denounced Anglo-Indian officialdom. As noted, Browne was a specialist in Persian who mostly published in that area. I have lingered over his career partly because he is so interesting, but also because Browne was a superb Arabist. It is not possible to be a first-rate Persianist without a good command of Arabic. As Ann Lambton has pointed out in her
Persian Grammar
: ‘There is a very large Arabic element in Persian. This element is an indispensable part of the spoken and written word.'
³¹
It is not just a matter of the entry of Arabic loan words into the Persian language, but also of whole phrases and constructions. Moreover, and most important for our purposes, Browne was an important and influential teacher of Arabic. Most of the important British Arabists of the next generation, including Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (1868–1945), the future author of
A Literary History of the Arabs
, were taught by Browne.

After undergraduate studies in Cambridge, followed by a year with Browne, Nicholson had studied in Leiden and Strasbourg with de Goeje and Nöldeke. Nicholson did important work editing and translating Arabic and Persian texts, especially Sufi ones.
³²
Some of these had previously been translated by Hammer-Purgstall, but since the latter usually translated them into gibberish, Nicholson did valuable work here. His most important and accessible work was his
Literary History of the Arabs
(1907). This was intended as a companion volume to Browne's
Literary History of Persia
. In this book Nicholson, a classicist to his fingertips, devoted less than three pages to literary developments in the Arabworld after 179 8and, as far as he was concerned, the main literary development in the modern world was the translation of European works into Arabic. The Arabs' own literary achievements were all firmly in the past, which ‘affords an ample and splendid field of study'. He had read the classics at Cambridge and won the Porson Prize for verses in Greek and he only switched to Arabic and Persian for Part Two of the Cambridge exams. It is not surprising then that his history of Arabic literature is replete with comparisons and allusions to Greek and Roman authors. Pre-Islamic odes were compared to the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
. Thus alMa‘arri is compared to Lucian and Ibn Khaldun to Gibbon. Mas‘udi
is referred to as the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs' as well as their ‘Suetonius'. Abu Muslim's advance west against the Umayyads is compared to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon. The Battle of Badr, fought between the followers of Muhammad and the pagan Quraysh, was compared to that of Marathon, fought between the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Laus duplex
, the Roman rhetorical figure, appears in Arabic also. The Abbasid historians' maligning of the Umayyads was compared by Nicholson to Tacitus's misrepresentation of Tiberius. Nicholson took for granted that all of his readers would be familiar with this sort of stuff. He never travelled out to the Middle East. What would have been the point? Indeed, although he taught both classical Arabic and Persian, he was unable to speak either of these languages.

The other striking feature of
A Literary History of the Arabs
is its heavy debt to continental scholarship. As Nicholson put it in the introduction: ‘the reader will see for himself how much is derived from Von Kremer, Goldziher, Nöldeke, and Wellhausen, to mention only a few of the leading authorities'.
³³
Although Nicholson knew a huge amount about Arabic literature, he did not like it very much and he found Arabic poetry much more alien than Persian. He judged the Qur'an to be ‘obscure, tiresome, uninteresting: a farrago of long-winded narratives and prosaic exhortations'.
³⁴
He preferred Persian mystical poetry and translated an enormous amount of the verses of the remarkable thirteenth-century Sufi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, but even Rumi was described by him as ‘rambling, tedious and often obscure'. Nicholson's Edwardian style of translation has not worn well. As Franklin D. Lewis notes, ‘Nicholson's verse translations, which reflect a Victorian sensibility, were already in his own day rather out of touch with the revolution of literary modernism and today sound quite dated and sentimental.'
³⁵
Faced with the occasional obscenity in Rumi he translated it into a Latin that was modelled on the erotic Latin verses of Juvenal and Persius. However, for all his limitations, he was a learned, accurate, diligent scholar who did a huge amount to introduce the Western world to the classics of Arabic and Persian literature. His work on Sufism was particularly valuable as he was one of the first to present Muslim mystical experiences as valid rather than drug-induced hallucinations or disguised atheism. Although his
protégé and successor as professor, A. J. Arberry, called him ‘the dervish', there was nothing very wild or exotic about Nicholson. A round of golf was as much excitement as he ever encountered.

Arabic and Persian were taught as dead classical languages by Nicholson and his academic contemporaries. At first sight this sort of approach was not useful for Britain's proconsuls, diplomats and adventurers in the Middle East. But then consider that the proconsular mentality was formed by a deep familiarity with Greek and Latin. Lord Curzon, Sir Ronald Storrs, T. E. Lawrence and most of the rest of them were steeped in the Greek and Rome classics. Readings of Thucydides, Herodotus and Tacitus guided those who governed the British empire. Lord Cromer, the proconsul in Egypt, was obsessed with the Roman empire and its decline and fall. Sir Ronald Storrs used to read the
Odyssey
before breakfast. T. E. Lawrence read the Greek poets during his time as an archaeologist at Carcemish and later translated the
Odyssey
. Colonial administrators were much more likely to be familiar with the campaigns of Caesar than those of Muhammad and the Quraysh.

The appointment of William Robertson Smith to the Thomas Adams Professorship in 1870 had established a great intellectual tradition in Arabic studies at Cambridge that would include Edward Palmer and then the twentieth-century professors, Browne, Nicholson, A. J. Arberry and Malcolm Lyons. But the first intellectually commanding figure to hold the Laudian Chair of Arabic in Oxford since the seventeenth century, Margoliouth, was appointed only in 1889.
³⁶
David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940), the son of a Jewish rabbi who had converted to Christianity, was born in Bethnal Green. He won a scholarship to Winchester and later read classics at Oxford and was awarded a first. Although he was to make a name for himself as an Arabist, he was first a classicist and he taught Latin and Greek to, among others, the future Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray and the historian H. A. L. Fisher. Murray thought that Margoliouth
lectured on Pindar not because he particularly liked the Greek poet's works, but because they raised difficult textual problems. Margoliouth was an eccentric genius in several languages, including Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. He was also striking in appearance. An Italian maid exclaimed on seeing him, ‘Questo bel animale feroce!'

Having tutored the classics for most of the 1880s and published some fairly dry stuff about scholia (classical commentaries), he took up Arabic and was appointed Laudian Professor at the age of thirty – a post which he held until his retirement in 1937. He became ordained and gained a reputation as a great preacher. During the First World War he lectured in India. After the war, he spent a lot of time in Baghdad. The travel writer and influential political figure Gertrude Bell, who was in Baghdad in 1918, wrote home to England about Margoliouth's appearance there and how he lectured for fifty minutes by the clock on the ancient splendours of Baghdad in classical Arabic and without a note. ‘It is the talk of the town. It's generally admitted that he knows more of Arabic language and history than any Arab here.' But in another letter she noted that at a later lecture given by Margoliouth, a brave member of the audience asked, ‘How do you say in Arabic – Do you drive a motor car?', which angered the classically erudite professor.
³⁷
According to
The Times's
obituary of Margoliouth, he ‘spoke the vernacular with scholarly precision; but the accent and intonation were not very much like any Arab', and the general consensus seems to have been that he spoke an Arabic that was so pure that ordinary Arabs could not understand it.

In the year he became professor he published
Analecta Orientalia ad Poeticam Aristoteleam
(1887), a collection of translations of Arabic and Syriac texts that might be used for textual criticism of the Greek text of Aristotle's
Poetics
. Margoliouth, who was brilliant at crosswords and anagrams, had the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed. Among other things he conducted eccentric investigations into possible anagrams and chronograms in the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. He believed that Homer had signed his epics, but disguised his signature in anagrams. In
The Homer of Aristotle
(1924) he argued that the Homeric epics were full of chronograms (words or phrases where the letters form a date). This kind of approach made little impression on more orthodox classical scholars.
His ideas about the Bible were similarly eccentric, as he entertained the strange belief that the Book of Daniel was written when it purported to be (sixth century
BC
) and therefore that its prophecies were genuine. Margoliouth's taste for making things difficult even extended to domestic matters and instead of telling his dog to ‘Sit!' he used to order it to ‘Assume the recumbent position!'

In the field of Arabic studies, he did solid work translating or editing such important medieval writers as al-Tanukhi, Miskawayh, al-Ma‘arri, al-Baydawi, al-Yaqut and Ibn al-Jawzi. He did important work on Arabic papyrology. However, he also published several works that were accessible to a wider public and somewhat offensive to Muslims. He wrote
Mohammed and the Rise of Islam
(1906) for the popular ‘Heroes of the Nations' series. In this book, Margoliouth's Gibbonian scepticism, oddly combined with Christian fervour, led him to present a thoroughly hostile portrait of Muhammad. He argued, like many before him, that Muhammad was an epileptic who had fits. However, where medieval polemicists had argued that the Prophet had married so many wives because of his excessive sensuality, Margoliouth argued that the marriages were mostly made in order to seal political pacts. He also suggested analogies between the founder of Islam and Brigham Young, the founder of the Mormon faith. As H. A. R. Gibb, his successor in the Laudian Chair of Arabic, wrote in his obituary of Margoliouth, ‘the ironical tone which informed his observations disturbed many of his European and sometimes infuriated his Muslim readers'.
³⁸
Among other things, he had suggested that there was no evidence that the Islamic faith improved the morality of those pagan Arabs who converted to it – rather the contrary. As for Muhammad, he was ‘a robber chief'.