The title I have given this short chapter is ‘Committed Openness: a Glance at William Montgomery Watt's Religious Life’. And I think the title needs an explanation. In religion being both committed and open would be considered by many to be a contradiction in terms. There is a strong belief in both Christianity and Islam that the religious question has been fully and finally answered. The matter is closed. The revelation is sealed. All that is left is commentary, explanation and commitment. If you are open, you can't be committed. If you are committed, you can't be open. William Montgomery Watt would have smiled quietly at that and replied: ‘Maybe so, but I happen to be both.’

Like many another distinguished Scot, he was a son of the manse, born on 14 March 1909 to Andrew and Mary Watt, in Ceres, Fife, where his father was minister. The most significant event in his life, when he was only fourteen months old, was the death of his father, who had just become minister of Balshagray Parish Church in Glasgow. In an unpublished manuscript from his later years William meditated on the impact his father's death had on his own attitude to life. It had necessitated a lot of moving about in his early years, and he mused: ‘I sometimes wonder if this early change of abode is the source of my tendency, once I have found a tolerable billet, to remain in it as long as possible.’

He was a good example of what Hugh MacDiarmid famously described as the Caledonian Antisyzygy, the existence of two opposing or competing polarities in the same entity, the famous Scottish double-mindedness. If the search for stability of life was one of the polarities in his character, the other equally powerful drive was for intellectual and spiritual exploration. So it was that in 1937 William made a turn that would direct the rest of his life: he discovered Islam. While studying for a doctorate at Edinburgh, he took in a Muslim lodger to make ends meet, K. A. Mannan, a student from India (later Pakistan) who was a member of the Ahmadiyya sect.