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Reviews of Books 515 Reviews of Books 515 This atlas, however, needs a major warning under the trade descriptions act. Even though, as it almost admits itself, more Muslims live east of Afghanistan than to the west, the focus is almost entirely on the Muslim world from Afghanistan to the Atlantic Ocean. Just four of the forty-four maps in the History and Politics section address the Islamic world east of Afghanistan; three maps address issues of water in the Sahara, the Jordan Valley and Turkey and Mesopotamia, but no attention is paid to water matters in the Indus Valley and the Ganges/Brahmaputra valleys where very much larger numbers of Muslims are affected by problems of water management and international rivalry for the resource; the map of holy sites and religious centres in the Muslim world has just three not very appropriate mentions for the area east of Afghanistan, placed almost as though they were an afterthought. Indeed, the structure and feel of this atlas is of a project designed to cover the Muslim world from Afghanistan westwards, and that is precisely the area shown in the picture on the front of the book. It would appear that perhaps the marketing department at Brill decided towards the end of the project that a focus just on the western lands of Islam would not do; the atlas had to claim, however inaccurately, to cover the whole of it. Whatever the reason for the pretensions of the title, the disproportionate coverage is a disgrace. And not least because it has been in the years 1800–2000 covered by the atlas that first the Muslims of South Asia, and then those of Southeast Asia, have come to have increasingly a leading role to play in Islamic civilisation. Francis Robinson Royal Holloway, University of London, and Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies The Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire.By Avril A. Powell. pp. xvii, 318. Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2010. doi:10.1017/S1356186311000654 Between 1827 and 1876 two remarkable brothers, Dr John Muir and Sir William Muir, both Scottish scholar-administrators, served the East India Company and the Raj in the North West Provinces of British India. Both came from a strong evangelical background which meant they supported Christian missionary work in India. Both were involved in colleges supporting Anglo-Oriental education. Both made major contributions to oriental scholarship, John in the field of Sanskrit and Vedic history and William in that of Arabic and early Islamic history. Both continued on their return to Scotland to make major contributions to their fields. William, in addition, had a major influence on the leading Indian Muslims of his day, rose to become Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Provinces and Oudh, and on his return became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, helping to consolidate its traditions of scholarship and teaching in Oriental Studies. Scottish Orientalists and India is the first major study of these two men. It begins by exploring the Muir family background as traders and civic figures in Kilmarnock in West Lowlands Scotland as, in the late eighteenth century, it experienced industrialisation. In the process the influence of Evangelical thought and the Scottish Enlightenment is carefully appraised. The book continues, taking the brothers through the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, painting a useful portrait of the institution and of the impact it left on the brothers. Their early lives in India, their involvement in evangelical networks, their engagements with pandits and ulama, and their contributions to Anglo-Oriental education are then addressed. There follows an examination of the development of John Muir’s Original Sanskrit Te xt s in five volumes (1855–70), which was to be the foundation of his reputation as a scholar, and William Muir’s The Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the era of the Hegira: With Introductory Chapters on the Original Sources for the Biography of Mahomet, and on the Pre-Islamite History of Arabia, two volumes (1858), which was to make him notorious in the eyes of Muslims. For much of the Mutiny Uprising of Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 07:16:45, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186311000654 516 Reviews of Books 1857/58 William Muir was holed up in Agra Fort. When the disturbances came to an end he opposed vigorously the assertion that there had been a Muslim conspiracy and supported Viceroy Canning’s policies of clemency. Two further chapters examine the counterpoint between William Muir and his great Indian contemporary, Saiyid Ahmad Khan. We are taken through the Saiyid’s strong criticism of William’s Life of Mahomet, note too that both felt that Indian Muslims were essentially loyal to British rule, and see both at the same time working on founding Anglo-Oriental Colleges, Muir his Central College at Allahabad and Saiyid Ahmad his MA-O College at Aligarh. The careers of both Muirs in retirement in Edinburgh are considered. The book concludes by considering how far the Muir’s distinctively Scottish upbringing and education influenced their intellectual engagement with India and the legacies of the two brothers to scholarship down to the present. Like Avril Powell’s earlier book, Muslims and Missionaries in pre-mutiny India (1995), this is a first-class piece of research to which scholars will refer for years to come. A particular high point for this reviewer is the setting out of the counterpoint in the actions of William Muir and Saiyid Ahmad Khan: so Muir’s The Testimony borne by the Coran to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures (1854/1860, Urdu trans. 1861)was followed by Saiyid Ahman Khan’s Tabyin al-Kalam: The Mahomedan Commentary on the Holy Bible,Parts 1 and 2 (1862/65); Muir’s Life of Mahomet was followed by Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s A Series of Essays on the Life of Mahomed . ; and Viceroy Lytton laid the foundation stone of Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s MA-O college just five years after Viceroy Northbrook laid that of Muir’s Central College. It would have been helpful to have had some assessment of how far Saiyid Ahmad Khan, up to now not usually considered in the context of Muir, might have been influenced by this distinguished Indian civil servant. There is no doubting the complicated relationship between them. Muir’s work on the Prophet was the cause of deep hurt to Saiyid Ahmad, yet Muir’s support was crucial to the establishment of MA-O College; Muir referred to Saiyid Ahmad as his ‘Dost’ and ‘Aziz’ but did not include him amongst his Indian correspondents after he retired. A second important conclusion reveals the different trajectories in religious understanding of the two evangelical brothers. John, through his work on Indian and other Eastern literary sources, moved towards valuing the ‘affinities’ and ‘equivalences’ in the ethical and moral teachings of the world’s great religions. William, throughout his life, down to the publication of his The Caliphate: Its Rise, Decline and Fall (1891), continued to present a negative picture of Islam. ‘William’, as Powell declares, “merits much of the recent Saidian and post-Saidian critique of nineteenth-century western writing on Islam”. A third important aspect of this book is Powell’s respect for the complexity of William Muir’s attitudes and responses. We are shown a man who is a persistent critic of the Muslim tradition to a point which caused many Muslims distress, yet he is also amongst the strongest supporters of north Indian Muslims during the period of high British Muslim paranoia between 1858 and 1870.Weare shown a man who in his early career was most supportive of Christian missionary work, yet at the same time hoped that Islamic progress might emerge from a group he called “Protestant Moslems” or “Delhi Wahabies”. We are shown a man who might spur Christian scholars into “verbal warfare” in his The Mohammedan Controversy pamphlet of 1845, yet fifty years later might lecture Edinburgh University students on the fanaticism and sin of the Crusaders while at the same time praising the chivalry and forbearance of their Muslim opponents, Nur al-din and Salah al-Din. There is much else to treasure in this work of careful and thorough scholarship which will be of interest to those working in the spheres of Scotland and empire, Evangelicanism and empire, Orientalism and nineteenth-century northern India. Francis Robinson Royal Holloway, University of London, and Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 07:16:45, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186311000654.
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