INTRODUCTION

The reality of London has never been easy to grasp – the character of this vast city has been shrouded in uncertainty and ambiguity and much has depended on the perspective of the observer. Most obviously, there have been the contradictions arising from London's various, overlapping spatial contexts – London has operated and has been experienced at sub-metropolitan, metropolitan, regional, national and international levels. Each of these arenas has generated a particular ‘London view’, and much of London's history since 1750 can be seen as a series of conflicts arising from the associated interests and tensions. Yet despite its ‘chinese box’ character, a fundamental feature of London has been its stability and continuity.

The basis of London's orderliness has, paradoxically, been its continued dynamism, driven by a particular type of physical and economic growth that permitted both interdependence and autonomy. The two centuries between 1750 and 1950 can be regarded as the benchmarks of this inherently stable, though expansionist era for London – after 1950, changed economic and political conditions accentuated the fragility of London, forcing previously hidden and unresolved contradictions in metropolitan life to the centre of the social and political stage.

The prism through which London is viewed in what follows is that of the impact of the metropolis on the Home Counties – that is, its expansion from the old core cities of London and Westminster, through Middlesex, and later Surrey, Essex, Kent and Hertfordshire. The nature of that impact, its causes and consequences cannot, however, be comprehensively assessed.

Education is best defined as the ‘methodical socialisation of the young generation’. Thus family and kinship networks, apprenticeships, patterns of child employment all have a part to play in the educative process, alongside any provision of a formal or semi-formal kind for schooling. It would be impossible to treat all of these adequately in one chapter; and indeed family, kinship and work are all themselves subjects for separate extended treatment. This chapter will therefore focus primarily on the development of provision for formal schooling, but not to the exclusion of all other aspects of the process. For one of the chapter's most important themes is the rise of formal schooling. In 1750 this was a relatively insignificant and brief part of the educative process and one not necessarily encountered by all children. By 1950 it was central and it was what most people, adults and children alike, meant when they spoke of education.

1750–1850

In England in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the vast mass of the population did not see the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic as an integrated package – the 3Rs – and one to be acquired in a formal institutional setting, as a prelude to economic activity. These skills were seen as discrete, reading far outweighing the other two in importance. If acquired at all, they were acquired – and offered by teachers – in sequence: reading before writing, writing before arithmetic.

No country on earth can lay claim to a greater philanthropic tradition than Great Britain. Until the twentieth century philanthropy was widely believed to be the most wholesome and reliable remedy for the nation's ills, a view that is not without adherents today. For every affliction, individual or social, physical or spiritual, the charitable pharmacopoeia has a prescription or at least a palliative. Disease, old age and immorality are perennial problems. Others come and go with the elements or the trade cycle. Others still fall out of fashion or disappear because of medical or technological advance. Little is heard nowadays of cholera victims, chimney sweeps or thirsty horses in the metropolis, yet they all aroused public concern in the nineteenth century. Such causes have given way to those in tune with changed conditions, some of which would amaze, indeed alarm, past philanthropists. What would William Wilberforce or Lord Shaftesbury make of modern voluntary societies in aid of gay rights or family planning? Would they join the National Trust (1895), a charity in receipt of government grants, one of whose purposes is the preservation of country houses emptied of a paternalist aristocracy and gentry? Few subjects bring out so well the differences between ourselves and our ancestors.

As befits a nation in which philanthropists are ubiquitous, enormous sums have been contributed, representing a massive redistribution of wealth. But while financial records exist for many charities, it is impossible to measure the overall sums contributed to philanthropy in a single year or to compare the percentage of national income redistributed at different periods.

When in 1837, in the pages of his first periodical, Master Humphrey's Clock, Charles Dickens celebrated the doings of the Mudfog Association, with all its little formalities, its concern for rules, and its sense of importance and purpose, he was recording one of the most pervasive, diffuse and amorphous social developments of the past 200 years. The creation of formal voluntary associations was not new in his generation but what was new was the increase in their number, variety and public importance which took place, especially after 1780. That increase was to continue for many decades. The basis of that growth was in the adult male urban middle classes, but this adaptable and flexible form of social institution could never and was never limited to this group.

As society became more complex, those with power, those with no power and above all those with slender fragments of power which they sought to defend and extend began to organise themselves in a variety of specific ways. A whole new series of words came into common use in the English language, often changing or adding to their meaning – the association, the society, the chairman, the agenda, the membership, the rules and constitution and the annual report. After the mid-eighteenth century voluntary organisations appeared in increasing numbers. Their defining characteristics were minimal, a set of rules, a declared purpose and a membership defined by some formal act of joining. These organisations acted independently of the family, household, neighbourhood, firm or work group.

The Arabic translation movement begins among non-Arabs, non-Muslims, neo-Muslims or heretical Muslims, as one phase of a much larger process at the interface between cultures. The Greek to Syriac translating which preceded and accompanied the translation of Greek works into Arabic is another phase of the same larger process.1 A salient aspect of this great meeting of eastern and western civilizations is the Hellenization of Islam. For all the centres of intellectual activity in western Asia during the formative period of Islamic civilization – the surviving Christian centres of medical, logical, historical and Biblical learning at Edessa, Nisibin, and Qinnasrīn, the Talmudic academies of Sura and Pumpeditha, the medical centre of Jundīshāpūr, the pagan astronomical and astrological centre at Ḥarrān, the fire temples of Magian Persia, the Buddhist centres of Balkh, and the Indian observatories of Ujjain – exhibit traditions of learning centuries old and deeply imbued with the spirit of Hellenism and with detailed knowledge of the Greek sciences and arts, often studied in the original texts, or (for us even more important) in translation or adaptation.

The new Islamic civilization which presided over the dissolution of the Sasanid Persian empire and effectively sealed the “lower tier” of former Byzantine provinces against Byzantine political control, which absorbed large numbers of Jewish, Christian, pagan and Magian converts and imposed the terms for coexistence with the unconverted, was not and by the very nature of its success could not be so radically creative or destructive as to exclude all that it found in the new-won lands.

Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (c. 180–250/795–865) flourished in particular in the reign of al-Muʿtaṣim (reigned 218–27/833–42). It is said that he served as tutor to the caliph's son Aḥmad, to whom some of his writings are dedicated. Others are dedicated to the caliph himself. Most are short didactic pieces of strictly limited scope. A few dozen survive, some in Latin or Hebrew translation. Many more titles are recorded by the bibliographers, covering an enormous range of subjects. Al-Kindī wrote on questions of mathematics, logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics and ethics, but also on perfumes, drugs, foods, precious stones, musical instruments, swords, bees and pigeons. He wrote against the false claims of the alchemists, the atomism of the mutakallimūn, the dualism of the Manichaeans, and the trinitarian dogma of the Christians. He supported astrology, calculated the duration of the Arab empire, and speculated on the causes of natural phenomena such as comets, earthquakes, tides or the colour of the sky. He also took an interest in distant countries and ancient nations, collecting information on Socrates (whom he confused with Diogenes the Cynic), the Ḥarranians and the rites of India. A similar range of topics was later covered by al-Kindī's pupil Aḥmad b. al-Ṭayyib al-Sarakhsī, tutor and boon-companion of the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid (reigned 279–89/892–902). No doubt al-Kindī, too, had played the part of a cultured polymath who, wearing his learning lightly, strove to captivate, divert and instruct a courtly public.

Unlike the changes which Muslim names frequently underwent in the Latin West, the last name of Abā Naṣr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Tarkhān b. Awzalugh (or Uzlugh) al-Fārābī was barely altered, and it is as “Alfarabi” that it has been common to refer to him. Al-Fārābī's name, however, may be the only constant on which to seize at the moment, as contemporary scholarship challenges previous assessments of his work. Al-Fārābī appears increasingly as a disarmingly subtle thinker, an individualist with a civic conscience, a man who attempted to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, philosophy and theology, Athens and Mecca.1 The syntheses attempted, however, are neither facile nor dogmatic, and proceed from a predominantly philosophical standpoint. The exact nature of al-Fārābī's philosophical credo, moreover, is still being questioned.

The question is complicated by the lack of a sure chronology for al-Fārābī's many compositions, and an equal ignorance of the particular circumstances which prompted each work in a given genre: the motivation, purpose and intended audience. With few sure criteria of a biographical or stylistic sort to assist them, scholars are forced to choose between differing statements and emphases in related texts, and even within the same text, to determine al-Fārābī's genuine convictions. Moreover, the work of Leo Strauss, Muhsin Mahdi and others has drawn attention to the likelihood that al-Fārābī deliberately shielded essential elements of his convictions from the eyes of the uncritical reader.

Arabic didactic verse (shiʿr ta līmī) aims solely at teaching a particular genre of knowledge. Many Arab critics do not regard it as true poetry, since it is devoid of emotion and imagination, both of which are essential constituents of poetry, besides metre and rhyme. In other words, they consider it as versified prose.

Didactic verse is instructive, adding to one's knowledge and aiming at improving one's morals. It pleases the ear and aids the memory. It is known to go as far back as the dawn of Greek history. In all probability, the Greeks borrowed the idea from the Sumerians, as so much of Greek civilization is traceable to ancient Mesopotamia. But the Arabs were influenced in this, as in so many other cultural aspects, by the Greeks and the Indians, rather than by Mesopotamia. Arabic didactic verse may be categorized under the following headings:

1. 1 Epigrammatic and gnomic verses (i.e. pertaining to maxims or aphorisms) that date back to the time of the Jāhiliyyah, for which Zuhayr b. abī Sulmā, al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī (d. AD 604) and Labīd b. Rabīʾah were well known.

2. 2 Fables, parables, songs, riddles, maxims, proverbs, monologues and dialogues, particularly of the ʾAbbasid era. An example of this kind of literature is the Dīwān of Umayyah b. abī ʾ1-Ṣalt (d. c. 9/630), whose didactic verses were turned into prose by al-Jāḥiẓ.

3. 3 Theological, medical and grammatical treatises which cover a wide range, for example, the Alfiyyah of Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mālik, 1,000 verses in rajaz metre to help students to learn by heart the intricacies of Arabic grammar.

4. […]

Christian Arabic literature in its widest sense comprises all the writings of Christians whose tongue is Arabic, but here we shall be concerned principally with the religious literature of Arabic-speaking Christians. The Arabization of Christian populations in north Africa and western Asia under the empire of Islam took place over some three centuries, proceeding most rapidly in Syria and Palestine, and being substantially complete in north Africa by the fourth/tenth century.

In spite of Georg Graf's five-volume study, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, Christian Arabic literature is still relatively unknown, and the various relevant publications are scattered. Some forty volumes have been published in the Patrologia Orientalis series (Paris) and in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Louvain) together with translations into European languages. More recently, a further ten or so volumes have been brought out in the Patrimoine Arabe Chrétien (Jounieh and Rome). The Bulletin d'Arabe Chrétien (1976–83) attempted to provide an annual bibliography, and from 1987 this task has been assumed by the review Parole de l'Orient (Kaslik, Lebanon).

Rather than follow Graf and classify the various authors in terms of their respective communities a thematic classification has been chosen here. However, given limitations of space, this may run the risk of providing little more than an inventory. The reader will find it easy enough to fill out what is said here by recourse to Graf's Geschichte (or to Nasrallah's Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l'église melchite in the case of Melkite authors).

Having reached its peak of descriptive adequacy virtually at birth, Arabic grammar often seems little more than an endless discussion and restatement of the same immutable facts. This superficially stagnant aspect of Arabic grammar has provoked the no less superficial criticism that it is “a somewhat dismal science”, while even the medieval Arabs complained that too much study of grammar could lead to madness. This brief historical outline will therefore emphasize the variety and flexibility of grammar as it responded to social pressures and the influence of other disciplines, in order to show that it is not the monolithic and fruitlessly abstract science it has sometimes been made to appear. For convenience, the terms naḣw and naḣwī are arbitrarily rendered “grammar” and “grammarian” throughout, but it cannot be stated too firmly that the equivalence is only partial, for neither naḣw nor “grammar” have remained stable in meaning over the centuries.

To keep the topic within bounds, two limitations are imposed: as far as possible only extant works are considered, and almost exclusively from the domain of syntax. The restriction to extant works ensures greater objectivity than is achieved by relying on the copious biographical literature, which provides abundant anecdotal material but seldom anything of technical value. Moreover, even the specialized grammatical biographies include many “grammarians” who have no real claim to the title -polymaths, amateur philologists, dilettanti and others who, in the absence of any surviving texts to judge them by, are no more than names.

The closest equivalent to “theology” in Arabic is kalām. It is not an exact translation, however, so we must begin by defining what is meant by “Muslim theology”. Provisionally, this can be done negatively by distinguishing it from terms which do not designate Muslim theology and which are the subjects of other chapters of this book.

Theology is not fiqh, Muslim jurisprudence; nor, even in its juridical capacity, is it the sharīʿab, revealed law. The sunnah must be excluded too because, as an oral tradition, it is revealed, like the sharīʿab, and constitutes the source of theology, therefore, rather than theology itself. In Christianity, mysticism is a branch of theology, but in Islam not only does it fall outside the domain of theology, in the general sense in which Muslim theology is understood, but is even regarded with some suspicion by the more traditional elements. Besides which, mysticism's unique nature calls for a singularly non-rationalist methodological approach. The term millah is synonymous with “religion” as man's expression of divine revelation, or of his relationship with the Deity, and, therefore, comes no closer to conveying the sense of the word “theology”. Nor should this be confused with falsa/ah, Muslim philosophy, although arguably their content is the same, for, whereas the starting-point of philosophy in Islam is reason, that of theology is revealed faith. Yet, while Muslim theology cannot be equated with any single one of these subjects, it is rooted more or less directly in all of them.

ẒUHŪR: THE EXPANSION OF IBAḌISM

The same general conditions which allowed the ʿAbbasids to establish their power in the core of the Islamic world were also exploited by the Ibādīs (the chief sect of the Kharijites) to establish states in parts of its periphery. During the last decade of Umayyad rule their movement in Basra had been transformed into a full-scale daʿwah under the guidance of Abū ʿUbaydah Muslim b. abī Karīmah, propagating its ideology among two major disaffected groups, the Berbers of North Africa and the Yamanī tribes in southern Arabia (notably the Azd). Basran political and social networks were also exploited, particularly those of the merchants of the old Sasanid Arḍ al-Hind, so that cells of Ibadism came into being in parts of Khurāsān, Kirmān, Sijistān and al-BaḤrayn. Lesser colonies also existed in other parts of Iraq and even in Egypt: but Syria seems to have been barren ground.

Political activation of the movement in the Maghrib appears to have been precipitated by the rival propaganda of the Ṣufrīs (another Kharijite sect) in about 126/743–4, but the first full realization (ẓuhūr) of an Ibāḍī state resulted from a joint ʿUmānī-Ḥaḍramī-Yamanī expedition which established ʿAbdullāh b. YaḤyā al-Kindī (Ṭālib al-Ḥaqq) in Yemen and took the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina in the ḥajj of 129/747. ʿAbdullāh was killed shortly afterwards. Following the suppression of this uprising, a rump imamate survived for a while in the Ḥaḍramawt and a weak (ḍaʿīf) imam, al-Julandā b. Masʿūd, was brought to power in ʿUmān: both areas however, were early on brought under ʿAbbasid control.