William Muir
Encyclopedia
Sir William Muir, KCSI
Order of the Star of India
The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1861. The Order includes members of three classes:# Knight Grand Commander # Knight Commander # Companion...

 (27 April 1819 – 11 July 1905) was a Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 Orientalist
Oriental studies
Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies...

 and colonial administrator.

Life

He was born at Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...

 and educated at Kilmarnock Academy
Kilmarnock Academy
Kilmarnock Academy is a comprehensive school, one of several in Kilmarnock, a town in western Scotland. It can trace its history back to the local burgh school founded in the 1630s and the first school to bear the name was established in 1807...

, at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and at Haileybury College. In 1837 he entered the Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...

 Civil Service
Civil service
The term civil service has two distinct meanings:* A branch of governmental service in which individuals are employed on the basis of professional merit as proven by competitive examinations....

. Muir served as secretary to the governor of the North-West Provinces, and as a member of the Agra
Agra
Agra a.k.a. Akbarabad is a city on the banks of the river Yamuna in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, west of state capital, Lucknow and south from national capital New Delhi. With a population of 1,686,976 , it is one of the most populous cities in Uttar Pradesh and the 19th most...

 revenue board, and during the Mutiny he was in charge of the intelligence department there. In 1865 he was made foreign secretary to the India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n Government. In 1867 Muir was knight
Knight
A knight was a member of a class of lower nobility in the High Middle Ages.By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior....

ed (K.C.S.I.
Order of the Star of India
The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1861. The Order includes members of three classes:# Knight Grand Commander # Knight Commander # Companion...

), and in 1868 he became lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces. In 1874 he was appointed financial member of the Council, and retired in 1876, when he became a member of the Council of India
Council of India
The Council of India was the name given at different times to two separate bodies associated with British rule in India.The original Council of India was established by the Regulating Act of 1773 as a council of four formal advisors to the Governor-General at Fort William...

 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. James Thomason served as Muir's mentor with respect to Imperial administration; Muir later wrote an influential biography of Thomason.

Muir had always taken an interest in educational matters, and it was chiefly through his exertions that the central college at Allahabad
Allahabad
Allahabad , or Settled by God in Persian, is a major city of India and is one of the main holy cities of Hinduism. It was renamed by the Mughals from the ancient name of Prayaga , and is by some accounts the second-oldest city in India. It is located in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh,...

, known as Muir College, was built and endowed. Muir College later became a part of the Allahabad University
Allahabad University
Allahabad University , is a premier Central University located in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. Its origins lie in the Muir Central College, named after Lt...

. In 1884 Muir was elected president of the Royal Asiatic Society
Royal Asiatic Society
The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was established, according to its Royal Charter of 11 August 1824, to further "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia." From its incorporation the Society...

. In 1885 he was elected principal of Edinburgh University in succession to Sir Alexander Grant, and held the post till 1903, when he retired.

Works, their reception, and legacy

Sir William Muir was an Orientalist specialising in the history of the time of Muhammad
Muhammad
Muhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...

 and the early caliphate
Caliphate
The term caliphate, "dominion of a caliph " , refers to the first system of government established in Islam and represented the political unity of the Muslim Ummah...

. His chief books are A Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira; Annals of the Early Caliphate; The Caliphate: Its rise, decline and fall, an abridgment and continuation of the Annals, which brings the record down to the fall of the caliphate on the onset of the Mongols; The Koran: its Composition and Teaching; and The Mohammedan Controversy, a reprint of five essays published at intervals between 1885 and 1887. In 1888 he delivered the Rede lecture
Rede Lecture
The Sir Robert Rede's Lecturer is an annual appointment to give a public lecture, the Sir Robert Rede's Lecture at the University of Cambridge. It is named for Sir Robert Rede, who was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in the sixteenth century.-Initial series:The initial series of lectures ranges...

 at Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 on The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam.

Life of Mahomet

His early book, Life of Mahomet
Muhammad
Muhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...

, was criticized in a contemporary review in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

for "propagandist writing" with Christian bias and for "odium theologicum
Odium theologicum
The Latin phrase Odium theologicum is the name originally given to the often intense anger and hatred generated by disputes over theology...

". Contemporary historian E. A. Freeman praised the book as a "great work", yet questioned its conjectural methodology, particularly the "half timid suggestion" made by Muir that Muhammad had fallen under the influence of Satanic inspiration. About this alleged influence Clinton Bennett
Clinton Bennett
Clinton Bennett is a British scholar of religions and participant in interfaith dialogue specializing in the study of Islam and Muslim-non-Muslim encounter. An ordained Baptist minister, he was a missionary in Bangladesh before serving as the second director of interfaith relations at the British...

 comments that Muir "chose to resurrect another old Christian theory", and quotes the following passage from Muir's 1858 Life, vol. 2:
In the final chapters of Life, Muir concluded that the main legacy of Islam was a negative one, and he subdivided it in "three radical evils":
Muir's contemporary reviewers of Life uniformly praised him for his knowledge of Arabic; the only competing work in Britain at the time was a book by Harrow
Harrow School
Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

 schoolmaster Reginald Bosworth Smith, who had no Arabic language skills. Historian Avril Powell notes that none of the contemporary reviews commented on Muir's view that the Muslim society was stationary and incapable of reforms, perhaps because it was quietly assumed as indisputable by most of Muir's Victorian co-nationals. Written objections to this aspect of Life could be found in the writings of Muslims living inside the Empire
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...

 only after the 1857 rebellion
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...

.

Among 20th century scholars, W. M. Watt (1961) described Muir's Life as following "in detail the standard Muslim accounts, though not uncritically", and Albert Hourani
Albert Hourani
-Life and career:Hourani was born in Manchester, England, the son of Soumaya Rassi and Fadlo Issa Hourani, immigrants from Marjeyoun in what is now South Lebanon. His brothers were George Hourani and Cecil Hourani. His family had converted from Greek Orthodoxy...

 (1989) declared that it "is still not quite superseded". Bennett (1998) praises it as "a detailed life of Muhammad more complete than almost any other previous book, at least in English," noting however that besides "placing the facts of Muhammad's life before both Muslim and Christian readers, Muir wanted to convince Muslims that Muhammad was not worth their allegiance. He thus combined scholarly and evangelical or missionary purposes."

Other works

Muir's later Annals was received with fewer reservations by the Times reviewer and other newspapers of the day. It was the Annnals that established Muir's reputation as a leading scholar on Islam in Britain. Nevertheless, his earlier hypercritical Life of Mahomet was used as a poster child by contemporary Muslim commentators—especially by Indian ones connected to the movement of Syed Ahmed Khan
Syed Ahmed Khan
Javad-ud Daula, Arif Jang, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, KCSI , commonly known as Sir Syed, was an Indian educator and politician, and an Islamic reformer and modernist...

—to dismiss all criticism of their society emanating from Western scholars. Syed Ameer Ali
Syed Ameer Ali
Syed Ameer Ali C.I.E. was an Indian Muslim jurist hailed from the state of Oudh from where his father shifted and settled down at Orissa...

 went as far as to declare Muir "Islam's avowed enemy".

An illustrative aspect in the evolution of Muir's positions is his stance on the Crusades
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...

. In his writings of the 1840s, he goaded Christian scholars to verbal warfare against Muslims using aggressive crusader imagery. Fifty year later, Muir redirected the invective hitherto reserved for the Muslims to the crusading leaders and armies, and while still finding some faults with the former, he praised Saladin
Saladin
Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb , better known in the Western world as Saladin, was an Arabized Kurdish Muslim, who became the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. He led Muslim and Arab opposition to the Franks and other European Crusaders in the Levant...

 for knightly values. (Muir's anti-Catholic animus may have played a role in this too.) Despite his later writings, Muir's reputation as an unfair critic of Islam remained strong in Muslim circles. Powell finds that William Muir deserves much of the criticism laid by Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

 and his followers against 19th century Western scholarship on Islam.

Muir had strong Evangelical views and was invited to preface many missionary biographies and memoirs, speak at conferences and to publicize Zenana missions. He wrote "If Christianity is anything, it must be everything. It cannot brook a rival, nor cease to wage war against all other faiths, without losing its strength and virtue." In his official capacity as principal of Edinburgh University, Muir chaired many meetings of Evangelists at the university, organized to support overseas missionary efforts, and addressed by speakers such as Henry Drummond. In India, William Muir founded the Indian Christian village Muirabad, near Allahabad
Allahabad
Allahabad , or Settled by God in Persian, is a major city of India and is one of the main holy cities of Hinduism. It was renamed by the Mughals from the ancient name of Prayaga , and is by some accounts the second-oldest city in India. It is located in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh,...

. Muir was impressed with the discovery of the Apology of al-Kindy; he lectured on it at the Royal Asiatic Society, presenting it as an important link in what he saw as a chain of notable conversions to Christianity, and later he published the translated sources. A proselytizing text, Bakoorah shahiya (Sweet First Fruits) was published under his name as well, but this work had actually been written by a convert to Protestantism from Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...

 investigated the origin of the phrase "Satanic Verses
Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses was a purported incident where a small number of apparently pagan verses were temporarily included in the Qur'an by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, only to be later removed...

", and concluded that despite Salman Rushdie's claim that he had borrowed the phrase from Tabari
Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari
Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari was a prominent and influential Sunni scholar and exegete of the Qur'an from Persia...

, the earliest traceable occurrence is in Muir's Life of Mohamet (1858) in a passage discussing "two Satanic verses". The phrase does not appear in the revised edition of 1912 though.

Family

He was the brother of the indologist John Muir
John Muir (indologist)
John Muir was a Scottish Sanskrit scholar and Indologist .-Biography:Muir was born in Glasgow, Scotland, one of four brothers amongst whom was William Muir, and educated at the grammar school of Irvine, the University of Glasgow, and the East India Company College at Haileybury...

. He married in 1840 Elizabeth Huntly Wemyss (d. 1897), and had five sons and six daughters; four of his sons served in India, and one of them, Colonel A. M. Muir (d. 1899), was Political Officer for South Baluchistan, and was acting British Resident in Nepal
Nepal
Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...

 when he died.

Publications

  • The Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira
    • Vols. 1-2 published in 1858 by Smith, Elder, & Co.
    • Vols. 3-4 published in 1861 by Smith, Elder, & Co. together with a reprinting of the fist two volumes; title shortened to The Life of Mahomet.
  • The life of Mahomet from original sources
    • 2nd abridged one-volume ed. of the above published in 1878, xi+errata slip, xxviii, 624 pp. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.
    • 3rd abridged ed. published in 1894 by Smith, Elder, & Co., ciii, 536 p.
    • posthumously revised ed. by Thomas Hunter Weir published in 1912 as The life of Mohammad from original sources, cxix, 556 pp.
  • The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt, 1260-1517 AD, end of the Caliphate
  • The Caliphate: Its rise, decline and fall
  • The Apology of al-Kindy, 1882
  • Annals of the Early Caliphate
  • The Sources of Islam, A Persian Treatise, by the Rev. W. St. Clair-Tisdall, translated and abridged by W. M. 1901. Edinburgh, T & T Clark.
  • Records of the Intelligence Department of the Government of the North-West Provinces of India during the Mutiny of 1857 including correspondence with the supreme government, Delhi, Cawnpore, and other places. 1902. 2 vols, Edinburgh, T & T Clark.
  • Two Old Faiths: Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans. J. Murray Mitchell and Sir William Muir. 1901. New York: Chautauqua Press.
  • Mahomet and Islam
  • The Rise and Decline of Islam
  • The Lord's Supper: an abiding witness to the death of Christ
  • Sweet First-Fruits. A tale of the Nineteenth Century, on the truth and virtue of the Christian Religion
  • The Beacon of Truth; or, Testimony of the Coran to the Truth of the Christian Religion, 1894
  • The Mohammedan Controversy, 1897
  • James Thomason, lieutenant-governor N.-W. P., India, 1897
  • The Teaching of the Coran

External links

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