In 2000 the Department celebrated the 250th anniversary of the beginning of Arabic teaching at the University of Edinburgh.
Over the years a series of scholars have ensured that both the Department and the University have maintained a reputation for academic achievement and teaching excellence in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.
These include Professor Sir William Muir (Principal of the University), Qur'anic scholar Dr Richard Bell, Professor L P Elwell-Sutton (an outstanding scholar in the field of Persian studies), and Professor W Montgomery Watt who, from his appointment as Lecturer in Arabic in 1947 until his retirement as Professor in 1979, made an outstanding contribution both to Islamic scholarship and to the development of the Department.
A History of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh
In 1983 the University of Edinburgh celebrated 400 years of achievement and progress. Throughout the most recent of those centuries, Arabic had been taught without interruption since 1880. Its appearance in the University's curriculum, however, dates from a much earlier period. As early as the second half of the 18th century, students attracted to the study of the classical languages and the cultures of the Middle East had access to the services of James Robertson, Professor of Oriental Languages from 1751 to 1792.
During the 18th and 19th centuries Arabic primarily attracted theological students who recognised the relevance of Semitic philology to their discipline. Persian was taught to meet the requirements of the Indian Civil Service.
In the area of Islamic Studies by far the most distinguished scholar of his day was Sir William Muir, KCSI, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1885 to 1903, whose Life of Mahomet went into several editions and for English-speaking peoples long remained the standard biography of the Prophet. For medievalists his celebrated work The Caliphate, first published 1881, remained essential reading for many years.
Muir's historical interest presaged a shift, however gradual, away from the treatment Arabic and Islamic Studies as little more than elements in a Christian theological curriculum. The first step in this direction came in 1912 with the appointment of Dr Edward Robertson as the first full-time lecturer in Arabic.
Robertson is mainly remembered for his part in cataloguing the Islamic manuscripts acquired by the University Library through the generosity of John B Baillie, grandson of the collector Lt-Col John Baillie of Leys and of the Indian Civil Service. Among the most valuable and best-known items in this collection are the world history of the Mongol vizier Rashid al-Din, written and illustrated in Tabriz c. AD 1306, and the collected poems of Hafiz of Shiraz.
A little-known fact about Robertson is that he was the much respected teacher of a young Edinburgh man who was to achieve international renown as an Islamic scholar. This was H A R (from 1954, Sir Hamilton) Gibb, who became Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford and who is known to a wide circle of readers of works on Islam and Islamic civilisation, notably through his Modern Trends in Islam, of which there is a well-known Arabic translation.
From 1921 Arabic was taught by Richard Bell, a scholar whose name is almost synonymous with Qur'anic studies. Bell, like Robertson, taught a young man also destined to acquire an international reputation. This was R B Serjeant, a native of Edinburgh, who in 1970 became the Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge and who donated his entire library to the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh. An authority on the Arabian Peninsula, Professor Serjeant enjoyed an unrivalled reputation for fieldwork that has preserved for posterity a remarkable record of traditional ways of Arabian life. Another well-known student of Edinburgh is C E Bosworth who became Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester.
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To the present day
Edinburgh's present international reputation in the field of Islamic Studies is inseparable from the name of William Montgomery Watt. His Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam (1949) was the first of more than twenty books on Islamic topics. Notable among subsequent publications are his Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956), summarised in the single-volume Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman (1961). Among works that have explored the formation of Islamic thought and civilisation is Islam and the Integration of Society (1961). A work of a somewhat different kind, but just as important, is his Muslim Intellectual (1963), a definitive study of the great Muslim thinker Al-Ghazali.
Until the establishment of EISAWI, the home of Islamic Studies at Edinburgh was, appropriately enough, the Muir Institute, of which Professor Watt has been aptly described as the founding father. The Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies is in effect an amalgamation of the old Departments of Arabic, Turkish and Persian (established in 1912, 1950 and 1951 respectively).
Following Professor Watt's retirement there was a short period of uncertainty surrounding the future of Islamic studies at Edinburgh. Professor Watt's chair had been a personal chair - a mark of recognition of his scholarship. There was therefore no post to which there could be automatic succession. But the cloud of uncertainty, born of economic rather than academic considerations, was soon dispelled when the University of Baghdad provided a handsome endowment to establish a permanent professorial chair. For the goodwill behind this generous gesture the university doubtless owed much to the esteem and respect in which Professor Watt was held in the Muslim world as well as to its own traditions of fostering good relations and cultural ties with other nations. In 1982 the new post, designated the Iraq Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, was duly filled. The first holder of the chair was Professor J D Latham, a well-known expert on Islamic Spain, who retired in 1988. In October 1990 the University elected Professor M Y Suleiman to the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, a position he held until his departure in 2007. He is succeeded in this post by Professor Marilyn Booth, who was appointed in January 2009.
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The programmes
In Scotland Edinburgh is the only academic institution that provides for the study of Islam and the Middle East in the widest sense. It offers three significant languages of the Muslim world, namely Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Any of these languages or their related cultures may be studied as components of the MA degree. While there are students whose primary interest is linguistic, it must be stressed that there are others who find it instructive and intellectually stimulating to offer courses in a subject not involving the study of a language. To meet new demands, whether in the field of medieval or modern Islamic Studies, Edinburgh has been quick to respond by extending the range of its courses. New courses have been developed both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, most notable the interdisciplinary/cross departmental taught MSc degree in the Practice and Theory of Translation - in which the Departments of Applied Linguistics are major partners.
Outside the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies staff works in close collaboration with the Religious Studies Unit of the Faculty of Divinity and provides the teaching for the MA in Religious Studies with Islam as the major religion. Similar teaching is also provided for students of the Islamic component in a course on comparative religion. There is also a network of scholars researching various aspects of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in other departments inside and outside the Faculty of Arts.
Apart from undergraduates and postgraduates drawn from the English-speaking world, Edinburgh has long had a strong postgraduate body made up of students from many different countries: from Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and China, in the east, to North Africa and Europe, in the west. Some of them, after graduating, have been appointed to high offices in their own countries, and they, as well as many others, maintain contact with the Institute.
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