2011 570511

This article was downloaded by: [2.188.96.
194]
On: 18 February 2014, At: 05:49
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Iranian Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cist20
The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian

Interactions with the English
Universities in the Early Nineteenth
Century
Nile Green
Published online: 24 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Nile Green (2011) The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the
English Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century, Iranian Studies, 44:6, 807-829, DOI:
10.1080/00210862.2011.570511
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2011.570511
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions
Iranian Studies, volume 44, number 6, November 2011
Nile Green
Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014
The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English

Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century
Against the background of the Russo-Persian wars of the early 1800s, the Iranian
government sponsored a series of Iranian students to travel to the homeland of its
erstwhile British allies in search of the new scientific and technological learning.
Along with members of the Iranian embassies to London in the same period, the
students were the first Iranians to acquire extensive and direct knowledge of British
society as it entered the industrial era and the earliest to gain access (albeit
short-lived) to the English universities. Yet in spite of the practical agenda of the
students and their sponsors, on reaching Britain the students found it necessary to
engage extensively with the evangelical and more generally religious agendas of their
British co-operators. In reconstructing in detail the intellectual circles in which the
Iranian students moved in England between 1815 and 1818, the article uncovers
the series of religious negotiations that were a necessary part of Irans early path to
modernization.
In Oxford there are twenty big madrasas and five small madrasas they call halls.
Mirza Saleh Shirazi, 1818
Introduction
Two distinct trajectories of development have long been apparent in early nineteenth
century Iran. One is associated with the modernizing initiatives of the crown prince
Abbas Mirza (17891833); the other with the increasing influence of the ulama in
political affairs. In part at least, the background to both sets of developments lay in the
same context of increasing Iranian interaction with Europe. Most crucially, this interaction revolved around the disastrous wars with Russia in the 1810s and 1820s which
prompted a set of religious and scientific developments whose interdependence is
symbolized in the fact that the first work to be issued from the pioneering
printing press introduced to Iran from Russia under Abbas Mirzas sponsorship
Nile Green is Professor in the History Department at UCLA, USA.
ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/11/06080723
2011 The International Society for Iranian Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2011.570511
808 Green
was a collection of clerical rulings on jehad.1 Despite renewed interest in the impact on
Iran of the British missionary Henry Martyn (17811812), the religious dimensions
of the heightened interaction between Iranians and Europeans have usually been
apportioned to the Iranian side (whether with regard to missionary journeys taking
place in the territory of Iran or the response of Iranian clerics to these missions),
leaving Europe to be presented chiefly as an arena of modernizing and particularly
technological influences on Iran.2 Indeed, this technological conception of Europe
was already in play when two groups of Iranian students were dispatched to study
in England in the 1810s expressly to acquire practical scientific skills and equipment.3
Yet in a period in which Britains nascent imperial expansion in Asia saw the development of the larger evangelical movement of which Henry Martyn was a part, the
increasing engagements between Iran and Europe contained no less significant a religious trajectory on the European side. If Iranian intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century looked to Europe primarily for technological and scientific learning,
in European societies in which Christianity had not yet been divorced from scientific
endeavors, access to such learning frequently involved negotiations with the personnel
and institutions of Protestant Christendom. This was especially the case at the English
universities, which until the reforms of the 1850s remained first and foremost the
training ground of the squirearchy and clergy.
By reconstructing the evangelical character of the university encounters of the
group of Iranian students sent to England in 1815, the following pages serve to
emphasize the religious dimensions to increasing interaction with Europe by demonstrating the degree to which British co-operation with the Iranian attempt to access
European science was predicated on an evangelical agenda of winning Persophone
Asia for Christ. For in coinciding with the rise at the English universities of an
evangelical Orientalism of studying Asia for Christ rather than John Company,
the Iranians journey to Britain saw them drawn into Christianizing projects that
ranged from attempting to convert the Iranian travelers themselves to inducing
them to co-operate in translating the Bible. As a central part of the cultural negotiations in which Iranian access to scientific learning was embedded, this pattern
1
Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 17851906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), chapter 5, Abbas Amanat, Russian Intrusion into the Guarded Domain:
Reflections of a Qajar Statesman on European Expansion, Journal of the American Oriental Society 113,
no. 1 (1993); and Firouzeh Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus
(London, 2006).
2
Abbas Amanat, Mutahids and Missionaries: Shii Responses to Christian Polemics in the Early
Qajar Period, in Religion and Society in Qajar Iran, ed. by Robert Gleave (London, 2004). Cf.
Husayn Mahbb Ardakn, Trkh-e Moassast-e Tamaddon-ye Jadd dar rn, 3 vols. (Tehran,
1354/1975); and Maryam Ekhtiar, Modern Science, Education and Reform in Iran: The Dar al-Funun
(Richmond, 1999).
3
For overviews of the Iranian students travels in Britain, see Mohammad Hossein Azizi and Farzaneh
Azizi, Government-Sponsored Iranian Medical Students Abroad (18111935), Iranian Studies, 43, no.
3 (2010); Mojtaba Minov, Avvaln Krvn-e Marefat, Yaghm, 6 (1953); Husayn Mahbb Ardakn,
Duvvumn Krvn-e Marefat, Yaghm, 18 (1965); and Denis Wright, The Persians amongst the
English: Episodes in Anglo-Persian History (London, 1985), 7086.
The Madrasas of Oxford 809
of co-operation was neither unique to Britain nor to the Iranians who visited it. For
in practical terms, science and technology could not be accessed without engaging
with their social gatekeepers and cultural locations which in this period were
strongly shaped by the rise of a staunchly evangelical vision of British relations
with Asia. While the students who traveled to Britain in 1815 were among the
most influential agents of Iranian modernization in the middle Qajar era, their
access to the English universities and to British scholarship in general was only
rendered possible by varying degrees of manipulation or co-operation with their
Christianizing aims.4 As we see below, other Middle Eastern scholarly travelers to
Britain also found themselves entering such negotiations in this period, while in
both Iran and the adjacent territories of imperial Russia the first half of the
nineteenth century saw a series of Iranians find financial or intellectual profit in
taking on Biblical translation work.5
The Christian Contexts of Intellectual Co-operation
The crucial context for these religious negotiations was the vast early nineteenth
century project to translate the Bible into every language of the world. As the evangelical interest in Britains expanding imperial possessions grew in the early 1800s,
Persian became increasingly recognized as a key language, offering a linguistic bridgehead for the conversion of India no less than Iran.6 Looking beyond the imperial space
of Bengal, in the early 1800s British evangelicals were expanding their interests
towards Irans Christian community, hoping that by supporting this small minority
they could gradually convert Iran as a whole. Within two years of the departure of
the Iranian student party in 1819, journals such as the Christian Observer were
issuing regular reports on the conditions of Persian Christians, describing the most
intolerant and cruel manner in which the Christians were treated by the
students princely sponsor Abbas Mirza while reassuring readers that their oriental
4
On different aspects of the Iranian students activities and investigations in Britain, see Nile Green,
Paper Modernity? Notes on an Iranian Industrial Tour, 1818, Iran: Journal of Persian Studies, 46
(2008); idem, Among the Dissenters: Reciprocal Ethnography in Nineteenth Century Inglistan,
Journal of Global History, 4, no. 2 (2009); idem, Journeymen, Middlemen: Travel, Transculture and
Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41,
no. 2 (2009) and idem, Kebabs and Port Wine: The Culinary Cosmopolitanism of Anglo-Persian
Dining, 18001835, in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts, ed. by Derryl Maclean and Sikeena
Karmali (Edinburgh, 2011). For summaries of their later careers in Iran, see Mehd Bmdd, Sharh-e
Hl-e Rejl-e rn dar Qarn-e 12, 13, 14 Hijr, 6 vols. (Tehran, 1363/198485), 1: 24144 and 2:
17579.
5
Nile Green, The Trans-Colonial Opportunities of Bible Translation: Iranian Linguists between the
Russian and British Empires, in Trans-Colonial Modernities in Asia, 18001940, ed. by Michael Dodson
and Brian Hatcher (London, 2011). On other Iranian and Indian travelers in Britain during this period,
see Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 16001857
(Delhi, 2004), and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and
Historiography (New York, 2001).
6
Green, Trans-Colonial Opportunities.
810 Green
co-religionists were true orthodox Trinitarians like themselves.7 Even such a figure as
Sir Gore Ouseley (17701844), better known through his interests in Persian literature as an heir to the Enlightenment Orientalism of Sir William Jones, was closely
involved in the evangelical outreach to Iran during and after his embassy to Iran of
181014. Ouseley helped rescue the manuscripts of the missionary Henry Martyn
after his death en passage from Iran; oversaw the publication of the 1815 Persian
New Testament in Saint Petersburg; and became vice-president of the British and
Foreign Bible Society on his return to London.8 One of the Iranian students,
Mirza Saleh Shirazi, had accompanied the Ouseley embassy and, along with Gore
Ouseleys status in Britain as former ambassador, this meant that Gore Ouseley
became one of the Britons with whom the Iranian students were most frequently
in contact during their four years in London. Certainly, Sir Gore Ouseley crops up
frequently in Mirza Salehs account of his years in London and Ouseleys position
at the Bible Society seems to have been a major factor behind Mirza Salehs appointment in early 1819 as apprentice to the Bible Societys oriental printer, Richard Watts
(d. 1844).9
While it is the Iranian students interactions with the universities which are the
focus of this essay, Ouseley and the Bible Society are important in forming the
larger Christian context into which the evangelical character of the university encounters must be located. The Bible Society in particular served as the institutional
mediator between university men and the logistical and financial undertakings of
evangelical activity as such. Early into the translation projects sponsored chiefly by
the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804), it quickly became apparent
that translating scripture into the living idioms of languages with which university
Orientalists were only familiar in the abstract and theoretical was fraught with problems. It is important to recognize the magnitude of the language problem. To
begin with, there was the basic question of intelligibility; more complex problems
were raised by the issues of register and style; still more unsettling was the problem
of how to strike a suitably grandiloquent note while avoiding the idioms of the
Quran. Not only did the evangelicals see understanding of scripture as essential to
the sincere conversions they sought, they also worried about the consequences for
their own souls as well as others of misrepresenting the words of God. These problems
were rendered all the more acute by the evangelical Protestant theology in which the
scriptural Word of God was seen as possessing sufficient agency of its own to bring
about the conversion of the heathen. To mistranslate the scripture was therefore to
block the linguistic flow of the transforming agency of grace. Given that scripture
translation was the acme of Orientalist skill among the university scholars of the
Persian Christians, The Christian Observer, Conducted by Members of the Established Church for the
Year 1820, vol. 19 (1821), 635.
8
On the wider impact of these evangelical contacts, see Nile Green, Persian Print and the Stanhope
Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism and the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010), and idem., Stones from Bavaria:
Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts, Iranian Studies 43, no. 3 (2010).
9
On Mirza Saleh and Watts, see Green, Journeymen, Middlemen.
7
early 1800s (a fact overlooked through Edward Saids emphasis on the secular frameworks in which Orientalism was supposedly formed), questions over the accuracy of
different scriptural translations frequently became academic causes clbres.10 For in a
period in which the English universities remained in large part the realm of the clergy,
whether in quantity or quality in the first half of the nineteenth century scripture
translation was the criteria on which Orientalist careers were made.11
By the time the Iranian students reached England in the autumn of 1815, matters
were made worse by reports of the incomprehensibility of Henry Martyns translation
of the New Testament into Persian, an issue which the translations made by the more
professionalized university Orientalists were intended to redress. As a result, reliable
native language assistants became a key part of the evangelical enterprise, whether
through bringing such assistants to Englandas in the case of the Iranian scholar
Mirza Ibrahim (c.180057)or through out-sourcing such translations to teams
of translators overseas.12 Here lay the irony at the heart of the evangelical enterprise,
that the help of native Asian-language speakers was requisite to the conversion of their
fellow Muslims.13 Since educated Asian travelers to England were a scarce commodity
in the early 1800s, their value was immense to those involved in the translation of portions of the Bible, tracts and polemics.14 So it was that members of the small group of
educated Muslim travelers to Britain found themselves drawn into the evangelical
project as part of the negotiations of gaining access to the knowledge, contacts or commodities in search of which they had traveled.
While there was nothing intrinsically new in Orientalists co-operating with native
speakers, Britains expanding imperial connections with India both enabled and
indeed encouraged a growing number of educated Asians to travel to Britain, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century with a trickle to reach a regular
flow a hundred years later. Traces of co-operation with such travelers crop up in
the careers of several of the key evangelical Orientalists at the universities. The
10
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978), 121. On the scripture as the acme of Orientalist skills, see the linguistic debates exchanged in Ebenezer Henderson, An
Appeal to the Members of the British and Foreign Bible Society, on the Subject of the Turkish New Testament, Printed at Paris, in 1819, Containing a View of Its History, an Exposure of Its Errors, and Palpable
Proofs of the Necessity of Its Suppression (London, 1824), and Samuel Lee, Remarks on Dr. Hendersons
Appeal to the Bible Society, on the Subject of the Turkish Version of the New Testament printed at Paris
in 1819 (Cambridge, 1824), especially 1953 on the linguistic accuracy of translations.
11
See Nile Green, Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Oriental Learning in the English Universities,
18001850 (forthcoming).
12
Green, Trans-Colonial Opportunities.
13
On the role of the munshi in language teaching, see Michael H. Fisher, Persian Professor in Britain:
Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim at the East India Companys College, 182644, Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 21 (2001); and Arabella Wennerstrm Nylund, Oriental Learning
and Western Knowledge: The Encounter of Educational Traditions in Bengal, 17811835 (Stockholm,
1991).
14
On the employment of foreign travelers to London in Bible translation, Leslie Howsam, Cheap
Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, 1991),
2122.
812 Green
problem in reconstructing the collaboration is that in their desire to promote their

own careers, the Orientalists themselves demurred on the details. In the age of Enlightenment Orientalism, the most notable cases concern Joseph Dacre Carlyle (1759
1804) in Cambridge and Sir William Jones (174694) in Oxford. In Carlyles case,
we only have his own meager testimony (written in the third person) that he owed
his expertise to David Zamir, a native of Bagdad [sic], who resided with the translator
for some time at Cambridge, and to whose assistance he [Carlyle] is principally
indebted for any knowledge he may have acquired in Oriental Literature.15 We
are somewhat more fortunate in Joness case, for though in the preface to his
Persian Grammar his own acknowledgement of help from a foreign nobleman is
anonymously oblique (and almost certainly a reference to the Polish Orientalist
Count Charles Reviczky), in his Persian account of his time in Britain Joness
Indian co-operator Munshi Etesam al-Din ( fl. 176669) claimed that his own translation of part of the Persian grammatical section of the Farhang-e Jehangiri had been
passed on to Jones and, by inference, influenced his famous work.16 Such fleeting
eighteenth century acts of scholarly contact and collaboration expanded in the evangelical era of the early 1800s, a period which coincided with the greater mobility of
Asian no less than European clergy and clerisy. At the beginning of this era of evangelical rather than Enlightenment Orientalism, the pioneer Cambridge missionary
Henry Martyn relied on the help of an Arabian erstwhile convert, Jawad Nathaniel
ibn Sabat (d. 1827) in making his Persian translation of the New Testament, for
example.17 Only when Martyn took his translation to Iran did he fully realize the
deficiencies in Sabats Persian. It was this crisis of mis-rendering Holy Writ that
initiated the series of revised translations that preoccupied so many of Britains
leading Orientalists in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the process
drawing them into contact with educated native speakers who passed through Britain.
The Christian Foundations of Academic Partnership
Although the Orientalists own writings are invariably thin on the detail (or even existence) of such Iranian co-operators, the discovery of the latters own writings opens the
possibility of a fuller appreciation of the scale and motivations of such co-operation.
By building on the Persian travel diary written by Mirza Saleh Shirazi, one of the
15
Joseph Dacre Carlyle, Specimens of Arabian Poetry, from the Earliest Time to the Extinction of the
Khaliphat, with Some Account of the Authors (London, 1796), 179. I have been unable to trace further
record of their association.
16
Mirza Itesa Modeen, Shigurf Namah i Velat, Or, Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe: Being the
Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen in Great Britain and France, trans. by James Edward Alexander (London,
1827), 6466, and William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1828), ix. For claims of
Joness fuller reliance on Munshi Etesam al-Din, see Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, chapter 2. I am
grateful to my anonymous reader for clarifications on Joness circle.
17
William Canton, A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 5 vols. (London, 190410), 1:
28991, and Maulvi Abdul Wali, The Life and Work of Jawad Sabat, an Arab Traveller, Writer and
Apologist (Calcutta, 1925).
members of the Iranian student party that reached Britain in 1815, the following pages
attempt to reconstruct some of the details of the encounter between the Iranian
science-seekers and the university evangelicals.18 Having traveled to England along
with three other Iranians hoping to study the malumat-e jadid or new sciences
with which Britain was becoming increasingly identified, Mirza Saleh Shirazi
remained in England until 1819, studying the Latin of the university men no less
than the English of more ordinary communications.19 Having traveled so far to
find mechanical training, the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge (still at
this point the only universities south of Durham) were not the Iranians most successful destination, for with their emphasis on training clerics and gentlemen rather than
engineers and mechanics in the early 1800s they were far from being the scientific
centers that the travelers imagined.20 Nonetheless, as we see in the following sections,
through the appeal of their language skills and the possibility of their conversion, the
Iranians were able to use the agendas of the evangelical Orientalists to gain at least
short-term access to the human and intellectual resources that the universities controlled.
While the evidence of the Iranians visits to the universities is fragmentary, it does
suggest a repeated pattern of visits during the period of almost four years in which they
remained in London (a city whose coach connections to the university towns Mirza
Saleh described in his journal). We possess two accounts of the Cambridge visits of
Mirza Saleh and his fellow Iranians. An account of a visit to the university in late September 1818 by Mirza Jafar and Mirza Reza appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle and
was reprinted in The Times, while Mirza Salehs travelogue describes one of these trips,
which he made alone in June 1819.21 The newspaper article describes how over a
period of several days, the two Iranians (Meerza Jaaffar and Meerza Reza)
inspected Kings Chapel, Trinity Library, and several of the Colleges in this University; and on Monday finished their examination by visiting the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Public Library, Senate House, &c. In addition to pointing to the institutions that the
students visited, the report in The Times also hints at the Christian education that
they had already (apparently enthusiastically) received by the time of the visit in
1818, for among the varied vales of English literature Mirza Jafar appears to have
18
Mrz Sleh Shrz, Majmeh-ye Safarnmehh-ye Mrz Sleh Shrz, ed. by Gholm Hossein
_ OrienMrz Sleh (Tehran, 1364/1985). I have also consulted the original manuscript (British Library,
tal and India Office Collections, Add. 24,034) to clarify the orthography and identification of personal
names. I have previously translated parts of the Oxford section as Nile Green, The Madrasas of Oxford,
1818, The Oxford Magazine, 253 (2006).
19
For overviews of the background to the students arrival, see A.H. Barrett, A Memoir of LieutenantColonel Joseph DArcy, R.A. 17801848, Iran, 43 (2005); and Wright, The Persians amongst the
English, 7086. On Indian Muslim travelers to England during the early nineteenth century, see
Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 16001857
(Delhi, 2004); and Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eighteenth
Century (Karachi, 1998).
20
On the travails of science-teaching in early nineteenth century Oxford, see G. L. E. Turner, Experimental Science in Early-Nineteenth Century Oxford, History of Universities, 8 (1989).
21
The Times, 29 September 1818, p. 3.
814 Green
become enamored with the most expressly Christian of all major English poets and,
according to the report, on visiting the garden of Christ-college Meerza Jaaffar,
who is a warm admirer of Milton, took away, with an intention most carefully to preserve them, some leaves from the mulberry-tree said to be planted by that immortal
poet.
However, it is the travelogue of Mirza Saleh that allows us to move beyond such
quick glimpses of the Iranians visits to the universities and construct a fuller
picture of the social interactions that afforded them access to their learning. Mirza
Saleh appears to be a reliable source and the fact that he penned an accurate biographical depiction of his host in Cambridge, the leading Orientalist, Professor Samuel
Lee (17831852), suggests that Lee trusted Mirza Saleh enough to describe to him
a past that in the Cambridge milieu of 1818 was well below social par.22 Despite
his humble origins, Lee quickly (and as we see below, with the Iranians help) rose
to the position of Sir Thomas Adams professor of Arabic at Cambridge and by
1831 rose still further to become Regius Professor of Hebrew. In 1818, Mirza Saleh
described Lee as aged around forty, the son of a carpenter and himself a woodworker in his youth, who at the age of seventeen began a program of self-education
by night in which he learned Latin, French and then Greek, such that he had soon
learned the languages of all Farangistan, all of which details are generally correct
(except he was actually aged thirty-five).23 On the basis of its coherence to Lees
own written account of his early life contained in a letter to his early mentor, the
Shrewsbury Orientalist Jonathan Scott (17351807), Mirza Salehs account appears
highly accurate.24 Hints at Lees earlier co-operation with Asian visitors to Britain
are found in Mirza Salehs note that Lee had first began to learn Hindi when he
met an Indian traveler; Mirza Saleh added that as a result of the Indians guidance,
Lee spoke the language with fine pronunciation and accent. It was then, he clarified,
that Lee began his great task of translating the New Testament into Hindi and then
Arabic and Persian.25
We know that the Cambridge visit of June 1819 described in Mirza Salehs journal
was not their first meeting, for in an English letter that Mirza Saleh wrote five months
earlier in February 1819, he expressly declared that he had already occasionally met
Mr. Lee.26 But it is the Persian journal itself which offers the most intimate insight
into the Iranians interactions with the university Orientalists. On the Cambridge visit
described in Mirza Salehs journal, Lee came to meet the Iranian from his stage coach
before escorting him to the Elizabethan buildings of the universitys evangelical
22
On Lees career, see Alice M. Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation: A Brief Memoir of Samuel Lee, by
his Daughter (London, 1896). On Lees early Cambridge years, see his obituary in the Church Missionary
Societys Intelligencer (March 1853); and John and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses from the Earliest
Times to 1900, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 192254), pt II, vol. 4,133.
23
Shrz, Majmeh, 350.
24
Lees letter to Scott is printed in Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation, 28.
25
Shrz, Majmeh, 351.
26
To the Honourable and Reverend the Vice Chancellor, Heads of Houses, and Members of the
Senate, of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), p. 8.
outpost at Queens College.27 Mirza Salehs arrival at the university was hardly the
most auspicious start. He reached Cambridge by means of an uncomfortable coach
journey from London on 13 June 1819. Just as it entered Cambridge after several
delays and coach changes en route, Mirza Salehs stagecoach suffered a crash so calamitous as to draw a large crowd to gather round. The women seated in the coach
beside him were thrown around by the impact. As Mirza Saleh struggled to regain
his senses, he heard one of his female fellow travelers wailing that her body was
hurting all over. Turning to help her, Mirza Saleh looked up to see her standing
above him and, he wrote, since English women wear nothing under their dresses, I
looked up to see that she was wearing nothing at all from her knees to her waist; it
was not a pretty sight!28 But the shock of this intimate introduction was only the
beginning of his embarrassments. As the crowd that assembled round the coach
started to lift out the passengers in the expectation of finding dead bodies among
them, when they instead found only Mirza Salehs Persian fur hat, bright silk robes
and bruised foreign body their fears dissolved into laughter. Alarmed at the attention,
Mirza Saleh fled, though, as it happened, the man he was due to meet in Cambridge,
Professor Samuel Lee, was standing nearby and guessed that the strange figure at the
center of the commotion must be his Iranian visitor. But when in turn Mirza Saleh
spotted his host, to make matters worse, in his relief he briefly lost concentration
and slipped as he stepped down from the upturned coach. He fell flat-faced on the
muddy road, giving yet more mirth to the mob. Hoping to hide his embarrassment
until they lost interest, Mirza Saleh sought refuge in a nearby shop, but he could
still hear the shrieks and guffaws from outside as his unheralded appearance on the
outskirts of Cambridge was explained as that of the King of Hell or the Queen of
Pain, as a monstrous merman or as the coach-riding courier of the Angel of Death!
After every wise-crack, Mirza Saleh wrote in his diary, three hundred people burst
into laughter. Yet sitting in the shop with Professor Lee and recuperating with a
cup of coffee, Mirza Saleh was able to share with Lee and the shopkeeper his sense
of the humor of the incident that also colored his recounting of it in his journal.
After this taxing entrance to university life, Mirza Saleh was taken for supper at
Queens College by Professor Lee. All of the scholars to whom the Iranian was introduced at the university had close links to the evangelical project. Mirza Saleh recorded
dining on that first evening in the company of several other senior members of
Queens College, including the bursar Mr Jee and the chaplain (kashish, priest),
whom he remembered as being named Mandell. The former figure was Joseph Jee,
a Fellow of Queens between 1814 and 1829 who later served in the high office of
Proctor of the University.29 A rather more interesting figure was Mirza Salehs
other dining companion that evening, Revd William Mandell, who in line with the
evangelical character of the college was another of Cambridges noted evangelicals.
27
Shrz, Majmeh, 35052.

29
I am grateful to Revd Jonathan Holmes, Keeper of the Records at Queens, for help in identifying Jee
and Mandell.
28
816 Green
An influential Fellow of the college at the time of Mirza Salehs visit, Mandell was
Dean of Queens and later served as Vice-President and almost succeeded the evangelical President, Isaac Milner, on his death a few months after Mirza Salehs visit. As we
have seen earlier, Mandell was closely associated with the Church Missionary Society
and the Bible Society, and was a sufficiently clear supporter of the leading Cambridge
evangelical Charles Simeon to preach the service at his funeral several years later. A
taste of Mandells oratorical style may be gleaned from the text of a sermon that he
preached on the death of King George within a year of his meeting with Mirza
Saleh, which in classic evangelical mode he began with a reading from the Book of
Revelation before moving on to the topic of making England a nation of sincere
Christians.30
After his dinner with Jee and Mandell, Mirza Saleh was taken for a tour of the other
colleges nearby, including Trinity College. There in the college court his own interests
in scientific learning found a brief outlet as Mirza Saleh praised Trinity as the place
where Sir Isaac Newtonwhom he described as a philosopher who was both the
eyes and the lantern of Englandhad studied and where there stood a statue in his
memory. He also noted that the College possessed a great library, by which he
presumably referred to the famous library designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The
next evening Mirza Saleh spent the night at the house of Professor Lee and his wife,
which he described as lying around a mile and a half outside Cambridge, a reference
presumably to the village of Chesterton of which Lee was the curate.31 It is not clear
how long he spent at Lees vicarage and from the dates given in his journal it seems
that he may have spent up to a fortnight there. This may suggest that he spent this
time working with Lee on the latters Persian works, which by 1828 would include a
new and much-expanded edition of Joness Grammar of the Persian Language in his
own preface to which Lee acknowledged the service of the opinions of intelligent
and learned Persians whom I have had the opportunity to consult.32 Since aside
from the Iranian Ambassador Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan Shirazi (whose diary discusses
Ouseley but not Lee), the Iranian students were the only educated Iranians known to
have been in England during the years in which Lee was revising the Grammar, it is
almost certain that he made use of their expertise.33
We have evidence as well as deduction to rely on here. According to the memoir
written by Lees daughter, around 1818 (that is, when he became acquainted
with Mirza Saleh) Lee was also helped by a learned Persian to prepare a Persian
translation of the Old Testament to complement the Persian New Testament
30
William Mandell, The Blessedness of Dying in the Lord, a Sermon, Preached on Occasion of the Death
of King George the Third (Cambridge, 1820).
31
Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation, 16.
32
Sir William Jones A Grammar of the Persian Language, with Considerable Additions and Improvements by S. Lee, ed. by Samuel Lee, 9th ed. (London, 1828), xix.
33
Hasan Morselvand, ed., Hayratnmeh: Safarnmeh-ye Mrz Ab al-Hasan Khn lch be Landan
(Tehran, 1364/1986), translated as Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George,
180910: The Journal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans. and ed. by Margaret Morris Cloake
(London, 1988).
prepared by the Cambridge missionary Henry Martyn a few years earlier.34 According
to a contemporary newspaper report as well as Bible Society records, Lees main helper
was Mirza Khalil, the Indian language instructor at the East India College at Haileybury.35 But given the existing contacts between Lee and Mirza Saleh, and the time
Mirza Saleh spent as a guest in Lees vicarage, it is possible that Lee also availed
himself of the extremely rare opportunity to ask the help of an educated native
Persian speaker with his Bible translation.36 Mirza Khalil was, after all, an Indian
and not an Iranian and it was explicitly to a Persian helper that Lees daughter
referred. Another detail further clarifies the matter: by September 1819 Mirza
Khalils arguments with the governors of the East India College had forced him to
return to India and Lee was in need of a replacement.37 As we see below in a letter
written by Mirza Saleh himself, the Iranian declared that he had read several of
Lees Persian and Arabic works.38 Since all of these were either translations of scripture
or else evangelical tracts, we have clear evidence of the exposure of Mirza Saleh, one
of the chief proponents of Iranian modernization and founder of the first Iranian
newspaper, to evangelical writings.
The next act of co-operation between Mirza Saleh and Samuel Lee offers direct
evidence of the role of the Iranian travelers in the evangelicals careers, pointing to
another dimension of the British scholars motivations in allowing the Iranians
access to their circles. This came as part of the campaign to elect Lee as the Sir
Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, a campaign into which Mirza
Saleh and his Iranian party found themselves drawn.39 According to the biography
of Lee written by his daughter, when Lee was granted the professorship in 1818,
this was achieved on the basis of testimonials written by four native Persian gentlemen at that time residing in London, who testified to his thorough acquaintance with
the idiom and pronunciation, as well as the grammar of that language.40 The original
documents in the Cambridge University Archives show that this account is not quite
correct, since it was only Mirza Saleh who wrote a letter of recommendation in
February 1819, albeit doing so on behalf of his fellow Persian students as well as
34
Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation, 18. Lees expertise and awareness by the early 1820s of the
various scriptural translations made into Islamic languages over the previous centuries is made clear in
Lee, Remarks, chapter 5.
35
Account of the Rev. Mr. Lee, Oxford University and City Herald, 26 September 1818, back page:
Mr. Lee has in hand a new translation of the Old Testament into Persian, in conjunction with Mirza
Khaleel. Also BFBS Archive, BSA/D1/1/(457), Letters of Professor Samuel Lee.
36
The slight discrepancy in dates (the 1818 of Alice Lee versus the 1819 of Salehs recorded stay with
Lee) might also be explained either by the existence of the earlier visit we have suggested previously or by
the fact that Lees daughter was writing her fathers memoirs several decades later.
37
A brief account of Mirza Khalils career at the college is found in Andrew Hambling, The East India
Company at Haileybury, 18061857 ([n.p.], 2005), 38.
38
Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), p. 8.
39
On the foundation of the chair and on early modern Arabic scholarship in the universities more
generally, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1996).
40
Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation, 1920.
818 Green
himself.41 Nor were the Iranians the only Muslims involved in Lees election, for Lee
had also called on Mirza Khalil, the Indian teacher of Persian, Arabic and Hindustani
at the East India College at Haileybury, who had already worked on Lees Bible translations. Other referees included John Shakespear (17741858), professor of oriental
languages at the East India Companys Military Seminary at Addiscombe, and Lord
Teignmouth (17511834), president of the Bible Society and until recently Governor-General of Bengal. The latter persuasively explained that considering the difficulties which he [Lee] had to contend with, are such, as nothing, but the united power of
superior intellect, and persevering application, could have surmounted.42 By dint of
their epistolary recommendation, the Iranian students were placed side by side with
such key imperial and evangelical figures as Teignmouth and Shakespear, with
whom Mirza Saleh had in any case earlier briefly studied English (possibly offering
his own language skills in return).43
Lee required the testimonials as a consequence of his unconventional background
as a laboring man who was married with children before matriculating at the university. For all his accomplishments, he was disqualified from entering the Fellowship of
Queens (hence his residing in the college vicarage where Mirza Saleh had visited
him in 1818). Nonetheless, Lees linguistic gifts were sufficient to put bureaucratic
regulations aside, and on his graduation in 1818 the university agreed to appoint
him immediately to the professorship of Arabic, even though this required that he
be at least a Master of Arts (for which status he would have to wait several more
years). As a result, it was proposed that he be made an MA by royal decree and it
was in order for such a decree to be passed that the special testimonials were required
and the Persians were contacted as obvious referees.44 Given its importance in
documenting the Iranians paradoxical role in the evangelical ascendance at the
universities, it is worth quoting Mirza Salehs letter of recommendation at some
length:
The object of writing these few lines is this: a person has this day requested the
writer of this page, Mohammed Saulih, of Sheeraz, in the particular of information
and attestation of this humble [person] as respects the learning and accomplishments of Mr. Lee, in the Arabic and Persic [sic] languages:and was then desirous
that he should write his belief, in this particular, on this page. Mohammed Saulih, of
To the Honourable and Reverend the Vice Chancellor, Heads of Houses, and Members of the
Senate, of the University of Cambridge (privately printed letter from Lee containing the full text of
all seven testimonials), Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), 11 pp.
42
Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), p. 5. On earlier motivations behind the patronage of Arabic scholarship, see M. Feingold, Patrons and Professors: The Origins and Motives for the
Endowment of University Chairsin Particular the Laudian Professorship of Arabic, in The
Arabick Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. by G. A. Russell
(Leiden, 1994).
43
On Mirza Saleh and Shakespear, see Shrz, Majmeh, 16768.
44
I am grateful to Revd Jonathan Holmes, Keeper of the Records at Queens, for first alerting me to
the peculiar circumstances of Lees election to the Sir Thomas Adams chair.
41
Sheeraz, therefore represents, that, having occasionally met Mr. Lee, and having
seen both his Arabic and Persian writing, the above mentioned, in both the pronunciation and writing of Arabic, is eloquent and perfect; and in like manner, he is perfectly learned in the Persic. Upon the whole, this being the entire persuasion of your
servant:and in like manner the belief of all his [Persian] companions, who have
spoken with the above-mentioned [Lee] is this, that Mr. Lee, both in Persic and
Arabic, whether as regards pronunciation, or reading, or writing, is learned and
perfect.45
Given that the reputation of the Orientalists built on a foundation of linguistic
accomplishmentaccomplishment sufficient to translate Holy Writ without error
the testimonial of native speakers was crucial to Lees rise to the summit of the intellectual establishment. But though the need for testimonials explains one part of the
willingness of British evangelical scholars to co-operate with the Iranian heathens
in lending them access to the universities, it was also an ongoing and indeed structural
demand of a scholarship directed towards translating into Asian languages. There was
also the more general need for local knowledge. It was in this regard that, several years
later, Lees need for a co-operator resurfaced during his translation of polemics
exchanged between Henry Martyn and the defenders of Islam whom Martyn had
faced in Shiraz a few years before the Iranian students reached London.46 Dedicating
this attempt to develop and refute the Religious Opinions of the Mohammedans of
Persia to the First Lord of the Treasury, Lee included in his Controversial Tracts on
Christianity and Mohammedanism the texts of both the Persian theological sermons
made by Martyn and the replies to them by the Iranian scholars, Mirza Ibrahim and
Muhammad Reza of Hamadan.47 However, neither Lee nor any other Englishman
had any idea of who Martyns opponents were. Fortunately, while Lee was preparing
his edition in 1823, he heard that his former co-operator Mirza Saleh had returned to
London on a diplomatic mission, and so wrote to him in Persian for information on
the identity of Martyns disputants. Ever keen to demonstrate his talents, Lee
reprinted his own Persian letter and Mirza Salehs helpful reply in the introduction
to the Controversial Tracts, referring to himself in the self-deprecating Persian
45
Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), pp. 89. The letter, addressed to the Vice
Chancellor, was composed in Persian and here translated in literal form; the handwritten Persian document appears to have been lost. The letter was dated Rabi al-Sani 1234 (February 1819), being the same
month in which the other testimonials were written. A somewhat amended extract from the letter is also
printed in Lee, A Scholar of a Past Generation, 20.
46
Revd Samuel Lee, BD, Controversial Tracts on Christianity and Mohammedanism, by H. Martyn and
Some of the Most Eminent Writers of Persia, Translated and Explained; to which is Appended an Additional
Tract (London, 1828). For a recent study of the debates, see Abbas Amanat, Mujtahids and Missionaries:
Sh Responses to Christian Polemics in the Early Qajar Period, in Religion and Society in Qajar Iran, ed.
by Robert Gleave (London, 2005).
47
For the translations of Mirza Ibrahim and Muhammad Rezas texts, see Lee, Controversial Tracts,
171, 161450. Lee had come into the possession of Martyns manuscripts through the help of James
Morier, who had brought Martyns papers back from Constantinople after his death at Tokat in 1812.
820 Green
idiom as Mirza Salehs bandeh-ye kamtarin or humblest of servants.48 For all his
politesse, Lee was unmoved by any of the Muslims arguments he included in the
Controversial Tracts and ended his own Rejoinder to them with a warning of the
Second Coming of Christ, when the Idolator, the Hindoo, the Mohammedan,
and the Jew, [shall] fall down before him, offer the tribute of sacrifice and praise,
and be made his children.49
The same pattern of evangelical interaction in Cambridge was repeated in Oxford,
where the guide of Mirza Saleh and his fellow student Mirza Jafar was none other than
the most senior of the universitys evangelicals, Professor John David Macbride (1778
1868), Lord Almoners Professor in Arabic and holder of other influential positions,
notably as Principal of Magdalen Hall.50 In Mirza Salehs journal entry for 11 October
1818, we get a clear sense of the amity with which the Iranians were received as useful guests:
Today we went to see Mister Hill and together with him went to see Doctor
Macbride, who is a calm and humane person.51 As well as the languages of
Europe, Macbride is a master of Arabic, such that he is the Arabic teacher of
Oxford. We ate breakfast together and then went along with him to visit the colleges.
We saw the chapel of New College, which is a church of splendid appearance.52
Since he described him as a church priest (kashish) and an occasional college teacher,
the Mister Hill whom Mirza Saleh describes appears to have been Revd John Hill
(17861855), an evangelical associate of Isaac Crouch and his St Edmund Hall
who a few years after meeting the Persians founded the Oxford branch of the
Church Missionary Society.53 As well as hosting Mirza Saleh in Oxford, Hill introduced him to a range of other university figures, including a nephew of the former
prime minister, William Pitt. Together with Macbride, Mirza Saleh recounted, they
also visited the Bodleian Library and there inspected its collection of Arabic and
Persian manuscripts.54 Although once again the journal contains no direct statement
of collaboration with Macbride, the visit to Oxford did coincide with Macbrides
Arabic translation of the New Testament. Moreover, a few months later Mirza
Saleh gained an apprenticeship in the workshop of the Bible Societys oriental
48
Lee, Controversial Tracts, cxviii. The original correspondence between Mirza Saleh and Lee is preserved in the Archive of the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge University Library), BSA/D1/
1/185186.
49
Lee, Remarks, 583.
50
I have consulted the small collection of materials related to Macbride in the Hertford College
archive. However, none of Macbrides private papers shed additional light on the meetings with the Iranians. I am grateful to Dr Tony Barnard, college archivist, for providing access to Macbrides papers.
51
I have clarified this identification by consulting the original manuscript of the travelogue: BL, Oriental and India Office Collections, Add. 24,034, folio 157v.
52
Shrz, Majmeh, 321.
53
J. S. Reynolds, Hill, John, in The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, 17301860, 2
vols., ed. by D. M. Lewis (Oxford, 1995).
54
language printer, typesetter and type-caster Richard Watts (d. 1844).55 Mirza Salehs
period of training at Wattss workshop coincided with the very months in which Macbrides Arabic translation of the Psalms was being printed there.56 After Mirza Saleh
left the workshop to return to Iran, in the early 1820s the same printer, Richard
Watts, took on Solomon Hyder, the son of the Arabic-script writing master at the
East India College Gholam Haydar (d. 1823), to fulfill presumably similar duties of
checking proofs for errors that the printer was not qualified to spot.57 As Leslie
Howsam has noted, such foreign assistants were an inherent requirement of evangelical printing which relied on native readers to ensure the accuracy and fluency of
the translations no less than the typesetting.58 Between the colleges of Oxford and
the printing establishments of London, Professor Macbride and Mirza Saleh
entered a relationship of mutual convenience in which ultimately won the Iranian
the training in the art of printing that he had traveled to England to acquire.
The Question of Motivations
If the motivations of the evangelical professors are clear enough, we must also address
the more complex question of the motivations of their Iranian co-operators. We are
not using here the framework of resistance and opposition, or even necessarily
invoking a picture of the persuasive means, the quotidian processes of hegemony theorized by Edward Said.59 In the period with which we are concerned, with regard to
traveling high status Iranians at least, assumptions of either political or cultural hegemony appear misplaced. At the human level on which these interactions took place the
terms look rather different and we should be wary of projecting a cultural imperialism
framework into the conscience of the period. In the early 1800s, the Bible translations
of the evangelicals were understood as essentially humanitarian projects in which
Christianity was the moral framework for such causes as the abolition of slavery.
What is clear is that the tone of his journal suggests that Mirza Saleh actually liked
his evangelical friends; and for all their rhetoric against the false religions of Asia in
their personal dealings these were often humane, god-fearing and generous men.
Certainly, his journal as whole suggests that it was among evangelicals that he was
made most welcome in Englandin London and the West Country no less than
the universitiesand if this was in part due to his usefulness to their causes it also
probably had more than a little to do with their charitable dispositions. The fact
that Mirza Saleh was an Iranian and not an Indian is also significant: Mirza Saleh
Shrz, Majmeh, 345, 353. For fuller discussion of the apprenticeship, see Green, Journeymen,
Middlemen.
56
Kitb Mazmr Dd al-Malik wa al-Nab [Arabic] (London, 1819). The Testament subsequently
appeared from the same workshop as Kitb al-Ahd al-Jadd, yan, Injl al-Muqaddas, li-Rabbin Yas alMash [Arabic] (London, 1821).
57
Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 16001857
(Delhi, 2004), 12123.
58
Howsam, Cheap Bibles, 22.
59
E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), 131 and chapter 3.
55
822 Green
and his fellow travelers had no experience of British rule in their homelands and in the
period of their journey Britain was an erstwhile ally against Russia.
Yet there were also more pragmatic reasons. Not least among these was the need for
foreign travelers to earn a wage; in the case of the Iranians we know from various
sources of their financial desperation after their initial funds ran out.60 Since immigrant teachers of languages like Persian commanded high fees in early nineteenth
century Britain, the possibility of financial gain presents itself as a clear possibility.61
When such remuneration was not in cash, it could be in kind. A system of reciprocal
favors oiled the social machinery of patronage in England no less than Iran and India
in this period. Such is the logic of patronage that when Mirza Saleh and Mirza Jafar
did favors for their evangelical friendshelping with translations, writing letters of
referencethey expected something in return.
Aside from the social introductions that we know the Iranians received, and the
financial remuneration that their circumstances suggest they may have accepted, in
Mirza Jafar and Mirza Salehs case we have a fairly clear picture of what was
gained in return. As we have already seen, Mirza Saleh gained his apprenticeship
with the Bible Societys oriental language printer through his dealings with Lee and
Macbride, both of whom were closely connected with the Bible Society. Through
his other Oxford host, Revd John Hill, Mirza Saleh was also introduced to the proprietor of one of Englands first industrialized paper mills in the Oxfordshire village
of Hampton Gay, of which Hill was curate. On the strength of the introduction,
Mirza Saleh made an inspection tour of a paper mill powered by one of the first
steam-driven Fourdrinier paper-making machines in Britain, providing him with
the ability to closely inspect one of the new print-related machines that were of
such interest to him.62 Fittingly, the Hampton Gay mill was also one of the paper
mills supplying Oxfords Bible printing industry that was expanding so rapidly in
this period as the publishing keystone to the internal evangelizing of the British poor.
This brings us back to the key contention of this article, that Iranian scholars such
as Mirza Saleh found evangelicalism to be the necessary appendage to accessing the
scientific and mechanical knowledge which they had traveled to England to acquire.
This is not only seen in connection with the Iranian partys relationship with university Orientalists, but also with scientific scholars for whom Christianity remained an
essential part of their intellectual vision. For the Iranians exposure to evangelicalism
was not limited to their visits to the universities and the crucial figure here was Dr
Olinthus Gregory (17741841), who features regularly throughout Mirza Salehs
memoir of his four years in England. A mathematician by profession, Gregory was
also a noted astronomer who wrote a number of works on the topics of his expertiseLessons Astronomical and Philosophical (1793) and Mathematics for Practical
60
On the long diplomatic wrangle over the Iranian students finances, see Barrett, A Memoir of
Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph DArcy.
61
Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism, 10336.
62
For full discussion and reconstruction of the visit, see Green, Paper Modernity?
Men (1825), among othersthat were well-regarded by his contemporaries.63 Gregory

was something of a polymath, having been one of just a handful of contributors to a
little-known encyclopedia entitled Pantologia, which was published in 1813, two years
before the Iranian students arrived in Britain.64 Yet as with the Bible printer Richard
Watts, here again scientific learning was embedded in a Christian social no less than
intellectual context, for in addition to being the mathematics professor at the Royal
Military Academy at Woolwich, Gregory also specialized in theological writing. In
the most important of these religious works, which was issued in the year in which
the Iranians reached London, Gregory openly blended his theological, military and
scientific interests, dedicating his book on the Evidences, Doctrines, and Duties of
the Christian Religion to Lieutenant Colonel William Mudge, the second-incommand of the Royal Military Academy at which Mirza Reza and Mirza Jafar
were about to begin studying.65
On the evidence of his travelogue, both Mirza Saleh and Mirza Jafar turned to
Gregory for advice on numerous occasions and it was Gregory who facilitated many
of their subsequent intellectual introductions, including those in Bristol, Bath and
Windsor. There Mirza Saleh and Mirza Jafar visited various scholars (such as the
astronomer Sir William Herschel (17381822) through whom Mirza Saleh acquired
a modern reflecting telescope) as well as industrializing manufactories of glass, brass
and cloth, though once again their intellectual tour of the West Country was punctuated with introductions to such leading evangelicals as the Bishop of Gloucester,
Henry Ryder.66 To all intents and purposes, Gregory may on this account be
placed as one of the key mediators of modern scientific learning to Iran in the
opening decades of the nineteenth century. But by 1815, when the Iranians arrived
in London, Gregory had also turned towards theology, responding to the rationalizing
trend set by William Paleys Natural Theology of 1802 by writing his Letters to a
Friend, on the Evidences, Doctrines, and Duties of the Christian Religion.67 In the
Letters, Gregory drew on his knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to formulate
a substantial rejection of the Deistic premise of natural religion and by extension of
the arguments that Paley had presented in his Natural Theology. Defending the truth
claims of scripture and the need for revelation to transmit knowledge inaccessible to
reason alone, Gregory attempted to undermine the rationalistic presumption of what
63
Olinthus Gregory, Lessons Astronomical and Philosophical for the Amusement and Instruction of
British Youth, 5th edition (London, 1815), Mathematics for Practical Men (London, 1825). In a
pointer to his wider acquaintances, Gregory dedicated the latter book of mathematics for engineers to
no less a figure than Thomas Telford (17571834).
64
J. M. Good, O. Gregory and N. Bosworth assisted by other gentlemen of eminence, Pantologia: A
New (Cabinet) Cyclopdia (London, 1813).
65
Olinthus Gregory, Letters to a Friend, on the Evidences, Doctrines, and Duties of the Christian Religion (London, 1851 [1815]), iii.
66
On the telescope, see Shrz, Majmeh, 35557. For details of the meetings in the West Country,
see Green, Among the Dissenters.
67
Gregory, Letters to a Friend.
824 Green
he termed as the absurdity of Deism.68 Defending the existence of mysteries that

cannot be understood by reason, Gregory drew on his learning to provide mathematical equations meant to serve his argument of the limits of mathematical or other
forms of rational knowledge, going so far in his defense of the mysteries as to state
that even maths has its incomprehensible elements.69 Echoing the somewhat later
writings of the university evangelical Orientalists Samuel Lee and John Macbride,
Gregory also wrote a spirited defense of the miraculous that bore many similarities
to the arguments that the missionary Henry Martyn used against the Shiite skeptics
of Shiraz. In the circular argument beloved by fundamentalists, for Gregory it was
possible to believe in miracles because the Bible testifies that they happened; the
truth claims of the Bible were in turn credible due to the evidence of miracles.70
For a leading mathematician employed to train the nations best military engineers
in the subtle arts of the trigonometry of mortar-aiming and the geometry of bridgebuilding, Gregorys writings exemplify the way in which early nineteenth century
British men of science were often still committed to positions of extreme scriptural
literalism and to rejecting the epistemological reach of experimental method
beyond practical spheres of knowledge.
What is particularly interesting about Gregorys attacks on Paleys rationalist
natural theology is that the Iranians appear not only to have been exposed to
Paley but also to have found his teachings attractive. For when questioned on their
religious opinions Mirza Saleh and Mirza Jafar were recorded as describing Paley as
their preferred Christian theologian. According to a report on the Iranians in The
Times in December 1818, Saleh has read Paleys Natural Theology; and both
[Saleh and Jafar] are curious in their inquiries as to this department of our literature,
as well as that of ethics.71 Even if Paleys distinctly rationalist kind of Christian theology was taught to the Iranians alongside the more practical mechanical mathematics
that they had traveled to learn, the contrary theological opinions of Gregory, who was
a perpetual figure in the Iranians lives in London, suggest that their exposure to Christianity was a complex one in which they were not so much indoctrinated into a seamlessly coherent doctrinal system as inducted into the debates, rifts and disputes that
more truly characterized British religiosity in the early 1800s. This more nuanced
picture appears to be confirmed by the fact that Mirza Saleh was able to include in
his journal what appears to have been the earliest Persian account of English religious
Dissenting groups such as Unitarians and Baptists.72
As we have noted, we are able to suppose some familiarity of Mirza Salehand
particularly of his friend Mirza Jafarwith Gregorys work because, through Gregorys employment as the professor of mathematics at Woolwich, he acted as Mirza
68
Gregory, Letters to a Friend, 65.

Gregory, Letters to a Friend, 46; on the uselessness of equations for solving the divine mysteries, see
5861.
70
Gregory, Letters to a Friend, 12956.
71
The Persian Princes, The Times, 7 December 1818, p. 3.
72
For fuller discussion, see Green, Among the Dissenters..
69
Jafars tutor and guardian. Gregorys relationship with Mirza Jafar was sufficiently
close for the mathematician to personally take him on a guided tour of Cambridge
as testified in the report in The Times from September 1818.73 Gregory also crops
up on numerous occasions in Mirza Salehs travelogue offering advice on different
matters and appearing instrumental in their religious meetings in the West
Country. Given that we have already read how curious in their inquiries into theological matters Mirza Saleh and Mirza Jafar were, it seems probable that either or both
of them would have discussed with Gregory his ideas on the irrational mysteries of
theology and the intellectual limits of the mathematics and science which he was
nonetheless employed to teach Mirza Salehs travel companions Mirza Jafar and
Mirza Reza. Gregory also introduced the two Iranians to a series of other evangelicals.
These included the celebrated bluestocking Hannah More (17451833) during
their tour of the English West Country, and in London the founder of the Church
Building Commission, Lord Percy (third Duke of Northumberland, 17851847).74
What is interesting here is that both More and Percy represented a expressly religious
vision of social progress through their self-consciously Christian projects of bringing
education to rural children and welfare to the urban poor, so exposing the Iranians
to not merely an abstracted theological Christianity but (in Hannah Mores terms)
a practical Christianity of social activism. Indeed, the very title of the book which
Hannah More presented to Mirza Saleh was Practical Piety.75
For Gregorys part, we have no evidence to suggest that the mathematicians association with his Iranian students led to any radical adoption of liberal principles, and in
the years after their departure Gregory busied himself with editing the sermons of his
role model, the Baptist preacher Robert Hall (17641831), in which he included a
sermon which Hall had delivered in London in the year before the students arrival
there and in which Hall expatiated on the virtues and necessity of converting the
heathen of Asia. It is a sermon which contains one of the most vivid statements of
missionary zeal ever made by an Englishman, as Hall stated that in India, Satan maintains an almost undisputed empire, and the powers of darkness, secure of their dominion, riot and revel at their pleasure.76 However, despite the more discomforting
dimensions of such evangelical opinions, the Iranians were able to make use of such
religious enthusiasts as Gregory for the practical purposes of acquiring the skills
they had traveled to access. In the case of Mirza Jafar, Gregory taught him the
skills of the military engineer that on his return home would earn him the office
and title of mohandes bashi, engineer-in-chief.
73
The Times, 29 September 1818, p. 3. I am grateful to A. R. Morton, Archivist, Royal Military
Academy, Sandhurst for help in identifying Olinthus Gregory.
74
Shrz, Majmeh, 318. On Lord Percys role in founding the CBC, see Michael Port, Six Hundred
New Churches: The Church Building Commission, 18181856 (London, 1961), 29.
75
Shrz, Majmeh, 332. Hannah More, Practical Piety, or The Influence of the Religion of the Heart
on the Conduct of the Life (London, 1811).
76
Olinthus Gregory, The Works of Robert Hall, MA (London, 1832), 298. The sermon (pp. 275316)
was originally preached in London in 1814.
826 Green
The curious submission of the new scientific knowledge to the orthodox demands
of Anglican theology expressed in the religious writings of Olinthus Gregory is also
seen in the case of another of the English pioneers of the new learning whom the
Iranian students sought out. This was the Reverend William Buckland (1784
1856), the renowned geologist and churchman who in 1814 had began to deliver
his famous series of lectures on geology and the as yet unnamed science of paleontology at Oxfords Ashmolean Museum. Although we have no evidence that Mirza Saleh
himself came into contact with Buckland, we do know that his other friend Mirza
Hajji Baba Afshar (who belonging to the first party of Iranian students had been in
London since 1813) visited Buckland shortly before Mirza Salehs arrival in
England. Their meeting is testified to in the existence among Hajji Babas possessions
of an English translation of one of Georges Cuviers geological textbooks which Buckland inscribed to him in Oxford on 12 June 1815.77 In line with the revolutionary
sentiments of the France in which he rose to fame in the 1790s and 1800s, Cuvier
(17691832) was a strong supporter of the notion of catastrophic geological (and
thence biological) revolutions.78 Given the date of the gift, the book that was given
to Hajji Baba must have been Robert Kerrs translation of Cuviers Discours sur les
rvolutions de la surface du globe, published in Edinburgh and London in 1813.79
Given the role that geological teaching would later play at the Dar al-Funun no less
than the crucial role of geological knowledge in the industrial advances of the nineteenth century, Hajji Baba provides an important early date of initial Iranian exposure
to the new science of stones.
On the one hand, the gift of the book is important material evidence for the transfer of scientific ideas from Europe to Iran, and given the linguistic and intellectual
expertise Hajji Baba gathered during his seven years residence in England we have
no reason to doubt that he read the treatise. At the same time, the setting of the
gift is a reminder that the new discoveries of Cuvier and his supporters posed quite
as many problems for European intellectuals as we might suppose they did in Iran.
For although William Buckland was happy to present his Iranian visitor with
Cuviers book, in his own career Buckland was careful to distance himself from
Cuviers revolutionary claims. In Bucklands inaugural lecture as Reader in Geology
at Oxford in 1819 in which he presented an apologia for the lectures he had been
delivering at the university for the past five years, he was punctiliously careful to
Abbs Eqbl, Ketb-e Hjj Bb va Dstn-e Nokhostn Mohasseln-e rn dar Farang, Ydgr,
1, no. 5 (1364/194445): 33. On the transfer and local adaptation of European science in India during
this period, see Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in
South Asia and Europe, 16501900 (New York, 2007).
78
For the best overview of Cuviers career, see Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and
Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester, 1984).
79
Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, trans. by Robert Kerr, with mineralogical notes and
an account of Cuviers geological discoveries by Professor Jameson (Edinburgh and London, 1813). The
professor of natural history at Edinburgh University from 1803 until his death half a century later, Robert
Jameson (17741854) was a strong supporter of Cuviers theories and was later to distance himself from
Bucklands scripturalist geology. See Jameson, Robert, q.v., ODNB.
77
make it plain to all that geology coincides with the records of Sacred History.80
Showing himself more an orthodox supporter of the natural theology of Paley to
which the Iranians had already been exposed than to Cuviers infinite series of revolutions, Buckland used his lecture and its much-expanded version in print to argue that
geology contributes proofs to Natural Theology strictly in harmony with those
derived from other branches of natural history.81 Buckland elaborated these godly
reassurances for the rest of his career, particularly in his two-volume Geology and
Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. There Buckland used his
vast collection of fossils to present scientific evidence for the theological proof by
design of Gods existence by way of the design of fossil vertebrate animals or fossilized
vegetables and mollusks, devoting an entire chapter to arguing for the consistency of
geological studies with sacred history.82 This display of conservative intellectual discretion eventually landed Buckland the canonry of Oxfords Christ Church and the
deanship of Westminster.83 What is therefore clear is that even when the Iranians
were able to meet with representatives of the new sciences in Englands universities,
they were encountering members of a society in which scientific knowledge still in
large part operated within an expressly Christian conception of the universe.
Conclusions
While the contributions to Iranian scientific knowledge of the early parties of student
travelers have long been known in outline, in the previous pages we have seen how the
scientific knowledge they sought in England remained deeply embedded in Christian
concerns. In intellectual no less than social terms, the science they acquired was in
many respects Christian science and at the very least the Iranians found themselves
deeply exposed to Christian ideas in their pursuit of science and technology. While
encounters with the occasional non-evangelical scientific scholarsuch as the astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel (17381822)do crop up in Mirza Salehs
travelogue, the larger proportion of scholars he described, and those with whom the
Iranian students appear to have been in more regular contact, were either university
evangelicals such as Samuel Lee and John Macbride or governmental and military
80
Revd William Buckland, BD FRS MGS, Vindici Geologic; or The Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, in an Inaugural Lecture delivered before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of a Readership in Geology by His Royal Highness the Prince Regent (Oxford, 1820), 23.
81
Buckland, Vindici Geologic, 18.
82
Revd William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 2
vols. (London, 1836), 1: chapter 2.
83
For overviews of Bucklands career I have relied on Mrs [Elizabeth Oke] Gordon, The Life and
Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., sometime Dean of Westminster, Twice President of
the Geological Society, and First President of the British Association (London, 1894). Unfortunately the
latter text contains no reference to Bucklands meeting with Hajji Baba. A hint of Bucklands oriental
interests may be surmised from the existence of Ouseleys Asiatic Researches in his library. See
J. C. Stevens (auctioneer), A Catalogue of the Valuable Scientific Library of the Late Very Rev. Dr.
Buckland, Dean of Westminster (London, n.d. [1857]), item no. 206.
828 Green
proponents of Christian outreach such as Sir Gore Ouseley and Olinthus Gregory.
Even on the one occasion when, aside from visits to Oxford and Cambridge, the
Iranian students ventured outside greater London during Mirza Saleh and Mirza
Jafars tour of the English West Country, they spent their time either visiting factories
or meeting religious enthusiasts such as Hannah More (17451833), whose Christian writings Mirza Saleh promised he would publish on his return to Iran.84
If the scale of the Iranians interaction with self-consciously Christian scholars was
partly a result of the broader character of scientific knowledge in Europe at this time, it
was magnified by the coincidence of their travels with the rise of the evangelical
societies based in London and the evangelical Orientalism at the universities, developments which were themselves by-products of the moral anxieties generated by Britains
imperial expansion in Asia. For Iran, the practical outcomes of these evangelical
encounters were significant and concrete. The clearest example was when Mirza
Saleh became the apprentice of the Bible printer Richard Watts and thereby acquired
the skills as well as the portable printing press and type he took back with him to Iran
to become the most important figure in the development of Iranian printing and subsequent founder of the first newspaper in Iranian history. Mirza Salehs companions
also brought back with them important contributions to Iranian knowledge of European history and society as well as science and technology. Mirza Jafar became the
countrys chief engineer (mohandes bashi) and in 1847 published a lithographic textbook on mathematics entitled Kholasat al-Hesab while Mirza Reza wrote a Persian
history of Napoleon.85 For his part Mirza Hajji Baba Afshar, the member of the
first student party whom we have seen meeting with the geologist William Buckland,
became the personal physician of the Crown Prince Abbas Mirza and the leading
Iranian medical expert of his period.
The relationship we have seen between mobile Middle Eastern intellectuals and the
evangelicals based at the English universities was not limited to Iranians. The most
notable Arab example is Faris Ahmad al-Shidyaq (180487).86 A Lebanese Christian
and later a convert to Islam, Shidyaq was first drawn into English circles on Malta,
where he worked with George Percy Badger (181588), missionary and Arabic
printer at the Church Missionary Societys early outpost on the island.87 Shidyaqs
work with Badger saw him eventually brought to Cambridge, where in the 1850s
84
William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Hannah More, 2 vols. (London, 1836), 246, drawing on
Mores own diary. For Mirza Salehs account of the meeting, see Shrz, Majmeh, 33132. On his
West Country religious encounters more generally, see Green, Among the Dissenters.
85
Details of these and similar scientific books are found in Akram Masd, ed., Fehrest-e Ketbhi
Chp-e Sang-ye rn Maujd dar Ketbkhneh-ye Dneshgh-ye Tehrn (Tehran, 1379s/2001), 136
39; and Sadqa Soltnfar, ed., Fehrest-e Kotob-e Dars-ye Chp-e Sang Maujd dar Ketbkhneh-ye
Mell-ye Jomhr-ye Eslm-ye rn (Tehran, 1376s/1998), 9394. More generally, see Iraj Afshar,
Book Translations as a Cultural Activity in Iran, 18061896, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of
Persian Studies, 41 (2003).
86
Ahmad Fris al-Shidyq, Kitb al-Rihlah al-mawsma bil-Wsita il Marifat Mlit wa Kashf
al-Mukhabb an Funn Awrubb [Arabic] (Tunis, 1238/1867).
87
Geoffrey Roper, George Percy Badger (18151888), British Society for Middle Eastern Studies
Bulletin 11 (1984).
he worked with the Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, Thomas Jarrett (1805
82), and his successor, Henry Griffin Williams (c. 181570). With Jarrett, Shidyaq
oversaw direct translations into Arabic from the Hebrew Testament, while with Williams he worked on Arabic translations of Sunday School stories, as well as a new
Arabic grammar.88 Yet like the Iranians, Shidyaq used these evangelical scholarly contacts towards his own ends and much of his spare time in England was spent learning
about the advances in scientific knowledge. These topics later featured prominently in
his Arabic travelogue of his European travels, while like Mirza Saleh and the Bible
Society, Shidyaq later used the printing skills he learned with the Church Missionary
Society to become one of the pioneers of Arabic newspaper printing. Such as it is, the
achievement of this essay has been to identify for the first time the series of English
interlocutors encountered by the Iranian student party of 181519. In so doing, an
attempt has been made to substantively map the interwoven religious and intellectual
trends to which they were exposed during the four years in England that amounted to
the fullest Iranian exposure to a Western European society by that date. Having met
the black-gowned clerics at Englands universities and found them more likely to be
experts on theology than technology, for Mirza Saleh it made perfect sense to describe
the colleges of Oxford in his Persian journal as madrasas.
88
For details of the translations, see Missionary Register for MDCCCLIV Containing the Principal
Transactions of the Various Institutions for Propagating the Gospel, vol. 42 (1854), 455456. The
grammar appeared as Faris El-Shidiac, A Practical Grammar of the Arabic Language: with Interlineal
Reading Lessons, Dialogues and Vocabulary (London, 1856), with a second edition under Williamss
name in 1866.

2011 570511

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

2011 570511

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

This article was downloaded by: [2.188.96.

The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Iranian Studies, volume 44, number 6, November 2011

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 809

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 811

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

problem in reconstructing the collaboration is that in their desire to promote their

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 813

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 815

Shrz, Majmeh, 35052.

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 817

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 819

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 821

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 823

Men (1825), among othersthat were well-regarded by his contemporaries.63 Gregory

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

he termed as the absurdity of Deism.68 Defending the existence of mysteries that

Gregory, Letters to a Friend, 65.

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 825

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 827

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

Downloaded by [2.188.96.194] at 05:49 18 February 2014

The Madrasas of Oxford 829

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen