Improving Experiences: Eighteenth-Century European Encounters with Arabs

ABSTRACT

This article shows how some early-modern British travellers found in the idea of travelling among and writing about Arabs an opportunity to reflect on a changing society at home. In Enlightenment Britain, many philosophers and writers thought of economic achievements as the roadmap to civility, humanity and progress. Many conservative moralists and clergymen of the period, however, protested this ideology and associated excessive materialism with moral decline, but they were not the dominant force in society. British travel writings about Arabs during the period confirmed and unsettled this dominant discourse. In these accounts, the images of primitive and polite Arabs appeared as screens upon which British anxieties about improvement were projected. This paper concludes with the contention that British travel writers appeared more concerned about their own society than about those about whom they wrote.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• Ishmael
• Arabs
• encounter
• eighteenth century British writings
• orientalism
• polite
• barbaric
• primitive

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Two important studies influenced the pattern of scholarship of European encounters with non-Europeans in the period between the Second World War and the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. The first was Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, first published in 1947 and translated to English in 1972 under the title Dialectic of Enlightenment. The second important study which influenced the field is Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).

2 In the 1730s, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, a Tory politician and political philosopher in England, wrote against the rampant culture of commercialism in his country. ‘Money, the Root of all Evil … binds together Persons of the Most opposite Complexions, and is a more lasting Tie than Honour, Friendship, Relation, Consanguinity or Unity of Affections’, he wrote for The Craftsman, (Vol I, 1731), 125. An English poet of the period, William Collins in his 1742 poem Hassan; Or the Camel Driver, contrasts the virtue of poverty with the dread of wealth: ‘Thrice Happy they, the wise contend the poor/ From Lust of Wealth, and the dread of death secure!/ They tempt no desert and no griefs they find;/ Peace Rules the day, where reason rules the mind’, The Complete Works of William Collins, Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith, ed., Epes Sargent (New York: G.P Putnam& Sons, 1871), 32. On the corruption of the culture of commercialism of the period, see John Brown’s An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: Printed for L Davis and C. Reymers, 1758).

3 This view about the great medieval Arab contribution to arts and sciences appeared in many accounts during the period. William Eton (1798: 195-6) wrote: ‘Under the splendid reign of Abdurrahman, the founder of the Arabian monarchy in Spain, it assumed a more civilised form. That political sovereign promoted intermarriages between Mahomedan and Christian subjects and favoured the natural propensity of the Arabs to literature and science, at a time when the rest of mankind were sunk in ignorance and barbarism’. This view on the influence of Arabs on medieval Europe also appeared in the example put forth earlier in the century by the writer of the chapter on Arabia in The Modern Part of The Universal History Compiled from Original Writers’ By the Authors of the Antients which will Perfect the Work, and Render it A Complete Body of History From the Earliest Account of Time, to the Present. In a footnote, the author (1765: 35) cites a letter sent by one Mr Ames, the secretary to the Society of Antiquarians in London, to the famous English astronomer and physician Dr John Bevis. In the letter Ames wrote: ‘ … our numerical characters were first brought into England at the return of Richard I from the holy wars, and that probable our people learned them among the Saracens [Medieval Arabs]’.

4 The English translator (1730: ix) of Jean de La Roque’s A Voyage to Arabia the Happy: By the Way of the Eastern Ocean, and the Streights of the Red Sea Performed by the French for the Firs Time A.D. 1798, 1709, 1710, recalled how ‘Ockley invites all traders, and other persons who have any such letters by them to communicate them to him; because he is persuaded that these sorts of letters, which discover to us the genius of the language and the Eastern way of expression, will be very useful for the clearing up several passages of the holy scriptures’. The English translator (1732: 96) of The Travels of the Chevalier d'Arvieux in Arabia the Desert ; Written by Himself and Publish'd by Mr. De la Roque wrote a fascinating footnote about the Biblical origin of the Arabs: ‘The Arabs in general have two Originals, they derive the first one from Joktan, Shem’s Great grandson, whose children peopled the Peninsula, since called Arabia, from the name Jarab one of his sons, or from Arabat, the name of a Country in the same Peninsula. The second Original of the Arabs is what they derive from Ishmael, Abraham’s and Hagar’s Son, who came and settled himself in the same Place those first and ancient Arabs and was the Father of the Arabian Ishmaelites, some tribes of whom applied themselves to trade and husbandry; and the others, the greater number, possessed the deserts and led a sort of life which they thought the most agreeable to their condition and Original … whom the Scriptures likewise calls Kedarens, Hagarens, and sometimes the Children of the East’. Robert Heron (1792: xii), the Scottish translator of Carsten Niebuhr’s Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries in the East, wrote: travel writings about Arabs ‘throw much new light on the historical events, the laws, the worship, and the customs recorded in the Old Testament’. Billie Melman (2002:109) argues shows how nineteenth-century European accounts about the regions often associated Arabia and its inhabitants with the textual universe of the Bible. These accounts, Melman maintained, were written by middle class and fervent Christian travellers whose journeys mainly aimed ‘to corroborate God’s revealed text’. The author (1756: 33) of the chapter on Arabia in The Modern Part of The Universal History Compiled from Original Writers’ By the Authors of the Antients which will Perfect the Work, and Render it A Complete Body of History From the Earliest Account of Time, to the Present argued that ‘ Some derive’ the name of Arabia ‘from the Hebrew … Harabi, which signifies a robber or freebooter, as that nation is known to have always bee; others from another signification of that Hebrew word implying mixture, or a mixt multitude … and are accordingly styled by the prophet Jeremiah, ‘the mixed people that dwell in the wilderness’’. The same trope about Arabs as the inhabitants of a Biblical deserts, a changeless people in a changeless land Rosalynn Haynes (2020: 318-19) argues, appeared in many nineteenth-century travel accounts such as those of Richard Francis Burton, Charles Doughty and Edward Robinson.

5 Henry Home (Lord Kames), the philosopher known in eighteenth-century Scotland for his ardent support for agricultural improvements never travelled in Arabia. Yet Kames (1775: 202) was fascinated with the extent to which the material conditions of Arabs influence their manners, especially their work ethics and also their treatment of women: ‘It is the business of women among the wandering Arabs of Africa to card, spin, and weave and to manage other household affairs. They milk the cattle, grind, bake, brew, dress the victuals, and bring home wood and water. They even take care of their husbands’ horses … They would also be obliged … to dig, sow, reap their corn; but luckily for them the Arabs live entirely on plunder’. James Dunbar (1781: 238) associated the primitive conditions of living in deserts with ancient virtues now lost in modern Europe: ‘a wild race from Arabia … proved an overmatch for a valiant and hardy nation’. The reference to the Arabs here as ‘a wild race’ recalls the Biblical image of the Arabs being the wild Ishmaelites of the deserts. The professor of laws at the University of Glasgow, John Millar, (1779: 209), also referred to the primitive conditions of Arabs to give credence to his argument about the impact of material progress on the people’s.

6 John Dwyer (1987: 2) notes that ‘The much-used phrase ‘the age of improvement’ needs to be understood as a cultural imperative rather than strictly factual observation. Its meaning rested in a critical way on the civic consciousness and discourse of those patriotic Scotsmen who linked economic advancement and polite learning with the creation of a stable modern polity’.

7 In Political Reflections Relating to Egypt, George Baldwin (1801: 6-7), the East India Company representative in Egypt in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, recalled how ‘I had the satisfaction also to convey the first advice of the war in 1778 to the East Indies; by means of which we were enabled to the astonishment of all England, when the news arrived, to expel the French from India, before the succour could reach them, and to add their possessions to our own’. Although the French after 1787 were no longer seen as a threat by the British, they, as an imperial nation, continued to compete with the England mainly in Egypt and Syria. France, throughout the eighteenth century, supported the Ottoman Empire in its wars against Russia.

8 See for an excellent discussion of the traditions of the Home Tour in Britain, see Zoë Kinsley’s Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (2013). See also Nigel Leask’s recent Book, Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour 1720–1830 (2020).

9 On the traditions of the sublime and picturesque in eighteenth-century Highland Tour, see Peter Womack’s Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (1989).

10 Abbott was born, the eldest of ten children, in 1764 in Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, to an extended family of expatriated merchants and consuls, among whom he was brought up in Ankara and Aleppo. After the sudden death of his father, Joseph Abbott, in 1773, the family decided that Henry, aged 10, should leave Pera for Aleppo where his two uncles John and Robert lived. He settled with his uncle Robert Abbott, a merchant and factor in Aleppo, in the old part of the city near Khan-el-Gumruk where the Levant Company held its own factory. For more about Abbott’s life in the Levant, see his unpublished diary titled Memoirs and Diary of Henry Abbott (The British Library - India Office Select Materials - MSS EUR B412 (A))

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Mohammad Sakhnini

Mohammad Sakhnini: Senior Lecturer in English at Khalifa University, UAE. He pursued his postgraduate studies (MA and PhD) in the English department at the University of Exeter, UK. After the completion of his PhD, 2015, Mohammad pursued different research and teaching opportunities in the UK and Europe. He has taught in English departments in the universities of Exeter, Brighton and Sussex. Mohammad also held fellowships in Linnaeus University (Sweden) and the Woolf Institute (Cambridge). His main research interests include European writings (travel writings) about Arabs and Muslims, mainly those of the early modern period.