Priceless manuscripts in camel trunks

European scholars discovered, edited, and promoted ancient Muslim writings seemingly lost to the world in the mid-19th century

Good writing on Islam in other times and places can become obscured — even “canceled” — through the sudden ascendency of ideas that judge the past very harshly. For several years I have been writing about the past in a project that began with the ambitious aim to describe and assess everything that Muslims have written about and against Christianity and everything that Christians have written about and against Islam! The stated goal of the project is to foster understanding of the present-day dimensions of mutual perceptions between Christians and Muslims.

The reference work Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History is one of those projects in which professors or retired academics volunteer huge amounts of time to solicit, coach, contribute, and edit entries in an ongoing process covering 1200 years. The first volume of CMRBH was published in 2009, and I am currently working with two other section editors on the final volume in the series, volume 23, on South Asia in the 19th century. To give an idea of the scope of the project: volume 18 on the Ottoman Empire, 1800-1914 (pub. 2021) is 1046 pages long. And this is only one of eight regional volumes for that time period, six of which have already been published.

The series of entries I am trying to complete these days concerns an Austrian scholar named Aloys Sprenger who went to India to work for the medical service of the East India Company in 1843. Contributors to CMRBH write a short biographical entry and then entries on each of the author’s works that relate to Christian-Muslim relations. You can see an example on my academia site. In the case of Sprenger, his output was remarkable during a 13-year period.

Sprenger developed a keen interest in manuscripts and editions of ancient Muslim works that began to dwarf his medical work. In his studies in Europe before going to India, Sprenger had added oriental languages to his medical studies. Already by 1845 while principal of the Mahommedan college in Delhi he edited and published the Arabic Abdu-r-Razzāq’s Dictionary of the Technical Terms of the Sufies, the first in a string of Arabic and Persian editions.

Then in 1848 he got his dream job, “extra assistant-resident in Lucknow,” with the assignment to catalogue the manuscripts in the libraries of the King of Oudh (Awadh). For 18 months he examined some 10,000 volumes, sometimes while facing incredible challenges. In one neglected royal collection, Sprenger writes, the manuscripts and books were kept in 40 “camel trunks” which were also the abode of families of rats. “Any admirer of oriental lore who may have an opportunity to visit this collection will do well to poke with a stick into the boxes, before he puts his hand into them, unless he be a zoologist as well as an orientalist.” Sadly, he laments, at the end of that library hall stood gunny sacks full of books completely destroyed by white ants. A first volume of the catalogue, on Persian and Hindustani poetry, was published in 1854.

One of the most interesting aspects of Sprenger’s work was his discovery of manuscripts — otherwise not known in the world mid-19th century — that greatly expand the knowledge of how Muslims conceived the story of Muhammad and the origins of Islam at around the end of the second Islamic century. When Sprenger entered India in 1843, Western scholars knew of only the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq (died 767) in the edition of Ibn Hishām (d. 833). Sprenger personally discovered manuscripts of early works about Muhammad written by Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845) and al-Ṭabarī (d. 923). And during Sprenger’s India years, fellow Austrian scholar Alfred von Kremer discovered the Maghāzī of al-Wāqidī (d. 823) in Alexandria in 1851, a priceless early narrative source which Sprenger subsequently arranged to have published in Calcutta in 1856.

Imagine if we only possessed a single canonical Gospel to tell us about the life of Jesus, and then within a decade three other major early sources for the life of Jesus were brought to light. Western academia would explode. This is the analogue to what happened related to the earliest major narrative writings on the life of Muhammad during Sprenger’s time in India. On the basis of this Muslim quartet — Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa‘d, al-Ṭabarī — Sprenger then set out to write his magisterial Das Leben und die Lehre des Moḥammad (Berlin, 1861-65).

The Austrian discovered, edited, sometimes even translated, and published a variety of Arabic and Persian works, and wrote scholarly articles about the content he was encountering. Sprenger seldom included personal comments and by all appearances his motivation was purely academic and scholarly — though he did also seem to want to bring many rare manuscripts back to Europe when he left India in 1856.

Did Aloys Sprenger perform a service to academic scholarship? Did he perform a service to the global Muslim community? Amazingly, these days the answer seems to be determined by ideology. Much of the remarkable work of scholars like Sprenger and von Kremer is now set in shadow by critiques of European colonialism and especially the approach to these materials influenced by the book Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said. Hopefully in a future column I can describe Said’s thesis and suggest the nature of its impact on writing about Islam.