Introduction

William Montgomery Watt was elevated to the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1964. In addition to marking a distinguished personal achievement for Professor Watt, the occasion was an important moment in the history of the university, and of Scotland itself. It was the first time that a professorship was recognised in this field in any Scottish university. Although Edinburgh, like other ancient universities in Scotland, had a tradition of including some Arabic in the curricula of Semitic languages, and had created a dedicated lectureship in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1912 – to which Montgomery Watt was appointed in 1947 – there had never before been a professor in this field in Scotland. Yet the intellectual history of Scotland had produced a remarkable number of scholars with interests in Islam. It was fitting therefore that Professor Watt devoted his inaugural lecture, given in October 1965, to reviewing of the genesis and the evolution of this field of scholarship in Scotland, under the title ‘Islamic Studies in Scotland: Retrospect and Prospect’.

An Analysis of the Contribution of Scottish Scholars to Arabic and Islamic Studies Discussed in Professor Watt's Inaugural Lecture

Seventeenth-century origins: Alexander Ross

Scottish interests in Islam go back as far as the mid-seventeenth century when Alexander Ross published the first English translation of the Qur’an (1649) – though he worked from an existing French translation rather than the original Arabic. If Ross's work as translator was less than original, it aroused a personal esteem for much that he discovered in Islamic scripture, and it prompted him to write about Islam with insights that were unusual for his day. In gentle rebuke of Christian polemic against Islam he commented in the introduction to his translation:

Ross developed his comparative approach in a second work entitled Pansebeia, or a View of All the Religions of the World (1653).