In Arabia Georg August Wallin and His Travels in the 1840 the in Travels His and Wallin August Georg Olce Far Niente Far Olce

23.9.2014 15:46:57 the Bedouin and his desert, and fear, whatever end one’s love may love fear, take.” whatever one’s end what does one with does one love not Georg August Wallin, 1846 “I love s

in Arabia Georg August Wallin and his travels in the 1840 the in travels his and Wallin August Georg olce far niente far olce

Society of Society of Swedish Literature in Finland D

dolce far niente in Arabia - - g g or ISBN 978-951-583-290-0 - nent scholar,nent ddle emi Mi ven-year ven-year se www.sls.fi arch community by arch by community rese Abdfrom al-Wali Central Asia. As an aphic observer and linguistic gr Wallin’s lifeWallin’s and travels in Egypt, ternational ternational Society Swedish of Literature in Finland he Arabianhe Peninsula and Persia are to make contact with the local inhabitants as he sumed a Muslim identity and disguised himself as thephysician ʽ observerwas he both inquisitive and sharp-eyed, and therefore well to document able daily life among the urban dwellers Cairo of and the Bedouin the of northern Arabian Peninsula. His unique material is preserved in diaries and letters which wrote he in his native language, Swedish – sometimes, however, with Arabic script to evade detection. By his con temporaries he was considered an diedhe but shortly afterhis and wasjourney, therefore to pub able lish only a fraction his of material, which wassubsequently obscured from the in the language barrier. described four by scholars here of Eastern culture and history. They also highlight importance Wallin’s as an ethno researcher. In the 1840s the Finnish Orientalist Ge August Wallin travelled in the Middle East, where collected he material Arabicon dialects. In order t Dolce far Niente_omslag_ENG.indd All Pages Dolce far niente in Arabia Dolce far niente in Arabia

Far niente is an opportunity for a unique, discriminating form of asceticism. Georg August Wallin and his Pierre Saint-Amand travels in the 1840s

Society of Swedish Literature in Finland Helsinki 2014 Dolce far niente in Arabia

Georg August Wallin and his travels in the 1840s

Society of Swedish Literature in Finland Helsinki 2014 © The authors and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland 2014 www.sls.fi

Cover illustrations: Paul Klee, With Two Dromedaries and 1 Donkey, 1919 (Indiana University Art Museum, Bernhard and Cola Heiden Collection, 2000.141. © Photo: Kevin Montague); R. W. Ekman, portrait of Georg August Wallin, 1854 (Helsinki University Museum, © Photo: Matti Ruotsalainen)

Editor: Nina Edgren-Henrichson Translations (all except Hämeen-Anttila’s article): David McDuff Picture editor and indexing: Kira Pihlflyckt Maps (pp. 18, 49, 74, 96): Hannu Linkola Cover and graphic design: Antti Pokela Typeset: Margita Lindgren/Ekenäs TypoGrafi

UDK 910.4, 929

ISBN 978-951-583-290-0 (print) ISBN 978-951-583-428-7 (pdf)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Sales and distribution in Scandinavia:

Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen Birketinget 6 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark www.mtp.dk

The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland PB 158 FI-00171 Helsingfors Finland www.sls.fi

Sales and distribution outside Scandinavia:

Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen Birketinget 6 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark www.mtp.dk Artikelns titel

Contents

Heikki Palva Foreword...... 7

Patricia Berg Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula ...... 13 Finland and Helsinki during the early decades of the nineteenth century...... 15 Family and youth...... 17 Student years in Helsinki in the 1830s...... 21 Further study of Oriental languages and dissertation for the docentship...... 27 The ravelt scholarship application and the research journey...... 32 After the research journey...... 37 G. A. Wallin, Letter...... 40

Sofia Häggman Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home...... 41 Alexandria – the encounter with the Orient...... 45 Cairo – an Oriental home...... 47 To Barraniya and Tanta – a summer in the country.... 48 The Nile journey – the encounter with the Pharaonic... 52 The last winter in Cairo...... 58 Retrospective and lessons...... 59 G. A. Wallin, Diary...... 64

5 Förnamn Efternamn

Kaj Öhrnberg The terra incognita of Arabia...... 65 Philology – the Queen of the nineteenth-century sciences...... 68 The Romantic traveller...... 72 The first journey into the desert...... 73 The second journey into the desert...... 76 The third journey into the desert...... 77 Back to Europe and plans for a new journey to Arabia...... 80 Epilogue: Empire and geography intertwined...... 85 G. A. Wallin, Letter...... 90

Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila Georg August Wallin and Persia...... 93 A country in turmoil...... 98 Wallin and the Persian language...... 100 Constantly comparing Persians with Arabs...... 104 Wallin and Persian literature...... 112 Results from the visit to Persia...... 117 G. A. Wallin, Letter...... 121

Notes...... 123 Bibliography...... 132 Picture sources...... 138 Contributors...... 139 Index...... 140

6 Artikelns titel

Foreword

eorg August Wallin (1811–1852) is famous in his native Finland as the daring explorer of the Arabian Peninsula, a Gtravelling researcher who did not hesitate to throw himself into adventures. At the University of Helsinki his exotic portrait aroused well-deserved attention in the ranks of the prominent men of his time. The sunburned face in the portrait speaks of long journeys under Arabia’s blazing sun, while the white turban and the scroll define the subject as a learned scholar of the Middle East. Wallin’s international star reached its zenith in 1850, after his return from his seven-year journey in the Middle East. He had been the first European to cross the northern Arabian Penin- sula and immerse himself in the local conditions of previously unexplored areas, including al-Jauf and Ha’il. His travel report was read out to the Royal Geographical Society in London, at a meeting he himself attended, and the society presented him with its major award. The Société Géographique de Paris gave him its prestigious silver medal, The East India Trading Company rewarded him for valuable new information that complemented the Company’s atlas, and the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesell- schaft made him an honorary member. During the decades that followed Wallin’s international fame gradually declined – not so much because he died young and his ambitious plans for further research thus came to nothing, than because his fame was based on only one part of his work: mainly two reports published in the Journal of the Royal Geo-

7 Heikki Palva graphical Society (1850 and 1854) on the journeys he undertook on the Arabian Peninsula in 1845 and 1848. The framework of the reports is a rectilinear and impersonal description of the topography and natural conditions along the route. While it is true that Wallin also shares his knowledge of the Bedouin tribes, their living conditions and their mutual relationships, he strives for a compressed and objective description, omitting his own experiences almost entirely. A completely different Wallin, the inquisitive researcher and colourful storyteller who takes an active part in the diversity of local life, emerges in his letters and diaries written in Swedish.

* * *

When Wallin began his research career in the 1830s, Europe was experiencing its Romantic period, and the dawning National Romantic movement in Finland sought sustenance in the Finnish folk poetry tradition, and its most significant creation the Kalevala, which was published in 1835. Finno-Ugric philology and folklore became the leading disciplines in the field of the humanities. In the competition for research funding, scholars specializing in Finno-Ugric languages had a n advantage in that the subject was perceived to be of national importance, involving the study of the Finnish ethnos. Wallin applied for a travel scholarship to study Arabic dialects and also the geography, history and religious life of the Arabian Peninsula. His plans gained support from the fact that his subject was likely to attract interest abroad – and thereby give prominence among international scholars to small, autonomous Finland, which was a Grand Duchy of Russia. It should be noted, however, that Wallin’s research plan lacked any link to the political and economic rivalry that existed between Europe’s great powers, as Russia had no interests in the Arabian Peninsula. Wallin’s uniqueness among other Arabian travellers is often overlooked, because scholarly linguistic publications rarely percolate beyond the circle of specialists. It is therefore worth mentioning that, of all the explorers in the Arabian Peninsula

8 Artikelns titel

Portrait of Georg August Wallin by R. W. Ekman, 1854.

9 Heikki Palva during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Wallin was the only trained linguist. He lacked formal training in geography, and the only instruments he took with him on his travels were a watch, a compass and a thermometer. However, his equipment also included a doctor’s bag and the medical knowledge he had acquired at university so that he could function as a physician. In the course of his medical studies he had taken classes in physiology, and was therefore able to record his acoustic observations with the use of precise terminology. In the field of phonetics he arguably led the way among scholars of Arabic. In his student years Wallin had taken an active part in music-making. As he himself tells us, during the four months he spent in the oasis of al-Jauf in 1845 he spent many evenings with other men listening to songs performed to the accompaniment of the rabāba, or one-stringed Bedouin violin. He later published the examples of Bedouin poetry he noted down at the time, together with comments on language and content, in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft in 1851 and 1852. These articles were the first on the subject, and they formed a starting-point for J. G. Wetzstein’s research in the field, and subsequently also for that of Albert Socin. As a linguist Wallin made it his task from the outset to focus systematically on the structure of the spoken language, and was the first to succeed in describing the phonetic and morphological characteristics of Bedouin dialects.

* * *

Georg August Wallin’s linguistic observations have been super- seded by new and increasingly accurate knowledge. However, his vivid descriptions of people and life during the 1840s in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, especially the Arabian Peninsula, are of permanent documentary value. Also, even though they no longer have any practical significance, his geographical and topographical observations are interesting and unique as historical documents. This rich material forms a part of his Swedish-language letters and diaries, the original copies of which are preserved in

10 Foreword the Finnish National Library in Helsinki. The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland publishes the collected letters and diaries in a scholarly edition – Georg August Wallin, Skrifter – with notes and contextualising articles. In this way Wallin’s writings, which often make difficult reading and are hard to interpret, are made available to researchers and the public in their original language, Swedish. This also facilitates translations into other languages. The edition Skrifterreproduces the letters and diaries in their entirety, as well as Wallin’s scientific works and scholarly applications. Also included are his notes on weather conditions and his lists of purchases and equipment, which help to fill out the picture of the life and work of a research explorer in the mid-nineteenth century. It is hoped that the collected edition, like this book about Wallin’s life and travels, will stimulate interest in the knowledge of the Middle East of the 1840s, a knowledge which, by virtue of his precise observations, Wallin is still able to impart.

Heikki Palva

11 I do not know what this love of mine for the desert can be – yet I already know it too well to expect anything of it but hunger and thirst and hot sun with no shade and at every moment the fear of being assailed and plundered by my friends the Bedouins and then mercilessly abandoned by them to die in distress or to test my powers with a nature as pitiless as its sons. And yet I know that in all the luxuriance of Persia and all the luxury of the English colony in Baghdad and the ample “fleshpots” of Egypt I constantly yearned for the desert.

Georg August Wallin 1849 (Wallin 2014, p. 391) Artikelns titel

P atricia Berg

Georg August Wallin A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

13 Förnamn Efternamn

14 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

n the years 1843–1849 the Finnish Orientalist Georg August Wallin travelled on the Arabian Peninsula and Sinai, in Egypt, ISyro-Palestine and Persia. The scientific aim of his research journey was to collect material about Arab tribal relations and Arabic dialects, and to conduct a geographic exploration of the Arabian Peninsula. Wallin travelled as a Muslim under assumed names, mostly as ῾Abd al-Wali, and his itinerary included visits to the cities of Mecca and Medina, which were closed to non- Muslims. The most remarkable thing about Wallin as a travelling researcher is not only that he travelled as a philologist at a time when research expeditions were usually of a scientific or military nature, but also that his personality and linguistic talents enabled him to become a part of the ethnic group and language he studied. But to begin from the beginning, let us start with what we know about Wallin as a person, about his student years and about the factors that came to lead him along the path towards Arabia.

Finland and Helsinki during the early decades of the nineteenth century The competition between Sweden and Russia during the Napoleonic Wars resulted in Sweden losing its eastern part – Finland – to Russia. Finland, which since the Middle Ages had been governed from Stockholm as part of the Swedish kingdom, was granted autonomy at the Diet of Porvoo in 1809. The formerly Swedish eastern part of the kingdom became the Grand Duchy of Finland, with the Russian Tsar as Grand Duke. As the country lacked a central administration, agencies and political bodies necessary for self-government were established. Foremost among these was the Diet, consisting of representatives of the four Estates. In

15 Patricia Berg accordance with the Swedish Riksdag Act hitherto in force, the Estates were chosen from those parts of Swedish Finland that had been annexed by Russia. The Diet was constituted in the presence of Grand Duke Alexander I, to the accompaniment of large celebrations. The shift from Swedish to Russian rule brought with it the formation of the basis of Finnish autonomy. Autonomy shaped the country into a self-standing political power during the same period when nationalism and the idea of an independent Finnish state took their first tentative steps. But Finland was under Russian rule, and the political climate depended greatly on who occupied the Russian throne. During the years of Georg August Wallin’s youth and until his death Nicholas I was Grand Duke of Finland. The so-called Decembrist uprising connected with Nicholas I’s accession to the throne in 1825 and the uprisings in Poland in 1830 and 1848 led to his rule being marked by an increasing level of control and surveillance, and by the militarization of the government. Censorship and control of the printed word continued in Finland until the country gained its independence in 1917. In Sweden a group of liberals headed by Anders Chydenius had spoken out for freedom of the press since the mid-eighteenth century. In 1766 Sweden’s Parliament had passed a bill on the same issue.1 Although press freedom was considerably reduced during Gustav III’s reign, beginning in 1772, it increased again from the start of the 1800s. However, while the press in the other Nordic countries acquired a growing degree of freedom, Finland was subject to systematic censorship throughout the nineteenth century. In 1812 Finland’s capital was moved from Turku to Helsinki. Turku was too close to Stockholm for the city to have much appeal for the Russian authorities, and they chose Helsinki partly because it lay closer to St. Petersburg. In the early nineteenth century Helsinki was a small town of only around 4,000 inhabitants.2 It was therefore well suited to be redeveloped as a symbol of Russian Finland, and planning of the new capital began right away. In 1816 the German architect Carl Ludvig Engel was appointed architect of the rebuilding committee. He designed the public buildings that would adorn the city centre in neoclassical Empire style.

16 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

The only university in the Grand Duchy of Finland was the Royal Academy of Turku. The Academy had been founded in 1640, and like the other universities in Europe it had four faculties: philosophy, theology, law and medicine. After the transition to Russian rule the university’s name was changed to the Imper- ial Academy.3 But in 1827 a devastating fire in Turku destroyed much of the city, and in 1828 the university moved to the new capital. Then the name was changed again, this time to the Im- perial Alexander University.4 Its main building was designed by Engel, and was constructed on Helsinki’s Senate Square. The main building was completed in 1832, and the adjacent University Library a few years later. These were the political circumstances into which Georg August Wallin was born and in which he grew up. Finland’s accession to the Russian Empire brought new opportunities and greater internationalization, but at the same time Russian censorship restricted freedom of expression and the division between Finnish and Swedish identity in Finland became stronger. In the late nineteenth century this eventually led to language conflicts. Finland’s upper social classes had their roots in the country’s Swedish period, and even during the first half of the nineteenth century nearly all university academics belonged to the Swedish-speaking group of Finns. Wallin’s family belonged to this group of Swedish-speaking Finns, and although Wallin himself was very much a polyglot, it is likely that he never learned Finnish. During the first half of the century this was nothing remarkable, as the language spoken at the university remained Swedish, and thus Finnish was not a language for which he would have had much use.

Family and youth Wallin came from a relatively modest background. He was the middle child of seven in the family of Israel and Johanna Wallin, and was born in the municipality of Sund in the Åland Islands in 1811. The male members of the Wallin family were traditionally vicars, but Georg August Wallin’s father was a chief accountant and court scribe.5 Israel Wallin died in Helsinki a few years before

17 Patricia Berg 10° 20° 30° 70° Rauma Vyborg Saltvik Turku Sund St. Petersburg 60° Mariehamn Helsinki 0 100 km

Åland and Southern Finland.

Georg August left on his research journey to the Middle East and, based on the diaries and letters that Georg August wrote later in life, it seems that father and son did not have a particularly close relationship. On the other hand, it is clear from the numerous letters Wallin sent to his mother Johanna and youngest sister Nat- alia during his sojourns abroad that the three of them were very close. In her adulthood his eldest sister Augusta lived at Lumbarla Manor outside Turku, and both his elder brother Carl August and youngest brother Bror August made their careers abroad. Georg August’s brother August Israel was born two years after Georg August, but died only three months old. Georg August’s brother Emile also died in childhood. Of the seven siblings, only Augusta married and had children. Thus there are no known heirs in the direct line of Georg August Wallin. Spending his childhood in Åland, Wallin grew up near the sea. The sea and shipping have traditionally been important to the people of Åland, and they still permeate life and business on the islands. Contact with the sea was a continuously significant factor for Wallin throughout his life. Several decades after his childhood, during the expeditions to the Middle East in the

18 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula 10° 20° 30° 70° Rauma Vyborg Saltvik Turku Sund St. Petersburg 60° Mariehamn Helsinki 0 100 km

1840s, he often returned in his diaries and letters to the theme of sailing and the sea in Åland and the Finnish archipelago. During his journey up the Nile from Cairo to Upper Egypt in 1844–1845,6 he saw the natural environment and watercourses at Aswan as well as the First Cataract, an area that reminded him of the Finnish archipelago. A few evenings after he and his travel companions had crossed the First Cataract, he wrote in his diary:

Incidentally, the river here had a different character than in Lower Egypt. It was for the most part usually narrower, and the cultivble [sic] sections between it and the mountains were quite small. Often the mountains projected right into the water. Here there were islands in the river, some merely stones and rocks and some also fertile land. In general the river and its banks had an extremely hospitable and beautiful appearance, reminding me more of an inland archipelago like Turholmen or Degerö than of the tall, inhospitable, barren rocks of a marine one.7

19 Patricia Berg

In his diary and letters Wallin also compared the foreign sailors he encountered during his voyages with those of Åland and Finland. The latter always won in these comparisons, because as a rule he found the foreign sailors too lazy and indifferent, and therefore bad at obeying their captain’s orders. Wallin was a good sailor, but away from home he was content to observe and criticize, rather than participate and help. He completed part of the voyage across the Mediterranean to Alexandria aboard a French ship. On 8 December 1843 he wrote in his diary about the French crew and the way they practised their profession:

The French sailors, whom I now once again had occasion to watch, seem to me inferior, and it is a vexing sight to witness them hauling at one end of a rope in large numbers with Cigars in their mouths. But such is la liberté. Now, especially since I have seen more of our Finnish navy and our hearty Finnish sailors, I find the Frenchmen feeble; they do not take their work at sea with proper seriousness, and while they are occupied with something they are unable to refrain from playing pranks and tricks. Nor are they slow to answer when the Captain or an officer gives them a dressing down, and the sailors can often be as gruff and wrathful as they. The British sailors are not much different, and the Captain must frequently be ill-disposed towards his men. With us there is no need at all to put the seamen in their place, and therefore where their diligence is concerned it seems that nowhere is the navy so good as in our land!8

When Georg August was six, the Wallin family moved from Åland to Turku, as in 1817 his father Israel Wallin was appointed district accounting officer in Turku and Pori. Georg August began as a pupil at the Turku Cathedral School in 1822. As a young schoolboy Wallin does not seem to have distinguished himself either for better or for worse. After the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 the Cathedral School was moved temporarily to the small coastal town of Rauma, north of Turku, and it was there a year later that he received his diploma. In the notes to the diploma the School’s rector Elfgren says plainly and simply that Wallin

20 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

“has by obedient diligence and steadfast conduct made himself known during his Schooldays in a positive light.”9 By now the rest of the family had moved on to the new capital, Helsinki, as Wallin’s father had been appointed superintendent of the Court of Auditors, and in 1828 Wallin also moved there. In the following year he took the entrance exam and then began his studies at the Imperial Alexander University. The University’s new statutes of 1828 stated, among other things, that the students were to be divided into so-called “departments”. Wallin enrolled in the Borealic Department (known after 1846 as the West Finnish Department) on 22 June 1829. The Borealic Department was one of the smaller ones, with only twenty students enrolled during Wallin’s university years in the 1830s.10

Student years in Helsinki in the 1830s In accordance with the new statutes of 1828, the Imperial Alexander University concentrated increasingly on training the officials that the civil government apparatus in autonomous Finland needed. All new students enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts degree (with a related Master’s degree). The Bachelor degree was a prerequisite for further studies at any of the other faculties and for the degree of Doctor. The Bachelor degree comprised eleven subjects at the Faculty of Philosophy: theoretical and practical philosophy, mathematics, physics, as- tronomy, chemistry, zoology, history, rhetoric and poetry, Greek literature, Oriental Literature and the history of learning. After taking their first degree, students who chose to continue their studies selected a field of study within one of the four faculties – philosophy, theology, law or medicine. Wallin continued his studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, specializing in Oriental literature. His first teacher of Arabic was the adjunct of Oriental literature Ivar Ulrik Wallenius. From 1835, the full professorship in the subject was held by Gabriel Geitlin. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the number of students at the Imperial Alexander University remained more or less the same. In the autumn semester of 1829, when Wallin

21 Patricia Berg enrolled, the printed syllabus listed 423 students.11 During this part of the century the young men privileged to attend university were mainly members of Finland’s Swedish-speaking population. A handful of old Swedish families had far-reaching roots in aca- demia and divided the professorships among themselves. As the academic circles were so restricted, a subject’s status within the university largely depended on the incumbent professor’s position and family connections. The families with the most influence at the university in Helsinki during Wallin’s student years were the Tengströms, Lagus, Melartins and Reins. In the wake of the research expeditions of Carl Linnaeus and his disciples, which were intended to document the Earth’s unexplored geographical areas and bring back natural specimens and other exotica to the homeland, the tradition of research exploration was a strong one in the Nordic universities. Carl Linnaeus wrote in his Instructions to the Travelling Naturalist (originally in Latin: Instructio Peregrinatoris) that travellers should “ask questions about everything” during research journeys, and Linnaeus’s so-called “two book method” meant that the traveller made notes during the journey and edited them for publication on his return home.12 The purpose of the early Nordic research trips and expeditions was thus mainly natural-scientific in nature. Wallin, by contrast, travelled as a philologist, his main objective being to collect material on the Arabic dialects. It is possible that he had been inspired by the newly-awoken Finnish nationalism, which in Helsinki university circles led to an increasing interest in the origin of the Finnish people, and of the Finnish language in particular. The idea of a Finnish nation had been born when the country separated from Sweden in 1809, but in the 1830s and 1840s it acquired a stronger foothold. The first Finnish research journeys were therefore largely aimed eastwards towards Siberia and the areas inhabited by people of Finnic extraction. In the 1820s Anders Johan Sjögren had travelled among the Finno-Ugric peoples and in the 1830s he began to draw up new plans for an extensive ethnographic and linguistic research journey to Siberia. However, his health did not permit him to complete the plans, and it was Wallin’s fellow student Matthias Alexander Castrén

22 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

The Senate Square in Helsinki, with the Imperial Alexander University to the left and the University Library in the background. Lithograph by Frederick Tengström, 1838. who in the 1840s finally came to lead the research expedition. The idea of language rather than natural phenomena as a source of knowledge about a culture may have been one of the driving forces behind Wallin’s own journey. As already mentioned, Wallin came from a relatively unpre- tentious background, and during his student years in Helsinki he gave private tuition to supplement his finances. In 1835 and 1836 one of his pupils was the young Jacob Johan Wilhelm Lagus (hereafter called Wilhelm), son of the Professor of Jurisprudence, Wilhelm Gabriel Lagus, and his wife Hedvig Maria af Tengström, the daughter of Bishop Jacob Tengström. In the biography he wrote, Wilhelm later expressed surprise that his parents chose Wallin to be his tutor, and at precisely that juncture. Together with six other students, Wallin had in fact been suspended from the university for the spring and summer of 1835 as one of the initiators of a meeting of Student Union members. Although the meeting had been convened to organize a protest against the rejection of a dissertation on the grounds that it was considered

23 Patricia Berg too theological, in reality the discussion at the meeting had been an argument between the students and the organizers of a soirée at the Societetshuset Hotel.13 Wallin spent his relegation in Turku and the Åland Islands together with his young pupil Wilhelm. Much later, Wilhelm wrote in his memoirs of Wallin that although he could often be cold and taciturn, at other times he was also capable of cheerfulness and warmth, empathizing with the vicis- situdes of others’ lives. Wilhelm held his teacher in great esteem, especially because of his simple demeanour and his distrust and resentment of every form of flattery and ingratiation.14 Georg August and Wilhelm began their journey west to the Åland Islands with a visit to Svidja Manor in Sjundeå, and then continued with visits to other places, including Lumbarla, where they stayed with Wallin’s sister Augusta and her husband Karl Ulrik Andersin. After that they stayed for a time with the Hydén family in Turku. Their time in Turku was mostly taken up with dancing and music. Wallin was a good musician and, according to Wilhelm, even performed on the flute and guitar at a charity event. From Turku Wallin and his protégé made their way to Åland, where they took lodgings at Haga Manor in Saltvik. In Åland Wallin and Wilhelm spent much of their time sailing. However, Wilhelm had to take care of the fishing alone, as Wallin did not find it enjoyable, and in any case he got up too late in the mornings to take part in the examining and emptying of the nets.15 Unfortunately their stay in Åland ended in trouble. Wilhelm writes of an oppressive atmosphere in the village, and says that Wallin seemed embarrassed and ill at ease before the journey home. In Helsinki a rumour later spread about a drama that was said to have taken place in Åland. According to the rumour, Wallin and the wife of the village dean, Olin, had made an excursion to the woods to pick berries together, whereupon the suspicious cleric followed them and caught them in the act. The dean was said to have threatened Wallin with a thrashing, but instead of apologizing Wallin had given him a slap in the face, and then had to buy the dean’s silence.16 So ashamed at the incident was the dean that he did not make a fuss about it – luckily for Wallin, who would otherwise probably have been expelled from the university.

24 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

From Åland Wallin and Wilhelm returned to Helsinki, and Wallin moved into the Lagus family’s house. At Christmas 1835, however, he went back home to his family to study for the up- coming Bachelor degree exam, which he passed in April 1836. His diploma shows that of the eleven subjects that were included in the exam he had the highest grade – laudatur – in Greek literature and in Oriental literature.17 During his years at the Cathedral School and university, Wallin received instruction in several languages, and he also studied languages on his own. On completing his education he thus had a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian, English, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. While Latin and Greek were part of the Bachelor degree, Arabic, Persian and Turkish were needed for the study of Oriental Literature. German was the modern language traditionally used within academic circles in Finland – contacts with the German universities had been common since the Reformation. Wallin probably learned French partly on his own and also by frequenting circles where French was the language of social intercourse and Russian had naturally acquired greater importance in Finland since 1809. On the other hand, it was very unusual for anyone in Finland to know English at this time. Among his fellow students and in university circles Wallin was generally known as an exceptionally talented and outstanding young man. He was, however, something of a lone wolf and was happiest with a few close friends or with his immediate family rather than among high society in restaurants and theatres. From his family home it was a short way to the sea, and as a student he used to sail around the islands off Helsinki. Water and the sea were in many ways his natural element. He was a very good swimmer and enjoyed swimming off the rocks on the southern shores of Helsinki. Later, during his time in the Middle East, he seldom missed the opportunity to take a dip if the occasion arose. But after having spent a few years travelling with Bedouins on the Arabian Peninsula and the Sinai and in Syro-Palestine, he marvelled in a letter of 1847 to Professor Geitlin about the fact that in his heart the desert seemed to have replaced the sea:

25 Patricia Berg

It is rather remarkable that I, an Insularian, born and raised beside the sea and always devoted to that element with pre- dilection, here in the Orient have never felt a longing or a love for it. It is as if here the desert had replaced the sea.18

In addition to his musical activities (he played not only the flute and guitar, but also the violin, piano and bassoon19), as a student Wallin also read a great deal of fiction, mostly authors like Walter Scott, Rousseau, Goethe and Shakespeare. He endeavoured to read them in the original language, and did so without the use of dictionaries – for, as he himself is quoted as saying: “When one has managed to go some way in a modern language, the text itself gradually teaches one the initially unfamiliar words.”20 Besides being known for his talent, Wallin also had a reputation for laziness. After completing the Bachelor’s degree and taking the conferment, he spent the entire summer sleeping, swimming, sailing, reading and playing musical instruments. His former pupil Wilhelm Lagus later wrote of the summer of 1836:

Meanwhile nothing was heard of Wallin. Taking the most thorough leave after his Bachelor’s degree and conferment, he spent the summer mostly out in the archipelago, occupied with sailing and his cello, which instrument he had now begun to play with passion. During his dolce far niente he derived a quite special enjoyment from lolling stark naked in the broiling sun upon the leeward side of barren rocks out in the sea.21

Even later, during his travels in the Middle East, Wallin remarked that the idle life of the Orient suited him, especially during the summer when it was too hot to do anything but sleep and observe one’s surroundings.22 Wallin had the gift of sleep and could basically sleep at any time for as long he wanted to. During long voyages he often resorted to sleep for lack of anything else to do. Of the sea journey from Helsinki to Lübeck, at the beginning of his research trip, he wrote in a letter to his mother and sister in August 1843:

26 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

By the way, I have been healthy throughout the voyage, have had no seasickness at all and have felt unusually well, with a truly ravenous appetite, devouring oatmeal and peas, the normal diet on board ship, and indeed everything else that was served up. But filling the time between the three meals each day has been more difficult. For the first two or three days I slept ceaselessly round the clock both day and night, but more recently my sleep has been less good.23

From Wallin’s letters and the statements of his contemporaries one forms a picture of the young student Georg August as a very stubborn man with a strong will. He comes across as someone who was not afraid to offend others. At university he was known as being exceptionally talented mainly with regard to the study of foreign languages. As a researcher, this indeed was probably his most characteristic trait: he distanced himself from study in its traditional form – the library and lecture halls, where one read one’s way to a knowledge of foreign cultures and languages – and in general from the constant and forced striving for diligence and industry that is typical of Protestantism. But he also had a burning interest in study and the acquisition of knowledge, especially regarding foreign languages, and in gaining a thorough understanding of his subject.

Further study of Oriental languages and dissertation for the docentship In Finland it had been possible to study Oriental languages, mainly Hebrew, since the founding of the Royal Academy of Turku in 1640. However, during the early years of the nineteenth century, when Wallin began his study of Oriental languages and literature, few students were interested in Arabic and Persian. Arabic was studied primarily in order to gain a better understanding of the Biblical languages Hebrew and Aramaic. It was therefore surprising that Wallin chose to focus on Arabic and Persian. It is also unclear what formed the basis of his interest in Persian and especially Arab culture. Even his own private

27 Patricia Berg pupil Wilhelm Lagus was in some doubt about the career path Wallin had in mind:

I pondered a great deal about what he [Wallin] was “going to be”, for he never spoke of it. Perhaps a priest, I decided to myself, as I had heard him preach in Saltvik Church on Midsummer Day. But why does he read such useless things?24

By “useless things” Wilhelm meant all the fiction that Wallin spent his days reading. Wallin’s favourite authors were the romantics, and it is probable that the escapist notion of a simpler life closer to nature in these books awoke his interest in Arabia. Perhaps it was the idea of the noble savage and the artless life of the desert that drew the young Wallin to study the languages that were spoken in the Middle East.25 In addition, Wallin got along very well with the new professor (since 1835) of Oriental literature, Gabriel Geitlin, and the two remained good friends for life. For someone like Wallin, who did not normally find it easy to agree with people, it was probably essential to have a soul mate in the subject he chose to specialize in. At the university the Oriental languages were studied in their written form. At that time neither Geitlin nor Wallin could speak Arabic, Persian or Turkish – the courses focused on understanding the grammatical construction of the languages. Wallin’s study of Oriental literature led him to write a dissertation for the academic rank of docent, or associate professor, which he defended in Helsinki in 1839. The dissertation dealt with the differences between spoken and written Arabic.26 At least in Europe’s university circles the topic was one that few had studied or even chose to pay attention to. Of the idea behind the dissertation he said the following in his lectio præcursoria at the oral defence on 8 June 1839:

One commits a great error in supposing, as many often do, that Arabic is a dead language. After becoming convinced of the falsity of this view, learned men have made a significant contribution to the thorough study of the modern Arabic

28 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

The Russian foreign ministry in St. Petersburg.

language. Thus our time has witnessed the publication of important and famous works of modern Arabic literature. In the first place should be mentioned the praiseworthy stories of the Arabian Nights, of which the famous Habicht has already published seven volumes. While it is true that the language employed in these stories is not yet as free in relation to the grammatical rules as is the language used by the common folk in their speech, it is still freer than the language that one reads in classical Arabic texts. As these brilliant tales, well-known among the commoners, also fas- cinated me and thereby gave rise to my studies in modern Arabic, I was able with a quiet mind to allow myself the eager pursuit of clearing an easier path that would lead to an understanding and explication of the Oriental tales among

29 Patricia Berg

my colleagues, that they too should proceed to study Arabic literature. And I have no scruples in saying that I would wish above all to win the gratitude of young people who take a liking to the Orient.27

After the dissertation, Wallin’s opportunities for further study in Finland came to an end. He therefore decided to apply for a permit to continue his studies at the Institute of Oriental Languages at the Russian foreign ministry in St. Petersburg. In the winter of 1840 he left for the Russian capital, but returned a few months later empty-handed. The Institute trained Russian subjects in Oriental languages so that they could be able to be of service to the expanding motherland. Wallin was probably considered unsuitable to be a diplomat, and therefore not allowed to study at the Institute. But during the summer the Minister-Secretary of State for Finland, Count Robert Henrik Rehbinder (the chief official represerting Finnish interests in St. Petersburg), managed to obtain the necessary study permit and a grant of 1,000 rubles into the bargain.28 Thus, in the autumn of 1840 Wallin returned to St. Petersburg and took up further studies in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. In a letter to his mother and sister dated 1 December 1840, only a few months after setting up residence in St. Petersburg, Wallin described life in the big city, of which he was already tired:

By the way, one can probably live here as long as one is in- dustriously occupied; but woe betide the man who comes here to enjoy himself, at least in the longer term. There is nothing of which one grows weary so quickly as this city in all its glory! I have also not sought entertainment here. I made one visit to the theatre to see Don Juan, and I must admit that I have not enjoyed anything so much for a long time. But [there were] at most 100 people in the immense Theatre who had deigned to grace this lovely play with their presence. Taglioni’s capers and ambiguous Russian and French trivia are the only things that people here run after; wantonness and vileness [are] the general character of commoners and all. The English are perhaps alone in not permitting themselves

30 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

to become infected, and it is with great pleasure and devo- tion that almost every Sunday I have visited their church.29

In the letters from St. Petersburg to his mother and sister, Wal- lin wrote mainly about life in the city and very little about his studies, or whether he found them interesting and useful. At least initially, he attended daily lectures both at the university and at the Institute of Oriental Languages.30 At the university Wallin attended the lectures of Osip-Yulian Ivanovich Senkovsky and Bernhard Dorn on Arabic and Arabic literature, and those of Anton Mukhlinsky on Turkish. At the Institute of Oriental Languages he received instruction in Arabic from Muhammad ῾Ayyad al-Tantawi and in Persian from Mirza Ismail. In a letter to his mother of 31 October 1840, Wallin wrote that he went to the university four times a week and to the Institute of Oriental Languages every day.31 A year later, in the autumn of 1841, he wrote to Geitlin that he had stopped going to the Institute, apparently because of some kind of disagreement:

With regard to the Institute, I initially visited it two or three times, but could not possibly bring myself to continue; for every step of the stairs was like a dagger blow for me. Much have I often regretted my arrogance, especially since I found that I could have derived infinite benefit from De Maison, who had now returned from Persia – yet I heaped arrogance upon arrogance and did not attend. But may He forgive me, He that can!32

In St. Petersburg Wallin met the person who would become the main source of inspiration for his research trip to the Middle East. The Egyptian sheikh Muhammad ῾Ayyad al-Tantawi was from Cairo and had come to St. Petersburg a few years earlier to teach Arabic at the Institute of Oriental Languages.33 al-Tantawi had studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, and was one of the learned sheikhs associated with this influential university. As in the case of Geitlin in Helsinki, Wallin and al-Tantawi became good friends. They were the same age and were united by a strong interest in the study

31 Patricia Berg of languages. They met at the Institute of Oriental Languages, but also after a time socialized privately in the evenings, and in November 1841 Wallin wrote that “now at last we are no longer on the narrow footing of teacher and disciple, but on one that is quite that of friends.”34 It was from his friendship with al-Tantawi, and the evenings they shared together in conversation, that Wallin drew the idea of undertaking a research trip to the Middle East. And when in the autumn of 1841 the Imperial Alexander University advertised a travel scholarship for young researchers, in consultation with al-Tantawi, Mukhlinsky and Geitlin, Wallin applied for it, so as to be able to fulfil his wish to further explore Arabic language and culture.

T he travel scholarship application and the research journey In addition to the actual itinerary, Wallin’s application contained two letters of recommendation, one from al-Tantawi and one from Mukhlinsky. al-Tantawi wrote his letter in Arabic and Geitlin translated it into Swedish for the other members of the University Senate or Professorial College. In the eloquent Arabic, al-Tantawi recommends that Wallin should receive the scholarship:

While knowledge is the noblest thing for which man strives and its acquisition to many remains a mystery, the finest means of attaining it is found in the knowledge of foreign languages, particularly of Arabic, which contains within itself the fairest inventions and the most wonderful creations of the imagination. Wise men have wanted to borrow light from its flame and have expended diligence and effort on the translation of its literature, both poetry and prose. Among those who have endeavoured to learn this language until the attainment of certain knowledge is Magister (Khodsha) Georg August Wallin, from Finland.35

32 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

From the University Senate’s protocol for November and Decem- ber 1841 it appears that there were heated discussions about who should be granted the scholarship. Rather than being the best candidate with the best research plan, Wallin won most votes for his application because of all the candidates he was the one who aroused the least opposition among the Senate’s members. He received seven of the sixteen votes cast.36 The university circles were small ones, and thus it was the in-fighting between the professors that prepared Wallin’s way to Arabia. In the itinerary Wallin described how flawed the research into Arabic dialects was, and how knowledge of the Arabian Peninsula’s geography and the origins of Wahhabism should be deepened.37 In order to correct these deficiencies, Wallin said, he would travel from Helsinki through Europe to Egypt to study Arabic there with the learned sheikhs at al-Azhar. Having strengthened his spoken Arabic, he would travel to Upper Egypt, then east to the Red Sea coast and across the sea to the southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula, to Yemen. From the south, he would travel north towards Mecca and Medina and then east towards the inner parts of the Peninsula to carry out his research into spoken Arabic and Wahhabism. With hindsight it may be said that the plan was very unrealistic. This was partly because the Arabian Peninsula was as yet largely unexplored and Wallin simply did not know where he was going and how long it would take to get from one place to another. On learning that he had been granted the scholarship, in the spring of 1842 Wallin returned from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. He applied to the university for a year’s dispensation to study medicine. The purpose of the medical studies was to enable him to administer self-treatment in the likely event that he became ill during the journey. In addition, he would be able to claim to be a vaccination doctor and therefore have a legitimate reason to travel among the Bedouins. Thus Wallin spent the autumn of 1842 and spring of 1843 in Helsinki, studying medicine and making other preparations for the trip. Dating from this period are a few letters he wrote to al-Tantawi in St. Petersburg, and from them it is clear that to the last moment he hoped to make the journey to

33 Förnamn Efternamn

Letter from Georg August Wallin to Sheikh ῾Ayyad al-Tantawi, dated 21 September

34 Artikelns titel

1842. The letter should be read from right to left.

35 Patricia Berg

Egypt together with al-Tantawi.38 Yet in the end it was not to be, and in July 1843 Wallin made his departure from Helsinki alone. His route took him by sea to Germany, and from there to France and Paris. In Paris he spent several weeks visiting sights and monuments. He looked up the eminent French Orientalist Étienne Marc Quatremère, on whose advice he spent several days in libraries reading and copying books and manuscripts that could be of use to him during the research trip. In the libraries Wallin was horrified to observe that women studied there:

One sees them sitting there at work in the Libraries, reading and copying manuscripts; in other words here nothing is reserved for us alone, everything here is open, even to ladies, who increasingly encroach on our domain.39

During a walk in the Père Lachaise cemetery on 1 September 1843 Wallin met a young Frenchman from Bordeaux who also spoke a little Arabic. That evening Wallin wrote in his diary how happy he was about this new acquaintance. The two had fixed an appointment for the following day, and Wallin wrote of his hope that the young man would not turn out to be a rascal: “I have heard and read so much about impostors, who are said to be particularly numerous here, and would find it highly amusing to have fallen in with such a person. Yet it did not seem to me to be the case.”40 This diary entry is the last for September, and the notes do not resume until October, a few days before Wallin left Paris and travelled south towards Marseilles. From the page numbering of the diary it is clear that Wal- lin also kept notes during this period of six weeks, but later he probably removed them so that his friends and family back in Helsinki would not know what had taken place. In Helsinki it was rumoured that he had been robbed and beaten by the young man, and had spent several weeks in hospital in Paris. Sven Gab- riel Elmgren, librarian at the university library in Helsinki, who published and edited Wallin’s diaries shortly after his death, wrote in his notes that during a jubilee dinner at the Borealic Depart- ment on 23 October 1858 he heard it said that Wallin’s mishap in

36 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

Paris occurred because Wallin had been lured by “an adventurer” into a deserted street where he was beaten and robbed, and left overnight.41 After the incident Wallin was probably ill for six weeks, and chose to keep it from his family. From Paris Wallin travelled on at last to Marseille, where he sailed with a Finnish ship to Constantinople. The voyages on the Mediterranean, first to Constantinople and from there through Smyrna to Alexandria, were agreeable. Except for some minor storms and a few days of calm, the sea journeys were relatively uneventful, and on 14 December 1843 he finally reached Alex- andria.42

After the research journey With Cairo as a base, Wallin travelled in the Middle East for six years. When he finally left Alexandria in the autumn of 1849, instead of going directly back to Helsinki he travelled to London. In 1849 Gabriel Geitlin had been appointed Professor of Exegetics, and thus the chair in Oriental Literature was vacant for Wallin to apply for. But according to the University statutes of 1828 one needed a licentiate degree and an approved dissertation before one could apply for a professorship. In London, therefore, Wallin wrote a dissertation in order to obtain the appropriate qualification for the post.43 Moreover, he worked with the British East India Company on a map of the Arabian Peninsula and prepared for publication some of the material he had collected on the Arabian Peninsula and in Syro-Palestine.44 From London he travelled via St. Petersburg to Finland, and arrived in Helsinki in June 1850. On 19 October he defended his dissertation, mostly in Latin, before a packed auditorium in the main university building. The teenage Gabriel Lagus described the defence in a letter to his brother, and Wallin’s former pupil, Wilhelm Lagus:

It was remarkable and pleasing that during his wanderings Wallin had not forgotten his Latin. He expressed himself with great fluency and also on the whole much accuracy. The listeners were highly animated, and the delight on everyone’s

37 Patricia Berg

faces could be read especially when they heard him utter long, long tirades in Arabic. He looked very neat in his long beard, particularly as that day he had washed and was completely clean in his physiognomy.45

On 1 January 1851 Wallin was appointed Professor of Oriental Literature, but his desire to return to the Bedouins and the desert sand was strong, and he does not seem to have set great store by the appointment. Robert Lagus, another brother of Wallin’s former pupil, wrote to Wilhelm in a letter dated 28 January 1851 that Wallin did not really seem to care about the appointment at all. When others had congratulated him on it, he had replied that it was not worth congratulation. Robert also wrote that it seemed uncertain whether Wallin would stay in Finland. It seemed more probable that as soon as the opportunity arose he would travel back to Arabia, because “it looks as though his sympathies for Arabia and England have made him a stranger in his native land.”46 Wallin really was planning to make a second research trip to Arabia, and was corresponding extensively with the British and Russian geographical societies in order to negotiate funding for the journey. However, the negotiations came to nothing when Wallin did not feel he could meet the demands that the societies wanted to place on his itinerary and research.47 Moreover, his health was faltering, and according to the University Senate protocol in the autumn of 1852 he often failed to turn up and give his lectures at all. On the evening of Saturday 23 October 1852 he died suddenly at home in the family’s apartment, where he lived with his mother and sister Natalia. According to Knut Tallqvist, Wallin’s biographer and later his successor as Professor of Oriental Literature, the cause of death on the death certific- ate was an enlarged and consequently ruptured aorta.48 On the other hand, people around him had noticed that his skin was becoming yellow, so some form of liver disease seems a more likely alternative. Although in his lifetime Wallin had not been especially popular in university circles, after his death he was hailed as a great and famous research traveller. At least during the last years of his life, he saw himself as a resident of Arabia,

38 Georg August Wallin – A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula not a visitor, and until the very end he expressed a desire to “live and die like a Bedouin among the free sons of the desert, to live the Bedouin’s free, merry and healthy life, [in] peace from the vanity, frivolity and conventional coercion of the West.”49

39 Patricia Berg

Letter to G. Geitlin St. Petersburg, probably November 1841

By the way, three days a week I have worked at home in the house of al-shaykh, and have now translated nearly half of that dictionary you saw at my place last summer and have also completed a translation of Schiller’s Der Neffe als Onkel. But in addition we have now begun to converse in the evenings. One evening we speak only German (and he is gradually beginning to make a little progress), and the next evening we speak only Arabic and avail ourselves of each other’s knowledge of literature, etc. His good-natured, pure and almost childlike character, his ingenuity and sincerity are increasingly gaining my esteem and friendship; and now at last we are no longer on the narrow terms of teacher and disciple, but on terms that are completely amicable. First we drink tea together and then we get our teeth into his great Divan, and his endless tales of his beloved Egypt, its Storytellers, Singers and Dance Maidens and all its other delights, have, if possible, aroused even further my inclination and desire to go there, and I really do not know how I shall be able to bear the news of the decision about my application, which must now come one of these days. If it is a “nay” I fear that I shall sink into sorrow and vexation, and if it is a “yea” I fear that my heart will leap from my breast.

G. A. Wallin, Skrifter 1, 2010, p. 227.

40 Sofia Häggman

Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

eorg August Wallin arrived in Egypt on the steamship Scamandre early in the afternoon of 14 December 1843. He Gwas not the only European on board.1 In the mid-nineteenth century Egypt had come into fashion in Europe, and now archaeologists, explorers, artists and collectors of antiques sailed up the Nile, attracted by the newly rediscovered Pharaonic temples and tombs. Wallin, however, never had any ambition to study Egypt’s monuments. While he had probably read about the latest developments in Egyptian archaeology and linguistics in the Finnish newspapers, he lacked knowledge both of the country’s Pharaonic history and of its numerous ancient remains. Wallin was in Egypt to improve his spoken Arabic and to learn how to appear as the learned Muslim he intended to present himself as during his planned trips to the Arabian Peninsula. Wallin’s goal was always Arabia and Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Egypt was already discovered. Researchers such as François Champollion, Gardner Wilkinson and Richard Lepsius had already immersed themselves in Pharaonic culture, while contemporary Egypt and its culture had been studied in detail by Edward William Lane. Shortly after his arrival in Alexandria Wallin read Lane’s book Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,2 which he considered an excellent work. Like nearly all other Orientalists at the time, in his research Wallin strove to emulate Lane.3 In his diary he often refers to Lane, confirming with his own observations what Lane had already extensively studied and described. Thus, when Wallin disembarked in Alexandria he had a rather clear picture of what “the Oriental” would be like, both in appearance and in character. During his early days in the country the people seemed in many respects to correspond to the stereotype

43 Sofia Häggman he had derived from Lane’s descriptions. He saw the people as cheerful and friendly, but also naive, superstitious and guided in word and deed by their Muslim faith. According to the dominant Orientalist discourse of the day, the modern Egyptians had no obvious link – and thus no right – to their country’s glorious past. Pharaonic culture was viewed as a precursor to Greek culture, and thus to the whole of European civilization. The collection of Egyptian antiquities was seen by many as a legitimate activity, one that was even essential in order to save this important cultural heritage.4 While interest in ancient Egyptian culture quickly spread throughout Europe, there was very little knowledge of it in Egypt itself – something partly blamed by later observers on the country’s Ottoman rulers. The proposal of Egypt’s Governor, Muhammad ῾Ali, to demolish the Pyramids of Giza in order to re-use the stone for more socially useful construction works has been highlighted as an example of a genuine lack of interest in the Pharaonic heritage. This particular example is somewhat unfair, not least because the idea was not even the Pasha’s own.5 On the contrary, Muhammad ῾Ali showed some interest in the country’s past. Among other things, he issued a ban on the export of antiquities (which he certainly did not obey himself) and worked for the establishment of an archaeological museum6 – though his principal focus was on the country’s modernization. He pushed through a series of reforms in all spheres of society and opened the country up to European experts and businessmen. Muhammad ῾Ali’s Egypt was a natural base for Wallin during his sojourn in the Orient, a relatively tolerant and safe environment in which to achieve the gradual transformation he needed to undergo before making his more adventurous desert journeys. Wallin’s time in Egypt can be divided into three main phases: first, a period of adjustment in Alexandria, when everything still seemed to him strange and new. This was followed by a stay in Cairo, during which he improved his Arabic and absorbed the country’s customs. The culmination of his sojourn was a voyage up the Nile, a journey that fundamentally changed his views on Egypt and the Egyptians.

44 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

Alexandria – the encounter with the Orient

In Alexandria, Muhammad ῾Ali had set out to build a city on the European model. Old districts were demolished and replaced by new ones. It was, in other words, a relatively Western city that Wallin encountered when he disembarked at the eastern harbour in December 1843. In Alexandria no eyebrows were raised at the sight of a man in Western clothes, speaking broken Arabic. Several foreign ships lay at berth in the city’s port, and European diplomats and businessmen resided at the Place des Consuls. Yet Wallin still found the city strange. The overcrowding, the noise and the people frightened him, and he spent the first few days in his hotel or its immediate vicinity. After about a week he felt sufficiently acclimatized to dare to approach the groups of men he found outside the city’s mosques. To his delight he discovered that the men could understand his rough Arabic and that he could understand them. After a couple of weeks Wallin slipped into an increasingly Arab identity. Even during the journey to Egypt, he had begun to write his name “Valy”, because he could never “make a French ear hear the last letter.”7 In his meeting with Alexandria’s sheikhs, on al-Tantawi’s advice he used the more Arabic-sounding “Waly”. Wallin’s first meeting with the sheikhs on the stairs of the mosque was followed by many more. His Arabic quickly improved, and the sheikhs accepted him as one of their circle. His self-confidence increased, and he dared to acquaint himself with the more Egyptian Alexandria that lay beyond the Pasha’s Western facade. Wallin’s first impression was that the people of Alexandria were in general “more gaudily and expensively” dressed than the inhabitants of Constantinople, which he had visited on his voyage across the Mediterranean.8 However, he was able to say at once that alongside the wealth and abundance there existed a heart-breaking poverty, with ragged and half-naked beggars who ran barefoot around the city’s rain-soaked streets.9 Wallin got to know parts of Alexandria that most Europeans tended to avoid – often with good reason. During his wanderings

45 Sofia Häggman

House facades in Cairo. Drawing by Hubert Sattler. in the city he formed an acquaintance with various aspects of his new homeland, and all its exotic aromas and flavours. Yet not all his experiences were equally pleasant. He was sometimes met with suspicion, and even with outright hostility.10 Muhammad ῾Ali’s grand plans for Alexandria meant the end of the ancient city, whose last remnants were being torn down and rebuilt at an ever-increasing rate.11 Wallin could still see some glimpses of the city’s glorious past. Like so many travellers before him he strolled up to the so-called Pompei’s Pillar, where he was angered by the graffiti that earlier visitors had carved high up on the column.12 He also managed to see the obelisk he called

46 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

Cleopatra’s Pillar, one of a pair that had once been erected in memory of the Emperor Augustus.13 Day by day he felt increasingly Egyptian, and by mid-January he was ready to travel on up to Cairo. Before the journey he made his first visit to a hammam, an Egyptian bathhouse, and adopted the more Oriental garb of tarbūsh. (fez) and a long coat of Turkish cut. This style of dress linked him more to the country’s Turkish-speaking upper class than to the Egyptian majority. It would still take some time before he dared to wear the turban that was the mark of the learned sheikh. On 22 January 1844 Wallin at last sailed up the newly-dug Mahmoudiya Canal to Cairo.

Cairo – an Oriental home In Cairo Wallin was now in the real Orient he had read about in Lane’s descriptions and the stories of the Arabian Nights. After spending the first night in the port city of Bulaq, he moved into a wakāla, a lodging house, in Gamaliya, which had been Cairo’s commercial centre since the Middle Ages. He found his new surroundings congenial, and therefore when vermin eventually drove him from the lodging house, he hoped to find an apartment in the same area. This quickly proved impossible. A stranger travelling alone was viewed with suspicion in this traditional part of the city which was made up of neighbourhoods, each forming its own secluded world, governed by strict social control. Lacking references and recommendations, Wallin had to settle for the more Western district of Azbakiya, where for two months he rented an apartment with high ceilings, bay windows and beautiful marble floors. During his first two months in Cairo Wallin gradually adapted to the city and its people. He walked around – often with the aid of a compass to begin with – and watched people in different situations and roles:

The Oriental, especially the Turk, walks in very leisurely fashion, without looking about him this way or that. The Arab usually hurries more, if he is a businessman or has

47 Sofia Häggman

some duty to attend to, but the learned and religiously pious Moslem always moves with caution, incessantly reading with a certain dignity, especially when leaving his house, prayers and countless repeated bismillahs.14

Wallin was a keen observer, and skilled at mimicry. Quickly he memorized all the polite phrases that were part of daily intercourse, and learned how to speak and conduct himself like a devout Muslim. His Arabic rapidly improved, not least through his diligent conversations with the city’s sheikhs, and through periods of private lessons. Wallin also had a distinctive appearance. It was not long before the people he met took him for a Muslim. Instead of putting them right about it, he grew increasingly self-assured in his role as a Muslim doctor from somewhere in Central Asia. In the spring of 1844 he began to practice medicine in a small way, and was soon able to tell his professor back home in Finland that he had the reputation of being “a good doctor and knowledgeable in the sciences.”15 Self-confidence was something Wallin had never lacked. Even so, he sometimes suffered from inexplicable shyness and insecurity. He therefore never brought himself to look up Edward William Lane, even though for a time they lived in the same neighbourhood. When Rifa῾al-Tahtawi, one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals, came to Wallin to obtain relief for a sore tooth, Wallin became so nervous that he almost could not think straight. al-Tahtawi was a teacher at al-Azhar, principal of the language school and the newly appointed head of the Council of Antiquities, and Wallin had been looking for him for some time.16 When at last he had the opportunity to talk to al-Tahtawi, he became so shy and timid that he was unable to utter a single one of his many questions and thoughts.17

T o Barraniya and Tanta – a summer in the country In the summer of 1844 Wallin’s life took a new turn. In April he had moved back to Gamaliya and ventured into a mosque for the

48 Mediterranean Sea Artikelns titel

Alexandria

Tanta Cairo Saqqara

Nile

Red Sea

Valley of the Kings Luxor

Aswan

Abu Simbel

Wadi Halfa 0 200 km

30°

20°

Georg August Wallin’s 35° 45° 55° journeys in Egypt.

49 Sofia Häggman first time.18 Just a few weeks later he completed his first Muslim prayer, a test he passed with flying colours and without revealing himself as a non-Muslim.19 During the spring he had also met Sheikh ῾Ali Nida al-Barrani, who became his teacher and friend. Sheikh ῾Ali must have had some doubts with regard to his new friend’s Muslim faith. That despite the undisguised suspicions of those around him he not only accepted Wallin as a student and friend, but even invited him to stay in his own home, suggests that Sheikh ῾Ali was an unusual man for nineteenth-century Cairo. In Wallin he had evidently found his equal, an educated man with whom he could discuss questions of both grammar and religion. ῾Ali’s pride in his friendship with Wallin became evident when the two visited the Sheikh’s home village of Barraniya in the Nile Delta, northwest of Cairo, and not far from it. What was supposed to be a short visit on the way to Tanta and the famous annual maulid in honour of Sayyid al-Badawi20 stretched out to nearly three weeks in Barraniya. While Sheikh ῾Ali drifted around from house to house, boast- ing of his guest who came from far away and lived in a region where the sun did not set, Wallin was bored. Although he amused himself with swimming, excursions and bird shooting, he was increasingly irritated by the heat, the flies and all the people who came to him to ask for advice and medicines. In spite of this, he managed to make new friends and was even invited into several homes. In his longing to get away from Barraniya and move on to new adventures, Wallin never reflected on the unique nature of his stay in this village in the Egyptian countryside. By the middle of the nineteenth century European explorers and a handful of archaeologists had already spent periods of time in Cairo. Several of them had sailed up the Nile to Upper Egypt. But they had not, like Wallin, been accepted and integrated into an ordinary peasant village. So much a part of Barraniya did Wallin become that he even received a proposal of marriage. To judge from his diary entries, however, he did not feel specially chosen or flattered. On the contrary, it was with great relief that he eventually left the village and travelled on to Tanta.

50 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

In Tanta the maulid of the Sufi Saint Sayyid al-Badawi was in progress, a religious celebration that lasted eight days and each year pulled in large crowds of visitors both from Egypt and from the neighbouring countries. By the 1840s the festivities had become something of a tourist attraction, drawing also European visitors. The events contained all the ingredients that were associated with the Orient: religious mysticism, sensuous dancing girls and dangerous tournaments on horseback. Wallin attended every part of the celebrations. He visited al-Badawi’s shrine, prayed in the mosques and, with a fascina- tion blended with alarm, watched the equestrian games, where two men rode against each other at high speed with the aim of knocking their opponent off his horse with a long stick. In the charged atmosphere, among the sweaty thoroughbreds and the brave horsemen, he thought he could finally sense “a spark of the Arab’s proud and free spirit,”21 something he otherwise missed in the Egyptians. Most of all he enjoyed strolling freely around the festival site, where thousands of people from near and far were encamped, and where there was constant cooking of food, conversation, and singing and playing of music. He would sometimes wander among the tents for hours, with a break for an occasional swim in the warm waters of the canal. Like many other Egyptian saints, Sayyid al-Badawi was renowned for curing impotence and sterility. This left its mark on his maulid, which attracted crowds of dancing girls and prostitutes. It is therefore hardly surprising that it was in Tanta that Wallin formed his first acquaintance with the Egyptian filles de joie.22 He had always had an eye for women, and was far from the only nineteenth-century European traveller to be lured by the beauties of the East and the possibility of erotic adventures. The Orient was the place where European men sought sexual experience that was virtually inaccessible at home.23 The autumn of 1844 Wallin devoted increasingly to chance meetings with Cairo’s prostitutes, meetings which he carefully noted in his diary. To spare his mother and sister, he wrote these entries in English in a text that was otherwise written in Swedish.24 In spite of his new pleasures, by the autumn of 1844 Wallin

51 Sofia Häggman was restless. He had been in Egypt almost a year, but had not accomplished much. He saw pilgrims leaving for Mecca, and wished he was able to join them, though also aware that he was not ready to do so. Instead, he passed the time with shorter and longer excursions in and around Cairo. He was present at the festivities marking the opening of the al-Khalij Canal that flowed through the city, he visited the obelisk in Matariya, the mosque of ῾Amr ibn al-῾As in Fustat and the mosque of Ibn Tulun with its unusual, spiral-shaped minaret. He admired the mosque of Sultan Hassan, which was the “largest and most beautiful” he had seen,25 and even managed to catch a glimpse of Muhammad ῾Ali himself in his reception room at the citadel.

T he Nile journey – the encounter with the Pharaonic After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to find fellow travellers for a boat trip up the Nile, in October Wallin was invited to accompany the German physician August Schledehaus and an Austrian landscape painter, Hubert Sattler, on a journey to Upper Egypt. To Wallin’s great surprise, Sheikh ῾Ali also came along. The itinerary Wallin had submitted with his scholarship application in the autumn of 1841 included a journey to Upper Egypt. In it, the primary aim of the trip was said to be the study of the area’s dialects. It would take Wallin up to Aswan, and from there he hoped to travel on to the Red Sea and further on to the Arabian Peninsula.26 The journey he ultimately made in the winter of 1844–1845 did not take him to the Red Sea. It was instead a Nile journey of the kind that formed part of the visits by most Europeans to Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century, with the customary excursions to temples and tombs.27 Most of the evidence suggests that it was Schledehaus who arranged the boat hire and provisions during the trip. Thus he also set the agenda. For Wallin the boat journey up through the Nile Valley was a journey back in time, from the Cairo of the Arab dynasties to Pharaonic Egypt. During his time in Cairo he had not really reflected on the country’s long history at all, being completely

52 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home focused on the Arabic language and Islamic culture. There was also the fact that in Cairo the Pharaonic heritage did not make its presence felt in the way that it did in Upper Egypt, where almost every village could boast impressive temple ruins or decorated rock tombs. Wallin had visited the Great Pyramids of Giza already in May, but at the time he had suffered from such bad stomach trouble that he had been able to appreciate neither their size nor their age.28 Aboard the dhahabīya, the rented sailboat, he had all the time in the world to immerse himself in the books on Pharaonic history he had brought with him,29 as he glided through a fab- ulously beautiful landscape, past grand monuments. The further south they travelled and the more Wallin learned about Ancient Egypt, the more angry he became with the Arabs and Turks, and the “unjust domination and sacrilege they had perpetrated on the ancient sacred Egyptian soil.”30 He grew even angrier when they arrived at the site of ancient Thebes and visited the temple of Luxor, where the village had moved into the temple itself. Within its interior, behind the great Pylon, one could now see the local inhabitants’ simple houses and cow stalls. In several places the wall reliefs bore traces of delib- erate destruction. It pained Wallin to see people doing violence to an ancient high culture:

Here nothing was visible but the wretched ugly Arab huts with their dovecotes and their dreadful filth, their naked, swarthy, ugly children and ragged folk. So hideous an Arab village I have never witnessed, so horrid and base a populace. [...] I hurried as much as I could, and I must confess that from none of it could I take enjoyment.31

Wallin was impressed above all by the “almost incalculable” age of the monuments.32 The mere notion that the Pylon he had climbed on had been there at the time of Moses, and even perhaps of Abraham, was staggering. On the other hand he had little interest in the temple architecture itself, which he considered too clumsy and lacking in subtlety.

53 Sofia Häggman

Wallin was simply a child of his time, and he preferred the pure white marble of classical Greece. The Egyptian temples, with their combination of grand, massive pylons and columns with colourful pictures and small hieroglyphs disturbed him. The temple walls reminded him of European wallpaper design,33 and he found the motifs on the walls of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings almost laughable.34 When during the return journey downstream the decoration of the royal tombs was explained to him by the famous scholar Richard Lepsius himself, Wallin could not help but be impressed, though perhaps more by Lepsius as a person than by Egyptian art.35 Despite his lukewarm interest in Egyptian art and architecture, Wallin visited nearly all the Pharaonic temples in the Nile Valley together with his companions. The painter Sattler’s enthusiasm for the monuments and his interest in architectural details sometimes rubbed off on Wallin, who at several points in his diary wrote highly detailed accounts of column capitals and wall decorations.36 After sailing up through the whole of the Egyptian part of the Nile Valley, at the end of November 1844 Wallin and his companions reached Aswan and the island of Philae, whose temple contemporary travellers described as the most beautiful in all Egypt. Wallin, too, was taken by Philae’s beauty, but this had more to do with its natural environment than with the temple building itself. In general it was the landscape of the Nile Valley that made the greatest impression on him. While the many visits to temples and tombs mostly made him just tired and hungry,37 he filled his diary’s pages with vivid descriptions of the green fields, the trees, the sparkling river and “Egypt’s glorious skies.” The region around Aswan was the one he found most beautiful of all. There the islands on the river reminded him of the Åland archipelago where he had sailed so many times.38 After an adventurous journey up through the rapids of the First Cataract, when they smoothed out into calmer waters, Wallin wrote in his diary:

Now we entered a quiet strait, the banks of which were covered in glorious spring verdure, with palms, lotus and sycamore.

54 Artikelns titel

The dhahabīya, Wallin’s home on the Nile during the winter of 1844–1845. Painting by Hubert Sattler.

55 Sofia Häggman

I have never seen anything so hospitably inviting outside the Åland archipelago and other archipelagos in our land, and it all felt quite like home to me.39

Yet the real gem was Philae, which lay “like a precious stone in a clamshell” and “like an oasis in the wilderness.”40 Wallin also devoted great attention to the temple itself, noting details of its architecture and decoration. It was a beautiful temple, dedicated to the goddess Isis – but too gaudy and colourful for Wallin’s taste. It gave him the impression of “a certain drollery and humour”, rather than one of “magnificence and sublime beauty.”41 In a moment of reflection Wallin realized that it might be precisely this combination of grandeur and tiny details that formed the core of the Egyptian identity. And, he reflected further, it was indeed not merely a question of ancient architecture and culture. He summed up his impressions in his diary:

But this, it seems to me from what little I am still able to judge, is what the ancient Egyptians were like, and it is not impossible that this Character also shines forth a little in the modern Arab Egyptians. In all their ingenious smallness there is a certain magnanimity.42

With Philae and the wind behind them, Wallin and his friends continued their journey south through Nubia. By way of places like Tafa, Dakka, Kurusku, Ibrim and Darr, on 4 December they arrived at the great rock temples of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Wallin was particularly struck by the larger temple, and especially by the size of the four statues that flanked the entrance. The rightmost statue was buried in sand up to its beard. Wallin’s Nile journey reached its turning point at Wadi Halfa, by the second Nile cataract. There the boat was made ready for the trip back downstream: the big mast was taken down, the galley was moved to the bow and the oars were prepared for rowing. For long stretches of the journey downstream they found it sufficient to drift with the flow, but occasionally the crew had to take over and row for all they were worth.

56 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

Sailing with the current, the voyagers were no longer as de- pendent on the wind, and the cruise back to Cairo offered plenty of time to visit the temples and tombs. They stopped again at Abu Simbel. This timet he place made Wallin uneasy. The desert seemed to him barren and desolate, and the Temple at once mysterious and frightening. Although it bore some similarities to churches in Europe, it was in stark contrast to the Islamic mosques, which Wallin perceived as safe and welcoming.43 After Abu Simbel they made the customary visits to all the rediscovered Nubian temples, where with varying enthusiasm Wallin studied pylons, columns and reliefs – nearly always in Sattler’s company.44 During the journey, and also his stay in Cairo, Wallin collected natural specimens on behalf of the Imperial Alexander Univer- sity. In Tafa, one of the larger villages in Nubia, on the journey upstream he had put in an order for a jackal. The villagers had managed to shoot one, but on his return during the journey down it turned out that the creature’s head had been lost when they laid out the hide to dry in the sun.45 While a search was made for the head, Wallin had time to do what he preferred to do on any occasion, wherever they put in – namely, to sit down and talk with people. During the Nile journey he held conversations with people from the most diverse backgrounds: donkey drivers, peasants, soldiers, fishermen and dancing girls. He learned a great deal about the Arabic and Nubian dialects spoken along the Nile, about the people’s views on the country’s leader and the ongoing reforms, about religion and agriculture, tales and legends. Unlike so many other nineteenth-century European travellers Wallin both understood Arabic and spoke it, and thus gained a much deeper knowledge than his fellow travellers of the country and its people. Wallin was also an attentive observer, and his ethnographical notes are often as valuable as his studies in Arabic dialects. In Tafa the Nubian women’s hair aroused his particular interest. It “was smeared with the usual mess of oil and tallow and compressed into many small, thick, bulky braids.” He described the unusual hairstyles in detail, both in his diary and in one of the many letters he sent home to his mother and younger sister Natalia.46

57 Sofia Häggman

T he last winter in Cairo On 19 December Wallin and his friends travelled down through the First Cataract without mishap and returned to Egypt proper. Wallin had already seen his fill of it during the trip south and more and more often he felt bored. Even the long-awaited meeting with the famous dancer Safiya of Esna was a disappointment.47 He left her house as fast as he could and roamed around town on his own instead. It was Christmas Eve and he was homesick for his family. He also spent New Year’s Eve alone, lying in wait for foxes in the tombs of Western Thebes,48 while Sattler saw in the New Year with Richard Lepsius and the members of his archaeological expedition.49 On the following morning, New Year’s Day 1845, Wallin could no longer avoid joining the Prussian archaeologists at their house on the hillside above the village of Qurna. Once surrounded by the jovial Germans, Wallin soon overcame his shyness and spent an enjoyable day in their company. Lepsius showed him the house and his newly purchased pets – a monkey, a lizard and a tiny crocodile – and showed a polite interest in Wallin’s research and planned trips. The day ended with an excursion to the Valley of the Kings, and then Lepsius accompanied Sattler, Schledehaus and Wallin back to the boat. Despite his constant worry about being exposed as a Christian, Wallin wrote his own name in Lepsius’s guestbook. At the foot of the page that begins the year 1845 one can still read his neat signature: “Georg Aug. Wallin von Finland.”50 After a chilly journey in strong headwinds and with several stops, including Gabal al-Haridi, the Temple of Dendera, the tombs of Beni Hassan and the great Pharaonic necropolis of Saqqara, Wallin and his companions finally returned to Cairo on the night of 14 January 1845. Wallin’s last months in Cairo were marked by a longing to be back in Finland that alternated with a desire to move on to new adventures. He made preparations to leave, and moved out of Sheikh ῾Ali’s home, back to the more Western district of Azbakiya, under the pretext that it would be improper to bring

58 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home human remains into the home of a devout Muslim. The human remains Wallin was handling were various medical specimens, skeletons and mummies, which he intended to send to Finland before he set off on his journey to Arabia. The package he finally sent contained, in addition to mummies and skeletons, a number of books, several manuscripts, forty species of fish, eighty birds, and other creatures, all preserved in alcohol – but a large part of the collection was later destroyed when customs officials in Odessa drank the spirits.51 During his last months in Egypt Wallin not only met more prostitutes, but also fell for one of them: Fatima, whom he described as both charming and sensible.52 The couple spent more and more time together, even though Fatima was already married. Although this did not bother Wallin much, he was soon to leave her to embark on his life’s journey. In the last days he spent in Cairo Wallin was increasingly tormented by the thought that in masquerading as a Muslim he had deceived Sheikh ῾Ali. A mutual acquaintance had told the Sheikh that his guest was really “a Frank in disguise,” who pretended to be a Muslim in order to gain access to Egyptian homes and mosques. But Sheikh ῾Ali, to whom Wallin’s religious background still mattered just as little as before, attached no value to such “fairytales”.53 His confidence in Wallin was intact, and he did his utmost to help his friend to reach the distant goals of his travels. To make sure that the Bedouins would not harm Wallin at least when they took him the first leg of the way, Sheikh ῾Ali kept one of their fine swords as a pledge.54

R etrospective and lessons In the spring of 1845 Wallin’s first visit to Egypt approached its end. He would return to Egypt again and stay in Cairo three more times before finally travelling back to Europe in August 1849. By then he was thoroughly familiar with the city, and it offered him few surprises and new impressions. Rather, it was a safe haven where he could rest and cure himself from his travels. Wallin was not one to rest on his laurels and think about what

59 Sofia Häggman he had accomplished. Ever restless and drawn by new challenges, he rarely had leisure to sum up the lessons he had learned and enjoy the fruits of his efforts. However, in February 1845 he reviewed some of the experiences and observations he had made during his initial period in Egypt in a letter to his professor, Gabriel Geitlin. With the impressions from the Nile journey fresh in his memory, he explained that the cruise had really been first and foremost a pleasure trip. In spite of this, he wished to emphasize the importance of getting to know the whole country:

… in addition I have to say that anyone who wants to get to know the modern Egyptians must necessarily make such a journey and get to know the ancient Egyptians.55

After all he had seen and experienced during the journey to Upper Egypt, this reflection seemed to him obvious. For a European Orientalist in the mid-nineteenth century it was, however, a most unusual conclusion. The dominant discourse of the time had effectively broken the continuity between the Pharaonic culture and the modern Egyptians. During his early days in the country Wallin himself had not devoted much time to thinking about the long lines of Egyptian history. But when during the Nile journey he encountered Pharaonic Egypt in the many ancient monuments along the river, the continuity between old and new emerged for him in a way that was obvious. On this point Wallin differs from most the other contemporary researchers and Nile travellers. Perceiving the connection between the Pharaonic and the modern worlds was far from the only thing Wallin had learned during his time in Egypt. Most of the lessons were so obvious that he did not reflect on them. He had learned to speak a fluent Egyptian Arabic, and had achieved his goal of blending into Muslim Cairo. It had sometimes been at the expense of his pride, when he had to listen to “insult and injury”56 of Christians and Christianity. He also believed that in some contexts he would have been better received if he had been seen as a Christian European. Particularly troublesome were situations in which differences in the respective cultural codes put him in an uncomfortable in-

60 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

The Great Temple at Abu Simbel, painted by Hubert Sattler. The age of the Pharaonic monuments impressed Wallin, but he found their art and architecture clumsy and lacking in style. between position. On several occasions during the journey to Upper Egypt he felt torn between his European travelling companions and the local inhabitants of the villages along the Nile. Wallin’s self-assumed Muslim identity sometimes also prevented him from making contact with other Europeans. Even so, the network of contacts he had built up during his year in Cairo was a broad one, and included not only learned Muslim sheikhs but also prominent Egyptian intellectuals and many of the era’s most famous European explorers and researchers.

61 Sofia Häggman

There can be no doubt that Wallin identified with the role of a Muslim. By living with an Egyptian family he grew naturally into Egyptian society. After a time he was no longer an outside observer but an integral part of the complex social fabric that nineteenth-century Cairo constituted. It did not leave him unaf- fected. The question of whether he converted to Islam is one that has preoccupied posterity more than it worried him.57 He had always despised exaggerated and demonstrative expressions of faith and religious superstition, whether they occurred in Muslims in Cairo or Lutheran pastors in Germany. He preferred simplicity in all things, including religion. In Egypt he therefore admired the uncomplicated directness he thought he saw in the people’s attitude to God, something that made the country’s mosques into places that were welcoming and homely – in contrast to the awe-inspiring churches of Christianity. No matter how appealing he found many aspects of Islam, throughout his time in Egypt Wallin referred to Islam as “their” (the Egyptians’ and Arabs’) religion, not as his own. The issue of official conversion was irrelevant to him. For him it was enough to live like the Muslims he socialized with. He fully embraced Islam as a way of life, and devoted little time or thought to the theological details. Neither did he spend an excessive amount of time familiariz- ing himself with the country’s Pharaonic history and the details of all the ancient monuments he saw during his Nile journey. While he learned to distinguish between different architectural styles and periods, he stuck to his first impression: that Pharaonic architecture was clumsy and lacking in finesse. Wallin was all the more interested in the people he met, both in Cairo and in the villages of the Nile Delta and Valley. And in nature, which he often described in exuberant and lyrical terms. In his search for the Egyptian national character he thought he could sometimes see a link to the country’s beautiful landscape. Wallin imagined that the Arabs who had once conquered Egypt had over time been seduced by its wonderful climate and beautiful nature, and become “an enfeebled and wretched people without manly courage and manly spirit.” Though he had not yet met

62 Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home them, he still had a great admiration for the desert Arabs, and hoped to make their closer acquaintance during his journey to the Arabian Peninsula. He initially felt that the individual Egyptians he encountered in the streets of Alexandria and Cairo confirmed the view of the “Oriental” he had taken away from his conversations with his friend and teacher Sheikh al-Tantawi in St. Petersburg, and from Lane’s descriptions in Manners and Customs. But the longer he spent in Egypt and the more Egyptians he really got to know, the more multifaceted his image of them became. From being an anonymous mass and a potential object of study, the Egyptians emerged as individuals. Several of them reminded him more of friends and acquaintances back home in Finland than of one another. After his return to Finland, when it was time to compile his diary notes for publication, Wallin would find it easier to gener- alize. Then he followed Lane as far as his “individuality allowed,” abandoning his own vivid descriptions for generalizations typical of the time, such as “Oriental dress”, “Oriental building”, “Oriental scholars” and “in the Oriental way”.58 In this Wallin was by no means alone. It was merely the accepted way of presenting Orientalist research and of raising his written reports to an identifiable and recognized scholarly level. Through such repetition of the work of earlier authorities Orientalist research gained legitimacy.59 Even those Orientalists who had access to completely new material borrowed perspectives, ideology and leading ideas from their predecessors, especially Edward William Lane. Yet in Cairo early in 1845 Wallin could discern no common characteristics in the Egyptians he met. It was easier to gener- alize about other groups – Turks, Nubians and others he came less close to. But to him the Egyptians were on the whole just like any other people, a blend of a large number of individuals all very different from one another: “in general the people look like our Finns or like Germans or whom you will, except that the sun has burned them dark brown.”60 The Egyptians had become his people, and Egypt his home.

63 Sofia Häggman

Diary Upper Egypt, 27 November 1844

We sailed all day in a good fresh breeze and at Esha reached a village below Dekkeh named Girshe, I think. Here we stopped for the night and went up into the country and strolled beneath large plantations of palms, which almost stood directly on the yellow desert sand without any sign of soil. Beneath them lay the village itself, which stretched rather far along the shore. The houses here stood open without doors, and no people were to be seen. I walked further in the dazzling moonlight and found large crowds of women sitting together and talking, but no men. I returned through the stretch of desert to the other end of the village and here found 6–8 men sitting together. I greeted them and sat down to talk. They told us that the village had little cultivable land, and that every Sakiyeh must pay 300 piastres in tax and complained a great deal about their poverty and the country’s unjust government. They said that Arab Bedouins lived and travelled on the east bank of the river and sometimes came down to buy grain. They were good and hospitable people, never robbed travellers and if anyone, because of the accidental death of a camel, were compelled to leave his load and baggage on the rocks he need not fear that he would not find it on his return months later. They said that so safe would it be to travel under the protection of these Arabs and so greatly did they dread the Pasha’s power and dominion that they would rather run away and leave their belongings among the rocks than take them and expose themselves to his revenge and punishment. It would be the same here in Nubia among the Barabra: you could safely leave anything on the shore, even a bag of Thaler, go away and return months later – you would find your bag still there. Among those who sat with me here was an old man with a completely chalk-white beard, and most venerable. I asked him his age, but he could not put it any more exactly than between 60 and 90. It is very common here for men both young and old not to know their age. The people here were most benevolent and kind, and they talked a great deal.

G. A. Wallin, Skrifter 3, 2012, p. 169. 64 Kaj Öhrnberg

The terra incognita of Arabia

n 11 July 1763, Peter Forsskål, one of the so-called “apostles” Carl Linnaeus had sent out into the world to investigate Onature, died of a fever in the village of Yarim in Yemen. Forsskål was born in Helsinki on 11 January 1732. He had studied Arabic and followed Linnaeus’s lectures at Uppsala before going to Göttingen in 1753 to continue his studies under the guidance of the Orientalist and Biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis. During the 1750s Michaelis had drawn up plans for a major scientific expedition to Arabia Felix. It was to be the first scientific expedition sent to the Arabian Peninsula. The list of questions to which Michaelis hoped the expedition would provide answers also shows the matters of which the researchers considered themselves ignorant. Despite the fresh winds of the Enlightenment most of the tasks were still more or less inspired by the Bible. One of the main goals was to collect linguistic information about Arabic in order to gain a better understanding of Old Testament Hebrew. This task was explicitly assigned to Forsskål, a student of both Natural History and Arabic, who was to gather the local Arabic names of plants and animals.1 On 16 October 1841 Georg August Wallin applied for one of the travel scholarships offered by the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki. He began his application by stating that “one of the greatest and most lamented deficiencies in Arabic Philology is a study of the different dialects of the Arabic lan- g u a g e .” 2 To remedy this deficiency Wallin intended to make a journey to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Once there, he would travel from Yemen to the northeast in order to follow “the transitional formations [of Himyaritic] to pure Arabic. In Mecca and the surrounding regions I would be minded to spend about a month; and I believe that by then I would have

67 Kaj Öhrnberg gained such proficiency in the language and become so much at home in Mohammedan customs that, without much danger of being recognized as a foreigner, I would be able to venture into the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, so as there to gather, in a linguistic regard as well as in a Geographical and Histor- ical one, information about a land hitherto so little known to Europeans.”3 And, just like Michaelis’s questions, Wallin’s goals, both those recorded in the application and those formed during the journey, underscore the gaps in knowledge about the Arabian Peninsula that he wished to remedy. By comparing the Danish expedition and its objectives with Wallin’s, we are able to follow a historical paradigm shift in Ori- ental studies: the study of Arabic frees itself from its centuries-old role as theology’s maid servant, ancilla theologiae, changing from philologia sacra to philologia simpliciter. On being appointed Professor of Oriental Literature at the Imperial Alexander Uni- versity, in 1851 Wallin even succeeded in consigning Hebrew to the theological faculty and ensuring that the Professor of Oriental Literature gave instruction in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the most significant languages used in Islamic cultural circles. When later, in 1867, Hebrew was reunited with Arabic, it happened within the framework of Semitic philology, not theology. But the surprising thing is that Wallin never mentions Forsskål or his tragic fate. Was the subject possibly taboo?

Philology ‒ the Queen of the nineteenth-century sciences4 We do not know how Wallin became interested in and emotionally attached to Arabic and the Arabs during his years at university in the 1830s. Luckily, however, we do know a good deal about the intellectual climate of early nineteenth century Europe. We witness a transition from the Romantic Orientalism personified by figures like Sir William Jones, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Rückert, to a more or less philologically-minded Orientalism. Wallin, despite being a Romantic, was schooled to the standards set by scholars like the founding father of aca-

68 The terra incognita of Arabia demic Orientalism, Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.5 I myself would be inclined to seek the basis of Wallin’s studies and travels in the prevalence of philology at the German universities in the early nineteenth century. The post-Napoleonic era is the period in the intellectual history of Germany when neo-humanist Bildung and Wissenschaft – ex- emplified by the ascendance of philology – entered the realm of what Germans call Kulturpolitik. By the 1820s classical philology had already become the recognized foundation of professional humanistic scholarship. And the step from classical philology to philology in general was a short one. In fact, as Raymond Schwab maintains in his book La Renaissance orientale, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Zend Avesta in 1771 marks the first approach to an Asian text totally independent of Biblical and classical traditions.6 Schwab has put this concisely: “Only after 1771 does the world become truly round.”7 Neo-humanism was critical of utilitarian goals in pedagogy. Inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s thoughts on human advancement, freedom and beauty, Wilhelm von Humboldt was led to stress the ideal of Bildung, individual self-cultivation. According to von Humboldt, the pursuit of academic knowledge, a task never perfected, had to be united with the personal formation (Bildung) of the individual.8 For the well-rounded individual, language and philology were the keys to the understanding of mankind or, as Ernest Renan so aptly put it: “La philologie est la science exacte de choses de l’esprit.” (“Philology is the exact science of spiritual things.”)9 University policy in Finland is crystallized in the first para- graph of the 1828 statutes: “The Imperial Alexander University has been founded in order to promote the development of Sciences and the Liberal Arts in Finland [...].”10 Matti Klinge has written, “[t]he reference to science committed the Imperial Alexander University to the ‘Humboldtian’ ideas [...], notably the principle of Erziehung durch Forschung, or learning through research.”11 The Humboldtian research university made its way to Finland in the 1830s, exactly the period when Wallin studied there. According to his fellow students at the University, Wallin was the first and

69 Kaj Öhrnberg

only one of them who did not study for bread and butter. He pursued all the liberal arts: music, literature, Oriental languages without a thought of how to earn his living.12 These digressions can help us to understand and truly appreciate the reasons why Wallin applied for the only major travel scholarship available at the University, and was awarded it in 1841. While it was quite exceptional for a scholar of Arab dialects

70 The terra incognita of Arabia

Bedouins in a desert landscape. Painting by Gustav Ankarcrona. to receive this award, it was also wholly in accordance with the spirit of the times. To emphasize the importance of philology at that period, it may be mentioned that Wallin’s only serious competitor for the travel scholarship in 1841 was another philologist, Matthias Alexander Castrén, a specialist in Finno-Ugric

71 Kaj Öhrnberg languages. In other words, although in Finland he had the status of pioneering philologist, Wallin was nevertheless part of a larger European intellectual movement.

T he Romantic traveller So it was that in the 1840s, inspired by Romanticism and an awakening national spirit, while Finnish academic circles were almost exclusively interested in Russia and Siberia – “the colonies of Finnish humanistic disciplines”13 – one headstrong individu- alist travelled across the Arabian Peninsula by camel, seeking the Noble Savage of the Romanticists in one Bedouin camp after another. Wallin was both an intrepid scientific traveller to Ar- abia and an escapist in flight from the conventional lifestyle of Europe. He was thus also in this regard part of a larger European literary and philosophical movement, in which rationalists and romanticists “are often thought of as opposing types, but in reality are two sides of the same coin.”14 It is almost impossible to imagine a more challenging and even hostile environment than the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and the same is true of the way of life practised by the camel nomads, the Bedouins. Despite all this – or perhaps because of it? – throughout the nineteenth century European explorers and Orientalists had fallen in love with their cherished but often unreal image of the Bedouin as the Noble Savage. Four books paved the way for the Romantic traveller of the nineteenth century and – equally important – created at home a reading public in eager quest of books that were engagingly written and contained insights into a landscape exotic, yet also familiar. These books of Romantic travel were the Arabian Nights, the Bible, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the De- scription de l’Égypte by the French savants who accompanied Napoleon in Egypt from 1798 to 1801. Riding camels, with this already half-painted canvas in their saddle-bags, one or two mis- fits in flight from the conventions of an industrializing Europe proceeded to create some of the finest nineteenth-century travel literature – and here I include Wallin himself. To quote Isaiah

72 The terra incognita of Arabia

Berlin, the Romantic (in this case the traveller), “is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adventurer, the outlaw, he who de- fies society and accepted values, and follows his own – it may be to his doom, but this is better than conformity, enslavement to mediocrity.”15 And the paragon of these ideals, the anarchist unspoiled by civilisation, was the Bedouin. Carsten Niebuhr and John Lewis Burckhardt had written about the Bedouins before Wallin, but Wallin was the first European to actually get to know them and their way of life, and to live among them for a considerable time. And most importantly, Wallin had the greatest of all gifts in an explorer – an intuitive understanding of the people he met and a sympathy with them. His diaries and letters to Finland are eloquent testimony to his great and abid- ing love for the Bedouins, as well as to his unrealistic dream of settling down with them for the rest of his life.

T he first journey into the desert On 11 April 1845 Wallin left Cairo, accompanied to the gate of the city by three Egyptian friends, to travel with a Bedouin guide to Aqaba, two weeks’ distance away. In Egypt the plans for the journey to the Arabian Peninsula had changed from those he had drawn up in St. Petersburg in 1841. In Cairo he had been told that his idea of travelling from Egyptian soil to the Peninsula via the Red Sea was not to be recommended. During the 1840s Egypt’s ruler Muhammad ῾Ali aspired to place the Peninsula with its religious centres of Mecca and Medina under his dominion. For this reason, everything that came from Egypt was viewed with extreme suspicion. Wallin was advised to travel to the Peninsula from the north, which he did, though he found himself suspected of being one of Muhammad ῾Ali’s spies none the less. Of his new itinerary Wallin wrote to Gabriel Geitlin the day before his departure: “Thus my journey to Aqaba is decided, completely safe and without danger; but there the circumstances must determine my further progress. My plan is to attempt to go straight across the desert to Djof [al-Jauf], which is so famous for its singing and poetry and is also celebrated in other respects.

73 Kaj Öhrnberg

35° 45° 55° 0 400 km

Damascus Mediterranean Baghdad Sea Jerusalem Bethlehem Suez 30° 30° Ma’an al-Jauf Aqaba Taima Ha’il Cairo Tabuk al-Muwailih Persian Saint Catherine’s Gulf Monastery Medina Riyadh

Jeddah Mecca Nile The Empty Quarter 20° 20°

Red Sea

35° 45° 55°

Georg August Wallin’s desert journeys on the Arabian Peninsula, the Sinai Peninsula and in the Holy Land.

There I should like to stay for a longer period of time; and from there go to Sedeir, where there are said to be remarkable antiquities, and on the way pass through Shammor; on to Derriyeh [al-Dir῾iya], then approach the Persian Gulf and travel up to Basra, which would be the terminus of my first exploration.”16 But Wallin was to learn that even plans made in situ were only plans, which harsh reality could turn on their head. After a week’s journey the destination was changed from Aqaba to al-Jauf, directly via Ma῾an. In al-Jauf the Wahhabis’ strict and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam had put an

74 The terra incognita of Arabia

35° 45° 55° 0 400 km end to both singing and poetry, and after a three-month stay in the city Wallin continued on his way via Jubba to Ha’il, in the Shammar Mountains. Wallin was the first European trav- Damascus Mediterranean eller to take this route and visit Ha’il, which was the base of Baghdad Emir ῾Abdallah Ibn Rashid – the most powerful man on the Sea Jerusalem Peninsula at that time. Bethlehem Because of a shortage of funds Wallin had to give up the idea Suez 30° 30° Ma’an al-Jauf of proceeding from Ha’il to the Persian Gulf. When the pilgrim Aqaba caravan from Baghdad arrived in Ha’il with mainly Shiite pilgrims Taima Ha’il Cairo Tabuk in mid-November 1845, Wallin decided to follow it to Medina, al-Muwailih Persian which he reached on 28 November. He visited the tombs of the Saint Catherine’s Gulf Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and the first Riyadh Monastery Medina Caliph, Abu Bakr. Wallin’s plan had been to travel from Medina to Yanbu῾ on the Red Sea, but when it was rumoured that the Jeddah route was unsafe, he decided to follow the caravan all the way to Mecca Nile The Empty Quarter 20° Mecca, where he arrived on 7 December 1845. During the days 20° that followed he took part in all the rituals prescribed in the Red Koran and the Sunna, many of which take place outside the city Sea itself. On 15 December he left Mecca and travelled to Jeddah on the Red Sea, where on 8 January 1846 he succeeded in boarding a ship bound for Suez. The voyage lasted a good sixty days, and he did not return to Cairo until March 14. The pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj in Arabic, is the duty of every 35° 45° 55° Muslim. Those who have visited Mecca are allowed to use the honorary title of hajj(ī), which is highly respected throughout the Islamic world. “I accomplished without fuss all that was required of me, so that now I am fully entitled to the designation of Hāgg. Apart from the vanity of being able to say that I am one of the three or four Europeans who ventured it, for future trips I dare say I shall have a real advantage from my pilgrimage.”17 From a European point of view, Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina – both inaccessible to non-Muslims – are probably the most fascinating destinations on the Arabian Peninsula. Those travellers who do not embrace Islam and want to visit the cities have been forced to pretend to be Muslim pilgrims – for being recognized as a non-Muslim has meant to put one’s life in danger. Thus, to visit the Muslim holy cities has been seen

75 Kaj Öhrnberg as evidence of true courage and resourcefulness, a kind of rite of passage among explorers. The regrettable aspect of Wallin’s pilgrimage is that its spectacular nature has obscured the real results of his desert journeys. His own notion that three or four Europeans had visited the cities before him was acceptable in his time. Although nowadays we know the names of about a score of Christians who made the pilgrimage to Mecca before him, we can also be sure that thousands of anonymous non-Muslims had visited Mecca from the time of the Crusades until the time of Wallin’s journey, as servants, slaves, soldiers, merchants, or simply adventurers.

T he second journey into the desert Wallin’s second desert journey was also a pilgrimage, this time mainly to the Holy Land and the sacred sites of both Christianity and Islam. It took him to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, to Palestine, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, as well as to Syria and Damascus. This journey, which was quite without any scientific pretensions, lasted six months, from December 1846 to June 1847. Although Wallin was not interested in book-learning and history, he called in at the library of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, where only a few years earlier (in 1844) the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf had identified one of the oldest manuscripts of the Greek Bible, dating from the fourth century, a text that is now known as the Codex Sinaiticus.

I visited the Monastery Library only once. There I found a dreadful Augean stables full of tomes and dust, and went in fear of it from the very outset. The Arabic manuscripts I set eyes upon consisted exclusively of translations of separate books, mostly from the New Testament. Most of them were defective, and I cannot recall one that would have held my attention. I did not forget Prof. Blomqvist’s exhortation to thoroughly examine old monastery libraries; but when after several hours of vain effort I felt my throat constricted by the dust on the tomes as I turned them over on the shelves, I

76 The terra incognita of Arabia

abandoned all hope and freed my attendant from his tedious chore of guarding me.18

T he third journey into the desert Even before his first desert journey Wallin had to think about how he would finance his stay in the Middle East until the end of 1848. The travel scholarship he received was meant to last only until 1845. In his application for a new grant dated 1 August 1846 he describes his plans to continue the exploration of the Arabian Peninsula:

As regards journeys I would be minded to undertake in the coming year, I would chiefly direct them to South East Arabia and the interior of Alnegd [Najd] where according to intelligence I received from the Shammar Arabs there are everywhere remains of old houses and inscriptions in the style I myself found and copied in the small desert town of Gubbe. In Almahra, as yet unvisited by any European, according to the information given me by the French Consul, Mr. Fræsnell, there are numerous ruins, and inscriptions in a dialect of the Old Himyaritic language that is unknown to him.19 But to accomplish these journeys I should first want to move my residence from Egypt to Basra, where over the Persian Gulf I could put myself in better communication with these regions [...] In this connection at the start of the coming year I should like to travel via Jerusalem to Damascus, and thence through the desert across the unknown provinces of Belka῾ and Nikrat Alsham to Baghdad and Basra. From here I would first visit, for its richness and its people’s experience in art, the still praised province of Alhassa and the adjacent provinces of Alnegd. If possible, here I would go directly through the great wilderness to Al ῾Oman and from there on to Almahra: otherwise I shall be compelled to return to Basra and cross the sea to Maskat or some port of the latter province. In Almahra I dare say that I will need to make a longer stay, though am unable to determine the exact duration in advance. From here I would go along the mountain plateau Alahkaf to San῾a so as to fill a gap in the journeys Messrs

77 Kaj Öhrnberg

Arnauld and Wrede made in Yemen last year. On that road which, according to my information, goes directly from here across Wadi Dowaser through the desert, I would make my way to Alriyadh, the seat of Alnegd’s Ruler Feysal, and then further along the pilgrim road to Alhegaz. I would thus have triangulated the most important locations in Arabia; and would subsequently be able to determine their position in relation to one another as nearly as it may be done without astronomical observations. Assuming that the execution of these journeys will exhaust the time for which the funds in our Imperial University Statutes are designated, upon my return to Alhegaz I shall probably find myself compelled to return home.20

What a plan! Had it been realized, Wallin would stand as the most pre-eminent of the nineteenth century explorers of the Arabian Peninsula. But as a plan it was extremely over-optimistic and lacking in realism, and so it is little wonder that reality turned out completely differently. In December 1847 Wallin set out from Cairo on his third desert journey. From al-Muwailih on the Red Sea he moved slowly from one Bedouin camp to the next, via Tabuk and Taima’, and once again attained Ha’il. In Ha’il, however, he learned that his European identity had been discovered. He assumed this had happened because in Cairo he had been forced to ask Egypt’s ruler Muhammad ῾Ali, via the Russian consulate, for a letter of recommendation for his trip to the Arabian Pen- insula. After the disclosure of his identity, Wallin was given to understand that he would be killed if he continued his journey to Riyadh. He therefore changed his plans and travelled to Baghdad, from where he made a four-month exploration of Persia. And by June 1849 he was back in Cairo again. From a scientific point of view the third desert journey – the one more or less broken off in Ha’il – was the most rewarding. It was Wallin’s route from al-Muwailih via Tabuk and Taima’ to Ha’il that made his name as an explorer. Wallin was the first European to leave a written description of these regions. Both the British Royal Geographical Society and the Société de Géographie in Paris

78 The terra incognita of Arabia acclaimed Wallin and bestowed on him their honorary awards. Wallin himself viewed his journeys into the Arabian Peninsula as mere preparations for future expeditions. In fact, he thought he had not done enough for the money the University spent on his travels. Viewing things from our perspective one could sympathize with him at least on one occasion. Inside Arabia there is the “Empty Quarter”, al-rub῾ al-khālī, the “big daddy” of all deserts. A desert within a desert must be the desert. It is widely believed that the name was launched by Charles Montagu Doughty in his book Travels in Arabia Deserta, published in 1888: “Zayd taught me thus [...] ‘The fourth part of the world is called Rob῾a el-Khâly, the empty quarter’: by this commonly they imagine the great middle-East of the Arabian Peninsula; which they believe to be void of the breath of life!”21 According to Nabih Amin Faris the expression al-rub῾ al-khālī was not known before this.22 But in a letter to his teacher in Helsinki, dated 2 August 1848 in Baghdad, Wallin mentions “the sand sea Alrub῾ alkhâli,”23 and in his portrayal of his first desert journey, which was published posthumously in 1854, he writes: “and that part, which, under the name of Alrab῾ Alkhâlî, is laid down in our maps as the uninhabited wilderness of Arabia.”24 This is the first time we find a Western explorer using this Arabic expression that literally means “the empty quarter.” It appears that the only Arabic text that mentions it before Wallin is the Kitāb al-fawā’id fī usūl al-bahr wal-qawā῾id (1490) by the Arab navigator and cartographer Ahmad ibn Majid, who died circa 1500.25 One modern traveller to Arabia, Martin Buckley, has written: “As I passed along the southern edge of the Great Southern desert of Arabia, the Empty Quarter, I knew that I was about to cross a line between legend and reality.”26 In the 1920s and 1930s it was the ultimate prize, and considered the only remaining unknown quarter of the world. In 1930 two British travellers, Bertram Thomas and Harry St. John Bridger Philby, had their hearts set on becoming the first European to cross the Empty Quarter. The race was won by Thomas, who between December 1930 and February 1931 made the crossing from south to north, bringing about comments suggesting that it was the end of the

79 Kaj Öhrnberg

Making coffee on the Arabian Peninsula. Photograph by Gertrude Bell, 1914. history of exploration. This was the prize Wallin did not achieve due to circumstances that forced him to change his itinerary.

Back to Europe and plans for a new journey to Arabia On 9 August 1849 Wallin sailed by ship from Alexandria, turning his back on the Orient and returning to Europe. His homeward route passed through Europe to London, where he arrived on 1 October. He remained in London for over half a year, among other things with the aim of completing an academic dissertation for the now vacant chair of Oriental Literature at the Imperial Alexander University. At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on April 22 1850, he read his account of the third desert journey, “Notes taken During a Journey through Part of Northern

80 The terra incognita of Arabia Arabia, in 1848.” In mid-May he left London and returned via St. Petersburg to Helsinki, which he reached on 15 June 1850, after a seven-year absence. However, the return awoke many mixed feelings in him, and he describes his situation in the third person: “Oh! only dry prose lies before him, all poetry has been left behind.”27 What Wallin saw ahead of him was an academic life in Europe, dry prose; meanwhile all the things that made life worth living, the world of the Orient, poetry, lay inaccessibly behind him. Starting with the first desert journey of 1845, in Wallin’s writings we can read about a constant battle between the Orient and Europe, East and West, the natural and the artificial. “O vae O vae the hour when I must return to the land of the Red-Haired and Blue-Eyed!! And yet how many things lure me there with Siren voices!”28 The thought of not returning to Europe was often prompted by Wallin’s encounters with the desert’s beauties. On his third desert journey in March 1848 he spent nearly a week in the home of a Bedouin sheikh. Wallin took a fancy to the sheikh’s seventeen-year-old daughter Amsha, who was both unhappily married and one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, “though [she is] not a real Arabian desert beauty, but almost a European blonde.” He began to toy with the idea of remaining among these Bedouins. In a letter he wrote:

For several days we talked during prolonged delousings and conversations about this and other matters, for I was fool enough to let a long-unaccustomed emotion gain a foothold in my heart; and guess to what a decision we came! Yes, she would elope with me, leaving her husband and kin, we would betake ourselves to other Arabs and from there compel her husband to divorce her; [… ] and when it was all set to rights we would marry, and return to our Arabs, and live with them. […] I can spend the rest of my days among the children of the desert, procure some camels and herds of sheep, and thrive in the conditions of the desert, and far away from Europe’s frivolity, vanity and over-refined culture live […].29

81 Kaj Öhrnberg

But although Wallin had convinced himself that everything in the Orient must be observed at a distance if his illusions of “the Orient” were not to fall apart, immediately after his return to Finland he began to make preparations for a new journey to Arabia, which he estimated would take at least five or six years to complete. All that he had so far accomplished he considered to be no more than preparations for the coming expedition. The intention was that the Royal British Geographical So- ciety, together with the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, would pay for Wallin’s planned journey for at least five years. The itinerary was largely the same as before. Wallin hoped to be able to return to Egypt in the late summer of 1852 and then begin the actual research expedition on the Red Sea coast. In al-Hijaz he intended to investigate pre-Islamic remains, after which he would travel to Wahhabi Najd, and then on to Khaibar, al-Qasim, Riyadh and al-rub῾ al-khālī, the desert within a desert. After a projected visit to Baghdad to report what he had accomplished, he would continue his journey to Oman, al-Mahra, Hadramaut and Yemen. From Aden he would either return to Europe or travel to other parts of Arabia.30 His attempt to find funding in Russia for the trip to Arabia met with resistance in St. Petersburg, however. The Russians advanced an alternative proposal, according to which Wallin would undertake to make a separate research expedition to Central Asia on his way home from Arabia. Russia had already for some time sought to expand into this area, and the Russian Geographical Society wanted him to explore the areas around Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. It seems that Wallin was initially willing to expand his itinerary to Central Asia, as it would have guaranteed his planned trip to the Arabian Peninsula. But after thinking it over in more detail he decided to opt out of this expedition, which would have combined research with military reconnaissance. He also felt that he had not mastered the local languages well enough, and besides, he was not interested in Central Asia. “Und wo dem Reisenden die Lust und die Hingebung fehlt, da wird er auch wenig ausrichten.”31

82 The terra incognita of Arabia

With the negotiations at an impasse, Wallin died unexpectedly on 23 October 1852. It is unfortunate that Wallin himself only managed to publish a fraction of the material he gathered on his travels; most of his scientific notes, travel journals and letters home were left for others to publish. Therefore, when one is evaluating Wallin’s travels, it should be noted that most of his notes, which are in Swedish, and often written with Arabic characters, have remained inaccessible to scholars interested in the Arabian Peninsula or its exploration. His early death and the linguistic barrier have relegated him to a footnote in learned studies. The two articles32 Wallin wrote for the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society are very disappointing for several reasons. For one thing, they were totally garbled by their editors. In 1851, Wallin was still alive when his account of the journey made in 1848 appeared. It was a shock: a certain Mr. Frederick Ayrton had furnished the article with simplistic notes and explanations. Wallin’s death saved him from another surprise when the second article appeared in 1854. This time the Reverend G. C. Renouard had co-assumed with Ayrton the role of expert and editor, with similar results. Fortunately, the article of 1851 can be completely restored from Wallin’s original manuscript and the article of 1854 can be partly restored. As M. Trautz wrote in 1930 in her review of how D. G. Hogarth treated Wallin in his classic work on the exploration of Arabia, The Penetration of Arabia (1904): “For European scholarship Wallin stands or falls by two papers in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society.” 33 And so it has been until now. Only the German anthology of Bedouin songs “Probe aus einer Anthologie neuarabischer Gesänge, in der Wüste ges ammelt” I–II was published in its final form by Wallin himself in 1851–1852.34 His posthumous archive also includes two linguistic articles that Herman Kellgren, Wallin’s successor as Professor of Oriental Literature, prepared for publication. These are “Über die Laute des Arabischen und ihre Bezeichnung” (1855 and 1858)35 and “Be- merkungen über die Sprache der Beduinen auf Veranlassung des Aufsatzes von E. W. Lane : «Über die Aussprache der Arabischen Vocale» u.s.w. Bd. IV, S. 170–186” (1858).36

83 Kaj Öhrnberg

As a fulfilment of D. G. Hogarth’s wish in 1904 that “[o]ne might spare something of his successors’ narratives to have more of Wallin’s,”37 a complete edition of everything that Wallin wrote (in Arabic, Persian, Swedish, English, Russian, German, French, and Latin), is now under preparation by the efforts of Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland). These efforts will undoubtedly raise him to the status of one of the most important nineteenth-century explorers of Arabia. This does not, of course, imply that the material already published is of no significance. Wallin was one of the first scholars to make observations on Bedouin dialects and to collect their oral poetry. Furthermore, his views on Arabic phonetics have enjoyed acclaim well into the twentieth century.38 Considering the political and social history of the region he visited (al-Jauf and Ha’il) in the first half of the nineteenth century, “Wallin is the first and only one, who provides us with the background to what had happened afterward. [...] [W]hat he has contributed is not available in local sources. Therefore, his contribution is the only available source of that time.”39 Viewed within the context of historical philology Wallin is an odd and isolated phenomenon in Finland. His journey did not result in a rush to the Middle East, and field-work in the Finnish academic world continued in the national romantic spirit. In most international works on the history of philology, Wallin is bypassed with a couple of lines or a footnote. It is natural that the reputation of a scholar or travelling researcher is defined according to what is known of his achievements. The enduring aspects of Wallin’s work are the extensive descriptions of Bedouin life in the Arabian Peninsula that we find in his diaries and letters. In an international context, however, it is precisely this part of his research that has remained unknown. It has simply been overlooked because of the language barrier that Swedish constitutes. Sadly one must agree that the footnote Wallin has hitherto received in histories of Arabic philology is justified. How then does Wallin fit with the ideas of Edward Said concerning imperialism in modern Orientalism?40 Although Wallin was not an imperial scholar travelling and publishing in the in-

84 The terra incognita of Arabia terests of an empire, he was still doing what he did for Europe’s learned societies, giving voice to those who had to be represented. To give just one example, Wallin wrote in January 1851 to Dr. Norton Shaw, the Danish but also Swedish-speaking secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. In a long letter, he told him that to return to the Arabian Peninsula was his supreme goal in life.

This may be realized in two different ways, and I may return either to examine as an European traveller in order to ascertain in a scientific point of view the terra incognita of the Arabs and to present the results and details of my researches to the learned people of the Occidental world and principally to the scientific societies of London; or for my own pleasure and satisfaction to seek a refuge in the wilds of the Desert from the oppressive atmosphere of Europe and to find rest and quiet from the vanities and conventional stiffness of the Inhabitants of the West and thus live as a free Beduin and at last die among the free sons of the Desert.41

This is quite comparable with what Edward Said wrote: “The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true. What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down. His power was to have existed amongst them as a native speaker, as it were, and also as a secret writer. And what he wrote was intended as useful knowledge, not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions.”42

E pilogue: empire and geography intertwined It is more than likely that the financing of Wallin’s planned trip to Arabia could have come – sooner or later – only from Great Britain, if he had lived. As early as May 1852, after Wallin’s unsuccessful negotiations with the two societies, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison, spoke of his desire that the East India Company and the British govern-

85 Förnamn Efternamn

Pages from Georg August Wallin’s diary written in Swedish with Arabic script during his first journey on the Arabian Peninsula.

86 Artikelns titel

87 Kaj Öhrnberg ment should jointly find a solution for the financing of Wallin’s trip. “Dr. Wallin was a child of the desert, and perhaps the only European perfectly qualified by training and knowledge to dispel our ignorance of a country so interesting to the earliest history of m an k i n d .” 43 Behind these fine words about Arabia’s importance for the history of mankind, however, lay Sir Roderick’s concern for the interests of the British Empire, both economic and geo- political. As Felix Driver put it, Sir Roderick saw “exploration and reconnaissance as the natural prerequisites of the expansion of British influence world-wide.”44 We must therefore take into account the fact that Wallin’s problems with the Imperial Russian Geographical Society would not need to affect British interests regarding the exploration of the southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Considering it better to be safe than sorry, in late October 1852 the Society’s representatives contacted Richard Burton, who was home in England on sick leave from India, and on 6 November Burton delivered a carefully prepared itinerary to the Board. This plan shows all the signs of having been prepared by Dr. Shaw and Colonel W. H. Sykes, who were familiar with the itinerary Wallin had previously drafted. In other words, the Royal Geographical Society intended to send Burton to undertake the journey that Wallin planned, even before London learned of Wallin’s death on 23 October.45 When trying to understand the Royal Geographical Society’s procedure with regard to Wallin’s submission of his plan for a new journey to Arabia, we have to remember that for the Society, the notion that “exploration might serve some purpose beyond the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake was thus not just an afterthought: it was its raison d’être.” 46 In addition, the plan proposed by Burton and the one that was eventually approved by the Society on 10 March 1853 differed from each other to the extent that the trip was to begin with the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. When Burton finally completed the journey it included only the pilgrimage. Burton’s interest lay in his posthumous reputation, and he was therefore more anxious to visit Mecca than to get to Hadramaut.

88 The terra incognita of Arabia

The Peninsula’s southern coast from Oman to Aden, which was often referred to by the name of Hadramaut, was of great strategic importance to the British and their connections to In- dia. During the Society’s negotiations with Wallin in late 1851 its Secretary, Norton Shaw, pointed this out to him in careful terms:

At the Council an opinion was very generally expressed that so learned and so enterprising a traveller as yourself ought not to be too closely tied by regulations, and that the explorations, which you desire to make in Arabia, should be, as far as possible, left to your judgment. [...] It appears to me very desirable that the province of Hadramaut should form one of the objects of your Mission.47

On 25 January 1875 the Finnish Arabist and Assyriologist Karl Fredrik Eneberg wrote from Paris to Otto Donner in Helsinki: “The name Halévy will not be unfamiliar to you. [...] The same man also has a certain interest for us. The research that Wallin in his day wanted to undertake in southern Arabia has been imple- mented by Halévy in a way that is as thorough as it is fruitful.”48

89 Letter to G. Geitlin Baghdad 2 August 1848

During those days my thoughts had been on other things. My host had a daughter, one of several other children, a young woman of seventeen or eighteen who three years ago had married her cousin, a young man whose tent was very close to ours. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, though not really an Arabian desert beauty, more like a European blonde, something I can almost never recollect having seen among the women of the East. She always spent the greater part of the day in our tent, where she could engage in her task of delousing her father’s beard, the favourite task of all Bedouin women. Here I soon made her acquaintance and after a few days I invited her to delouse my beard. Although there was probably nothing to be found in it, she still managed to prod some nits from my side-whiskers and took a long time about doing so; for meanwhile she had to tell me that her husband had threatened to take another wife; he had been married to her three full years and in that time she had not given him more than one little daughter; he wanted children and a wife who gave him them, and had therefore given his beautiful young wife called Amshà the aforesaid declaration. This she did not like, and she sought advice from me on how to stay the execution of her husband’s resolve. For several days we talked during prolonged delousings and conversations about this and other matters, for I was fool enough to let a long-unaccustomed emotion gain a foothold in my heart; and guess to what a decision we came! Yes, she would elope with me, leaving her husband and kin, we would betake ourselves to other Arabs and from there compel her husband to divorce her; we would appease her father, if he was angry, and when it was all set to rights we would marry, and return to our Arabs, and live with them. None of this would have been anything out of the usual in the desert, though I understood all too well that it could not be done by me, I could not act against her father, my host, a man I learned to love and value highly; but I could not imagine myself in these romantic desert projects and ideas and I again reasoned with myself, raising the argument which sometimes occurred to me in a Bedouin tent and whose shibboleth was kus umm al dunya (the ordinary Arabic expression for let the world go to hang). I meant what more is there for me to do in the Europe to which I have almost grown unaccustomed? I can spend the rest of my days among the children of the desert, procure some camels and herds of sheep, and thrive in the conditions of the desert, and far away from Europe’s frivolity, vanity and over-refined culture live and die in the simple life of the desert. But although I knew that no one but a person born and raised in the desert can endure its life and understand its workings, I had too much and too closely seen all the errors and false steps the Bedouin is exposed to from the first step he takes out of his desert into life in the cities of the desert or other Arab cities of the Orient, and am firmly convinced that it is in general easier for us to return to nature than for the Bedouin and Oriental to catch up with us. I therefore drove all such thoughts from my mind and began to hasten my departure.

G. A. Wallin, Skrifter 5, 2014, pp. 239–240.

Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

Georg August Wallin and Persia

eorg August Wallin stayed in Persia slightly less than four months in 1848–1849, from 18 September 1848, till G7 January 1849, to be exact.1 The country he came to was in many ways different from the Arab countries, especially Egypt and the Wahhabite Arabian Peninsula, which he knew so well. A non-specialist may confuse Persia, modern Iran, with Arab countries, but the differences between the two are perhaps more prominent than their similarities. In Wallin’s time, the power in Arab areas was in the hands of staunch Sunni rulers, if we except some local Shiite rulers of little importance in Lebanon. The Ottoman Sultan, or Caliph, was at least the nominal overlord of much of what today is considered the Arab world, and he saw himself as the representative of Sunni Islam. The Arabian Peninsula was in the hands of the even more uncompromising Sunni Wahhabites, in whose eyes Shiites were outright heretics. The Caliph was not much more lenient towards them and they were mostly ousted from the administration, which, e.g., in Iraq created the situation where the majority of the population were Shiites but the ruling elite, until Saddam Hussein, whether religious or secular, was of Sunni origin. Persia, on the other hand, had officially been a Shiite Empire since 1501, and there the overwhelming majority of the population were Shiites. In addition, there was a linguistic barrier. Arabic was widely used in Persia in scholarly and especially religious works, but the majority spoke Iranian languages (Persian, Kurdish, and several local dialects and minor languages) and the national written language was Modern Persian, used by the administration, as well as by poets, journalists and the school system. The most important linguistic minorities in the country were formed by speakers of Turkic languages and Kurdish. There were few Arabic speakers.

95 Förnamn Efternamn

Caspian Sea

Tehran

Kirmanshah

Bisitun Baghdad Isfahan Karbala Tigris Najaf Karun

Euphrates

Basra Shiraz

Persian Gulf 0 200 km

30°

20°

35° 45° 55° Georg August Wallin’s journey in Persia.

96 Georg August Wallin and Persia

The linguistic difference brought with itself cultural differences. Whereas the learned in Arab countries read very much the same literature, Persians had their own set of Classics, even though Arabic was, like Latin in Western Europe at the time, a language a learned person was supposed to know at least to some extent. Persians were often familiar with the best-known Arab Classics, but Arabs rarely knew anything about Persian literature. Separated from Arabs by language and religion, Persia had in the mid-nineteenth century developed in its own direction, but, of course, there were also features that joined them to the common Arab-Islamic culture. Though different from Sunnis, Shiites were still Muslims, too, and the two branches of Islam share many basic theological concepts, even though they differ in others. Likewise, Arabic and Persian literature had developed in the Middle Ages through mutual influence, the one inspiring the other. Though few Arabs would have read the top classics of the Persians, Hafiz or Sa῾di, these authors had written in the same literary environment as Arab authors. They wrote with few exceptions in the same genres (different from, e.g., European or Indian genres) and even used the same or similar literary tropes, metres or metaphors. The relations between Arabic and Persian cultures have for the last 1400 years vacillated between assimilation and dissim- ilation, but politically Persia has been for the last 500 years a clearly defined political entity. During Wallin’s stay in the country in 1848–1849 it was one of the three main actors in the Islamic world, the other two being Ottoman Turkey, its archenemy, and various independent or semi-independent Arab principalities. Ottoman Turkey had already started its decline that was to lead to the birth of modern Turkey, a tiny Anatolian state compared to the Ottoman Empire at its largest, ruling huge parts of Europe, as well as most Arab countries, and extending its influence far into North Africa. Several defeats to various European armies had already led to the reduction of Ottoman Turkey’s territories, and not only on the Western front: Egypt had wriggled out of Turkey’s influence, only to fall victim to the British, who in practice took the place of the Ottomans as the overlords of Egypt.

97 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

A country in turmoil In Persia, the Qajar dynasty had taken over at the end of the eighteenth century, to rule Persia until the emergence of the short- lived Pahlavi dynasty in 1924. The old Shah had died in 1848, and the new one, the young Nasir al-Din (r. 1848–1896), ascended the throne to start his long reign. No one, of course, knew that Nasir al-Din would rule for the following five decades. In 1848, his position seemed precarious enough, not only because of the international situation – Russia was showing ever more interest in widening its territory to the South, the British kept an eye on Persia, and the Ottomans repeatedly turned against their Eastern neighbour to compensate for their losses elsewhere – but he was also facing formidable problems at home. In Persia itself, religious turmoil was threatening the system. A series of partly related movements had challenged the Shiite clergy (῾ulamā’), which was influential in the court. The by now Classical Shiite doctrine considered the Hidden Imam – hidden since 941 – to be vested with both religious and earthly authority. In his absence, his religious authority was vicariously used by the ῾ulamā’, and this brought them considerable earthly power, too. (In modern times, this was to lead to the doctrine of vilāyat-e faqīh, or direct rule by a supremely learned Islamic legal scholar, developed by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1940s and still in use in the Islamic Republic of Iran.) In contrast and in opposition to the established system, a Bahrayni scholar, Ahmad al-Ahsa’i, influential also among the Shiites of Iraq and Persia, had opined that a further religious character called Rukn (“The Pillar”) also had religious authority, which was based on direct spiritual contact with the Hidden Imam. In his widely circulated writings, he built this up on the level of theory only, but in his private teaching he claimed this position for himself. al-Ahsa’i’s Shaykhi movement did not die with the founder’s death in 1826. He was succeeded by Sayyid Kazim Rishti, but after the latter’s death the movement became fragmented. One of the branches was led by a highly charismatic young man, Sayyid

98 Georg August Wallin and Persia

῾Ali Muhammad Shirazi, better known to posterity as the Bab (“The Door”). The Bab claimed esoteric authority for himself, as al-Ahsa’i had done, but was less circumspect in his claims. He was the Door through which believers were to access the Hidden Imam, an idea that went back to certain 10th-century doctrines, but had since then become antiquated. Such a claim naturally irritated the ῾ulamā’, who would have been ousted from their position of authority by the Babi system. This, together with the popular support the Bab was able to win, made the administration suspicious of him. By 1845, the Bab and his followers were ready for the qiyāma, which means both resurrection and revolution in Shiite parlance. The government found it difficult to repress the troublemaker, though, and for two years he was able to attract further followers. In 1847, however, he was arrested and sent to internal exile in North-Eastern Persia. In 1848, the year Wallin visited Persia, the Bab publicly an- nounced from exile that he was the Qa᾿im and the Mahdi, i.e., the eschatological leader, awaited by the Shiites since time im- memorial. This, in Shiite tradition, was an open call to rebel against the powers that be. In July 1848, a trial was held against the Bab, who was publicly beaten but did not retract his claims. In September, when the old Shah died and Wallin entered the country, a rebellion broke out, led by the inner circles of the Babi movement. The main rebellion continued for half a year and was only quenched in May 1849, when Wallin had already returned to Iraq. Several smaller revolts broke out in various parts of Iran and finally, on 9 July 1850, the Bab was executed, and by 1854 Babi rebellions had ceased. Though not relevant from the perspective of Wallin’s visit to Persia, it might be mentioned that the Babi doctrines were later resurrected in the form of early Bahaism. Although nowadays it is none too keen on remembering its Shiite background, in fact, Bahaism started as a Shiite movement before developing into a universal religion. It is slightly surprising that Wallin has nothing to say about the movement that was causing such disturbances around the country, though not, it must be admitted, primarily in the areas he visited. Also in other cases, Wallin was more interested in

99 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila observing his immediate surroundings than in chronicling events of which he had only heard or read. Persia’s inner turmoil prevented the Shah from actively building up the Empire and it weakened the country in the long run, a fact which became more visible towards the end of the century. Culturally, Persia was also somewhat quiescent in the mid-19th century. The previous century had witnessed some interesting developments in philosophy and there had been occasional authors who are still worth reading, but the mid-nineteenth century produced very few intellectuals who left a permanent impact on Persia’s national history. The intellectual climate hovered between an age-old paradigm, no longer vital, and a modern, West-inspired paradigm, not yet fully received. This was the world Wallin came to, but what did he think about it?

Wallin and the Persian language In the mid-nineteenth century academic world, scholars were still multilingual. An Arabist was sure to be able at least to read Persian and Turkish, and even Sanskrit was not always too exotic for him. In Finland, Arabic and Turkish studies have generally been stronger than Persian studies.2 Wallin’s teacher and friend Gabriel Geitlin, Professor of Oriental Literature in 1835–1849 (thereafter Professor of Exegetics), was one of the few who had given Persian more than passing notice. He published his Principia grammatices neo-persicae in 1839–1846, just before Wallin visited Qajar Persia. The grammar was not bad by the standards of the day and might even now be used profitably in learning written Classical Persian, although it is far from the level that Geitlin’s other major student Wilhelm Lagus reached with his Arabic grammar (Lärokurs i arabiska språket. I–IV. 1869–1878), which, had it been written in some language other than Swedish, would have raised considerable interest in the academic world. Geitlin was also Wallin’s main cor- respondent and what we know of Wallin’s travels in Persia is mainly thanks to three letters by Wallin to Geitlin. All three of them are published in the fifth volume of Wallin’s collected works, Skrifter.3

100 Georg August Wallin and Persia

Geitlin, and after him Mirza Ismail in St. Petersburg in 1841, had taught Wallin some Persian, and when in Persia in 1848 Wallin seems to have been able to get along in the local language. Before the journey, he had been enjoying the idea that he would have the opportunity to learn more Persian and get better acquainted with the country’s literature.4 The former he obviously achieved, whereas there is no sign of any real improvement in his familiarity with Persian literature in 1848. Even earlier, Wallin had claimed Persian to be his native tongue, but this happened in St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai,5 and it is more than obvious that the monks would not have been in a position to judge this, so it was a safe claim. When in Muslim company he was always ready to claim a Central Asian Turkic language as his native tongue, though his fluency in Turkish languages was also restricted. Both claims were made in order to avoid public interest and to lessen the feeling that he was a foreigner to the Islamic world. Wallin was going native and avoiding unnecessary contacts and associations with Europeans, and speaking Persian or a Turkish language was less prone to draw attention to him than admitting that Swedish was his mother tongue. Sometimes, we seem to hear echoes of Wallin’s limited knowledge of Persian in his letters and diaries. When he tells how when Hafiz is read, Persian sounds magical in his ears,6 one wonders whether this was at least partly due to the exotic nature of a language he only partially understood. The same comes to mind when he compares Arabic and Persian storytelling7 to the latter’s disadvantage. He does refer to the noble simplicity of Arabic and the verbosity and self-assertion of Persian, but this might also be a matter of details that may have escaped him and of limited ability to enjoy linguistic wordplay, metaphors, allusions, and the like in Persian. In the same letter he also describes a ta῾ziya passion play on the suffering of Husayn and the accompanying rawda-khwānī , chanting of martyr texts or religious stories, both of which he attended to. Here, he admits that he had difficulties in following the story as he did not understand much of what was sung, although to his credit it has to be admitted that following a chanted story, familiar to everybody else, would have been no mean achievement. Wallin’s

101 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

Persian was restricted, but obviously adequate enough for normal communication and for reading texts for their content, even if he was not able to appreciate all their stylistic niceties. The Indo-European language and the literature written in it never really interested the Arabist Wallin, whereas his illustrious younger contemporary, Theodor Nöldeke, was the reverse: despite his immense merits in Arabic and Semitic studies and his pro- found knowledge and penetrating understanding of Arabic poetry,

102 Georg August Wallin and Persia

Tomb of the poet Hafiz outside Shiraz. Painting by Eugène Flandin, 1840.

Nöldeke always felt that Persia and its literature were dearer and nearer to him than the Bedouin poetry that the Arabs themselves admired. In his later years, Nöldeke admitted that he never had got the knack of Pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry, which he felt (like many others did) to be monotonous, confused, and, to put it bluntly, dull. The wider reading public of the nineteenth century

103 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila shared this feeling: while Goethe had made Hafiz a household name in the German-reading world (more or less the whole of Europe at the time when even the British scholars read German) from the beginning of the century, Edward FitzGerald started a real rage for Omar Khayyam during the last four decades of that same century. Arabic poetry never found such an enthusiastic audience in the nineteenth century, and it was only the Arabian Nights from all of Arabic literature that really found its way to the heart of European readers. With Wallin, however, it was the other way round. His knowledge of, and interest in, Persian was marginal and he never did any serious scholarly work on Persia and its culture. The lack of enthusiasm in matters Persian may be seen in his letters and journals. In Egypt he was comfortable, though sometimes he was critical of the Egyptians and not all his notes on them are complimentary. On the Arabian Peninsula, among the Bedouin, he was exuberant and at home (though he did occasionally feel homesick for Finland and Europe) but Persia for him was – well, not an Arab country, to begin with.

Constantly comparing Persians with Arabs Wallin also shared the dominant view that the real Islam was that of the Arabs, Sunnism, whereas Shiism was its half-hearted version, developed by the Persians. While not historically quite accurate – it was, of course, the Arabs who were the first Shiites, and there were, and still are, a lot of Arab Shiites in both Iraq and Lebanon – Persia had become a Shiite country at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and in the eyes of both Arabs and Turks “Shiite” and “Persian” were more or less coterminous words. This attitude was inherited by Western scholars, too, and Persians themselves were happy to comply: Russia was ready to see itself as the representative of the Orthodox Church and “protect” its weaker co-religionists around the world, and Persia has always shown similar signs with respect to Shiites. Wallin, of course, was aware that there were also Arab Shiites, but still, for him, Persians were the default Shiites.

104 Georg August Wallin and Persia

Another oft-discussed matter was which of the branches of Islam was closest to “original” Islam, whatever that might mean. From a modern historian’s point of view, both branches developed during the seventh, eighth and partly also the ninth century in ways that distanced them from the Koranic Islam. On the other hand, one could easily come to the conclusion that the “original” Islam of Muhammad and the Koran must have been a rather simple construction and that it was the offspring of a desert culture with oases and camels rather than of the refined urban Persian culture of the nineteenth century. Whatever the historical truth, for Wallin “real” Islam seems to have been a kind of mix between Sunnism and Bedouin religious laxity. Islam was an austere religion of the desert, born in the landscape the Bedouins lived in, and it was only their lack of deep religious feeling that distanced the Bedouins from this Islam. Second best was the Sunni mode of religion in Cairo. Persians and Shiites were something else, with their martyrs and chapels, local pilgrimages and rituals. Wallin is clearest on this in his letter to Geitlin 13 September 1848, when he states that “Islam is a desert plant, which actually does not thrive elsewhere. It does not really take root in other than an Arab’s heart. Among Turks and Persians it is a hothouse plant, watered by credulity, thoughtlessness and habit.”8 Although this can be read as somewhat critical of Islam in general, I think the statement should first and foremost be read from an Arab perspective: for Wallin, like for many Arabs, Persians and even the Sunni Turks were not “real” Muslims. In another letter to Geitlin he more or less repeats this and adds that even an unlearned and neglectful Bedouin is a more genuine Muslim than a learned Persian. Islam only suits the sons of the deserts, he says, in an approving tone. Indeed, Wallin was at home with these Bedouins and had no problems with Islam when among them. It is authenticity that counts: as Islam was the Arabs’ religion for Wallin, it should stay with them, and Persians should have their own religion. Incidentally, Wallin does not seem to comment on Zoroastrianism anywhere in his writings. When it comes to Persians, Wallin, thus, considered Islam to be

105 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila an extraneous feature for them. This fits well with the respect he gives them for knowing their own nation’s past, which, to be sure, was Pre-Islamic.9 Wallin even calls himself a Sunni in the letter to Geitlin, dated from Baghdad 13 September 1848, and he was usually considered one.10 Here, though, he speaks of the role he had taken in Cairo, but in a certain sense the mask had become his real face, at least partly. It is in line with this that in his letter to Geitlin 4 April 1849, Wallin comments very negatively on the ῾ārifs, or mystics, he met in Persia.11 For him they were atheists or rationalists, in- sincere in their Islamic faith and all too prone to hobnob with non-Muslims (a modern scholar might appreciate their willing- ness to be open towards other religions). Here the viewpoint is that of a staunch Sunni, horrified by the seemingly relativistic ideas of these mystics. It is not that Wallin is hostile to Islam, it is just that he preferred authenticity and for him Islam was authentic only in the desert or, more widely taken, among the Arabs. Hence, as the ῾ārifs were in his eyes less than authentic Muslims, he disliked them. The same preference for authenticity may be seen in Wallin’s comments on the Persian passion play, ta῾ziya.12 Wallin enjoyed the play very much, even despite the linguistic difficulties he had in following it, but there was one thing that greatly disturbed him. The protagonists of the play are Husayn and other early Arabs, but they behaved on the stage in a way Persians would do, and this Wallin found disturbing: an Arab would not wallow in sentimental fare-ye-wells nor would he have presentiments of a coming disaster. The passage is revealing. Wallin sets a contemporary Bedouin as the standard, and when someone or something fails this standard, he is disappointed. Wallin himself realizes that characters in a play are not always authentic – Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is no Roman, he says – but it would seem that at least in this case, he would fain see them as authentic. With, of course, the added piquancy that Husayn was no Bedouin of the mid-nineteenth century at all, but a small-town Arab from the mid-seventh cen-

106 Georg August Wallin and Persia tury. This Wallin never realised, sharing the widespread belief that things never change in the desert. (They may be slow in changing, yet one should not skip millennia quite as easily as Wallin and most of his contemporaries did.) The passion play ta῾ziya and the rawda-khwānī are typical of Shiite Islam. In a letter to Geitlin, dated 15 April 1849, Wallin tells how the lamentations, with which the audience joined in, crying their eyes out, annoyed him. Here we may suspect his personal background shines through. A nineteenth-century Lutheran Finn would be brought up in a more restricted culture, where showing one’s feelings was not particularly encouraged. A Catholic observer would perhaps have had less problems in understanding the reactions of the audience, which I, personally, have always found extremely moving, indeed leaving one performance with tears in my own eyes. In Najaf (Iraq), or Mashhad ῾Ali as the town is also known, there is the burial mosque of ῾Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites, which Wallin visited before his trip to Persia. In a letter to Geitlin he commented on the architecture of the mosque, built by Per- sians, which he first describes as decorated with fine paintings and sculpture in Persian taste but in the continuation of the same sentence his preference for the Arabs suddenly pops up: “and lacking the imposing Arab simplicity.”13 Here, of course, one also hears the influence of Winckelmann’s edle Einfalt und stille Grösse of the preceding century, but his preference for simplicity was probably also at least partly due to it being Arab simplicity. Another echo links Wallin’s opinion to the difference between Lutheran and Orthodox church architecture, somewhat similar to the difference between Sunni and Shiite mosques in the nineteenth century. Lutheran himself, Wallin sees the Persian/Shiite mosque, which he implicitly sets below the imposing simplicity of the Arabs/Sunnites, as a cognate to “our Russian [i.e., Orthodox] churches” (as it indeed was, influences travelling both ways). The simple white-washed Lutheran church is implicitly set above the ornate Orthodox church, as the Arab/Sunni mosque is superior to the Persian/Shiite one, despite the latter’s fine workmanship. Perhaps we should also see something similar in Wallin’s

107 Förnamn Efternamn

The Shah Mosque in Isfahan. Painting by Pascal Coste, 1841.

108 Artikelns titel

109 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila notes on Shiite saints. For a Lutheran, again, saints and their veneration – a 19th-century Lutheran would presumably have used the word “worship” – was something suspiciously Catholic, an aspect of popery and the “degenerate” form of Christianity it represented. Sunnis, to be sure, also had their saints on a popular level, but the Wahhabites on the Peninsula were antagonistic towards them and even in Cairo a certain suspicion of popular religion hovered around the saints and their tombs, whereas for Shiites the veneration of the Imams and their descendants, the Imamzades, and their tombs and memorials was part and parcel of the religion of the learned, too. In the above-cited letter of 2 August 1848, Wallin also describes as fools the Shiites who wish to die in the sacred region where ῾Ali had passed away.14 However, he does not condemn them but adds that, after all, human folly has created everything that is great and good in the world. Volens nolens, he has to admit that, all things considered, edle Einfalt does not account for everything, and there are human needs that counterbalance noble simplicity. Although Wallin preferred his Bedouins, he was originally by no means hostile towards the Persians. In the letter of 2 August 1848, he also describes his sojourn among the Persians of Mash- had ῾Ali as quite pleasant, though, he says, he cannot say he had gained anything by changing the company of the Bedouins for that of the Persians.15 What he associates with his new neighbours is sitting with the water pipe bubbling and doing nothing, something that might directly come out of a contemporary traveller’s account of Italians and their dolce far niente, just changing a glass of grappa for the water pipe. Seen from a Finnish Lutheran viewpoint, of course. This “delicious idleness” was not, however, restricted to Per- sians only. In his diary, Wallin several times uses this expression of Arabs16 and himself17, and his friend Wilhelm Lagus confirms Wallin’s occasional tendency to enjoy doing nothing by informing us that during summer the young Wallin enjoyed the dolce far niente in the Finnish archipelago. Wallin’s notes on Persians should not be read in isolation from the rest of his notes and letters. Wallin also commented on the Persians as people. He some-

110 Georg August Wallin and Persia times considers them “completely European, or Westerners, in their habits and thoughts. Even though they profess Islam, it has not taken root in their heart.”18 A few lines later, he says that when in Persian company, he has often felt himself surrounded by Europeans. Here, the implicit assumption is that Arabs differ more from Europeans than do Persians. Wallin knew very well that Persian was an Indo-European language, and in the middle of the nineteenth century language and race – to use the term that would have been used by Wallin’s contemporaries – were considered to a large extent to be features that united groups of people: Persians spoke an Indo-European language, ergo, they were Indo-Europeans, which means they were almost Europeans. This may have strengthened the idea that Persians were more European than the Arabs, but we should not fall victim to claiming that nineteenth-century comments are ideological when, in fact, they are not. To a certain extent, Persians were different from the Arabs and closer to Westerners, even without any ideological background. What we are sometimes led to believe is an ideological or biased comment may instead be based on an accurate perception of the reality, a fact that is often ignored in the so-called Orientalism discussion. That he had some preconceived notions of the Persians was well known to Wallin himself. In his letter to Geitlin, he describes his expectations before the trip to Persia by saying that he expected to see the country such as it was described in its literature, full of roses and nightingales.19 (He knew perfectly well that it was not a season of roses, though.) Though not free of preconceived notions, Wallin, like the good scholar he was, was able to note many of these biases in himself and see the world around him rather objectively. Wallin also reports in a letter to Geitlin that Persians are considered an artistic folk. This he seems to accept, even though in several places he himself prefers the noble simplicity of the (Bedouin) Arabs, as we have already seen. He also comments favourably on the politeness of the Persians.20 A feature that had astonished Wallin in Cairo was how little Egyptians travelled: most Cairenes had never seen the pyram-

111 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila ids, even though to his mind they were a fascinating sight just around the corner. In Persia, he was taken in by the wanderlust of the Persians. Everybody seemed to be on the move and the local pilgrimages to the burial places of the martyrs he took as ultimately motivated not by religion but by an urge to move around and see the world. Even though he only states this, with little comment, one may well guess that this was positively valued by Wallin, who himself spent much of his adult life in travelling and enjoyed his life among the Bedouins, who were also on the move for most their lives. The letter to Geitlin on 13 September 1848,21 is a good source for comparisons between Persians and Arabs. In this letter, Wallin discusses the mutual antagonism between Arabs, Persians, and Turks. As the latter two had for centuries been the dominant nations in the area, it is understandable that a fierce antagonism had developed also on a popular level: many times the Turkish armies had invaded Persia, burning and pillaging the country, and almost as often the Shah’s armies had paid visits to Anatolia. The Arabs did not forget, or let others forget, that theirs was the language of the Koran and they were the true Muslims, especially when compared to Persians, who not only did not speak the holy language but were also heretics in the eyes of their mainly Sunni neighbours. No wonder that for their part did Persians look askance at Arabs, too. In the letter to Geitlin,22 Wallin negatively compares the people and the bazar of Kirmanshah to what he had seen among the Ar- abs. In Kirmanshah people were ugly with their “gloomy opium faces”, reminding him of the sight in a mortuary he had once visited – the healthy-looking ones, on the other hand, were to him bloated and overfed, resembling, if anything, wine bottles. Lean or fat, they were not favourably seen by Wallin.

Wallin and Persian literature While totally negative about Kirmanshah, Wallin, perhaps as an afterthought – the letter to Geitlin was written retrospectively, after he had returned from Persia – admitted that although the

112 Georg August Wallin and Persia

Orientals preferred chitchat to reading or serious talking, it was among the Persians that one would most likely find people reading their old classics (the national epic Shāhnāme and the works of Sa῾di being taken as examples here), which Wallin had been taught to value highly, being the nineteenth-century scholar that he was. In Isfahan, he met a young man of seventeen, who impressed him with his extensive reading. This gave him an opportunity to comment on the matter on a more general level: Persians read more than Arabs do. The same goes for literacy, which was clearly higher in Persia than it was in Arab countries. He also commented on attitudes towards learning: whereas a Persian father may be seen carrying his unwilling son to school on his own back, an Arab father may, on the contrary, forbid his son from going there. Wallin, though, appreciatively adds that Arabs learn more by heart, so their reading is more thorough, an opinion perhaps not shared by many in our own times. Personally, Wallin himself often preferred this chitchat to the classics. He wrote his most important scholarly contributions on the Arabic dialects spoken by ordinary people, and although he did write a professorial dissertation on a Sufi poem, he admitted doing this in a half-hearted way and the publication (Carmen elegiacum Ibnu-l-Faridi cum commentario Abdu-l-Ghanyi, 1850) does show a lack of interest in the subject. Wallin’s own attitude may be seen in his notes on Bisitun in the same letter: the magni- ficent Achaemenid inscriptions obviously interested him far less than the popular stories and legends about the place. The chitchat of the locals was enough, and he did not take the – admittedly great – trouble of climbing to inspect the texts, only recently deciphered at the time, Henry Rawlinson having published the first part of his studies in 1847; the second was to appear in 1849. Wallin added that while Persian travellers and dervishes did take the trouble to go and see the inscriptions a short distance away, Arabs would not have bothered to take the trouble. This is not the only instance where Wallin behaves like a true Arab. While not himself particularly enthusiastic about Pre-Islamic Achaemenid inscriptions, Wallin blames the Persians for having given up their original, Pre-Islamic language,23 as he seems to

113 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila have blamed them for accepting Islam, too, a religion he was quite happy to see Arabs adhere to. In a heated discussion with some of his newly-made Persian friends, who attacked him for his supposed Sunnism, he made a counterattack and blamed Persians for having abandoned their original language and half-heartedly having adopted a new one (Arabic), which in the end they could not master, thus resulting in an impure mixture, “nonsense”, as he calls it.24 The argument may originally have been somewhat tongue- in-cheek, kindled as it was by the Persians’ harping on about religious questions, but Wallin’s later comment shows that he was serious in his opinion about the corrupt state of the Persian language (the “corrupt” Arabic dialects, however, he found ab- solutely fascinating). His comments on this do not come from the discussion he had with the Persians but from his additional notes to Geitlin, who, it might be repeated, had just published a Persian grammar. Wallin states that just as the rigidity of French needs some spirit and life from the ease and high-flying emphasis of German (a modern writer might view the two languages in a somewhat different light, though), the highly intoxicated Per- sian language would have needed a glass of clear Arabic min- eral water. But the Persians only sipped the foam from the glass and discarded the fresh water, which they disliked, so that their intoxication only deepened (a sentence that one might see as a calque from Persian – Wallin obviously got carried away here with Oriental rhetorical images himself). All in all, Persian was not the language for the Arabist Wallin. What is interesting, too, is what Wallin reports that a young sayyid (a supposed descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) had answered. This young man seems to have been a Persian nation- alist, somewhat on the lines of the Pahlavi Shahs a century later, or the representatives of the shu῾ūbiyya (nationalistic movement) a millennium earlier. For this young man, the original Persians had been superior to everyone else. Even prophets sent to other nations had not ventured to come to Persia, as they knew that Persian science and civilisation were superior to theirs. Franks and Indians had come to Persia to tap this source of wisdom – the

114 Georg August Wallin and Persia shu῾ūbīs had also claimed that the wisdom of Antiquity had been borrowed from Persia. To this highly nationalistic interpretation of the past, the young man added that Mullahs had then corrupted the language by inserting into it so much foreign vocabulary that uprooting these weeds was hardly possible without upsetting the whole linguistic field. Though this attitude did not find favour among the other Persians who had been taking part in the discussion, it exhibits a permanent trait in Persian culture, where nationalism and Islam have always lived together in an uneasy combination. Persians are proud of their past, yet often highly religious and this may result in an odd combination of counting Muhammad as “our” Prophet – as Wallin says the young man did – yet seeing Persians as superior to Arabs. This combination had certainly paved the way for the acceptance of Shiism as the state religion in Persia at the beginning of the sixteenth century, enabling many Persians to have their “own” nationalistic version of Islam. What Wallin says about the language also holds true, in his opinion, for Persian cuisine. In the same passage, he blames it for overdoing everything and mixing spices, instead of prefer- ring clear raw materials, serving them more or less as they are and using few spices. Wallin seems to have favoured pilaf, but the other dishes he found distasteful, as nothing was served in an unaltered or unadulterated form. Meat was boiled for the whole day and so seasoned that one could hardly know what was being eaten. The same over-elaboration is a problem in Persian literature, Wallin adds. One would be inclined to give a harsh verdict and say that Wallin was merely unable to enjoy the intricacies that he did not understand, but it has to be admitted that he is not alone in this: his was the era of sabk-e Hindī, or Indian style, which even today is considered very hard to understand and few, except for the real connoisseur, read authors such as Bidil-e Dihlavi for sheer pleasure. However, Wallin does not pay any attention to the poets of the Indian style, so he may just as well be speaking about Hafiz and Sa῾di and then it becomes more difficult to agree with him. Perhaps he just did not realise that a Bedouin poem

115 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila he enjoyed would have been as difficult and obscure to a person that had a lesser command of Arabic than he did. Wallin does not often discuss his attitude towards Persian classics, or contemporary Persian literature, for that matter, and it would seem that his readings in them were not too extensive. When in Shiraz, he visited the tomb of Sa῾di and speaks extremely highly of him, mentioning his Gulistān and Būstān,25 the two works familiar to most Orientalists of the time, the former also a bestseller in the seventeenth century in many European languages and well known after that, too. One must, however, remember that especially the Gulistān was the usual elementary book of Persian texts, even used as a primer for British officials in India where the first British language of government was Persian, not English. The Gulistān is also full of Arabic quotations and vocabulary, which would have made it even more palatable to Wallin. His appreciation of Sa῾di may at least partly be due to the fact that Sa῾di’s prose and his unadorned verse in the Būstān were more accessible to Wallin than much of Persian lyrical poetry would have been. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that whereas Wallin speaks warmly of Sa῾di as an author, he does not say anything about Hafiz’s poems, even in the passage26 where he tells of his visit to the tomb of this Tongue of the Unknown (Lisān al-Ghayb), as Persians love to call him. He briefly mentions Hafiz’s fame among Persians but does not have anything else to say about him, merely telling us that where Goethe and Schiller vie with each other in German minds, Hafiz and Sa῾di do the same in Persia, as though he knew little about Hafiz. In fact, this may well have been the case. Even when he came back from this visit he did not delve into Hafiz’s Dīvān, but spent the evening reading a lithographed edition of Anvār-e Suhaylī, which he had just bought. This was another book popular among both Orientalists and native speakers, containing animal fables that are written in easy language – if one reads Arabic. For a monolingual Persian, the book is more difficult.

116 Georg August Wallin and Persia

R esults from the visit to Persia Wallin’s greater interest in Arabic than in Persian literature is only partly visible in his manuscript purchases, commissioned by the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki. Wallin brought back many more manuscripts and printed books in Arabic than in Persian, but he also had many more opportunities to buy Ar- abic books in Cairo than he had to buy Persian books during his short visit, less than four months, to Persia from 18 September 1848 to 7 January 1849. When he had the opportunity, as he did in Paris,27 he also acquired Persian books (a copy of the Gulistān in this case), as he had been instructed to do. The Helsinki collection of manuscripts – meagre though it is on the whole – does contain a couple of Persian manuscripts brought to Finland by Wallin. Through them, we can see what interested Wallin, although we have to keep in mind that not only his taste but also his general situation and financial assets set the limits to what he could buy. Thus, the only manuscripts he brought back home that relate to Persian literature are Sa῾di’s Gulistān, its Arabic commentary, Sa῾di’s Būstān, its Turkish commentary, and the Dīvān of Hafiz,28 as well as al-Halimi’s Persian‒Turkish dictionary29 aimed at the Turkish speaker who wants to orientate himself in ornate Persian language. This we might well call a do- it-yourself kit for a 19th-century beginner in Persian, expanded by the one more difficult classic, the Dīvān, which was the paragon of Persian literature. The manuscript collection is further strengthened by a couple of printed Persian books, namely the Gulistān and the Pandnāme, another favourite in the West.30 Wallin did, of course, take into account the needs and instructions of the University in his acquisitions; however, a scholar better acquainted with Persian literature might perhaps have indulged himself also by buying other works. When it comes to Arabic literature, we immediately note a firmer and more individual hand behind the acquisitions, which include some surprising but interesting choices, such as Voltaire’s history of the Swedish King, Charles XII in Arabic translation, and Sheikh al-Tahtawi’s travelogue to Paris.31

117 Förnamn Efternamn

Illustration from an edition of the Gulistān by Sa῾di, c. 1840.

118 Georg August Wallin and Persia

Occasionally, we find additional information in Wallin’s notes in his diaries and letters. Thus, in the diary note for 8 January 1844,32 he jotted down his lack of interest in a printed volume which contained ῾Attar’s Persian Pandnāme together with its interlinear Arabic translation. Even an Iranist, though, might have been rather unenthusiastic about the volume, as the Pand- nāme was one of the commonest Persian books, and we know from the Helsinki collection that Wallin eventually did acquire a copy of the Pandnāme.33 Wallin continues the letter to Geitlin in April 184934 by laugh- ing at the importance Persians ascribe to humoral pathology, a theory of medicine that had dominated from Antiquity until the birth of modern medicine in Renaissance Europe and still continued holding sway in the Arab-Islamic traditional medicine. He found it ridiculous that Persians, in full earnest, took humoral pathology into account while eating and had “hot” dishes, if they were supposed to be suffering from a “cold” disease, and vice versa. Humoral pathology was by then outdated, but the Persians’ diets were hardly any more ridiculous than many of the popular diets of today, which are one day claimed to be the ultimate key to health, and the next day we read from the newspapers how injurious they are. Likewise, Wallin finds the Persian veneration of the Koran, as a material object, ridiculous, as he does too with istikhāra, or fortune telling by opening at random a copy of the Koran (or the Dīvān of Hafiz, for that matter) and reading the first verse on the right-hand page.35 This he finds something an Arab would not do, at least not to the same extent. After some positive comments on Persians and their com- parison to Europeans, it comes as a slight surprise how harshly Wallin speaks about their national character in his letter to Geitlin: if you want to get along with them, you have to treat Arabs as you would friends, Persians as if they were servants.36 Twice he sums up his views on the Persians in very negative terms, both times after his travel. First, to Geitlin he states that he did not like Persians, who are, in his opinion, vain and corrupt, again negatively comparing them to Arabs.37 Later, in a letter of his to

119 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

Count Mukhlinsky in January 1852, some seven months before his death, he retrospectively gives what seems to be his final verdict on the country and its people: in 1848 he had learned, he writes, to despise the tasteless and degenerate Persian people.38 Wallin’s opinions about Persians deteriorated during his visit to the country, and after it he seems to have decided that he did not like them. He has, though, to admit that science and arts are on a higher level among Persians than they are among Arabs.39 But even here he manages to turn the facts upside down. They may seem more civilised but in fact it is merely a half-hearted acceptance of culture and does not penetrate deeply into their hearts and characters. A similar disillusionment can also be seen in other cases where Wallin came to a country with high hopes but left it disappointed. Only the Bedouins of the Arabian Pen- insula never let him down. All in all and despite this final verdict, Wallin’s attitude towards and opinions about Persians are contradictory. This, perhaps, we should count to his merit, as a unified vision of what Persians were or were not would have had to play fast and loose with reality. The Persians Wallin met must have included irritating and stupid people who were ready to backbite, as well as charming personal- ities whom one could love and respect. What we, as readers, have to keep in mind is that the material we are reading was not meant for publication as such. Most of the comments on Persians come from Wallin’s letters to his friend, Gabriel Geitlin, and he was as free to speak his mind about what he had seen as we are when telling about our experiences in a foreign country to a friend. The nineteenth century did not subscribe to politically correct language even in its publications, though, and had Wallin edited his letters or diaries for publications there would still have been things that would perhaps offend our modern sensibilities. But although he would not have used politically correct language according to our standards, he would certainly have weighed his opinions more closely before publishing them. In fact, it is a blessing he did not edit his texts. His uncensored voice from the letters and diaries, politically incorrect though it be, is much more interesting than a sanitised edited version could ever have been.

120 Letter to G. Geitlin Baghdad 15 April 1849

I cannot deny that their [the Persians’] cuisine I found a model or likeness of their language and literature. Just as a Persian bard can never say a thought or an idea cleanly and straightforwardly, but must clothe it in a motley garb of symbols, epithets and so on, and work on it so that its fragrance evaporates and nothing remains for the mind and imagination of reader and listener to sense and feel independently, so a Persian cook will never give you a foodstuff that is pure and unadulterated; he either seasons it so with all kinds of spices, the more the better, so that its real taste disappears, or cooks it with other ingredients so that he swills it away, or he boils it so thoroughly that all of its goodness and strength are lost. So, for example, he boils his meat from morning to night and when he fetches it out it is as impoverished as the meat at our inn, from which first soup has been made, and then roast and then stew, and even then it is so blended with vegetables or dried apricots and prunes and other dry fruit or swilled up with sweet or sour that one does not know what one is eating. His really rather good pilaf is very strongly spiced with cardamom and ginger and pepper and all of the other condiments one can think of. But the poor Persian! His puny mind needs to be tickled by glitter and it will not stand to hear the naked truth as it is, and his depraved stomach needs spices to warm it, and it cannot endure a strong and unadulterated food like that of the Arab, for example, who digests and loves meat that is raw and half-raw. None the less, be it man or woman, the Persian cook is particularly keen that one should praise his work, and I know from the experience of attending a feast that for several days afterwards I was daily troubled by my host himself with the question of whether this or that dish we ate at his house was excellent or not, and my travelling companion, otherwise one of the least prejudiced of his people and as free of vanity as a Persian can possibly be, always took it very amiss when I forgot to praise our host’s dish that he cooked for that evening. The Persian is in general far more selective and appreciative of good food than the Arabian, and also eats far more. But this is probably mainly due to his healthier climate and I personally know that nowhere in the Orient have I ever had such a good appetite as in Persia. But on the other hand the Persian is particularly conscious of his diet – he wishes to eat according to what he calls the rules of medicine. Each of them thinks he is a medicus and knows what is good and bad for him. Each of them knows whether his constitution [illegible is hot or cold or damp (rutâb) or dry([illegible]) and each of them knows of the constitution of every food and every fruit whether it is hot, cold, dry or wet, and all the compositions and combinations that can be made of it and if the man [is] Safrâwi, for example, whose constitution is hot and dry, he never eats anything but what he says is cold and moist, or if he is blood constitution (damawi) and therefore hot and moist, he eats and drinks what is cold and dry and if he is balghami i.e. cold and moist he consumes what is the opposite and if he is sawdâvi cold and dry his diet is the opposite of those two. It is mainly upon this doctrine that all Persian and indeed all Oriental medicine is founded.

G. A. Wallin, Skrifter 5, 2014, pp. 318–320. Notes

N otes

Patricia Berg Georg August Wallin A Finnish sailor stranded on the Arabian Peninsula

1. Chydenius 2013, pp. 37–39. 2. For a table showing population figures for Helsinki from 1800 to 1975, see Helsingfors stads historia (History of the City of Helsinki) 1950, p. 11. 3. For a history of the Royal Academy, see Klinge 2010. 4. For a history of the Imperial Alexander University, see Klinge 2010. 5. For a family tree of the four generations closest to Wallin, see Wallin 2010, p. 75. 6. For a detailed description of Wallin’s time in Egypt, and of his journey to Upper Egypt, see Häggman 2011. 7. Diary, 19 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 168. 8. Diary, 9 December 1843, Wallin 2010, p. 176. 9. Wallin 2010, p. 283. 10. See Strömberg 1989, p. 303 for a table of all the departments and the number of enrolled students in the years 1818–1872. 11. Strömberg 1989, pp. 291, 293. 12. For a Swedish translation of Linnaeus’s instructions, see Hodacs & Nyberg 2007. 13. Helsingfors stads historia 1950, p. 498. 14. Lagus 1904, p. 164. 15. Lagus 1904, pp. 154–156. 16. Öhrnberg 1985, p. 40. 17. For the complete text of the diploma, see Wallin 2010, pp. 284–285. 18. Letter to Geitlin, Jerusalem, 3 March 1847, Wallin 2013, p. 355. 19. Tallqvist 1903, p. 12. 20. Lagus 1904, p. 162. 21. Lagus 1904, p. 171. 22. See e.g. Wallin 2011, pp. 76, 103; Wallin 2012, p. 308. 23. Letter to Johanna and Natalia Wallin, Hamburg, 18 August 1843, Wallin 2010, p. 243. 24. Lagus 1904, p. 163. 25. On the West’s interests in Arabia, see Öhrnberg 2013, pp. 7–24.

123 Notes

26. Wallin 1839. 27. Wallin 2010, p. 316. Wallin’s dissertation and lectio præcursoria have been translated from Latin to Swedish by Tom Bergman and Tommi Lankiala in Wallin 2010, pp. 315–340. 28. Öhrnberg 2010a, pp. 28–31. 29. Letter to Johanna Wallin, St. Petersburg, 2 December 1840, Wallin 2010, p. 214. 30. Öhrnberg 2010a, p. 31. 31. Letter to Johanna Wallin, St. Petersburg, 31 October 1840, Wallin 2010, p. 211. 32. Letter to Geitlin, St. Petersburg, November (?) 1841, Wallin 2010, p. 227. 33. For a short biography of al-Tantawi, see Öhrnberg 2010b, pp. 76–77. 34. Letter to Geitlin, St. Petersburg, November 1841, Wallin 2010, p. 227. 35. Swedish translation by Geitlin, see Wallin 2010, p. 349. For al-Tantawi’s original letter in Arabic, see p. 348. 36. For the Senate’s protocol in its entirety, see Wallin 2010, pp. 350–363. 37. For the complete itinerary, see Wallin 2010, pp. 343–347. 38. See e.g. letter to al-Tantawi, Helsinki, 10 April 1843, Wallin 2010, p. 240. 39. Letter to Geitlin, Marseille, 21 October 1843, Wallin 2010, pp. 263–266. 40. Diary, 1 September 1843, Wallin 2010, p. 121. 41.. S G. Elmgrenin muistiinpanot (S.G. Elmgren’s Memoirs) 1939, pp. 321–322. 42. Wallin’s travels in Egypt and Persia and on the Arabian Peninsula are extensively discussed by Sofia Häggman, Kaj Öhrnberg and Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila in the other articles in this volume. 43. Wallin 1266 h./1850 m. 44. For Wallin’s own publications, see Öhrnberg’s article in this volume. 45. En gammal akademisk släkt (An Old Academic Family) 1936, p. 208. 46. En gammal akademisk släkt 1936, p. 263. 47. For an account of the negotiations on the financing of the planned second research trip, see Öhrnberg 2010, pp. 56–63. 48. Bref och dagboksanteckningar av Georg August Wallin (Letters and Diary Notes of Georg August Wallin) 1905, p. CXXVI. 49. Copy of G. A.Wallin’s letter to Norton Shaw, 13 January 1851, National Library of Finland, coll. 468.

124 Notes

Sofia Häggman Wallin’s Egypt – Quite like home

1. This article is based on my work on Wallin’s stay in Egypt 1843–1845, Häggman 2011. 2. Lane 1890. 3. According to Edward Said, this was how research on the Orient was practised, especially during the nineteenth century. Scholars repeated and confirmed what earlier authorities had established. Said 1978, pp. 176–177. For discussion of Said and problematic issues see e.g. MacKenzie 1995, Ibn Warraq 2007. 4. See, for example, the preface to Description de l’Égypte by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. Cf. also Said 1978, pp. 80–87. 5. The idea came from an advisor, Yusuf Hekekyan. Reid 2002, p. 60. 6. Reid 2002, pp. 55–56. 7. Wallin 1853, p. 97. 8. Diary, 16 December 1843, Wallin 2011, pp. 66–67. 9. See, for example, diary entries for 16 December 1843 and 4 January 1844, Wallin 2011, pp. 66–67, 96–97. 10. In the diary entry for 30 December Wallin writes that children had shouted abusive chants after him. On 1 January 1844 some women commented on the “Nazarene’s” constant presence at the mosque. The men rebuked them and consoled Wallin by telling him that they “were merely women, and thus without sense and understanding”. Wallin 2011, pp. 86, 93. 11. Many of the ancient city’s buildings had indeed been dismantled and their stone re-used elsewhere much earlier (McKenzie 2007, 10), but the great destruction came under Muhammad ῾Ali. 12. Diary, 22 December 1843, Wallin 2011, pp. 76–77. 13. Diary, 20 December 1843. The second obelisk lay on the ground, probably embedded in sand and debris, as Wallin did not notice it, Wallin 2011, pp. 72–74. In the 1870s both obelisks were transported out of Egypt, one to London and the other to New York. 14. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 13 April 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 285. 15. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 13 April 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 290. 16. After studying theology at al-Azhar, al-Tahtawi was sent to Paris with a group of students. There he wrote the work he later became best known for, Takhlīs al-ibrīz fi talkhīs Barīs (An Imam in Paris, translated into English with an introduction by Daniel Newman, 2004). 17. Diary, 26 June 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 202.

125 Notes

18. Diary, 21 April 1844, Wallin 2011, pp. 164–165. 19. Diary, 11 May 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 179. 20. For more on the saint and his feast, see Mayeur-Jaouen 1994. 21. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 3 September 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 333. 22. Diary, 2 August 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 245. 23. Said 1978, 190. 24. See, for example, his first erotic adventure in Cairo, Diary, 22 Septem- ber, 1844, when he writes in English that he “meeted with a girl in the street and passed with her in a house, in which I rested in her embracings the whole night.” [sic], Wallin 2012, p. 78. 25. Diary, 18 September 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 73. 26. Wallin’s itinerary, attached to his application for the Faculty of Philo- sophy’s travel scholarship, filed 29 October 1841: Wallin 2010, pp. 344–347. 27. In Murray’s guidebook of 1847 the Egyptologist Gardner Wilkinson recommends that tourists devote not less than three months to a visit to Egypt; Wilkinson 1847, p. 406. A large part of the time should be set aside for a boat journey to Upper Egypt and Nubia, with visits to temples and tombs, and possibly also a short stay with the ladies of the night in Esna and and an exciting journey down the rapids of the First Cataract. 28. Diary, 12 May 1844, Wallin 2011, pp. 179–182. 29. He read at least an article by the United States consul George Gliddon, and Champollion-Figeacs’ recently-published book on ancient Egypt. 30. Diary, 7 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 135. 31. Diary, 17 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 146. 32. Diary, 17 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 147. 33. Diary, 15 December 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 200. 34. Diary, 18 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 150. 35. Diary, 1 January 1845, Wallin 2012, pp. 244–245. 36. See, for example, Diary, 21 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 154. 37. Diary, 18 November 1844 and 15 December 1844, Wallin 2012, pp. 151, 201. 38. Diary, 24 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 160. 39. Diary, 25 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 164. 40. Diary, 17 December 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 205. 41. Diary, 26 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 166. 42. Diary, 26 November 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 167. 43. Diary, 7 December 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 182. 44. Sattler’s impressions can be read in his Reisebriefe (travel reports) to Austrian newspapers, Sattler 1844 and 1845.

126 Notes

45. Diary, 15 December 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 202. 46. Diary, 15 December 1844; Letter to mother and sister, Cairo, 24 Feb- ruary 1845, Wallin 2012, pp. 202, 347. 47. Diary, 24 December 1844, Wallin 2012, pp. 230–232. 48. Diary, 31 December 1844, Wallin 2012, p. 241. 49. Sattler 1845. 50. The guest book can be seen today in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Above Wallin’s signature Sattler has written “Hubert von Sattler aus Wien”. 51. Letter from Wallin to Wilhelm Lagus, 14 april 1851. 52. Diary, 7 and 14 March 1845, Wallin 2012, pp. 299, 306. 53. Diary, 20 January 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 265. 54. Diary, 3 April 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 325. 55. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 24 February 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 352. 56. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 3 September 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 337. 57. Wikström 2007; Schildt 1976, p. 11; Salminen 1988, p. 111. 58. Wallin 1853, pp. 1, 73. 59. Said 1978, pp. 176–177. 60. Diary, 23 January 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 268.

Kaj Öhrnberg The terra incognita of Arabia

1. On Forsskål and the journey to Arabia Felix, see Rasmussen (ed.) 1990; Klaver 2009; Hamilton 2011; Resa till Lycklige Arabien 1950; Wiesehöfer & Conermann (Hg.) 2002; Bæk Simonsen 2004, pp. 90–116; Hansen 1962; Osterhammel 2010, pp. 261–264. 2. Wallin 2010, p. 344. 3. Wallin 2010, p. 346. 4. I owe this wonderful characterization to Suzanne Marchand 2001, p. 466. 5. An excellent presentation on the development of Oriental studies in Germany at this time can be read in Johansen 2004, here pp. 69–78. 6. Schwab 1950, p. 25 (English translation 1984, p. 17). 7. Schwab 1950, p. 23 (English translation 1984, p. 16). 8. A good summary of the decades between 1790 and 1840 of this for- mative period of modern scholarship in Germany and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s role can be found in Watson 2010, pp. 225–237; and on the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers, see Clark 2006.

127 Notes

9. Renan 1890, p. 149. In one note (69, p. 506) Renan adds: “j’ai pris le mot de philologie dans le sens des anciens, comme synonyme de polymathie” (“I have taken the word philology in the sense used in Ancient times, as a synonym of polymathy”). James Turner in his excellent study Philology: the forgotten origins of the modern humanities (2014), argues that the historical foundations of most of the modern humanities are to be found in philology. 10. Klinge 2010, p. 290. 11. Klinge 2010, p. 291. 12. Öhrnberg 2010a, p. 25. 13. Adapted here from the title of Timo Salminen’s Ph.D. dissertation “Suomen tieteelliset voittomaat; Venäjä ja Siperia suomalaisessa arkeo- logiassa 1870–1935” (2003); Salminen’s own translation is “scientific lands of conquest”. The expression was coined by Johan Reinhold Aspelin in 1887. 14. Osborne 2007, p. 317. Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. does not subscribe to this harmonizing view in his thought-provoking article “Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism”, where he describes “the discrepant value systems embedded in Enlightenment and Romanti- cism” as “two competing and probably inconsistent sets of political commitments.” Ruprecht 2010, pp. 203, 209. In her book Arabes des Lumières et Bedouins romantiques : un siècle de voyage en Orient (1982), Denise Brahimi has put forward the idea that after the En- lightenment reawakened interest in the Arabs, the Romantics were needed to produce the Bedouin. See also Pouillon 1996, pp. 57–79. 15. Berlin 2013, p. 10. 16. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 10 April 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 362–363. 17. Letter to Geitlin, Cairo, 29 March 1846, Wallin 2013, p. 243. 18. Letter to Geitlin, Jerusalem, 3 March 1847, Wallin 2013, p. 351. 19. Oman and Mahra were perhaps not quite as unknown as Wallin suggests. The Portuguese had reached Oman and Muscat as early as 1507, and the first real travel description was published by the Italian Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) in 1625. But it was the British naval officer James Raymond Wellsted (1805–1842) who in the 1830s initi- ated the scientific exploration of the area. He was the first to record Himyaritic inscriptions, something that was also part of Wallin’s plans. Wallin wrote this letter on 29 March 1846, and in his diary we read that in Jerusalem on 23 March 1847 he borrowed Wellsted’s book Travels To The City Of The Caliphs (1840). This explains why Wallin was not aware that some scientific research had already been done in the area. See Ward 1987; Pfullmann 2001, pp. 448–451.

128 Notes

20. Wallin 2013, pp. 407–408. 21. Doughty 1964, p. 558. 22. Faris 1957, pp. 28–30. 23. Letter to G. Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 205. In fact, already in a letter to Geitlin dated 14 December 1847, Wallin mentions the translation of this expression into Swedish, Wallin 2014, p. 162. 24. Wallin 1854, p. 173. 25. Ahmad Ibn Mādˇid 1984(II)–1985(I), II: p. 155, Russian translation I: p. 396; English translation in Tibbetts 1971, p. 261. 26. Buckley 2000, p. 423. A sober relation of Bedouins who actually inhabit the vast and mysterious region of southeastern Arabia known as al-rub῾ al-khālī, the Empty Quarter, is to be found in Cole 1971. 27. Wallin’s letter in English to Sir Henry Rawlinson written in London at the start of 1850. Quoted by Rawlinson in The Nautical Standard 18 May 1850, p. 298; in Swedish in Finlands Allmänna Tidning 154, 6 July 1850; also in Bref och dagboksanteckningar, p. XCIV. 28. Diary, 28 March 1847, Wallin 2013, p. 198. 29. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 240. 30. Draft of Wallin’s letter written in French to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society’s Vice President, General Muravyov, dated 6 May 1851, with Wallin’s itinerary in G. A. Wallin’s archive, National Library of Finland, coll. 468 (to be published in Wallin, Skrifter); the Russian translation of the original reproduced in Vestnik Imperator- skogo Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva 1851: II: X, pp. 5–10; see also Dyakov 2000, pp. 51–54; Dyakov 2004, pp. 70–82. 31. “And when the traveller lacks inclination and dedication, one cannot expect results.” Draft of Wallin’s letter written in German to the Board of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in January 1852, G. A. Wallin’s archive, National Library of Finland, coll. 468 (to be published in Wallin, Skrifter). 32. “Notes taken during a Journey through Part of Northern Arabia, in 1848”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 20, 1851, pp. 293–344; “Narrative of a Journey from Cairo to Medina and Mecca, by Suez, Arabá, Tawilá, al-Jauf, Jubbé, Háil, and Nejd, in 1845”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 24, 1854, pp. 115–207. A third article published as “Narrative of a Journey from Cairo to Jerusalem, via Mount Sinai”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 25, 1855, pp. 260–290, is a posthumous translation made by Norton Shaw from Wallin’s Swedish letters to Finland as published in the newspapers. 33. Trautz 1930, p. 248. 34. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft V, 1851,

129 Notes

pp. 1–23; VI, 1852, pp. 190–218, 369–378. 35. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft IX, 1855, pp. 1–69; Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft XII, 1858, pp. 599–650; and “Nachlese zur Abhandlung G. A. Wallins über die Laute des Arabischen, Ztschr. d. D. M. G. Band IX, S. 1 ff.”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft XII, 1858, pp. 650–665. 36. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft XII, 1858, pp. 666–675. 37. Hogarth 1966 [1904], p. 171. 38. On Wallin as a linguistic researcher, see Palva 2013, pp. 511‒530. 39. Dr. Awadh Albadi’s unpublished paper presented at the “200 Years Anniversary Seminar of Georg August Wallin” (Helsinki 2 October 2011), pp. 7–8. 40. On this see Öhrnberg 2011, pp. 309–316. 41. Letter dated 13 January 1851, here presented in a translation by Dr Shaw himself. Copy at G. A. Wallin’s archive in the National Library of Finland (not catalogued; to be published in Wallin, Skrifter). 42. Said 1978, p. 160, italics in the original. 43. Murchison 1852, p. cxv. 44. Driver 2001, p. 43. On Sir Roderick Murchison’s role as a promoter of Victorian imperialism, see Stafford 1989. 45. Godsall 2008, pp. 77–83, 93, 104, 462–463. Even in late December no one in London knew of Wallin’s death. 46. Driver 2001, p. 40. 47. Norton Shaw’s letter to Wallin, 17 November 1851, G. A. Wallin’s archive, National Library of Finland, coll. 468 (to be published in Wallin, Skrifter). 48. Eneberg’s letter quoted by Holma 1913, pp. 122–123. On Joseph Halévy’s travels in Yemen during 1869–1870, see Pfullmann 2001, pp. 240–243.

Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila Georg August Wallin and Persia

1. The article is published in a slightly edited Swedish version in Wallin 2014. 2. See in general Aalto 1971. 3. Wallin 2014, pp. 169–249, 249–255, 259–383. 4. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 13 September 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 255. 5. Letter to Geitlin, Jerusalem, 3 March 1847, Wallin 2013, p. 346.

130 Notes

6. Diary 12 March 1845, Wallin 2012, p. 305. 7. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 263. 8. Letter to Geitilin, Baghdad, 13 September 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 254. 9. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, pp. 369–370. 10. E.g., letters to Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848 and 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014 pp. 247, 312, 359. 11. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 359. 12. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, pp. 350–353. 13. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 247. 14. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848, Wallin 2014 p. 247. 15. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 2 August 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 249. 16. Diary, 21 December 1843 in Alexandria, Wallin 2011, p. 76; 16 March 1845 in Cairo, Wallin 2012, p. 308. 17. Diary, 10 January 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 103. 18. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 13 September 1848, Wallin 2014, pp. 253–254. 19. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 260. 20. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 13 September 1848, Wallin 2014, p. 254. 21. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 13 September 1848, Wallin 2014, pp. 249–255. 22. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 289. 23. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 370. 24. Classical and Modern Persian are lexically heavily in debt to Arabic. The grammatical structure, however, has remained Indo-European, although much simplified from Old Persian, coming close to Eng- lish in the scarcity of grammatical endings and the simplicity of morphology. 25. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 301. 26. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 358. 27. Diary, 28 August 1843, Wallin 2010, p. 114. 28. Aro 1958, nos. 77–81, pp. 50–52. 29. Aro 1958, no. 88, pp. 55–56 30. Aro 1958, pp. 15–16. 31. Aro 1958, p. 16. 32. Diary, 9 January 1844, Wallin 2011, p. 102. 33. Aro 1958, p. 16. 34. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, pp. 319–320. 35. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 261. 36. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 314. 37. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 369. 38. Letter to Count Mukhlinsky, January 1852, G. A. Wallin’s archive, Na- tional Library of Finland, coll. 468 (to be published in Wallin, Skrifter). 39. Letter to Geitlin, Baghdad, 15 April 1849, Wallin 2014, p. 369.

131 Bibliography

Bibliography Aalto, Pentti, Oriental Studies in Finland 1828–1918, Helsinki: Societas scientiarum Fennica 1971. Ahmad Ibn Mādˇid, Kniga pol’z ob osnovakh i pravilakh morskoy nauki I–II, T. A. Shumovsky (ed. ), Arabskaya morskaya entsiklopediya XVA‒B, Moskva: Nauka 1984(II)–1985(I). (English translation in Tibbetts 1971) Albadi, Awadh, unpublished paper presented at the “200 Years Anniversary Seminar of Georg August Wallin”, Helsinki 21 October 2011. Aro, Jussi, Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek zu Helsinki, Publications of the University Library at Helsinki 28, Helsinki 1958. Bæk Simonsen, Jørgen, Islam med danske øjne. Danskeres syn på islam gennem 1000 år, København: Akademisk Forlag 2004. Berlin, Isaiah, The Power of Ideas, 2nd ed. by Henry Hardy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013. Brahimi, Denise, Arabes des Lumières et Bedouins romantiques : un siècle de voyage en Orient (1735–1835), Paris: le Sycamore 1982. Bref och dagboksanteckningar av Georg August Wallin, utgifna jämnte en lefnadsteckning av Knut Tallqvist (Letters and Diary Notes of Georg August Wallin, published with a biography, by Knut Tallqvist), Helsingfors: Society of Swedish Literature in Finland 1905. Buckley, Martin, Grains of Sand, London: Hutchinson 2000. Chydenius, Anders, Samlade Skrifter 2. 1765–1776 (Collected Writings 2. 1765–1776), edited by Maren Jonasson & Pertti Hyttinen, Helsingfors: Society of Swedish Literature in Finland 2013. Clark, William, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research Uni- versity, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press 2006. Cole, Donald Powell, Nomads of the Nomads. The Āl Murrah Bedouin of the Empty Quarter, Chicago: Aldine Publ. Co. 1975. Doughty, Charles M., Travels in Arabia Deserta II, London: Jonathan Cape 1964. Driver, Felix, Geography Militant. Cultures of exploration and empire, Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell 2001. Dyakov, N. N., “K istorii izucheniya Aravii v pervoy polovine XIX v.: neko- torye materialy gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo archiva o proekte poslednego puteshestviya G. A. Vallina”, Ed. L. A. Bereznyi, Istori- ografiya i istochnikovedenie istorii stran Azii i Afriki, Sankt-Peterburg: Sankt-Peterburgskiy gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2004, pp. 70–82.

132 Bibliography

Dyakov, Nikolay N., “Documents from St. Petersburg’s Archive on the project of G A Wallin’s last travel to Arabia”, Russian Orientalists to the 36th ICANAS, Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences – Institute of Oriental Studies – Orientalists’ Society 2000, pp. 51–54. En gammal akademisk släkt. Enligt familjebrev tecknad av Hugo Lagus (An Old Academic Family. From family letters edited by Hugo Lagus), Helsinki: Mercator 1936. Faris, Nabih Amin, “Derivation and Orthography of al-Rub῾ al-Khali”, Royal Central Asian Journal XLIV, 1957, pp. 28–30. Godsall, Jon R., The Tangled Web. A life of Sir Richard Burton, Leicester: Matador 2008. Häggman, Sofia, Alldeles hemlikt. Georg August Wallins Egypten 1843–1845 (Quite like home. Georg August Wallin’s Egypt 1843–1845), Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2011. Hamilton, Alastair, The Arcadian Library: Western appreciation of Arab and Islamic civilization, Oxford: Arcadian Library & Oxford Uni- versity Press 2011. Hansen, Thorkild, Det lykkelige Arabien. En dansk ekspedition 1761–67, København: Gyldendal 1962 (English translation as Arabia Felix: The Danish expedition of 1761–1767, New York: Harper & Row 1962). Helsingfors stads historia (History of the City of Helsinki), Part III, vol. 2, Helsingfors 1950. Hodacs, Hanna & Kenneth Nyberg, Naturalhistoria på resande fot. Om att forska, undervisa och göra karriär i 1700-talets Sverige (Natural History on the Move. On research, teaching and the pursuit of careers in eighteenth century Sweden), Stockholm: Nordic Academic Press 2007. Hogarth, David George, The Penetration of Arabia. A record of the development of Western knowledge concerning the Arabian Peninsula, Beirut: Khayats 1966 [1904]. Holma, Harri, “Karl Fredrik Eneberg. Orientalisti ja assyriologi”, Jouka- hainen XIV, 1913, pp. 122–123. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 2007. Johansen, Baber, “Islamic studies, the intellectual and political conditions of a discipline”, Youssef Courbage & Manfred Kropp (eds), Penser l’Orient. Traditions et actualité des orientalismes français et allemand, Beirut: Institut français du Proche-Orient & Orient Institut 2004, pp. 65–93. Klaver, J. M. I., Scientific Expeditions to the Arab World (1761–1881), Oxford: Arcadian Library & Oxford University Press 2009.

133 Bibliography

Klinge, Matti, A European University. The University of Helsinki 1640–2010, translated by Antony Landon & Malcolm Hicks, University of Hel- sinki 2010. Lagus, Jakob Johan Wilhelm, Från pojkåren och gymnasiet. Hågkomster (Memoirs), Helsingfors: Edlund 1904. Lane, Edward William, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Reprinted from the Third Edition, London, New York & Melbourne: Ward, Lock and Co 1890. MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism – History, theory and the arts, Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press 1995. McKenzie, Judith, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt c. 300 BC to AD 700, New Haven: Yale University Press 2007. Marchand, Suzanne, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145, 2001. Mayeur-Jaouen, C., Al-Sayyid al-Badawi. Un grand saint de l’Islam Égyp- tien, le Caire: IFAO 1994. Murchison, R., “Address to the Royal Geographical Society of London”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 22, 1852. Nylander, Carl, Avtryck av liv, Stockholm: Carlssons 2010. Öhrnberg, Kaj, “Nu va de kucku de!”, Nya Argus 1–2, 1985, p. 40. Öhrnberg, Kaj (2010a), “Vägen till Arabien – ‘det förlofvade landet’” (“The Road to Arabia – ‘the Promised Land’”), Wallin 2010, pp. 28–31. Öhrnberg, Kaj (2010b), “Muhammad ῾Ayyad al-Tantāwī”, Wallin 2010, pp. 76–77. Öhrnberg, Kaj, “Georg August Wallin: An Orientalist between national and imperial orientalism”, Bertil Tikkanen & Albion M. Butters (eds), Pūrvāparaprajñābhinandanam. East and West, Past and Present. In- dological and Other Essays in Honour of Klaus Karttunen, Studia Orientalia 110, Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society 2011, pp. 309–316. Öhrnberg, Kaj, “Arabien”, Wallin 2013, pp. 7–24. Osborne, Roger, Civilization. A new history of the western world, London: Pimlico 2007. Osterhammel, Jürgen, Die Entzauberung Asiens. Europa und die asiat- ischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert, München: Verlag C. H. Beck 2010. Palva, Heikki, “G. A. Wallin’s contributions to the study of Arabic dialects”, Sylvia Akar, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila & Inka Nokso-Koivisto (eds), Travelling through Time. Essays in honour of Kaj Öhrnberg, Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society 2013, pp. 511–530. Pfullmann, Uwe, Durch Wüste und Steppe Entdeckerlexikon arabische Halbinse: Biographien und Berichte, Berlin: Trafo-Verlag 2001. Pouillon, François, “Bédouins des Lumières, Bédouins romantiques :

134 Bibliography

mouvement littéraire et enquête sociologique dans le voyage en Orient (XVIIIe‒XIXe siècles)”, Ugo Fabietti & Philip Carl Salzman (eds), The Anthropology of Tribal and Peasant Societies. The dialectics of social cohesion and fragmentation, Pavia: Collegio Ghislieri 1996, pp. 57–79. Rasmussen, Stig T. (ed.), Den Arabiske Rejse 1761–1767. En dansk ekspedi tion set i videnskabshistorisk perspektiv, København: Det kongelige Bibliotek & Munksgaard 1990. Reid, D. M., Whose Pharaohs? – Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press 2002. Renan, Ernest, L’Avenir de la science : pensées de 1848, troisième édition, Paris: Calmann Levy 1890. Resa till Lycklige Arabien. Petrus Forsskåls dagbok 1761–1763, A. H. Uggla (ed.), Uppsala: Svenska Linné-Sällskapet 1950. Ruprecht, Louis A., “Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism: On the complex relation of religious, ethnic, and civic identity in a modern ‘Museum Culture’”, Carl W. Ernst & Richard C. Martin (eds), Rethinking Islamic Studies. From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press 2010, pp. 203–223. S.G. Elmgrenin muistiinpanot (S. G. Elmgren’s Notes), ed. Aarno Maliniemi, Suomen Historian Lähteitä (Sources of Finnish History) II, Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura (Finnish Historical Society) 1939. Said, Edward, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul International 1978. Salminen, Johannes, Minnet av Alexandria (The Memory of Alexandria), Helsingfors: Söderströms 1988. Sattler, Hubert, “Aus Cairo in Egypten. Ende October”, Allgemeine Theat- erzeitung, 11 December 1844, Vienna 1844, pp. 1215–1216. Sattler, Hubert, “Aus Theben in Egypten”, Salzburger Zeitung, 25 März 1845, Salzburg 1845, pp. 238–240. Schildt, Göran (ed.), Georg August Wallin. Källan i fjärran öknen. (Georg August Wallin. The spring in the far desert), Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren 1976. Schwab, Raymond, La Renaissance orientale, Paris: Editions Payot 1950 (English translation as The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s rediscovery of India and the East 1680‒1880, New York: Columbia University Press 1984). Stafford, Robert A., Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchinson, scientific exploration and Victorian imperialism, Cambridge & New Yord: Cam- bridge University Press 1989. Strömberg, John, “Studenterna”, Matti Klinge, Helsingfors universitet

135 Bibliography

1640–1990. Andra delen. Kejserliga Alexanders Universitetet 1808–1917 (University of Helsinki from 1640 to 1990. Part Two. Imperial Alex- ander University 1808–1917), Helsingfors: Otava 1989. Tallqvist, Knut, Yrjö Aukusti Wallin, Helsinki: Kansanvalistus-Seura 1903. Tibbetts, Gerald Randall, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese being a translation of Kitāb al-fawā’id fī usūl al-bahr wal-qawā῾id of Ahmad b. Mājid al-Najdī together with an introduction on the history of Arab navigation, notes on the navigational techniques and on the topography of the Indian Ocean, and a glossary of navigational terms, Oriental Translation Fund, New Series XLII, London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland & Luzac and Company Ltd. 1971. Trautz, M., “G. A. Wallin and ‘The Penetration of Arabia’”, The Geographical Journal LXXVI, 1930, pp. 248‒252. Turner, James, Philology: The forgotten origins of the modern humanities, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press 2014. Vestnik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva 1851: II: X. Wallin, Georg August, De praecipua inter hodiernam Arabum linguam et antiquam differentia, Helsingforsiae: Frenckelliana 1839 (academic dissertation). Wallin, Georg August, al-Qasīda al-hā’īya min al-Ash῾ār al-fāridīya ... Carmen Elegiacum Ibnu-l-Faridi cum commentario Abdu-l-Ghanyi e duobus codicibus Londinensi et Petropolitano into lucem edidit, Helsingforsiae: Litteris Frenckellianis 1266 h./1850 m. (academic dissertation). Wallin, Georg August, “Notes taken during a Journey through Part of Northern Arabia, in 1848”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 20, 1851, pp. 293–344 Wallin, Georg August, “Probe aus einer Anthologie neuarabischer Gesänge, in der Wüste gesammelt, I–II”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländis- chen Gesellschaft V, 1851, pp. 1–23; VI, 1852, pp. 190–218, 369–378. Wallin, G. A., Georg Aug. Wallins första resa från Cairo till arabiska öknen i April 1845 (Georg August Wallin’s first journey from Cairo to the Ara- bian desert in April 1845). Fragment, Helsinki: J. Simelii arfvingar 1853. Wallin, Georg August, “Narrative of a Journey from Cairo to Medina and Mecca, by Suez, Arabá, Tawilá, al-Jauf, Jubbé, Háil, and Nejd, in 1845”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 24, 1854, pp. 115–207. Wallin, Georg August, “Narrative of a Journey from Cairo to Jerusalem, via Mount Sinai”, translated by Norton Shaw, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 25, 1855, pp. 260–290. Wallin, Georg August, “Über die Laute des Arabischen und ihre Bezeich-

136 Bibliography

nung, I–II”, posthumously published by Herman Kellgren, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft IX, 1855, pp. 1–69; XII, 1858, pp. 599–650. Wallin, Georg August, “Nachlese zur Abhandlung G. A. Wallins über die Laute des Arabischen, Ztschr. d. D. M. G. Band IX, S. 1 ff.”, posthumously published by Herman Kellgren, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Mor- genländischen Gesellschaft XII, 1858, pp. 650–665. Wallin, Georg August, “Bemerkungen über die Sprache des Beduinen, auf Veranlassung des Aufsatzes von E. W. Lane: «Über die Aussprache der arabischen Vocale» u.s.w. Bd. IV, S. 170–186”, posthumously published by Herman Kellgren, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft XII, 1858, pp. 666–675. Wallin, Georg August, Skrifter 1. Studieåren och resan till Alexandria (Writings 1. Student years and journey to Alexandria), edited by Kaj Öhrnberg and Patricia Berg, with Kira Pihlflyckt, Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2010. Wallin, Georg August, Skrifter 2. Det första året i Egypten 1843–1844 (Writ- ings 2. The first year in Egypt 1843–1844), edited by Kaj Öhrnberg and Patricia Berg, with Kira Pihlflyckt, Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2011. Wallin, Georg August, Skrifter 3. Kairo och resan till Övre Egypten 1844–1845 (Writings 3. Cairo and the journey to Upper Egypt 1844–1845), edited by Kaj Öhrnberg and Patricia Berg, with Kira Pihlflyckt, Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2012. Wallin, Georg August, Skrifter 4. Färderna till Mekka och Jerusalem 1845–1847 (Writings 4. Journey to Mecca and Jerusalem 1845–1847), edited by Kaj Öhrnberg & Patricia Berg with Kira Pihlflyckt, Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2013. Wallin, Georg August, Skrifter 5. Norra Arabiska halvön och Persien 1847– 1849 (Writings 5. Northern Arabian Peninsula and Persia 1847–1849), edited by Kaj Öhrnberg, Patricia Berg & Kira Pihlflyckt, Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis 2014. Ward, Philip, Travels into Oman: On the track of the early explorers, Arabia past and present 21, Cambridge & New York: The Oleander Press 1987. Watson, Peter, The German Genius. Europe’s third renaissance, the second scientific revolution and the twentieth century, New York: Harper Collins 2010. Wiesehöfer, Josef & Stephan Conermann (ed.), Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) und seine Zeit, Oriens et Occidens 5, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2002. Wikström, A. J., “Abd Al-Wali – den finske muhammedanen”, i Minaret

137 Bibliography

– tidskrift för svensk muslimsk kultur (Journal for Swedish Muslim culture), Volume 7, No. I, 2, 2007, pp. 20–29. Wilkinson, G., Hand-Book for Travellers in Egypt, London: John Murray 1847.

Picture sources p. 9. Helsinki University Museum (©Photo: Matti Ruotsalainen) p. 23 Vuer af Helsingfors år 1838, stentryck av Fredrik Tengström, [S.l.] 1838 p. 29 Strolls Around Saint Petersburg, 2002 pp. 34–35 National Library of Finland, Helsinki p. 46 Salzburg Museum p. 55 Salzburg Museum p. 61 Salzburg Museum pp. 70–71 Gåvor från Österland, edited by AnneMarie Dahlberg, Stock- holm: Livrustkammaren 2001 p. 80 The Gertude Bell Archive, Newcastle University (Signum: Y_346) pp. 86–87 National Library of Finland, Helsinki pp. 102–103 Wikimedia Commons pp. 108–109 Wikimedia Commons p. 118 Wikimedia Commons

138 Bibliography

Contributors Patricia Berg, M. A., Egyptologist, co-editor of G. A. Wallin’s Skrifter (Wri- tings) at the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. Sofia Häggman, Ph.D., Egyptologist, Curator of the Museum of Mediter- ranean and Near Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm. Kaj Öhrnberg, Phil. Lic., Arabist, co-editor of G. A. Wallin’s Skrifter (Wri- tings) at the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Ph.D., Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Helsinki. Heikki Palva, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Arabic Language and Islamic Studies at the University of Helsinki.

139 Notes

Index A Balkh 82 ῾Abdallah Ibn Rashid (ruled 1836– al-Balqa῾ 77 1848) 75 al-Barrani, ῾Ali Nida 50, 52, 58–59 Abu Bakr (c. 573–634) 75 Barraniya 48, 50 Abu Simbel 56–57, 61 Basra 74, 77 Temple of Ramses II 56 Belka see al-Balqa῾ Aden 82, 88 Bell, Gertrude (1868–1926) 80 Ahmad ibn Majid (c. 1432–c. 1500) Beni Hasan 58 79 Berlin 127 al-Ahqaf 77 Egyptian Museum 127 al-Ahsa’i, Ahmad (1753–1826) 98–99 Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997) 72 Alexander I (1777–1825) 16 Bethlehem 76 Alexandria 20, 37, 43–46, 63, 80 Bidil-e Dihlavi (1642–1720) 115 Cleopatra’s Pillar 47 Bisitun 113 Place des Consuls 45 Blomqvist, Alexander (1796–1848) Pompei’s Pillar 46 76 ῾Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661) 107, 110 Bordeaux 36 ῾Amr ibn al-῾As (d. 633) 52 Brahimi, Denise 128 Amsha 81, 90 Buckley, Martin 79 Anatolia 97, 112 Bukhara 82 Andersin, Karl Ulrik (1791–1860) 24 Bulaq 47 Ankarcrona, Gustav (1869–1933) 71 Burckhardt, John Lewis (1784–1817) Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hya- 73 cinthe (1731–1805) 69 Burton, Sir Richard Francis (1821– Aqaba 73–74 1890) 88 Arabian Peninsula 7–8, 10, 15, 25, Byron, Lord George Gordon (1788– 33, 37, 43, 52, 63, 67–68, 72–75, 1824) 72 77–80, 82–86, 88, 95, 104, 120, 124 C Arnaud, Thomas-Joseph (1812–1884) Cairo 12, 19, 31, 37, 44, 46–47, 50– 77 52, 57–63, 73, 75, 78, 105–106, Aswan 19, 52, 54 110–111, 117, 126 ῾Attar, Farid al-din (c. 1142–1220) Azbakiya 48, 58 119 al-Azhar 31, 33, 48, 125 Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) 47 Gamaliya 47–48 Ayrton, Frederick (1812–1873) 83 al-Khalij Canal 52 Mosque of Hasan 52 B Mosque of Ibn Tulun 52 al-Badawi, Sayyid Ahmad (c. 1200– Castrén, Matthias Alexander (1813– 1276) 50–51 1852) 22, 71 Baghdad 12, 75, 77–79, 82, 90, Champollion, Jean François (1790– 106, 121 1832) 43

140 Index Champollion-Figeac, Jacques Joseph Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht (1778–1867) 126 (1810–1888) 69 Charles XII (1682–1718) 117 Forsskål, Peter (1732–1763) 67–68, Chydenius, Anders (1729–1803) 16 127 Constantinople 37, 45 Fresnel, Fulgence (1795–1855) 77 Coste, Pascal (1787–1879) 108 al-Fustat 52 Mosque of ῾Amr ibn al-῾As 52 D Dakka 56, 64 G Damascus 76–77 Gabal al-Haridi 58 Darr 56 Geitlin, Gabriel (1804–1871) 12, 21, De Maison, Pyotr Ivanovich (1807– 25, 28, 31–32, 37, 40, 60, 73, 90, 1873) 31 100–101, 105–107, 111–112, 114, Degerö 19 119–121 Dekkeh see Dakka Girshe see Qirsha Dendera 58 Giza 44, 53 al-Dir῾iya 74 Gliddon, George (1809–1857) 126 Donner, Otto (1835–1909) 89 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Dorn, Bernhard (1805–1881) 31 (1749–1832) 26, 68, 104, 116 Doughty, Charles Montagu (1843– Gubbe see Jubba 1926) 79 Gustav III (1746–1792) 16 Driver, Felix 88 Göttingen 67

E H Ekman, Robert Wilhelm (1808– Habicht, Christian Maximilian 1873) 9 (1775–1839) 29 Elfgren, Erik (1780–1845) 20 Hadhramaut 82, 88–89 Elmgren, Sven Gabriel (1817–1897) Hafiz (1325–1390) 97, 101, 103–104, 36 115–117, 119 Eneberg, Karl Fredrik (1841–1876) Ha’il 7, 75, 78, 84 89 Halévy, Joseph (1827–1917) 89, 130 Engel, Carl Ludvig (1778–1840) al-Halimi, Lutf Allah (d. 1521) 117 16, 17 al-Hasa 77 Esna 58, 126 Hasan (624–670) 52 Alhegaz see al-Hijaz F Hekekyan, Yusuf (1807–1875) 125 Faisal Ibn Saud (1785–1869) 78 Helsinki 10, 15–17, 21–26, 28, 31, 33, Faris, Nabih Amin (1906–1968) 79 36–37, 67, 79–80, 89, 117, 119, 123 Fatima (d. 632) 75 Finnish National Library 10, 17, Fatima 59 23, 36 Feysal se Faisal Ibn Saud Imperial Alexander University 17, FitzGerald, Edward (1809–1883) 104 21–23, 32, 57, 67–69, 80, 117, 123 Flandin, Eugène (1809–1876) 103 Societetshuset Hotel 24 University of Helsinki 7, 11

141 Index Herat 82 Lepsius, Richard (1810–1884) 43, al-Hijaz 78, 82 54, 58 Hogarth, David George (1862–1927) Linnaeus, Carl (1707–1778) 22, 83 67, 123 von Humboldt, Wilhelm (1767–1835) London 7, 37, 80, 85, 88, 125, 129–130 69, 127 Lower Egypt 19 Husayn ῾Ali ibn Abi Talib (626–680) Lumbarla Manor 18, 24 101, 106 Luxor 53, 58 Hussein, Saddam (1937–2006) 95 Lübeck 26

I M Ibn Tulun, Ahmad (835–844) 52 Ma’an 74 Ibrim 56 Mahmoudiya Canal 47 Isfahan 108, 113 al-Mahra 77, 82, 128 Shah mosque 108 Marseille 36–37 Maskat see Muscat J Matariya 52 al-Jauf 7, 10, 73–74, 84 Mecca 15, 33, 43, 52, 67, 73, 75–76, 88 Jeddah 75 Medina 15, 33, 43, 73, 75, 88 Jerusalem 76–77, 128 Mediterranean 20, 37, 45 Jones, Sir William (1746–1794) 68 Michaelis, Johann David (1717–1791) Jubba (Gubbe) 75, 77 67–68 Mirza Isma῾il 31, 101 K Muhammad 75, 105, 114–115 Kabul 82 Muhammad ῾Ali (1769–1849) 44– Kellgren, Herman (1822–1856) 83 46, 52, 73, 78, 125 Khaibar 82 Mukhlinsky, Anton Osipovich Khayyam, Omar (1048–1131) 104 (1808–1881) 31–32 Khiva 82 Mukhlinsky, Count 120 Khomeini, Ruhollah (1902–1989) Murchison, Sir Roderick (1792–1871) 98 85 Kirmanshah 112 Muscat 77, 128 Klinge, Matti (b. 1936) 69 al-Muwailih 78 Kurusku 56 N L Najaf 107, 110 Lagus, Gabriel (1837–1896) 37 Mosque of ῾Ali 107 Lagus, Jacob Johan Wilhelm (1821– Najd 77–78, 82 1909) 23–26, 28, 37–38, 100, 110 Napoleon I (1769–1821) 15, 69, 72 Lagus, Robert Erik (1827–1863) 38 Nasir al-Din (1831–1896) 98 Lagus, Wilhelm Gabriel (1786–1859) New York 125 23 Nicholas I (1796–1855) 16 Lane, Edward William (1801–1876) Niebuhr, Carsten (1733–1815) 73 43–44, 47–48, 63 Nikrat see Niqrat al-Sha’m

142 Index Nile 19, 43–44, 50, 52, 54–57, 60–62, Rückert, Friedrich (1788–1866) 68 74 Niqrat al-Sha’m 77 S Nöldeke, Theodor (1836–1930) Sa῾di (ca. 1215–1292) 97, 113, 115–118 102–103 Safiya 58 Said, Edward (1935–2003) 84–85, 125 O Saltvik 24, 28 Odessa 59 Haga Manor 24 Olin, Carl Johan (1800–1838) 24 Samarkand 82 Oman 77, 82, 88, 128 San῾a’ 77 Saqqara 58 P Sattler, Hubert (1817–1904) 46, 52, Paris 7, 36–37, 78, 89, 117, 125 54–55, 57–58, 61, 126–127 Père Lachaise Cemetery 36 von Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805) Persian Gulf 74–75, 77 40, 69, 116 Philae 54, 56 Schledehaus, Christian Friedrich Philby, Harry St. John Bridger August (1810–1858) 52, 58 (1885–1960) 79 Schwab, Raymond (1884–1956) 69 Pori 20 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832) 26 Porvoo 15 Sedeir see Sudair Senkovsky, Osip-Julian Ivanovich Q (1800–1858) 31 al-Qasim 82 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) Qirsha 64 26, 106 Quatremère, Étienne Marc (1782– Shammar 74–75, 77 1857) 36 Shaw, Henry Norton (d. 1868) 85, Qurna 58 88–89, 129–130 Shiraz 103, 116 R Shirazi, Sayyid ῾Ali Muhammad Ramses II (1279–1213 BCE) 56 (Bab) (1819–1850) 99 Rauma 20 Siberia 22, 72 Rawlinson, Sir Henry (1810–1895) Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine-Isaac 113, 129 (1758–1838) 69 Red Sea 33, 52, 73, 75, 78, 82 Sinai 15, 25, 74, 76, 101 Rehbinder, Robert Henrik (1777– Saint Catherine’s Monastery 76, 1841) 30 101 Renan, Ernest (1823–1892) 69, 128 Sjundeå 24 Renouard, George Cecil (1780–1867) Svidja Manor 24 83 Sjögren, Anders Johan (1794–1855) Rishti, Sayyid Kazim (1793–1843) 98 22 Riyadh 78, 82 Smyrna 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) Socin, Albert (1844–1899) 10 26 St. Petersburg 16, 29–31, 33, 37, 40, al-rub῾ al-khālī 79, 82, 129 63, 73, 80, 82, 101

143 Index Institute of Oriental Languages V 29, 30, 31, 32 della Valle, Pietro (1586–1652) 128 Stockholm 15, 16 Valley of the Kings 54, 58 Sudair 74 de Voltaire, François (1694–1778) Suez 75 117 Sund 17 Sykes, William Henry (1790–1872) W 88 Wadi Dawasir 77 Wadi Halfa 56 T Wallenius, Ivar Ulrik (1793–1874) 21 Tabuk 78 Wallin, August Israel (1813–1814) 18 Tafa 56–57 Wallin, Augusta (1804–1864) 18, 24 Taglioni, Marie (1804–1884) 30 Wallin, Bror August (1820–1868) 18 al-Tahtawi, Rifa῾a (1801–1873) 48, Wallin, Carl August (1807–1828) 18 117, 125 Wallin, Emile (1810–1819) 18 Taima’ 78 Wallin, Israel (1777–1839) 17–18, 20 Tallqvist, Knut (1865–1949) 38 Wallin, Johanna Maria (1779–1854) Tanta 48, 50–51 17–18, 26, 30–31, 38, 51, 57 al-Tantawi, Muhammad ῾Ayyad Wallin, Natalia Sofia (1818–1881) (1810–1861) 31–33, 36, 45, 63, 18, 26, 30–31, 38, 51, 57 124 Wellsted, James Raymond (1805– Tengström, Fredrik (1799–1871) 23 1842) 128 af Tengström, Hedvig Maria (1795– Wetzstein, Johann Gottfried (1815– 1859) 23 1905) 10 Tengström, Jacob (1755–1832) 23 Wilkinson, John Gardner (1797– Thomas, Bertram (1892–1950) 79 1875) 43, 126 von Tischendorf, Constantin (1815– Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 1874) 76 (1717–1768) 107 Trautz, M. 83 von Wrede, Gustav Adolf (1807– Turholmen 19 1863) 77 Turku 16–18, 20, 24, 27 Cathedral School 20, 25 Y Royal Academy of Turku 17, 27 Yanbu῾ 75 Yarim 67 U Upper Egypt 19, 33, 50, 52–53, 60–61, Å 64, 123, 126 Åland 17–20, 24–25, 54, 56 Uppsala 67

144