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The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Nile Green
Nile Green*
Affiliation:
History Department at UCLA, USA
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Abstract

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 Iran's early path to modernization.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2011 , pp. 807 - 829
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2011

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References

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28 Shīrāzī, Majmū‘eh, 349–50.

29 I am grateful to Revd Jonathan Holmes, Keeper of the Records at Queens', for help in identifying Jee and Mandell.

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36 The slight discrepancy in dates (the 1818 of Alice Lee versus the 1819 of Saleh's 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 Lee's daughter was writing her father's memoirs several decades later.

37 A brief account of Mirza Khalil's career at the college is found in Andrew Hambling, The East India Company at Haileybury, 1806–1857 ([n.p.], 2005), 38.

38 Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), p. 8.

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42 Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), p. 5. On earlier motivations behind the patronage of Arabic scholarship, see Feingold, M., “Patrons and Professors: The Origins and Motives for the Endowment of University Chairs—in Particular the Laudian Professorship of Arabic”, in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. by Russell, G. A. (Leiden, 1994).Google Scholar

43 On Mirza Saleh and Shakespear, see Shīrāzī, Majmū‘eh, 167–68.

45 Cambridge University Archives, CUR 39.7.12 (1), pp. 8–9. 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.

44 I am grateful to Revd Jonathan Holmes, Keeper of the Records at Queens', for first alerting me to the peculiar circumstances of Lee's election to the Sir Thomas Adams chair.

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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 Shīrāzī, Majmū‘eh, 321.

50 I have consulted the small collection of materials related to Macbride in the Hertford College archive. However, none of Macbride's private papers shed additional light on the meetings with the Iranians. I am grateful to Dr Tony Barnard, college archivist, for providing access to Macbride's papers.

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69 Gregory, Letters to a Friend, 46; on the uselessness of equations for solving the divine mysteries, see 58–61.

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71 “The Persian Princes,” The Times, 7 December 1818, p. 3.

72 For fuller discussion, see Green, “Among the Dissenters.”.

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